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      US watchdog to investigate Musk ‘Doge’ team’s access to payment systems

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      A government watchdog is to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system as a judge on Friday considered whether access by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to the highly sensitive data base was unconstitutional.Amid mounting court cases concerning Doge’s activities, the treasury department’s inspector general said it would launch an audit after Democrats complained about the access gained to a 25-year-old Musk associate, Marko Elez, who was briefly granted edit access within the system, meaning he had the potential to change entries. The access was later rescinded by an interim court ruling.The payment system contains the personal details of millions of Americans and disburses trillions of dollars to federal government programmes.Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has been tasked by Trump to slash government spending by targeting alleged waste and fraud and has upended large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, cancelling contracts, stopping spending programs and throwing thousands of staff out of work.Loren Sciurba, the treasury’s deputy inspector general, said the audit would review the past two years of the system’s transactions to examine Musk’s claim that his team has uncovered evidence of billions of dollars of fraudulent payments.She said the audit – launched in response to demands from the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden – would begin immediately and take until August to complete.Its launch coincided with a judge in Washington considering a legal suit lodged by Democratic attorneys general from 14 states, arguing that Doge’s work was illegal on the alleged grounds that Trump violated the US constitution by creating a federal government department without congressional approval.The attorneys general argue that Musk has exercised “virtually unchecked power” by entering government agencies and ordering sweeping cuts without oversight or authorization from Congress.USAid, the government foreign assistance agency, has been shuttered on his authority and its workforce put on leave, although a judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift the funding freeze it has imposed on the agency’s humanitarian work.The suit, led by New Mexico’s justice department, alleges that Doge has “unraveled federal agencies, accessed sensitive data, and caused widespread disruption for state and local governments, federal employees, and the American people”.The attorneys general asked the court to order Musk to identify how “any data obtained through unlawful agency access was used” and to destroy any “unauthorised access in his or Doge’s possession”. They called on the court to bar Musk and his team from stopping the disbursement of public funds, cancelling contracts and dismantling agencies.The hearing was due to take place after Musk said the US needed to “delete entire agencies” to eliminate waste.A separate hearing in a court in New York was due over whether to extend a temporary block on the Doge team entering the payments system that was imposed in an interim ruling last Saturday by Judge Paul Englemayer. Musk called for Englemayer’s impeachment after that ruling, while JD Vance, the vice-president, wrote in a social media most that judges were not allowed to interfere with a president’s “legitimate power” – a view contested by most constitutional law experts.Swingeing cuts continued apace despite the plethora of legal challenges. Federal agency heads were ordered to fire most recent hires who have not completed their probation period – a move likely to affect about 200,000 workers, the Washington Post reported.The treasury department audit coincided with a call from Chris Murphy, Democratic senator for Connecticut, for an official investigation into the “legality and scope” of Musk’s penetration of the federal bureaucracy.“Musk and his aides are subject to various conflict of interest statutes which prohibit federal employees from participating in matters that impact their own financial interests,” Murphy wrote to the US government comptroller general, Eugene Dodaro.He added: “It is imperative the public understands whether Musk and his aides have complied with the law and whether highly sensitive data could be at risk if accessed by private actors who seek to benefit from the information illegally, or worse, by foreign adversaries who wish to attack this country.”Despite the rising resistance to its activities, the US armed services were preparing a list of weapons systems to be cut in preparation for Doge casting its gaze over the Pentagon, the Wall Street Journal reported.Members of Musk’s team were expected to visit the Pentagon on Friday. “People are offering up things sacrificially, hoping that will prevent more cuts,” a defence official told the Journal.The army was said to be volunteering cutting outdated drones and vehicles, while the navy is proposing cuts to frigates and littoral combat ships. 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      Musk-linked group offered $5m for proof of voter fraud – and came up with nothing

