Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from The Intercept: The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else. When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: 'Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud' -- Apple's cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who's behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse -- and political will -- of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report. The Heat Initiative is helmed by Sarah Gardner, who joined from Thorn, an anti-child trafficking organization founded by actor Ashton Kutcher. [...] Critics say these technologies aren't just uncovering trafficked children, but ensnaring adults engaging in consensual sex work. "My goal is for child sexual abuse images to not be freely shared on the internet, and I'm here to advocate for the children who cannot make the case for themselves," Gardner said, declining to name the Heat Initiative's funders. "I think data privacy is vital. I think there's a conflation between user privacy and known illegal content."

Wednesday seven U.S. Republican candidates for President held their second debate before the 2024 primary — during which TikTok led to some surprisingly heated attacks against entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy:

Moderator: Mr. Ramaswamy, TikTok is banned on government-issed devices because of its ties to the Chinese government. Yet you joined TikTok at the dinner with boxer and influencer Jake Paul. Should the commander in chief be so easily persuaded by an influencer?

Vivek Ramaswamy: So the answer is, I have a radical idea for the Republican party: we need to win elections. And part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where they are. So when I get into office, I've been very clear. Kids under the age of 16 should not be using addictive social media. We're only going to ever get to declaring independence from China, which I favor, if we actually win. So while the Democrats are running rampant reaching the next generation three-to-one, there's exactly one person in the Republican party — which talks a big game about reaching young people — and that's me.... [Scattered applause]
Donald Trump declined to participate in the debate. But his former vice president Mike Pence immediately interrupted to say that "TikTok is controlled by the Chinese communist party." Continuing criticisms he'd made in an earlier interview, Pence said that TikTok "compromises the privacy of Americans every day."

Ramaswamy responded "And that is why we will end it once we win this election."

This immediately drew a strong response from from South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (also a former US ambassador to the UN): Nikki Haley: This is infuriating, because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps —

Ramaswamy: Yes it is.

Haley: — that we could have. And once you've got — honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say. Because I can't believe that — here you've got a TikTok situation. What they're doing is these — 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get —

Ramaswamy: Let me just say —

Haley: — your text messages, they can get all of these things.

Ramaswamy: Hurling — this is important. This is very important for our party —

Haley: China knows exactly what they're doing.

Ramaswamy: This is very important for our party, and I'm going to say it —

Haley: And what we've seen is you've gone and you've helped China go make medicines in China, not America.

Ramaswamy: Excuse me, excuse me —

Haley: You're now wanting kids to go and get on this social media that's dangerous for all of us. You went and you were in business with the Chinese... We can't trust you. We can't trust you. We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. We need to ban it. [Loud applause]

Moderator: You have 15 seconds, Mr. Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy: I think we would be better served as a Republican party if we're not sitting here hurling personal insults, and actually have a legitimate debate.

Six months ago Republican Senator Josh Hawley proposed legislation banning downloads of TikTok in the U.S. But this week he told the Wall Street Journal that "TikTok and its dark-money cronies are spending vast amounts of money to kill these bills."

The newspaper argues that TikTok's "friends" in the U.S. government — backed by billionaire financier Jeff Yass — "helped stall attempts to outlaw America's most-downloaded app." Yass's investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company's recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.

Yass is also one of the top donors to the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that rallied Republican opposition to a TikTok ban. Yass has donated $61 million to the Club for Growth's political-spending arm since 2010, or about 24% of its total, according to federal records. Club for Growth made public its opposition to banning TikTok in March, in an opinion article by its president, at a time when sentiment against the platform among segments of both parties was running high on Capitol Hill... With many Democrats already skeptical of a ban, the whittling away of Republican support killed momentum for several bills, including the bipartisan Restrict Act backed by the Biden administration...

TikTok's own lobbying efforts in Washington have included hundreds of meetings and other contacts, according to a person familiar with the matter. One of its main arguments to Republicans has been that a majority of ByteDance's shareholders are Americans, and some are well-connected conservatives, this person said. The lobbying appears to have helped push House Republican lawmakers to back away from the idea of a ban on TikTok and focus instead on legislation that would put new legal protections in place for users' personal data...

