NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world. I spoke to Hassen Selmi, who heads the incident response team, to learn how his team fights spyware abuses.

And people say targeted advertising doesn’t work

California winters are really something else (Half Moon Bay)

It’s fog season again in San Francisco!

We just launched our new and expanded Adversarial Threat Report! We've been reporting on online threats like foreign interference for 7 years, but today's report expands our work to cover fraud, scams, and AI security threats. There's a ton in the report, I'll try to break it down in this thread. 1/

It’s green season in the Bay! And the mustard is flowering in Half Moon Bay. Sometimes when world events have you down it’s good to get above it for a bit.

For those unfamiliar with the US intelligence community, this is the Discount Intelligence Agency

In this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out on TaiwanPlus, The Citizen Lab’s senior researcher Rebekah Brown talks about the commercial spyware industry, its misuse by governments, and the urgent need for regulation. #spyware Watch it here: www.taiwanplus.com/news/shows/z...

Wrote a piece in @techpolicypress.bsky.social on some of the lessons that Meta’s Q3 threat report brings back to the surface in online IO: 1. Tension between virality & opsec 2. Experimentation is ongoing 3. Variation in defenses creates arbitrage dynamics 4. Line btwn overt & covert is blurry

To quote @hayesbrown.bsky.social, "this is going to be [is already] the dumbest dystopia

DRONE THREAD (I’m sorry) Context: I used to be a commercial drone operator in DC before becoming a real airplane pilot. I’ve seen a lot of people confused about this “drone” story. Some important things to understand:

As the holiday season approaches, we’re taking steps to disrupt scammers operating across the internet, including on Meta platforms, and partnering with researchers and experts to raise awareness about scams - read more below! /1

"The Haw Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis of Bag Culture..." You bolt awake in the mountains of Carthage. You are not online. It is 217 BC. You are the general Hannibal, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn.

Interestingly, Sichuan Silence LTD was also the subject of our info ops threat report in 2021: about.fb.com/news/2021/12...

We've just released our Q3 Adversarial Threat Report. Being part of the team creating the threat disruption discipline has been the high point of my last 6 years at Meta. The report covers influence operations and adversarial ops we've detected and disrupted in the last quarter. Some key takeaways:

NEW REPORT: We investigate the rising trend of gender-based digital transnational repression by drawing on the lived experiences of 85 women human rights defenders living in exile across the globe. Read the full report: citizenlab.ca/2024/12/the-...

All these takes debating whether we need to stay on X to “break through” or whatever and my top of feed there is a graphic of prominent women in history with Stars of David overlaid on their faces claiming “feminism is a tool of Jews to undermine the Christian Man” I think we will be ok without X

Ever wondered what more than 1000mph of closure looks like? Southwest Airlines passing 1000 feet below from a Cirrus Vision Jet going the other direction

Looking down the Pacific coast on a chilly Fall morning

While it’s a tale as old as time to see platforms speed run these hard tradeoffs, I really respect the Bluesky team for talking transparently *about* those tradeoffs. While this is an adversarial space, this kind of transparency goes a long way in building trust.

Oh hey San Francisco

Good group to follow!

> everyone posts solidarity weasels > inadvertently DDoSes the app again

Looking at the implementation on profiles, seems there’s space for a future domain host

Some photos of Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared today today, some notable stuff, besides how dumb he looks. First, this one. Most notable is the insignia on his hat, which appears to be for the Libyan Armed Forces, and is consistent with the uniform he’s wearing. Why Libya? 1/x

The brilliant and occasionally grumpy @shanehuntley.bsky.social is here, go follow him because he gazes into the cyber abyss and brings forth arcane knowledge

@gavinwilde.bsky.social worth reading today. Those (particularly in Western Europe) who point to the popularity of Russian media in LatAm and Africa shouod perhaps introspect on history.

If Russia-watchers search their deepest selves, the situation in Rostov feels like the most predictable outcome of the last 6 years. Russia invades Russia while Russian state media decries news about Prigozhin, noted troll farm operator, as misinformation.

Lol. Lmao even.

As I join a new social network, it feels very apropos to begin with an article on why one should close their account with another social network https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ #telegram #ukraine

Great thread. In addition $8 gateway probably does the exact opposite by keeping the vulnerable and marginalized groups especially in international contexts with weaker currencies.

They absolutely would. Elon thought $8 and payment professing was meaningful friction against bots, trolls, and spammers, but the ego-driven misconceptions that led to his failure deserve some elaboration. Thread time!

Definitely a different intelligence guy than the one that named Operation Acoustic Kitty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

Woof Wednesday with two perritos traveling north from Baja to Seattle. Oro and Laura were strays taken in by Baja Dogs La Paz and later adopted by families in Washington. The slept the whole way up, though Laura often stuck her head up front to make sure we knew what we were doing.

This is Zeus. He is a deaf Great Pyrenees who lived in a small shelter in Sonoma until he was adopted by a deaf dog rescue ranch in SoCal. He was one of my first Pilots n Paws passengers and fell asleep from the engine vibrations. He lives in SoCal now and guards a bunch of sheep.

Hello San Francisco. These flights always make me think about how someone on the ground is having a cold, wet, overcast day; yet a sunny blue skies day is just a few hundred feet above them. Two completely different moods coexisting.

This is even more impressive placed in historical context: the US utterly failed at the narrative war when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014. The aggressive disclosure policy in 2022 neutered many Russian covert operations and primed the public to spot disinformation. 1/

Some truly incredible work by Olga and the team diving into the challenging and nuanced realm of State Controlled Media, how to define it, and how to address it. Read the lawfare piece linked in her thread for more

Flown commercially recently and experienced delays? Something is rotten in the National Aerospace System, and it’s getting worse 1/n

Fascinating watching a relatively small team build capabilities fairly quickly. Content moderation has been stuck with few archetypes (curated feed[TikTok], trying to do everything[FB, Twitter], opacity [YouTube], nothing[Parler, 4Chan]). Definitely a space to watch, hoping for something new.

So... we're excited to launch: Moderator Mayhem (which we've spent the last few months building, in partnership with Engine). A browser-based mobile content moderation simulator game: https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/

Hey everyone. So we’re supposed to post blue skies?