Feed aggregator

In a campaign ad released Monday, Seth Bodnar—an Independent candidate running for U.S. Senate in Montana—warns viewers that Flock Safety cameras are tracking Americans “getting groceries,” “going to church,” and “buying ammo for the season.”

He then sets a surveillance camera on a tree stump, pulls a shotgun from his car, and just absolutely blows the thing away.

Trump says he ‘likes’ Flock cameras,” Bodnar wrote in a social media post. “I say ‘Flock off.”

Trump says he "likes" Flock cameras. I say "Flock off." pic.twitter.com/NekA0w4VJd

— Seth Bodnar for Montana (@SethBodnarForMT) September 14, 2026

Given America’s deep-seated gun culture—and mounting public frustration over automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras—it makes a kind of sense that Bodnar isn’t the only candidate for national office taking aim at automated police surveillance.

Adam Heimerman, an Independent running for Congress in Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District, allegedly used a shotgun to shoot four Flock cameras this past July. He couldn’t stand the sight of them on his way to a job as a river guide, he told the Washington Post.

So, while Bodnar (presumably) bought his own camera to shoot, Heimerman (allegedly) did some target practice with four government-owned license plate readers.

“When people act out in a manner that we’re witnessing, things have gotten bad, and they no longer feel like they’re being heard,” Heimerman said at the time. “People are tired of being told to sit down and be quiet and write a letter.”

Heimerman’s chances of winning against Republican incumbent Tim Burchett were already slim before he was hit with four felony counts of vandalism. Bodnar, in Montana, might have a better shot. The most recent poll in his race has him only eight points behind his Republican opponent Kurt Alme—and Bodnar’s anti-surveillance stance might just close that gap.

In his camera-blitzing video, Bodnar points out that Alme has refused to take a position on surveillance. Other Republicans do not seem to have the same reservations. In the past month, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas have backed off of funding ALPRs on their roads, citing privacy concerns; in late August, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) launched an investigation into Flock Safety for assembling an “unprecedented national surveillance network” without Americans’ consent.

But divisions around the technology are emerging within the Republican Party. While Hawley might take the side of the camera-shooters—and of the Americans who share their surveillance concerns, if not their explosive tactics—President Donald Trump has declared his support for the cameras.

“I sort of like them…because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last week, as the Washington Post reported. “They think it’s an infringement. I like them.”

An anonymous whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security has accused the Trump administration of using agents within the agency to impersonate voters as part of a plot to expose purported “unlawful voters.” The whistleblower said in their account that resources at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been diverted from national security-related activities and…

Source

Criminals are exploiting a critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw that can turn a malicious email into root access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a 9.8 CVSS score and affects physical and virtual Secure Email Gateway appliances regardless of their configuration. Cisco says there are no workarounds, so patching is the only fix. The bug lies in how Cisco's AsyncOS software handles incoming email. An attacker doesn't need to log in: they can send a booby-trapped message through a vulnerable gateway and, if the exploit works, run commands as root. Which is not exactly what you want from the box tasked with keeping nasty emails out. Cisco's Product Security Incident Response Team said it became aware of active exploitation in September, although the networking giant hasn't said who is behind the attacks, how long they have been going on, or how many organizations have been compromised. Cisco uncovered the bug while resolving a Technical Assistance Center support case. Signs suggest at least some Cisco cloud customers were caught up in the attacks. Cisco said it investigated devices belonging to its Secure Email Cloud service and directly contacted customers whose appliances showed indicators of possible compromise. It is now carrying out remediation and recovery work and says all of its Secure Email Cloud devices have been upgraded to AsyncOS 16.5.0-780. Admins running their own appliances have a little more work to do. Cisco recommends checking logs for signs of suspicious activity, but warns that finding nothing doesn't necessarily mean the system is clean. Once attackers have root access, Cisco says they could tamper with the logs and cover their tracks. Admins are also being told to check network and firewall logs for anything unusual, rather than relying on the gateway itself for answers. For virtual appliances suspected of being compromised, Cisco's recovery advice is fairly drastic: preserve the forensic evidence, deploy a fresh VM running fixed software, rebuild the configuration, and rotate credentials and cryptographic material. Cisco has fixed the bug in AsyncOS releases 15.5.5-014, 16.0.4-302 and 16.5.0-780, with customers strongly encouraged to move to the latter. There's still a decent-sized target pool out there. The Shadowserver Foundation was tracking more than 400 Cisco Secure Email Gateway appliances exposed to the internet as of Monday The flaw has also landed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, with US federal civilian agencies ordered to remediate it by September 17. CVE-2026-76461 comes less than a year after attackers exploited another critical AsyncOS flaw, CVE-2025-20393, to break into Cisco Secure Email Gateway appliances and install persistence mechanisms. That bug eventually scored a perfect 10. For anyone still running an affected gateway, the message is fairly simple: the box designed to inspect hostile email can itself be pwned by one; attackers are already doing it, and there is no workaround to hide behind. ®

