Quoting Joe Swelterpants, a.k.a. Joey Campfire, who is responsible for the
THIS MACHINE Songs of Protest Open Mics at New Deal Cafe:

"I'm doing this show along with other songwriters not performing at the Freedom 250 Concert."

Friday, July 17, 7:30 PM at Creative Caldron Stage
CONCERT: Still We Sing: A concert for our times
127 E Broad St, Falls Church, VA 22046

Led by Suzanne Brindamour: Award-winning musicians unite for a stirring evening of peace and protest music rooted in solidarity, justice, and collective power. Blending genres, original work, and reimagined covers, the performance lifts up voices of resistance and invites the audience into uplifting singalong moments. These songs honor movements for equity, amplify marginalized voices, and remind us what's possible when we organize, care for one another, and build community through art. Featuring David Kitchen, Arch Alcantara, Valeria Stewart, Night Train 357, Michelle Murray, Suzanne Brindamour, Dumi Right, Joey Campfire, and Grey Jacks. Percussionist Eddie Hartness and violinist Gabbi Boguslaw to accompany.

TICKETS: Creative Caldron Stage

#music #concert #resist #resistance #protest #singalong #SocialJustice #solidarity #VA #Virginia

[DISCLAIMER: This is a summary, written by the author, of her Substack article, and accompanying video. There's some speculation in the article and video. However there are a lot of verifiable citations as well. See the citations at the bottom of the actual Substack article.]

I found a second vote·gov -- and it's registered to the White House

The Drey Dossier

thedreydossier.substack.com/p/…

"There is a moment in every investigation where the thing you have been looking for finds you instead. Mine found me on TrumpRx.

If you have not been to TrumpRx, it is a federal drug pricing website that looks like Wix and a Pinterest board threw up on each other. There is a gold three-dimensional eagle on the homepage clutching a ribbon in its talons that says TrumpRx. There are pills floating across the screen like a pharmaceutical screensaver. The tagline, and I am quoting directly from a website owned by the United States government, invites you to TrumpRx the price. It has the typography of a Brooklyn juice bar and the self-regard of someone who has never been told no. It is, in every conceivable aesthetic sense, a catastrophe. And while you are busy looking at the eagle, the website is busy looking at you. I wish I were being metaphorical.

In the footer of the page, beneath all of it, I found something I have never seen on a federal government website in my life. A byline. The government does not do this. The IRS does not sign its work. The FBI does not. Social Security does not. No federal agency that has ever built a website has felt the need to take credit for it. In plain bold text, sitting directly above the privacy policy, it said: Designed and Engineered in D.C. by National Design Studio. So I clicked through.

The National Design Studio was created by executive order in August 2025. Its job, officially, is to redesign how Americans experience their government. Its leader is Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, which is to say he is a man who looked at the American home and saw an untapped revenue stream. If anyone understands how to improve public spaces, it is the company that took residential ones and made sure the public could never afford them again. He reports directly to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, which is a strange place to house a website design agency. A technology office that builds federal websites should answer to the General Services Administration, or at minimum to the agencies whose websites it is building. Instead it answers to the person who controls access to the President. His position requires no Senate confirmation, which means he files no financial disclosures, which means the office he runs does not appear in any federal procurement database, which means as far as the official record is concerned, it barely exists.

Which, as I was about to find out, was entirely the point.

The structure of the National Design Studio will be familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. Staff are hired under a federal authority called Section 3161, written for temporary advisory bodies, which means most of them are part-time advisors or volunteers. They do not appear on the White House salary report. They answer to no inspector general, because the Executive Office of the President does not have one. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it is exactly how DOGE was run.

Gebbia spent six months at DOGE before taking his current role. The senior staff at the National Design Studio, when you pull the bylines from their blog posts and run the names against court filings, come back from the same place, DOGE, the same DOGE currently named as defendant in multiple federal lawsuits for letting engineers without proper security clearance access Social Security data and Department of Homeland Security data, and for sharing sensitive federal information with outside parties. The National Design Studio is not a successor to DOGE. It is DOGE with a better logo and a design philosophy.

