How To Kill Subversives and Get Away With ItNew Lines Mag
Friday, October 31, 2025
Data journalists start news site to track extremist movements
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
~The phrase "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" was written by Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" to explain how interconnected all people are. It means that allowing injustice to go unchecked in one place weakens the foundation of justice for everyone, as every person is part of a single "garment of destiny". This quote is a call to action, urging people to stand up against injustice wherever it occurs
Data journalists start news site to track extremist movements
Decoherence Media is an independent, journalist-founded nonprofit investigating authoritarian and anti-democratic movement seems using open-source and data-driven methods.
At a time when masked agents of the state act with impunity, emboldened neo-Nazi groups march in the streets, and one institution after another legitimizes authoritarian consolidation, there is a need for unflinching reporting to hold these forces to account. We will identify and expose fascists, whether they are wearing khakis, a suit, or a badge.
Decoherence Media is a 501(c)(3) registered nonprofit. Read more about our mission and approach here.
As reporters and researchers, we have years of experience exposing far-right and neo-Nazi networks, first anonymously and then for outlets including Bellingcat, The Texas Observer, The New Arab, and Left Coast Right Watch.
ICE Buys Powerful AI Software for Social Media Surveillance Scanning 8 Billion Posts Daily
ICE is building a social media panopticon
The Verge – no paywall – “The agency’s latest surveillance contract is an ’assault’ on democracy and free speech. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries out raids across the country, the agency is working rapidly to expand an online surveillance system that could potentially track millions of users on the web.
Press Freedom Watch
Poynter – An ongoing catalog of federal government actions affecting journalists. “A free press is the bedrock of American democracy, vital enough to be enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
It informs citizens, holds leaders accountable and preserves democratic principles. After decades of relative freedom, the press now faces a precarious future. Since January, President Donald Trump and his administration have taken actions that have hindered the media’s ability to cover the government, including cutting funding, investigating outlets and detaining writers.
Some actions appear tied to broader strategies, such as Project 2025, the 900-page conservative roadmap for reshaping government. Others focus on outlets that Trump has repeatedly singled out for criticism.
To document these developments, Poynter is compiling a list of federal actions affecting journalists, including lawsuits, policy changes, investigations, funding cuts, firings and detentions. The list will be updated periodically and does not include verbal attacks, threats or media companies’ anticipatory compliance.”
What if the Big Law Firms Hadn’t Caved to Trump?
But law firms are in a special position. They don’t just use the legal system; they play a critical role in creating and upholding it. Even more than other private actors, such as universities and media companies, law firms and lawyers have an established duty to uphold the integrity of the system they work in, not only for their own benefit but for the benefit of society. As the inscription on the New York State Supreme Courthouse in lower Manhattan says, “The true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government.”
The New Yorker: It’s not inconceivable that, had the firms resisted the President’s executive orders, his momentum for lawlessness might have been curbed. “That expression of the corrosive damage done by the failure to protect people to whom we owe a duty has new resonance lately.
In just the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has successfully pressured the Department of Justice to bring baseless criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James Comeyand New York Attorney General Letitia James, whom he perceives to be his political enemies, and he has threatened to arrest both the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois. Trump has ordered the National Guard into blue cities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
His close adviser Stephen Miller has said that judges, prosecutors, and lawyers are protecting a movement of “leftwing terrorism,” and that “state power” should be used to dismantle “terror networks,” with the clear implication that those judges, prosecutors, and lawyers who oppose the Administration are part of those networks and should be punished accordingly.
Then there are Trump’s long-term efforts to shred the Constitution, such as his executive order purporting to eliminate birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment. Bedrock legal principles of prosecutorial independence, separation of powers, and rule of law have been shattered, and it’s not clear when, or even if, they can be restored.
A central goal of the first nine months of Trump’s second Administration has been to establish an unbridled and unopposed “unitary executive”—a fever dream of the far right which holds that the President has absolute authority over the entire executive branch, and that any independence of agencies or departments of the federal government is impermissible.