From the massive DOGE data breach and the compromise of critical infrastructure to the hack of federal surveillance systems, here are the most damaging security incidents and data breaches of 2026 so far.

A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Trump says he’s the only one smart enough to regulate AI…

Source

House Speaker Mike Johnson is stoking the flames of Donald Trump’s $5,000 giveaway.

Speaking with reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday, the chief House Republican not only suggested that the government handouts could actually happen, but said the process to do so will “take time.”

Johnson opted not to elaborate when asked if the checks could be sorted out through the House’s reconciliation process.

“I’m not going to get into the details of all that because again we haven’t had the time to process that,” Johnson said. “It’s a big idea.… We’ve begun some of that process right now.”

“I spoke to the president about this late last night,” he continued. “He is very animated right now, as the vice president was this morning.”

It’s been six days since Trump announced his grand plan to dole out $5,000 to every American should Republicans win in the midterms. Only, the sudden and unexpected promise did not come with any details on how the checks would actually be distributed, or how the government could afford it.

Despite his repeated commitments to “drain the swamp” and “get rid of the debt,” the national debt has more than doubled since Trump first entered office—moving from $19.97 trillion in 2016 to more than $40 trillion today. During Trump’s first term, the debt grew by $7.8 trillion, and through the first year and a half of his second term, the sum has grown by another $3.8 trillion.

Trump’s last attempt to bribe Americans with money, stimulus checks during the Covid-19 pandemic, helped with his popularity but cost the country a lot in the end. The pandemic-era relief effort extended up to $1,800 to qualifying single adults, totaling $814 billion, according to IRS data collected by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

But those congressionally approved checks were significantly smaller than Trump’s current offer, which was unveiled just seven weeks before contentious midterm elections. And this time, American voters seem more skeptical that the president will actually follow through on his word.

“Personally, I think it’s just a publicity stunt and I don’t think that it’s ever gonna happen,” a voter named William told Fox News Digital Tuesday. “It’ll need to go through Congress, and I don’t think with the midterm elections ... the possibility of that happening is just so far down the road.”

Daniel from Maryland told the network that he wasn’t sure if America “[has] the money for that.”

“And I think if we did, it should be going a couple different other places than that for sure,” he added.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun quietly firing new officers hired during the agency’s push to recruit thousands of “Homeland Defenders.” The results have been deadly.

ICE has started to dismiss some of its newest recruits, citing poor performance and red flags that should have been identified in the vetting process, three former DHS officials told The Washington Post Tuesday.

ICE officials struggled to process the massive surge of applicants after the Trump administration dangled a $50,000 signing bonus in front of people’s noses, hoping to entice Americans to join the legion of officers tearing families apart. In August 2025, an ICE whistleblower wrote to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General warning that the hiring surge had “overwhelmed” the agency, and that applicants were being cleared for duty “without fingerprints, identity verification, or credit checks.”

The agency’s slapdash method of hiring and firing unqualified officers has had disastrous results.

Joseph Moore, a 38-year-old father of two, took his own life in the parking lot of ICE’s Philadelphia office after he was notified that he would be fired. It was his dream to work in law enforcement, and after struggling to hold down a job, Moore leapt at the chance to join ICE. When that opportunity was taken away, he shot and killed himself, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. (His family has expressed doubts that his death was in fact a suicide.)

