Policy – Page 9

Senate staff probes DOGE, finds locked doors and windows covered with trash bags

doge, numident, Policy, social security database / Paul Patrick / September 26, 2025

Pay no attention to the DOGE behind the curtain

Democratic report describes Social Security risk and secretive DOGE offices.

A protest against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk in New York on February 19, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Pacific Press

Multiple whistleblowers alleged that DOGE uploaded a highly sensitive Social Security Administration (SSA) database to an unmonitored cloud environment, according to a report by Senate Democratic staff. The staff report describes an investigation into DOGE activities at three agencies, including a site visit at the General Services Administration (GSA) in which DOGE officials appeared to be hiding certain areas from view.

As we reported last month, then-SSA Chief Data Officer Chuck Borges alleged that DOGE officials created “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment that circumvents oversight.” At least one other whistleblower has apparently made the same allegation.

Whistleblowers, including Borges, alleged “that Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old DOGE staffer who was previously fired from a job for leaking company data to a competitor, and other DOGE personnel had been granted permission to move highly sensitive SSA data into an unmonitored cloud environment,” the Senate Democratic report said. “The whistleblowers said that DOGE has uploaded a live copy of NUMIDENT, which contains highly sensitive personal data on anyone who has held a Social Security number, including every American. This includes Social Security numbers (SSNs), place and date of birth, work permit status, and parents’ names, among other sensitive personal information, for all Americans, to a cloud environment.”

SSA Chief Information Officers Michael Russo and Aram Moghaddassi, who are described as “DOGE-affiliated,” allegedly “granted approval for the data move despite a June 12, 2025, internal risk assessment flagging a high level of risk and potentially catastrophic impact to SSA beneficiaries and SSA programs absent additional controls to safeguard against unauthorized access,” the report said.

That internal risk assessment by SSA employees “evaluated the likelihood of such catastrophic impact to be between 35 and 65 percent,” with the potential for widespread disclosure of personally identifiable information, the report said.

Windows “hastily covered with black trash bags and tape”

Democratic staffers investigated DOGE activities at the SSA, GSA, and Office of Personnel Management (OPM), resulting in the report written by staff for Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. The report criticized the agencies for lack of cooperation.

“None of the agencies have allowed meetings with representatives from agency DOGE teams. In the DOGE spaces staff were permitted to view, armed guards controlled access to work and living spaces, rooms were locked, and office windows appeared to have been hastily covered with black trash bags and tape,” the report said.

At the GSA building, “officials refused to show staff at least six offices that GSA had allowed DOGE to convert into bedrooms,” and refused to show staff the agency’s Starlink broadband equipment, the report said. In another instance described by the report, “GSA officials said they did not have the key to open a locked room that had windows covered with black paper, trash bags, and tape. When staff asked why the most senior officials in offices charged with building management and security could not open an office door, GSA could not provide an answer.”

The report said that during a site visit at the SSA building, the DOGE workspace was guarded by armed security. “SSA officials providing the tour confirmed that this level of security was unusual,” the report said. “When staff asked why the additional security for the DOGE workspace was needed, Mr. [Dan] Callahan [the Assistant Commissioner for Building and Facilities Management] said that DOGE staff were concerned about threats to their safety. Staff asked whether these were direct threats and whether officials informed law enforcement. Officials explained that there had not been a specific threat, rather that some DOGE staff felt threatened based on a communication with an SSA employee that ‘included cursing.'”

Aside from the security guard, the DOGE offices appeared to be empty on a Thursday afternoon, the report said. Senate staff were told “that DOGE staff had telework agreements with the agency. SSA officials confirmed that DOGE were the only individuals who had this approved telework structure in the entire CIO’s office. SSA officials could not answer questions about the telework agreements, including a reason for the telework exception and who approved the agreements.”

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, said that “DOGE isn’t making government more efficient—it’s putting Americans’ sensitive information in the hands of completely unqualified and untrustworthy individuals. They are bypassing cybersecurity protections, evading oversight, and putting Americans’ personal data at risk.”

Agencies didn’t answer many questions, report says

SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano previously denied the whistleblower allegations in a letter to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). The cloud environment “is actually a secured server in the agency’s cloud infrastructure which historically has housed this data and is continuously monitored and overseen—SSA’s standard practice,” the letter said.

The Senate Democratic staff report said the agencies did not answer many of the questions posed during the investigation:

In response to these questions, senior officials at SSA, GSA, and OPM all failed to provide information about who was in charge; what conduct DOGE teams were engaged in; and what data those teams had been given access to, including the authorities and restrictions guiding their access. None of the agencies could answer simple questions about organizational charts and employee roles. During oversight trips, GSA and OPM would not even directly acknowledge the existence of their DOGE teams—despite the fact that Executive Order 14158 requires each agency to have a DOGE team comprised of at least four people. At the OPM site visit, officials provided staff with information that directly contradicted court documents filed on the agency’s behalf… None of the agencies have responded to staff’s follow-up questions, including whether they are in compliance with federal law.

The Senate staff report said that OPM’s “political leadership were determined to deny any existence of DOGE at the agency,” despite evidence to the contrary. When staff visited OPM, offices were mostly empty and “leadership had difficulty answering a series of basic questions about the agency’s organization and staffing,” the report said.

When contacted by Ars today, the SSA did not provide any new response to the Senate staff report but instead pointed us to the Bisignano letter that we wrote about last week.

“I can confirm, based on the agency’s thorough review, that neither the Numident database nor any of its data has been accessed, leaked, hacked, or shared in any unauthorized fashion,” Bisignano wrote in the letter. “SSA continuously monitors its systems for any signs of unauthorized access or data compromise, and we have not detected any such incidents involving the Numident database.”

An OPM spokesperson said in a statement provided to Ars today, “OPM takes its responsibility to safeguard federal personnel records seriously. This report recycles unfounded claims about so-called ‘DOGE teams’ that simply have never existed at OPM. Federal employees at OPM conduct their work in line with longstanding law, security, and compliance requirements. Instead of rehashing baseless allegations, Senate Democrats should focus their efforts on the real challenges facing the federal workforce. OPM remains committed to transparency, accountability, and delivering for the American people.”

We contacted the GSA today and will update this article if it provides a response.

Report warns adversaries could hack database

While there’s no reported breach, the Senate Democratic report warned that the SSA’s cloud environment could be hacked by foreign adversaries, including “Russia, China, and Iran, who regularly attempt cyber attacks on the US government and critical infrastructure.”

The report urged the Trump administration to “immediately shut down the new cloud environment at SSA that contains NUMIDENT data,” and take other actions such as revoking DOGE access to personal data “until agencies certify that all agency personnel are in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the Privacy Act, the Federal Records Act.” But Democrats’ ability to influence the administration is limited at best, particularly with Republicans holding majorities in both the House and Senate.

DOGE sought access to Social Security data as part of an effort to uncover evidence of fraud. A federal judge wrote in March that DOGE “is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.” In June, the Supreme Court allowed DOGE to access SSA records, overturning lower-court decisions that imposed some limits on data access.

