US government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices

The many ways Big Brother is watching

Anne Toomey McKenna, Penn State

On a Saturday morning, you head to the hardware store. Your neighbors’ Ring cameras film your walk to the car. Your car’s sensors, cameras and microphones record your speed, how you drive, where you’re going, who’s with you, what you say, and biological metrics such as facial expression, weight and heart rate. Your car may also collect text messages and contacts from your connected smartphone.

Meanwhile, your phone continuously senses and records your communications, info about your health, what apps you’re using, and tracks your location via cell towers, GPS satellites and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

As you enter the store, its surveillance cameras identify your face and track your movements through the aisles. If you then use Apple or Google Pay to make your purchase, your phone tracks what you bought and how much you paid.

All this data quickly becomes commercially available, bought and sold by data brokers. Aggregated and analyzed by artificial intelligence, the data reveals detailed, sensitive information about you that can be used to predict and manipulate your behavior, including what you buy, feel, think and do.

Companies unilaterally collect data from most of your activities. This “surveillance capitalism” is often unrelated to the services device manufacturers, apps and stores are providing you. For example, Tinder is planning to use AI to scan your entire camera roll. And despite their promises, “opting out” doesn’t actually stop companies’ data collection.

While companies can manipulate you, they cannot put you in jail. But the U.S. government can, and it now purchases massive quantities of your information from commercial data brokers. The government is able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data because the information it buys is not subject to the same restrictions as information it collects directly.

The federal government is also ramping up its abilities to directly collect data through partnerships with private tech companies. These surveillance tech partnerships are becoming entrenched, domestically and abroad, as advances in AI take surveillance to unprecedented levels.

What Trump’s post as a Jesus‑like figure tells us about political messianism

Trump the Messiah

Austin Sarat, Amherst College

Donald Trump sparked immediate outcry on April 12, 2026, when he posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. The post, which Trump later said was supposed to depict him as a doctor, came shortly after he criticized Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and “terrible.”

Three days later, Trump posted an image depicting Jesus with his left hand on his shoulder. Referring to that post, Trump observed, “Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

These posts help illustrate the political messianism that Trump has brought to the Oval Office.

Political messianism is a style of leadership that places great faith in a single leader who is endowed with godlike attributes. It does not welcome dissent, and it portrays politics as a struggle between good and evil.

Eric Voegelin, a 20th-century political thinker, warned that political messianism often fuels authoritarian rule. It divides society, with a messianic leader’s supporters seeing him as a savior who will deliver their country into a golden age, while opponents foresee a coming apocalypse.

Democratic politics thrive when leaders and followers act with modesty and humility, when no one sees themselves as infallible or indispensable. As someone who teaches and writes about U.S. democracy, I don’t think it can thrive, or even survive, when its leaders see themselves as godlike and when the citizenry is divided into true believers and heretics.

Trump’s messianic vision

The image depicting Trump as a Jesus-like figure is the latest evidence of Trump's messiah complex.

At the Republican National Convention in 2016, he boasted that “I alone can fix it,” referring to a system that was responsible for what he would later call “American carnage.”

In a 2019 speech, Trump referred to himself as “the chosen one.”

In 2023, he described what he had done in his first term this way: “I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren’t elected.” As president, “I was very busy. I consider this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives.”

And in a Jan. 8, 2026, interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law,” since his actions as commander in chief were guided only by “my own morality. My own mind.”

The president is not alone in believing in his messiah status, or in comparing himself to Christ. On April 2, 2026, at a White House Easter celebration, Paula White-Cain, one of his spiritual advisers, used Jesus’ death and resurrection to explain what had happened to Trump.

“Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection,” she said. “He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President … you were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.”

Guess you still have the right to choose

Wednesday action in Hope Valley

 

Who else - besides Donald Trump - votes by mail?

URI forester offers tips on tree safety, protection and observation

On keeping your trees healthy

Kristen Curry 

URI’s Plant Diagnostic Laboratory assesses symptoms of beech leaf disease and other plant issues. (URI Photo / Keiddy Urrea-Morawicki)

A forestry extension specialist at the University of Rhode Island, Christopher Riely works with faculty and students across campus, and off-campus partners, to help improve Rhode Island’s forests and the wildlife they support. A certified arborist and forester, Riely answers some questions about local trees for Arbor Day which was on April 24.

Do you have any tips for tree safety for residents — things to check for tree weakness after the winter, or safety tips for home yard work as people start getting out in their yards more?

The early spring before trees have fully leafed out is a good time to check for damage that trees may have sustained over the winter. However, as bark is more easily damaged during this time of higher sap flow, pruning at this time can make trees more susceptible to disease. The dormant season is the best time for pruning, especially the late winter when cuts will heal soon thereafter when trees start growing again. 

