The problem with doorbell cams: Nancy Guthrie case and Ring Super Bowl ad reawaken surveillance fears; The Guardian, February 14, 2026

Sanya Mansoor , The Guardian; The problem with doorbell cams: Nancy Guthrie case and Ring Super Bowl ad reawaken surveillance fears

"What happens to the data that smart home cameras collect? Can law enforcement access this information – even when users aren’t aware officers may be viewing their footage? Two recent events have put these concerns in the spotlight.

A Super Bowl ad by the doorbell-camera company Ring and the FBI’s pursuit of the kidnapper of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, have resurfaced longstanding concerns about surveillance against a backdrop of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. The fear is that home cameras’ video feeds could become yet another part of the government’s mass surveillance apparatus...

“Ring has a history of playing it pretty loose with people’s privacy rights,” said Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission charged the company with “compromising its customers’ privacy by allowing any employee or contractor to access consumers’ private videos and by failing to implement basic privacy and security protections”. This, in turn, allowed hackers to “take control of consumers’ accounts, cameras, and videos”. Ring agreed to pay $5.8m in a settlement with the FTC."

I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.; The New York Times, February 14, 2026

 Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times; I Trusted Jeff Bezos. The Joke’s on Me.

"At the end of the century, a journalism scholar published a fascinating comparative study of regional newspapers in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. “Papers of the 1960s seem naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” Carl Sessions Stepp, the researcher, wrote. Newspapers of the ’90s were “better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist and more informative and public-spirited.”

This sounds, you might think, salutary for the health of democracy. But it may have been precisely this move, away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation, that led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw.

“As news grew more negative and more critical, people had more reason to find journalism distasteful,” the media scholar Michael Schudson wrote in a provocative essay on the problem of assessing trust in journalism. “What people do not like about the media is its implicit or explicit criticism of their heroes or their home teams.” No one, famously, likes the bearer of bad news.

Thinking back to that dinner with Bezos, I realized that something similar had happened. He flattered my chosen profession, reassuring me that it was not a cynical undertaking but something much more noble. He told me, in short, what I wanted to hear — and won my trust. In the intervening years, Bezos has apparently decided that his flattery is better aimed at a very different audience: Donald Trump.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Bezos notoriously demanded that The Post spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, at great cost to the paper. After the election, he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and joined the row of plutocrats at the inauguration. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump, spent tens of millions more to market the movie and donated to Trump’s absurd White House mega-ballroom project. It’s certainly one way to win trust.

The Post’s loss is others’ gain. Its best-known journalists have streamed out the door, joining thriving news organizations like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Times. These companies’ success, built on aggressive and independent reporting, makes me wonder whether the hand-wringing about trust is misplaced. In this new gilded age, maybe we should set aside trust and — as Bezos himself once urged — embrace skepticism."

Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts; The New York Times, February 13, 2026

 Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac , The New York Times; Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts

The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials and tech workers said.

"The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court."

The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power; The New York Times, February 13, 2026

 Ezra Klein,

Produced by Jack McCordick

, The New York Times; The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power

"At the end of January, President Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Jeffrey Epstein files: millions of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records.

It’s a huge dump of information. Journalists, investigators and the public are sifting through them. What’s amazing, though, is how much we still don’t know — or at least don’t know yet.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before he joined the Justice Department, has said that investigators identified six million “potentially responsive” pages but released only about three and a half million pages to the public. So what’s in the two and a half million pages that haven’t been released?...

What has come into clear view is the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and maybe through that the infrastructure of elite networks more generally.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter The.Ink and is the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.”

I often think of his work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power, and that has been the perspective he has brought to his coverage of these files. I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs."

How ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ pushed the limits of copyright law to create its most WTF moments; Page Six Hollywood, February 14, 2026

Katcy Stephan, Page Six Hollywood; How ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ pushed the limits of copyright law to create its most WTF moments

"“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” the latest mockumentary collaboration between director Matt Johnson and composer Jay McCarrol, probably shouldn’t exist. The film features extended parodies that carefully skirt copyright law, a stunt that sees the duo literally dive off Toronto’s CN tower and at least two dozen more moments that will leave audiences asking “How the hell is this legal?” 

It’s a miracle the film made it to screens at all."

Pope invites Catholics to 'disarm' language and build kindness, respect for Lent; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, February 13, 2026

Carol Glatz , United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Pope invites Catholics to 'disarm' language and build kindness, respect for Lent

In his first message for Lent, Pope Leo XIV asked the faithful to "cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace."

"The Vatican released Pope Leo XIV's message for Lent, which begins Feb. 18 on Ash Wednesday.

Titled, "Listening and Fasting: Lent as a Time of Conversion," the papal message asked Catholics to come together as a community to listen to the word of God and to the vulnerable.

The pope also invited the faithful to engage in a "very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor."

