If Arctic Frost Perpetrators Don’t Go To Jail, Conservatives Will
To conservatives, Arctic Frost is a scandal. To Democrats, it’s their new baseline. And the only way to stop it is to punish them.To conservatives, Arctic Frost is a scandal. To Democrats, it’s their new baseline. And the only way to stop it is to punish them.This city bought 300 Chinese electric buses — then found out China can turn them off at will
A city had a rude awakening when it tested its electric buses for security flaws.
Some cities have gone all-in on their dedication to renewable energy and electric public transportation, but discovering that a jurisdiction does not actually control its own public property likely was not part of the idea.
'In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable.'
This turned out to be exactly the case when Ruter — the public transportation authority for Oslo, Norway — decided to run tests on its new Chinese electric buses.
Approximately 300 e-buses from Chinese company Yutong made their way to Norway earlier this year, with outlet China Buses calling it a "core breakthrough" in Chinese brands' global reach.
Yutong offers at least 15 different types of electric buses ranging from 60- to 120-passenger capacity.
As reported by Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten on Tuesday, Ruter conducted secret testing on some of its electric buses over the summer. It decided to look into one bus from a European manufacturer, as well as another from Yutong, to address cybersecurity risks.
The test results were shocking.
RELATED: Cybernetics promised a merger of human and computer. Then why do we feel so out of the loop?
Investigators discovered that the Chinese-built buses could be controlled remotely from their homeland, unlike the European vehicles.
Ruter reported that the Chinese can access software updates, diagnostics, and battery systems remotely, and, "In theory, the bus could therefore be stopped or rendered unusable by the manufacturer."
The details were described by Arild Tjomsland, who helped conduct the tests. Tjomsland is a special adviser at the University of South-Eastern Norway, according to Turkish website AA.
"The Chinese bus can be stopped, turned off, or receive updates that can destroy the technology that the bus needs to operate normally," Tjomsland reportedly said. He additionally noted that while the buses could not be steered remotely, they could still be shut down and used as leverage by bad actors.
Pravda Norway described the situation as the Chinese government essentially being able to decommission the buses at any time.
Norway's transport minister praised Ruter for completing the tests and said the government would initiate a risk assessment related to countries "with which Norway does not have security policy cooperation."
Ruter's CEO, Bernt Reitan Jenssen, said the company plans on working with authorities to strengthen the cybersecurity surrounding its public infrastructure.
"We need to involve all competent authorities that deal with cybersecurity, stand together, and draw on cutting-edge expertise," Jenssen said.
As a temporary fix, Ruter revealed the buses can be disconnected from the internet by removing their SIM cards to assume "local control should the need arise."
There was no word as to whether the SIM cards are upsized for buses.
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No, ICE isn’t terrorizing innocent families with social media surveillance
A bombshell report came out over the weekend accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement of surveying millions of Americans’ social media accounts. In what left-wing groups call an “assault on democracy and free speech,” this looks to be a major violation of American rights and freedoms.
Or ... maybe their journalistic machine isn’t telling the whole truth.
The problem
In the report, the Verge alleges that ICE has partnered with an AI-powered social media monitoring group Zignal Labs to survey the social media posts of everyday Americans as part of an online surveillance system. The platform can scan posts in 100 different languages, analyze photos and videos to pinpoint the precise location they were taken, and even review weather data thanks to a new partnership with NOAA.
If you do something illegal and you post it online, you’ve just supplied the evidence to charge your crime.
With the power to process up to 8 billion posts per day, the Verge raises serious concerns over Americans’ privacy and free speech, as if the Constitution had suddenly become precious again. And for what? According to Will Owen, the communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, the goal is to “terrorize immigrant families” and “target activists fighting back against their abuses.”
That sounds terrible, if it were true. Unfortunately for Owen, he’s missing some details.
The details
For starters, ICE isn’t targeting “immigrant families.” Anyone who’s a legal citizen or in the country under an active visa isn’t under any pressure — or terror — at all. What ICE is looking for are illegal immigrants who have broken our nation’s laws and deserve a one-way ticket back home. Owen’s first claim is incorrect.
Second, the “targeted activists” he references are the ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters that have incited violence across the U.S. The most recent attack happened last week, when an anti-ICE protester in a U-Haul truck tried to ram into Coast Guardsmen at a base in Alameda, California. Or maybe you remember the deadly shooting at an ICE facility in Texas? Perhaps I could interest you in the rising tensions in Chicago, or the active calls for violence from former media pundits, or liberals’ outright disregard for law and order relating to ICE in general. These “activists” sound more like rioters, agitators, and criminals than law-abiding citizens who simply wish to exercise their First Amendment rights. Owen just isn’t being honest.