Two former ICE officers told the Post that their colleague’s death might have been avoided if the agency had adequately vetted him and determined that he was not qualified to serve in law enforcement.

“Once you get fired from law enforcement, it’s terribly hard, right or wrong, to get back into law enforcement,” one of the officers told the Post. “It’s the death of a career, and the weight of this hits some officers hard enough where they take their own lives.”

The privacy-friendly services for viewing X posts without an account have gone dark again after X's escalated legal action.

OpenAI confirms weeks of AI safety talks with Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as Trump's team dismisses safety concerns and pushes to keep pace with China.

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Inside Washington

What is this bipartisan data center bill really about?

On Tuesday, Congress will consider the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to make data centers responsible for their costs to the energy grid. The premise sounds good—but some critics say all it would really do is give cover to vulnerable incumbents in an election season dominated by concerns about affordability and AI data centers.

The bill, introduced by Democratic Representative Kathy Castor of Florida and Republican Representative Gabe Evans of Colorado, tells states to consider adopting a federal standard that ensures data centers cover the costs of their grid updates. The key word there is “consider.” Under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978, state-level utility commissions set their own rates. Congress can only tell these commissions to consider changes, but can’t actually force those changes itself. The bill is the legislative counterpart to President Trump’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” a voluntary and nonbinding pledge that the White House said nearly 200 utilities and AI companies signed in March. Both the bill and the pledge tell AI companies to shoulder the cost of data centers, but neither has an enforcement mechanism to make that happen.

“It doesn’t really have much in the way of teeth,” said David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute. Both Pomerantz and Grayson Flood, a senior fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, said that the bill’s toothlessness doesn’t mean it’s bad—just that it doesn’t actively change much. “It should be something that folks support,” Flood said. “Where I would push back is if it starts to be framed as: Well, we’ve done the thing and now we don’t need to do any more.”

Some view the legislation more harshly. Mitch Jones, the managing director of policy and litigation at Food and Water Watch, said that his organization is opposed to the bill because it acts as a “fig leaf” for Big Tech companies and members of Congress to hide behind without meaningfully addressing high utility costs from data centers.

“This legislation is clearly meant to give members of Congress cover, especially during an election year, when the issue of data centers and the issue of AI more broadly have really come to the fore as one of the top issues animating politics in the United States currently,” Jones said.

Polls suggest voters overwhelmingly hate data centers, and a number of this bill’s co-sponsors are facing tough elections this November. Notably, GOP Representatives David Valadao of California, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Mónica de la Cruz of Texas, and Bill Huizenga and Tom Barrett of Michigan have signed on to the bill since September 1. All are facing strong Democratic challengers in their elections. Barrett is facing Will Lawrence in Michigan’s 7th congressional district; Lawrence has made data centers a central part of his campaign, and has criticized Barrett on data centers and AI specifically.

Instead of this bill, Jones said, Congress should pass the moratorium on data center construction introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in March. Flood, for his part, wants to see Congress levy taxes on data center tenants based on their electricity usage—something Congress actually does have the authority to do. “That creates a floor that every data center has to pay, regardless of what state it’s in,” he said. That “makes it harder for these tech companies to do what you would call regulatory arbitrage,” playing states off of each other to secure the best deals possible.

The experts who spoke to The New Republic emphasized that states are already tackling this issue themselves, and don’t need Congress to tell them it’s important—in recent months, governors including Kathy Hochul in New York and Greg Abbott in Texas have called for pauses to new data center construction, and other states are considering plans to address the issue. “There’s nothing inherently wrong” about Congress making a “political statement” about data center costs, Pomerantz said. But ultimately, Flood noted, “This is the bare minimum.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

In barely 24 hours after Republican Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French posted a bizarre, racist comment on X, several Republicans denounced him—and 500 new donors flocked to Democratic candidate Jon Rosenthal, The Texas Tribune reported on Monday. The original social media post on Sunday featured a picture of numerous nonwhite students cheering the Texas Longhorns’ big comeback win over Ohio State Saturday, with French commenting: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Wrote the Tribune’s Carlos Nogueras Ramos: “French, who has scarcely debated the issues the Railroad Commission regulates since launching his campaign last November, vigorously defended his remarks. He said UT-Austin and other institutions have prioritized foreign students and workers, which, without evidence, he said has resulted in fraud.” Last year, Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for French’s resignation as Tarrant County party chair after French posted a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims posed a bigger threat to the United States.

