President backs Pulte for acting DNI chief despite backlash that puts reauthorization of key surveillance law at risk

Donald Trump met with the House speaker, Mike Johnson, at the White House on Tuesday as pressure mounts on the president to nominate a permanent director of national intelligence, the step some Republicans now believe is the only way to save a controversial and powerful surveillance law before it expires by the end of the week.

At stake is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a post-9/11 authority that allows US intelligence agencies to collect the communications of foreign targets overseas without a court warrant. While the program is intended to target non-Americans abroad, it can also sweep up communications involving Americans. This powerful and contentious spy tool is set to expire at midnight on Thursday.

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© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

© Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.

In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.” 

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door. 

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.” 

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain. 

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply. 

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.” 

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal. 

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth." 

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language. 

The post Exiled at Midnight appeared first on Coda Story.

Greece has signed an agreement to expand its fleet of Shield AI V-BAT unmanned aerial systems for maritime surveillance operations across the Aegean Sea, the American company announced June 2.

The deal deepens an existing partnership that has already seen the Hellenic Army deploy these advanced drones for intelligence and reconnaissance missions.

Concluded between Shield AI and the Hellenic Army, the agreement bolsters Greece’s existing V-BAT fleet. The company says that the agreement will enhance the nation’s capacity to maintain persistent situational awareness over hundreds of islands, remote coastlines, and contested maritime approaches.

Company says drone is ideal for Greece’s needs

The V-BAT can launch from ship decks or small island clearings without a runway, fly for over 12 hours on a single sortie, and operate seamlessly despite aggressive electronic warfare attempts to disrupt its navigation and communications.

“V-BAT is exceptionally well-suited for operations in Greece, where forces operate across dispersed islands, remote coastlines, deep valleys, mountain ranges, and complex maritime environments,” said James Lythgoe, Shield AI’s regional director for Eastern and Southeast Europe. “V-BAT has proven itself in combat operations in Ukraine, including in GPS- and communications-denied environments, and was built for exactly these kinds of operational realities.”

Combat-proven resilience

In Ukraine, the V-BAT has successfully operated amid intense Russian electronic warfare, where GPS signals are actively jammed and drone communications are disrupted. This proven resilience against satellite spoofing and signal jamming ensures the system remains operational against sophisticated adversaries, rather than falling out of the sky.

Classified as a NATO Class I unmanned aircraft (weighing under 330 pounds), the V-BAT acts as a highly tactical asset deployable by ground units and small naval vessels without requiring massive support infrastructure. Its twelve-hour flight endurance allows a single aircraft launched at dawn to maintain continuous coverage through the entire day. This enables crucial “pattern-of-life” analysis to reveal suspicious maritime activity.

By expanding its V-BAT fleet, the Hellenic military strengthens its layered early-warning architecture across the Aegean, giving commanders the vital reaction time needed to respond to maritime intrusions before situations escalate.

Related: Classified US Stealth Drone Makes Rare Appearance in Greece

by Willow Tohi | Natural News Google confirmed it uses web content to train AI-powered search features (e.g., Gemini) even when publishers opt out, as its search division operates under different rules than general AI training policies. To fully block AI training, publishers must opt out of Google Search indexing via robots.txt. But this renders their content invisible in search results, harming traffic and ad revenue. The Justice Department proposes drastic measures, including forcing Google to divest Chrome, end default-search payments, and share search/AI data with competitors to curb dominance. Publishers and authors accuse Google and OpenAI of exploiting copyrighted […]

by Elizabeth Melton | The Daily Economy A surveillance state is being erected around the American public at an alarming rate. In many urban and suburban settings, anyone traveling on public streets or sidewalks will have his image captured by the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. A leisurely stroll around the neighborhood, as well as any conversation along  the way, might be recorded if the city uses surveillance-enabled street lights. Even our own front yards might not be safe from the prying eyes of the state if a neighbor has a “smart” doorbell that shares data with law enforcement. Rural areas are […]

by Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute for Peace And Prosperity Speaking Tuesday before the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations regarding the implementation of REAL ID mandates on travelers, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem displayed succinctly in one sentence her disdain for the right of Americans to travel freely and her support instead for an authoritarian approach to travel. “But we are telling people that this law will be enforced and it will allow us to know individuals in this country who they are and that they’re authorized to travel,” declared […]

by Didi Rankovich | Reclaim The Net By 2027, the European Union (EU) is set to use its Anti-Money Laundering regulations (AMLR) to ban privacy cryptocurrencies (crypto-asset accounts allowing anonymization of transactions) and anonymous accounts (accounts using anonymity-enhancing coins). This is interpreted by observers to be defined in the Markets in Cryptao-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The European Crypto Initiative (EUCI) has come out with its “AML Handbook” focusing on how AMLR obligations affect crypto asset service providers (CASPs), as well as financial and credit institutions. These “strict” prohibitions are contained in AMLR Article 79, the key takeaway being that they will […]

by Nicolas Creed | Substack I will preface this roundup by reminding readers that the overwhelming majority of Bangkok’s visible population are walking around like zombies staring at their phones. In the parks, most people just want to find a quiet spot in beautiful nature, to spend quality time with their phones. It is getting more difficult to use cash as vendors rarely have change. People love to pay for things using their phones via QR code scanning with banking apps. Bangkok is ground zero for all things technocratic to be battle tested. There is no resistance. There shall be […]