RELATED: House Democrats' ICE 'tracker' will 'put our lives in danger': DHS agent
The Verge is right about one thing, though: Social media monitoring isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, social media has been used as a political weapon for years. The Biden administration loved it, in fact. Unlike ICE, which is (allegedly) leveraging social media to bring illegal aliens and criminals to justice, the previous White House and its party apparatus preferred to target regular American citizens. Here are just a few examples:
- Let’s start with the Twitter Files. Remember when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) silenced journalists he didn’t like?
- Then the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor conservative content, especially posts that questioned the COVID vaccine.
- The Biden-Harris campaign also ran a deep-state censorship campaign against the American people under the guise of misinformation and disinformation.
- Biden’s DOJ demanded info on users who interacted with Trump’s Twitter account.
- President Trump was banned from Twitter amid political pressure.
- The Biden administration indicted Douglass Mackey for jokingly telling voters to cast their vote for Hillary Clinton via text in the 2016 election. The conviction was later tossed out as saner minds prevailed.
- And on, and on, and on.
The truth
Believe it or not, social media isn’t a private space concealed under lock and key. It’s a public square brimming with comments, photos, videos, and data. When you post online, you willingly put your content in the public eye for all to see, and many groups regularly take advantage of it. Facebook can scan your posts to serve you ads. The large language models powering AI can gobble up your data for better responses. And yes, law enforcement can see illegal activity and charge offenders under the law. It all falls under fair use.
That means, if you do something illegal in the public square, there could be consequences. If you post about illegal things, legal repercussions will follow. The same goes for an illegal alien whose crime is simply residing in the country. All it takes is a photo, video, or some piece of information that confirms their location to pursue charges or, in this case, deportation.
A final word to the wise
Although illegal aliens don’t get to enjoy the same rights as American citizens (that requires citizenship), they do have to follow the same laws. No one — legal, illegal, or otherwise — has the right to commit a crime in a public space in the United States. If you do something illegal and you post it online, you’ve just supplied the evidence to charge your crime. Generally, it’s a good idea to refrain from posting about illegal things if you don’t want to get caught. In the case of an illegal immigrant living in the United States, it’s probably better not to post at all.
If it’s ‘worse than Watergate,’ then why the media blackout?
In a sense, this is old news. In December 2021, CNN reported that the House’s January 6 committee had subpoenaed phone records of more than 100 people.
But that was mostly Trump officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. No surprise there. After all, the January 6 Select Committee was empaneled for the specific purpose of turning President Donald Trump into a criminal for supposedly aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.
It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies.
But when this story resurfaced earlier this month, there was something new, too. For one thing, the scope of the investigation was almost unbelievable — it turns out those subpoenaed phone records consisted of a staggering 30 million lines of phone data.
And when the select committee’s investigation went nowhere, one of the members — GOP malcontent and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — informed the FBI about the phone data in Dec. 2023 when it was becoming apparent that Trump was the favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024.
Greater than Watergate
More revelatory than the numbers of the phone records hauled in by the J6 committee was the news that the FBI had gone after these same records — and possibly more — in an effort to target Trump and his conservative allies. Not only did the agency have its eyes on Trump, it also went after nine Republican members of Congress — eight senators and a stray congressman, in an obvious effort to sweep up accomplices in the coup that never was.
Whether the FBI obtained the same phone records as the J6 committee is unclear. Kinzinger’s tip may have been moot, because an FBI memo released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shows that by September 2023, the agency had already “conducted preliminary … analysis” on the call data of several members of Congress, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
According to CNN, “The FBI, as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation, used court orders in 2023 to obtain the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers.” These were not actual phone calls or text messages, but rather information about who called or texted whom and when.
Grassley posted the memo to his X account, with the message:
This document shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues during its Arctic Frost investigation into "election conspiracy." Arctic Frost later became Jack Smith's elector case against Trump.
He concluded, in all caps: “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”
Which raises the question: Why did the story turn out to be a one-day wonder? Here we have the discovery of a partisan investigation seeking to uncover dirt on fellow members of Congress (if the records did indeed start with the J6 committee), or at the very least a rogue element of the executive branch targeting political enemies in the legislative branch.
As Johnson said:
They’re casting this net, this fishing expedition against members of the Senate and the House. There is no predicate. There’s no reason for this other than a fishing expedition, which, again, should outrage and shock every American.
