April, 24 2024, 10:24am EDT
A Federal TikTok Ban Is a 'Misguided Detour' from Doing What’s Needed to Protect People’s Privacy and Safeguard National Security
On Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest its holdings of the popular social-media site or face an effective ban in the United States. The White House has indicated that President Biden will sign the legislation, which – after failing to move quickly through the Senate – was folded into a foreign-aid bill that included support for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.
According to the bill, ByteDance must sell its TikTok shares within 270 days to a buyer that satisfies the U.S. government. If ByteDance refuses to sell, the government will prohibit cloud providers and app stores from distributing TikTok in the United States.
TikTok has approximately 170 million active monthly users in the United States alone and is especially popular with younger generations and people of color, who use TikTok to organize, communicate, educate and entertain.
Free Press Action Policy Counsel Jenna Ruddock said:
“If lawmakers want to rein in the harms of social-media platforms, targeting just one under the guise of national security ignores an entire industry predicated on surveillance capitalism. Like all popular platforms — including those that Meta and Google own — TikTok collects far too much user data. But banning a single platform will not address the privacy problem that’s rotting the core of the entire tech industry. At any given time, dozens of corporations are tracking us, analyzing our behavior and profiting off of our private information. An entire business sector is dedicated to harvesting our sensitive data, selling it both in the United States and abroad, where it’s used to discriminate, target people with unwelcome ads and political disinformation — and, potentially, pry into their personal lives.
“Singling out TikTok for privacy concerns, when so much personal information is available on the open market to U.S. law enforcement and foreign intelligence agencies alike, is a misguided detour from doing what’s needed to protect everyone’s digital rights. A sell-or-be-banned law targeting one platform runs afoul of the First Amendment and unilaterally closes off essential spaces for people to connect and communicate. The government should never have the right to cherry-pick the venues we use to explore new ideas. Many of the same lawmakers who passed this effective ban on TikTok are often heard decrying the rise of censorship. Such rhetoric gives a distinct whiff of hypocrisy to this latest legislative move.
“TikTok users include a disproportionate number of younger people and people of color, who traditional media outlets too often ignore or neglect. Free Press Action will continue to fight for the free-speech rights of these and all other social-media users. Instead of banning TikTok, lawmakers should focus their energies on passing a federal privacy law that limits how all of these companies collect, store, analyze and sell our personal data.”
Free Press was created to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. We believe that positive social change, racial justice and meaningful engagement in public life require equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what's actually happening in their communities.
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'Another Trump-Authorized Murder': 1 Dead, 2 Survivors Reported After Latest US Boat Bombing
More than 200 people have been killed in US strikes targeting boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that the Trump administration claimed—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs.
Jun 17, 2026
The US military said Tuesday that one person was killed and two others survived the latest attack on a boat that the Trump administration claimed—again without providing concrete evidence—was involved in smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
"On June 16, at the direction of the commander of US Southern Command Gen. Francis L. Donovan, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations," SOUTHCOM said in a statement.
"Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations," the statement continued. "One male narco-terrorist was killed during this action, and there were two male survivors."
SOUTHCOM added that it "immediately notified [the] US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivors."
It is not known whether the survivors were saved.
The attack—in which no US forces were harmed—was one of more than 60 that have occurred in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since US President Donald Trump launched the campaign early last September. More than 200 people have been killed.
Relatives of people killed in some of the boat strikes, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, say that at least some of the victims were fishers who were not part of the illicit drug trade.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused the US of “murder." Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was abducted during a US invasion in January and imprisoned in the United States on dubious narco-terrorism charges.
In January, relatives of two Trinidadian fishers killed in the strikes filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit in Massachusetts.
Experts argue that the strikes are illegal. Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America previously said that even in cases of vessels that were involved in drug trafficking, the bombings were illegal and “the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”
Just Security editor-in-chief and New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman said last month that the “overwhelming consensus of experts, myself included, assess these to be murder because no armed conflict” is occurring, adding that they would be a “war crime if it were armed conflict"—and possibly even a "crime against humanity."
Responding to Tuesday's strike, former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth lamented what he called "another Trump-authorized murder" and act of "blatant criminality."
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Trump's Iran Disaster an Even Bigger US Strategic Defeat Than Vietnam: Expert
"The United States is inarguably in a weaker position than when it began this war of choice, with core US strategic objectives harmed."
Jun 17, 2026
President Donald Trump's illegal war of choice with Iran has dealt the United States an even bigger strategic defeat than the one it suffered in the Vietnam War, according to one expert.
In an essay published on Tuesday by Foreign Policy, Paul Musgrave, associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, made the case that the damage done to the United States' reputation and credibility in the wake of the Iran war are significantly more severe than anything the country suffered in the wake of Vietnam.