How Fast Can A.I. Change the Workplace?; The New York Times, February 14, 2026

ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times; How Fast Can A.I. Change the Workplace?

"People need to understand the part of this argument that’s absolutely correct: It is impossible to look at the A.I. models we have now, to say nothing of what we might get in six months or a year, and say that these technological tools can’t eventually replace a lot of human jobs. The question is whether people inside the A.I. hype loop are right about how fast it could happen, and then whether it will create a fundamental change in human employment rather than just a structural reshuffle.

One obstacle to radical speed is that human society is a complex bottleneck through which even the most efficiency-maxing innovations have to pass. As long as the efficiencies offered by A.I. are mediated by human workers, there will be false starts and misadaptations and blind alleys that make pre-emptive layoffs reckless or unwise.

Even if firings make sense as a pure value proposition, employment in an advanced economy reflects a complex set of contractual, social, legal and bureaucratic relationships, not just a simple productivity-maximizing equation. So many companies might delay any mass replacement for reasons of internal morale or external politics or union rules, and adapt to A.I.’s new capacities through reduced hiring and slow attrition instead.

I suspect the A.I. insiders underestimate the power of these frictions, as they may underestimate how structural hurdles could slow the adoption of any cure or tech that their models might discover. Which would imply a longer adaptation period for companies, polities and humans.

Then, after this adaptation happens, and A.I. agents are deeply integrated into the work force, there are two good reasons to think that most people will still be doing gainful work. The first is the entire history of technological change: Every great innovation has yielded fears of mass unemployment and, every time we’ve found our way to new professions, new demands for human labor that weren’t imaginable before.

The second is the reality that people clearly like a human touch, even in situations where we can already automate it away. The economist Adam Ozimek has a good rundown of examples: Player pianos have not done away with piano players, self-checkout has not eliminated the profession of cashier and millions of waiters remain in service in the United States because an automated restaurant experience seems inhuman."

Microsoft AI CEO predicts 'most, if not all' white-collar tasks will be automated by AI within 18 months; Business Insider, February 12, 2026

 Lloyd Lee and Kelsey Vlamis, Business Insider; Microsoft AI CEO predicts 'most, if not all' white-collar tasks will be automated by AI within 18 months

[Kip Currier: Microsoft AI Chief Mustafa Suleyman's assertion that AI will be performing "most, if not all" white-collar  tasks within 12 to 18 months raises lots of questions, like:

• Is this forecast accurate or AI hype?
• As individuals and societies, do we want AI to displace human workers? Who has decided that this is "a good thing"?
• What are the spiritual implications of this revolutionary transformation of our world?
• What are the implications of such changes for the physical and mental well-being of children, young people, and adults?
• What are the short-term and long-term cognitive impacts of AI use?
• How will marginalized persons around the globe be affected by such radical employment changes? How will the Global South be impacted?
• What are the implications for income disparities and wealth concentration?
• In what ways will culture, the arts, science, medicine, and research be influenced?
• What are the impacts on education, life-long learning, and professional development?
• How will the environment, diminishing resources like water, and climate change be influenced by this employment forecast?
• In what ways will AI proliferation impact people in need and the fauna and flora of the world, particularly vulnerable organisms and ecosystems?
• How will monies and resources spent on AI data centers create new environmental justice communities and exacerbate inequities in existing ones?
• What are the implications for democracy, human rights, and civil liberties, like privacy, data agency, free expression, intellectual freedom, and access to accurate, uncensored information?
• Do you trust AI to do the white-collar jobs that humans have done? 
• Are Microsoft and Suleyman disinterested parties? Microsoft has major self-interest in hyping AI enterprise products that Microsoft will be charging users to adopt and license.
• If Suleyman's claim is accurate, or even is accurate but in a longer time period than 12 to 18 months, what kinds of oversight, regulations, and ethical guardrails are needed/desired?]

[Excerpt]

"Mustafa Suleyman, the Microsoft AI chief, said in an interview with the Financial Times that he predicts most, if not every, task in white-collar fields will be automated by AI within the next year or year and a half.

"I think that we're going to have a human-level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks," Suleyman said in the interview that was published Wednesday. "So white-collar work, where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person — most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.""

Scoop: Disney sends cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0; Axios, February 13, 2026

 Sara Fischer, Axios; Scoop: Disney sends cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0

"The Walt Disney Company on Friday sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging the Chinese tech giant has been infringing on its works to train and develop an AI video generation model without compensation, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: It's the most serious action a Hollywood studio has taken so far against ByteDance since it launched Seedance 2.0 on Thursday. 

Zoom in: The letter, addressed to ByteDance global general counsel John Rogovin, accuses ByteDance of pre-packaging its Seedance service "with a pirated library of Disney's copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney's coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art." 