Once again, a member of Congress implied that we are witness to a political scandal (one of many in the Biden administration) that is among the worst in our history. Yet when you do a Google search for stories related to phone toll records being subpoenaed by either the J6 committee or the FBI, virtually nothing comes up beyond Oct. 7, the day after Grassley released the memo.
Crickets …
A few news outlets reported in the following days that FBI Director Kash Patel had fired agents involved in the Arctic Frost investigation. In addition, scattered reports surfaced on Hagerty questioning why Verizon released his phone records without informing him.
Verizon told Fox News Digital:
Federal law requires companies like Verizon to respond to grand jury subpoenas. We received a valid subpoena and a court order to keep it confidential. We weren't told why the information was requested or what the investigation was about.
Grassley and Johnson followed up with their own letter to Verizon and three other telecommunication companies demanding to be supplied with the same data that was provided to the FBI or special counsel Jack Smith. In addition, the senators expressed their belief that the records should have been privileged because they concerned the official constitutional duties of certifying the 2020 presidential election.
It seems like a real story — one that deserves the full attention of the press — but where are the special investigation teams at the New York Times and the Washington Post? What have you heard about this story on CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts? Very little if anything. Certainly nothing in comparison to the coverage provided to Watergate.
Most recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Smith demanding a transcribed interview and documents along with communications related to his investigation of Trump. Well and good, but that interview will be conducted in secret, as were the interviews of Smith’s subordinates — one of whom, according to Jordan, “invoked the Fifth Amendment approximately 75 times.”
Time for Congress to step up
It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies. Press releases and secret interviews won’t do the job. We need public televised hearings, with witnesses ranging from members of the J6 committee, including Kinzinger, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), to former FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jack Smith.
Would the legacy media networks cover it? Probably not, because as we all know by now, those outfits are still after Trump’s scalp, and they will only seek to discredit Jordan and the other congressional investigators who want to know the truth. That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up.
Watergate started as a one-day story about a botched break-in. But even without Woodward and Bernstein, the famous team of reporters from the Washington Post, the story would never have been kept quiet unless Senate Democrats and congressmen didn’t do their job.
Now it’s time for Jordan, Grassley, and Patel to do theirs.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
GOP senator to sue Jack Smith after his lawyers try gaslighting on Biden FBI surveillance
One of the Republican lawmakers targeted by the FBI during the previous administration is preparing to take several Biden officials to court, including Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland on dubious legal grounds.
"There is absolutely nothing 'proper' about spying on your political opponents to further your own radical agenda," Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn noted on X. "This is further proof Jack Smith must be fully investigated and held accountable as soon as possible."
'These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump.'
Earlier this month, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents from 2023 indicating that the FBI under the Biden administration obtained private cellphone records from Blackburn and eight other Republican lawmakers during its Arctic Frost operation — an investigation that ultimately morphed into Smith's federal case against President Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election.
After a briefing by FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on the alleged surveillance scheme — which Grassley said was worse than Watergate — Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the eight GOP senators targeted, said that "we were surveilled simply for being Republicans."
Bongino indicated that the FBI obtained call logs from the affected GOP lawmakers' phone carriers for the period of Jan. 4 to Jan. 7, 2021. Smith ultimately used and disclosed the records in his 2024 indictment of President Donald Trump.
There now appears to be a reckoning under way.
For starters, the FBI has canned several agents involved in Operation Arctic Frost and opened an internal investigation.
Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and other Republican lawmakers have called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal probe into Smith.
"The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party," Brecheen told Blaze News last week. "We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution."
Meanwhile, Grassley has written to four telecommunications companies and five federal entities demanding answers about precisely which records were turned over to Smith as part of his elector case against Trump, noting that "there are serious constitutional questions that those communications are still subject to constitutional protections."
Lawyers for Jack Smith, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, tried their best in a Tuesday letter to Grassley to spin the apparent surveillance of elected officials as benign and "lawful" data collection.
'I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team.'
"A number of people have falsely stated that Mr. Smith 'tapped' senators' phones, 'spied' on their communications, or 'surveilled' their conversations," the lawyers wrote, according to the New York Times. "Toll records are historical in nature, and do not include the content of calls. Wiretapping, by contrast, involves intercepting the telecommunications in real time, which the special counsel’s office did not do."
The lawyers further characterized the covert effort to find out who the Republican lawmakers were speaking to and when as "entirely proper, lawful, and consistent with established Department of Justice policy" and claimed that Smith was authorized to seek the records by the Biden Justice Department's Public Integrity Section.
