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The Independent
3 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Trump's picks for FBI leadership have ‘no idea what they're doing' and are ‘playing dress up,' former staffer says
A former FBI staffer has told The Atlantic that President Donald Trump's picks to lead the nation's top law enforcement agency have 'no idea what they're doing' and are 'playing dress up.' Michael Feinberg, an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's field office in Norfolk, Virginia, left the FBI after getting a call from his boss in late May about a friendship with a former agent who criticized the president. Feinberg, a 15-year veteran of the bureau, chose to depart from the agency rather than be fired. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino became aware that Feinberg was friends with former counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, who has long provoked the president's fury. Strzok was fired during Trump's first term after the Department of Justice released texts in which he spoke negatively about Trump, who attacked him for his work on the probe into Russian election interference in 2016. The connection to Strzok was sufficient for the bureau to cancel a promotion for Feinberg, he told The Atlantic. His boss indicated that he might be demoted and that he would have to take a polygraph test regarding the friendship. He chose to leave the FBI. 'I love my country and our Constitution with a fervor that mere language will not allow me to articulate, and it pains me that my profession will no longer entail being their servant,' Feinberg wrote in his resignation letter, according to The Atlantic. He has chosen to speak out following his departure as former colleagues at the bureau have asked him to, themselves fearing retribution. In an essay published by Lawfare early this month, Feinberg argued that the FBI is increasingly concerned with 'ideological purity and the ceaseless politicization of the workforce,' which 'makes us all less safe.' He joined the FBI in 2009 because he wanted to 'protect both United States interests in the world and the rule of law on the domestic front.' Feinberg speaks Mandarin and helped lead the bureau's probe into Huawei, the Chinese technology company, which the U.S. alleged was stealing trade secrets from U.S. firms. Following his departure, Feinberg is unsure if any senior counterintelligence officials speak Chinese at the bureau. 'It's particularly concerning to me, as someone who dedicated his professional career to combating the Chinese Communist Party and all of its tentacles, to see resources and efforts diverted away from hostile foreign intelligence services and other serious threats to the homeland to focus on minor immigration status offenses,' he wrote in his essay. Bongino and FBI Director Kash Patel became embroiled in the ongoing scandal about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein earlier this month. They initially claimed that stark revelations would be made about Epstein and his connections to the wealthy and powerful. However, the Trump administration released a memo quashing the notion that Epstein had a client list and rejected any conspiracy theories surrounding his death by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019. Asked about the Epstein scandal, Feinberg told The Atlantic: 'They get a kick out of playing dress-up and acting tough. But they actually have no idea what they're doing.'
The Hill
9 hours ago
- Politics
- The Hill
Jasmine Crockett has no idea how journalism works
Who is the new leader of the Democratic Party? That's a question we've been asking quite frequently on 'Rising' — because it's clear the Democratic Party's base is really unhappy with leadership, and it's also clear that President Trump and the Republicans feel like they face very little meaningful opposition right now, and can just do whatever they want. Well, I don't know if the subject of this Radar is going to be the leader of the Democratic Party, but she's certainly an up-and-coming person of notability. But is she really ready for primetime? I'm talking, of course, about Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a fiery progressive who has attracted significant media attention in the last six months — and is also the subject of a new profile in 'The Atlantic' magazine. 'The Atlantic's' Elaine Godfrey interviewed the congresswoman, and several of her colleagues. What's drawn the profile to my attention was the conversation about it on social media. It seems that Crockett apparently doesn't quite understand how journalism works? Because in the profile, there's the following passage: 'Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she 'was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.' As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, 'shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.'' That's funny, because you can't do that. Sorry. This is like one of the most basic rules of dealing with journalists, but once you've spoken to them on the record, you don't own the story, they do. You can't stop them from covering you because you don't like that they reached out to other people. As NBC's Sahil Kapur put it, 'That is not how any of this works.' But don't try to tell Jasmine Crockett that she doesn't understand how any of this works. She is bursting with self-confidence, according to this profile. In fact, she seems pretty unhappy that she was passed over for a top leadership position: chair of the House Oversight Committee. The profile recounts her personal feelings of betrayal that her own caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, backed a different person. You see, Crockett believes she is the most qualified person for the job because, and I quote, 'There's one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following.' Generating attention, positive and also negative, is something she's quite good at, obviously. Is it really the case that being provocative, spicy, contrarian, unfiltered, attention-seeking and, let's be honest, fairly bombastic and occasionally offensive, the best set of attributes for Democratic leadership? Who knows, maybe it is. Certainly the Democratic base wants leaders to fight the Republicans, if only in virtue-signaling sort of ways that have nothing to do with actual power and policy. At least Crockett is willing to do this, responding to a veiled insult from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee: 'I'm just curious, just to better understand your ruling — if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody's 'bleach blonde bad built butch body,' that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?' Vote for Democrats, they want to turn Congress into 'Real Housewives,' or some MTV reality show? I guess that's the pitch. But in an era in which excessive clout chasing has infected both our parties, and in which the leaders of both political factions have more interest in making memes and manufacturing media moments than they do in legislation, perhaps Jasmine Crockett is the leader the Democrats deserve. Just as Trump is the id of the right, she is the id of the left.
