Fired 'Stars and Stripes' Journalists Sue Pentagon, Seeking to Block Their Terminations 27AUG26

Lt. Col. Sean P. Klimek, commander Stars and Stripes Europe and Expeditionary, Office of Secretary of Defense, Kaiserslautern, Germany, Max D. Lederer, jr., Publisher Stars and Stripes and Lt. Col. Richard E. McClintic, Commander of Stars and Stripes Pacific headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, pose for a group photo with Public Affairs personnel from U.S. Army Central

 NOT fired for publishing actual military secrets that would put American military members and the nation at risk, no, these people were fired for doing their job and reporting truth and facts much to the chagrin of neo-nazi fascist fotze trunt petie lola hegseth and that no class neo-nazi fascist drippings ( meaning the best of him, it there actually was any, ran down something's leg ) c-i-c bone spurs NOT MY pres drumpf/trump. It is a very sad commentary on the lack of commitment to defending the US Constitution, especially the First Amendment by the drumpf/trump-vance administration, their ass licking cabinet and the gop / greed over people-republican party. This from Military.com.....

Fired 'Stars and Stripes' Journalists Sue Pentagon, Seeking to Block Their Terminations

"Our goal is to protect the rights of service members and their families to a free and independent press," the plaintiffs said.

Published Aug 27, 2026, 6:23 PM EDT

By Adam Gramegna

Three Stars and Stripes journalists fired by the Pentagon last week have sued the Department of Defense, seeking to block their terminations.

Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin, Middle East reporter Lara Korte, and publisher Max Lederer filed the 45-page lawsuit Thursday in Washington. Among the defendants named were the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and two of the department's public affairs officials, according to their now former employer.

The suit asks the court to halt the terminations as unlawful, arguing they amounted to retaliation over unflattering coverage of a Navy deployment as part of a broader attempt to censor the press. The three plaintiffs are represented by Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers for Good Government, Government Accountability Project and the Yale School Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic

"Our goal is to protect the rights of service members and their families to a free and independent press," the three journalists said in a joint statement provided to Military.com. "This lawsuit is about safeguarding that mission and ensuring our civilian and military journalists can do their jobs without retaliation."

Colonel Christopher M. Coglianese, facing left, deputy chief of staff, U.S. Army Central (Forward), meets with Max D. Lederer Jr., center, publisher, Stars and Stripes

Credit: U.S. Army Reserve photo by Staff Sgt. Justin Hardin

The three were issued separation notices last Friday, each charged with insubordination. Stars and Stripes is owned by the Defense Department and its employees are federal workers, but the paper operates as an editorially independent news organization. It has been in continuous circulation since World War II.

Military.com asked the Defense Department whether it intends to contest the lawsuit and about the status of the employees' appeals. No response was received by press time.

The Firings

Separation notices for Slavin and Korte cited a CBS News interview in which each defended the First Amendment principles behind their work and said censorship of news for service members would be a red line.

Slavin joined the publication in 2005 and became its top editor in September 2025. Korte began reporting for the paper in 2024.

Lederer, who spent 30 years with Stars and Stripes and had announced his retirement days before the firings, was terminated because he refused a request from Pentagon leadership to fire Slavin and Korte, according to the lawsuit.

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) sails in the Arabian Sea, May 29, 2026

Credit: [null Courtesy], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

He was also cited for insubordination over comments he made in his resignation.

Attorneys for Slavin and Korte claim they are being fired merely for saying on the CBS Sunday Morning TV show that Stars and Stripes should remain independent of Pentagon and political influence.

“The Pentagon is trying to punish journalists for defending the established mission of Stars and Stripes,” said Taryn Wilgus Null, senior counsel at Democracy Defenders Fund, in a statement provided to Military.com. “We are asking the court to stop these unconstitutional terminations. Service members and their families need reporting that is independent of the officials it covers and is unafraid to criticize them when they deserve it.”

Lederer had said he was stepping down because his understanding of the mission of Stars and Stripes differed in "fundamental ways" from the direction the Defense Department had set for the paper. He was scheduled to leave Sept. 30.

