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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, a curated list of the week’s top stories from the intersection of tech and politics.
Federal employees sue over Musk’s meddling
Three unions representing current and former federal employees — the American Federation of Government Employees, the Service Employees International Union and the Alliance for Retired Americans — are suing the Trump administration for allowing Elon Musk and his underlings to access the vital government systems used to issue federal payments. The lawsuit alleges Musk and his allies engaged in a data breach and that “the scale of the intrusion into individuals’ privacy is massive and unprecedented.” In an attempt to quell concerns, President Donald Trump’s White House said Musk has been designated a “special government employee.”
On Monday night’s episode of “The ReidOut with Joy Reid,” Joy referred to Musk’s power grab as a “coup” that has put millions of Americans’ private data at risk, and she asked Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey how Democrats intend to fight back:
Read about federal employees’ lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury and its secretary, Scott Bessent, at The New York Times.
Sloppy writing
Books written using artificial intelligence technology are rapidly growing in number, and the AI “slop” — or fact-free gibberish — in many e-books is wreaking havoc on library officials tasked with vetting them.
Read more on 404 Media’s report here.
What’s up with WhatsApp?
Officials at Meta-owned WhatsApp, a messaging platform, told NBC News that dozens of users were targeted with spyware by an Israeli company called Paragon Solutions. (Paragon did not reply to NBC News’ request for comment.)
Read more on the attack at NBC News.
Robinson’s lawsuit goes limp
Former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson has dropped his lawsuit against CNN over its 2024 report that an online account linked to Robinson had posted lewd comments and referred to him as a “black nazi” on a pornographic website.
Read Robinson’s statement at NBC’s Winston-Salem affiliate, WXII.
Neo-Nazi convicted of plotting blackout attack
Brandon Russell, the founder of a Florida-based neo-Nazi group, was convicted Monday for plotting “sniper attacks” on Maryland’s power grid to cause chaos in the majority-Black city of Baltimore. The New York Times explained the alarming trend of extremists’ attacking power grids last August.
Read more about Russell’s conviction at NBC News.
Mark Zuckerberg rages over leaks
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems pretty furious about leaks coming out of his company. The Verge is out with a report on his attempts to punish leakers, including a recent internal memo vowing to fire anyone who is found to have leaked.
“We try to be really open and then everything I say leaks,” Zuckerberg recently told employees. “It sucks.”
Read more at The Verge.
Orwellian website outages
Several federal websites, including sites for the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, faced outages last week as the Trump administration waged an Orwellian campaign to scrub government websites of any references to diversity. Trump was asked about the outages last week and told reporters that a pause on government websites “doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”
Read more about the site outages at NBC News.
Trump Media’s gift to Kash Patel
Just days before Kash Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing to lead the FBI, Trump’s media company gave him a massive stock gift totaling more than $700,000. The windfall establishes a clear conflict of interest for the aspiring FBI director, who during his testimony refused to walk back earlier vows to target the media if put in a position of power.
Read more on Patel’s gift on the ReidOutBlog.
Trump wants Ukraine’s ‘rare earth’
My colleague Steve Benen wrote about the new strings Trump may be looking to attach for aid to Ukraine. Trump said he wants a deal with the ally to provide the U.S. some of its “rare earth” (by which he could be referring to its lithium and titanium) as the country defends itself from Russia’s invasion. The rare earth elements Trump was presumably referring to are building blocks for the high-tech future, found in everything from aerospace vehicles to consumer electronics.
Read more on Trump’s new quid pro quo on the Maddowblog.