from the because-of-course-they-did dept

This news will come as no surprise to anyone. Those who have been following police misconduct revelations for years have seen this happen time and time and time and time again. Those who are in the business of engaging in police misconduct have known for years that it’s easy to do and it seldom gets punished.

While Flock Safety is currently hoovering up most of the negative headlines about tech-enabled stalking by law enforcement officers, it’s a relative newcomer. Cops (and federal officers) have been exploiting database access for years to do everything from harass complainants to stalk their exes to dig up info on people they’d like to coerce into a sexual relationship.

The documents obtained by Wired come from the DHS OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility). The last time we saw a DHS-adjacent OPR take any action, it was to open investigations into people opposed to ICE, rather than limit itself to the confines of its office: investigating complaints about ICE officer misconduct. So, it’s nice to know the DHS OPR isn’t completely compromised. On the other hand… well…

Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations.

Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. 

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It is as it is everywhere. If you give someone access to tons of personal data and tracking information and then simply trust that they’ll do the right thing, you’ll always be disappointed. If you wouldn’t trust AI with this access, why would you trust humans? Their goals are far more simplistic, banal, and perverse.

And yet, this is what we’ve been doing for decades: allowing officers to access tons of personal info and providing them tech that can convert digital voyeurism into physical acts of stalking. The databases may be a necessary part of government functionality. But once you add license plate readers, facial recognition tech, and expensive algorithms to the mix, a bit of click-wrap is never going to be enough to deter officers (and government contractors) from using this wealth of information to um… enhance their personal lives.

In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a “heated divorce.” And yet another DHS employee allegedly used controversial ad-tech-derived location data to track several coworkers’ cell phones—which appears to be the first known internal abuse case involving DHS use of ad-tech-derived mobile location data.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. What’s seen here is just what’s been caught and documented. But everyone who wants to do this sort of thing learns stuff from those who have been caught. And it’s not just officers doing the expected ex-stalking. According to the documents, DHS employees and contractors have been caught supplying inside info to drug traffickers and other criminals.

And it’s not going to get better any time soon. Most officers are allowed to resign rather than face discipline or criminal charges. And the private sector’s revolving door just means contractors abusing their access will move on to other jobs in the same field, because surveillance tech companies are similarly uninterested in punishing employees for abusing access to surveillance tech and government databases.

Will this revelation result in meaningful change? Obviously, it won’t. Previous revelations have done little in terms of accountability or oversight. And this administration in particular is deeply opposed to accountability and oversight. Trump himself is openly supportive of law enforcement misconduct. That means the most likely response will be re-tasking the CBP Office of Professional Responsibility to align more with ICE’s bastardized version. The focus will no longer be internal. Instead, the OPR’s power and personnel will be redirected to target Trump critics and amplify the administration’s narratives. The only thing CBP officers and contractors will learn from this is: “Don’t get caught.”

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, law enforcement misconduct, mass deportation, opr, stalking

There’s no actual data, but if we had to guess the least-favourite Disney movie of former Amiga owners would have to be Frozen, because none of them will ever be able to “Let it Go”. The Amiga-derived AROS Research Operating System has just been ported to boot bare-metal on the Raspberry Pi, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Yes, there’s a 64-bit Amiga-compatible OS that runs on ARM. It truly is a time of wonders.

AROS has already been ported to a number of platforms. Besides x86, there’s a PPC port that provided a lot of code to the MorphOS, which you can read about here, and a back-port that brings AROS back to original Amiga 68k hardware. There is even a build for RISC V.

AROS developers are making sure that Amiga legacy isn’t stuck on any given hardware, so they never have to let it go. So while not totally out of left field, this development is “pretty nifty” both in that it gives another ultralight operating system for the Pi, with boot times to rival RiscOS, and another platform for ex-Amiga users to play with that isn’t 40 years old. Previously if you wanted to run AROS on a Pi it was virtualized in Linux, making it similar to all other Amiga emulators.

While some software has been recompiled for ARM, the available software isn’t as full-featured as x86, but that’s almost certain to change as time goes on. It’s early days yet and this build is very much a work in progress. Likewise we expect support for other Pi boards to expand, as while right now the target is the Pi3, the forum threads include discussion of the Pi4 and even Zero2W.

