Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The Angine de Poitrine Argument for UBI. “If universal basic income enables even one more Einstein to become Einstein over the course of the next century, it will have paid for itself a thousand times over.”
The records, from the U.S. Justice Department’s management unit, show that the total number of employees at the FBI has dropped more than 7% since the government’s 2024 fiscal year, a loss of about 2,600 people. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6%, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lost about 14% of its workers.
Other parts of the Justice Department shrank even more rapidly. Its National Security Division, which handles intelligence and terrorism matters, lost nearly 38% of its staff, the department’s records show. The division’s most recent budget request to Congress noted “unprecedented personnel constraints” in the unit that handles cases involving espionage and the export of sensitive military technology.
“It’s the difference between being proactive and entrepreneurial or purely reactive to the most obvious imperative of the day,” Adam Hickey, a former senior official in the National Security Division, said of the loss of staff. Those records, which Reuters obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, offer the most detailed accounting to date of the extent to which the Trump administration has downsized some of the nation’s premier law-enforcement agencies.
Those agencies have traditionally handled the government’s highest-profile criminal investigations, including efforts to combat terrorism, deter drug traffickers and keep guns away from criminals.
Other records, including detailed information about people who left government jobs, show an increasing pace of departures from law-enforcement agencies after Trump began his second term in January 2025…”
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 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…”
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…”
Russia has stepped up security protocols for President Vladimir Putin amid fears of assassination as he grows more isolated and absorbed by his war in Ukraine.
Russia has stepped up security protocols for President Vladimir Putin amid fears of assassination as he grows more isolated and absorbed by his war in Ukraine.
In recent months, Russia’s Federal Protective Service (FSO), which guards top officials, has sharply tightened security around the president. He spends more time in underground bunkers micromanaging the war and has grown more detached from civilian affairs, according to people who know Putin in Moscow and a person close to European intelligence services.
Putin’s isolation has increased in recent years, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic. But as of March, the Kremlin’s concern over a coup d’état or an assassination attempt, specifically involving drones, has intensified sharply, said the person close to European intelligence.
“The shock of Ukraine’s drone Operation Spiderweb is still there,” a person familiar with Putin told the FT. Last year, Ukrainian drones attacked Russian airfields beyond the Arctic Circle. Security fears were additionally fuelled by the US’s seizure of Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro in January, said a second person also familiar with the president.
In response, the FSO has further tightened stringent security measures. Putin has cut down his visits and security checks for people meeting him in person have been tightened further, said the person close to European intelligence.
The president and his family have stopped going to their residences in the Moscow region and in north-western Valdai. Putin is spending more time in bunkers, including in the Krasnodar area in southern Russia, working from there for several weeks, while state media use pre-recorded footage to project normality.
Staff in the president’s immediate circle, including cooks, photographers and bodyguards, have been barred from taking public transport and using mobile phones or internet-enabled devices around him. Surveillance systems have been installed in their homes.
People in Russia who know Putin said recent internet shutdowns in Moscow are also at least partly related to the president’s security and anti-drone protection.
FSO agents now conduct large-scale checks with the help of dog units, and are stationed along the banks of the Moscow river, ready to react in case of drone attacks, according to European intelligence.
The Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Security concerns are not limited to Putin. According to the person close to European intelligence, security service representatives at a meeting with the president late last year blamed one another for failures to protect Russia’s top military personnel, including the killing of Fanil Sarvarov, a lieutenant general — the latest in a series of Ukraine-linked attacks.
Alexander Bortnikov, head of the FSB, the federal security service, blamed the defence ministry, which, unlike other agencies, lacks a unit dedicated to protecting senior officials. Viktor Zolotov, head of the National Guard and Putin’s former bodyguard, denied responsibility, citing limited resources.
Ultimately, the president called for calm and tasked the FSO with ensuring the security of 10 senior generals, including three deputies, to Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, who until then had been the only officer under such protection.
The tightening of security measures has coincided with Putin, who traditionally has been more absorbed in geopolitics, dropping domestic policies to concentrate on the war, said two people who speak to him.
The president holds daily meetings with military officials, focusing on operational details such as the names of small Ukrainian settlements that are changing hands. Non-war-related officials, in contrast, are typically granted an audience only once every few weeks or months.
“Putin spends 70 per cent of his time running the war and the other 30 per cent meeting [someone like] the president of Indonesia or dealing with the economy,” said one person who knows him, adding that the only way to get more access is through “doing more war”.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst, said: “Putin is like the new Banksy sculpture in London [a man carrying a flag that covers his face], he does not want to see or hear. He listens only to the security services, which now run all spheres of life, and hopes that people will adapt to this as the new normal.”
The president’s remoteness has fuelled frustration among Russians as they are growing tired of the war and grapple with mounting domestic issues.
