Elon Musk Will Soon Be Worth More Than Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund European Business Magazine
More Details Emerge of Trump’s Secret Use of ICE to Spy on Critics Truthout
2026 RSF Index: press freedom at a 25-year low
For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.
Since 2001, the expansion of increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — has been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries. The Index’s legal indicator has declined the most over the past year, a clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide. In the Americas, the situation has evolved significantly, with the United States dropping seven places and several Latin American countries sliding deeper into a spiral of violence and repression.
- See the Index
- See the infographic in full screen
- See also: “Gal Beckerman’s How To Be a Dissident is not a guide for how to resist authoritarianism. Rather, Beckerman explores the mindset of dissidents. The volume is less than 200 pages but densely packed with fascinating accounts of global dissidents over thousands of years, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Baruch Spinoza to Diogenes to Henry David Thoreau (and many whose names will not be familiar)…”
- See also The New Republic – no paywall: “Jamie Raskin’s Harsh Trump Takedown on CNN Has Damning Hidden Message. The real importance of that Jamie Raskin–Dana Bash dust-up on Sunday: Raskin showed that Democrats and journalists share values that Donald Trump does not…”
- See also Older Americans who vote live longer than those who don’t – new research
How Washington Built a Backdoor Into Your Texts, Got Caught Abusing It 300,000 Times, and Kept It Anyway
The Developer: “The United States government has, for years, maintained a legal mechanism that allows it to scoop up your emails, your texts, and your phone calls without asking a judge for permission. In a vote on Friday, after a week of theatrical congressional hand-wringing, lawmakers chose to keep it. If you missed the debate, don’t feel bad—it was designed to be confusing, and the people who benefit from that confusion are not you.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is, on its face, a foreign intelligence tool. Congress added it in 2008 to codify what the George W. Bush administration had already been doing in secret for years after 9/11: monitoring the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States.
The NSA and the FBI got the authority to surveil foreign targets without going to a judge, on the logic that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t extend to non-Americans living abroad. That logic is defensible, as far as it goes. The problem is where it stops going. It stops going the moment you text someone overseas, or email a foreign contact, or call a relative in another country.
At that point, your communications are in the database too. You are an American citizen. You have Fourth Amendment rights. And yet, under Section 702, federal agents can query that database without a warrant. They just need to assert that the search might yield intelligence on a foreign bad actor. The standard is, to put it charitably, loose.
How loose? Between 2020 and early 2021, the FBI improperly used Section 702 nearly 300,000 times, according to documents from the FISA court itself, running warrantless searches on January 6 suspects, racial justice protesters, and other U.S. citizens who—innocent or not, which is beside the point—had no business being in a foreign intelligence dragnet. No single agent runs 300,000 improper searches.
That is an institution behaving as designed. The court that is supposed to provide oversight documented it. Congress was informed. And the program was reauthorized anyway. The defenders of Section 702—the intelligence agencies, their allies on the Hill, the national security commentariat—have a ready answer to all of this: terrorism.
Cybercrime. Chinese government espionage. Islamist extremist networks. These are real threats, and the people invoking them are not entirely wrong. The question is whether “the threat is real” is a sufficient answer to “you searched 300,000 Americans without a warrant.”It has historically not been considered a sufficient answer in a country with a Bill of Rights. But here we are…”