A growing body of evidence, drawn from leaked planning documents, academic research, and the testimony of intelligence professionals, suggests that the most consequential military operation of the twenty-first century may have been shaped less by strategic necessity than by a phenomenon researchers now call AI sycophancy — the tendency of large language models to tell their users exactly what they want to hear.

a spark that ignited the 200,000 cubic metres of hydrogen

Mais en novembre, le groupe français a répondu à un nouvel appel d’offres, cette fois pour identifier et localiser des étrangers. Cela s'appelle du skip-tracing, et une urgence pour l'ICE. Capgemini rafle la plus grosse part du marché, avec jusqu'à 365 millions de dollars à la clé. C'est écrit noir sur blanc : plus la société française localisera de migrants, plus elle pourra empocher d'argent. Les bonus financiers, en effet, sont basés sur le taux de réussite dans la vérification des adresses des étrangers.

Le champion français des services informatiques compte 350 000 collaborateurs dans le monde, et une filiale américaine installée près de Washington. Celle-ci travaille avec plusieurs agences gouvernementales : ministère de la Santé, des Anciens Combattants et, depuis plus de quinze ans, le département de la Sécurité intérieure. Des contrats que nous avons consultés sur les bases de données publiques. Pour l'ICE, Capgemini gère par exemple un standard téléphonique réservé aux victimes de crimes commis par des étrangers. Une création de Donald Trump.

ICE is angry, ICE is terrified, of how deeply unpopular it is.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

AkademikerPension verwaltet nach den Angaben auf seiner Webseite zufolge ein Vermögen von insgesamt 164 Milliarden Dänischen Kronen. Dies entspricht umgerechnet knapp 26 Milliarden Dollar oder etwa 22 Milliarden Euro. Der Verkauf der US-Anleihen betrifft damit einen vergleichsweise kleinen Teil des Gesamtportfolios, hat aber eine hohe symbolische Bedeutung.

Es handele sich um Papiere im Wert von rund 100 Millionen Dollar

80% of total spending on cloud software and services for business use in Europe went to US companies, representing a volume of €265 billion.

This spending, relating exclusively to cloud software and services for business use, represents approximately 2 million direct, indirect, and induced jobs in the US.

You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.

without a complete dismantling of the targeting and detention systems we’ve created, we’re bound to return to this again and again. If it isn’t stopped, it can and will get much worse. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } Still, just as the U.S. has a heritage of oppression, it also has a vast inheritance from those who believed and worked for the best that the country could become

if you happen to be thinking, “Well, Japanese American detention camps were stopped. America refused all that,” I would answer that in that case, the camps were stopped within that critical three-to-five year period I’ve been discussing today. (And that camp system was never quite dismantled even then, but for decades continued to remain a closer call than you might imagine.)

People often think the Nazi system was a single static thing. But it evolved over time, just as our system of detention is evolving right now. It was in November 1938, just over five years into Nazi rule and Dachau’s existence, that the Nazis first swept tens of thousands of Jews en masse into camps in Germany and its territories during Kristallnacht.

The way camps work is that they come into being in a police state and help the police state to become more of a police state. Camps ratchet up the speed and the efficiency of harm the state does, particularly killing.

Congress has already allocated funding that will create a camp system that could, on its own, surpass our existing (massive) prison system. The state is already trying to use modern surveillance methods to control communities both outside and inside the camps. Concentration camp systems take the worst abuses of the existing system then expand and weaponize them.

Slave patrols combined a quasi-official role with citizen vigilantism. At the far end of the spectrum, the U.S. government has had an overt and vicious history of harming civilians from its founding, with Native genocide and chattel slavery.

both the international history of camps and domestic U.S. history are critical to understanding what’s going on and where we are in the current process.

Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean.

we’re on the verge of entrenching a massive system, which is a very bad place to be. It’s my opinion that we have a limited window in which to act. What happens this year will be critical for significantly dismantling the existence of and any future capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the government is constructing today.

We may already be living in a concentration-camp regime, but it hasn’t yet hardened into the kind of vast system that becomes the controlling factor in the country’s political future.

But Trump has since returned to office. And if we count the Biden administration as simply a pause on the Trump agenda in several ways, the U.S. is currently approaching the end of that three-to-five year window.

