Whoops: Meta’s Muse Share Links Disclosed All Sorts Of Super-Sensitive User Data
from the who-could-have-possibly-predicted-such-a-thing dept
Earlier this month we noted how Meta’s launch of its cutesy agentic AI software Muse arrived with all sorts of major privacy and security screw ups, despite the company’s repeated, breathless claims that privacy and security were at the forefront of the company’s thinking during development.
Like most AI agents, Muse is supposed to help automate simple to moderately complicated daily tasks.
But the app launched with multiple ugly zero-day flaws, one of which let an attacker covertly spy on Mac users. Other flaws were reportedly glossed over and downplayed by a company more interested in rushing to market than ensuring its software actually worked. One person even found you could trick Muse into giving you device root access on the device it’s installed on simply by pretending to be a Muse agent yourself.
Giving Meta (a company with abysmal ethical and privacy standards) massively expanded access to all sorts of personal accounts is just foundationally insane. That was quickly reflected by the people who found the app was accessing people’s private messages without approval, and often ignored all permissions and uploaded them to the cloud – even if you specifically tell it not to.
Outlets like Wired found that Muse consistently creates detailed profiles of all your friends, family, colleagues, “collaborators,” and people you “follow.” Which is “fun” and “cute” when you consider Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s enthusiastic collaboration with corrupt, surveillance-obsessed authoritarians.
And now Ars Technica has found that Muse can reveal all manner of sensitive personal information when users share conversations through Web links. Like many services, Muse lets users share images, content, searches, and chats with other people via unique URLs. Those URLs generally have long-sequences of text that aren’t supposed to be easily guessed.
But researchers from Claroc found that Meta’s implementation of this feature made it possible for folks to decipher shared content details via a passive DNS search:
“Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.”
According to the Claroc researchers, some of the data they were able to easily access included:
- a candidate’s notes preparing for a confidential executive-search call with a frontier AI lab, naming the lab’s internal contact and the meeting time
- a national marketing company’s internal revenue review, marked for its CEO
- a small-business owner’s loan application, with the amount requested
- a to-do list that included a bank fraud alert, with a partial account number and a transaction amount and time
- a real-estate investor’s internal performance report, with two property addresses and exact return, income and mortgage figures
- a workplace’s full-year staff vacation calendar, listing dozens of employees against the week each one would be away
Meta has suspended the feature while they figure out why they screwed up. Again, this is despite Meta claiming repeatedly in pre-release blog posts that Muse was built with a heavy focus on privacy and security. And again, this is all made possible because Meta doesn’t have to worry about any meaningful accountability in a country too corrupt to pass modern privacy laws, regulate the data broker ecosystem, or hold corporations legally accountable for literally anything.
This is just the orchestra getting warmed up as a parade of half-cooked agentic AI agents rush to market, and people who don’t really understand the scope of what they signed up for connect all sorts of sensitive accounts with Mark Zuckerberg or other sketchy industry titans. Hopefully at least a few market entries can differentiate themselves by not being an ethically dubious pit of public interest malfeasance.
Filed Under: agentic, ai, mark zuckerberg, muse, privacy, security, zero day
Companies: meta
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the the-good-words dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars:
If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide.
In second place, it’s a comment about Malcolm Gladwell’s strange strawman assertion that people say the bad behavior of police is caused by there being too many of them:
No, the police are badly behaved because they rarely face repercussions.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Kinetic Gothic and another comment about the Canadian YouTuber:
I was particularly amused by their concerns this could be used to locate their homes, since unlike most of us, cops do have the option to -not- drive home in the vehicles they patrol the town in.
Next, it’s an anonymous comment about the impossibility of perfect content moderation:
I dunno, I’ve also done and overseen moderation work on that kind of scale, and I would be deeply hesitant to say we always get things correct. I’ve dealt with enough community blowback over the years — sometimes stuff I thought was justified; sometimes stuff I thought was exaggerated; sometimes stuff I thought was invented out of whole cloth — to know not only do errors happen but that people can have very different opinions over what those errors were and what ‘the right way’ to do things would have been.
Facebook is a titanic entity with enormous resources to throw at the problem, but the problem with moderation of any sort is that the need for it scales faster than the supply. The flood of output from slop engines is only making the issue worse, especially if you’re somebody like YT or FB, where there’s lots of perceived value in shouting over everyone else.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment about Trump hiding the IRS report on his Big Beautiful Bill:
Hey now, be fair to the IRS, they might actually be having trouble figuring this shit out. I mean haven’t they been cut down to like six guys and a beat-up old Tandy 1000 at this point?
In second place, it’s MrWilson with an idea for the Canadian YouTuber and his camera:
Just tell the cops that you’re setting up a service to track all the Canadian girlfriends that Americans have claimed existed. I bet even Canadian cops think tracking girlfriends, fictional or otherwise, with mass surveillance camera networks is fine.