It is obvious now, if it was only hypothetical in the early days of the second term, that achieving that goal requires making the Justice Department merely a tool of his political aims and forcing lawyers and judges to go along with his demands, or else. It is worth considering how we got here, and whether we could have done anything to slow this downward spiral. Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but it doesn’t require a giant speculative leap to conclude that, had major U.S. law firms not so quickly surrendered to Trump, this spring, he would have been denied early momentum for his lawlessness.
Perhaps a united opposition might have even provided the opposite momentum, toward a defense of the rule of law…”
Building a More Effective, Responsive Government: Lessons Learned from the Biden-Harris Administration
Even prior to the current administration’s actions, both parties presided over decades of disinvestment in federal government capacity, too often abdicating power to private market forces where public institutions once shaped outcomes in the public interest—as Roosevelt has written much about. Conservative efforts to undermine the federal government and hamstring its very ability to function compounded the problem.
Decades of underfunding and hollowing out agencies, outsourcing expertise, layering on procedural hurdles that slow action to a crawl, and stacking courts with ideological allies have weakened the government’s ability to deliver for working families, stand up to special interests on their behalf, and earn the public’s trust.
And while the Biden-Harris administration had a fundamentally different vision of the government’s role in the economy—rejecting laissez-faire, hands-off approaches to markets—it often sought to restore the governmental institutions and norms that had existed prior to the first Trump administration, rather than dramatically reimagining them to create more progressive, action-oriented government institutions.
The long-running undercutting of the government’s capacity to solve national problems is not just a bureaucratic problem. It is a democratic one, because democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations—not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government.”
To avoid that fate, American policymakers must prove that democracy can still deliver—that democratic institutions can operate with urgency to meaningfully improve the lives of ordinary people, and that the government is answerable to the people, not just the monied few.
Doing so will require reimagining and building a new, more responsive, and more effective set of federal government institutions, rather than simply restoring what existed before Trump. Future administrations must flip the government’s risk profile away from status quo bias and toward delivering bold, timely, and resonant results for working people.
To ground conversations about government institutional reform in practical experience, we interviewed more than 45 recent federal officials—senior political appointees from the Biden-Harris administration who worked on economic policymaking—to capture while still fresh their candid insights into the institutional obstacles to execution and innovation.
To better understand the bureaucratic hurdles and gaps in capacity that undermine robust federal economic policymaking and delivery, we interviewed appointees from a wide range of agencies, roles, and modes of government administration—including specialists in regulatory policymaking, enforcement, service delivery, federal funding deployment, personnel processes, communications, and more.
In this report, we recount their lessons learned, and we provide 161 practical ideas they offered for institutional reforms to create a more effective, nimble, and responsive government. These ideas are not meant to be consensus recommendations—i.e., they were not each endorsed by every interviewee. Rather, they serve to provide an “options menu” of credible, actionable solutions offered by practitioners with a shared passion for building a democracy that more quickly and effectively delivers for working people. Of course, we could not speak with every appointee, and we recognize that there are different perspectives; this report offers a window into the experiences and ideas of those we interviewed. We organize the report around core principles for reform gleaned from these interviews, as follows…”
‘Huge breach’: MPs fume over email transfer during investigation
Federal parliament boss Rob Stefanic sacked after 'loss of trust and confidence'
‘Huge breach’: MPs fume over email transfer during investigation
More than 100,000 sensitive parliamentary emails and documents were handed to a private company that had been the victim of a massive cyber hack by Russian criminals, despite warnings that granting such access posed an “extreme” risk.
Federal parliament’s second most senior bureaucrat ordered her department to surrender a search of all emails, Microsoft Office files and Teams chats over a 10-month period in 2023 in a bid to investigate potential wrongdoing by senior colleagues, including her then boss.
