Thrilled to finally share this ⚡𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙥𝙖𝙥𝙚𝙧⚡ with my (now-graduated!) student Zachary Pepin, which will appear at TCC 2025. We tackle a frequent inconvenience in BGV/BFV-style homomorphic encryption: getting the desired kind of "SIMD slots" for plaintext packing. 🧵 web.eecs.umich.edu/~cpeikert/pu...

What a gem of a movie. I ran into David Strathairn at Vetri in Philly while he was doing a play at the Wilma and when I shook his hand I said "Sneakers is one of my all time favorites" and he said "most fun I ever had and hardly anyone brings it up" Gonna watch it tonight.

This is Ted Chiang erasure, Spelling Bee.

Acts of political violence aren’t acceptable. Non-political school shootings aren’t acceptable. Sacking the legislature isn’t acceptable. Military occupation of peaceful American cities isn’t acceptable. Abductions conducted in courthouse hallways by masked agents of the state aren’t acceptable.

This was, hands down, the top highlight among many in Pompeii. Some ancient Roman had this beautiful floor mosaic made for his home entryway. Is the red-eyed dog snarling and bearing its claws, barely held back by the links of a weak chain? Or is it wagging its tail and play-bowing? CAVEAT VIATOR!

CAVE CANEM (beware of dog)

DHS has arrested two medical personnel at a surgical center in California for demanding that the officers trespassing in their building identify themselves & provide a warrant, accusing them of another.... wait for it... ASSAULT. The case shows how DHS lies relentlessly to violate the Constitution

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

They aren't against illegal immigration. They want immigration to be illegal.

1/ Trump’s immigration machine is abducting Oregonians without cause—including four U.S. citizen children in my district—and detaining them in a windowless cell with NO access to counsel. This is not law enforcement. It’s authoritarianism.

apart from its inherent qualities as a comic strip, I really appreciate that Watterson resisted the urge to franchise and merchandise C&H. There's no animated movie, no tv show, no line of toys, no ipad game. it exists in its entirety as a comic strip written and drawn entirely by one man.

This is a great and moving story. Last 4th of July in Seattle I came across a huge naturalization ceremony—hundreds of people from all over the world officially becoming Americans. More of this!

"Alligator Alcatraz" is wrong and media should not use it. It's propaganda. Alcatraz held people convicted of crimes, particularly violent crimes. The Florida camp holds people *not* convicted of any crime. If they had been, they'd be in prison elsewhere. The site is a textbook concentration camp.

And remember, 93% have no record of any violent crimes. This facility, then, is comparable to the internment camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War. But let's call it what it is: a concentration camp. Jesus wept.

This is remarkable. New Quinnipiac poll finds support for path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants has risen to 64%. Only 31% want most of them deported. That's a 14 point net swing for legalization since Trump took office. On immigration generally, he's at 41-57!

For the first time ever, ICE is holding nearly 12,000 people who have no criminal convictions or criminal charges in squalid overcrowded deportation centers.

David R. Hagen just solved a small mystery that I mentioned 13 years ago in the mouseover text of a comic drhagen.com/blog/the-mis...

Dad of the Year award for this!

Senator Padilla’s office sends me this video of his take-down and detention at Sec. Noem’s press conference in L.A.

Just throw it onto the pile of reasons (as detailed by @radleybalko.bsky.social) that Sen. Bill Cassidy should be shamed for the rest of his life for for his craven, tie-breaking vote in support of RFK Jr.

BREAKING: RFK Jr. fires ACIP, the panel responsible for advising on vaccines. This breaks a promise to Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted to advance Kennedy as HHS secretary on the condition that he would, among other things, keep ACIP in place. www.statnews.com/2025/06/09/r...

Abducting people at work sites - meaning they have jobs. Capturing them at court dates - meaning they're following the law. Blocking them from accessible higher education - meaning they're striving for more. And peddling lies about jobless, lawless, driftless.

Super pleased to see that Zama has just announced the first recipients of the Zama Cryptanalysis Grants. www.zama.ai/post/announc... The projects supported cover security of FHE, MPC, TEEs and ZK. The teams getting the grants represent some of the leading experts in their respective fields.

