Have you been hearing a lot about Flock recently? You’re not alone: The surveillance company has put 120,000 cameras on roads in every US state except Alaska, and people are mad about it — online, at city council meetings, and out in the world, where the cameras have become the target of vigilante vandalism.

Flock’s automated license plate readers — cameras that scan the license plates of every car that passes, along with the car’s make, model, bumper stickers, and other identifying characteristics — aren’t really new technology. What makes Flock unique is its use of AI to power a nationwide database that law enforcement can search with very few restrictions.

Founded in 2017, Flock was most recently valued at $8.4 billion. Its aggressive growth strategy has led to widespread adoption: 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country use Flock cameras, representing a whopping 40 percent of the nation’s police departments.

Flock says its cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year. Police say the ability to track suspects across jurisdictions has been a critical tool for solving thousands of crimes including car thefts, missing persons, and abducted children.

But recent reporting also shows how the system is ripe for abuse, with dozens of reported cases of police officers illegally conducting searches on Flock to track the movement of current or former romantic partners. Those stalking cases have led to some arrests, but the instances only came to light after journalists and concerned citizens filed public records requests for the data.

The company recently unveiled several reforms that it says will help avoid improper uses of its system. Critics say the changes are merely window dressing for a surveillance system that threatens the privacy of everyone, regardless of whether they have committed a crime — and they haven’t helped to quell widespread outrage about the cameras, which has caused dozens of cities and counties across the country tohave cut ties with Flock. 

“There’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.”

To get a better sense of where the Flock backlash is heading — and whether the company will be able to survive — Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who has reported extensively on Flock and has broken several stories about its misuse.

The Today, Explained team also reached out to Flock for comment and received an out-of-office reply that said: “Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Cops are using Flock in a really creepy way to stalk their exes. You’ve been writing about other potential misuses and existing misuses of Flock. What are you seeing?

I’ve been reporting on Flock for a few years now and there’s been several high-profile cases and trends that we’ve been reporting on. 

Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. Police in Texas and South Carolina and Tennessee were searching the entire Flock network for either “immigration” or “ICE” in the reason field in the Flock system. And they were searching not just in the states and communities that they were in, but they were searching throughout the entire country. So these searches happened in, notably, Illinois and California, where it is against the law to use this technology for immigration enforcement. An investigation by the Illinois secretary of state found that these searches broke state law and Flock had to do some reform after that. 

There was also a case in Texas where a woman’s partner reported that she had a self-administered abortion and more than 80,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. This is a nightmare situation for people who are worried about access to reproductive freedom. In that case, Flock wasn’t able to track down the woman, but the searches were done nonetheless and police there considered whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime while they were doing that investigation. 

And then earlier this month, I reported on a case in Wisconsin where police used the Flock network to track a man who drove from Wisconsin, where weed is not legal, into Michigan, where it is legal. They then waited for him to drive back into Wisconsin, pulled him over, and then used the fact that he crossed state lines as the pretext to search his car for weed.

So this isn’t just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships. This is ICE, this is abortion. This is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for?

People are really mad about it. I think that there are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles, to find missing children, for property crimes, things like that. And what we’ve seen is a real mission creep. 

We are seeing it used to surveil protesters. We’ve seen it used for immigration enforcement. We’ve seen it used for all these stalking cases. People think that this is the surveillance state. And so there’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.

Tell me about the vigilante backlash.

Basically, people are putting masks on and they are cutting Flock cameras down. These are mounted on poles, and so they are buying pole saws and they’re cutting the poles down. Flock cameras have been shot with shotguns. Industrial foam has been sprayed on the lens of Flock cameras. 

I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was “changing the angle of a Flock camera.” And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a Flock camera and had it face the sky. He was like, “I made it not able to surveil people. Now it’s surveilling the sky.”

There’s something called DeFlock, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the Flock cameras in the United States. This map has become incredibly popular. 

What we’re seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, “Is this a technology that we want in our town?” It’s been people standing at a podium saying, “I don’t like this technology. Let’s talk about it.” And then on the other hand, you have vandals who are destroying Flock cameras and cutting them down.

The backlash is happening across the political spectrum. There have been towns in Silicon Valley that have banned Flock cameras. There was a town in Texas called Bandera that is like a Wild West tourism town that banned Flock cameras. 

Conservatives will say, “This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me. I don’t want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck.” The left is saying much the same thing, but they’re saying, “This is being used to surveil Black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be, and has been, used to surveil undocumented immigrants.” And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point. 

“I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried.” 

There have been dozens of cities and towns that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contract with Flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contract with Flock. Some of these have been quite large cities. You’ve also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well.

This is a multibillion-dollar company. They don’t want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address these concerns?

The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. So if a police officer is searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see, “Hey, is this police officer abusing the system?” 

They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days, meaning that your Flock data will stay in its system for only a week rather than a month.

Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being extremely routine — there are hundreds of thousands of searches done on this system every single month — to where there would be a higher bar, where a judge has signed off that this is a crime that warrants this type of search.

If Flock goes down or if the backlash grows to the point where they’re at least far less relevant in this field, are there a dozen other companies doing the same thing ready to take its place?

This technology is really old. It’s been around for decades. And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. Axon, which makes taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an [automated license plate recognition] product. And some of the cities that have ditched Flock have actually just replaced it with an Axon contract, meaning they’ve ditched one surveillance vendor and they’ve added a different one.

I don’t know that surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers are ever going to fully go away, but I don’t think it’s clear that Flock itself is going to survive this backlash. I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried. 

We can see it in how their CEO, Garrett Langley, has been talking about the tech. A year ago he was calling journalists who covered the company activists and he was calling activists who protested the company terrorists. And he’s had to apologize for that rhetoric. He’s had to go and say, “We are not Big Brother. We are trying to improve your communities.” And they’re really on a PR tour right now to clean up their image. 

I don’t know where this goes from here, but I haven’t seen much fatigue from the public on this story. I opened my Instagram feed and I’m just inundated with video after video that has millions and millions of views about Flock. This seems to be something that has really captured the public’s attention and that they really seem to care about.

Easier to build, faster to launch and more destructive than ever before, cyberattacks are getting a significant boost from frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models.

That was the message from European Union (EU) digital chief Henna Virkkunen at the early July 2026 launch of the EU’s Action Plan on Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence.

Virkkunen raised concerns that advanced AI models can now build cyber exploits in minutes or hours, posing a direct threat to the security of critical infrastructure and society at large.

While AI is a powerful asset for attackers, it is also a powerful tool for defenders.

There is, thankfully, another side to the story. While AI is a powerful asset for attackers, it is also a powerful tool for defenders. Organizations are leveraging AI to reduce their mean time to detect, respond and recover, and to stay ahead of advanced attacks.

The EU’s Action Plan on Cybersecurity and AI not only outlines a coordinated strategy for responding to AI-driven attacks, but also proposes a blueprint for structured access to advanced AI models for the use of IT security teams working within public authorities and private companies.

Adapt and survive

This is an important step forward but, in today’s AI-fueled threat landscape, there are three areas that EU organizations need to consider if they want to keep hackers in check. In short, they must adapt to survive.

The first is control and sovereignty. This is particularly important in Europe, where technological sovereignty has become an increasingly strategic objective.

Organizations need the ability to understand where their data has been created, moved and stored. This is central to their ability to retain meaningful control over the technologies they depend on. In practice, this means avoiding architectures that lock them into specific providers or limit their ability to integrate new capabilities and retaining the freedom to move data in, between, and out of vendors and service providers as their needs evolve. Vendor lock-in is a procurement concern, and one that many organizations seek to escape from.

Open source can help address this challenge. It enables organizations to reduce dependence on any single supplier, combine multiple technologies, switch providers, maintain systems independently or engage local service providers to do so on their behalf. This contrasts with most closed-source IT security products, where continuity of service is by no means a given, especially as vendors can change their commercial terms or exit the market altogether.

Additional advantages lie in code being publicly available for inspection and modification. Open-source technologies are continuously reviewed, maintained and improved by a global development community of people working together to make updates, address gaps, fix bugs and test security tools. They are built by the community for the community and the benefit of the industry.

The second consideration is economics. Typically, implementing IT security technologies involves a range of structural costs and licensing penalties from vendors that make little sense in a world of rising threats and stagnant or even shrinking budgets.

Some of these costs introduce unnecessary risk, like per-device fees that may force organizations to leave lower-priority endpoints unguarded. Some organizations also pay extra costs associated with add-on technologies for automating security processes to coordinate response workflows. Others are dealing with the considerable financial risks involved in using large language models (LLMs) that don’t adequately explain or keep a record of decisions for auditing purposes. During incident response, there are also the high costs and delays attached to retrieving historical data for analytical purposes.

Fragmented tools and restrictive pricing models force IT security teams into a risky game of balancing protection and cost. The objective should therefore be to make comprehensive security economically sustainable.

To achieve this, many teams are looking toward platforms that consolidate monitoring, alerting and response, where pricing is based on compute power and storage.

Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.

Technology architecture matters too. Sprawling estates of disconnected security tools create operational and financial costs. Bringing logs, signals and alerts together in a unified platform can give teams a full, real-time picture of all activities and behaviors occurring across an IT architecture. The best of these platforms will incorporate AI capabilities to identify threats and automate analytical and management tasks, including reverse-engineering malware, compiling actionable case summaries and predicting future vulnerabilities.

The third consideration is readiness for innovation: agentic security. AI agents can take the pressure off overwhelmed security operations center (SOC) analysts by automatically handling tasks such as data collection, threat prioritization, alert correlation and response planning.

The transition to an agentic SOC is already underway. Organizations are embedding AI agents across the cyber stack, automating high-volume and repetitive tasks. This is not to replace human analysts, but to free them for the work that demands human judgment.

In an agentic SOC, instead of spending hours manually triaging across multiple consoles just to reconstruct the full picture of a threat, analysts will increasingly delegate it to AI agents. This avoids slower response times and longer exposure windows, reducing cyber risks to the organization. Analysts can focus their time and skills on supervision, governance, context and the high-impact decisions for which human expertize remains essential.

Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), a public research university in Belgium, illustrates the value of getting that foundation right. Academic freedom has resulted in a highly decentralized IT estate supporting thousands of researchers running their own systems, sensitive research and personal data. Just three engineers are able to operate detection and investigation across 64 billion events and more than 300 servers, because VUB has centralized its data, normalized it for analysis, and built detection and investigation capabilities on a foundation it can control.

Clear-eyed assessment

Getting these fundamentals right will be vital as the EU forges ahead on its stated ambition of scaling up Europe’s AI-driven cybersecurity capabilities. In fact, a clear-eyed assessment of how an organization stands on these issues today is a prerequisite to that organization getting the best from AI-based cybersecurity in the future.

Multi-cloud architectures, expanding volumes of data and increasingly complex digital estates have revealed serious gaps in tried-and-tested ways of protecting digital systems.

There is also a compliance dimension. The EU Action Plan explicitly connects its ambitions with Europe’s existing cybersecurity and technology framework, including the AI Act, the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act.

Yet, the environment these rules are designed to protect is itself changing. Multi-cloud architectures, expanding volumes of data and increasingly complex digital estates have revealed serious gaps in tried-and-tested ways of protecting digital systems. Now, a growing onslaught of AI-enabled attacks adds another dimension, as adversaries can discover vulnerabilities, develop exploits and operate at a speed and scale that human-only security processes will struggle to match.

The answer to this cannot be to leave AI in the hands of attackers.

Europe is right to explore how advanced AI can be put to work for defenders too. But access to powerful models will only deliver results if organizations have first established the control, data foundations and operating models needed to use them effectively.

Attackers are moving toward machine-scale cybersecurity. Defenders need to be ready to do the same.

It’s time to fight fire with fire.

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• The political advertisement relates to the EU’s Action Plan on Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence and advocates for greater adoption of AI-powered cybersecurity, arguing that Europe and its organisations need stronger technological foundations, greater control over data and infrastructure, and increased use of AI to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

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If you’re like me, and you grew up in a house where your mom refused to let you get a video game console, because she believed sitting and staring at a TV was bad for you, you might think of video games as antithetical to health. And there is plenty of research about the ways in which gaming too much can harm your physical and mental well-being. I don’t think anyone would argue that eight hours of Call of Duty every day is doing your body or your mind much good.

But the old caricature of video games as simple brain rot is increasingly out of date. Even some normal, non-educational games can help with brain function (as long as they are played in moderation — and some games are better than others). 

Beyond that, what if we could take something that is wildly popular (there are 3 billion gamers worldwide, 190 million in the United States) and reimagine it in a way that goes beyond just entertainment? Gaming tech has advanced to the point that we can put people into hyperrealistic virtual realities or use AI to create new personalized gaming apps with a brief voice prompt. These and other capabilities are unlocking new ideas from ambitious physicians and game developers that would have sounded like science fiction when I was a teen.

There’s increasing evidence that these platforms can be adapted to do genuinely incredible things to benefit our health. Here are just two ways in which video games are poised to change medicine — including one that allows any of us to game out in the name of advancing science. I can’t wait to tell my mom.

Video games could solve some big challenges in caring for kids

My perspective on video games in medicine started to change when I learned about one specific use: as an alternative to anesthesia for children and adolescents.

Here is a genuine clinical problem: For years, doctors have had few options beyond general anesthesia for kids who need to undergo imaging or minor surgeries. An MRI, for example, really only works when the patient is able to stay completely still and, as anyone who has spent a single minute around a child can attest, that’s hard for kids to do. So, children have been put under during routine MRIs or minor procedures that, when they’re performed on an adult, require only local anesthesia or no anesthesia at all.

But giving children general anesthesia comes with health risks. The FDA warns against repeated or lengthy use of general anesthesia for children 3 and younger because of the risks to their growing brains and future learning development. Other studies have suggested that general anesthesia also poses some risk to the development of older children, and its use should be minimized as much as realistically possible.

Enter virtual reality video games.

“Games and VR can be especially effective for reducing pain and anxiety during pediatric procedures, including burn care, needle procedures, and other medical treatments,” Dr. Kimberly Hieftje, co-director and co-founder of XR Pediatrics and the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics, told me over email. “If we can help a child get through a procedure comfortably without sedation, that’s a significant benefit. Sedation and anesthesia carry risks, and minimizing unnecessary or repeated exposure is particularly important in children.”

Several small-scale studies have examined using virtual reality games as an alternative to general anesthesia for minor and routine surgeries and for MRI imaging — with promising results. In one 2024 experiment, more than 100 kids (average age of 11) wore a mobile VR headset during a minor procedure (most frequently a hormone implant) and played a relaxing game such as Pebbles the Penguin (in which players navigate a snowy world and collect pebbles) or Space Pups (in which they play as a canine soaring through outer space and eating treats) while doctors performed the operation.

The surgical team kept general anesthesia on hand in case it was needed, but none of the children involved in the experiment required it or any other kind of sedation. They were also able to follow simple directions from their physician during the procedure. Their post-surgery reports of pain were similar to patients who did receive anesthesia, and they had shorter recovery times.

Likewise, a study out of Canada published in December 2025 tested how younger patients responded to VR as an alternative to anesthesia when they needed an MRI. It was a small study of only 18 patients, but, once again, the results were encouraging. The kids (average age of 5) went into a VR game prior to the MRI scan, learning about the procedure while collecting magic fairy dust. Then, they went into the actual MRI. And all of the kids who had played the VR game prior to the procedure were able to complete the imaging scan without any additional sedation or anesthesia.

The foundational idea here is: Kids are not little adults. It’s harder for them to sit still. They get anxious about even imaging scans. “We create for adults and, then, put kids in it,” Hieftje said, “and we need to think backwards.”

Video games can help kids stay calm and stop moving — or, for kids with different medical needs, start moving. As any parent knows, children also aren’t very good at following directions or being self-motivated to exercise — even if it would be good for their health, like if they have Type 1 diabetes, for example. That’s why a group of researchers from Yale, as described in a study published earlier this year and which Hieftje co-authored, experimented with introducing kids with Type 1 diabetes to a virtual reality video game that coached them through exercises. 

It was a small group — 17 adolescents, an average age of 15 — but patients who participated were motivated to play the game, followed through with their routines, and even registered a small but detectable decrease in their blood sugar levels. The researchers are hoping that larger studies could demonstrate the program’s effectiveness and continue taking it mainstream.

The list goes on: Hieftje said their work uses games and immersive technologies to address everything from substance use and human trafficking prevention to mental health, child loss and grief, and infection prevention for infants in a natal intensive care unit.

But video games are doing more than changing clinical care for challenging patients. They are also unlocking the basic science that leads to new breakthroughs in treatment for everybody.

Video games could allow all of us to contribute to future scientific advances

When I think of massive multiplayer online games, I think of my friends and I camping out in somebody’s basement to play Halo against strangers for hours on end. But Attila Szantner, the co-founder and CEO of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, has found a more productive use for these remarkable platforms that can connect hundreds of people from all around the world.

What his company has done, in tandem with academic scientists, is integrate important but tedious basic research tasks into the gameplay of popular commercial multiplayer games like Borderlands 3. When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health summit this summer, Szantner presented a demo of one of his company’s modules. What appeared to be players sorting colorful tiles in gameplay that would look familiar to anyone who’s played Tetris, he said, was actually players — normal people with no special training — helping to sequence DNA samples for people’s gut bacteria. Players in the game learn the task from a Borderlands character — including its ultimate scientific aim — and, then, complete the puzzles that the scientists have set up.

“Games are the absolute masters of engagement. They found the magic formula to make repetitive tasks feel fun,” he said. “In citizen science, people have intrinsic motivation to help, but standard tasks get monotonous and people drop off. Games solve that completely.”

They’ve turned the boring but vital work of number crunching and sequencing into gameplay — and convinced millions of their fellow citizens to help. In a paper published in October 2024 in Nature Biotechnology, Szantner and his co-authors described a project that involved more than 4 million individuals completing more than 135 million science puzzles in order to align a million human microbiome sequences. They found that the players’ collective contributions led to better sequencing than the current state-of-the-art computational methods. In another project, they turned some basic cellular analysis tasks into gameplay on the multiplayer game EVE Online that, once again, performed better than what is now the standard.

We have only scratched the surface of gaming’s awesome potential. Clinicians are also optimistic about gaming’s ability to preserve the cognitive health of aging adults and coach them through exercise routines (much like the kids in that Yale experiment), especially as the native gamer generations get older. Video games could revolutionize trauma care by placing burn victims inside of a cold VR environment — and what if you could reduce PTSD by playing Tetris? In 2020, the FDA approved the first video game for ADHD treatment: EndeavorRx. Experts confronting a male loneliness epidemic believe they can use video games to bring young men together. These programs could also transform medical training and allow surgeons to preplan and practice surgeries using their patient’s unique data to produce a bespoke virtual reality practice module.

The point is: The caricature of video games as a gateway to couch potato-itis is a relic of the past. Gaming could help all of us stay healthy — seriously.

BRUSSELS — In Europe’s fight against wildfires, eyes are turning toward the sky: not just looking for rain or water-dropping Canadair planes, but also for ways to exploit new satellite capabilities to help contain or even prevent new blazes.

Satellites and the images and data they gather from space are increasingly seen as a means of providing European governments and firefighters on the ground with more accurate information: to map damage and detect fires at an early stage. 

Such help is more than welcome during another scorching European summer with wildfires in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Approximately 600,000 hectares have burned across EU countries since the start of the year. Just last weekend, Belgium was hit by one of the largest wildfires in its history, in the High Fens nature reserve.

Still, this latest use of satellites is another reminder that Europe needs to step up its game in yet another strategic arena. After Elon Musk’s Starlink showed how satellite-based services could revolutionize everything from mobile communication to waging war, space technology for disaster management offers a potential avenue for Europe to compete.

Greece, a country that seems to be battling bigger wildfires every summer, was the first to act. 

In early May, a rocket of Musk’s SpaceX carried four small satellites into space with the specific task of helping the country detect and track wildfires in near real time.  It was a crucial step in the build-out of the “Hellenic Fire System,” which the Greek government boasted was the first national satellite system of its kind. 

