DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, which means the future of the company’s vast trove of customer data is unknown. Here’s what that means for your genetic data.

Genetic testing company 23andMe, once a Silicon Valley darling valued at $6 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late Sunday as it prepares for a sale of the business. CEO Anne Wojcicki, who cofounded the company in 2006, has also stepped down after months of failed attempts to take the firm private.

As uncertainty about the company’s future reaches its peak, all eyes are on the trove of deeply personal—and potentially valuable—genetic data that 23andMe holds. Privacy advocates have long warned that the risk of entrusting genetic data to any institution is twofold—the organization could fail to protect it, but it could also hand over customer data to a new entity that they may not trust and didn’t choose.

California attorney general Rob Bonta reminded consumers in an alert on Friday that Californians have a legal right to ask that an organization delete their data. 23andMe customers in other states and countries largely do not have the same protections, though there is also a right to deletion for health data in Washington state’s My Health My Data Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Regardless of residency, all 23andMe customers should consider downloading anything they want to keep from the service and should then attempt to delete their information.

“This situation really brings home the point that there is still no national health privacy law in the US protecting your rights unless you live in California or Washington,” says Andrea Downing, an independent security researcher and cofounder of the patient-led digital rights nonprofit The Light Collective. “Meanwhile, we continue to evolve our understanding of how genetic information has value, but also has unique vulnerability.”

John Verdi, senior vice president of policy at the Future of Privacy Forum, says 23andMe’s new owner could revise the company’s privacy policies for new customers and new data collection, but the data it has already collected from current customers is subject to existing terms. “The company has legal obligations regarding information collected under the current policies,” he says.

Still, researchers emphasize that in practice, such a large transition will create real data exposure that is outside of 23andMe customers’ control. “In my opinion, these privacy policies—especially in the context of acquisitions in the venture capital and private equity space—aren't worth the paper they're printed on,” says longtime security researcher and data privacy advocate Kenn White. “For regular people out there who use these services, you're pretty much on your own. My advice is to request your data get deleted as soon as possible"

To delete your genetic data through 23andMe’s website, log in and then go to **Settings** in your profile. Scroll to **23andMe Data** and then click **View**. At this point, you can choose to download a copy of your genetic information. Then scroll to **Delete Data** and click **Permanently Delete Data**. Once you initiate the process, you’ll receive an email from 23andMe to confirm. Click the link in the email to complete the deletion process. Additionally, you can direct 23andMe to destroy the biological sample it used to extract your DNA data if you previously authorized the company to keep it. Go to **Settings** and then **Preferences**.

You can also opt in to and out of participating in research at any time by updating your consent status in your account settings. If you opt out, 23andMe will stop using your information for research going forward and will discontinue use of your data within 30 days. This does not affect studies that have already been completed.

23andMe has never been profitable and has struggled to revamp its business model since it went public in 2021. Demand for its ancestry and health testing kits has been declining for years. And data privacy has had a role to play in the company’s dwindling fortunes after the company was hit with a major data breach in December 2023 that affected millions of customers. The incident led to a class action lawsuit, which 23andMe agreed to settle for $30 million.

Last summer, Wojcicki filed a proposal to take the company private, which was rejected by 23andMe’s board of directors. Shortly after, the company shuttered its in-house drug discovery unit, and its board members resigned en masse over Wojcicki’s strategic direction.

23andMe says it intends to continue operating as usual throughout the sale process and that there are no immediate changes to the way it stores, manages, or protects customer data. In an open letter to customers, the company said it will “seek to find a partner who shares our commitment to customer data privacy and allows our mission of helping people access, understand and benefit from the human genome to live on.” But the direction of 23andMe will ultimately be in the hands of whoever takes over the company.

“If there is a new owner that comes out of the bankruptcy process, that new owner steps into the shoes of 23andMe and takes over those assets,” says Jennifer Wagner, an assistant professor of law, policy, and engineering and anthropology at Penn State University.

“They would still be bound by the complex web of contractual agreements that are in place right now with users,” Wagner adds. “But I think it does give rise to some uncertainty in terms of whether or not a new player would have the same values or that same kind of culture that 23andMe was trying to cultivate.”

_Updated 7:15 pm ET, March 24, 2025 to correct the date 23andMe formally went public._

How to Delete Your Data From 23andMe

Crossing into the United States has become increasingly dangerous for digital privacy. Here are a few steps you can take to minimize the risk of Customs and Border Protection accessing your data.

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When Ryan Lackey has traveled to countries like Russia or China, he has taken certain precautions: Instead of his usual gear, the Seattle-based security researcher and chief security officer of a cryptocurrency insurance firm brings a locked-down Chromebook and an iPhone that's set up to sync with a separate, nonsensitive Apple account. He wipes both before every trip and loads only the minimum data he'll need. Lackey has gone so far as to keep separate travel sets for each country, so that he can forensically analyze the devices when he gets home to check for signs of each country's tampering.

Now, Lackey says, the countries that warrant that paranoid approach to travel might include not just Russia and China but also the United States—if not for Americans like him, then for anyone with a foreign passport who might come under the increasingly draconian and unpredictable scrutiny of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). "All of this applies to America more than it has in the past," says Lackey. "If I thought I were likely to be a targeted person, I would go through this same level of protection."

Since the start of the second Trump administration, there appears to be an uptick in foreign visitors to the US being denied entry, resulting in people being sent back to their original destinations or being held in detention. Citizens from Germany, the UK, and France have all reported being detained, in some cases for weeks, or denied entry when attempting to enter the US—including several individuals who say they are legal residents with Green Cards. France’s education minister said one French scientist was denied entry after immigration officials searched his phone and found conversations where “he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy.” The stricter enforcement of visa and travel permit regulations has led to officials in Germany and Britain to change their travel guidance, with Britain warning that rules are enforced “strictly.”

That de facto border crackdown is set to become far more explicit if the Trump administration follows through on a plan to enact a new “travel ban” on more than 40 countries, which would reportedly bar entry entirely from at least 10 nations and subject visitors from another five to new scrutiny and automatic interviews at the border. Another 26 countries would fall into a third category where their status will be decided in the 60 days after the policy goes into effect.

All of these changes suggest that US borders are about to become far less friendly places to foreigners and even to Americans returning from abroad. And these new border enforcement measures will no doubt be accompanied by aggressive attempts at surveillance extending to travellers’ electronic devices—a threat to digital privacy and free expression that extends to foreigners and US residents alike.

“We’re seeing extraordinarily disturbing examples of retaliatory action based on people's speech and political opinions,” says Nathan Wessler, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “When that’s combined with really sweeping authority to mine the contents of our phones and laptops, looking at things we've written, things people have sent us, it should be a particular cause for concern for people across the political spectrum—and people with all kinds of citizenship and immigration statuses.”

In fact, Customs and Border Protection has long considered US borders and airports a kind of loophole in the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections, one that allows them wide latitude to detain travelers and search their devices. For years, the agency has used that opportunity to hold border-crossers on the slightest suspicion and demand access to their computers and phones, with little formal cause or oversight.

Citizens are far from immune. CBP detainees from journalists to filmmakers to security researchers have all had their devices taken out of their hands by agents.

As those intrusions become more common and aggressive in the second Trump era, WIRED has assembled the following advice from legal and security experts to help preserve your digital privacy while crossing American borders. But take all of these strategies with caution: Given CBP’s unpredictable—and in many areas undocumented—practices, none of the experts WIRED spoke to claimed to have a privacy panacea for the American border.

_This article was first published in February 2017 and updated in March 2025 to reflect changes in technology and the second Trump administration. WIRED’s guide to protecting yourself against government surveillance includes more security and privacy advice._

**Phone Home**

First, if you have any reason to think you could be detained or questioned at the border, alert a lawyer or a loved one who can contact a lawyer _before_ going through customs, and contact them again when you get out. If you are detained, you may not be able to access your devices or otherwise have the opportunity to reach the outside world. And in the worst-case scenario of a lengthy detention, you'll want someone advocating for your release and legal representation.

**Lock Down Devices**

If customs officials do take your devices, don't make their intrusion easy. Encrypt your hard drive with tools like BitLocker, Veracrypt, or Apple's Filevault, and choose a strong passphrase. On your phone, set a strong PIN. Using hard-to-crack alphanumeric code to unlock your phone rather than a four digit PIN or biometrics is the strongest approach to securing the device. On an iPhone, disable Siri from the lock screen by switching off **Allow Siri When Locked** under the **Siri men**u in **Settings**.

Remember also to turn your devices off before entering customs: Hard-drive encryption tools offer full protection only when a computer is fully powered down. If you use FaceID, your iPhone is safest when it's turned off, too, since it requires a PIN rather than a face scan when first booted, resolving any ambiguity about whether border officials can compel you to unlock the device with your biometrics.

In recent years, Apple and Google have made it possible to separate sensitive apps from being shown with others on your phone—placing them in a separate folder from other apps and protecting them with another layer of authentication. Android’s Private Spaces can be turned on in the Security and privacy settings menu, while long pressing an app on iOS will bring up the option to place it in a hidden folder.

