Michael Burton was stopped by Southern Illinois University-Carbondale campus police so many times that he dreads driving anywhere near the college. “Anytime I got behind the wheel, I was getting pulled over,” said the 21-year-old junior from the Austin neighborhood in Chicago.

He reached his breaking point in December 2023 while driving with friends — all of whom, like Burton, are Black — to an art exhibit on campus. Police pulled over his gray Jeep Compass for not coming to a complete stop and turning down a one-way street.

The Investigative Project obtained body camera footage of Burton’s encounter with the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale police through a public records request. Reporters watched the 58-minute body camera video recording from the police department. After the car’s occupants exit the vehicle carrying backpacks, Burton stands silently, cross-armed in fitted jeans and a black hoodie as one officer explains the alleged violations and hands Burton four tickets. He tells Burton to show up for a court date on Dec. 20 –– days after the semester was to end and the week before Christmas –– or have a warrant issued for his arrest.

“We were sitting in the car for about 30 to 40 minutes-ish, and then the fucking tow truck comes up,” he said.

In the video, Burton scratches his goatee as the tow truck driver hooks up the SUV as a woman standing next to Burton reaches over to hug him.

“Insane,” Burton said in an interview. The first-generation college student had relied on his car to get to school and work where he taught music at an early-childhood center. He was without a car for nearly a year, spent more than $1,200 on ride shares and Voi e-scooters, as he defended himself in court. At the end of the ordeal, his car was sold before he could recover it. In court, three of the four tickets were dismissed, leaving just one that he pled guilty to: failure to obey a stop sign.

Burton, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side and graduated from Christ the King Jesuit College Prep, is among thousands of Black students from the Chicago area attending a four-year public university in Illinois. Burton knew the perils of driving as a Black driver. However, when he enrolled at SIU-Carbondale, he said he never expected campus police to be so harsh. It’s a phenomenon playing out at public universities across the state, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s traffic-stop data analyzed by the Investigative Project in collaboration with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.

The investigation found:

• Campus police have pulled over Black drivers at rates higher than Black student enrollment at those schools and at higher rates than the Black adult population of their surrounding communities, according to a new analysis of 33,388 traffic stops by police officers, from 2019 to 2023, at 11 Illinois public college campus police departments included in the analysis. Traffic stops data include students and the general public.
• During those stops, Black drivers were more likely than white drivers to get traffic tickets, while white drivers were more likely than Black drivers to drive away with warnings. Nearly 1 in every 3 Black drivers received a ticket rather than a verbal or written warning in comparison to almost 1 in every 5 white drivers, according to an analysis of the most recent five years of data available.
• Disparities have widened in recent years. Among those stopped by campus police, collectively, the share of stops involving Black drivers increased from 29% in 2019 to 34% in 2023. However, Black students and Black adults account for far lower percentages of all students and adults at the universities and the communities surrounding them. Meanwhile, the share of white drivers stopped by campus police, collectively, decreased from 54% in 2018 to 45% in 2023.

The analysis included traffic stops reported by campus police departments at 11 four-year public universities in Illinois: Eastern Illinois University; Governor’s State University; Illinois State University; Northeastern Illinois University; Northern Illinois University; Southern Illinois University-Carbondale; Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Springfield; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Western Illinois University.

The analysis excluded Chicago State University, which reported no traffic stops from 2019 to 2023.

The Investigative Project and WBEZ compared the share of Black drivers among those stopped and ticketed by campus police departments with the share of Black students among all students enrolled at the universities in fall 2022. The analysis also compared the percentage of traffic stops involving Black drivers with the share of Black adults among all adults in the communities surrounding the campuses.

The findings are “unfortunately not surprising,” said Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. The findings are “consistent with the kinds of reports we see from other communities across the state.”

Yohnka said he worked alongside then-State Sen. Barack Obama in 2003 to get the data-collection bill passed following decades of conversations around the country “about driving while Black and brown.” The bill required police departments statewide to submit data on all traffic stops to the Illinois Department of Transportation, detailing driver demographics and whether the stop led to a citation or warning. On the 20-year anniversary of the law, the Investigative Project and WBEZ compiled the data, which is the foundation for the analysis of traffic stops on campuses.