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      In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics.Close ties to world’s richest manThe Fair Election Fund is a fictitious name for another 501(c)(4) non-profit, Documented can reveal, and operates within a network run by Musk’s top political advisers. The group received funding from the same dark-money vehicle Musk has used to channel his political spending, and also routed funds to another Musk-backed non-profit.The group is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund. Formed on 3 January 2023, the non-profit raised $8,226,000 from a single donation in 2023.The group is led by Victoria “Tori” Sachs, a Republican operative who was also executive director of And to the Republic, a group also formed in January 2023 that supported Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, including by funding DeSantis’s private jets and hosting quasi-campaign events.The naming of the two Sachs-led groups – And to the Republic and the For Which It Stands Fund – and the timing of their creation in January 2023 suggests that the group that now houses the Fair Election Fund was originally intended to support DeSantis’s run, which Musk initially supported.Sachs’s involvement continued through 2024, with her name appearing on records that accompanied the Fair Election Fund’s broadcast purchases.Since 2022, Musk has been secretly channeling his political spending through a dark-money non-profit called Building America’s Future. That group is run by Generra Peck and Phil Cox, two Republican operatives who were involved in DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and now advise Musk. Building America’s Future reportedly backed the Fair Election Fund in 2024. It also provided half of And to the Republic’s overall fundraising in 2023.View image in fullscreenThe Fair Election Fund has other ties to the Musk advisers who lead Building America’s Future. Cox’s digital marketing firm IMGE LLC, which provides services to several groups in the Musk-backed, Building America Future-tied universe, manages the Fair Election Fund’s Facebook page, and an IMGE employee appears to be responsible for articles on the Fair Election Fund’s website.The Fair Election Fund/Interstate Priorities also acted as a conduit to support other Musk-backed groups. The group’s 2023 tax return shows that it made a $1,550,000 grant to Citizens for Sanity, which Musk funded in 2022 through Building America’s Future, and which aired racist and transphobic ads that election cycle. That grant made up almost the entirety of Citizens for Sanity’s funding in 2023.In the 2024 election cycle, Musk publicly disclosed at least $277m in political contributions to Super Pacs that worked to elect President Trump and other Republicans. It is not known how much he may have given to other politically active groups that disguise their donors.A detour into third-party ballot accessThe Fair Election Fund’s goal of exposing election fraud seemingly turned up nothing of significance.Out of its $5m fund, the group announced $75,000 in “bounty” payments, releasing $50,000 in July 2024 and $25,000 in September 2024. The Fair Election Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible.Instead, the group took a detour in July 2024: it launched a $175,000 ad “blitz” targeting North Carolina state board of election (NCSBE) members who delayed placing third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr on the ballot. At the time, Republicans and their allies believed that West and Kennedy would act as spoilers to help Trump, by siphoning left-leaning votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.Ironically, the NCSBE had delayed a decision on West’s and Kennedy’s ballot eligibility based on evidence that petitions were obtained through fraudulent means – concerns that would seem to align with the Fair Election Fund’s stated mission of exposing election fraud.The Fair Election Fund ads declared that the Democratic members of the NCSBE were “blocking your voting rights”, and offered a reward for evidence of the members’ “shady backroom deal”. The group also projected images on the side of the NCSBE’s building, and drove mobile billboards around the agency’s headquarters.The Fair Election Fund also ran digital ads in North Carolina featuring Black voters, some of which asserted that “African American voices are not being heard”, while others declared “Support Equality, Support Inclusion, Support [Cornel West’s] Justice for All Party”. The group pushed similar efforts in states such as Michigan.Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who sought to keep West off of ballots in North Carolina and elsewhere, was a frequent target of the group. In October 2024, the group announced that it would be running a six-figure ad buy to “troll” Elias. The ads included mobile billboards around the Elias Law Group office as well as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, which declared: “We beat Marc Elias and his racist voter suppression lawsuits … He tried to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West, but the Fair Election Fund stopped him.”The Fair Election Fund then veered into a series of efforts to chase other trending rightwing conspiracy theories.For example, over the summer, the Fair Election Fund seized on to a far-fetched conspiracy theory about the online fundraising platform ActBlue, claiming to have found “60,000 potential discrepancies” in ActBlue-facilitated contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign, based on an investigation conducted “from late July to early August”. The group claimed to have “spent $250,000 on these initial findings” – a jaw-dropping sum to spend on a brief review of campaign finance records.The group then announced a $50,000 ad buy in several swing states soliciting evidence from people who claim to have been “defrauded by ActBlue”. No evidence from this “investigation” has been made public.In fall 2024, as conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting gained momentum, the Fair Election Fund announced that it would be launching a “six-figure investigation into noncitizen voting in seven key swing states”. The results of this “six-figure investigation” were never made public.

