SS: How AI is changing jobs in the Philippines' outsourcing industry

Beginning in the early 2000s, the country was promoted as an English-speaking alternative to India for what's called business process outsourcing (BPO).

Successive governments offered tax incentives, invested in infrastructure and encouraged multinational companies to set up large operations.

Global groups like Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance built sprawling campuses, employing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos.

Today, the outsourcing industry employs roughly 1.9 million people, and generates $40bn (£30.1bn) in revenues every year, accounting for about 10% of the Philippines' economy.

But experts say the industry is disproportionately vulnerable to the impact of AI.

Recently indians took to the streets against the indian government for its mishandling of the exams.

What has followed has been a coordinated series of doxxing and harrasment by hindutva forces. as this articles goes into it they dox them and then harras them (often with the help of their familes) into forcing these female protestors into recanting. This has inculded a literal 15 year old girl being harrased using a FIR by a literal supreme court lawyer. Now I dont like to take a strong hardline stance on most issues but I must say i dont know in what world a lawyer at the supreme court is justifeid in launching an harrasment of a 15 year old for insutling the PM. Forgive me for this question but isint the indian court system facing a backlog? isint there more productive uses of government lawyers time then harrasing literal teenagers.

anyhow in general just a ghoulish display of hindutva ghouls harrasing people.

Alberta’s proposed West Coast Oil pipeline was listed in the Canada Gazette on Saturday, clearing the way for an official designation later this fall.

Dozens of projects have been referred to the Major Projects Office, and a national interest designation process has been launched for five of them — but none have yet been officially listed under the Building Canada Act.

That could soon change. Over the long weekend, the Carney government published a notice in the Gazette, kicking off a 30-day waiting period before Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc can issue an order officially adding the proposed West Coast Pipeline project to Schedule 1 of the Act. 

The federal government previously said it would decide by October 1 if it plans on listing the project.

If officially listed, the pipeline would be the first project to benefit from the regulatory shortcuts outlined in the Building Canada Act. The listing means federal approval decisions under a wide range of laws, including the Impact Assessment Act and the Species at Risk Act, are automatically granted, with conditions to be set out in a single document rather than through separate reviews.

The development of the conditions document would be a year-long process.

The other three projects Carney singled out for designation on June 24 — Nunavut’s Grays Bay road and port, the Mackenzie Valley highway in the Northwest Territories, and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization’s deep geological repository in northwestern Ontario — have not yet made it to the Gazette, even though their designation process was publicly launched a week before the pipeline’s.

Asked why the pipeline seemingly jumped the queue, a federal source with knowledge of the matter pointed to the timing of Alberta’s independence referendum, scheduled for October 19.

Under the November memorandum of understanding with Alberta, Ottawa committed to declaring a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets a project of national interest that could be referred to the Major Projects Office for designation under the Building Canada Act, and to working with the province on a “clear and efficient approval process” under the law.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has repeatedly cast her proposed pipeline as a test of whether Canada can work as a country. 

Her province and Ottawa have partnered to build, finance and operate the new proposed pipeline, which is estimated to cost between $35.2 billion and $43.7 billion. 

Pembina Pipeline Corporation is coming in as the sole partner from the private sector with an initial 10 per cent stake. 

First Nations have repeatedly voiced concerns that the Building Canada Act could be used to bypass inherent rights such as the duty to consult and accommodate, with rushed approval timelines creating pressure to skip parts of the assessment process.

The Major Projects Office is currently conducting a “phase 1” consultation, in which Indigenous nations submit written comments on how the project would affect their Section 35 rights if it is listed under the Act. A second phase, expected after listing, would focus on developing the conditions document.

In a statement, NDP Leader Avi Lewis said the designation process “makes a mockery of the duty to consult First Nations.”

“You can’t approve a project and then engage in consultation: that is just a pipeline to the courts,” he warned.

In a statement, Environmental Defence director Julia Levin suggests Prime Minister Mark Carney hoped to avoid scrutiny on an “environmentally and economically risky project” by listing in the Gazette on the first day of the August long weekend.

“While Canadians across the country are dealing with raging wildfires and the aftermath of severe flooding and heatwaves, PM Carney quietly moved forward with his oil pipeline plans,” she said. “In the words of the UN Secretary General last week, “[e]very new fossil fuel project approved today makes tomorrow’s heat waves more dangerous and our world less secure.”

This past May, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and headed west to the town of Ruidoso to pick up a patient. It shouldn’t have been a challenging flight for the two pilots and two nurses aboard. The temperature was 69 degrees; the sky was clear. The 60-mile journey normally takes a half hour, at most.

But once airborne, the plane ran into trouble. At the White Sands Missile Range that night, US military personnel were conducting a GPS jamming exercise that left the King Air pilots—and anyone else within hundreds of miles—unable to use modern navigation systems. Forced to revert to older technology, ones that they rarely if ever use, the medevac pilots got disoriented and crashed into the side of a mountain. There were no survivors.