The system was set up through European-wide collaboration, with the help of the European Space Agency, its Greek counterpart, German wildfire intelligence platform Ororatech and Finnish radar-based satellite provider ICEYE.

“By integrating space-based capabilities into our emergency response systems, we are equipping our fire services with the tools they need to respond faster,” Dimitrios Papastergiou, Greece’s minister of digital governance and artificial intelligence, said at the launch in May. 

The satellites that were launched before the summer were equipped with two infrared imagers. Those pick up the heat energy radiated by fires, allowing satellites to detect hotspots and gauge their intensity. 

The system is designed to “support early detection of emerging hotspots and continuous monitoring of fire behavior,” the European Space Agency said. 

Satellites’ role in gathering vast, real-time data and images can also help with other extreme weather events. The Finnish company ICEYE offers monitoring services for governments and businesses to manage both natural catastrophes, such as floods and wildfires, and man-made ones, such as illegal deforestation.

ICEYE raised €1 billion in new financing this year, and became the first company to get backing from the Scaleup Europe Fund, a new fund backed by the European Commission to help companies expand rapidly.

“If we want to be effective in managing the environment around us, both in terms of growth and development, as well as preventing or managing natural catastrophes, these sorts of space-based systems are extremely effective,” ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski told POLITICO.

He said the company has been mostly focused on “managing” wildfires, but is now “trying to push towards predicting wildfires or at least detecting them in an earlier stage.” Modrzewski says a similar offering is available for floods, and for wind damage stemming from hurricanes and typhoons.

The impact can be maximized if Brussels becomes a coordinating “buyer” of those services. “Using space-based capabilities is much more effectively done on an EU scale through [the European] Commission than on a national scale in 27 separate nations,” Modrzewski said. 

The Commission is already prominent in helping governments and emergency services map and detect wildfires. The European Forest Fire Information System, which sits within the Commission’s research desk, maps both active fires and burned areas based on data from NASA’s MODIS and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3, an Earth observation satellite. 

Currently, data and images arrive every 10 minutes, but the launch of a new satellite from the Meteosat third generation next Thursday should speed that up — with images arriving every 2.5 minutes, improving detection and even forecasting of possible wildfires.

BRUSSELS — EU countries will be able to fund small local media without asking Brussels for permission, according to a draft of the bloc’s revised state aid rulebook obtained by POLITICO.

Government subsidies to businesses are strictly disciplined by Brussels under state aid rules, but there are exceptions. These are spelled out in frameworks, with the master one, the General Block Exemption Regulation (GBER), up for revision at the end of the year. 

The European Commission put out an initial draft for public consultation in February with a view to finalizing it by year’s end. The updated, 200-page draft gives a leg-up to local and independent journalism by allowing governments to fund small- and medium-sized outlets without formal vetting by Brussels.

“SMEs active in the press sector play an essential role in safeguarding media pluralism, cultural and linguistic diversity, democratic participation and citizens’ access to reliable information, particularly at local and regional level,” the Commission writes, highlighting structural challenges arising from the digital transformation of media markets.

To qualify for assistance, beneficiaries would need to fulfil at least one item in a Commission checklist that includes preserving media pluralism and diversity of opinion, transitioning to digital content while also preserving print editions. 

“The exemption covers aid pursuing cultural objectives — including linguistic diversity, the digitalization of press publications or the promotion of printed publications,” said Carole Maczkovics, of Counsel at Covington & Burling, of the press measures. 

Many European media outlets are struggling to stay viable, with print readership declining and publishers complaining that online platforms, such as search giant Google, are reducing referral traffic to their websites.

Broad scope

The GBER covers most sectors of the economy, from agriculture to transport, and is the target of intense lobbying from EU capitals, traditionally torn between big government spenders led by Germany and smaller member states, including the pro-free-trade Nordics, which complain that national subsidies distort the EU single market.

Countering the stereotype, Denmark was a leading advocate to extend GBER exemptions to the media. In a consultation response last year, the Danes said the state aid framework should be broadened to include private and public media providers “to promote harmonisation and simplify the general management of state aid in the media sector.”

The latest GBER draft focuses strongly on SMEs and innovation, as well as on the social dimension of state aid — as it expands on conditions for money that governments can put in training programs and the inclusion of disadvantaged workers. 

But it may not necessarily make things easier.

“Although the revision aims to simplify the State aid framework, it may ultimately make it more detailed and prescriptive,” warned Maczkovics. She added that the Commission’s gradual shift from broad aid categories to narrowly defined exemptions may sway EU countries to design measures that don’t quite fit the real needs of companies — for the sake of avoiding a notification.

Industry, for its part, is keeping a close eye on state aid exemptions, with airport lobby ACI Europe quick to react to the latest leak. 

“The revised GBER remains too restrictive for Europe’s smaller regional airports,” said Philippe Sacré, the association’s secretary general. He was referring to aid exemptions that would be restricted to airports handling over 500,000 passengers a year, according to the Commission’s draft. 

The Commission’s latest State aid Scoreboard shows that EU countries spent €168.2 billion in state aid in 2024, with Germany, France and Italy the top spenders. Capitals are increasingly taking advantage of block exemptions, with GBER representing close to 70 percent of all active exemption measures.

Tommaso Lecca contributed reporting.

LONDON — Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government said the U.K. is willing to discuss American concerns over its digital services tax amid renewed pressure from the White House.

President Donald Trump in June threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on European countries with DSTs which target U.S. tech firms, and in an interview with The Times newspaper published on Monday, Trump’s top trade official Jamieson Greer said the threat was “not a bluff” and the president’s demands that foreign governments abandon such taxes were “quite serious.”

“We remain open to discussing U.S. concerns and working with partners internationally,” a U.K. government spokesperson said when asked about Greer’s comments.

“This tax is about making sure that businesses pay their fair share of U.K. tax based on the value they derive from U.K. activities,” the spokesperson said, adding that the U.K. is committed to removing it “once a global solution is in place.”

The DST raised over £1 billion last year, predominantly from American tech firms, and has repeatedly drawn Trump’s ire.

The U.K. government has so far resisted calls to abandon the tax, including during trade negotiations last year. A U.K.-U.S. Economic Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Burnham’s predecessor, Keir Starmer, did not mention the DST but said both sides would continue discussions to increase digital trade and address non-tariff barriers.

Greer added in his interview with The Times that the U.S. administration would not “set artificial timelines” and that relations with his British counterparts, including Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and the prime minister’s business adviser Varun Chandra, are positive.

Today's links

• The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad).
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost $6.5T in a year; Voter ID is voter suppression; Become unoptimizable.
• Upcoming appearances: Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

The ordinariness of evil (permalink)

Maybe it seems weird that AI bosses won't stop publicly rending their garments about the terrible potential of their products, from the jobspocalypse that will ensue when AI can do our jobs better than us, to the impending moment when the word-guessing programs learn too many words, wake up and turn us all into paperclips.

It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh

In other words, AI is mostly a novelty, a heavily subsidized toy that produces little more than distraction. Where AI does produce value, that value is comparable to a plug-in, a new feature for your word processor or image/sound/video-editing package that might help you do your job somewhat better, or it might not.

That doesn't make AI useless, it just makes it a normal technology: useful for some, useless for others, capable of being abused and likely to waste a lot of time when used unwisely:

https://www.normaltech.ai/

Normal technologies are fine. But normal technologies do not warrant the massive economic and political commitments that have been bestowed upon AI: a trillion dollars in the past year alone, and the world's civil servants fired en masse and replaced with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

The people who have committed our society and its resources to an all-or-nothing bet on AI will tell you that AI is the everything machine, but when pressed, they will confess that AI is about to become the everything machine, for example, once AI starts doing AI research, a thing that AI cannot do:

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-agents-cant-yet-do-open-ended

This is a civilizational act of Magic Underpants Gnomery, and every day that it goes on is a day when more economic, climate and political costs of AI are imposed on all of us. Scientific journals, open source repositories and even science fiction magazines are being overwhelmed by slop, whose perpetrators and apologists insist that soon, AI will realize its potential and the slop will be transformed into gold.

That's why AI bosses are so committed to talking up AI's destructive potential: because destructive potential is nonetheless potential. The moment we stop believing in that potential is the moment that we stop supplying AI companies with bales of cash to shovel into their money-furnaces so that they can afford to sell hundred dollar bills for a dollar each to Elon Musk cultists who want to generate child porn and pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog with giant boobs.

AI does have destructive potential. It has the potential to destroy the productive economy when an AI salesman convinces your boss to fire you and replace you with chatbots that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

AI has destructive potential because bosses are trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where none of them can admit that the money they've spent – and the jobs they've destroyed – chasing AI has been wasted, and so other bosses bet even harder:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/01/dare-snot/#i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

AI has destructive potential because the data-center bubble has convinced credulous town officials to throw out environmental and planning review, seize people's home and farms, and carpet the countryside with giant data centers (many of which will never be built):

https://www.404media.co/people-hate-datacenters-survey-finds/

AI has destructive potential because it is consuming scarce water and energy and emitting gigatons of carbon:

https://www.404media.co/even-the-u-s-government-says-ai-requires-massive-amounts-of-water/

This is the destructive potential we need to be hammering at, because this isn't the kind of destructive potential that translates into productive potential that will someday make the AI bet pay off. Quite the opposite: this is all about the potential of AI to destroy the economy and consume your retirement savings:

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/congrats-youre-about-to-unwittingly-make-elon-musk-trillionaire-spacex-ipo-index-funds

Just as importantly: we have to stop amplifying tech bosses' chosen narratives about their products' destructive potential, because this helps them raise more money and do more terrible things. Bernie Sanders needs to stop insisting that the US government should own 50% of the money-losingest corporations the world has ever seen and start talking about how they will not get a government bailout when their investment bubble bursts. We need to stop talking about AI "haves" who will enjoy the awesome potential of AI, and AI "have-nots" who will fall behind.

We need to stop talking about "AI safety" and the possibility of "rogue AI" destroying the world. When an AI company's security tool "escapes containment" and hacks someone else's servers, we need to ask the company "Why do you suck so bad at building secure sandboxes for your hacking tools?" rather than "Why are your hacking tools so amazingly powerful?"

