Tag: government

Elon Musk’s X Appears to Be Violating US Sanctions by Selling Premium Accounts to Iranian Leaders

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In recent weeks, Elon Musk has followed president Donald Trump’s lead, slamming Iranian government officials and supporting the thousands of protesters railing against the regime. He even provided free access to his Starlink satellites in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout.

But while publicly proclaiming his support of the protesters, Musk’s company X appears to be profiting from the very same government officials he railed against, potentially violating US sanctions in the process, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) shared exclusively with WIRED.

TTP identified more than two dozen X accounts allegedly run by Iranian government officials, state agencies, and state-run news outlets which display a blue checkmark, indicating they have access to X’s premium service. These accounts were sharing state-sponsored propaganda at a time when ordinary Iranians had no access to the internet, and their messages appeared to be artificially boosted to increase reach and engagement, which is a key aspect of X’s premium service. An X Premium subscription, which is the only way to receive a blue checkmark, costs $8 a month, while a Premium+ subscription, which removes ads and boosts reach even further, costs $40 a month.

At a time when the Trump administration is threatening Iran with possible military action if it does not meet demands related to nuclear enrichment and ballistic missiles, X appears to be undermining those efforts by providing a social media bullhorn for the Iranian government to spread its message.

“The fact that Elon Musk is not just platforming these individuals, but taking their money to boost their content through these premium subscriptions and give them extra features also means he’s undermining the sanctions that the US and the Trump administration are actually applying,” Katie Paul, the director of the TTP, tells WIRED.

X did not respond to a request for comment, but within hours of WIRED flagging several X accounts belonging to Iranian officials, their blue checkmarks were removed. The rest of the accounts identified by TTP but not shared with X continue to display a blue checkmark.

The White House directed WIRED to the Treasury when asked for comment. A Treasury spokesperson said they do not comment on specific allegations but “we take allegations of sanctionable conduct extremely seriously.”

At the end of last year, protests broke out in the Iranian capital of Tehran on December 28 over the continuing devaluation of the Iranian rial against the dollar and a widespread economic crisis in the country. Over the following days, tens of thousands of protesters poured onto the streets in cities across the country, calling for regime change and the end of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 37-year reign.

In response, the regime brutally cracked down on protesters, arresting tens of thousands of people and killing thousands more. The true death toll is still unknown but could be much higher than currently reported.

Trump signaled his support for the protesters in a post on Truth Social on January 2, promising to come to their rescue. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote. Musk quickly followed Trump, calling Khamenei “delusional.”

On January 5, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, who had a blue checkmark at the time, wrote in a post on X, “This time, we will show no mercy to the rioters.” Ejei was among the accounts whose blue checkmarks were removed on Wednesday after WIRED contacted the company.

A few days later, X changed the Iranian flag emoji on the platform to one used before the 1979 revolution, featuring a lion and sun. On January 14, Musk announced that anyone with a Starlink device would be free to access the internet in Iran without a subscription. At the time, Starlink devices were the only viable way of getting online after the government imposed a near total internet blackout.

National Security Council adds Gmail to its list of bad decisions

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The Washington Post that members of the White House’s National Security Council have used personal Gmail accounts to conduct government business. National security advisor Michael Waltz and a senior aide of his both used their own accounts to discuss sensitive information with colleagues, according to the Post‘s review and interviews with government officials who spoke to the newspaper anonymously.

Email is not the best approach for sharing information meant to be kept private. That covers sensitive data for individuals such as social security numbers or passwords, much less confidential or classified government documents. It simply has too many potential paths for a bad actor to access information they shouldn’t. Government departments typically use business-grade email services, rather than relying on consumer email services. The federal government also has its own internal communications systems with additional layers of security, making it all the more baffling that current officials are being so cavalier with how they handle important information.

“Unless you are using GPG, email is not end-to-end encrypted, and the contents of a message can be intercepted and read at many points, including on Google’s email servers,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Post.

Additionally, there are regulations requiring that certain official government communications be preserved and archived. Using a personal account could allow some messages to slip through the cracks, accidentally or intentionally.

This latest instance of dubious software use from the executive branch follows the discovery that several high-ranking national security leaders used Signal to discuss planned military actions in Yemen, then added a journalist from The Atlantic to the group chat. And while Signal is a more secure option than a public email client, even the encrypted messaging platform can be exploited, as its own team last week.

As with last week’s Signal debacle, there have been no repercussions thus far for any federal employees taking risky data privacy actions. NSC spokesman Brian Hughes told the Post he hasn’t seen evidence of Waltz using a personal account for government correspondence.