[su_box title=”Editor’s Comment” box_color=”#1989B5″]Last year, I wrote about New York City’s efforts to create an advanced “precrime” surveillance state combining aspects of the Robocop and Terminator movie franchises. This article provides an update on some of the advances the city has made since my article was written. – Jesse Smith [/su_box] by Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net Picture this: it’s rush hour in New York City. A guy in a Mets cap mutters to himself on the F train platform, pacing in tight circles. Nearby, a woman checks her phone five times in ten seconds. Overhead, cameras are watching. […]

by Frank Wright | LifeSite News In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Catherine Fitts presents an account of the globalist project that will shock even seasoned veterans of this campaign against humanity. Why? Her claims are backed by decades of published evidence. Her conclusions show the United States, along with the wider West, have suffered a series of manufactured crises designed to usher in a permanent digital dictatorship. Her 20 years of research, which expose the trillion-dollar secret network funding the transition of civilization to tyranny, have now led her to the discovery of a vast underground system of interconnected […]

by Jon Fleetwood | Substack In a recent article, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is openly pushing digital public infrastructure (DPI)—anchored by digital ID systems—as the foundation of a “connected future.” But their own words reveal a future where governments and corporations will track, control, and commodify nearly every digital interaction under the banner of equity, security, and innovation. If your digital ID is the key to banking, benefits, and daily life, then falling out of line with the globalist agenda means they can shut you out with a single click. For years, the WEF has advocated for a future […]

by Willow Tohi | Natural News The U.K. government is developing an AI-driven “homicide prediction” system that analyzes personal data — including ethnicity, mental health and past police interactions — to identify potential future murderers, drawing comparisons to sci-fi film “Minority Report.” The system aggregates sensitive personal data from crime victims, witnesses and non-convicted individuals, raising concerns about racial profiling, wrongful targeting and erosion of civil liberties. Advocacy groups warn it could criminalize vulnerable people preemptively. Experts compare the project to flawed U.S. predictive policing tools (e.g., NYPD’s CompStat), citing bias, inaccuracy and disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Past attempts, like […]

by Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project This May, the long-delayed enforcement of the Real ID Act finally kicks in. Originally passed in 2005 under the guise of post-9/11 security, Real ID standardizes driver’s licenses nationwide and ties them into a federal identification system. What started as a measure to “secure the skies” has now become a cornerstone in what many privacy advocates fear is a looming surveillance state. Real ID isn’t needed and won’t stop terrorists from hijacking planes. Most of the 9/11 hijackers held Saudi, UAE, Egyptian, or Lebanese passports. Real ID is a national standard and […]

by Didi Rankovich | Reclaim The Net UK’s digital ID scheme, GOV.UK One Login, allegedly contains a host of serious vulnerabilities affecting security and data protection, that are “built in” and present in the system since its launch. These claims come from a whistleblower, a security expert who worked for the Government Digital Service (GDS, a part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology). The most grave consequences stemming from the flaws – that the whistleblower first pointed out through proper channels in 2022, only to be ignored – would include data breaches. Read Full Article >

by Melissa Stern | Secuzine Germany’s new coalition government, formed by the conservative bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), has outlined an ambitious plan to digitize public services and provide a digital identity for every citizen. The incoming government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, is focused on modernizing the state with a major digital overhaul. One of the key components of this transformation is the establishment of a new Ministry of Digital and State Modernization, aimed at streamlining public administration. Read Full Article >

by Anthony Kimery | Biometric Update America’s surveillance architecture has grown from an opaque counterterrorism framework into a complex and far-reaching system with deep implications for civil liberties. The federal government’s expanding use of facial recognition, AI, and data aggregation tools has prompted urgent concerns among civil rights advocates, legal scholars, technologists, and lawmakers. And their message is clear: without stronger oversight, warrant requirements and transparency, the very technologies deployed in the name of safety may become the greatest threat to Americans’ freedoms. Last year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights detailed in a 194-page report how federal agencies are […]

by Didi Rankovich | Reclaim The Net A variety of attempts to establish or expedite the implementation of digital IDs and other forms of similar infrastructure, to enable unprecedented levels of centralization of data and highly likely mass surveillance – if and when “the powers that be” decide to go for it – get a fair amount of reporting, when it comes to England and Wales. But, what’s happening in another – and a large one at that, of UK’s “countries” – Scotland? Nothing to look forward to, according to privacy campaigners. Like in so many places around the world, […]

by Laura Harris | Natural News The United Kingdom’s Crime and Policing Bill 2025, now at the Committee stage, grants police access to over 50 million driver’s license photos for facial recognition searches. The bill revives a dropped Conservative plan, with Labour justifying it as necessary to combat crime, terrorism and violence against women. Big Brother Watch warns that the bill enables mass biometric surveillance, risking misidentification and unjust tracking of innocent citizens. Russia plans a 2025 rollout of facial recognition payments via 2 million terminals, linked to its state biometric database (UBS). Both systems face criticism for enabling government […]

[su_box title=”Editor’s Comment” box_color=”#1989B5″]The totalitarian surveillance state is continuing to advance almost unabated and once REAL ID is in effect the trap door will widen to include almost every US citizen. As part of their “Refuse REAL ID” campaign, The Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom has created a guide to resisting REAL ID and choosing a state issued ID instead that doesn’t include the same surveillance trappings. If you live in an eligible state, this may be well worth obtaining. Derrick Broze’s article below will provide even more reasons why you should![/su_box] by Derrick Broze | The Last American Vagabond […]

by Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net The European Commission has unveiled plans to invest €1.3 billion in the Digital Europe Programme (DIGITAL) for 2025–2027, with a significant portion dedicated to advancing the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallet. This initiative aims to provide EU citizens with a unified digital identification system, enabling access to public and private services across member states. While the Commission emphasizes benefits such as streamlined access and enhanced security, the proposal has ignited a robust debate concerning potential risks to privacy and civil liberties.​ Read Full Article >