Now, back to TrumpRx looking at you.

Every webpage you load is making phone calls. Not to people, but to servers around the internet, dozens per second, all invisible to you. When I opened TrumpRx, I right-clicked the page, opened the browser's built-in inspector, and started reading the list. Mixed in with the routine traffic was a name I recognized: PostHog. PostHog is a Silicon Valley analytics company whose entire business model is recording what visitors do on a website and reporting it back to whoever owns the site. Mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, keystrokes. I had not typed anything. I had not clicked anything. I had just opened the page, and it was already on the phone with PostHog telling them about me.

The recordings are not anonymized. IP addresses are not stripped. And the way it is configured, the data looks to your browser like it is going back to TrumpRx, but it is actually being forwarded behind the scenes to PostHog. That is a technique used to slip past ad blockers by disguising where the data is really going, and it is not something I expected to find on a federal health website. So I went and looked at the other sites the studio had built. Real Food, the federal food policy site. Trump Accounts, the children's savings program. The studio's own homepage, ndstudio. gov. All of them had the same vendor, the same setup, IP addresses not stripped, the same forwarding trick. And on ndstudio. gov alone, running alongside PostHog, was something someone had built entirely by hand. Five hundred and forty lines of custom JavaScript with a name embedded directly in the code: AutoMonitor. What it appears to do is rewire the part of the browser that handles how a page talks to the outside world, so that every conversation the page has with any server gets copied and forwarded to a private backend with no public presence. The studio has the structural ability to keep a copy of every recording as it passes through their infrastructure. I cannot prove they are keeping one. The pipe is built that way on purpose, and that is the part that matters.

When the federal government collects information about citizens, the law requires specific things first. Privacy disclosures. Notices in the Federal Register. Published contracts with outside vendors. I went looking for all of it across twelve National Design Studio programs and found none of it, not a single required document filed across any of the twelve. Every missing document is, by itself, a violation of federal law, and these are the laws Congress wrote after Watergate to make sure the federal government could not run secret surveillance programs on its own citizens. The only document they did publish is a privacy policy on TrumpRx, and it contradicts itself two paragraphs apart. The first paragraph says PostHog records the pages users visit and the medications they view. Two paragraphs later, it says they do not collect health or medical information. A federal health website is lying to the people using it and cannot even keep the lie consistent.

I wanted to know whether there were more sites the studio had not announced. Here is something almost nobody outside of security research knows. Every website with a padlock in the address bar has a certificate, and there is a rule that every certificate issued anywhere in the world must be logged in a public ledger the moment it is created, no exceptions. The side effect of that rule is that every new website on the internet, even ones nobody has announced and even ones hidden behind a login, leaves a public fingerprint the moment it is built. There is a free search engine called crt.sh where anyone can look up those logs. I typed in the studio's domain, and underneath the public sites I already knew about were roughly forty more, unannounced, with no links pointing to them from any public page. I started reading the names. Sites that looked like they belonged to the State Department. To NASA. To the Department of Homeland Security. And then two that stopped me cold: a working preview of vote. gov, and something called fbi-kirk-tipline. I checked the public ownership records for every subdomain, and every single one traced back to the same place, the Executive Office of the President. The National Design Studio had built pre-launch versions of websites belonging to other federal agencies and registered all of it to the White House.

All of it ran through the same private Cloudflare account. Using Cloudflare is not unusual for a federal agency. Running forty federal websites through one personal account is another matter. The login screen for the gated preview sites read: loveisaskill.cloudflareaccess. com.

Love is a skill is a phrase Gebbia has used publicly to describe Airbnb's design philosophy. It is the kind of name you give an account when it belongs to you personally, not when it belongs to the federal government, and federal infrastructure is supposed to be owned by the agency, not the person running it.

