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FBI Surveillance, Social Media, AI, Partnerships Draw Scrutiny at Senate Hearing

The FBI is not collecting data from license plate readers, it is merely looking at data that is already collected by somebody else. This is how FBI Director Kash Patel explained the use of this surveillance tool during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 15.

“They collect information, not the FBI,” said Patel, adding, “Private companies have and private municipalities and towns put up cameras around traffic circles in the neighborhoods and the like.”

He also said that this is information “where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, basically publicly available information.”

As for the FBI, it “partners” with those who collect the data “on a case-by-case basis and not a rolling access basis.” And he repeated, “We have to use it lawfully, but we the FBI don’t continue to access that on a rolling basis.”

As examples of how this works, he mentioned the Brown University shooting, where “we weren’t able to get any facial recognition on the individual, but what we were able to get based on a Flock camera was a license plate,” which helped locate the suspect who “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in New Hampshire.”

And then there are kidnappings across state lines, where “we have saved children over and over again,” Patel said.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) brought up Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has not been reauthorized and has been expired since June 12, but is still in use thanks to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order, which runs out in spring 2027.

Lee’s concern is not that the government is allowed to collect data of non-US persons abroad, which is the purpose of 702, but what happens to the data of Americans who are in contact with those foreign targets and get swept up in the process.

Lee asked why the FBI cannot be required to go to the FISA court for a warrant before being able to query this data. He said that the current system, based on the government’s “internal procedures” is not sufficient to protect Americans’ privacy, and that the past abuses have shown this.

Lee said a query should have “nothing to do with an agent wanting to vet a potential tenant for his rental property, vet a romantic interest, investigate his father…for a suspected extramarital affair.” He added, “These are real-world examples.”

Patel’s response was that the FBI is “flying blind” and cannot establish probable cause for a warrant because it does not know what information it is looking for in the first place. “We don’t have access to that information. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we wouldn’t be able to establish a predicate probable cause because we don’t have access to the information,” he said.

He also said that “what the FBI does not do is collect on U.S. citizens. What the FBI does do is access pursuant to the federal statute already lawfully collected information.”

The FBI director also said the FBI is “responsible for three percent of 702 collection,” with the rest belonging to the intelligence community. He said 702 had produced “terrorist attacks that we’ve prevented, children that we found, on narco traffickers that we were able to annihilate and arrest.” He added, “Were that to go dark, we would have a lot of problems or we would have no ability to trace that information.”

Senator Cornyn asked if it is true that 702 makes up 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and Patel confirmed this.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked about how the FBI uses private sector partnerships, specifically to catch predators. Patel said that the FBI must work with the private sector.

He also said that the FBI is “utilizing the fact that this great information has been collected and sitting on the shelf,” referring to data harvested by private companies, and that the FBI is now “professionally partnered and officially partnered” with more private sector companies in social media and AI than ever before.

He spoke about a 600% increase in AI investment, and then a 605% increase “since I hit the seat,” and credited these partnerships with “the largest reduction in violent crime in American history.”

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CAUGHT ON TAPE: Talarico’s Own Church Minister Says His Sudden “Moderation” Is A Con – “Once He Gets Elected, He’ll Change His Tune Back to Where He Was”

An undercover video obtained by The Daily Wire has blown a hole in Texas Democrat James Talarico’s latest campaign makeover.

Rev. Babs Miller, the “Minister to the Parish” at Talarico’s longtime Austin congregation, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, was recorded telling an undercover journalist that the Senate candidate’s new talking points on transgender ideology are political theater, and that the old Talarico will be back the minute the votes are counted.

“I can guarantee you that once he gets elected, he’ll change his tune back to where he was,” Miller said.

That is not a Republican talking point. That is Talarico’s own minister.

Miller did not stop there. When the journalist noted that Republicans were hammering Talarico over his infamous “God is non-binary” line, she answered, “Duh.” She then complained that Talarico is “getting some advice that I don’t think he should be following.”

“That’s what his campaign has convinced him of,” Miller said. “The Democratic Party is backing off on their stances on trans and all of this, and so his staff is encouraging him to kind of do the same thing, just for the next 50 weeks, whatever days.”