A Warning Over the USS Abraham Lincoln

The firings are tied directly to the newspaper's reporting, per the complaint.

The demand that Lederer fire Slavin and Korte came the day after Stars and Stripes published an article on deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, according to the suit.

That news coverage described an aircraft carrier that had been deployed for a historic 270 days without a port call, as part of the ongoing war with Iran that will mark the six-month mark of the conflict on Friday.

“These retaliatory firings at Stars and Stripes are precisely why these First Amendment protections matter," Amy Powell, litigation director, Lawyers for Good Government, said in a statement shared with Military.com. "The government cannot preserve an independent press while punishing the people who insist that its independence is paramount to a functioning democracy.

"We are proud to stand with these employees in defending their rights and the principle that government officials cannot use their power over federal workers to silence protected speech.”​​​​​​​

The dispute over the paper's independence predates the firings. In March, the Pentagon outlined an overhaul of Stars and Stripes that barred it from using some newswire services and running comics and other syndicated features.

They required that its content be consistent with "good order and discipline," a phrase drawn from the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Its ombudsman, whose role Congress created to protect its editorial independence, was fired in April.

This week's lawsuit is separate from a suit filed in June by two members of the paper's advisory board, who alleged the Pentagon's overhaul violated federal law. That case remains pending.

Omniscience Does Not Belong to the State & U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk 19&21AUG26

 

Samuel Tunick faces a felony charge for deleting his phone’s data during an airport customs search last year.Credit...Samuel Tunick

Jan. 27, 2026, Minneapolis, Minn. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents question a man and scan his face with a mobile phone as part of the "Operation Metro Surge"

Reuters

THIS neo-nazi fascist administration continues to try to control us through violations of our civil liberties and human rights that are guaranteed in the US Constitution. We the people are refusing to give up on our democratic Republic no matter how many of us the administration's gestapo assaults, detains and arrest and even kills. These from Sojourners and the New York Times.....

Omniscience Does Not Belong to the State

God’s all-knowing nature is central to the divine’s singular nature—God is the only being who can be all-knowing. However, authoritarians seek to make this a characteristic feature of their regimes instead of God’s rule.

By Michael Woolf

Aug 19, 2026

On Jan. 24, 2025, U.S. Border Patrol stopped Samuel Tunick at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta and demanded to search his phone. Tunick was part of the “Defend the Atlanta Forest” movement in Atlanta, opposed to the development of a police training center dubbed “Cop City.” He has been charged with a felony for giving a customs officer a duress passcode that deleted the contents of his phone when the officer entered it. Not only is the case chilling because of the aggressive nature of the prosecution, but also because the federal government wants to assume characteristics that are typically reserved for God.

The point of government surveillance is not merely to know everything, but to fundamentally change what we do.

I will confess that the three omnis always gave me some pause—especially as a kid. Omnipotence—the idea that God is all-powerful—was fine, even if I had my doubts. Omnipresence—God’s capacity to be everywhere all at once—was hard to imagine, but I could live with it. But it was omniscience—God’s ability to know everything, even my own thoughts—that gave me anxiety. Most of my fear centered on committing “thought crimes,” essentially. If thinking about committing adultery is the same as doing it, as scripture suggests, then I basically had to keep a pure mind at all times. As anyone reading this will readily acknowledge, this is an impossible task.

What seems clear to me is that there is only one being I would trust, however ambivalently, with omniscience: God. Otherwise, I wouldn’t trust anyone or any institution to be able to know everything, to read my mind. The United States government wants that power and is willing to use whatever means necessary to achieve it.

It may sound like hyperbole to say that the U.S. government is trying to read our thoughts, but our phones are an extension of our minds at this point. In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers first made the argument, dubbed the “extended mind thesis,” that the thinking process extends beyond the human brain and body into the physical environment. Consider the way that you use your phone. If you’re like me, you use it to Google random questions you have throughout the day, plan your trips, and research your anxieties and fears, hoping a Reddit post might have the solution. Our phones have become an integral part of our thinking process.

