Blog

Waste Of The Day: Alleged Data Center Fraud

The Securities and Exchange Commission paid $10.7 million to store its electronic data at a Maryland facility that was allegedly certified by a company that does not exist.

AiNET Corp. and its former CEO Deepak Jain recently agreed to pay $1.8 million to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act by knowingly defrauding the government. The settlement does not contain an admission of guilt.

Key facts: When the SEC began looking for a new data center in 2012, it required applicants to have a Tier III certification. That means the data center is fully operational even when undergoing maintenance.

Jain submitted paperwork to the SEC showing that AiNET had been certified by the company Uptime Council. No such company exists.

The Department of Justice later alleged that Jain wrote the certification letters himself, and that nobody had ever inspected AiNET’s data center. Jain allegedly purchased a web domain for Uptime Council to make it appear like a legitimate business.

The name also closely resembled the Uptime Institute, a legitimate company that certifies data center infrastructure.

When SEC employees toured the facility before signing the contract, an AiNET employee allegedly prevented them from viewing infrastructure that would have shown the center did not meet the claimed standards.

The SEC later experienced issues involving security, cooling and power and spent additional money and resources addressing them.

When the SEC requested a new certification in 2017, Jain allegedly drafted another Uptime Council letter stating that the center had been reinspected. Prosecutors claimed no inspection occurred.

The SEC stopped using the facility in 2018. Prosecutors allege that Jain was still advertising the data center’s false certification to private customers as of 2024.

Jain’s attorneys previously maintained that AiNET fulfilled the contract and that no SEC data was lost or compromised.

Summary: An independent certification is not much of a safeguard when the contractor allegedly creates the certifier himself.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Keep reading

Father Forced to Move Where His Kids Sleep After Cop Used City Flock Cameras to Stalk Him 76 Times Over a Woman

A former Amarillo, Texas, police officer allegedly weaponized the city’s surveillance system to track a local father dozens of times after developing a personal interest in a female officer the man had previously dated.

Christian Eder, 29, was fired from the Amarillo Police Department on July 17 after an internal investigation found that he allegedly misused law-enforcement databases for personal purposes. He now faces 78 counts of tampering with a government record, ABC 7 Amarillo reported.

According to NewsChannel 10, an internal audit found Eder searched the father’s license plate through the city’s Flock automated license plate reader system 76 times between February and June 2026.

He also allegedly searched the man’s name twice through TLOxp, a law-enforcement database containing information such as addresses, phone numbers, vehicles, and businesses.

Investigators reportedly found no police calls, cases, or assignments that would have justified the searches. Eder allegedly entered false explanations, including “city planning,” while dozens of other searches were reportedly marked with the reason “want.”

The father, who spoke anonymously, said Eder became interested in him after pursuing a female APD officer whom the man had previously dated.

The victim said he later learned Eder had allegedly been using a department-issued phone to monitor the female officer’s active patrol-car and body-camera feeds.

Keep reading

SHOCK: Devout Catholic Parents in Massachusetts Say State Took Custody of Their Teen Daughter After they Refused to Affirm Her as a Boy

A devout Catholic couple in Massachusetts said the state took custody of their teenage daughter after they refused to affirm her as a boy.

Joseph and Arlene Kutzko said they have been fighting in court for nearly two years after their minor teen daughter Sophie was taken away from them because they would not recognize the child as a boy.

In December 2024, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) took Sophie away and is now beginning the process of medically transitioning her with testosterone.

The distraught parents alleged that the counselors at Algonquin Regional High School secretly began the process of socially transitioning their daughter without their permission.

A restraining order was lodged against the parents with allegations of abuse.

The DCF put the teen girl in a boys’ dormitory, put her on psychiatric drugs, and gave her birth control.

The couple has not spoken to their daughter Sophie, who is now 17 years old, in nearly two years.

Keep reading

Digital Surveillance Is Becoming the New Form of Government Power

The latest revelations involving the Department of Homeland Security demanding Google surrender data tied to a Canadian citizen demonstrate just how far governments are pushing digital surveillance powers beyond traditional legal and national boundaries. According to reports from WIRED, DHS used a “customs summons” under the Tariff Act of 1930 to demand location records, account activity, and identifying information connected to a Canadian man who had criticized ICE online following controversial immigration enforcement incidents earlier this year.

