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Dear friends,
Welcome to our weekly newsletter, where we summarize important news articles buried by the mainstream, revealing both the darker forces shaping society—regardless of who's elected in office—and the best of human goodness, creativity, and possibility. This week we've summarized key news articles on:
Big Tech rolling out technologies for mass surveillance of school kids
mass surveillance tech tested in Israel before being deployed in the US
weather modification and geoengineering tech being proposed and tested despite catastrophic risks
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security engaging in highly questionable activities including kidnappings without due process
the US military plan to use lasers in space for warfare and communications
the US military's embrace of generative AI for spying
the CIA's ongoing legal challenges related to its post-9/11 torture program
Our inspiring stories (skip to this section now):
finding wisdom in the regrets people feel at the end of their lives
how near-death experiences transform people's relationships with their careers
tips for overcoming our natural negativity bias to become more positive
Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the news source listed. If any link fails, see this page. The most important sentences are highlighted. By educating ourselves and spreading the word, we can work together to create a more free and informed society.
With faith in a transforming world,
Mark Bailey and Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Is your school spying on your child online?
May 8, 2025, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/08/surveillance...
In 2009, Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion school district remotely activated its school-issued laptop webcams to capture 56,000 pictures of students outside of school, including in their bedrooms. After the Covid-19 pandemic closed US schools at the dawn of this decade, student surveillance technologies were conveniently repackaged as “remote learning tools” and found their way into virtually every K-12 school, thereby supercharging the growth of the $3bn EdTech surveillance industry. Products by well-known EdTech surveillance vendors such as Gaggle, GoGuardian, Securly and Navigate360 review and analyze our children’s digital lives, ranging from their private texts, emails, social media posts and school documents to the keywords they search and the websites they visit. In 2025, wherever a school has access to a student’s data – whether it be through school accounts, school-provided computers or even private devices that utilize school-associated educational apps – they also have access to the way our children think, research and communicate. As schools normalize perpetual spying, today’s kids are learning that nothing they read or write electronically is private. Big Brother is indeed watching them, and that negative repercussions may result from thoughts or behaviors the government does not endorse. Accordingly, kids are learning that the safest way to avoid revealing their private thoughts, and potentially subjecting themselves to discipline, may be to stop or sharply restrict their digital communications and to avoid researching unpopular or unconventional ideas altogether.
Note: Learn about Proctorio, an AI surveillance anti-cheating software used in schools to monitor children through webcams—conducting "desk scans," "face detection," and "gaze detection" to flag potential cheating and to spot anybody “looking away from the screen for an extended period of time." For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.
U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home.
April 30, 2025, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/04/30/israel-palestine-us-ai-surveillance-state/
In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians ... for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp. Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.”
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the erosion of civil liberties.
A Mysterious Startup Is Developing a New Form of Solar Geoengineering
March 22, 2025, Wired
https://www.wired.com/story/a-mysterious-startup-is-developing-a-new...
In July 2012, a renegade American businessman, Russ George, took a ship off the coast of British Columbia and dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate dust into the Pacific Ocean. He had unilaterally, and some suggest illegally, decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—an attempt at geoengineering. Now a startup called Stardust seeks something more ambitious: developing proprietary geoengineering technology that would help block sun rays from reaching the planet. Stardust formed in 2023 and is based in Israel but incorporated in the United States. Geoengineering projects, even those led by climate scientists at major universities, have previously drawn the ire of environmentalists and other groups. Such a deliberate transformation of the atmosphere has never been done, and many uncertainties remain. If a geoengineering project went awry, for example, it could contribute to air pollution and ozone loss, or have dramatic effects on weather patterns, such as disrupting monsoons in populous South and East Asia. Stardust ... has not publicly released details about its technology, its business model, or exactly who works at its company. But the company appears to be positioning itself to develop and sell a proprietary geoengineering technology to governments that are considering making modifications to the global climate—acting like a kind of defense contractor for climate alteration.
Note: Regenerative farming is far safer and more promising than geoengineering for stabilizing the climate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on geoengineering and in the scientific community.
Making it rain: How weather manipulation and geoengineering are fueling global tensions
March 28, 2025, Fortune
https://fortune.com/europe/2025/03/28/weather-manipulation-geoengineering...
