Beautiful copypasta: "I have failed in that sacred trust...Like the scribes of antiquity who bore their stylus as both privilege and burden, I understand that legal authorship demands more than mere competence - it requires absolute fidelity to truth and precision in every mark upon the page."

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot. I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

NEW: Records reviewed by WIRED show DHS’s facial recognition app (Mobile Fortify) isn’t designed to actually "verify" identity—despite DHS claims and its agents relying on its matches to support probable cause in the field.

❤️

I wanna keep doing this work, in any form (podcast! newsletter! movie? AI literacy class!). Pls msg me on Signal at nitasha.10 if you need someone who’s well-sourced in AI & SV, worked hard to understand the technology + ideas + players, cares about getting it right and informing the public

"Ah, a headshot I like!" *Taken 14 years ago* 🫥

Over the last six months, MuckRock teamed up with a class of investigative journalism students at West Virginia University to request opioid settlement spending documents from all 55 counties in West Virginia. www.muckrock.com/news/archive...

Forget it Roger, it's Toontown

“If and when collaboration starts to really take off, it won’t be because someone built some whizzy new tech.” www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/a-sc...

"The propaganda is going to get a lot worse and more pervasive before it gets better... our tax money was given to a private business actively destroying our public education systems, [and] none of the grant money allocated for libraries and museums will go to actual libraries and museums."

Remember, 99% of your future readership are Moltys. Plan accordingly

A Minnesota woman observing ICE agents in her car was cornered on one-way streets. An agent approached, called her by name—citing facial recognition. Days later, her Global Entry and TSA privileges were revoked, with no explanation.

Dartmouth's communications office coached a student on what to say in an op-ed in the Dartmouth praising the college's new wellness AI, and the AI project office paid him for his time writing it. This is wildly unethical; the responsible staff need to be fired. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...

NEW: An AI toy company's web portal had basically protections, allowing anyone with a Gmail address to access some 50,000 transcripts of kids' chats with their stuffed animals. @agreenberg.bsky.social has the scoop: www.wired.com/story/an-ai-...

This is great! @taniel.bsky.social and @boltsmag.org are putting together a big Q&A for people who want to know more about state and local response to ICE operations. Send them your questions!

NEW, by me: Loose Rules Let State Police Hand Out Lax Penalties for Serious Misconduct The agency's disciplinary system is weaker than other large departments in NY. Troopers who committed serious misconduct have been allowed to remain on the job. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u...

Kotaku is hiring for *three* positions: - Staff reporter: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi... - Nights and weekends editor: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi... - Community editor: kotaku.com/kotaku-is-hi...

Looking for DC-area Spanish-to-English interpreters if you have any recommendations you've used. One session for an in-person conference.

Generally feel Sam Altman's proclamations are worth the bits they're printed on, but interesting that he thinks inference (I think?) be "100x" less expensive than it is now. www.youtube.com/live/Wpxv-8n...

And I genuinely, truly and non-trollingly, understand concerns about threats to officers in question, but in every single other law enforcement shooting I've covered, authorities name the individual(s) involved. This is just the baseline of public accountability.

this stuff is complex (at least to this non-lawyer), but chris breaks it down better than anyone. a must read post

"Anyone who has attempted to gamify some experience knows that if you want to keep people hooked, make them feel like they’re always almost at the next level. Vibe coding does this naturally ... It always feels like you’re right on the precipice of completion." hils.substack.com/p/help-my-hu...

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Open Journalism Bot, the TMZ* for news nerds. * IDK, I don't really read TMZ.

The "Board of Peace" installs Trump (in his personal capacity, not as serving US President) as its chairman, and gives him personally (not USG) right to select his successor. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_o...

"We have a nice little database. Now you're considered a domestic terrorist." www.reddit.com/r/Maine/comm...

We spent months and months figuring out how to connect generic drugs to the factories they were made in. A bunch of researchers asked us for our data, so we’re giving it away to everyone: www.propublica.org/article/rx-i...

Newly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn’t care. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/u...

Look at this: @inquirer.com has digitally preserved the interpretative signage removed by NPS, and used annotations to explain what specifically was flagged before removal. This keeps the content publicly accessible (for now) while doing newsworthy reporting www.inquirer.com/news/philade...

Paul Kedrosky's takes on AI are a nice departure from most analysis. Frontier models seem like a precarious thing to bet the farm on — hugely expensive but quickly commoditized. paulkedrosky.com/four-takeawa...

Last week I asked BOP officials if they had sent tactical teams to Minneapolis. They denied it (left). Multiple agency sources told me otherwise, and photos from reporters on the ground soon confirmed BOP folks were there. Now BOP is finally admitting it (right):

On Friday, January 9, ICE arrested a member of our union, the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild, as part of Operation Metro Surge. He has been transferred to a detention facility in Texas, where he is awaiting action on his petition for habeas corpus. newsguild.org/guild-member...

The 6-month-old that DHS is tweeting about here lived in the neighborhood and the baby’s father was just trying to evacuate his family after federal agents had shot someone.

A clear and appalling sign that this administration will set no limits on its acts of aggression against an independent press. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Apparently Harry's is diversifying into Babies-as-a-Service. No thanks, too many scents around here already.

hmm.. i don't think that's true!

Congress requires ICE to publish a report within 90 days when someone dies in custody. That deadline has passed in the case of Huabing Xie. If reporting rules aren’t enforced, what safeguards actually exist for people in detention? www.kpbs.org/news/border-...

New: we've obtained material explaining how an ICE surveillance system, called Webloc, works. Draw shape on a map, see all phones available there, follow them home. All without warrant “This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency.” www.404media.co/inside-ices-...

Amazing org!

Congrats! Another big MA public records win. And glad to see a judge ordering attorney's fees! One of the few things we've seen broadly create culture change at agencies.

Judge to Lindsey Halligan: Explain yourself. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

For people who were a certain kind of computer nerd a certain number of years ago, Steve Yegge is not only writing again, but writing regularly, and wrote a book. steve-yegge.medium.com

New year, new register. All data viewable and downloadable through the link.

Amidst all that is destructive and demoralizing, we're meeting to celebrate civic culture + public knowledge and build solidarities. Open to NYC info workers (librarians, archivists), grad students, artists, designers. Apps are due Wednesday, Jan 7, end-of-day! Confirmed sessions include:...

What are you using these days to track what you’re reading/what you want to read?

Star Wars: Young Jedi Masters has to be the worst franchise entry since the Disney acquisition. At least in Christmas Special, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fischer were having fun.

I no longer have the email, but my favorite rejection is a message from the IL Secretary of State FOIA folks that had a clear subtext of "why would anyone want this information, you freak?"