You can check the port out in action in a video by [Dan Wood] embedded below, sent to us by tipster [Stephen Walters]. Thanks [Stephen]!

We have featured AROS once before, thought it’s been a while.

Twelve men. One jury room. Ninety-six minutes. No explosions, spaceships, serial killers, car chases or Dolby Atmos objects flying over your sofa.

And nearly 70 years later, 12 Angry Men remains more suspenseful than most movies equipped with all of those things.

Sidney Lumet’s 1957 feature debut arrives on Criterion Collection 4K UHD on September 8, 2026, with a new 4K digital restoration presented in Dolby Vision HDR and its original monaural soundtrack in uncompressed audio. Criterion is pricing the two-disc 4K UHD plus Blu-ray edition at $49.95 MSRP, with the company currently offering it for $39.96 directly.

We briefly included the release in our recent look at Manhunter, Dracula and 12 Angry Men, but this one deserves a closer look. Not because it is going to demonstrate the capabilities of your height channels, but because it illustrates something physical-media collectors sometimes forget: 4K UHD is also a preservation format, and image quality is about considerably more than explosions and peak brightness.

12 Angry Men 4K UHD Release Details

Criterion’s new edition presents the 1957 film in its 1.66:1 aspect ratio, in black and white, from a new 4K digital restoration with Dolby Vision. The film retains an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, rather than receiving a newly fabricated surround remix that would make very little sense for a movie built almost entirely around twelve men talking in one room.

Sometimes leaving the audio alone is the upgrade.

The package contains the film on a 4K UHD disc plus a Blu-ray carrying the movie and supplemental features. Criterion has also retained one of the most historically valuable extras from its earlier edition: the 1954 live television version of 12 Angry Men, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner for CBS’s Studio One. Reginald Rose’s television drama came three years before Lumet’s feature adaptation and allows viewers to see how the material evolved from live television into one of the defining American films of the 1950s.

Criterion 4K UHD Features

• New 4K digital restoration
• Dolby Vision HDR
• Uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• 1954 Studio One television version directed by Franklin J. Schaffner
• Production history tracing the story from television to feature film
• Archival interviews with Sidney Lumet
• Interview with screenwriter Walter Bernstein about Lumet
• Interview concerning writer Reginald Rose
• Tragedy in a Temporary Town, the 1956 teleplay directed by Lumet and written by Rose
• Interview about cinematographer Boris Kaufman
• Original trailer
• English SDH subtitles
• Essay by writer and law professor Thane Rosenbaum

The 4K UHD plus Blu-ray edition arrives September 8 for $49.95 MSRP. Criterion also lists a $39.95 Blu-ray and $29.95 DVD edition.

How Did Twelve Men in One Room Become This Influential?

12 Angry Men began as a Reginald Rose teleplay broadcast on Studio One in 1954. Henry Fonda later became interested in bringing it to the screen, producing the feature with Rose and starring as Juror 8, the lone member of the jury initially unwilling to convict an 18-year-old defendant of murdering his father without discussing the evidence further.

The film does not tell us that Fonda’s character knows the defendant is innocent. He doesn’t. His position is considerably more important: if a person’s life is at stake, perhaps eleven men wanting to get home is not quite enough evidence to execute him.

From there, Rose’s screenplay dismantles the apparent certainty of the case piece by piece while exposing prejudice, anger, ego, class assumptions and personal baggage among the jurors. The room becomes a pressure cooker in which the legal principle of reasonable doubt has to compete with the fact that human beings are the ones applying it.

The film received three Academy Award nominations, for Best Motion Picture, Sidney Lumet’s direction and Rose’s adapted screenplay. It lost all three to The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is the cinematic equivalent of having a very good season during the year somebody else goes undefeated.

Its reputation only grew. The Library of Congress selected 12 Angry Men for the National Film Registry in 2007, recognizing its cultural, historical and aesthetic importance. The Library’s own essay notes how extensively the film has been used to teach civic responsibility, social justice and the importance of resisting group pressure.

