Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
DOGE deposition videos released
To paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: Now is the time for justice to roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty (YouTube) stream.
On Monday, a federal judge permitted the release of deposition videos, footage that has garnered widespread mockery for two former employees of President Donald Trump’s dubiously named Department of Government Efficiency. Nathan Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, who are both white men, have been dragged over the videos, which show them stumbling while responding to lawyers’ questions about diversity initiatives and cuts they made to federal programs while at DOGE. The depositions were part of a lawsuit over cuts made to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said the threat of further online harassment of the men didn’t justify withholding the videos. The ruling reverses her previous decision to order the videos be taken offline after the Trump administration said, in an emergency filing, that the men suffered harassment.
“Here, the testimony in the videos concerns the conduct of public officials acting in their official capacities — a context in which the public interest in transparency and accountability is at its apex,” she wrote in her ruling.
Read more at ABC News.
Warren seeks answers on Anthropic
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is questioning the Defense Department’s choice to effectively blacklist Anthropic. On Monday, Warren sent a formal letter demanding answers on the department’s move to label the artificial intelligence company a supply chain risk after the company’s executives refused to weaken rules forbidding their technology from being used to conduct mass surveillance stateside or to power autonomous weapons.
Read more at CNBC.
Data center dangers
New research out of Arizona State University offered compelling evidence that the massive heat output from data centers can warm their surrounding communities, fueling concerns over these centers’ human and environmental impacts.
Read more at AZFamily.
Musk takes an L in court
A jury in San Francisco has concluded that Elon Musk defrauded Twitter investors when he deliberately made misleading statements about the number of bots on the platform amid his efforts to purchase it. As Courthouse News Service reported:
Investors, including lead plaintiffs Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett and Brian Belgrave, sued Musk in October 2022 over claims they suffered major losses when Musk deliberately made misleading statements about the presence of spam bot accounts on Twitter to drive down the company’s stock, in hopes of backing out of the acquisition deal or renegotiating more favorably for himself.
Musk’s attorneys said they intend to appeal the verdict, which could result in the plaintiffs being awarded more than $2 billion.
Read more at Courthouse News Service.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Calif., warned that a move by prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket to prevent insider trading is merely “a fig leaf to deflect criticism from criticism.” Her critique comes amid growing outrage over suspicious bets that people have cashed in on the prediction markets, which essentially are glorified online gambling platforms. Read more at Mediaite. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., is demanding answers from the Treasury about a mysterious $10 billion fee that TikTok investors have reportedly agreed to pay the federal government — to be used for who knows what — after Trump helped steer the company’s U.S. operations toward an ownership group led by one of his political allies. Read more in my post at MS NOW. The Trump administration’s new AI “framework” released last week looks like yet another effort to serve the president’s Big Tech benefactors by targeting state-level regulation of AI companies. Read more at Rolling Stone. A new story in The Wall Street Journal underscores how AI companies are trying to wield their influence in this year’s midterms. The report shines light on the time and money that some companies are dedicating to the race for the seat being vacated by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. The race involves New York state Rep. Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee who has faced criticism while trying to portray himself as a sensible critic of AI companies. Read more at The Wall Street Journal.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
AOC isn’t buying the spin
Warner raises concerns about TikTok fee
Trump’s umpteenth AI deregulation attempt
AI companies look to influence the midterms