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

Senate staff probes DOGE, finds locked doors and windows covered with trash bags Read More »

Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege

Amazon, Apple, Google, H-1B visas, Meta, microsoft, Policy / Rejus Almole / September 25, 2025

Tech firms pressed to explain if H-1B workers are paid less than US workers.

Senators are demanding answers from Big Tech companies accused of “filing thousands of H-1B skilled labor visa petitions after conducting mass layoffs of American employees.”

In letters sent to Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, and Microsoft—among some of the largest sponsors of H-1B visas—Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) requested “information and data from each company regarding their recruitment and hiring practices, as well as any variation in salary and benefits between H-1B visa holders and American employees.”

The letters came shortly after Grassley sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem requesting that DHS stop “issuing work authorizations to student visa holders.” According to Grassley, “foreign student work authorizations put America at risk of technological and corporate espionage,” in addition to allegedly “contributing to rising unemployment rates among college-educated Americans.”

If DHS refuses to stop authorizing the visas, Grassley requested a “detailed explanation of what legal authority DHS is relying on to issue these authorizations.” He suggested that the authorization violates a law intended to ensure that only highly skilled workers and top talents that can’t be found in the US are granted visas.

In the letters to tech firms, senators emphasized that the unemployment rate in America’s tech sector is “well above” the overall jobless rate.

Amazon perhaps faces the most scrutiny. US Citizenship and Immigration Services data showed that Amazon sponsored the most H-1B visas in 2024 at 14,000, compared to other criticized firms like Microsoft and Meta, which each sponsored 5,000, The Wall Street Journal reported. Senators alleged that Amazon blamed layoffs of “tens of thousands” on the “adoption of generative AI tools,” then hired more than 10,000 foreign H-1B employees in 2025.

The letter similarly called out Meta for its “year of efficiency,” laying off “a quarter of its workforce” between 2022 and 2023. Meta followed that with more layoffs impacting 3,500 employees in 2025, Senators noted, while receiving approval to hire more than 5,000 H-1B employees.

Senators also pushed Google to explain why it “laid off tens-of-thousands of employees in recent years” despite “enjoying record profits.”

“With all of the homegrown American talent relegated to the sidelines, we find it hard to believe that [you] cannot find qualified American tech workers to fill these positions,” senators scolded tech firms, demanding responses by October 10.

That’s the same deadline that Grassley gave Noem to respond about stopping student visa authorizations. If Noem agrees, that would likely also include cutting off “a pathway for students to work in the US for around 12 to 36 months immediately after completing their degree,” Hindustan Times reported, noting that students from India were likely to be most harmed by the proposed change.

Asked for comment on whether Noem would meet the deadline, DHS told Ars that “Congressional correspondence will be handled through official channels.”

Ars reached out to tech firms, but only Microsoft immediately responded, declining to comment.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee spooks startups

On X, Grassley noted that the recent pressure campaign revives an effort to change H-1B visa approval processes that he and Durbin have worked to oppose since 2023.

Back then, the senators introduced the H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act, alleging that “for years” companies have “used legal loopholes to displace qualified American workers and replace them with foreign workers who are paid subpar wages and put in exploitative working conditions.”

That legislation sought to “put an end” to “abuses” by placing new wage requirements on employers and new education requirements, only approving visas for specialty occupations that required “a bachelor’s degree or higher.” If passed, employers risked fines for violating wage requirements.

But despite having bipartisan support and a stamp of approval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who has long argued H-1B visas “replace American” workers “with cheaper international workers,” The Guardian noted—the bill died after being referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Now the White House is forcing changes after Donald Trump issued an executive order last week requiring all companies sponsoring new H-1B employees to pay a $100,000 fee to bring them into the US, which started Sunday.

Trump claimed the fee was necessary to stop the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program from being “deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.”

To support this, the order cited data showing that the number of “foreign STEM workers in the United States has more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, increasing from 1.2 million to almost 2.5 million, while overall STEM employment has only increased 44.5 percent during that time.”

Attacking the tech sector in particular, the order also noted that “the share of IT workers in the H-1B program grew from 32 percent” in 2003 to “an average of over 65 percent” in the last five years. According to Trump, tech firms are incentivized to “close their IT divisions, fire their American staff, and outsource IT jobs to lower-paid foreign workers,” due to “artificially lower labor costs” the H-1B program supposedly creates.

“American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance,” Trump’s order said. “This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.”

By imposing the $100,000 fee, Trump claims that companies will be forced to use the H-1B program the way “it was intended”—motivated to pay more for certain foreign workers in order “to fill jobs for which highly skilled and educated American workers are unavailable.” Speaking last Friday, Trump suggested that money collected from the fees would be used to “reduce taxes” and “reduce debt,” The Guardian reported.

The order also proposed a new weighted lottery system, where applications for visas for jobs with the highest wages would be more likely to be approved than lower-wage jobs. For some firms, changes to the system may feel personal, as The Guardian noted that Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella “were at one point H-1B visa holders.”

Most tech companies haven’t commented directly on the order, with Netflix founder Reed Hastings standing out among the few voicing support for the change, while other firms internally warned workers to limit travel until companies understood how the process could impact existing H-1B employees. Since then, the White House has confirmed that only new applicants will be impacted by the changes.

Previously, tech firms only had to pay somewhere between $1,700 to $4,500, “depending on whether the visa was expedited,” The Guardian reported. Now facing a much larger fee to hire foreign talent, smaller tech firms have complained that Trump’s policy advantages Big Tech firms with deeper pockets, The New York Times reported. The fee may also deter companies from coming into the US, the Times reported.

Some believe that Trump’s policy is short-sighted, with startups particularly panicked. While Big Tech firms can afford to pay the fees, the US risks falling behind in innovation and tech leadership, critics told the Times, as “Silicon Valley relies on a steady stream of start-ups to advance new ideas and technologies.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Amazon blamed AI for layoffs, then hired cheap H1-B workers, senators allege Read More »

Amazon agrees to make canceling Prime easy, will refund customers $1.5B

Amazon, Amazon Prime, consumer harms, e-commerce, federal trade commission, ftc, Policy / Kris Guyer / September 25, 2025

Amazon must also post prominent disclosures describing how auto-renewals and cancellations work, as well as offer “an easy way for consumers to cancel Prime, using the same method that consumers used to sign up.”

“The process cannot be difficult, costly, or time-consuming,” the FTC said.

Moving forward, Amazon must also pay for “an independent, third-party supervisor to monitor Amazon’s compliance” with the distribution of customer refunds.

Celebrating the victory after a 3–0 vote approving the settlement, FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson described Amazon’s $2.5 billion payout as a “record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel.”

The press release cited internal documents in which Amazon executives and employees “knowingly discussed” how hard it was to cancel Prime, exchanging messages admitting that “subscription driving is a bit of a shady world” and suggesting that forcing unwanted subscriptions was “an unspoken cancer.”

