“It’s not officially over until the neighbors’ lawn signs come down.”
Tag: Crime
Political cartoons / memes / and news I want to share. 11-12-2026
For me, it’s always a renewed excitement to birth a new novel into the world. I have been waiting in anticipation since it went to press last fall. I can now share this with you : Wish Upon a Satellite will be released on May 2nd (and you can pre0rder it now!)
I wanted to write a story about funny trans characters going through some serious teenage drama. Can’t wait for it to get banned in Texas along my other novels!
“The glaciers are melting and the climate crisis is on their mind, but nothing shakes the foundations of non-binary teen Ciel’s world more than sharing an unexpected kiss with their best friend, Stephie. Everything they thought was clear is suddenly all mixed up—and that’s without the new problems at school: sexting, peer pressure, and overdue book reports.“
News I want to share. 11-11-2026
Political cartoons / memes / and news I want to share. 11-11-2026
Gender indoctrination always sounds so rad when transphobes are talking about it.
It’s a Christmas tree, right? Uh… right?
Sinema, bottom right, was a far left radical member of the Green Party. She was light years to the left of Bernie and AOC before members of the Koch family approached her with bags of cash. Same for all of them. Fetterman is now going to Republikkkan training seminars paid for by the Koch family.
There would be mass uprisings against this in any developed country…except our own.
Turning Points USA picked many of the bigoted racists losers that lost in the midterms. They also spread fake and vile homophobic, anti-Muslim, and trans slurs about Dem candidates.
Good. Now, release un redacted Epstein files.
The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans
Two US senators say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding the FISA court decision while it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.
Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.
Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration’s own deadline for releasing it passed in September.
The program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), lapsed in June after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March approval. The administration’s own public documentation says rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance.” That window closed September 13, even as intelligence officials press lawmakers to reauthorize the program by the end of the year.
Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Schiff, the former chair of its House counterpart, say the administration owes Congress an explanation for the delay, and the names of the officials responsible, by November 6.
“If this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive,” the senators told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche in a demand letter obtained exclusively by WIRED, “it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.”
Outside Congress, Demand Progress and 22 other civil liberties and government accountability groups on Monday urged congressional leaders to refuse to reauthorize Section 702 “while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates.” Signatories range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative-backed Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.
The Trump administration has already been pressed, and has promised, to release the ruling. In April, senators Tom Cotton and Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chair and Democratic vice chair, pressed the administration to release it within 15 days so it could inform the Senate’s debate. In July, asked in writing whether he would commit to declassifying it by the 180-day deadline, Blanche replied, “Yes.”
Warner “has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702,” his communications director, Rachel Cohen, tells WIRED. Neither former director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard nor Bill Pulte, who briefly replaced her as acting director, “were responsive,” Cohen says, “but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan letter and as required by law.”
Cotton’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Justice Department did not answer questions WIRED sent Friday about the delay.
Clayton, who is legally responsible as director of national intelligence for declassifying the ruling, has made no such promise. Asked before his July confirmation whether he would ensure the opinion was public before Congress voted on reauthorization, he wrote only that the government was “working arduously to expeditiously declassify” it and had made the full opinion available to lawmakers.
Some of what the court found is already known. A FISA court opinion declassified last year described a similar FBI tool, a “participants filter” that let agents select people in contact with surveillance targets and read their messages. In February 2025, the Justice Department’s National Security Division told the court the tool had been running searches no one counted. The FBI shut it off the next month and switched it back on later that year, after the department approved a rebuilt version.
This year’s ruling went beyond that. The court found that tools agencies use to narrow intercepted data to an American’s messages amount to searches of Americans, subject to the same limits, and ordered them rebuilt, The New York Times reported in April, citing unclassified administration talking points sent to lawmakers. Senator Alex Padilla said in a written question to Blanche that the Justice Department “is appealing portions” of the ruling “limiting the government’s use of certain filtering tools.”