Breuer and Koski apparently engaged in some mental gymnastics to play off the alleged surveillance scheme as business as usual, comparing it to two instances where the targets were themselves under criminal investigation, namely former President Joe Biden during the classified documents probe and former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), who was convicted on bribery charges.
"Mr. Smith’s use of the toll records as Special Counsel was lawful and in accordance with normal investigative procedure," wrote Smith's lawyers.
Upon receipt of the letter, Grassley wrote on X, "SMELLS LIKE POLITICS."
Blackburn told Just the News that she will be suing Biden DOJ and FBI officials who targeted her, Smith in particular.
The senator suggested that the 2023 grand jury subpoena of phone records violated her First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy; her separation of powers protection as a senator; and potentially the Stored Communications Act because Verizon, her telecommunications carrier, allegedly turned over information pertaining to where she was when she made calls.
"We know that they pulled what is called the toll data, that is every call we either made or received, the duration of the call, the individual and the number that it was to and from, and then also the physical location where we were when that call was either made or received," said Blackburn.
"I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team, which, of course, has already been fired by [FBI Director] Kash Patel, thank goodness," noted the senator. "These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump and we were standing with Donald Trump."
In addition to wanting to take Smith to court, Blackburn has expressed an interest in seeing the former special counsel disbarred.
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Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme
Since former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme surfaced earlier this month, House Republicans are leading the charge to bring justice.
Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, a member of the Republican Study Committee, urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal investigation into Smith for his apparent involvement with Operation Arctic Frost, according to a letter obtained by Blaze News. During former President Joe Biden's administration, the FBI obtained private cellphone information from nine Republican lawmakers, an internal document indicated, in what appears to be an ideologically motivated instance of government weaponization.
'Weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes.'
Brecheen's call for an investigation is also in accordance with President Donald Trump's executive order entitled "Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government," which Trump signed the same day he was inaugurated.
Since the scandal broke, the FBI has opened an internal investigation, firing several agents who were involved in the operation. As of this writing, the Department of Justice has not yet opened a criminal investigation, leading Brecheen and his co-signatories to be the first federal group to call for a criminal investigation into the operation.
RELATED: 'WORSE THAN WATERGATE': Republicans demand answers after documents reveal FBI spied on 9 GOP lawmakers
“The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party," Brecheen told Blaze News. "We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution.”
Many prominent lawmakers, including Brecheen, have characterized the scandal as a modern-day Watergate, according to the letter obtained exclusively by Blaze News. Brecheen also warned that if high-profile politicians can have their privacy violated for ideological purposes, ordinary Americans could too.
'The Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens.'
"The revelation that the Biden Administration directed the FBI to surveil duly elected American lawmakers is indeed a scandal of magnitude our country has not seen since Watergate," the letter reads. "Let us be clear: weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes such as North Korea or Iran, not the United States."
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"The ramifications of this unprecedented scandal, however, stretch far beyond the lawmakers who were surveilled," the letter reads. "By empowering federal agents to secretly monitor the private phone calls of sitting United States Senators, Jack Smith set the sinister precedent that the same form of covert surveillance can and will be deployed against law-abiding American citizens."
"If the FBI could be so readily weaponized against powerful figures in our government, then it is not difficult to conclude that the Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens."
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How Bill Gates and friends turned global health into a profit machine — at your expense
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing network of nongovernmental organizations, politicians, and corporations have pushed for sweeping global health initiatives. They lobby for massive funding, insisting it will prevent the next international health crisis.
Groups such as the World Health Organization, the Gates Foundation, and the U.S. government have saturated the media with calls for “equity” and “preparedness.” Together, they established the Pandemic Fund — a financial pool designed to channel money into their shared vision of global health management.
It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.
According to its website, the Pandemic Fund “finances critical investments to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response capacities at national, regional, and global levels, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.” In practice, it serves as a central clearinghouse for governments, NGOs, and business coalitions to move money under the banner of “health security.”
The funds flow to “implementing entities” such as the World Bank; the WHO; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UNICEF. These organizations, in turn, decide how the investments are distributed — and to whom. Each claims to act on behalf of public health, but their reach and influence often extend far beyond medicine into politics, surveillance, and control.
Convenient ambiguity
Who actually gets paid to implement these objectives? What do “surveillance” and “prevention” mean in practice? How is “preparedness” measured? Which corporations manage the process, and whose services are contracted for the lab upgrades? None of these questions has a straight answer. The fund’s language reads like a bureaucratic fog — dense, opaque, and unaccountable.