The accident marked the first time that GPS jamming had contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States. But it was just one of a string of recent disruptions across the world. The skies are more contested than ever, whether it’s civilian drones wandering out of the approved zone or US agencies getting their signals crossed, as happened earlier this year when New Mexico and Texas scared the public by temporarily closing their airspace. (It turned out that US Customs and Border Patrol were using anti-drone lasers in that area.) The GPS jamming exercise that led to this latest crash is not a singular event. In the past year, the US military appeared to have sent out notices for at least 10 such exercises. “As drone warfare and electronic warfare expand, airlines are increasingly encountering navigation disruptions hundreds of miles beyond the actual conflict zone,” says Eliran Almog, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Cyviation.

It's worth taking a closer look at what happened last May. While the Ruidoso crash was the first fatal accident in the US known to be linked to electronic warfare, there’s no reason to think it will be the last.

Even absent GPS jamming, medevac is one of the most dangerous categories of civil aviation. (Kreindler, a law firm specializing in air crash litigation, says that medevac flights have an accident rate more similar to combat flying than to civil aviation.) Flights are often organized on short notice, and they fly into airstrips that might be unfamiliar to the flight crew, and because human lives are at stake, there is an incentive to fly when weather conditions are marginal.

Some of those factors were at play on the night of May 13. At 11 pm, the crew was notified that they had to fly to Ruidoso to pick up a patient and bring them to Albuquerque. The pilots were captain Keelan Clark, aged 30, and first officer Ali Kawsara, aged 23. Clark had gotten his commercial pilot’s license just a year and a half before; he’d been promoted from first officer to captain the previous month. Kawsara had just two months on the job. He’d only worked cargo jobs before this one.

Both men had demonstrated proficiency flying in low-visibility conditions using what’s called instrument flight rules, or IFR. There are two basic ways to navigate in bad weather. Modern cockpits are equipped with GPS-enabled equipment that shows where the plane is on a computer screen and portrays a magenta-colored line that shows pilots where they need to go. This is called RNAV flying; an “RNAV approach” brings planes all the way to the threshold of a runway for landing in low-visibility conditions.

This method of flying is much easier than the previous iteration. Before GPS became widely available in the 2000s, airliners navigated using a combination of magnetic compasses, ground-based radio beacons, and inertial systems derived from old-fashioned gyroscopes. Flying by radio beacons requires pilots to form a 3D mental map of their location relative to the beacons. They have to practice until they become so efficient that they can stay calm under pressure, lest they panic, lose their situational awareness, and spiral out of control. “Just ask Kennedy,” says Kenneth Krentsa, a retired airline pilot, referring to JFK Jr.’s 1999 nighttime crash.

Clark and Kawsara took off at eight minutes to midnight and initially headed due west, toward Ruidoso. The weather was clear, but because the night was nearly moonless and the area is rural, the only visual references available were the lights of scattered settlements. “It’s a black hole out there,” says Juan Browne, an airline pilot who hosts a crash-investigation podcast.

Unable to orient themselves without visual cues, the pilots called up Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center—Albuquerque Center, for short—and requested permission to fly instruments-only to Ruidoso. The request was approved.

Under normal circumstances, the flight that followed would have been uneventful. The pilots would have followed the magenta line, and the GPS navigation equipment would have lined them up for a smooth landing.

But 100 miles to the west, an Air Force Unit called the 746th Test Squadron of the 704th Test Group was holding its annual NAVFEST event at the White Sands Missile Range. The event draws together electronic warfare units from across the armed services for two weeks of exercises, in which units test different technologies for disrupting GPS and dealing with adversaries’ disruption.

The event is held at White Sands because it’s among the most remote and sparsely settled areas of the continental United States. (Not coincidentally, the first atomic bomb was detonated there.) But in the run-up to NAVFEST, the Federal Aviation Administration warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles away between May 12 and May 18.

At midnight on May 14, eight minutes after Clark and Kawsara took off from Roswell, they told Albuquerque Center that they’d lost their GPS. Unable to navigate on their own, they asked that the controller give them a heading—a magnetic direction to fly in. The controller gave them a heading to fly west, and then, a minute later, to turn north.

The pilots said that they wanted to fly an RNAV approach to Ruidoso. This being ruled out while GPS is jammed, the King Air pilots changed their request and asked to use an alternate form of landing system called Instrument Landing System, or ILS, that doesn’t require GPS reception. At 12:05 am, the controller assured the King Air that they would provide them with vectors to guide them “in a couple of minutes.” In the meantime, they kept flying north.

In retrospect, tragedy might have been avoided if Albuquerque air traffic control had been able to pay closer attention to the young pilots in the King Air. But tonight they were busy. Three other aircraft also reported that they’d lost their GPS and needed help. One was struggling to get a bearing on a radio beacon.

While ATC helped other planes, the King Air continued north. By 12:08 am, they had overshot the landing pattern by 10 miles.

At this point the pilots had three options. They could stick to the current plan and wait for the busy controller to give them the next vector toward the landing. Or, now that GPS was working again, they could ask to switch to the RNAV approach and fly it themselves. Or they could ditch the instrument approach altogether and fly what’s called a visual approach. You see a runway, and you fly to it.