According to state-backed as well as independent pollsters, Putin’s approval ratings have slipped to their lowest level since autumn 2022, when he announced a partial mobilisation, prompting hundreds of thousands of young men to flee the country.
Social media is filled with videos of ordinary Russians and influencers criticising the authorities over internet crackdowns, taxes for small businesses and livestock culls in Siberia.
The most prominent has been Viktoria Bonya, a Monaco-based lifestyle blogger. In an 18-minute video address to Putin last month, she said that “people are afraid of him”. The clip gained more than 1.5mn likes.
While Bonya made it clear that she does not oppose the regime, the scale of the video’s reach forced the Kremlin to acknowledge it had seen it.
After Bonya’s speech, Putin publicly addressed internet crackdowns for the first time, urging officials to “inform citizens” properly and not to “focus solely on bans”.
On April 27, Putin made his second public appearance this year, visiting a rhythmic gymnastics school in his native St Petersburg. A video released by the Kremlin shows him in a brief exchange with a group of girls in black leotards, at the end of which he kisses one of them on the forehead.
The Kremlin has long used such staged interactions with ordinary people to demonstrate Putin’s approachability.
“A sure sign that Putin is worried about his falling approval ratings: he’s publicly kissing children again,” said Farida Rustamova, independent Vlast newsletter founder and political analyst, referring to similar instances, such as when Putin kissed a boy on the stomach in 2006, apparently in an attempt to portray the president as closer to the masses.
The president’s few trips and meetings so far this year, compared with at least 17 in 2025, are another sign of tighter security and a diminished focus on domestic affairs. Last year’s engagements included visits to the Kursk region bordering Ukraine and to military headquarters where he appeared in uniform at least five times.
“The gap between what Putin is willing to deal with and what is expected of him is widening,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, adding that this was unlikely to change any time soon.
The public’s “bursts of discontent will only become more frequent”, she added.
On the futility of border walls. “The Ozymandian ruins of many such walls litter our ancient and modern landscapes, because for as long as humanity has built hard borders, people have inevitably found ways to cross, topple or simply bypass them
In states with large Black populations that remain under Republican control — half of the Black American population resides in the South — lawmakers will now be able to draw districts that dilute Black residents’ voting power. In his opinion for the right-wing majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “in considering the constitutionality of a districting scheme, courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim: a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.” The Court’s decision is consonant with the philosophy, articulated by Kilpatrick in his earlier days, that the state is oppressive when it interferes with the right to discriminate, and respects liberty when it allows discrimination. And the decision fits just as well with Kilpatrick’s later spin on that philosophy: Attempts to ban racial discrimination are themselves discriminatory — against white people.
What Kilpatrick wanted, and what the Roberts Court is making possible, is a country where white people can maintain their political dominance at the expense of Americans who are not white. The anticaste provisions of the Reconstruction amendments, intended by their authors to reverse the “horrid blasphemy” that America was a white man’s country, are being inverted to defend that dominance. This is not the color-blindness of Martin Luther King Jr., but what the scholar Ian Haney López has called “reactionary colorblindness,” the purpose of which is to maintain racial hierarchy through superficially neutral means. It takes the view that the Constitution’s “color-blindness” renders any attempt to remedy anti-Black racism unconstitutional, because by definition that would involve making racial distinctions. Similarly, the ruling in this case does not explicitly overturn the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination in voting so much as rewrite it to allow such discrimination.
I can’t tell you how much I fucking hate this, and every other stupid fucking thing conservatives have done to this country. I try to keep my cynicism (or what I like to think of as being realistic) about the American political situation off the site for the most part, but seeing this decision come down yesterday morning let all the air out of my balloon. Not that it contained much air to begin with…the balloon is shot right through with holes from the past decade+ of authoritarian shenanigans and general acquiescence of institutions that are supposed to protect us.
On a personal note, in these moments I find it increasingly difficult to go on — being engaged here, keeping up with the news, highlighting positives in the world, showcasing the enthusiasms of others, informing ppl of harms & how they can help, hyping hope, not letting the bastards grind me down. It’s nothing new — I’ve talked about it here before — but as the situation becomes more unstable & uncertain (or rather: as I grow more certain about its instability & fuckedness), it grows more difficult to keep going. I know this is self-defeating & self-centered, but I’m angry and scared and grieving and tired. I’m gonna publish this before I just delete the whole stupid thing.
US files case to strip Nigerian man of US citizenship; was convicted head of stolen ID tax refund operation FTC fraud data. I’ve covered the annual fraud data from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, and also data from Australia. I expected the FTC to release its compilation of fraud data for 2024, but I’ve not seen that. Sources report that even though the FTC has done this every year since 2008, it is not doing a fraud data book this year. Sad to see. Of course the FTC has itstableau sitewhere one can find data, but it is not nearly as easy to get the big picture. In my view this is a loss for the public. Reviews and recommendation”We went to seeOperation Hail Mary, at a local movie theater -- and it is just excellent. Written by Andy Weir, author ofThe Martian, it is very much a crowd pleaser, with stellar reviews -- and no politics at all. Sure to be one of the best movies of the year. And its worth seeing it in a theater on a big screen.