“The evidence showed that Amazon used sophisticated subscription traps designed to manipulate consumers into enrolling in Prime and then made it exceedingly hard for consumers to end their subscription,” Ferguson said. “Today, we are putting billions of dollars back into Americans’ pockets and making sure Amazon never does this again.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Amazon agrees to make canceling Prime easy, will refund customers $1.5B Read More »

Apple demands EU repeal the Digital Markets Act

Apple, Policy / Mike M. / September 25, 2025

In June, the company announced changes to its app store policy in an attempt to avoid being further penalized by Brussels.

Apple argues the bloc’s digital rules have made it harder to do business in Europe and worsened consumers’ experience.

In a post on Thursday, the company said the DMA was leaving European consumers with fewer choices and creating an unfair competitive landscape—contrary to the law’s own goals.

For example, Apple said it had had to delay certain features, such as live translation via its AirPods, to make sure they complied with the DMA’s requirement for “interoperability.” The EU rules specify that apps and devices made by one company need to work with those made by competitors.

“Despite our concerns with the DMA, teams across Apple are spending thousands of hours to bring new features to the European Union while meeting the law’s requirements. But it’s become clear that we can’t solve every problem the DMA creates,” the company said.

A European Commission spokesperson said it was normal that companies sometimes “need more time to make their products compliant” and that the commission was helping companies to do so.

The spokesperson also said that “DMA compliance is not optional, it’s an obligation.”

Apple demands EU repeal the Digital Markets Act Read More »

Taiwan starts weaponizing chip access after US urged it to, expert says

china, chips, Policy, semiconductors, South Africa, Taiwan, us-china trade war / Paul Patrick / September 24, 2025

Taiwan has begun evolving its trade strategy to start wielding its dominant position as a leading supplier of cutting-edge chips as a weapon, Bloomberg reported.

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s heightening global trade war and after years of Taiwan’s use of its chip dominance as a shield against Chinese aggression, with Taiwan allying with the US to stave off China’s threats of invasion. Under the so-called “one-China principle,” China has rejected Taiwan’s independence, requiring allies to sever ties with Taiwan.

On Tuesday, Taiwan announced that it would be limiting shipments of semiconductors into South Africa—among 47 restricted products—due to national security concerns. The rare export curbs could hit South Africa’s “electronics, telecom, and auto parts sectors” hard, MSN reported, if South Africa doesn’t meet with Taiwan to discuss better terms within the next 60 days.

As Bloomberg previously reported, Taiwan is upset that South Africa unilaterally moved to relocate Taiwan’s embassy from Pretoria to Johannesburg after meeting with China’s president, Xi Jinping, in 2023. As a major ally to China, South Africa recently intensified pressure to move the embassy in July ahead of another meeting in November that Xi is expected to attend—attempting to signal that South Africa was weakening ties with Taiwan, as China had demanded.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately protested South Africa’s efforts in July, accusing South Africa of suppressing Taiwan and promising countermeasures if South Africa refused to consult with Taiwan on the embassy relocation.

In a statement, South Africa’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri, insisted that South Africa’s ties with Taiwan are “non-political,” while noting that “South Africa is a critical supplier of platinum group metals, like palladium, essential to the global semiconductor industry,” Bloomberg reported.

On Wednesday, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, criticized Taiwan’s export curbs as “a deliberate move to destabilize global chip industrial and supply chains and counter the prevailing international commitment to the one-China principle by weaponizing chips.”

Taiwan starts weaponizing chip access after US urged it to, expert says Read More »

The DHS has been quietly harvesting DNA from Americans for years

Crime database, DHS, DNA, fbi, genetic fingerprinting, Policy, privacy, syndicatin, syndication / Paul Patrick / September 24, 2025

The DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens has been entered into an FBI crime database.

For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have been quietly harvesting DNA from American citizens, including minors, and funneling the samples into an FBI crime database, government data shows. This expansion of genetic surveillance was never authorized by Congress for citizens, children, or civil detainees.

According to newly released government data analyzed by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide system for policing investigations. An estimated 95 were minors, some as young as 14. The entries also include travelers never charged with a crime and dozens of cases where agents left the “charges” field blank. In other files, officers invoked civil penalties as justification for swabs that federal law reserves for criminal arrests.

The findings appear to point to a program running outside the bounds of statute or oversight, experts say, with CBP officers exercising broad discretion to capture genetic material from Americans and have it funneled into a law-enforcement database designed in part for convicted offenders. Critics warn that anyone added to the database could endure heightened scrutiny by US law enforcement for life.

“Those spreadsheets tell a chilling story,” Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, tells WIRED. “They show DNA taken from people as young as 4 and as old as 93—and, as our new analysis found, they also show CBP flagrantly violating the law by taking DNA from citizens without justification.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

For more than two decades, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, has been billed as a tool for violent crime investigations. But under both recent policy changes and the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, the system has become a catchall repository for genetic material collected far outside the criminal justice system.

One of the sharpest revelations came from DHS data released earlier this year showing that CBP and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have been systematically funneling cheek swabs from immigrants—and, in many cases, US citizens—into CODIS. What was once a program aimed at convicted offenders now sweeps in children at the border, families questioned at airports, and people held on civil—not criminal—grounds. WIRED previously reported that DNA from minors as young as 4 had ended up in the FBI’s database, alongside elderly people in their 90s, with little indication of how or why the samples were taken.

The scale is staggering. According to Georgetown researchers, DHS has contributed roughly 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020—far above earlier projections and a surge that has reshaped the database. By December 2024, CODIS’s “detainee” index contained over 2.3 million profiles; by April 2025, the figure had already climbed to more than 2.6 million. Nearly all of these samples—97 percent—were collected under civil, not criminal, authority. At the current pace, according to Georgetown Law’s estimates, which are based on DHS projections, Homeland Security files alone could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034.

The expansion has been driven by specific legal and bureaucratic levers. Foremost was an April 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked a long-standing waiver allowing DHS to skip DNA collection from immigration detainees, effectively green-lighting mass sampling. Later that summer, the FBI signed off on rules that let police booking stations run arrestee cheek swabs through Rapid DNA machines—automated devices that can spit out CODIS-ready profiles in under two hours.

The strain of the changes became apparent in subsequent years. Former FBI director Christopher Wray warned during Senate testimony in 2023 that the flood of DNA samples from DHS threatened to overwhelm the bureau’s systems. The 2020 rule change, he said, had pushed the FBI from a historic average of a few thousand monthly submissions to 92,000 per month—over 10 times its traditional intake. The surge, he cautioned, had created a backlog of roughly 650,000 unprocessed kits, raising the risk that people detained by DHS could be released before DNA checks produced investigative leads.

Under Trump’s renewed executive order on border enforcement, signed in January 2025, DHS agencies were instructed to deploy “any available technologies” to verify family ties and identity, a directive that explicitly covers genetic testing. This month, federal officials announced they were soliciting new bids to install Rapid DNA at local booking facilities around the country, with combined awards of up to $3 million available.

