Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business…
The FBI was given access to unreleased technology to access the phone of the man identified as the shooter of former President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the investigation. As the FBI struggled to gain access on Sunday morning to the phone, they appealed directly to Cellebrite, a digital intelligence company founded in Israel that…
When Maria Cantwell first ran for the U.S. Senate, she championed what was then an unconventional political cause: internet privacy. “What you do on your computer should be your business, and no one else’s,” Cantwell, the dot-com millionaire and former U.S. House member, said in a 2000 campaign video that showed her huddled around a…
How to name the rude currents eroding the Left, those which have claimed the hearts, minds and Substacks of so many former friends and fellow travelers? There are the journalist-provocateurs and the readers who have followed them rightward, the Trumpers-come-lately marching on to Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble or vanishing into Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone. There are those…
There’s a new power player on America’s extremist scene. White nationalist “Active Clubs” are growing explosively, and filling a void created by the prosecutions that decimated the leadership of Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. “The Active Clubs are who the Proud Boys thought they were,” says John Lewis, a research fellow at the Program…
In June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments…
In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that the federal government would not bail out Silicon Valley Bank, but is working to help depositors who are concerned about their money. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures deposits up to $250,000, but many of the companies and wealthy people who used the bank…
Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data from the have-you-ever-noticed-that-making-money-is-the-only-thing-we-actually-care-about dept We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number…