Ohio Train Disaster: How Corruption and Greed Created Catastrophe, w/ David Sirota

Glenn Greenwald

Politics • Culture • Writing

Plus: Hawley's New Social Media Law

February 15, 2023

Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Tuesday, February 14, 2023. Watch System Update Episode #41 here on Rumble.

In this episode, we take a look at Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, who has long supported the conservative view on culture war issues, that parental rights are sacrosanct and that it should be parents, not the state or school bureaucrats, who decide what American children learn about social, cultural and religious debates and how they learn about them. Yet this week, Senator Hawley has introduced a new law that would deprive America's parents of the right to decide for their own children when and how those children can start using social media and replace that parental decision-making power with a blanket rule from the state that bans social media from allowing any children under the age of 16 to use social media, even if their own parents believe they are ready to use it. We'll examine the values in conflict as a result of Senator Hawley's bill and whether it can be reconciled with the banner of parental rights, which the American right has been waving as part of the culture wars.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.

Monologue:

Many of the most inflammatory culture war issues over the last several years have involved fights over what children should and should not be taught in public schools about highly contested questions regarding history, race and gender ideology. But a related dispute is whether communities and parents are acting recklessly – or even endangering children – by allowing them to attend so-called drag shows or read books about LGBT history and how to understand their own gender.

When these controversies began receiving significant public attention a few years ago, conservatives – often led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – waved the banner of parental rights. They objected to children being taught – or indoctrinated with – highly disputed beliefs about social issues. Aside from arguing that schools should focus on teaching students the traditional subjects they need to advance in their education and prepare themselves for the adult world – English, mathematics, science, geography, chemistry, algebra and the rest – opposition to much of the curriculum centered on the view that the responsibility to decide what children learn about political and social issues – and how they learn it – should rest with parents and not with school bureaucrats or elected officials using the force of law.

In March of last year, Governor DeSantis published an announcement on his official website under this title: “Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Historic Bill to Protect Parental Rights in Education.” The announcement emphasized that value over and over – parental rights - in announcing, in the governor's words, that he had signed

House Bill (HB) 1557, Parental Rights Education, which reinforces parent's fundamental right to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children”.

The bill prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through 3rd grade and prohibits instruction that is not age appropriate for students and requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child's mental, emotional or physical health or well-being.

The Bill builds on the Parents’ Bill of Rights, which was signed into law in Florida last year, and as part of Governor DeSantis’ Year of the Parent focus on protecting parental rights in education.

Parents’ rights have been increasingly under assault around the nation but, in Florida, we stand up for the rights of parents and the fundamental role they play in the education of their children”, said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Parents have every right to be informed about services offered to their children at school (Florida Governor’s Office. March 2022).

As that passage demonstrates, the banner of parental rights has been the one most frequently waved by conservatives in these culture war debates. It is the parent's right to decide what social, cultural, and religious influences their kids are exposed to – or not exposed to – and not the role of the state and its educational bureaucracy to decide that for the parents.

Yet, now, Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, who has been an outspoken advocate of the right's views in many of these culture war issues, often waving the banner of parental responsibility and parental rights himself, has introduced a bill this week that seems to me to do the opposite. That bill would deny parents the right to decide when and how their children can use social media and instead transfer the responsibility to make that decision away from the parents and onto the state.

As Fox Business reports today about this bill,

Missouri GOP Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a pair of bills aimed at protecting kids online – one that would implement an age requirement for social media usage and another that would study the harmful impact of social media on children. The first bill titled the Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust and Effective Act (MATURE Act) […]

He went out of his way to create this acronym: MATURE Act

[…] would place a minimum age requirement of 16 years old for all social media users, preventing platforms from offering accounts to those who do not meet the age threshold (Fox Business. Feb. 14, 2023).

Hawley’s other measure, titled The Federal Social Media Research Act, would commission a government report on the harm of social media for kids. That study, according to the senator's office, would examine and “track social media's effects on children over 10 years old.”