For those curious about the outsize influence that the three-member Texas Railroad Commission has over the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, check out Kate Aronoff’s explanation from the 2020 election season.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Tuesday, Arizona State University and New America host their 12th Annual Future Security Forum “in collaboration” with the Global SOF Foundation, Security & Defense PLuS, the McCain Institute, and Small Wars Journal. The forum, focused on “America’s Post-9/11 Wars,” will feature among its many speakers Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch, Colorado Democratic Representative Jason Crow, General Joseph L. Votel, and reporters Azmat Khan, former New America head Steve Coll, Jason Burke, and Joby Warrick.

Wednesday at noon, the Center for American Progress hosts an in-person and Zoom discussion with Senator Tim Kaine, Representative Jason Crow (busy guy this week!), and Representative Chrissy Houlahan about how to “reform” national security post-Trump. The Brookings Institution’s Damian Murphy and Allison McManus will moderate, with opening remarks delivered by Dan Herman.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Clarence Thomas is probably the most conservative Supreme Court justice in modern U.S. history. Which two men, who both sat in the mid-to-late twentieth century, are generally considered the most liberal justices in the court’s history? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Profound has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, less than seven months after it raised a $96 million Series C.

FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday was forced to answer why his agency is no longer automatically disqualifying applicants who engaged in bestiality. What followed was a perplexing exchange that highlighted the deep absurdity of our current political moment.

Democratic Senator Dick Durbin kicked off the bestiality questioning.

“According to a memo issued this June, the FBI has lowered its hiring standards by dropping automatic disqualification for applicants who have stolen from [their employers], paid for sex, are engaged in bestiality. In July, you claim the FBI is ‘losing too many qualified candidates to the rigors of requirements from yesteryear,’” Durbin said. “Director Patel, do you believe those who have previously stolen from [employers], solicited sex, are engaged in bestiality are qualified candidates that the FBI is losing?”

Kash Patel: "We did not want to punish victims of beastiality" pic.twitter.com/YIWHXasjZs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2026

“What we did was, we did not want to punish victims of bestiality—victims who were trafficked,” Patel replied, failing to clarify that the FBI was not in fact making it easier to hire people who had sex with animals. “We did not want to make it an automatic disqualification for the FBI to consider you if you are a victim of these awful, heinous acts.”

“He’s no longer protecting those who’ve been charged with bestiality, he’s protecting those who are victims. Just turned it upside down,” Durbin replied. “What I’m reading to you is you dropped automatic disqualification for applicants who have been engaged in bestiality, not victims of bestiality. Applicants who have engaged. Do you disagree with that?”

“Applicants who have engaged in bestiality means they were victims of bestiality because they were forced to do so,” Patel said. “And at this FBI, we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving the United States of America and the premier law enforcement agency in the world.”

Kash Patel: "Applicants who have engaged in beastiliaty means they were victims of beastility because they were forced to do so. At this FBI we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving." pic.twitter.com/tXI4t9Kr85

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2026

Even Republican Senator John Kennedy was stunned by Patel’s answer, arguing with the FBI director about the loosened hiring standards.

“What about the bestiality?” Kennedy said, genuinely confused.

“It automatically disqualified any individual who participated on either side of it,” Patel replied.

“Either side of what, the bestiality?”

“Yes.”

“So you disqualified the animal?”

“Well, we have great canines, but we’re not going to disqualify [them],” Patel said, a poor attempt at a joke.

“I’m trying to understand why you did this.... And I understand the game. People try to make you look bad. We do the same thing when the other party’s in office,” Kennedy continued. “Why would you even get into bestiality?”

“We are not into bestiality—”

“I know you’re not, but you changed the qualifications and mentioned bestiality. If if Joe participated in bestiality—not as the animal but as the human—don’t you think he ought to be disqualified?” Kennedy raised, still confused.

“If he voluntarily did it, sure. But if he was trafficked into it…”

“How do you involuntarily do it?”