Finally, Wessler recommends that travelers be sure to update their operating systems on both laptops and phones before crossing the border. That’s because CBP could, in some cases, use tools like Cellebrite or GrayKey to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in those devices, accessing them without the user unlocking them. “It may be that if your operating system is six months out of date, your device is vulnerable,” Wessler says. “The newest version may not be.”

**Keep Passwords Secret**

This is the tricky part. American citizens can't be deported for refusing to give up passwords for social media accounts or encrypted devices, says the ACLU's Wessler. That means if you stand your ground and don't reveal passwords or PINs, you may be detained and your devices confiscated—even sent off to a forensic facility—but you'll eventually get through with your privacy far more intact than if you divulge secrets. "They can seize your device, even for months while they try to break into it," says Wessler. "But you’re going to get home." (Despite the Trump administration’s shocking treatment in some cases of foreign permanent residents, this protection applies to green card holders too, Wessler says.)

Be warned, however, that denying customs officials access can at the very least lead to hours of uncertain detention in a bleak, windowless CBP office. At some US airports and in various states, court rulings have put limitations and restrictions on what CBP officials can do to access your devices, but there’s little guarantee those restrictions will be followed in practice if border agents have your computer or phone in their custody without oversight.

Broadly, the CBP outlines two types of device searches: basic, where an officer “manually” reviews a device’s content; and an advanced search where a device is connected to external equipment and its contents can be reviewed, copied, or analyzed. The latter search requires a “reasonable suspicion” of a crime, CBP says. The agency’s official guidance avoids explicitly saying people are required to hand over passwords, skirting around the issue by saying devices should be presented “in a condition that allows for the examination.”

“If the electronic device cannot be inspected because it is protected by a passcode or encryption or other security mechanism, that device may be subject to exclusion, detention, or other appropriate action or disposition,” the agency says online.

For non-Americans coming to the US on a visa or from a visa-waiver country, Wessler warns that they face a far starker dilemma: Refuse to give up a passcode or PIN and you may be denied entry. “There’s a very practical assessment people have to make about what's most important to them,” he says. “Getting into the country but sacrificing privacy or protecting your privacy—but risking that you may be turned around at the border.”

**Minimize the Data You Carry**

For the most vulnerable travelers, there’s one clear solution to that dilemma: The best way to keep customs away from your data is simply not to travel with it. Instead, like Lackey, set up travel devices that store the minimum of sensitive data. Don't link those "dirty" devices to your personal accounts, and when you do have to create a linked account—as with an Apple ID for iOS devices—create fresh ones with unique usernames and passwords. "If they ask for access and you can’t refuse, you want to be able to give them access without losing any sensitive information," says Lackey.

(Social media accounts, admittedly, can't be so easily ditched. Some security experts recommend creating secondary personas that can be offered up to customs officials while keeping a more sensitive account secret. But if CBP agents do link your identity with an account you tried to hide, the result could be longer detention and, for noncitizens, even denial of entry.)

If you can’t create a separate travel device, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also suggests logging out of apps and cloud services—such as Google Drive, or MicrosoftOne Drive—so that border agents can’t access documents or data you are storing remotely. Backing up data, such as photos or files, to the cloud services before you travel can help to remove data from the phone.

“The only sure way to protect yourself is to not carry information with you or to carry as little as possible,” says the ACLU’s Wessler. “As long as you have a device and there's stuff on it, that's potentially vulnerable to search.”

That vulnerability to search comes in part from the fact that privacy rights for digital devices at the border remains troublingly unsettled in US law, says UC Davis law professor Elizabeth Joh. While the Supreme Court decision in _Riley v. California_ in 2014 declared warrantless searches of devices at the time of arrest unconstitutional, no case has set such a precedent for the American border—much less for non-Americans seeking those same privacy rights.

Since 2014, several federal appeals courts have come to conflicting opinions about when it’s constitutional for customs and border agents to search electronic devices, but the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in. Until it does, the border zone will remain in a kind of legal limbo.

The government, after all, has the power to open bags crossing into its territory or even dismantle cars to search for contraband, Joh points out. "What does that mean in an age when people bring their digital devices across borders? The Supreme Court hasn’t spoken to that issue," Joh says. "The real problem here is there's still no good set of protections for a portal into your private life."

How to Enter the US With Your Digital Privacy Intact

The ad hoc addition to the otherwise tightly controlled White House information environment could create blind spots and security exposures while setting potentially dangerous precedent.

As the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to rampage through the United States federal government, essentially guided by Elon Musk, the group has also been upending traditional IT boundaries—evaluating digital systems and allegedly accessing personally identifiable information as well as data that has typically been off-limits to those without specific training. Last week, The New York Times reported that the White House is adding Musk-owned SpaceX’s Starlink Wi-Fi “to improve Wi-Fi connectivity on the complex,” according to a statement from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The White House's Starlink internet service is reportedly being donated by the company.

Spotty internet is an annoying but highly solvable problem that WIRED has reported on extensively. Of course, the White House is a highly complex organization operating out of a historic building, but network security researchers, government contractors, and former intelligence analysts with years of experience in US federal government security all tell WIRED that adding Starlink Wi-Fi in a seemingly rushed and haphazard way is an inefficient and counterproductive approach to solving connectivity issues. And they emphasized that it could set problematic precedents across the US government: that new pieces of technology can simply be layered into an environment at will without adequate oversight and monitoring.

“This is shadow IT, creating a network to bypass existing controls,” alleges Nicholas Weaver, a member of the nonprofit International Computer Science Institute's network security team and a computer science lecturer at UC Davis. He adds that while secret and top secret information is typically (but not always) processed only on special, separate federal networks that have no wireless access, the security and uniformity of White House Wi-Fi is still extremely important to national security. “A network like the White House unclassified side is still going to be very sensitive,” he says.

“Just like the Biden Administration did on numerous occasions, the White House is working to improve WiFi connectivity on the complex,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt tells WIRED in a statement.

A White House source who asked not to be named supported the switch, arguing that in some areas of the campus, “the old Wi-Fi was trash.”

Researchers point out that while Starlink is a robust commercial ISP like any other, it is not clear that it is being implemented in compliance with White House Communication Agency requirements. If the controls on the White House Starlink Wi-Fi are more lax than on other White House Wi-Fi, it could introduce security exposures and blind spots in network monitoring for anomalous activity.

“The only reason they'd need Starlink would be to bypass existing security controls that are in place from WHCA,” claims former NSA hacker Jake Williams. “The biggest issues would be: First, if they don't have full monitoring of the Starlink connection. And second, if it allows remote management tools, so they could get remote access back into the White House networks. Obviously anyone could abuse that access.”

One baffling aspect of the arrangement is that Starlink and other satellite internet is designed to be used in places that have little or no access to terrestrial internet service—in other words, places where there are no reliable fiber lines or no wired infrastructure at all. Instead of a traditional ISP modem, Starlink customers get special panels that they install on a roof or other outdoor place to receive connectivity from orbiting satellites. The New York Times reported, though, that the White House Starlink panels are actually installed miles away at a White House data center that is routing the connectivity over existing fiber lines. Multiple sources emphasized to WIRED that this setup is bizarre.

“It is extra stupid to go satellite to fiber to actual site,” ICSI's Weaver says. “Starlink is inferior service anyplace where you have wire-line internet already available and, even in places which don't, inferior if you have reasonable line of sight to a cell tower.”

Weaver and others note that Starlink is a robust product and isn't inherently unreliable just because it is delivered via satellite. But in a location where fiber lines are highly available and, ultimately, the service is being delivered via those lines anyway, the setup is deeply inefficient.

While Starlink as a service is technically reliable, incorporating it in the White House could create a long-term federal dependence on an Elon Musk–controlled service, which could create future instabilities. After European officials raised concerns earlier this month on whether Starlink might stop serving Ukraine, Musk posted on social media: “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals … We would never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.”

_Updated at 3 pm ET, March 24, 2025, to add comment from the White House, additional details from a White House source, and further context around the transmission of classified materials._

Using Starlink Wi-Fi in the White House Is a Slippery Slope for US Federal IT

Companies in the EU are starting to look for ways to ditch Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud services amid fears of rising security risks from the US. But cutting ties won’t be easy.

The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former, decade-long member of the European Parliament.

The moves may already be underway. On March 18, politicians in the Netherlands House of Representatives passed eight motions asking the government to reduce reliance on US tech companies and move to European alternatives. Days before, more than 100 organizations signed an open letter to European officials calling for the continent to become “more technologically independent” and saying the status quo creates “security and reliability risks.”

Two European-based cloud service companies, Exoscale and Elastx, tell WIRED they have seen an uptick in potential customers looking to abandon US cloud providers over the last two weeks—with some already starting to make the jump. Multiple technology advisers say they are having widespread discussions about what it would take to uproot services, data, and systems.

“We have more demand from across Europe,” says Mathias Nöbauer, the CEO of Swiss-based hosting provider Exoscale, adding there has been an increase in new customers seeking to move away from cloud giants. “Some customers were very explicit,” Nöbauer says. “Especially customers from Denmark being very explicit that they want to move away from US hyperscalers because of the US administration and what they said about Greenland.”