I don't think anybody objects to a study to understand how this technology that is still quite new in our lives and continuously evolving – social media – is impacting the nation's children. I don't think many people would object to that; I know I wouldn't. The question of the other bill, however, I find much more difficult to grapple with, which is the idea that there should be a minimum age that applies nationally, to every community, to every state, and to every family, that prohibits any children under the age of 16 from using social media – even if you, as the parent of your children, conclude that your children are ready and able to use social media at the age of 13 or 14 or 15 with whatever guidelines and limits you decide are necessary for them to do that.

Under this bill, Josh Hawley is taking away the power for you to decide for your own children at what age they are able to use social media and replacing your decision-making power with that uniform minimum law from the federal government that says that it shall be illegal in essence, for social media companies to remit children under the age of 16, to use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the rest.

Before delving into what I think are some interesting and difficult questions raised by this law, let's listen to Sen. Hawley himself at a hearing today in the Senate in which he defends his own bill and has an exchange with the witness he believes illustrates the need for it.

(Video 12:44)

Sen. J. Hawley: It wasn't until Carson was a freshman in high school – was about 14, I would guess – that we finally allowed him to have social media because – this is what caught my attention – that was how all the students were making new connections. Could you just say something about that? Because that's the experience, I think, of every parent. My kids are, my boys are ten and eight, and they're not on social media yet. But I know they'll want to be soon because they'll say, “Well, everybody else is on it.” So, could you just say a word about that?

Witness: Yes. Thank you. We waited as long as we possibly could, and we were receiving a lot of pressure from our son to be involved. I think – and I hear this a lot from other parents – you don't want to isolate your kid either. And so, we felt by waiting as long as possible, talking about the harms – don't ever say anything that you don't want on a billboard with your name and face next to it, that we were doing all the right things and that he was old enough. He was by far the last kid in his class to get access to this technology. Yet this still happened to us.

Sen. J. Hawley: Yeah, that's just incredible. Well, you were good parents and you were a good mother. Incredibly good mother, clearly. This is why I support and have introduced legislation to set 16 years old as the age threshold for which kids can get on social media and require the social media companies to verify it. I heard your answers.[…] I just have to say this, as a father myself, when you say things like, well, the parents really ought to be educated. Listen, the kids’ ability and I bet you had this experience, the kid's ability to figure out how to set what's on this phone. And my ten-year-old knows more about this phone than I know about it. Already. What's going to be like in another four years or five or six years, like your son?

So, I just say, as a parent, it would put me much more in the driver's seat if the law was “You couldn't have a phone. I'm sorry you couldn't get on social media till six”. I mean, that would help me as a parent. So that's why I'm proposing it. Parents are in favor of it. I got the idea from parents who came to me and said, Please help us. You know, please help us. And listen, I'm all for tech training. It's great. But I just don't think that's going to cut it. So, I've introduced legislation to do it. Let's keep it simple. Let's just, let's put this power in the hands of parents. I'd start there.

I'm really confused by that last part where he said, “let's put the power in the hands of parents,” because what he's doing is clearly the opposite. He's taking away the power of parents to decide when their own children can go on social media or not.

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NEW: Message from Glenn to Locals Members About Substack, System Update, and Subscriptions

Hello Locals members:

I wanted to make sure you are updated on what I regard as the exciting changes we announced on Friday night’s program, as well as the status of your current membership.

As most of you likely know, we announced on our Friday night show that that SYSTEM UPDATE episode would be the last one under the show’s current format (if you would like to watch it, you can do so here). As I explained when announcing these changes, producing and hosting a nightly video-based show has been exhilarating and fulfilling, but it also at times has been a bit draining and, most importantly, an impediment to doing other types of work that have always formed the core of my journalism: namely, longer-form written articles and deep investigations.

We have produced three full years of SYSTEM UPDATE episodes on Rumble (our premiere show was December 10, 2022). And while we will continue to produce video content similar to the kinds of segments that composed the show, they won’t be airing live every night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, but instead will be posted periodically throughout the week (as we have been doing over the last couple of months both on Rumble and on our YouTube channel here).