      This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is deputy executive director and Emma Steiner is a researcher with Documented More

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      X to pay Donald Trump $10m to settle lawsuit over Capitol attack – report

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      Elon Musk’s social media platform X will pay Donald Trump $10m to settle a lawsuit the president filed after he was banned from the platform following the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, according to a report.The lawsuit was filed against X under the leadership of its previous CEO, Jack Dorsey. After Musk purchased X, reinstated Trump’s account, began developing a relationship with the president and spent $250m on his re-election campaign, Trump’s legal team considered abandoning the lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the case.But, ultimately, Trump’s lawyers went ahead with the case.The settlement will mark the second time a social media platform has paid Trump millions after the 2021 siege of the Capitol. In January, Meta agreed to pay the president $25m – including $22m to Trump’s presidential library – to settle a similar lawsuit after Facebook suspended Trump’s account. Trump’s attorneys are expected to pursue a similar settlement with Google over its decision to ban the president from YouTube after the attack.In recent months, Trump has formed a close relationship with Musk, resulting in his appointment to lead the newly formed “department of government efficiency”. On Tuesday, Musk took questions from reporters alongside the president in an Oval Office ceremony regarding the closure of government offices.Trump’s lawsuit against X stems from the president’s use of the platform, then still called Twitter, to spread falsehoods after he lost the 2020 election. Trump used his account to encourage his followers to attend a “Stop the Steal” rally on 6 January 2021 before the storming of the Capitol.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting

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      Google’s executives gave details on Wednesday on how the tech giant will sunset its diversity initiatives and defended dropping its pledge against building artificial intelligence for weaponry and surveillance in an all-staff meeting.Melonie Parker, Google’s former head of diversity, said the company was doing away with its diversity and inclusion employee training programs and “updating” broader training programs that have “DEI content”. It was the first time company executives have addressed the whole staff since Google announced it would no longer follow hiring goals for diversity and took down its pledge not to build militarized AI. The chief legal officer, Kent Walker, said a lot had changed since Google first introduced its AI principles in 2018, which explicitly stated Google would not build AI for harmful purposes. He said it would be “good for society” for the company to be part of evolving geopolitical discussions in response to a question about why the company removed prohibitions against building AI for weapons and surveillance.Parker said that, as a federal contractor, the company has been reviewing all of its programs and initiatives in response to Donald Trump’s executive orders that direct federal agencies and contractors to dismantle DEI work. Parker’s role has also been changed from chief diversity officer to the vice-president of Googler Engagement.“What’s not changing is we’ve always hired the best person for the job,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting the Guardian reviewed.Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said the company had always “deeply cared” about hiring a workforce that represents the diversity of its global users but that the firm had to comply with the rules and regulations of where it operates.“Our values are enduring, but we have to comply with legal directions depending on how they evolve,” Pichai said.Pichai, who was speaking from Paris while attending an international AI summit, and other executives were responding to questions employees posted in an internal forum. Some of these questions were part of a coordinated effort among worker activist groups such as No Tech for Apartheid to force company executives to answer for the tech giant’s drastic move away from its previous core values.Employees had submitted 93 questions about the company’s decision to remove its pledge not to build AI weapons and more than 100 about Google’s announcement that it was rolling back DEI pledges, according to screenshots the Guardian reviewed. The company recently shifted to using AI to summarize similar questions employees had ahead of regularly scheduled staff meetings, which are known as TGIF.Last week, Google joined Meta and Amazon in shifting away from an emphasis on a culture of inclusivity in favor of policies molded in the image of the Trump administration. In addition to removing mentions of its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it would no longer set hiring targets for people from underrepresented backgrounds. The company also removed language from its publicly posted AI principles that stated it wouldn’t build AI for harmful purposes including weaponry and surveillance.“We are increasingly being asked to have a seat at the table in some important conversations, and I think it’s good for society that Google has a role in those conversations in areas where we do specialize – cybersecurity, or some of the work around biology, and many more,” Walker, the chief legal officer, said. “While it may be that some of the strict prohibitions that were in [the first version] of the AI principles don’t jive well with those more nuanced conversations we’re having now, it remains the case that our north star through all of this is that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks.”Google has long attempted to give the impression that it was toeing the line between its stated corporate and cultural values and chasing government and defense contracts. After employee protests in 2018, the company withdrew from the US Defense Department’s Project Maven – which used AI to analyze drone footage – and released its AI principles and values, which promised not to build AI for weapons or surveillance.In the years since, however, the company has started working with the Pentagon again after securing a $9bn Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract along with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. Google has also had active contracts to provide AI to the Israel Defense Forces. The tech giant had worked over time to distance the contract, called Project Nimbus, from the military arm of the Israeli government, but the Washington Post revealed documents that showed the company not only worked with the IDF but rushed to fulfill new requests for more AI access after the 7 October attacks. It is unclear how the IDF is using Google’s AI capabilities but, as the Guardian reported, the Israeli military has used AI for a number of military purposes including to help find and identify bombing targets.In a statement a Google spokesperson, Anna Kowalczyk, said the company’s work with the Israeli government was not “directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOrganizers at No Tech for Apartheid said the DEI and AI announcements were deeply related. The “SVP of People Operations Fiona Cicconi communicated internally that the move to dismantle DEI programs was made to insulate government contracts from ‘risk’,” the group wrote in a worker call to action published on Tuesday. “It is important to note that the bulk of government spending on technology services is spent through the military.”For each category of question from employees, Google’s internal AI summarizes all the queries into a single query. The AI distilled the questions about the development of AI weapons to: “We recently removed a section from our AI principles page that pledged to avoid using the technology in potentially harmful applications, such as weapons and surveillance. Why did we remove this section?”While the company does not make all of the questions that were posted visible, the list gives a snapshot of some of them. Questions that employees asked included how the updated AI principles would ensure the company’s tools “are not misused for harmful purposes” and asked executives to “please talk frankly and without corp speak and legalese”.The third-most-popular question employees asked was why the AI summaries were so bad.“The AI summaries of questions on Ask are terrible. Can we go back to answering the questions people actually asked?” it read. More