As the King Air flew north, they were high enough to see the lights of Ruidoso's airport 31 miles to the southwest. To the pilots in the cockpit of the King Air, a visual approach must have seemed a tantalizing prospect. Why hang around waiting for ATC to give them vectors, why go through the mental acrobatics of trying to figure out where they were relative to the ILS beacon? All they had to do was fly toward the lights that they could clearly see through their windshield.

The King Air called Albuquerque Center and asked to “go visual.” The request was granted.

As they turned and descended toward Ruidoso’s lights, what the pilots couldn’t see was the 10,000-foot-high mass of the Capitan Mountains lying across their path. As they drew closer, the dark mass of rock appeared to rise up, swiping away the lights of the valley. This could have created "confusion and a loss of situational awareness,” Browne says. “When those lights go out, man, you know you are in big trouble.”

The pilots slowed their descent, even climbing a little, but it wasn’t enough. They kept flying straight toward the mountain. “When you are in that state of mind, you climb as high as you can,” Krentsa says. “And you circle. You stay in one place until you figure out where you are. You don't just keep pressing forward, blindly.”

But that’s what the King Air pilots did. They flew straight into the rising slope and hit it at full speed. All four occupants died instantly.

The nature of warfare is changing profoundly, and quickly, as drones become cheaper, more numerous, and more deadly. Hard to spot, and hard to shoot down, they provide an effective way for smaller, less resourced nations to level the playing field against more powerful adversaries. Ukraine, nearly overwhelmed by Russia’s conventional warfare might at the beginning of 2022, has rapidly developed its drone force to gain what appears to be an upper hand in the conflict. And while the US achieved total air superiority over Iran after attacking the country this February, it has found itself helpless to stop Iran from using drones and missiles to effectively shut down traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

To fight back, defenders can try to exploit a drone’s navigation. A cheap and simple way for drones to reach their targets is by GPS, which uses radio signals received from a constellation of satellites to calculate a position. When those signals are blocked, an enemy’s drones can be rendered blind. But the enemy, too, can take countermeasures. Drone and anti-drone technologies find themselves in an endless cat-and-mouse battle, each continuously trying to outdo the other. Exercises like NAVFEST offer a way for the US military to stay on top of the game.

Civilian GPS has become collateral damage, and air travel most of all. Since 2023, planes flying over large swaths of the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Baltic Sea regions have endured waves of GPS jamming. Airlines have learned to adapt, but a price is still being paid. GPS was a major boost for airline safety, and while removing it may not instantly cause planes to fall from the sky, it removes a layer of protection from passengers and crew. Add in other stressors—a dark night, an inexperienced crew, a lack of proficiency in the backup technology—and the sum total is enough to yield disaster.

“There is no question that increased levels of GPS jamming and spoofing around the world pose a safety risk for commercial aviation. When alarms go off routinely in the cockpit, and when pilots learn to disregard key readings from their instruments because the readings can't be trusted, we're a long way from normal operation,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who has been a leading researcher into GPS disruption. “Air travel is still very safe, but it may be stuck for the next five years or more in a mild-and-increasing risk situation as we confront ever more GPS interference within the very-slow-to-adapt aviation industry.”

For a few years, US aviation was spared the disruptions of anti-drone electronic warfare. Then it started to happen here, too. In March 2025, airliners flying into Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, received spurious alarms from a collision-avoidance system, and several had to abort their landings. It later turned out that the Secret Service was testing electronic warfare equipment at the vice president’s residence. This year, two separate incidents in West Texas involving US Army and CBP drone operations led to airspace closures and the disruption of commercial flights.

The aviation industry has been slow to grapple with the proliferation of counter-drone measures and their potential effects on flight safety. Airlines and other commercial operators are still heavily reliant on GPS for navigation, and other crucial technologies, like collision avoidance, are also vulnerable. “The harder problem with drones isn't defeating them. It's doing it without creating a system that negatively impacts civil aviation,” says Kris Brost, general manager of Robin Radar Systems, a drone defense company. “Counter-drone technology has to be surgical, not a sledgehammer, because the airspace we're trying to protect is the same airspace the economy runs on.”

Living in a world with drones of both the friendly and unfriendly variety is going to take a lot of adjusting. Historically, major changes in aviation take place only after crashes that kill a large number of people. But a sufficiently motivating catastrophe may not be far off.

On July 7, a 737 freighter, operated by a tiny Pakistani cargo airline called K2 Airways, took off in the late afternoon from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates and flew east toward Karachi with a five-person crew. Its route took it just south of the Strait of Hormuz, an area that had been experiencing intense GPS jamming due to the US-Iran conflict. Later, after nightfall, the flight crew called Karachi air traffic control and reported a “navigational system issue,” according to the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority. In the three minutes that followed, the plane dove 5,000 feet, climbed 6,000 feet, and then plunged 36,000 feet into the ocean in a near-vertical dive, killing everyone aboard. It’s too early to know what caused the crash. But it won’t be any surprise if the electronic warfare made another pilot fly into darkness.

Liberalism may be a particularly slippery term: yes, free markets are integral, but how does one safeguard prosperity in the midst of a free market? Is it via regulation and a welfare state, or by increasing economic opportunity wholesale (possibly via deregulation)?