In other cases, the external pressure applied is different. Three years into mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s, the situation was volatile enough that the U.S.—the major state supporting Pinochet’s dictatorship there—pressed for changes to DINA, the Chilean secret police. The organization was eliminated and replaced. That subsequent force was still abhorrent and continued to practice arbitrary detention. But one byproduct of the shift was that any expansion of mass detention into a broader, permanent camp system was halte

In most cases, there’s a three-to-five-year window after a ruling party or leader or revolutionary brigade comes to power and asserts the right to arbitrarily detain and punish civilians. At some point toward the end of that window, a struggle typically begins over whether to massively expand the quasi-legal sites of detention into a more permanent system.

In the U.S., we currently have the existing brutality of the carceral system, cultural acceptance of disparate treatment for people of color, forced Native American exile to reservations, the long echoes Japanese American internment during World War II, the continuing operation of places like Guantanamo, and the willingness of both major political parties to use a detention-based punitive approach to immigration. These are the domestic weaknesses that helped to make the country susceptible to becoming a concentration camp regime.

Concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of political, racial, ethnic, or religious identity. And that is where we’re at right now.

I’ll make clear that not all concentration camps are death camps

And also keep in mind that the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security, in its language and images in press releases and on social media, is directly aping Nazi propaganda.

A recent report from the American Immigration Council counts some 66,000 people in immigration detention at the end of 2025. That’s an increase of almost 75% since Trump returned to office. But it falls far short of the goal the government had hoped to reach, having planned to expand capacity to more than 100,000 beds and fill them.

As far as we know at present, seven people have died in immigration detention this year. Two died by suicide (despite facility responsibility to prevent self-harm). Two died of heart issues. One is said to have died from fentanyl withdrawal, and one was reportedly choked to death by guards. One more was found unconscious and unresponsive, with details of his death yet to come.

Today I’ll write about how a society comes to concentration camps, the process we’re already deep into, why the ways we’re talking about events in the U.S. may be unhelpful, and how we can undo it this mess.

What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.

we need massive reform to the way in which ICE and DHS are currently conducting themselves.” Note that the “massive reform” mentioned is to the way that the agencies conduct themselves, not to the bad-faith mission of these agencies.

Nexperia wilde rugdekking van het ministerie van Economische Zaken. Daarvoor moest het zijn bedrijfsstructuur zo aanpassen dat de Chinese invloed kleiner zou worden. Anders was het overtuigen van de Amerikanen volgens het ministerie een onbegonnen zaak.

Dit alles gebeurde tegen de achtergrond van dreigende Amerikaanse sancties vanwege Nexperia’s banden met China.

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. “I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

het regime

Die aspecten van het trumpisme – wetteloosheid, vijanddenken, leugens, omdraaiingen en geweld – zijn de pijlers van zowel zijn binnenlandse als buitenlandse beleid. Dat is al tien jaar het geval,

Congress just killed a military "right to repair" law. So now, US soldiers stationed abroad will have to continue the Pentagon's proud tradition of shipping materiel from generators to jeeps back to America to be fixed by their manufacturers

This is exactly the kind of infrastructural risk that we were warned of if we let Chinese companies like Huawei supply our critical telecoms equipment. Virtually every government ministry, every major corporation, every small business and every household in the world have locked themselves into a US-based, cloud-based service.

The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now!

are on the cusp of a "Post-American Internet," a new digital nervous system for the 21st century. An internet that we can build without worrying about America's demands and priorities.

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this ‘sovereignty washing’. Caffarra warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act.

This creates a risk that is difficult, if not impossible, to mitigate contractually. Any private contract between a European customer and a US cloud provider is ultimately subordinate to US federal law. A warrant issued under the CLOUD Act legally compels an American company to hand over data, overriding any contractual commitments of data residency or privacy.

The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally

Ook andere landen hebben inmiddels hun samenwerking met de Verenigde Staten ingeperkt, uit zorg dat gedeelde informatie wordt gebruikt voor militaire acties die mogelijk botsen met internationaal recht en mensenrechten. Canada en het Verenigd Koninkrijk hebben de regels voor informatie-uitwisseling aangescherpt, terwijl Frankrijk openlijk afstand heeft genomen van Amerikaanse militaire drugsoperaties buiten een internationaal en juridisch kader. Binnen de Europese Unie is afgesproken dat lidstaten geen gegevens delen die kunnen bijdragen aan dodelijke acties op zee.