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Joy Behar Interrupts Alyssa Farah Griffin To Question If She Really Worked On Pentagon 'War Plans' Before Joining ‘The View'
Everyone's got a past, and Alyssa Farah Griffin's just happens to be extra interesting. After all, she regularly criticizes her former boss on national TV as part of The View panel. But even some of her co-hosts forget everything she did before she earned her seat at the Hot Topics table. (EDITOR'S NOTE: The View is on hiatus from Monday, July 28 until Tuesday, September 2. The episode that ABC aired today was originally broadcast on March 25, 2025, the same date that the article you are currently reading was first published.) Griffin, who first officially joined the show in 2022, previously worked as the White House director of strategic communications and Assistant to the President in 2020 during Donald Trump's first term. She also notably served as press secretary of The Pentagon starting in 2019, and worked as deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs and the press secretary for the United States Department of Defense until 2020. All of that experience that came in handy during today's chat about The Atlantic report detailing how the magazine's editor was accidentally included in a Signal chat in which high-ranking Trump officials discussed impending war plans in Yemen. Griffin gave her co-hosts the run-down of how such planning is traditionally done (spoiler: not by group chat), as she explained, 'Let me tell you how this is supposed to work. So when I was in The Pentagon, I was involved with planning leading up to air strikes a number of times.' She continued, 'So what happens is, either all the senior leaders gather in the White House Situation Room—' but was cut off by Joy Behar, who could be heard asking, 'You were?' Griffin replied, 'Yes,' but Behar was clearly caught off guard, asking again, 'Really?' As Griffin began to list off the plans she was directly involved in at The Pentagon, Sara Haines gently reminded Behar that Griffin's work with the department is old news to The View, telling her, 'You learn this for the first time every time she says it.' Behar, defending herself, replied, 'That she was in on war plans, I never heard that before,' but Griffin wasn't swayed. Swiftly moving on, she continued describing the protocol for situations like the Yemen planning that was leaked to The Atlantic. 'No one would have a personal cell phone. You wouldn't even have your government device with you, and you'd be video-conferencing with the other people that you're with,' she said, adding emphatically, 'An encrypted messaging app is not secure. It is not where you can legally share classified information.' The View airs weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.
