Ferbruary #oldknees

Data protection, as a concept, grew out of post-war legal scholarship in Germany which reflected on the use of data about people by the Nazi Govt, and formulated a set of limits on data use which recognised that to collect and use data about people was to impact the people’s lives.

Yesterday, Todd Blanche said that people weren't going to find in the Epstein files what we always suspected. And while I'm mostly watching what others find in the Epstein files second hand, I keep thinking, are you fucking HIGH? Everything I'm seeing is precisely what we expected.

It's amazing how u can throw basically any word into the Epstein docs search & get like 800 instances of that word being used in the creepiest way by the most powerful people you never heard of before googling who they are and exactly how many prestigious world institutions they are hired/lauded by

The FBI was able to access Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's Signal messages because she used Signal on her work laptop. The laptop accepted Touch ID for authentication, meaning the agents were allowed to require her to unlock it. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

I wonder if the New York Times will go after any of the prominent academics in the Epstein files for being rapists as hard as they went after Claudine Gay for being kind of sloppy with citations in her graduate thesis. If not, why not?

Whether it's a Hillary Clinton staffer asking John Podesta how to make risotto or Elon Musk asking Jeffrey Epstein where he could find a party featuring child sex slaves, there's plenty of embarrassing emails on both sides.

Can’t believe they released the Epstein files to cover up for the Melania movie.

DOJ has since killed this link. This is what was there:

Elon making plans to go to Epstein's island:

I’ve launched a Citation Needed membership drive to celebrate publishing my 100th recap issue! Citation Needed critically covers cryptocurrency, the crypto industry, and its influence on policy. Paid subscriptions support much more than just the newsletter — here’s what goes into this work:

President Trump has filed a lawsuit against the IRS, in which he demands that the IRS, which he as president controls, pay him $10 billion. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Israel has wiped 2,700 families off of the Civil Registry. In 6,000 families, there is only one survivor. The Al Jazeera report shedding light on these numbers came days after Trump unveiled his colonial plan to rebuild Gaza, the site of Israel’s genocide.

We’re just not a free country. Any American watching this play out between regime forces and journalists overseas would recognize it for what it is.

Within 4 hours of ICE (actually CBP) killing Alex Pretti, the data suggested that the right wing spin machine was having trouble gaining traction, even on their home turf over on X. Here's a Substack I wrote analyzing X data from that time. katestarbird.substack.com/p/another-mu...

They’re all so incredibly useless.

This isn’t just “owning the libs” — this is the highest office in the nation using technology to lie to the entire world. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Vienna Convention puts embassies & consulates as “inviolable”: can’t be searched, entered, etc by security forces w/o permission of mission. So a warrant is besides the point except as extra fascist fuckery. Not extraterritorial in sense it’s Ecuadorian land… …& this is not how one does things

according to bluesky, working for ice is a protected class against discrimination lol

SCOOP: Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti WIRED obtained Slack conversations + an updated internal Palantir wiki defending the company's work for ICE to outraged workers. More here: www.wired.com/story/palant...

You know it's a whole lot of things going on when newspapers run articles on "Know Your Chemical Weapons' to support their population.

As a libertarian, I think it’s important that Americans understand that if they just do what the government says, they won’t get shot.

Good stuff from @gregsargent.bsky.social. I think we tend to overemphasize, esp. w/ Trump's mush-brain at the top, that their fascism is a kind of purely id-driven emotional impulse. But it's a real ideology w/ real theorists and tenets. Miller isn't an evil genius, but he has a real evil worldview

I think more of you should be getting your news from photographers. Here’s a thread. Most aren’t here. Sorry, you’ll have to branch out. Scott Olson, Getty.

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

At this point you could basically just edit together a remix of Civil War and One Battle After Another and call it a documentary

"I am a children's entertainer who specializes in face painting," writes a woman now in hiding from the federal government for witnessing a state-sanctioned street execution

Dave Guttenfelder is an amazing photojournalist who‘s most recently primarily focused on conflict photojournalism in Syria and Ukraine. Hes recently turned his talents to Minneapolis.

Federal law enforcement agents shot and killed a man in Minneapolis on Jan. 24 according to local police officials. DHS told Fox News that the man was “armed with a gun”. A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man before the first shot was fired. x.com/BillMelugin_...

Even when there’s no accountability, the record matters. Credit to the Wikipedia editors maintaining this page.

A doctor who witnessed the shooting submits a sworn declaration in federal litigation to halt ICE surge in MN: "I did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind." and "The victim had at least three bullet wounds in his back." Read storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

15 years ago I borrowed a bulletproof vest from a reporter so I could report from a war zone. I held onto it after I returned. Last week the reporter finally asked for it back because he is headed to Minneapolis.

ICE will repeatedly execute nonviolent protesters in the streets and call it insurrection

A coworker took this from her apartment. I haven't seen a crowd this size before. Maybe the first Women's March? But it was much much warmer that day. ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA!

"Slavery was real" Tiny sign at the base of a brick wall that, until yesterday, held panels about the people enslaved by George Washington. Presidents House, Philadelphia.

2026 US National Defense Strategy is out. Let's see: »Previous administrations squandered our military advantages ... to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order.« Yeah, it's what I thought.

this guy is a terrible liar who genuinely believes he is great at lying

Two women trained as first responders were abducted by three ICE agents. One of the agents starts seizing. The other two don’t know what to do. The women jump into action and save the agent’s life, only to be re-handcuffed and processed. www.startribune.com/detained-by-...

This is one of those things that in another administration couldve been a months long scandal if the media wanted it to be. call it AgentGate. What did Bondi know and when did she know it? Weeks of opinion pieces etc etc.

And using humanitarian funds that were pulled from actual humanitarian efforts to pay for this. Sickening.

Consider this in the context of oppression. For a white person to perceive that racism has increased, racism has to have *greatly* increased. For a man to perceive an increase in misogyny, it had to have gotten fucking nightmarish For a cis person to perceive more transphobia, it's genocide.

The Weber-Fechner Law of psychophysics: your perception of senses is logarithmic, not linear. It all works like decibels, basically. A sensation has to be much stronger for you to feel it has doubled, than twice as strong. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E...

Once upon a time you could assume (mostly) that any Federal law enforcement agency doing this would be operating within the bounds of the law. Nowadays, who knows. I sure wouldn’t want to be a journalist relying on Bitlocker. www.cnn.com/2026/01/21/m...

Microsoft is handing over Bitlocker keys to law enforcement. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

This is the first example I’ve seen of an American government using AI to meaningfully misrepresent actual events with the intent to deceive the public. We are at Stalinesque levels of propaganda. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/past-the-b...

Explicitly, the U.K.'s per capita loss of troops was quite commensurate with that of the United States, just slightly less. Denmark on the other hand had a per capita rate that exceeded both. Trump is draft-dodging, slandering swine and will be a permanent stain on the honor of the United States.

In our conservative estimate, 41 percent of Grok’s images — or 1.8 million — were sexualized depictions of women. Separately, CCDH analyzed how many were sexualized images across genders and ages. Their findings: an estimated 3 million images, including more than 23,000 of children.

[AI bubble bursts] billionaire tech bro: the stupid consumer did not understand it