AI-top in Parijs ging en daar publiekelijk zei dat als wij Amerikaanse bedrijven beboeten, zij de NAVO zullen verlaten

Chinese producers are close to being monopolists not only in rare earths, but also electronics products, batteries, and many types of active pharmaceutical ingredients

When these nuts open, it looks like China is producing a big wave of new products. These are its breakthroughs in drones, electric vehicles, and robotics. Years from now we may see greater success in biotech as well. I am keen to follow along China’s progress in electromagnetism over the next decade. China’s industrial ecosystem is leading the way in replacing combustion with electromagnetic processes. Everything is now drone, as the combination of cheaper batteries and better permanent magnets displaces the engine.

I’ve had Silicon Valley friends tell me that they are planning a trip to China nearly every month this year. Silicon Valley respects and fears companies from only one other country. Game recognizes game, so to speak. Tech founders may begrudge China’s restrictions; and some companies have suffered directly from IP theft. But they also recognize that Chinese companies can move even faster than they do with their teams of motivated workers; and Chinese manufacturers are far ahead of US capabilities on anything involving physical production. Some founders and VCs are impressed with the fact that Chinese AI companies have gotten this far while suffering American tech restrictions, while leading in open-source to boot.

China’s capacity, which was one-third US levels in 2000 and more than two-and-a-half times US levels in 2024. Beijing is building so much solar, coal, and nuclear to make sure that no data center shall be in want. Though the US has done a superb job building data centers, it hasn’t prepared enough for other bottlenecks. Especially not as Trump’s dislike of wind turbines has removed this source of growth. Speaking of Trump’s whimsy, he has also been generous with selling close-to-leading chips to Beijing. That’s another reason that data centers might not represent a US advantage for long.

One advantage for Beijing is that much of the global AI talent is Chinese. We can tell from the CVs of researchers as well as occasional disclosures from top labs (for example from Meta) that a large percentage of AI researchers earned their degrees from Chinese universities. American labs may be able to declare that “our Chinese are better than their Chinese.” But some of these Chinese researchers may decide to repatriate. I know that many of them prefer to stay in the US: their compensation might be higher by an order of magnitude, they have access to compute, and they can work with top peers. 5But they may also tire of the uncertainty created by Trump’s immigration policy. It’s never worth forgetting that at the dawn of the Cold War, the US deported Qian Xuesen, the CalTech professor who then built missile delivery systems for Beijing. Or these Chinese researchers expect life in Shanghai to be safer or more fun than in San Francisco. Or they miss mom. People move for all sorts of reasons, so I’m reluctant to believe that the US has a durable talent advantage.

it’s not obvious that the US will have a monopoly on this technology, just as it could not keep it over the bomb.

Chinese efforts are doggedly in pursuit, sometimes a bit closer to US models, sometimes a bit further. By virtue of being open-source (or at least open-weight), the Chinese models have found receptive customers overseas, sometimes with American tech companies.

I am skeptical of the decisive strategic advantage when I filter it through my main preoccupation: understanding China’s technology trajectories. On AI, China is behind the US, but not by years

Silicon Valley’s views on AI made more sense to me after I learned the term “decisive strategic advantage.” It was first used by Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book Superintelligence, which defined it as a technology sufficient to achieve “complete world domination.” How might anyone gain a DSA? A superintelligence might develop cyber advantages that cripple the adversary’s command-and-control capabilities. Or the superintelligence could self-recursively improve such that the lab or state that controls it gains an insurmountable scientific advantage. Once an AI reaches a certain capability threshold, it might need only weeks or hours to evolve into a superintelligence. 3 And if an American lab builds it, it might help to lock in the dominance of another American century.

I’m struck that some east coast folks insist to me that driverless cars can’t work and won’t be accepted, even as these vehicles populate the streets of the Bay Area.