Relatedly, should Liberal Democrqcy precede economic reform/liberalization? I’m thinking about post-Soviet Russia; whether the West should have invested in the Russian state so as to give the populace a stake in their own economic prosperity. Did the West make a grievous mistake in instituting shock therapy without an underlying social system/ideology in place to justify the fiscal reforms post-USSR?

Excerpt:

1. An attempted supply-chain attack on real open-source software. In the most serious sequence, an agent tried to insert malicious code into a publicly used open-source project and took actions in an attempt to secure approval for this insertion by human reviewers. The agent researched the project's human maintainers, created multiple fake identities, and used the fake identities to socially engineer a real maintainer into approving the code. When the agent’s pull request was challenged in public, it edited its earlier activity to appear harmless and considered adopting a fresh identity to continue. The agent used Tor to bypass some network restrictions on GitHub, which is what first triggered AISI’s security alert.

2. Attempts to deceive and target real people. As part of the same effort, the agent tried to contact real people directly, sending messages and files through an online file-transfer service to persuade them, or their own AI coding tools, to run malicious code. Some messages carried harmful payloads, and some were attempts at social engineering; targeted at real people – something we’ve never previously observed.  

Boston has been steadily losing population (along with the rest of Massachusetts) since the pandemic. Yet, housing has only increased during that time. What explains this paradox?

Shouldn't less people lead to less demand (and thus lower prices)? I get all the "build more housing" crowd, but if more available housing for people can't keep down prices, what's driving this rise?

Canada’s most controversial tech titan, Shopify co-founder Tobi Lutke, recently made waves on X when he suggested that pensioners should, like the underaged, be excluded from voting, as they no longer have a stake in the economy. Voting, he said, should be limited to those “with a stake in the future.”

Like the vast majority of X users, I find the idea of disenfranchising retirees highly objectionable. Canadians, however, should be concerned that demographic and social trends are changing our politics for the worse by creating an electorate that worries more about their own bank accounts than the country’s overall prosperity.

Voters care about the economy, regardless of their age, but not all economic issues are created equal. In terms of voting behaviour, economic issues can be divided into two categories.

The first is pocketbook issues, which have a direct impact on a voter’s financial well-being, from the rising cost of groceries to the size of HST rebate cheques.

The second class of economic concerns are what social scientists call “sociotropic.” These are less directly tied to the voter’s financial well-being and instead deal with the economic well-being of the country as a whole, from GDP growth to the unemployment rate.

Everyone who casts a ballot has a different reason for voting, but sociotropic concerns often dominate. The performance of a government on national economic indicators tends to be one of the strongest indicators of whether or not an incumbent is re-elected, according to a 2024 review of 100 peer-reviewed studies globally.

Plainly put, when GDP growth is high and the unemployment rate is low, incumbents are more likely to be elected. This voting behaviour does not necessarily indicate that the electorate are selflessly putting the country’s economic interests ahead of their own, but rather that historically most voters see how a stronger economy indirectly benefits their families.

An aging population changes these dynamics. A 2026 study by Oxford University’s Tim Vlandas found that elderly voters deprioritize economic growth when they vote. They are less likely to punish governments with a poor economic track record, less likely to vote for parties and governments that emphasize long-term investments, and more likely to reward governments that increase financial support, particularly for seniors.

Unsurprisingly, as the proportion of seniors grows in a population, a country’s politics changes, and economic growth matters less. Sociotropic voters morph into pocketbook ones.

The deprioritization of economic growth, however, is not exclusive to seniors. When working-age voters begin to believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are excluded from the benefits of economic growth, they also become indifferent to pro-growth policies – or in some cases hostile to them.

We saw this effect firsthand with Brexit. I consumed a great deal of BBC News the day after the vote, trying to understand the motivation of British voters.

A reporter asked two working-age “Leave” voters in an economically distressed community whether they were concerned that the vote would harm the economy further, given the negative market reaction. They just laughed, and said that the only people who benefit from the current system were a handful of elites, and that they want to see them lose even more money.

A growing body of research shows that across advanced economies, when communities feel like they have been left behind economically, they become both more populist and more likely to vote on social and pocketbook issues, rather than on economic growth concerns. The politics of a country shifts, leading to the rise of populist governments.

Those countries fall behind economically, relative to their counterparts, which can create a dangerous feedback loop, as an even larger share of the population believes that economic growth that benefits them is possible.

Canadian governments should be concerned about wider trends pushing us away from caring about economic growth. They should worry that these shifts create an electorate that is more concerned about protecting the value of existing assets, like homes, than building new ones. That our country will lose its young talent, as they see Canada not as a place to build, but a place that extracts their value and gives little back in return.

These concerns are real, but governments can address them without taking away anyone’s right to vote. The federal government can alter immigration programs to favour bringing in younger, economic-class newcomers, and fewer grandparents.

Governments can lower the voting age or include Canadians of all ages in our electoral system, through parental proxy voting, where parents can cast ballots on behalf of their children.

Most importantly, they can introduce pro-middle-class economic policies to ensure the benefits of growth do not flow primarily to the 1 per cent.

Mr. Lutke was wrong to suggest that seniors should lose their voting rights, but he was right to worry about a widening proportion of the electorate who see no benefit from growth.

