Yogev Toby reports: Meet the Instagram follower that may never stop looking at your feed: the Boston Police Department. The department this summer started using new artificial intelligence software that combs through social media looking for possible threats and information helpful to investigations, a city report revealed this week. The software, dubbed LifeRaft, offers tools...

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Jason Koebler reports: Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the...

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Cyrus Farivar reports: New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate. Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses,...

Sam Levine reports: The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight. In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of...

This. 1000x this. Mario Trujillo writes: In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is...

Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales, and Andy Mannix report: It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens...

Ed Hasbrouck writes: The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has subpoenaed the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) for a copy of all entries in the CDLIS national database of state-issued commercial driver’s licenses held by AAMVA. The administrative subpoena was issued August 11th and ordered AAMVA to hand over a copy of all records that were found in...

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: The FBI has been using hacking techniques and tools, such as spyware, since at least 1998, but to date there is no public data counting how often the feds were deploying them. That’s about to change — at least for the use of spyware for tapping into someone’s real-time communications. Starting in 2029, U.S. judiciary...

James Reddick reports: The controversial license plate reader company Flock Safety is changing some of its policies to address the abuse of its technology by law enforcement officers amid growing backlash nationwide to the rapid spread of its cameras. The company announced Thursday that it would expand its “Audit Assistance” feature, which tracks abnormal activity within departments...

Dhruv Mehrotra reports: On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him. According to a criminal complaint reviewed by WIRED, officers drove Moreno-Mendez to a nearby ICE field office. There, one deportation officer after another...

The Associated Press and Anthony Izaguirre report: More than 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration on Monday to block it from getting wide access to the personal information of millions of recipients of a benefits program for low-income families. The case is the latest legal action between states and the federal government...

Jackson Healy reports: The Trump administration has ended its push to force the University of Pennsylvania to release a list of the names and personal contact information of Jewish people on campus, according to court documents filed Thursday. While tied to an ongoing federal inquiry into on-campus antisemitism accusations, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s now-dropped subpoena against...

By Amanda Seitz, Maia Rosenfeld, and Darius Tahir Jul 27, 2026 A tiny federal agency tasked with protecting the public from injuries caused by lawn mowers and coffeemakers is demanding that some of the nation’s biggest health systems turn over detailed, personally identifiable medical records of all patients who seek help at their emergency rooms....

Paul Schroeder writes: On June 4, 2026 the Department of Commerce issued a new order “Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products” (DAO 216-26) that limits the types of privacy protection methods that the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) can use for their data products. This order subverts processes developed over decades to foster transparency and...

Zack Whittaker reports: The Dutch government has blocked American IT giant Kyndryl from acquiring Solvinity, a Dutch cloud provider that hosts the Netherlands’ online identity platform. The government in The Hague said the deal poses a possible “risk to the public interest.” Dutch minister for the digital economy Willemijn Aerdts said in a machine-translated letter published Monday...

Stetson Miller reports: The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on Monday that could determine if law enforcement’s use of geofence warrants violates the Fourth Amendment. The case was filed by a man named Okello Chatrie, who was convicted in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery after law enforcement obtained his digital location information...

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, and Mia McCarthy report: Hill Republican leaders are finding themselves in a never-ending crisis over the fate of a government spy law that has unleashed a bitter, intraparty battle within the House while also threatening to derail a host of other GOP priorities. Republicans now have scant legislative days to...