The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade and involved the domestic transport of thousands of noncitizens from Mexico and Central America, including some children, in exchange for thousands of dollars, according to the indictment.

Abrego Garcia is alleged to have participated in more than 100 such trips, according to the indictment. Among those allegedly transported were members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, sources familiar with the investigation said.

Abrego Garcia is the only member of the alleged conspiracy charged in the indictment.

I just think it's interesting. It's political theater like Fox News, but it's interesting to see it in another cultural context and with different behaviors of argumentation being modeled for the audience and different types of false conflict to keep them engaged.

Also, Tucker Carlson sure looks like hell now. He used to look vigorous and bad like an 80s comedy villain, then he got lazy and started looking like an HOA Karen, and now he's turning into a bloated prep school Mitch McConnell. He also looks super unhappy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31288698

In The Political Economy of Human Rights, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued that the American ruling class and corporate media regard bloodbaths as being constructive, nefarious or benign. A constructive bloodbath is typically carried out by the US or one of its proxies, and is endorsed in establishment media. The most obvious contemporary example is the genocidal US/Israeli campaign in Gaza, approved by media commentators in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.

The two other approaches that Chomsky and Herman outline illuminate the corporate media’s approach to Syria. When Bashar al-Assad was in power in Syria and the US was seeking his overthrow, corporate media treated killings that his government and its allies carried out as nefarious bloodbaths: Their violence was denounced in corporate press with unambiguous language, and prompted demands that the US intervene against them.

In the months since Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa came to power, with substantial assistance from the US and its partners, his government has opened Syria’s economy to international capital, arrested Palestinian resistance fighters, indicated that it’s open to the prospect of normalizing relations with Israel, and opted not to defend Syria against Israel’s frequent bombings and ever-expanding occupation of Syrian land. In that context, Washington has embraced Damascus, with Trump praising al-Sharaa personally, and finally lifting the brutal sanctions regime on Syria.

As these developments have unfolded, US media have switched from treating bloodbaths in Syria as nefarious to treating them as benign. A benign bloodbath is one to which corporate media are largely indifferent. They may not openly cheer such killings, but the atrocities get minimal attention, and don’t elicit high-volume denunciations. There are few if any calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice or ousted from government.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65322395

Looking less likely that this is just a distraction. I think the breakup is pretty official 💔

Just to be clear though, most of what Musk was doing under DOGE was planned by Thiel during Trump's first administration, when he brought Michael Kratsios in to OSTP to help Trump with technology issues.

June 2018: The president’s most senior technology advisor claims the White House is quietly pursuing an aggressive AI plan.

Speaking at EmTech Next, a conference held at MIT, Kratsios, who is deputy assistant to the president and deputy US chief technology officer, said the government is looking for ways to open up federal data to AI researchers. “Anything that we can do to unlock government data, we’re committed to,” Kratsios told MIT Technology Review. “We’d love to hear from any academic that has any insights.”

Data has been a key factor behind recent advances in artificial intelligence. For example, better voice recognition and image processing have been contingent on the availability of huge quantities of training data. The government has access to large amounts of data, and it’s possible that it could be used to train innovative algorithms to do new things. “Anything we can do to figure that out, we will work very hard on,” Kratsios added.

Elon first began to step back from government once Kratsios was confirmed to serve as Trump's Science Advisor during his second term.

Odd timing that as of yesterday, Neuralink raised $600M and is now valued at $9B. It would appear Musk at least got something out of being the official face of taking a chainsaw to American government

Whenever you follow the science, the right wing will fall to pieces.

Twelve days before Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse (2024) was set to broadcast on April 15 across PBS stations nationwide as part of its strand American Masters, the filmmakers were told that a 90-second sequence—which shows the famous artist discussing an anti-Trump cartoon he created for the 2017 Women’s March newspaper—would be cut from the documentary.

The filmmakers, directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, who produced the film alongside Sam Jinishian and Alicia Sams, had a choice. According to Sams, they could choose to buy back their licensing deal, or agree to PBS’s decision and move forward with the broadcast. “We were told the film still has an anti-fascist message, and the audience can connect the dots themselves,” she says. “The irony of censoring someone who is a free speech advocate is maybe lost on PBS, but certainly not lost on us.”

I also enjoy the AI-generated summary of the comments:

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly criticize the notion that the actions of "fake electors" were merely political acts rather than criminal offenses. Many commenters argue that the fake elector scheme was part of a broader conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, which they... (Show more)

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

In this News Brief, we we break down an object lesson in racist US-Israeli national security state toadyism, double standards, and runaway condescension.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64675314

Looks like this got deleted from the original community where I posted it, so re-posting what I can remember here.

This screenshot is from a post I made on my city's subreddit.

