Washington
Trump extends control over capital by taking management of Union Station away from Amtrak
WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that his department is taking management of Union Station, the main transportation hub in Washington, away from Amtrak, in another example of how the federal government is exerting its power over the nation’s capital.
Duffy made the announcement in a statement before he joined Amtrak President Roger Harris at Union Station for the launch of the NextGen Acela, the rail service’s new high-speed train.
The secretary said Union Station, located within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol, had “fallen into disrepair” when it should be a “point of pride” for the city.
“By reclaiming station management, we will help make this city safe and beautiful at a fraction of the cost,” Duffy said.
At the event, Duffy said President Donald Trump has been “pretty clear” about what he wants.
“He wants Union Station to be beautiful again. He wants transit to be safe again. And he wants our nation’s capital to be great again. And today is part of that,” Duffy said.
Duffy echoed the Republican president, who said last week he wants $2 billion from Congress to beautify Washington as part of his crackdown on the city. The Republican president has sent thousands of National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials into Washington in a bid to fight violent crime he claimed had strangled the city.
Local police department statistics show violent crime in Washington has declined in recent years, but Trump has countered, without offering evidence, that the numbers were fudged.
National Guard troops have been on patrol inside and outside of Union Station after Trump launched the anti-crime effort earlier this month. Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were shouted down by opponents of the federal intervention when they visited with troops there last week.
During Wednesday’s train unveiling, Duffy will also talk about what the administration is doing to turn Union Station into a world class transit hub, according to a Transportation Department news advisory.
Duffy had pressed Amtrak about crime at Union Station in a March letter to its chief operating officer and requested an updated plan on how it intended to improve public safety there.
Washington
Whistleblower: 300 million people’s Social Security data is at risk
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk after Department of Government Efficiency officials uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight, according to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to the special counsel’s office Tuesday.
Whistleblower Charles Borges, who worked as the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration since January, said the potential sensitive information that risks being released includes health diagnoses, income, banking information, familial relationships and personal biographic data.
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost,” said the complaint.
The complaint was submitted by the Government Accountability Project and addressed to House and Senate oversight lawmakers. It requests that authorities “take appropriate oversight action.”
The whistleblower report is just the latest complaint against President Donald Trump’s DOGE and the unprecedented access it was given by the Republican administration to the vast troves of personal data across the government under the mandate of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Labor and retiree groups sued SSA earlier this year for allowing DOGE to access
Americans’ sensitive agency data, though a divided appeals panel decided this month that DOGE could access the information.
SSA said in a statement that it takes whistleblower complaints seriously but seemed to downplay Borges’ accusations.
“SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information. The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet. High-level career SSA officials have administrative access to this system with oversight by SSA’s Information Security team. We are not aware of any compromise to this environment and remain dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data,” the agency wrote.
Borges’ complaint says he disclosed to his superiors that he believed the upload was an abuse of authority and poses a substantial threat to public health and safety, and potentially violates the law.
Andrea Meza, a lawyer representing Borges, said her client released the information “out of a sense of urgency and duty to the American public.”
California
Book authors settle copyright lawsuit with AI company Anthropic
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A group of book authors has reached a settlement agreement with artificial intelligence company Anthropic after suing the chatbot maker for copyright infringement.
Both sides of the case have “negotiated a proposed class settlement,” according to a federal appeals court filing Tuesday that said the terms will be finalized next week.
Anthropic declined comment Tuesday. A lawyer for the authors, Justin Nelson, said the “historic settlement will benefit all class members.”
In a major test case for the AI industry, a federal judge ruled in June that Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books.
But the company was still on the hook and was scheduled go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in his June ruling that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”
“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.
A trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — alleged in their lawsuit last year that Anthropic’s practices amounted to “large-scale theft,” and that the San Francisco-based company “seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”
Trump extends control over capital by taking management of Union Station away from Amtrak
WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that his department is taking management of Union Station, the main transportation hub in Washington, away from Amtrak, in another example of how the federal government is exerting its power over the nation’s capital.
