Queenie Wong · LA Times

Trevor Paglen · Richard Hames · Do Your Own Research

Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic

this is just straight up corruption, oligarch pals of the President getting to roll up and gut the industry’s globally important, culturally essential media sector. The “teachers’ pets” of the Democratic Party have once again sold out working people in a bid to be liked by the rich and powerful

Kurt Vonnegut • The New Yorker

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!

—Kurt Vonnegut

Brian Merchant · Blood in the Machine

A conversation with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about what they call end times fascism in the tech industry.

As audio or video

Michelle Chan, Martha Muir, Rafe Rosner-Uddin and Lee Harris · FT

So great are the sums involved that even Big Tech groups with tens of billions of dollars in cash need to fund the infrastructure with debt.

This is presenting major lenders with a complex set of calculations as they stretch themselves to finance, insure and underwrite an entirely novel asset class.

Gift Link

Dhruv Mehrotra · WIRED

Joseph Cox · 404 Media

404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol’s predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.

Daniel Boguslaw · The American Prospect

As Anthropic ramps up its efforts to monitor dissent with in-house intelligence teams and real-time protest tracking powered by AI, it will have to contend with the increasing economic desperation that plagues human beings outside its Bay Area towers. Last week, the security guards who patrol the campuses of OpenAI and Anthropic announced that they had authorized a strike over stalled pay negotiations. In response, Anthropic sent a company-wide email telling employees that it was best if they worked from home.

Michael Sainato • The Guardian

Surveillance capitalism strikes again

Yuras Karmanau · AP

Strange how the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit is almost not covered at all.

It now includes 10 nations: Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

· · ·

Along with Russia, China has presented the SCO as an alternative to Western-aligned organizations like the G7, and in recent years has wanted to expand the scope and influence of the organization.

Adam Curtis · The Creative Independent

Capitalism is about self-expression; art is about self-expression. Art is far from being a radical outside movement. It’s at the heart of the modern conformity. That’s why nothing ever changes, because the radicals have gone to a form of expression at the very center of the power structure they disapprove of. So they’re neutered.

Kristina Beek · Heard It From a CISO · Dark Reading

She started as a dev … dat’s me. Nice

• cybersecurity welcomes a diverse array of individuals
• aspiring professionals should start where their interests lie
• build exposure across multiple security domains rather than staying siloed in one specialty

Daniel Boguslaw · WIRED

Spencer Reynolds [senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund] says that, despite the real if limited threat posed … a category like “anti-tech extremism” could be drawn so broad as to ensnare peaceful data center protesters, AI skeptics, and anyone with a bone to pick with technology that permeates modern life.

· · ·

“Suspicious activity reports are incredibly unreliable, often about vague or innocent behavior, issued under permissive standards. These reports, often received in large volumes, allow officers to inject their own biases and see what they want to see in the facts.”

· · ·

Among the vaguely defined activities flagged by the Northern Virginia intelligence center as suspicious are “expressed/implied threat,” “observation/surveillance,” “photography,” “testing/probing of security,” and “attempted intrusion.”

Wikipedia

The Old Stockholm telephone tower was a metallic structure built to connect approximately 5,500 telephone lines in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Constructed in 1887, the tower was used until 1913.

Joel Khalili · Wired

“A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline ‘to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,’” the DeepMind employee told WIRED. “The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we’re building here.”

· · ·

“These conversations are happening . . . The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They’ve come to us asking for help as well.”

This Machine Kills

We chat with Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie — authors of the indispensable newsletter The Polycrisis and hosts of the new podcast Electric World Order
· · ·
We lay out what an energy transition under conditions of polycrisis actually entails: things don’t just smoothly change while staying the same, instead it’s more like a material shift in the centre of political, economic, energetic power: from the petrostate (e.g. USA) to the electrostate (e.g. China).

The New School

Via Mike Pepi who’s speaking on Friday.