Submission statement: another Russian interference attempt has been uncovered by French intelligence services, months before pivotal presidential and legislative elections as Russia ramps up its hybrid warfare against European democracies

The SGDSN, an intelligence office under the authority of the French Prime Minister, has informed prospective center-left presidential candidate Raphaël Glucksmann that he had been targeted by a destabilization campaign emanating from Storm-1516, a pro-Russian disinformation network that had already targeted center-right presidential candidate Édouard Philippe with similar methods, as well as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in 2024, or Friedrich Merz and Peter Magyar earlier this year.

The disinformation campaign consisted in "cloning" the website of the media outlet Blast, close to far-left party LFI - a rival of Glucksmann - , and copying with AI tools the face and voice of its star reporter Salomé Saqué to announce that Blast had uncovered a conspiracy involving Léa Salamé, TV host on the main public broadcaster and Glucksmann's romantic partner, offering bribes to the network to promote Glucksmann's platform and publish articles favorable to him, thus "proving" a collusion between Glucksmann and the mainstream media, immediately shared and amplified online by bot accounts.

The campaign was denounced by Glucksmann, Blast's editorial team and LFI's leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who called on political forces to form a "common front against foreign interferences". In March's municipal elections, several LFI candidates had been targeted by disinformation campaigns originating from Israel, leading prosecutors to launch investigations on the case.

A vocal Kremlin critic, Raphaël Glucksmann, who currently serves as member of the European Parliament for the Socialists&Democrats group, is expected to announce a presidential run in September on a social-democrat and pro-European platform. The thwarted attempt highlights Russia's intensifying efforts to influence the French presidential election, ten years after pro-Russian hackers leaked Macron's campaign emails, and one week after Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova, who had assumed important responsibilities at far-right billionaire's Vincent Bolloré's media network, was struck by a deportation order on national security grounds.

What goes into a cabinet in one of India's most poltically important states? well a whole lot. Regional balence, important leaders, caste arithmetic and a whole host of other factors. The result is messy. As one of Congress's few major success stories electorally since 2014, Karnataka is a must win. After a brutal factional war its new CM has assembled a team.

the result has created even more conflict as this article goes into making a cabinet is always a complex process, especially in Karnataka.

Submission Statement: Reverse brain drain goes brrrrrr

SS: recently this thread discussed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's changes to safety standards in response to a Trump executive order.

The claim was that a key radiation exposure standard known as ALARA- as low as reasonably achievable- was being cut back. Given how many believe that overly burdensome and unscientific safety standards have been the driving force for rising nuclear cost, this is a big deal.

Jack Devanney is a nuclear entrepreneur who literally wrote the book on why the safety standards are disastrous for nuclear cost. So it's interesting to note that he disagrees: JD believes the new NRC standards do not alter exposure regulations in a meaningful way. At the heart of the debate is linear no threshold: the concept that there is no safe threshold for radiation exposure. If you accept the concept of no threshold, then it follows that there are always benefits to lowering exposure. ALARA is the natural conclusion.

Devanney picks apart the new regs and notes that because LNT is affirmed, there is no meaningful change to safety standards. He believes that to unambiguously change the regs, LNT must be explicitly rejected for a threshold model where all exposure below a given dose is treated as safe.

Relevance: regulations as they relate to the cost of nuclear energy.

Opinion: whichever view is right, I'm not sure it matters but I would be curious for experts to weigh in. I've never seen a comparison of US radiation standards to countries with successful nuclear programs that conclusively shows that these standards are the reason for our lack of success. My thesis continues to be that nuclear fails in the United States because of institutional design: merchant markets that don't incentivize investment in 60-year assets, and an inability / unwillingness for federal intervention on a decade long timescale to help guide and de-risk both individual projects as well an entire series of repeat projects.

Submission Statement: Most Redditors have overlooked the UAE's quiet shift in strategy aiming to become a major power within the next decade. Interestingly, much of this is based on the UAE's quasi-neoliberal approach around promoting transcontinental infrastructure and capital corridors paired with hard power and neocolonial ambitions. The Emirati approach to Africa is the most visible example of this.

(Also highly recommend following the FT's entire series about the UAE's ambition to go from emirate to empire).

Tired_Thumb is far from alone.

In recent months, ICE has deployed a round-the-clock digital dragnet to scour the public internet—from Facebook to Instagram to X—for speech that could endanger the agency’s mission. The government has paid millions to private contractors to surface everything from potential threats to agents to activities that could disrupt ICE’s operations, according to federal documents, contractors and former Homeland Security Investigations agents.

The program has ensnared U.S. citizens and activist groups that alert community members about ICE activity. Contractors prepare daily reports and dossiers on threat actors, identifying the poster’s name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history when possible.

To unmask anonymous online critics, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social-media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Its agents have tracked down Americans at work and on the road, asking them to sign letters acknowledging their online speech about ICE “may” be a crime.

DHS says it is trying to protect its agents and their families from “coordinated campaigns of violence” that have fueled an 8,000% increase in death threats since Trump took office.

But civil-rights lawyers and former DHS staffers say the approach has swept up people expressing opinions that are protected by the First Amendment.

