What We Know About Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Secret ‘Dialog’ Society

Malta’s bays ‘becoming alien worlds’, says leading marine biologist

How BBC Eye built a multi-agent AI system to sift through ten thousand Russian social media posts

Reuters Institute – “The system allowed a team of OSINT specialists, reporters and computational journalists to accelerate their investigation of Russian nationalists. Any journalist who’s done online investigations knows there’s simply too much evidence for one human to ever collect or investigate. Too often, we are overwhelmed with a flood of information: 

tens of thousands of social media posts, images and other media. Our team from BBC Eye, which works on original documentary investigations from around the world, wanted to see if AI could help solve this problem. We opted for AI agents – a collection of large language models (LLMs) that can coordinate and execute multi-step tasks under human supervision. 

When connected to external environments such as the Internet or databases, these agents can fetch and analyse relevant social media content at scale, performing work that our team might otherwise not have the time to undertake. We used this approach as part of a recent published investigation on Russia’s rising nationalist vigilante movement, building a multi-agent AI system we named Haystack to help us explore new emerging forces in daily Russian life. 

The team included BBC Eye’s open-source investigators, who are specialists in gathering and analysing public information, and Russia-focused reporters, along with help from computational journalists at Stanford University…”

Government Seeks to Resume Taxpayer Info Sharing With ICE

Trevor Sikes, “Government Seeks to Resume Taxpayer Info Sharing With ICE” (Tax Notes, June 16, 2026):

An injunction against the sharing of taxpayer data between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was improperly granted and is hindering criminal law enforcement efforts, according to the Justice Department.

In its June 12 appellate brief to the First Circuit in CEDC v. Bessent, the government defended the IRS’s disclosure of taxpayer information to ICE under a data sharing agreement and argued that the district court abused its discretion in putting a stop to the sharing.

Along with Center for Taxpayer Rights v. IRS, No. 26-5006 (D.C. Cir.), this is the second injunction against the sharing of taxpayer information between the agencies that the government is looking to get overturned.

 

What We Know About Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Secret ‘Dialog’ Society

Forbes: “A leak of private information purportedly related to an ultra-secret society called “Dialog” founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel has revealed the inner workings of an elite group to which hundreds of global leaders, business executives and billionaires belong.

• The documents, examined and revealed by Wired this week, show Thiel and investor Auren Hoffman co-founded Dialog in 2006 as a private, invitation-only and “bipartisan” network of influential people in technology, politics, academia, finance, government and beyond.
• Dialog describes itself as a place for off-the-record relationships among leaders from different fields and ideological backgrounds, and the group hosts at least one in-person retreat per year at lavish locations like the Ritz-Carlton Dove Mountain in Arizona, the Ritz-Carlton in Santa Barbara, California and the San Clemente Palace in Venice.
• The retreats include moderated sessions for attendees (who are promised nothing they say will leave the room) with names like “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?”
• The leak, first revealed by the Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, revealed registration records were hidden within the publicly-available code of the group’s poorly-secured website—dialog.org—and for every person, Dialog lists a membership status, each retreat they’ve attended, a biography, political affiliation, a home city and a private access token, which functions as login credentials.
• Dialog has been described as Bilderberg (an off-the-record gathering of political and business elite) meets Silicon Valley salon…”

See also The Hollywood Reporter – Hollywood Names Surface in Peter Thiel-Backed, Invite-Only Society. Ranks of his group, Dialog, appear to include several prominent figures in media and entertainment who’ are put in the same room as C-suite execs and political titans during closed-door annual retreats. The group is planning an expansion.

Trump OMB Shifted Secret Service Funds to Build His Ballroom

NOTUS – Records show that the White House Office of Management and Budget last week quietly apportioned $352 million from Trump’s tax cuts law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for “White House Security Measures.” The tax law, which passed with Republican-only votes last summer before Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House and began construction of a ballroom, states that the funding can only be used for “United States Secret Service resources, including personnel, training facilities, programming, and technology,” as well as other personnel costs. It’s not clear exactly what the funds will be used for. 