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about Brendan Carr threatening journalists for covering polls Trump doesn’t like:
I’m sure Mr. Carr has security footage of Antifa vandals cutting a 350-foot long slice in the polls with a box cutter and then pouring fertilizer into them. He’s just not releasing it yet.
Finally, it’s another anonymous comment about Malcolm Gladwell, this time with a simple retort to the description of him as “one of America’s foremost thinkers”:
[Citation Needed]
That’s all for this week, folks!
This Week In Techdirt History: October 18th – 24th
from the that-was-that dept
This Week in 2016
- Hillary Clinton’s Staff Recognize She Doesn’t Understand Encryption And Is Supporting ‘The Impossible’
- FBI Facial Recognition Expert Helps Denver PD Arrest Wrong Man Twice For The Same Crime
- Appeals Court Affirms NSA Surveillance Can Be Used To Investigate Domestic Criminal Suspects
- CNN Tells Viewers It’s Illegal For Them To Read Wikileaks Document Dumps. CNN Is Wrong
- Arrested Backpage Execs Ask Kamala Harris To Drop Bogus Case She Herself Has Admitted She Has No Authority To Bring
- Team Prenda Loses Big Again: Told To Pay Over $650k For Bogus Defamation Lawsuit
This Week in 2011
- British Historian On Porn And Internet Censorship: North Korea Is Right — The Internet Is Our Enemy
- Warner Bros. Buys Story That Was Written In The Reddit Comments; Then Tells Author To Stop Redditing
- Bill Gates Called To Testify In Antitrust Trial Over Windows 95; No This Isn’t An Old Post
- Google Realizing That Its Real Names Policy Is Excessive
- UK Parliament Recommends Websites Be Liable For Anonymous Comments If They Won’t Reveal Identities
- Who Gets The Copyright On The Photo Of A Beaten Gaddafi, Captured Off A Cameraphone
This Week in 2006
- On The Corner of Hollywood and Wall
- Why YouTube Could Make Things Difficult For Google
- No, I Don’t Think Anyone Believes Boycottwalmart.com Is Actually A Wal-Mart Site
- Universal Music Finally Sues Video Sites… Just Not YouTube
- Internet Addiction Not Quite An Addiction…
- Without Copyright Extension, The Beatles Will Never Have Incentive To Write Another Song
Police In Guinea-Bissau Raid Offices Of Danish Anti-Vaxxers Planning CDC-Funded Unethical Study
from the tiny-little-coffins dept
In all of our coverage of the disastrous tenure RFK Jr. has had as Secretary of HHS, we have not yet discussed a bonkers study the CDC planned to fund in Guinea-Bissau. This hepatitis B “vaccine trial” was supposed to already have been kicked off, but it has been suspended since January instead because of the plainly unethical methodology for the trial, combined with the understanding that the two researchers employed to run it are virulent anti-vaxxers.
The trial was suspended in January after its unethical design came to light and drew international outcry. Although the trial is still halted, staff of the CDC director’s office told the agency’s budget office in late September to set aside $1.6 million to fund the trial, according to a report by Rolling Stone. The money was to be pulled from funding for the CDC’s global health security programs, which might otherwise go toward efforts like combating the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
If the trial moves forward, it would be funded by the US but run by Danish researchers, who have separately been accused of misconduct. In December, the CDC announced the award of an unsolicited grant for $1.6 million to a research group at the University of Southern Denmark, led by married couple Christine Stabell Benn and Peter Aaby. The pair have produced numerous studies that have been promoted by anti-vaccine advocates, drawing concern and criticism from researchers. Stabell Benn and Aaby are currently under investigation by Danish authorities over allegations of “falsification” and “scientific misconduct” related to previous vaccine research.
So, what makes the design of the trial unethical, beyond the notion that the two researchers are known bad-actors on the topic of vaccines? Well, let’s start with the fact that this trial is not designed to study the efficacy of the hepatitis B vaccine at all. We already have plenty of data on that that suggests the vaccine is safe and effective overall. No, this study is designed specifically to find harmful outcomes from the vaccine. To do that kind of study, the researchers planned to enroll 14,000 newborns in Guinea-Bissau in the trial and give half of them the vaccine and withhold it from the other half to study the health outcomes of the children.
In case that didn’t land properly: The study is designed to knowingly expose 7,000 children to hepatitis B, which can have immensely deleterious long-term health outcomes if exposed.
But wait, you might say. Are these children that would otherwise have ready access to the hep B vaccine? The answer is, in large part, no they would not. The government in Guinea-Bissau is born of a recent coup and it’s ability to deliver on basic government services has been wanting, to say the least. But that does not, in any way, make this trial more ethical.
