happy birthday to moms

Some personal-professional news: I have spawned/sired yet another person, and as a result am not writing news stories until deeper into the summer. Please refrain from making any news until August.

I'm so fascinated by these things. Practically all cybercrime these days is done by people far away, usually on another continent. You don't really need to worry about a hacker in your coffee shop and haven't for a long time. But occasionally dudes will drive a textspam-van in your area.

EXCLUSIVE: My latest story for @theatlantic.com : www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...

Question for my fellow tech/AI/etc reporters here: How often do you get "tips" from people clearly suffering from AI psychosis? Strangers reaching out to tell you they've uncovered something secret and special and technical through an AI. I've had several via Grok. Yesterday my first Gemini.

I get a lot of AI slop book marketing emails, but this is the first time I have ever been . . . mistaken for Jane Austen.

[NYT breaking news email has a typo in the subject one time] Oh was that during the Meg Gala?

Some really strong reporting here. As many communities across the country are rejecting new data centers, WV is seeing a boom, often in secret thanks to a special state law that makes it easy for companies building them to dodge FOIA requests.

This week, the Supreme Court finally killed off the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I've spent the past decade studying the VRA and the attacks on it, so I thought I would offer some historical perspective, and where I think we're headed. This will be a long thread; buckle up.

Potential case of Chinese government transnational repression behind RightsCon cancellation.

This is the biggest digital rights conference in the world, with people from every corner planning for months, and scheduled to start in less than a week.

I think she's the first cyber subcommittee leader to say she wants to dismantle DHS. bsky.app/profile/ddim...

Last night’s incident was closer on the spectrum to the Clinton era “assassination attempt” when a guy opened fire on the White House with an AK-47 from the public sidewalk than it was to Butler, where the president was actually in danger. It was just a Hail Mary at the first line of security.

Do think it’s notable here that the pool report—the journalists not attending the event, but actually covering it—was the correct one

Big news: Sean Plankey has withdrawn from consideration to be Trump's CISA director after his nomination languished for more than a year amid bipartisan holds in the Senate. CISA hasn't had a permanent director since Trump retook office. www.politico.com/news/2026/04...

I admittedly follow news from WV in particular, but I really don't think there's another state in the country where industry so routinely kills and poisons the locals.

This is the kind of specific election disinfo/misinfo that Facebook and others actively sought out to remove in 2020. Now it's just a mailer that the WV GOP does.

NEW: The Onion says it has struck a deal to take over Infowars. That deal still must be approved by a judge. This news was first reported by @pablo.show. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Not relevant to this specifically but since we're doing Justified discourse, I always desperately appreciated it was a show set in Appalachia that had cops and criminals, bad people and good and in between, rich middle and working class often in tension, etc. Very little of that on TV!

Extremely good reporting and color in here.

SCOOP at @nbcnews.com: Back in January, Apple privately threatened to remove the Grok app from the App Store.

New: San Jose and SJPD sued over use of nearly 500 Flock Safety cameras. Class action alleges their prevalence and the accessibility of residents' location data violates the Fourth Amendment.

Still thinking about the NY Post scoop on a scientifically impossible CIA spy tool. While it's possible the reporter lied/misunderstood/talked to two bogus sources, I think it's more likely is that it's an actual US gov disinformation campaign, knowing the NYP is conservative and for/by rubes.

My toddler keeps getting gifted hand me down Thomas the Tank Engine books and I truly do not understand their deal. He keeps pointing to these trains with expressive round human faces and saying what's that and I have to keep telling him it's yet another funny train-man who is among regular people

Tonight's a good reminder that when you see abuse allegations in a major news outlet with a real standards department, the allegations have been thoroughly vetted, investigated, corroborated. There's strong reason to believe them. It's not wanton rumors or a coin toss whether or not they're true.

I have a weird little story about Paolo Zampolli, the guy who introduced Trump to Melania: He owned a building 1 block away from the old BuzzFeed NYC office and would rent some of its apartments on AirBnB. I stayed there a lot (proof attached, he gave me great reviews). This was part of the decor:

A subtle/weedsy thing I find very interesting about Anthropic's exclusive mega hacking machine announced Tues: They say they briefed CISA and NIST on it. A non-exclusive list. I asked them + NSA if those agencies had tried it. Each deliberated for a v long time and then refused to confirm or deny.

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning. And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep. Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones. No warrant required. Our @citizenlab.ca investigation + how to protect yourself 🧵/1 citizenlab.ca/research/ana...

I can say without hesitation that this is the HARDEST article I have ever written, but I am incredibly proud of it. If you have questions about Orion’s heat shield, given the issues with Artemis I, I hope I can provide some answers: www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

"To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago." If you think it is necessary to be on Twitter to communicate your fact-based worldview, the reality is that worldview is being smothered.

This might be overstating it a bit

This is some of the most important reporting to come out of the war on Iran so far. And it's nice to see CBS doing it, i.e good reminder that bad leadership doesn't mean that every journalist there instantly stops doing their job.

For weeks I’ve been working on a very strange story that sent me to Victoria, Canada and a little town in Georgia, to try and get to the bottom of a left-wing conspiracy theory about Donald Trump and a man who claims he was abused by the president and Jeffrey Epstein. www.ms.now/news/sascha-...

It's annoying that the NY Post credulously published such ridiculous claim, but props to Scientific American for actually doing the legwork to explain why it's certainly bullshit.

Three days after Easter, FCC Chair Brendan Carr has released an official agency blog post titled Hopping To It.

I wrote, literally more than a decade ago (2014 or 15), a cheeky "history of people misidentifying Satoshi" article for the Daily Dot. I think in response to Newsweek doing that when it staged a print comeback. This is a decently done one...but it's still not a slam dunk? What a world.

It worked because they put quantum in it

Liveblogs are great for several reasons but man what a brutal case of the card headline contradicting the latest development.

New: Federal agencies warned today that Iranian hackers have hacked into multiple US industrial/infrastructure systems with the intent of causing disruption. Unclear how/if serious. Comes same day Trump threatened Iranian civilization would "die" and is considering strikes on Iranian infrastructure.

And attacking civilian CI is a war crime escalation we are seeing elsewhere right now (Israel on Palestine, Russia on Ukraine) and something I would suspect would be targeted at the US for the foreseeable future, which we would not want to see escalated.

Man, it really bugs me that everyone's yelling about nukes when Trump's already laid out what he's threatening to do - attack civilian infrastructure

Compare far-right leaders' responses to Trump's looming genocide deadline to that of the Senate minority leader this morning.

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

“It’s difficult to cover him in a way that conveys how unhinged he is. Journalists are trained to be like, ‘OK, what did he say that was newsworthy?’ So you convey that to your audience. But in reality, when you actually watch, you see he's full of hatred, lying constantly, and very incoherent.”

Recently former NSA General Counsel Glenn Gerstell published a @lawfaremedia.org piece on FISA 702 Despite claiming to fact check a Brennan Center brief on the topic, the piece is riddled with misleading claims, it contains no less than 4 key factual errors... www.lawfaremedia.org/article/fisa...

NEW from me and @ryanjreilly.com: U.S. marshals waived training rules for Musk's armed DOGE security, emails show www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-mu...

I really can't stress enough how much the US has up until this point really stressed to other countries that critical infrastructure is uniquely crossing a red line and will be met with harsher retaliation than hacking anything else.

I totally understand news outlets using the "experts say" framing, which is often a crutch. I do it sometimes! It gets you over that kind of perceived potential opinion framing into something clearly objective. But it's still funny to see here. Easy to prove nobody else this century has done this!