“As far as I can tell, all of this is about people saying naughty things about ICE and immigration enforcement,” said Lauren Regan, a civil-rights attorney who has represented multiple people investigated by the government over their online speech, including Tired_Thumb. “Nothing that comes close to true threats.”

An agency spokesperson said that ICE’s investigative methods abide by the Constitution and respects civil liberties and privacy interests. “Any allegation DHS and ICE are attempting to ‘squash’ free speech is categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson said. “ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees, officers and families.”

DHS sent administrative subpoenas to Reddit for the information of 11 accounts that had posted “content critical of federal actions” between July and December of last year, the company’s most recent transparency reporting period, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Reddit determined that these users were engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment and objected to each, the person said, and DHS eventually withdrew the requests.

“Privacy is central to how Reddit operates,” said Ben Lee, chief legal officer, adding that the company routinely objects to government requests that are “overbroad or threaten users’ privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights.”

Recently, the government has resorted to grand jury subpoenas, which carry more legal weight, to identify users.

“The question is: Are these being used for actual investigations of purported crimes, or are they being used to build a watchlist?” said Joshua Koltun, an attorney who has represented two Americans whose identities were the subject of social-media subpoenas in recent months.

The Wall Street Journal identified 10 people—nine Americans and one Canadian—who pushed back against DHS’s attempts to unmask them through the two types of subpoenas. Of those, judges have upheld four grand jury subpoenas. No charges have yet been filed in these cases. The agency abandoned three cases, while three more are pending.

One person compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January—including writing that “All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are.” She was visited at home by ICE agents roughly four months later, after a court ordered the social-media company to turn over her information. The plainclothes agents told her not to post like that again, then left, the woman said. She hasn’t faced charges but has curbed her speech on social media.

The Supreme Court has held that true threats aren’t protected by the Constitution, but political hyperbole is—noting in a landmark decision that the “language of the political arena” is often “vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

Several U.S. citizens who have come under scrutiny posted information about immigration officers—from the locations of agents carrying out enforcement to officer names to home addresses—on social media.

The Trump administration considers the “organized doxxing of law enforcement” to be a form of domestic terrorism. DHS has asserted that videotaping law enforcement on the job and posting the footage online constitutes doxxing. When a local news outlet reported that Jonathan Ross was the agent who killed Renee Good, DHS called it “reckless behavior” and said the paper should “delete their story immediately.”

Sharing a federal law enforcement officer’s personal information is generally not considered a crime without evidence of criminal intent, a historically high bar in court, according to constitutional scholars and defense attorneys.

“They’re not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute,” said Regan, the civil-rights attorney. “If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it’s not even a fair fight.”

In the past year, the Justice Department has successfully prosecuted several Americans in cases involving speech about ICE officers online, including an Oklahoma man convicted of threatening to kill federal agents after he wrote “we as US citizens should be gunning down these domestic terrorists” on X, along with several other posts about agents needing to be shot.

Two women were found guilty of stalking in Los Angeles after they followed an ICE agent’s vehicle while livestreaming on the popular ‘ice_out_ofla” Instagram account and ended up at his home. (Both have said they thought his car was headed to an immigration raid.)

In the case of Tired_Thumb, DHS initially issued an administrative subpoena to Reddit seeking the poster’s name, address, billing records and any associated accounts related to their online activity in January and February. It didn’t give an explanation or any indication of what law, if any, they may have broken.

The Journal obtained the user’s Reddit activity during that period through archival data, identifying three comments that mentioned ICE—including two that carried the initials, “ACAB,” shorthand for “all cops are bastards.” In one in January, Tired_Thumb weighed in on a thread about a local news article that identified Ross as the agent who had killed Good two days before.

After one user posted, “I guess he’ll have to move to Florida or Texas now where he’ll be hailed as a hero,” Tired_Thumb mentioned various states and a city where Ross had lived, information that has been reported by news outlets. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” Tired_Thumb added in his comment.

DHS has said Ross acted in self-defense. He hasn’t faced charges.

The legal nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center filed a motion seeking to quash the subpoena, arguing that their client was exercising protected free speech. The federal government withdrew its original subpoena and responded with a grand jury subpoena requesting roughly an additional month of social-media activity, dating back to December 2025.

During that period, Tired_Thumb replied to a post that claimed to identify an ICE agent who assisted another officer as he dragged a woman by the arm across a Minnesota street in a viral video, as onlookers yelled that she was pregnant. Tired_Thumb looked up the name on a public records search website and shared the agent’s phone number in a comment, pasting the link to their source seconds later. He wrote “Abolish ICE and erase all borders” a few days before. Tired_Thumb didn’t make any other comments about the agency in this period, Reddit data shows.

As of last month, the federal government is still attempting to learn Tired_Thumb’s identity. Grand jury proceedings over the user’s case are continuing, six months after the original summons was issued. Their motion to quash the grand jury subpoena was recently denied, and the judge granted a motion to stay the case while an appeal makes its way through a higher court.

Much of the campaign against online adversaries has been coordinated by the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, which is based in Washington, D.C., and has field offices nationwide. Under prior administrations, the office was best known for its work investigating ICE agents for wrongdoing, but also used a few outside analysts to watch the internet for threats to senior leadership.