Stabell Benn and Aaby have argued that the trial is not unethical because newborns in Guinea-Bissau are currently not routinely given a dose of hepatitis B vaccine at birth. But outside experts point to ethical guidelines, such as the Declaration of Helsinki, which requires trials to provide the “best proven intervention”—which is a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine—regardless of whatever the current standard is in the country hosting the trial. Placebos may only be used when there is no proven intervention or there is “compelling and scientifically sound methodological reasons” to withhold a proven intervention.
In a scathing rebuke in February, the World Health Organization laid out a bullet-point list of “why withholding the vaccine is unethical.” The WHO notes that the entire premise of the trial is based on “hypothetical safety outcomes without sufficient credible evidence,” which don’t justify putting newborns at risk. The agency also blasted Stabell Benn and Aaby’s defense of the trial, saying: “Resource constraints cannot be used to justify withholding proven care in a research study involving people. Ethical obligations require minimizing risk and ensuring a prospect of benefit for participants.”
RFK Jr. has a pattern building of this sort of thing. Emails released show that he almost certainly lied in congressional hearings about his adventures in Samoa in 2019, after which the country experienced a tragic outbreak of measles that claimed over 83 deaths. Brown people are fit for experiments designed to boost Kennedy’s ego, it seems.
The CDC recently planned to grant even more taxpayer money to Stabell Benn and Aaby, but they’ve now run into an even bigger problem that worldwide condemnation: a police raid by the government of the study’s offices.
Police in Guinea-Bissau raided the offices of Danish researchers on Monday, seizing doses of hepatitis B vaccine intended for a vaccine trial for newborns. International health experts have called the trial “unethical,” but anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has attempted to fund it with US taxpayer dollars.
Now it appears that officials in Guinea-Bissau have opened an investigation into Aaby and Stabell Benn’s work. In a Facebook post Monday, translated from Portuguese, the judicial police announced they carried out a “search operation at the facilities of the Bandim Health Project in Bissau, which culminated in the seizure of a batch of hepatitis B vaccines intended for vaccination of children in the country.”
I’ll just say that I hope the government there has access to enough quality scientists to do a very thorough investigation as to what precisely is in the hep B vaccines that were intended for use in this study. I’d be very curious to know just what is in them. Call it a hunch.
But, regardless, it should horrify us all that our own tax money is being used to fund this kind of unethical study. The trolley problem is famous for a reason, after all, and the idea is not generally to want to purposefully put yourself at the switch in that problem. That’s precisely what these “researchers” intended to do, all to go looking for any evidence for a conclusion they reached long ago.
Filed Under: anti-vaxxers, cdc, christine stabell benn, guinea-bissau, hepatitis b, hhs, medical ethics, peter aaby, rfk jr., vaccines, who
How Trump’s FBI Purge Saved Lindsey Graham And James Clyburn From A Bribery Investigation
from the corruption-everywhere dept
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.
Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.
“Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.”
At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the “yes” he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek’s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.
In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham’s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.
The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state’s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.
Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: “This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.
Kao’s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court — a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.
But the FBI agents who took Kao’s confession — two experienced anti-corruption investigators — could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.
The details of this investigation have not previously been reported.
President Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption — an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbade the DOJ’s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao’s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.
ProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao’s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao’s secret steakhouse dinner.
This story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a “convicted liar.”
Kao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.
Graham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.
Clyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.
“Whatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Jami LaRue, Clyburn’s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. “The Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.”
David Snider, Wilson’s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. “Congressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,” Snider said in an email.
In an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham’s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.” She said the accusations were the “ravings of a convicted felon” and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao’s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.
The two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao’s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.
Hartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.
“[It’s] corruption at its best,” Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. “But I am the only one rotting in prison.”
Small Company, Big Ambitions
Kao’s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.
He had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company’s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state’s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.
At times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company’s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn’t true.
But what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. “He would talk about how we’re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we’re going to be a billion-dollar company,” said a former engineer. “He was an absolute megalomaniac.”
Kao hatched a plan to expand Navatek’s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called “the method,” as ProPublica detailed in September.
Navatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.
Kao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek — through executives, family members and lobbyists — would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company’s work.
That legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers’ staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show — even though the contracts were in theory competitive.
Kao “wanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,” a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to “rebuild,” as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.
Hartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company’s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. “If anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it’s him,” Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.
Later, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a “key supporter.”
The company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer “constituents to ‘feed.’”
The senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. “You can get access to Lindsey Graham,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.
Kao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson — all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation — in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.
Yet Navatek had “zero people” capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.
Its $9.5 million “power and energy” proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham’s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would “ensure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.”
In reality, Navatek’s initial research “looked like a college senior’s graduation project,” the executive said. “Something you go get from RadioShack.” Graham’s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.