While the ruling stayed secret, seven intelligence agency fact sheets from March 2026, one dated the day of the ruling, cited a 98.9 percent compliance rate for FBI searches of Americans and credited Section 702 with stopping a planned terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. None mentions the court’s findings. The figure appears nowhere in the Justice Department inspector general’s October 2025 review of those searches, which put the compliance rate at 98.6 percent and could not conclude that “the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”
According to the fact sheets, FBI auditors review every such search. FBI director Kash Patel closed the bureau’s Office of Internal Auditing last May and moved its auditors into another division. The bureau’s search counts before 2025 also omit queries run through the participants filter, searches the government’s own privacy watchdog says are “not possible to track.”
Lawmakers who have read the ruling hint that it says more. Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged colleagues on the Senate floor in June to read it in a secure room. “I have seen it,” he said. Once they did, he told them, “your opinion of the role of FISA and the rights of Americans will be impacted for sure.”
Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators. The court’s current approval of the program expires in March.
Surveillance reform advocates say the administration may try to avoid that fight by attaching a renewal to the annual defense authorization bill, which Congress usually finalizes in December. In 2023, lawmakers extended Section 702 for four months through that year’s defense bill after a Senate effort to strip the provision failed. This year’s House and Senate versions of the bill do not yet include it.
Dell Cameron is an investigative reporter from Texas covering privacy and national security. He’s the recipient of multiple Society of Professional Journalists awards and is co-recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was a senior reporter at Gizmodo and a staff writer for the Daily … Read More
ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations is engaged in far-reaching spying against left-wing activists that rivals the FBI and CIA crackdowns on the Civil Rights and anti-war movements.
Attorneys for 15 Minnesota residents facing federal conspiracy charges have obtained evidence of a sweeping, possibly unconstitutional spying operation carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against left-wing social movements in Minnesota and beyond.
The high-profile Minnesota 15 prosecution makes clear that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), flush with federal funds and newly hired personnel, is now President Donald Trump’s primary tool against dissent, with a powerful array of post-9/11 investigative authorities brought to bear against everyday Americans organizing their communities.
Nothing of this scale has been seen in the United States, experts say, since the federal government’s counterinsurgency against the New Left and the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
Among the records revealed during the discovery process in these cases are dozens of reports, audio transcripts, emails, intercepted Signal chats, photographs, database queries, and more. They reveal the inner workings of the domestic terrorism investigations, running under the names Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master, authorized by the controversial National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
Published following Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September of last year, NSPM 7 instructs federal law enforcement to use every tool available against organizations and people who criticize the administration’s policies and espouse “anti-Christian” ideas. The full scope and extent of the investigations it authorizes remains unknown.
Defense attorneys for the Minnesota 15 claim that the prosecution stems from a broader nationwide surveillance operation aimed at opponents of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. One attorney in the case directly compares the DHS-run campaign to the FBI’s infamous Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, which unconstitutionally surveilled, infiltrated, and blackmailed racial justice, civil rights, and anti-war movements from the 1950s through the early 1970s.
Three former law enforcement officials who reviewed filings concur, telling WIRED that the case is almost certainly part of a wider intelligence-gathering operation that began long before the administration invaded Minnesota in December 2025.
Dueling motions in the case over discovery of DHS’s surveillance program reveal that personnel with Homeland Security Investigations—one of ICE’s two components—repurposed funding mechanisms and investigative tools for serious criminal probes and turned them on domestic dissenters. Operation Keyhole, the HSI undercover program that bankrolled the Minnesota 15 prosecution, dates back to 2008. As of June 2026, it was underwriting a half dozen active undercover investigations in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.
Around 120 HSI agents, many drawn from specialized units across the country that have served as the leading edge of the administration’s militarized immigration enforcement operations, were assigned to the case—including 11 undercovers. They used highly invasive surveillance techniques, including the deployment of Reaper drones and Patriot Act tools usually restricted to money laundering and terrorism investigations. Undercover operatives also infiltrated churches in apparent violation of a court order.
The Minnesota 15 indictment stems from the Trump administration’s demand that the Justice Department “go big and go loud” to crack down on community response networks during last winter’s Operation Metro Surge. Twin Cities activists organized volunteers to monitor DHS agents and their vehicles using encrypted Signal groups, homebuilt vehicle databases, and a centralized dispatch system. Government prosecutors claim that this amounts to a criminal conspiracy to block immigration enforcement, unlawfully identify and stalk federal agents, and even assault them.
