"Mistakes are a feature and not a bug of authoritarian surveillance. If ICE occasionally makes mistakes by arresting Americans and deporting innocents, then everyone has to fear it. This is by design." www.lawfaremedia.org/article/digi...

Should be a bigger deal how many of these people are in a cult.

Every year deepens my hatred for "family history" people: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

As I read another in @eff.org's excellent series on the censorship of reproductive health information, here's a reminder that I saw it coming thirty years in advance because I witnessed it in high school, in my grunge era, before we had home dialup internet. heatherburns.tech/2020/08/12/h...

To celebrate the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from prison, the ebook edition of YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN DEFEATED, tr. an anonymous collective, is available to download for free for the next week via all ebook platforms, including Kindle and Apple Books, until 30 September.

I loved talking to Signal's @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, who is such a consistent, clear voice of sanity (and always a great interview). We talked about (of course) SignalGate, what AI means for Signal, why tech bros continue to be such a disappointment, and much more. Read, listen, etc!

Some of the friends whom I love the most work in #a11y and I've been struggling to find a way to tell them that they're next. Web accessibility teams and initiatives are going to find themselves professionally defunded and personally under attack. God's own image and all that. It's going to happen.

👇

RFK Jr. Warns Mistress That Condoms Cause Autism https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-warns-mistress-that-condoms-cause-autism/

Apparently the rapture is today (again) so I have to share this thing I found in my dissertation research (again) because let's face it, if I had to look at this stuff, so do you

Tylenol does not cause autism but *not* taking Tylenol can cause women to be truly miserable during pregnancy so you can see why the GOP is so gung-ho about this line of argument.

New: 404 Media is suing ICE. We have filed a lawsuit demanding ICE release its $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that makes powerful spyware to break into phones and read encrypted messages. This is expensive for a small outlet but this info is important www.404media.co/were-suing-i...

Well, I'm *officially* in my Rogue Radical era now! Sept 26th,is the last day to sign up for my Race, Media and International Affairs online classes. They don't want us to talk about race and history, but I'm going to teach it anyway. Enroll here! www.resistancesummerschool.com/fall-2025-re...

A fun fact about McCarthyism is that just two and a half years after he was condemned and censured, Sen. Joseph McCarthy drank himself to death at 48. Fevers break. Petty tyrants fall. Censorship and persecution drive good people to stand together and fight back.

@rossmc11.bsky.social heads up that the village rat plague is heading your way and it likes kitchens.

"Limit children's doomscrolling to two hours," say Lib Dems, while their grandparents spend six hours a day on social media spreading racist bile and AI slop. But they're untouchable, because they're ~pensioners~.

I’m reading a daily newsletter I rely on for my research, from the US, discussing how they are making a backup plan to publish by snail mail in case the newsletter topic is banned and they get deplatformed. Snail mail.

Reviewed Nick Clegg’s book. Didn’t think much of it, except for: “Nadine Dorries, while secretary of state for the department overseeing the internet, ‘once called me in high dudgeon, demanding to know why I hadn’t taken down tweets … I had to explain to her that Twitter was a different company’.”

Draft law in the US state of South Carolina would make it illegal for any web site anywhere which discusses abortion to be viewed within the state. I wonder where they got that idea from

How dare news stories directly relevant to my master's dissertation take place after I turned it in www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Things I wonder about at 6 AM on a Saturday: whether I should keep using my otherwise brilliant citations app because the cloud syncing is hosted in the US and is not e2ee, which is A Thing when academic research is a target. forums.zotero.org/discussion/1...

1. Republicans are attempting to get the FBI to label trans advocacy as domestic terrorism. Project 2025's parent org is pushing it. It would not label all trans people as terrorists, but it would open the door for heavy surveillance and disruption. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Left-Wing Group Too Disorganized For FBI Agents To Infiltrate https://theonion.com/left-wing-group-too-disorganized-for-fbi-agents-to-infi-1848923025/

I know this sounds all cheesy and twee but I submitted my master’s dissertation yesterday in my late forties, and you know what folks? I did that.

As I wrote last week: there are age verification providers who have already built the racial profiling and discrimination modules to plug into their offerings the minute they legally can. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

My daughter was going past Bird & Blend Tea so I asked her to get me a bag of 50g of Baby Spice and thank god for end to end encryption because that sounds all sorts of wrong.

Strange to be sitting here stoically with my morning coffee, watching Americans go through all the phases of existential collapse that we in the UK did from 2016 onwards. "Oh I remember that phase", I think to myself as I see a skeet, in the sense that I remember being capable of having feelings.

I loved this Pet Shop Boys tour

A rare exception to Betteridge’s Law. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/t...

RIP Robert Redford, seen here in "All The President's Men" gazing at what later became my bedroom in Washington DC. As anyone who has ever lived in DC knows, that's the most DC apartment picture ever. All good memories.

“Free speech absolutists” when they don’t like how people exercise their freedom of expression…

I'm working from campus today, during freshers week, which means that all I can see around me are piles of free pizza and Santa-sized sacks of free condoms. I love this place.

[me, a journalist who spends all day every day on a social media app where the discovery algorithm is personally controlled by its owner, captain birdseye] you know, a lot of people are talking about fish fingers, we should probably cover that

Evergreen:

Keeping in mind that the Trump administration openly views contraception as abortion, this is why I've committed to an MPhil on this.

I recapped all the tech that ICE is using to power its ruthless deportation operations. Hat tip to everyone who's been doing great reporting on these companies and tools. techcrunch.com/2025/09/13/h...

Lord almighty this is beautiful because I once stood on a conference stage and told my audience that someday they might have to do this very thing. 🥹 www.muellershewrote.com/p/breaking-e...

Barrister cites fictitious case (from ChatGPT). When challenged by Tribunal, uses ChatGPT to confirm the case exists. This does not go well. tribunalsdecisions.service.gov.uk/utiac/2025-u...

Really good read which speaks far more highly of the UK’s young people than the child safety establishment does. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Politico is calling a possible UQ in the Commons today re: Musk and X and the weekend. This would be such an easy win.

You know what, I think all my followers should have to suffer as much as I did

@rossmc11.bsky.social I thought you might appreciate this footnote I just had to write

Bernard Keenan, "From interception to integration: encryption, bulk data, and the investigatory powers regime" (King's Law Journal, Ahead of Print) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

I used to explain to my conference audiences how America's hostility to privacy was born of the east coast Puritan legacy of domestic snooping against sin, meshed with the west coast frontier legacy of freedom to do what you want (e.g. with other people's lives). Anyone remember the paper about it?

The Dept. of Education has pulled funding for programs in 8 states that support students with both hearing and vision loss. A staffer at one program says he was told the Trump admin. took issue with 2 words on the grant application: “transition" and “privilege": www.propublica.org/article/trum...

The Online Safety Act requires social media platforms to protect against foreign interference in British democracy. It didn't quite envision the platforms itself being the interference.

This is an archived government report that found that “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.” It existed yesterday and is gone today.

NEW: After a social media firestorm, smart ring maker Oura says it's not sharing users' data with the government. But users raised justified concerns about where and how Oura stores and secures its data. Oura now tells me that it *has* received government demands for user data. For subscribers. ❤️

Worth a read on the dystopian potential of the OSA.