Asked to explain the transfer on Wednesday, an OMB official brought up the ballroom unprompted and said its construction will be funded by private donors….The administration maintains the funds are being directed in a manner consistent with the law, and that the Secret Service needs the money to upgrade security at the White House complex. 

It also argues the funding is necessary given recent failed attacks targeting Trump, including one at the UFC match this past weekend and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting earlier this year. However, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle suspect the funds are going toward construction of the ballroom, which is still being challenged in federal court…

 "I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic."

-- George Carlin, who died 2008

It’s a perfect distillation of Carlin’s genius—finding profound, rebellious beauty in the absolute unlikeliest of places. It perfectly sums up the beauty of raw resilience against all odds.

Why All The Conspiracy Movies Right Now?

Is this a trend? Are all these pictures related? Common sense, our trusted friend, tells us that life is random and arbitrary and that we’re mostly making it up as we go along. But the conspiracy theory is like a seductive interloper, sidling up to assure us that, actually, that’s not true at all. - The...

Assume You Will Be Hacked

The Atlantic [no paywall] – AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. “AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before…As AI tools have become extremely good at writing code, they’ve also become extremely good at pulling off cyberattacks. (Malware, after all, is still software.) The result has been a change in the scale, speed, and sophistication of hacks that is difficult to overstate: 

Among its tens of thousands of clients, the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks identified a fourfold increase in daily attacks from 2024 to 2025. Hackers are developing AI-enhanced computer viruses that adapt on the fly to avoid detection. They are automating cyber-espionage campaigns on foreign governments. They are stealing data in minutes instead of hours.

 “There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer of Yahoo and Facebook, told me. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”

White House App Uses Code From Tech Vendor Still Operating in Russia

The Newsground: “Leaked Russian records obtained by The Newsground show that the founders of a technology company embedded in the White House’s official mobile application continued using sanctioned Russian banks after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Following the invasion, its founders continued to travel to Russia, even after one of them complained on Telegram that Russian tax authorities had issued him a subpoena regarding a related business. 

The company, Elfsight, markets itself as a European company headquartered in Andorra, where its founders now appear to reside. But records reviewed by The Newsground show that the company’s Russian operations continue. Elfsight is a software vendor that supplies pre-built, embeddable widgets such as social media feeds, image galleries, and forms for websites and apps that load directly from Elfsight’s servers. 

According to a network traffic analysis by the security research firm Atomic Computer, Elfsight’s code runs inside the White House app and is served through a broad network of Elfsight-controlled domains. The app is now reportedly mandatedfor government employees’ phones. 

NOTUS, a nonprofit newsroom, previously reported that security researchers had raised alarms about the White House app’s use of Elfsight and that the integration had already exposed personal details of some White House staffers through the app’s network traffic…”

tЯ☭mp : The Rolling Coup

The Rolling Coup

Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed.

RICHARD GEPHARDT and TIMOTHY WIRTH

President Donald Trump attends the FIFA World Cup 2026 Official Draw at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on December 5, 2025, in Washington, DC.

(Hector Vivas / FIFA via Getty Images)

We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election.

The current executive is slowly dismantling institutional checks on the president’s power. Their efforts to corrode and then destroy democracy as we know it are more discernible each month and year.

Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these events and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture. Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration, but few have taken a step back and connected the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision, or a single day.

Consider what happened in plain sight over the past nine months. On September 25, 2025, the president signed a directive called a National Presidential Security Memorandum known as NPSM-7 (titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence”). Its language designates as targets of federal counterterrorism authorities Americans whose sponsors are labeled “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” “anti-Christian,” or “hostile to traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” No statute authorizes the federal government to treat protected political speech as terrorism; NPSM-7 does it anyway.

On September 30, 2025, the president stood before nearly 800 senior military commanders at Marine Base Quantico, an assembly without modern precedent, and told them that the United States was “under invasion from within.” He said, “the enemy is not in Beijing or Moscow. The enemy is domestic,” adding that US cities should serve as “training grounds” for troops to target domestic “enemies.”

NPSM-7, the sweeping federal directive issued by the White House, orders federal agencies to aggressively investigate and disrupt groups or financial networks associated with political violence and domestic terrorism. It tasked the FBI, the IRS, and the Treasury Department with tracking the funding sources and supporters of organizations suspected of directly or indirectly facilitating political unrest, with no reference to the First Amendment.