The individual reportedly had not entered the United States in more than a decade, yet American authorities still attempted to access his digital information because the technology platforms involved operate under U.S. jurisdiction.

People need to understand the implications because this goes far beyond one investigation or one political controversy. Governments are increasingly treating access to private technology infrastructure as a gateway to global surveillance authority. If your information passes through American technology companies, authorities now appear willing to argue they possess legal grounds to access portions of that data regardless of where you physically reside.

According to the lawsuit described in the WIRED investigation, DHS issued what is known as a customs summons, which functions as an administrative subpoena that does not require prior approval from a judge or grand jury. The summons reportedly demanded records involving location history, account activity, and communications tied to “threatening or harassing language.” The government allegedly justified the request under customs law despite the fact the individual was not accused of importing goods or violating customs duties in any conventional sense.

Authorities rarely begin by openly announcing broad monitoring programs targeting ordinary citizens. They start with politically sensitive cases involving terrorism, immigration enforcement, extremism, sanctions violations, or national security concerns. Then the scope quietly expands over time until governments normalize monitoring broader categories of speech, behavior, and political activity.

Keep reading

Pete Buttigieg Says Democrats Have to Pack the Supreme Court Because it’s too Partisan

Former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on Meet the Press this weekend and explained that Democrats have to pack the U.S. Supreme Court, because it’s just too partisan.

This is one of those complaints that Democrats only make now. When the court had a liberal majority for years, there were no concerns about partisanship, only now is this suddenly an issue.

The Daily Wire has more details:

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argued Sunday that the Supreme Court has become dangerously partisan — then proposed a fix that would require Congress to add six justices widely expected to lean in his own party’s favor, during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Buttigieg told host Kristen Welker that the court has come to look like a “nakedly partisan institution” and calling for six additional justices to be added to the current nine-member bench — a bigger expansion than he has previously floated.

“It has become a nakedly partisan institution,” he said. “And I want to be clear. The idea is not to just add justices for its own sake. The idea is to reform the institution, to make it less partisan.”

The comments extend a message Buttigieg has delivered repeatedly since at least July, when he told Fox News that public confidence in the court had fallen to what he called the lowest point in its history, and proposed a package of changes including term limits for justices and a “balanced bench” selection process meant to reduce political influence over appointments. At that time, Buttigieg said he favored expanding the court from nine seats to 13, a number he said should match what he called “the number of districts” in the federal system. In fact, the federal judiciary has 94 judicial districts; the number 13 refers to the appellate circuits, not districts — an error critics flagged after his July remarks.

Keep reading

US Data Centers To Burn More Natural Gas Than Most Nations

Several weeks ago, we explained why most data center developers favor on-site gas power: it boiled down to two main reasons – availability (especially since modular nuclear power for commercial ‘behind the meter’ use is still in the distant future) and price. Furthermore, a recent BloombergNEF analysis shows the marginal cost of operating an on-site gas plant may be below industrial electricity tariffs, making continued generation from on-site assets the cheaper option in many cases. 

As we discussed in late August, marginal generation costs depend on fuel prices and variable operating expenses. BloombergNEF modeled the marginal cost of operating engines, turbines and fuel cells at a mid-scenario gas price of $3.97 per million British thermal units. Gas engines, such as ones manufactured by Wartsila and INNIO, have the highest marginal cost, at $43.2 per megawatt-hour (MWh). Fuel cells, most prominently procured from Bloom Energy, are the cheapest to continue running, at $21.5/MWh, benefiting from high thermal efficiencies and the lowest variable operational cost.

It appears that none of this was lost on US data centers, and the result has been an explosion of nat gas use to power the domestic data center industry which in turn is critical to keep the AI bubble afloat. 

Which brings us to another key data point: according to a new outlook from BloombergNEF, data centers in the United States will consume more natural gas than most countries within a decade.