Part of thinking is collaborating with others, which helps us make connections and figure out ways to advocate for a more just society. Authoritarian governments don’t want us to collaborate with others, and they seek to surveil us to discourage us from doing these things. Whether it’s a 30-year sentence for a man who hid zines, or the federal targeting of Minnesotans who protested the Bishop Henry Whipple Detention Center, the Trump administration is trying to criminalize dissent. This administration is increasingly using prosecution as a weapon not simply to punish speech, but to make the average American think twice before engaging in activism.

There has been a steady stream of well-publicized attempts by the government to gain access to Signal’s secure messaging logs, as activists turn to encrypted modes of communication to fight authoritarianism.

As Christians, we ought to be explicit about how our theology offers a different take on omniscience that drastically diverges from how authoritarians understand it. Many Christians have critiqued tyranny as idolatrous because it assumes absolute power and submission, which should only be reserved for God. Calvin put it this way in his Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Daniel: “We ought rather utterly to defy than to obey [rulers] whenever they are so restive and wish to spoil God of his rights, and, as it were, to seize upon his throne and draw him down from heaven.” If Calvin were alive today, I imagine that he would argue that the government’s obsession with knowing our thoughts is an idolatrous attempt to claim attributes reserved for God alone.

God’s all-knowing nature is central to the divine’s singular nature—God is the only being who can be all-knowing. However, authoritarians seek to make this a characteristic feature of their regimes instead of God’s rule. This too is idolatry, and it threatens not only our democracy, but our faith as well. Not only does it attempt to cheapen God, but it makes following God’s commands harder. It is also a perversion of the way that God uses that omniscience. While the government seeks to punish what it finds, God is instead characterized by forgiveness and grace, even while knowing our innermost thoughts.

In attempting to become omniscient, the Trump administration is not just trying to punish its critics, but also trying to make it harder to follow our convictions and do what God is calling us to do.

The government may seek to know what we are doing in real time. It may even want us to believe that it knows what we are thinking. But omniscience does not belong to the state, and neither does our conscience. The fundamental truth that we must proclaim is simple: both belong to God.

Michael Woolf

Michael Woolf is the senior minister of Lake Street Church of Evanston in Illinois.

READ MORE: ‘Brand New Day’ Makes Peace with the Powers of Surveillance

U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk

Samuel Tunick, who faces a felony charge for deleting his phone’s data during an airport customs search, called the government’s peering into people’s private lives “creepy.”

By Adeel Hassan

Aug. 21, 2026Updated 10:47 a.m. ET

Samuel Tunick was returning to the United States in January 2025 from a vacation in the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Customs and Border Protection officers wanted to search his phone. After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a passcode that then erased the contents of his Google Pixel phone.

As result, federal prosecutors in Atlanta have charged him with obstruction.

The case of Mr. Tunick, 30, became widely known last month after news reports of his federal court hearing in Atlanta. Mr. Tunick, a musician who has taught at a Jewish day school and tutored students, is also a left-wing activist and a graduate student in geography at Georgia State University.

He said that he has been ensnared by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive issued by President Trump last September that expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to include crimes like getting in the way of immigration enforcement.

His prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of the federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence using a program designed to wipe a device clean after a specific code is entered.

“Obstructing federal law enforcement is a serious matter that has serious repercussions,” Theodore Hertzberg, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said in a statement. “Individuals who destroy or attempt to destroy property, including data, to prevent lawful search and seizure should expect to face prosecution and punishment for their actions.”

A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency had the authority to search the electronic devices of anyone entering or leaving the United States, regardless of citizenship, to enforce laws addressing terrorism, child exploitation, drug- and human-smuggling, visa fraud and national security threats.

“The border search will only include an examination of information that is present on the device at the time it is presented for inspection,” the spokeswoman said, adding that it searched the electronic devices of fewer than 0.01 percent of all arriving international travelers in the last fiscal year.

In an interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, Mr. Tunick explained how he ended up in this situation.

Why did you decide to replace your phone’s default software with Graphene OS, which can delete the phone’s contents?

Knowing the kind of surveillance that activists have been subjected to, it just seems like a good idea to protect my private data that I don’t necessarily want corporations or governments to have access to, just out of the principle of privacy.

Some people think that if you have that software, you’re trying to hide something.