Monday the Washington Post revealed my city was using a first of its kind mass surveillance and facial recognition software that allows police to track individuals added to a watchlist via cameras installed around the city.

The ACLU is saying it is "the stuff of authoritarian surveillance states, and has no place in American policing.”

“Until now, no American police department has been willing to risk the massive public blowback from using such a brazen face recognition surveillance system,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “By adopting this system–in secret, without safeguards, and at tremendous threat to our privacy and security–the City of New Orleans has crossed a thick red line.

The NOPD has stopped using it since WaPo began investigating because it violated a city ordinance, but federal agents (ICE) and state police are still using the real time tracking app.

I realized after reading an Axios article about it on Wednesday that the ordinance was created after the mayor, suddenly asked the city to lift a blanket ban on the technology and other controversial predictive policing policies.

The city's mayor has been facing federal charges regarding a scandal for several years and is currently just running out the clock on her last term as mayor. She has also been accused of other corruption such as accepting gifts as bribes in the past

The ban on predictive policing policies was originally created following the end of a secret partnership between Palantir and the city of New Orleans from ~2012-2018.

Months after the city first abandoned it's contract with Palantir, Mayor Cantrell seemed to be looking for loopholes that would allow her to continue using controversial predictive policing

I have tried to avoid pile-on critique of the mayor, and I actually voted her the first time she ran. However, one of the most common questions people in my city ask, is "how has she not been arrested?" I want to stress this is my own speculation, but given the details that are emerging now, I do wonder if these charges may have been related to why she so willingly turned over the city's privacy to the federal government in 2022?

The proposed ordinance, if passed, would largely reverse the council’s blanket bans on the use facial recognition and characteristic tracking software, which is similar to facial recognition but for identifying race, gender, outfits, vehicles, walking gait and other attributes. One provision also appears to walk back the city’s ban on predictive policing and cell-site simulators — which intercept and spy on cell phone calls — to locate people suspected of certain serious crimes.

That provision could, for the first time, give the city explicit permission to use a whole host of surveillance technology in certain circumstances, including voice recognition, x-ray vans, “through the wall radar,” social media monitoring software, “tools used to gain unauthorized access to a computer,” and more.

Lastly the proposal would allow the city to use “social media or communications software or applications for the purpose of communicating with the public, provided such use does not include the affirmative use of any face surveillance.” The Lens asked Tidwell and Green why this was included and what it was meant to allow, but neither responded.

While she may not have realized it at the time, the removal of the ban, along with her oddly warm welcome of the Governor's own state police force, Troop Nola, has placed the entire city in danger as the 2025 Trump administration continues to remove protection for civil rights and liberties as well as oversight for potential abuse of NSA surveillance

Louisiana State Police (LSP) Troop Nola, are now permanently established in the city and cannot be regulated by city policy and regulations. This means that they can also not be regulated by the same city ordinance that compelled the NOPD to pause their use of the controversial surveillance and real time tracking notifications.

As of yesterday, the Justice Department decided to stop investigating civil rights accusations previously made against LSP, while Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry and his long time friend Attorney General Liz Murrill, were reported to have celebrated the decision.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64452424

This is the first known time an American police department has relied on live facial recognition technology cameras at scale, and is a radical and dangerous escalation of the power to surveil people as we go about our daily lives.

According to The Washington Post, since 2023 the city has relied on face recognition-enabled surveillance cameras through the “Project NOLA” private camera network. These cameras scan every face that passes by and send real-time alerts directly to officers’ phones when they detect a purported match to someone on a secretive, privately maintained watchlist.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64252755

Archive link without paywall: https://archive.is/Wod1E

New Orleans Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said city police weren’t notified about the escape until 10:30 a.m., about two hours after the routine headcount turned up short. The department then set out to inform the public so people could protect themselves and help with the search.

“We wanted to immediately notify our public because we knew these escapees would be in our city,” she said before promising a “full court effort” to track down the escapees.

Kirkpatrick declined to criticize the sheriff’s office but said the delay in reporting the escape was “concerning.” When asked whether Hutson should have let her know about the escape sooner, the superintendent demurred.

“We’ll deal with that at another time,” she said.

Last year, Hutson requested the New Orleans City Council increase her budget by 60 percent, from $55.3 million to $88.3 million to deal with an influx of inmates, according to nola.com. The sheriff told city leaders her office was holding far more people than the jail and her staff could handle, costing millions in unexpected expenses.

The roughly 1,500 inmates the jail has housed for the last year has been well above the 1,250-inmate limit the city council had put in place and far more than the 900 inmates her deputies can safely oversee, the news agency reported. “We are underfunded, understaffed, underpaid, so we do our best to hire staff and retain them,” Hutson said Friday, “but like everyone else, we’re short.”