We Mapped DOGE’s Silicon Valley and Corporate Connections

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Since the first days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been everywhere in the federal government, moving fast and breaking things. In a matter of weeks, DOGE operatives have spread across dozens of government agencies as they have attempted to terminate tens of thousands of federal employees. With so much focus on where DOGE is going, WIRED wanted to take a beat to look at where they’ve come from and what that might tell us about how they’re thinking about reshaping the federal government.

The big takeaway: Many on the DOGE team are from Musk’s world. If Musk is America’s CEO, then DOGE has become his Silicon Valley executive branch.

We’ve mapped out a non-exhaustive list of people affiliated with DOGE, including creating a searchable table with each member, their corporate history, and the agencies they’ve been connected to. Readers can check that out, and click through it, below. We plan to keep updating this as we find more DOGE operatives or as known affiliates move to new agencies.

We’re focused on the new people brought in under the second Trump administration or directly hired into agencies—as Special Government Employees (SGEs) or regular employees—who are operating as members of DOGE teams. This gets a little tricky because there are technically two DOGEs established under the president’s executive order. There’s the US DOGE Service (USDS), formerly the US Digital Service, that’s a permanent organization. Then there’s the temporary USDS organization, which wraps up on July 4, 2026, and through which SGEs can be hired.

Here’s what we’ve learned:

The DOGE world, as it stands, seems to break down into roughly three categories: former Trump officials, conservative lawyers, and imports from the Silicon Valley area (funders, founders, technologists, or people connected to them). In that first category we find people like DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller. The two of them have been Musk’s guides to DC.

In that second category are people like James Burnham and Austin Raynor, both former clerks for conservative Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, respectively. Jacob Altik, another conservative lawyer on the DOGE squad, has been selected to clerk for Gorsuch. Jeremy Lewin, who was part of DOGE’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), worked with Second Lady Usha Vance’s former law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, a firm that has also represented Tesla.

Then, the biggest throughline of all: Of those Silicon Valley imports, one of the most clear themes across DOGE’s ranks is fairly obvious: a connection to Elon Musk. Forty-nine people on our list have connections to Musk, his companies, or his greater network. This connection is most often through one of his allies or one of his companies. There are the obvious people like Steve Davis, president of Musk’s Boring Company, who have followed Musk across his various ventures. (Davis previously worked at SpaceX and assisted Musk in his overhaul of X, formerly Twitter.) Davis spearheaded the DOGE recruitment efforts before inauguration day and has continued to play a pivotal role in the organization. Similarly, SpaceX employee Brian Bjelde, who is now at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), also helped Musk downsize Twitter’s staff in 2022.

There are people like many of the young engineers WIRED first identified who were given the keys to different government agencies, like Marko Elez, Luke Farritor, and Edward Coristine, who were all interns or employees at one of Musk’s companies: SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, X, and Neuralink. (Musk has been involved in others, but these are the ones he controls.)

Trump’s Spy Chief Urged to Declassify Details of Secret Surveillance Program

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Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a renowned privacy hawk who has served on the Senate intelligence committee since just after 9/11, has referred to the new provision as “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.”

Declassifying the new types of businesses that can actually be considered an ECSP is an essential step in bringing about clarity to an otherwise nebulous change in federal surveillance practices, according to the ACLU and the other organizations joined in its effort. “Without such basic transparency, the law will likely continue to permit sweeping NSA surveillance on domestic soil that threatens the civil liberties of all Americans,” the groups wrote in their letter to Gabbard this week.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In addition to urging Gabbard to declassify details about the reach of the 702 program, the ACLU and others are currently pressing Gabbard to publish information to quantify just how many Americans have been “incidentally” wiretapped by their own government. Intelligence officials have long claimed that doing so would be “impossible,” as any analysis of the wiretaps would involve the government accessing them unjustifiably, effectively violating those Americans’ rights.

The privacy groups, however, point to research published in 2022 out of Princeton University, which details a methodology that could effectively solve that issue. “The intelligence community’s refusal to produce the requested estimate undermines trust and weakens the legitimacy of Section 702,” the groups say.

Gabbard is widely reported to have softened her stance against government spying while working to secure her new position as director of the nation’s intelligence apparatus. During the 116th Congress, for instance, Gabbard introduced legislation that sought to completely dismantle the Section 702 program, which is considered the “crown jewel” or US intelligence collection and crucial to keeping tabs on foreign threats abroad, including terrorist organizations and cybersecurity threats—exhibiting a stance far more extreme than those traditionally held by lawmakers and civil society organizations who’ve long campaigned for surveillance reform.