That’s a rather substantial afterlife for a movie Hollywood initially expected people to watch while twelve sweaty men argued around a table.

Sidney Lumet Made the Jury Room Shrink

The real reason 12 Angry Men works as cinema rather than photographed theater is what Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman do with that room.

Lumet developed what he called a “lens plot.” As the deliberations progress, the filmmakers gradually move toward longer focal lengths, reducing the apparent space between the characters and making the jury room feel increasingly compressed. The camera also begins above eye level, moves to eye level and eventually drops below it, causing the ceiling to enter the compositions and increasing the sense of confinement. Only when the jurors finally leave does Lumet switch to an unusually wide lens and higher camera position, visually allowing the audience to breathe again.

That is why a 4K restoration makes considerable sense.

Boris Kaufman’s black-and-white photography depends on facial texture, sweat, cigarette smoke, fabric, window light, shadow detail and the increasingly uncomfortable proximity of one human face to another. Dolby Vision does not need neon colors or 4,000-nit highlights to be useful; carefully controlled grayscale, bright whites, deep blacks and subtle shadow transitions matter just as much.

If Criterion gets those elements right, the jury room should not merely look cleaner. It should feel smaller.

Why the Film Still Works

Courtroom movies frequently focus on the lawyers. 12 Angry Men focuses on what happens after the attorneys stop talking and ordinary citizens are asked to decide whether another human being lives or dies.

That shifted the drama from legal performance to moral responsibility.

The film also established many of the themes Lumet would pursue for decades: institutions under pressure, individuals confronting authority, justice compromised by human weakness and ordinary people forced into decisions that reveal who they really are. You can draw a remarkably straight line from 12 Angry Men through Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Verdict.

Our recent Criterion review of Lumet’s Network made the same point from another direction. Lumet was exceptionally good at putting people inside systems that claimed to function rationally and then showing what happened when greed, fear, prejudice or ambition entered the room.

Apparently the problem was never the conference table.

The Bottom Line

12 Angry Men is not the first movie anybody will use to demonstrate a new subwoofer, but that makes Criterion’s 4K release more interesting rather than less.

A proper restoration can reveal what Lumet and Kaufman were doing with faces, lenses, light, contrast and physical space without turning a 1957 black-and-white film into something it was never supposed to be. Keeping the original mono soundtrack intact is equally important; twelve exceptional actors and Reginald Rose’s dialogue do not require overhead speakers to hold your attention.

Nearly seven decades later, the film still asks an uncomfortable question: how certain should we be before we destroy somebody else’s life?

Turns out you don’t need a car chase for that to create some tension.

Where to pre-order: $49.95 at Amazon (available September 8, 2026)

Related Reading:

Are you reading more text written by an AI bot? A Pew Research study published this week says it’s very likely.

That’s not breaking news if you’re aware of the Dead Internet Theory that dates back to 2021. CNET writer Trisha Jandoc dove into that theory last year, which basically says people believe the internet died 10 years ago in 2016 and that much of what we see online now is AI-generated.

There is some truth to that. Pew researchers scanned nearly half a million English webpages from the past five years using Common Crawl, a web archive. That dates back to before ChatGPT was made publicly available in November 2022. Researchers ran those pages through Open Pangram, an AI detection tool, to see if it was written or edited by AI. Then the researchers looked at a sample of 10,000 pages from last month to spot signs of AI-written content. They looked for phrases, words and language that are more common among AI bots than humans. 

Researchers made it clear that AI detection models don’t always get it right. Sometimes they flag text written by humans as AI authorship and AI-written text as being written by a human. 

Nonetheless, the study found that 10% of the samples “show significant signs of AI authorship.” 

“One in 10 webpages as of July 2026 may seem modest. But the internet includes a mix of new and old material. A lot of pages in these random samples couldn’t have been written by AI,” the study findings said. “If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced.” 

Researchers say this trend began in 2022 when ChatGPT was released and increased as other AI bots launched, like Claude and Google’s Gemini. 

Where is AI-written content spotted the most? 

The Pew Research study shows that AI-derived text is most common on .com domains, with about 1 out of every 10 pages. Other domains have less AI-written work — 4.6% for .org and around 1% for .edu and .gov webpages. 