What the Pandemic Fund does provide is a clear list of donors: the United States, the Gates Foundation, and several European governments. It also highlights 47 active projects spanning 75 countries.
What it doesn’t provide is equally telling. The site omits the names of officials who manage the money in each country, the ownership of the laboratories, and the companies installing the surveillance systems. Even the identities of those delivering “medical support” remain concealed behind the veil of “global cooperation.”
Conflicts of interest
Beyond its opacity, the Pandemic Fund is riddled with conflicts of interest. The Gates Foundation ranks among its largest institutional donors, while Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, acts as an “implementing entity” responsible for distributing those same funds.
Gavi’s own website acknowledges that the Gates Foundation was both a founding partner and a seed donor, contributing $750 million at its launch in 2000. That relationship alone should raise questions. Gavi now helps allocate the Pandemic Fund’s grants, meaning one of its original funders plays a direct role in deciding where new money goes.
The potential conflicts run deeper. Bill Gates has invested heavily in Moderna and BioNTech, two of the world’s leading mRNA vaccine manufacturers. The Gates Foundation funded Moderna’s early mRNA work, and public records show that Gates himself owns more than 1 million shares of BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to produce the COVID-19 vaccine.
It takes little imagination to see how a fund directed by Gates-linked institutions could steer money — intentionally or not — toward companies in which he holds a stake.
The web of influence extends into policy enforcement. The World Health Organization’s director-general oversees the International Health Regulations, a global framework that allows governments to impose quarantine, testing, or vaccination requirements during declared health emergencies. The United States accepted the IHR in 2005 but rejected the most recent amendments adopted in 2024, formally withdrawing from those obligations in July of this year.
Even so, the structure remains in place. If Washington — or any other government — adopted tighter compliance measures, it could channel money from the Pandemic Fund to purchase vaccines and “countermeasures.” Pharmaceutical companies would profit handsomely from policies that treat mass vaccination as the first and only line of defense. The more the world relies on vaccines as a universal solution, the more secure the profits for investors like Gates.
The Gates Foundation’s influence doesn’t stop at funding or investment. It appears on the WHO’s list of official “non-state actors,” a category that allows direct collaboration on projects and participation in committee meetings. In other words, the foundation helps set global health standards and then funds the programs that enforce them.
RELATED: Researchers tied to Fauci’s COVID cover-up still scoring big NIH grants
American taxpayers foot the bill
At the end of the chain, American taxpayers pay for it all. Washington’s seemingly benevolent $700 million “donation” to the Pandemic Fund comes straight from the U.S. Treasury. Every dollar funneled into this global health consortium began as someone’s paycheck.
In practice, the fund operates less like a charity and more like a taxpayer-financed slush fund for international health bureaucrats and private interests. The U.S. government collects money from citizens, passes it through the fund, and watches as the Gates Foundation, the WHO, and their network of NGOs redirect it to vaccine manufacturers, foreign governments, and organizations with which they maintain deep financial and institutional ties.
This system of influence moves wealth in one direction — up and out. Money leaves the hands of American workers and flows to a global health elite that hides behind the language of “pandemic prevention.” The slogans of safety and preparedness disguise a network that rewards insiders and deepens the dependence it claims to end.
Congress and federal auditors need to dig into where this money actually goes and who profits from it. Americans deserve to know whether their taxes support genuine public health or line the pockets of the same institutions that cashed in during the last pandemic.
Europe shows us what happens when bureaucrats win
Americans are accustomed to innovation improving their lives. From smartphones to artificial intelligence, breakthroughs keep coming — and most of them happen in the United States, where freedom fuels invention. But across the Atlantic, the story is very different. Europe’s regulators have built a bureaucracy that smothers creativity.
The lesson is simple: Innovation thrives where government steps back, not where it rules from Brussels.
Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again.
A recent analysis from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation drives home the point. All seven of the world’s trillion-dollar tech firms are American. Europe can claim only 28 companies worth more than $100 billion. Over the past decade, European firms raised about $426 billion — $800 billion less than their U.S. counterparts.
Rather than learn from failure, Brussels tightened its grip — proving again that when regulators fail, they regulate harder. Their Digital Markets Act and Copyright Directive saddle companies with costly mandates that make life harder for both innovators and consumers.
EU regulators insist that their rules ensure fairness, transparency, and competition. In reality, they’re strangling convenience and driving users crazy.
