Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration’s own deadline for releasing it passed in September.

The program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), lapsed in June after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March approval. The administration’s own public documentation says rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance.” That window closed September 13, even as intelligence officials press lawmakers to reauthorize the program by the end of the year.

Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Schiff, the former chair of its House counterpart, say the administration owes Congress an explanation for the delay, and the names of the officials responsible, by November 6.

“If this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive,” the senators told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche in a demand letter obtained exclusively by WIRED, “it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.”

Outside Congress, Demand Progress and 22 other civil liberties and government accountability groups on Monday urged congressional leaders to refuse to reauthorize Section 702 “while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates.” Signatories range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative-backed Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.

The Trump administration has already been pressed, and has promised, to release the ruling. In April, Senators Tom Cotton and Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chair and Democratic vice chair, pressed the administration to release it within 15 days so it could inform the Senate’s debate. In July, asked in writing whether he would commit to declassifying it by the 180-day deadline, Blanche replied, “Yes.”

Warner “has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702,” his communications director, Rachel Cohen, tells WIRED. Neither former director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard nor Bill Pulte, who briefly replaced her as acting director, “were responsive,” Cohen says, “but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan letter and as required by law.”

Cotton’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Justice Department did not answer questions WIRED sent Friday about the delay.

Clayton, who is legally responsible as director of national intelligence for declassifying the ruling, has made no such promise. Asked before his July confirmation whether he would ensure the opinion was public before Congress voted on reauthorization, he wrote only that the government was “working arduously to expeditiously declassify” it and had made the full opinion available to lawmakers.

Some of what the court found is already known. A FISA court opinion declassified last year described a similar FBI tool, a “participants filter” that let agents select people in contact with surveillance targets and read their messages. In February 2025, the Justice Department’s National Security Division told the court the tool had been running searches no one counted. The FBI shut it off the next month and switched it back on later that year, after the department approved a rebuilt version.

This year’s ruling went beyond that. The court found that tools agencies use to narrow intercepted data to an American’s messages amount to searches of Americans, subject to the same limits, and ordered them rebuilt, The New York Times reported in April, citing unclassified administration talking points sent to lawmakers. Senator Alex Padilla said in a written question to Blanche that the Justice Department “is appealing portions” of the ruling “limiting the government’s use of certain filtering tools.”

While the ruling stayed secret, seven intelligence agency fact sheets from March 2026, one dated the day of the ruling, cited a 98.9 percent compliance rate for FBI searches of Americans and credited Section 702 with stopping a planned terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. None mentions the court’s findings. The figure appears nowhere in the Justice Department inspector general’s October 2025 review of those searches, which put the compliance rate at 98.6 percent and could not conclude that “the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”

According to the fact sheets, FBI auditors review every such search. FBI Director Kash Patel closed the bureau’s Office of Internal Auditing last May and moved its auditors into another division. The bureau’s search counts before 2025 also omit queries run through the participants filter, searches the government’s own privacy watchdog says are “not possible to track.”

Lawmakers who have read the ruling hint that it says more. Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged colleagues on the Senate floor in June to read it in a secure room. “I have seen it,” he said. Once they did, he told them, “your opinion of the role of FISA and the rights of Americans will be impacted for sure.”

Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”

The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators. The court’s current approval of the program expires in March.

Surveillance reform advocates say the administration may try to avoid that fight by attaching a renewal to the annual defense authorization bill, which Congress usually finalizes in December. In 2023, lawmakers extended Section 702 for four months through that year’s defense bill after a Senate effort to strip the provision failed. This year’s House and Senate versions of the bill do not yet include it.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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A 25-year-old German photographer won the 2026 Nikon Small World competition with a microscopic image freezing ink droplets in midair as an inkjet printer deposits them onto paper. Ars Technica reports that Ole Bielfeldt "beat out 1,802 other entries hailing from 69 different countries." From the report: Bielfeldt became interested in photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown after discovering an old microscope in his parents' attic. He figured out how to build an adaptor out of a tube and some wood to connect the microscope to his father's camera and taught himself the art through trial and error, building custom tools as needed. He documents how he captures transformative images of everyday objects with behind-the-scenes videos posted to macrofying, his photography and videography brand. It was Bielfeldt's curiosity about the inner workings of inkjet printers that inspired his winning entry, but capturing the action of ink drops being deposited on paper was a challenge, given that the process happens so quickly. The droplets, for instance, moved faster than the camera's shutter speed. Bielfeldt's solution was to deconstruct the printer so that the paper moved under a stationary (rather than moving) printhead, and then take the image in a dark room, using a flash to serve as the shutter, thereby freezing the ink drops mid-air. There was no need for pricey equipment. Bielfeldt does not use AI in his images, preferring to rely on traditional techniques. "Ole Bielfeldt's winning image embodies what makes Nikon Small World so powerful: the intersection of microscope imaging, ingenuity, and artistry," said Eric Flem, a spokesperson for Nikon Instruments. "By using a microscope objective in a different way, he transformed a familiar object into something altogether new and previously unseen. It is a reminder that the microscope is not only a scientific tool but also a creative one, capable of expanding how we see and imagine the world around us." The full list of winners can be found here.