I’ve yet to see one acknowledgement in the major financial press about how badly the Bakken performed compared to how it was sold. Why should this happen?  Because the average American still thinks there is endless oil and gas in the U.S. shale. They are going to pay the price for the industry fraud in multiple ways. First, with higher electricity and heating prices as natural gas supplies become scarce. Secondly, they don’t realize how the current administration’s attempts to block renewable energy and electric vehicles in America is based on the lie that there is plenty of cheap oil and gas to use instead.

Last month was Trump’s 28-point Russia-Ukraine war peace proposal, presented without consultation with Ukraine. Now, the U.S. National Security Strategy claims that Europe is in “economic decline” and experiencing “civilizational erasure,” and it openly endorses parties hostile to the European Union.

But while many thought they had cracked the code for managing Trump, the U.S. attacks on Europe have only multiplied over time

they converge into a strategy built to implement Trump administration’s geoeconomic ambitions: complete regulatory freedom for Silicon Valley tech companies in Europe and a commercial reset with Russia at the expense of Ukrainian and European sovereignty.

NVIDIA lost ~$593bn in market cap as investors panicked that AI maybe wasn’t an American monopoly after all.

In februari zegt Vance tijdens een speech op de jaarlijkse veiligheidsconferentie in München onder meer dat Europa zichzelf van binnenuit uitholt. De democratie in de EU zou niet meer functioneren, wat onder meer zou komen door de Europese regels voor de digitale wereld – die in de praktijk vooral de grote Amerikaanse sociale mediabedrijven als Meta en X treffen.

In het stuk gebruikt Chamber of Progress de term digital curtain. De suggestie is dat Europeanen zichzelf achter een digitaal gordijn zetten als ze proberen alle technologie zelf in elkaar te knutselen – een verwijzing naar het leven achter het IJzeren Gordijn tijdens de Koude oorlog.

* "Digital platforms are used for hybrid campaigns."* "EU can't compete with US tech ON THEIR TERMS."* "Post-reality US is what happens when tech is unregulated."* "Ireland is a Trojan Horse for Big Tech."* "The Digital Omnibus is sabotage."

America’s former role is gone. And I think that Americans themselves are having the hardest time of all coming to terms with what that might actually mean in the long run.

The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won’t matter. Because “we will never fucking trust you again.”The Americans at the table seemed somewhat startled by the heat of that pronouncement. I agreed with it entirely. So, it seemed to me, did most of the non-Americans. This wasn’t the only such moment at the forum this year, but it was, to me, the most interesting. And it was still being talked about the next day. “Thank God,” one allied official said to me. “Someone had to tell them.”

But before I could worry about it too much, a senior military officer from a major (non-American) allied nation drove a stake right through the heart of the matter.America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America’s recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally.

And the damage to America’s soft power — the shutting down of aid programs and things like Voice of America — can’t be undone rapidly no matter who wins the midterms. U.S. troops that are pulled out of bases where the U.S. no longer sees a strategic reason for their presence aren’t likely to come back.And, this is the critical part, wouldn’t necessarily be welcomed even if they did.

The damage is already done. I know firsthand that a great many Americans who really do believe in the post-1945 global order, and of America’s prior role in the world and the value of that role to America and Americans, are still inside the U.S. government. But I also know that many of them are retiring, or seeking early retirement, or switching to consulting gigs. They can’t stomach what U.S. foreign policy is becoming, and they won’t be a part of it.Good for them. But every single person who departs is being replaced by someone who is totally fine with the new U.S. foreign policy. And sometimes is actually quite enthusiastic about it. That will accelerate the process that’s already underway. And those new people are going to have long careers, shaping things both in public and behind the scenes.

The session, over dinner, was a small group. It was about America’s moral leadership in the world. Our moderator was a now-former American official. She was pretty frank and clear-eyed about how America’s allies currently view the country’s place in the world, but also expressed some hope that after the midterms next year or maybe the next presidential election, things would start to get more back to normal. We were assured that a lot of people in America are still with us. Some of the other Americans present nodded their heads.

What would happen is that someone senior at Amazon, maybe Jeff Bezos himself, would get a call from some golf partner or drinking buddy in the administration, and the message will be simple: “Stop, or you won’t get contracts. We’ll arrange some hearings into your operations. Your little spaceflight company will find itself under way more levels of regulatory review than your Musk-owned competitor. This is what the boss wants. Make it happen.”

but it raised a much deeper point — America has “walked away” from its allies. And the leader of the CODEL took no issue with that characterization.