While attempting to control the weather might sound like science fiction, countries have been seeding clouds for decades to try to make rain or snow fall in specific regions. Invented in the 1940s, seeding involves a variety of techniques including adding particles to clouds via aircraft. It is used today across the world in an attempt to alleviate drought, fight forest fires and even to disperse fog at airports. In 2008, China used it to try to stop rain from falling on Beijing’s Olympic stadium. But experts say that there is insufficient oversight of the practice, as countries show an increasing interest in this and other geoengineering techniques as the planet warms. The American Meteorological Society has said that “unintended consequences” of cloud seeding have not been clearly shown — or ruled out — and raised concerns that unanticipated effects from weather modification could cross political boundaries. And there have been instances when cloud seeding was used deliberately in warfare. The United States used it during “Operation Popeye” to slow the enemy advance during the Vietnam War. In response, the UN created a 1976 convention prohibiting “military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques”. A number of countries have not signed the convention. Researcher Laura Kuhl said there was “significant danger that cloud seeding may do more harm than good”, in a 2022 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Note: Regenerative farming is far safer and more promising than geoengineering for stabilizing the climate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on geoengineering and in the scientific community.
Geoengineering’s Risks Need to Be Studied More
April 22, 2025, Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-22/earth-day...
More than a dozen private companies around the world are looking to profit from extreme measures to combat global warming — filling the sky with sunlight-blocking particles, brightening clouds or changing the chemistry of the oceans. The problem is that nobody knows how to control the unintended consequences. Some scientists who’ve studied and modeled the complexity of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere say any “geoengineering” scheme big enough to affect the climate could put people at risk of dramatic changes in the weather, crop failures, damage to the ozone layer, international conflict and other irreversible problems. Environmental lawyer David Bookbinder is more afraid of geoengineering than he is of climate change. “The consequences of geoengineering could happen a lot faster and with much less warning,” he said. He said the world lacks the legal or regulatory framework to ensure no single government or private entity takes a risky initiative. At the same time, “there’s a clamor for tech solutions.” Mark Z. Jacobson, an atmospheric modeler ... said we’ve already seen the results of several natural experiments. Some forms of air pollution have been cooling the planet by about 1 degree C, but that same pollution also kills millions of people from respiratory illnesses. In 1815, the eruption of Tambora injected so many particles into the atmosphere that 1816 was dubbed “the year without a summer.” People died from crop failure and famine.
Note: Regenerative farming is far safer and more promising than geoengineering for stabilizing the climate. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on geoengineering and in the scientific community.
The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests
April 11, 2025, New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-mystery-of-ices...
On March 12th, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a press release about an “enhanced” operation that the agency had conducted the previous week in New Mexico. Forty-eight people were arrested in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Roswell. Twenty of them had been “arrested or convicted of serious criminal offenses,” which included homicide, sexual assault, drug trafficking, and shoplifting. Others had committed “immigration violations such as illegal entry and illegal re-entry,” and twenty-one had final orders of removal issued by an immigration judge. On March 16th, the New Mexico chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint with two oversight agencies within the Department of Homeland Security: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman. “ICE has not identified any of the 48 individuals,” the letter said. “ICE has not indicated where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them.” In the past two and a half months, ICE has ended a long-standing policy discouraging arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals; its officers have also allegedly entered residences without warrants, arrested U.S. citizens by mistake, and refused to identify themselves while whisking people away on the streets of American cities.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on immigration enforcement corruption.
Who's Watching DHS?
March 28, 2025, Project on Government Oversight
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/whos-watching-dhs
The Department of Homeland Security is effectively gutting key civil rights offices within the agency, slashing the number of staff at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman. Each of these offices was created by Congress, but DHS has decided to move ahead anyway, saying they “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles.” Four days later, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts student with a valid F-1 visa , was pulled off a sidewalk in Massachusetts and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agents surround Ozturk in the video, has a long history of civil and human rights abuses . DHS is home to the largest law enforcement cohort in the United States. Its agents have extraordinary powers to stop, arrest, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike throughout the country. When Congress created DHS in 2002, it ... created the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) to provide oversight to guard against abuses. Every year, CRCL files a report to Congress. In its fiscal year (FY) 2023 report, for example, CRCL reported that it received over 3,000 allegations of misconduct and opened 758 investigations into issues ranging from treatment of travelers at airports to discrimination by DHS law enforcement to sexual abuse in DHS custody to deaths in DHS custody.