The Biden administration hasn't indicated any change in its effort to ban the app or force its sale. It could still try to use executive powers to ban it, or force a sale to remove Chinese control. But without legislation, analysts say those orders could be overturned in court.

The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms. From a report: The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year's Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle. The agency's new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers.

Earlier this year, Republicans succeeded in clawing back $20 billion as part of an agreement to raise the nation's borrowing cap. That political fight has put the onus on Democrats and the Biden administration to show that the funding is primarily enabling the I.R.S. to target the rich. "These are complex cases for I.R.S. teams to unpack," Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, said in a briefing with reporters. "The I.R.S. has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships; in a real sense, we've been overwhelmed in this area for years."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Political polarization in the US has become a major issue, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly inhabit separate realities on topics as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. [...] Now, a team of researchers has tested whether social media can potentially help the situation by getting people with opposite political leanings talking to each other about controversial topics. While this significantly reduced polarization, it appeared to be more effective for Republican participants. The researchers zeroed in on two concepts to design their approach. The first is the idea that simply getting people to communicate across the political divide might reduce the sense that at least some of their opponents aren't as extreme as they're often made out to be. The second is that anonymity would allow people to focus on the content of their discussion, rather than worrying about whether what they were saying could be traced back to them.

The researchers realized that they couldn't have any sort of control over conversations on existing social networks. So, they built their own application and hired professionals to do the graphics, support, and moderation. [...] People were randomly assigned to a few conditions. Some didn't use the app at all and were simply asked to write an essay on one of the topics under consideration (immigration or gun control). The rest were asked to converse on the platform about one of these topics. Every participant in these conversations was paired with a member of the opposing political party. Their partners were either unlabeled, labeled as belonging to the opposing party, or labeled as belonging to the same party (although the latter is untrue). Both before and after use of the app, participants answered questions about their view of politicized issues, members of their own party, and political opponents. These were analyzed in terms of issues and social influences, as well as rolled into a single index of polarization for the analysis.

The conversations appeared to have an effect, with polarization lowered by about a quarter of a standard deviation among those who engaged with political opponents that were labeled accordingly. Somewhat surprisingly, conversation partners who were mislabeled had a nearly identical effect, presumably because they suggested that a person's own party contained a diversity of perspectives on the topic. In cases where no party affiliation was given, the depolarization was smaller (0.15 standard deviations). The striking thing is that most of the change came from Republican participants. There, polarization was reduced by 0.4 standard deviations. In contrast, Democratic participants only saw it drop by 0.1 standard deviations -- a change that wasn't statistically significant. The error bars of the two groups of party members overlapped, however, so while large, it's not clear what this difference might tell us. The researchers went back and ran the conversations through sentiment analysis and focused on people whose polarization had dropped the most. They found that their conversation partners used less heated language at the start of the conversation. So it appears that displaying respect for your political opponents can still make a difference, at least in one-on-one conversations. While the conversations had a larger impact on people's views of individual issues, it also influenced their opinion of their political opponents more generally, and the difference between the two effects wasn't statistically significant. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos survey, nearly half of American adults support a ban on TikTok. From the report: TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance and used by tens of millions of Americans, has faced calls from U.S. lawmakers for a nationwide ban over concerns about possible Chinese government influence. Some 47% of respondents to the two-day poll, which concluded on Tuesday, said they at least somewhat supported "banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States," while 36% opposed a ban and 17% said they didn't know.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans favored a ban, compared to 47% of Democrats, the poll showed. The online Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted nationwide, collecting responses from 1,005 adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans. It had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points in either direction. Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (59%) believe the social media app is a threat to the national security of the United States.

A paper from U.K.-based researcher suggests that OpenAI's ChatGPT has a liberal bias, highlighting how artificial intelligence companies are struggling to control the behavior of the bots even as they push them out to millions of users worldwide. From a report: The study, from researchers at the University of East Anglia, asked ChatGPT to answer a survey on political beliefs as it believed supporters of liberal parties in the United States, United Kingdom and Brazil might answer them. They then asked ChatGPT to answer the same questions without any prompting, and compared the two sets of responses. The results showed a "significant and systematic political bias toward the Democrats in the U.S., Lula in Brazil, and the Labour Party in the U.K.," the researchers wrote, referring to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's leftist president.

