Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Chatbots Are Doing the Work of Congress With Little Oversight
From writing speeches to sorting constituent mail, AI is spreading through Congress faster than the rules governing its use.
The amendment was one of hundreds filed this summer to an annual defense bill making its way through Congress. Along with her proposed change, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s office had sent a summary of what it would do.
But the first line made no sense.
“increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM????Claude responded:”
One of Luna’s staffers had copied a chatbot’s answer — time-stamp and all — and pasted it into the public record of the National Defense Authorization Act.
As a screenshot of the garbled text circulated on social media, the Florida Republican was nonchalant. “Not a shocker,” she wrote. “Most staff use it.”
The rules Congress wrote for itself are loose. Off limits under current House guidance: putting sensitive material such as constituent information into a chatbot, generating deepfakes, making personnel decisions and finalizing legislation.
In theory, a staffer breaking those rules can be stripped of access to AI tools, suspended, fired, even fined and imprisoned. But no one could name a single case of that happening.
A former senior Republican House staffer said that his office subscribed to both ChatGPT and Claude and that staff used them however they liked. He wasn’t sure what the rules were, or whether his team followed them. “We just had a free-for-all,” he said.
Link: Washington Post (Anna Liss-Roy)
The ‘Manosphere’ Isn’t a Movement. It’s a Multibillion-Dollar Grievance Industry
Many young men are driven to resentment and are financially exploited as influencers sell them classes, pills, and the illusion of clout, a new report reveals.
For many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?
Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.
The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.
In “The Grift Economy: How Young Men Are Being Sold Fake Belonging and Fake Wealth Online,” researchers from the digital safety organization Reset Tech and the nonprofit Equimundo map how men are “algorithmically routed into paid communities, unregulated supplements, crypto schemes, and high-ticket ‘coaching’ programs,” which together make up a “multibillion-dollar industry.”
Link: Wired (Miles Klee)
Backup: https://archive.ph/BE2si
As Credit Card Debt Mounts, Home Becomes a Piggy Bank
A rise in home equity to record levels has led many Americans to refinance their mortgages to pay their bills.
When Linda Boroski bought her three-story Queen Anne home with a wraparound veranda in Bellevue, Ohio, in 2021, she made sure it fit her budget.
“My mom taught me, ‘We like to cross our t’s, dot our i’s, and we pay our bills on time,’” said Ms. Boroski, a 63-year-old retired schoolteacher.
So she was concerned when she ran up $26,000 in credit card bills to pay for travel for medical treatment. It meant putting off renovations for her drafty house and visiting her family less.
When Ms. Boroski got an offer from Rocket, a mortgage lender, for a home-equity loan, she took out $45,000, paid off her bills and bought new windows. And she still has a little left over for a trip to see her granddaughter.
Americans continue to spend freely, keeping the economy humming, even as they amass more credit card debt. But like Ms. Boroski, many homeowners have built up a nest egg to help pay for their lifestyles: $35 trillion in home equity, a record high.
“People are sitting on all this money,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at Redfin, a real estate brokerage firm. “So they pull some of that equity out of their home to pay off their credit card debt.”
Household debt dipped 0.1 percent in the second quarter of 2026, to $18.8 trillion, from a year earlier, according to a report on Tuesday by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But credit card balances climbed to $1.26 trillion from the year before.
“Nobody really talks about their credit card rates being 23 percent,” said Alex Elezaj, the chief strategy officer at United Wholesale Mortgage, a mortgage lender that works exclusively with independent brokers.
Link: New York Times
Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Follow Years of Warnings and Neglect
Federal and state officials are racing to address an assault on the nation’s water supply that they believe is the work of Iranian hackers.
In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration proposed creating stronger cybersecurity guidelines to better safeguard the nation’s water supply from hackers.
The steps were modest, but necessary, officials said at the time: Many municipalities lacked even basic protections, and the computers that monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels, were easy-to-find targets for a would-be intruder.
The E.P.A. rescinded the order, however, after Republican-led states and industry groups sued to block its enforcement. They argued that the E.P.A. lacked authority for the move and that smaller, underfunded utilities would struggle to adopt the new standards.
The episode is just one of several in recent years in which efforts to bolster the cyberdefenses of America’s water systems were blocked despite repeated attacks that highlighted vulnerabilities. Just a little more than a month after the E.P.A. proposal was killed, a small town in western Pennsylvania disclosed that a hacking group tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps briefly took control of equipment used to adjust water pressure.
Now federal and state officials are racing to address an alarming, widespread assault on the nation’s water supply that they believe is also probably the work of Iranian hackers.