While begging off from this position in January, Gabbard’s newly espoused views have, in fact, brought her more closely in line with mainstream reformers. In response to questions from the US Senate ahead of her confirmation, for example, Gabbard backed the idea of requiring the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans swept up by the 702 program.

Slews of national security hawks from former House speaker Nancy Pelosi to former House intelligence committee chairman Mike Turner have long opposed this warrant requirement, as traditionally have all directors of the FBI. “This warrant requirement strengthens the [intelligence community] by ensuring queries are targeted and justified,” Gabbard wrote in response to Senate questions in late January.

The Section 702 program was reauthorized last spring, but only for an additional two years. Early discussions about reauthorizing the program once more are expected to kick off again as early as this summer.

Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, one of the organizations involved in the lobbying effort, notes that Gabbard has a long history of supporting civil liberties, and refers to her recent statements about secret surveillance programs “encouraging.” “Congress needs to know, and the public deserves to know, what Section 702 is being used for,” Vitka says, “and how many Americans are swept up in that surveillance.”

“Section 702 has been repeatedly used to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans, including journalists, activists, and even members of Congress,” adds Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the ACLU. “Declassifying critical information, as well as providing long-overdue basic data about the number of US persons whose communications are collected under this surveillance are essential steps to increasing transparency as the next reauthorization debate approaches.”

CFPB drops Zelle lawsuit in latest reversal under Trump administration

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has dropped its lawsuit over peer-to-peer payment system Zelle, the latest in a series of dismissals from this department under President Donald Trump’s administration. The agency had only just announced the suit — filed against Zelle’s operating entity Early Warning Services and partner banks JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – in December. According to the initial action, the CFPB said that customers of the three banks had lost more than $870 million during the seven years Zelle has been active.

A spokesperson for Zelle said the company welcomed the CFPB’s decision, and reiterated that it believes the lawsuit was “without merit, and legally and factually flawed.” A JPMorgan Chase representative called scam prevention and consumer education “a national security problem” and stated the bank’s commitment to working “across the public and private sectors” toward solutions.

The CFPB made several moves to increase oversight on the financial products offered by tech companies under its previous director, Rohit Chopra. However, the agency is now overseen by Acting Director Russell Vought, who ordered the CFPB to cease all “supervision and examination activity” last month. While employees of the bureau have sued to try to keep the CFPB alive, there have been conflicting messages from government leadership about the agency’s status.

Since taking office, Trump and ally Elon Musk have taken sweeping actions to control and close federal government departments. Agencies that have historically regulated Musk’s business activities have been among those with reduced powers, as have federal operations for cybersecurity, digital services and personnel management.

Update, March 5, 2025, 4:41PM ET: Added official statements from Zelle and JPMorgan Chase.

Not Even DOGE Employees Know Who’s Legally Running DOGE

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Before Trump was inaugurated, the USDS administrator was Mina Hsiang. After she left, Ted Carstensen was the highest-ranking legacy USDS leader, but he resigned from the organization on February 6.

“After Ted resigned, we received no correspondence as far as who the head of this organization was,” says a current USDS employee, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation.

Some people WIRED spoke with at USDS view Amy Gleason, a former USDS official who served in the first Trump administration, as a liaison between legacy USDS, DOGE, and other agencies, but little is known about her official role. Steve Davis, a longtime Musk associate and the president of the Boring Company, is another name rumored to be formally leading DOGE. Davis has worked with Musk for years, and led the billionaire’s cost-cutting efforts when taking over Twitter, now X, in 2022. Davis went as far as sleeping in the Twitter HQ with his wife, Nicole Hollander, and their child. (Hollander is now a high-level General Services Administration official.)

“Steve Davis has always been articulated as the leader of DOGE, but when I ask if he’s the administrator, [managers] say we don’t know,” one former USDS employee tells WIRED. “When I ask if he’s the interim administrator, they say ‘we don’t know.’ They’ve said Brad Smith [a health care entrepreneur with ties to Davis] is serving in a chief of staff role.”

Meanwhile, as USDS staffers are trying to figure out who is running their agency, dozens of them have been laid off. Around 50 people out of USDS’s approximately 200 employees were fired on Friday. Sources tell WIRED that product managers, designers, and members of the talent team were hit the hardest, along with some engineers.

“No rhyme or reason. Literally in the middle of work,” another source said of the Friday night firings. “There are so many of us.”

“I have heard that our directors at USDS (legacy) still have not received any kind of list or justification for the intention to terminate emails sent Friday evening,” says another source at the agency.

