@chrispeikert
Cryptographer (lattices/post-quantum), Professor at U-Michigan Computer Science and Engineering , Head of Cryptography Research at Algorand, PhD from MIT CSAIL. Previously faculty at Georgia Tech School of CS. Here I speak for myself.
America's status as the top destination for global talent is being shattered.
The Administration only just published (!) what happened last summer to international student visa issuances. It's grim.
From the indispensable @karinfischer.bsky.social @chronicle.com —> chronicle.com/newsletter/l...
This was an exceptionally informative and interesting conversation, even by the high standards of #WITHPod!
Scoop: DHS ousted multiple privacy officers at CBP after they questioned orders to purposely mislabel records about government surveillance to prevent their release under FOIA.
He allegedly said "he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.] ... [and] that he expected to receive a presidential pardon ... ." www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
YES
MERKLEY: So when the VP said 'ICE agents have absolute immunity' in violating people's civil rights, he was effectively correct?
BIER: Effectively, yes. Right now as the law stands.
RON JOHNSON: 650k people that are at large in America have committed crimes. Mr Bier, you're shaking your head
BIER: They're not at large. They're in prison. They're in prison where they should be
JOHNSON: They're not detained!
BIER: They're detained by the states. They're not detained by ICE
KENNEDY: You said, 'Republicans think can troll their way to ethnic cleansing.' Did I read that correctly?
BIER: DHS tweeted for 100m deportations. That would be ethnic cleansing!
K: You don't think it's hyperbolic?
B: I think advocating 100m deportations is ethnic cleansing. Yes. Your time is up
“A WSJ investigation tracked the U.S. citizens caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize dissenters” www.wsj.com/us-news/immi...
“Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II…”
Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.
There is a legal provision in immigration law that someone married to a US citizen can stay in the US while there visa is pending. Immigration officials have long recognized it to allow residency during the wait time. The DHS has just stopped following this part of the law.
They've now killed four people -- three U.S. citizens and a Mexican national. They've shot several more.
They've lied about all of them. They haven't shaded the truth. They haven't "misled" us. They've brazenly, knowingly lied while in possession of the evidence disproving their lies.
CBS obtained video of the DHS killing of an unarmed man in Texas that DHS concealed for nearly a year, which clearly contradicts claims that he violently rammed anyone. He is shot with his brake lights on, car not moving or barely moving. Another DHS crime.
For anyone with relatives or friends who still claim Trump is targeting only "illegal" migrants, this interview with @davidjbier.bsky.social dispels the myth. It explains how the US govt is blocking legal immigration - even people who followed the process and paid all the fees to become citizens.
NEW: ICE tackled + arrested Juanita Avila, an Oregon shop owner who is a legal permanent resident and had her green card in her pocket.
When she asked through sobs why they didn't believe her, one masked agent replied: “Because they lie all the time.”
Video + interview with her and her daughter:
NEW: Here's the story of a woman deported by Kristi Noem. Legally in the United States (as a DACA recipient), she is the mother of a U.S. citizen and was working to help the homeless—but when she went for an appointment to get a green card, she was deported.
www.thebulwark.com/p/kristi-noe...
Good news that the execrable Kristi Noem has been fired, but Trump should really be firing Stephen Miller, the primary engineer of the vile ethnic reengineering agenda and murderously violent civic tensions that are sucking all of them into a bottomless political sinkhole, Trump included.
An ICE detainee in Arizona has died of a TOOTH INFECTION after it went untreated for weeks, a local official says. He was a Haitian asylum seeker imprisoned in Florence, Arizona. @emilybregel.bsky.social reports.
tucson.com/news/local/b...
“The court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the US in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again & again & again—to force the US govt. to comply with court orders”
*210* violations of court orders in MN alone according to Reagan-appointed judge x.com/rparloff/sta...
Columbia President with NEW details:
5 DHS agents entered a residency with no warrant.
They said they were police looking for a missing kid.
Security camera even captures them showing pictures of the "kid."
A campus officer asked for a warrant & their boss.
They ignored him & took the student.
'IT ENDS TODAY': A federal judge in NJ says the Trump admin has continued to violate court orders in immigration cases and says he's prepared to haul in DOJ and DHS officials under oath. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Columbia says DHS entered a dorm at dawn today under false pretenses, detaining a student in violation of the law and university policy.
I tried it once. It made the slide much more beautiful! Except for the aliasing of the text. And the complete uneditability of the monolithic image. I thought I was doing it wrong!
"In Chicago, of 92 people arrested for assaulting or impeding officers last fall, 74 cases have resulted in no charges; in 13 cases, charges were filed and dismissed; and five charged cases were still pending."
A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Incredible opinion. It holds that the common ICE tactic of jumping out of an unidentified rental vehicle and seizing suspected noncitizens while masked violates the Fourth Amendment because the *manner* of the seizure is incompatible with a free society governed by the rule of law.
At this point, we should just assume they’re lying. But by their own account the kid had no record. US citizen. At the very least, it looks like multiple policy violations — they surrounded the car, fired into a moving vehicle, killed him through the driver’s side window.
1/ Okay, now I’m mad.
Any Supreme Court in our nation’s history before John Roberts would have upheld the lower courts’ injunctions blocking Trump’s tariffs & not issued a stay that let Trump wreck the economy and break the law for over a year.
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/u...
