Oracle sells enterprise databases. It’s a very solid business. They have so many corporate and government deals that Larry Ellison doesn’t even slightly have to pretend to be human any more.

But Ellison got greedy and did a deal in September for OpenAI to pay Oracle three hundred billion dollars for data centres over the next five years. [WSJ, archive]

The Oracle share price went through the roof! On 9 September, it was $241. On 10 September, $328! All time high!

Now, you might think: hold on, OpenAI’s job is to burn money. They claimed $10 billion annualised revenue as of June last year. Where’s OpenAI going to get $60 billion a year to pay Oracle from? Well, Sam Altman’s confident he’ll work something out. Everyone in the world will buy enough ChatGPT to pay the bill! You just watch.

Putting Oracle this close to the OpenAI money bonfire is not working out so well for Oracle. They just got sued by bondholders today.

Oracle has always been the cloud provider you don’t want. You go to Amazon for stuff that works, you go to Azure if you’re running Windows or you hate yourself — or both — you go to Google if you hate getting customer service, and you go to Oracle if you think a deal with Larry Ellison ends any other way than a fiery pit, getting poked at with pitchforks by demons. (Oracle’s lawyers.)

But Oracle really wants cloud business, and they think Stargate’s their big chance. Oracle has told Wall Street analysts they expect $166 billion each year in cloud revenue by 2030 — but most of that imaginary number is OpenAI. In a deal that assumes OpenAI gets more venture capital funding than exists in the world. And doesn’t die. [FT]

Oracle’s stock price gains from the OpenAI deal were reversed by November. Tech stocks had a dip around this time — but no-one dipped as badly as Oracle. It almost looks like an OpenAI deal may not be stock market magic any more. [FT, archive]

Oracle’s money guys are getting cold feet. The deal for a one-gigawatt Stargate data centre in Saline Township in Michigan may be off — Blue Owl Capital said in December they wouldn’t get the $10 billion together to build the thing. Though Oracle swore the next day that the data centre’s still happening. [FT, archive; press release]

Finally, just today, Oracle got sued by bondholders, led by the Ohio Carpenters’ Pension Plan. Oracle had issued $18 billion in bonds in September to pay for its big Stargate plans. The people who lent Oracle that $18 billion are not happy, because Oracle offered another $38 billion in data centre bonds in October. And market unease over Oracle’s debt levels made the September bonds drop in price badly. [Bloomberg, archive; Bloomberg, archive]

The bondholders say the September offering documents were “false and misleading” because they didn’t mention the October plans which crashed the price. This has been filed as a class action, but it’s a big class action with a serious backer. [complaint, PDF]

Oracle stock is at $191 today, which is down 21% on the $241 it was in September — before the OpenAI deal.

Larry Ellison is not a stupid man. He can count. He’s quite capable of looking at OpenAI’s numbers and going “waaait a minute.” But somehow, he was fooled by Sam Altman.

• Video — Podcast

Everyone loves Copilot in Office! ^{[citation needed]} The handy AI button for making stuff up! It’s not like facts matter, is it.

Microsoft’s worked its backside off to get the Copilot sales number going up — no matter what.

But Microsoft can see exactly who’s using Copilot. And you office workers stuck with your bouncy Copilot pal aren’t using the lying chatbot so much.

So Microsoft is paying actual money for its customers to get training in Copilot! [Information, paywalled]

Microsoft knows their customers would love a version of Copilot that didn’t just make stuff up. But also, just making stuff up is inherent to chatbots. The hallucinations cannot be fixed. So instead, let’s:

teach workers how to use the features, as many of them just aren’t good at it.

All those people who hate using Copilot? Turns out they’re just prompting it wrong!

The City of Raleigh in North Carolina bought 200 seats of Copilot and it got Microsoft-paid training:

We wanted to make sure that people are actually using the technology that we’re paying for.

So sunk cost fallacy then. Microsoft is paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to train large customers.

Microsoft swears it’s “seeing strong adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.” But it also needs to pay people to not just despise this exciting new technology.

Because Microsoft is worrying about the worst possible course of events transpiring: customers not renewing.