“Folks on the advocacy side had always hoped that there would be a moment every year when this data came out where city councils, county boards and boards of trustees would be able to look at this data and … ask questions of the police officials about why certain things occurred,” Yohnka said, and “why there were disparities.”

“Even when you’re right, in a sense, you’re still wrong.”

When Billy Evans Jr., 24, decided to go to Northern Illinois University in fall 2018, he had big dreams. He wanted to open a building that has a barbershop in the front and a speakeasy in the back with live music, dinner and fine wine. He said he has about two semesters left.

But during his time there, Evans Jr., who is Black, has had five interactions with campus police –– three in cases where he contacted them for help –– and two in which he was stopped and issued warnings.

Black drivers made up just over half of all traffic stops by NIU campus police in the most recent five years of data available, though Black students made up 18% of student enrollment in fall 2022. In DeKalb, where NIU is located, about 13% of all adults are Black, according to 2023 five-year estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

NIU interim Police Chief Jason John declined to be interviewed to discuss the findings. He issued a statement saying, “It’s difficult to disentangle disparities that can arise in traffic stop data, which can be impacted by a variety of factors, such as geographic areas patrolled.” He added, “Officers are trained to make decisions on traffic stops based on traffic violations, not the race, ethnicity or any other demographics of drivers.”

The widest disparity between traffic stops and enrollment by race was at the University of Illinois Chicago. There, Black drivers make up nearly 50% of traffic stops by campus police while Black students make up 8% of enrollment. In the Near West Side community area, where UIC is located, just 23% of adults are Black. However, at least 75% of all adults are Black in the East Garfield Park, North Lawndale and West Garfield Park communities just west of campus.

Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez, the associate vice chancellor for university communications for UIC, said that the department is “committed to equitable policing practices” and that “most traffic stops conducted by UIC Police are on city streets surrounding the campus and largely involve individuals who are not affiliated with the university.”

At Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Black drivers were involved in 49% of traffic stops conducted by campus police. Black drivers received 50% of traffic tickets issued by campus police, though Black student enrollment in fall 2022 was 15% of the university total. In Carbondale, overall, Black adults account for 25% of all adults in the city.

Former SIU-Carbondale student Clare Killman, 29, serves on the Carbondale City Council. She said that the analysis “seems to indicate that there’s a very clear racial bias on campus against Black people.”

A spokesperson from SIU-Carbondale, Kim Rendfeld, issued a statement saying, “Our sole motivation for traffic stops is public safety, regardless of the driver’s race or other characteristics.”

The Investigative Project found that the racial disparities are pervasive across the state’s public universities. For Illinois State University, 26% of the 3,916 traffic stops conducted between 2019 and 2023 were of Black drivers, while just 11% of its enrollment is composed of Black students. Similarly, in the town of Normal surrounding ISU, just 10% of all adults are Black.

Illinois State University Police Chief Aaron Woodruff, who has led the department for 14 years, said “a lot of this could be related to implicit bias, which is why you try to educate officers on that to begin with.” He said in an additional email statement that “there is no easy solution” to the “complexity” of how and why traffic stops happen but “using race as a basis for a traffic stop undermines the principle of equal protection under the law.”

“While disparities in traffic stop data may raise concerns, it is important to recognize that simple comparisons between stop rates and general population demographics does not provide an accurate assessment of policing practices,” Woodruff wrote. “Just as every individual carries their own story, every police-traffic stop unfolds its own narrative—each one distinct and shaped by its circumstances.”

Woodruff said his department has beefed up its training manual, requested money for body cameras and worked to educate its officers on implicit bias by bringing in Stanford University Professor Jennifer Eberhardt who has written on the topic.

For students like Evans Jr. at NIU, he takes advice on how to interact with police from his family. “I pretty much look to my dad for answers,” Evans Jr. said. “He understands how things are, especially as Black men. Even when you’re right, in a sense, you’re still wrong.”

“My character was shattered”

Black drivers stopped by Illinois’ public campus police officers were more likely to get traffic tickets while white drivers were more likely to get a warning, according to the analysis. Chicago State University, another Illinois public school, had no traffic stops on file in the state data from 2019 to 2023. 

