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Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of tech and politics.
Miller Time
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie, are looking to crack down on their critics. Days after Katie Miller appeared on Piers Morgan’s YouTube channel, where she lobbed an ominous threat against the citizenship of a TV news panelist, The New York Times reported on the Millers’ role in an ongoing law enforcement investigation that involves the seizure of an activist’s phone. The activist, Barbara Wien, protested outside the Millers’ former home and distributed leaflets in the neighborhood, some of which included the Millers’ home address at the time.
A White House spokesperson told the Times, “Doxxing and any other actions that directly threaten the safety of officials and their families should be resoundingly denounced and thoroughly investigated to ensure attacks against members of the administration are not realized.”
“They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution,” a lawyer for Wien told the paper, referring to the protesters who object to Miller’s involvement in the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Read more at The New York Times.
MAGA goes mad over makeup
Several Arizona teachers were reportedly bombarded with threats after conservative online influencers falsely claimed their Halloween costumes were intended to mock slain MAGA operative Charlie Kirk.
Read more at the Daily Beast.
Trump’s pardon denial
Over on the MaddowBlog, my colleague Steve Benen reported on Donald Trump’s alarming claim of ignorance regarding his recent pardon of Changpeng Zhao, a convicted crypto bro with financial ties to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency empire.
Read more on MSNBC.
Potshots from the MAGA civil war
“If your ‘conservatism’ flirts with underage girls it’s not conservatism” — that’s a spicy post from Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, aimed at former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has denied allegations he engaged in sexual activity with a minor — including in a 2024 House Ethics report that found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz may have violated state laws against prostitution and statutory rape. (The Justice Department declined to bring charges against Gaetz.)
Crenshaw’s post is a measure of the acrimony emerging in the conservative movement amid a MAGA civil war that’s erupted over antisemitism and Nazi sympathies within the conservative movement.
Read more in the New York Post.
Trump-induced data dangers
Trump and his administration’s effort to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has put Americans’ confidential data at risk, according to an audit published last Friday by the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General.
Reuters reports:
The information security program at CFPB — which maintains sensitive and confidential data from investigations, the oversight of companies and complaints received from members of the public — is ‘not effective,’ according to the Office of Inspector General, which also covers the Federal Reserve.
Read more at Reuters.
Online propaganda fuels shutdown messaging
The Trump administration launched a website on Monday to blame Democrats for the government shutdown on the basis of debunked claims that they’re fighting to ensure that dangerous, criminal immigrants receive health care. Trump repeated similar allegations during his recent “60 Minutes” interview.
PolitiFact exposed the falsity in such claims here.
ICE’s high-tech surveillance
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago — many of whom go masked while enforcing Trump’s mass deportation agenda — are now using controversial facial recognition technology that state police are barred from using.
Read more in the Chicago Sun-Times.