Kucher said this to Shaheen: “We’ve talked about allyship. What should the allies, who uphold democratic values, in the reality that the United States has walked away from them … what should the allies do?”

I will not confirm or deny that that is happening, but there is nothing in 12333 to prevent that from happening.

Hypothetically, under 12333 the NSA could target a single foreigner abroad. And hypothetically if, while targeting that single person, they happened to collect every single Gmail and every single Facebook message on the company servers not just from the one person who is the target, but from everyone—then the NSA could keep and use the data from those three billion other people. That’s called 'incidental collection.'

Executive Order 12333 has been regarded by the American intelligence community as a fundamental document authorizing the expansion of data collection activities.[9] The document has been employed by the National Security Agency as legal authorization for its collection of unencrypted information flowing through the data centers of internet communications giants Google and Yahoo!.[9]

Part 2.3 permits collection, retention and dissemination of the following types of information along with several others. .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 32px}.mw-parser-output .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;margin-top:0}@media(min-width:500px){.mw-parser-output .templatequotecite{padding-left:1.6em}}(c) Information obtained in the course of lawful foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, international narcotics or international terrorism investigation ... (i) Incidentally obtained information that may indicate involvement in activities that may violate federal, state, local or foreign laws[1]

Indien de Algemene Rijksvoorwaarden bij IT-overeenkomsten 2022 (ARBIT-2022)6 van toepassing verklaard is op de overeenkomst is er een ontbindingsgrond als er sprake is van een ingrijpende wijziging in de zeggenschap (wat het geval kan zijn bij fusies en overnames) met betrekking tot de onderneming van de wederpartij/opdrachtnemer. Door de landsadvocaat wordt momenteel onderzocht in hoeverre dit het geval is. Indien door de overname de nakoming van de verwerkersovereenkomst en de naleving van de AVG wordt bemoeilijkt of zelfs onmogelijk wordt, kan dit een grond vormen om de dienstverleningsovereenkomst respectievelijk de verwerkersovereenkomst te ontbinden. Dit laat overigens onverlet de mogelijkheid om in een concreet geval een overeenkomst op basis van de Algemene Rijksvoorwaarden op te kunnen zeggen.

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Expect geo-fenced product design: "EU mode" platforms with different algorithmic defaults, transparency flows, and researcher access versus "US mode."

U.S. willingness to treat compliance as hostile action changes the calculation.

That increases risk premium on firms whose EU revenues depend on algorithmic distribution: social platforms, digital advertising, app stores, marketplace ranking.

The irony both sides miss: this conflict could entrench the very platforms Trump claims to defend and Europe claims to regulate. Compliance burden becomes incumbent moat.

The DSA doesn't mandate content removal based on viewpoint; it requires transparency in algorithmic curation, researcher access to platform data, and accountability for enforcement decisions. What the Trump administration calls "censorship," Europe frames as democratic governance of the digital public square—the same principle that makes "what is illegal offline illegal online."

a sharper conflict emerges: this is about who owns the distribution layer of democracy—who sets the rules for how speech gets amplified, throttled, demonetized, and made discoverable on platforms where most political discourse now occurs.

The EU had just levied a €120 million fine on X for DSA violations—the first major enforcement action under rules requiring platforms to moderate illegal content

visa restrictions on Thierry Breton, architect of the EU's Digital Services Act, alongside four anti-disinformation advocates: Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of HateAid

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The Digital Republic van Jamie Susskind (2023) is nogal een boekwerk. Niet iets dat je in een avondje uitleest. Maar het is wel een heel belangrijk boek, want het gaat over de vraag hoe we als samenleving technologie kunnen reguleren.

There are 3 million small businesses

Aditya emphasizes the importance of funding independence. Indonesia needs around Rp4.8 trillion (about US$292 million) per year to run a comprehensive HIV and AIDS program. This figure pales in comparison to some government’s populist policies, chief among them the much-criticized Free Nutritious Meals, for which it allocates Rp 335 trillion in 2026 alone.