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the erosion of civil liberties.
Torture and Secret C.I.A. Prisons Haunt 9/11 Case in Judge’s Ruling
April 29, 2025, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/cia-torture-sept-11.html
When a military judge threw out a defendant’s confession in the Sept. 11 case this month, he gave two main reasons. The prisoner’s statements, the judge ruled, were obtained through the C.I.A.’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. But equally troubling to the judge was what happened to the prisoner in the years after his physical torture ended, when the agency held him in isolation and kept questioning him from 2003 to 2006. The defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, is accused of sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers who carried out the terrorist attack, which killed 3,000 people. In court, Mr. Baluchi is charged as Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. He is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of masterminding the plot. The judge, Col. Matthew N. McCall, wrote that it was easy to focus on the torture because it was “so absurdly far outside the norms of what is expected of U.S. custody preceding law enforcement questioning.” “However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement — all while being continually questioned and conditioned — is just as egregious” as the physical torture. Prosecutors are preparing to appeal. But the 111-page ruling was the latest blow to the government’s two-decade-old effort to hold death penalty trials at Guantánamo Bay by sweeping aside a legacy of state-sponsored torture.
Note: Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military
April 11, 2025, MIT Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/11/1114914/generative-ai...
2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit [tested] a leading AI tool the Pentagon has been funding. The generative AI tools they used were built by the defense-tech company Vannevar Labs, which in November was granted a production contract worth up to $99 million by the Pentagon’s startup-oriented Defense Innovation Unit. The company, founded in 2019 by veterans of the CIA and US intelligence community, joins the likes of Palantir, Anduril, and Scale AI as a major beneficiary of the US military’s embrace of artificial intelligence. In December, the Pentagon said it will spend $100 million in the next two years on pilots specifically for generative AI applications. In addition to Vannevar, it’s also turning to Microsoft and Palantir, which are working together on AI models that would make use of classified data. People outside the Pentagon are warning about the potential risks of this plan, including Heidy Khlaaf ... at the AI Now Institute. She says this rush to incorporate generative AI into military decision-making ignores more foundational flaws of the technology: “We’re already aware of how LLMs are highly inaccurate, especially in the context of safety-critical applications that require precision.” Khlaaf adds that even if humans are “double-checking” the work of AI, there's little reason to think they're capable of catching every mistake. “‘Human-in-the-loop’ is not always a meaningful mitigation,” she says.
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.
Inspiring Articles
These are the top 3 regrets at the end of life, according to a death doula at the bedside of over 1,000 past patients
April 12, 2025, Fortune
https://fortune.com/well/2025/04/12/biggest-life-regrets-death-doula/
She has been at the bedside of over 1,000 people globally in their last moments of life—from her home in the U.S. to Thailand and Zimbabwe. O’Brien, a registered nurse, had an impulse to move into hospice care over two decades ago and has since worked as an oncology nurse and a death doula, supporting those at the end of life. O’Brien’s recent book, The Good Death, aims to normalize the realities of death and the need to plan for the end. At the end of life, many people share what they didn’t do but knew they always wanted to do, O’Brien says.“We all are here for a purpose, and we all have gifts, and when we don’t share them and act upon those, that’s where the huge regret comes,” O’Brien says. Not “dipping into the unknown” or trying something new is a factor of having an abundance mindset, she says. When we consider our time sacred and limited, we are less afraid to take action on something that may excite us. “One of the things we don’t know is how many days we have,” she says. “When you get that feeling, or you have something that you want to do, don’t let your ego, the fear part of you, shut it down.” Many people at the end of life regret not being vulnerable enough to let themselves be loved and give love. They often share that they could not reach a level of forgiveness with someone else or themselves, O’Brien says. It’s essential to extend ourselves grace, know when to take ownership, and release guilt, she says. O’Brien encourages patients to envision the time they’re struggling to let go of and ask themselves if they did what they could in the moment with the information and resources they had.
