OUR PICKSTrump Is Trying to Change How the Midterm Elections Are Conducted | How Arctic Research is Influencing U.S. Homeland Security Strategy | The Right-to-Repair Fight Could Make or Break US Troops’ Robot-War Plans, and more

Trump Is Trying to Change How the Midterm Elections Are Conducted  (Patrick Marley and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Washington Post)
Many of these endeavors go far beyond typical political persuasion, challenging long-established democratic norms.

F.B.I.’s Inquiry into ICE Shooting Faces Doubts After White House’s Remarks  (Glenn Thrush, New York Times)
Ex-law enforcement officials said the administration’s declarations that the killing was justified elicited questions about the F.B.I.’s willingness to scrutinize the agent who fatally shot an unarmed activist.

ICE Can Now Spy on Every Phone in Your Neighborhood  (Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess, Wired)
Materials obtained by 404 Media shed new light on how the surveillance tools Tangles and Webloc from a company called Penlink can provide information to ICE agents after the agency contracted for the services in September. The social-media and phone-surveillance platforms can be used to monitor neighborhoods or city blocks for mobile phones and track the devices over time, potentially revealing where people live, work, and visit. Penlink purchases vast troves of commercial location data to augment and expand the dragnet.

U.S. Citizens Are Joining the Military to Protect Undocumented Parents  (Greg Jaffe, New York Times)
Amid an ICE crackdown in her area, an Oregon National Guard recruiter offers U.S. citizens a way to save their immigrant parents.

Trump Lawsuits Seek to Muzzle Media, Posing Serious Threat to Free Press  (Kathy Kiely and Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky, The Conversation)
In December 2025, President Donald Trump filed a US$10 billion lawsuit against the BBC in a federal court in Florida. It was only the latest in a long series of high-dollar legal challenges Trump has brought against prominent media organizations, including ABC, CBS, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Trump has won some sizable settlements in cases legal scholars had dismissed as largely lacking in merit. But as media scholars, we believe prevailing in court is not necessarily his primary goal. Instead, Trump appears to use lawsuits as a strategic weapon designed to silence his enemies and critics – who sometimes seem to be one and the same in his eyes.
Trump has always been litigious. Over the course of his life, he has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. Many of these involved Trump suing for defamation over perceived threats to his reputation. Relatively few, however, have been successful, if success is defined as prevailing in courts of law.
But using litigation as a tool for intimidation can produce other results that can count as victory. We are concerned that the president may be using the courts as a tool not to correct the record but to muzzle potential watchdogs and deprive the public of the facts they need to hold him accountable.

Two Americans Plead Guilty to Targeting Multiple U.S. Victims Using ALPHV BlackCat Ransomware (DOJ)
a federal district court in the Southern District of Florida accepted the guilty pleas of two men to conspiring to obstruct, delay or affect commerce through extortion in connection with ransomware attacks occurring in 2023.
“These defendants used their sophisticated cybersecurity training and experience to commit ransomware attacks — the very type of crime that they should have been working to stop,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Extortion via the internet victimizes innocent citizens every bit as much as taking money directly out of their pockets. The Department of Justice is committed to using all tools available to identify and arrest perpetrators of ransomware attacks wherever we have jurisdiction.”

How Arctic Research is Influencing U.S. Homeland Security Strategy  (Megan Norris, HSToday)
U.S. Border Patrol Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Chris Kuhn, who has spent nearly two decades working on southern, northern, coastal, and Arctic border operations, leveraged his master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) to fill a critical gap in how the nation approaches Arctic and border security. He identified a significant oversight: existing Arctic security frameworks – traditionally focused on diplomacy, military affairs, economy, society, and environment – did not include border security.

The Right-to-Repair Fight Could Make or Break US Troops’ Robot-War Plans  (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
Contracts that prevent battlefield repair, mods are hindering troops’ lethality, operators and experts say.

Under Trump, U.S. Adds Fuel to a Heating Planet  (Lisa Friedman, New York Times)
The president’s embrace of fossil fuels and withdrawal from the global fight against climate change will make it hard to keep warming at safe levels, scientists said.