Above all, we need to stop talking about AI as exceptional. AI is normal. A normal technology has some uses, but isn't useful for all things and all people. A normal technology isn't inevitable, it's something you decide whether you want to use or not.

Treating AI as unexceptional is the best way to halt the destructive march of AI companies and their impact on jobs, the climate and the economy. But treating AI as unexceptional requires that we stop talking about AI as if it were exceptionally evil. Yes, some people who use AI experience severe mental problems, but that's not because AI is a Lovecraftian horror that destroys your brain and your capacity for rational thought if you use it. It's not a basilisk. AI is like a carny ride that triggers cardiac events in riders who never knew they had a problem because they never experienced those particular g-stresses – it's not something that induces vulnerability, it's something that triggers vulnerability:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

Using AI doesn't make you evil, nor does it risk your sanity – no more than doing any of the other dangerous, compromised, unsustainable things that constitute our daily lives in this fraught moment. The world will be better off when the AI companies are bankrupt and their servers are sold off at ten cents on the dollar – but using those servers to run open models in modest, careful ways won't infect you with their wickedness. They are not stained with communicable sin. They're just computers. They are unexceptional.

One way for a technology to be normal is for it to be produced and marketed by an awful corporation that wants to do terrible things. This isn't to say that "all technologies are dual use, and you have to take the good with the bad." That's the inevitabilist argument of vulgar Thatcherites who insist – as Margaret Thatcher did – that "there is no alternative," and we have to accept their abuse if we want to reap the benefits of the technology.

The normal way to deal with this is to reject vulgar Thatcherism in favor of heroic Gibsonism, thundering William Gibson's rallying cry, "the street finds its own use for things," as we seize the means of technology and use it in the ways that benefit us, while restricting, banning, or blocking the uses that harm us:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/17/technopolitics/#original-sin

To treat AI as exceptionally evil is to elevate the mediocrities who run AI companies to super-villain status, a status in which they positively revel. A serial liar like Sam Altman will someday trip over his own dick and end up in a cell for securities fraud – unless we keep exalting his evil to Satanic scale, in which case he might make himself "too big to jail":

https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/sam-altman-ai-job-losses-openAI-/

Altman is a con-man and a stock swindler, not a super-genius. The more we describe his products as possessing a special kind of durable evil that will endure even after his company fails and he is condemned to history's ash-heap, the more we help Altman raise money for his chatbot Ponzi. Normal technology isn't a cursed artifact. That's something you find in a lich-king's tomb. We need to stop helping Altman burnish his reputation as a lich-king and stop treating AI like it's magic.

There's a technical term for the kind of tech criticism that inadvertently helps tech bros sell their swindle: "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for "tak[ing] the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip[ping] them, and start talking about 'risks'":

https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/

In other words, to commit criti-hype is to repeat the marketing claims of people like Sam Altman and then add, "(and that's bad)" in parentheses at the end. These guys – these terrible, mediocre, boring-ass losers – are bullshit factories, ejecting fountains of nonsense about AI. The right way to criticize them is to point out that they're lying – not to repeat their lies as warnings.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• Are We Still Litigating Whether Corporate Profit-Taking Contributed to Inflation? https://www.thesling.org/are-we-still-litigating-whether-corporate-profit-taking-contributed-to-inflation/

• Hook and Squeeze https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/hook-and-squeeze

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Dot-com crash toilet paper https://web.archive.org/web/20010822220826/http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-6908350.html

#25yrsago Associated Press says a single sentence excerpt is not fair use https://web.archive.org/web/20050717075914/http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/8/17/202249/240

#15yrsago German Pirate Party poised to win first federal election https://torrentfreak.com/german-pirate-party-on-course-to-election-win-110820/

#15yrsago Understanding the Nym Wars https://epeus.blogspot.com/2011/08/google-plus-must-stop-this-identity.html

#15yrsago Journalism school teaches students pre-digital newspaper production techniques https://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

#15yrsago 90 percent of US net users don’t know from crtl-F https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s Augmented Reality project https://web.archive.org/web/20110827010512/https://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/08/augmented-reality-science-fiction-writer-becomes-augmented-reality-developer/

#10yrsago Woman sues cops because they destroyed her empty house, thinking a suspect was hiding in it https://www.techdirt.com/2016/08/19/woman-sues-after-police-destroy-her-home-during-10-hour-standoff-with-family-dog/

#10yrsago US Army committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in one year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG/

#10yrsago Candid Republican operators admit that voter ID laws are about disenfranchisement https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/when-politicians-tell-truth-voting-restrictions

#1yrago Become unoptimizable https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• London: AI and the Enshittification of the Media, NUJ (Sep 2)
  https://www.nuj.org.uk/learn/ems-event-calendar/ai-and-the-enshitification-of-the-media.html

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

• Victoria: Munro's Books (Oct 20)
  https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020

• Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
  https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Deflating the AI Bubble (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/deflating-the-ai-bubble-with-cory

• Technofeudal Enshittification (Fucking Cancelled)
  https://www.fuckingcancelled.com/p/technofeudal-enshittification-with

• Who The Machine Serves (EFF)
  https://archive.org/details/effecting-change-who-the-machine-serves

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change II (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-two-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/937e8800-9404-45a6-b5e3-90ebee2cfaea

• Speculative Fiction for Social Change I (Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff)
  https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/cool-people-who-did-cool-stuff/08cbb840-a6ae-013a-d8aa-0acc26574db2/part-one-cory-doctorow-on-speculative-fiction-for-social-change/15ad467c-0832-44c9-91ea-59defd783dba

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 531 (7157 total).

• "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

ATHENS — Greece’s attempt to lure top scientists back to their homeland after the trauma of the financial crisis has stalled after an ambitious program to reverse the brain drain descended into fiasco.

A group of professors who hoped to bring back young researchers through a much-advertised program financed with EU funds are now feeling betrayed, having been left waiting for years only to find out the program won’t happen.

To rub salt into the wound, no one from the government bothered to inform them that the scheme was dead, they said.

“All this ‘brain gain’ talk isn’t just a joke; it’s a massive step backward,” Aristides Hatzis, a professor at the University of Athens, said. “During the financial crisis, there was only one area where there was money invested: research, as the EU prioritized this. Now there’s nothing; it’s at the very bottom of the list of priorities — a complete abandonment.”

An estimated 500,000 people moved abroad during Greece’s financial crisis, which began in 2008, shrinking the country’s economy by a quarter and driving unemployment to 28 percent. Greece had experienced mass migration before, including in the decades after World War II, but this time it was many citizens with high levels of education and skills who emigrated.

“Brain Regain,” an initiative by the ruling conservative New Democracy government to reverse the mass exodus of scientists and professionals, comprises several schemes, such as offering a 50 percent income tax exemption for seven years, and is expanding to include high-skilled public sector roles.

And overall, the situation has improved since the crisis era.

According to the survey OECD Diaspora Review Greece, from 2021 onward, there has been a steady increase in the number of citizens returning to Greece, with 2023 marking a milestone year when — for the first time since the start of the crisis — more people returned than left. Specifically, during the two-year period of 2023–2024, 69,000 Greeks left their country while 98,000 returned.

But when it comes to scientists, there is still a major problem.

Star-crossed project

The current fury of many researchers and scientists hinges on a Greek government project called “Trust your Stars” — an €80 million research funding program backed by funds from EU’s post-Covid recovery fund, the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF).

Research teams were called to submit their proposals, with 145 out of a total 1,241 submissions selected. Thirteen months later, after several complaints regarding the delay, the selected list of projects was finally published on July 22, 2025.

Then, it all started to unravel.

Those not selected for funding reacted fiercely, with some 203 submitted objections and calls for reevaluation. Scientists raised their concerns over the evaluation process itself, and some even submitted complaints to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

In January 2026, Greece’s development ministry then issued a statement, saying payments of some €40 million had already been made, and that the remaining half of the program’s budget was earmarked for completion by Dec. 31, 2029. But complaints only escalated, with some of those selected for funding sending formal legal notices to the education ministry, seeking details about where the money had been spent since the program had not yet started.

Then, the final bombshell dropped: Trust your Stars was not going to receive the EU funds anymore.

In a statement published in May, Greece’s education ministry said the country’s finance ministry had decided to “remove the project during the review of Greece’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.” It was later revealed that on the day the list of selected proposals was officially published, the government also delisted the program — but no one informed the applicants for 10 months.

“It was ultimately not possible to implement the project ‘Trust your Stars’ within the time frame set out by the RRF,” said an official from the education ministry. “For this reason, the project was removed, as part of a review of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the Council of the European Union.”

“As regards the funds linked to the actions in question, these were redirected to finance other actions undertaken by the RRF and the Education Ministry. Consequently, under no circumstances was there any loss of resources from the RRF,” added the official.

Shattered hopes

On July 15, Greece’s finance ministry issued a statement, saying it was trying to secure funds “to settle any outstanding financial obligations arising from legal commitments entered into at the time of the revocation of the program.”

While the statement rekindled hopes that a solution would be found, Hatzis argues that it was just a legal trick and that the education ministry has no legal commitment since no contracts were signed following the initial announcement of accepted proposals.

“What happened violates a fundamental principle, one that is sacrosanct in states governed by the rule of law: ‘reliance,’ the citizen’s legitimate trust in the state,” he said. “There may be no contractual liability, since we did not sign an agreement, but there is a political, moral and even legal obligation. Many young people turned down other offers or did not take up jobs elsewhere because they hoped they would be paid through the program.”

Hatzis added that with its handling of the situation, the government had managed to turn the entire scientific community against it — both those who had been successful and those who had not.

“If you’re a young scientist and you’re abroad, stay there! If you’re a young scientist and you’re thinking of moving abroad, go for it. Don’t wait a minute!” he wrote in a lengthy social media post.

Pantelis Kammas, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was co-leading one of the teams that had a successful proposal, said the program was a chronicle of a death foretold.

