A Jury Just Called Social Media What It Is: Addictive by Design

A Los Angeles jury ruled last Wednesday that Meta and Google deliberately built addictive platforms that damaged a young woman’s mental health. Meta was hit for $4.2 million, Google for $1.8 million. The dollar amounts are pocket change for companies spending $100 billion a year on infrastructure. The precedent is not.

This is the first time a jury has validated the legal theory that social media platforms can cause personal injury: the same legal framework that broke big tobacco. Thousands of similar cases are now pending across the country. The day before, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading users about platform safety and enabling harm against children, including sexual exploitation, ordering the company to pay $375 million in penalties.

Meta said it’s “confident in its record of protecting teens online.” Google called YouTube “a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” Meanwhile, the soaring teen depression rates don’t lie, and it’s well known these companies hire psychologists to try to make their products as addictive as possible.

Exit & Build: Remove social media from your kids’ devices today. Replace the dopamine slot machine with books, outdoor time, and real human interaction. If you’re an adult who feels the pull, set app timers or delete the apps entirely. The jury confirmed what you already knew: these platforms were engineered to hook you.

Sources: Reuters, NPR, The Guardian

Parents Are Voting With Their Feet, and Homeschooling Is Booming

A new Johns Hopkins University report confirms what the exit-and-build crowd already suspected: homeschooling is surging again. In Michigan alone, homeschool rates jumped from 5.04% of K-12 students in 2022-23 to 6.58% in 2023-24. During the pandemic peak, U.S. Census Bureau data showed it hit 11.3%.

New Hampshire is leading the deregulation charge: the state House passed legislation eliminating requirements that parents notify the state they’re homeschooling and removing rules requiring periodic evaluations. Meanwhile, Connecticut is trying to go the opposite direction with new surveillance requirements for homeschool families.

Exit & Build: If you’ve ever thought about homeschooling but felt intimidated, you’re not alone, and you’re more capable than you think. The American Enterprise Institute published a piece this week titled “Yes, You’re Smart Enough to Homeschool Your Kids.” Start with your state’s legal requirements and a local co-op. The community is massive and welcoming.

Sources: The Alpena News/Johns Hopkins, The Federalist, AEI

The Federal Government Still Wants to Spy on You Without a Warrant

In 2024, Donald Trump posted “KILL FISA” in all caps. This week, his administration is pushing for an 18-month clean reauthorization of Section 702 with zero reforms. Another politician, another flip-flop. As disappointing as it is predictable. The folks who think Trump is somehow not part of the deep state are plainly not seeing the evidence.

The April 20 expiration is approaching. Prediction markets give 64.5% odds it gets renewed before it expires.

Section 702 was built for foreign intelligence, but the “data broker loophole” lets federal agencies buy Americans’ location data, browsing history, and app usage from commercial brokers: no warrant required. This week, 17 state attorneys general sent a letter to Congress demanding the loophole be closed before reauthorization. Vermont, California, and Maryland all issued independent press releases.

The bipartisan pushback is the silver lining.

Exit & Build: Use a VPN. Use Signal. Use cash. Assume your phone is a tracking device, because it is. The EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide is free and covers the basics.

Sources: Reason, The Intercept, Vermont AG

For this week, I wanted to focus more on positive news than the never-ending stream of negativity coming out of the press. Admittedly, in some cases, like the Afroman story, it’s a mix of positive and negative. Yes, the cops had no right to raid his home, but at least he humiliated them and won in court.

Cops Raided His House. He Made a Hit Album About It. The Jury Loved It

In August 2022, half a dozen gun-wielding Adams County, Ohio sheriff’s deputies kicked down rapper Afroman’s door on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping. His wife and kids (ages 10 and 12) were home. He wasn’t. The deputies rifled through his CD collection, flipped through his suit pockets, got distracted by a lemon pound cake on the kitchen counter, and confiscated a joint, a vape pen, and $5,031 in cash. They never filed charges. The raid “failed to turn up probative criminal evidence,” the prosecutor’s office later admitted.

Afroman’s home security cameras caught everything. Instead of suing, he did something better: he made an album. Lemon Pound Cake dropped in late 2022 with 14 tracks, including “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” all featuring the security footage. He sold merchandise comparing the deputies to Peter Griffin and Quasimodo.

The deputies were not amused. Seven of them sued Afroman for $3.9 million, claiming defamation and invasion of privacy. The ACLU filed an amicus brief in his defense. Last Wednesday, after a three-day trial and less than a day of deliberations, an Ohio jury sided with the rapper on every count.

“I didn’t win, America won,” Afroman told reporters outside the courthouse, wearing an American flag suit, aviators, and a white fur coat. “America still has freedom of speech.”

What you can do: Know that mockery is protected speech. When power comes for you, document everything. Cameras, recordings, receipts. The best defense against abuse of authority isn’t a lawyer. It’s a record.

There’s a reason those ICE cops are all wearing masks, they fear people knowing who they are because they know what they’re doing is wrong.

Sources: GPB/NPR, Vanity Fair, CNN, Independent Institute

The SEC Finally Admitted Crypto Isn’t a Crime

After more than a decade of “regulation by enforcement,” the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a joint 68-page interpretive release on March 17 that explicitly names 16 crypto assets as digital commodities, not securities. The list: Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, Avalanche, Chainlink, Polkadot, Hedera, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Shiba Inu, Stellar, Tezos, and Aptos.

Three activities that launched a thousand lawsuits are now settled: protocol mining, protocol staking, and airdrops of non-security tokens are all classified outside securities law. SEC Chair Paul Atkins described “decades of regulatory turf wars” that “stifled innovation and pushed market participants offshore.” Translation: they chased builders out of the country, realized the industry thrived anyway, and are now scrambling to bring it back.

The CLARITY Act, which would make these classifications permanent law, passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee in January. Polymarket bettors are pricing it around 60-70% to be signed this year. But the real story isn’t what the regulators did. It’s that crypto builders spent a decade building without permission, and the regulators had to come to them.

What you can do: If you’ve been waiting for “regulatory clarity” to get into crypto, the excuse just evaporated. Start with Bitcoin, learn the basics, and never keep significant holdings on centralized exchanges. If it’s not your wallet, it’s not your crypto.

Sources: CoinDesk, FinTech Weekly, The Guardian

SCOTUS Goes 9-0: You Can Challenge Speech Restrictions

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on March 20 that a Mississippi street preacher can move forward with his First Amendment lawsuit against the city of Brandon. The case, Olivier v. City of Brandon, involves Gabriel Olivier, a public evangelist who was arrested in 2021 for stepping outside a “designated protest area” to preach near a public amphitheater. The city told him he could exercise his First Amendment rights, but only in the pen they assigned him.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for all nine justices, wasn’t having it. Kagan wrote that forcing Olivier to choose between “knowingly violating the ordinance and risking another prosecution” or “forgoing speech he believes is constitutionally protected” was unacceptable. “His suit to enjoin the ordinance, so he can return to the amphitheater, may proceed.”

Nine-zero. In a court that agrees on almost nothing, every single justice said: you can’t confine speech to a government-approved zone and then use a prior conviction to prevent anyone from challenging that zone. “Designated protest areas” are a favorite tool of local governments that want to technically allow free speech while making sure nobody has to hear it.

What you can do: Know your rights. The ACLU’s protest rights page is worth bookmarking. The Institute for Justice and First Liberty offer pro-bono legal defense for First Amendment cases.

Sources: SCOTUSblog, AP News, Washington Post

People Are Building Their Own Internet (and It Runs on $50 Radios)

While telecom giants argue over spectrum licenses and municipalities beg for broadband funding, thousands of people across the country just built their own communication network. No cell towers. No internet. No permission.

Meshtastic is an open-source protocol that turns cheap $50 LoRa radio devices into nodes in a decentralized mesh network. Buy a device the size of a credit card, turn it on, and you’re connected to every other node within range. Messages hop from node to node, extending the network’s reach without any central infrastructure. No subscription. No account. No company running it.

The project has been around since 2020, but it’s experiencing what Hackaday called “a bit of a renaissance.” Communities are deploying nodes on hilltops, rooftops, and mountaintops across the country. In Asheville, North Carolina, the MeshAVL community in Western North Carolina gained momentum after Hurricane Helene knocked out cell networks. About 120 radios were deployed to volunteers during the storm. Similar networks now span Florida, New Jersey, and dozens of other regions.

The use cases keep expanding: property alarms, neighborhood communication networks, off-grid coordination. The devices run on tiny batteries or solar panels, some lasting weeks on a single charge.

What you can do: Get a SenseCAP T1000-E (~$40) or a LilyGo T-Echo and join your local mesh. Check if your area has a community at meshtastic.org. No license required, no monthly fee, and nobody can shut it down.

Sources: Hackaday, MeshAVL, Meshtastic.org, Gulf Coast News Now

Bipartisan Food Freedom Bill Takes on the FDA

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced the Interstate Milk Freedom Act of 2026 (H.R. 7880), a bipartisan bill that would prohibit the federal government from interfering with the interstate traffic of unpasteurized milk and milk products packaged for direct human consumption. The bill currently has nine cosponsors.

Right now, the FDA bans the sale of raw milk across state lines. A farmer in Vermont can sell raw milk to a neighbor, but the moment that milk crosses into New Hampshire, it becomes a federal crime. The same government that can’t secure its own databases has decided it needs to police what you drink.

Massie is a libertarian-leaning Republican who raises cattle on his off-grid Kentucky farm. Pingree is a progressive Democrat from Maine who runs an organic farm. They agree on almost nothing politically, but they both think the government should stay out of your kitchen. That’s not “reaching across the aisle” in the usual DC theater sense. It’s two people who actually produce food and are sick of Federal overreach.

What you can do: Find your local raw milk source at getrawmilk.com. Join a local herdshare or co-op. Build relationships with farmers directly. The parallel food economy is already thriving, and it doesn’t need Congress to function.

Sources: Quiver Quantitative, Breitbart, Spencer Magnet

Every male in America between 18 and 25 is registered in a federal database. This week, the White House confirmed that database might actually get used.

Your Body, Their War

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked whether a military draft is on the table. Her answer: “It’s not part of the current plan right now, but the president again wisely keeps his options on the table.”

Conscription is forced labor under threat of imprisonment. Call it what it is. The federal government maintains a list of every man aged 18 to 25 through the Selective Service System. Registration is compulsory. If Congress authorizes a draft, the system already knows who you are, where you live, and how old you are. The machinery never went away after Vietnam. It’s been sitting in a drawer for 53 years, waiting.

If activated, 20-year-olds get called first, followed by 21, then 22 through 25, then 18 and 19. Birthday lottery, just like Vietnam. Happy birthday to you.

Polymarket bettors give an actual draft 8.5% odds this year. That’s low, but a month ago the market didn’t exist.

What you can do: If you have sons, brothers, or friends aged 18 to 25, make sure they understand what Selective Service registration means. The Selective Service website has information on conscientious objector status and deferment categories.

Maybe look into dual citizenship possibilities - a strategic “vacation” to another country during a draft could save you or your loved ones from becoming cannon fodder in another senseless war.

During Vietnam, tens of thousands of draft-age men left the country. They were technically federal criminals until Carter’s amnesty in 1977. Dual citizenship or legal residency abroad doesn’t exempt you on paper, but enforcement across borders is a different story. Worth thinking about before the lottery starts, not after.

Sources: Military.com, FOX LA

450,000 Reasons to Pay Attention

The Israeli government is preparing to mobilize 450,000 military reservists for a potential ground invasion of Lebanon south of the Litani River. The current authorized ceiling is 260,000 troops. This request would increase that by more than 70%.

Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported the mobilization is “part of military preparations for war and the possibility of a ground incursion in Lebanon.” Axios reported Friday that the IDF is already sending reinforcements to the border. Southern Lebanon has been part of the “Greater Israel” (Eretz Yisrael HaShlemah) territorial vision since the Revisionist Zionist movement, and Likud’s founding ideology has never formally abandoned the claim.

Israel’s total population is 9.6 million. Mobilizing 450,000 reservists means pulling roughly one in every 21 citizens into uniform.

Polymarket bettors give a major Israeli ground offensive in Lebanon 76.5% odds by March 31, with $4.6 million in volume. Fifteen days on the clock.

Oil is responding exactly how you’d expect. WTI crude hit $98.71 Friday (it was in the low $60s in January). Brent crossed $103. Gas is up to $3.58 per gallon nationally. Goldman Sachs raised its 12-month recession probability to 25%. This war is already in your wallet.

What you can do: If you haven’t already, start tracking your energy costs and building a buffer. Fill up the tank before prices climb further. If you’re in a position to, look into solar, wood heat, or other ways to decouple from oil-dependent energy.

Sources: Middle East Monitor, Axios, Forbes

Iran’s War Came Home Through Microsoft

An Iran-linked hacker group called Handala hijacked the device management system of Stryker, a Fortune 500 medical technology company with $25.1 billion in annual revenue.

The attack exploited Stryker’s Microsoft Intune account, which manages corporate devices. Instead of deploying ransomware (how quaint), the hackers used the system’s own remote wipe feature to factory-reset employee devices globally. Phones stopped working. Laptops bricked. Internal communications went dark.

Stryker, headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan, makes surgical equipment, implants, and hospital infrastructure. A “global network disruption” at a company that supplies operating rooms could delay surgeries.

Cybersecurity firm Sophos linked Handala to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. This is the first significant Iranian cyberattack on a US company since the war started. Previous Iran-sympathetic attacks were minor (defacing websites). This was different: a wiper attack on a $25 billion medical company, using its own management tools against it.

What you can do: If you work for any large organization, ask your IT department how device management systems like Intune are secured. Multi-factor authentication on admin consoles is the bare minimum. For personal devices, make sure you have offline backups of anything important. A wiper attack can’t touch a hard drive sitting in your desk drawer.

Sources: NBC News, TechCrunch

The Beef Line

3,800 meatpackers at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado walked off the job this morning. It’s the first major meatpacking strike in the US since the 1980s.

The workers, represented by UFCW Local 7, have been negotiating for eight months on an expired contract. JBS offered raises of 60 cents an hour the first year and 30 cents annually after that. The union says that after a 22-cent-per-hour increase in healthcare costs, the real raise in years two and three drops to 8 cents. In a state where the minimum wage is $15.16 (more than double the federal minimum), that’s an insult wrapped in a spreadsheet.

JBS is the world’s largest meat company, with $21 billion in quarterly revenue. It’s also one of four corporations (along with Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef) that control 80 to 85% of US beef processing. When one plant in a four-company oligopoly shuts down, you feel it at the grocery store. Beef prices are already up 15% year-over-year, hitting record after record.

The company’s response: it plans to “temporarily shift production to other JBS plants where we currently have excess processing capacity.” Translation: we’ll keep the machine running without you. JBS also claimed the union “abruptly walked away” from the negotiating table. The union’s version: the company’s offer is a copy-paste of a national deal negotiated with workers in lower-cost-of-living states like Texas and Utah, where $7.25 minimum wage makes the same raise stretch further.

What you can do: This is a good time to look into local beef sources: ranchers, co-ops, or buying clubs. Industrial meatpacking concentrates your food supply through a handful of companies that can be disrupted by strikes, cyberattacks, or policy changes. Knowing a local rancher isn’t just about quality. It’s supply chain insurance.

Sources: Colorado Sun, Reuters

When the Drones Hit the Duty-Free

Iranian drones struck near Dubai International Airport this week, igniting a fuel tank fire and suspending flights at the world’s busiest international airport. Separate strikes hit Abu Dhabi, killing one person (a Palestinian national), and Fujairah.

Dubai International handled 95.2 million passengers in 2025. It’s the linchpin of global air travel connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa. When drones close it, flight schedules ripple worldwide.