“It's a big worry about the uncertainty around everything. And from the Europeans’ perspective—that the US is maybe not on the same team as us any longer,” says Joakim Öhman, the CEO of Swedish cloud provider Elastx. “Those are the drivers that bring people or organizations to look at alternatives.”

Concerns have been raised about the current data-sharing agreement between the EU and US, which is designed to allow information to move between the two continents while protecting people’s rights. Multiple previous versions of the agreement have been struck down by European courts. At the end of January, Trump fired three Democrats from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), which helps manage the current agreement. The move could undermine or increase uncertainty around the agreement. In addition, Öhman says, he has heard concerns from firms about the CLOUD Act, which can allow US law enforcement to subpoena user data from tech companies, potentially including data that is stored in systems outside of the US.

Dave Cottlehuber, the founder of SkunkWerks, a small tech infrastructure firm in Austria, says he has been moving the company’s few servers and databases away from US providers to European services since the start of the year. “First and foremost, it’s about values,” Cottlehuber says. “For me, privacy is a right not a privilege.” Cottlehuber says the decision to move is easier for a small business such as his, but he argues it removes some taxes that are paid to the Trump administration. “The best thing I can do is to remove that small contribution of mine, and also at the same time, make sure that my customers’ privacy is respected and preserved,” Cottlehuber says.

Steffen Schmidt, the CEO of Medicusdata, a company that provides text-to-speech services to doctors and hospitals in Europe, says that having data in Europe has always “been a must,” but his customers have been asking for more in recent weeks. “Since the beginning of 2025, in addition to data residency guarantees, customers have actively asked us to use cloud providers that are natively European companies,” Schmidt says, adding that some of his services have been moved to Nöbauer’s Exoscale.

Harry Staight, a spokesperson for AWS, says it is “not accurate” that customers are moving from AWS to EU alternatives. “Our customers have control over where they store their data and how it is encrypted, and we make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design,” Straight says. “AWS services support encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS, which means customers have complete control of who accesses their data.” Staight says the membership of the PCLOB “does not impact” the agreements around EU-US data sharing and that the CLOUD Act has “additional safeguards for cloud content.” Google and Microsoft declined to comment.

The potential shift away from US tech firms is not just linked to cloud providers. Since January 15, visitors to the European Alternatives website increased more than 1,200 percent. The site lists everything from music streaming services to DDoS protection tools, says Marko Saric, a cofounder of European cloud analytics service Plausible. “We can certainly feel that something is going on,” Saric says, claiming that during the first 18 days of March the company has “beaten” the net recurring revenue growth it saw in January and February. “This is organic growth which cannot be explained by any seasonality or our activities,” he says.

While there are signs of movement, the impact is likely to be small—at least for now. Around the world, governments and businesses use multiple cloud services—such as authentication measures, hosting, data storage, and increasingly data centers providing AI processing—from the big three cloud and tech service providers. Cottlehuber says that, for large businesses, it may take many months, if not longer, to consider what needs to be moved, the risks involved, plus actually changing systems. “What happens if you have a hundred petabytes of storage, it's going to take years to move over the internet,” he says.

For years, European companies have struggled to compete with the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon’s cloud services and technical infrastructure, which make billions every year. It may also be difficult to find similar services on the scale of those provided by alternative European cloud firms.

“If you are deep into the hyperscaler cloud ecosystem, you’ll struggle to find equivalent services elsewhere,” says Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur and former government regulator, who says he has heard of multiple new cloud migrations to US firms being put on hold or reconsidered. Hubert has argued that it is no longer “safe” for European governments to be moved to US clouds and that European alternatives can’t properly compete. “We sell a lot of fine wood here in Europe. But not that much furniture,” he says. However, that too could change.

Schaake, the former member of the European Parliament, says a combination of new investments, a different approach to buying public services, and a Europe-first approach or investing in a European technology stack could help to stimulate any wider moves on the continent. “The dramatic shift of the Trump administration is very tangible,” Schaake says. “The idea that anything could happen and that Europe should fend for itself is clear. Now we need to see the same kind of pace and leadership that we see with defense to actually turn this into meaningful action.”

Trump’s Aggression Sours Europe on US Cloud Giants

Amid growing concerns over Big Tech firms aligning with Trump administration policies, people are starting to move their digital lives to services based overseas. Here's what you need to know.

Law enforcement requests for user data from Apple, Google, and Meta mean that these companies can decide whether government authorities have access to your personal information, including location data. This means the companies with the most insight into our lives, movements, and communications are frontline arbiters of our constitutional rights and the rights of non-US citizens—a fact some are likely feeling more acutely now than ever.

Collaboration between Big Tech and the Trump administration began before Donald Trump’s swearing-in on January 20. Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Uber each gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Separately, in personal donations, so did Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook.

Americans concerned about the Trump administration and Silicon Valley’s embrace of it, may consider becoming a “digital expat”—moving your digital life off of US-based systems. Meanwhile, Europeans are starting to see US data services as “no longer safe” for businesses, governments, and societies.

Here’s a brief rundown of the privacy, security, and civil liberties issues related to the use of US-based digital services that suddenly feel more urgent—and what to do about it.

**Cozying Up**

In anticipation of Trump’s inauguration, Meta-owned Facebook, Instagram, and Threads made drastic policy changes citing alignment with Trump administration values, to permit hate speech and abuse “on topics like immigration and gender.” Meta also signaled its allegiance by ditching its fact-checkers—a frequent target of MAGA world ire. Two days after the inauguration, Meta quietly rolled out pro-life moderation actions through post suppression and account suspensions. Zuckerberg explained the company’s new direction to staff, saying: “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government.”

Meta did not immediately respond to our request for comment regarding its partnership, data sharing, or policy changes.

Google followed suit. The company changed its Maps and Search results to rename part of the world—the Gulf of Mexico—following a Trump executive order renaming it the Gulf of America, despite the the US claiming control of less than 50 percent of the Gulf. Apple and Microsoft also followed Trump’s order.

Google’s consumer products also received a swath of updates in line with the new administration, including further changes to Maps, Calendar, and Search. Next, Google removed the new administration’s “banned” terms from its Google Health product. Then it did an about-face on its public promise not to build weaponized AI tools, such as Project Dragonfly, which was discovered in 2018 to be tailoring Google’s entire platform to enable China’s aggressive crackdown on its citizens. When reached for comment, Google did not immediately respond.

Big Tech aligning with the Trump administration matters because its business models rely on surveillance and amassing our personal data. Meta, Google, Apple and other large tech firms are among the gatekeepers standing between privacy and government requests for user data. Even when tech firms must comply by law, they’re often still free to decide how much information they collect about people and how long they store the data.

**Government Hand-Outs**

Current US laws around tech, privacy, and government requests have been guided by bulwarks like the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, US court rulings, and tech companies’ willingness to question the federal government’s opinion that it is entitled to access our personal information and location data. Apple, Google, and Meta each have language about law enforcement data requests that make it seem like they have our backs when it comes to overreach. Now, with companies shaping certain policies, tools, and practices in pursuit of “partnership” with the Trump administration, these companies’ powers over our data takes on new focus.

Generally, law enforcement can compel US companies to hand over user data using a subpoena, court order, search warrant—or, in rarer cases, a National Security Letter (NSL). As Google explains, an NSL is “one of the authorities granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).” Google adds, “FISA orders and authorizations can be used to compel electronic surveillance and the disclosure of stored data, including content from services like Gmail, Drive, and Photos.” How companies respond to these demands can vary in consequential ways.

A nearly decade-old battle over encrypted communication provides a clear example of the push and pull over user data between tech companies and federal law enforcement. In 2016, the FBI tried to compel Apple to backdoor an iPhone so law enforcement could access its encrypted contents. Apple refused to break its iOS security to do so. Then-candidate Trump said the company should be made to comply or be punished. “We should force them to do it,” he stated. Backdoors for law enforcement data access became a pet project in Trump’s first term; his DOJ appointee Rod Rosenstein launched a 2017 campaign to rebrand encrypted communications (and locked phones) as “law-free zones.” By 2019, Trump officials were brainstorming laws and bans against “unbreakable” consumer security measures, like end-to-end encryption.

The second Trump administration’s stance on encryption is less clear. Prior to Trump’s new term, in December 2024, FBI officials urged Americans to use encrypted messaging apps in the wake of cyberattacks on telecom companies attributed to the Salt Typhoon hacking campaign. (Since then, Trump’s team disbanded the DHS board investigating Salt Typhoon.) When reached for comment regarding the administration's current stance on companies using forms of encryption law enforcement can't break, a While House official told WIRED via email: “The White House looks forward to working with industry leaders to unlock the Golden Age of digital literacy.”

Apple did not immediately respond to WIRED”s request for comment.

Big Tech’s MAGA pivot is pointedly problematic for countries that rely on services like Meta platforms for government communications, official emergency response coordination, social tools like Marketplace, news, public health messaging, and small business services. Officials in one New Zealand district are exploring Facebook and Instagram exit strategies "until such time as we can be assured of the safety of our whole community and the integrity of democracy on these platforms."