Jaala Hinchcliffe, then deputy secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services, last year twice oversaw an order for the IT team to give the department’s legal firm, HWL Ebsworth, access to parliamentary communications.
In the second instance, a private contractor was given full administrator rights to DPS’s entire computer network, despite the department’s cybersecurity experts warning that this risked unlawful disclosure of sensitive information, including matters of national security.
There was particular alarm inside the DPS cybersecurity division about unfiltered data being handed over to the law firm, given the company had been the victim of a massive cyberattack in April 2023 by a Russian-based ransomware group.
In that attack, 3.6TB of data was stolen from HWL Ebsworth, which has dozens of government agencies as its clients, including Home Affairs, Defence, the Australian Federal Police and Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Computer networks are used by federal MPs and their staff to conduct their work, some of which has legal protection and immunity under so-called parliamentary privilege.
Federal politicians said they feared confidential communications may have been potentially compromised.
“If this investigation has breached that parliamentary privilege, well, then that confidentiality has been breached also, and that’s really a threat to the democratic processes that we rely upon,” Liberal senator Jane Hume said.
Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May said it was a “huge breach of trust from a government department that, frankly, doesn’t pass the pub test”
Hinchcliffe was investigating the propriety of a $315,000 “incentive to retire payment” to former department deputy secretary Cate Saunders, who had a personal relationship with Rob Stefanic, the DPS secretary until December 17 last year, when he was sacked.
Stefanic was dismissed by Senate President Sue Lines and the Speaker of the House of Representatives Milton Dick, citing a loss of trust and confidence. Hinchcliffe became acting secretary in November and was appointed formally to the role in March this year.
The National Anti-Corruption Commission, which is currently investigating the payment to Saunders, raided the department’s offices in parliament on October 3 last year.
But four months before the NACC raid – and a month before DPS asked barrister Fiona Roughley to begin a separate “fact-finding” probe – Hinchcliffe had begun her own investigation into Stefanic, her then boss, and the payment to Saunders.
In that investigation, Hinchcliffe asked the department’s IT team to search for communications between February and November 2023 involving 10 people, including Stefanic, Saunders, the Australian Public Service Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer and senior staff, as well as seven keywords or terms: including incentive to retire, ITR, Secretary, APSC and Commissioner.
According to documents seen by this masthead, the search generated more than 108,000 emails and 44,000 Microsoft Office 365 records.
This data was sent to HWL Ebsworth in July last year. But Hinchcliffe was not satisfied. She told the IT department the next month that counsel for the department believed potentially relevant materials had been “inadvertently excluded” from the data.
She requested another search, but this time it was conducted by a data analyst contracted by HWL Ebsworth.
A risk assessment conducted by the IT and cyber section of DPS concluded Hinchcliffe’s request carried “extreme” risk on two fronts: the potential breach of confidentiality, including matters of national security, and the potential release of material subject to parliamentary privilege.
Hinchcliffe was sent the advice on September 4, but this masthead has been told she did not approve, reject or seek further details.
The next month, DPS IT was directed to give HWL Ebsworth’s contractor full systems administrator access to the department’s computer systems, data and networks, which occurred over two to three days.
In a statement, the department said HWL Ebsworth “provided suitable assurances to facilitate the provision of this information, with mechanisms and protocols established to manage all data”.
Queensland LNP senator James McGrath said he would be concerned if sensitive communications were shared beyond the parliamentary network.
“If public servants have released emails to a third party against a risk assessment which advised them not to release those emails, then heads should roll,” McGrath said.
Hume said that DPS, in pursuing alleged misconduct, may have breached confidentiality.
“The idea that the department would potentially share information that was already privileged with a third party, and that that third party had had a cyber breach only 12 months before that, to me, sets off alarm bells,” she said.
Hodgins-May said that while it was important to investigate potential wrongdoing, “methods absolutely matter”.
“What we’ve seen is a dragnet that’s trolled through and captured over 100,000 emails, sweeping up correspondence between even junior staffers with no suggested involvement in this, and then handing it over to a third party,” she said.