The UAE hosts Al Dhafra Air Base, a major US military installation. UAE defenses intercepted most incoming missiles, but debris reached residential areas. Four people were injured near Dubai: two Ghanaians, a Bangladeshi, and an Indian. The casualties tell you who absorbs the damage in these conflicts: overwhelmingly, foreign workers from countries with no say in any of it.

What you can do: If you have travel plans through the Middle East or connections through Gulf hubs, build in backup routing now. More broadly, this is another reason to reduce dependency on fragile global systems. The more your life runs through single points of failure (one airline hub, one supply chain, one energy source), the more vulnerable you are when someone puts a drone through it.

Sources: Washington Post, Al Jazeera, Reuters

Next Steps

- Check your Selective Service status (or your son’s): sss.gov/verify

- Research conscientious objector status: the time to prepare documentation is before it’s needed

- Fill up the tank: gas prices are climbing and oil shows no sign of retreating from $100

- Find local beef: eatwild.com and localharvest.org are good starting points

- Back up your devices offline: external hard drives still work when your cloud account gets wiped

Reader’s note: after running The Liberty Lookout for a couple of weeks, I realized, there’s not enough daily news to be worth reporting on. At some point it just becomes noise. Plus, I really want The Liberty Lookout to encourage people to exit & build as the proper solution to the collapsing system around us, not be glued to the screens looking at news feeds - and a daily news roundup is kind of counter-productive in that regard. We want people to be informed, not distracted.

So I’ve changed my approach. I’m going to do a single weekly recap on Monday mornings that goes over everything important that’s happened over the past week. I’m still going to send out a daily newsletter, but it’ll be focused on deep dives on topics like prepping, homesteading, the psychology of power, specific important news events (if appropriate), profiles of people who are exiting and building - that kind of thing. Let me know what you think of the updated format!

And now, for the news…

175 Children, One Missile, and a Government That Says It Didn’t Happen

A newly verified video shows a US Tomahawk cruise missile striking a girls’ school compound in Minab, Iran on February 28, killing 175 people, most of them children. The Washington Post, NYT, and NPR have independently geolocated and verified the footage. The Guardian published a visual reconstruction using satellite imagery, verified video, and interviews. The Trump administration continues to deny US involvement.

This is the worst single mass casualty event of a war that has now killed over 1,255 people in Iran according to Al Jazeera’s tracker, along with 8 US service members and at least 14 in Gulf states. Week two brought strikes on oil refineries and fuel depots across four Gulf nations. Toxic black rain is now falling on Tehran from burning oil infrastructure. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively shut down, with maritime traffic down 80% after Iran hit four tankers with drones. Oil blew past $100 per barrel for the first time since 2022 (WTI gained 35% in a single week, the biggest surge since futures trading began in 1983). An explosion hit the US Embassy in Oslo on Sunday in what Norwegian police called a probable “targeted attack” linked to the Middle East conflict.

Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the assassinated Supreme Leader, was named Iran’s new supreme leader today, signaling hardline continuity. Both chambers of Congress voted to reject War Powers resolutions that would have required presidential authorization. Polymarket bettors put the chance of a ceasefire by March 31 at just 22.5%, with nearly $4 million in volume. No authorization, no oversight, no end in sight.

If Trump really cared about the price of gas like he said he did, he wouldn’t have started this war.

“We Can Get to You Whenever We Want”

The Department of Homeland Security is using administrative subpoenas to unmask anonymous Americans who criticize immigration enforcement online. DHS issues thousands of these subpoenas to tech companies like Google and Meta, demanding personal information behind anonymous social media accounts. No warrant. No judge. Just a bureaucratic form letter.

ICE agents in Minneapolis addressed a civilian observer by name during a confrontation, then recited her home address. In Portland, agents photographed observers’ faces and license plates. The ACLU is suing over First Amendment violations affecting more than 30 people who described similar encounters under oath. Meanwhile, Palantir built ICE an app called ELITE that pulls home addresses from Medicaid records to pinpoint neighborhoods for raids. The health data you surrendered to qualify for government benefits is now a targeting tool.

The FBI Left the Back Door Open

Chinese hackers breached an internal FBI computer network that stores information related to domestic surveillance orders, including FISA data. The FBI noticed abnormal log activity on February 17 and notified Congress this week. Remediation is still ongoing.

The FBI demands backdoors into encryption, collects warrantless surveillance data on Americans through Section 702, and builds sprawling databases of domestic communications. Then it can’t secure its own systems. The agency that insists it needs to read your messages left the door open for a foreign government to read its files on you. The timing is poetic: the FISA Section 702 reauthorization fight is approaching, with the current authority expiring next month.

The Jobs Number the Government Can’t Spin

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, against expectations of a 50,000 gain. The official unemployment rate rose to 4.4%. The BLS also quietly revised January’s figure down from 130,000 to 126,000, and December from a gain of 50,000 to a contraction of 17,000. That means 2025 recorded five months of job losses, the most since 2010.

Labor force participation fell to 62%, the lowest in years. Truflation’s real-time index puts inflation at just 0.87% year-over-year, sharply below the BLS official figure of 2.40%. But that was before oil blew past $100 on the Iran war. With energy costs surging, the word nobody in Washington wants to say is “stagflation”: rising prices, falling employment, and a government that just launched a war to make both worse. (NBC News, CNBC)

The man who campaigned on “no new wars” launched one this morning.

At approximately 2 AM Eastern on Saturday, the US government and Israel began joint strikes on Iran under the codename “Operation Epic Fury.” In an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social, President Trump announced “major combat operations” and called for the overthrow of the Iranian government.

“To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight: the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump said. “Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government.” As if buildings will protect you from bombs.

Freedom has arrived, and it sounds like a cruise missile.

What’s Actually Happening

This is not a limited strike. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both made clear the goal is regime change. Israel said its fighter jets are hitting “dozens of military targets” in what it called months of joint planning. Trump vowed to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate” Iran’s navy. He told the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to “lay down your arms or face certain death.”

Iran retaliated within hours. Missiles struck at or near US military bases in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Black smoke rose near the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Manama. Dubai suspended all flights.

Iranian state media reported that a strike hit a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, killing at least 40 to 51 students and wounding dozens more. Iran’s Foreign Ministry called the strikes a “gross violation” of its sovereignty. The IRGC’s chief of staff, Aziz Nasirzadeh, was reportedly killed. Reports suggest Khamenei has been cut off from contact.

The “Peace President”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly promised “no new wars.” He lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. Barely 10 days ago, he hosted the inaugural meeting of his “Board of Peace,” where 27 nations gathered to praise Trump the peacemaker. Tony Blair declared Trump’s vision “the best, indeed the only hope, for the region and the wider world.”

Now Trump is waging war against the largest adversary the US has faced since World War II. Iran’s 93 million people dwarf Iraq (25M in 2003), Vietnam (40M), and Korea (30M). Only Nazi Germany was comparable. Two carrier strike groups, 40,000 to 50,000 troops, and bases across the Persian Gulf that are now under Iranian missile fire.

Congress was not consulted. No Authorization for Use of Military Force. No declaration of war. The Constitution says only Congress can declare war, but presidents of both parties have ignored that for 75 years. Polymarket bettors give just 6.15% odds Congress formally declares war by March 31. Even the people betting real money know the constitutional requirement is a dead letter.

The Bankruptcy Context

The US government’s national debt stands at $38.8 trillion. The government is in the middle of its second partial shutdown of 2026 because Congress cannot agree on basic funding. The CBO projects deficits will hit 5.9% of GDP by 2030, with interest payments alone consuming more than the defense budget.

The post-9/11 wars cost an estimated $8 trillion according to Brown University’s Costs of War project and killed over half a million people. Those were against countries with no capacity to strike back at the US homeland.

Iran is a different animal. It has 960,000 troops, a missile arsenal that just demonstrated it can reach every US base in the Persian Gulf simultaneously, and proxy networks (Hezbollah, the Houthis, Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces) across at least seven countries. Within hours of the first strikes, Iran had turned this into a regional war spanning Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria.

The Iraq Playbook, Again

Anyone who lived through 2003 is watching a rerun. The buildup while “negotiations” proceed. The dismissal of diplomacy the moment the armada is in position. The soaring rhetoric about freedom. The claim of imminent threat, offered without evidence.

And then there is the question nobody in Washington will ask: what happens to the people who survive the bombs? In Iraq, the US military used depleted uranium munitions across Fallujah, Basra, and Baghdad. Peer-reviewed research in PubMed and the BMJ documented sharp rises in cancer rates, congenital birth defects, and genetic damage in exposed populations. Children born years after the fighting ended came into the world with conditions their parents never saw. The contamination persists in soil and water for billions of years.

“Freedom bombs” don’t free anyone. They create generational biological damage that outlives the governments that dropped them.

The Gift to Moscow and Beijing

The US Navy emptied other commands to assemble this Middle East armada. Business Insider reported the Navy’s Caribbean footprint, once a substantial show of force, “has shrunk dramatically.” Two carrier strike groups are now parked in the Persian Gulf instead of the Pacific, where the Pentagon has spent a decade insisting the real threat lives.

China is watching. Chatham House noted that Beijing “may seek concessions on issues more directly related to its interests, such as Taiwan and trade“ while Washington burns through munitions and attention in the Middle East. Pentagon planners have warned for years that the US cannot fight two major wars simultaneously. Trump just committed to one, and China and Russia know the math.

Russia condemned the strikes as “an unprovoked act of armed aggression,” which is rich coming from the country occupying Ukraine. But Moscow’s hypocrisy doesn’t change the strategic reality: AP reported that observers in Moscow believe the Iran conflict “could distract global attention from the war in Ukraine and play into Russia’s hands.” Russia and Iran held joint naval exercises nine days ago. Iran has been supplying Russia with drones for the Ukraine war. Now Iran needs those weapons for itself.

Every carrier group in the Gulf is a carrier group not in the Taiwan Strait. Every billion spent on cruise missiles is a billion not available for Pacific deterrence. The “peace president” didn’t just start a war. He handed America’s two biggest adversaries exactly the strategic window they’ve been waiting for.

Who Benefits?

Israel’s stated goal is to “remove the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran.” Netanyahu has spent decades advocating for exactly this. The coordination was described as “months of joint planning” and “full synchronization.” This is not a US operation that Israel joined. It is a shared project toward an objective one party has pursued for 30 years.

Trump acknowledged US troops may die. He called it “a noble mission.” The troops at those Gulf bases now absorbing Iranian missiles might use a different word.

The Pattern, Not the Person

None of this should surprise anyone who studies how power actually works. Trump is not an aberration. He is the pattern.

The clinical literature on psychopathy in leadership is unambiguous: individuals with psychopathic traits are 3 to 4 times overrepresented in executive positions. They are drawn to power, skilled at acquiring it, and constitutionally incapable of the empathy required to wield it responsibly. These traits are 60 to 81% heritable and self-selecting: power attracts psychopaths, psychopaths breed psychopaths, and the institution perpetuates itself regardless of which party holds office.

Trump promised peace because promising peace wins elections. He launched a war because launching wars consolidates power. There is no contradiction here. The promises were never meant to be kept. They were instruments, tools for acquiring the office that grants access to the weapons. Every president who campaigned on peace and delivered war followed the same script: Wilson, LBJ, Bush, Obama, now Trump. The machine produces the same output regardless of which operator sits at the controls.

The people who believed “this time is different” made the oldest mistake in politics: they evaluated the words instead of the structure. The structure is a machine that concentrates the power to kill in a single individual, insulates that individual from consequences, and rewards the acquisition of that power with wealth and status. It will always attract exactly the kind of person who would use it.

Reform doesn’t fix this. Voting doesn’t fix this. The only answer is to stop feeding the machine: exit and build.

The Last Straw

Every empire collapses. The question is never whether, only when and what. Rome overextended into Germania. Spain bankrupted itself chasing gold. Britain bled out across two world wars. The Soviet Union crumbled trying to hold Afghanistan and match Reagan’s defense spending simultaneously. You never know which war will be the final straw until the camel’s legs buckle.

Now we know.

The US government is $38.8 trillion in debt, running its second shutdown of the year, printing money to cover interest payments on money it already printed, hollowing out the Pacific fleet to fight a war in the Middle East while its two most dangerous adversaries watch and wait. The post-9/11 wars already cost $8 trillion and achieved nothing except the creation of more enemies. The military can’t recruit. The dollar’s reserve currency status is under sustained pressure from BRICS alternatives.

And into this, the “peace president” just committed the US military to regime change in a country of 93 million people, with a conventional army nearly a million strong, missile systems that can reach every US base in the region, proxy forces in seven countries, and the backing of both Russia and China.

This is not a war the US government can win quickly, win cheaply, or walk away from without humiliation. It is the kind of war that historians will point to as the moment the imperial project became unsustainable. Not because Iran is unbeatable, but because the empire was already running on fumes. Iraq cost $8 trillion and 20 years against a country with no allies and a hollowed-out military. Iran has allies, weapons, and a population that will fight. The math doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for years. This war is just the event that makes the math undeniable.

For those of us who have been building outside the system, the timeline just accelerated. The parallel structures, the local food networks, the alternative currencies, the sovereign communities: they aren’t lifestyle choices anymore. They are survival infrastructure. The empire is not declining. It is choosing its own destruction in real time, on live television, while telling you it’s freedom.

Sources: NPR, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, CBS News, Axios, NBC News, Middle East Eye, Brown University Costs of War, Fortune

1. The Surveillance Network Nobody Was Supposed to Find

A San Diego man named James Cordero found an abandoned trailer on a remote border road. Inside: a hidden license plate reader feeding a vast federal surveillance network. He’s since found more than 40 of them, tucked inside trailers and construction barrels along highways between San Diego and Arizona.

The cameras started appearing after California quietly issued permits to Border Patrol and other federal agencies in the final months of the Biden administration. Every plate that passes gets logged: make, model, state, GPS coordinates, timestamp, and sometimes photos of passengers. Border Patrol won’t say where the cameras are or who can access the data. There’s “no transparency, that’s the worst part,” Cordero told CalMatters.

The EFF and 30 organizations sent Gov. Newsom a letter demanding the permits be revoked. California’s own 2016 law restricts ALPR data-sharing with out-of-state agencies, especially for immigration enforcement. The federal government’s solution: bypass the law by putting the cameras on state highways with state permits, then pipe the data to federal databases. Cordero leads volunteer water drops for migrants in the backcountry. He’s not worried about himself. He’s worried his volunteers are being tracked. Given the first Trump administration prosecuted volunteers for leaving water in the Arizona desert, he should be.

Sources: CalMatters, EFF, KPBS

2. Flock Safety’s Very Bad Week

Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala used Flock Safety’s license plate reader system to track a person he was dating 124 times between March and May 2025, plus that person’s ex another 55 times. He’s now charged with attempted misconduct in public office. The ACLU of Wisconsin said the charges “exemplify just how easily Flock cameras can be turned against the very people the technology purports to protect.”

That was Tuesday. Also this week: Mountain View’s city council unanimously voted to terminate its Flock Safety contract after discovering that 250+ unauthorized agencies had conducted roughly 600,000 searches of the city’s plate data without permission. Some out-of-state. Some in violation of California law banning immigration enforcement data-sharing. “We did not know this was going on,” admitted Police Chief Mike Canfield. Santa Clara County followed suit days later.

The pattern is always the same: “safeguards” exist on paper, nobody checks them, and the data flows wherever power wants it to go.

Sources: NYT, ACLU-WI, SJ Spotlight, Fox6 Milwaukee

3. Pakistan Declares “Open War” on Afghanistan

The Pakistani government bombed Kabul and Kandahar overnight, the first time it has directly attacked Taliban military facilities. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif: “Our cup of patience has overflowed. Now it is open war between us and you.”

The strikes hit weapons depots and military posts across three provinces. Thick black smoke rose over Afghanistan’s capital. Both sides claim heavy casualties; neither’s numbers are verifiable. The Taliban (now the Afghan government, if you’ve lost track) fired back at Pakistani military installations but says it wants to “resolve issues through dialogue.”