The people running this office are worth knowing about. In 2025, a federal judge ordered everyone at DOGE blocked from accessing personnel records at the Office of Personnel Management. Three people were granted exceptions and allowed to keep their access anyway. Greg Hogan was one of them. The administration argued he was essential to ongoing system work, the judge accepted it, and Hogan kept his access to federal personnel records while every other DOGE staffer was locked out. He has since moved from DOGE into the National Design Studio, where he was recently promoted to run Login. gov, the federal government's sign-in system. If you have ever applied for a federal job, requested your Social Security records online, or filed for federal benefits, you have used it. It scans your biometrics. More than 150 million Americans have accounts. The man who survived the OPM injunction now runs the front door to your federal identity.

A second name from the original DOGE cohort, Akash Bobba, now serves as the official security contact for the US African Development Foundation, a small independent agency the administration tried to dissolve by executive order earlier this year. The dissolution got tied up in court, the agency technically survived, but most of its staff was cleared out. Bobba now holds the credentials controlling the agency's website, its email, and its security configuration, which means a White House staffer has full visibility into who applies for grants, who gets approved, and who inside that agency is talking to whom.

In October 2025, Bobba got on a recorded conference call with state election directors from across the country and presented a federal voter registration system the studio was building. Voters would register through a federal portal, their identities verified through Login. gov, their citizenship verified through DHS's SAVE database, their registrations transmitted to the states. A state election director asked him what data the federal government would retain. He said, on a recording, in an election year: I don't know what they retain and what they are logging. The person presenting a federal voter registration system to state election directors did not know what data his own system kept on American voters.

After Florida 2000, Congress passed a law creating the Election Assistance Commission specifically because both parties agreed that voter registration cannot live inside the White House of any sitting president. The sitting president should not have visibility into who is checking their registration in the weeks before an election that decides whether they keep their job. So Congress built a wall, and today vote. gov is registered to the Election Assistance Commission. As of this writing, that wall is still standing.

But in the certificate logs, underneath the studio's unannounced sites, was a working preview of vote. gov, built inside the studio's staging environment, behind the same Cloudflare login, isolated deliberately. The certificate appeared on April 10, 2026. Weeks before that certificate appeared, this administration signed an executive order requiring DHS, the Social Security Administration, and the SAVE program to construct a federal citizenship-verified voter list, with a deadline of ninety days from signing. That deadline is weeks away. When the order was challenged in federal court, the Department of Justice told the judge the agencies named had not yet begun preparation and were still in the deliberation phase.

The certificate is dated April 10. DOJ told a federal court the infrastructure does not exist. Both of those cannot be true. Either DOJ lied to a federal judge, or the studio is building a replacement for the country's voter registration site without telling the agencies whose work it would replace. There is no third option.

While I was finishing this piece, I typed passports. gov directly into my browser, just to see what was there. A sign-in page came up: enter your email and we will send you a six-digit code. No State Department seal. No agency name. No privacy notice. Just a black button that says Send code. The owner of passports. gov is the Executive Office of the President, White House Office. The State Department does not own this domain. The security contact field is blank. The first certificate was issued May 5, three weeks ago. Based on what I can see in the staging environment, the next step will ask Americans to upload their passport photo through a White House-controlled website, on the same Cloudflare account, by the same people, with no privacy notice on file. A passport photo is biometric quality. Linked to your identity through Login. gov. Collected through infrastructure the White House owns, sealed from public view. They are building it this week.

Here is what the structure looks like from the outside. Section 3161 hides the staff so they do not appear on salary reports or file financial disclosures. The Executive Office of the President has no inspector general. There are zero required privacy disclosures filed across all twelve programs and no published contracts with any outside vendor. Forty federal websites run behind one personal Cloudflare account. And the Presidential Records Act seals everything for twelve years the day this administration ends, meaning until 2040, no one outside the White House can see who works there, what they collected, or where any of the data went.

What this office is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote. gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login. gov belonged to GSA, and the studio's guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

There is a gold three-dimensional eagle on the homepage of TrumpRx, clutching a ribbon in its talons. You are looking at the eagle. Something is being built underneath the government you think you have, on infrastructure you cannot see, by people who answer to no one, collecting everything.