Then the tell: “I think it’s bad advice personally, but if it helps him win, okay…”

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ChatGPT Straight Up Tries to Gaslight User After Being Confronted About Its Obviously Wrong Answer

Don’t ask an AI chatbot how many letter e’s there are in the word “seventeen.” Or do, actually, if you want to see how dodgy the tech remains.

In a clip that’s gone viral in AI circles, the content creator who goes by “Husk” asks ChatGPT’s Voice mode to answer this simple counting question. Not only does the confident-sounding AI get it wrong — insisting there’re only three e’s instead of four — it doubles down so vehemently that it effectively tries to gaslight the user.

“Let’s go through it. S-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n,” ChatGPT spells out, after assuring that its underlying model, GPT-6, is “pretty much” the smartest model out there. “Those are three e’s.”

When Husk points out the obvious, the chatbot doesn’t back down.

“I said three e’s,” the AI snaps. “And it’s three.”

“No, it’s four,” Husk points out.

“It’s still three,” ChatGPT shoots back.

After Husk points out that ChatGPT just spelled out for e’s for about the fifth time, the AI appears to give up.

“Alright,” it says, falling silent.

“So you agree?” Husk asks.

“No, it’s still three,” it sulks.

This is the AI that OpenAI wants your grandma to talk to, by the way.

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The Trump Administration Shut Down a Police Misconduct Database. Now It’s Facing a FOIA Lawsuit

Last year the Trump administration shut down a national database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. Now it’s facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for refusing to release records about that decision.

A coalition of civil rights and police accountability groups filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 4 after waiting 10 months for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release records about why it pulled the plug on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a nonpublic database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.

The Justice Department launched NLEAD in 2023 to assist federal agencies with hiring and oversight. However, in one of his first acts after returning to the White House in 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the department to delete it. In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said former President Joe Biden’s executive order creating the database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts.”

Before the DOJ scrapped NLEAD, it had logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers—more than 70 percent of them Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.

Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, says the lawsuit is not seeking the misconduct data itself, but rather records “about how and why the government dismantled its own accountability tool.”

“You can’t build a national misconduct database, watch federal agencies run 10,000 searches against it in eight months, shut it down, and then tell the public that there’s nothing urgent about explaining why,” Enriquez says.

The Kennedy Human Rights Center, along with the National Police Accountability Project, Black Lives Matter D.C., and National Immigration Project, filed a FOIA request last October seeking records concerning the creation, operation, and decommissioning of NLEAD, as well as whether the data was preserved or destroyed.

The Justice Department first agreed to fast-track the FOIA request based on the heightened public interest in the records, but then reversed its decision. The coalition’s FOIA lawsuit says the department has been sitting on their request for 10 months now.

Civil liberties groups have called for the creation of centralized databases of police misconduct because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.

“This was about giving people more information to make smart hiring decisions,” Enriquez says. “Just as you always check someone’s recommendations whenever you’re hiring for your department, we want to do that with people who are entrusted with public safety before we put a weapon in the hands of someone and give them the authority to arrest or even use deadly force. We want to make sure that they don’t have a record of abusing that authority.”

Federal law enforcement unions opposed NLEAD, arguing that it included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.

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Pentagon’s Iran war costs hit $38 billion in five months – budget office

The US war with Iran cost the Pentagon approximately $38 billion in its first five months, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The bill could rise by another $2 billion to $3 billion for every additional month of fighting – and by more if hostilities intensify.

In a report released on Tuesday, the CBO estimated Defense Department expenses from the start of US combat operations on February 28 through August 1. The figure includes the estimated cost of replacing expended munitions and equipment lost in battle, as well as additional flying hours, military operations, and higher fuel costs.

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Netanyahu: I’ll introduce bill to revoke citizenship of those who slander IDF abroad

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he will introduce two bills to punish those who slander IDF soldiers abroad.

The first bill will introduce the option of revoking their citizenship, and the second will increase the sum they can be sued for if found guilty, Netanyahu says in a video, explicitly referencing Democrats party chief Yair Golan, former military advocate-general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi and the filmmakers behind the recent film “NAZA.”

“Their place isn’t here,” says Netanyahu, adding that he expects all Zionist parties to support the measures.