The jailbreak is the latest in a series of oddly high profile incidents regarding the Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson over the last several weeks.

The current Governor of Louisiana has critiqued New Orleans sanctuary policy for handling immigration since at least 2017, when he was Attorney General for the state. The policy is the result of a federal consent decree handed down by the Department of Justice.

In 2024, the mayor of New Orleans, who has been under legal pressure due to her own corruption scandal, ignored concerns of many civil rights advocates, when she sided with the Governor to establish a permanent state police (Troop Nola) presence in the city.

Governor Landry claimed this was necessary to reverse damage to NOPD caused by the Federal decree.

The following has all seriously happened in New Orleans over the last 2.5 weeks:

•Sanctuary city trial. The current Louisiana AG filed charges against Hutson to force her to lift what the state argues is a sanctuary city policy, relating to a federal decree placed on NOPD by the DOJ.

The AG, a long time friend of Governor Landry, argued that New Orleans was in violation of state law created last year.

That law was written by Blake Miguez, a different long time friend of Landry and member of his Louisiana DOGE taskforce. Miguez has also been helping the Governor restructure the Louisiana board of ethics following claims of ethics board violation, which have allowed Landry the ability to appoint the majority of the members of the ethics board directly, with less oversight.

Ultimately, the federal judge ruled that she did not believe AG Murrill had the authority to make those claims against Hutson.

•A Trump EO about ending federal decrees and sanctuary cities was released on the Monday night, (less than 48 hrs) before the Wednesday trial

•The Saturday after the trial, the city held a vote to continue a millage, so that a small amount of property tax would fund the jail. Hutson said she needed the funds to make repairs to the jail, but faced a bizarre disinformation campaign falsely claiming voting yes would raise taxes. Nobody has ever taken credit for the signs placed around the city.

It just barely passed by 2 votes. A request for a recount was filed early the next week.

•The recount request was filed under an alias by somebody who had previously run for elected office in Louisiana, and was previously involved in revealing an astroturfing scandal against the city The recount ultimately increased the number of yes votes so the millage passed by 4 votes.

•This past Tuesday the city submitted a request to lift the consent decree. The request was filed right at the 5 pm deadline

•Thursday Governor Landry released an EO urging Louisiana law enforcement to partner with ICE

From the Office of the Governor news release Governor Jeff Landry Partners with President Donald Trump to Launch “Operation GEAUX”

•Late Thursday night/early Friday morning, 11 prisoners escape from Orleans Parish jail

•Hutson is up for re-election soon. Candidates running against her are now speaking to the press, claiming this should make her ineligible to run for re-election.

If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.

Since Donald Trump's inauguration, OAN personalities have pushed bizarre and inflammatory foreign policy commentary, including referring to Canada as “our vassal state,” calling Greenland ”the new Africa,” and pushing for a revival of “manifest destiny.” They’ve also run cover for Trump over his planned acceptance of a luxury jet from Qatar.

I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial.

BBC probe finds coordinated social media campaigns, originating abroad, spreading false information against and in favour of new Syrian administration

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43987676

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/381055

Comments

I’ve recently had conversations with a number of people who, it turned out, were completely unaware that before the October 7th attack on Israel, Gazans had tried huge non-violent demonstrations for almost two years.

Every week, thousands of unarmed men, women and children in Gaza’s open air prison had gathered in a nonviolent, Gandhian march to end the Israeli blockade that was strangling them and to return to their stolen homes and villages.

And every week Israeli snipers had shot dozens of them, killing and maiming unarmed people of all ages – men, women, children, medics, journalists. On the first day alone, atleast fifteen people were killed and 750 others were shot. (See detailed reports here. and videos below.)

Yet, US news reports mentioned these so infrequently, if at all, that many Americans have no idea that these massive weekly demonstrations even took place.

One of the most blatant and egregious examples is PBS.

PBS’s Frontline program had actually co-produced a documentary with the BBC about the Great March. While this still contained considerable pro-Israel spin, It showed a level of Israeli violence that most Americans never see.

At the last minute, PBS suddenly canceled the broadcast.

The reason given was that it was simply postponed because of a more important breaking news story.

However, the allegedly timely news story that preempted the Gaza documentary consisted of a minimal, widely known update to a news story that had been on the website for 2 months. PBS told callers the film would be broadcast at some unnamed time in the future.

The next story from PBS was that the film was supposedly not a PBS documentary, even though it had been announced as such in numerous places. Moreover, this fraudulent excuse had not even been mentioned when the film was preempted. The upshot was that PBS now announced it would never show it.