• Video — Podcast

Kurze Zwischenmeldung weil bei mir gerade sehr viel los ist, ich aber Bescheid geben will, dass ich noch da bin. Ab nächster Woche dann auch wieder wie gewohnt und in regelmäßig.

Neulich in Warschau:

A 13kg deer decided to take on a 1.7-tonne rhinoceros in a curious confrontation at Wroclaw Zoo in Poland on Friday (9 January).

The Chinese Muntjac, a small deer species native to Asia, fearlessly engaged with its huge opponent.

Despite the substantial size difference, the small creature repeatedly approached the much larger mammal, which appeared to respond playfully.

Wroclaw Zoo wrote on Facebook: “His partner is in heat, and the bachelor is pumping with testosterone. He needs to release his energy and show who’s boss – even if his sparring partner weighs 1.7 tonnes.

(Direktlink)

Today's links

• How the Light Gets In: The door is open a crack!
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Poitras v First Look; Aaronsw's "Against School"; I was investigated by the FBI.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

How the Light Gets In (permalink)

Of all the tools that I use to maintain my equilibrium in these dark days, none is so important as remembering the distinction between happiness, optimism and hope.

Happiness is self-explanatory – and fleeting. Even in the worst of times, there are moments of happiness – a delicious meal with friends, a beautiful sunrise, a stolen moment with your love. These are the things we chase, and rightly so. But happiness is always a goal, rarely a steady state.

Optimism, on the other hand, is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It's just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing its course.

But hope? That's the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn't see from our lower vantage-point. It's not necessary – or even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there in stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/03/hope-not-optimism/

These days, I am often unhappy, but I am filled with hope.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a speech, "The Post-American Internet," at the 39th Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition

In that talk, I laid out the case for hope. So many of the worst aspects of modern life can be traced to our enshittified technology, from mass surveillance and totalitarian control to wage suppression and conspiratorial cults. This enshittified technology, in turn, is downstream of policy decisions made by politicians who were bullied into their positions by the US trade rep, who used the threat of tariffs to push for laws that protected the right of tech giants to plunder the world's money and data, by criminalizing competitors who disenshittified their products, leaving technology users defenseless.

Trump's tariffs have effectively killed that threat. If you can't tell from day to day – let alone year to year – whether the US will accept your exports, you can't rely on exporting to the USA. What's more, generations of pro-oligarch policies have stripped America's bottom 90% of discretionary income, stagnating their wages and leaving them mired in health, education, and housing debt (even as the system finds ever more sadistic and depraved ways for arm-breakers to collect on that debt):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

This is terrible for Americans, but when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. With the decline of the US market for global exporters, there's finally political space to stop worrying about tariffs and reconsider anti-circumvention laws, to create "disenshittification nations" that stage raids on the most valuable lines of business of the most profitable companies in world history – Big Tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/#mere-billions

People who dream of turning American tech trillions into their own billions are powerful allies in the fight against enshittification, but they're only one group that we can recruit to our side. There's another powerful bloc waiting in the wings: national security hawks.

These people are rightly terrified that Trump will order his tech companies to switch off their governments, businesses and households, all of whom are dependent on US cloud-based administrative software for email, document creation and archiving, databases, mobile devices. Trump's tech companies could also brick any nation's mobile phones, medical devices, cars, and tractors.

It's the same risk that China hawks warned of when it looked as though Huawei would provide all of the world's 5G infrastructure: allow companies that are absolutely beholden to an autocrat who is not restrained by the rule of law to permeate your society, and your society becomes a prisoner to the autocrat's whims and goodwill.

A coalition of digital rights activists; investors and entrepreneurs; and national security hawks makes for a powerful bloc indeed. Each partner in the coalition can mobilize different constituencies and can influence different parts of the state. These are very different groups, and that's why this coalition is so exciting: this is a three-pronged assault on the hegemony of Big Tech.

That's not to say that this will automatically happen. Nothing happens automatically. Fuck pessimism, and fuck optimism, too. Things happen because people do stuff:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/17/against-the-great-forces-of-history/

That's where hope comes in. The door to a better technological future has been slammed shut and triple-locked for 25 years. Today, it is open a crack. A crack isn't much, but as Leonard Cohen taught us, "that's how the light gets in":

https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-anthem-lyrics

Understand: this isn't a bet on politicians discovering heretofore unsuspected wellsprings of courage or principle. This is a bet on politicians confronting unstoppable political will that corners them into doing the right thing.