April and May are good months for planting trees and shrubs so they can start to get established before the hot summer months that usually bring drought stress. Planted trees should be watered regularly at least through their first growing season in a new location. While it’s best to avoid planting during the summer months, larger trees, such as those that come from nurseries balled and burlapped, can be also planted in the early-to-mid fall.

There is a reason why the military requires vaccinations

George Washington recognized that in wartime, disease can be as deadly as bullets

Beds with patients in an emergency hospital in

Camp Funston, Kansas, in the midst of the

influenza epidemic during World War I. Otis

Historical Archives, National Museum of

Health and Medicine.

Katrine L. Wallace, University of Illinois Chicago

For the first time in almost 80 years, U.S. service members will no longer be mandated to receive the annual influenza vaccine.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the change on April 22, 2026. Citing medical autonomy and religious freedom, he described the requirement as “overly broad and not rational,” telling troops that “your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable.”

The flu shot requirement that Hegseth ended had been in place since 1945, with one brief pause in 1949. It was part of a tradition of military vaccine mandates nearly as old as the United States itself.

As an epidemiologist who studies vaccine-preventable diseases, I find the end of the flu mandate striking less for its immediate impact than for what it signals. For most of American history, military commanders took for granted that infectious disease could cost them a war, which is why vaccination was considered a matter of military readiness rather than personal choice.

A tradition that started with George Washington

The first American military vaccine mandate predates the Constitution. In the winter of 1777, Gen. George Washington ordered the mass inoculation of the Continental Army against smallpox.

His decision wasn’t ideological – it was strategic. The year before, a smallpox outbreak had torn through American troops outside Quebec, contributing to the collapse of the northern campaign. John Adams famously wrote to his wife, Abigail, that smallpox was killing 10 soldiers for every one felled in battle.

Inoculation in 1777 was itself risky. The procedure, called variolation, involved deliberately infecting a soldier with a small amount of smallpox virus to build immunity. Washington gambled that losing some to inoculation was better than losing a war to the virus. Historians have credited the decision with saving the Continental Army.

8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

How Trump plans to win by cheating

By ProPublica

When Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election, the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — but just barely.

If faced with the same tests today, those guardrails and the people who held the line would largely be missing, a ProPublica examination found.

At least 75 career officials who once held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety are gone. Two dozen appointees — including many who either actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote or are associates of such people — have been hired to replace them. And once-fringe actors now have access to vast powers.

As the midterms approach, current and former government officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Trump appointees who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about balloting are now in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness.

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Here are some of the key things you should know about the Trump administration’s efforts to, as the president said, “take over” the midterms. Read the full investigation here.

1. In 2020, institutional guardrails helped to prevent Trump from overturning the election.

Following his defeat in the 2020 election, Trump pushed for federal officials to uncover proof that he had, in fact, beaten Joe Biden at the polls. Election cybersecurity experts with the Department of Homeland Security relayed to Attorney General William Barr that the election fraud claims that they looked into were false. Barr then told the president what he didn’t want to hear: The election had not been hacked.

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Despite the violent uprising at the Capitol on that day, the election results held firm.

2. Less than 18 months into his second term, Trump has dismantled many of those same guardrails.

Since the start of his second term, Trump and his appointees have made significant changes at federal agencies tasked with helping to safeguard elections. In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, the Department of Justice and other agencies have left, been fired or been reassigned, ProPublica found.

In their place are roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of those people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election-denial movement.

Bless him

Jeffrey Epstein was right about this

Major hurricanes in the Northeast are rare.

Could climate change make them common?

By Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections

Figure 1. The storm surge of the 1938 Long Island Express hurricane washes away a home in Westport, Massachusetts. (Image credit: Westport Historical Society, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Landfalling major hurricanes in the northeast U.S. are a rare breed, with only five having been observed since settlers arrived in the early 1600s — an average of just over one such storm per century. And despite warmer sea surface temperatures in the past 30 years, the northeast U.S. has avoided a major hurricane landfall since Carol in 1954. Yet research suggests these storms may become more likely as the climate continues to change.

Since accurate records began in 1851, only two other major hurricanes made landfall in the Northeast U.S.: the 1938 Long Island Express Hurricane and an unnamed 1869 storm that hit Rhode Island (though there’s reason to be skeptical of the second one; in an email, historical hurricane expert Cary Mock said, “I doubt it would intensify that far north as a Cat 3.”) 