If someone you don’t know, who’s actively hostile to you, is trying to access your private data, your pictures, your messages or notes to self, that may be not something that you’d like.

Your lawyers have said that the government was investigating you over your association with the movement against “Cop City,” a planned police and fire training center in Atlanta. What are your views?

I was a participant, along with hundreds of thousands of other people in the movement.

I heard that people were trying to fight it, and I have a background in environmental studies. That’s what I got my bachelor’s degree in. I’m about to go back to school for geography, so the environmental justice issue struck a chord for me, but especially so when it was combined with this concerning trend that we’ve seen over the last several years of expanding and militarizing the police at the exact time when tens of millions of Americans are demanding the exact opposite.

How do you view the federal government’s approach to investigating this movement?

We don’t know for sure, but it’s interesting to me that my charges and the other federal charges come on the heels of NSPM-7, which is the Trump administration’s mandate to attack left-wing movements under the bogus pretense of domestic terrorism. I think we should just call that what it is, which is a direct attack on our First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.

During these proceedings, it was revealed that the federal authorities had secretly placed you on a watch list. What was your reaction to learning you had been flagged as a suspected terrorist?

Initially, I was surprised and upset, but this was also after 40 or so Stop Cop City protesters and several dozen attendees of a music festival had been charged with domestic terrorism. So I was able to understand it in that context.

However, it’s not a pleasant experience to find out that you’ve just been placed on a watch list without any input from a judge, from a jury. They can justify all of this warrantless surveillance. Or they try to justify it, at least.

How has it affected your life?

It’s stressful to have potentially up to five years in prison looming over my head. I’m a musician. I tour occasionally. I have to get a judge’s approval anytime I want to leave the Northern District of Georgia.

All of my family lives on the West Coast, so I have to get a judge’s approval to visit them as well. I was forced to surrender my passport.

Just the knowledge that the government is peering into your private life in this way, trying to dig up dirt on you, even though it’s unsuccessful, is creepy.

Cybersecurity experts have expressed concern that your prosecution sends a message that using privacy tools like Graphene OS to delete your phone’s contents is criminal by default. So what message do you hope your defense sends?

I just hope to send the message that the government doesn’t own our data. The government doesn’t own our communications, our relationships, as hard as they might try to. We have to defend our fundamental right to privacy; otherwise we can’t say that we really live in a democracy.

From the comment

1. M

   MH

   Rhinebeck NY

   Not mentioned, is that Tunick likely had not technically entered the US yet-- he was in customs before entry authorization. This may be an interesting gray area, in that claiming "you (Tunick) have not entered yet so we (immigration) can do anything we want with you and your data" also means "immigration doesn't have US law coverage for the (Tunick's) data because US law perhaps doesn't even apply in this meta state of 'you are not in the US yet' so what law applies to Tunick deleting his own data?". People think because you are standing in Atlanta/Hartsfield you are in the US, but that isn't really true until you are admitted although it is fairly dense shade of gray legally (notwithstanding trump government opinions always being read in the trump government's favor).

   1. 

      Adeel Hassan

      Breaking news reporter

      @MH You are correct, and we wrote about that previously: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/duress-password-phone-wipe-charge.htmlThere's also a link in to it in this article. But it helps to spell it out again. Thank you for the helpful reminder.

2. W

   Winston Smith

   Cambridge MA

   Most americans seem to be unaware that in the "border zone", the rights you take for granted evaporate. I am astounded that Mr Tunick, given his activities, took his personal phone with him on an overseas journey, giving the government an opportunity to attempt seizing his private data. Immigration attorneys travel with burners and are starting to recommend to legal non-citizen residents to use a "travel phone" if they want to preserve their privacy.

   1. 

      Adeel Hassan

      Breaking news reporter

      @Winston Smith Thanks, one of my colleagues wrote about this very issue. Have a look, though you already seem well-versed on this topic. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/technology/personaltech/travel-burner-phone-cbp.html

   2. Adeel Hassan, a New York-based reporter for The Times, covers breaking news and other topics.

   3. A U.S. Citizen Deleted His Phone’s Data. Now He Faces a Felony Charge.

      July 28, 2026