Power — Politics & Media
Covers politics as a media product, because that is what it has become.
Writes PowerKurt writes about campaign machinery, partisan media economics and the professionals who manufacture consensus for a living.
Power
Universities already hold the records needed to retrace a demonstration. The real safeguards are dull but decisive: deletion schedules, access controls and rules against joining the data.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
A locked-down tablet can make prison life less isolated. New Jersey’s contracts also turn messages, music and books into metered products paid for by people with nowhere else to shop.
Kurt Halloran · 7 min read
Power
Districts buy Turnitin and similar tools as ordinary software, then let probabilistic scores migrate into misconduct cases. The contract rarely says how much evidence a percentage should become.
Kurt Halloran · 7 min read
Power
AI-writing detectors sell institutions a quick signal, then disclaim the certainty their interfaces imply. Students are left defending their authorship against a probability with no witness.
Kurt Halloran · 7 min read
Power
A facial-search opt-out can erase the visible result while preserving the machinery that found it. Here is how to test the difference without feeding the service more faces.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
OpenAI has described a pathway from threatening chat to human review and possible police referral. Most rivals reserve similar powers without explaining the threshold.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
New Jersey institutions often call AI detection a clue, not proof. Their misconduct machinery can erase that distinction before a student gets a meaningful chance to contest it.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Municipal purchase records describe powerful drone systems in exact detail. The public policies governing where they fly, what they keep and who gets the footage are often thinner or later.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Removing a people-search listing can mean handing the broker more identifying data. Here is which common routes ask for it, and how to disclose less.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and X govern speech and livelihoods through appeal forms that collect little evidence, promise little explanation and rarely identify a real escalation path.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
The useful evidence is usually a copied clip, not the camera on the wall. Police can ask the owner, send an upload link, use legal process, or make a documented emergency request.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Universities say social-media scanners find threats. Their contracts and vendor claims reveal a broader function: converting public political speech into intelligence for campus police.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
In New Jersey, getting the device back does not necessarily erase its forensic double. Property rules have an ending. Extracted data often enters a different system.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Schools buy AI gun detection as a fast technical fix. The consequential machinery begins after the software draws a box and someone decides whether to call police.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
New York bought Voyager Labs software that could search public posts and map relationships around them. The purchase shows how procurement turns ordinary speech into durable police intelligence.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Memphis released four videos after police killed Tyre Nichols. The fixed-camera file labeled Video 2 showed why body-camera disclosure is never just a matter of pressing upload.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Police requests go to the company holding your account, not necessarily to your phone. The paperwork determines whether they receive subscriber details, metadata, stored messages or a stream of new records.
Kurt Halloran · 7 min read
Power
Body-camera footage can be visible without being meaningfully available. New Jersey’s streaming releases preserve agency control while making outside scrutiny slower, costlier and easier to lose.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Venue policies treat facial authentication as an optional convenience and facial recognition as security infrastructure. Only the first kind comes with a dependable way around it.
Kurt Halloran · 8 min read
Power
Apple and Google do not require one political moderation doctrine. They do require controls that make a fully hands-off social platform difficult to distribute through their stores.
Kurt Halloran · 7 min read