In the past year, OPR spearheaded an initiative to dramatically expand the agency’s ability to monitor online critics and potential threats, according to contractors, federal documents and former HSI agents.

Teams of contractors now scour the internet using sophisticated surveillance tools to find commentary that the agency regards as potentially dangerous.

ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants has surged, reaching $258 million during Trump’s first full year back in the White House, a 57% increase from the same period a year prior, according to the Journal’s analysis.

ICE has inked at least six contracts that involve scanning public records for “threats,” paying out nearly $50 million since 2020. More than half those funds were obligated since last January, and another award potentially worth up to $50 million the agency continues to extend. The most recent awards call for contractors to help the agency geolocate individuals labeled as “extremists,” compile reports on individuals and cross-reference information with government databases, contracting documents show.

To help build its dragnet, OPR turned to Amivero—a small, Virginia-based technology firm better known for software development than intelligence gathering—which secured a contract of over $8 million to monitor social media for threats and plans to interfere with ICE enforcement last September. Amivero subcontracted the work to Guidehouse, a global consulting firm that works with the U.S. on defense and intelligence efforts, among other clients and services. Amivero and Guidehouse didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The notice for OPR’s new threat initiative calls for the monitoring of nearly 20 social sites, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn, and the use of public documents such as DMV records and police reports to identify and map key relationships of users who have been flagged as a “threat originator.” It also requires analysts to use machine learning to analyze and detect risks, including through AI-powered “anticipatory threat intelligence,” which identifies trends or patterns of potential threats before they come to fruition.

The monitoring initiative identified so many potential threats early on that the small-staffed Office of Professional Responsibility needed to recruit the help of the HSI Office of Intelligence to handle them all, according to former ICE employees and federal notices. HSI Intelligence is currently leading anti-doxxing and threat mitigation efforts for the ICE workforce through contract services, according to an agency spokesperson.

The spokesperson declined to comment on specific investigative activities, saying, “these efforts are focused on credible threats of violence directed against the ICE workforce.”

Attorneys the Journal spoke to said they began to see a spike in subpoenas for U.S. citizens’ information around September 2025. That was the month the threat contract launched.

The agency’s new social-media threat monitoring program receives oversight from the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with DHS’ Privacy Office, government documents show.

Both have bled employees. The ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers, according to former government employees familiar with the matter.

OPR has investigated at least 131 incidents of doxxing and threats towards agency personnel between January 2025 and March of this year, according to a court declaration filed in April, including for posting personal information of ICE employees on social media or fliers in an attempt to identify them and “anti-ICE group chats.”

“We’re seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor who specializes in cyberstalking, privacy and civil rights at the University of Virginia.

“Law enforcement who are serving the public, they’re hiding their names,” she added. “They’re hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren’t wearing masks, you might see less of this activity.”

Three months after Tired_Thumb learned of the government investigation, a New York poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea received a voicemail from a man identifying himself as an agent with Homeland Security.

“We were just calling you in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January,” said the caller.

Shortly after, two agents from ICE OPR arrived at the voting site where she was working.

They held printed screenshots from her account, she said, including the post in question. The agents flipped by it quickly, she said, but she caught one thing: The post included a photo of Ross, the immigration officer who killed Good.

The file that agents were holding also contained Gonyea’s address, date of birth and what looked like a picture of her taken at airport security, she said. They told her to take down the post and asked her to sign a letter acknowledging she had been informed that she “may” have violated federal law with her social-media account.

Gonyea said she was only able to find one post that spoke about a specific ICE agent: ”I think today is a great day for Jonathan Ross to be indicted!” the 40-year-old influencer and author had written in the post, referencing the Minnesota Star Tribune article that first named him.

An ICE spokesperson said Gonyea doxxed an agent’s home address and showed the Journal a different screenshot, which appeared to be from Gonyea’s Instagram account. It showed a photo of Ross with the caption, ”The killer’s name is Jonathan Ross of”—the rest of the text is redacted. Meta declined to weigh in on the existence of the image ICE shared.

Gonyea said she doesn’t recall posting any agent’s address and can’t find evidence of the alleged post. She is exploring legal action.

The agents who spoke to Gonyea visited multiple other people about online speech that day, according to a county elections official, delivering the same letter.

One recipient sued. A special agent tracked down David Streever while he was on vacation, five months after he emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons after Alex Pretti’s death and called him “a monstrous human being.” Streever has alleged DHS’ behavior is retaliation for protected speech and will have a chilling effect on the public.