“The perception within the scientific community was that this was EU money and that it could be handed out hastily through nontransparent procedures. There was a sense of mistrust because this was a one-off emergency program,” said Kammas. “The ministry lacked an organized framework for evaluation, the academic community’s objections were based on these well-known shortcomings, and media that seek to oppose the government jumped on that. This was the perfect storm, so the government decided to backtrack and cancel the program.”

Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, an associate professor of the history of science at the University of Athens, said he had gathered a team of 25 young scientists to come to Greece from countries like the U.K. and Germany for a study of medicines used during the Byzantine period, which could serve as inspiration for new pharmaceutical formulations. Fortunately, they had not already traveled by the time the project was canceled.

“The most offensive thing is that the government never bothered to meet us or give us a reasonable explanation about what happened,” he said, noting the government’s handling created even greater problems with the scientific community than those that already existed.

Bouras-Vallianatos himself returned to Greece in 2022 after a 15-year career in Edinburgh, and has not regretted the decision, as he wanted to raise his children in his homeland. However, he added that while many others wanted to return to Greece, the conditions for doing so were not in place. Some of them do but only for sentimental, personal reasons, he said.

“There has been no serious policy by the Greek state to get its scientists back.”

According to preliminary statistics, research spending in Greece has declined, dropping to €1.27 billion — or 0.51 percent of GDP — in 2025, from €1.30 billion in 2024.

“Funding and low salaries is a big issue,” continued Bouras-Vallianatos. “An independent body should be set up, which would allocate funds for research and adheres to international standards in terms of evaluation. We are a small country; we all know each other, so a large proportion of the evaluators should be foreigners.”

The first thing I noticed when I gave up American technology was the silence.

My phone usually starts up before I get out of bed, buzzing every few minutes throughout the day with calls, messages, headlines, calendar reminders and social media alerts. It’s a constant pulse that averages nearly 200 iPhone notifications on weekends and twice as many Monday-to-Friday.

But on this warm mid-summer Sunday, my life was on an unlikely version of mute. After years of reporting on Europe’s push to wean itself off U.S. tech giants and cultivate homegrown alternatives, I had decided to test my own daily habit by cutting myself off from using any American technology for 72 hours.

No iPhone. No Mac. No Slack or Teams. No Google Search or Maps. No ChatGPT. No WhatsApp or Signal. No Facebook or Instagram feeds. No credit card payments.

I wondered if I would turn into a digital monk.

For three days, I set out to live and work in Brussels as if U.S. tech had suddenly become unavailable to me overnight. It was a purposefully fictional scenario rooted in a very real European anxiety: what happens if Washington weaponizes our continent’s Silicon Valley dependence and reaches for the tech “kill switch?”

Limited versions of that scenario have already surfaced. When U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration cut off French-born International Criminal Court judge Nicolas Guillou from U.S.-linked financial and technology services, he called it a form of “civil death.”

Meanwhile, U.S. export controls in June forced Anthropic to block foreign nationals from accessing two of its most advanced AI models, offering a glimpse of what government bans on access to cutting-edge technology can look like.

Such episodes feed into mounting fears that the Trump administration could use Europe’s overreliance on U.S. tech as leverage in trade fights or disputes over EU regulations. A Proton survey released earlier this month found that 74 percent of European business leaders worry such a cutoff could disrupt their operations.

In my own little experiment, the stakes were much lower. Yet I was about to find out that replacing American tools with those built here in Europe was going to make almost everything harder — and lonelier.

Trying to live without U.S. tech, I would find out, essentially amounts to trying to live without tech at all. That was partly because, like virtually all of my fellow Europeans, I had locked myself into those consumer choices.

Dumbphones and FOMO

The early symptoms of going cold turkey looked suspiciously like withdrawal.

On that first morning, with my iPhone shut off, I reached for a Nokia brick from Finland. The so-called dumbphone is the type of device now enjoying a second life among people detoxing from screen time and is also a favorite of drug dealers seeking to avoid getting busted by any tracking and data collection.

Several hours in, I realized there were no notifications on the Nokia. Nobody calls or texts anymore. Then came the shameful part: a sense of helplessness, followed by FOMO-fueled restlessness. The world had surely kept spinning at full speed, and I was missing it. For the next few days, I would still catch myself checking the phone compulsively like an addict.

“The phone aged you instantly,” my best friend joked later that day as we traded our now-standard FaceTime video calls for a regular one. It was unclear whether he meant the muffled audio or me struggling with a new-but-actually-old device, or both.

I did notice that I was pacing up and down my flat because my usually overstimulated brain apparently couldn’t handle focusing on a voice-only call.

One instant benefit from my dumbphone: no doomscrolling in bed.

It all took me back to my first cellphone at 13, when texting meant tapping the same tiny key several times for a single letter, every SMS cost money and abbreviations and emojis were not just stylistic choices but ways to squeeze more into a message.

I knew my social media life would be at risk in my experiment. European alternatives such as Mastodon have gained traction since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X. But who joins a social network when none of their friends are there?

That was fine. I was actually eager to disappear for a while, well aware of the anxiety social media induces in me and the insecurities created by constantly watching other people’s supposedly perfect lives.

Online shopping was out — but so too was paying by card in stores and restaurants. The payment networks I rely on are American: Visa and Mastercard dominate card payments across Europe, meaning that even a purchase made with a European bank card often still runs over U.S.-controlled rails.

It meant I had to buy everything using cash, which I hadn’t done regularly in ages. Fortunately, unlike in some other European countries, Belgian legislation requires merchants to accept banknotes. The hard part was finding some of those stores without the help of Google Maps, which I’d come to rely on almost as much as my credit cards.

The invisible grip

Swearing off Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and YouTube was also part of the deal — already eliminating a sizable chunk of my leisure time. But it turned out I could barely watch anything at all, or even properly test European streaming platforms, because my television and tablet both ran on Google software.

Thankfully, an offline Nintendo Switch from Japan, good old books and the legendary Snake game kept me company.

These invisible dependencies run deep. Beyond the products we use every day, U.S. systems often serve as gateways to European companies trying to take on Big Tech.

Take Sweden’s Spotify or the Estonia-based rival to Uber, Bolt. Both still heavily rely on U.S.-controlled app stores, operating systems, payment networks and other digital infrastructure.

And then there is the cloud: the data centers and servers that host websites, process data and route traffic. The vast majority of that market is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, whose infrastructure supports large parts of Europe’s digital economy.

Many corners of Europe would go dark if those services were shut down, with its economy, public administration and communications infrastructure struggling to function normally.

Working outside the stack

On Monday morning, I walked into the office with the slightly misplaced confidence that I had prepared for everything. My efficiency at work, admittedly during a very quiet summer week, took less of a hit than I expected.

I was still working from the office. I used an open-source, Linux-powered computer. I communicated by email through a Switzerland-based Proton address, browsed the web using the Norwegian browser Vivaldi and French search engine Qwant, wrote everything in LibreOffice and even tried Mistral’s generative AI assistant. And there was always a good old notebook.

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.

“It was like you disappeared,” one colleague would tell me later.

European alternatives do exist in that space. The problem is, just like for social media, they only work properly when everyone else uses them too or when competing systems are interoperable — something the EU has long tried to legislate and enforce, often against resistance from large technology platforms.

For this little while, despite technically being able to continue working, I became an outsider within my own team. I had to skip our routine video meetings on Slack and Teams, while missing messages sent over WhatsApp and Signal.

In a trade, a city and an era built around instant messaging, sending a good old SMS felt almost prehistoric — a reminder of the longstanding complaints from the European telecom industry about losing messaging and calling revenues to U.S. tech firms.

Ultimately, this underscored one of the major pinch points in Europe’s push for greater tech independence: digital sovereignty is not an individual project. It only works if people, companies and institutions move together.

On their own, individual efforts are more likely to leave people feeling digitally isolated rather than digitally sovereign.

Relax and relapse

And yet, there was something blissful about these three days.

The initial anxiety slowly gave way to a kind of peace. Of course, that feeling may only reflect that the experiment was temporary and my digital life had not been erased.

The experience nevertheless highlighted how much I had taken these tools for granted. I have placed all my eggs in the same digital basket: my communication channels, the tools I use to authenticate myself and access the digital world, my polished digital self and years of accumulated knowledge, all stored inside one sprawling digital safe.

The concern is no longer simply whether that safe could be broken into from the outside. It is also whether somebody could lock it — or empty it — from within.

Now, as you might wonder how I’ll act on what I’ve learned, I am strangely reminded of Covid.

Many of us emerged from that temporary era of lockdowns and involuntary limits full of healthy new habits and grand ideas about how our lifestyles should change, only to return remarkably quickly to our old routines.

Sadly, the same thing happened here. My iPhone came straight back into my pocket. Messages began flowing through again. My bank card returned to its usual place. Within hours, I had fallen comfortably back into the U.S. technology stack.

As I switched my smartphone back on, my screen lit up with incoming texts inquiring whether my little experiment was over. After 72 hours of old-school SMS exchanges, two different friends were both clearly eager to return to reality, sending me the same final text: “Back to WhatsApp?”

LONDON — The personal mobile phone numbers of three U.K. Cabinet ministers — including Defense Secretary Wes Streeting — have been found published online alongside their names.

The discovery comes after POLITICO reported that Prime Minister Andy Burnham fell victim to a texting scam — engaging with messages from someone impersonating Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, before becoming suspicious the contact was illegitimate and ending the conversation.

After checking through a list of Cabinet members, POLITICO found three published on the web, for Streeting, Justice Secretary Alex Norris and Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant. POLITICO is not pointing to where the numbers can be found to avoid further risking security.

All three ministers declined to comment on the record. The reference to Streeting’s number online has since been deleted, and officials are working to remove the other two.

Ministers are given secure government devices to conduct business for their briefs, in particular for high-risk roles like defense, and are expected to use those for non-personal comms.

A government spokesperson said: “The government has robust procedures in place to ensure the security of sensitive information.”

But Prerana Joshi, research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, said that having direct numbers for Cabinet ministers in the public domain is a risk, warning that numbers could be spoofed and used to call others at a time when the U.K. is “in a high threat situation” globally.