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      Elon Musk appears with Trump and tries to claim ‘Doge’ team is transparent

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      Elon Musk claimed in the Oval Office on Tuesday that his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) was providing maximum transparency as it bulldozed its way through the federal government, remarks contradicted by the reality of how he has operated in deep secrecy.The appearance from Musk was the first time he had taken questions from the news media since his arrival in Washington, and he used his time standing next to Donald Trump at the Resolute Desk to defend the aggressive cost-cutting measures the Doge team has pursued.Musk confidently asserted, without offering any evidence, that some officials at the now gutted USAid had been taking “kickbacks” and that “quite a few people” in the government had “managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position”.The most startling claim centered on his insistence that the Doge team had been transparent about its activities as it had swept through roughly 20 agencies, seeking the removal of career officials who stood in his way and accessing sensitive data systems.“We are actually trying to be as transparent as possible,” Musk said, referring to what Doge has posted on X. “So all of our actions are maximally transparent. I don’t know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.”In reality, Musk has taken great pains to conceal how Doge has operated, starting with his own involvement in the project. Musk himself is a “special government employee”, which the White House has said means his financial disclosure filing will not be made public.The Doge team involves about 40 staffers, but the actual number is not known. Staffers have tried to keep their identities private and refused to give their last names to career officials at the agencies they were detailed to, the Guardian has previously reported.Musk has also tried to stop Doge staffers from being identified. When the Wall Street Journal reported that one 25-year-old staffer, Marko Elez, had made racist posts on an anonymous X account in recent months, Musk called for the reporter who wrote the story to be fired.Their identities have slowly come to light not because of any transparency efforts on the part of Musk but as a result of Doge staffers having to use their official government emails and sometimes being added to employee directories – often over their objections.Doge technically reports to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. But Musk has operated with virtually unchecked power as he radically reshapes the federal government, and some of his moves have caught the White House by surprise, a person familiar with the matter said.Musk’s appearance came on the sidelines of Trump signing new executive orders related to his bureaucratic cost-cutting initiatives, including one to implement the “workforce optimization initiative” of Doge that limits hiring, according to a White House official.The billionaire stood next to the Resolute Desk, where Trump sat as he signed the executive orders, wearing a black “Dark Maga” hat and accompanied by his young son, who is named X. While Musk responded to reporters, Trump was busy staring at the boy with amusement.Asked about possible conflicts of interest as a result of Musk gutting agencies that either are investigating his companies for regulatory noncompliance or that have contracts with his companies, such as the defense department, Musk suggested there were none.“First of all, I’m not the one filing the contract. It’s the people at SpaceX or something,” said Musk, the founder, chief executive, chief engineer and chair of SpaceX.Pressed by reporters on the possibility that Doge might be moving too fast and cutting too much, Musk said he would simply reverse any measures that were gratuitous, reprising a strategy that he has used to reduce costs in his private companies.“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody’s going to bat 1,000,” Musk said. “We all make mistakes. But we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”But Musk has bristled at criticism leveled at him or Doge, and has lashed out at injunctions issued by federal judges. Over the weekend, Musk promoted a series of posts that contemplated defying a court order that temporarily blocked the Department of the Treasury from giving Doge access to its payment systems. More