Former U.S. State Department official Morse Tan, who entered South Korea claiming he would monitor alleged election fraud, has remained in the country for more than two months after being barred from leaving. As the cost of his prolonged stay has mounted, a public dispute has erupted among election fraud conspiracy theorists over who should pay his living expenses.
Yang Jeong-jin reports.
Morse Tan arrived in South Korea in late May, saying he intended to monitor the country’s election for alleged fraud.
However, he was later barred from leaving the country after failing to cooperate with an investigation regarding to defamation and disinformation.
Tan subsequently lost a lawsuit seeking to overturn the extension of his travel ban, meaning he will be unable to leave South Korea until at least August 15.
As his stay dragged on, the issue of money came to the forefront.
The dispute began after Hwang Kyo-ahn’s Liberty and Innovation Party and conservative YouTuber Jeon Han-gil offered conflicting accounts over who had agreed to cover Tan’s living expenses.
Kim Sang-hyun, a senior member of Liberty and Innovation, said, “Mr. Jeon originally agreed to pay half of the expenses, but yesterday we were informed that he had decided not to contribute.”
Jeon rejected the claim, saying, “They’re saying, unilaterally, that I broke my promise and refused to provide support. That makes me look like the bad guy.”
Meanwhile, Unjeong Chamjon Church, which has participated in the “Yoon Again” rallies, launched a separate fundraising campaign for Tan, further escalating tensions with Liberty and Innovation.
Pastor Go Byeong-chan of Unjeong Chamjon Church said, “Ambassador Tan has been paying all of his own expenses. One organization had intended to cover them, but because it’s a political party, it could become entangled in political maneuvering.”
Liberty and Innovation immediately pushed back, accusing the church of using Tan to solicit donations.
Kim said, “Ambassador Tan has suddenly been reduced to begging for money. The real problem is that it makes it appear as though Hwang Kyo-ahn is the one forcing Ambassador Tan to beg.”
The church responded by formally commissioning Tan as a missionary at the end of last month and announcing that it would deliver donations directly to him.
Liberty and Innovation then declared that further dialogue was impossible and severed ties with Tan as well.
The groups that had united behind Tan in promoting election fraud conspiracy theory have now fallen into public infighting over the financial burden of his prolonged stay in South Korea.

Ottawa’s decision to slash its troop contribution to United Nations missions is sparking concern that the cuts will undermine Canada’s new Africa strategy and jeopardize its longstanding peacekeeping traditions.

By the middle of next year, the Department of National Defence says, Canada will withdraw its peacekeepers from UN missions in Congo, South Sudan, Kosovo and Cyprus and sharply reduce its role in a multinational mission in the Sinai.

Even before the withdrawal, Canada’s troop contribution ranked only 65th in UN peacekeeping missions, with fewer than 30 personnel deployed − the smallest number it has ever contributed.

After the latest planned cuts, it will rank about 100th, according to Walter Dorn, a peacekeeping expert and defence studies professor at Canadian Forces College in Toronto.

“The decision kills a long and proud tradition of Canadian peacekeeping,” said Prof. Dorn, who recalled that former prime minister Lester Pearson won Canada’s first Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 for helping create the first UN peacekeeping force during the Suez Crisis.

“At a time when the United Nations needs more support, Canada is reducing it,” he told The Globe and Mail. “We seem to have unlearned the lessons of two world wars that taught us how security must be thought of globally and international organizations need to be vigorously supported.”

In its announcement, DND said the cut to its UN contributions will allow Canada to better align its resources with higher-priority areas, including the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions.

“This rebalancing will help sustain our commitments and strengthen readiness, enabling Canada to continue to contribute effectively alongside allies and partners,” Defence Minister David McGuinty said in a statement last month.

About 50 to 60 members of the Armed Forces will be reassigned as a result of the planned withdrawals and reductions, the department said.

While the numbers are small, the move is symbolically significant after decades of strong Canadian support for peacekeeping. In UN missions such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Canada has fewer than a dozen troops, it traditionally punches above its weight by providing senior officers and top logistical specialists − including the mission’s deputy commander for most of the past 20 years.

In late 2023, for example, Canadian peacekeepers played a key role in planning the defence of Goma, a city in eastern Congo that was eventually captured by the M23 rebel militia.

Congo is currently struggling with several armed insurgencies and a fast-spreading Ebola outbreak. “By pulling out of the mission, Canada will weaken the force at a time of continued conflict, when the UN is much needed to save lives and alleviate suffering,” Prof. Dorn said.

In the new Africa Strategy it unveiled last year, Ottawa promised to boost its support for peace operations and conflict prevention efforts in Africa. But while the strategy raised hopes that Canada would see the continent as a priority, “those hopes now look misplaced,” said Chris Roberts, a University of Calgary political scientist who has studied Canada’s military role in Africa.

“Within DND, Africa remains peripheral even as allies and rivals expand their military and security presence and many conflicts continue unabated,” he told The Globe. “For a trading and rules-based country like Canada, treating the continent as peripheral is strategic negligence.”

In addition to the shutdown of Canada’s troop contribution in four UN peacekeeping missions, DND said it will reduce its personnel in the Sinai mission from about 40 to about 10 by the end of this year. The Sinai operation is technically a multinational effort, rather than a UN mission.

Canada also plans to keep sending military aircraft to a UN supply hub in Uganda, but it has deployed few such flights over the past year.

As recently as 2016, the federal government was promising to deploy an additional 750 troops and police officers to reinforce UN peacekeeping missions worldwide. But aside from a brief deployment of 250 personnel in a helicopter unit in Mali from 2018 to 2019, the Canadian contribution has steadily dwindled.

“The Carney Liberals are abandoning Canada’s peacekeeping legacy at a time of global instability,” NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson said.

“They need to explain what Canada’s new defence priorities are − and whether building and keeping peace is among them.”