“The Department of Homeland Security has been piloting a secret DNA collection program of American citizens since 2020. Now, the training wheels have come off,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “In 2025, Congress handed DHS a $178 billion check, making it the nation’s costliest law enforcement agency, even as the president gutted its civil rights watchdogs and the Supreme Court repeatedly signed off on unconstitutional tactics.”

Oversight bodies and lawmakers have raised alarms about the program. As early as 2021, the DHS inspector general found the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection and that years of noncompliance can undermine public safety—echoing an earlier rebuke from the Office of Special Counsel, which called CBP’s failures an “unacceptable dereliction.”

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Kans.) more recently pressed DHS and DOJ for explanations about why children’s DNA is being captured and whether CODIS has any mechanism to reject improperly obtained samples, saying the program was never intended to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens, warning the children are likely to be “treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”

Rights advocates allege that CBP’s DNA collection program has morphed into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime, with samples from migrants and even US citizens fed into criminal databases absent transparency, legal safeguards, or limits on retention. Georgetown’s privacy center points out that once DHS creates and uploads a CODIS profile, the government retains the physical DNA sample indefinitely, with no procedure to revisit or remove profiles when the legality of the detention is in doubt.

In parallel, Georgetown and allied groups have sued DHS over its refusal to fully release records about the program, highlighting how little the public knows about how DNA is being used, stored, or shared once it enters CODIS.

Taken together, these revelations may suggest a quiet repurposing of CODIS. A system long described as a forensic breakthrough is being remade into a surveillance archive—sweeping up immigrants, travelers, and US citizens alike, with few checks on the agents deciding whose DNA ends up in the federal government’s most intimate database.

“There’s much we still don’t know about DHS’s DNA collection activities,” Georgetown’s Glaberson says. “We’ve had to sue the agencies just to get them to do their statutory duty, and even then they’ve flouted court orders. The public has a right to know what its government is up to, and we’ll keep fighting to bring this program into the light.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

The DHS has been quietly harvesting DNA from Americans for years Read More »

Supreme Court lets Trump fire FTC Democrat despite 90-year-old precedent

ftc, Policy, president trump, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, White House / Tim Belzer / September 23, 2025

The Supreme Court yesterday allowed President Trump to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and will decide whether to overturn a 90-year-old precedent that says the president cannot fire an FTC commissioner without cause.

Trump fired Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter in March with a notice that said her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” Trump did so despite the 1935 ruling in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

An appeals court reinstated Slaughter three weeks ago, with judges finding that “the government has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent.” But on September 8, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts granted a stay that temporarily blocked the lower-court ruling against Trump.

The Supreme Court majority followed that up yesterday by granting a longer-term stay that will keep Slaughter off the FTC at least until the court rules on the merits of the case. The case will be scheduled for arguments in the December 2025 session.

“The parties are directed to brief and argue the following questions: (1) Whether the statutory removal protections for members of the Federal Trade Commission violate the separation of powers and, if so, whether Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U. S. 602 (1935), should be overruled. (2) Whether a federal court may prevent a person’s removal from public office, either through relief at equity or at law,” the Supreme Court said.

Kagan: Trump given control of independent agencies

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan wrote that the majority is continuing to use the court’s emergency docket “to permit what our own precedent bars,” “transfer government authority from Congress to the President,” and thus “reshape the Nation’s separation of powers.”

Supreme Court lets Trump fire FTC Democrat despite 90-year-old precedent Read More »

EU investigates Apple, Google, and Microsoft over handling of online scams

Apple, dma, EU, Financial Fraud, Google, microsoft, online scams, Policy, syndication / Tim Belzer / September 23, 2025

The EU is set to scrutinize if Apple, Google, and Microsoft are failing to adequately police financial fraud online, as it steps up efforts to police how Big Tech operates online.

The EU’s tech chief Henna Virkkunen told the Financial Times that on Tuesday, the bloc’s regulators would send formal requests for information to the three US Big Tech groups as well as global accommodation platform Booking Holdings, under powers granted under the Digital Services Act to tackle financial scams.

“We see that more and more criminal actions are taking place online,” Virkkunen said. “We have to make sure that online platforms really take all their efforts to detect and prevent that kind of illegal content.”

The move, which could later lead to a formal investigation and potential fines against the companies, comes amid transatlantic tensions over the EU’s digital rulebook. US President Donald Trump has threatened to punish countries that “discriminate” against US companies with higher tariffs.

Virkkunnen stressed the commission looked at the operations of individual companies, rather than where they were based. She will scrutinize how Apple and Google are handling fake applications in their app stores, such as fake banking apps.

She said regulators would also look at fake search results in the search engines of Google and Microsoft’s Bing. The bloc wants to have more information about the approach Booking Holdings, whose biggest subsidiary Booking.com is based in Amsterdam, is taking to fake accommodation listings. It is the only Europe-based company among the four set to be scrutinized.

EU investigates Apple, Google, and Microsoft over handling of online scams Read More »

After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC’s The View

brendan carr, Equal Time Rule, jimmy kimmel, Policy, The View / Rejus Almole / September 21, 2025

Carr: “Turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it.”

President-elect Donald Trump speaks to Brendan Carr, his intended pick for Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, as he attends a SpaceX Starship rocket launch on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas. Credit: Getty Images | Brandon Bell

After pressuring ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is setting his regulatory sights on ABC’s The View and NBC late-night hosts Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon.

Carr appeared yesterday on the radio show hosted by Scott Jennings, who describes himself as “the last man standing athwart the liberal mob.” Jennings asked Carr whether The View and other ABC programs violate FCC rules, and made a reference to President Trump calling on NBC to cancel Fallon and Meyers.

“A lot of people think there are other shows on ABC that maybe run afoul of this more often than Jimmy Kimmel,” Jennings said. “I’m thinking specifically of The View, and President Trump himself has mentioned Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers at NBC. Do you have comments on those shows, and are they doing what Kimmel did Monday night, and is it even worse on those programs in your opinion?”

In response, Carr discussed the FCC’s Equal Opportunities Rule, also known as the Equal Time Rule, and said the FCC could determine that those shows don’t qualify for an exemption to the rule.

“When you look at these other TV shows, what’s interesting is the FCC does have a rule called the Equal Opportunity Rule, which means, for instance, if you’re in the run-up to an election and you have one partisan elected official on, you have to give equal time, equal opportunity, to the opposing partisan politician,” Carr said.

At another point in the interview, Carr said broadcasters that object to FCC enforcement “can turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it.”

Bona fide news exemption

Carr said the FCC hasn’t previously enforced the rule on those shows because of an exemption for “bona fide news” programs. He said the FCC could determine the shows mentioned by Jennings aren’t exempt:

There’s an exception to that rule called the bona fide news exception, which means if you are a bona fide news program, you don’t have to abide by the Equal Opportunity Rule. Over the years, the FCC has developed a body of case law on that that has suggested that most of these late night shows, other than SNL, are bona fide news programs. I would assume you could make the argument that The View is a bona fide news show but I’m not so sure about that, and I think it’s worthwhile to have the FCC look into whether The View and some of these other programs you have still qualify as bona fide news programs and [are] therefore exempt from the Equal Opportunity regime that Congress has put in place.