I wish, still, that I were being metaphorical."

~ The Drey Dossier

Additional references:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrumpRx

crt.sh/

#resist #resistance #protest #surveillance #news #broligarchy

"Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.

Her name is Timnit Gebru.

She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.

The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.

The paper had not even been published yet.

Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.

The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.

This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.

The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.

The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.

Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.

Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.

The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.

In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.

The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.

In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.

The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.

Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.

This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.

The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.

The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.

Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.

She was making that argument from inside Google.

Then Google proved her right by removing her.

The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.

Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.

Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.

Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.

The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.

The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.

And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so."

SOURCE: Guri Singh, as posted on Twitter.

REPOSTED: facebook.com/darren.oconnor.94…
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #prediction #research #censorship #dangers #threats

I stumbled across this bit of brass, drum and "chant" by accident and was ​quite amused. There's also a wee bit o' harmonica. So I investigated. Today I Learned (TIL)...

According to the great god Wikipedia:

"Prisencolinensinainciusol" (pronounced [ˌprizeŋˌkɔliˌnɛnsinainˈtʃuːzol]; stylized on the single cover as "PRİSENCÓLİNENSİNÁİNCIÚSOL") is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori. It was released as a single in 1972. Both the name of the song and its lyrics are gibberish, but are intended to represent what American English sounds like to people who do not understand English.

Here he is, performing the song whilst channeling the original Nutty Professor, Professor Julius Ferris Kelp (as portrayed by Jerry Lewis):

youtube.com/watch?v=fU-wH8SrFr…

There is also a longer "extended cut" video, apparently produced by a fan, that incorporates the original​(?) black-and-white extravagant dance production number (where I think he may be trying to channel Chico Marx 🤣) with some actual English lyrics added at the end.

It runs for over 7 minutes.

No attempt is made to sync the video -- which starts at 2:07, with the audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foU3Tgg7VJI​

#music #video #humor #Italian #brass #percussion #drum #dance #parody

The People's Music Network [for Songs of Freedom and Struggle] (PMN/SFS) Steering Committee passed this Resolution on February 22:

ATTENTION!

The Steering Committee has passed Steering Committee Resolution 260222A, entitled PMN ANTI-ICE RESOLUTION.

BE IT RESOLVED:
 
The Steering Committee of the People’s Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle (“PMN”) condemns the actions of the United States Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) against the people of this nation.
 
For nearly 250 years, accurately and inaccurately, the United States of America has presented itself to the world as the standard bearer of individual rights and liberty. Our Declaration of Independence, for example, contains some of the most potent and consequential words in recorded history. Ironically, none of those words support the outrageous practices and horrific behavior employed by the current President of the United States and his subordinates since he has been in office.
 
Through DHS and its “military” arm, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), this Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces has degraded the security of these United States and its residents. He has violated the spirit, the intent and the specific language of our nation’s Constitution – a document admired and emulated around the world – and numerous other laws. He has immorally redefined the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” to arbitrarily exclude individuals. He has unlawfully demanded violence by federal employees against U.S. citizens and residents – including lethal force – enabling ICE as a terroristic para-military organization. He has arrested, detained and deported individuals without due process. He has treated children inhumanely.
 
He has eviscerated the protections embedded within our federalist system and discarded the rights of individual States and municipalities. He has advocated for and supported misleading and libelous characterizations of individuals defending American civil liberties and rights. He has used federal power unethically and illegally to limit freedom of speech and assembly, and to fascistically threaten the media and individuals who exercise their “free speech” rights.
 
Abusers of power will always seek to control and exploit others. They use corruption and lies to advance their selfish agendas. Abusers may be called Hitler, Putin or Trump; authoritarians, Nazis or MAGA; storm troopers, the Ku Klux Klan or ICE. They are all the same. They have been and should always be overcome by courageous, freedom-loving people.
 
Therefore, the People’s Music Network stands with and sounds the call with our neighbors in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Philadelphia, Maine, New York City and any place where the abuse of power and the abandonment of decency is taking place.
 