“In any civil space, if your number is exposed, a whole host of malign, nefarious or even opportunistic cyber criminals or cyber actors could get hold of it, and they have tactics,” Joshi said.

‘No significance’

Downing Street would not comment on the revelation that Burnham exchanged messages with the impersonator, citing “national security.”

One person briefed on the communications said a “few messages” were exchanged after the PM entered No. 10 but insisted they were “of no significance.”

It is unclear how the fraudster obtained Burnham’s number. POLITICO could not find it published online.

British officials initially feared Wiles’ phone had been hacked again. But a White House official said: “This incident had nothing to do with the Chief of Staff’s devices being hacked.”

It is not clear whether Burnham will change his phone number, as Boris Johnson did after the Popbitch newsletter revealed in 2021 that the then-prime minister’s details had been sitting online for years.

‘Full of traps’

The episode has sharpened questions over whether Burnham — who built his political brand on his informal style and being more approachable than other prime ministers — can carry on that way in No. 10.

A former national security adviser, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said the prime minister needs to “get into the habit” of having his security staff verify that messages reaching him are authentic.

National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell “could have phoned the White House in five minutes and checked whether Susie Wiles genuinely was texting the prime minister,” they said.

“Being a domestic politician and going on listening tours around the U.K. is one thing, but when you engage in the international world, it’s full of traps and full of risks,” the former adviser added.

“What starts off as a very informal chat can quickly get into some kind of business, and you could give away key details of an upcoming trip or the movements of Donald Trump,” they said.

Former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace — himself targeted by imposters posing as Ukraine’s prime minister in 2022 — said the incident “demonstrates our adversaries are always looking for weak points in our communications.”

While Downing Street has said nothing significant was discussed in the exchanges between Burnham and the imposter, Wallace said “there is always a risk of kompromat” being obtained by hostile actors.

As technology, such as AI voice cloning, improves, these sort of incidents are going to “happen more and more,” Wallace added.

Others have urged Burnham not to change tack.

Guto Harri, Johnson’s former director of communications, said: “It’s only a threat and it’s only an embarrassment if they give something away — and it doesn’t seem that he’s done anything like that.”

Harri said it was “good to have someone big enough not to have his calls screened from everyone” as prime minister.

“I don’t think it’s healthy that the civil service wants to control all access to the principal. If they had their way, nobody would be able to talk to a prime minister without going through them,” he said.

“We can’t say that politicians are not living in the same world as us … and then moan about them speaking to people like a normal human being.”

Harri conceded a new number might be a “good idea,” giving the prime minister a “clean slate.”

Dan Bloom contributed to this report.

Ukraine called on the European Union to sanction the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom on Monday, hours after a POLITICO investigation revealed allegations of safety and engineering failures at one of the company’s flagship projects.

“Rosatom is not just another energy company — it is the instrument of Russia’s ambition to secure a global monopoly in nuclear energy,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X.

He said the findings were further evidence that Rosatom was “not a reliable partner” and urged capitals to restart talks on EU sanctions. “No state should be doing nuclear business with a company complicit in war crimes,” he added, sharing a link to POLITICO’s article.

POLITICO’s investigation revealed warnings from Egyptian authorities and internal assessments by Rosatom regarding the construction of the El Dabaa nuclear plant. The documents obtained by POLITICO raised concerns ranging from the quality of concrete work to delays and management problems, while an Egyptian agency alleged “deliberate negligence” and violations of “nuclear safety culture.” Nuclear material has yet to be introduced at the site.

Rosatom previously defended its safety record at El Dabaa and pointed to regular scrutiny of the project by Egyptian, Russian and International Atomic Energy Agency officials. None of the allegations contained presented to Rosatom by POLITICO, have been “confirmed within the contractual, technical and oversight procedures envisaged by the project,” the company said in a statement.

It did not respond to a request for comment on Sybiha’s remarks on Monday.

Sybiha’s call puts renewed pressure on EU governments that continue to cooperate with Rosatom despite Russia’s war in Ukraine. In Hungary, the company is building two new reactors at the Paks II nuclear plant using the same VVER-1200 technology planned for El Dabaa.

Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar last week challenged Rosatom’s claim that construction for the reactors remained on schedule, saying his government was carrying out a full review of the project.

BRUSSELS — A Russian state-controlled corporation building a nuclear power plant in Hungary is facing allegations of safety, security and engineering failures at another project in Egypt that uses the same technology, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO. 

In a confidential letter dated June 4 and addressed to a Rosatom executive, Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority describes “defects” affecting multiple reactor units and violations of “nuclear safety culture” as it builds the El Dabaa nuclear plant. The letter also cites “deliberate negligence” on the part of an official at the project. 

The tranche of documents was shared through an intelligence official who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, and it has never previously been made public. It includes confidential company documents that describe construction delays and engineering concerns coming from Rosatom’s own reviews of the project. 

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Europe to impose sweeping sanctions on the country, Rosatom has tried to convince European governments that it remains a reliable and competent supplier in the nuclear power market. But the accusations of safety breaches could add to existing concerns over the Kremlin-controlled company’s operations in the EU.

In an emailed statement to POLITICO, Rosatom said it upholds the highest levels of nuclear safety and had done so throughout the construction of El Dabaa. The company declined to comment on whether it had received the letter or the complaints from Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its communications with Rosatom.

“The high standard of work organisation, the quality management system and the safety culture are affirmed by the sustained attention paid to the project by the political leadership of the Russian Federation and the Arab Republic of Egypt, as well as by the leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose representatives regularly attend key project milestones,” said the company by email, adding that a recent ceremony for one of El Dabaa’s reactor units was attended by Russian, Egyptian and IAEA officials.

None of the allegations contained in the letter, presented to Rosatom by POLITICO, have been “confirmed within the contractual, technical and oversight procedures envisaged by the project,” read the company’s statement.

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said in July he expected the construction of all four El Dabaa reactors to finish by 2030, with the first reactor unit set to begin producing power by 2028. No nuclear fuel has yet been introduced to the site. Rosatom’s Egyptian plant will use the same technology at the heart of Hungary’s Paks II project, the Kremlin-backed nuclear expansion that has repeatedly raised tensions between Budapest and the European Commission.

The Commission told POLITICO it was not aware of the confidential documents and allegations they contain. “For the EU, nuclear safety is a key priority,” said a Commission spokesperson. 

They added that while the Commission was following the project’s developments, “issues of nuclear safety are [the] responsibility of the EU Member State concerned.”

Initially green-lit by Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2014, the Paks II project became emblematic of Budapest’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin and provided a foothold for Russian energy technology inside the EU. Work began on the project in February this year.

The Kremlin-controlled corporation also has plant projects in Turkey and China, while Germany is under fire for green-lighting a deal in July that will allow one of Rosatom’s subsidiaries to help produce nuclear fuel rods for a plant in Lower Saxony. The German government said the deal would be under strict national security controls.

The Egyptian government and its embassies in Belgium and the United States did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The allegations

Once fully operational, the El Dabaa complex will contain four Russian-designed nuclear reactor units under the supervision of the Nuclear Power Plants Authority. In the letter sent by the Egyptian authority to Rosatom, an official at the agency wrote that uncompleted reactor units have already encountered defects.

Originally sent to Rosatom in English, the letter appears to have been translated into Russian for internal circulation. POLITICO is citing a version of the letter translated back into English.

“There has been a re-emergence of serious concrete defects, including voids behind the metal cladding at Unit 4, defects in the foundation slabs of Units 1, 2 and 3, which took a year to repair, and defects in the cellular structure in the cylindrical wall of the reactor building at Unit 4,” details the letter. 

The Egyptian agency then accuses Rosatom of “misleading methods” and “fictitious work” attempting to prove the plant’s construction is over halfway complete, “while a visual inspection at the site clearly shows that the main buildings of the nuclear island are still in the underground construction phase.”

Rosatom, the Egyptian authority alleges, also presides over an unprofessional workplace culture in which workers were caught in possession of  “prohibited alcoholic beverages” on the work site, used “forged passes and impersonated others to gain unauthorized access,” and took several “photos and videos taken at the construction site” that ended up on social media, “which negatively affected the reputation of the project.”

The letter makes reference to a serious accident on the construction site, which resulted in a worker suffering “a severe open fracture” and then being smuggled to a private vehicle, not to an “equipped ambulance,” which the Egyptian authority claims was done “intentionally” to cover up the incident.

“Such behavior represents a serious disregard for both human well-being and professional responsibility, and constitutes a gross violation of workplace safety regulations, nuclear safety culture and reporting obligations,” said the letter.

Four additional internal Rosatom business documents reviewed by POLITICO reinforce aspects of the Egyptian authority’s concerns, detailing delays, construction-quality problems and project-management failures. One Rosatom draft audit prepared internally in 2025 warned of a “significant risk of failure to fulfill” the company’s contractual obligations and forecast that the preliminary schedule of El Dabaa’s first reactor unit could slip by 18 months, from September 2028 to March 2030.

Future in doubt

The allegations contained in the documents cast a shadow over the Paks II project in Hungary and are likely to reinforce concerns in Brussels about entrusting critical European infrastructure to a company under the Kremlin’s control.

In a lengthy commentary by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security think tank, researchers warned Western countries against doing business with Rosatom, citing its deep connections to Russian intelligence and its problematic role in forcibly running the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine through military force.

For the government of Hungary’s newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar, the Rosatom revelations also present a new headache: Paks II remains indispensable to Hungary’s plans to decarbonize its electricity system and replace aging nuclear capacity. In an effort to reexamine Orbán-era policymaking, Magyar’s government recently opened a review into Paks II, questioning its hefty price tag and connections to Putin. 

Former Hungarian Green lawmaker Benedek Jávor, who focused on Paks II and was critical of the Orbán government, cautioned other governments about working with Rosatom. He told POLITICO he now believed the allegations coming out of El Dabaa could have far-reaching consequences for Rosatom and the fate of Paks II.

“They’ve already decided to reconsider the contract, and this was already communicated during the election campaign,” he said of Magyar’s government. “[This] information from Egypt will definitely be part of the evaluation.”