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      Democrats demand conflict-of-interest answers over Elon Musk ‘Doge’ role

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      The California senator Adam Schiff has demanded answers about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest in his role leading the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), as evidence grows of his complex business relationship with agencies now facing cuts.In a Monday letter to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, Schiff accused Musk of operating in a legal grey zone, noting that as a “special government employee” Musk is subject to strict conflict-of-interest regulations while retaining “significant financial interests in multiple private companies that benefit from federal government contracts”.He is now demanding a response before 13 February about whether Musk had completed a financial disclosure report and whether he had received any waivers exempting him from potential penalties for financial entanglements.“Mr Musk’s compliance with federal conflicts of interest and other related obligations remains unknown to Congress and the public,” the letter read.The controversy centers on Musk’s dual role as a government official and CEO of companies under federal scrutiny, including Starlink, a satellite internet service operated by Musk’s SpaceX. Most notably, USAid was investigating Starlink’s operations in Ukraine just months before Musk, as Doge chief, moved to dismantle the agency.USAid inspector general Paul K Martin confirmed to Congress in September that the agency was looking into its oversight of Starlink terminals provided to Ukraine. The investigation focused on a 2022 collaboration where USAid helped deliver 5,000 Starlink terminals to the war-torn nation.Tesla, valued at $1.25tn – more than all other American automakers combined – faces multiple federal investigations that could be affected by Doge’s restructuring and government regulation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s investigation into Tesla’s autopilot system identified design flaws that “led to foreseeable misuse and avoidable crashes” in an April report linking the technology to 13 fatalities.Further entanglements arise from Neuralink, Musk’s brain computer chip company. The firm received FDA clearance for human trials in May 2023 after initially being denied permission, but remains under investigation by the FDA and the Department of Agriculture over its animal testing practices. Reuters reported that approximately 1,500 animals died in four years of testing at Neuralink facilities.“Mr Musk’s companies have been the subject of at least 20 recent investigations or reviews by federal agencies, which heightens the risk that Mr Musk may seek to use his new position to shield his companies from federal scrutiny,” Schiff wrote.Last weekend, a federal judge blocked Doge-affiliated employees from accessing a sensitive Department of the Treasury payment system that handles 90% of federal payments. Another judge temporarily halted Doge’s move to place thousands of USAid employees on immediate leave – a decision that would have effectively ended the agency’s ongoing investigations.In response, Musk posted on X that the judge who made the decision should be impeached, and later suggested that the “worst 1% of appointed judges” be purged yearly.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has claimed Musk would “excuse himself” from any conflicts, but Schiff says such assurances are insufficient.“Unless [Wiles] or another senior White House official, in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics, provided a written waiver prior to Mr Musk’s appointment as a special government employee, Mr Musk may have violated the federal criminal conflict of interest statute by undertaking acts otherwise prohibited by law,” Schiff wrote in the letter.Send us a tip
      If you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of cuts to federal programs, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (646) 886-8761 or JosephGedeon.01 More