Last week, multiple agencies were rocked by sudden layoffs. Dozens of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees were fired after receiving emails botching their names and roles. Later in the week, the entire CFPB team tasked with investigating big tech were terminated, a former CFPB official told WIRED. After the CFPB firings, other agencies, including the General Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, terminated thousands of workers.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While Musk’s DOGE workers have taken over at USDS for the last month, very few legacy employees have interacted with their new colleagues whatsoever. Earlier this month, WIRED reported that DOGE had built a “firewall” separating Musk’s team from the rest of the organization’s workforce. The only time legacy staff had a meeting with a representative from DOGE was on February 1 with Stephanie Holmes, who identified herself as the team’s new HR person.

The only other experiences legacy USDS staff have had with DOGE staff were their surprise one-on-one interviews with DOGE-affiliated engineers who refused to identify themselves during the first week of the Trump administration.

OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing.

The announcement, which Altman made in a post on X late Thursday evening, was light on details. But it — along with a similar deal with the U.K.’s AI safety body struck in June — appears to be intended to counter the narrative that OpenAI has deprioritized work on AI safety in the pursuit of more capable, powerful generative AI technologies.

In May, OpenAI effectively disbanded a unit working on the problem of developing controls to prevent “superintelligent” AI systems from going rogue. Reporting — including ours — suggested that OpenAI cast aside the team’s safety research in favor of launching new products, ultimately leading to the resignation of the team’s two co-leads, Jan Leike (who now leads safety research at AI startup Anthropic) and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever (who started his own safety-focused AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.).

In response to a growing chorus of critics, OpenAI said it would eliminate its restrictive non-disparagement clauses that implicitly discouraged whistleblowing and create a safety commission, as well as dedicate 20% of its compute to safety research. (The disbanded safety team had been promised 20% of OpenAI’s compute for its work, but ultimately never received this.) Altman re-committed to the 20% pledge and re-affirmed that OpenAI voided the non-disparagement terms for new and existing staff in May.

The moves did little to placate some observers, however — particularly after OpenAI staffed the safety commission entirely with company insiders including Altman and, more recently, reassigned a top AI safety executive to another org.

Five senators, including Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, raised questions about OpenAI’s policies in a recent letter addressed to Altman. OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon responded to the letter today, writing that OpenAI “[is] dedicated to implementing rigorous safety protocols at every stage of our process.”

The timing of OpenAI’s agreement with the U.S. AI Safety Institute seems a tad suspect in light of the company’s endorsement earlier this week of the Future of Innovation Act, a proposed Senate bill that would authorize the Safety Institute as an executive body that sets standards and guidelines for AI models. The moves together could be perceived as an attempt at regulatory capture — or at the very least an exertion of influence from OpenAI over AI policymaking at the federal level.

Not for nothing, Altman is among the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board, which provides recommendations for the “safe and secure development and deployment of AI” throughout the U.S.’ critical infrastructures. And OpenAI has dramatically increased its expenditures on federal lobbying this year, spending $800,000 in the first six months of 2024 versus $260,000 in all of 2023.

The U.S. AI Safety Institute, housed within the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, consults with a consortium of companies that includes Anthropic, as well as big tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Amazon and Nvidia. The industry group is tasked with working on actions outlined in President Joe Biden’s October AI executive order, including developing guidelines for AI red-teaming, capability evaluations, risk management, safety and security and watermarking synthetic content.

ISPs are fighting to raise the price of low-income broadband

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A new government program is trying to encourage Internet service providers (ISPs) to offer lower rates for lower income customers by distributing federal funds through states. The only problem is the ISPs don’t want to offer the proposed rates.

 obtained a letter sent to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo signed by more than 30 broadband industry trade groups like ACA Connects and the Fiber Broadband Association as well as several state based organizations. The letter raises “both a sense of alarm and urgency” about their ability to participate in the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. The newly formed BEAD program provides over $42 billion in federal funds to “expand high-speed internet access by funding planning, infrastructure, deployment and adoption programs” in states across the country, according to the (NTIA).

The money first goes to the NTIA and then it’s distributed to states after they obtain approval from the NTIA by presenting a low-cost broadband Internet option. The ISP industries’ letter claims a fixed rate of $30 per month for high speed Internet access is “completely unmoored from the economic realities of deploying and operating networks in the highest-cost, hardest-to-reach areas.”

The letter urges the NTIA to revise the low-cost service option rate proposed or approved so far. have completed all of the BEAD program’s phases.

Americans pay an average of $89 a month for Internet access. New Jersey has the highest average bill at $126 per month, according to a survey conducted by . A 2021 study from the found that 57 percent of households with an annual salary of $30,000 or less have a broadband connection.