It's a global concern. This week, an annual report on the global state of democracy, the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), told reporters, "the United States will not score as a democracy when we release \[next year's\] data." V-Dem’s principal investigator, Staffan Lindberg, added: "If it continues like this, democracy \[in the US\] will not last another six months." With an expected downgrade to the status of electoral autocracy, the US will share its label with Turkey, Hungary, Iraq, India, and Russia.

This makes Big Tech's data collection, storage, control over, or any use of that data an even more urgent issue around the world. This is particularly true for countries the US government has in its sights for territorial expansion, extracting resources, or MAGA grievance politics.

Of course, saying, “just quit Facebook” is one thing—it’s not that simple. Ditching Messenger and WhatsApp for Signal is pretty straightforward, though. Trading X for Bluesky is easier. Keep in mind that both are currently based in the US and that these are merely _safer_ alternatives. In other words, editing your digital footprint is an act of risk and harm reduction, where you identify threats and take the appropriate steps for your situation to reduce potential harms to yourself and those you care about.

**Cutting Ties**

If you’re thinking it might be handy to know about secure non-US options for your digital footprint, good news: There are a variety of well-established services worth checking out—ones that are increasing in popularity as fears of a DOGE\-Facebook partnership seem less far-fetched by the day..

In the wake of deletions and alterations in the Trump administration’s war on science, accurate health information, inclusion, and equity, an archived copy of the CDC’s pre-Trump website is hosted in Europe due to concerns about US jurisdiction. Similarly, the Internet Archive has a full, live copy of itself preserved outside the US (Internet Archive Canada), also using decentralized Filecoin storage for the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive “as an added layer of preservation.”

It’s no coincidence that a majority of jurisdictionally-aware US data preservation efforts are listing ProtonMail accounts as their contact info. Proton is a Swiss company offering services comparable to Gmail, Google Drive and Docs, as well as having an end-to-end encrypted platform, a password manager, backup storage, photos, and a VPN. Proton explains in a March 2023 blog post that Swiss law and encryption protects Proton’s users from abortion-related data requests, and details the difference between data requests they receive and those sent to Facebook and Google.

For people who prefer globally accurate maps free of Trump Sharpie defacements, and the Gulf of Mexico keeping its name, check out MagicEarth, TomTom AmiGO, HERE WeGo (all Netherlands-based) or OpenStreetMap (global contributors). Check out Vivaldi (Norway) for browsing, and Qwant (France) or Startpage (Netherlands) for a search engine. IONOS (Germany) is a Squarespace/Wix alternative, Pixelfed (Canada) can stand in for Instagram. StoryGraph (UK) for Goodreads. Affinity (UK/AU) or Canva (AU) can replace Adobe products, and Kobo (Canada/Japan) for an ebook reader.

Check out Plex or Jellyfin for music and video, Nextcloud for file storage and syncing, LibreOffice for an office suite, Affinity Suite to replace Adobe, SearXNG for search—all based outside the US. Codeberg (EU) is basically an open source, privacy-forward, community-run Github; one user has a handy Linux-Is-Best/Outside\_Us\_Jurisdiction listing for digital service providers. If you’re looking for a non-U.S. Starlink alternative, Eutelsat may have you covered.

To find other services that suit your needs, take a look through this sprawling, collectively curated Non-US Alternatives List of everything from email to antivirus programs, e-commerce and social media options, and more. European Alternatives also has a growing collection of categories listing services from web analytics and cloud platforms to password managers, web browsers, calendars, and even a few music streaming services.

Concerns prompting people to jettison US digital services isn’t new, but it’s only getting more popular as the lines between Trump’s White House and Big Tech grow less distinct by the day. There are over a quarter million members in the r/degoogle subreddit, where members share tips, tricks, and reviews on everything they’re using to replace Google products or ditch US products altogether.

“Cancelled all my US streamers and moved to a Crave/GEM combo,” one member explained. “Spent 2 weeks moving to Proton and deleted/cancelled everything US during that process. Bye PayPal, bye Amazon, goodbye American everything.”

How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services—and Why You Might Want To

Chinese ecommerce giants like Temu and AliExpress sell drone accessories like those used by soldiers in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Commercial quadcopters have been on the mainstream gadget scene for 15 years, proliferating across industries and among hobbyists. There's a swanky DJI store on New York City's Fifth Avenue, and you probably have a neighbor, not to mention a roofer, who owns a drone. So when researchers at the embedded-device security firm Red Balloon started seeing surprising quadcopter accessories on Chinese shopping platforms like Temu and AliExpress, they didn't think much of it at first. As with any popular gadget type, there's a whole ecosystem of niche, wacky, and comical add-ons available for drones. But the more Red Balloon CEO Ang Cui thought about it, the more unsettled he and his colleagues became about how cheap and easy it would be for anyone to buy seemingly disparate add-ons that could easily turn a mainstream quadcopter into a war machine.

The accessories the researchers found include AI drone guidance modules—essentially small mounted cameras that use object recognition to identify humans and road vehicles at long range—and miles-long fiber optic tethers. Like plugging an ethernet cable directly into your laptop, miles-long tethers allow drones to fly around a large area without being vulnerable to disruption by signal jammers. The researchers recognized them from battlefield footage and other reports that such tethers—not to mention AI guidance modules—are being used by both sides in the Russia\-Ukraine war to drop explosives or autopilot crash entire drones themselves into tracked objects without requiring operator control.

The fact that battlefield technology is widely available in the United States and around the world at low cost augurs a climate in which any actor—from criminal syndicates to paramilitary groups, from disgruntled employees to ostracized teens—can quickly and cheaply gather the needed equipment to remotely go on a destructive and violent rampage.

“The more we looked at this and started to see the big picture, the more my heart sank, because these are toys that are really amazing at killing people,” Cui tells WIRED. “This tech didn't exist in the commercial space two years ago, it wasn't in demand from hobbyists, but now manufacturers are making it for war and it's spilling over.”

The Red Balloon researchers found that long-range quadcopters are readily available on marketplaces like AliExpress for under $300, with many priced at around $200 each. And the unit price of a long-range drone can drop even lower when purchased in bulk. The researchers noticed sellers who were claiming that they ship 60,000 of the long-range drones per month. They purchased a 1-mile-long tether from a seller on AliExpress for about $260 and another that is 7.5 miles long for about $700. Meanwhile, the researchers also purchased an AI guidance module from a different AliExpress seller for $325. Cui and his colleagues also purchased cargo holders that strap to drones and can be used to transport beer cans or water bottles, but could also be loaded with mortar bombs. These were $106 each. In the two months since the researchers made the purchases, they say the prices of most of the products they bought have even dropped slightly.

“This equipment is mainstream, but it does not just cost a few dollars to make, so I think this stuff is being sold either at or below cost,” Cui says.

In December the Kyiv Post reported of the Ukrainian military's own long-range, tethered drones, that, “currently about 40 percent of the components \[are\] sourced locally in Ukraine while, because there is limited domestic microelectronics manufacturing capability, the rest are imported, primarily from China.”

AliExpress parent company Alibaba and Temu did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED about whether such accessories—which are not inherently weapons themselves—pose any risks or have purchasing restrictions imposed on them in any markets.

“I don't know a hobbyist that wants to fly a drone miles away with a tether to drop a water bottle in someone's yard,” says Dave Torres, Red Balloon's head of FPGA security. “I'm a combat veteran, so I'm used to dealing with IEDs and worrying about things that are buried in the ground. Well, now you have the capability to fly your IED over whoever you want to attack.”

Red Balloon specializes in embedded device hardware and firmware analysis, so the researchers were interested to evaluate the processors and low-level code powering the fiber optic tethers and AI guidance components. In the tethers, they were surprised to find years-old, but relatively pricey, reprogrammable chips known as “field programmable gate arrays” or FPGAs (Torres' area of expertise). Inclusion of these chips was notable, because it suggests that the devices are designed to be more dynamic and expandable than what a hobbyist would presumably need. Meanwhile, the guidance modules have largely reliable object recognition using all the cheapest components possible, including Chinese-made chips as their main processor.

“When I first saw the AI guidance components, one was advertising that it could identify a bird at 30 meters away and a horse at a hundred meters away—but later they actually just changed that to identifying people and cars,” says Cui. "It's not specific people or specific models of vehicles, but they're not even dancing around it anymore that those are the categories of targets this would be used for.”

Counter-drone defense tech is still, relatively, in its infancy around the world. Even vague sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena can throw airports, or the state of New Jersey, into chaos. As WIRED reported in December, the US Department of Homeland Security has been encouraging state and local law enforcement since at least last summer to assess their ability to respond to weaponized drones. In a memo, DHS warned that violent extremists in the US have been looking to modify “off-the-shelf” quadcopters to carry weapons, including "explosives, conductive materials, and chemicals."

Red Balloon is based in New York City, and the researchers note that as they were investigating drone accessories they began to realize that the few options currently available for stymying malicious drones can't be used in dense urban areas.

“The things that work at taking them down are machine guns, lasers, and massive jammers—none of which can be used in a city,” Cui says. “This is why Red Balloon has been focusing on developing techniques appropriate for high-density environments to track and safely defeat these drones without shooting at them or without jamming.”