"Over Disney's well-publicized objections, ByteDance is hijacking Disney's characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance's virtual smash-and-grab of Disney's IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable," Disney's outside attorney David Singer wrote. 

"We believe this is just the tip of the iceberg – which is shocking considering Seedance has only been available for a few days," he added.

Between the lines: The letter includes a slew of examples of infringing Seedance videos that feature Disney's copyrighted characters, including Spider-Man, Darth Vader, Star Wars' Grogu (Baby Yoda), Peter Griffin from Family Guy and others."

Bar Punts on Ethics Complaint Over Application to Search Reporter’s Home; The New York Times, February 12, 2026

Charlie Savage, The New York Times; Bar Punts on Ethics Complaint Over Application to Search Reporter’s Home

A press freedom group accused a prosecutor of violating an ethics rule by not telling a judge about a law limiting searches for journalistic work product.

"The Virginia State Bar has told a press freedom organization that it is up to a judge to decide whether a federal prosecutor mishandled an application for a warrant last month to search the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation.

The group, Freedom of the Press Foundation, had filed a disciplinary complaint with the bar against the prosecutor, Gordon D. Kromberg. It cited his failure to alert the magistrate judge, who approved the search warrant, about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which limits searches for journalistic work product.

But in an unsigned letter viewed by The New York Times, the state bar said the judge, William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia, had to evaluate the omission."

The Guardian view on the BBC World Service: this is London calling; The Guardian, February 13, 2026

Editorial,The Guardian; The Guardian view on the BBC World Service: this is London calling

[Kip Currier: This is the "money quote" for me in this persuasive Guardian Editorial on supporting the BBC World Service:

Accurate journalism is the strongest weapon in the war of information.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/13/the-guardian-view-on-the-bbc-world-service-this-is-london-calling]

With just seven weeks before its funding runs out, the UK’s greatest cultural asset and most trusted international news organisation must be supported

"The programmes will neither be very interesting nor very good,” said the then BBC director general John Reith, when he launched its Empire Service in December 1932. Nearly a century later, the BBC World Service, as it is now known, broadcasts in 43 languages, reaches 313 million people a week and is one of the UK’s most influential cultural assets. It is also a lifeline for millions. “Perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world” in the 20th century, as Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, once put it.

But this week Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, announced that the World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks. Most of its £400m budget comes from the licence fee, although the Foreign Office – which funded it entirely until 2014 – contributed £137m in the last year. The funding arrangement with the Foreign Office finishes at the end of March. There is no plan for what happens next.

Meanwhile, Russia and China are pouring billions into state-run media. And American news organisations are crumbling under the Trump administration. Last week the Washington Post axed 300 jobs including its Ukraine reporter, and hundreds were lost at Voice of America, the closest US equivalent to the BBC, last year.

Although some question why licence-fee payers should subsidise services largely consumed abroad, it is also loved by many at home. In the small hours, it is a window on a dark world, an alternative to doomscrolling and a pushback against parochialism. Jeremy Paxman summed it up when he compared the World Service to a cords- and cardigan-wearing “ageing uncle who’s seen it all. It has a style that makes understatement seem like flamboyance”. But we should not allow this cosy, slightly fusty image to obscure its purpose.

For many it is not just life-enhancing, but life‑saving. Last month, during the internet blackout in Iran, the BBC’s Persian service provided additional radio programmes over shortwave and medium wave. Emergency services were also launched in response to conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and Sudan, and after the earthquake in Myanmar. It remains the only international news organisation still broadcasting inside Afghanistan, setting up an education programme for Afghan children in 2024.

But it has been beleaguered by cuts, closures and job losses. In 2022, radio broadcasts in 10 languages including Arabic, Persian, Chinese and Bengali were replaced by digital services, a decision criticised for disproportionately affecting women, who rely most on radios. Wherever the BBC has been forced to withdraw – for financial or political pressures – propaganda has been quick to fill the gap.

No one doubts the World Service’s value as an instrument of soft power. But, as BBC bosses argue, it is also part of our national security. Accurate journalism is the strongest weapon in the war of information. The World Service must not be allowed to stumble into decline. Mr Davie is right – if optimistic – to urge the government to back it decisively and urgently.

During the second world war, radio was “scattering human voices into the darkness of Europe”, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in her 1980 novel Human Voices, based on her time working for the BBC. Amid the AI noise and disinformation, the World Service must be enabled to keep scattering human voices in our own dark times."

A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education; The New York Times, February 12, 2026

 Matthew Connelly, The New York Time; A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education

"Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education...

It is still too early to know how A.I. usage affects young people’s ability to learn. But research suggests that students using A.I. do not read as carefully when doing research and that they write with diminished accuracy and originality. Students do not even realize what they are missing. But educators and employers know. Reading closely, thinking critically and writing with logic and evidence are precisely the skills people need to realize the bona fide potential of A.I. to support lifelong learning."