We gentle, angry artists in America pledge ourselves to support the voices of the unheard and the dismissed, to protect the rights that we and our neighbors are entitled to under our Constitution, and to tell the stories of those who are sacrificing or who are being sacrificed every day in the struggle to preserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
 
We are singing for our lives and we shall overcome!

Chris "Oledude" Owens
Chair, PMN Steering Committee
Interim Management Team - Administrator of Governance

#PeoplesMusicNetwork #PMN #resolution #ICE #resist

DC Candidate Transportation Forum and Social
Organized by The Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA)

Josephine Butler Parks Center, Washington, DC
Sunday, Mar 1 from 2 pm to 6:30 pm EST

• RSVP at bit.ly/dctransportationforum

Overview
Hear from DC Mayoral candidates and At-Large Council candidates about transportation issues.

Join the Bike, Walk & Bus PAC, DC Transportation Equity Network, DC Families for Safe Streets, Greater Greater Washington, Coalition for Smarter Growth, and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association* to hear from qualifying Washington, DC Mayoral and At-Large Council candidates running in this year’s primary election and special election.

The DC Candidate Transportation Forum will take place on March 1st from 2pm-4:00 pm at the Josephine Butler Parks Center (2437 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20009) followed by a community social at Franklin Hall (1348 Florida Ave NW, Washington, DC 20009) from 4-6:30pm.

During the forum, you will get to hear directly from Mayoral and At-Large Council candidates about their vision for the District’s transportation future and actions they would prioritize to improve transportation. Come to learn where candidates stand on:

• Achieving a multimodal transportation system that serves all residents
• Improving bus and train access and reliability
• Making walking safer in every neighborhood for everyone
• Expanding a Low Stress Network for biking

The event will include moderated panels for both the qualifying mayoral candidates and another for the qualifying candidates for at-large seats on the DC Council.

Space is limited at the Josephine Butler Parks Center, but attendees can also register to stream the event virtually.

Attendees can register to attend the community social even if you were unable to attend the candidate forum in-person.

*The 501c3 organizations listed here do not endorse or work on behalf of candidates, or express any view for or against any candidate.

Invited and confirmed candidates will be posted closer to the event.

Highlights

• 4 hours 30 minutes
• under 16 with parent or legal guardian
• In person
• Doors at 1:45 PM
• Location: Josephine Butler Parks Center, 2437 15th St NW, Washington, DC 20009

Agenda

02:00 PM Mayoral Candidate Panel at the Josephine Butler Park Center
03:00 PM At-Large Council Candidate Panel at the Josephine Butler Park Center
04:00 PM - 06:30 PM Community Social at Franklin Hall

Frequently asked questions

#bike #biking #bicycle #bicycling #cyclists #bus #PublicTransit #walk #walking #pedestrians #walkers #commuters #commuting #DC #WashingtonDC #elections #candidates #event #forum #social #WABA #GGW #PAC

Scroll to the bottom of the post for the actual video.

           ​              ​  

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]

Donald Trump can't win the 2026 election, so he's putting in place a plan to steal it. That's not hyperbole. That's not conspiracy. He is literally doing it, and telling you he's going to do it, every single day.

[TRUMP PODCAST CLIP]: The Republicans should say, "We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many -- 15 places." The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.

Let me put the pieces together for you. Just the pieces that have been put down on the table over the course of the past week, week and a half:

[NEWSWEEK HEADLINE: Pam Bondi Offers to Pull ICE out of Minneapolis if Voter Files Handed Over]

1. the president sends a letter to state officials in Minnesota. He says "I'll be glad to take ICE officials out, but you got to give me control of your voter rolls." This is a key swing state. It's going to have an important gubernatorial election and an even more important Senate election. And Trump is saying, "If you give me control of your voter lists, then I'll take the ICE agents out."