I understand why Europeans, Canadians and Britons might feel cynical about their political classes (to say nothing of Americans, of course). It has been decades since a political party delivered broad, structural change that improved the lives of everyday people. Instead, we've had generations of neoliberal austerity sadists, autocrats and corrupt dolts who've helped billionaires stripmine our civilization and set the world on fire.

But politics have changed before, and they can change again (note that I didn't say they will change – just that they can, because we can change them). Society may feel deadlocked, but crises precipitate change. As I said in my Hamburg speech, the EU went from 15 years behind in their solar transition to ten years ahead, in just a few years, thanks to the energy crisis that slammed into the continent after Putin invaded Ukraine.

Crises precipitate change. The fact that the EU pivoted so quickly away from fossil fuels to solar is nothing short of a miracle. Anyone who feels like their politicians would never buck Big Tech needs to explain how it came to pass that these politicians just told Big Oil to fuck off. The fossil fuel industry is losing. This is goddamned wild – indeed, their loss might just be locked in at this point, because fossil fuel and its applications (like internal combustion) are now more expensive and more impractical than the cleantech alternatives:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/02/there-goes-the-sun/#carbon-shifting

Sure, it sucks that Trump has killed incentives to drive an EV and that the EU is dropping its goal for phasing out internal combustion engines, but given that EVs are faster, cheaper and better than conventional automobiles, the writing is on the wall for the IC fleet.

That's the wild thing about better technology: people want it, and they get pissed off when they're told they can't have it. When the Texas legislature tried to pass a law requiring that power companies add a watt of fossil-fuel generation capacity for every watt of solar they brought online, Trump-voting farmers and ranchers from the deepest red parts of Texas (Texas!!) flooded town halls and hearings, demanding an end to "DEI for natural gas":

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/for-reality

They won.

Politics aren't just terrible today, they're in chaos. Crises precipitate change.

After World War II, one of Britain's two parties, the Liberals (AKA "Whigs") imploded. With them out of the way, the Labour Party rose to power, with a transformative agenda backed by a mass movement, which created the British welfare state.

Today, the British Conservative Party (AKA "Tories") are also imploding, and look set to be taken over by a fascist MAGA-alike party, Reform. As of a couple months ago, that seemed like very bad news, since Labour is also set to implode, thanks to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's austerity, authoritarianism, corruption and cowardice. For quite a while, it looked like when Starmer's Labour is totally wiped out in the next election, they would give way to Reform, plunging Britain into Hungarian- (or American)-style autocracy.

But all that has changed. Today, the UK Greens have a new leader, Zack Polanski, who has dragged the Greens into an agenda that promises transformations as bold as the ones that remade the country under Clement Attlee's Labour government. Polanski is a fantastic campaigner, and he is committed to the same kind of grassroots co-governance with a mass movement that characterized Zohran Mamdani's historic NYC mayoral campaign.

In other words, it seems like both of Britain's sclerotic mainstream parties will be wiped out in the next election, and the real fight in the UK is between two transformative upstart parties, one of which plans to spend billionaires' dark money to mobilize fascists yearning for ethnic cleansing; and the other wants a fair, prosperous and equitable society where we abolish billionaires, confront the climate emergency, and smash corporate power. In other words, the UK is heading into an election in which voters have a choice that's more meaningful than Coke vs Pepsi.

Versions of this are playing out around the world. Anti-billionaire policies have surfaced time and again, everywhere, since the late 2010s:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

None of this means that we will automatically win. I'm not asking you to be an optimist here, but I am demanding that you have hope. Hope is a discipline: it requires that you tirelessly seek out the best ways to climb up that gradient toward a better world, trusting that as you attain higher elevation, you will find new paths up that slope.

The door is open a crack. Now isn't the time to complain that it isn't open wider – now's the time to throw your shoulder against it.