“In a lot of these cases, when human traffickers … they don’t just traffic you for prostitution. They traffic you for degrading acts of all kinds,” Patel said. “And some of these individuals would go on to be law enforcement officers, who qualified to be law enforcement officers and later applied to the FBI.”

“When you saw bestiality, I say this with respect. The person who recommended it, why didn’t you just say, “What planet did you parachute in from? Why do I wanna lead with my chin and get into bestiality?!” Kennedy hollered.

“That was my initial response, senator. But they then explained to me and showed me cases in which people were forced into it and had applied to the FBI, and so I thought they should be considered. It’s not an automatic disqualification. That’s all,” Patel said, alluding to an apparently significant number of bestiality victims who want to join the FBI.

“Okay, all right. I think I understand. But you’re not telling us today that if a human being had sex with an animal, that they can still be an FBI agent,” Kennedy asked.

“No, they cannot.”

“In fact, they oughta be in jail right?”

“They all are.”

“Yeah, well. OK.”

PATEL: The previous regulation automatically disqualified any individual who participated in either side of it

KENNEDY: Either side of beastiality? So you disqualified the animal?

PATEL: Well, we have great canines, but we're not going to disqualify them

KENNEDY: I'm trying to… pic.twitter.com/I2oJH6XKJf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 15, 2026

Founded by veteran e-commerce entrepreneur Marc Lore, Wonder is slowly building a massive portfolio of restaurants and delivery companies.

Joseph diGenova’s resignation from the Justice Department last Thursday lays bare the degradation in the department under Todd Blanche. It is not simply the collapse of one crackpot investigation. It is a window into the fundamental corruption that now runs through the DOJ; the replacement of law and evidence with the raw political will of Donald Trump.

It’s important to the story that diGenova is a consummate Trump loyalist. He aligned himself with the Rudy Giuliani–Sidney Powell–Jenna Ellis effort challenging the election results, and more generally adopted the (meritless) article of faith that the 2020 campaign was stolen. And he was a prominent voice on Fox News insisting that the Russia inquiry was a law enforcement plot to frame Trump.

He is one of the president’s own. Descriptions of him typically append the kenning “Trump loyalist” or “longtime Trump ally.” But diGenova is also a former federal prosecutor—a real one, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under Ronald Reagan.

That was some 40 years ago, and he has not tried a case in the decades since. No matter. Any criminal prosecutor who came up in the department in that era was steeped in the axioms set out in the Principles of Federal Prosecution that govern every legitimate federal charge. You do not indict unless you believe the target is guilty and you believe you can prove it to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. To translate it into diGenova’s terms: evidence and witnesses. They are the sine qua non of federal prosecution, and they are precisely the same principles Todd Blanche himself was schooled in as an assistant United States attorney in New York.

Those most basic of commands have been abandoned in this DOJ. They have become disposable the moment they collide with Trump’s political preferences. And when diGenova, a partisan of the first order, hit the point where he was being told to indict without the basic goods, he balked. Reading between the lines of a resignation, his exit is a quiet, devastating verdict on Todd Blanche’s tenure and the department he now runs.

The investigation that diGenova stepped away from is what Trump’s allies reverently call the “grand conspiracy.” It’s amorphous and protean, but in essence it’s the theory that everyone who ever scrutinized Trump since 2016 was secretly part of one coordinated plot to destroy him. Barack Obama. John Brennan. James Comey. James Clapper. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. The Russia investigation, the classified-documents case, all of it, braided into a single decade-long scheme.

But there is no such thing, on the facts and the law. “Grand conspiracy” is not a concept in federal law. There is no statute, no charge, nothing in the United States Code by that name. It is not a legal theory at all. It is a MAGA wet dream, a holy grail cherished by the most fevered corner of Trumpworld, with no possible purchase in an actual courtroom.

The first prosecutor on the case saw exactly that. Maria Medetis Long, a seasoned career national security prosecutor in South Florida, balked at bringing charges faster than the evidence would support. She was pushed off the investigation in the spring for her trouble.