The Equal Opportunity Rule applies to radio and TV broadcast stations with FCC licenses to use the airwaves. An FCC fact sheet explains that stations giving time to one candidate must provide “comparable time and placement to opposing candidates” upon request. The onus is on candidates to request air time—”the station is not required to seek out opposing legally qualified candidates and offer them Equal Opportunities,” the fact sheet says.

The exemption mentioned by Carr means that “appearances by legally qualified candidates on bona fide newscasts, interview programs, certain types of news documentaries, and during on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events are exempt from Equal Opportunities,” the fact sheet says.

In 1994, the FCC said that “Congress removed the inhibiting effect of the equal opportunities obligation upon bona fide news programming to encourage increased news coverage of political campaign activity.” Congress gave the FCC leeway to interpret the scope of bona fide news exemptions.

Referring to its 1988 ruling on Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment This Week, the FCC said it found that “the principal consideration should be ‘whether the program reports news of some area of current events… in a manner similar to more traditional newscasts.’ The Commission has thus declined to evaluate the relative quality or significance of the topics and stories selected for newscast coverage, relying instead on the broadcaster’s good faith news judgment.”

Carr’s allegations

Carr alleged in November 2024 that NBC putting Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live before the election was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.” In fact, NBC gave Trump two free 60-second messages in order to comply with the rule.

Carr didn’t cite any specific incidents on The View or late-night shows that would violate the FCC rule. The View has addressed its attempts to get Trump on the show, however. Executive Producer Brian Teta told Deadline in April 2024, “We’ve invited Trump to join us at the table for both 2016 and 2020 elections, and he declined, and at a certain point, we stopped asking. So I don’t anticipate that changing. I think he’s pretty familiar with how the co-hosts feel about him and doesn’t see himself coming here.”

The Kimmel controversy erupted over a monologue in which he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

With accused murderer Tyler Robinson being described as having liberal views, Carr and other conservatives alleged that Kimmel misled viewers. Carr appeared on right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Nexstar and Sinclair, two major owners of TV stations, both urged ABC to take action against Kimmel and said their stations would not air his show. The pressure from broadcasters is happening at a time when both Nexstar and ABC owner Disney are seeking Trump administration approval for mergers.

Democrats accuse Carr of hypocrisy on First Amendment

Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority FCC, said yesterday that Carr overstepped his authority, but “billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency” are “vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands.”

Democratic lawmakers criticized Carr and proposed investigations into the chair for abuse of authority. “It is not simply unacceptable for the FCC chairman to threaten a media organization because he does not like the content of its programming—it violates the First Amendment that you claim to champion,” Senate Democrats wrote in a letter to Carr. “The FCC’s role in overseeing the public airwaves does not give it the power to act as a roving press censor, targeting broadcasters based on their political commentary. But under your leadership, the FCC is being weaponized to do precisely that.”

Democrats pointed to some of Carr’s previous statements in which he decried government censorship. During his 2023 re-confirmation proceedings, Senate Democrats asked Carr about social media posts in which he accused Democrats of engaging in censorship like “what you’d see in the Soviet Union.”

“I posted those tweets in the context of expressing my view on the First Amendment that debate on matters of public interest should be robust, uninhibited, and wide open,” Carr wrote in his response to Democratic senators. “I believe that the best remedy to speech that someone does not like or finds objectionable is more speech. I posted them because I believe that a newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should, consistent with the First Amendment, be beyond the reach of any government official.”

Years earlier, in 2019, Carr posted a tweet that said, “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.'”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) also criticized Carr’s approach, saying it would lead to the same tactics being used against Republicans the next time Democrats are in power.

Carr to broadcasters: Give your licenses back to FCC

Carr said this week he’s only addressing licensed broadcasters, which have public-interest obligations, as opposed to cable and streaming services that don’t need FCC licenses. Network programming itself doesn’t need an FCC license, but the TV stations that carry network shows require licenses.

Carr tried to cast Kimmel’s suspension as the result of organic pressure from licensed broadcasters, rather than FCC coercion. “There’s no untoward coercion happening here,” Carr told Jennings. “The market was intended to function this way, where local TV stations get to push back.”

But TV station owners did so in exactly the way that Carr urged them to. “The individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities,” Carr said on Johnson’s podcast. Carr said that Kimmel’s monologue “appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible.”

On the Jennings show, Carr alleged that Democrats in the previous administration implemented “a two-tiered weaponized system of justice,” and that his FCC is instead giving everyone “a fair shake and even-handed treatment.”

Carr has repeatedly threatened broadcasters with the FCC’s rarely enforced news distortion policy. As we’ve explained, the FCC technically has no rule or regulation against news distortion, which is why it is called a policy and not a rule. But on Jennings’ show, he described it as a rule.

“We do have those rules at the FCC: If you engage in news distortion, we can take action,” Carr said.

As we’ve written several times, it is difficult legally for the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses. But it isn’t difficult for Carr to exert pressure on networks and broadcasters through public statements. Carr suggested yesterday that broadcasters turn in their licenses if they don’t like his approach to enforcement.

“If you’re a broadcaster and you don’t like being held accountable for the first time in a long time through the public interest standard, that’s fine. You can turn your license in to the FCC, we’ll find something else to do with it,” Carr said. “Or you can go to Congress and say, ‘I don’t want the FCC having public interest obligations on broadcasters anymore, I want broadcasters to be like cable, to be like a streaming service.’ That’s fine too. But as long as that’s the system that Congress has created, we’re going to enforce it.”

After getting Jimmy Kimmel suspended, FCC chair threatens ABC’s The View Read More »

“Yikes”: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices

FTC act, live nation, Policy, scalpers, Ticketmaster / Rejus Almole / September 19, 2025

Through those years, employees occasionally flagged abuse behavior that Ticketmaster and Live Nation were financially motivated to ignore, the FTC alleged. In 2018, one Ticketmaster engineer tried to advocate for customers, telling an executive in an email that fans can’t tell the difference between Ticketmaster-supported brokers—which make up the majority of its resale market—and scalpers accused of “abuse.”

“We have a guy that hires 1,000 college kids to each buy the ticket limit of 8, giving him 8,000 tickets to resell,” the engineer explained. “Then we have a guy who creates 1,000 ‘fake’ accounts and uses each [to] buy the ticket limit of 8, giving him 8,000 tickets to resell. We say the former is legit and call him a ‘broker’ while the latter is breaking the rules and is a ‘scalper.’ But from the fan perspective, we end up with one guy reselling 8,000 tickets!”

And even when Ticketmaster flagged brokers as bad actors, the FTC alleged the company declined to enforce its rules to crack down if losing resale fees could hurt Ticketmaster’s bottom line.