The department-ordered external investigation of the payment to Saunders, conducted by Roughley, found there were conflicts of interest as well as multiple procedural failures, including the exclusion of specialist payroll staff, resulting in overpayment.
The department said Roughley was provided with access to information relevant to the scope of her investigation.
“No parliamentarian or parliamentary data was provided to Dr Roughley,” the department said. “DPS can confirm that legal advice and other contracted services were sought from national law firm HWLE Lawyers to support Dr Roughley’s fact-finding investigation, and DPS’s engagement with relevant Commonwealth agencies, including the NACC.”
Before joining the Department of Parliamentary Services, Hinchcliffe was deputy commissioner at the National Anti-Corruption Commission and a former Australian Commissioner for Law Enforcement Integrity.
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No Kings — the hacker
The protesters’ depth of feeling was matched only by the modesty and decency of the event.
The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You
Thursday, October 30, 2025
The moral case for tax
Why does the government tackle benefit fraud and ignore tax cheats? Could it be prejudice?
The National Audit Office issued a report yesterday on efforts being made by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to tackle benefit fraud, and the rate of errors being made in payments of what I call social security.
The DWP estimates that it overpaid 3.3% of benefit expenditure in 2024-25 as shown in Figure 1, below. This equated to £9.5 billion of the £292.2 billion that it spent on benefits. Fraud accounted for an estimated £6.5 billion; claimant error, £1.9 billion; and official error, £1.0 billion.
The moral case for tax
We're told tax is a curse and even “theft.” That's wrong. Tax is how we build a fair society. It plays an essential role in the funding of education, healthcare, and economic stability and justice. It's how we express our shared responsibility. The real immorality lies in avoiding tax. In this video, I explain why tax is not a burden but the foundation of democracy itself.
There is a moral case for tax.
I'm bored by hearing people say that tax is a curse or even theft. It's a refrain I hear often from right-wing politicians, and it's wrong because tax is not a punishment; it is the price of civilisation. It is how we express our shared responsibility for one another. Without tax, there is no functioning democracy or fair society.
So the case for tax is not just an economic one; although tax is fundamental to the management of the government's macroeconomic cycle, it is a moral one.
Politicians claim tax is a burden as if it takes something from us. In truth, that's not the case. What it does is return to the government what the government spent for our benefit. They spent for our benefit, in the form of education, healthcare, safety, and social trust. Tax does not, then, destroy freedom. It creates the conditions for it by letting the government manage its spending. Calling for lower taxes has become a straightforward shorthand for the government shirking its responsibilities, when the truth is that spending more usually enhances the well-being of most.
What tax really does is rebalance wealth and power within society.
At the same time, it shapes behaviour, it encourages us to do the right things and to not do the wrong things.
It curbs inflation, and it funds public purpose by assisting that macroeconomic cycle.
Tax may not directly pay for anything that the government has to pay for. That's true. But unless tax can be recovered, that spending can't take place. And we have to understand that as well. And in the process, tax anchors democracy by making the powerful contribute to the common good.
Tax, then, is not about taking money. It's about defining fairness amongst those who have benefited from what the government does. And that makes tax a moral obligation.
So, a just society asks for more from those who have gained most from what the government does, and that is the wealthiest. They, after all, do not make their wealth single-handedly. They might like to think that they did everything by themselves and that they are self-made men or women, but there has never been such a person in the history of society. They've always stood on the shoulders of others.
Others who were educated by the state.
Others who are fit and healthy because of the state.
Others who can afford to take the risk of working for them because the state underpins a social security system, or at least a sort of social security system now, because the one that we used to have and cherish has now gone.
And they can afford to work for that employer because that employer is now forced to make payment into a pension fund for them.
So, wealth is never created alone. It relies both on us, the people who work for those with wealth, and on public infrastructure and stability.