(Image: Joe Mabel, CC BY 3.0)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• No, liberals were not right about Trump https://www.peoplesline.org/p/no-liberals-were-not-right-about

• Asimov’s Editor Sheila Williams Hospitalized https://locusmag.com/2026/01/sheila-williams-hospitalized/

• Want to understand the K-shaped economy? Go fly on an airplane https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/business/k-shaped-economy-delta-nightcap

• How It Stops, How It Ends https://www.againstallenemies.net/p/how-it-stops-how-it-ends

• ‘They’ve pickled each others’ brains’ https://sf.gazetteer.co/theyve-pickled-each-others-brains?giftLink=ce04b5653afd37bc361bfdaab30b6b62

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsao Journal of a homeless woman in San Francisco: witty, articulate, pregnant, and addicted to heroin https://web.archive.org/web/20010124050200/https://www.thematrix.com/~sherrod/diary.html

#20yrsago Study: how Canadian copyright law is bought by entertainment co’s https://web.archive.org/web/20060207141159/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1075

#20yrsago My Toronto Star editorial about Hollywood’s Member of Parliament https://web.archive.org/web/20060616024225/http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1137279034770

#10yrsago Aaron Swartz’s “Against School” – business leaders have been decrying education since 1845 https://newrepublic.com/article/127317/school

#10yrsago Yosemite agrees to change the names of its significant locations to appease trademark troll https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/yosemite-rename-several-iconic-places/?scope=anon

#10yrsago Bernie Sanders support soars among actual voters, if not Democratic Party power-brokers https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/14/bernie-sanders-is-winning-with-the-one-group-his-rivals-cant-sway-voters

#5yrsago Tesla's valuation is 1600x its profitability https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

#5yrsago Disneyland kills annual passes https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#disney-dash

#5yrsago Machine learning is a honeypot for phrenologists https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#phrenology

#5yrsago Yugoslavia's Cold War obsession with Mexican music https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#yu-mex

#5yrsago I was investigated by the FBI https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#g-man

#5yrsago Facebook says it's the best henhouse fox https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#hens-need-foxes

#5yrsago Laura Poitras fired from First Look ( https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#poitras

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berlin: Re:publical, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1058 words today, 7122 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

A group of six Democratic lawmakers is proposing legislation that would dramatically rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) facial recognition app, according to a copy of the draft bill shared with 404 Media. ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been scanning peoples’ faces with the app, called Mobile Fortify, across the country, using it to verify their citizenship and claiming that a result in the app should be trusted over a birth certificate.

The move signals the first potential legislative move against the app after 404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence in June based on leaked ICE emails. Since then, 404 Media has covered its continued use against U.S. citizens, the 200 million images it uses, and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) plan to roll out a version of the app to local law enforcement.

“When ICE claims that an image it snaps and runs through an unproven app can be enough evidence to detain people for possible deportation, no one is safe,” Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security, and who authored the legislation, said. “ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify to determine a person’s legal status is an outrageous affront to the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike. DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans’ faces and fingerprints in the field—especially with unproven and biased technology. It is time to put an end to its widespread use. We can secure the Homeland and respect the rights and privacy of Americans at the same time.”

The bill is being cosponsored by by Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Border Security & Enforcement; Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations & Accountability; Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus; Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus; and Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It follows some of the lawmakers demanding answers from DHS about the app in September.

The proposed law, called the Realigning Mobile Phone Biometrics for American Privacy Protection Act, aims to curtail both Mobile Fortify and Mobile Identify, the local law enforcement version, in a few ways. First, it would ban use of the apps except for identification at ports of entry. As 404 Media showed, Mobile Fortify uses CBP systems that are usually reserved for identifying and taking photos of people as they enter the U.S. Mobile Fortify turned that capability inwards to American streets. 

The law would also require all photos and fingerprints of U.S. citizens captured before the practices introduced by the bill be deleted, and require that all photographs or fingerprints of U.S. citizens be destroyed within 12 hours of being taken. The law would also prohibit DHS from sharing the apps with non-DHS law enforcement agencies, effectively killing the local law enforcement version. (404 Media reported the app became unavailable on the Google Play Store in early-December.)