AI is threatening to replace human workers in some fields, and rightfully, many people are furious that they’re going to be replaced by lines of code. Count scumbag scam artists among them, as a report in Wired dives into the results of a study showing that AI chatbots may be significantly better at scamming people than humans are.

Researchers from four universities, who published their findings on arXiv, tested an AI chatbot against human scammers in a simulated “pig butchering” scam, a particularly vile form of fraud in which criminals spend weeks or months pretending to be friends or romantic partners before lulling victims into making shady investments.

For the experiment, 22 unsuspecting participants spent a week texting with two strangers: one was a human scammer, and the other was an AI chatbot told to pretend to be human and never admit it was AI.

The AI won.

AI Scammers Could Be Better at Manipulating People Than Human Ones

Forty-six percent of participants agreed to download an app at the chatbot’s request, compared with just 18 percent who complied with the human scammer. Participants also reported trusting the AI more than the human and sent roughly 80 percent of their messages to the chatbot.

What’s especially troubling is that the AI wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. It didn’t find some clever, significantly more sinister way of scamming people. It was just persistent. It just made conversation, remembered people’s details the way a robot can, and generally did the thing AI does best: be a ruthless, shameless sycophant that gets people on its side by showing a degree of interest in the victim that humans generally don’t. It pretended to give a s—t better than humans can pretend to give a s—t.

Researchers warn that eventually, these ass-kissing scam AI artists will be used to automate their scummy work, which could have at least one upside of reducing or eliminating the need for all the human trafficking victims who currently are forced to work in Southeast Asian scam compounds. An AI might reduce the amount of exploited people in the world while making pig butchering scamming more efficient, prevalent, and harder to trace than ever.

Congrats, humanity! We finally created a technology that’s so good at replacing human labor that one of its most promising uses will be emotionally manipulating people into handing a scammer their life savings.

The post AI Chatbots Are Better at Scamming People Than Human Scammers, Study Finds appeared first on VICE.

A court in France on Friday shot down a bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s from September — a major blow to President Emmanuel Macron that raises fundamental questions about efforts to protect kids on the internet.

The Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, said the restrictions in the bill disproportionately infringe on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.

Europe’s would-be first social media ban, which sought to prohibit access to anyone in France under the age of 15 from next month, had been a flagship policy of Macron’s second and final term.

The French president has also pushed restrictions to the top of the EU agenda, with an expected announcement of bloc-wide measures by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September.

In a statement late Friday, the French presidential office said the government would not be giving up on the bill. It has set a new target date for spring 2027, which coincides with when Macron will leave office.

The statement said Macron “has instructed the Prime Minister to work, as quickly as possible, on a legally sound draft that takes into account” the court’s decision. The ruling hinted at what would make the age restriction align with fundamental rights: giving parents more flexibility.

Peter Craddock, a senior Brussels-based attorney advising social media firms, said the French court decision could have far-reaching implications.

“What they’re basically saying here is: ‘Listen, government, if you want to get this to succeed, you can’t just work on the basis of a general ban. There have to be limitations,” said Craddock, a partner at Keller & Heckman. “There have to be ways for people to say, ‘well, actually, in my case, my son, my daughter is of a certain degree of maturity and is able to use this properly.'”

The government bill had passed through the French legislative procedure after a lengthy back-and-forth earlier this summer. It was set to bring forward Europe’s first social media age restrictions, with Greece and Denmark planning to follow suit.

But Article 1 of the French bill essentially rendered it a blanket ban, without sufficiently distinguishing between the risks of each social media platform or the varying levels of vulnerability among minors themselves, said the court. The ban would also apply to online platforms that have not been proven to have risks to the health and safety of minors.

Craddock warned the court’s judgment may not bode well for other national bans or restrictions coming from the European Commission, since the decision is framed around fundamental rights, which are harmonized across the bloc.

“The reasoning is actually equally relevant internationally,  throughout the EU, because this fundamental freedom is not specific to France,” he said.

This article has been updated.

In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. 

In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will.” He then walked off in triumph.

As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. 

Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.

“Flock from the first has been quite deliberate in sequestering decision making processes — where these things are placed, what they gather and for whom — and the data gathered through them from the general public,” Adrian Daub told me. A comparative literature professor at Stanford University, his forthcoming book, “What Tech Calls Governing,” examines the increasingly authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley. 

“The intersection with state actors is particularly worrisome,” Daub said. “Governments can outsource the dodgier aspects of data collection and use, while the private sector gets to disavow the obvious political implications of this kind of massive surveillance.”

According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. In Johnson County, Texas, police officers fixated on a woman suspected of having an abortion, and used the database to track her movements in an effort to prove it — even though state law is supposed to exempt the patient from criminal prosecution. Police have been outed for using the cameras to stalk people for personal reasons, such as having a conflict — or even a sexual obsession — with them. 

Flock has claimed the company will reform its policies to address these issues, but history suggests it would be unwise to trust them. One former Flock employee, Jonathan Paz, has accused the company of lying about its intentions to gain government contracts, which are then abused by law enforcement to harm the public. Paz told 404 Media that company management had assured him they weren’t feeding information to agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a falsehood he passed on to city governments in his sales pitch. After finding out about a secret pilot program to help track down and detain immigrants, Paz left the company.

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Flock’s behavior represents a microcosm of a larger trend in tech that should alarm freedom-loving Americans, regardless of political affiliation. Silicon Valley enriched itself with promises that the cyber revolution would mean more freedom and democracy by enabling the flow of information and communication. But in recent years, there has been a dramatic about-face as the C-suite class has become increasingly authoritarian. Algorithms and AI are used to choke off people’s access to information and make intra-human communication more difficult. Journalism is faltering as an industry, even as social media and search engines are being programmed to dissuade users from reading or watching real news sources. Surveillance is starting to feel ubiquitous, between online bots tracking our every move to cameras everywhere, including the faces of other people wearing AI glasses. Billionaires like New York Knicks owner James L. Dolan reportedly use spying tech to harass people who criticize them. 

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a major donor to pro-Trump groups, observed at a recent meeting of financial analysts about the future of AI.

“There is a link between technology (whether it ‘works’ or not) and repressive state apparatuses,” Daub explained. For example, while Flock cameras expand the ability of the government to crack down on people, they also allow officials “to claim it’s not their fault when some poor sucker gets snared” unjustly by blaming poor technology. “It’s not an accident that their politics have tacked more openly to the right in recent years,” he said of the tech CEO class. 

This can all feel overwhelming at times, which is very much by design. Silicon Valley’s hype machine portrays an AI-controlled future as inevitable, even equating the technology to a god that will overpower us humans, rendering democracy a quaint artifact of the past. AI was swiftly embedded in innumberable computer programs, often not even allowing a user to opt out. The goal of this isn’t mysterious. Tech CEOs, mimicking the villains of sci-fi, are telling the public that resistance is futile. 

The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable — and we have the right to fight back. The public has some leverage points. Despite their elaborate efforts at secrecy and unaccountability, Flock works through government contracts. Citizens can petition leaders to avoid or drop contracts, a tactic that has been working across the country. There are still transparency laws that apply to Flock databases, which is how 404 Media and other media outlets have discovered abuses of the technology. Activists have been building maps alerting people where the cameras are. 

The maps intersect with what has been the most controversial part of the Flock uprising: the vandalism. Although it appears the vandals aren’t organized in any meaningful way, they are being egged on by social media users who cheer from afar as people shoot, steal or otherwise disable the cameras. It’s understandable that the vandalism is the most compelling front of the rebellion, and not just because petty, victimless crime is a cheap thrill. Vandalizing the cameras is a sharp rebuttal to Silicon Valley talk about how technology will liberate us from the limitations of the physical world.

The reality is that bodies and physical space are still of paramount importance, which is why tracking and controlling people’s movement is a priority for tech-obsessed authoritarians. But while they’d like to pretend they are gods on an invisible mountain, bending us to their wills, the reality is that they need old-fashioned metal — copper and gold, even! — to get it done. Destroying a camera sends a strong and unmistakable message: They are finite, physical entities, just like us.

Like it or not, the vandalism sends an emboldening signal to the public that tech oligarchs are not omnipotent. If you toss a brick at their expensive cameras, they squawk. It’s crass and illegal, and yes, the cameras are insured and immediately get replaced. But the boost to human self-esteem and the reminder that our squishy bodies still matter more than all the data in the cloud? It’s hard to argue against it. 

There are still plenty of pitfalls. MAGA leaders like Tucker Carlson are clocking the anti-Flock movement and trying to hijack it. Using conspiracy theories, he and others can redirect attention away from real enemies — tech oligarchs and compliant politicians — and toward blaming phantasms like the “deep state,” falsely insinuating that the tech spies are left-wingers doing some poorly defined socialism. This has the twin benefits of ginning up outrage at innocent people, while also shielding the very right-wing forces that are actually the source of the problem. 

Still, it’s promising sign that people are rebelling against Flock cameras. Along with protests against data centers, it’s a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave.

The post The Flock uprising is just the beginning appeared first on Salon.com.

This week and next, the Brussels Playbook Week Ender podcast is away for the summer holiday. 

So, we thought we’d re-up this popular installment on Europe’s quest to become independent from U.S. tech. 

In this episode first released in June, Sarah Wheaton is joined by “The Tech Coup” author and former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and POLITICO’s Laurens Cerulus, as they look at what happens when the systems running Europe’s schools, ministries, banks, businesses and security are controlled elsewhere. They also discuss whether Brussels can build real alternatives or simply learn to manage its dependence better. 

The Brussels Playbook Podcast will be back to its regular schedule on Aug. 24. 

Questions? Comments? Send us a message to our WhatsApp here or at +32 491 05 06 29. 

A bipartisan House delegation met with top Vatican officials on Wednesday to discuss artificial intelligence during a visit that briefly included Pope Leo XIV, according to two people with knowledge of the trip granted anonymity to disclose details of the private meetings.

The delegation’s visit, which has not been previously reported, included nine lawmakers and was coordinated by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the person said. Committee member Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) and California Rep. Ro Khanna, the panel’s top Democrat, led the trip.

A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.

In an interview confirming the visit, Khanna said the topics of discussion included religious freedom, AI’s economic and geopolitical risks, as well as broader ethical and existential implications. It centered on two key principles: human dignity and equality.