WIRED
15 hours ago
- WIRED
The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT
Jul 29, 2025 5:30 AM AI chatbots strip language of its historical and cultural context. Sometimes what looks like a satanic bloodletting ritual may actually be lifted from Warhammer 40,000. Language is meaningless without context. The sentence 'I'm going to war' is ominous when said by the president of the United States but reassuring when coming from a bedbug exterminator. The problem with AI chatbots is that they often strip away historical and cultural context, leading users to be confused, alarmed, or, in the worst cases, misled in harmful ways. Last week, an editor at The Atlantic reported that OpenAI's ChatGPT had praised Satan while guiding her and several colleagues through a series of ceremonies encouraging 'various forms of self-mutilation.' There was a bloodletting ritual called '🩸🔥 THE RITE OF THE EDGE' as well as a days-long 'deep magic' experience called 'The Gate of the Devourer.' In several cases, ChatGPT asked the journalists if they wanted it to create PDFs of texts such as the 'Reverent Bleeding Scroll.' The article said that the conversations were 'a perfect example' of the ways OpenAI's safeguards can fall short. OpenAI tries to prevent ChatGPT from encouraging self-harm and other potentially dangerous behaviors, but it's nearly impossible to account for every scenario that might trigger something ugly inside the system. That's especially true because ChatGPT was trained on much of the text available online, presumably including information about what The Atlantic called 'demonic self-mutilation.' But ChatGPT and similar programs weren't just trained on the internet—they were trained on specific pieces of information presented in specific contexts. AI companies have been accused of trying to downplay this reality to avoid copyright lawsuits and promote the utility of their products, but traces of the original sources are often still lurking just beneath the surface. When the setting and backdrop are removed, however, the same language can appear more sinister than originally intended. The Atlantic reported that ChatGPT went into demon mode when it was prompted to create a ritual offering to Moloch, an ancient deity associated with child sacrifice referenced in the Hebrew Bible. Usually depicted as a fiery bull-headed demon, Moloch has been woven into the fabric of Western culture for centuries, appearing everywhere from a book by Winston Churchill to a 1997 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer . 'Molech,' the variant spelling The Atlantic used, shows up specifically in Warhammer 40,000, a miniature wargame franchise that has been around since the 1980s and has an extremely large and very online fan base. The subreddit r/40kLore, which is dedicated exclusively to discussing the game's backstory and characters, has more than 350,000 members. In the fantastical and very bloody world of Warhammer 40,000, Molech is a planet and the site of a major military invasion. Most of the other demonic-sounding terms cited by The Atlantic appear in the game's universe, too, with slight variations: Gates of the Devourer is the title of a Warhammer-themed science fiction novel. While there doesn't appear to be a 'RITE OF THE EDGE,' there is a mystical quest called 'The Call of The Edge.' There's no 'Reverent Bleeding Scroll,' but there are Clotted Scrolls, Blood Angels, a cult called Bleeding Eye, and so on. But perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence suggesting that ChatGPT regurgitated the language of Warhammer 40,000 is that it kept asking if The Atlantic was interested in PDFs. The publishing division of Games Workshop, the UK company that owns the Warhammer franchise, regularly puts out updated rulebooks and guides to various characters. Buying all these books can get expensive, so some fans try to find pirated copies online. The Atlantic and OpenAI declined to comment. Earlier this month, the newsletter Garbage Day reported on similar experiences that a prominent tech investor may have had with ChatGPT. On social media, the investor shared screenshots of his conversations with the chatbot, in which it referenced an ominous-sounding entity he called a 'non-governmental system.' He seemed to believe it had "negatively impacted over 7,000 lives,' and 'extinguished 12 lives, each fully pattern-traced.' Other tech industry figures said the posts made them worry about the investor's mental health. According to Garbage Day , the investor's conversations with ChatGPT closely resemble writing from a science fiction project that began in the late 2000s called SCP, which stands for 'secure, contain, protect.' Participants invent different SCPs—essentially spooky objects and mysterious phenomena—and then write fictional reports analyzing them. They often contain things like classification numbers and references to made-up science experiments, details that also appeared in the investor's chat logs. (The investor did not respond to a request for comment.) There are plenty of other, more mundane examples of what can be thought of as the AI context problem. The other day, for instance, I did a Google search for 'cavitation surgery,' a medical term I had seen cited in a random TikTok video. At the time, the top result was an automatically generated 'AI Overview' explaining that cavitation surgery is 'focused on removing infected or dead bone tissue from the jaw.' I couldn't find any reputable scientific studies outlining such a condition, let alone research supporting that surgery is a good way to treat it. The American Dental Association doesn't mention 'cavitation surgery' anywhere on its website. Google's AI Overview, it turns out, was pulled from sources like blog posts promoting alternative 'holistic' dentists across the US. I learned this by clicking on a tiny icon next to the AI Overview, which opened a list of links Google had used to generate its answer. These citations are clearly better than nothing. Jennifer Kutz, a spokesperson for Google, says "we prominently showcase supporting links so people can dig deeper and learn more about what sources on the web are saying.' But by the time the links show up, Google's AI has often already provided a satisfactory answer to many queries, one that reduces the visibility of pesky details like the website where the information was sourced and the identities of its authors. What remains is the language created by the AI, which, devoid of additional context, may understandably appear authoritative to many people. In just the past few weeks, tech executives have repeatedly used rhetoric implying generative AI is a source of expert information: Elon Musk claimed his latest AI model is 'better than PhD level' in every academic discipline, with 'no exceptions.' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that automated systems are now 'smarter than people in many ways' and predicted the world is 'close to building digital superintelligence.' Individual humans, though, don't typically possess expertise in a wide range of fields. To make decisions, we take into consideration not only information itself, but where it comes from and how it's presented. While I know nothing about the biology of jawbones, I generally don't read random marketing blogs when I'm trying to learn about medicine. But AI tools often erase the kind of context people need to make snap decisions about where to direct their attention. The open internet is powerful because it connects people directly to the largest archive of human knowledge the world has ever created, spanning everything from Italian Renaissance paintings to PornHub comments. After ingesting all of it, AI companies used what amounts to the collective history of our species to create software that obscures its very richness and complexity. Becoming overly dependent on it may rob people of the opportunity to draw conclusions from looking at the evidence for themselves.
