even if you think you “have nothing to hide”, you have a lot to lose from these practices. They work just as effectively from their INaccuracy—people would be remiss to think they’re just about sorting risk or about knowledge. they are about producing categories of people, like “enemy of the state."

The false positives + overly-generic categorizations like “domestic terrorism,” already have significant precedent in phenomena like the 9-11 travel bans and “gang member” databases, both of which included babies. Communities of color have long experience with these practices and *warned everyone…*

There is huge risk to our privacy in terms of the data we *did* produce, the use of our faces, tracking, etc. AND we also need to draw on these important insights to understand how the risks include the dangers of *misrecognition* weaponized against people.

Black surveillance scholars including @hypervisible.blacksky.app and @wewatchwatchers.bsky.social have long warned of the dangers of simultaneous hypervisibility AND invisibility, long known to the Black community. Being always seen and watched, but as a “type,” not recognized as a person.

I am trying and failing to find the article from 2 months ago that adds one more terrifying layer: about the successful altering of a facial recognition database such that the photos no longer “read” as someone’s face to a computer, although they look unchanged to a person.

A manager for the Immigrant Defense Network told MPR News that back in November, 2,500 people were trained as constitutional observers. Now, the total is nearly 30,000 trained observers in 77 of Minnesota's 87 counties.

What makes Gavin Newsom such a skilled politician is that he stands up to Trump’s bullying with piping hot memes AND is able to agree with Trump about policy www.sacbee.com

Free Liam, and his father.

Not going to lie, just very much filled with dread on reporting on Medicaid cuts this year :( Needless suffering sucks.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), run by Oz and his boss, RFK Jr., will no longer require physicians to report vaccination rates. Instead, they plan to start having doctors report if they’ve discussed “alternative” vaccine schedules.

Keeping the social safety net as small and as punitive as possible helps to ensure that there will always be a steady stream of people for employers like Bezos to exploit--people in such a precarious position that have no choice but to take whatever underpaid, overworked job they can get.

No. No. No. Punitive processes make narrowly targeted programs *less* efficient and *more* costly. Because more scrutiny requires more bureaucracy. Punitive processes also make it *less* likely that people will get aid for which they qualify. Because of the roadblocks and stigma scrutiny creates.

Zillow property listings no longer show risk of fires, floods, and storms

Fact-checking one of the single most effective convincing-sounding lie generation machines = trying to sweep the ocean back into the sea (or capture emissions after they're released) We don't solve this without regulating, attacking and delegitimising the slop firehose

wait THAT is the concern? “damn the calipers worked so well before people got the ability to alter their face shape!"

The managerial class yearns for phrenology

How about we shut down the government for this very popular and specific goal and then, hear me out, we hold out for like a month and a half and then, ok this part is important, after a watershed election where we ran the table, ONLY THEN, fold and don't get the one thing we said we wanted.

DOGE and others in the administration want to build a giant database of records by haphazardly combining info the government collected for one purpose, like paying taxes, and use it for another purpose, like targeting immigrants. We can't let this happen. takebackctrl.org/get-a-warrant

The biggest challenge is convincing people that things could be different and that their actions matter.

Letitia James criminally charged in Trump’s latest effort to punish rivals

Just published in @amjpublichealth.bsky.social: a collective analysis of the power ecosystem that jeopardizes public health and produces inequity, titled “Why Building Power is Key to Protecting Academic Public Health and Advancing Health Equity”

Cops used 83,000 cameras to track a single abortion patient — on her abuser’s tip.

🙏🏿🙏🏿🙏🏿

“My biggest fear is going to the hospital." Pregnant immigrants are terrified ICE will show up outside the doctors' office or at the hospital. So they're skipping the care necessary to ensure a healthy birth. Some experience dangerous complications as a result. 19thnews.org/2025/10/preg...

🚨🚨 Both the police and Flock's defense for why Texas police searched the entire country for License Plate Reader data to find woman who had self-administered an abortion was because she was a missing person and family was concerned with her health. Now documents reveal they wanted to charge her.