The Russian, Chinese, Turkish, and Saudi governments are scrambling to mediate.

Pakistan has 170+ nuclear warheads and a conventional military that vastly outguns the Taliban. But the Taliban spent 20 years bleeding the world’s most advanced military in exactly this terrain. Nobody wins a land war in Afghanistan. Nobody ever has.

Sources: Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera

4. ChatGPT Becomes a Snitch (Because It Wasn’t One Already)

OpenAI admitted it found a second ChatGPT account belonging to the Tumbler Ridge, B.C., mass shooter, who killed eight people including six at a secondary school on February 10. The original account was banned in June 2025 for “potential warnings of committing real-world violence.” OpenAI chose not to tell police. The shooter simply made another account. OpenAI only discovered it after the name went public.

Now, under pressure from the Canadian government, OpenAI is “overhauling safety protocols.” The new policy: OpenAI will notify authorities of “imminent and credible” threats even if the user hasn’t revealed “a target, means, and timing.” They’re establishing a direct pipeline to Canadian law enforcement.

Polymarket prices a US AI safety bill before 2027 at 39.5% ($49K volume), suggesting the political pressure may translate into legislation.

Once you build a reporting pipeline between AI companies and police, who decides what qualifies as a “credible threat”? Hopefully not the AI! It hallucinates enough as is - imagine if those hallucinations translated into arrests.

Sources: Politico, CBC, Engadget

1. Building the Praetorian Guard

ICE more than doubled its officer count last year, luring recruits with $50,000 signing bonuses in a months-long taxpayer-funded blitz. DHS called it a “historic 120% manpower increase.” The federal prison system lost over 1,800 workers in a single year (its worst since 2017) as guards followed the money. The scale tells the story: this isn’t staffing an agency. It’s constructing a domestic enforcement army.

These 12,000 new officers and agents get abbreviated training (a whistleblower told Congress the program is “deficient, defective, and broken”), lavish bonuses, and careers that exist only because this administration created them. Their loyalty is structural.

History rhymes. Late-era Roman emperors paid the Praetorian Guard ever-increasing sums to secure their loyalty. The Guard became kingmakers: when Emperor Pertinax tried to impose discipline and cut their bonuses, they murdered him and auctioned the throne to the highest bidder. The pattern never changed: buy loyalty with public money, create a force beholden to the ruler rather than the republic, watch the institution consume itself.

Sources: ProPublica

2. The President’s Media Shopping List

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos is visiting the White House Thursday to discuss the streamer’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming assets. Top of the agenda, per Politico: Trump’s demand that Netflix fire board member Susan Rice, former Biden domestic policy chief and Obama national security advisor.

Rice’s offense? She said on a podcast that corporations that “bent the knee” to Trump would be “held accountable” when Democrats return to power. Trump called her “purely a political hack” on Truth Social. Political activist Laura Loomer urged him to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” The DOJ has since opened a formal antitrust probe.

Meanwhile, Paramount CEO David Ellison sat as a guest of Sen. Lindsey Graham at Trump’s State of the Union, while running a competing $108 billion hostile bid for all of WBD. A Heritage Foundation offshoot launched “Project Netflix” to scuttle the deal. The president of the United States is personally conditioning regulatory approval of a corporate merger on political loyalty tests for board members. That’s not antitrust enforcement. That’s a shakedown.

Sources: Politico, CNBC, Deadline

3. Strange Bedfellows at the Supreme Court

The ACLU, an organization that spent decades insisting the Second Amendment doesn’t protect individual gun ownership, just filed its first-ever brief defending someone’s gun rights. The case: United States v. Hemani, oral arguments Monday.

Ali Hemani, a Texas man, was charged under federal law for possessing a Glock 19 while being a marijuana user. Section 922(g)(3) makes it a felony punishable by up to 15 years for an “unlawful user” of any controlled substance to own a firearm. The 5th Circuit struck it down as unconstitutional. The Trump administration, despite its executive order on “protecting Second Amendment rights,” is asking SCOTUS to reinstate the charge.

Siding with Hemani: the ACLU, the NRA, NORML, the Drug Policy Alliance, Gun Owners of America, and the Firearms Policy Coalition. The ACLU’s Brandon Buskey: “This is the first time that we have entered a case affirmatively on behalf of an individual making a Second Amendment claim.” The vagueness argument alone is devastating: nobody can define “unlawful user” with enough precision to justify 15 years in a cage.

When the gun lobby and the civil liberties lobby agree the government went too far, pay attention.

Sources: Reason

4. The Epstein Files That Disappeared

The DOJ removed more than 50 pages of FBI interviews from the public Epstein files database, specifically documents where a woman accused Trump of sexual abuse when she was a minor. The accuser came forward in 2019, alleging Epstein introduced her to Trump around 1983 when she was 13 years old.

An FBI slide deck listed Trump as a “prominent name” in the sex-trafficking investigations. One summary describes the allegation in graphic detail. Yet only the first of four FBI interviews with the accuser made it into the public release, despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act requiring full disclosure.

Rep. Robert Garcia reviewed unredacted evidence logs at the DOJ and confirmed the department “appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor.” Democrats are opening a parallel investigation. The DOJ claims files were “temporarily pulled” for “victim redactions” and will be “promptly restored.” The White House says Trump has been “totally exonerated.”

Three million pages released. Fifty-three conveniently missing. All pointing the same direction.

Sources: The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Common Dreams

5. Patel’s Revenge Tour Continues

FBI Director Kash Patel fired at least 10 FBI employees this week, all connected to the classified documents investigation into Trump’s retention of top-secret records at Mar-a-Lago. The firings came the same day Patel told Reuters the Biden-era FBI had subpoenaed his phone records and those of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles during that very investigation.

The arithmetic is simple. Patel was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in 2022, given immunity to testify. The investigators pulled his phone records as part of standard procedure. Now he runs the FBI and he’s firing the people who did the investigating. The FBI Agents Association called it “unlawful,” warning it “weakens the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce.”

This is part of a broader purge: dozens pushed out over the past year, prosecutors swept from the DOJ, three former senior officials (each with decades of service) suing Patel for wrongful termination since September. The message to anyone in federal law enforcement is clear: investigate the boss, lose your career.

Sources: AP, The Guardian

6. The Wall Comes Down

The Trump administration is tearing down the post-Watergate wall between law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Per ProPublica, the CIA is getting access to a database of hundreds of millions of documents: FBI case files, banking records, criminal investigations of labor unions, all touching on law-abiding Americans.

These restrictions exist because Presidents Johnson and Nixon used the CIA to spy on anti-war and civil rights activists. Intelligence agencies operate with far more secrecy and far less oversight than the FBI, which is precisely why they were kept separate. The administration blew past that by labeling drug gangs “terrorists” and using the designation to justify sharing domestic data without the usual legal hurdles. One intelligence official called it “shocking” that nobody “wants to deal with” the privacy implications.

The whole thing happened with almost no public acknowledgment and almost no notification to Congress. Sen. Ron Wyden called the abuse potential “staggering.” The DNI’s spokesperson offered a canned quote about “seamless two-way push communications.” The spigot is open, and nobody asked permission.

Sources: ProPublica

1. Film a Cop, Get Called a Terrorist and Added to a “Nice Little Database”

A federal class action lawsuit alleges DHS agents are retaliating against people who lawfully observe immigration enforcement by scanning their faces, recording their plates, and branding them “domestic terrorists.”

Colleen Fagan, a social worker in Portland, Maine, was watching an enforcement operation in January when a masked agent scanned her face with a smartphone. She recorded what happened next. “We have a nice little database,” the agent told her. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Agents used Motorola’s Mobile Companion app for real-time facial recognition and plate scanning. In Minnesota, observers were led to their own homes to prove agents knew where they lived. DHS flatly denied any “domestic terrorist database” exists. Either the database doesn’t exist and agents are freelancing the label, or it does exist and DHS is lying. Pick one.

Sources: NPR, Politico, Newsmax

2. Waymo Hits 10 Cities. No Driver, No Permission Slip, No Slowing Down.

Waymo launched robotaxi services in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando today, bringing its total to 10 US cities. A year ago it was in three. It now provides over 400,000 rides per week across a fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, valued at $126 billion after a $16 billion raise earlier this month.

Waymo’s San Francisco service now stretches to San Jose, covers three airports, and runs on freeways. Next up: Denver, D.C., London, and Tokyo.

The liberty angle: Waymo is routing around one of the most regulated industries on the planet. No medallion cartels. No licensing boards. No union negotiations over staffing ratios. Just a car that shows up when you call it. The taxi commissions that spent decades protecting incumbents are watching an Alphabet subsidiary make them irrelevant, one city at a time.

Sources: TechCrunch, CNBC

3. The FCC Wants Broadcasters to Air “Pro-America” Content. Totally Voluntary.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr launched a “Pledge America Campaign” urging broadcasters to air “patriotic, pro-America programming.” His suggestions: start each broadcast day with the Pledge of Allegiance, run “civic education” segments, and play music by “America’s greatest composers.”

The FCC describes participation as “voluntary.” Same document, next paragraph: broadcasters can meet their public interest obligations by taking the pledge. This is the same Carr who has repeatedly threatened to punish stations for violating the public interest standard. “Voluntary” is doing Olympic-level lifting in that sentence.

When the head of the agency that controls your broadcast license “invites” you to air specific content, the invitation carries weight. This is the same administration that threatened to revoke a network’s license after a late-night host’s on-air comments. State media doesn’t always arrive with a press conference. Sometimes it arrives with a “voluntary pledge.”

Sources: Ars Technica, FCC Release, NYT

4. Export Controls Are Working Great: DeepSeek Trained on Banned Chips Anyway

Reuters reported that Chinese AI startup DeepSeek trained its upcoming model on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the most advanced AI processors in existence, banned from export to China. A senior Trump official confirmed it but couldn’t explain how the chips got there.

The Blackwells are “likely clustered at a data center in Inner Mongolia.” Nvidia declined to comment. Commerce didn’t respond. DeepSeek didn’t respond. Nobody can explain how the chips got there.

The real lesson: export controls are theater. The US government spent years building restrictions and end-user agreements. The result: the hottest AI startup in China is training on the exact hardware it was never supposed to touch. Paperwork doesn’t stop physics.

Sources: Reuters, Benzinga

5. Criticize the President’s Allies? The FTC Will Investigate You.

Seventeen nonprofits, led by The Intercept’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, filed an amicus brief urging a federal appeals court to block the FTC’s retaliatory investigation into Media Matters for America. The FTC opened the probe after Media Matters published research critical of Trump administration allies.

The coalition includes the EFF, Reporters Without Borders, and Freedom of the Press Foundation. Their argument: this is a weapon, not regulation. The brief describes agencies that “launch pretextual investigations, keep them open as a way to coerce compliance, and resist any effort to have a court review the lawfulness of the agency’s actions.”

It fits a pattern: journalists arrested in Minnesota, a reporter’s phone seized and biometrically unlocked in D.C. You don’t have to like Media Matters to understand the principle: if a federal regulator can investigate every time someone publishes unflattering research, the investigation itself becomes the punishment.

Sources: The Intercept, Free Press, NYT

1. Mexican gov. Killed El Mencho. His Cartel Burned Half the Country in Response.

Mexican security forces killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, “El Mencho,” leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), on Sunday in the Sierra Madre mountains. He was 59, Mexico’s most wanted man for a decade, with a $15 million US bounty. At least six associates and seven National Guard members died in the operation.

Then things got bad.

Within hours, the cartel launched military-style retaliation across eight Mexican states. Gunmen torched petrol stations, banks, and stores. They set buses ablaze to blockade highways. In Guadalajara, a 2026 World Cup host city, airport passengers sprinted for cover. In Puerto Vallarta, smoke billowed as prisoners rioted, killing a jail guard. US and Canadian airlines cancelled dozens of flights.

Former Mexican security official Eduardo Guerrero called it “undoubtedly the most important blow dealt to drug trafficking in Mexico since drug trafficking existed in Mexico.”

Sure. And now there’s a power vacuum in one of the world’s largest criminal enterprises. History is clear on what happens next. The Sinaloa Cartel splintered after El Chapo. The Zetas got worse after every leadership “decapitation.” Nobody who has followed Mexico’s drug war thinks this story ends with “and then the drugs stopped.”

The question isn’t whether El Mencho deserved it. It’s whether tourists trapped in Puerto Vallarta, watching buildings burn from their hotel windows, feel like this is victory.

Sources: Guardian, NYT, NYT, Al Jazeera, BBC

2. America’s Decade-Long Syrian Adventure Finally Ends

US forces began pulling out of their largest remaining base in northeastern Syria on Monday. Dozens of trucks loaded with armored vehicles were filmed heading toward the Iraqi Kurdistan border. Reuters, the WSJ, and Syrian military sources confirmed the withdrawal, expected to take about a month.

This follows the US abandoning al-Tanf on February 12 and Shaddadi shortly after. All roughly 1,000 remaining American troops are leaving. The Pentagon said it “will not discuss future force posture or troop numbers to protect operational security.” Translation: yes, we’re leaving, but we’d like to pretend that’s still a secret.

Syria’s new government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa agreed to take “primary responsibility” for fighting ISIS. The Kurdish-led SDF has been absorbed into the Syrian government after a US-brokered ceasefire deal in January, handing over Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, all border crossings, oil fields, and prisoner-of-war camps.

Consider the Iran backdrop. Polymarket bettors price a US strike on Iran at 19% by February 28, rising to 59% by March 31, in a market with $373 million in volume. The US is pulling troops out of Syria while running carrier groups toward Iran. Whether that’s strategic repositioning or coincidence depends on how much credit you give the Pentagon.

American soldiers are coming home from a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map, after a decade-long mission against an enemy the government’s own intervention helped create. Better late than never.

Sources: Reuters, Reuters (Feb 18), AP News

3. Iowa Wants to Let Farmers Sell You Milk and Food. Health Inspectors Are Losing Their Minds.

A bill advancing through the Iowa House would let farmers sell raw milk at on-farm stores, put cottage foods in grocery stores, and host farm-to-table dinners under a $100 annual event permit. The state’s health inspectors are treating this like a public safety emergency.

House File 2444, introduced by Rep. Chad Ingels, R-Randalia, passed out of a House subcommittee on February 19. The Iowa Environmental Health Association showed up to oppose it. Their representative said the association has “great concern with many issues” and is “generally opposed to any raw milk legislation.”

Read that again. Not “we found a specific problem.” Not “there’s been an outbreak.” They’re “generally opposed” to you buying milk that hasn’t been processed through an industrial facility. The objection isn’t safety. It’s principle: you can’t be trusted to decide what goes in your own body.

Rep. Shannon Latham, R-Sheffield, pointed out the absurdity: Iowa stores can sell processed goods shipped from other states, but can’t stock locally produced cottage foods. Your grocery store can sell factory cookies from New Jersey, but not your neighbor’s homemade salsa.

In Michigan, a similar bill package (HB 5217) would legalize direct raw milk sales statewide. Around 20 states already allow some form of raw milk sales. The regulators’ argument is always the same: you’re too stupid to decide what food to put in your own body.

Sources: Iowa Capital Dispatch / KTIV, KCRG, Bridge Michigan, Iowa Legislature (HF 2444)

4. Google Wants Government ID Before You Can Install Apps on Your Own Phone

Starting September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, every app installed on a certified Android device must come from a Google-verified developer, with global rollout in 2027. Your phone, the one you paid for, will refuse to run software Google hasn’t approved.

This isn’t a Play Store policy change. It applies to all apps, including sideloaded ones. Google’s Android Developer Verification program requires every developer to pay a fee, provide government-issued identification, upload app signing keys, and register all package identifiers. The kill mechanism is already in Android’s API: try to install an app from an unregistered developer, and the phone blocks it.