Enter diGenova, eagerly. Days after Medetis Long was shown the door, he was sworn in as counselor to the attorney general in April with marching orders to bring home the grand conspiracy. DiGenova vowed to do so.

After several months passed, diGenova began to get crosswise with Main Justice. The department had grown impatient with his pace, believed he was slow-rolling the whole thing, and sent prosecutors down to Florida from Washington to speed him along. He sidelined them, and the standoff only deepened, until someone told him last week that he had lost the confidence of his superiors.

If it was a move designed to get him to accelerate the work, it backfired: Last Thursday, diGenova resigned. His resignation statement itself was courtly and anodyne: “It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” he told CNN. But his subsequent statements leave no doubt about the corrupt nature of the pressure he was experiencing from Main Justice.

DiGenova is an old Washington hand, used to working the press, and he has given several post-resignation statements. I expect that he’s not done talking.

He spoke to the New York Post and delivered the bombshell line: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

That’s radioactive. It charges the administration with pushing to indict a grand conspiracy with no evidence, and disparages it as unethical. And this from a brass-knuckles “Trump loyalist,” not a prissy ethics specialist.

To CNN, he played the longtime institutionalist card. “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old-fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.” More blood drawn. The new crowd makes cases the 2026 way: whatever and whenever Donald Trump says, with the innocence or guilt of the defendant an immaterial detail so long as Trump has it in for you. And the attorney general, who was trained under the same long-standing regime as diGenova, publicly champions that abomination.

We needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, ascribe choir-boy rectitude to diGenova, a man who among other things has been a Republican operative before and after his stint as U.S. attorney. He’s likely attending to his own reputation. He is 81 years old and near the end of a long career, and he is not going to let the second paragraph of his obituary read that he railroaded innocent people into a lawless prosecution to please a president.

That just makes his parting shot all the more potent. He fired his arrow directly into the DOJ’s Achilles’ heel. The fact is, everyone from Blanche on down knows that the department’s treatment of Trump’s enemies is indefensible. I have written about this at length, and I will not stop writing about it. The actual embrace of prosecutions of innocent enemies whom Trump simply wants to immiserate is the most grotesque corruption in the history of the Department of Justice. The department has gone awry before, but never before in Trump 2.0 did it leap to eviscerate its most sacred responsibility of doing justice without fear or favor.

Blanche makes a show of defending Trump’s prerogative to prosecute anyone he chooses. But when the spotlight shines on the practice, he and everyone else has to scurry away like cockroaches. DiGenova’s resigning blow hit home precisely because it came from within the home team, and it made the obvious point that everyone, including Blanche, knows is true.

Nitter and XCancel, a pair of social media services which let you view posts on X without an X account, are down again after the latest round of legal wrangling. While the XCancel site now displays the message "Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice," Nitter's site is offline, and the code repository was archived on September 11, 2026. Things were not looking good in August for the services, which allowed a user to view posts on X (formerly Twitter) without an account or having to endure adverts and accept trackers. X's lawyers fired off a cease-and-desist letter, and the services acquiesced, going offline while the implications were digested. A few weeks later, the services were back up and running. At the time, zedeus, Nitter's maintainer, wrote, "an announcement will be made within a week, once we're able to reveal more information." Alas, that "more information" appears to be another cessation. XCancel wrote simply, "We can't share more details," and added a link to X for users keen for content. It is difficult to say for sure if and when the services might be back, or if users have headed elsewhere for their microblogging fix. Users not wishing to sign up for an X account have plenty of alternatives – Mastodon and Bluesky, for example. X has considerable form when it comes to rolling out the lawyers to fend off perceived threats or alleged abuses of its services, and is perfectly within its rights to do so. In the case of Nitter (and XCancel, which uses the project), the concern likely centered on how posts were viewed without an account, JavaScript, or ads. X also attempted to defend the Twitter and blue bird trademark and branding in a spat with tweet.app. It kept hold of Twitter (despite ditching the name after Musk's takeover), but tweet.app snapped up the word 'tweet' and the bird imagery. That's for the time being, at least. ®

Iran has inflicted heavy damage on U.S. installations across the Middle East since February, much more than had been previously disclosed.