Such approaches could involve targeting drones at the protocol and firmware level to commandeer them and cause them to land. The researchers point out that the drones' ultra-low-cost development and manufacturing leaves no margin for research and development, testing, or onboard security protections. This represents a vulnerability for operators but could also be a benefit for defenders seeking to diffuse violent attacks without collateral damage.

For now, though, the proliferation of accessories to weaponize mainstream drones is a looming threat with no easy resolution.

“Somebody who designs a plan and puts it into action could do some sophisticated damage for really, really cheap,” Red Ballon's Torres says. "I wonder if the US military can even get defense contractors to build these devices for them for the price they're selling online.”

Low-Cost Drone Add-Ons From China Let Anyone With a Credit Card Turn Toys Into Weapons of War

Plus: A nominee to lead CISA emerges, Elon Musk visits the NSA, a renowned crypto cracking firm’s secret (and problematic) cofounder is revealed, and more.

Knifings, firebombings, shootings, and murder-for-hire plots—all linked to a splinter group of the 764 crime network called “No Lives Matter.” According to its own manifesto, the group seeks to “purify mankind through endless attacks” and has released at least two “kill guides” tied to violent plots in the US and Europe. Intelligence documents reviewed by WIRED reveal growing concern among analysts, but experts remain unsure how to stop the group’s spread.

On Monday, X experienced intermittent outages after a botnet flooded the social network with junk traffic in an attempt to take down its system. Elon Musk stated that the distributed denial-of-service attack originated from Ukrainian IP addresses, implying that the country—already under siege by a Russian invasion and frequently mocked by the centibillionaire—may have been responsible. Security experts tell WIRED that this is not how DDoS attacks work.

Meanwhile, inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, mass layoffs are hurting US cyberdefense, weakening protections against foreign adversaries. Vital staff cuts have left employees overworked and strained international partnerships, according to interviews with staff at the agency that helps safeguard cities, businesses, and nonprofits from cyberattacks. “A lot of people are scared,” says one employee. “We’re waiting for that other shoe to drop. We don't know what's coming.” As WIRED takes you inside the agencies at the center of the uncertainty and chaos of the second Trump administration, we've updated our quick and easy guide to using Signal to help you get the most out of the messaging app’s end-to-end encryption.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Those “green bubbles,” the cross-platform text messages that annoy iPhone owners and keep Android users relegated to a group-chat underclass, aren’t just a cultural disconnect. They’re also a security issue: Text messages sent between Android and iOS devices—unlike blue-bubble iMessage texts or Android-to-Android messages—aren’t end-to-end encrypted, leaving them open to surveillance or interception. Now, that may finally be changing.

The GSM Association, responsible for many widely used telecom standards, this week announced that its Rich Communication Services (or RCS) protocol will now support end-to-end encryption for cross-platform texting, and Apple revealed that it will now integrate that feature of RCS into its iOS devices. Until now, Apple and Google had both supported RCS’s other features in texts sent between iOS and Android, but not end-to-end encryption, which ensures that only the devices sending and receiving messages can decrypt them and not any server or snoop that sees them in transit.

Neither Apple nor the GSMA has said exactly when the new privacy features are launching. Until then, anyone sending cross-platform messages would be wise to stick with apps like WhatsApp or Signal that have long provided end-to-end encryption—and have also helped Android and iPhone users avoid personal disputes over bubble colors.

**Sean Plankey Nominated as Head of CISA, America’s Top Cybersecurity Agency**

The White House has tapped Sean Plankey to run CISA, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security primarily responsible for American digital defense. Plankey, long considered the leading contender for the role, served in multiple cybersecurity positions in the first Trump administration and previously held senior roles in US Cyber Command. In that DOD agency focused on cyber offense, he served as a weapons and tactics branch chief and earned a Bronze Star for hacking operations in Afghanistan. CISA, like many federal agencies, has faced hundreds of personnel cuts in recent weeks, and its previous director, Chris Krebs, came under harsh criticism under the previous Trump administration for the agency’s work to counter disinformation and secure elections. Krebs was fired in a Trump tweet near the end of his term after CISA described the 2020 election, whose results Trump baselessly contested, as the “most secure in American history.”

**Elon Musk Visits the National Security Agency**

Not even the National Security Agency has been spared from Elon Musk’s scorched-earth campaign to gut the federal government. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had visited the intelligence agency in Fort Meade, meeting with leadership to discuss staff reductions and operational changes, according to current and former US officials who spoke to the Journal.

Despite being one of the most insulated branches of US intelligence, the NSA has still found itself pulled into Musk’s orbit. The visit to Fort Meade is another sign of the sweeping nature of his influence and the extraordinary access the world’s richest man has been granted over even the most secretive federal operations.

Last month, staff at the intelligence agency received emails offering deferred resignations, signaling impending changes. Then, a week ahead of his visit, Musk publicly called for an overhaul of the intelligence and cybersecurity agency. Posting to his social media site X, Musk wrote, “The NSA needs an overhaul,” alongside an apparent agency recruitment graphic featuring a group of college-aged people of color and a list of universities where the NSA was conducting outreach—seemingly mocking the agency’s recruitment efforts.

**A Buzzy Crypto Cracking Firm Had a Hidden CoFounder Accused of Sexual Assault**

The cryptocurrency recovery firm Unciphered has made headlines with its feats of whitehat wallet cracking on behalf of customers who have lost access to their cryptocurrency fortunes. In the fall of 2023, for instance, the company cracked a model of encrypted IronKey USB drive believed to hold 7,000-plus bitcoins now worth well over half a billion dollars. Now, The Washington Post reports that one of the cofounders of that company was Morgan Marquis-Boire, a once-lauded hacker and security researcher for Google and Citizen Lab who was later accused of sexually assaulting multiple women. The reported involvement of Marquis-Boire, who has largely disappeared from the cybersecurity world after facing the sex crime accusations in 2017, was kept secret from even many of the startup’s staff, and the revelations of his role have left the company in “disarray,” according to the Post.

**A Reporter Behind an Indian Hacker-for-Hire Story Is Fighting to Regain His Citizenship**

In November of 2023, Raphael Satter was one of a team of Reuters reporters who published an in-depth feature on Appin Technology, a startup that allegedly hacked numerous celebrity and civil society targets on behalf of clients. A group with a similar name responded by suing, and obtained a court ruling that for a time successfully censored Reuters’ story—a remarkable case of an Indian judge restricting free speech internationally. Satter is now fighting a different battle following publication of that story. In late 2023, his Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card—a kind of international citizenship extended to foreign citizens of Indian origin and those married to Indians—was revoked around the same time as the judge filed the injunction. A letter sent to Satter in December of that year accused him of “maliciously creating adverse and biased opinion against Indian institutions in the international arena.” Satter is now petitioning a Delhi court to reverse that revocation, which has prevented him from entering India to visit family there.

End-to-End Encrypted Texts Between Android and iPhone Are Coming

The UK, France, Sweden, and EU have made fresh attacks on end-to-end encryption. Some of the attacks are more “crude” than those in recent years, experts say.

Over the past decade, encrypted communication has become the norm for billions of people. Every day, Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp keep billions of messages, photos, videos, and calls private by using end-to-end encryption by default—while Zoom, Discord, and various other services all have options to enable the protection. But despite the technology’s mainstream rise, long-standing threats to weaken encryption keep piling up.

Over the past few months, there has been a surge in government and law enforcement efforts that would effectively undermine encryption, privacy advocates and experts say, with some of the emerging threats being the most “blunt” and aggressive of those in recent memory. Officials in the UK, France, and Sweden have all made moves since the start of 2025 that could undermine or eliminate the protections of end-to-end encryption, adding to a multiyear European Union plan to scan private chats and Indian efforts that could damage encryption.

These latest assaults on encryption come as intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials in the United States have recently backtracked on years of anti-encryption attitudes and now recommend that people use encrypted communication platforms whenever they can. The drastic shift in attitude followed the China-backed Salt Typhoon hacker group’s widespread breach of major US telecoms, and it comes as the second Trump administration ramps up potential surveillance of millions of undocumented migrants living in the US. Simultaneously, the administration has been straining longtime, crucial international intelligence-sharing agreements and partnerships.

“The trend is bleak,” says Carmela Troncoso, a longtime privacy and cryptography researcher and the scientific director at the Max-Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Germany. “We see these new policies coming up as mushrooms trying to undermine encryption.”

End-to-end encryption is designed so only the sender and receiver of messages have access to their contents—governments, tech companies, and telecom providers can’t snoop on what people are saying. Those privacy and security guarantees have made encryption a target for law enforcement and governments for decades, because officials claim that the protection makes it prohibitively difficult to investigate urgent threats such as child sexual abuse material and terrorism.

As a result, governments around the world have frequently proposed technical mechanisms to bypass encryption and allow access to messages for investigations. Cryptographers and technologists have repeatedly and definitively warned, though, that any backdoor created to access end-to-end encrypted communications could be exploited by hackers or authoritarian governments, compromising everyone’s safety. Additionally, it is likely that criminals would find ways to continue to use self-made encryption tools to conceal their messages, meaning that backdoors in mainstream products would succeed at undermining protections for the public without eliminating its use by bad actors.