Their defense attorneys say the heavy charges filed against the Minnesota 15 don’t align with their alleged conduct. “This is the first time I’ve had a client who’s accused of a conspiracy and went on a speaking tour,” says Kevin Riach, who represents defendant Isaac Sant.
Peeking Through the Keyhole
An internal ICE document laying out the scope of Operation Puppet Master—which led to the indictment of the Minneapolis 15—ends by noting, “This case has also been accepted under CUC Op Keyhole.” According to prosecutors, Operation Keyhole is a long-standing program created by HSI’s Saint Paul office to fund “undercover activity”—primarily equipment purchases and personnel costs—in a region covering Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska. The program has funded at least 77 investigations into “narcotics trafficking, child sexual abuse, financial investigations, and counter-proliferation” since it started in December 2008.
The CUC prefix, per an internal 2008 DHS handbook unearthed by the independent media outlet Unicorn Riot, refers to Certified Undercover Operations, a formal designation with clearly defined oversight mechanisms, procedures, and reporting requirements. Operation Keyhole’s parameters are reviewed every six months by a committee comprising senior DOJ and DHS officials. As of June 2026, when it was last renewed, Keyhole funded six active investigations, including Project Whipple Shield, which was initiated in February to probe claims of assault, stalking, and doxing of DHS agents and other federal employees, and underpins the Minnesota 15 indictment.
At least 11 undercover agents working under Operation Keyhole infiltrated Twin Cities anti-ICE activists, participating in martial arts and know-your-rights trainings, marches, general strikes, and community meetings. They also infiltrated activists’ communications network for identifying possible undercover ICE vehicles and dispatching activists to tail them through the Twin Cities, and penetrated several activist group chats on Signal, transmitting their contents back to other HSI colleagues for analysis and eventual inclusion in the indictment.
Activist conferences as far away as Seattle, Michigan, Chicago, and New York City were placed under surveillance as part of the investigation, and HSI teams photographed and ran the license plates of every car parked in the lot of a meeting location or seen transporting activists. There is also drone footage from unarmed Customs and Border Protection Reaper drones of the activists moving around the Twin Cities area.
The undercovers were part of a much broader group of more than 50 HSI agents, including at least two dozen from HSI’s little-known Special Operations Group, that took part in the investigation and surveillance of the defendants, both digital and in-person. Feds with decades of experience on complex financial crimes, drug cartel investigations, human trafficking, and organized crime were pulled into the Minnesota 15 investigation.
Several of the Minnesota 15 case agents are from out of state and appear in court records for the prosecutions of anti-ICE activists in other cities. This includes Los Angeles–based HSI agents Robert Kurtz III, who specializes in financial fraud, and Ryan Ribner, who allegedly assaulted SEIU California president David Huerta at a June 2025 protest of an ICE enforcement operation, arrested him, and then claimed the then 58-year-old Huerta attacked federal law enforcement. (Huerta’s charges were dropped in July after videos contradicting Ribner’s account surfaced.) HSI records show Ribner was also involved in at least two prosecutions of Southern California residents who physically confronted ICE and Border Patrol agents last year.
Other agents from the conspiracy investigation have also been involved in recent high-profile incidents. Tim Gerber, the “team leader” of an HSI Special Operations Group squad, led the investigation of former CNN host Don Lemon for reporting on a protest at a Minneapolis Church where an ICE agent was a pastor. Fellow SOG agent Yue Her was present at the scene of a 2025 incident when Renee Good’s killer, ICE Special Response Team agent Johnathan Ross, was dragged by the car of a man he tried to apprehend.
“This operation does not seem in any way limited to Minnesota,” says Spencer Reynolds, a former DHS attorney and counterterrorism lawyer who now works at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “As we saw with the boots on the ground in the streets, with Greg Bovino leading CBP and Border Patrol special forces units on sweeping raids across the country, this is the intelligence and undercover investigative apparatus that is running in parallel to the door-kicking.”
