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2025-09-12 17:45:27 UTC

National Guard Accidentally Sends Evidence Of Troop Disillusionment To The Washington Post

This news — you know, the stuff that shows National Guard troops aren’t exactly happy to be expendable pieces in Trump revenge schemes — is unsurprising. No one signed up for this, but Donald Trump and a bunch of suck-ups scattered across a handful of red states have made Trump’s War on DC the new day-to-day operation for troops who’d probably rather be doing anything else than this.

And what exactly is “this?” Well, it’s all sorts of things. Some of “this” is standing idly by while law enforcement officers do law enforcement work. Some of “this” is sleeping on floors, defecating in Humvees, being the constant gardener you never wished to see in the world, and not knowing if you’re actually going to get your next paycheck, much less the pension you’ve been drilling for.

While previous reports of widespread discontent have been mostly hearsay contributed by anonymous troops and officers, this one comes straight from the US military. Yeah, the Department of War is just as sloppy as the guy running it — the one who decided it was okay to share war plans with family members and family members’ acquaintances.

The lede gets buried a bit in the Washington Post report by Alex Horton, but when you see it, it’s less “omg” than “ofc.” (I’m going with the swear-y version here because… ofc I am.)

Not for public consumption, however, is an internal “media roll up” that analyzes the tone of news stories and social media posts about the National Guard’s presence and activities in Washington.

[…]

“Trending videos show residents reacting with alarm and indignation,” a summary from Friday said. “One segment features a local [resident]describing the Guard’s presence as leveraging fear, not security — highlighting widespread discomfort with what many perceive as a show of force.”

A National Guard official acknowledged the documents are authentic but downplayed their sensitivity, saying the assessments are intended for internal use and were inadvertently emailed to The Post last week.

That’s the sort of unforced error that has been the calling card of the military under Pete Hegseth’s “leadership.” A guy who loves photo ops and fawning interviews more than he likes actually doing his job isn’t an anomaly in the Trump administration. It’s the other thing: emblematic.

See also: the final line in this WaPo paragraph.

It is unclear how many people mistakenly received the documents.

A completely fair point to make. If the military was careless enough to send this to a Washington Post email address, it has likely made the same mistake elsewhere. We’ll see if any other news agency speaks up now that the Post has gone on record with this. Or maybe we’ll discover months or years from now that this was actually a deliberate leak, but one that had to be sternly denied lest Hegseth and the man he owes this unearned position to decide it’s time to bring back summary executions for consorting with the enemy.

That’s the more remarkable part of this report. The rest of it just adds to what we have already assumed and that has been buttressed by a handful of anonymous National Guard members. All of this sucks, and very few troops are fully supportive of invading US cities just to make Trump feel even more powerful.

In examining public opinions online, Guard officials last week highlighted the sentiments shared by people who self-identified as veterans and active-duty troops, who, the documents show, say they viewed the deployment “with shame and alarm.” 

Great. At least they’re on our side. We also feel “shame and alarm” when seeing military troops sent into a city just because the US president doesn’t like the political leanings of city officials. With Trump pretty much straight-up declaring war on Chicago, we can only expect things to get a whole lot worse, and then hope with all of our might there’s a turning point in the future where things get better. But until a bunch of troops walk off the job rather than just express their discontent, Trump will do what he wants to do because no one with the power to do so seems capable of stopping him.

2025-09-12 16:30:47 UTC

Brendan Carr’s Baseless Xenophobia Derails New FCC ‘Internet Of Things’ (IOT) Device Security Standards

For many, many years security experts have warned that the “internet of things” (IOT) (or the myriad “smart home” devices we have scattered around our homes) was a security and privacy dumpster fire. A lot of these devices are made in China (often poorly) introducing new network attack vectors and widespread national security concerns.

So in 2023, the Biden FCC proposed a new voluntary program that would rank and label smart home devices if they adhered to some basic privacy and security standards. Under the program, the FCC would work with a private Illinois-based company named UL Solutions to study and test devices, then apply a “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” on devices deemed relatively secure.

Enter Trumpism. The program’s creation has stalled out because of some baseless claims by Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr that UL Solutions, a company that has done this kind of testing for one-hundred-and-thirty years and which is well-known and well-respected in the field, also happens to do business in China and runs 18 China-based testing locations (which makes sense given the massive volume of such devices built in, you know, China).

So in June, Carr made a post to Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website vaguely stating the program would be paused while his FCC “investigated” UL Solutions:

To be clear, this is about U.S. companies not wanting to have to adhere to any sort of oversight or privacy and security standards whatsoever (and this voluntary program probably would have not included serious penalties). Carr has just selected weird Chinese xenophobia as cover for regulatory capture.

Carr’s “investigation” is much like his other pseudo-investigations, which have included “investigating” Verizon for not being racist enough, “investigating” CBS for doing journalism critical of King Dingus, or “investigating” Dish Network for not giving its expensive spectrum to Elon Musk.

There is absolutely zero evidence of any kind that UL Solutions has done anything wrong, and the longer the program is delayed, the greater risk to the public:

“David Simon, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, said he was “not aware of any” other instance where the FCC investigated a company it had just approved to run one of its projects.

The uncertainty is already putting pressure on the program. “The longer one proceeds without trying to implement something like this, the more the risk is to the consumers,” said Paul Besozzi, a senior partner at Squire Patton Boggs. That includes both individual buyers and companies outfitting offices with smart devices.”

It’s now September and there’s zero update or transparency into the “investigation.” The whole thing is fairly representative of MAGA’s self-serving exploitation of “national security” and Chinese xenophobia when convenient.