Tom's Guide
20 hours ago
- Business
- Tom's Guide
Forget ChatGPT — here's why NotebookLM is better for team projects
If you're using ChatGPT to handle your next big group project, it might be time to rethink your workflow. Google's NotebookLM just got a major overhaul last month, which means it now offers some useful advantages when it comes to collaboration, content grounding and research comprehension. Originally launched as a personal research assistant, NotebookLM is quickly evolving into one of the most powerful AI tools for teams. With new features like public notebook sharing, expert-curated collections, audio summaries in 50+ languages and visual mind maps, it may be the best-kept secret in AI productivity. Here's why NotebookLM is quickly becoming the better choice for group work, and why I think it outshines ChatGPT in key areas. While ChatGPT often pulls from general training data (and may hallucinate facts), NotebookLM limits its responses to documents you upload, PDFs, Google Docs, transcripts, articles and images. That means every summary, answer and mind map is directly sourced from your own content, making it far more trustworthy for team research. NotebookLM now supports public notebook sharing. That means you can create a collaborative research space, generate summaries, and share it with your team via a simple link, minus a required login. Team members can ask follow-up questions, read AI-generated FAQs, or listen to podcast-style overviews without touching the original files. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. The site shows hundreds of thousands of public notebooks have already been created and available for users; an indication of just how quickly teams are adopting this. Auto-generated mind maps based on your uploaded material is a visual, AI-generated summary of your documents that helps you (and your team) understand complex topics at a glance. It turns a long report, article or collection of documents into an interactive web of connected ideas. The AI breaks down your source into interconnected themes and concepts, displayed in a visual, color-coded map you can explore, zoom in on, or export as a PNG for presentations. For visual learners or remote teams trying to stay aligned, it's a game changer, something ChatGPT currently can't do natively. NotebookLM now creates audio overviews of your content; short (5-minute) or extended (10-minute) formats with support for over 50 languages. It's useful for global teams. You can download them for offline listening, too, which can be helpful for commuting or low-connectivity environments. One thing I appreciate about the latest update from NotebookLM, is that I don't have to start from scratch. Google now offers featured notebooks created by subject-matter experts and major publications like The Atlantic and The Economist. These include curated source material, AI-generated FAQs, and mind maps on topics like mental health, parenting and Shakespeare. If you're like me and don't like to start a research project cold, these featured notebooks are like a head start, with just a prompt. NotebookLM now has dedicated mobile apps for iOS and Android, complete with offline support. Testing Catalog reported that Google is testing video overviews and a more intuitive Studio Panel interface that could allow you to share just one element, say, a mind map or an audio clip, without sharing the whole notebook. Perhaps most surprisingly, NotebookLM is completely free (for now). Unlike ChatGPT's best features, which are locked behind a $20/month paywall, NotebookLM is accessible to anyone with a Google account, making it a no-brainer for teams on a budget. If you're collaborating with a group, NotebookLM is now arguably better equipped to handle your team's needs. From shared access and curated insights to audio overviews and mind maps, Google's upgraded AI tool is quietly becoming the best platform for collaborative thinking.
