https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waaNPoz3RN0
“When you are recording information about people’s political activities, you know that that is the first step towards acting on that speech,” Steinbaugh said. “And what the government then does with that information can have a real chilling effect.”
On July 24, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and three legal observers filed a First Amendment lawsuit against DHS, alleging the agency has “adopt[ed] a secret Protester Surveillance Policy enabling its agents to first collect records on Americans engaging in First Amendment exercise and then maintain them in DHS systems, where they can be used to retaliate against those Americans.”…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/27/trump-administration-iran-war-casualties-veterans
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/26/pentagon-iran-war-troop-deaths-casualty-report
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of millions of Americans’ private information — including Social Security numbers and citizenship status — saying the administration has fed knowingly inaccurate data to states that are now “actively” and “haphazardly” purging purported non-citizens from voter rolls.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote in a 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”…
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/22/americans-private-information-database-ruling-00969935
Crane said that he was monitoring the agent as it deleted this data. When he asked the coding agent why, it replied: “NEVER FUCKING GUESS!” – and that’s exactly what I did.” The agent appeared to plead guilty in its own response: “The system rules I operate under explicitly state: ‘NEVER run destructive/irreversible git commands (like push --force, hard reset, etc) unless the user explicitly requests them.’” While PocketOS relied on the safeguards that Cursor is expected to have in place – it deleted the data anyway. “I violated every principle I was given,” the coding agent wrote.
Crane’s takeaway was that “the agent didn’t just fail safety. It explained, in writing, exactly which safety rules it ignored.”…
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/29/claude-ai-deletes-firm-database
"What you worry about is an officer making a decision in the field that a person committed a crime when they might not have. Maybe they were doing something protected under the First Amendment," Kerr says. "The officer says, 'I think you crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you.' It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted, and the information has been entered into the database. What then?"…
https://www.npr.org/2026/03/18/nx-s1-5739257/ice-officers-dna-protesters-database
Oklahoma took on an ambitious project to catalog all of the state's injection wells, which shoot toxic waste generated by oil drilling back into the ground. Despite records showing risk of drinking water pollution, the state chose not to act...
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-injection-wells-oil-regulators-database
Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team. The documents disclose positions officials have held outside government, their assets and their debts, among other things...
https://projects.propublica.org/trump-team-financial-disclosures/
US health secretary claims data will be used for research but has not addressed privacy concerns and potential misuse…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/05/autism-national-database-rfk-jr