But for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn’t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year’s budget came together, both Graham’s and Clyburn’s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek’s funding.
In May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn’s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a “modular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,” according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.
In September, the Senate Appropriations Committee — Graham’s committee — released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for “Talent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.” Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because “an almost identical paragraph” appeared in Hartman’s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.
After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records — a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins’ and Graham’s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.
Congress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek’s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.
At that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.
That would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson’s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson’s campaign $3,500.
And bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek’s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.
During that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator’s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao’s version of events.
Kao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: “We became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,” he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, “until we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.”
To secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.
“The Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,” Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek’s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was “yes.”
“These discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,” Kao told the FBI. “I suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.”
A Dinner With Graham
Graham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham’s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser’s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the “money man.” After that person departed, Graham entered.
Graham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was “very abrupt” and “straight to the point”: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.
Navatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it’s not clear which one Kao was describing.
Congress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had “zero past performance,” the former executive said.
The same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham’s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.
A day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham’s office to ask about the money, which “the Senator may have an interest in.” Craig Abele, Graham’s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham’s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. “Spoke to ONR this morning,” Abele wrote March 6. “Should be set.”
The company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020.
Abele became Graham’s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.
Graham’s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.
The checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.
“My understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,” Winer said. “I never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.”
After Kao’s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. “University officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,” Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Our sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.”
One week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham’s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek’s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.
Tongour confirmed many elements of Kao’s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham’s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. “I don’t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,” Tongour said in an email. “Certainly not for appetizers, entrée, and dessert.”
But he denied Kao’s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.
“I would remember that forever,” Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek’s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. “If I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.” Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao’s arrest.
Navatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.
For that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget “mirrored” whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.
Over a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.
The FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn’s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was “Congressman Clyburn’s favorite school.”
The spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.
Kao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.
Wilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was “very clear and knew what the ask was,” Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.
Tongour denied this. “There was no ‘pay to play’ with Joe Wilson or his staff either,” he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson “is a friend and I want to see him re-elected.”
Kao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers’ campaigns picked up the check.
By August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham’s and Wilson’s committees would each support part of the company’s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.
Kao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.
Kao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company’s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.
“It’s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,” Kao said. “The whole thing is a grand lie.”
An Arrest, a Lifeboat
Kao’s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. “Don’t call us,” one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.
The Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao’s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.
As Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer’s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.
Hartman didn’t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao’s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.
In September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.
As the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had “uncovered a lengthy history” of a government contractor making donations “in exchange for government contracts,” she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.
In federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers’ conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.
In the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.
But before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president’s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section’s authority to bring new cases.
Then Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.
Ball was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.
The corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.
The White House referred ProPublica’s questions to the FBI and DOJ.
The Department of Justice didn’t respond to detailed questions about the investigation.
“Under President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden’s two-tiered system of justice,” DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.
Kao’s claims are “half baked” and “misleading,” FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. “Additionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a “model for public-private success.”
The company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. “It was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,” he wrote. “It’s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.” Johnson’s office did not reply to an email requesting comment.
The occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen.
Filed Under: bribery, corruption, donald trump, duke hartman, fbi, james clyburn, joshua knight, kash patel, lindsey graham, lobbying, martin kao, south carolina, susan collins
Companies: integer technologies, martin defense group, navatek, pacmar
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Meta Had A Lotta Scams, Lotta Scams, Lotta Scams
from the ctrl-alt-speech dept
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.
In this week’s episode, Ben is joined by Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter for Thomson Reuters and author of Broken Code, which expands on the award-winning series ‘The Facebook Files’ and partly inspired The Social Reckoning. Together they discuss:
- Rhode Island sues Meta over alleged tolerance for scam advertising (Reuters)
- Meta ordered to pay $25bn to New Mexico in Cambridge Analytica data-privacy case (The Guardian)
- Joel Kaplan leaves Meta (Platformer)
- Hooked on YouTube (NBC News)
- Anthropic gives third-party auditors ’employee-like access’ in AI industry first (ZDNET)
- A moderator’s death exposes an industry-wide crisis (Uni Global Union)
And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:
Our fun links this week include an archive/newsletter of the most visited Wikipedia page from the prior day and puppies doing their best to navigate through mazes.
Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from the episode!
If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.
Filed Under: child safety, content moderation, scams, trust and safety
Companies: anthropic, google, meta, tiktok, youtube
OPM Barely Bothered Defending DOGE’s Access To Federal Employee Data. Court Rules It Was Illegal.
from the will-there-be-any-accountability dept
Remember back when Elon Musk was handed the keys of our federal government with basically zero accountability or oversight? All sorts of bad stuff happened, but one of the lawsuits we’ve been covering was the American Federation of Gov’t Employees (AFGE) along with the Association of Administrative Law Judges and a few individual federal workers suing DOGE over the fact that Musk’s team of unqualified DOGE boys demanded, and then received, access to information about millions of federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). This is highly sensitive data (remember the seriousness of the OPM hack by China? Sorry, the multiple OPM hacks?) that OPM is not supposed to share with anyone who lacks a demonstrated need to know, even within the federal government.
