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ResearcherZero • July 11, 2026 4:18 AM
De-funding public access to government records and data.
The National Archives and Records Administration is closing its facilities in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. Staffing was additionally cut by more than 500 employees. Funding has been in dire circumstances for many years and the administration is operating with a reduced budget which hampers its ability to properly function.
In 2024 a major report on the status of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) warned that NARA desperately needed more funding in order to continue reviewing and declassifying records and meet Freedom of Information requests requirements. As electronic records add to the problem of paper records already overwhelming NARA, the lack of staffing, adequate equipment and infrastructure has seen the backlog of requests grow to the point where requests can become stuck in queues of 12 years waiting to be processed.
Many records will now no longer make it to the National Archives. That information will become lost to the public. As public record and federal data access is reduced for the public, or becomes entirely unavailable in many cases, the Trump administration is amassing data for itself to further its own interests and amass even greater power and control. Abrupt changes to how data is collected, have altered once comparable datasets and how information can be looked at over time, obscuring and distorting how different data might be interpreted.
Now the Trump administration has begun closing public records facilities containing historical records, gutting the National Archives and deleting or removing access to federal data. Important programs that collect vital statistics and information are being de-funded, wound back and ended. Scientific and historical data is also being deleted as the Trump administration makes changes to government websites, agencies and services.
The cost of filing FOI requests has become out of reach for many. Only corporations and the wealthy will have the time and money necessary. Changes to how census and economic data are collected will add to the reduction in data that is available to the public. Removal of scientific and historical information worsens the problem. As facts disappear and access to historical records is lost, fabrications, misinformation and lies will fill the gaps.
Without the paper trail, the public cannot hold government accountable for its actions. This is taking place while the government consolidates data for itself and massively expands its surveillance capabilities.
When history is rewritten, citizens can find themselves written out of it without warning, as the foundations of society shift around them and administrative errors alter reality.
For members of the public to protect their rights, property and liberty, access to public records can be essential. Without that access, the ability of citizens to defend themselves from unreasonable or criminal actions becomes far more difficult. Proving ownership, ancestry or events – perhaps might become impossible – if the documentation required to ascertain certain facts, is no longer accessible or perhaps no longer exists.
Cith • July 11, 2026 4:39 AM
AP News: Greek police arrest 2 people over 2010 fatal arson attack on Athens bank
https://apnews.com/article/greece-marfin-bank-deaths-firebomb-arrests-257bbbbe0a2598872278c87d801d06fd
A highly concerning development out of Greece this week regarding the intersection of digital forensics, generative AI, and political policing.
Greek police have just arrested two suspects for the infamous 2010 Marfin Bank arson attack, 16 years after the fact. While the English-language wire reports (like the AP link above) merely mention that the cold case was reopened due to an “anonymous tip” and the “cross-referencing” of old photographs, local Greek media is heavily pushing the narrative that these arrests were made possible by “new technologies,” specifically AI image enhancement and body-type/gait identification from the original footage.
This is a textbook example of the “CSI Enhance” fantasy being weaponized in the real world.
As anyone with a background in information theory knows, the Data Processing Inequality dictates that you cannot recover lost information from a degraded signal. The CCTV and protest footage from 2010 is heavily compressed, low-resolution, and chaotic. Applying modern generative AI to a 15-pixel blur doesn’t “clean up” the image to reveal the true face of the perpetrator. it simply instructs the neural network to hallucinate a statistically plausible face based on its training distribution.
Furthermore, attempting to establish identity matches based on clothing or body silhouette from 16-year-old footage of a riot completely ignores both base-rate fallacies and intra-class variability.
Using algorithmic interpolations and statistical guesses to secure arrest warrants a decade and a half later—especially against the backdrop of an upcoming election cycle—is a dangerous biometric overreach. It sets a terrible precedent where the synthetic “hallucinations” of a machine learning model are presented to courts and juries as hard, indisputable forensic evidence.
Clive Robinson • July 11, 2026 5:38 AM
@ lurker, ALL,
With regards,
“If you sup with the devil …”
I would not believe very much of it.
I suspect the real reason Apple is doing what it is doing is trying to keep a competitor out of the market by lengthy litigation (an up and coming practice).
I’ve seen it before and an employer in the past tried it on with me.
Because of a lack of trust I used to “Blind Carbon Copy”(BCC) everything to my home server that I had back then.
Also I would Email to and from home things I was “working on”.
Engineers as such tend to work best in short bursts of serious “mind work” an hour here or an hour there all through the day.
I also had a food issue… Eating wheat based products acted like a slow “micky finn” not fast like chloral hydrate but slow like taking some types of sleeping tablet. Taking about a couple of hours to KO me so I was not much use as anything other than a zombie post lunch. I was tested repeatedly for celiacs but it always came up inconclusive. So I felt guilty about not being able to work in the afternoon so worked in the evening / night.
Way back then they concluded it was probably something to do with “sleep apnea” and Migraine issues… which has in later life become like a “Cluster ‘suicide’ headache” of indescribable head crushing like pain). Effecting the side of the face near the ear spreading up into the temples and causing significant visual issues. I’ve recently been informed that the wheat issues and headaches are likely to be related…
So no bacon and egg sarnies any longer or Singapore Noodles either 🙁
oh haha. i wanted to thank gchq for doing a “once over” with qatar-1.
MUCH appreciated.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
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