Many thanks to Amazon Science for granting a research award for my proposal “Practical Third-Generation FHE and Bootstrapping” at U-Michigan! www.amazon.science/research-awa...

Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime, nor accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document: Form I-751. www.mississippifreepress.org/ice-arrests-...

Here’s our 1st profile. Widmer Josneyder Agelviz Sanguino entered the United States legally as a refugee. He was extensively vetted abroad including in-person before coming to the US, but was still detained and renditioned. This is criminal behavior by the USG.

Cato has published my comprehensive review of the ~240 Venezuelans the US government renditioned 2 months ago to Salvador’s notorious prison. We identified FIFTY who came legally, never violated any immigration law, but are imprisoned at the US government’s request and at US taxpayer expense.

Connections today is Keanu erasure.

The president is playing videos at his political rallies of people getting their heads shaved at what is effectively a concentration camp. He’s sending people to that camp with no due process, and 9 in 10 have no criminal record. The rallies are eating it up. Forget “can.” It is happening here.

The SEVIS stuff, where ICE went after thousands of foreign students, tied up likely hundreds of lawyers nationwide and dozens of judges, and likely generated thousands of hours of wasted effort, all for the backlash to lead ICE to rescind their actions in the first place. Just an ENORMOUS waste.

Providence City Councilor Justin Roias: “Yesterday, ICE tased & detained a Providence resident with a pregnant U.S. citizen wife & a green card interview that same day.”

I watch videos like this and I can’t help but believe that standing up for immigrants is good politics, in addition to being right and moral. And our problem is we have too few practicing politicians who think so. www.instagram.com/reel/DH1HDuA...

“In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.” www.aclu.org/press-releas...

NEW: A federal judge raised alarm Friday that the Trump administration appeared to have deported a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with "no meaningful process" — even as her father was fighting to keep her in the country. Details w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

Major theme of Harvard's lawsuit against the gov't is describing how the Trump admin did not follow any of the regulations or statutory requirements the gov't is supposed to do if it wants to cut off funds www.harvard.edu/research-fun...

Van Hollen: "This case is not only about one man, as important as that is. It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the fundamental principle in the Constitution for due process that protects everyone who resides in America."

Teeth! The knives of the face

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, said about President Trump's demands. nyti.ms/4jzSS9W

“To protect both themselves and the entire educational system, then, university leaders should commit, collectively and immediately, to challenge unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance. Nothing in the antitrust laws prohibits this sort of coordination.” 👇👇

“I could march for democracy down the middle of Fifth Avenue and nobody would stop me” is more like it.

Huge congratulations to my amazing student Yeyuan Chen (+co-author Zihan Zhang of OSU advised by Zeyu Guo) for being awarded the STOC 2025 Best Student Paper Award! Their monumental result proves that explicit Reed-Solomon codes can correct more errors than previously known: arxiv.org/abs/2408.15925

In this piece, I endorse Tufts Fletcher School faculty's proposal that universities challenge Trump's speech-based deportations of non-citizen students in court, and explain why this strategy is much better than letting targeted students fend for themselves: reason.com/volokh/2025/...

The ICE arrests are meant to terrorize dissenters and crush the intellectual freedom that’s the whole point of universities—and the tactic is having its intended effect. Thanks to these professors for fighting back. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Did AI write this game because it’s a slop fest

Next up, Zero-knowledge Proofs for Legacy Signatures, presented by Pui Yung Anna Woo and Chad Sharp #realworldcrypto

WOW: @miamiherald.com reveals that a person imprisoned in El Salvador had LEGAL REFUGEE STATUS. He entered the USA legally in January and was detained because of his tattoos, EVEN THOUGH he had previously passed a full background check. Without warning, he was sent to El Salvador on March 15.

Efficient Proofs of Possession for Legacy Signatures (Anna P. Y. Woo, Alex Ozdemir, Chad Sharp, Thomas Pornin, Paul Grubbs) ia.cr/2025/538

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will. The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.