Paying tax then acknowledges the debt we owe to society itself. Refusing to contribute is a moral failure, not clever accounting. Tax avoidance might be celebrated by the rich as financial sophistication in that case, but in truth, it is a form of theft of opportunity from everyone else, and that has an enormous moral cost attached to it.
Meanwhile, secrecy jurisdictions, which is what I prefer to call tax havens, and the loopholes that they create, erode democracy and trust as if they were the aircraft carriers of the far right sitting offshore from our democracy, lobbing the occasional missile in our direction to undermine the purpose of government itself.
A society that tolerates avoidance cannot claim to value fairness. Decades of neoliberalism have tried to teach us that tax is inherently bad. We have to unlearn that now. We need new stories about tax. The media and politicians portray taxation as loss and not investment, but that narrative disempowers citizens and strengthens elites.
What we must do is reclaim the language of tax so that we can, in turn, reclaim democracy itself, because the two walk hand in hand with each other.
Tax is how we say we are all in this together. A progressive tax system builds cohesion and legitimacy. Those with wealth, privilege, and power must shoulder the greatest responsibility as a consequence. And despite claims made, they don't.
That often rolled out claim that the wealthiest 1% in the UK pay 28% of all income tax is nonsense because it ignores the fact that income tax is only one of many taxes, and they don't pay much of anything else. In fact, they pay less than they should do because they use companies to reduce their tax rates, capital gains to reduce their tax rate, and they use allowances and loopholes more than anybody else in society. Without fair tax, democracy becomes a marketplace for influence, and that is what the wealthy try to make it.
Tax is then not merely an economic tool. It is a moral statement. It expresses who we are, what we value, and how we live together. To defend tax is to defend civilisation itself. And of course, the corollary is true, to attack tax is to attack civilisation itself.
The moral case for tax is the moral case for society. You can say you don't like tax, but what you are really saying by doing so is that you want to live outside society, and we should say that loud and clear. Those who don't want to pay their tax can clear off because we don't need them here, because they don't want to be part of our society, or to support it, or to nourish it, or to develop it for the sake of everyone, themselves included.
The case for tax is that we're all in this together, and we should all contribute according to our means.
What do you think? Do you think the wealthy should pay their fair share of tax? Do you think they are? Do you think they should pay more? Do you think you should pay less because you are paying too much in proportion to the wealthy?
Let us know. There's a poll down below, and we've offered you some options, but add some comments if you want as well. They are valuable to us. They do influence how we make future videos.
Trailing the Polish Tatra Mountains On Foot | Extreme Treks of No longer Kings
Last night my cousin’s wife and daughter arrived from the Irish and Slovakian corners of the world so the evening has been filled with many European stories … Little Katie, aka Katka, my grandmother’s great great grandchild travelled more in her first 6 months of her life than Katarina ever travelled in over 80 years …
It is hard for my daughters to believe that their great grandmother, Katarina, never travelled past Krakov markets and Vrbov where she now rests behind the house her son Jozef, their grandfather, built after WWII. Katarina’s entire life was blessed with the panoramic views of High Tatra, Carpathian, Mountains …
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| Vrbov |
Thermal pool and rybnik in Vrbov that was built on my grandfather’s land which was confiscated by the communists in 1948. My mum Maria and her brothers and sisters never cared about the loss of the land, but my family never got over the death of my sister Aga that was linked to communist regime’s production of chemicals and anthrax. (UNWANTED MEMORIES OF MY SISTER AGA'S GRAVE)
When we think about hiking in Europe, first what comes to our minds are the Alps. But there are other Alpine-like spectacular mountains in central Europe - the High Tatras Tatras
Divided between Poland and Slovakia, they are the highest mountains in this part of Europe.
Even in 2025 AD, the additional advantage of this European mountain region is low prices - Poland and Slovakia are one of the cheapest places to travel in Europe.
