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The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country’s major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest, funnel customer records to a data broker they co-own called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which then sells access to peoples’ travel data to government agencies.

The IRS case in the letter is the clearest example yet of how agencies are searching the massive trove of travel data without a search warrant, court order, or similar legal mechanism. Instead, because the data is being sold commercially, agencies are able to simply buy access. In the letter addressed to nine major airlines, the lawmakers urge them to shut down the data selling program. Update: after this piece was published, ARC said it already planned to shut down the program. You can read more here.

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Two federal appeals court judges appointed by President Donald Trump described his arguments as "meritless" and "unpersuasive" in a ruling affirming a lower courts decision to dismiss his $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN for its coverage of the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The Education Department plans to announce Tuesday that it will move multiple parts of the agency to other federal departments, an unprecedented and unilateral effort to dismantle an agency created by Congress to ensure all Americans have equal access to educational opportunity and better coordinate federal programs.

The move was described by three people informed of the plan ahead of the announcement. Two of these people said six offices within the department would be shifted elsewhere; the third person said it was at least two.

Archive: http://archive.today/Tw2Xx

A Cloudflare spokesperson told Ars that the cloud services provider saw “a spike in unusual traffic to one of Cloudflare’s services,” which “caused some traffic passing through Cloudflare’s network to experience errors.”

“We do not yet know the cause of the spike in unusual traffic,” the spokesperson said. “We are all hands on deck to make sure all traffic is served without errors. After that, we will turn our attention to investigating the cause of the unusual spike in traffic.”

Ratcheting up President Donald Trump’s assault on the judiciary, a group of Republican senators Monday asked an appeals court to suspend Chief Judge James Boasberg, who initiated potential contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials in April.

President Trump’s second term has brought a period of turmoil and controversy unlike any in the history of the Justice Department. Trump and his appointees have blasted through the walls designed to protect the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency from political influence; they have directed the course of criminal investigations, openly flouted ethics rules and caused a breakdown of institutional culture. To date, more than 200 career attorneys have been fired, and thousands more have resigned. (The Justice Department says many of them have been replaced.)

Archive: https://archive.md/10jxU

Since its creation in 1965, the National Endowment for the Humanities has distributed more than $6.5 billion to support more than 70,000 projects, from landmark works like Ken Burns’s documentary “The Civil War” to small local efforts in every corner of the country.

But now, six months after the Trump administration canceled virtually all grants approved during the Biden administration, the nation’s largest public funder of the humanities appears to be transforming into a vehicle narrowly tailored to the president’s agenda.

Archive: https://archive.md/LgVyh