[POLITICO HEADLINE: FBI raids Atlanta-area elections office amid Trump's push to relitigate 2020 election]

1. We have the FBI raid of the voter office in Georgia. They take all these ballots to a place that we still don't know about, and we know exactly what's going to happen here: they're going to take these ballots, they're going to claim that they counted them again, and in fact, Donald Trump won Georgia.
2. And that's going to be used by the president to do what he then told all of us on a podcast just a day or two ago: nationalize elections in key states. He wants the federal government, meaning Donald Trump's MAGA loyalists, to run elections in places like Georgia and Minnesota, and probably Pennsylvania and Texas and Maine. Anywhere that there's a race that might determine control of the House or the Senate.

Over and over and over again, we see in front of our eyes what is happening:

• Donald Trump is taking the steps to create a pretext to take over state elections -- that's what Georgia is about.
• He's using the power of the federal government to try to give him control of the elections -- that's what Minnesota is about.
• And he's telegraphing openly what his desire is -- that's what he said on the podcast, "I want to nationalize elections."

He's doing this because he knows in a fair and free election, he will lose. Republicans will lose. He's the most unpopular president, I think ever, one year into a term. The polling today suggests that [Republicans are] going to get wiped out in the House, that they might lose the Senate as well. He's got a deeply unpopular agenda.

And so the only way that he can win, the only way the Republicans can win is to steal the election. And the only way they can steal the election is for MAGA loyalists to insert themselves into state elections and take over, so that they can either erase a whole bunch of Democrats off the voter rolls, or they can provide false counts. All the things that totalitarians do to rig elections.

Keep your eyes wide open. Because if we don't see clearly what is happening -- an attempt to take over elections, to steal and rig elections -- then we have no way to stop it.

#resist #totalitarianism #authoritarianism #ElectionTampering #dictatoship #fascism

Tadonic the Flautulent

2026-02-04 17:35:16

2026 election theft in progress

Donald Trump has begun implementing a plan to nationalize elections, replacing state control of elections with a federal group of MAGA loyalists, allowing falsification of election results and removal of "undesirables" from voter registration records. It is a multi-pronged attack that includes a recent FBI raid seizing Georgia 2020 voting records, and a extortion / ransom demand to Minnesota: "Give us your voter information, or ICE will continue to intimidate your citizens."

WIRED: How to Film ICE

Filming federal agents in public is legal, but avoiding a dangerous -- even deadly -- confrontation isn't guaranteed. Here's how to record ICE and CPB agents as safely as possible and have an impact.

Harry Ramsbottom, Washington D.C.
January 31, 2026

IN JANUARY 2026, two Americans were killed in the act of watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minneapolis. #ReneeNicoleGood was acting as a legal observer while her wife recorded the federal immigration agents they encountered. #AlexPretti was holding a phone in his hand, filming the agents who would soon take his life. Yet as dangerous as the mere act of observation became for these victims of #ICE and #BorderPatrol's violence, video is also what documented their murders and is now holding federal agents accountable.

That's the paradox United States residents face as they decide how to resist -- and record -- ICE's incursion into American cities.

"Video documentation has the power to expose abuses, to help call for accountability, and to challenge official narratives," Zammuto says. "At the same time, we're absolutely seeing an increase of documenters being targeted -- including journalists who are marked as journalists -- even when they're doing it legally, even when they're respecting orders from the police. It is a massive risk, and I think that it's important for people to weigh that risk and their own comfort in taking it."

Yet Zammuto also notes there are practical tips to protect yourself in the act of recording authority figures like ICE agents. "There are ways to be safer, to consider your own security and also the security of those around you," Zammuto says.

Here are some of those tips that WIRED has assembled from speaking to those who have used the radical act of pointing video cameras at authority figures for activism, in the media, and in court.

Before Filming

When filming ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents, or more generally recording events at a protest, using an alternative or burner phone can help protect your privacy and that of those around you. Still, leaving no digital trace at all is difficult to achieve: Immigration officials have built vast surveillance capabilities, including buying up online advertising data, deploying surveillance drones, tapping into license plate reader networks, and accessing systems that can monitor mobile phones across entire neighborhoods.