Among the 11 campus police departments, the widest ticketing disparity between the rates of white and Black drivers getting warnings was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to receive a ticket.

The Investigative Project submitted public records requests for complaints to the university regarding traffic stops from 2004 to 2023; the department released four. None were from the last five years, except one involving an e-bike.

In one complaint filed in 2017, a person driving a yellow Camaro with the windows tinted “just to resemble the car from Transformers’ Bumblebee” was pulled over by campus police for turning incorrectly down a one-way street. The complaint said the vehicle was then surrounded by multiple squad cars, campus officers, a sheriff and her canine. It had the “look of a major drug bust,” the complainant said. The race of the driver could not be determined from the complaint, which was partially redacted.

After the vehicle was searched for drugs, guns, and other weapons, the driver, whose name was redacted, received a ticket, according to the complaint. It was their second in days, after university police stopped them earlier that week for driving on a suspended license, which the driver alleged was the result of a “DMV” mistake.

“I just don’t honestly feel safe driving on campus anymore. I feel targeted by university police,” the driver said in the complaint. “I was harassed, my Fourth Amendment rights weren’t protected, and profiling played a part in this incident.”

“My character was shattered as people took pictures and videos and uploaded them to social media,” the complainant said. “I am now dealing with issues at work from this incident.”

Matt Ballinger, the police chief for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, declined to be interviewed for this story to discuss the findings but issued a statement saying that campus officers conduct traffic stops on and off campus, including a large off-campus portion.

“The traffic-stop data reported to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) includes hundreds of these interactions and are not limited to U. of I. students,” Ballinger said. “Moreover, the six Illinois public universities included in this study may have different community demographics and departmental policies.”

Abbigail Kepp, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spokesperson, did not make herself available for an interview and issued a statement saying that campus officers attend several trainings. Their officers “exceed the minimum standards and attend various other trainings required by the University of Illinois and the Division of Public Safety,” she added.

During the time of the written complaint, the campus became a flashpoint about university policing when students, part of the #DefundUIPD movement, penned an open letter to university leaders urging them to re-evaluate the school’s relationship with both the campus police and the Champaign City Police Department. The letter also named the overticketing of Black drivers in Champaign and Urbana as a major concern.

The #DefundUIPD account on X, formerly known as Twitter, has been inactive since May 2022.

“I was on the phone with my boyfriend at the time, kind of freaking out.”

The pandemic left many college campuses bare, which meant fewer drivers on the road and fewer people being pulled over by campus police. However, Black drivers were still disproportionately stopped.

The Investigative Project found that, compared to pre-pandemic levels, the share of campus police stops involving Black drivers increased by 5 percentage points. During the same period, 2019 to 2023, the share of stops involving white drivers dropped 9 percentage points –– compounding an already wide disparity.

Campus police at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stopped 1,093 Black women, the most of any of the 11 campus police departments reporting data from 2019 through 2023. The department reported it has never issued a verbal warning in a traffic stop in the past two decades, according to records it files with the state annually.

Davarian Baldwin, a historian and American studies professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, believes the Investigative Project’s data findings are a clear indication of racial profiling, consistent with the history of policing in America. He said the impacts of viral police killings like George Floyd’s have led to people pointing out that when police stops only end in tickets, it’s better than the alternative. But that’s not the only issue.

“You were stopped by the police, you were searched by the police, you were given a citation [ticket] by the police,” Baldwin said. “All these things produce trauma on their own.”

Isabelle Senechal and Jonathan Torres for the Investigative Project on Race and Equity; Matt Kiefer, assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School; Jordan Butler, Courtney Dillon and Molly Hughes for CU-CitizenAccess; and Alden Loury and Amy Qin for WBEZ contributed to this report.

This Investigative Project on Race and Equity story was created in collaboration with Capital B News, Chicago Sun-Times, WBEZ, CU-CitizenAccess, Saluki Local Reporting Lab, and The Daily Egyptian.

They didn’t just vote to gut programs. They voted to gut women’s lives.

Last week, in the dark of night, House Republicans passed a budget bill that slashes billions in federal spending on Medicaid, SNAP (food assistance), childcare, home energy assistance and disability support. The budget bill will cut direct support to tens of millions of working-class families—and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, millions more will lose their health insurance through changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace.