Sam Bankman-Fried used money he stole from customers of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange to make more than $100 million in political campaign contributions before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, federal prosecutors said on Monday. Reuters reports: An amended indictment accused the 31-year-old former billionaire of directing two FTX executives to evade contribution limits by donating to Democrats and Republicans, and to conceal where the money came from. "He leveraged this influence, in turn, to lobby Congress and regulatory agencies to support legislation and regulation he believed would make it easier for FTX to continue to accept customer deposits and grow," the indictment said.

Bankman-Fried faces seven counts of conspiracy and fraud over FTX's collapse, though the indictment no longer includes conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws as a separate count. [...] Bankman-Fried's indictment does not name the two people prosecutors say he used for "straw donors" to donate money at his direction. But other court papers and Federal Elections Commission data show they are Nishad Singh and Ryan Salame. Singh, FTX's former engineering chief, pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations in February. He donated $9.7 million to Democratic candidates and causes, and said in court he knew the money came from FTX customers.

Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX's Bahamian unit, gave more than $24 million to Republican candidates and causes in the 2022 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commision data. He has not been charged with a crime. In a separate court filing on Monday, prosecutors said Salame's lawyer had told them he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to testify. Prosecutors said Salame told a family member in a November 2021 message that Bankman-Fried wanted to use political donations to "weed-out" anti-crypto Democratic and Republican lawmakers, and would likely "route money through me to weed out that republican [sic] side." On Friday, a U.S. judge revoked Sam Bankman-Fried's bail due to probable cause that he tampered with witnesses at least twice. He is being sent to jail.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Austria's leader is proposing to enshrine in the country's constitution a right to use cash, which remains more popular in the Alpine nation than in many other places. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said in a statement on Friday that "more and more people are concerned that cash could be restricted as a means of payment in Austria." His office said that the "uncertainty" is fueled by contradictory information and reports. "People in Austria have a right to cash," Nehammer said. [...]

The chancellor's proposal, according to his office, involves a "constitutional protection of cash as a means of payment," ensuring that people can still pay with cash, and securing a "basic supply" of cash in cooperation with Austria's central bank. Austria is one of 20 countries that are part of the euro area. Nehammer said he has instructed Finance Minister Magnus Brunner to work on the proposal and plans to hold a round table with the ministries concerned, finance industry representatives and the central bank in September. "Everyone should have the opportunity to decide freely how and with what he wants to pay," he said. "That can be by card, by transfer, perhaps in future also with the digital euro, but also with cash. This freedom to choose must and will remain."

Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl accused Nehammer of stealing his party's ideas and argued that the chancellor's "suddenly discovered love of cash" was meant only "to secure his political survival." The biggest opposition party in the current parliament, the center-left Social Democrats, has called for at least one ATM in every municipality and accused Nehammer of "pure populism." "Even if we write the word 'cash' into the constitution 100 times, there won't be a single ATM more in Austria," said the head of its parliamentary group, Philip Kucher.

According to new research published Thursday, conservatives on Facebook during the 2020 presidential election were more isolated and saw more misinformation than the platform's liberal users -- though Facebook widely affected users' political content in different ways. Slashdot reader RUs1729 shared one of the four peer-reviewed studies, appearing in the journals Science and Nature. Forbes reports: The study, led by two researchers from the University of Texas and New York University, had hundreds of thousands of participants and analyzed mass amounts of Facebook user data. One of the study's papers, which used aggregated data for 208 million U.S. Facebook users, found that most misinformation on Facebook existed within conservative echo chambers, which did not have an equivalent on the liberal side of the platform. The paper found that news outlets on the right post a higher fraction of news stories rated false by Meta's third-party fact-checking program, meaning conservative audiences are more exposed to unreliable news.