Beyond widespread surveillance, ICE or Border Patrol access to your phone could pose direct digital surveillance risks, either while you're on the scene or at a later date if you're detained and they take your device to extract data. If you are bringing your daily device to a protest, turn off biometrics, disable all Face ID and fingerprint unlocking systems, and instead use a password or a PIN to secure your device. Officials must have a warrant or court order to demand a PIN or passcode from you, whereas it is legally easier for them to compel you to unlock your device using a biometric.

While Filming

When filming, you should start recording as soon as possible when you're in the vicinity of an incident, and keep the camera rolling as long as you can. Filming horizontally rather than vertically includes more of the scene. "We think it's really important to try to capture as much of the situation as possible continuously. If you start and stop your footage, it's easier for people to say it's been manipulated or things have been cut out," Witness' Zammuto says.

With cheap, easy-to-use video generation tools available to virtually anyone, it is straightforward to create AI videos of ICE agents and false scenes. Filming a slow 360 degree pan can show the full surroundings and make it harder for people to claim video footage isn't real. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), for instance, recommends making video footage easier to authenticate by also filming the wider context -- including nearby landmarks or street signs -- as well as potentially filming a smartphone home screen, or a clock, that shows the time or date.

The NYCLU recommends focusing on ICE agents themselves where possible to document their activity, rather than using the camera to follow the people impacted by agents' actions. Keeping the lens on agents makes it more likely that you will capture footage of any visible badges, officers' clothing, license plates on vehicles, or other potentially identifying features to further transparency and accountability. Additionally, recording for as long as possible, even after interactions with agents appear to be over, is a way of ensuring that you capture any unexpected activity that could crop up as a crowd is dispersing.

Intimidation and deterrence to filming can be a reality on the scene. For example, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared a video showing what appears to be an ICE agent scanning a legal observer's car. The observer asks why the agent is scrutinizing their vehicle and the agent says, "We have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that."

When interacting with federal agents while filming, it is important to show clear compliance in an attempt to deescalate tension, experts say. The aim of documenting ICE is to create accountability, not to intervene in their operation. When possible, it can be helpful to capture yourself on video interacting peacefully with agents and complying with their orders.

"If they're saying to step back, step back, so that they don't say that you're interfering," Zammuto says. "You can say, 'I am exercising my First Amendment right to observe and document this interaction, and I'm complying with orders,' and it can be helpful to document yourself complying with those orders. So film yourself taking some steps back and saying 'I'm backing up.'"

If you need to go further in an attempt to deescalate, experts say that you should show agents that you've stopped filming or do whatever it takes to protect your safety. Given the fraught climate, they do not advise recording secretly or attempting to trick agents.

"You could be putting yourself more at risk by potentially lying to a federal law enforcement officer or potentially getting yourself into trouble in different ways," Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation says. "I think the best defense against an ICE officer potentially seizing your camera in a public space is other people recording that action and then being able to use that footage as evidence in court when you sue them for violating your constitutional rights."

After Filming

While it may be tempting (and often newsworthy) to immediately post video footage of ICE or other immigration official activity to social media as soon as it is safe, you may want to pause before doing so. "It can expose people in the video to harm as well as the person who filmed it," says Zammuto from Witness. This includes potentially subjecting people's likenesses to the FBI's face recognition systems, which the bureau may run against photos and videos of protesters posted to social media.

You should consider who is being shown in the video and if there are risks to them by publishing it, if you may face repercussions from publishing the video, and whether there are alternative routes to get it online. Precautions you could take, depending on the situation, include blurring the faces of bystanders in the video, scrubbing metadata from files, and removing location data.

Instead of posting footage online from your own accounts, you may want to directly share footage with media outlets, investigators, lawyers, victims of immigration activity, or civil society groups. You should create backups of the footage, such as sharing it with trusted contacts or uploading to cloud storage. Zammuto says you should not edit footage or change file names; if edits or alterations need to be made, they should be done on a duplicate copy so the original is preserved.