This is not just cruel. It’s calculated.

And it will hit women hardest.

The proposed cuts will impact millions of middle- and working-class families—but they will disproportionately harm women, especially:

• Poor women who are pregnant: At a time when Medicaid covers 41 percent of all births in the U.S.—will be left with fewer prenatal visits, fewer safe births, and fewer chances to survive childbirth.
• Infants and young children will go without food and basic healthcare. Fewer immunizations. Fewer early screenings.
• Mothers will be forced to leave their jobs just as child care subsidies disappear and housing becomes even more unaffordable.
• Women students and new graduates will lose access to job training and pathways to independence.
• Women with disabilities will face devastating rollbacks in essential services and care.
• Women in the sandwich generation—both taking care of children and caring for aging parents—who are so often the unpaid caregivers in this country, will be punished for doing the work of caring for children and aging parents.
• Older women, who make up the largest share of nursing home residents and rely heavily on Medicaid, will lose long-term care support.

For what? To pay for massive tax breaks for the richest Americans.

According to the just-released nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, the top 0.1 percent of earners—those making $4.3 million or more per year—will see their after-tax income INCREASE by an average of $389,280 in 2026. Meanwhile, Americans making less than $51,000 a year will actually see their after-tax income DECREASE. (This analysis was reported by journalist Judd Legum in Popular Information.)

This is not fiscal responsibility. It is a redistribution of wealth—from the most vulnerable to the most powerful. And it is being done at the direct expense of women’s health, safety and economic security.

Now, the bill moves to the U.S. Senate. And the question is no longer if women will be hurt. It’s how many. It’s how deeply. It’s how soon.

We have one month to stop these devastating cuts.

How?

Contact your senators—Republicans and Democrats alike—and tell them to reject these cruel, calculated cuts. Tell them to protect women, families, caregivers and our most basic support systems.

And tell your stories. As Sage Warner, the stories director at Center for American Progress, wrote for Ms. this week:

“We have one month to stop this bill from becoming law. As it moves to the Senate, we must continue building and amplifying platforms that let constituent voices permeate government decision-making—whether that takes place in the halls of Congress, via news feeds or in the inboxes of their representatives. Stories alone won’t stop bad policy. But they can challenge indifference, mobilize public pressure and drive home the real cost of cutting life-saving programs for American families.” 

Have a story to tell about how cuts to healthcare or food aid would affect you or your community? We want to hear from you. Pitch your story to Ms. as an op-ed; learn more at msmagazine.com/submissions.

This is our line in the sand. Join us—in fury and in action.

P.S. While we fight back, we can also dream: What if we had a Black woman president? Ms. contributor Janell Hobson dares to imagine just that in a powerful new essay. In the face of relentless attacks, envisioning bold feminist futures is itself an act of resistance.

On June 2nd we’re excited to host two of the sharpest thinkers on tech power: Columbia law professor and former FTC Chair Lina Khan will join Karen Hao for a conversation about AI at an event to celebrate the launch of Karen’s new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI.

Karen Hao is an award-winning journalist covering artificial intelligence. She was the first journalist to ever profile OpenAI and wrote a book, EMPIRE OF AI, about the company and the AI industry for Penguin Press. Previously, Karen was a foreign correspondent at The Wall Street Journal focused on AI & China, and a senior editor at MIT Technology Review. Her work has won an American Humanist Media Award in 2024, and an American National Magazine Award in 2022 for “outstanding achievement for magazine journalists under the age of 30.” Karen started her career as an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google[x]. She received a B.S. in mechanical engineering and minor in energy studies from MIT.

Lina Khan served as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission from June 15, 2021 to January 20, 2025. Khan got her start in antitrust as a business reporter and researcher examining consolidation across markets, from airlines to chicken farming. While at the FTC, Khan focused on exercising the full suite of the FTC’s statutory authorities, regularly engaging with and hearing from the public, and ensuring the agency is updating its tools and skillsets to tackle new market realities and next-generation challenges. Priority initiatives included reinvigorating antitrust and consumer protection enforcement, tackling noncompete clauses, protecting people’s sensitive data from unchecked surveillance, and taking on illegal conduct that deprives Americans of access to affordable, high-quality healthcare.