On Monday, the Department of Defense inspector general released an official account of U.S. losses from February 28 to June 30 to Congress, and the findings are stark. The military lost dozens of aircraft, including drones, fighter jets, helicopters, and refueling tankers. Hundreds of buildings on U.S. bases were damaged or destroyed by Iran, including extensive damage to the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain in a February 28 drone attack. U.S. munitions have been depleted, with supply chains to restock them hit with bottlenecks.

The U.S. spent close to $22.3 billion on munitions and $33.4 billion on the war in general in that four-month period. At least 11 U.S. service members were “killed in action,” while another seven were killed in “non-hostile events.” At least 417 U.S. troops were wounded in the war as of June 30. U.S. diplomatic facilities were damaged to the tune of $184 million in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

All of this doesn’t include the costs and damage sustained since hostilities resumed in July. Iran captured a U.S. submersible Dive-LD earlier this month and traded attacks on oil tankers with the U.S. last week.

As the war continues, the White House has requested $87.6 billion in emergency supplemental funding, including $67.1 billion for the Pentagon itself. Senior White House officials have warned President Trump behind closed doors that the war could stretch through the end of 2028. The war has hurt the global and U.S. economy, and sent gas prices skyrocketing. Billions of taxpayers are essentially being set on fire for a war that wasn’t even necessary to begin with.