To enlarge the scope of my work, I am returning to Substack as the central hub for my journalism, which is where I was prior to launching SYSTEM UPDATE on Rumble. In addition to long-form articles, Substack enables a wide array of community-based features, including shorter-form written items that can be posted throughout the day to stimulate conversation among members, a page for guest writers, and new podcast and video features. You can find our redesigned Substack here; it is launching with new content on Monday.

For our current Locals subscribers, you can continue to stay at Locals or move to Substack, whichever you prefer. For any video content and long-form articles that we publish for paying Substack members, we will cross-post them here on Locals (for members only), meaning that your Locals subscription will continue to give you full access to our journalism.

When I was last at Substack, we published some articles without a paywall in order to ensure the widest possible reach. My expectation is that we will do something similar, though there will be a substantial amount of exclusive content solely for our subscribers.

We are working on other options to convert your Locals membership into a Substack membership, depending on your preference. But either way, your Locals membership will continue to provide full access to the articles and videos we will publish on both platforms.

Although I will miss producing SYSTEM UPDATE on a (more or less) nightly basis, I really believe that these changes will enable the expansion of my journalism, both in terms of quality and reach. We are very grateful to our Locals members who have played such a vital role over the last three years in supporting our work, and we hope to continue to provide you with true independent journalism into the future.

— Glenn Greenwald

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 13, 2026

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.

The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs.

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.

Amazon’s Super Bowl ad for Ring and its “Search Party” feature.

Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.

Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”

Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.

Guthrie, however, did not pay Google for a subscription for those cameras, instead solely using the cameras for real-time monitoring. As CBS News explained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.” Even professional privacy advocates have understood that customers who use Nest without a subscription will not have their cameras connected to Google’s data servers, meaning that no recordings will be stored or available for any period beyond a few hours.

For that reason, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced early on “that there was no video available in part because Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the company.” Many people, for obvious reasons, prefer to avoid permanently storing comprehensive daily video reports with Google of when they leave and return to their own home, or who visits them at their home, when, and for how long.

Despite all this, FBI investigators on the case were somehow magically able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s camera many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was essentially forced to admit this when he released still images of what appears to be the masked perpetrator who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agreement, which few users read, does protect the company by stating that images may be stored even in the absence of a subscription.)

While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”

Image obtained through Nancy Guthrie’s unsubscribed Google Nest camera and released by the FBI.

It is rather remarkable that Americans are being led, more or less willingly, into a state-corporate, Panopticon-like domestic surveillance state with relatively little resistance, though the widespread reaction to Amazon’s Ring ad is encouraging. Much of that muted reaction may be due to a lack of realization about the severity of the evolving privacy threat. Beyond that, privacy and other core rights can seem abstract and less of a priority than more material concerns, at least until they are gone.

It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

These recent events emerge in a broader context of this new Silicon Valley-driven destruction of individual privacy. Palantir’s federal contracts for domestic surveillance and domestic data management continue to expand rapidly, with more and more intrusive data about Americans consolidated under the control of this one sinister corporation.

Facial recognition technology — now fully in use for an array of purposes from Customs and Border Protection at airports to ICE’s patrolling of American streets — means that fully tracking one’s movements in public spaces is easier than ever, and is becoming easier by the day. It was only three years ago that we interviewed New York Timesreporter Kashmir Hill about her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us.” The warnings she issued about the dangers of this proliferating technology have not only come true with startling speed but also appear already beyond what even she envisioned.

On top of all this are advances in AI. Its effects on privacy cannot yet be quantified, but they will not be good. I have tried most AI programs simply to remain abreast of how they function.

After just a few weeks, I had to stop my use of Google’s Gemini because it was compiling not just segregated data about me, but also a wide array of information to form what could reasonably be described as a dossier on my life, including information I had not wittingly provided it. It would answer questions I asked it with creepy, unrelated references to the far-too-complete picture it had managed to create of many aspects of my life (at one point, it commented, somewhat judgmentally or out of feigned “concern,” about the late hours I was keeping while working, a topic I never raised).