Last week, at least seven states, including Minnesota and Michigan, reported incidents to the F.B.I., and in some cases the hacks — or the response to them — degraded water operations. The tally of states reporting possible attacks to the F.B.I. is now at least a dozen, according to people familiar with the investigation. The F.B.I. has not disclosed the states publicly, but some have come forward to confirm activity.
Link: New York Times (Dustin Volz)
The ‘Jury Duty’ Scam That Cost This Family $25,000
In a growing ruse, swindlers pose as cops and use tremendous pressure to trap people; ‘They had every single thing about me.’
It began at 10:43 a.m. on a Tuesday last month, with a call from an unknown number. Kimberly Fudge, 38, a manager in the finance department of a government contractor who lives outside Tampa with her husband and daughter, had just gotten a refurbished Samsung in the mail and was still setting it up; when it rang, she assumed it might be a contact the phone didn’t recognize yet. She picked up.
The caller said he was from nearby New Port Richey in Pasco County, verified her identity, then asked her to hold for a sheriff’s deputy. What followed was troubling and oddly specific. The “deputy” said Fudge had missed jury duty in a federal case despite signing a document promising to appear. An angry judge had issued a warrant for her arrest.
A team of at least five scammers, playing different roles with dead-perfect Florida accents, would keep her on the phone for nearly 10 hours and talk her into handing over $25,000.
“They had me scared,” Fudge said. They could read her texts and see her internet searches. “They knew my Social Security number. They knew how much I had in my bank account. They had every single thing about me.”
Fudge pulled together $5,000 through a credit-card cash advance, then, at the swindlers’ instruction, texted her husband, Jonathan: “I need you to not ask any questions, but can you transfer me $5,000 on PayPal?” Jonathan, 40, a balloon artist who runs an event business, trusted his wife and sent it.
The exchange didn’t sit right with Jonathan. He asked ChatGPT why his wife might need money “no questions asked.” The chatbot flagged it as a possible scam. When Kimberly texted again asking for $2,500 more, Jonathan replied that he wouldn’t send more until he knew she was safe, and he called 911.
Kimberly walked through her front door at 8:28 p.m., nearly 10 hours after the first call. She was exhausted, embarrassed and sobbing. Jonathan rubbed her back. “I don’t care about the money,” he told her. “We can make more money. I’m just happy you’re home.”
Link: Wall Street Journal
‘DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE’: How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock
Flock is a mass surveillance company that operates automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras used by police departments across the country to track vehicles. New documents show some police are being told to keep that surveillance a secret from the very people they’re using it against.
When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret:
“DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”
The police guidance document is unusual in how clearly it tells police not to mention their Flock use, but it also highlights several important things in the Flock debate. While Flock likes to say that it is a transparent surveillance company and that it cares about “accountability” and “governance,” some of its customers believe its use should be kept secret.
It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage.
Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be “as vague as permissible” about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice.
“If it is necessary to explain in a report, it is advised to use language such as ‘Using county resources, I discovered the suspect vehicle was bearing an Iowa plate.’ Treat the ALPR information like you would intelligence. It is simply a lead that you verified and acted on.”
In the public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said “there is no need” to tell people about the use of Flock.
Link: 404 Media (Jason Koebler)
Backup: https://archive.ph/VVaXH
If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay
Americans require a policy as a condition of driving, but it often doesn’t provide the backstop car owners expect
Auto insurers didn’t pay out on 45% of auto liability and medical claims they resolved last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of thousands of company regulatory filings. That rate might change slightly as more claims are resolved, but it is up from around one in three, or 35%, of such claims a decade ago.
Christopher Benton hit another car, what he called a “little bumper accident,” in 2023. The Adelanto, Calif., lab technician assumed his $5,000 liability-coverage insurance claim would sail through. But Allstate-owned National General refused to pay a cent. The reason? His 15-year-old son.
The teenager wasn’t in the family’s 2012 Chevrolet Silverado at the time of the fender-bender. He didn’t even have a driver’s license. But National General said his absence from the policy application breached its requirement to disclose all household members ages 14 or over.
“That’s why you pay for insurance,” he added. “It doesn’t seem right they can just not pay.”
He’s now part of a class-action lawsuit alleging National General set up its application process to discourage the required disclosures. “It was deliberately designed this way, so that they have this ace card in their back pocket if there’s an accident,” Justin King, Benton’s lawyer, said.
Personal auto insurers last year paid out around 61 cents in claims for every dollar in premium, their lowest so-called net loss ratio since 2020, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“The industry uses claim lowballing and denials to wring extra profit out of customers who don’t have the resources or, in some states, the rights to fight back,” said Douglas Heller, director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America.
Link: Wall Street Journal
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend. See you in the comments!