F-Droid, the open-source app repository millions of privacy-conscious users depend on, has said this will kill the project. F-Droid builds apps from source and distributes them outside Google’s control. Under the new rules, it would need to register every app in its catalog through Google. That’s not compliance. That’s surrender.

The EFF’s analysis lays out the stakes: requiring government ID to publish software immediately excludes anyone for whom that ID is a liability. Activists under authoritarian regimes. Journalists. Whistleblowers. You don’t just inconvenience developers. You create a database of exactly who built every app, accessible to any government that asks Google nicely enough.

This is the app-store version of “papers, please.” Four countries by September, the rest of us by 2027.

Sources: FOSS Daily, Google Developer Verification, Ars Technica, EFF, Reddit r/degoogle

5. Connecticut Democrats Want to Regulate Homeschooling. They Won’t Say How or Why.

Last Wednesday, the co-chair of Connecticut’s Education Committee raised a concept bill titled “An Act Concerning the Provision of Equivalent Instruction in Connecticut.” When Republicans asked what it would do, she couldn’t say. The motion passed on a party-line vote. There is, as of today, no bill text.

Connecticut is one of 12 states with no homeschool regulation. That freedom is under attack because of two child abuse cases that had nothing to do with homeschooling and everything to do with a failed state agency.

In both cases, the Department of Children and Families had prior contact with the families and did nothing. DCF made years of visits to the Waterbury home before closing the file. Mimi’s estate filed a $100 million lawsuit against DCF.

Rep. Irene Haines, R-East Haddam, noted that just 50% of public school students in her district read at grade level. “When you start talking about equivalent instruction, what’s the benchmark?”

The pattern: a government agency fails, children die, and the legislature regulates the families who wanted nothing to do with the system. DCF had the cases. DCF had the contact. DCF closed the files. Now tens of thousands of Connecticut families quietly educating their children may pay for the state’s incompetence.

Sources: Hartford Courant, CT Mirror, CT Homeschool Parent Testimony

1. Every WiFi Router Is a Potential Surveillance Camera. German Researchers Just Proved It.

Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have demonstrated that ordinary WiFi routers can identify specific people with near-perfect accuracy. Through walls. Without the target carrying a phone, connecting to the network, or doing anything at all.

Professor Thorsten Strufe and doctoral researcher Julian Todt from KIT’s Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL) tested the technique on 197 volunteers and achieved identification rates approaching 100%, regardless of viewing angle or walking style. They presented their findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Taipei last October. The European Commission posted about the research on social media this week, which is when most of the world noticed. The researchers did the work. The EU put it on X.

Here’s how it works. WiFi devices on a network regularly send something called beamforming feedback information (BFI) back to the router. This data is transmitted unencrypted and readable by any device within range. When a human body passes through or near the WiFi signal, the radio waves are disrupted in ways specific to that individual. Unlike cameras, which only capture your outer surface, WiFi signals interact with internal structures: bones, organs, body composition. The result is a biometric signature as distinctive as a fingerprint, formed entirely from radio waves passing through you.

“By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present,” Strufe explained. “This works similar to a normal camera, the difference being that radio waves instead of light waves are used for the recognition. Thus, it does not matter whether you carry a WiFi device on you or not.” Switching your phone off won’t help. “It’s sufficient that other WiFi devices in your surroundings are active.”

No special hardware is needed. A standard WiFi device will do. Once the underlying machine-learning model is trained, identification takes seconds.

“This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warned Todt. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later, for example by public authorities or companies.”

Fellow researcher Felix Morsbach acknowledged that easier surveillance methods currently exist (CCTV, video doorbells). But he warned that “the omnipresent wireless networks might become a nearly comprehensive surveillance infrastructure with one concerning property: they are invisible and raise no suspicion.”

The researchers are calling for privacy protections in the upcoming IEEE 802.11bf WiFi standard, which governs how WiFi sensing works. Whether standards bodies listen to security researchers before deployment, rather than after, is another question entirely.

Consider the scale. WiFi routers exist in virtually every home, office, restaurant, airport, and public space in the developed world. The surveillance infrastructure isn’t being built. It’s already installed. It’s just waiting for the software.

Sources: KIT Press Release, ACM CCS Paper, Interesting Engineering, Physics World, Athens News

2. Discord Ran a Secret Biometric Experiment. Surprise: It Was Linked to Peter Thiel.

Discord announced recently that all users worldwide will be defaulted to “teen mode” until they verify their age. The platform offered reassurances: most people won’t need to show ID. AI-powered video selfies will estimate your age. Easy.

Then researchers discovered the fine print.

In the UK, Discord had been running a quiet experiment with Persona, an age verification vendor backed by Founders Fund (co-founded by Peter Thiel, whose other venture, Palantir, is one of the largest surveillance contractors on earth). Discord didn’t disclose the partnership publicly. Users discovered it through an FAQ disclaimer that Discord posted, then deleted: “If you’re located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona.”

The real kicker: security researchers who examined Persona’s exposed frontend code found the system performs 269 individual verification checks on submitted data, including screenings for terrorism and espionage. For an age check. On a chat app.

This comes barely a year after a third-party breach of a previous Discord age verification partner exposed 70,000 users’ government IDs. Discord’s global head of product policy had told The Verge that IDs are “deleted quickly, in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.” The deleted FAQ said Persona would store data for up to 7 days.

After the backlash, Discord confirmed the Persona experiment has ended, the partnership is terminated, and all collected data has been deleted. Discord promised to “keep our users informed as vendors are added or updated.” Translation: next time they’ll tell you which surveillance vendor is scanning your face before you find out from security researchers.

Persona’s CEO spent the week responding to furious users.

The UK’s Online Safety Act and Australia’s under-16 social media ban are what’s driving all of this. Governments mandate age verification. Platforms scramble to comply. Surveillance vendors collect biometric data. The data gets breached. Repeat.

Sources: Ars Technica, BBC, Malwarebytes, PC Gamer, IBTimes UK

3. Amazon Blinked. Public Outrage Actually Worked.

File this one under “rare victories.”

Amazon’s Ring cancelled its planned integration with Flock Safety, the surveillance company that makes license plate reader cameras used by police departments, ICE, and school districts across the country. The partnership would have connected Ring’s 20+ million doorbell cameras to Flock’s law enforcement network, creating a real-time surveillance mesh covering residential neighborhoods nationwide.

The plan imploded after Ring’s Super Bowl ad. The 30-second spot showcased a feature called “Search Party”: AI scans footage across the entire Ring camera network to help locate a lost dog. Heartwarming on TV. In practice, a live demonstration that Ring could activate millions of private cameras to scan for any target on command. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “surveillance nightmare.” Privacy advocates, civil liberties groups, and ordinary customers piled on.

Ring and Flock described the cancellation as “mutual,” with Ring claiming the integration “would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.” (Translation: the PR damage exceeded whatever the contract was worth.) No Ring video data was ever sent to Flock, as the integration hadn’t launched yet.

But here’s what Flock Safety still does without Ring: the company operates tens of thousands of automated license plate readers across the US, feeding data to local police, federal agencies including ICE, and school security systems. A report from The 74 Million noted that Flock cameras are deployed in school zones, tracking the movements of parents and students alongside everyone else.

The victory is real but narrow. Ring walked away from one partnership. The underlying surveillance infrastructure, where your car’s plate is captured dozens of times per day by cameras you never consented to and fed into searchable databases accessible by law enforcement without a warrant, remains fully operational. The next partnership will be quieter.

Sources: CNBC, NY Times, 9to5Mac, Variety, The 74 Million

4. DHS Tried to Suspend Your PreCheck. That Lasted About 12 Hours.

On Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that TSA PreCheck and Global Entry would be suspended starting 6 a.m. Sunday because of the partial DHS shutdown. By Sunday morning, PreCheck lanes had closed at airports including LAX and St. Louis Lambert. Then, before noon, DHS reversed itself.

“TSA PreCheck remains operational with no change for the traveling public,” TSA posted on X. Just hours after saying the opposite.

The reversal came after Noem spoke with the White House and TSA officials. It also came after Airlines for America, the US Travel Association, and members of Congress publicly blasted the decision. Airlines for America called the move using “the traveling public” as “a political football.” The US Travel Association said it was “a crisis of [DHS’s] own making.”

Global Entry remains suspended at airports including Boston, Austin, and Vancouver. FEMA entered emergency operating status at the same time, halting all non-disaster responses. With a blizzard currently pounding the Northeast, the timing is not ideal.

More than 20 million Americans are enrolled in TSA PreCheck. They paid $78 to $85 for the privilege of a background check and a faster line. Over 10 million use Global Entry. Both programs are funded by user fees, not the general treasury. Suspending them was a choice, not a budgetary necessity.

The shutdown started February 14 after Democrats demanded changes to DHS operations following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents last month. The Republican majority won’t budge. Neither will the Democrats.

Polymarket bettors have $4 million riding on how long this lasts. Current odds price a 70%+ chance the shutdown drags past two weeks.

Here’s the part that should bother you: the parts of DHS that surveil, detain, and deport people never stopped. ICE and CBP have been fully operational this entire time, funded through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The parts that serve you (TSA screening, disaster relief, cybersecurity) are the ones going dark. The announce-then-reverse stunt on PreCheck tells you everything about the calculation. Make travelers suffer just long enough to generate headlines, then “generously” restore service. Global Entry users? They can keep waiting.

Sources: ABC News, The Guardian, CNBC, Washington Post, CNN

5. DOGE Spent a Year Cutting Government. The Government Got Bigger.

DOGE turns one year old this month. Elon Musk showed up with a chainsaw and a mandate from the president to slash federal waste. One year and nearly 30,000 terminated grants and contracts later, USA TODAY did the math on what actually happened.

The headline number: DOGE claims $110 billion in savings across 64 agencies. That’s about $323 per American.

The fine print: nearly 30% of those grants and contracts had already been fully paid before they were “terminated.” You can’t save money on a bill that’s already been settled, but you can put it on a website and call it efficiency. DOGE’s own tracker hasn’t been updated since October 4.

Then there’s how the cuts were made. A lawsuit by the Authors Guild revealed that two DOGE operatives, Nate Cavanaugh (a college dropout who founded a startup) and Justin Fox (an associate at a private equity firm), decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill by feeding grant titles to ChatGPT and asking: “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.” If the chatbot said yes, the grant was slated for termination. Actual NEH staff, including the Acting Chair, were blocked from removing grants from the kill list.

The pace peaked at over 16,000 terminations in February and March 2025. By September, it had slowed to 373.

But here’s the real punchline: Congress ignored almost all of it. The Washington Times sampled 30 programs Trump proposed slashing or eliminating in his 2026 budget. Only one was eliminated. Of the remaining 29, just two were cut by more than half. The 2026 budget bills actually increase spending over 2025. “Congress largely rejected the discretionary spending cuts President Trump proposed,” said Cato Institute budget analyst Dominik Lett.

Meanwhile, in Kipnuk, Alaska, the EPA cancelled a $20 million flood mitigation grant in May that was supposed to stabilize a riverbank against permafrost erosion. Five months later, Typhoon Halong battered the village. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the project wouldn’t have been complete anyway and suggested the money would have been “swept into the Kuskokwim River.”

DOGE is scheduled to “delete itself” by July 4, 2026. The federal budget will not notice.

Sources: USA Today, Washington Times, Techdirt, Cato Institute

1. The Government Made You Give Conduent Your Data. Conduent Gave It to Hackers.

If you've ever received Medicaid benefits, child support payments, or unemployment insurance, there's a decent chance a company you've never heard of has your Social Security number, your medical records, and your home address. That company is Conduent, a New Jersey-based government technology contractor that handles benefits processing for nearly half the Fortune 100 and more than 600 government agencies.

Hackers had access to Conduent's network from October 21, 2024 to January 13, 2025. Nearly three months of open access to files containing names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information, and health insurance records. The stolen data covers an estimated 25 million people and counting. An additional 181,000 victims were added to the tally just this week.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called it "likely the largest breach in U.S. history" and launched an investigation into Conduent and its client Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas. Oregon's Department of Justice reports 10.5 million affected residents in that state alone. Texas claims 4 million. New Hampshire keeps revising its numbers upward, from 11,000 to over 181,000 in six disclosure letters to the state AG.

A class action lawsuit in New Jersey federal court alleges Conduent failed to implement basic security measures. The company maintains it "acted promptly" and followed incident response protocols. Translate that from corporate: they discovered the breach in January 2025, and people are finding out more than a year later.

Here's the part that should make your blood boil: you didn't choose Conduent. You didn't sign up for their service or agree to their terms. Your state government hired them to process your benefits, handed over your most sensitive personal information, and Conduent left the door open for three months. This is the forced dependency that makes government data collection so dangerous. When a private company you chose has a breach, you can stop using them. When a government contractor has a breach, you were never given a choice in the first place.

Sources: NJ.com, NDTV Profit, Rolling Out, WMUR, Texas AG

2. SCOTUS Strikes Down the Tariffs. The President Shrugs.

The Supreme Court told Donald Trump on Friday that he cannot impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that IEEPA, a 1970s-era statute designed for freezing foreign bank accounts and blocking transactions, never once uses the word "tariff." Using it to levy import taxes on nearly every country on Earth was, in the Court's view, an authority the law simply doesn't grant.

Roberts was joined by Gorsuch, Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito dissented. Kavanaugh's dissent included a pointed observation that would have made a fine newsletter headline: "The Court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the Government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers."

He's talking about roughly $175 billion. Total tariff revenue has been running about $30 billion per month, with IEEPA tariffs accounting for approximately half. That's roughly what the federal government collected under IEEPA alone since the tariffs took effect. Whether importers get any of it back is now a separate legal question with no clear answer. Polymarket bettors currently give a court-ordered refund a 40% probability.

https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-refund-tariffs

Markets initially jumped on the ruling. Then the president stepped to a microphone and announced he was immediately imposing a 10% global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. This is a provision designed to address trade deficits. No president has ever invoked it. It caps tariff rates at 15% and expires after 150 days. Trump also promised to pursue tariffs under Section 232 (national security) and Section 301 (unfair trade practices), both of which require actual investigations before implementation.

Treasury Secretary Bessent told reporters that the combination of Section 122, 232, and 301 tariffs would result in "virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026." Translation: we lost the legal authority but we'll collect the same amount of money from you, just through different doors.

The Cato Institute published what might be the most useful analysis of the day: "The Supreme Court Got It Right on IEEPA, But Don't Pop the Champagne Yet." Their point: Section 122 gives the president real tariff authority with real limitations. The 150-day clock starts ticking immediately. After that, Congress would have to act. And if the last year taught us anything about Congress and tariffs, it's that Congress would rather complain about tariffs than vote on them.

Here's the kicker nobody in Washington wants to talk about: the tariffs didn't work. Census Bureau data released this week showed the US merchandise trade deficit hit a record $1.24 trillion in 2025, the highest ever recorded, despite the most aggressive tariff regime in nearly a century. Imports of goods and services rose 4.7% to $4.3 trillion. Manufacturing shed 108,000 jobs. The tariffs were supposed to bring factories home. Instead, companies played musical chairs with supply chains, shuffling production from China (imports dropped from 12% to 8% of total) to Vietnam, Mexico, and India. The deficit barely budged.

A Harvard-IMF working paper confirmed what anyone shopping for groceries already knew: nearly all the cost of the tariffs was paid by US importers, not foreign suppliers. Some absorbed the hit. Most passed it along to you.

The most honest assessment came from Fran Dunaway, president of apparel company TomboyX, who told Marketplace that at one point she was paying 187% tariffs: "We paid more in tariffs than our operating loss, which means that tariffs were the difference between being profitable and not."

So the scorecard: the tariffs were illegal, they didn't shrink the trade deficit, they killed manufacturing jobs, American businesses and consumers paid the bill, and the president replaced them with new tariffs before anyone finished reading the ruling. The constitutional system worked exactly as designed and changed almost nothing.