Prior to joining the FTC, Khan served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. She is presently an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.

Download

NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): So, Angelo, you framed my political worldview around this idea of narrative dominance. I would say, and I know this isn’t universal, but this is an example of slippage in that category here.

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Oh, yeah. It really is actually because — and this ties into what John was saying before about an example. There’s not — I can’t think of a political figure that’s made that point, but I can think of right-wing media figures that have been saying that starting in 2020 with COVID. Tucker Carlson was the one when there, you know, there was a point with COVID where, you know, there was a little bit conspiracies, but people still wanted to protect themselves. And we largely agreed that, you know, we shouldn’t just have mass death. Now, we had very different opinions about how to survive that, but we weren’t cool with mass death. 

And then Tucker got out there, you know, in the early summer and started saying, “We’re all going to die,” literally, on the timeline, we’re all going to die. So, we have to put all these policies and all these efforts to protect ourselves from COVID on that scale. And since we’re all going to die anyway, all of these Republicans that are lining up that are supporting policies that are restricting access to schools or thinking about how to sort of mask policies, all these things, they’re taking away your life, your quality of life when you’re going to die anyway. So, they’re the enemy and you need to start putting pressure on them. And what he did was plant a seed in that larger landscape that started to take off and then they weaved in conspiracies to help grow it and propagate it. But that was one of the big turning points. 

That and a few other conspiracies that really started to shift and soften the ground about where the tolerance level was for mass death, not the individual policies, but it shifted it. And yeah, it’s not their whole scale perspective, I think, but it really has an example of the change because it’s not that that’s their overall angle, but what is a reflection of this other piece of the slippage that you’re referring to is the rot. They’ve become callous and cruel and indifferent, nihilistic. You know, for the people that largely believe in something, right, these are supposed to be the religious people too, they’re really nihilists. 

She went right to the void. And I thought that was when she voted for Hegseth, like John said before, it was — she sort of really gave up her position as a steward, as a legislator and whatever principle she had and said, “No, I’m all in for Trump now.” If you can rationalize that, you can get up there just a few months later and say the thing that she said. And the last thing that’s I think critical — so one is that they’ve sort of tested this before and it worked; two, that they got cruel and callous and indifferent and nihilistic, and that’s just a consequence of the poison being pumped into the system. And the third is that they are so confident or I don’t think it’s stupidity, I don’t think it’s indifferent. 

But they’ve looked at their opponents, sized them up, at Democrats, and they’ve said, given what we’re confronting and given the terrain that we stand on, which is our information landscape, and today has proved it so far — no is going to write a peep about Ernst’s comment in the right-wing media. Not one, not one critical, not even one saying, “Well, I’m an armchair quarterback and I think that’s stupid.” No, no, no, they’re just quiet about it. She’s not going to suffer any repercussions, at least in the larger landscape. She will politically a little bit, but she’s sizing up her competition and she says, they’re so bad, and I have so many advantages already with this larger terrain that Trump sort of is the conductor for, but I’m going to win no matter what I say, that I could literally tell my constituents to die, and I’m still going to beat whoever they put up against me. And that’s the problem when you add it all up. And that’s what I see. I see that overconfidence based on an assessment of the landscape, real cruel politics.

Last month, Brazil announced it is rolling out a data ownership pilot that will allow its citizens to manage, own, and profit from their digital footprint — the first such nationwide initiative in the world. 

The project is administered by Dataprev, a state-owned company that provides technological solutions for the government’s social programs. Dataprev is partnering with DrumWave, a California-based data valuation and monetization firm.

Today, “people get nothing from the data they share,” Brittany Kaiser, co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation and board adviser for DrumWave, told Rest of World. “Brazil has decided its citizens should have ownership rights over their data.”

In monetizing users’ data, Brazil is ahead of the U.S., where a 2019 “data dividend” initiative by California Governor Gavin Newsom never took off. The city of Chicago successfully monetizes government data including transportation and education. If implemented, Brazil’s will be the first public-private partnership that allows citizens, rather than companies, to get a share of the global data market, currently valued at $4 billion and expected to grow to over $40 billion by 2034.