Looking to spot AI-written text? Researchers say certain types of punctuation, words and phrases are more common in AI-generated text compared to humans. For example, em dashes and Oxford commas in lists. This is mainly because they’re trained on datasets of human text, so they mimic that style and, as a result, use them more than humans do. The researchers found that em dashes appear twice as frequently, negative parallelisms are more common and Oxford commas are used 63% more than in human-written text. AI is also more likely to use certain words, like “delve” and “interplay.”

“They also learn to recognize more subtle statistical patterns in word choice and sentence structure, which help them determine whether a particular piece of writing was likely AI-authored,” researchers said. 

A few other common AI-written flags include key terms from your prompt being used repeatedly, repetitive explanations and a bot-like tone instead of a natural one. More importantly, AI bots even make it clear that their responses could be inaccurate, so it’s best to double-check elsewhere online. But in this case, Pew’s findings show that we may not be able to trust the sources that we’re verifying it against if that content is AI-generated, too.

Dashia is the consumer insights editor for CNET. She specializes in data-driven analysis and news at the intersection of tech, personal finance and consumer sentiment. Dashia investigates economic shifts and everyday challenges to help readers make well-informed decisions, and she covers a range of topics, including technology, security, energy and money. Dashia graduated from the University of South Carolina with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She loves baking, teaching spinning and spending time with her family.

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Before astronauts became brands, billionaires started launching rockets for fun and every space movie required a soundtrack capable of loosening drywall, there was The Right Stuff.

Philip Kaufman’s 1983 epic about America’s test pilots and the original Mercury Seven astronauts arrives from the Criterion Collection on 4K UHD on November 24, 2026, with a new 4K restoration supervised and approved by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Dolby Vision HDR and the film’s 70mm 5.1 surround soundtrack in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio.

That audio choice is especially welcome. Criterion has not invented a Dolby Atmos remix to make the back of the box look newer. Instead, it is preserving a soundtrack connected to the film’s 70mm presentation, which feels appropriate for a movie that won Academy Awards for both Sound and Sound Effects Editing.

Sometimes the upgrade is knowing when not to “upgrade” something.

The Right Stuff 4K UHD Release Details

Criterion’s director-approved special edition uses a new 4K digital restoration supervised and approved by Caleb Deschanel, whose cinematography earned an Academy Award nomination for the film. The 193-minute feature is presented in its 1.85:1 aspect ratio with Dolby Vision HDR.

Audio options include the 70mm 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack, along with alternate 2.0 surround and 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio tracks. The two-disc set places the film on 4K UHD and the supplemental material on Blu-ray.

Criterion 4K UHD Features

• New 4K restoration supervised and approved by Caleb Deschanel
• Dolby Vision HDR
• 70mm 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Alternate 2.0 surround and 5.1 surround audio tracks
• Archival Philip Kaufman interview excerpts from the Academy Film Archive
• New programs on the film’s visual effects, sound design and editing
• Realizing The Right Stuff
• T 20 Years and Counting
• The Real Men with The Right Stuff
• Selected-scene commentary with Kaufman and members of the cast and crew
• Deleted scenes
• Trailer
• English SDH subtitles
• Essay by critic Michael Sragow

Criterion lists the November 24, 2026 4K UHD edition at $49.95 MSRP, with a current direct preorder price of $39.96. A two-disc Blu-ray edition is $39.95 MSRP.

Three Hours About Test Pilots Shouldn’t Work This Well

Kaufman’s film is based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the early American space program, beginning not with NASA but with Chuck Yeager, played by Sam Shepard, and the dangerous world of test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base.

Yeager’s 1947 attempt to break the sound barrier establishes the film’s central question: what exactly constitutes courage when courage is being transformed into public mythology?

The story eventually shifts to the Mercury Seven, with Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Ed Harris as John Glenn, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper and an exceptional ensemble filling out the rest of the program. Kaufman avoids turning them into marble statues. They are competitive, frightened, funny, vain, ambitious and occasionally ridiculous.

That is a major reason the movie still works.