Note: Explore more positive human interest stories and meaningful lessons from near-death experiences.
Near-Death Experiences Radically Change How People View Their Careers
May 5, 2025, StudyFinds
https://studyfinds.org/near-death-experiences-how-people-view-their-jobs/
A new study from Canadian researchers reveals that near-death experiences transform not just how people view mortality, but how they approach their 9-to-5s. The research, published in the Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, found that after brushing against death, employees frequently reprioritize their professional lives. Many shift away from pursuing money, status, and career advancement toward seeking meaningful work and authentic relationships with colleagues and clients. Near-death experiences (NDEs) are deeply personal experiences that some people report after almost losing their lives. These experiences can include sensations such as floating above one’s body, reviewing moments from one’s life, encountering spiritual beings, and feeling a profound sense of unity and love. Many participants reported that traditional career achievements and financial success plummeted in importance following their close call with death. The researchers identified six major themes: insights and new realizations, personal transformations, reprioritization of work, job changes, motivation, and changed relationships. Most participants reported profound spiritual insights following their NDEs. These weren’t just abstract philosophical ideas but deeply felt revelations that reshaped their identities. Common realizations included beliefs that consciousness continues after death, that there exists a “collective oneness” among all people, and that life has an underlying purpose.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about near-death experiences.
Your brain is biased to negativity. Here’s how to be more positive.
May 6, 2025, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/05/06/negativity-bias...
Negative events feel more psychologically intense than positive ones, thanks to a cognitive tendency called the negativity bias. That’s true even when events are of equal weight. Researchers have found that negative images elicit a stronger brain response in subjects than positive ones. Studies have shown that such negative reactions can remain stable for up to a year. Negativity bias is important to human functioning since it helps protect us from harm. But in some individuals, negativity bias can be correlated with stress, depression and anxiety. There are ways to manage negativity bias, experts said, so that it can benefit us. Try to switch your attention to the positive. For example, if you’re stewing over the belief that your husband can’t do anything right because he forgot to wheel out the trash bins, correct your bias by remembering that he just did the laundry. Make gratitude a habit. Set a time each day to write down a handful of things for which you are grateful. Connect with other people in a constructive way. “Sometimes when we’re ruminating on negative stuff, we get very self-focused,” [psychologist Alison] Ledgerwood said. Finding ways to help others “can be this shortcut to breaking out of that self-focus” and makes us feel better, she said. On a broader scale, people can channel negative feelings into positive action, Ledgerwood said. “We can use them to say: ‘There’s a problem. Who else is experiencing this problem? How can I connect with them?’” she said. “The action part is really important,” she said, “for example, with anger, using it as a motivation to do something about what feels unfair.”
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
A Psychologist Explains ‘Past Life Memories’—And What They Mean
December 8, 2024, Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/12/08/a...
A 2021 study published in Explore suggests that past life experiences have been reported across various parts of the world. Children often begin recalling past life memories around the age of 2 and gradually stop discussing them by about 9, when they’re well into their schooling years. Many children describe events, names, families or places from their alleged past life. Many also recall violent or unnatural deaths in their previous life, and about 20% participants mention an “intermission” period between lives, with an average gap of 16 months between a previous death and rebirth. Children can also display skills or behaviors they haven’t been taught, such as xenoglossy (speaking a language they’ve never learned). Research on near-death experiences, published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, also suggests that survivors sometimes experience past-life memories, similar to those that young children in past-life recollection studies recall . Mr. David Moquin ... was in a coma and hospitalized with double pneumonia. “During that time, I experienced at least two events that felt like past lifetimes. The one that has haunted me for the past 24 years was that of burning to death in an airplane crash. Many years later a psychic told me that in my last lifetime I died landing a fighter plane on an odd single digit day in November 1944. I was born December 21, 1944,” Moquin explains. “My daughter, hearing the recording of the reading, googled and found that Captain Fryer was the only pilot that died on an odd single digit day that November, and that he died trying to land his burning P-51 Mustang. My favorite plane has always been the P-51. The model sits on my desk. My daughter asked me questions and I seemed to know the names of my wing commander, squadron commander, mother and father."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
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