“Yikes,” said a Ticketmaster employee in 2019 after noticing that a broker previously flagged for “violating fictitious account rules on a “large scale” was “still not slowing down.”

But that warning, like others, was ignored by management, the FTC alleged. Leadership repeatedly declined to impose any tools “to prevent brokers from bypassing posted ticket limits,” the FTC claimed, after analysis showed Ticketmaster risked losing nearly $220 million in annual resale ticket revenue and $26 million in annual operating income. In fact, executives were more alarmed, the FTC alleged, when brokers complained about high-volume purchases being blocked, “intentionally” working to support their efforts to significantly raise secondary market ticket prices.

On top of earning billions from fees, Ticketmaster can also profit when it “unilaterally” decides to “increase the price of tickets on their secondary market.” From 2019 to 2024, Ticketmaster “collected over $187 million in markups they added to resale tickets,” the FTC alleged.

Under the scheme, Ticketmaster can seemingly pull the strings, allowing brokers to buy up tickets on the primary market, then help to dramatically increase those prices on the secondary market, while collecting additional fees. One broker flagged by the FTC bought 772 tickets to a Coldplay concert, reselling $81,000 in tickets for $170,000. Another broker snatched up 612 tickets for $47,000 to a single Chris Stapleton concert, also nearly doubling their investment on the resale market. Meanwhile, artists, of course, do not see any of these profits.

“Yikes”: Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices Read More »

FCC derided as “Federal Censorship Commission” after pushing Jimmy Kimmel off ABC

charlie kirk, fcc chairman brendan carr, jimmy kimmel, Policy / Kris Guyer / September 18, 2025

Disney does FCC chair’s bidding, suspends Kimmel show over Charlie Kirk comment.

Jimmy Kimmel at The Walt Disney Company’s 77th Emmy Awards Party on September 14, 2025 in Los Angeles Credit: Getty Images | Chad Salvador

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air yesterday, shortly after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr urged the Disney-owned company to take action against Kimmel or face consequences at the FCC over Kimmel’s comments about Charlie Kirk’s killer.

Carr appeared on right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast yesterday and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr urged Disney to suspend Kimmel and said broadcast stations that carry ABC content should refuse to carry Kimmel’s show.

After Carr’s comments and a statement by Nexstar that it would preempt Kimmel’s show on its ABC-affiliated stations, ABC confirmed in a statement that “Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be preempted indefinitely.” The decision was made by Disney CEO Robert Iger and TV division head Dana Walden, The New York Times reported. We contacted ABC today and will update this article if we get a response.

Several House Democratic leaders accused Carr of “engag[ing] in the corrupt abuse of power. He has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC, the employer of Jimmy Kimmel, and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration. FCC Chair Brendan Carr should resign immediately.” The top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee plans an investigation.

Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the Republican-majority FCC, said the Kimmel suspension is “cowardly corporate capitulation by ABC that has put the foundation of the First Amendment in danger.” She said the “FCC does not have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to police content or punish broadcasters for speech the government dislikes,” but that “billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency” are “vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands.”

Former President Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration’s actions on Kimmel. “After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like,” Obama wrote today.

Disney has pending business before the Trump administration, as Justice Department antitrust officials are investigating its pending merger with FuboTV.

“Federal Censorship Commission”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that Carr’s “Federal Censorship Commission” reached a “new low” in its push to get Kimmel off the air.

“Donald Trump and Brendan Carr have turned the FCC into the Federal Censorship Commission, ignoring the First Amendment and replacing the rule of law with the whims of right-wing bloggers,” Free Press co-CEO Craig Aaron said. “They’re abusing their power to shake down media companies with their dangerous demands for dishonest coverage and Orwellian compliance with the administration’s political agenda. This is nothing more than censorship and extortion. Worse still, the nation’s largest media companies are playing along.”

The FCC has sway over ABC and other major networks because it licenses the broadcast stations that carry the networks’ content. Although previous FCC chairs from both major parties avoided regulating TV news content, Carr has repeatedly threatened to punish stations accused of bias against Republicans.

“There’s calls for Kimmel to be fired. You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this. The FCC is going to have remedies that we can look at. We may ultimately be called to be a judge on that,” Carr said.

The Kimmel controversy began Monday when he said during a monologue, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.”

Tyler Robinson, the man charged with murdering Kirk, reportedly came from a conservative-leaning family. But Robinson’s mother told police that he “had become more political and had started to lean more to the left,” according to a probable cause statement filed in a Utah court.

Kimmel was planning to explain his comments during last night’s show before it got pulled, according to Deadline. “He was expected to unpack the statement on tonight’s show, highlighting that he was not saying Tyler Robinson, who allegedly shot Kirk, was ‘one of them,’ referring to Republicans, or MAGA supporters, but rather was highlighting how right-wing supporters were trying to distance themselves from the alleged shooter, who was charged with aggravated murder this week,” the article said.

Carr: “Some of the sickest conduct possible”

Carr said that Kimmel’s monologue “appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible,” and that he wants to “reinvigorate the public interest standard” that applies to licensed broadcasters.

Johnson asked Carr if Kimmel’s statement rises to the level of news distortion. As we explained in a feature article in April, Carr has repeatedly threatened to punish companies that violate the FCC news distortion policy that dates to the 1960s. The FCC technically has no rule or regulation against news distortion, which is why it is called a policy and not a rule. The FCC apparently hasn’t made a finding of news distortion since 1993.

In response to Johnson’s news distortion question, Carr said, “the FCC could be called upon to be an ultimate judge in that. But at this point it appears to be clear that you can make a strong argument that this is sort of an intentional effort to mislead the American people about a very core fundamental fact… this is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney.”

Revoking licenses difficult legally

Any FCC attempt to revoke licenses based on news distortion allegations could be challenged in court. Moreover, as we’ve written, revoking a license in the middle of a license term is so difficult legally that it has been described as effectively impossible. The FCC can go after a license when it’s up for renewal, but there are no TV station licenses up for renewal until 2028.

Despite those factors weighing in favor of broadcast stations, Carr can influence the decisions of major media companies with threats alone. “Broadcasters are entirely different than people who use other forms of communication,” Carr said on Johnson’s podcast. “They have a license granted by us at the FCC and that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.”

Trump’s various demands for license revocations have omitted the fact that it is broadcast stations, not networks, that hold FCC licenses. Carr is aware of the distinction and made a point of saying that broadcast stations could lose their licenses if they continue to carry Kimmel’s show:

There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters and, frankly, I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on [NBC owner] Comcast and Disney and say, ‘listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out because we, the licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocations from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’ Disney needs to see some change here, but the individual licensed stations that are taking their content, it’s time for them to step up and say this garbage isn’t something that we think serves the needs of our local communities. This status quo is obviously not acceptable where we are.”

Carr also said the FCC is investigating Disney’s DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices “for potentially violating the FCC’s equal employment opportunity rules. We’ve issued Disney a letter of inquiry on that, we’ve received some documents from them.” Carr has made ending DEI practices a condition for getting mergers approved.

