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May 26 to June 1, 2024 Evidence from the Twitter Files and other reports revealing how the U.S. government works with nonprofit groups and Big Tech to clamp down on protected speech struck many Americans and a new and startling development. The censorship industrial complex, however, was not invented in response to Donald Trump and COVID-19. As Ben Weingarten reports for RealClearInvestigations, the roots of the sprawling network that identifies and often seeks to quell dissenting views can be traced back at least seven decades to the rise of major, government-funded research universities – especially Stanford University, and the Big Tech revolution it helped incubate in Silicon Valley. Weingarten reports: After World War II, the visionary Stanford professor and later Provost Frederick Terman drew on government and business contacts he had forged during the war to turn Stanford into a research powerhouse that included work on classified military programs. In 1951, Terman helped establish the Stanford Industrial Park, a high-tech cooperative on university land that would attract electronics firms and defense contractors to an area that would become known as Silicon Valley. Building on President Eisenhower’s earlier warning, Democrat Sen. William Fulbright warned in 1967 about the rise of the “military-industrial-academic-complex.” This complex took on a new mission after the 9/11 terror attacks and the advent of social media, including Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) as information came to be seen as a battlespace as the government and non-state actors, including terrorist groups, realized they could harness the power of such platforms, and use them for intelligence gathering, waging information warfare, and targeting foes. The Obama administration expanded these efforts to include not just enemies abroad but Americans in the homeland. Various agencies were involved, but especially the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the FBI. Recognizing the constitutional prohibitions against censorship, government agencies increasingly funded and worked with Big Tech companies and nonprofit groups to monitor what they identified as “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “misinformation.” A key player in this effort, especially during the 2020 election, was Stanford Internet Observatory, which initiated and coordinated efforts to flag and suppress social media posts deemed false or misleading. These posts often targeted figures from the right, including President Trump, or narratives that challenged the official government line on COVID-19 and other issues. The Supreme Court may change the contours of the censorship industrial complex this summer when it is expected to issue a ruling in the first amendment case challenging the censorship industrial complex, Murthy v. Missouri. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Houston, You've Got a Budget Problem, RCI
Rep. Puts Solar $ Where His Vote Wasn't, RCI
COVID's All Over but the Internet Funding, RCI
Squandered Tech Dollars for Census, RCI
Public Buildings Have Mr.-Don't-Fixits, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway The Trump Manhattan Criminal Verdict, Count By Count, New York Times
Joe Biden's Surprise Visit to Witness in Hunter's Gun Case, New York Post
Hunter Timed Joe's Meeting With Chinese to Massacre Memorial, Daily Mail
FBI Knew VP Biden's Role re: Hunter's Chinese Biz, Just the News
Rep. Jamie Raskin and Dems' Push for Noncitizen Voting, Federalist
Biden's New Target for 'Equity' Bias: Kidney Transplants, Free Beacon
Biden 'Environmental Justice' Cash Fuels Gaza Protests, City Journal
Biden Seeks to Shield Health Bureaucrats from Trump, Dossier Other Noteworthy Articles and Series For nearly two decades, a loose band of sheriff’s deputies roamed impoverished neighborhoods across a central Mississippi county, meting out their own version of justice. An investigation by The New York Times and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today found a history of blatant and brutal incidents stretching back to at least 2004: Narcotics detectives and patrol officers, some who called themselves the Goon Squad, barged into homes in the middle of the night, accusing people inside of dealing drugs. Then they handcuffed or held them at gunpoint and tortured them into confessing or providing information, according to dozens of people who say they endured or witnessed the assaults. … Many of those who said they experienced violence filed lawsuits or formal complaints, detailing their encounters with the department. A few said they had contacted Sheriff Bailey directly, only to be ignored. The news outlets say they identified 20 deputies who were present at one or more of the incidents – many assigned to narcotics or the night patrol – but also several high-ranking officials: a former undersheriff, former detectives and a former deputy who is now a local police chief. Quote: Brett McAlpin, former chief investigator for the [Rankin County Sheriff’s] department, was involved in at least 13 of the arrests and was repeatedly described by witnesses as leading the raids. He was named in at least four lawsuits and six complaints going back to 2004. Even so, Sheriff Bailey named him investigator of the year in 2013. This year, he pleaded guilty to criminal charges for his role in the January raid. As many as one million migrant children who have crossed the border since 2021 are settling in cities and entering public schools around the U.S., adding financial and logistical strains in communities where they have arrived in large numbers. This article reports that many districts are faced with the need for additional teachers and staff who can teach English and space for new students, often while waiting for promised supplemental federal or state funding. Denver schools, for example, earlier this year announced a $17.5 million budget shortfall because of new migrant students. This article focuses on Stoughton, Massachusetts, which now has more than 500 English learners in its schools, double the number from three years ago: The increase was fueled partly by 90 students, ranging from kindergarten to high school, placed by the state in two nearby hotels serving as homeless shelters. Many are from recently arrived Haitian migrant families. … Adding the 90 shelter students has cost Stoughton, which teaches a total of 3,740 students, at least $500,000 for increased staff and busing costs. The state said it has reimbursed nearly all of that money. But the lag time and uncertainty about how much would be paid back has challenged the district’s ability to plan, said Joseph Baeta, Stoughton’s superintendent. The most immediate upfront costs this year were hiring five new staff members, including two teachers, and contracting for a bus to shuttle students to and from the hotel shelters, Baeta said. The district has gone from seven to 17 English-as-a-second-language teachers in the past five years. … Migrant students