There is so much unknown about how ICE intends to use Paragon's terrifying no-click surveillance spyware. We appreciate members of the House Oversight Committee for sending this letter and trying to find out how this spyware will be used.

These people are evil. Never stop saying so. Don’t be intimidated into shutting up.

BREAKING: California Attorney General sues the El Cajon Police Department over illegal sharing of data from Flock Safety automated license plate readers. oag.ca.gov/news/press-...

"just upload a scanned image of your drivers license no big deal"

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

ICE is buying a location tracking tool that harvests data from hundreds of millions of phones a day. Protect your location data by updating a few settings on your phone 🧵 (1/4): www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-...

oh mainly just @hypervisible.blacksky.app's surveillance beat like every day there seems to be a dozen new startups that are like "our business plan is to create a surveillance platform monopoly primarily as an attractive acquisition target for some even bigger surveillance platform monopoly"

SESTA/FOSTA backfired miserably. The UK's age verification law backfired miserably. The TikTok ban is backfiring miserably. So of course @blumenthal.senate.gov has decided now is a great time to revive the terribly written Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) which will ... spoiler... backfire miserably

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Fucking grim. Jesus.

And through sheer force of will, Electronic Arts manages to become even worse.

I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.

California’s S.B. 524, which puts important guardrails on police using AI to write police reports, has passed through the statehouse. Now it’s time for us to tell Governor Newsom to sign it into law. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

The lack of regulation is allowing untransparent and potentially harmful technologies, like AI-written police reports, to flourish. California, tell Governor Newsom he must sign S.B. 524. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

To know more about Real Time Bidding and mass surveillance, see: www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

More excellent coverage of @eff.org's Stop Censoring Abortion project! www.jezebel.com/crucial-info...

as someone whose been through several visa / green card / citizenship processes in this country, there are so many questions that are designed to get you to commit perjury for a quick exile, that I am not at all surprised. the fascist are in charge, and the law bends in their direction. whose next.

Silly Jimmy Kimmel. He should have just called for all homeless people to be killed and he’d still have a job.

A grim reminder: these people will never be satisfied. There’s no point at which they will say “we’ve won, let’s enjoy life.” They will always be looking for someone else to punish, to revile, to dehumanize. They’re empty without that.

"In Europe, we have a law that says there can be no more than six minutes of advertising per hour on television. Why the hell can’t we regulate social media advertising and say that not more than 10% of your feed can be ads?" 💯 english.elpais.com/technology/2...

Feels invasive because it is invasive.

What.

The Wall Street Journal needs to issue a full retraction and apology to the trans community for this. Nothing less will suffice. They put us all in danger and recklessly put out incorrect information.

Logging off is an option

beware of people who want to "protect" the children but are vehemently opposed to empowering children, giving them information so they can have agency, teaching them about consent, and actually listening to them

If you are collecting sensitive information about users, like, I dunno...their sexual orientation...you need to take securing user data seriously.

New from 404 Media: this company turns dashcams into 'virtual CCTV cameras'. Then hackers got in. Hacker accessed terabytes of users recordings. Includes a user driving to CIA entrance; others at U.S. military bases. Big tech also buying images from the cameras www.404media.co/this-company...

Don’t you tempt me with a good time.

Every day, another piece of nauseating news hits my gut in a way I thought I’d become immune to, reminding me that the decline towards fascism takes place through the actions, not just of the fascists themselves, but of weak humans who choose short term self-preservation over courage and conviction.

HOW CAN I TEACH CONSTITUTIONAL LAW UNDER THESE CONDITIONS FOLKS

It's called fascism. Fascist regimes, like Mussolini's Italy, directly nationalized some businesses. American journalists need reminding that this isn't necessarily a 'socialist' thing. Articles like this don't help the public interpret what's happening in the US. www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

I used to think I was too online, and that gave me a mistakenly grim impression of the world, but now I think the opposite. It's people who are not online enough who don't realize that John McCain's party is well and truly dead and the online shitposters are fully running the Republican Party now.

I’m so tired of being so embarrassed.

I notice the free speech chuds seem pretty fucking silent for some reason.

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.

“Think of Gloo as something like Salesforce but for churches: a behavioral analytics platform, powered by church-­generated insights, psychographic information, and third-party consumer data.”

What are you reading on the internet these days that isn’t Bluesky, Reddit or Twitter? Waking up to *all this* just isn’t good for me.

*could be*

Sex is getting scrubbed from the internet, but a billionaire can sell you AI nudes

Stop debating this website's growth potential. I don't care. I'm a digital hermit crab. If it dies, I'll find another shell as I've done a dozen times before.

If we're reaching an era where we start to say "certain apps can't ever visit an openly available website" we're not going to have much of an open internet and I think we'll be very disappointed in what that results in for all of us.

The rest of the world continues to stare at us in disgusted disbelief.

NEW — The Handbasket’s anti-eulogy for Hulk Hogan written by the amazing @josie.zone. “To use the parlance of Gawker—the news outlet Hogan helped destroy with the assistance of a neofascist billionaire—And now he’s dead.” Read it here:

we just republished months of our ICE coverage, free of paywalls, in professionally-translated spanish. check it out: www.404media.co/were-publish...

It is genuinely infuriating that copyright is even the conversation we are having about it, and the reason that's even a question is because regulators just utterly suck at going through the *actually important* and *entirely not-about-copyright* issues at the heart of all of this

But the furor around AI training is poised to take out fair use at the knees--not because of an objection to the actual doctrine, but because the fury at AI companies is real, justified, and *completely blind* to the second-order consequences of what they're demanding.

Fair use is what enables quote-dunking. It's what lets you make fun of elected officials by quoting their own words back at them. It's what allows gifs to exist in the first place. It's what makes software interoperable. It underpins literally everything online.