The FAA is delaying flights at Newark and Denver airports because they haven’t got enough air traffic control. Burbank has zero ATC from 4.30-10pm. Lots of controllers who aren’t being paid during the government shutdown are calling in sick.

Three weeks after a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health filed a whistle-blower complaint against the Trump administration, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired her. @nytimes.com

North Carolina and Idaho have cut their Medicaid programs to bridge budget gaps, raising fears that providers will stop taking patients and that hospitals will close even before the brunt of a new federal tax-and-budget law takes effect.

“Researchers have already reported that these so-called silicon samples produce humanlike responses in some surveys and experiments—and some even hope they could simulate the responses of minorities or other groups who are often underrepresented in studies.”

Ring founder: “I’m focused on: How can I get the highest density of camera coverage in a neighborhood matched with AI to make neighborhoods safer?…It’s not just hard crime.” Just put this guy and the Flock guy on a deserted island together so they can surveill each other until the end times.

How is AI changing the nature of scams? @lanalanalana.bsky.social & @alicetiara.bsky.social spoke to @alixdunn.com on @themaybe.org to explain how AI automates & scales the work already being done in massive, exploitative “cybercrime compounds” around the world. www.themaybe.org/podcast/gotc...

saw this at heathrow airport. i can't see it appealing to anyone but fraudsters and scammers

Ridiculously, Medicare Telehealth coverage keeps are getting tied to continuing resolutions. Bills could be passed separately. But political bureaucracy. This means Medicare Telehealth waivers are kaput as of today. My latest for @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Flock is preparing to roll out a new feature: Its gunshot detection devices will begin listening for voices in “distress”

Join us on Thursday, OCTOBER 16th at 4:00 - 5:30 PM ET over Zoom for a conversation about How to Survive Techno-Hellscapes 🔥💻🌐 This panel will feature four phenomenal disability culture workers, activists, writers, and scholars in conversation with DISCO's own @remiyergeau.bsky.social

This is spot on. Our capitulation to the ‘inevitability’ of AI couldn’t come at a worse time.

All of this is so deeply upsetting because children will have preventable febrile seizures, mothers may miscarry due to untreated fever, and some pregnancies will be more challenging due to unmanaged pain. There are no upsides to this reckless misinformation from the top just harm and pain.

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

btw Costco seems to have the cheapest updated COVID vax. You can get it without a card at the pharmacy and they do take walk-ins. If you’re also uninsured due to the massive amounts of layoffs this year, they also take this goodrx coupon to lower the cost of www.goodrx.com/comirnaty?sr...

Oh.

This is so, so bad. They’ve gutted CDC like a fish.

The desired final form of all these companies is “you let us watch you all the time.”

What would you say if you saw it in another country? A senator from a coequal branch of government dragged away by security from asking a question of a Cabinet official

California Senator Alex Padilla was physically assaulted by federal law enforcement and detained for attempting to attend DHS secretary Kristi Noem's press conference in LA.

Absolutely upside down stuff: a Peabody award winning professor who teaches media non-fiction storytelling about *checks notes* police, inequality, and power is “persona non grata” on the campus where he is employed for that expertise? for documenting the thing he is known for covering?

And this paper came out this week as well (I'm senior author): Weinstein et al (2024) Community-Level Internet Connectivity and Utilization of Maternal Telehealth. Telemed J E Health. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/39527...

Porsha Ngumezi's mother-in-law, a former physician, told her she needed a D&C, but doctors in Texas refused to provide one and left her to hemorrhage instead. Now, Porsha's young sons will have to grow up knowing that their mother could have and should have lived.

"based on previous experience with travel bans that were enacted in the first Trump Administration in 2016": perhaps reporters covering higher ed & drumming on about cancel culture might interview some students & faculty who were impacted by travel ban 1.0, as we move into mass deportation 2.0.

Censorship will begin - in the name of "anti-censorship"