Broadly, the recent threats to encryption have come in three forms, says Namrata Maheshwari, the encryption policy lead at international nonprofit Access Now. First, there are those where governments or law enforcement agencies are asking for backdoors to be built into encrypted platforms to gain “lawful access” to content. At the end of February, for example, Apple pulled its encrypted iCloud backup system, called Advanced Data Protection, from use in the UK after the country’s lawmakers reportedly hit the Cupertino company with a secret order demanding Apple provide access to encrypted files. To do so, Apple would have had to create a backdoor. The order, which has been criticized by the Trump administration, is set to be challenged in a secret court hearing on March 14.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Sweden are also considering legislation that would require encrypted messaging companies, such as Signal and WhatsApp, to keep copies of messages that people send on their platforms so they could allow law enforcement to access suspects’ histories. Signal has said it would pull out of Sweden if the potential law goes ahead. While in France earlier this year, a proposed amendment to a drug trafficking law outlined plans to require encrypted messaging services to hand over decrypted chat messages within 72 hours of a request or face fines of up to 2 percent of annual global revenue. This week, the proposal was reportedly scrapped, while some politicians said they supported the idea.

“We’re seeing some democracies revert back to very crude approaches to circumventing encryption that we maybe thought were something of the past,” Callum Voge, the director of governmental affairs and advocacy at nonprofit Internet Society, says of efforts that could require a backdoor to be created.

In January, the head of EU law enforcement agency Europol told the Financial Times that tech companies have a “social responsibility” to provide access to encrypted messages. “Anonymity is not a fundamental right,” Catherine De Bolle told the publication. The comments expanded upon a previous statement from European police chiefs saying “we do not accept that there need be a binary choice between cybersecurity or privacy on the one hand and public safety on the other.”

The second threat, Maheshwari says, relates to an increase in proposals related to a technology known as “client-side scanning.” The process, which is sometimes called “on-device scanning,” involves scanning messages locally on a person’s device before they are encrypted, and comparing them against a database of prohibited content that is held elsewhere. Client-side scanning is an effort to contort encryption backdoors into something more palatable to privacy proponents by keeping people’s personal data on their own devices.

Ultimately, though, cryptographers and digital rights advocates have repeatedly warned that client-side scanning does not sidestep the fundamental dangers posed by creating a way for a third party to access encrypted data. The Internet Society’s Voge describes such efforts as a more “sophisticated” way that democracies have been trying to circumvent encryption in recent years.

For instance, politicians in the EU have been fiercely debating plans to scan billions of messages for potential child sexual abuse material using client-side scanning for more than three years. The unresolved debates have proved highly controversial, with multiple countries pushing to weaken encryption. “Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types,” Apple officials said in a letter first reported by WIRED in August 2023, after the company ditched its own, separate plans to introduce a form of client-side scanning on iPhones.

“It’s very divided in Europe, \[there are\] countries strongly in favor of scanning and countries strongly against it as well,” Voge says of the EU’s long-running chat monitoring plans. In May 2023, WIRED obtained leaked documents that stated many European countries’ positions on encryption. At the time, Spanish officials said they would like to prevent end-to-end encryption entirely in the EU, while many others were in favor of scanning people’s messages. Other countries, such as Germany, were against weakening encryption. Dutch political documentation says the country’s intelligence agency, AIVD, considers client-side scanning to be “too great a security risk for the digital resilience of the Netherlands.”

Finally, Maheshwari says, there is always the looming threat of potential bans or blocks for encrypted services. Toward the end of 2024, Russian officials blocked access to Signal amid the country’s ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine and widescale efforts to censor and control information environments. India has an ongoing lawsuit against WhatsApp, which could threaten its ability to operate in the country or necessitate that the platform retreat from end-to-end encryption in that market. Maheshwari also points out that while all virtual private networks do not specifically use end-to-end encryption, India has already banned multiple VPN services.

While each potential proposal that could undermine encryption is slightly different, the Internet Society’s Voge says that they’ve been met with some “stronger” pro-encryption voices coming from government or law enforcement services around the world, particularly when it comes to protecting national security.

In December, two officials from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI, encouraged more people to use encrypted communications systems after China’s Salt Typhoon hackers gained deep access to US telecoms providers, exposing unencrypted calls and texts. “Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” one of the officials said.

Voge points out that as well as CISA and the FBI’s calls to use encrypted messaging, the Swedish armed forces has specifically cleared Signal for use with unclassified material, saying it can stop messages and calls from being intercepted by third parties.

Ahead of the UK’s March 14 legal hearing about the backdoor order reportedly made to Apple, US senators and privacy groups urged there to be more transparency about the demands and the risks to global encryption it presents. A bipartisan group of five members of Congress said the “cloak of secrecy” should be removed.

UK civil liberties groups Privacy International and Liberty also filed legal challenges over the secrecy of the proceedings. “While the UK Government seems to have come for Apple today, tomorrow it may be any other big tech companies, such as Google and Microsoft, and the day after it could be Signal, your VPN Provider, Proton and others,” Privacy International said in a statement.

Ultimately, Access Now’s Maheshwari says, efforts to defend encryption will almost certainly continue, as they have for decades, to protect people’s human rights.

“Encryption right now is exceptionally important because it's a crucial enabler of the full spectrum of human rights,” Maheshwari says. “It’s not just privacy. It is what enables you to speak freely, to exercise your freedom of expression, to organize, to assemble, to associate.”

A New Era of Attacks on Encryption Is Starting to Heat Up

Employees at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tell WIRED they’re struggling to protect the US while the administration dismisses their colleagues and poisons their partnerships.

Mass layoffs and weak leadership are taking a severe toll on the US government’s cyber defense agency, undermining its ability to protect America from foreign adversaries bent on crippling infrastructure and ransomware gangs that are bleeding small businesses dry.

Inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, vital support staff are gone, international partnerships have been strained, and workers are afraid to discuss threats to democracy that they’re now prohibited from countering. Employees are even more overworked than usual, and new assignments from the administration are interfering with important tasks. Meanwhile, CISA’s temporary leader is doing everything she can to appease President Donald Trump, infuriating employees who say she’s out of touch and refusing to protect them.

“You've got a lot of people who … are looking over their shoulder as opposed to looking at the enemy right now,” says one CISA employee.

As the Trump administration’s war on the federal bureaucracy throws key agencies into chaos, CISA’s turmoil could have underappreciated consequences for national security and economic prospects. The agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has steadily built a reputation as a nonpartisan source of funding, guidance, and even direct defensive support for cities, businesses, and nonprofits reeling from cyberattacks. That mission is now under threat, according to interviews with seven CISA employees and another person familiar with the matter, all of whom requested anonymity to avoid reprisals.

“Our enemies are not slowing their continuous assaults on our systems,” says Suzanne Spaulding, who led CISA’s predecessor during the Obama administration. “We need all hands on deck and focused, not traumatized and distracted.”

**Talent Exodus**

CISA’s mission has grown significantly since its creation in 2018. Established mainly to defend government networks, the agency increasingly embraced new roles supporting private companies and state governments, advocating for secure software, and cooperating with foreign partners. This helped CISA raise its profile and gain credibility. But now, following several rounds of layoffs and new restrictions from the Trump administration, the agency is struggling to sustain its momentum.

The extent of the cuts at CISA is still unclear—employees are only learning about the loss of colleagues through word of mouth—but multiple employees estimate that, between the layoffs and the Office of Personnel Management’s deferred-resignation program, CISA has lost between 300 and 400 staffers—roughly 10 percent of its 3,200-person workforce. Many of those people were hired through DHS’s Cybersecurity Talent Management System (CTMS), a program designed to recruit experts by competing with private-sector salaries. As a result, they were classified as probationary employees for three years, making them vulnerable to layoffs. These layoffs at CISA also hit longtime government workers who had become probationary by transferring into CTMS roles.

Key employees who have left include Kelly Shaw, who oversaw one of CISA’s marquee programs, a voluntary threat-detection service for critical infrastructure operators; David Carroll, who led the Mission Engineering Division, the agency’s technological backbone; and Carroll’s technical director, Duncan McCaskill. “We've had a very large brain drain,” an employee says.

The departures have strained a workforce that was already stretched thin. “We were running into \[a\] critical skills shortage previously,” says a second employee. “Most people are and have been doing the work of two or more full-time \[staffers\].”

The CISA team that helps critical infrastructure operators respond to hacks has been understaffed for years. The agency added support positions for that team after a Government Accountability Office audit, but “most of those people got terminated,” a third employee says.

CISA’s flagship programs have been mostly unscathed so far. That includes the threat-hunting branch, which analyzes threats, searches government networks for intruders, and responds to breaches. But some of the laid-off staffers provided crucial “backend” support for threat hunters and other analysts. “There's enhancements that could be made to the tools that they're using,” the first employee says. But with fewer people developing those improvements, “we're going to start having antiquated systems.”

In a statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin says CISA remains “committed to the safety and security of the nation’s critical infrastructure” and touted “the critical skills that CISA experts bring to the fight every day.”

National Security Council spokesperson James Hewitt says the reporting in this story is “nonsense,” adding that “there have been no widespread layoffs at CISA and its mission remains fully intact.”