Sources: NPR, CNBC, CNBC (refunds), Politico, Cato, Washington Post, Marketplace, NBC, NYT (trade deficit)

3. PayPal Exposed Your Social Security Number for Six Months. They Just Got Around to Telling You.

PayPal disclosed this week that a software error in its Working Capital loan application exposed customers' Social Security numbers, names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, and dates of birth from July 1, 2025 to December 13, 2025. That's nearly six months of sensitive personal data sitting in the open before anyone noticed.

The company discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, reversed the code change the next day, and started notifying affected users in February 2026. PayPal says the number of affected customers is roughly 100. They've reset passwords on impacted accounts, issued refunds for unauthorized transactions detected as a result of the exposure, and are offering two years of credit monitoring through Equifax.

One hundred people is a small number. The principle is not.

PayPal is a financial platform that processes $1.5 trillion in annual payment volume. It handles more money than most countries' central banks. A software error exposed Social Security numbers for half a year, and users had no idea until PayPal decided to tell them. The only reason we know about it at all is because state breach notification laws forced the disclosure.

This is PayPal's second major data incident in three years. In January 2023, a credential stuffing attack compromised 35,000 accounts. New York State fined them $2 million in January 2025 for failing to comply with cybersecurity regulations around that breach. The pattern: breach, delay, disclose, fine, repeat.

The broader lesson, especially paired with the Conduent breach above: every time you hand your data to a company (or your government hands it for you), you're betting that their security is better than the worst hacker trying to get in. That bet keeps losing.

Sources: BleepingComputer, PayPal breach notice, BleepingComputer (2023 breach), BleepingComputer (NY settlement)

4. A Republican and a Democrat Walk Into a War Powers Vote

Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna don't agree on much. Massie is the Kentucky Republican who votes "no" on things so reliably that his colleagues once tried to strip him of committee assignments. Khanna is a Silicon Valley progressive who represents a district where the median home costs more than some countries' GDP. But they both read the Constitution, and they both noticed the part where Congress, not the president, decides whether the country goes to war.

The two are forcing a House floor vote on a resolution that would prohibit "unauthorized hostilities" against Iran without congressional approval. The vote is expected next week.

The timing is not academic. Two carrier strike groups are positioned within striking distance of Iran. Israeli hospitals have shifted to emergency mode, banning medical staff from traveling abroad and discharging patients to free beds for mass casualties. ZeroHedge reported (then partially walked back) that the US was evacuating troops from exposed bases in Qatar and Bahrain. Iran's rial has lost roughly half its value in six months, according to Iran International. Trump's "Board of Peace" delivered a 10-to-15-day ultimatum to Tehran last Thursday, which, if you're counting, means the window closes sometime between this weekend and early March.

Polymarket bettors with $313 million on the table give US strikes on Iran a 27% probability by February 28, rising to 50% by March 15 and 61% by March 31. This is the platform's top trending market.

https://polymarket.com/event/us-strikes-iran-by

The Khanna-Massie push faces headwinds. Axios reported that key swing-district Democrats from New Jersey and New York, including Josh Gottheimer and Mike Lawler, plan to vote against the resolution, making passage harder. The administration has not briefed Congress on any military strategy. "There haven't been any briefings about a military strategy," Khanna told the New York Times. Massie put it more bluntly on X: "I will vote to put America first which means voting against more war in the Middle East."

Meanwhile, Iran appears to be preparing a counterproposal on its nuclear program, though Reuters reports the details remain vague. Whether the diplomacy track matters depends on whether the military track waits for it.

Whatever your politics, this much should be obvious: if two carrier strike groups, a presidential ultimatum, hospital evacuations, and $313 million in prediction market volume don't trigger the constitutional requirement for Congress to weigh in on war, nothing will.

Sources: Yahoo News, Daily Signal, Axios, Common Dreams, NYT, Benzinga, CBS (NORAD)

5. Wikipedia Nukes 695,000 Links After Archive Site Goes Rogue

Wikipedia just blacklisted Archive.today, one of the internet's most widely used web archiving services, after discovering that the site's operator weaponized it for a personal grudge.

The chain of events: Archive.today was caught directing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger. During the investigation, Wikipedia editors discovered something arguably worse: Archive.today had been altering the content of archived web pages, inserting the name of the targeted blogger into snapshots of unrelated pages. The grudge apparently stemmed from a blog post that exposed how the Archive.today operator hides behind multiple aliases.

The Wikipedia community's verdict was swift and decisive. An official consensus statement declared: "There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack. Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable."

695,000 links to Archive.today, spread across roughly 400,000 Wikipedia pages, are now being removed or replaced. Editors are redirecting citations to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Ghostarchive, and other services.

The implications go well beyond Wikipedia's housekeeping. Archive.today was the go-to tool for preserving web pages behind paywalls, capturing articles before they were edited or deleted, and providing permanent references for journalists and researchers. It was quietly essential internet infrastructure. Millions of people relied on it without knowing who ran it, and that anonymity was part of its appeal.

Now it turns out the anonymous operator was running DDoS attacks through users' browsers and doctoring the archives. The FBI had already subpoenaed domain registrar Tucows in November 2025 seeking the operator's identity.

The blacklisted domains: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. If you've bookmarked anything on those domains, it may still load, but Wikipedia will no longer link to it, and the trust model is broken.

The lesson is one the digital world keeps having to relearn: infrastructure you don't control is infrastructure that can be used against you. The same principle applies to your Ring doorbell, your VPN, your social media accounts, and the archive service you assumed was neutral. Decentralization isn't just a buzzword. It's the difference between owning your tools and discovering your tools own you.

Sources: Ars Technica, Wikipedia RFC, PCMag, Ars Technica (FBI subpoena)

1. GDP Faceplants, Bettors Price In Recession

The government’s own numbers just confirmed what your grocery receipt already told you: the economy is slowing fast.

Q4 GDP came in at 1.4% annualized, the Commerce Department reported Friday morning. Economists expected 3%. They were off by more than half. The prior quarter logged a blistering 4.4%, making the Q4 number look like a car hitting a median barrier. For all of 2025, the economy grew 2.2%, down from 2.3% the year before.

The official culprits: tariffs, the 43-day government shutdown last fall, and a consumer spending pullback. But the picture is uglier than the headline suggests. Reuters noted this is a “K-shaped economy,” where upper-income households are humming along while lower-income Americans are getting ground down by inflation, stalled wages, and rising borrowing costs. The 13-week Treasury bill yield sits at 3.60%, signaling no rate cut within three months. If you carry a mortgage, a car note, or credit card debt, relief isn’t coming.

The government claims the economy grew 2.2% for the year. That’s the Bureau of Economic Analysis talking. The same BEA whose figures get revised, sometimes dramatically, with every benchmark update. (Recall: just last week, the BLS wiped 1.03 million jobs off the books in its annual revision.) Take the 2.2% with the grain of salt it deserves.

Meanwhile, Friday’s S&P Global flash PMI showed US business activity expanding at its slowest pace in 10 months. Orders are receding at factories, new business is slowing for service firms, and employment growth has stalled across the board.

Polymarket bettors currently put the odds of a full recession by end of 2026 at roughly 23%, and that number was recorded before today’s GDP miss. The market for “negative GDP growth in 2026” is also live and climbing.

Why it matters: Tariffs, government shutdowns, and deficit spending all carry real costs. They just showed up. And the tools the government typically uses to respond (rate cuts, stimulus) are boxed in by inflation that won’t quit and a $36+ trillion national debt that’s rolling over at higher rates. The fire department is out of water.

Sources: Bloomberg, Reuters, Washington Post, NYT, CNN, Axios

2. The FDA Can’t Decide If It Wants to Approve Medicine or Burn It Down

The Food and Drug Administration is currently fighting a war on at least three fronts, and all of them involve the same agency contradicting itself within the span of days.

The Moderna saga. Earlier this month, Dr. Vinay Prasad, the RFK Jr.-appointed head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, personally signed a “Refuse to File” letter rejecting Moderna’s application for the first mRNA flu vaccine in the US. Career scientists in the vaccine center had already decided to accept the application. Prasad overruled them. His objection: Moderna’s Phase 3 trial of nearly 41,000 adults compared the mRNA shot to a standard-dose flu vaccine instead of a higher-dose version recommended for seniors. It was a technicality no previous FDA leadership had ever used to block review of a vaccine application.

Then, on Tuesday, the FDA reversed itself. After what Politico reported was White House pressure, the agency agreed to review Moderna’s application after all. So within two weeks, the FDA rejected, then un-rejected, a flu vaccine application, for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the vaccine works.

The $500 million bonfire. This wasn’t Prasad’s only contribution. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. killed $500 million in government contracts for mRNA vaccine research last August, halting 22 separate mRNA initiatives. These weren’t just COVID shots. Moderna had been running late-stage trials on mRNA vaccines for multiple sclerosis and other diseases. Those trials are now on hold or cancelled. Vaccine makers, facing an agency that rejects applications on technicalities and kills funding for the underlying technology, are pulling back from the US market entirely. The NYT reported that the policy changes have “sent a chill through the entire vaccine industry.”

The ACIP cancellation. On Thursday, HHS confirmed it won’t hold the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting that was scheduled for next week. ACIP is the panel that recommends which vaccines Americans should get. No meeting, no new guidance. This happened days after the American Academy of Pediatrics went to federal court trying to block the meeting because Kennedy had stacked the panel with appointees skeptical of vaccines. So the meeting was too compromised to hold but also too important to cancel. HHS cancelled it anyway. No reschedule date.

The new drug chief. Tracy Beth Hoeg, who was just appointed acting director of the FDA’s drug evaluation center, told staff in her first speech that she plans to scrutinize SSRI antidepressants used in pregnancy and RSV shots given to infants. Both are treatments with extensive safety records. Meanwhile, the CDC director position is vacant.

The government has no business mandating what you put in your body. Personal medical decisions belong to individuals. Full stop. But the answer to government-mandated vaccination isn’t government-obstructed medicine. When a single political appointee can overrule career scientists to block a vaccine from even being reviewed, when $500 million in research gets torched on ideological grounds, when the advisory panel gets cancelled because its new members are too controversial to convene, that isn’t medical freedom. It’s the same government power problem wearing different clothes.

The state shouldn’t force you to take a vaccine. It also shouldn’t use its regulatory monopoly to ensure you can’t get one.

Sources: STAT News, STAT News (Hoeg), Politico, NYT, Reuters (ACIP), Ars Technica, AJMC, The Guardian

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3. DHS Wrote Palantir a Billion-Dollar Check and Skipped the Bidding

While most of DHS is technically shut down (more on that in a moment), the department somehow found the bandwidth last week to sign a $1 billion blanket purchase agreement with Palantir Technologies.

The five-year deal, reported by WIRED, lets every DHS agency buy Palantir software “without initiating separate competitive contracts.” That’s bureaucrat-speak for: ICE, Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, FEMA, TSA, and CISA can all purchase up to $1 billion in Palantir products and services on a pre-approved tab. No competitive bidding. No separate justification for each purchase.

Palantir already runs the digital backbone of ICE’s deportation operations. Last April, ICE paid the company $30 million to build “ImmigrationOS,” a surveillance platform providing “near real-time visibility” on immigrants. The company’s tools have been criticized by the EFF as creating “a massive surveillance dragnet.” We covered in Sunday’s newsletter that Palantir also has a $4 million contract with New York City’s public hospitals, scanning patient records of over 1 million New Yorkers who use the city’s 70+ public clinics.

The internal fallout is telling. After federal agents fatally shot two American citizens in Minneapolis in separate incidents weeks apart — Renee Good on January 7 by an ICE officer, and Alex Pretti on January 24 by CBP agents — Palantir employees flooded internal Slack channels demanding to know how their technology enabled the operations. CEO Alex Karp recorded a video for staff that, according to WIRED, failed to address direct questions. His solution: employees could sign NDAs to learn more.

Palantir CTO Akash Jain, in the email announcing the deal, acknowledged “increased concern, both externally and internally, around our existing work with ICE.” He then said the agreement could expand Palantir’s reach into agencies like the Secret Service, FEMA, and CISA.

A government that can’t fund its own cybersecurity agency (CISA has 62% of its staff furloughed due to the shutdown) but can sign a billion-dollar surveillance contract in the same week has very clear priorities. And “protecting the Fourth Amendment” isn’t one of them, no matter what the company’s PR materials say.

Sources: WIRED, SiliconAngle, EFF, WIRED (ImmigrationOS)

4. Two Carriers, Zero Explanation, and a 10-Day Fuse

Trump stood in front of his newly convened “Board of Peace” on Thursday — yes, that’s the actual name — and told Iran that “bad things will happen” if it doesn’t make a nuclear deal. He gave a deadline: 10 to 15 days. (He started at 10 days, then bumped it to 15 aboard Air Force One, because apparently even ultimatums have flex pricing.) The military is not waiting for the deadline.

The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has been operating in the Arabian Sea since its deployment roughly three months ago. The USS Gerald R. Ford — which left Norfolk in late June 2025 and has been at sea for nearly eight months, pushing toward the Navy’s post-Vietnam deployment record — is now transiting toward the Mediterranean, headed for the Middle East. Dozens of fighter jets, bombers, and support vessels between them. CNN reported Wednesday that the military told Trump it’s ready for strikes as early as this weekend, though no final decision has been made. The NYT noted that unlike Bush’s (false) case for Iraq, Trump has made “almost no case at all” for why a second major strike on Iran in less than a year is necessary. US troops haven’t received a target list, which CNN says is a sign Trump hasn’t “pulled the trigger” yet.

The price tag: two carrier strike groups run roughly $12 million per day to operate. A “sustained, weeks-long campaign” (the Pentagon’s term, per Reuters) would cost billions. Oil analysts say prices could spike $15 per barrel if rhetoric turns to action.

Polymarket bettors currently give US strikes on Iran by February 28 a 76% probability, with $16.8 million in 24-hour trading volume. The market for a full US invasion of Iran by March 31 is also live.

Meanwhile, inside Iran, the regime is still dealing with the aftermath of a crackdown on nationwide protests in January. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has verified nearly 7,000 deaths, with thousands more cases still under review and other estimates running far higher. Iranians are now in their 40-day mourning cycle, which historically reignites unrest. Polymarket also puts the odds of Supreme Leader Khamenei being removed from power by September at roughly 50%.

We covered the initial carrier deployment on February 15. What’s changed since then: a second carrier, an explicit deadline from the president, military readiness for this weekend, and prediction markets pricing strikes as more likely than not. Whether this ends in diplomacy or missiles, the American taxpayer is underwriting the entire show.

Sources: Washington Post, NYT, CBS News, CNN, Reuters, NPR, The Intercept

5. DOGE Gutted the IRS. Congress Spent More Anyway.

Remember when the Department of Government Efficiency was going to save the taxpayer trillions? Here’s what actually happened.

The IRS lost 27% of its workforce during DOGE’s chainsaw sweep last year, including 40% of its IT staff. The cuts fell during what the Taxpayer Advocate Service warned was the worst possible time: right before implementation of new tax laws under the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Register obtained figures showing that “implementation of these legislative changes is at risk for the 2026 Filing Season.”

The fallout is now arriving at your mailbox. The IRS is sitting on a backlog of 590,000 unprocessed amended returns. Refund delays are expected across the board. Phone wait times, which had finally started to improve after Congress funded an IRS hiring surge, are back to nightmarish levels. If you filed on paper (still about 10% of filers), your return is essentially in a pile somewhere in Austin, Texas, waiting for one of the remaining humans to get to it.

And here’s the twist that should make every DOGE cheerleader spit out their coffee: Congress rejected most of the spending cuts. The Washington Times reported this week that the 2026 spending bills “actually hike spending slightly compared with 2025.” Most agencies saw funding held flat or increased. The DOGE crusade ended up delivering the worst possible outcome: the government is still spending the same money (plus a little more), but it broke the machinery that processes your tax return.