In a separate paper that assigned users to Facebook and Instagram feeds chronologically instead of algorithm-based feeds, which are the platforms' default feed types, researchers found users on chronological feeds were less engaged and saw more political content compared to those viewing algorithm-based feeds, along with more content from untrustworthy sources and more content from ideologically moderate friends and sources with mixed audiences. However, the feed analysis noted replacing algorithmic feeds with chronological ones did not create any detectable changes in political attitudes, knowledge or offline behavior.

Another paper assigned nearly 9,000 U.S.-based Facebook users feeds with no reshares, later concluding that the removal of reshared content "substantially" lessened the amount of political news, and content from all untrustworthy sources decreased overall. The two lead researchers and 15 other academics, who had control rights for the study's papers, declined compensation from Meta to ensure an ethical study was completed.

Following a rash of deadly fires, consumer advocates and fire departments, particularly in New York City, want the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to confiscate lithium-ion electric bikes that don't comply with regulations at the border. The ultimate goal is for unsafe e-bikes and poorly manufactured batteries to be taken off the streets and out of homes. The Associated Press reports: "We've been sounding the alarm for months," New York City Mayor Eric Adams said a day after an exploding battery ignited the Chinatown e-bike shop fire last month. "We need real action, not only on the state level, but on the federal level." With some 65,000 e-bikes zipping through its streets -- more than any other place in the U.S. -- New York City is the epicenter of battery-related fires. There have been 100 such blazes so far this year, resulting in 13 deaths, already more than double the six fatalities last year. Nationally, there were more than 200 battery-related fires reported to the commission -- an obvious undercount -- from 39 states over the past two years, including 19 deaths blamed on so-called micromobility devices that include battery-powered scooters, bicycles and hoverboards.

New York's two U.S. Senators, Democrats Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, introduced legislation last month that would set mandatory safety standards for e-bikes and the batteries that power them. Because mandatory standards don't exist, Schumer said, poorly made batteries have flooded the U.S., increasing the risk of fires. Earlier this year, New York City urgently enacted a sweeping package of local laws intended to crack down on defective batteries, including a ban on the sale or rental of e-bikes and batteries that aren't certified as meeting safety standards by an independent product testing lab. The new rules also outlaw tampering with batteries or selling refurbished batteries made with lithium-ion cells scavenged from used units. [...]

Tighter regulations, safety standards and compliance testing drastically reduced the risk of fires in such devices, according to Robert Slone, the senior vice president and chief scientist for UL Solutions. The same can happen with e-bike batteries, he said, if they are made to comply with established safety standards. "We just need to make them safe, and there is a way to make them safe through testing and certification," Slone said, "given the history that we've seen in terms of fires and injuries and unfortunately, deaths as well -- not just in New York, but across the country and around the world."

A key congressional committee on Wednesday advanced a bipartisan bill that aims to develop a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, a milestone for Capitol Hill in its efforts to codify federal oversight for the digital asset industry. From a report: The bill passed by the House Financial Services Committee would define when a cryptocurrency is a security or a commodity and expand the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) oversight of the crypto industry, while clarifying the Securities and Exchange Commission's jurisdiction, as many crypto advocates complain of the agency's perceived overreach. A handful of Democrats, including Reps. Jim Himes and Ritchie Torres, joined committee Republicans in voting for the bill. The House Agriculture Committee is scheduled to consider the same bill Thursday. "As other jurisdictions like the UK, the [European Union], Singapore and Australia have moved forward with clear regulatory frameworks for digital assets, the United States is at risk of falling behind. We intend to change that today," said Representative Patrick McHenry, the Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee, at the markup.

The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims. Associated Press: Retired Maj. David Grusch's highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress' latest foray into the world of UAPs -- or "unidentified aerial phenomena," which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and "little green men," Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries.

Grusch said he was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force's mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites. "I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access," he said. Asked whether the U.S. government had information about extraterrestrial life, Grusch said the U.S. likely has been aware of âoenon-humanâ activity since the 1930s. The Pentagon has denied Grusch's claims of a coverup. In a statement, Defense Department spokeswoman said investigators have not discovered "any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently." The statement did not address UFOs that are not suspected of being extraterrestrial objects, AP reported.

dcblogs writes: According to federal officials at a U.S. House hearing Thursday, the monumental federal buildings in Washington are largely empty, with some agencies using 25% or less of their headquarters' building capacity on average. The government owns some 511 million of square feet of office space, and capacity problems open the door to the possibility of conversions to housing or commercial uses. Commercial reuse has happened before. In 2013, the General Services Administration leased the Old Post Office Building at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., to the Trump organization for a hotel.