Follow the Money
Mike German, a retired FBI agent who worked undercover domestic terrorism cases for years before becoming a sharp critic of post-9/11 federal law enforcement, likens the Minnesota 15 case to federal law enforcement’s long history of suppressing left-wing social movements, including the CIA’s Operation MH/Chaos, which surveilled the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War for evidence of foreign influence. One difference is the sheer scale—this time, it’s bigger.
According to a 2011 book by former CIA officer Frank Rafalko, the CIA secret investigation into suspected foreign influence on the New Left and anti-Vietnam War movement had 42 officers working the case at its peak. Court records show 119 HSI agents worked on the Minnesota 15 case alone.
“Broad monitoring of social media, communications, and financial transactions are used to link an ever increasing number of people as potential subjects of investigation and prosecution,” German says. “These are exactly the kind of intelligence activities J. Edgar Hoover adopted to suppress the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s.”
The key difference today, German says, is the vast pool of data available to the feds.
HSI used highly invasive measures—including scrutiny of wire transfers, PayPal reimbursements, and other financial transactions; forensic digital analysis of website traffic; 15 terabytes worth of infiltrated Signal chats; and information from a commercial data broker—to identify individuals under investigation.
After a local activist uploaded a license-plate search tool on Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud platform, to an infiltrated Signal chat, HSI agents reviewed website DNS queries and Stripe data along with data purchased from a commercial broker. This gave HSI access to SSH session logs, outbound connection records, the Fly.io account’s signup IP, and a Stripe card fingerprint on an account that had never completed a payment. Agents fused that with Minnesota DVS records and commercial data from the Thomson-Reuters CLEAR platform to produce a driver’s license number, Social Security number summary, years of address history, phone numbers, property records, and jointly registered vehicles.
Documents concerning financial records requested through the Treasury Department’s 314(a) suspicious activity reporting program—created by the Patriot Act to enable speedy tracking of finances for terrorism and money-laundering investigations—show that the feds targeted records of 29 “subjects” during queries conducted on March 31, 2026. Emails viewed by WIRED between several HSI agents based in Los Angeles and Arizona show that batches of records were turned over pursuant to those inquiries, including some dealing with SEIU that a senior Minnesota HSI agent sent to a LA-based colleague to be filed “wherever these records are stored.”
HSI investigators used similar workarounds to warrants and grand jury subpoenas to obtain phone records for several journalists who covered Operation Metro Surge, as first reported by The Guardian. Court records show the feds used an administrative summons request reserved for violations of customs and taxation requirements, which does not fit the activity that made up the criminal charges filed by the Minnesota US attorney against former CNN anchor Don Lemon and others.
The Minnesota 15 case is the clearest example yet of DHS pursuing the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on what have long been upheld as First Amendment–protected activities. But it’s unlikely alone.
Riach, the defense attorney, says the HSI reports show the agency is complicit in what he called “the new COINTELPRO.”
“What we saw during the immigration surges last year was that ICE is the administration’s paramilitary force, the projector of strength,” Riach says. “Here, we see that HSI are taking the FBI’s place as the investigative secret police—it’s the classic one-two punch of authoritarian regimes around the world.”
Ali Winston is an independent reporter covering criminal justice, privacy, and extremism. He has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New York magazine and has reported documentaries for BBC Panorama and PBS Frontline. His work has earned several honors, including a George Polk Award for Local Reporting, an … Read More
Political cartoons / memes / and news I want to share. 11-10-2026
The male abuser that adopted me
I am very tired and Ron made the supper I asked him for yet I could only eat half of my portion. He was glad I ate that much. Ron wants me to go to bed, but I wanted to do this post first and I have not finished the cartoon / meme / news roundup I was working on. But this post is important. And yes please comment on it, I will try to reply to the comments.
So as I have already told everyone I was adopted at age three. My adult female adopter wanted a cute cuddly toddler to hold and make of. So at first she did not join in with the abuse but she only stopped it if she was there when it was happening. And then only if it was by their children who I call my hellspawn siblings. My adopting adult male was allowed to do what ever he wanted with me and she never cared and occasionally joined in. As I grew out of the toddler stage her care about me simply diminished to nothing, and she actively joined in with the abuse and abused me herself.