Had this film not been blocked, quite likely vastly more Americans would have seen Palestinians’ courageous attempt to use nonviolence, would have seen Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed demonstraters in cold blood, and more Americans would have demanded that their government stop supporting Israel… And then, perhaps, the desperate October 7th breakout would not have occurred.

Cross-posted from "Russia behind dozens of disinformation campaigns targeting Ukraine and allies, France says" by @[email protected] in [email protected]

French authorities said Wednesday they had tracked nearly 80 disinformation campaigns led by Russian operators between August 2023 and early March 2025, mainly targeting Ukraine and its allies, including France.

The estimate by the French agency countering foreign online attacks, Viginum, said the campaign was "particularly... effective in distributing anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western narratives to Western audiences".

The so-called "Storm-1516" campaign uses artificial intelligence to create realistic profiles, pays amateur operators, and poses a "significant threat to the digital public debate, both in France and across all European countries," the agency said.

"The European public debate is being pounded by disinformation campaigns conducted by Russian entities and relayed especially by the American far-right," said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot in a statement to AFP, adding that Russian entities had targeted the French legislative elections of 2024.

...

The Viginum report highlighted the role of American far-right influencers or pro-Russian influencers like Adrien Bocquet, a "former French soldier exiled in Russia", who amplify the dissemination of false information.

Some of the false information -- such as the alleged purchase by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of a former Nazi building in Germany or a luxury hotel in Courchevel -- have been verified by AFP's digital investigative team in articles available on AFP Factuel's website (factuel.afp.com).

...

The disinformation-fighting organisation NewsGuard previously attributed to Storm-1516 a video supposedly showing a Chadian migrant confessing to raping a 12-year-old girl in France. Another, AI-generated video accused Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron, of sexual assault.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/63196442

Deregulation is also foundational policy. Kratsios said that removing regulations that act as “barriers to innovation” will help foster progress in the technology stack within the U.S.

For the final element of OSTP’s “promote” effort, Kratsios said the widespread adoption of these tech solutions will both catalyze domestic efficiency and set an example internationally.

“We as a country need to be having our great industry at companies, academic institutions and everyday Americans using this technology,” he said. “But also, even more importantly, we need to have the rest of the world running on an AI stack that is ours, that’s American.”

Deploying these solutions within the federal government is also a critical step to promoting U.S. leadership in emerging tech and science realms. Kratsios said that accelerating adoption at a public- and private-sector level, potentially facilitated with the help of the deregulation policies, will help further drive U.S. innovation.

“Those breakthroughs are only really valuable if we actually adopt them and allow the American people to fully realize the benefits of those technologies,” Kratsios said. “But if no one is using it, if the Department of Defense isn't actually adopting and using it in its stack, if all of our great financial institutions aren't attempting to leverage those models to drive better services for their customers, it really doesn't matter.”

He added that the White House is contemplating the idea of creating an “ecosystem of trust” to facilitate adoption of new U.S. technologies.

While the EU is aiming to become the global leader for more ethical and trustworthy AI via improved regulatory laws, Peter Theil protege and current science advisor to president Trump, Michael Kratsios, has again indicated the U.S. is taking the polar opposite approach, and once again emphasized the need for deregulation while attempting to dominate the global AI race.

Although the U.S. previously joined the U.K. and E.U., in September of 2024, signing the first “legally binding” treaty on AI, to ensure use of AI aligns with “human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” the Trump administration began distancing the U.S. from a unified stance on AI regulations, within the first month Trump took office in 2025.

At a global summit in Paris, this past February, the U.S. and U.K. refused to join dozens of other countries including France, China and India, agreeing to an "open", "inclusive" and "ethical" approach to AI development.

While the U.K. government claimed it did not sign due to concerns over national security and global governance, Vice President J.D. Vance indicated the U.S.refusal was due to concerns over strict regulations, stating it could "kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off". Vance vowed that the U.S. would not squander an opportunity to grow AI policies over safety concerns

As Chief Technology Officer during Trump's first administration, Kratsios would have certainly been involved in the policy and decision making regarding Clearview AI's controversial facial recognition technology and it's use by FBI and ICE. In fact, a 2019 interview with Kratsios indicates he opposed the regulation of controversial facial recognition technology.

Given Kratsios previous leadership and dismissal of regulations when promoting what is now recognized as extremely controversial A.I. technology, the Trump administration's repeated attempts to shift the U.S. away from consensus with the E.U.'s focus on the necessity of regulations, should perhaps alarm any American citizens with their own ethical concerns regarding AI technology, privacy, and human rights.

While Trump has asked Kratsios to utilize AI technology to blaze a trail for America in 2025, it may also be worth noting that just over 5 years ago, in March of 2020, Kratsios was also tasked by Trump to use cutting edge technology to tackle COVID misinformation and track early cases of the virus in the U.S. in order to keep it from spreading..