Soon thereafter the FBI organized a Joint Mission Center, drawing hundreds of personnel from 10 federal agencies to identify and prosecute the targets of NPSM-7. The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, subsequently testified to a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified that thousands of US citizens and nongovernmental organizations are now on a secret watch list tied to the Joint Mission Center.

Concurrently the Justice Department has opened grand-jury investigations and indictments aimed at officials of previous administrations including former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey. The president’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has publicly described political opposition as a “fifth column,” and the president himself amplified this by posting on Truth Social, “Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all……… But first, Barack Obama.”

0n May 6, 2026, the administration’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy that names “violent left-wing extremists,” “anti-fascists,” and certain religious minorities as principal threats to the United States. Bondi provided a Department of Justice operational order that included a five-year plan for retroactive mining of data files and plea interrogations along with the requirement that financial donors be named.

The Joint Mission Center uses its $12.5 billion budget to do the targeting. Trump v. The United States provides absolute immunity for official acts; and the president’s lead lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel has preauthorized the use of domestic force. Meanwhile, the administration has appropriated $45 billion for construction of new ICE detention facilities, a 265 percent increase over previous years and more than four times the entire budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Tom Homan, the president’s “border czar,” has overseen the proposal for the acquisition of over 100,000 detention beds above the current capacity of 70,000, with contracts for permanent mega-centers whose scale far exceeds anything an immigration processing operation would require. These are undoubtedly prisons for political prisoners, even as 1974 federal law prohibit the detention of US citizens without an act of Congress.

In the Caribbean and eastern Pacific US forces have killed more than 200 people across nearly 60 strikes on small boats designated as “narcoterrorists” without indictment, trial, or judicial review. The commander of US Northern Command has said publicly he would “definitely” execute lawful orders to apply this same authority on American soil. The White House has declined to rule out using lethal force against US citizens designated as members of domestic terrorist organizations, while the president has fired most of the Department of Defense officials responsible for overseeing the legality of military operations. And he is seeking yet more funding for what appears to be his private army of ICE and Border Patrol agents to be deployed in numerous target states, at airports, and at urban polling places in the states he lost in the 2024 election, where he has now begun to seize voter rolls and ballots.

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Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents (PEADS). These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” that is currently underway. Unlike what might be recognized as a coup with tanks in the streets, this is not the seizure of power on a single day but the methodical construction of an apparatus designed to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.

Why aren’t more Americans seeing this? Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens

Congress, paralyzed and outnumbered, has not mounted a serious institutional response. Some press has reported stories about the pieces but not on the whole dangerous picture.

The first job of any coup is to make the recognition of it seem premature. That is the trap. By the time recognition is no longer premature, the moment to resist has already passed.

So what is to be done? Congress must reassert its Article I authority over emergency powers, military deployment on US soil, and the Office of Legal Council’s power to rewrite statute by memo. Governors and state attorneys general must adopt the protective measures that civil liberties lawyers have already drafted to shield citizens, nonprofits, and election workers from NPSM-7. Newsrooms must report the rolling-coup architecture as a single big picture story, because that is what it is. And each of us—in pulpits, in classrooms, in podcasts, in union halls, at work, and around kitchen tables—must call this by its name out loud, while there is still time and there is still room.

What makes this a “rolling” coup rather than a sudden one is that each part of the mechanism was built individually; each in isolation appeared to serve a defensible purpose, and no single step was dramatic enough to trigger unified institutional resistance. The public is not awake to the architecture, which is only visible when you begin to see the whole construct.

What is happening is clear. The question is whether enough of us will face the uncomfortable prospect of the destruction of our democracy. Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude, and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost, and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a presidential declaration of a national emergency and the subsequent implementation of the emergency measures found in the PEADS, not authorized by law but drafted and implemented without any congressional oversight.

We took the same oath of office that every member of the military and every federal officer takes—to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The obligation in that oath does not end when one leaves office. We believe that an awake America can stop what a drowsy one will not, but time is short and the challenge is urgent.