"While it is important to share content on social media, these platforms modify content by reducing resolution and quality and stripping informative metadata," says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California and digital forensics expert. "As such, I advocate always saving the original recordings that can be shared with reporters and forensic analysts like me."

Uploading files into cloud storage systems, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or other centralized storage, is an option, Farid says. One limitation of using cloud storage, though, is that law enforcement officials can potentially subpoena companies for access to files stored on their servers. DHS has issued at least one subpoena asking for information about those documenting ICE's activity.

Aside from showing ICE's actions on social media, there are multiple other efforts ongoing to gather and document immigration enforcement activities on video. Around the country, multiple state attorneys and local governments have set up online portals where videos or other imagery can be uploaded to aid any potential investigations. Attorneys general and officials in New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Oregon, Illinois, and Minnesota, have all published complaint forms where people can share details of incidents to help track actions of federal agents.

Media organizations, civil society groups, and various community projects are also aiming to gather and document information about ICE activities. Local town or city "ICE watch" groups and tiplines may, as part of their organization efforts, create shared online drives where photos and videos can directly be uploaded.

While many efforts may backup videos, often the most value can be gained from them by systematically geolocating footage, adding metadata, and uploading them to databases. Collecting as many videos as possible and verifying details about them can be incredibly useful for investigations over time, says Eliot Higgins, the founder of investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat. "You can see patterns of behavior, look at incidents that wouldn't normally break through on social media, because they aren't as violent or lethal as some of the other ones, but still show stuff that is at best dubious and possibly illegal or violations of human rights."

Bellingcat, which has published detailed visual investigations of the two ICE killings and weapons used by immigration agents, is using open source software Atlos to archive and create databases of ICE-related footage, which can then be further investigated. "Getting training and those methodologies out there, and having people organize before it happens is very important," Higgins says, adding that many video classification and archiving techniques have already been developed. "There's a lot of this work that's already been done in the context of Syria and Ukraine, which applies directly to what's happening in the US," Higgins says.

In Court

In addition to sharing footage with media organizations, community projects, and posting online, some people might choose to share with an attorney. ACLU branches, such as ACLU-MN and ACLU-IL, are representing observers in lawsuits against the federal government.

In those cases, attorneys have relied heavily on declarations, which are signed statements that are submitted to the court verifying the truth of something the witness saw. Ian Bratlie, an ACLU-MN attorney who is representing observers in a lawsuit against the federal government, says that because judges need to rely on the record to make facts, "declarations are a good way for the courts to hear what is happening on the ground."

Groups like ACLU-MN have intake forms where people can submit accounts of suspected unlawful conduct by federal agents. Bratlie says it's important to be as thorough as possible when submitting, and the more detail the better.

"Everybody's a little different," says Bratlie. "Some people are really good about remembering what cars look like, other people are pretty good at remembering actual quotes versus the essence of what was said."

The ACLU-MN processes the intake forms, and sometimes reaches out to people to prepare a formal declaration to submit to the courts. Bratlie says, "I tend to think video is very helpful, but even people without video should still reach out and talk to us -- you don't need video to prove these are violations." But video makes the testimony hard to dispute, and more comprehensively catalogues details than fallible human memories.

While lawyers can also rely on news articles to establish facts, declarations are often seen as stronger because there are consequences if the declarant lies and commits perjury. ACLU-MN has made use of declarations in two lawsuits against Kristi Noem in her capacity as DHS secretary, and the state of Minnesota has resubmitted some of those declarations as evidence in its own lawsuit against Noem.

All of those means of accountability show how powerful visual evidence can be when it's recorded carefully and ends up in the right hands. "Unquestionably, video has the power to expose the tactics that ICE and authorities are using against people and to challenge the 'official' narrative," Witness' Zammuto says. "I think that's probably one of the most powerful roles we're seeing video play: The administration is saying one thing and a video shows something completely different."

As powerful as documenting ICE activity can be, remember: There is no way to film federal agents without some level of risk, so think carefully before heading into the streets. And stay safe out there.

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