AFGE sued on behalf of their members, all federal government employees, whose data was put at risk. And while Musk is long out of the government and many of the DOGE bros have also left the government, the lawsuits have continued to move forward, including an initial ruling last June that granted a preliminary injunction. But litigation takes time, and going from the preliminary injunction to motions for summary judgment took basically another year.
And this week there was another big (if late) victory. Judge Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York found that OPM violated the Privacy Act by handing DOGE access to the sensitive data of tens of millions of federal employees. Indeed, the sharing of the information was so obviously illegal and egregious that the government effectively offered no defense other than “we’re no longer sharing such info.” As the court notes:
At this point, there is no meaningful dispute concerning the underlying conduct. The defendants barely defend its legality, relying instead on what has happened since to argue that the case is moot and that prospective relief is unnecessary. The Court therefore reaches the same conclusions on the merits of the plaintiffs’ APA claims for the reasons stated in the June 9 Opinion, which are incorporated here. OPM’s decision to grant DOGE Agents broad access to its systems of records containing PII without a demonstrated need was unlawful; because all the access permissions have been rescinded, those permissions need not be set aside.
Admittedly, this is at odds with the Fourth Circuit (NY is in the Second Circuit), which felt bound to let DOGE have access to Social Security data because the Supreme Court… rejected an earlier injunction with zero explanation in a perplexingly stupid shadow docket non-ruling. The main difference here is OPM data vs. Social Security data, but with this Supreme Court, who the hell knows.
As for this case, for those who will argue that because Trump declared that DOGE was there to modernize the federal government, DOGE was free to access whatever information it needed, that’s not at all how any of this works. Even taking that modernization mandate at face value, nothing about it required access to this much private information. Indeed, the judge points out that the government provides nothing to show that DOGE needed this data for “modernization” efforts.
In their briefing, the defendants reiterate their argument that the nature of the DOGE Agents’ modernization responsibilities under the DOGE Executive Order provided the necessary justification for access to OPM records systems. But the June 9 Opinion already concluded that “IT modernization does not necessarily require access to confidential PII,” much less administrative access. 786 F. Supp. 3d at 688. In fact, one of the plaintiffs’ experts, former OPM CIO David Nesting, testified to participating in modernization efforts at two federal agencies without ever obtaining access to PII contained in the systems being modernized. The defendants do not explain why modernization efforts by the DOGE Agents at OPM needed to proceed differently. The record also provides no support for a finding that it was the pursuit of a modernization agenda that prompted OPM to grant sweeping and expedited access to a score of DOGE Agents to its systems of records containing PII.
The government, having not even bothered to defend the obviously illegal data sharing, tried instead to argue that the case is moot because (1) they’ve stopped OPM from continuing to share such data and (2) the “DOGE Temporary Organization” officially expired on July 4th, and nearly all of the DOGE bros who had access to the data are long gone. That would be quite the trick: go into government, get access to all sorts of private information illegally, and then as long as you leave the government before the court can finish deliberating you get off free. That’s not how it works. Especially since OPM kept conveniently timing its policy changes to land right before court deadlines (not suspicious at all…)
the timing of OPM’s revisions to its policies closely tracks this litigation’s deadlines, suggesting that they are driven more by a desire to resolve this case than by a genuine departure from its prior conduct…. OPM repeatedly removed access permissions for the DOGE Agents shortly before court reports were due. OPM circulated its November 2025 policy days before its mootness motion was due. It revised its policies again amid summary judgment briefing and settlement negotiations. And Starr, OPM’s third CIO since this case began, at last repudiated the need-tobe-prepared justification for granting any type of access to OPM’s systems of records containing PII in a declaration attached to the defendants’ sur-reply. He had repudiated the justification for administrative access only in a declaration submitted just two weeks prior. “To the extent that the voluntary cessation doctrine exists primarily to keep parties from acting strategically to avoid judicial review,” Ruesch v. Comm’r of Internal Revenue, 25 F.4th 67, 71 (2d Cir. 2022), OPM’s behavior, while undoubtedly commendable, appears designed to do just that.
The court also notes that DOGE hasn’t fully disappeared, and that at least one person tied to this mess, Senior Advisor Noah Peters, is still at OPM:
That said, the DOGE Executive Order provides that the Organization’s termination does not “imply the termination, attenuation, or amendment of any other authority or provision of this order.” USDS continues to operate within the Executive Office of the President, and the Executive Order’s directive that agencies give USDS “full and prompt access” to their records remains in effect. The termination thus narrows, but does not eliminate, the circumstances in which the challenged conduct could recur.