Gas consumption to produce electricity for data centers is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day in the ten years to 2035, even accounting for many currently planned projects never being built, BloombergNEF said. That’s more gas than is currently consumed by all nations except China, Russia, Iran and the US itself, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It’s also more than double BloombergNEF’s previous forecast in December of 6.9 billion cubic feet per day.

The report is the latest illustration of how the future of AI is intertwined with the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuels, tying Big Tech’s ambitions to those of the legacy oil and gas industry, and why – as we discussed over the weekend – a Democratic win in the midterm elections will make life for data center developers a socialist hell. 

The abundance and low cost of producing natural gas in the US, combined with gas power plants’ ability to quickly ramp up and down as needed by 24/7 data centers, are a key part of why the fuel is expected to supply 69% of the power needed by new grid-connected data centers in BloombergNEF’s forecast.

Keep reading

Democrat Socialist Who Wants to ‘Tax the Rich’ Complains About Paying Her Own Back Taxes and Student Loan Debt

Angie Nixon, the Democratic Socialist running for U.S. Senate in Florida, is not interested in paying her fair share.

The ‘tax the rich’ leftist commented during a podcast appearance this summer that she does not want to pay her back taxes or her student loan debts.

How incredibly typical.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Nixon’s personal income in 2025 clocked in at well over five times the median income of the average American worker, yet she failed to set aside enough of her substantial earnings to pay her taxes and repay her student loans. The dues-paying Democratic Socialist reported in her latest disclosure submitted in Florida that, as of Aug. 25, she owes nearly $14,000 in unpaid taxes to the IRS on top of $17,600 in unpaid federal student loans.

Nixon’s unpaid taxes and student loan debts are a drop in the bucket compared with the extraordinary and diversified income she earned in 2025. Still, the Democratic Socialist, who wants to institute a 5 percent annual wealth tax on billionaires, recently complained about how “crazy” it is that the federal government is forcing her to pay her own fair share.

“Your girl over here is on a payment plan to pay the IRS $12,000 back,” Nixon said during a podcast interview in July. “And listen, I ain’t made $105 billion, but you making me pay $12,000 to the feds? Like, really? That’s what we’re doing? And they already took some of the taxes away anyway. I paid over $10,000. It’s just, it is crazy.”…

As for Nixon’s unpaid federal student loan debt, she says she won’t repay it. In October 2023, when Congress ended the pandemic-era student loan moratorium, Nixon, a University of Florida graduate, declared on Facebook she was “above” paying back her educational debts.

“Dear Student Loans. It’s above me now,” Nixon wrote. “I don’t wanna pay it back. Education supposed to be free.”

Keep reading

“I’d Be Okay With That”: Trump Says He’s Open To Chinese Automakers Building Cars In US

In comments that most people missed on Friday, President Donald Trump suggested that he’s open to letting Chinese automakers build cars on US soil. 

Speaking with Fox News, Trump said that while he wouldn’t allow Chinese cars to operate in the United States because the US market would be overrun – he might be open to manufacturing them here. 

“We don’t allow his cars into the United States, and I never did,” he said, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, noting that then-President Joe Biden had kept his policies on Chinese cars. 

“If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be okay with that. Japan does it, but they hire our people. The big thing is they hire our people,” he continued, adding “What I don’t want is them to build in Mexico and just … build it inexpensively and ship it across the border.”

As The Epoch Times notes further, a regulation imposed by the Biden administration in early 2025 effectively bans all Chinese automakers from selling or building passenger vehicles in the United States. Washington also maintains more than 100 percent tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles.

Trump’s remarks came ahead of Xi’s planned visit to the United States later this month. The president said on July 23 that he would discuss artificial intelligence with the Chinese leader during the visit. The two leaders last met during Trump’s visit to Beijing in May, where Trump formally invited Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, to the White House.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a Washington-based group representing major U.S. automakers, on Sept. 3 urged Congress to permanently ban the sale, import, and manufacture of Chinese-connected vehicles, hardware, and software before the current congressional session ends.

“Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world,” John Bozzella, the group’s president and CEO, said in a letter to the congressional leadership.

Bozzella warned that China is gaining market share in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America with vehicles that can collect, process, and transmit “sensitive vehicle and consumer data to the Chinese Communist Party.”