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An Anthropic engineering manager says he has stopped using traditional coding interviews because AI can now outperform candidates on the kinds of programming challenges they typically contain. "There's no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both," said Felix Rieseberg in a blog post. "Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests." The Register reports: "I don't think the coding interview is going to come back," said Rieseberg. "It's easy to get sentimental given how many copies of 'Algorithms and Data Structures' were bought in hopes of unlocking good jobs and a better future -- or how the death of the coding interview is another milestone in software engineering reaching a new level of abstraction." At the same time, he's not certain what will replace it. "I'm probably not the only manager trying to figure out how to interview for people who build well with AI," Rieseberg wrote. "I haven't quite gotten there yet -- but I'm scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking. If you have figured out something better, I'd love to hear how." In a response posted to social media, Jaana Dogan, principal engineer at Google, said: "I'm not doing a ton of coding interviews nowadays but I'd be interested to interview how people use coding agents," she wrote. "That itself gives me more signals about candidates' coding skills." "We are not seeing tech companies abandon skills assessments widely across the industry -- at least not yet," added Nicole Bachaud, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. "In fact, based on our October 2026 Employer Survey of 1,500 employers, we see the tech industry (Information sector specifically) is actually the most likely to test for skills, with 62.5 percent of employers requiring formal skill tests on initial applications." "The change at Anthropic might be reflecting a shift away from technical skills towards more human, soft skills," said Bachaud. "As AI becomes fully capable of writing code, tech employers may be pivoting away from rote technical testing and heavily toward human-centric soft skills." She argues that while AI may be able to code well, it can't replace critical thinking. "A staggering 61.5 percent of Information employers now report that 'critical thinking' is a primary skill lacking in today's candidate pool," she said.

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"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around AI , the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech," writes the chief economist at U.S. asset management firm Apollo Global. He adds that "there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth... [M]ainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending not as a source of growth but as a cost center that weighs on margins." VC-backed companies are spending more and more on tokens, but mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited... The question looking ahead is whether, even as models become commoditized, mainstream corporate America can turn increasingly cheap intelligence into higher revenue growth and higher profit margins. That may be harder than it sounds. AI may be a great calculator, but in business, intelligence is mostly judgment. Judgment depends on context, and the answer varies with which human or which model you ask. Perhaps most importantly, AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector. More details from TechCrunch: Apollo's Torsten Slok focuses on what he calls the S&P 493 — the S&P 500, minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear to be flat, with no evidence that AI is improving productivity... Recent studies have also found that AI has yet to deliver significant productivity gains.

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BeamFS creator Aurelien Desbrieres is not calling for a merge, but is requesting feedback on an 18-patch proposal that takes the place of FTRFS, an earlier filesystem he proposed in April. The Linux/Open Source blog It's FOSS reports: Filesystems that can repair damage, like Btrfs and ZFS, usually do it by falling back on a spare copy of the data. BeamFS skips that and stores Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes inside every block. Every read gets checked against those codes, and small amounts of damage are corrected before the data reaches the application. If the filesystem can tell the damage is beyond repair, the read fails with an error instead of returning the wrong bytes... In his technical report, ext4 and ext3 returned wrong data without any error, while Btrfs refused to read the file. BeamFS returned the correct file every time except once, when a flip hit a pointer to the file's data and it refused the read. "Aurelien says he used Anthropic's Claude to write the code, the tool that checks the patches, and the cover letter..."

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Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry. Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer. A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."

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