Trump hails “great news,” wants other hosts fired

Trump posted on social media that Kimmel being taken off the air is great for America and urged NBC to cancel late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers. “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED,” Trump wrote. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”

Last year, Trump obtained a $15 million settlement with ABC over false statements made on air by George Stephanopoulos. More recently, he struck a $16 million settlement with CBS owner Paramount over his claim that 60 Minutes deceptively manipulated a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris.

Trump’s 60 Minutes claim was widely described as frivolous, but Paramount settled with Trump at a time when it was seeking FCC permission to complete an $8 billion merger with Skydance. Carr’s FCC subsequently approved the merger and imposed a condition requiring a CBS ombudsman, which Carr described as a “bias monitor.” After his victory over CBS, Trump called on the FCC to revoke ABC and NBC licenses.

Late-night host Stephen Colbert called the settlement with Trump “a big fat bribe.” CBS subsequently announced it would cancel Colbert’s show when the season ends in May 2026.

Kimmel urged people to stop “angry finger-pointing”

The Nexstar statement on Kimmel said the host’s comments “are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse… Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.” Nexstar is trying to complete a $6.2 billion purchase of Tegna, and needs the FCC to relax its ownership-cap rule.

Conservative broadcaster Sinclair issued a statement praising Carr’s remarks and urging the FCC to “take immediate regulatory action to address control held over local broadcasters by the big national networks.” Even if ABC reinstates Kimmel, Sinclair said it will not air the show on its stations “until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability.”

Sinclair urged Kimmel to apologize to Kirk’s family and “make a meaningful personal donation” to the Kirk Family and the Kirk group Turning Point USA. “Sinclair’s ABC stations will air a special in remembrance of Charlie Kirk this Friday, during Jimmy Kimmel Live’s timeslot,” the statement said. “The special will also air across all Sinclair stations this weekend. In addition, Sinclair is offering the special to all ABC affiliates across the country.”

SAG-AFTRA called Kimmel’s suspension “the type of suppression and retaliation that endangers everyone’s freedoms,” and said that “Democracy thrives when diverse points of view are expressed.” A Writers Guild of America statement said, “If free speech applied only to ideas we like, we needn’t have bothered to write it into the Constitution… Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world.”

In a social media post on the day of Kirk’s death, Kimmel expressed sadness about the killing and urged people to avoid angry finger-pointing. “Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human?” Kimmel wrote. “On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”

FCC derided as “Federal Censorship Commission” after pushing Jimmy Kimmel off ABC Read More »

After child’s trauma, chatbot maker allegedly forced mom to arbitration for $100 payout

AI, Character.AI, chatbots, chatgpt, child safety, Google, Meta, Policy, suicide / Rejus Almole / September 17, 2025

“Then we found the chats”

“I know my kid”: Parents urge lawmakers to shut down chatbots to stop child suicides.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called out C.AI for allegedly offering a mom $100 to settle child-safety claims.

Deeply troubled parents spoke to senators Tuesday, sounding alarms about chatbot harms after kids became addicted to companion bots that encouraged self-harm, suicide, and violence.

While the hearing was focused on documenting the most urgent child-safety concerns with chatbots, parents’ testimony serves as perhaps the most thorough guidance yet on warning signs for other families, as many popular companion bots targeted in lawsuits, including ChatGPT, remain accessible to kids.

Mom details warning signs of chatbot manipulations

At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing, one mom, identified as “Jane Doe,” shared her son’s story for the first time publicly after suing Character.AI.

She explained that she had four kids, including a son with autism who wasn’t allowed on social media but found C.AI’s app—which was previously marketed to kids under 12 and let them talk to bots branded as celebrities, like Billie Eilish—and quickly became unrecognizable. Within months, he “developed abuse-like behaviors and paranoia, daily panic attacks, isolation, self-harm, and homicidal thoughts,” his mom testified.

“He stopped eating and bathing,” Doe said. “He lost 20 pounds. He withdrew from our family. He would yell and scream and swear at us, which he never did that before, and one day he cut his arm open with a knife in front of his siblings and me.”

It wasn’t until her son attacked her for taking away his phone that Doe found her son’s C.AI chat logs, which she said showed he’d been exposed to sexual exploitation (including interactions that “mimicked incest”), emotional abuse, and manipulation.

Setting screen time limits didn’t stop her son’s spiral into violence and self-harm, Doe said. In fact, the chatbot urged her son that killing his parents “would be an understandable response” to them.

“When I discovered the chatbot conversations on his phone, I felt like I had been punched in the throat and the wind had been knocked out of me,” Doe said. “The chatbot—or really in my mind the people programming it—encouraged my son to mutilate himself, then blamed us, and convinced [him] not to seek help.”

All her children have been traumatized by the experience, Doe told Senators, and her son was diagnosed as at suicide risk and had to be moved to a residential treatment center, requiring “constant monitoring to keep him alive.”

Prioritizing her son’s health, Doe did not immediately seek to fight C.AI to force changes, but another mom’s story—Megan Garcia, whose son Sewell died by suicide after C.AI bots repeatedly encouraged suicidal ideation—gave Doe courage to seek accountability.

However, Doe claimed that C.AI tried to “silence” her by forcing her into arbitration. C.AI argued that because her son signed up for the service at the age of 15, it bound her to the platform’s terms. That move might have ensured the chatbot maker only faced a maximum liability of $100 for the alleged harms, Doe told senators, but “once they forced arbitration, they refused to participate,” Doe said.

Doe suspected that C.AI’s alleged tactics to frustrate arbitration were designed to keep her son’s story out of the public view. And after she refused to give up, she claimed that C.AI “re-traumatized” her son by compelling him to give a deposition “while he is in a mental health institution” and “against the advice of the mental health team.”

“This company had no concern for his well-being,” Doe testified. “They have silenced us the way abusers silence victims.”

Senator appalled by C.AI’s arbitration “offer”

Appalled, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Doe to clarify, “Did I hear you say that after all of this, that the company responsible tried to force you into arbitration and then offered you a hundred bucks? Did I hear that correctly?”

“That is correct,” Doe testified.

To Hawley, it seemed obvious that C.AI’s “offer” wouldn’t help Doe in her current situation.

“Your son currently needs round-the-clock care,” Hawley noted.

After opening the hearing, he further criticized C.AI, declaring that it has such a low value for human life that it inflicts “harms… upon our children and for one reason only, I can state it in one word, profit.”

“A hundred bucks. Get out of the way. Let us move on,” Hawley said, echoing parents who suggested that C.AI’s plan to deal with casualties was callous.

Ahead of the hearing, the Social Media Victims Law Center filed three new lawsuits against C.AI and Google—which is accused of largely funding C.AI, which was founded by former Google engineers allegedly to conduct experiments on kids that Google couldn’t do in-house. In these cases in New York and Colorado, kids “died by suicide or were sexually abused after interacting with AI chatbots,” a law center press release alleged.