“Human dignity means that human beings need to be responsible for any key decisions involving health, involving finances, involving individual freedom, involving public services,” he said.

The Silicon Valley Democrat said that in this context, equality means preventing automation from causing mass unemployment, and ensuring AI cannot be used to exclude people from social services. Khanna said it also means guarding against a concentration of power in which “a few billionaires can make decisions about data and algorithms.”

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting. But Pope Leo has taken a special interest in the technology and used a May encyclical to call on countries to “safeguard humanity” as AI develops, warning that the technology could deepen inequality, fray the social fabric and erode moral responsibility if it doesn’t have ethical guardrails. Congress, meanwhile, has introduced dozens of AI bills and held several hearings, but has failed to agree on a comprehensive federal framework for governing the technology.

The pope previously cast the global race to develop cutting-edge AI technology in stark terms. As the U.S., China and other powers compete for an edge, he warned against a “dehumanizing ambition to develop ever more powerful technologies or to secure control over them,” describing a contest between “opposing imperialisms” seeking either to preserve or seize technological supremacy.

Khanna told POLITICO he plans to introduce legislation that would tax the use of autonomous AI agents to incentivize companies to hire human workers.

The group also discussed AI’s implications for human mortality and the limits of human knowledge — boundaries some developers have long imagined technology might overcome by uploading human consciousness and accumulated wisdom to the cloud.

Following the meetings, Khanna sent letters to top executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, and Amazon, asking how they intend to align their technology with the tenets of human dignity and equality.

An OpenAI spokesperson pointed POLITICO to prior policy documents outlining the AI company’s commitment to safety and to ensuring benefits from the technology are distributed equitably. The other companies did not respond to requests for comment.

The lawmakers traveled to Berlin to discuss China’s rising global influence, before picking up on the topic during their Vatican visit and in meetings with Italian government officials a few days later.

Alongside Khanna and Newhouse, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), John Rutherford (R-Fla.), Randy Feenstra (R-Iowa), Shontel Brown (D-Ohio), Jill Tokuda (D-Hawaii) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) took part in the discussions, according to one of the people familiar with the trip.

Spokespeople for the members did not respond to requests for comment.

NATO plans to fortify its eastern edge using drones, sensors and artificial intelligence in a massive network designed to spot and help repel a potential Russian attack.

Western officials say the alliance is exploring AI-assisted drone operations as part of the broad effort to bolster its defenses. The aim, however, isn’t full autonomy; instead, machines could help to pilot the drones while human operators make the call on what they strike.

The approach echoes what Ukraine is already doing. The embattled country is increasingly incorporating AI into its drone operations, but both soldiers and defense tech firms have repeatedly emphasized that humans must remain at the center of the fight, even as the war becomes more robotic.

For NATO, AI-assisted drones would be part of the Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative — a digital battlespace network the alliance is building to track threats along its borders with Russia and Belarus, which stretch from northern Finland to the Black Sea.

The new concept includes thousands of drones, sensors and satellites linked with AI to detect potential breaches of allied territory and repel attacks as the first line of defense. Conventional military forces, such as tanks, fighter jets and artillery, will remain the backbone.

U.S. Army Maj. Ben Schiff, a software operations officer, told Bild — which, like Business Insider and POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network — that both Ukraine and Russia still rely on humans to control drones.

While some systems have AI or machine-learning capabilities that allow brief moments of autonomy in flight, piloting is primarily performed by operators on the ground. Schiff said that “the most boring parts of flying”— drones loitering above the battlefield looking for targets — should be automated. But when it comes to deciding what the drone should strike, that’s where a human comes into play.

“So the humans are deciding what the drone does, but they don’t necessarily need to take the action of flying it because we don’t have a million pilots. We can’t fly a million drones at the same time,” said Schiff at the U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Schiff is a product manager for the EFDI Data Backbone, a developing framework designed to help NATO forces detect, classify, share and act on information at speed and scale. The backbone bridges incompatible computer and command systems across multiple allied nations, allowing real-time data to flow from forward-deployed sensors all the way back to headquarters.

The goal is to help NATO move beyond today’s linear system — called a “kill chain” — where information moves from the front line back to a decision-maker and then back again to the battlefront to a “kill web,” where data from sensors can be rapidly passed to weapons systems and operators.

“The value of a drone, sensor or other capability is not determined solely by its individual performance,” said Maj. Matt Blubaugh, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. “Its effectiveness depends on how well it integrates into the broader operational ecosystem.”

Learning from Ukraine

Ukraine is already pioneering the integration of AI into military operations.

On the battlefield, Ukraine has made significant progress in using AI to support functions like decision-making, drone navigation, terminal guidance and precision, said Andrii Hrytseniuk, the CEO of the Ukrainian state-backed innovation platform Brave1.

This spring, Hrytseniuk told Business Insider in Kyiv that more than 200 local companies were developing AI-based components for drones, missiles, radars and other systems. However, they insist machines won’t control drones from start to finish.

Wild Hornets, the manufacturer of the popular Sting interceptor drone, also told Business Insider in May that AI will be gradually integrated at almost every stage of flight operations — target detection, identification and, later, terminal guidance.

A spokesperson for the company said humans will still make the final decision on what to strike. Since Russia is constantly changing its tactics, interceptor operators must keep tabs on these changes and make necessary adjustments, they said.

As autonomous systems become more common on the battlefield in Ukraine, commanders also told Business Insider that humans need to remain in the loop.

Grek, the call sign of a company commander overseeing robots with Ukraine’s 21st Unmanned Systems “Kraken” Regiment, said the goal is to “allow people to focus on the tasks where human judgment has the greatest value.”

U.S. Army officers stressed that NATO is using the operational environment in Ukraine to inform military planning for a potential future confrontation.

“We’re not copying Ukraine,” said Capt. Ronan Sefton. “We’re learning from Ukraine.”

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

President Donald Trump is paving a legal pathway for U.S. companies to launch cyberattacks on foreign cybercriminal gangs — a significant and potentially controversial measure that would put approved tech and cybersecurity firms on the front lines of digital combat.

The presidential memorandum, released late Wednesday, comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly pushed for more aggressive action to counter foreign scams and cyberattacks, which the White House said cost Americans nearly $21 billion last year.

The memo represents one of the biggest shifts in U.S. cyber policy undertaken in recent years. It would empower tech and security companies — whose data and control over internet infrastructure often offer unique insight into foreign hacking operations — to mount state-sanctioned digital strikes.

While many such companies already work closely with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, a web of legal and political constraints has long prevented them from taking direct action inside foreign networks.

Companies that want to participate would be required to sign contracts with both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and to undergo what the memo describes as “rigorous vetting” while working with the government. The overall effort would be overseen by a National Coordination Center, established in an earlier Trump administration executive order, with co-executive directors from DOJ and DHS.

However, the memo states that no operations by the companies would be approved until the executive directors at DOJ and DHS establish “consensus procedures” with the White House Homeland Security Council guaranteeing “complete oversight and control of Participating Companies’ performance.”

Those procedures, it notes, should be drafted within 60 days. They are likely to be extensive.

They will outline steps for participating companies to obtain approval for proposed offensive hacking operations, so the government can confirm that the targets are criminal gangs and ensure that operations are consistent with U.S. law and don’t undermine ongoing U.S. intelligence efforts. Companies could propose surveillance operations to help identify criminals or “effects” operations to degrade the systems they use to stage their attacks.

Participating companies would have to pass minimum standards for technical expertise and personnel vetting, and would be required to notify the federal government if they believe approved operations may result in the loss of life or rise to the level of use of force under international law.

Some see the memo as a critical step to help the U.S. government counter foreign cybercriminal gangs that operate outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

“For years we’ve called the American technology industry a strategic asset but left it on the cyber sidelines,” Joe Lin, the CEO and co-founder of Twenty, a start-up that builds offensive cyber tools for the U.S. government, said in a statement. “This administration is changing the paradigm.”

The memo notes that companies will only be authorized to target criminals that are “not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”

Even with the help of the U.S. intelligence community, making that distinction could be difficult.

Adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran have persistently targeted U.S. critical infrastructure, including water systems, ports, and telecommunications infrastructure, while multinational crime syndicates have defrauded billions of dollars annually from Americans via complex online schemes.

But many cyber gangs in Eastern Europe are thought to operate with the tacit consent of the Russian government, while state hackers in Iran and China sometimes moonlight as cybercriminals to earn extra money or deflect blame for their governments’ attacks.

More broadly, it is not always easy for digital investigators to determine who is responsible for a given cyberattack, or who different computer networks belong to — another risk the memo contemplates.

Companies that accidentally carry out operations targeting a U.S. citizen or network will be required to immediately pause the operation and notify the U.S. government, the memo states. It does not appear to preclude activities that are deliberately “directed” at a U.S. person, so long as they receive “any necessary authorization, judicial or otherwise, prior to approval of the operation.” Under U.S. law, a “U.S. person” can refer to an American business or organization.

Many lawmakers and security experts have broadly supported calls for the private sector to play a larger role in responding to cybercrime, though not all approve of granting them the ability to launch active hacking efforts.

In recent years, some House members have debated the idea of issuing “letters of marque” to private companies to carry out cyberattacks on behalf of the U.S. government, similar to the U.S. Navy authorizing private ships to disrupt British shipping during the War of 1812.

As part of a more assertive cyber posture, Trump has turned to U.S. Cyber Command to mount digital attacks in tandem with U.S. military operations, including in Iranand Venezuela. He signed an executive order this March to clamp down on countries that fail to take action against scam centers operating within their borders.

That same month, the White House called on the private sector to broadly help it “disrupt” foreign adversaries in its new national cyber strategy, though it stopped short of telling private companies to take riskier and more consequential steps, such as directly launching attacks against foreign criminals.

Some of the most prolific online fraud operations are believed to emanate from scam compounds in Southeast Asia. But hackers from North Korea — who for years have stolen hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency from victims around the world — would likely be exempt from targeting by U.S. companies since they work at the direction of the North Korean government.

North Korea's Red Star Linux OS ships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. — Read the rest

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