This is the eternal problem with “cutting government.” The political class doesn’t actually want to spend less. It wants the theater of efficiency. Elon Musk got his photo-ops, a few thousand mid-level bureaucrats lost their jobs, and the federal budget sailed right past the whole spectacle without noticing. The difference is that now, when you call the IRS to ask where your refund is, nobody picks up.

Sources: The Register, Washington Times, Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, The Independent

1. The Crown Finally Ran Out of Favors

BREAKING: Six unmarked police vehicles rolled up to Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate this morning and arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor on his 66th birthday. Happy birthday. The charge: suspicion of misconduct in public office.

Not sexual assault. Not trafficking. Not any of the things the public has suspected for the better part of a decade. Misconduct in public office. Specifically, that he shared confidential British trade intelligence with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as the UK's trade envoy between 2001 and 2011.

Emails released on January 30 as part of the DOJ's Epstein files dump show what appears to be Andrew forwarding classified reports from official visits to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vietnam directly to Epstein and his associates. One email from May 2010 references an envoy trip to Kuala Lumpur and discussions about "The Green Park Group," a vehicle linked to Epstein's financial network. The man entrusted with representing British commercial interests abroad was allegedly feeding insider intelligence to a convicted sex offender's business operation.

The timeline is instructive. Epstein's first conviction was in 2008. Andrew continued his friendship, continued sharing sensitive government reports, and continued attending Epstein's gatherings until at least 2011. After Epstein's death in 2019, Andrew did that legendary BBC Newsnight interview where he claimed he couldn't sweat and had been eating at a Pizza Express in Woking. Virginia Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit in 2021 alleging she was trafficked to Andrew as a minor. He settled for roughly $16 million in 2022, funded by the late Queen Elizabeth from Prince Philip's estate. Giuffre died by suicide last year. Her siblings said today: "He was never a prince. For survivors everywhere, Virginia did this for you."

King Charles stripped Andrew of his royal titles in October 2025. Today's arrest makes him the first senior royal taken into custody in modern British history. Charles released a statement saying "the law must take its course." Prime Minister Keir Starmer: "Nobody is above the law."

Misconduct in public office carries a maximum sentence of life in prison in Britain.

Here's what the ponerology textbooks would note: the system protected Andrew for decades. The royal family, the British establishment, the intelligence services, the legal system, the media (until they couldn't ignore it anymore). Every institution that should have held him accountable instead shielded him. When Giuffre accused him publicly, the palace paid her off. When the Epstein files became undeniable, the palace stripped his titles. Only now, with documentary evidence published by a foreign government that even the British establishment couldn't suppress, did a local police force show up with handcuffs.

And the charge is sharing trade reports. Not the thing everyone suspects. Power doesn't sacrifice its own willingly. It yields the minimum it must, as late as it possibly can. The question now is whether "misconduct in public office" is the beginning of accountability or the ceiling of it.

Sources: CBS News, NPR, NYT Live Updates, The Guardian, CNN, BBC

2. Your Anonymous Account Isn't Anonymous if Google Gets a Strongly Worded Letter

We flagged the DHS surveillance expansion earlier this week. It's gotten worse. The Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord demanding the real identities behind accounts that track or criticize ICE operations. Not warrants signed by judges. Administrative subpoenas, which DHS signs and sends on its own authority.

The New York Times reported last week that the subpoenas target accounts "that do not have a real person's name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents." The targets include community safety pages like "Montco Community Watch," a bilingual Facebook and Instagram account with roughly 10,000 followers that posts about ICE sightings in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Google, Meta, and Reddit complied with some of the requests. In one case documented by WinBuzzer, Google received an ICE subpoena for user data and fulfilled it the same day it notified the user, leaving zero realistic opportunity to challenge the demand. The subpoena left the section describing the suspected violation completely blank. Google handed over the data anyway.

Meta unmasked at least one user without providing any prior notice at all.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an open letter to ten major tech companies calling the subpoenas "lawless" and urging them to require court intervention before complying. The EFF notes a telling pattern: when a handful of users managed to challenge subpoenas in court (with ACLU help), DHS withdrew every single one rather than let a judge rule on their legality. "These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it," the EFF wrote. DHS's own inspector general had previously criticized the agency's use of administrative subpoena authority.

Steve Loney, senior supervising attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told the Daily Beast: "It's a whole other level of frequency and lack of accountability."

Meanwhile, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has sued Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for coercing platforms into removing ICE-related content. The lawsuit accuses officials of attempting "to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations." DHS threatened to sanction CNN for reporting on ICE-tracking apps. Officials demanded Meta delete a Chicago-based Facebook group with 100,000 members. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau is investigating Signal group chats used by people tracking ICE activity.

The Founders had strong feelings about anonymous speech. The Federalist Papers were published under the pen name "Publius." Cato's Letters, the very essays that inspired the libertarian think tank we eulogize later in today's newsletter, were published anonymously. The right to criticize government without revealing your identity to that government isn't a loophole. It's the foundation.

What's happening here is not an immigration enforcement story. It's a First Amendment story. The government is demanding that private companies reveal the identities of people who criticize government agents, using subpoenas that even DHS won't defend in court, and the companies are folding.

Sources: NYT, EFF Open Letter, Daily Beast, WinBuzzer, FIRE Lawsuit, Military.com

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3. The Arsonist Brought a Fire Extinguisher

Democrats have a bold new plan for your grocery bill: make it illegal for prices to go up.

The Center for American Progress published a proposal today, led by Jared Bernstein (Biden's former Council of Economic Advisers chair), calling for a two-year freeze on the prices of 22 essential grocery items. The list: eggs, steak, chicken, pork chops, canned tuna, milk, cheese, butter, rice, flour, bread, pasta, cereal, potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, apples, oranges, strawberries, canned corn, dried beans, and coffee.

The "voluntary" plan works like this: grocers agree to cap prices at 2026 levels. In exchange, they get lower credit card processing fees. Who pays the difference? Credit card companies, involuntarily. A draft of the proposal actually said the Federal Reserve could force credit card companies to subsidize the arrangement. That provision was quietly removed after the Washington Post asked questions about it.

The numbers tell the story of why this is politically tempting. Since 2020, the cost of bread is up 32%, lettuce 39%, mayonnaise 50%, and coffee 80%. Wages are up 29%. The squeeze is real, and voters feel it every time they check out.

The economics tell the story of why this is insane.

Ryan Bourne, who holds the Cato Institute's chair for the public understanding of economics, read the proposal before publication: "Price controls on food have a long, storied history of failure. Holding prices of 'essentials' below market rates will produce some combination of shortages on shelves, deteriorations in product quality, and black market re-selling." He added: "In the 1970s, Nixon's price ceilings led poultry farmers to destroy millions of chicks and dairy farmers to cull herds rather than sell at a loss."

Steven Kamin at the American Enterprise Institute put it even simpler: "Maybe it's impossible to produce eggs at $3. Maybe the cost of producing them is $3.50. In which case the eggs come off the market entirely."

The proposal projects that a family of four would save a grand total of $229 per year. That's $4.40 a week. The savings come from about half a typical household's grocery trip, and the Center for American Progress estimates a nationwide maximum savings of $13 billion. For context, the federal government spent roughly $6.7 trillion last year.

The intellectual whiplash is staggering. The government printed trillions of dollars during COVID. It ran record deficits. It imposed tariffs that economists across the spectrum confirmed were paid by American consumers. It created the inflation. And now one faction of the same political class proposes to fix the damage by telling grocery stores what they're allowed to charge. One economist who supports the plan, UMass's Isabella Weber, was candid about the real motivation: "Biden should have done some sort of shelf in supermarkets clearly branded: 'This price-stabilized shelf is from Biden stepping in on behalf of the American people.' I still think doing that kind of thing could have saved us Trump."

It's not about economics. It's about branding.

Sources: Washington Post, WaPo via DNYUZ (full text), Cato Institute

4. Don't Vote. It Only Encourages Them.

Edward H. Crane died on February 10 at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He was 81. Heart failure.

That's the news part. The story is bigger.

In 1972, Crane was in the room at the founding convention of the national Libertarian Party in Denver. Five years later, he opened a policy research shop in a San Francisco storefront with $500,000 in seed money from Charles Koch. Murray Rothbard, the anarcho-capitalist economist, came up with the name: Cato, after the pen name of two 18th-century British essayists who argued for republican government over monarchy. (The same Cato's Letters, incidentally, that the Founders devoured and that inspired the anonymous speech tradition DHS is now trying to dismantle.)

Over 35 years, Crane built that storefront into the nation's pre-eminent libertarian think tank. By 1993, Cato occupied its own six-story building near the White House. The Washington Post called Crane "the lion king of button-down libertarianism." His philosophy was dress conservatively, think radically.

The Cato under Crane was genuinely heterodox. Its scholars advocated privatizing Social Security and NASA. They argued for legalizing marijuana and opposed universal healthcare. They were anti-interventionist on foreign policy when that position cost serious donor money, opposing the 1999 Yugoslavia bombing and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Crane pushed Social Security privatization onto George W. Bush's agenda. He backed gay marriage before it was acceptable in either party. He championed open immigration. He brought ideas from the fringe to the mainstream and did it with style.

He also had a quip for everything. He didn't vote, and when asked about it, his answer was perfect: "Don't vote. It only encourages them." He resisted marrying his partner, Kristina Knall, because he didn't need the government's permission. When she insisted, he agreed on one condition: they'd get "a very strong government" to do it. In 1988, they flew to China and married at People's Marriage Office No. 9 in Shanghai.

The Koch split is the cautionary tale. Charles Koch had recruited Crane, bankrolled Cato to the tune of roughly $30 million, and then, as the Koch network aligned itself with the Republican Party, wanted Cato to follow. The Kochs expected the think tank to supply intellectual ammunition for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group that helped engineer the Republican House takeover in 2010. Crane refused. "This is an effort by the Kochs to turn the Cato Institute into some sort of auxiliary for the G.O.P.," he told the New York Times in March 2012.

The Kochs sued. Crane lost. He was forced out as president in June 2012, and the brothers installed their own man, former banking chain chairman John Allison. Cato survived, still does excellent work, but the lesson is etched in institutional stone: build something on someone else's money, and eventually the money wants the steering wheel.

Robert A. Levy, a former Cato chairman, said it simply: "While Charles Koch provided the seed money, it was Ed who ran the thing, and it was Ed's impetus that built the institution into what it is today."

Crane's legacy is mixed in the way that all institutional legacies are. He demonstrated that libertarian ideas could be taken seriously in Washington, which is both an achievement and a compromise. The question he spent his life working on remains open: can you change the system from inside without the system changing you?

He answered it his own way. Rest in peace, Ed. And don't vote.

Sources: New York Times, Cato Institute, RealClearMarkets, Washingtonian (2012 profile)

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5. New York Elected a Socialist. Guess What Happened Next.

Zohran Mamdani, New York City's democratic socialist mayor, has been in office for less than two months. He ran on rent freezes, free transit, universal child care, and massively expanded city spending. On Tuesday, he unveiled a $127 billion budget and threatened a 9.5% property tax increase to close a $5.4 billion budget gap.

To understand how breathtaking this is: the $127 billion budget is $5 billion more than last year's. As Reason noted, almost the entirety of the budget gap could be solved by holding spending at current levels. Instead, Mamdani wants to spend more, tax more, and blame Albany when the math doesn't work.

Here's the play. The city can raise property taxes on its own. What it cannot do without state approval is raise income taxes on the wealthy, which is what Mamdani actually wants. So his "last resort" property tax hike is a hostage play: give me the wealth taxes, or I'm raising property taxes on 3+ million residential units whose median owner income is $122,000. That's not soaking the rich. That's soaking the middle class.

Governor Kathy Hochul, who offered a $1.5 billion bailout the day before, isn't having it. "I'm not supportive of a property tax increase. I don't know that that's necessary," she said.

Neither is his own city council. Speaker Julie Menin and Finance Committee Chair Julie Lee issued a joint statement: "Dipping into rainy day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever." Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan watchdog, called it a "false choice": "The best choice is to eliminate spending that does not improve New Yorkers' lives and make government more efficient."

It gets worse. The same week Mamdani threatened property tax hikes, he seized control of the Rent Guidelines Board to deliver on his campaign promise of a rent freeze for roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. A rent freeze with a property tax hike is financial poison for landlords who are already drowning. Some 25,000 apartment units currently sit vacant because owners can't raise rents enough to finance necessary repairs. At least 10% of rent-stabilized buildings are already running at an operational loss. Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association, said the combination "virtually guarantees the physical destruction of tens of thousands of units of housing."

Reason's headline for this saga: "Austerity Socialism." Florida Senator Rick Scott, anticipating a wave of wealthy New Yorkers relocating south, captured the situation perfectly: "Surprise, surprise... it took Mamdani less than 3 months to demand a massive tax hike."

Reason called it "Austerity Socialism." Kenny Burgos called it "the physical destruction of tens of thousands of units of housing." Florida's already running ads. The buildings don't care about ideology. They just need repairs that nobody can afford to make anymore.

Sources: NBC New York, Reason, NYT, Politico, The Guardian, Crain's NY

1. The Crowd Is Betting a Quarter Billion Dollars on When America Bombs Iran

Forget the pundits. Forget the Pentagon briefings. If you want to know when the United States might strike Iran, ask the people putting real money on it.

Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction platform where anonymous traders wager on everything from elections to weather, now hosts a $289 million market on the question: "US strikes Iran by...?" As of Tuesday morning, traders give it a 36% chance by February 28 and 54% by March 15. The odds of a strike by March 31 surged 32% in a single week, according to Israel Hayom. This isn't a fringe bet. It's a quarter-billion-dollar consensus that American bombs may be falling on Iran within six weeks.

The market spiked after retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, former head of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate, went on live television last Wednesday and said he'd "think twice about boarding a plane" this weekend. The ex-spy chief who once ran Israel's intelligence apparatus telling his country not to fly is not a subtle signal.

Here's where it gets truly wild: last week, Israeli prosecutors indicted two people for using classified military intelligence to place Polymarket bets on strikes against Iran. A civilian and a military reservist allegedly turned inside knowledge of the June 2025 Israel-Iran war into winning wagers. It was the first known criminal case anywhere in the world involving insider trading on armed conflict. In January, a separate Polymarket trader flipped $32,000 into $400,000 by correctly predicting the U.S. would topple Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro before the operation went public. Nobody has been charged in that case.

Polymarket operates offshore, outside U.S. regulatory reach, with anonymous crypto wallets. Kalshi, its U.S.-regulated competitor, is banned by the CFTC from offering bets on wars, terrorism, and assassinations. Polymarket faces no such restriction. As Stanford law professor and former SEC Commissioner Joseph Grundfest told NPR: "Such bets can put your own military at greater risk because you are signaling to your enemies what may happen, and that puts your own troops in danger."

Meanwhile, two carrier strike groups sit in the Persian Gulf running up a $12 million daily tab for American taxpayers. Iran's nuclear talks produced "guiding principles" but no deal. Trump gave Tehran roughly a month to agree. That month is almost up. And a quarter billion dollars says the bombs are next.

Sources: Polymarket, Israel Hayom, VINnews, NPR, Times of Israel

2. "Zero Knowledge" Turns Out to Mean "We Know Everything"

If you use Bitwarden, LastPass, or Dashlane, congratulations: you're among the roughly 94 million American adults who trust a password manager with the keys to their digital life (per Security.org's 2025 survey). You were told your vault was encrypted on your device, that nobody at the company could read it, and that even a server breach couldn't touch you. Researchers at ETH Zurich just found 25 ways that's not true.

Turns out "zero knowledge" was more of a marketing aspiration than an engineering achievement.