The pilot involves a small group of Brazilians who will use data wallets for payroll loans. When users apply for a new loan, the data in the contract will be collected in the data wallets, which companies will be able to bid on. Users will have the option to opt out. It works much like third-party cookies, but instead of simply accepting or declining, people can choose to make money. 

The “dWallet” allows users to deposit the data generated by their daily activities into a “data savings account.” After a user accepts a company’s offer on their data, payment is cashed in the data wallet, and can be immediately moved to a bank account.

The project will be “a correction in the historical imbalance of the digital economy,” said Kaiser. Through data monetization, the personal data that companies aggregate, classify, and filter to inform many aspects of their operations will become an asset for those providing the data.

“This initiative can lay the foundation for a data ownership model that promotes financial inclusion and redefines the digital economy from a fairer perspective,” Rodrigo Assumpção, president of Dataprev, said in a statement in April.

But data protection specialists in Brazil, home to the most expansive data privacy framework in Latin America, are concerned that this commoditization may raise the price of data, making it inaccessible for smaller companies and even state offices with low budgets. The project could also widen the digital divide in a country that lacks robust digital infrastructure in rural areas.

3 in 10 Brazilians are functionally illiterate

“We will be asking half of the country that doesn’t know how to read to decide if their data can be bought for a certain fee,” Pedro Bastos, a researcher at Data Privacy Brazil, told Rest of World. “People in situations of vulnerability will say yes, and this might be used against them.”

Worldwide, data monetization has so far been led by the private sector. Companies such as Datarade, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft have created data marketplaces where clients can purchase data sets for their large language models and other artificial intelligence products. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have created their own government-backed infrastructure to commercialize data. Separately, China allows companies to treat data as assets while the United Nations has said countries can add the economic value of data to their GDP calculations.

Brazil’s project stands out because it brings the private sector and the government together, “so it has a better chance of catching on,” said Kaiser.

In 2023, Brazil’s Congress drafted a bill that classifies data as personal property. The country’s current data protection law classifies data as a personal, inalienable right. The new legislation gives people full rights over their personal data — especially data created “through use and access of online platforms, apps, marketplaces, sites and devices of any kind connected to the web.”

The bill seeks to ensure companies offer their clients benefits and financial rewards, including payment as “compensation for the collecting, processing or sharing of data.” It has garnered bipartisan support, and is currently being evaluated in Congress.

The project “represents a significant conceptual transition,” a spokesperson for DrumWave told Rest of World. It positions Brazil “as a global reference in data ownership initiatives.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about how it could potentially harm new and small businesses, as well as vulnerable socioeconomic groups.

If approved, the bill will allow companies to collect data more quickly and precisely, while giving users more clarity over how their data will be used, according to Antonielle Freitas, data protection officer at Viseu Advogados, a law firm that specializes in digital and consumer laws. As data collection becomes centralized through regulated data brokers, the government can benefit by paying the public to gather anonymized, large-scale data, Freitas told Rest of World.

These databases are the basis for more personalized public services, especially in sectors such as health care, urban transportation, public security, and education, she said.

But similar projects elsewhere are facing pushback: In the U.S., federal data privacy bills such as the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (2022) and the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024 have stalled. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, the bills undermined laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (2020) that give users better protections for privacy violations.

“At a state level [in the U.S], there is pressure to not give up their own autonomy to federal institutions,” Victor Quintiere, a law professor at the University Center of Brasília, told Rest of World.

In Brazil, some like Maximilian Rodrigues are eager to try out the data monetization project. For Rodrigues, a computer science professor in Mato Grosso, in central Brazil, it will be an opportunity to regulate access to his data. “If you don’t accept bids, companies won’t be able to use your data,” he told Rest of World.

But not all users are as savvy. Inaf, Brazil’s institute for research on illiteracy, said last year that 95% of functionally illiterate Brazilians — three out of 10 Brazilians — had low digital proficiency. Large swaths of the country, including cities, have slow internet connectivity, which means they generate less data online. 