Take Google Maps. Because of DMA rules, Europeans can no longer click directly into expanded map views. As one user complained on Reddit, it’s become “a severe pain in the butt.” The new restrictions also hobble tourism. Google Search can’t link directly to airlines or hotels, forcing travelers through clunky intermediaries that waste time and money.
The Copyright Directive makes things worse. It tells search engines to display only “very short” snippets of news articles — without defining what that means. Bureaucrats promise to judge “the impact on the effectiveness of the new right,” which means nothing. By contrast, American courts have long recognized that snippets are fair use and help people find what they need. U.S. policy treats information as a public good; the EU treats it as a privilege controlled by the state.
The damage goes beyond search results. The EU now forces Apple and other “gatekeepers” to make their devices interoperable with third-party software — a costly demand that undermines engineering efficiency. Features like iPhone-to-Mac mirroring and real-time translation could disappear from European markets because of it.
As Cato Institute’s Jennifer Huddleston noted, “The real-time translation feature would be immensely helpful in Europe with so many languages; however, the consequence of European regulation is that it might not be available.”
RELATED: Can anyone save America from European-style digital ID?
And when companies don’t comply fast enough, Brussels slaps them with massive fines. Apple got hit with 500 million euros (around $580 million), Meta with 200 million euros (around $232 million) — punished not for misconduct but for trying to innovate.
The EU now says it will review whether the DMA “achieves its objectives of ensuring contestable and fair digital markets.” That’s bureaucratic code for “we might make it worse.” Meanwhile, the Copyright Directive’s vague language grows even more dangerous in the age of AI, where machine learning depends on large-scale data use that Brussels can’t seem to comprehend.
Europe doesn’t need more commissions or consultations. It needs courage to scrap bad laws and let innovation breathe again. If Brussels wants to compete with America, it should stop punishing success and start trusting its own entrepreneurs. A lighter-touch approach has worked for the United States — and it could save Europe from technological irrelevance.
New AI policing program could entrap innocent Americans
Several Arizona police departments are piloting a new AI-powered policing tool that promises to revolutionize how officers catch criminals. But without robust constitutional safeguards, this cutting-edge technology could pose a serious threat to the civil liberties of everyday Americans.
Arizona police agencies are now testing a new AI program that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” The program, called Overwatch, was developed by Massive Blue and provides police departments with up to 50 different AI personas.
While the technology could, in theory, be used for noble purposes, ... it also creates new opportunities for government overreach.
These include a sex trafficker persona, an escort persona, a 14-year-old boy in a child trafficking scenario, and a vaguely defined “college protester.” Beyond social media monitoring, the program allows police to communicate directly with suspects while posing as one of these AI-generated personas, all without a warrant.
No transparency
So far, both the police departments using Overwatch and the company behind it have been extremely secretive about its operations. Massive Blue co-founder Mike McGraw declined to answer questions from 404 Media, which first broke the story, about how the program works, which departments are using it, and whether it has led to any arrests.
“We cannot risk jeopardizing these investigations and putting victims’ lives in further danger by disclosing proprietary information,” McGraw said.
The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, one of the few agencies that have confirmed using the program, admitted it has not yet led to any arrests. Officials refused to provide details, saying, “We cannot risk compromising our investigative efforts by providing specifics about any personas.”
At an appropriations hearing, a Pinal County deputy sheriff also declined to share information about the program with the county council. Remarkably, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which funds the initiative, does not appear to have been informed about the program’s specifics.
While the technology could, in theory, be used for noble purposes, such as preventing terrorist attacks or combating human trafficking, it also creates new opportunities for government overreach. Without safeguards, it poses a direct threat to the civil liberties of innocent Americans.
Invitation to entrapment
History is full of examples of government entrapment and abuse of power. In the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.), for example, FBI involvement played a central role in bringing groups together that may never have otherwise connected.
Similarly, in Jacobson v. United States (1992), federal agents sent child sexual abuse material through the mail to a man with no prior criminal record, leading to his conviction, which was later overturned.
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In both cases, it is doubtful the crimes would have occurred without government intervention. A program like Overwatch makes such abuses easier, granting the government new ways to monitor and manipulate citizens who have never been convicted of a crime, and all without warrants.
The risks are compounded by the program’s vague and troubling categories, such as “college protester,” which could be redefined depending on who is in power. That opens the door for the technology to be weaponized against political dissent, even when no crime has been committed.
Without serious constitutional safeguards, programs like this are poised to become political tools of tyranny. Americans must demand warrant requirements and legislative oversight before this technology spreads nationwide and the erosion of our constitutional liberties becomes irreversible.
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