What about before accurate record-keeping began? Severe hurricanes that hit Long Island and then Connecticut in 1635 and 1815 were likely major hurricanes. A 2014 paper, Estimation of Hurricane Wind Speed Probabilities: Application to New York City and Other Coastal Locations, estimated that major hurricane wind speeds should occur about once every 300 years on Long Island and once every 700 years in New York City. 

Note that by” major hurricane," we mean one with sustained winds of at least 111 mph, making it a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. 

A large, west-angling hurricane like 2012's Sandy – discussed below – can deliver a catastrophic storm surge to the Northeast even if its winds decrease below the major-hurricane threshold just before landfall.

As the climate warms, at least four factors might increase the risk of a major hurricane in the northeast U.S.:

1. Ocean warming is causing the strongest hurricanes to get stronger.
2. A poleward shift in which hurricanes reach their peak intensity farther north (primarily because of warming sea surface temperatures)
3. More hurricanes are forming close to the U.S. coast as a result of ocean warming.
4. More Greenland blocking (a “stuck” jet stream pattern that increases the risk of a Northeast U.S. landfall)

One factor that might decrease risk: a tendency toward slower-moving storms, which would result in more weakening as they cross the cold waters offshore of the Northeast.

My hunch: these competing factors may act to modestly increase the major hurricane risk to the Northeast, so that a one-in-100-year storm of the 20th century would be roughly a one-in-75-year storm during the 2026-2050 period.

Reducing use of personal care products quickly lowers toxic chemicals in the body

Study shows even small reductions lower levels of health-harming substances

Pamela Ferdinand, US Right to Know

Lindsey Deng steers a red shopping cart into the travel aisle of her local Target, filled with miniature bottles of shampoos, lotions, and cosmetics. Packing for a trip to Texas, the 24-year-old Northwestern University student scans shelves for TSA-friendly versions of products recommended by social media influencers.

“I only look at the ingredients for my own skin type. As long as a product is on the market and from a big corporation or reliable brand, I feel like it shouldn’t contain too much [to be worried about],” Deng said. “I trust the manufacturers.”

But a small study shows that assumption may not hold. Routine decisions about everything from mascara to moisturizer matter when it comes to shaping your chemical exposure and health risks, the researchers suggest.

On average, women use 13 personal care products a day, containing more than 100 unique ingredients, and men use about 11. Roughly 1 in 10 adults uses more than 25 products daily. Late last year, the FDA reported that more than 1,700 cosmetic products contain PFAS — so-called “forever chemicals” tied to serious health risks including cancer, birth defects and liver disease.

The findings, published in the May issue of Environment International, indicate that switching from conventional personal care products to nontoxic alternatives can rapidly and significantly reduce exposure to harmful chemicals. Even a few changes in only a few days can lower body levels of substances linked to hormone disruption, cancer, developmental problems, and reproductive toxicity, the study shows.

The real cost of the Iran War: $72 billion for the first 60 days

Hegseth lied: Trump's Iran War costs almost triple

Stephen Semler

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Acting Comptroller Jules Hurst told Congress last week that the Iran War had cost $25 billion through the first 60 days. The next day, CBS reported that officials familiar with the Pentagon’s internal assessments estimated the cost was actually closer to $50 billion — double the amount department leadership had just stated publicly. However, even the figure reported as the war’s “true cost” is at least $22 billion too low.

Popular Information conducted a cost estimate of the Iran War based on officials’ statements, military procurement and operations data, and reporting on deployments and armament use. Through 60 days, the US spent an estimated $71.8 billion on the Iran War, or $1.2 billion per day on average. This includes the cost of operations, munitions, combat losses, and arming co-belligerents. Like the estimates from Pentagon leadership and unnamed officials, this figure refers only to direct war costs — near-term expenses for military operations, munitions, and the like — and not indirect costs, which include broader economic impacts, interest on the national debt and longer-term expenses like veterans’ care.

Trump administration stifles data showing COVID vaccine works

Don't like the numbers? Bury the report.

Chris Dall, MA

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has canceled publication of a scientific report showing the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to media reports.

The Washington Post, which first reported the news, says the report, initially scheduled to be published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on March 19, showed the COVID-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations in half this past winter. 

The report had cleared the agency’s scientific review process before being delayed by acting CDC Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, over concerns about the methodology. But the same methodology has long been used by the CDC to evaluate vaccine effectiveness for respiratory viruses and was used in a study on the flu vaccine published last month in MMWR.

In response to a query from CIDRAP News, a CDC official did not address the blocked report specifically but said the agency has to apply the “highest standards of scientific rigor” to the information it publishes.

“Responsible science requires careful review. Taking time to ensure analyses are methodologically sound and clearly communicated is always preferable to risking error,” the official said.

To be absolutely clear...