"The taxpayer is quite literally paying to keep the lights on even when no one is home," said Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who chairs the infrastructure subcommittee meeting. The blame for the low utilization has several causes: a shift to hybrid work, out-of-date buildings that waste space, and designs before technology reduced the need for certain types of workers. The Republicans want federal workers to return to offices and reduce telecommuting to at least pre-pandemic levels. In February, the House passed H.R. 139, the Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act of 2023 -- or the Show Up Act -- requiring agencies to revert to 2019 pre-pandemic telework policies. A companion bill, S. 1565, is pending in the Senate. It has six Republican sponsors but no Democrats.

Lina Khan, the progressive head of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), faced tough questions on Thursday from a Republican-led House committee about court fights over multi-billion dollar mergers the agency opposed and lost. From a report: Representative Kevin Kiley, Republican from California, asked Khan about the cases that the agency had lost. "We fight hard when we believe there was a law violation, and unfortunately things don't always go our way," responded Khan. "Are you bringing cases you expect to lose?" Kiley asked later. "Absolutely not," Khan said. "Okay well your track record seems to suggest otherwise," he answered.

Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, sternly disagreed with the Khan FTC's decision to press on with a fight against Illumina's purchase of Grail after an FTC internal judge disagreed with FTC commissioners. That challenge was initially brought under the Trump administration and is currently before an appeals court. The agency also lost a fight to stop Facebook parent Meta Platforms from buying VR content maker Within Unlimited. Democrats on the committee sought to defend Khan, occasionally joined by Republicans on the panel including Rep. Ken Buck. The White House also put out a statement backing Khan. "Chair Khan has delivered results for families, consumers, workers, small businesses, and entrepreneurs," said White House Press Secretary Michael Kikukawa, citing efforts including the agency's bid to ban non-compete agreements and mergers that would harm consumers.

Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are calling (PDF) for an investigation into popular online tax filing companies, accusing them of sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Meta and Google without user consent. The Verge reports: On Tuesday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and others asked the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission, Treasury Department, and the IRS to investigate whether TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and TaxAct violated taxpayer privacy laws by sharing sensitive user information with the two tech firms. Senators also released (PDF) their own report Wednesday detailing the accusations, first raised by The Markup last November.

The report alleges that for years, tax preparation companies infused their products with Meta and Google tracking pixels that revealed identifying information -- like a user's full name, address, and date of birth. The senators also suggest that some of the information provided, like the forms a user accessed, could be used to show "whether taxpayers were eligible for certain deductions or exemptions." The senators claim that the companies did not receive user consent to share this information, which could violate laws banning tax preparers from sharing tax return information with third parties, especially since much of this data could be used for advertising purposes.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, the majority of Americans (59%) say TikTok is a threat to the national security of the United States. Variety reports: The findings from Pew Research Center's survey of U.S. adults come as TikTok, the popular short-form video app owned by Chinese internet conglomerate ByteDance, continues to be targeted by American lawmakers wary over its ties to China and how TikTok handles user data. Just 17% of Americans say the platform is not a threat to national security, while 23% say they are unsure, per the Pew survey.

Opinions about the national security threat posed by TikTok differ by political affiliation and age. Roughly 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say TikTok is either a minor or major threat to national security in the U.S., compared with 53% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. The perception of TikTok as a threat also varies by age: Just 13% of adults 18-29 say TikTok is a "major" threat; that rises to 24% among those 30-49, 35% among those 50-64; and 46% among Americans 65 and older.