The most devastating attacks target Bitwarden and LastPass and would let an attacker who compromises the server read or write the contents of entire vaults: every password, every credit card number, every "secure note" where you stored that crypto seed phrase. Not some exotic theoretical hack, either. The researchers describe the flaws as "numerous but mostly not deep in a technical sense." They sat in plain sight for over a decade, through multiple professional security audits that apparently audited everything except the parts that mattered. One might ask what those auditors were actually auditing.

The culprits are key escrow mechanisms (the systems that let you recover your account when you forget your master password) and legacy software compatibility. In other words, the features marketed as conveniences are the ones that blow the vault door off its hinges. A separate attack against Dashlane allowed reading shared vault items.

All three companies were given 90 days' notice and have begun patching, but some weaknesses are architectural, baked into the product design rather than fixable with a quick update. Fixing them may require redesigning features millions of people rely on, like account recovery and vault sharing. So: good luck with that.

What to do: Most attacks require specific features to be enabled (account recovery, vault sharing, group memberships). Check whether you've turned those on. If your threat model is serious, consider a locally stored vault. 1Password wasn't fully analyzed in the study, which at this point is less reassuring than it sounds.

Sources: Ars Technica, The Hacker News, CyberInsider, Help Net Security, ETH Zurich Paper

3. The President's Son Invested in Prediction Markets. Now Dad's Regulator Is Overriding State Gambling Laws to Protect Them.

The Trump administration's newly appointed CFTC chairman, Michael Selig, announced this week that the federal government will intervene on behalf of prediction market companies Kalshi and Polymarket in their legal battles against state gambling regulators. His position: the CFTC has "exclusive jurisdiction" over these platforms, and states can't touch them.

Small problem: Donald Trump Jr. has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and serves as a strategic advisor to Kalshi.

Prediction markets let users wager on anything from "Will it rain in LA tomorrow?" to "Who wins the NBA Finals?" Companies like Kalshi and Polymarket classify their products as "event derivatives" (futures contracts, legally speaking), which puts them under federal commodities law rather than state gaming commissions. That means they can operate in all 50 states, including those where gambling is illegal, and accept users as young as 18 (state gambling typically requires 21).

The numbers make the "not gambling" defense hard to maintain. About 90% of Kalshi's trading volume is on sports, per the company's own data as reported by Newsweek. Kalshi says it processed over $1 billion in Super Bowl wagers alone, per the Nevada Independent. At least 20 federal lawsuits have been filed by states arguing these platforms are unlicensed sports betting operations, per The Guardian. Nevada's gaming board got a temporary restraining order against Kalshi. Massachusetts obtained a preliminary injunction.

At his confirmation hearing, Selig said the courts should decide. Now he's filing friend-of-the-court briefs and created a 35-member "Innovation Advisory Committee" that includes the CEOs of Polymarket, Kalshi, Coinbase, Robinhood, FanDuel, and DraftKings. Consumer advocates or public interest groups? Zero representation.

"To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear, we will see you in court," Selig wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

The federalism angle matters regardless of how you feel about gambling. State gaming laws exist because states chose to regulate (or ban) gambling within their borders. Federal preemption of state gambling authority is an expansion of federal power, not a reduction. And when the federal regulator's position happens to protect the president's family's investments, the conflict of interest writes itself.

Sources: AP News, The Guardian, PBS

4. The Air Force Blew $1.79 Million on Combat Switchblades and Called Them Box Cutters

For nearly a decade, Air Force maintenance units spent $1.79 million in taxpayer funds buying 5,166 high-end combat knives, mostly Benchmade Infidels (sleek automatic switchblades that retail for several hundred dollars each), through the military supply system. They called them "box cutters."

Everyone on the flight line knew the knives had zero legitimate maintenance use. The Benchmade Infidel is a front-opening automatic blade designed and marketed for combat. Its presence around aircraft mechanics is "difficult to justify, and often outright banned," per The Intercept's investigation, which obtained procurement records from 12 Air Force bases via FOIA. Every single base that returned records showed the same pattern.

The knives served as welcome gifts, favors, and informal currency. "Tech sergeants would come in for a short time and get a knife as a welcome present," one former maintainer from Hill Air Force Base said. Another: "If you wanted one, all you had to do was be friends with people attached to the supply line." At Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, documents noted a "recurring problem with physical location and quantity consistency" and acknowledged that "thievery is not out of question."

Meanwhile, maintainers at the same bases reported chronic shortages of safety wire, specialized hydraulic fluids, and calibrated test equipment, the tools they actually need to keep planes flying. "Jets would come back with the same broken parts or worse, just so we could meet flight numbers," said a senior airman from Nellis. "We never had money for proper tools."

It's $1.79 million. In a $300 billion Air Force budget, it's a rounding error. But it illustrates exactly how federal procurement works in practice: high-end luxuries slide through the supply system on handshakes while essential tools get stuck in bureaucratic limbo. Multiply this across every branch, every base, every department, and you start to understand where the trillion-dollar “defense” budget actually goes.

Sources: The Intercept

5. Magic Mushrooms Cleared Every Clinical Hurdle. Now They Face Something Harder: the FDA.

For half a century, the federal government classified psilocybin alongside heroin, raided labs, and put people in cages for growing mushrooms in their basements. On Tuesday, a UK pharmaceutical company announced that the stuff actually works as medicine, and the clinical data to prove it is now complete.

Compass Pathways' synthetic psilocybin treatment, COMP360, hit the primary endpoint in its second Phase 3 trial for treatment-resistant depression, the last major clinical hurdle before the FDA decides whether to approve it. Treatment-resistant depression affects an estimated 2.8 million Americans (per a study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry) who don't respond to existing antidepressants. COMP360 is a single dose administered in a supervised setting. If approved, it would be the first psilocybin-based medicine ever to receive FDA authorization.

The timing is exquisite. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, the Johns Hopkins surgeon who built his reputation criticizing medical establishment groupthink, spent last week getting grilled by pharma executives at an industry forum over the agency's recent vaccine decisions. He's now the guy who decides whether the government approves a drug it spent 50 years demonizing. Meanwhile, CMS chief Mehmet Oz (yes, the TV doctor who once told millions of viewers that green coffee extract was a "miracle fat burner") got a warmer reception from the same pharma crowd. Oz oversees $1.5 trillion in annual Medicare and Medicaid spending. The man who hawked raspberry ketones is cozier with the pharmaceutical industry than the actual FDA commissioner. This is the regulatory environment psilocybin walks into.

Compass stock surged on the news, though more detailed safety data is still needed. The company expects to file for FDA approval in the coming months.

The question: will the FDA treat psilocybin like any other drug that clears clinical trials? Or will the cultural baggage of "magic mushrooms" create obstacles that synthetic opioids and amphetamines, both Schedule II drugs with catastrophically worse safety profiles, never faced? Fentanyl analogs get fast-tracked. Adderall is prescribed to children. Psilocybin cured depression in two Phase 3 trials. The data is in. The politics are what's left.

Sources: STAT News, Yahoo Finance, Psychiatric Times

1. A Federal Court Just Ruled That Computer Code Isn’t Speech (If It Makes Guns)

The Third Circuit ruled last Wednesday that digital files for 3D-printed firearms are not protected speech under the First Amendment. The unanimous decision in Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey upheld New Jersey’s 2018 law criminalizing the distribution of CAD files that can be used to print firearm components.

Defense Distributed, the Texas company founded by Cody Wilson that has spent a decade fighting to publish printable gun designs online, argued that code is speech. Federal courts have agreed with that premise before. The Ninth Circuit ruled in Bernstein v. DOJ (1999) that encryption source code is protected expression. The Second Circuit reached a similar conclusion about encryption software in Universal City Studios v. Corley.

The Third Circuit didn’t exactly disagree. Judge Cheryl Ann Krause’s opinion acknowledged that some code qualifies as expression, but drew a new distinction: source code (human-readable) can be expressive, while object code (machine-readable instructions that directly operate a 3D printer) is functional, not communicative. Since Defense Distributed’s files are designed to be fed into a printer, not read by a person, they’re closer to a machine instruction than a political pamphlet.

The Second Amendment Foundation called the ruling an attack on both the First and Second Amendments. “Today’s ruling goes against prior courts which have ruled code is indeed speech, creating a new test that seems to have been prompted by this panel’s disfavor of firearms,” said SAF’s Bill Sack.

The same week, the full Third Circuit heard en banc arguments in a separate case challenging New Jersey’s “sensitive places” law, which bans concealed carry in parks, zoos, libraries, theaters, stadiums, and dozens of other public locations. During oral arguments on February 11, even some sympathetic judges pressed New Jersey’s attorney on whether the state’s approach had any limiting principle. Attorney Daniel Schmutter, representing gun owners, argued that the law effectively bans carry “everywhere people want to go,” nullifying the right the Supreme Court recognized in Bruen.

Two cases, one court, one week. The Third Circuit is drawing the boundaries of the Second Amendment for 100 million people in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Virgin Islands. The 3D printing decision will almost certainly be appealed. The sensitive places ruling could land at the Supreme Court. Both will shape whether the right to keep and bear arms means anything beyond keeping a pistol locked in your nightstand.

Sources: AmmoLand, The Reload, Bearing Arms, Reason, Courthouse News

2. Google Kept Your “Deleted” Doorbell Video. The FBI Got It.

When Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her Virginia home on February 1, investigators initially said there was no video because her Nest doorbell camera wasn’t on a paid plan. Google’s free tier only stores three hours of event history. After that, clips are “deleted.”

Ten days later, the FBI released doorbell footage showing a masked individual tampering with the camera. Google had recovered the video from what investigators described as “residual data located in backend systems.”

Translation: Google keeps your video after telling you it’s gone.

The company’s own support pages state that expired videos “are no longer available” and “cannot be restored.” Yet when the FBI came knocking, engineers retrieved footage that was supposedly deleted more than a week earlier. Google hasn’t explained how long this “residual data” persists, whether it applies to all Nest cameras, or what other data it retains after telling users it’s been erased.

Privacy researchers immediately flagged the implications. “We should absolutely be alarmed over the privacy implications,” Georgetown Law’s Laura Dahl told Fortune. Every American with a Nest doorbell, a Ring camera, or any cloud-connected device now has reason to wonder: when a tech company says your data is deleted, what does “deleted” actually mean?

In this case, the footage helped investigators in a genuine abduction. Nobody is rooting against finding Nancy Guthrie. But the principle cuts both ways. If Google retains video it claims to delete, that video is available to any government agency with a subpoena, a warrant, or (as we’ve seen with ICE’s administrative subpoenas) sometimes just a strongly worded letter.

Sources: Ars Technica, NBC News, Fortune, Inc.

3. Judges Ruled 4,400 Times That ICE Is Jailing People Illegally. ICE Kept Jailing Them.

A Reuters review of court records found that more than 400 federal judges have ruled at least 4,400 times since October that ICE is detaining people unlawfully. The administration’s response: keep doing it.

The core dispute is straightforward. For nearly 30 years, federal law was interpreted to allow immigrants already living in the U.S. to request release on bond while their cases moved through immigration court. The Trump administration unilaterally reinterpreted that law to deny bond hearings entirely, holding people indefinitely.

Judges across the political spectrum have called the policy illegal. U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston, a George W. Bush appointee in West Virginia, wrote last week: “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written.”

The scale is staggering. Detained immigrants have filed more than 20,200 federal lawsuits seeking release since Trump took office. ICE detention now holds roughly 68,000 people, up 75% from when Trump was inaugurated. The government has deployed about 700 Justice Department attorneys just to represent itself in these cases, and the sheer volume threatens to clog the federal court system.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin dismissed the rulings as the work of “activist judges.” One conservative appeals court in New Orleans did side with the administration last week, ruling 2-1 that prior administrations simply hadn’t used all available authority. Other appellate courts are set to weigh in soon.

When the executive branch openly ignores thousands of court orders from hundreds of judges, the question stops being about immigration policy. It becomes about whether the rule of law means anything at all.

Sources: Reuters, Newsweek, MPR News

4. Seven States Failed to Agree on Water. Now the Feds Take Over.

The seven states that share the Colorado River missed their second federal deadline on Saturday to agree on how to divide the water after current rules expire at the end of 2026. The Bureau of Reclamation will now likely impose a plan, or broker one under heavy federal pressure.

This isn’t abstract. The Colorado River provides drinking water for 40 million people and irrigates farmland that produces a significant share of America’s winter vegetables. It feeds Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are barely one-third full. Snowpack in the mountains is running well below average.

The split is between the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona, Nevada) and the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico). The Lower Basin offered cuts: Arizona would reduce its allocation by 27%, California by 10%, Nevada by nearly 17%. The Upper Basin states said they were already preparing for 40% cuts to their proven water rights, but wouldn’t agree to make them mandatory. Upper Basin negotiators accused their downstream neighbors of “seeking to secure water that simply does not exist.”

The first deadline was November 11. It passed. The second was February 14. Also missed. With no agreement, the federal government steps in, and “federal management” of water resources has a long history of prioritizing political considerations over the people who actually depend on the river.

Forty million people’s taps depend on bureaucrats in Washington figuring out what seven states couldn’t. Feel good about that?

Sources: Reuters, Courthouse News, Nevada News & Views

5. The House Passed a Voting Law. Trump Says He’ll Do It by Executive Order Anyway.

The House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday, 217-212, with every Republican and one Democrat voting yes. The bill would require Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and present photo ID at the polls. It would also require states to run their voter rolls through DHS databases to scan for noncitizens.

All provisions take effect immediately upon enactment.

The bill faces a near-certain death in the Senate, where the filibuster means it needs 60 votes in a chamber with 53 Republicans. Some GOP senators want to force Democrats into a literal talking filibuster to pass it with a simple majority, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t encouraging that approach.

Trump, apparently tired of waiting for the legislative process, posted Friday: “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem echoed the sentiment, boasting about ensuring “the right people” are voting.

The bill solves a problem that barely exists. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime, and studies consistently find it occurs at negligible rates. What the bill would do is create a paperwork barrier for millions of eligible American voters who don’t have a passport or birth certificate handy. An estimated 21 million voting-age citizens lack government-issued photo ID. They tend to be older, poorer, and disproportionately rural.

But the bigger story is the executive order threat. The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, authority over federal election law (Article I, Section 4). If a president can impose voting requirements by executive order, he can also remove them, change them, or tailor them to favor his party. The power to set the rules of elections is the power to choose who wins them. That’s not a power any single person should hold, regardless of party.

Sources: Votebeat, The Hill, Politico

1. The Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Law Expires in Two Months. Congress Is Scrambling.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires April 20, and a bipartisan pair of senators just reintroduced legislation to reform it before renewal. The SAFE Act, from Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), would require the government to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications swept up in foreign surveillance dragnets.

Here’s the problem Section 702 was designed to solve: spy agencies can target the communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant. But the process routinely sweeps up texts, emails, and phone calls of Americans talking to those targets. Government oversight bodies have extensively documented unauthorized searches of this data by the FBI and other agencies. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found systematic abuses going back years.

The SAFE Act would also revisit a 2024 provision that critics say dramatically widened the government’s surveillance reach by expanding the definition of communications service providers required to comply. A classified hearing last week reportedly erupted in frustration when intelligence officials refused to say whether the White House even wants to renew the law. The White House is holding a separate meeting with GOP lawmakers to discuss a path forward.

Section 702 expires April 20. The SAFE Act would add basic warrant protections that should have been there from the start. If Congress can't manage that, letting the law lapse entirely is better than rubber-stamping warrantless surveillance for another few years.

Sources: Nextgov/FCW, Brookings, The Record, CNN

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2. A Major Public Hospital Just Hired ICE's Favorite Contractor

New York City’s public hospital system is paying Palantir $4 million to optimize billing and scan patient records, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. The same company that built ICE’s deportation-tracking software and provides battlefield analytics to the Pentagon now has access to health data for over 1 million New Yorkers who use the city’s 70+ public clinics and hospitals.