The male that adopted me was the oldest of 8 children. His dad was a drinker who drank himself to death. The male left school before the 8th grade and worked to provide a living for his family. So that gave him a dislike for schools and book learning and for some years I was forbidden to have even school books at the house. He was a hard worker and one of the ways he because so strong was that he pulled ships on the Saint Laurence seaway into the docks by hand. He built up very powerful shoulders, arms, and the rest of his body. At family gatherings he would brag how when they would go out drinking, others in the family would pick fights and then come get him to do the fighting. According to him no matter how many there were he never lost. I did see him fight a few times and he was viscous and powerful. But for me he was an overwhelming force for a tiny boy who had no chance to defend my self against him. He enjoyed using his much greater size and strength to hurt me.
To explain his way of thinking and dealing with the world around him I will repeat a story he often told and I heard as a kid sitting on the counter during their drinking parties as my job was to keep very quiet, when someone raised their empty glass I was to rush over, take the glass, mix their drink, return it, get patted on my ass or groped me, and return to my place. It was not always the counter but you get the idea. I was the drink boy and if someone wanted I was also a party favor / treat.
The story was he was at a restaurant, and a group of famous TV wrestlers came in. They sat down and ordered. Then at some point I guess the meal came or they got complementary bread. One of the group members reached for the butter and the largest guy took his knife and hit the guy across his hand repeatedly saying “I go first”. The largest guy then took most if not all the butter. My adopting thug brawler adult male thought that was the pinnacle of manhood and success. He tried to be the biggest guy that way all my life. It was easy for him to do to a small boy who was malnourished and once hospitalized for malnutrition because I was not always allowed to eat or be fed. His strength allowed him to do things to me that haunt me to this day.
However I think I became the better person. I have a real loving relationship with my spouse not the hate filled tit for tat that my adopting adults had. When he was dying his last month he begged Ron to come get them and bring them to Florida as his own hellspawn were making his life miserable. He had three final wishes, and Ron and I made sure he got all three. The second week after he got here the little grasp he had on reality went bye-bye, and he was bedridden and needed constant personal care. I had to provide that care as Ron was working 12 hour shifts. I have written about having to clean his genitals, to hold the penis that raped me and from which he made me drink his urine as he urinated, I helped him poop and after he soiled himself I cleaned the asshole that he made child me lick with my tongue to punish and humiliate me.
I was barely able to hold it together the weeks he was here. At home I cried and sobbed and Ron who did not yet know my full childhood abuse couldn’t understand why my health was deteriorating so rapidly. After he died I told Ron more parts of it slowly filling him in on the horror I lived. So when my adopting adult female was also dying and we had already let her live in our park model here in our park he refused to put me through it again, demanding she go to hospice.
OK well sorry to burden all of you with this. But it has been on my mind for several days, and I have had nightmares for several nights. I needed to deal with these memories / thoughts. While I really dislike throwing my burden on everyone who comes here ( you really are a grand group of people) it does help me to get some of this poison I carry out of myself, out of my system. I guess it is true what they say, a burden shared is a burden lessened. Thank you. Hugs
Pete Hegseth: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
John Oliver discusses the damage that Pete Hegseth has caused both at home and abroad as the U.S. Secretary of Defense, how it could take a generation to fix, and the unexpected decorating flourishes of Mr. Kid Rock.
Political cartoons / memes / and news I want to share. 11-9-2026
And this is coming from an anti-imperialist activist who is deeply critical of Western media.
(However, please continue to analyze, point out and criticize how the media are covering the war, or how POC face intensified challenges in these conditions, this is important and relevant. But don’t diminish the importance of the conflict.) March 5, 2022
So apparently this is a thing now.
(Also, be aware that purposefully saying “the Ukraine” is a reference to the belief that Ukraine is nothing but a region of Russia and is considered to be a dog whistle.) March 7, 2022