Lastly, Peters remains at OPM. The parties dispute whether he was an OPM employee or detailed from USDS during the relevant period. Although Peters currently does not have access permissions to any of OPM’s systems of records containing PII, OPM has committed only that it will not grant him access “except in conformity with” its policies and applicable law. That assurance carries little weight, given that the defendants engaged in the challenged conduct notwithstanding the existence of policies and law prescribing their actions. And even though OPM has strengthened their access protocols considerably in response to this litigation, “it is ultimately no more difficult for OPM to ignore these new protocols than to ignore its old procedures.”
There is still the question of remedies, which will apparently be the next phase of this case. Judge Cote has asked both sides for further briefing about whether a permanent injunction is still needed. OPM says no because they’ve already stopped such information sharing. But the timeline here still matters: DOGE got access to all of this data on day one of the Trump administration. The preliminary injunction didn’t come until June, five months later. And then this final ruling came over a year later.
It’s good that the court refused to let OPM run out the clock by pretending that it no longer mattered since DOGE is gone, but no injunction can unshare the data that the DOGE Bros already took. OPM insists that its own review says that the DOGE Bros didn’t exfiltrate the data they got access to outside of OPM, but we have no reason to trust them. They’ve lied before.
Either way, this data is the kind of thing OPM used to insist was fully locked down, and then suddenly it wasn’t once Elon Musk came to town. After the OPM hacks a decade ago, the government swore that it understood how dangerous it was to let this information out. But then Trump and Elon handed the keys to a group of cocky, inexperienced tech bros with basically no limits. And it took the court nearly two years to say, officially, that this was illegal.
That seems like an unworkable system when you have a situation — as we did — where the federal government is taken over by those dead set on looting it as quickly as possible.
Filed Under: denise cote, doge, elon musk, opm, privacy act
Companies: aalj, afge
Daily Deal: MOGICS Power Bagel Travel Power Strip
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
The MOGICS Bagel has 5 international AC sockets, dual USB ports, 3ft integrated length-adjustable power cord, and an ergonomic AC plug. Unlike ordinary power strips, the bagel design makes it easier to charge multiple devices giving ample space for each plug. It has a LED power indicator that emits brilliant blue light when power is connected. With a rolling mechanism developed by MOGICS, AC cord storage has never been so compact. The adjustable cord comes with auto-lock stoppers to keep it all neat and organized. It’s on sale for $37.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.
Filed Under: daily deal
Malcolm Gladwell: Cops Are Violent Because The US Doesn’t Have Enough Cops
from the beatings-will-continue-until-police-morale-improves dept
One of America’s foremost thinkers hasn’t done enough thinking. Instead, he’s delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn’t hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he’s saying.
Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on the entirety of his latest work. I have, however, read a particularly atrocious excerpt — one that was published by The Atlantic because even Slate has moved on from Slatepitches.
In this excerpt, Gladwell argues that the reason US law enforcement officers are so violent is because there just aren’t enough of them. You may think I’m paraphrasing. I assure you: I am not. Here’s the headline and subhead from his Atlantic piece:
America Has a Police Shortage
Many Americans have decided that their country’s problem is that it has too many police officers. In fact, it has too few.
That’s a wild conclusion to reach. It’s especially wild when the only outside support you have to offer for your theory are: one (1) study that agrees with your foregone conclusion, and one (1) police official who agrees with your foregone conclusion.
He starts by comparing US cops per capita with European cops per capita. Most people would think the Los Angeles PD is larger than the Berlin (Germany) police force. They’d be wrong.
Berlin has about 18,000 police officers, making its police department twice the size of Los Angeles’s.
American police departments, compared with their counterparts around the developed world, are tiny. Phoenix has 2,500 police officers. Munich—which has a population of roughly the same size—has nearly two and a half times as many. Dallas has 3,100 officers. The Brussels metro area, comparable to Dallas in population, has 6,700.
But would they actually be wrong? Maybe, but not by much. These comparisons only mean as much as Gladwell is willing to share. He doesn’t look at everything else that factors into this, including police spending as a percentage of national/local budgets.
Despite this objective lack of accountability for policing practice, public levels of trust in police remain among the highest in the EU only behind Scandinavian countries and Switzerland.[179] This allows Germany to maintain one of the lowest levels of public order and safety spending in the EU, at 1.5 percent of gross domestic profit, compared to the EU average of 1.8 percent.[180] As a result, Germany has a police force of only 300 officers per 100,000 of its population.
The US has about 243 officers per 100,000 people. That is a smaller number but it’s not so much smaller that it should immediately raise eyebrows, much less overwhelming support for Gladwell’s preferred narrative.