Even though the Vietnam War went on for far longer and resulted in far more deaths than Trump's Iran war, Musgrave argued, the US nonetheless exited it with little long-term damage to its global power.
"Compare that situation with the aftermath of Trump’s war," Musgrave continued. "The United States is inarguably in a weaker position than when it began this war of choice, with core US strategic objectives harmed."
Musgrave noted that while the US and Israel had initial success in decapitating Iran's leadership at the beginning of the conflict, this only left the hardliners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to run the country.
By failing to achieve the stated aim of regime change and by empowering even more radical elements within Iran, Musgrave added, Trump has severely damaged other nations' willingness to trust the US for national security protection.
"Regional allies, many of whom reportedly argued against the venture, bore the brunt of the costs of the fighting," the scholar wrote. "Most tellingly, Iran learned that its capacity to throttle the Strait of Hormuz could deliver economic leverage on a worldwide scale."
Writing in The New York Times on Wednesday, national security journalist WJ Hennigan argued that the United States' strategic defeat has laid bare the limits of US military power to bend weaker nations to its will.
In particular, he pointed out that the US, which spent $1 trillion on its military last year, could not take out even a majority of Iran's missile stockpiles.
"Yes, the wonder weapons that American industry cranks out, like cruise missiles and air-defense interceptors, have proven impressive on the battlefield," Hennigan wrote. "But the war has exposed the underlying weaknesses of depending on weaponry that’s extremely expensive and time-consuming to deliver. During an April 30 congressional hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated it could take 'months and years' to replenish the stocks that had been used in the war."
Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, similarly said that Trump's Iran war had resulted in a strategic defeat for the US. However, he also expressed hope that this defeat could mark a turning point in US foreign policy circles regarding the applications of American power throughout the world.
"There’s a longstanding US bipartisan consensus around wildly inflating the Iranian threat," Duss wrote in a social media post. "Trump’s war, a strategic defeat, was an expression of that consensus. If... ending the war puts the US and Iran on path to a more normal relationship, that will be a positive thing."
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Luigi Mangione—Accused of Murdering UnitedHealth CEO—to Invoke Psychiatric Defense in State Trial
The legal strategy—which is not an insanity defense—would be an admission that Mangione killed UnitedHealth's Brian Thompson, but did so under mitigating circumstances.
Jun 17, 2026
Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of murdering UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, will assert a psychiatric defense in his state murder trial, the New York judge presiding over the case revealed Wednesday.
The Associated Press reported that Judge Gregory Carro of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan said Mangione’s legal team informed him that they will argue that the 28-year-old defendant suffered from “extreme emotional disturbance" when he allegedly gunned down Thompson outside the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel just after dawn on December 4, 2024.
The defense strategy would be an admission that Mangione killed Thompson, but did so due to mitigating circumstances. The precise nature of the claimed psychiatric issue remains under seal, but it has been reported that Mangione suffered chronic back pain for years and harbored deep animosity toward the for-profit health insurance industry that dominate the US system.
Court documents indicate that Mangione's lawyers previously sought additional time to decide whether to pursue a mental health defense.
Extreme emotional disturbance is not the same as pleading guilty by reason of insanity, which would result in a convicted defendant being sent to a psychiatric facility instead of prison.
On Wednesday, Carro revealed that he had held a secret hearing on the matter earlier this month, and that the session's proceedings were sealed "to give the defense an opportunity to determine whether they were going forth" with the extreme emotional disturbance defense.
The June 3 hearing focused on the psychiatric basis for such a defense, its procedural consequences, disclosure obligations, and potential examinations.
Mangione's attorney, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, decried Carro's decision to unseal details of the secret hearing.
“The reason why we asked for the sealing is that this defense is not available federally and Mr. Mangione is being prosecuted federally and this is prejudicial to his defense to the exact same facts,” she said.
Last year, then-US Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would seek the death penalty for Mangione at his federal trial. New York state effectively abolished capital punishment in 2004.
Mangione allegedly shot Thompson, 50, as he walked to the New York Midtown Hilton for UnitedHealth Group’s annual investor conference. Police said the words “delay,” “deny,” and “depose”—a description of how insurance companies avoid paying claims—were engraved in shell casings of bullets used in the attack, which was carried out with a 3D-printed pistol. New York police also said they recovered a three-page handwritten note that expressed "some ill will toward corporate America."
Five days after the shooting, Mangione was arrested after a customer in an Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's recognized him and alerted authorities.
Thompson's murder exposed the depth of public rage over corporate greed and a for-profit healthcare system in which thousands of people die each year because they have no insurance, while millions more face financial hardship or bankruptcy.
Mangione is facing state charges of second-degree murder, multiple weapons violations, and possession of a fake ID. More serious charges, including first-degree murder and terrorism, have been dismissed. Mangione's New York trial is set to begin on September 8.
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