“We continue to strengthen cybersecurity partnerships, advance AI and open-source security, and protect election integrity,” Hewitt says. “Under President Trump’s leadership, our administration will make significant strides in enhancing national cybersecurity.”

**Partnership Problems**

CISA’s external partnerships—the cornerstone of its effort to understand and counter evolving threats—have been especially hard-hit.

International travel has been frozen, two employees say, with trips—and even online communications with foreign partners—requiring high-level approvals. That has hampered CISA’s collaboration with other cyber agencies, including those of “Five Eyes” allies Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, staffers say.

CISA employees can’t even communicate with people at other federal agencies the way they used to. Previously routine conversations between CISA staffers and high-level officials elsewhere now need special permissions, slowing down important work. “I can’t reach out to a CISO about an emergency situation without approval,” a fourth employee says.

Meanwhile, companies have expressed fears about sharing information with CISA and even using the agency’s free attack-monitoring services due to DOGE’s ransacking of agency computers, according to two employees. “There is advanced concern about all of our services that collect sensitive data,” the third employee says. “Partners \[are\] asking questions about what DOGE can get access to and expressing concern that their sensitive information is in their hands.”

“The wrecking of preestablished relationships will be something that will have long-lasting effects,” the fourth employee says.

CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, a high-profile hub of government-industry cooperation, is also struggling. The JCDC currently works with more than 300 private companies to exchange threat information, draft defensive playbooks, discuss geopolitical challenges, and publish advisories. The unit wants to add hundreds more partners, but it has “had difficulty scaling this,” the first employee says, and recent layoffs have only made things worse. Contractors might be able to help, but the JCDC’s “vendor support contracts run out in less than a year,” the employee says, and as processes across the government have been frozen or paused in recent weeks, CISA doesn’t know if it can pursue new agreements. The JCDC doesn't have enough federal workers to pick up the slack, the fourth CISA employee says.

With fewer staffers to manage its relationships, the JCDC confronts a perilous question: How should it focus its resources without jeopardizing important visibility into the threat landscape? Emphasizing ties with major companies might be more economical, but that would risk overlooking mid-sized firms whose technology is quietly essential to vital US industries.

“CISA continuously evaluates how it works with partners,” McLaughlin says, “and has taken decisive action to maximize impact while being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and aligning with Administration priorities and our authorities.”

**Gutting Security Advocacy**

Other parts of CISA’s mission have also begun to atrophy.

During the Biden administration, CISA vowed to help the tech industry understand and mitigate the risks of open-source software, which is often poorly maintained and has repeatedly been exploited by hackers. But since Trump took office, CISA has lost the three technical luminaries who oversaw that work: Jack Cable, Aeva Black, and Tim Pepper. Open-source security remains a major challenge, but CISA’s efforts to address that challenge are now rudderless.

The new administration has also frozen CISA’s work on artificial intelligence. The agency had been researching ways to use AI for vulnerability detection and networking monitoring, as well as partnering with the private sector to study AI risks. “About 50 percent of \[CISA’s\] AI expert headcount has been let go,” says a person familiar with the matter, which is “severely limiting” CISA’s ability to help the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute test AI models before deployment.

The administration also pushed out CISA’s chief AI officer, Lisa Einstein, and closed down her office, the person familiar with the matter says. Einstein’s team oversaw CISA’s use of AI and worked with private companies and foreign governments on AI security.

A large team of DHS and CISA AI staffers was set to accompany Vice President JD Vance to Paris in February for an AI summit, but those experts “were all pulled back” from attending, according to a person familiar with the matter.

**‘Nefarious’ Retribution**

CISA staffers are still reeling from the agency’s suspension of its election security program and the layoffs of most people who worked on that mission. The election security initiative, through which CISA provided free services and guidance to state and local officials and worked with tech companies to track online misinformation, became a target of right-wing conspiracy theories in 2020, which marked it for death after Trump’s return to the White House.

The program—on hold pending CISA’s review of a recently completed internal assessment—was a tiny part of CISA’s budget and operations, but the campaign against it has alarmed agency employees. “This is definitely in the freak-out zone,” says the first employee, who adds that CISA staffers across the political spectrum support the agency’s efforts to track online misinformation campaigns. “All of us recognize that this is a common deception tactic of the enemy.”

The election security purge rippled across the agency, because some of the laid-off staffers had moved from elections to other assignments or were simultaneously working on both missions. Geoff Hale, who led the elections team between 2018 and 2024, was serving as the chief of partnerships at the JCDC when he was placed on administrative leave, setting off a scramble to replace him.

The removal of Hale and his colleagues “was the start to a decline in morale” at CISA, according to the second employee. Now, staffers are afraid to discuss certain topics in public forums: “No one's going to talk about election security right now,” the first employee says.

“The fact that there’s retribution from the president … is kind of frightening,” this employee adds. “A very nefarious place to be.”

**Abandoned and Demoralized**

The layoffs, operational changes, and other disruptions at CISA have severely depleted morale and undermined the agency’s effectiveness. “Even simple tasks feel hard to accomplish because you don't know if your teammates won't be here tomorrow,” says the fourth employee.

The biggest source of stress and frustration is acting CISA director Bridget Bean, a former Trump appointee who, employees say, appears eager to please the president even if it means not defending her agency. Bean “just takes whatever comes down and implements \[it\] without thought of how it will affect \[CISA’s\] mission,” the fifth employee says. Employees describe her as a poor leader and ineffective communicator who has zealously enacted Trump’s agenda. In town-hall meetings with employees, Bean has said CISA must carefully review its its authorities and urged staffers to “assume noble intent” when dealing with Trump officials. While discussing Elon Musk’s mass-buyout program, she allegedly said, “I like to say ‘Fork in the Road’ because it's kind of fun,.” according to the fourth employee. She was so eager to comply with Musk’s “What did you do last week?” email that she instructed staffers to respond to it before DHS had finalized its department-wide approach. DHS later told staff not to respond, and Bean had to walk back her directive.

“Bean feels like she's against the workforce just to please the current administration,” the second employee says. The fourth employee describes her as “not authentic, tone-deaf, spineless, \[and\] devoid of leadership.”

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, says CISA “is not interested in ad hominem attacks against its leadership,” which she says “has doubled down on openness and transparency with the workforce.”

The return-to-office mandate has also caused problems. With all employees on-site, there isn’t enough room in CISA’s offices for the contractors who support the agency’s staff. That has made it “very difficult” to collaborate on projects and hold technical discussions, according to the first employee. “There wasn’t much thought about \[RTO’s\] impact to operations,” says the fourth employee. According to a fifth employee, “executing some of our sensitive operations is now harder.” (“CISA has worked tirelessly to make the return to office as smooth as possible from space to technology,” McLaughlin says.)

Employees are dealing with other stressors, too. They have no idea who’s reading their Musk-mandated performance reports, how they’re being evaluated, or whether AI is analyzing them for future layoffs. And there’s a lot of new paperwork. “The amount of extra shit we have to do to comply with the ‘efficiency measures’ … \[takes\] a lot of time away from doing our job,” says the fifth employee.

**Bracing for More**

When Trump signed the bill creating CISA in November 2018, he said the agency’s workforce would be “on the front lines of our cyber defense” and “make us, I think, much more effective.” Six and a half years later, many CISA employees see Trump as the biggest thing holding them back.

“This administration has declared psychological warfare on this workforce,” the fourth employee says.

With CISA drawing up plans for even larger cuts, staffers know the chaos is far from over.

“A lot of people are scared,” says the first employee. “We’re waiting for that other shoe to drop. We don't know what's coming.”

Entire wings of CISA—like National Risk Management Center and the Stakeholder Engagement Division—could be on the chopping block. Even in offices that survive, some of the government’s most talented cyber experts—people who chose public service over huge sums of money and craved the lifestyle of CISA’s now-eliminated remote-work environment—are starting to see their employment calculus differently. Some of them will likely leave for stabler jobs, further jeopardizing CISA’s mission. “What is the organization going to be capable of doing in the future?” the first employee asks.

If Trump’s confrontational foreign-policy strategy escalates tensions with Russia, China, Iran, or North Korea, it’s likely those nations could step up their use of cyberattacks to exact revenge. In that environment, warns Nitin Natarajan, CISA’s deputy director during the Biden administration, weakening the agency could prove very dangerous.

“Cuts to CISA’s cyber mission,” Natarajan says, “will only negatively impact our ability to not only protect federal government networks, but those around the nation that Americans depend on every day.”

‘People Are Scared’: Inside CISA as It Reels From Trump’s Purge

“No Lives Matter” has emerged in recent months as a particularly violent splinter group within the extremist crime network known as Com and 764, and experts are at a loss for how to stop its spread.

The kids are all grown up. In the face of international law enforcement pressure, dozens of prosecutions, and worldwide disrepute, the network of young sadists, misanthropes, child predators, and extortionists known as Com and 764 has not shrunk away into obscurity.

Rather, its members have progressed from online extortion and crimes related to child sexual abuse material, to real-world violence, a trajectory that alarms extremism researchers and government officials alike. Knifings, killings, firebombings, drive-by shootings, school shootings, and murder-for-hire plots in North America and Europe have all been connected to a splinter group called “No Lives Matter” that, per the group’s own manifesto, “idolizes death” and “seeks the purification of all mankind through endless attacks.” The group has released at least two “kill guides” that have been connected to violent attacks and plots in Europe and the United States.