Here’s where Gladwell decides 2+2 equals whatever number he needs it to be.
In 2020, an African American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer, setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country. The motto of many of the protesters was “Defund the police.”
If the police were badly behaved, the thinking went, it was because there were too many of them.
[…]
Following the [George Floyd] protests, city after city saw their police force shrink. Of the 15 largest police departments in the United States, 12 had a markedly smaller police force in 2025 than in 2019. Philadelphia lost 23.1 percent of its police force during that period; Washington, D.C., lost 21.4 percent; San Francisco, 17.5 percent; Phoenix, 15 percent; and on and on. The reformers won the day. But what they did not understand is that there is a trade-off between certainty and severity: When criminals think they can get away with crimes, policing and punishments need to be more severe to achieve the same deterrent effect. Severity is not something that comes from lots of police. It’s something that comes from having too few police.
First off, Gladwell refuses to call Floyd’s killing a murder, which is extremely fucking strange since the officer who murdered Floyd (Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin) was convicted of murder. Calling Chauvin “rogue” is just plain insulting to everyone’s intelligence, considering a handful of other officers were on the scene and not a single one did anything to stop Chauvin from murdering George Floyd.
Second, the sudden disappearance of cops had nothing to do with any “defunding” efforts. While lots of politicians made loud noises about defunding the police, very few of them actually did anything about it. No defunding of the police has taken place. In a few instances, some police funding has been rerouted to mental health professionals, allowing them to respond to incidents cops are poorly trained (if they’re trained at all) to handle.
The drop-off in police staffing is due to the cops themselves. Lots of cops who got into the business for its high octane blend of maximum power and minimum accountability decided they’d rather exit the force than improve or subject themselves to whatever bare minimum of accountability might be inflicted on them as a result of this widespread (but wholly ineffectual) “defund the police” movement. If cities were spending less on cops, it was due to attrition, rather than any funding restrictions enacted by local legislators.
But the most noxious conclusion Gladwell draws from these stats is that the George Floyd protests and the “defund the police” shouting that accompanied it generated police violence. That statement ignores that fact that decades of police violence (a lot of it racist) led to the nationwide protests that greeted George Floyd’s murder. And this was preceded by several other large protests against police violence that were far more severe and violent than those provoked by Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions.
Gladwell wants to connect the dots between calls for defunding police and the understaffing that now plagues many police departments — something that is wholly due to cops not wanting to be cops if it meant a modicum of accountability might be applied to their actions. But cops have been violent for years, and there’s nothing on the record that even slightly suggests having more cops and bigger budgets makes these officers better than those working for departments with less funding and staffing.
While we’re still on the subject of “more cops = better cops,” let’s go back to Gladwell’s quoting of German police staffing stats as evidence of his theory. I mean, I guess? He just dumps this comparison of Berlin to Los Angeles into the mix and then hustles past it to an interview with a Colorado law enforcement official who claims having more officers would somehow make all of these officers better.
But having more cops hasn’t exactly made German cops better.
As law enforcement is vested solely with the states of Germany, each state’s police force (or “Land” police) follows a different system of law. Accordingly, there is an absence of a federal comprehensive register, compiling and publishing regular, uniform, and comprehensive figures on complaints about police ill-treatment.[170] Even though Germany is bound to obligate its many international treaties and conventions, Amnesty International (2002) highlights the authorities failed to protect a range of human rights as guaranteed by international human rights law and standards.[170] A study conducted in 2019 on police brutality in Germany found that it led to complaints in only 9%, and trials in only 13% of the cases. The study was conducted by the Ruhr-University of Bochum and was the biggest study at the time to be conducted on police brutality in Germany. The study found that the low number of complaints was likely due to a low expectation of success.[174] Furthermore, most German states do not require their police force to carry identification, making it difficult for victims to lodge complaints against individuals.[175][176]
Having more officers doesn’t make policing in German better. In fact, the lack of accountability seems to be on par with the United States. The only reason we don’t hear more about this (and I’m speaking for Gladwell as well) is because we don’t live in Germany. What is different is how we train and arm our cops, which means US law enforcement will almost always kill more people than their counterparts in other parts of the Western world.
And, as if this butchering of logic weren’t damning enough, Gladwell is out there digging his own hole while promoting his book:
Evoking the parable of the blind men and the elephant he promises: “chapters on the trunk and the leg and the tusk, and at the end my hope is that by seeing all the parts in one place you will finally get a sense of the whole elephant – and understand that what seems from the outside like an intractable problem need not be intractable at all”.
If that’s the defense for his cherry-picking and attempting (and failing) to work backwards from his preconceptions, it’s time for a meme. And not just any meme, but one that hits Gladwell right in his presumptions twice:
The headline — “Defense: Chauvin did what he was trained to do” — points to the origin of a lot of our police violence problems. Adding more cops just means adding more cops trained to treat violence as a first option, no matter how many of them are actually patrolling the streets.