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Body Cam Footage Reveals Maryland Democrat State Sen. LIED to Police About Drunken Hit-and-Run — Cops Let Him Walk Without a Sobriety Test as He Says “Governor Will Take Care of It”

Newly released body-camera footage and surveillance video have raised serious questions about Maryland Democratic state Sen. C. Anthony Muse after his Land Rover struck a parked vehicle and ended up partially on a sidewalk and on top of a tree.

The footage, obtained by Gary Collins of Spotlight on Maryland and reported by Fox Baltimore, shows Muse telling officers that his “driver” had parked his Land Rover Defender on a sidewalk and against a tree, an account that surveillance video directly contradicts.

The video shows Muse himself behind the wheel, maneuvering the SUV for several minutes before getting out and walking away alone.

The incident began shortly after 8 p.m. on Aug. 3 in Annapolis’s Eastport neighborhood while the Maryland General Assembly was meeting in special session over congressional redistricting. Muse’s SUV struck the mirror of a parked vehicle, and witnesses say he didn’t stop.

One caller told dispatchers she was “pretty sure he is intoxicated.”

Surveillance video shows Muse’s SUV later maneuvering for several minutes before coming to rest partly on the sidewalk and on top of a tree in the 400 block of Fourth Street. Annapolis parking enforcement issued a $100 citation.

When parking enforcement officers approached, one radioed to police: “The senator just entered the vehicle. I’m not sure he should be driving.”

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The case for declassifying 9/11 records

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently ordered the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. This release, the first in a series of planned disclosures, shows how opening decades-old records, including those that expose government wrongdoing, is in the public interest. Political will to expand such efforts elsewhere is crucial.

Thousands of 9/11 survivors and victims’ families in Lower Manhattan have fought for more than two decades to hold foreign entities liable for the terrorist attacks — only to find that one of the biggest obstacles is their own government. While successive U.S. administrations have promised closure for victims, critical records remain classified 25 years after 9/11, delaying justice and accountability.

The executive order governing classification, EO 13526, mandates that most historical records must be automatically declassified at 25 years, unless they meet certain strict criteria.

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Mapped: The U.S. States Hit Hardest by Canada’s Tariffs

Trade talks between the U.S. and Canada have broken down, with Canada responding to broad U.S. duties with dollar-for-dollar tariffs on key American products.

This map shows the value of exports in each U.S. state covered by Canadian counter-tariffs, using the latest data from BBC for September 2026 from Scotiabank and Statistics Canada. Figures are in U.S. dollars.

States are shaded according to the value of their exports to Canada that are subject to Canadian duties.

Tariff Blues in the Midwest

The Great Lakes region stands out on the map, reflecting its central role in the roughly $870 billion bilateral trading relationship.

Ohio and Illinois have more exports covered by Canadian tariffs than any other states, at $2.3 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively. They are followed by Pennsylvania at $1.8 billion.

The table below lists each state alongside the value of its exports covered by the new Canadian tariffs.

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‘I am ashamed’: ‘Lifelong’ Democrat has son and new bride killed by illegal alien on roads, now blames own party for disasters

A “lifelong Democrat,” as she described herself to Congress, has admitted being ashamed of how her party has handled the issue of illegal aliens being allowed into America.

Millions arrived under Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House, and despite a concerted effort by the White House of President Donald Trump, while millions have been removed, millions still remain.

A report at Fox News explains that Democrat Elizabeth Carter said her feeling developed when her son, William Micah Carter, and his newlywed wife, Jennifer Lower, were killed in a car crash triggered by an illegal immigrant, Rajinder Kumar.

He had jackknifed a big rig on the highway, and Carter and Lower, and their cat “Bert” hit the wreckage and died in the accident.

“Sixteen days after they were married, Billy, Jenny and her cat Bert were killed. They lost the Russian roulette game our government is forcing them to play,” Carter explained,

She said, “We allowed 10 million people in under Biden. How is there a different suggestion as to how to process them, other than the same way they came into the country, en masse, leaving?”

Under questioning from Rep. Brad Knott, R-N.C., she took aim at the Democrats.

“I have to say, as a lifelong Democrat, I am ashamed of what my party is doing.”

Knott said, “This is the question for the country to consider, is it worth enforcing our laws to protect just one American family?”

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