United States congressman Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is privately lobbying colleagues to preserve the FBI’s power to conduct warrantless searches of Americans’ communications, WIRED has learned, arguing that he has seen no evidence that the Trump administration is abusing its authority.

In a letter obtained by WIRED, Himes urges fellow Democrats to support the White House’s request to renew a controversial surveillance program that intercepts the electronic data of foreigners abroad. While targeted at foreigners, the program—authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—also sweeps in vast quantities of private messages belonging to US citizens.

Himes’ pitch relies on the “56 reforms” passed by Congress in 2024, which codified the FBI’s own internal protocols as a substitute for constitutional warrants. In the letter, Himes claims these changes are “working as intended” to prevent domestic misuse, citing a compliance rate “exceeding 99 percent” over the past two years.

The structural foundations of that defense, however, have been fundamentally altered by recent changes within the FBI. Himes’ “99 percent” compliance metric was produced by the Office of Internal Auditing, for instance—a unit that long served as a smoke alarm designed to detect illegality, but no longer exists.

The unit was shuttered by FBI director Kash Patel last year. Historic court opinions based on its data had previously exposed hundreds of thousands of improper FBI searches. Without the auditors required to calculate failure rates, the compliance mechanisms Himes points to have effectively ceased to function.

In a statement, Himes’ office largely reiterated the positions laid out in his letter to colleagues. “I am open to making further reforms to Section 702, building on the many successful reforms we made in reauthorization legislation two years ago,” he says. “A short-term reauthorization of Section 702 will enable Congress to thoroughly debate the pros and cons of these suggested reforms—and to determine if compromise is possible—without placing our national security in peril by allowing the program to expire.”

As a member of the so-called Gang of Eight—a bipartisan group of lawmakers who are briefed on highly sensitive classified information—Himes possesses some of the deepest knowledge of the spy program. Nevertheless, his letter contains several other claims that appear fundamentally at odds with the mechanics of FISA oversight.

“Because of how heavily it is overseen by all three branches of government,” Himes says, “any effort to misuse the program would almost certainly become known to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and to Congress.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a secret court that possesses no investigative arm to audit FBI databases. Similar to Congress, its oversight role is purely reactive, relying entirely on the US Justice Department to self-report violations.

“Neither Congress nor the FISA Court conducts independent audits of the FBI’s queries,” says Liza Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “They rely on the Department of Justice to conduct thorough audits and to report the results truthfully and promptly. This particular Department of Justice has gutted internal oversight mechanisms and has been rebuked by dozens of federal courts for providing inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete information.”

There are no judges standing between the FBI and the private communications of millions of Americans, something that Himes and other members of his committee claim is necessary for the government to react quickly to terrorist threats. Critics argue that, given the current administration’s efforts to dismantle internal checks at the FBI, this is a massive vulnerability, leaving Americans exposed to surveillance abuses that will take years to declassify—if they’re ever reported at all.

After a day of widespread, overwhelming pushback, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doubled down and said gamers are “completely wrong” about DLSS. (You know how much gamers love being told that they’re wrong.) But developers at Capcom and Ubisoft say they didn’t even know what the tech demo would look like and, according to Insider Gaming, found out about it the same time everyone else did and were just as surprised. (Nvidia, Ubisoft, and Capcom did not immediately get back to our request for comment.)

“I think the reaction from gamers is understandable,” Marwan Mahmoud, a game developer at Incrypt, wrote in an email to WIRED. “Some games started relying too heavily on these technologies instead of focusing on proper optimization. From a developer perspective, it feels a bit different because you see DLSS as a tool that helps rather than a core solution.”

The problem for many people, developers included, is the one-size-fits-all approach of a technology that can adjust visuals across various game types.

“The artist has a style, the artist has an art direction that you’re going to give him, and that’s something that AI kind of doesn’t respect all the time,” says Raúl Izquierdo, an indie game developer in Mexico, “Maybe I don’t want my characters to be yassified.”

Bates agrees, saying he doesn’t think every game needs to be photo real. And that sentiment is also echoed by game developer Sterling Reames, who has worked at Striking Distance Studios and Zynga. “People just want better games,” Reames wrote in a message to WIRED. “That’s as plainly as I can put it.

At GTC, Nvidia ran its demo on its most powerful consumer graphics cards, two GeForce RTX 5090s. Had Nvidia made its selling point for the tech that it saves resources, thus enabling older hardware to deliver more impressive graphics, there may have been something to that.

“What’s the point if you’re not going to do it on weaker hardware?” Izquierdo says. “If this were done on an [RTX 2080 graphics card], for instance, I think I would be thinking differently about it. OK, this is for the betterment of gamers’ experiences and everything, not just for selling graphic cards.”

Ultimately, Nvidia’s demo, and GTC writ large, was a flex of the company’s power in the AI space. The reaction, Bates posits, is more about humans dealing with not just crossing the uncanny valley, but what happens when we reach the other side.

“Right now it’s pretty clearly a thing they are forced to do to demonstrate their prowess as an AI company,” Bates says. “But the truth is, this is going to be the default in a few years, and nobody is even going to think twice about it. It’s Jensen’s world, we’re just living in it.”

Essex Police has paused its use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after identifying potential accuracy and bias risks.

The force’s suspension of its LFR system – provided by Israeli biometrics firm Corsight – was revealed in an audit document published by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which said Essex Police must work to “reduce the risks” identified before continuing with future deployments.

A list of LFR deployments from Essex Police shows the last time the force used the technology was on 26 August 2025, meaning its deployments had already been paused by the time the ICO carried out its audit that November.

While it is currently unclear what specifically prompted the force to suspend its LFR use, Computer Weekly exclusively reported in May 2025 that Essex Police had failed to properly consider its potentially discriminatory impacts, after a “clearly inadequate” equality impact assessment (EIA) was obtained via Freedom of Information rules by privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch.

Experts criticised the document at the time for being “incoherent”, failing to look at the systemic equalities impacts of the technology, and relying exclusively on testing of entirely different software algorithms used by other police forces trained on different populations.

The force was also criticised for “parroting misleading claims” from the supplier about the LFR system’s lack of bias, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology – a body widely recognised as the gold standard for LFR testing, where all of the testing data is publicly shared – holding no information to support the accuracy figures cited by Corsight, or its claim to essentially have the least-biased algorithm available.

Big Brother Watch alleged at the time that these issues taken together meant the force had likely failed to fulfil its public sector equality duty to consider how its policies and practices could be discriminatory.