4—6pm

Andy Greenberg · WIRED

Researchers at Google and cybersecurity firms iVerify and Lookout on Wednesday jointly revealed the discovery of a sophisticated iPhone hacking technique known as DarkSword that they’ve seen in use on infected websites, capable of instantly and silently hacking iOS devices that visit those sites. While the technique doesn’t affect the latest, updated versions of iOS, it does work against iOS devices running versions of Apple’s previous operating system release, iOS 18
· · ·
the hackers who carried out that espionage campaign left the full, unobscured DarkSword code—complete with explanatory comments in English that describe each component and include the “DarkSword” name for the tool—available on those sites for anyone to access and reuse. That carelessness, he says, practically invites other hacker groups to adopt it and target other iPhone users. “Anyone who manually grabbed all the different parts of the exploit could put them onto their own web server and start infecting phones. It’s as simple as that,” says Frielingsdorf. “It’s all nicely documented, also. It’s really too easy.”
· · ·
“Instead of using a spyware payload to brute force your way through the file system—which leaves tons of artifacts of exploitation that are pretty easy to detect—this just uses system processes the way they’re meant to be used,” iVerify’s Cole says. “And it leaves far fewer traces.”
· · ·
“People assumed that it was just going to be journalists or activists or maybe an opposition politician that was targeted, and that this wasn’t a concern for a normal citizen,” says Justin Albrecht, who leads mobile threat intelligence at Lookout. “Now that we see iOS exploits being delivered through an unscrupulous broker, there’s a whole market here for this to get to cybercriminals” who will use it with far less discretion.
· · ·
“If this one gets burned, I’ll just go get another one,” Cole says, describing the hackers’ apparent thinking. “They know there’s more where this came from.”

Quoted at length because paywall. WIRED’s reporting has been good as of late, and my subscription was absurdly inexpensive. Consider it if this is your kinda thing.

Joseph Cox · 404 Media

An internal DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows for the first time CBP used location data sourced from the online advertising industry to track phone locations. ICE has bought access to similar tools.

· · ·

DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) later found both CBP and ICE did not limit themselves to non-operational use. The OIG found that CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service all illegally used the smartphone location data, and found a CBP official used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. CBP and ICE went on to repeatedly purchase access to location data.

Charlie Young & Carole Cadwalladr · The Nerve

“When you have that mosaic built from UK sovereign defence, health, roads, power networks, power stations, and our major industrial bases, you have a detailed understanding of virtually every aspect of the sovereign United Kingdom. For an adversary, or even a nation with whom we have a special relationship, that picture is worth more than all the fine art on Earth.” 

FT · Mehul Srivastava · James Shotter · Neri Zilber · Steff Chávez

This is mostly an article about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but I was drawn to the intelligence operation, namely the construction of “patterns of life” through hacked traffic cameras.

Nearly all the traffic cameras in Tehran had been hacked for years, their images encrypted and transmitted to servers in Tel Aviv and southern Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.

One camera had an angle that proved particularly useful, said one of the people, allowing them to determine where the men liked to park their personal cars and providing a window into the workings of a mundane part of the closely guarded compound.

Complex algorithms added details to dossiers on members of these security guards that included their addresses, hours of duty, routes they took to work and, most importantly, who they were usually assigned to protect and transport — building what intelligence officers call a “pattern of life”.

Artwrld · Zoom

“Mark Leckey presenting his recent work including his solo exhibition enter through medieval wounds“

Friday, March 13
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM GMT
Online

Retia.io

Waves that purr

All Trades w/ Chuggy · NTS

L0la L33tz · The Rage

Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open internet.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

…

Persona Identity, Inc. is a Peter Thiel-backed venture

…

The software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years.

…

The program, according to the researchers, performs product analytics and user behavior tracking on a government identity-verification platform, provides real-time user monitoring — every click, every page load — on a FedRAMP platform processing PII and biometrics, and includes financial identity-verification capabilities on the government platform.

Garth · Wicked Sound System

Classic Garth right here

NYPD · NYC.gov

The NYPD disclosure from February 4th:

The NYPD uses internet attribution management infrastructure, including Ntrepid, to manage digital footprints and allow its personnel to safely, securely, and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet.

. . .

The information that is ultimately accessible to NYPD personnel utilizing this equipment is limited to publicly available information or the information that is viewable as a result of the privacy settings, privacy practices, and access limitations of an internet environment (e.g., chatrooms, social media profiles, messaging applications)

Eric Berger · The Guardian

On 4 February, the NYPD disclosed that it used “internet attribution management infrastructure” from the technology company Ntrepid to “allow its personnel to safely, securely and covertly conduct investigations and detect possible criminal activity on the internet”. In other words, to create the sort of “sock puppet” online identities that Mamdani had once sought to prevent.

. . .