Trailing the Polish Tatra Mountains On Foot | Extreme Treks via BC
Malchkin followed several treks on Slovak side … I showed her the panorama from Rysy mountain which is 360 degrees and on a sunny day, walkers get to admire almost 100 of Tatra peaks and 12 lakes. The climb that my father enjoyed every year for many years is worth the effort.
Europe’s Best Kept Secret -Tatra National Park (SLOVAKIA is Incredibly Underrated)
Popradske
pleso where as teenagers - Vrbov soccer team and Tatranka dancers - spent many nights skiing as another unrelated town local Mr Imrich was the handyman at the Hotel … it is never what you know but who you know 😇
Katarína - - Imrichová (born Sekulová) Pilhov to Krakov and Tatras
My sister Gitka who shares an isolated three room chalupa in Pilhov with my cousin Andrej knows all about bears … however, lucky for her they tend to leave her alone. (There are so many first cousins with the same first name Andrej …)
From Cold Mountains to ICE recruitment ads appearing on Spotify, HBO Max and other streaming services
Note: ICE has the thirteenth largest military budge, in the world. ICE boosts weapons spending 700%. A Popular Information investigation reveals tens of millions in new ICE spending on guns, chemical weapons, and explosives.
The Independent: “Customers of many of the country’s most popular streaming serviceshave expressed concerns after Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruitment ads appeared on their platforms. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed in August that it would launch an ad campaign via social media and streaming services to target young people, former law enforcement and veterans.
The ads in question have already appeared on cable TV. Now, Spotify users who do not have a premium plan have angrily reported receiving the ads in between music that encourage people to “join the mission to protect America” and “fulfill your mission” by applying to become an ICE agent…
The ads, some of which specifically target disgruntled police officers in major cities such as Chicago or Seattle, offer recruits a $50,000 signing bonus, generous benefits and even student loan forgiveness. They mirror similar advertising that has been seen on cable television, X, YouTube, LinkedIn and Meta. A spokesperson for Spotify said the ads are “part of a broad campaign the U.S. government is running across television, streaming, and online channels.” The spokesperson added that the ads do not violate Spotify’s advertising policies, but that users can mark an ad with a thumbs up or down to manage preferences…”
See also NBC News: “Nothing but the best people” finally has stopped being funny..
- ICE officials only later discovered that some of the recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said. … Staff members at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong-arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course hadn’t submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said. “There is absolutely concern that some people are slipping through the cracks,” the current DHS official said. The official said many of the issues that have been flagged during training surface only because the recruits admitted they didn’t submit to fingerprinting or drug testing before they arrived. “What about the ones who don’t admit it?” the official said.
- Nearly half of new recruits who’ve arrived for training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center over the past three months were later sent home because they couldn’t pass the written exam, according to the data. The academic requirement includes an exam in which officers are allowed to consult their textbooks and notes at the end of a legal course on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment, which outlines when officers can and can’t conduct searches and seizures…”
There’s a Reason Trump Fears No Kings
On Saturday, between five million and seven million people assembled on streets, sidewalks and town squares across the country — in “red” states and in “blue” — to protest against President Trump and his administration, in what may have been the largest single-day demonstration in American history. This came on the heels of a similar demonstration in June, which, despite its smaller size (approximately two million to five million participants), was still one of the largest single days of protest ever recorded in this country.
Here is what Trump, whose job it is to represent the whole people of the United States, had to say about the day:
“It’s a joke,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I looked at the people. They are not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand-new signs I guess paid for by Soros and other radical left lunatics. We’re checking it out. The demonstrations were very small. And the people were whacked out.”
That same day, the president posted to his Truth Social account an A.I.-generated video in which he bombarded protesterswith what appeared to be a flood of feces from a fighter aircraft he was flying while wearing a crown.
Hackers Say They Have Personal Data of Thousands of NSA and Other Government Officials 404 Media
DHS Asks OpenAI to Unmask User Behind ChatGPT Prompts, Possibly the First Such CaseGizmodo
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