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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, bringing you the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
Trump’s Truth Social posts cause opsec trouble
It sure seems like the president’s social media habits created additional obstacles for the U.S. armed forces as they carried out his order to bomb Iran. A New York Times article on the internal discussions surrounding Trump’s order reports that, according to “one military official, [the president] was the ‘biggest threat to opsec,’ or operational security, that the planning faced” with his multiple social media posts about Iran ahead of the bombings — and that military planners took steps to confuse Iran in light of what Trump was posting.
It seems more than a little disadvantageous that our military has to do twice the planning because the president is extremely online.
Read more at The New York Times.
WhatsApp with that?
The chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives has banned the use of Meta’s messaging app, WhatsApp, on government devices, allegedly “due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.”
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a social media post, “We disagree with the House Chief Administrative Officer’s characterization in the strongest possible terms,” adding, “We know members and their staffs regularly use WhatsApp and we look forward to ensuring members of the House can join their Senate counterparts in doing so officially.”
Read more at CNBC.
Trump and Hannity’s disinfo campaign
Donald Trump and Fox News host Sean Hannity, arguably the president’s top ally in conservative media, set off a deluge of disinformation this weekend in an effort to justify the president’s bombing of Iran. A new report in Wired magazine highlights how the two launched a fact-averse propaganda campaign to gin up public support for the president’s warmongering.
Read more in Wired.
Palantir profiteer
Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller appears to have a significant financial stake in Palantir, the controversial tech company that’s playing a large role in Trump’s anti-immigrant crackdown. (The company has also reportedly been tapped to aid the Trump administration in building a central database for information about Americans from sources across the federal government.)
The Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog, published financial disclosure forms showing “Miller disclosed from $100,001 up to a quarter million dollars of stock in Palantir.”
Read more from the Project on Government Oversight’s findings.
Slight Signal boost
A federal judge last week declined an effort from government watchdog American Oversight to require the feds to retrieve deleted messages that were part of a Signal text thread in which top Trump administration officials discussed secret military plans. But the judge did take steps to have the administration preserve any other Signal chats that may be at risk of deletion in the future.
Read more on NPR.
ICE seeks high-tech tools
The U.S. Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is plunging into the controversial world of predictive policing, which has been criticized for using technology that’s ripe for civil rights abuses. ICE recently posted a request for information from potential vendors for technology that can help the agency monitor “a million individuals or entities of interest” for the purpose of “identifying potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize.”
Read more at FedScoop.
Judge gives gift to generative AI companies
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that artificial intelligence company Anthropic can legally use books without authors’ permission to train its models in a ruling that could have serious implications for artists’ ability to protect their works from being used to power generative AI tools. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said his ruling still prevents generative AI tools from creating work that violates the copyright of original source material, but his ruling delivers a blow to those who’ve sought to completely prevent AI companies from cribbing their work.
Read more at The Verge.
Media Matters lawsuit
Media Matters, the left-leaning media watchdog, is suing the Federal Trade Commission, alleging the agency, at the behest of Elon Musk, is subjecting it to a politicized probe of its editorial practices. (The FTC did not respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment.)
The lawsuit comes as the FTC is also probing advertisers over Musk’s claims that companies boycotted his social media platform, X, after he bought the site and weakened moderation, opening the door to more hate speech and extremist content.
Read more at Ars Technica.