The US Department of Justice classifies Com and 764 as a “Tier One” terrorism threat, the highest priority afforded to an extremist group, ideology, or tendency in American law enforcement’s internal rubric. Intelligence documents reviewed by WIRED show a stream of concern from analysts about the group’s harm to juvenile exploitation victims and the growing exhortations to physical violence that embody the No Lives Matter ethos.

However, the phenomenon has proved incredibly hard to combat due to a lack of coherent structure or ideology. Along with the insidious neo-Nazi propaganda group the Terrorgram Collective, over the past four years, Com/764 has morphed into a twisted amalgam of the Columbine Effect and older domestic terror groups like the Atomwaffen Division: Young extortionists and assailants egg each other on to progressively more lurid and debased acts of violence for the sake of internet notoriety and status.

In response, Western governments have employed terrorism charges against young people accused of conspiring to kill homeless people or phoning in bomb threats to schools and religious institutions beyond their own borders. In the United Kingdom, the Crown Prosecution Service recently secured a six-year prison term for 19-year-old Cameron Finnegan, who went by the handle “Acid,” for a raft of 764-related offenses, including possessing CSAM, urging young people to kill themselves, and possessing a “kill manual” authored by No Lives Matter adherents, replete with viable instructions for carrying out lethal attacks with knives, firearms, and vehicles.

"We want to make the public aware of \[Com/764\]," Detective Chief Superintendent Claire Finlay, the head of Counter Terrorism Policing Southeast, told the BBC following Finnegan’s guilty plea in January. "The threat that they pose, not just within the United Kingdom but globally, is immense."

According to senior DOJ officials who were granted anonymity to speak about internal law enforcement matters, the feds have come across related cases in every field office in the US. US authorities are so hell-bent on pursuing this trend that they are trying to extradite a 17-year-old Romanian boy who prosecutors at the Southern District of New York claim took part in exploiting minors and soliciting and distributing CSAM. The teenager also faces US terrorism charges for allegedly phoning in several hundred bomb threats to dozens of schools and institutions in the US as part of 764 and its splinter groups, according to information obtained by this reporter.

"We’ve seen a lot of hybrid movements and ideologies, new trends that we can’t categorize under the traditional categories,” says Bàrbara Molas, a senior analyst at RAND Europe who specializes in far-right extremism and who testified as an expert witness for the prosecution in Finnegan’s recent Com/764-related case.

For Molas, Com/764 represents that type of hybridity, where participants in the network will pick and choose elements from a series of discrete ideologies—neo-Nazism; the satanist group Order of Nine Angles, which has become prevalent throughout the most transgressive spheres of the transnational far right; Ted-Kaczynski-inspired neo-Luddism—and assemble their own belief pantheon.

“When 764 was only about CSAM, their targets tended to be women—but specifically women from diminished social groups, who were seen as the weak party of society,” Molas says. “That ideal of imposing violence on this part of society has carried on and become more violent.” When members of the network commit violence in the name of the group, Molas says, it “helps them rise within the group and advance the larger cause, which is to change society through violence and chaos.”

The lodestar for this transition towards wanton violence is a German teenager named Nino Luciano, who went by the handle “Tobbz” within 764. Sent to live in a foster home in Romania because his mental illnesses overwhelmed the capacity of institutions in his home country, Tobbz was drawn into 764 during the Covid-19 pandemic and quickly became enthralled with the group, daubing its name on a wall in his room and tattooing himself with “764” and a septagram from the Order of Nine Angles. In March 2022, he committed and livestreamed a series of knife attacks, stabbing an elderly woman to death and severely wounding an old man. He was convicted in August 2023 and is serving 14 years in prison.

Tobbz’s behavior inspired other young extremists in the Com/764 network, who have since either tried to emulate his livestreamed attacks or commit similar acts of violence to boost their notoriety and status within their extremist peer group. No Lives Matter’s exhortations to commit mass casualty events and distribution of detailed guides to violence are patterned off Tobbz’s example, according to experts who’ve studied the network.

Baron Martin, a resident of Tucson, Arizona, was charged in federal court with cyberstalking and sexual exploitation of a child that included the production of CSAM. According to court records, the government also accused Martin of soliciting the murder of the grandmother of one of his victims under the handle “Convict.” He allegedly sent the following message to a Discord server, court records show: “know anyone in \[state\] thats willing to do kidnappings or shootings...i need someone to tobbz a grandma. Somebody wanted to dox one of my egirls. now I’m getting their grandma merked.” The use of “Tobbz” as a synonym for murder was not casual: Martin allegedly offered to pay another user to carry out the hit, which was never realized.

According to court documents, Martin, through his handle, was connected to authoring a detailed guide widely distributed in 764’s channels on how to groom victims for extortion, which the FBI claims Martin bragged online was “the catalyst for thousands of extortions.” (Martin has pleaded not guilty.)

Molas, of RAND Europe, says Martin’s alleged path from extortion to soliciting a homicide traces a familiar path of transgressive behavior often seen in Com/764’s online world. “They’ll start with little acts of sin—shoplifting, then robberies, abuse of minors, weapons violations, then all the way up to kidnapping and murder,” Molas says.

In mid-February, Jairo Tinajero, a 25-year-old Arkansas man who took part in the 764 splinter group 8884, pleaded guilty to CSAM and conspiracy charges for extorting an underage girl in Louisville, Kentucky. According to his plea agreement, Tinajero confessed to plotting to kill the girl once she stopped complying with him, posting her address and personal information about her and her family family in 764’s servers, unsuccessfully trying to buy an assault rifle, and talking through a murder plot with other 764 members.

Tinajero also admitted taking part in 764 online chats where prior mass casualty attacks were discussed along with “future attacks on heavily populated areas such as malls or other large gatherings, LGBTQ+ events and gatherings, schools, public places, government buildings and police stations” with the intent to “destabilize society and cause the collapse of governments and rule of law.”

Most recently, neo-Nazi Aidan Harding’s inspiration from 764 was brought up during a mid-February federal court hearing for CSAM possession charges. In addition to participating in public actions with a number of Pittsburgh-area extremist groups, prosecutors claimed that Harding and another man were deeply interested in the Columbine massacre, visiting the memorial in Littleton, Colorado, and posing for a photo in front of a swastika flag while dressed as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. “Eric and Dylan were kickstarting a revolution,” Harding wrote in a message, which prosecutors showed in court. Harding and the other man, who hasn’t been charged, also discussed carrying out mass shootings through Instagram direct messages, which were presented in court. “The only thing holding me back is a partner … I don’t want to do it alone or die alone,” Harding wrote.

According to two researchers who attended Harding’s three-and-a-half-hour court appearance related to probable cause on February 12, an FBI agent claimed during questioning that investigators found reams of videos depicting children being raped, ultraviolent videos of executions, and the extremist mass shootings in Buffalo, Nashville, and Columbine, along with a photo on Harding’s phone of a phrase daubed in blood: “I sold my soul to 764,” above a swastika and a Lviathan cross often used by 764. Another photo, handed up to the judge and not shown in court, depicted the naked chest of a young girl wearing a cross, with the words “No Lives Matter” carved into her body with a sharp instrument.” Harding has pleaded not guilty.

The crimes described in court cases this year follow a months-long surge in No Lives Matter–related violence. In October, authorities claim, a 14-year-old Swede committed eight attacks on unsuspecting passersby in Stockholm. The attacker, per national broadcaster SVT, took part in 764 and went by the handle “Slain” in the group. Documents circulated by 764 participants on Telegram and elsewhere claim “Slain764” as one of their own, and identify Sweden, the UK, and Bulgaria as countries where their group has a presence.

In mid-February, Italian police arrested a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of planning to murder a homeless man and livestream the act. Police said the teenager was reportedly involved in 764 and faces charges for explosives possession and possession of CSAM material. Italian authorities claim he planned his actions as part of a “week of terror” along with unspecified colleagues.

There is also evidence of 764’s praxis and imagery merging with that of the Terrorgram Collective, a neo-Nazi propaganda network that aims to radicalize young people and inspire solo acts of sabotage and mass murder.

Solomon Henderson, a Tennessee teenager whom police said shot up his high school last month, posted a sprawling manifesto that referenced both mass shooters inspired by Terrorgram as well as homicidal 764 members, including Tobbz. Henderson’s social media accounts also show extensive imagery from 764’s channels as well as the Order of Nine Angles “The influence I see most heavily in that agenda is the Order of Nine Angles,” Molas says.

That confluence of extremist inspirations is highly unpredictable, and may prove influential: There is reportedly evidence that social media accounts connected to Henderson may have communicated with accounts linked to Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, a young Wisconsin woman who killed two and wounded classmates in a mid-December shooting at her school before dying by suicide. Earlier in December, a high school student in Guadalajara, Mexico, livestreamed an axe attack on his classmates before they were able to subdue him. The young man’s social media posts were rife with O9A influence, including photos of himself with butchered animals and another with a blood pact, a common O9A practice.

Source

Wired