The evolving news landscape: Comparing media habits and trust between teens and adults
The Evolving News Landscape: Comparing media habits and trust between teens and adults is the latest study from the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the American Press Institute, Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and the Local News Network at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. This study features a combined sample 1,092 respondents ages 18 and older and 1,009 respondents ages 13-17, both nationally representative.
The new survey’s large nationally representative sample provides a unique opportunity for a detailed analysis of America’s most diverse generations. This report from the study will examine the news behaviors and views of five distinct age groups: 13- to 17-year-olds, 18- to 34-year-olds, 35- to 49-year-olds, 50- to 64-year-olds, and adults 65 and older. The sample allows us to explore how new-related habits and views vary across different age groups.
Over 80% of US government agencies already use AI agents – and it’s only the beginning
ZDNET: “According to IDC research focused on public-sector readiness, agentic AI is no longer in the experimental phase for government; it is a leadership mandate. IDC finds that while many government agencies are implementing agent-driven workflows, few have moved beyond pilots. The rate of agentic AI adoption in government is due to several factors:
Budgetary pressures
Sovereignty and compliance, including requirements for data resistance, algorithmic transparency, and accountability
Workforce disruption, which points to skill gaps in cybersecurity and machine learning operations
Citizen expectations for faster, more personalized, and equitable services…
US bill would require warrants for digital surveillance, biometric searches Biometrics Update. In a sign of what I am willing to pay, literally and figuratively, to try to preserve a modicum of privacy, I refused a free hotel for a long layover (the Dubai Connect service) because I would have had to enter the UAE, which meant an iris scan. I have ruled out the EU and UK permanently because they have the same requirement. I went instead to a pod hotel in the airport, which was not great (too cold!!!)
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is preparing banks to collect citizenship data
CNBC:” Banks in the U.S. may not like the idea of being forced to collect citizenship data on customers, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says they better be prepared for the task.
“If Treasury and the banking regulators say it’s their job, it’s their job,” Bessent told CNBC’s Sara Eisen at the Invest in America Forum in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. An executive order that has been discussed for months took a step closer to reality earlier this week when Bessent said in an The planned EO is one more plank in President Donald Trump’s broader effort to tie his immigration policy to collection of information in the United States, including for voting and Census efforts. In the U.S., citizenship documents are not necessary in order to open a bank account. Banks are required to verify identity.
The U.S., like many countries, uses “know your customer” rules for bank accounts to prevent money laundering and other forms of financial crime, verifying client identities, assessing risks, and monitoring transactions to prevent fraud. Laws including the Bank Secrecy Act, or BSA, and the USA Patriot Act also underpin efforts to verify customers. Banks collect Social Security numbers, or an individual taxpayer identification number, or ITIN, names, dates of birth and addresses, among other documents.
But that doesn’t satisfy Bessent. “Why can unknown foreign nationals come and open a bank account?” he said at the CNBC event. “Our bank executives job is to know your customer. How do you know your customer if you don’t know if they have legal or illegal status, whether they are a U.S. citizen or green card holder?”
Overseas, citizenship information is more often required for banking access, but there is no universal mandate. Bessent told Eisen: “Every other country does it. Every other country. … There should be stricter rules.” Republicans have voiced support for the idea…”
Trump fought to keep the ballroom fundraising contract secret. Here’s what’s in it
“The Trump administration’s failure to disclose this contract was flatly unlawful,” said Wendy Liu, a Public Citizen attorney and lead counsel on the lawsuit, filed after the Park Service and the Interior Department failed to fulfill a public records request for the document.
“The American people are entitled to transparency over this multi-million-dollar project.” The secrecy surrounding the contract mirrors the administration’s broader approach to the project. White House officials have declined to disclose the total amount raised, the identities of all donors or, until recently, basic details about the building’s design. Court documents show Trump knew he was going to tear down the East Wing at least two months before doing so, but he never told the public.
The contract provisions, taken together, allow wealthy donors with business before the federal government to contribute anonymously to a sitting president’s pet project, while exempting the White House from key conflict of interest safeguards and limiting scrutiny by Congress and the public…The contract resembles templates used by the Park Service formore routine fundraising partnerships — with several notable differences:
Provisions peppered throughout the agreement prevent the signatories from revealing the identities of anonymous donors, and a review process for detecting conflicts of interest with the Park Service and Interior Department makes no mention of doing the same for the president, other White House officials or the 14 other executive departments he oversees.
Via Justice Connection – Reuters “The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies, even as it vowed to crack down on crime, according to records obtained by Reuters. 
