Katie on Katie. @katierobertson.bsky.social profiles Wired editor, @katie-drummond.bsky.social, who has been making the tech optimists very mad lately. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/b...

New report of a woman who was improperly jailed for SIX MONTHS because of a facial recognition error How many times will this happen before Congress steps up and enacts strong rules on how facial recognition is used? www.grandforksherald.com/news/north-d...

Going to war with bad maps. It has happened before: www.nytimes.com/2000/04/17/w...

Thomson Reuters is best known for its media outlet and legal research tools, but it is also a huge data broker that provides investigative tools to the government, including ICE. Its Minneapolis workers aren't happy about that: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/t...

Scoop: DHS ousted multiple privacy officers at CBP after they questioned orders to purposely mislabel records about government surveillance to prevent their release under FOIA.

Take a quiz to see whether you prefer human or A.I. written passages. MAJOR warning required here that you might hate your results. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Of course they asked a chatbot to do it for them. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

How the rich have gotten richer since the 2017 tax cuts, and how it's affecting everyone else. A case study in Wyoming: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/u...

For many in the tech sector, fictional dystopias are aspirational. "Science fiction did not just predict the future, Mr. Luckey said, but 'literally caused the future.'" www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/t...

My major takeaway from the last year of reporting on generative AI chatbots is that safety guardrails can fail when conversations run long and that everyone who works in this space knows that www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/t...

People are revealing sensitive personal information to A.I. chatbots — including plans to commit violent acts. What should the companies do when it happens? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/t...

There are privacy implications raised by this, but ingenious investigating to find a serial rapist by asking Google for IP addresses of those who looked up the address of a victim's house apnews.com/article/goog...

One of favorite reads back in 2017 by @kashhill.bsky.social when she worked at Gizmodo was ‘How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You’ve Ever Met’ She chronicled the People You May Know (PYMK) feature extensively gizmodo.com/how-facebook...

Huge story by Georgia. Flagged by an automated review system, debated by "about a dozen staffers," and OpenAI did nothing.

When I raid my kids' holiday candy stashes, I usually think to myself, 'This doesn't taste as good as it tasted to me when I was a kid.' I thought it was because my taste buds had changed, but it's actually that the candy is not as good: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/c...

When you don't realize the person in glasses is recording you, restaurant edition: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/d...

NEW: ChatGPT and other chatbots are feeding users' fixations on real people, reinforcing users' delusional ideas and obsessions about others as they descend into unwanted harassment, stalking, and/or domestic abuse — traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Our reporting uncovered that hundreds of administrative subpoenas have been sent by the Homeland Security Department to Meta, Google, Reddit, and other social media companies. Some of the accounts they have sought to unmask have flight back in court.

New story up on the Homeland Security Department’s new tactic: flood social media companies with subpoenas to unmask anonymous accounts that criticize ICE or monitor the movements of ICE agents. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

Will immediately read anything @kashhill.bsky.social writes www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/t...

We did a video for this one so people can see what it’s like to have your every marital conversation mediated by a translation app: www.nytimes.com/video/busine...

For Valentine’s Day, a story from me about A.I. and love, but with no chatbots involved. He speaks English. She speaks Mandarin. The key to their happy marriage: Microsoft Translator. 💝 Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/t...

For a past Valentine's Day, I did a story about tracking my husband's every move with AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker: www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/t... I love a holiday hook...

In an internal memo in May, Meta laid out its plans to release facial recognition in its smart glasses, to the blind first, & then to the general public. “Civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...

I am increasingly scared of flying and this does not help. The reason the El Paso Airport was closed, my colleagues report, is that federal agents shot a laser into the sky that could take down an airplane. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/u...

oh so just dumb luck these idiots didn’t shoot down a passenger aircraft

NEW: CBP signs a new deal with Clearview AI to access its scraped image database for "tactical targeting," including efforts to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” networks of people labeled security threats.

Fascinating: Regulators in Europe deem illegal how many content creation companies define success www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/b...

‘HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS,’ EMILY DICKINSON famously wrote, and that often leads to pictures of doves sitting quietly and looking sweet, but what if hope is an albatross that can soar for years without stopping, or an osprey that can haul a thrashing salmon out of rough waters?

This is how Sen. Ron Wyden clues the public into activity that he finds extremely alarming. He does a press release about a letter he sent to the director of the CIA that basically says, 'I want to make sure you saw the classified letter I sent early today.' www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

A retiree wrote this email to a DHS attorney. Within five hours, DHS demanded Google turn over records for his account. A Kafkaesque form of domestic surveillance, intimidating Americans for lawful speech. New from us at the Post: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio... @johnwoodrowcox.bsky.social

Speaking of the Washington Post, this is a must-read story it recently put out about how the government chased down a guy who sent critical emails to federal employees about current deportation policies.

Very sad to see yet another news outlet eradicate jobs for journalists. Reliable information about the world and what’s happening in it, from local to global scale, is harder to get with fewer and fewer skilled people whose mission is to provide it. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/b...

New territory. Must read story from a colleague. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

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.

The government’s arrests of journalists @donlemonofficial.bsky.social and @bygeorgiafort.bsky.social are attacks on freedom of the press. Two federal courts flatly rejected prosecuting Lemon, but instead of accepting that humiliating defeat, the government has now doubled down. Read our statement:

"News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend [independent journalists Don] Lemon’s and [Georgia] Fort’s rights. Journalists are not making themselves the story, Trump is.” Full Freedom of the Press Foundation statement below.

One of the greatest fears for facial recognition tech is its use to suppress dissent. Congress has been talking about creating laws for facial recognition since the "Snooper Bowl" in 2001, when it was unknowingly used on football fans (wrote about it in my book). But lawmakers never got it done.

ICE has weapons of war... www.nytimes.com/video/us/100... ...and surveillance: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/t... ... including face recognition app Clearview AI. In 2024, DHS was only using Clearview for child exploitation investigations. Now use includes investigating "attacks on law enforcement."

OpenAI will retire GPT 4o on Feb 13: openai.com/index/retiri... In November, we wrote about how OpenAI engineered this model to be more engaging, resulting in harmful effects on some users: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/t...

Whoa, the longterm effects of the reporting I did on GM's sale of people's driving information to risk profilers: phoebewallhoward.substack.com/p/gm-warns-o...

NEW we got more details about Mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app that immigration agents have reportedly been using: www.wired.com/story/mobile...

Incredible story by @agreenberg.bsky.social, both on the scam compound operation and how he navigated a uniquely difficult and dangerous situation for his source. This one should be required reading for journalism ethics classes: www.wired.com/story/he-lea...

Another article by @kashhill.bsky.social about the harms to which LLMs are being tied

I’ll confess, my initial reaction when stories like this started dribbling out was that the folks described must have had some preexisting issue waiting to be set off by something or other. But the more accumulate, the more it seems like… no, it’s the LLMs. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/u...

One of many awful stories: “One woman, who had no history of mental illness, asked ChatGPT for advice on a major purchase she had been fretting about. After days of the bot validating her worries, she became convinced that businesses were colluding to have her investigated by the government.”

Fascinating article, conversations w/ medical professionals about AI use in their patients. Takeaways: 1) AI psychosis moving firmly from anecdote to data 2) "They were going to have a breakdown anyway" misunderstands causes of psychotic breaks 3) Chatbot addiction may be a presenting condition

Once again, the government is trying to get you to believe your own eyes are lying to you. This was another murder by ICE, an agency that proves day after day it has no business policing on America’s streets.

The federal government is gunning people down in the streets, lying about what happened and then preventing any independent investigation of the killings