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      Revelations of Israeli spyware abuse raise fears over possible use by Trump

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      Even as WhatsApp celebrated a major legal victory in December against NSO Group, the Israeli maker of one of the world’s most powerful cyberweapons, a new threat was detected, this time involving another Israel-based company that has previously agreed contracts with democratic governments around the world – including the US.Late in January, WhatsApp claimed that 90 of its users, including some journalists and members of civil society, were targeted last year by spyware made by a company called Paragon Solutions. The allegation is raising urgent questions about how Paragon’s government clients are using the powerful hacking tool.Three people – an Italian journalist named Francesco Cancellato; the high-profile Italian founder of an NGO that aids immigrants named Luca Casarini; and a Libyan activist based in Sweden named Husam El Gomati – announced they were among the 90 people whose mobile phones had probably been compromised last year.More is likely to be known soon, when researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which investigates digital threats against civil society and has worked closely with WhatsApp, is expected to release a new technical report on the breach.Like NSO Group, Paragon licenses its spyware, which is called Graphite, to government agencies. If it is deployed successfully, it can hack any phone without a mobile phone user’s knowledge, giving the operator of the spyware the ability to intercept phone calls, access photographs, and read encrypted messages. Its purpose, Paragon said, was in line with US policy, which calls for such spyware to only be used to assist governments in “national security missions, including counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, and counter-intelligence”.In a statement to the Guardian, a Paragon representative said the company had “a zero-tolerance policy for violations of our terms of service”. “We require all users of our technology to adhere to terms and conditions that preclude the illicit targeting of journalists and other civil society leaders,” the representative said.The company does appear to have acted swiftly in response to the cases that have emerged so far. The Guardian reported last week that Paragon had terminated its contract with Italy for violating the terms of its contract with the group. Italy had – hours before the Guardian’s story broke – denied any knowledge of or involvement in the targeting of the journalist and activists, and said it would investigate the matter.David Kaye, who previously served from 2014 to 2020 as a special rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion said the marketing of military-grade surveillance products, such as the kind made by Paragon, comes with “extraordinary risks of abuse”.“Like the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, it is easy for governments easily to avoid basic principles of rule of law. Though not all the details are known, we are seeing the likelihood of scandalous abuse in the case of Italy, just as we have seen that in other contexts across Europe, Mexico and elsewhere,” Kaye said.The issue seems particularly relevant in the US. In 2019, during the first Donald Trump administration, the FBI acquired a limited license to test NSO Group’s Pegasus. The FBI said the spyware was never used in a domestic investigation and there is no evidence that either the Trump or Joe Biden administrations used spyware domestically.In the face of increasing reports of abuse, including use of NSO’s spyware against American diplomats abroad, the Biden administration put NSO on a blacklist in 2021, saying the company’s tools had enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression and represented a threat to national security.Biden also signed an executive order in 2023 that discouraged the use of spyware by the federal government and allowed it to be used in limited circumstances.It was therefore a surprise when it was reported by Wired last year that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency had – under the Biden administration – signed a $2m one-year contract with Paragon. The contract was reportedly paused after the news became public and its current status is unclear. Ice did not respond to a request for comment.A Paragon representative said the company was “deeply committed to following all US laws and regulations” and that it was fully compliant with the 2023 executive order signed by Biden. The person also pointed out that Paragon was now a US-owned company, following its takeover by AE Industrial Partners. It also has a US subsidiary based in Virginia, which is headed by John Fleming, a longtime veteran of the CIA who serves as executive chair.Unlike its predecessor, however, the new US administration has publicly stated that it will seek to use the levers of government against Trump’s perceived political enemies. Trump has repeatedly said he would try to use the military to take on “the enemy from within”. He has also singled out career prosecutors who have investigated him, members of the military, members of Congress, intelligence agents and former officials who have been critical of him, for potential prosecution. He has never explicitly stated that he would use spyware against these perceived rivals.Researchers like those at Citizen Lab and Amnesty Tech are considered the leading experts in detecting illegitimate surveillance against members of civil society, which have occurred in a number of democracies, including India, Mexico and Hungary. More