When an immigration officer scans someone’s face with Mobile Fortify, the app runs their face against a bank of 200 million images held by DHS, according to the app’s user manual previously obtained by 404 Media. If the app finds what it believes is a matching face, it returns a name, their nationality, age and date of birth, unique identifiers such as their “alien registration,” and a field titled “Immig. Judge Decision,” the manual says. This appears to refer to whether an immigration judge has ruled on this person’s case, and may include a result that says “remove.”

404 Media previously obtained an internal DHS document through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) which showed ICE does not let people decline to be scanned by the app. 404 Media has found likely cases of the app being used in Chicago. In a partnership with Reveal, 404 Media reported the app has been used on U.S. citizens.

One video posted to social media this week showed an officer using the app to take a photo of an identification document in what the video said was Minnesota. 404 Media compared the app shown in the video to the user interface in the leaked Mobile Fortify user manual and they matched.

“The Trump Administration has weaponized federal agencies against the American people. This latest effort to use facial recognition to further target immigrant families is reckless and dangerous,” said Rep. Espaillat in a statement. “I’m proud to stand with Ranking Member Thompson to introduce legislation to combat ICE and DHS, prohibiting the use of facial recognition as yet another ruthless tactic to further this administration’s mass deportation agenda.”

“The abuse of this type of technology by DHS agents is not only invasive, it is likely unconstitutional and certainly un-American,” Rep. Meng added. “Immigration enforcement should not be conducted by an app and DHS should not conduct dragnet operations that terrorize communities and violate people's constitutional rights. I am proud to have worked with Ranking Member Thompson and my colleagues to introduce this commonsense legislation.”

A DHS spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement, “Claims that Mobile Fortify violates the Fourth Amendment or compromises privacy are false. The application does not access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data. Its use is governed by established legal authorities and formal privacy oversight, which set strict limits on data access, use, and retention.”

“Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations. It operates with a deliberately high matching threshold and queries only limited CBP immigration datasets. Mobile Fortify has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts or by legal guidance. It is lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities,” the statement continued.

Update: this piece has been updated to include a statement from DHS.

Rising along a ridgeline above San Francisco Bay, the Lagoon View Residence occupies a steep site in Tiburon, California, reached by a sequence of snaking roads that open onto sweeping views of the city skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Pacific beyond. The residence was realized through a recent remodel and addition to an existing home, with Swatt + Partners shaping the work as a contemporary intervention that takes direction from its setting.

Originally a 4,753-square-foot house that had undergone a series of renovations, the existing structure was visually and spatially fragmented. In response, Swatt + Partners unified the house into a more cohesive composition with a plan that remains consistent from one level to the next. Open sightlines and an expanded relationship to the exterior were central to this reorganization, allowing views to register fully throughout the interior. The plan prioritizes clarity of movement and orientation, while materials and structure work together to anchor the home to its hillside location.

Shifts between openness and enclosure shape the experience of Lagoon View. On the north, entry-facing side, solid stone volumes and vertical structural elements establish a sense of weight and enclosure. To the south and west, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, a cantilevered roof, and terrace extensions open the interior to bay views. These horizontal projections extend living spaces outward to create a continuous relationship between interior rooms and exterior decks while providing shade and framing sightlines.

Interior spaces by local firm Leverone Design showcase a balance between custom work and select made-to-order pieces, including works from the likes of Coup d’État, Jun Aizaki, Holly Hunt, and more. Outdoor furnishings from Zachary A. Design, RH, and Niche are arranged along the deck in response to the expansive bay-facing vistas, while a restrained approach throughout the interiors sets the stage for the clients’ capacious art collection, which includes works by Pablo Picasso, Ansel Adams, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Lin Fengmian, Wu Guanzhong, and Henry Moore.

Landscape design by Berkeley, California–based Thuilot Associates responds directly to the property’s natural topography, with paths stepping down the hillside through planted terraces and outdoor rooms, tracing the slope from street level to the lower edge of the property. Material continuity also carries through the exterior envelope, where integrally colored cement plaster, stained tongue-and-groove cedar siding, Windsor limestone, and clear anodized aluminum windows form a cohesive palette, executed by Stroub Construction. Together, these elements reinforce the home’s spatial clarity and its relationship to the surrounding terrain.

To learn more about the Lagoon View Residence by Swatt + Partners, visit swattpartners.com.

Photography by Matthew Millman.