Experienced IT leaders know that shadow IT is a persistent problem, but rapidly evolving AI and the proliferation of agents mean the potential threat - and cost - is greater than ever. AI agents are non-deterministic, autonomous, and adaptable. They excel at solving tasks in creative ways, often to the surprise of their creators. We've seen agents write blogs that criticize project maintainers that refused their pull requests. Another one hacked a McKinsey chatbot to gain read/write access without asking for permission. And agents are getting smarter all the time. As an industry veteran, DigiCert's senior vice president of product Brian Trzupek sees an old pattern. "When the promise of the technology is so good, people are willing to throw security out the window, and they just want to get to that promise real fast." CISOs should be worried about allowing these agents into their infrastructure without strict controls, but it's happening anyway. IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report found that more organizations lacked governance to manage AI or detect shadow AI, at 68 percent compared to 63 percent last year. The number requiring IT approval to deploy AI had fallen to 38 percent from 45 percent. DigiCert is trying to solve this problem with its own approach to AI governance called AI Trust. The framework, outlined in this white paper, builds on what the company is good at: public key infrastructure, DNS, and attestation. The AI governance questions CISOs should ask AI Trust uses these tools to help organizations answer five AI governance questions: · What agents your employees are using · What regulated data is flowing to them · Whose credentials they hold · Whether a compromised agent can be stopped immediately · Whether an incident can be reconstructed with a tamper-evident trail Almost every enterprise fails at the first hurdle, warns Trzupek. Developers build agents or buy them from vendors and deploy them internally without asking. Users might also spawn agents from inside tools like Claude Desktop or OpenAI Codex that will then create sub-agents. "Those sub-agents don't assume the same rights and responsibilities and authorization as the parent agent," he says. "So they try to delegate tasks that can be wholly controlled." How to manage AI agent identity Most companies haven't developed the tools to keep track of all these different agent types yet. The first step is to identify them. This is where many organizations make their first mistake by bolting agents onto the human identity and access management (IAM) stack they already have. The idea is that if you give an agent a service account and a long-lived API key you can treat them like a super-fast employee. That's impractical. "IAM was built for a human sitting at a keyboard who can tap 'approve' on their phone," Trzupek says. "An agent can't do that. So you fall back to a static API key that never expires and has way more scope than it needs, and now you've undone everything zero trust was supposed to give you. It's the exact credential we've spent a decade telling people to get rid of." Industry bodies have started converging on a different answer. IDC now recommends treating agent identity as a workload identity problem rather than an extension of human IAM, aligning with the IETF's Workload Identity Management and Security Extensions (WIMSE) and NIST's Cybersecurity Framework version 2.0. They can then frame agents as governed workloads requiring runtime attestation and short-lived credentials . This idea also pushes teams toward the Service Profile Identity (SPIFFE) and its SPIFFE Registration Endpoint (SPIRE). This is an open workload identity standard already deployed inside many hyperscaler-hosted Kubernetes estates, and they're part of DigiCert's AI strategy. DNS is a governance tool for agentic AI Inventory and identity might get you visibility, but you still need somewhere to enforce policy. DigiCert has strong opinions about where, tied to its history managing DNS integrity. No matter whether an agent is resolving an API endpoint or connecting to an MCP server, it has to query DNS first. So why not make that a core verification point? DigiCert proposes a solution that looks a lot like the DMARC standard used for email. An organization would publish an agent policy record in DNS that declares several things: · Its authorized agent identities · The certificate authority that issued their credentials · The scopes they're allowed to act within A gateway can then query that record to verify whether an inbound agent is legit, and terminate the session if the check fails . And if an agent contacts an unauthorized domain mid-execution, DNS can block the query and the MCP gateway kills the session. IDC likes this idea but warns that scale is an issue. As the number of agents grows, DNS records might not keep up, and stale records might become a loophole. Overly permissive scope declarations are also still a potential problem. "The scale problem is real, but it's the same problem DNS has solved a hundred times before," Trzupek responds. "You automate the lifecycle, you tie the record to the certificate issuance, and when the cert expires the record goes with it." And operators writing wildcard scopes because they're in a hurry is a discipline problem, not an architecture problem, he adds. Inside DigiCert's AI Passport Agents built in-house live alongside third-party agents like Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce and ServiceNow, and the control planes for the two categories are different. DigiCert's answer is a single SPIRE server anchored to a DigiCert CA for identity, with policy enforced centrally in an Open Policy Agent engine, and a unified kill switch that operates across both categories. The AI Agent Passport is the artifact that ties the identity to the authorization. It's a cryptographically protected record of approved systems and permitted operations. Each 'passport' also contains things like data sensitivity classifications and expiration state, along with an accountable human owner. Trzupek says the field that generates the most pushback in the design is policy itself, because customers typically have a complex web of policies already in GCP or AWS. "Trying to replace those or displace them is a fool's errand," he says. So the passport can hold pointers to those engines rather than replacing them. How to manage model integrity Governing agents is only half of the challenge. The models themselves are strategic assets, and they're subject to integrity and provenance controls too. That means encryption and cryptographic signing of model artifacts, Open Container Initiative-compliant packaging with tools like the Sigstore code signing initiative, and a cryptographically verifiable Model bill of materials describing weights, datasets and dependencies . It also means governing models at runtime, not just securing the supply chain. DigiCert's AI Trust framework advocates trusted hardware execution to help solve that problem. A model running inside a trusted execution environment on Intel TDX or AMD SEV-SNP stays encrypted in memory, isolated from the host OS. DigiCert operates a confidential computing attestation service that follows the IETF Remote ATtestation Procedures (RATS) architecture. The execution environment is the attester and DigiCert is the verifier. Downstream systems are the relying parties. This approach moves attestation from a neutral third party rather than the cloud operator running the workload, which serves regulated buyers. Hyperscalers shouldn't attest to their own integrity. Those regulated buyers face some heavy governance conversations. In healthcare, the question is whether the AI model cleared through an FDA 510(k) pathway is the exact algorithm running in clinical deployment. Cryptographic attestation lets these companies prove model integrity before every inference. That addresses the FDA's 2023 cybersecurity guidance on software integrity verification and SBOM enforcement. But while some regulated verticals have specific needs, AI governance is a cross-sector problem. Any organization storing customer data an agent can access or exfiltrate needs these controls. Why build in AI governance now This is agentic AI's moment, so companies are at a pivot point, and they've been here before. Many of them spent the last 25 years following a cybersecurity antipattern: move fast to grab an opportunity with a significant new technology development, and call in the security team later to clean up the loose ends. It hasn't gone well. With many organizations at the beginning of their agentic AI journey, they now have an opportunity to break that habit and do things right from the beginning using verifiable controls. As frontier model prices climb and AI crops up as a noticeable cost on enterprise budgets, this will become an increasingly visible choice, concludes Trzupek. Companies will hold people more accountable for their use of agentic technology. Wouldn't it be nice to have the controls in place and be ahead of the game for once? Sponsored by DigiCert

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