The contract allows Palantir to work with protected health information and “de-identify” patient data for uses beyond research. Privacy researchers have repeatedly shown that de-identified medical data can often be re-identified using publicly available information, linking names, addresses, and immigration status back to medical records.

NYC Health and Hospitals says the software will “increase charges captured from missed opportunities” by automatically scanning doctors’ notes to find billable procedures. Translation: an AI reads your medical records to squeeze more money out of Medicaid.

This matters beyond New York. Palantir holds similar contracts with the UK’s National Health Service and is expanding its healthcare business while simultaneously running the digital backbone of ICE’s mass deportation operations. Activists and nurses’ unions are calling for the city to cut ties immediately. The question they’re asking: will immigrant patients stop seeking care if they know a government contractor is analyzing their data?

Sources: The Intercept, Crain’s New York Business

3. A Man Faces 20 Years in Federal Prison for Moving a Box of Zines

Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada goes on trial tomorrow in Texas on federal charges of concealing documents and conspiracy to conceal documents. His alleged crime: moving a box of anarchist zines from his parents’ house to another residence in Dallas. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

The charges stem from a July 4, 2025 anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, Texas, where an officer was shot. Prosecutors do not allege Sanchez Estrada or his wife were involved in the shooting. The homemade zines contain no violent plans. Under normal circumstances, possessing political pamphlets is clearly protected speech under the First Amendment. But the government’s concealment theory only works if merely having the literature is treated as criminal.

The prosecution came on the heels of Trump’s executive order classifying “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization and National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism. Last week, AG Pam Bondi acknowledged for the first time that the DOJ maintains a secret list of domestic terrorist organizations under NSPM-7, refusing to say who’s on it. Last month, activist Lucy Fowlkes became the 19th person indicted in connection with the same protest. Her alleged crime: using Signal to tell people to delete messages and removing people from group chats, which prosecutors call “hindering prosecution of terrorism.”

The founders placed enormous value on the right to possess and read anything, even material that challenged the government. What’s happening in Texas is the opposite: prison-style censorship exported to the general population, where possessing political literature becomes evidence of criminality. If that precedent holds, it won’t stop with anarchist zines.

Sources: The Intercept, The Intercept (Bondi/NSPM-7), Protect the Protest, KERA News

4. Elon and Bezos Race to Beat China to the Moon (You’re Funding Both Sides)

SpaceX and Blue Origin are in a heated race to land astronauts on the moon before China’s planned 2030 mission, and NASA is writing checks to both billionaires to make it happen.

Elon Musk announced plans this week for “Moonbase Alpha,” a permanent lunar facility that would support up to one million satellites for AI computing in orbit. SpaceX absorbed his xAI company in January and is prepping for a $1 trillion IPO later this year. Jeff Bezos isn’t sitting still. Blue Origin shut down its space tourism business to focus all resources on its Blue Moon lander, which shipped to NASA last week for testing.

Both companies are building their lunar landers with billions in NASA contracts under the Artemis program. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who took the job after paying SpaceX millions for private spaceflights, is pushing both companies to accelerate. This is taxpayer money funding a private race between two of the richest men alive. The geopolitical framing is that America “must” beat China, but that assumes China’s lunar plans are a threat rather than just their space program.

SpaceX’s Starship has launched 11 times since 2023 but has yet to deploy anything into orbit or demonstrate the in-orbit refueling critical for a moon landing. The 2028 timeline for a crewed mission is, by industry consensus, wildly optimistic.

Sources: Reuters, Epoch Times

5. FCC Investigates a Talk Show, Warns “Fake News Will Be Punished”

The Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation into whether ABC’s “The View” violated equal-time rules by interviewing a Democratic Senate candidate without offering equivalent airtime to opponents. The probe comes amid what the agency frames as a broader crackdown on broadcasters.

The equal-time rule dates to 1934 and requires broadcast stations to offer equivalent opportunities to all candidates if one gets airtime. Exceptions exist for bona fide news programs, interviews, and documentaries, and the FCC has historically applied them broadly. But in a January 21 notice, the FCC’s Media Bureau warned that current talk shows “may not qualify” for the news exemption and that stations could lose their broadcast licenses for violations. Telecom attorney Harold Feld notes the notice ignores decades of precedent and appears designed to intimidate.

An FCC source told Fox News that “fake news will be punished.” Commissioner Anna Gomez later downplayed the probe, but the damage is done. Networks are now on notice that booking political candidates could trigger federal scrutiny. That’s a chilling effect on political speech regardless of whether the FCC follows through.

The equal-time rule has been selectively enforced for decades. Presidential candidates routinely appear on entertainment shows without triggering complaints. Now it’s being used as a tool to pressure networks that air unfriendly voices. The principle at stake isn’t whether you like The View. It’s whether a government agency should have the power to threaten broadcasters over who they interview.

Sources: Ars Technica, Reuters, The Hill, The Desk

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1. Pentagon Gaming Out a Sustained Military Campaign Against Iran

The Pentagon is preparing plans for a sustained, weeks-long military campaign against Iran if nuclear talks collapse, according to two U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters. This is a significant escalation from Friday’s confirmation that a second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is joining the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

Two carrier strike groups in one theater is an unusual concentration of American firepower. The Ford’s crew has been at sea for eight months and the Navy has flagged the ship as overdue for maintenance.

Trump has given Tehran roughly a month to agree to a deal on its nuclear program. Iran says its ballistic missile program is off the table.

Inside Iran, the regime is reeling from a crackdown on nationwide protests last month that reportedly killed nearly 7,000 people. Iranians are now holding 40-day mourning ceremonies, which historically reignite unrest.

“Weeks” could easily turn into years. Ask Iraq. Two carrier strike groups run roughly $12 million per day to operate. If this escalates, the bill lands on the American taxpayer, and the human cost lands on Iranian civilians who had nothing to do with their government’s nuclear ambitions.

Sources: Reuters, AP via Washington Times, The National

2. Border Patrol Shot Army Lasers at Party Balloons, Shut Down El Paso Airspace

When the FAA suddenly closed airspace over El Paso on Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the move was prompted by a “cartel drone incursion” and assured the public that “the threat has been neutralized.”

That was not what happened.

A Border Patrol unit fired a U.S. Army LOCUST laser counter-drone weapon at what they assumed was a drone near Fort Bliss. It was a metallic party balloon. The weapon was deployed without FAA approval, which may have violated federal law. The FAA’s chief lawyer had warned the Department of War in a February 6 email that using the weapon near civilian airspace posed “a grave risk of fatalities or permanent injuries” to people flying overhead.

The FAA shut down airspace below 18,000 feet near El Paso, disrupting commercial flights and diverting medevac helicopters to Las Cruces, New Mexico, 45 miles away. The order was rescinded hours later.

The Department of War’s position: it doesn’t need FAA approval. Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg reportedly said the department was “free to do what it wanted.” This comes after the fatal January 2025 collision between an American Airlines jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk near Reagan National that killed 67 people. The administration has yet to walk back its “cartel drone” claim.

Sources: New York Times, NBC News, Zero Hedge

3. The U.S. Government Sold $701 Billion in Treasuries This Week. The Math Is Getting Ugly.

The Treasury Department held nine auctions this week, selling $701 billion in securities. That includes $54 billion in 10-year notes at 4.18%, replacing $25 billion in 10-year notes from 2016 that yielded 1.73%. That single swap added $29 billion to the total outstanding debt.

This is the mechanical reality of deficit spending. Every month, maturing low-rate debt from the easy-money era rolls over into higher-rate replacements, and total outstanding debt keeps growing because new issuance far exceeds what it replaces. The Treasury said it would shift toward more short-term bill issuance to ease pressure on long-term yields. Wolf Street’s analysis found that was jawboning: the ratio hasn’t actually shifted.

Meanwhile, services inflation spiked in January. Core services CPI jumped 0.39% month-over-month (4.8% annualized), the worst reading in a year. The BLS headline of 2.4% relies heavily on Owner’s Equivalent of Rent, a metric Wolf Street has documented as having been manipulated with doctored figures for September through November. Food prices are up 30% since January 2020.

The 13-week Treasury bill yield at 3.60% signals the market no longer expects a rate cut within three months. If you carry a mortgage, car note, or credit card balance, borrowing costs aren’t going anywhere.

Sources: Wolf Street, Wolf Street (CPI)

4. BLS Quietly Erased 1.03 Million Jobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual benchmark revisions this week. Total nonfarm employment is 1.03 million jobs lower than previously reported for 2024 and 2025.

Every month, the BLS estimates payrolls from employer surveys and a model that guesses how many businesses opened or closed. Once a year, it checks those estimates against actual quarterly payroll tax data, which counts every employee in the country. The tax data is the gold standard. It showed the BLS had been overstating job growth by over a million positions across two years.

For two years, those inflated figures shaped Federal Reserve decisions, market expectations, and political narratives about the economy’s strength. They were wrong. Wolf Richter notes the obvious fix: benchmark quarterly instead of annually. The BLS has the data. It just doesn’t update.

Why it matters: If you’ve been skeptical every time a jobs report was touted as proof of a strong economy, this is your vindication. The government’s own data, once corrected against harder numbers, shows the labor market was significantly weaker than advertised.

Sources: Wolf Street

5. Jimmy Lai Sentenced to 20 Years in Hong Kong

Jimmy Lai, the 77-year-old founder of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper, was sentenced to 20 years in prison under China’s national security law. The charge: conspiracy to collude with foreign forces.

Lai’s actual crime was running an independent newspaper critical of Beijing and meeting with foreign officials to advocate for Hong Kong’s democratic movement. Apple Daily, which had a daily readership of over a million, was forced to close in 2021 after authorities froze its assets and arrested its editors.

Lai has been in custody since December 2020. He is a British citizen. The UK called the sentence “politically motivated” and demanded his release. Beijing’s response: the trial was “fair” and foreign governments should mind their own business.

Lai had every opportunity to leave Hong Kong before the crackdown. He chose to stay. He’s now spending what may be the rest of his life in prison for publishing a newspaper.

Sources: AP News, Epoch Times, Reuters

1. DHS Shuts Down - But Not the Parts That Matter

The Department of Homeland Security officially ran out of funding at midnight. Congress left town without a deal, and won’t be back until at least February 23. Over 260,000 DHS employees are affected.

But here’s the part worth paying attention to: the agencies at the center of the political fight aren’t affected at all. ICE is sitting on $75 billion from last summer’s reconciliation bill. Customs and Border Protection has another $64 billion. Both will continue operating at full capacity, paychecks included. The enforcement apparatus doesn’t even flinch.

What does get hit? TSA, the Coast Guard, FEMA, and CISA (the cybersecurity agency). CISA will furlough about two-thirds of its already-depleted workforce, halting proactive cyber threat-hunting and vulnerability scanning. Acting CISA director Madhu Gottumukkala told Congress this week that cyber threats don’t take a break when the government does.

This is the third federal funding lapse in five months. The pattern tells you everything about how Washington actually works: Congress can’t keep the lights on, but there’s never a shortage of cash for enforcement. The $140 billion ICE and CBP war chest was locked in before the budget fights even started. Priorities are revealed by what gets funded no matter what, and what gets cut first.

Sources: NBC News, NPR, CBS News, Nextgov

2. Five European Nations Confirm: Russia Poisoned Navalny in Prison

This one broke today. The UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands jointly announced that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed with epibatidine, a neurotoxin derived from South American poison dart frogs. The substance was confirmed in samples taken from his body. It is not found naturally anywhere in Russia.

Navalny died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024. He was serving a 19-year sentence that everyone understood to be politically motivated. Russian authorities claimed he fell ill on a walk. His widow, Yulia Navalnaya, announced the findings at the Munich Security Conference, saying she always knew it was murder.

This was the Kremlin’s second attempt. In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent. A joint CNN-Bellingcat investigation tied the attack to an FSB team that had trailed him for years. He survived, recovered in Germany, then made the extraordinary choice to return to Russia knowing he’d be arrested.

A man spent his life fighting state corruption, and the state killed him for it. Twice, actually. It just took two tries. The five European nations are now reporting Russia to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for breaching the Chemical Weapons Convention. Whether anything comes of that is another question entirely.

Sources: NPR, NBC News, Bloomberg, CNN

3. Second Aircraft Carrier Heading to the Middle East

President Trump confirmed Friday that the USS Gerald R. Ford is being redeployed from the Caribbean to the Persian Gulf, joining the USS Abraham Lincoln already stationed there. Two carrier strike groups in one theater is an unusual concentration of firepower, and the crew of the Ford has already been at sea for eight months. The Navy has reportedly flagged the ship as overdue for maintenance. The sailors don’t get a vote.

The stated purpose is leverage against Iran over its nuclear program. Trump gave Tehran roughly a month to agree to a deal, warning that failure would be “very traumatic.” Iran says its ballistic missile program isn’t on the table. Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham said at the Munich Security Conference that it would be a “disaster” if Trump “lets the Iranian regime survive.”

Inside Iran, the regime is dealing with fallout from a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests last month. Nearly 7,000 people were reportedly killed. Iranians are now holding 40-day mourning ceremonies, which historically reignite unrest.

Whether this ends in a deal or a strike, the invoice lands on the American taxpayer either way. A carrier strike group costs roughly $6 million a day to operate. None of this makes the average American safer, cheaper to insure, or better off. If it escalates, it means more dead people in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map, more veterans coming home broken, and another decade of “stabilization” costs laundered through the defense budget. The track record in this region speaks for itself.

Sources: AP via Washington Times, NBC News, The National

4. The Government Says Inflation Fell. Your Grocery Bill Disagrees.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its January CPI report on Friday, claiming annual inflation slowed to 2.4%. If you find that number hard to square with reality, you’re not alone, and there’s a reason for that.

The CPI has been methodologically overhauled multiple times since the early 1980s, each revision conveniently producing a lower reported number. Substitution effects, hedonic quality adjustments, and changes to how housing costs are calculated have all pushed the index further from what people actually experience at the register. ShadowStats, which attempts to reconstruct CPI using pre-1990s methodology, has historically pegged real inflation several percentage points higher than official figures.

Then there’s Truflation, a decentralized index that pulls from 35 million real-time data points across sources like Amazon, Walmart, and Zillow. Its latest reading puts year-over-year inflation at just 0.68% as of early February, which tells a completely different story than either the BLS or ShadowStats. The takeaway isn’t that one source has the “right” number. It’s that the official number is a political product, shaped by decades of methodological changes that consistently skew in the government’s favor.

What’s not in dispute: food prices are climbing faster than the headline, shelter costs remain elevated, and the Fed isn’t cutting rates anytime soon. If you carry a mortgage, a car note, or credit card debt, borrowing costs stay where they are for the foreseeable future.

Sources: Econbrowser/Truflation, ShadowStats, CNN Business

5. 910 Measles Cases Across 24 States — Expect the Mandate Push

The CDC is reporting 910 confirmed measles cases across 24 states so far in 2026. We’re six weeks in and already approaching half of last year’s total of 2,280, which was the worst year since 1991. South Carolina remains the epicenter. No one has died from measles in 2026.

The U.S. may lose its “measles elimination” status, a designation it’s held since 2000. Canada and several European countries already lost theirs. The Pan American Health Organization is expected to review U.S. data sometime this year.

Why it matters: every spike in measles cases becomes a pretext for expanding government authority over personal medical decisions. Expect calls for mandatory vaccination with fewer exemptions, possible restrictions on travel, and more pressure on states that currently allow religious or philosophical opt-outs. The playbook is familiar — a public health concern, however legitimate, gets leveraged into an expansion of state power that never quite gets rolled back.

Whatever your personal decision on vaccination, the thing to watch here isn’t the case count itself. It’s what legislators and bureaucrats try to do with it.

Sources: CDC, NBC News, U.S. News