Like the TikTok ban, which was floated for years (often by Carr) and even written into law, only to be scuttled because it upset the financial plans of a billionaire Trump ally. Or the “race to 5G,” which involved giving giant U.S. telecoms bottomless subsidies and tax cuts to “defeat the Chinese,” only for lawmakers to disappear when the efforts resulted in slow, expensive, and patchy U.S. 5G coverage.

Or all the GOP’s fear mongering about China’s Huawei, which involved a decade of hyperventilation over Chinese spying on U.S. telecom networks, and a bunch of programs the Trump administration is now dismantling so that rich people can get tax cuts. And most recently the AI wars, where we’re told we must give giant tech companies zero oversight and bottomless subsidies, again to best thwart the Chinese.

There are genuine security concerns related to China, and then there are greasy opportunists who leverage those fears for their own financial gain. And the U.S. press sucks at illustrating the difference, which is why it’s so easy for Carr to get away with this sort of vague bullshit.

While Carr professes to be super worried about Chinese threats to national security, with its other hand the Trump administration has gutted government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating the biggest Chinese hack of U.S. telecom networks in history), dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents), and fired oodles of folks doing essential work at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Brendan Carr is also engaged in a massive effort to destroy whatever’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection and corporate oversight authority, despite the fact that the recent historic Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (caused in large part because major telecoms were too incompetent to change default administrative passwords) was a direct byproduct of this exact type of mindless deregulation.

The Trump administration’s stacked courts are also making it impossible to hold telecoms accountable for literally anything (see the Fifth Circuit’s recent reversal of a fine against AT&T for spying on customer movement), which also undermines consumer privacy and national security, and ensures zero real repercussions for companies that fail to secure their networks and sensitive data.

So even if the FCC did implement this labeling program, any penalties for non-compliance (which there aren’t because it’s voluntary) would never survive the MAGA zealot-stocked court system. Carr of course is well aware of this. I suspect this program never sees the light of day and remains permanently bogged down in bogus, utterly nontransparent inquiry.

China’s super useful as a distraction from corruption or regulatory capture, but with MAGA it’s always performative. In Carr’s case, his primary interest is in pleasing the giant U.S. companies (his inevitable future employers) who don’t want any privacy and security oversight (however modest). And his efforts are always aided by a lazy U.S. corporate press too feckless to illustrate the distinction.

2025-09-12 12:22:22 UTC

IOT

Waymo Tells Cops: ‘Get A Warrant’

Despite being the somewhat crispied face of (extremely limited) unrest in Los Angeles in response to ICE activity, Waymo hasn’t suddenly decided it’s time to get snitchin’.

In fact, it’s chosen to go the other direction, as Riley McDermid reports for Gizmodo:

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana recently emphasized that the company will challenge, limit, or reject robotaxi footage requests from law enforcement that are not backed by a valid legal process, such as a warrant or court order.

She stressed that while the company “follows the legal process to receive footage,” it reserves the right to push back on overly broad or undefined demands—a move aimed at preserving rider trust.

This is pretty remarkable for at least a couple of reasons. First, as noted above, Waymo’s cars got set on fire pretty frequently in Los Angeles, prompting the company to shut down service until the violence (most of it provoked by police) in downtown LA subsided a bit.

Second, the average Waymo car is a surveillance conveyance:

Each Waymo vehicle is outfitted with 29 external cameras, offering a comprehensive 360-degree view, and potentially additional internal sensors.

That definitely makes these vehicles tasty targets for law enforcement. And when cops start pounding on the virtual doors virtually non-stop in search of all this stuff, the most common response from tech companies is to simply open up, rather than demand to see some paperwork.

Caveat, the third: Waymo says warrants or “court orders.” There are plenty of court orders that don’t contain the protections of a warrant. A subpoena, for example, doesn’t need probable cause to be established. Things not considered covered by the Fourth Amendment (but rather the Third Party Doctrine) can be obtained without a judicially authorized warrant: things like route and passenger data that may not specifically identify passengers, but give the government enough other data (including payment info) that could identify passengers in Waymo cars.

That being said, it’s nice to see a tech company that had every reason to make cops its best friends (see also: the burning cars referenced above) decide it cares more about the privacy of its passengers than the well-being of its automated automobiles.

HOWEVER:

By making this demand of law enforcement, Waymo may be setting up the entire nation for another limitation of Fourth Amendment rights. Between the Third Party Doctrine and the automobile exception, cops may decide to press the issue in court after their warrantless demands for data are rebuffed, citing both of the above doctrines in support of their claims.

The automobile exception tends to lower the standard for searches from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion” under the assumption that vehicles traveling on public roads are not generally afforded an “expectation of privacy.” That’s why cops can look in windows and run drug dogs around cars and perform inventory searches of any vehicles they choose to tow.

The Third Party Doctrine says information voluntarily given to other people (including companies like Waymo) also isn’t covered by an expectation of privacy. Even if there’s no other option but to give Waymo your address, payment information, personal identification, phone number, etc. just to be able to hitch a ride, most courts consider this to be a “voluntary” relinquishment of otherwise private information. After all, you can always just walk.

Given all of this, we’ll have to see where this goes from here. It’s unclear at this point whether Waymo data/recordings are useful enough to law enforcement to make this something worth fighting in court. But no matter how things play out going forward, it’s nice to know a company has decided to put its foot down before its customers have asked it to. Too many companies only decide to do this after weeks or months of negative press, if they bother to do it at all. Waymo’s warrant demands may ultimately prove to be short-lived, but the fact that it’s pushing back means this company is similarly as sick of this administration and its bullshit, and won’t allow its vehicles to become nothing more than proxy snoops for cops.

2025-09-12 02:50:58 UTC