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Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, a collection of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of tech and politics.
Missing Ratcliffe messages
The CIA’s chief data officer testified in court last month that he was unable to locate any “substantive messages” from CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s Signal app as part of an ongoing lawsuit stemming from his and other top Trump officials’ use of the messaging app to share highly sensitive U.S. military plans.
According to ABC News:
Hurley Blankenship, CIA’s chief data officer, told a federal judge overseeing a lawsuit challenging the use of Signal that he was only able to retrieve “residual administrative content” from Ratcliffe’s personal Signal account. “I used that terminology because the screenshot does not include substantive messages from the Signal chat; rather, it captures the name of the chat, ‘Houthi PC small group’, and reflects administrative notifications from 26 March and 28 March relating to changes in participants’ administrative settings in this group chat, such as profile names and message settings,” Blankenship wrote.
For the record, all defendants in this lawsuit — including Ratcliffe — were instructed by a judge on March 27 to preserve all Signal messages sent from March 11 to March 15. And several current and former U.S. national security officials told CNN they worry messages Ratcliffe sent in the thread may have damaged the country’s ability to gather intelligence on the Houthis going forward. In light of all that, the missing messages certainly raise eyebrows. American Oversight, the organization that filed the lawsuit, suggested in a statement that the revelation about Ratcliffe's messages raises questions about whether some in the administration are destroying evidence.
Read more on ABC News.
Database tracking DOGE gets deleted
The Trump administration is being sued over its deletion of an online database meant to track how federal funds are being spent. The nonprofit group that brought the lawsuit, Protect Democracy Project, says the database offered “the only public source of information on how DOGE (Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency) is being funded — information that Congress and journalists have used in reporting and oversight.”
Read more at The Hill.
Zuckerberg takes the stand
Meta’s high-stakes trial, in which the U.S. government has accused Facebook's parent company of holding a monopoly through its ownership of WhatsApp and Instagram, kicked off on Monday, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg taking the stand. The case could determine whether Meta has to spin off any of its social media companies to comply with anti-monopoly laws.
Read more at Reuters.
And check out this recent CNBC interview with Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chair who oversaw the agency when it first filed the lawsuit against Meta during the Biden administration.
Snooping suspicions
As part of a recent report for The Guardian, federal employees shared their fears that they are being snooped on by Trump administration officials trying to crack down on dissent. According to the paper, the employees fear that Trump appointees “may be snooping on conversations, using software to track computer activity and, possibly, using artificial intelligence to scan for disloyalty or mentions of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) buzzwords.”
Read more at The Guardian.
Immigrants face digital death under Trump administration
I recently wrote about the highly unusual and overtly cruel strategy the Trump administration is using to dehumanize and deter migrants by marking thousands of them as dead in the federal government’s Social Security system to effectively cut them off from obtaining employment or other government services.
Check out my post about it here.
MAGA masculinity and Trump's tariff war
I also recently appeared on "Alex Witt Reports" to discuss my recent post about the trend of right-wing influencers promoting the idea that Trump’s destructive trade war and efforts to increase manufacturing are good for men — and their dignity — in particular. It's part of the absurd trend of hypermasculine influencers who have aligned themselves with Trump.
Read my post about it here. And you can watch my conversation with Witt below.
Sen. Wyden’s cyber-related stoppage
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has put a hold on Trump’s nominee to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, saying he won’t release the nomination unless the administration publishes a report on vulnerabilities in the telecommunications industry.
Read more at Reuters.
Palantir plays to the MAGA crowd with 'meritocracy'-based fellowship
Palantir, a tech company that was co-founded by far-right investor Peter Thiel and whose CEO has been gung-ho about using the company’s potentially deadly technologies to aid Donald Trump’s mass deportation and military plans, recently launched a “Meritocracy Fellowship” program in response to the company’s claim that “college is broken” and “meritocracy and excellence are no longer the pursuits of educational institutions.” To be honest, this sounds like little more than a jab at affirmative action policies that promote diversity on college campuses, which right-wingers falsely suggest is antithetical to meritocracy.
Read more about the program at Business Insider.
Un-4chan-ate circumstances
4chan, a forum website popular among far-right extremists, was recently hit with a major hack that has people wondering what — if any — data related to the site may have been exposed.
Read more at The Verge.