Data monetization could also pressure vulnerable people into forgoing their privacy for a quick payout, much like World (previously Worldcoin) has done in dozens of countries, according to Bastos. Co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, World scanned over 400,000 people’s irises in Brazil before the government suspended its operations in January for gathering data without sufficient opt-out mechanisms.

“Once you treat data as an economic asset, you are subverting the logic behind the protection of personal data,” said Bastos. The data ecosystem “will no longer be defined by who can create more trust and integrity in their relationships, but instead, it will be defined by who’s the richest.”

Anthony Scaramucci Jr. joins Tim Miller and Cameron Kasky to discuss his father’s brief White House stint under Trump, family drama, rap culture, crypto skepticism, and surviving the political spotlight.

Be sure to check out the trailer for Money Talk$, Anthony Scaramucci Jr’s upcoming film: https://www.instagram.com/mooch/reel/DJxD9QVSGCy

Follow FYPod on TikTok @thefypod

Leave a comment

Watch, listen, and leave a comment.

FYPod is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here.

Happy Saturday!

Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a Bulwark+ member: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it.

ICYMI: Here are links to each newsletter section so you can quickly get back to that edition you may have missed this week.

Morning Shots – Triad – Huddled Masses – Press Pass – Bulwark Goes to Hollywood – The Opposition – False Flag – The Breakdown

The Other American ‘Popes’

Happy Saturday, everyone! School is out for summer, it’s the beginning of pool season, yard sales, and summer camps. And whatever our post-Musk(?) Summer brings, we’ll bring you what you need to know.

Our sold-out events in Chicago and Nashville were fantastic. Thank you to all who came, and took the time to chat with us at one of our Founder’s events or at the post-show meet and greets. The pleasure was all ours.

For your summer music playlist… Sam Fender live at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend.

The Trump administration just kicked its war on free speech into overdrive Over the past few days, members of Trump’s Cabinet threatened or imposed censorship in at least a half-dozen different ways, writes Anthony L. Fisher at MSNBC.

Jay Nordlinger’s… Oslo Journal. (Be sure to read parts 2 and 3)

American Life Is Wonderful. People Just Spend Too Much Time Online. Today’s spiritual crisis isn’t about society failing to give us meaning. It’s about asking it to do what it never could, observes Ben Dreyfuss.

Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.

—30—

Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.

Sarah had a busy travel schedule this week, so we’re bringing you some raw audio. With the recent revelations about Joe Biden’s mental state during his term, we asked a couple of groups of Democrats what they thought during (and after) his presidency, and how it might inform their thinking going forward. These voters liked Biden but supported his decision to withdraw from the 2024 race. The excerpts of these groups were edited for length and for participants’ privacy.

Leave a comment

Watch, listen, and leave a comment. The Focus Group podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Add this podcast to your player of choice, here.

Don’t care for video? Use the control on the left-side of the player to toggle to the audio-only version of the show.

Ad-free editions are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Upgrade to now to listen without ads.

The Connecticut Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the most significant reform to the state’s towing policies in decades, a measure lawmakers said would help protect drivers from predatory towing.

House Bill 7162 overhauls the state’s century-old towing statutes and comes in response to an investigation by the Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica that showed how state towing laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of drivers. It takes several steps to make it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow.

The bill, which passed the House of Representatives last week with wide bipartisan support and little debate, sailed through the Senate on a 33-3 vote.

“It’s reform that ensures transparency, it ensures fairness and accountability, but does all of this without undercutting the essential work that ethical and professional tow operators do each and every day for us, keeping our roads safe and our properties accessible,” said Transportation Committee Co-chair Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford. “We’ve learned over the years, and particularly over the last year due to some investigative reporting, of some particularly egregious circumstances.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont said the governor plans to sign the bill into law.

Republican Sen. Tony Hwang, ranking member of the Transportation Committee, also spoke in favor of the bill. The bill got about a half hour of debate ahead of passage, and there were no comments in opposition.

Hwang, who represents Fairfield, said the bill strikes the right balance between the interests of towers and consumers.

“I want to acknowledge that our press had an important part to bring out transparency and some of the bad actions, and I think in this bill we address some of those issues,” Hwang said. “We took measures to ensure that there is due process, and what has been discovered to have occurred in a criminal action, I believe, should never, ever happen again, to undermine the trust that we have to have in this process.”