The second part is for Gladwell: you do get how that’s worse, right? Using this parable as a selling point for your book is an incredible self-own. If your best hope is that people will convert your own writing into an Aesopian game of telephone and then still come to the conclusions you want them to draw from this, you’re no longer in the non-fiction game. You’re just telling people what you believe and expecting them to fall in line simply because they might have heard your name somewhere before.
Again, I have not read Gladwell’s book. But if this is the promotional vehicle he’s chosen to drive, I’d rather walk.
Filed Under: defund the police, malcolm gladwell, police accountability, police misconduct, police violence, racist policing
Trump Leveraged FCC ‘Investigation’ Into Dish CEO Charlie Ergen To Get Him To Donate To Ballroom
from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept
The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various “pay to play” shenanigans related to Trump’s $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are also well represented.
I was more interested in the until-now undisclosed contributions by billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network. Ergen committed $25 million to the venture, but didn’t want his help publicized. The donations came as Ergen was being forced by the admin to offload spectrum assets to AT&T and Elon Musk by FCC boss Brendan Carr:
“In December, with the sale still pending, Ergen committed $12.5 million to Trump’s ballroom, according to the donation list. Records indicate Ergen requested that the source of the donation remain anonymous. The donation has not been previously reported.
He committed another $12.5 million in February, according to the list.”
I covered Carr’s dubious “investigation” into Dish network early last year. Carr, who never really engages in meaningful corporate oversight of telecom misbehaviors, suddenly and uncharacteristically put pressure on Dish for not meeting build out goals for its 5G network. But Carr knew Dish would lag on the build because the whole effort was a regulatory head fake concocted by the first Trump administration (more on that later).
The Washington Post reveals that the second Trump administration leveraged the “investigation” into Ergen to convince him he needed to pony up the ballroom cash:
“Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Ergen in May to inform him that the agency had begun investigating EchoStar. Carr threatened to yank government licenses that were critical to the survival of the business, accusing EchoStar, owner of Dish Network, of not following through on promises it had made to upgrade its cellphone network.
The following month, Ergen met with Trump and Carr behind closed doors to discuss the investigation, according to Bloomberg. The outlet, citing unnamed sources, said the June 11 discussion included a brief exchange about Ergen’s political donations and whether he gave to candidates in both political parties.
The company referenced a June 11 meeting between Ergen and Carr in a regulatory filing and wrote that Trump “subsequently encouraged the parties involved to reach an amicable resolution.”
Part of that “amicable resolution” apparently involved Ergen throwing money at the president’s costly and legally dodgy vanity project if he wanted to avoid “government oversight.” Carr dropped the “investigation” shortly after Dish and Echostar sold large swaths of spectrum to both AT&T (which the Post mentions) and Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which the Post does not).
The Ergen stuff is particularly interesting because Ergen was a massive beneficiary of the first Trump administration, only to have his alliance with authoritarians blow up in his face later on in the relationship (as is often the case). I use the term “blow up” loosely, as Ergen will still net billions of dollars from the assistance provided him by the Trump administration.
If you recall, in 2019 Trump’s DOJ and FCC rubber stamped a massive, competition and job killing merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. If you also recall, a cornerstone of that deal involved an elaborate stage play where Dish, with the Trump DOJ’s and FCC’s help, insisted that it was going to build a viable new 5G wireless competitor across the whole United States.
As I predicted repeatedly at the time, that network was never going to succeed. Dish’s gambit existed largely as a prop to justify the competition harm of Sprint/T-Mobile consolidation. And while some think Dish really wanted to build a 5G network, others (like myself) believe it was an elaborate attempt to string regulators along while the company’s massive spectrum hoard appreciated in value.
So in the first Trump term, Dish found itself a direct beneficiary of regulatory capture. But in the second term, with AT&T and Elon Musk eyeing Dish’s under-utilized spectrum assets, Carr uncharacteristically pretended to care about corporate oversight and public welfare, and utilized his office to help Trump pressure Ergen and Dish to offload a significant chunk of spectrum assets to Musk and SpaceX (for their likely-doomed wireless play), and AT&T — and donate to the ballroom.
The broader backstory tying all of this to the Sprint and T-Mobile merger won’t really be discussed by what’s left of the U.S. press, and the latest ballroom revelations barely had enough juice to carry an hour-long news cycle while consumers and labor bore the costs of regulatory capture. Just another day in a country being devoured alive by corruption and the shittiest rich people imaginable.
Filed Under: ballroom, brendan carr, charlie ergen, corruption, donald trump, elon musk, pay to play, regulatory capture
Companies: dish network, echostar
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