Duffy made the announcement in a statement before he joined Amtrak President Roger Harris at Union Station for the launch of the NextGen Acela, the rail service’s new high-speed train.
The secretary said Union Station, located within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol, had “fallen into disrepair” when it should be a “point of pride” for the city.
“By reclaiming station management, we will help make this city safe and beautiful at a fraction of the cost,” Duffy said.
At the event, Duffy said President Donald Trump has been “pretty clear” about what he wants.
“He wants Union Station to be beautiful again. He wants transit to be safe again. And he wants our nation’s capital to be great again. And today is part of that,” Duffy said.
Duffy echoed the Republican president, who said last week he wants $2 billion from Congress to beautify Washington as part of his crackdown on the city. The Republican president has sent thousands of National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials into Washington in a bid to fight violent crime he claimed had strangled the city.
Local police department statistics show violent crime in Washington has declined in recent years, but Trump has countered, without offering evidence, that the numbers were fudged.
National Guard troops have been on patrol inside and outside of Union Station after Trump launched the anti-crime effort earlier this month. Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were shouted down by opponents of the federal intervention when they visited with troops there last week.
During Wednesday’s train unveiling, Duffy will also talk about what the administration is doing to turn Union Station into a world class transit hub, according to a Transportation Department news advisory.
Duffy had pressed Amtrak about crime at Union Station in a March letter to its chief operating officer and requested an updated plan on how it intended to improve public safety there.
Washington
Whistleblower: 300 million people’s Social Security data is at risk
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 300 million Americans’ Social Security data was put at risk after Department of Government Efficiency officials uploaded sensitive information to a cloud account not subject to oversight, according to a whistleblower disclosure submitted to the special counsel’s office Tuesday.
Whistleblower Charles Borges, who worked as the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration since January, said the potential sensitive information that risks being released includes health diagnoses, income, banking information, familial relationships and personal biographic data.
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital healthcare and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for re-issuing every American a new Social Security Number at great cost,” said the complaint.
The complaint was submitted by the Government Accountability Project and addressed to House and Senate oversight lawmakers. It requests that authorities “take appropriate oversight action.”
The whistleblower report is just the latest complaint against President Donald Trump’s DOGE and the unprecedented access it was given by the Republican administration to the vast troves of personal data across the government under the mandate of eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Labor and retiree groups sued SSA earlier this year for allowing DOGE to access
Americans’ sensitive agency data, though a divided appeals panel decided this month that DOGE could access the information.
SSA said in a statement that it takes whistleblower complaints seriously but seemed to downplay Borges’ accusations.
“SSA stores all personal data in secure environments that have robust safeguards in place to protect vital information. The data referenced in the complaint is stored in a long-standing environment used by SSA and walled off from the internet. High-level career SSA officials have administrative access to this system with oversight by SSA’s Information Security team. We are not aware of any compromise to this environment and remain dedicated to protecting sensitive personal data,” the agency wrote.
Borges’ complaint says he disclosed to his superiors that he believed the upload was an abuse of authority and poses a substantial threat to public health and safety, and potentially violates the law.
Andrea Meza, a lawyer representing Borges, said her client released the information “out of a sense of urgency and duty to the American public.”
California
Book authors settle copyright lawsuit with AI company Anthropic
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A group of book authors has reached a settlement agreement with artificial intelligence company Anthropic after suing the chatbot maker for copyright infringement.
Both sides of the case have “negotiated a proposed class settlement,” according to a federal appeals court filing Tuesday that said the terms will be finalized next week.
Anthropic declined comment Tuesday. A lawyer for the authors, Justin Nelson, said the “historic settlement will benefit all class members.”
In a major test case for the AI industry, a federal judge ruled in June that Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books.
But the company was still on the hook and was scheduled go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco said in his June ruling that the AI system’s distilling from thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative.”
“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.
A trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — alleged in their lawsuit last year that Anthropic’s practices amounted to “large-scale theft,” and that the San Francisco-based company “seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”