Connecticut’s law allows tow companies to begin the process to sell vehicles after just 15 days. CT Mirror and ProPublica found that it is one of the shortest windows in the nation, and that the law has particularly impacted people with low incomes. Reporters spoke with people who said towing companies required them to pay in cash or wouldn’t allow them to get personal belongings out of their vehicles. Many couldn’t afford to get their towed vehicles back and lost transportation or jobs because of it.

After weeks of negotiations, lawmakers said they came to a compromise with the towing industry. Two bills were merged to include massive reforms to towing procedures from private property and rate increases for highway tows that typically follow car accidents.

The bill that passed and would take effect Oct. 1 requires tow companies to accept credit cards and doesn’t allow them to tow vehicles immediately just because of an expired parking permit or registration. Vehicles can’t be towed from private property without notice unless they’re blocking traffic, fire hydrants or parked in an accessible spot.

Under the bill, towing companies can still start the sales process for vehicles worth $1,500 or less after 15 days, but they would now have to take more steps to give the owner a chance to claim the vehicle. The Department of Motor Vehicles would be required to check whether the driver filed any complaints about the tow before approving the sale, and the tower would have to send a notice ahead of the sale to the registered owner and lienholders via certified mail, with receipts of delivery.

The actual sale couldn’t go through until 30 days after the tow.

The bill also requires that towers take at least two photos before they tow a vehicle — one of the violation that resulted in a tow and another of any damage to the vehicle. Cohen said this would help determine if vehicles had any missing parts before the tow, a seeming nod to the news organizations’ story about a DMV employee who the agency’s investigators found schemed with a towing company to undervalue vehicles and sell them for thousands in profit. (The employee denied he did anything wrong, and the agency ultimately took no action in that case.)

The bill also establishes a working group to study how to handle proceeds from the sales of towed vehicles. State law requires that towing companies hold profits in escrow for a year in case the vehicle owner claims them, then remit that money to the state. But CT Mirror and ProPublica found the DMV never set up a system for that process to occur.

Additionally, it calls for the DMV to work with the state’s attorney general to develop a consumer bill of rights on towing.

Tow companies have to be available after hours and on weekends to allow people to get their vehicles or personal property. In a story published this month, CT Mirror and ProPublica reported that tow truck companies sometimes hold onto people’s belongings to pressure them into paying their towing fees.

Under the new law, drivers will be allowed to retrieve their belongings from their vehicles, even if they haven’t paid the towing fees. State regulations currently allow vehicle owners to retrieve only “personal property which is essential to the health or welfare of any person.”

Cohen listed many of the issues outlined in the news outlets’ reporting as “some of the worst abuses of predatory towing practices.”

Timothy Vibert, president of Towing and Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, said the industry initially opposed the bill because towers believed it would impede their ability to tow cars and clear traffic. He also said towers weren’t involved enough in the original draft. But they worked with lawmakers on the bill over several weeks, and he issued a statement in support this week.

“The people of Connecticut deserve safety, accountability and transparency when their cars are towed, and so do the people who work for Connecticut’s towing companies who risk our lives every day to make our roads safe,” Vibert said. “We all need clear, easy-to-follow rules.”

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera commended the House and Senate.

“The DMV fully supports this initiative, as it not only enhances the framework for fair and equitable enforcement of towing laws but also provides a clear path forward for our agency to advance these efforts,” Guerrera said in a statement.

Cohen said that the bill aims to “fix a broken process,” and that lawmakers had worked on some aspects of it for years before the bill passed.

News of the bill’s passage brought relief to Melissa Anderson, who was featured in a CT Mirror and ProPublica story after her car was towed and sold from her Hamden apartment because of an expired parking permit.

The bill requires a 72-hour grace period before a car can be towed for an expired parking sticker to allow people time to get a new one.

“I’m glad we made a difference,” Anderson said. “This is going to help a lot of people.”

The bill next heads to Lamont’s desk.

“The Governor appreciates all the work that went into this legislation, which provides greater protections for the public and their vehicles,” Lamont’s spokesperson, Rob Blanchard, said in a text message. “He plans on signing the legislation once it reaches his desk.”