Owen, of Stop, also argues that the police could use such a tool to target Black and Latino residents. He pointed to the NYPD’s previous disclosure that if someone “makes a comment such as ‘Happy Birthday’ on the Facebook page of a gang member”, they could be considered a “known associate” and added to its criminal database, according to an inspector general report.

EFF · EFFecting Change Livestream Series

Join our panel to explore what’s happening as Flock contracts face growing resistance across the U.S. We’ll break down the legal implications of the data these systems collect, examine campaigns that have successfully stopped Flock deployments, and discuss the real-world consequences for people’s privacy and freedom.

Livestream
February 19, 2026 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm PST

Ravie Lakshmanan · The Hacker News

advertised on Telegram as a way to grab sensitive data and facilitate real-time surveillance on Android and iOS devices

The fact that it’s being marketed on Telegram is hinting at a trend toward spyware commodification. No bueno.

Timothy Snyder · Thinking about…

Then said JD unto him, Go, slay, and curse.

Joshua Citarella and Yancey Strickler · Metalabel

Yancey and Josh dropping breadcrumbs to a new world.
Hint: It’s our own shared private internet.

Mario Trujillo · EFF

🤐

[DHS] has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.   

Jason Koebler · 404 Media

Ring had always, explicitly been intended to assist law enforcement. In a series of investigations we did back at VICE (mostly written by Caroline Haskins, who is still covering surveillance at WIRED), we uncovered thousands of pages of documents, emails, and chats via public records requests and leaks that highlighted Ring’s surveillance ambitions. The company threw parties for police, employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties, and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate.

. . .

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool.

Mark Keierleber of the 74 · The Guardian

Flock of Vultures – Flock of Terror

Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, the 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.
. . .
Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did”, Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them – no questions asked.”

Martin Sandbu · FT Magazine

Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming

“One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”

FT Gift Link

Jason Koebler · 404 Media

Cypurr @ Wonderville

Sunday, February 1, 2026
2:30 PM 5:30 PM

Wonderville
1186 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY, 11221

Justin Strauss, Annie & the Caldwells · Bandcamp

Download: Right Click —> Save As

James Bamford · The Nation.

The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”

The Verge

While I’m already familiar, that Bruce Schneier share got me to take another look at the Ring doorbell relationship with law enforcement.

This time I caught the heartwarming mention, “Ring is ‘exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices.’”

good lookin’ out

Schneier on Security

The mighty Bruce Schneier breaking down the existing data about us, how it’s collected, how it’s used and what you personally might want to consider given your situation.

Compute technology is constantly spying on its users—and that data is being used to influence us. Companies like Google and Meta are vast surveillance machines, and they use that data to fuel advertising. A smartphone is a portable surveillance device, constantly recording things like location and communication.

…

What’s different in a techno-authoritarian regime is that this data is also shared with the government, either as a paid service or as demanded by local law. Amazon shares Ring doorbell data with the police. Flock, a company that collects license plate data from cars around the country, shares data with the police as well.

…

Imagine there is a government official assigned to your neighborhood, or your block, or your apartment building. It’s worth that person’s time to scrutinize everybody’s social media posts, email, and chat logs.

Jay Stanley · ACLU

the incorporation of “BOLO” (“Be On the Look Out for”) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become — and may already be becoming — a powerful nationwide government surveillance dr­agnet.

Cute move Rite Aid:

In 2023 the FTC investigation found that “Rite Aid specifically instructed employees not to reveal Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition technology to consumers or the media.”

We know the technology makes false positives all the time, and that there’s typically no human in the loop.

If such sharing networks emerge — much as blacklists of “troublemakers” (i.e., labor organizers) were shared among companies in the 20th century — someone who is falsely accused might find themselves unjustly banned from a significant number of retail stores.

This article collects a lot of scattered details concerning the issue, so would be a decent jumping off point for your exploration.

bitforms gallery

luv luv luv me some Jim Campbell

Opening: This Saturday, January 24th, 5 – 7 PM @ the lovely bitforms gallery

Thomas Pynchon · NYTimes

One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work – to be ”worth” that many human souls.
…
It was open-eyed class war.
…
If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.

Written in 1984 👆 heh

2026.01.21 7PM – 7:30PM · EARTH · 49 Orchard St

Techlore Talks

You don’t have to trust Obscura—you just have to trust that not both Obscura and Mullvad are compromised.