Many of these unnerving developments have happened without much public notice because we are often distracted by what appear to be more immediate and proximate events in the news cycle. The lack of sufficient attention to these privacy dangers over the last couple of years, including at times from me, should not obscure how consequential they are.

All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden. Although most of our reporting focused on state surveillance, one of the first stories featured the joint state-corporate spying framework built in conjunction with the U.S. security state and Silicon Valley giants.

The Snowden stories sparked years of anger, attempts at reform, changes in diplomatic relations, and even genuine (albeit forced) improvements in Big Tech’s user privacy. But the calculation of the U.S. security state and Big Tech was that at some point, attention to privacy concerns would disperse and then virtually evaporate, enabling the state-corporate surveillance state to march on without much notice or resistance. At least as of now, the calculation seems to have been vindicated.

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 11, 2026

Netanyahu Visits Trump for the Seventh Time Amid More Threats of a U.S. Attack on Iran

Will the U.S. Government base its policies toward Iran on its own interests, or fight a pointless but costly war against Israel's prime enemy in the Middle East?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has by far spent more time with President Trump than with any other world leader. Netanyahu, on Wednesday, will make his seventh visit to the U.S. since Trump’s second term began a little over a year ago, on top of the visit to Israel made by Trump in October. No other leader has visited the White House during Trump’s second term more than twice. The duo will once again meet at the White House.

The Israeli leader is traveling to Washington this time in order to impose as onerous conditions as possible on Trump’s desire to sign a deal with Iran that would avert a second U.S. attack on that country in the last eight months. “I will present to the President our positions regarding the principles of the negotiations,” Netanyahu saidbefore boarding his presidential plane this morning.

In June, Trump ordered the U.S. military to bomb several of Iran’s underground enrichment facilities in the midst of Israel’s 12-day bombing campaign. After those strikes, Trump pronounced Iran’s nuclear facilities “completely and totally obliterated.”

Yet over the past two months, Trump has ordered the deployment of what he called a “massive armada,” led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, headed to Iran. On Truth Social, Trump emphasized that the deployment of military assets to Iran is larger than what he sent to Venezuela prior to the removal of that country’s president by the U.S. military. Trump added: “Like with Venezuela, [the U.S. armada] is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.”

Indeed, Trump has explicitly and repeatedly threatened Tehran with “violence” and “very steep” consequences in the event that the two countries fail to reach a long-term agreement governing Iran’s nuclear program — the same one that Trump insisted had been “obliterated” last June.

Trump stated over the weekend that he believes negotiations with Iran are going “very well,” arguing that “they want a deal very badly.” Numerous reports have suggested that Trump’s strong desire for an agreement instead of war has put him at odds not only with many of his most hawkish pro-Israel advisers, but also with Netanyahu. Today’s trip is thus being depicted as one between two leaders who have very different views of how Iran should be dealt with, thus implying that Netanyahu’s trip is an act of desperation to prevent Trump from reaching peace with Israel’s arch-nemesis.

All of that might be encouraging if not for the fact that this was the exact playbook run by Israel and the U.S. prior to their last joint bombing campaign on Iran. In the weeks leading up to Israel’s surprise attack, Trump had repeatedly assured the public, and Iran, that he believed negotiations were rapidly progressing to a deal that would render unnecessary military conflict with Iran.

And, just as now, coordinated leaks — typically laundered through Axios’ always-helpful Barak Ravid, the former IDF soldier who served in Israel’s notorious intelligence Unit 8200 — depicted a major rift between the two leaders as a result of Trump’s refusal to sanction a war with Iran. It seems clear that last year’s reports of a major “rift” were designed to lower Iran’s guard against what Trump ultimately acknowledged was a jointly planned U.S./Israel attack.

The supposed “dispute” between Washington and Tel Aviv this time rests on the scope of the deal with Iran. Israel’s fiercest loyalists in the U.S. have been demanding that Trump send the U.S. military to achieve Netanyahu’s longest and most supreme goal: having the U.S. military impose regime change on Israel’s most formidable regional enemy and replace it with a pliable puppet.