The Library of Congress added The Right Stuff to the National Film Registry in 2013, recognizing a film that operates simultaneously as a Western, a satire and a Space Age epic. It celebrates extraordinary achievement while remaining suspicious of the media machine turning astronauts into national celebrities.

The rockets matter, but so do the men standing beside them wondering why Life magazine suddenly cares what their wives are wearing.

Why The Right Stuff Was So Influential

Science-fiction movies had been taking audiences into space for decades, but The Right Stuff was more interested in how human beings actually got there.

Kaufman combined practical effects, aerial photography and NASA archival footage to make the early space program feel dangerous, improvised and physical. Aircraft fail. Rockets explode. Machinery rattles. People make mistakes. The movie never lets the hardware become cleaner or safer than it really was.

It also helped establish a way of dramatizing aerospace history that could be heroic without becoming completely reverential. The men accomplish extraordinary things, but the film is equally interested in politics, celebrity, ego and the machinery required to manufacture national heroes.

The Academy noticed. The Right Stuff received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor for Sam Shepard and Cinematography for Deschanel. It won four: Film Editing, Original Score for Bill Conti, Sound and Sound Effects Editing.

More than four decades later, that combination of technical detail, human drama and healthy skepticism remains difficult to duplicate.

Why 4K UHD Is Such a Good Fit

Deschanel’s photography moves between desert landscapes, cockpit interiors, military installations, launch pads, fire, clouds and the blackness of space. A strong Dolby Vision presentation should help preserve the film’s wide tonal range without making it look artificially modern.

The practical effects may benefit just as much. Modern space movies can put a virtual camera almost anywhere, but The Right Stuff comes from an era when spacecraft, aircraft and optical effects had texture, weight and physical lighting. A good 4K master should make that craftsmanship easier to appreciate without exposing it merely for the sake of increased resolution.

Then there is the sound. Aircraft engines, rocket launches, cockpit noise, explosions and Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score were central to the original experience. Criterion’s decision to preserve the 70mm 5.1 presentation in lossless audio gives home-theater owners something much more meaningful than another revisionist remix.

No height channels required. Your subwoofer will cope with the indignity.

A Different Kind of Space Movie

Modern space films often emphasize visual scale and technical spectacle. The Right Stuff is interested in something messier: why anybody would willingly climb into machines that engineers themselves were not always sure would survive.

That makes its heroes more interesting. Yeager, Glenn, Shepard, Grissom and Cooper are not presented as flawless monuments. They are people operating at the edge of technology, politics and personal ambition.

Kaufman also understands that bravery and insanity occasionally occupy neighboring offices.

That human element is what keeps the film from becoming a museum piece. The technology has changed enormously since 1983, but the personalities, institutional pressures and need to turn complicated people into simple public heroes remain remarkably familiar.

The Bottom Line

Criterion could have sold The Right Stuff on a new 4K restoration and Dolby Vision alone. The involvement of Caleb Deschanel and preservation of the 70mm 5.1 soundtrack make this edition considerably more compelling.

Its photography, practical effects and Oscar-winning sound work are exactly the kind of material that can benefit from UHD without requiring unnecessary revisionism. The supplemental package also focuses on the filmmaking itself, including the visual effects, editing and sound design that helped make the movie so influential.

At 193 minutes, The Right Stuff will also test your commitment to both physical media and bladder management.

But Kaufman’s film earned the running time. More than forty years later, it remains funny, muscular, technically fascinating and deeply impressed by the people who pushed aviation and space exploration forward without ever becoming entirely convinced that putting them on pedestals was a good idea.

That still feels like the right way to remember them.

Where to pre-order: $49.95 at Criterion

Related Reading:

• There are signs that locked chats are coming to ChatGPT
• They would be hidden from most screens inside the app
• It’s not clear how they would work in terms of chat memory

OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI assistant continues to evolve and improve, and it looks as though the latest upgrade to the app may let you lock your most sensitive cuts behind a PIN code or fingerprint scan, to prevent anyone else from catching a glimpse of them.

This is based on hidden, not-yet-active code found in the latest version of ChatGPT for Android, spotted by Android Authority. There are references to “locked chats” and the ability to “protect chats” from prying eyes.