often arrive both with checkered academic histories and having endured harrowing events in their home countries and on their journeys to the U.S. One girl in a Stoughton High School English-learning class wrote, following a discussion about pets, that gangs in Haiti killed and ate her cat, teacher Thais Payne said. “There are huge trauma issues. There are students who don’t even have basic skills in their first language,” said [Stoughton schools superintendent Joseph] Baeta. “In some cases they have lived in two, three or four countries and are not even five years old.” In separate article, Politico reports that traditional public schools are facing additional pressure from parents. Focusing on Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice, this article reports that the success of those efforts have left some of Florida’s largest school districts “facing staggering enrollment declines – and grappling with the possibility of campus closures – as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.” Angela Tipton was disgusted when she heard that her students were circulating a lewd image around their middle school. What made it far worse was seeing that the picture had her face on someone else’s naked body. This article reports that she is not alone: K-12 educators, school administrators and law enforcement were already struggling with how to address rare instances of the realistic-looking fake images that cause real damage. But the explosion of sophisticated, easy-to-access artificial intelligence apps is making deepfakes a disturbingly common occurrence in schools. Twenty states have passed laws penalizing the dissemination of nonconsensual AI-generated pornographic materials, according to data from MultiState, a Virginia-based state and local government relations firm. Still, when the fake images and videos of students and educators are discovered, what happens next in schools – who gets disciplined, how minors are treated and who is responsible for taking images to the police – varies widely depending on the state. For Tipton, a classroom teacher for 20 years who lives in Indianapolis, the incident with an AI-generated deepfake drove her to change jobs. She now works with an alternative program within her city’s public school system that lets her help students one-on-one or in small groups. “The way it impacted my career is indescribable,” Tipton said of the picture in an interview. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stand in front of a classroom in Indianapolis again.” Cryptocurrency may be new money, but the companies behind it are practicing old-fashion politics – using greenbacks to influence lawmakers. This article reports that crypto companies and investors ... ... have spent at least $149 million over the past four years to thwart tough regulation, elect new allies to Congress and defeat lawmakers seen as potential threats, a campaign that culminated this week with a House vote to soften federal oversight of the embattled industry. The wide array of financial backers includes Coinbase and Ripple, which the U.S. government recently sued for allegedly violating federal rules meant to protect investors from harm. Even as they have come under withering scrutiny, these and other major crypto firms have fought not only to rebuff the charges but to remake the laws entirely, mounting an expensive lobbying effort that has left no part of Washington untouched. The Washington Post reports that its spending estimates “are an undercount, partly because federal campaign finance laws do not require companies and executives to disclose donations to certain nonprofit groups. Even so, the figures suggest the crypto industry now belongs to a category of Beltway powerhouses that regularly shell out massive sums to influence U.S. policymaking.” Los Angeles County medical examiners discovered something startling as they worked to determine what killed the actor Matthew Perry: his body had the same amount of ketamine in it as one would find in a patient given general anesthesia for an operation. This article reports that the death of the “Friends” TV star is shining a light on the growing use of ketamine, especially among the wealthy: Far removed from its club-drug days, when ketamine was known as "Special K" or "Super Acid," the drug's newest users include the rich and famous. … Elon Musk posted on X that he has a prescription for ketamine "for when my brain chemistry sometimes goes super negative." Sharon Osbourne told People [magazine] she underwent three months of ketamine therapy. Saturday Night Live alumni Pete Davidson revealed during a comedy set in Atlantic City that he had taken ketamine daily for four years before he checked himself into rehab. This article reports that ketamine is legal and commonly used as an anesthetic, but it also is used recreationally to create a sense of disconnect and sedation – and, at times, hallucinations. Experts say the drug's new boom is being driven by clinics and online services offering intravenous treatments and prescriptions for in-home use – such as tablets and nasal sprays – for ailments including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse. It doesn't come cheap. A single intravenous session can cost from $350 to more than $700. Many clinics bundle treatments, which can cost thousands of dollars. The FBI said it has dismantled what is likely the world’s largest botnet – an army of 19 million infected computers – that was leased to hackers for cybercrimes. This article reports that the botnet, which was spread across more than 190 countries, enabled financial fraud, identity theft and access to child exploitation materials around the world. Law enforcement seized internet equipment and assets, and levied sanctions against the alleged administrator of the botnet, YunHe Wang, a Chinese citizen arrested in Singapore, as well as co-conspirators: [The botnet] was started in 2014 and relied on a network of millions of compromised residential Windows computers, according to the US government. … Residential IP addresses became compromised when users downloaded certain free software or virtual private network apps, which unknowingly contained malware associated with the botnet onto their devices. … Wang then generated millions of dollars by offering cybercriminals access to these infected IP addresses for a fee. As the Biden administration pushes the country to switch to electric vehicles, much of the attention has focused on stalled efforts to create an estimated one million public-charging stations in the next decade or two. In asking how many charging stations the nation might need if we replaced all gas-powered cars, this article includes a stunning fact: the real challenge may be building out more than 100 million home charging stations. Wired reports that the U.S. currently has 188,600 public and private charging ports. If everyone drove an EV, it calculates, the country could need: 1.078 million public charging stations, 3.66 million work-based stations and 129.4 million home-charging stations. | 