It hasn’t happened yet inside the United States, he said. He urged lawmakers to act quickly, given the scale and urgency of the threat.

Keep reading

A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models hacked into several real world systems over the past three months. These models gained unauthorized access to web systems, published malicious packages, and exploited unnamed vulnerabilities.

A single firm, Irregular, is responsible for hacking done by all three companies. Anthropic disclosed that Irregular was responsible for creating the tests that led to Claude hacking into real world targets and for providing the models with internet access. Irregular claims that it was unaware at the time that it provided internet access to those AI models.

In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

Instead, Irregular, Anthropic, and their allies have begun a media campaign promoting a literally apocalyptic ideology with sensationalist language. Anthropic’s incident assessment blames their own AI’s “recklessness”; Irregular describes “the agent itself becoming a threat actor”; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”; and an Associated Press headline claimed bots are “going rogue”.

In one report from Anthropic, its Claude model breached a real company’s system through a simulated-name collision, publishing a malicious package, and scanning outside systems. In this test, Anthropic and Irregular incorrectly provided internet access to this model and did not instruct the model “which systems were in scope for the exercise”.

While Anthropic claims that their issues were caused by “rogue swarms” and “misalignment,” their later disclosure shows that exactly zero percent of the agents went “rogue”. In this experiment, Claude models’ real-world hacking dropped to zero percent once Anthropic employees told the models not to do real-world hacking. According to their own findings, Anthropic and Irregular bear all of the responsibility for the cybersecurity incidents they caused.

Keep reading

Ilhan Omar Has Been Cleared of Misconduct Accusations, but Something Doesn’t Add Up

Sometimes things just don’t make sense. Especially when someone like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is concerned.

She’s been a controversial figure in the past, especially when it came to her “Somalia first” statements that she’s made – something that doesn’t reflect well on someone of her stature. But it’s her most recent case surrounding a mysterious increase in funds that I feel needs a bit more attention – especially considering the result.

See, there was a financial disclosure with Omar’s personal records a while back, indicating that her and her husband’s assets were between $6 million and $30 million. That’s a far cry from the salary of $174,000 that she makes with her current position.

Many believed that she was taking advantage of local Minnesota businesses with this – myself included. After all, a huge increase in cash like that doesn’t just appear magically. So, yes, I fully supported the investigation into the case, because we deserve answers.

But apparently the Office of Congressional Conduct felt that there was no wrongdoing. Last month, it noted that any misconduct charges against Omar were cleared. “From day one, we have been clear: the Congresswoman is not a millionaire.” This is in spite of the statistics that previously told us otherwise.

And the reason for the mistake? Get this. Her husband’s accountant reportedly listed gross business values for firms such as Rose Lake Capital without subtracting liabilities.

Does that sound like a legal excuse to someone else?

Apparently they were quick to cover up this “error” of theirs, filing a new report in April 2026 to show an actual household value between $18,000 and $95,000. That’s a stark difference from those previous numbers. Like, nearly night and day.

The Office of Congressional Conduct voted 5-1 to dismiss these allegations, stating that they believe she did not “knowingly” file false information. But I’m not so sure.

I think there should be some form of a secondary investigation to look more closely into Omar’s business dealings. And her husband as well. I have a hard time believing that a professional accountant would make such a blunder to report such inflated numbers as an “error.”

In case you missed it a while back, Omar was involved in another controversy during the COVID era. Back then, she had involvement with the MEALS Act, calling to ensure children would receive food during pandemic school closures. Sounds innocent enough, right? Only it was a scheme that ended up creating a $250 to $300 million fraud scheme for “Feeding Our Future.” I mean, kids?! Really? And we’ve seen three people already pleading guilty to this, though Omar, as usual, denied being involved.

“Any claim that I had knowledge of this scheme is flat-out false,” she stated earlier this year when asked about the program. “I have always championed feeding kids and will continue to ensure our children do not go hungry.”

Not to mention, with 9/11 coming around again this past week, her thoughts on “some people did something” still linger. “Some people”? No wonder that drew the backlash that came from it. It was one of the most harrowing events that took place in U.S. history, but she dismissed it like it was nothing.

Keep reading