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      While Trump blathers about tariffs and Gaza, Musk is executing a coup d’état | John Naughton

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      Way back in 2019, Steve Bannon, then a Trump consigliere, outlined in a TV interview a strategy for managing information. “The opposition party is the media,” he said, “And because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time… All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.”Since his re-election, Donald Trump has been following this script to the letter, and the media, not to mention the entire world, are feeling punch-drunk. Which is, as Bannon pointed out, enabling other members of the Trump crew to get their stuff done. Really bad stuff too, to which the world has not been paying enough attention.Prime suspect in this respect is Elon Musk, whom Trump has chosen to slash $2tn off US government spending. Late on Friday 31 January, he and a few of his goons gained access to the Department of Treasury payments system – the system that processes the federal spending that makes up more than a fifth of the US economy. More importantly, Musk and a 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who has previously worked for two of his companies, were given the ability to make changes to the payments system, thereby enabling them to stop disbursements of taxpayers’ dollars to recipients that the Trump crowd decide are illegitimate – for example a $367m payment to an outfit called Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Inc.It’s conceivable, of course, that this payment was an example of the wasteful federal spending that Musk and co are pledged to root out and eliminate. But that is not the point. The point is that all the spending passing through the system constitutes expenditure that has been authorised by Congress. Traditionally, the system was run by apolitical civil servants who had no authority to decide whether a particular payment was unwise or unacceptable. Now, suddenly, that power has been appropriated by an unelected billionaire who spent a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that Trump was elected.But the Treasury coup is just one part of a bigger story. Musk is not just going after payments, he’s also going after jobs, salaries and the employment status of federal employees. And his strategy mirrors what he did to Twitter after being forced to buy it. At around 5pm on 28 January, millions of US government employees received an email from Musk with the subject line “Fork in the Road”. The message in the email was stark: accept a sweeping set of workplace changes or resign within nine days. It was more or less a replica of the email that Twitter employees received in November 2022 and it signals an intention to do to the federal bureaucracy what he did to Twitter in 2022: hollow it out and subject it to intensive personal control.It’s worth pondering the immensity of what’s happening while Trump blathers on about tariffs, acquiring Gaza, buying Greenland, trolling Justin Trudeau and generally “flooding the zone” with crap. As Mike Masnick, a distinguished tech commentator, puts it: “A private citizen with zero constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power – a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.”Musk’s arrival at the heart of American power signals a new, sinister kind of technocracy – an obnoxious blend of obscene wealth, narcissism, arrogance, determination, IQ and the kind of “solutionism” that believes there is no problem that cannot be solved by technology. He reminds Masnick of “a toddler ‘fixing’ a grandfather clock by removing its pendulum. Yes, the clock needed maintenance – but now it can’t tell time at all. The federal government absolutely needs reform, but what we’re seeing isn’t reform – it’s vandalism dressed up as innovation.”The strange thing is that what most people expected from Trump 2.0 was his usual performative chaos: perhaps a bit less than last time, but chaos nonetheless. What no one saw coming was a tech bro who spotted an opportunity to use AI to re-engineer the US government in the name of the “efficiency” that Silicon Valley worships, and was able to pay hundreds of millions to get into the driving seat. In the bad old days, insurgent colonels would surround the presidential palace with tanks and capture the radio station. Thanks to Trump, Musk didn’t have to worry about the palace, and he already had his own radio station (X), so he went straight to the heart of the matter – the Treasury. What we’re watching is nothing less than a thoroughly modern coup d’état.What I’ve been readingLLMs and a flawed paradigm
      An astute essay by Erik J Larsen on his Substack, Colligo, about the large language models that the tech industry calls “AIs”.How to raise your artificial intelligence
      A fascinating conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik and AI scientist Melanie Mitchell in the LA Review of Books.The Musk junta Nice satirical piece by Garrett Graff on Doomsday Scenario, imagining how foreign correspondents would report on current events in Washington DC.

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