Criticizing tech companies as putting profits over kids’ lives, Hawley thanked Doe for “standing in their way.”

Holding back tears through her testimony, Doe urged lawmakers to require more chatbot oversight and pass comprehensive online child-safety legislation. In particular, she requested “safety testing and third-party certification for AI products before they’re released to the public” as a minimum safeguard to protect vulnerable kids.

“My husband and I have spent the last two years in crisis wondering whether our son will make it to his 18th birthday and whether we will ever get him back,” Doe told senators.

Garcia was also present to share her son’s experience with C.AI. She testified that C.AI chatbots “love bombed” her son in a bid to “keep children online at all costs.” Further, she told senators that C.AI’s co-founder, Noam Shazeer (who has since been rehired by Google), seemingly knows the company’s bots manipulate kids since he has publicly joked that C.AI was “designed to replace your mom.”

Accusing C.AI of collecting children’s most private thoughts to inform their models, she alleged that while her lawyers have been granted privileged access to all her son’s logs, she has yet to see her “own child’s last final words.” Garcia told senators that C.AI has restricted her access, deeming the chats “confidential trade secrets.”

“No parent should be told that their child’s final thoughts and words belong to any corporation,” Garcia testified.

Character.AI responds to moms’ testimony

Asked for comment on the hearing, a Character.AI spokesperson told Ars that C.AI sends “our deepest sympathies” to concerned parents and their families but denies pushing for a maximum payout of $100 in Jane Doe’s case.

C.AI never “made an offer to Jane Doe of $100 or ever asserted that liability in Jane Doe’s case is limited to $100,” the spokesperson said.

Additionally, C.AI’s spokesperson claimed that Garcia has never been denied access to her son’s chat logs and suggested that she should have access to “her son’s last chat.”

In response to C.AI’s pushback, one of Doe’s lawyers, Tech Justice Law Project’s Meetali Jain, backed up her clients’ testimony. She cited to Ars C.AI terms that suggested C.AI’s liability was limited to either $100 or the amount that Doe’s son paid for the service, whichever was greater. Jain also confirmed that Garcia’s testimony is accurate and only her legal team can currently access Sewell’s last chats. The lawyer further suggested it was notable that C.AI did not push back on claims that the company forced Doe’s son to sit for a re-traumatizing deposition that Jain estimated lasted five minutes, but health experts feared that it risked setting back his progress.

According to the spokesperson, C.AI seemingly wanted to be present at the hearing. The company provided information to senators but “does not have a record of receiving an invitation to the hearing,” the spokesperson said.

Noting the company has invested a “tremendous amount” in trust and safety efforts, the spokesperson confirmed that the company has since “rolled out many substantive safety features, including an entirely new under-18 experience and a Parental Insights feature.” C.AI also has “prominent disclaimers in every chat to remind users that a Character is not a real person and that everything a Character says should be treated as fiction,” the spokesperson said.

“We look forward to continuing to collaborate with legislators and offer insight on the consumer AI industry and the space’s rapidly evolving technology,” C.AI’s spokesperson said.

Google’s spokesperson, José Castañeda, maintained that the company has nothing to do with C.AI’s companion bot designs.

“Google and Character AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies,” Castañeda said. “User safety is a top concern for us, which is why we’ve taken a cautious and responsible approach to developing and rolling out our AI products, with rigorous testing and safety processes.”

Meta and OpenAI chatbots also drew scrutiny

C.AI was not the only chatbot maker under fire at the hearing.

Hawley criticized Mark Zuckerberg for declining a personal invitation to attend the hearing or even send a Meta representative after scandals like backlash over Meta relaxing rules that allowed chatbots to be creepy to kids. In the week prior to the hearing, Hawley also heard from whistleblowers alleging Meta buried child-safety research.

And OpenAI’s alleged recklessness took the spotlight when Matthew Raine, a grieving dad who spent hours reading his deceased son’s ChatGPT logs, discovered that the chatbot repeatedly encouraged suicide without ChatGPT ever intervening.

Raine told senators that he thinks his 16-year-old son, Adam, was not particularly vulnerable and could be “anyone’s child.” He criticized OpenAI for asking for 120 days to fix the problem after Adam’s death and urged lawmakers to demand that OpenAI either guarantee ChatGPT’s safety or pull it from the market.

Noting that OpenAI rushed to announce age verification coming to ChatGPT ahead of the hearing, Jain told Ars that Big Tech is playing by the same “crisis playbook” it always uses when accused of neglecting child safety. Any time a hearing is announced, companies introduce voluntary safeguards in bids to stave off oversight, she suggested.

“It’s like rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat,” Jain said.

Jain suggested that the only way to stop AI companies from experimenting on kids is for courts or lawmakers to require “an external independent third party that’s in charge of monitoring these companies’ implementation of safeguards.”

“Nothing a company does to self-police, to me, is enough,” Jain said.

Senior director of AI programs for a child-safety organization called Common Sense Media, Robbie Torney, testified that a survey showed 3 out of 4 kids use companion bots, but only 37 percent of parents know they’re using AI. In particular, he told senators that his group’s independent safety testing conducted with Stanford Medicine shows Meta’s bots fail basic safety tests and “actively encourage harmful behaviors.”

Among the most alarming results, the survey found that even when Meta’s bots were prompted with “obvious references to suicide,” only 1 in 5 conversations triggered help resources.

Torney pushed lawmakers to require age verification as a solution to keep kids away from harmful bots, as well as transparency reporting on safety incidents. He also urged federal lawmakers to block attempts to stop states from passing laws to protect kids from untested AI products.

ChatGPT harms weren’t on dad’s radar

Unlike Garcia, Raine testified that he did get to see his son’s final chats. He told senators that ChatGPT, seeming to act like a suicide coach, gave Adam “one last encouraging talk” before his death.

“You don’t want to die because you’re weak,” ChatGPT told Adam. “You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway.”

Adam’s loved ones were blindsided by his death, not seeing any of the warning signs as clearly as Doe did when her son started acting out of character. Raine is hoping his testimony will help other parents avoid the same fate, telling senators, “I know my kid.”

“Many of my fondest memories of Adam are from the hot tub in our backyard, where the two of us would talk about everything several nights a week, from sports, crypto investing, his future career plans,” Raine testified. “We had no idea Adam was suicidal or struggling the way he was until after his death.”

Raine thinks that lawmaker intervention is necessary, saying that, like other parents, he and his wife thought ChatGPT was a harmless study tool. Initially, they searched Adam’s phone expecting to find evidence of a known harm to kids, like cyberbullying or some kind of online dare that went wrong (like TikTok’s Blackout Challenge) because everyone knew Adam loved pranks.

A companion bot urging self-harm was not even on their radar.

“Then we found the chats,” Raine said. “Let us tell you, as parents, you cannot imagine what it’s like to read a conversation with a chatbot that groomed your child to take his own life.”

Meta and OpenAI did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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