Not surprisingly, adults who do not use TikTok are more likely than those who do to consider it a national security risk. Among non-users, 65% say the app is a security threat, including 36% who view it as a major threat. Among TikTok users, just 9% see it as a major threat and about one-third say it's a minor threat. The Pew survey was conducted May 15-21, 2023. [...] A survey Pew Research Center conducted in March found that 50% of Americans support a U.S. government ban on TikTok, while 22% were opposed and 28% were unsure.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has used his partial veto power to make a creative line-item change to the state budget, securing increased funding for public schools until 2425 instead of 2025. The BBC reports: Republicans have reacted with fury to what they call "an unprecedented brand-new way to screw the taxpayer." The move could however be undone by a legal challenge or future governor. It is the latest tussle between Mr Evers, a former public school teacher who narrowly won re-election last year, and a Republican-controlled state legislature that has often blocked his agenda. Their original budget proposal had raised the amount local school districts could generate via property taxes, by $325 per student, for the next two school years.

But Wisconsin allows its governors to alter certain pieces of legislation by striking words and numbers as they see fit before signing them into law - what is known as partial veto power. Both Democrats and Republicans have flexed their partial veto authority for years, with Mr Evers' Republican predecessor once deploying it to extend a state program's deadline by one thousand years.

This week, before he signed the biennial state budget into law, the governor altered language that applied the $325 increase to the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, vetoing a hyphen and a "20" to instead make the end date 2425. He also used his power to remove proposed tax cuts for the state's wealthiest taxpayers and protect some 180 diversity, equity and inclusion jobs Republicans wanted to cut at the public University of Wisconsin.

The FBI's primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as "threat actors" requiring "continuous monitoring" in 2015. From a report: The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a "high severity" physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. "It's been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts," Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, "including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately."

The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community's failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau's broad authorities to surveil social media content -- authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI's reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them. The FBI's $14 million contract to ZeroFox for "FBI social media alerting" replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown.

After a three-year pause, U.S. student loan repayments are set to resume on October 1st — just three months from today. But CNN reports that yesterday America's Supreme Court "struck down President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program, blocking millions of borrowers from receiving up to $20,000 in federal student debt relief."

"The court's 6 to 3 conservative majority held that the secretary of education did not have that authority under existing law," writes the Washington Post. The Guardian quotes President Biden's response: "I think the court misinterpreted the constitution."

CNN reports: No debt had been canceled, even though the Biden administration had received about 26 million applications for relief last year and approved 16 million of them. The forgiveness program, estimated to cost $400 billion, would have fulfilled a campaign promise of Biden's to cancel some student loan debt. But a group of Republican-led states and other conservative groups took the administration to court over the program, claiming that the executive branch does not have the power to so broadly cancel student debt in the proposed manner.

Critics also point out that the one-time student loan forgiveness program does nothing to address the cost of college for future students and could even lead to an increase in tuition. Some Democrats joined Republicans in voting for a bill to block the program. Both the Senate and the House passed the measure, but Biden vetoed the bill in early June...

The administration estimated that roughly 20 million borrowers would have seen their entire federal student loan balance wiped away.
UPDATE: CNBC reports the administration hasn't given up: President Joe Biden suggested on Friday that he was looking for another avenue to deliver student debt relief after the Supreme Court rejected his forgiveness plan.

"Today's decision has closed one path," Biden said during a briefing Friday. "Now we're going to pursue another."
A statement from the White House also points to other relief policies for students, noting for example that now "no one with an undergraduate loan has to pay more than 5 percent of their discretionary income." CNN reports: New rules set to take effect in July could broaden eligibility for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which is aimed at helping government and nonprofit workers. And a new income-driven repayment plan proposal is meant to lower eligible borrowers' monthly payments and reduce the amount they pay back over time. The administration said this plan was finalized Friday and borrowers will be able to take advantage of it this summer, before loan payments are due. The Department of Education has also made it easier for borrowers who were misled by their for-profit college to apply for student loan forgiveness under a program known as borrower defense to repayment, as well as for those who are permanently disabled. Altogether, the Biden administration has approved more than $66 billion in targeted loan relief to nearly 2.2 million borrowers....

[T]he Biden administration said Friday that it will provide a 12-month on-ramp period for borrowers reentering payment... Borrowers will not be reported to credit bureaus, be considered in default or referred to collection agencies for late, missed or partial payments during the on-ramp period, according to a fact sheet from the White House.