The sudden outbreak of deep concern over the human rights of Iranian protesters, from the same crowd that has cheered on every U.S. and Israeli war for decades, was quite obviously intended to provoke and even force a U.S. war to dislodge the Iranian government from power. This ritual is depressingly familiar to anyone paying even minimal attention to U.S. wars over the last several decades.

As I have long documented, feigned concern for oppressed peoples is always the tactic of choice for Washington’s neocons and warmongers. When they were trying in 2005 to force former President George W. Bush to go “from Baghdad to Tehran” on what was intended to be his regime-change crusade against Israel’s enemies, Americans were suddenly subjected to stories about the cruel and abusive treatment of Iranian gay men, as if that were a motivating factor in agitating for regime change there. (Similar concerns are rarely, if ever, expressed about the at least equally repressive behavior of friendly governments in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Uganda — all governments which the U.S. actively supports.)

What Israel and its American supporters most fear is a U.S. deal with Iran that will only resolve the question of Iran’s nuclear program, while leaving the current government in place. But the position of the U.S. government and of President Trump has long been that the threat posed to the U.S. by Iran comes from the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon. By Trump’s own repeatedly stated views, that is the only legitimate concern of the U.S. when it comes to Iran.

But Israel has a far more ambitious agenda when it comes to that country. For that reason, Israel — as it did last June — is demanding the imposition of pre-conditions on Iran to which Israel knows Iran would and could never agree.

As the Israeli journalist Guy Azriel reported this week: “Despite the apparent lack of tangible progress in the Iran talks over the weekend and the unresolved gaps between Washington and Tehran, concern is growing in Jerusalem over the trajectory of the U.S.-led negotiations[.] … In Israel, there is mounting fear that any emerging deal could fall short of addressing the country’s core demands, not only regarding Iran’s regional terror proxies, but above all its ballistic missile program.”

In other words, Israel is demanding that the U.S. go to war with Iran even if Tehran satisfies Trump’s demands on its nuclear program. Netanyahu is insisting that Trump also require Iran to give up its ballistic missiles before any deal can be signed: something no country would ever do.

It may be rational for Israel to wish that their main regional rivals were left completely defenseless against any possible Israeli attack. President Trump himself admitted that Iran’s ballistic missiles were used to great effect to retaliate against Israel for its attack last June: “Israel got hit very hard, especially the last couple of days. Israel was hit really hard,” the President said, adding, “Those ballistic missiles, boy, they took out a lot of buildings.”

But what does that desire have to do with the United States? And why would any country, let alone Iran — which was just heavily bombed for almost two weeks last June — agree to give up conventional weapons that serve as a deterrent for future Israeli attacks?

Despite the best propaganda efforts of the Ellison-owned, Bari Weiss-led CBS News to convince Americans that Iran’s ballistic missiles somehow pose a threat to the U.S. rather than just Israel, the reality is that Iran cannot and does not pose a threat to the U.S., particularly if there is an agreement in place to ensure Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons (such an agreement had been in place that, by all accounts, provided a comprehensive inspection regime at Iranian facilities before it was nullified in 2017 by the U.S.).

The very idea that the U.S. should even consider sending its own citizens to fight a war against Iran is the consummate example of Israel having Americans fight wars that serve Israel’s national interest but not Americans’ interests. In the days leading up to Netanyahu’s latest in a series of visits to the U.S., Israeli officials began publicly threatening that they would attack Iran on their own if Trump refused to do it for them.

If Israel actually wants war with Iran, Israel can go fight it itself. Invite their most impassioned, loudmouthed American advocates, such as Mark Levin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to join that fight. But leave the U.S. out of it.

The towering question, as always, is how much Trump is actually willing to defy not only Israel but his top Israel-centered donors and advisors, such as Miriam Adelson and Stephen Miller. The record on that front has been quite poor thus far. One once again watches to see whether the U.S. will make policy and war decisions not based on its own interests but on the interests of this one foreign country.

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