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The NSA's "Big Delete"

[Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby in Popular Information]

The removal of banned terms on both internal and external government websites is going more stupidly than one might have expected:

"One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums' “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”"

And:

"The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term "privilege" is used by the NSA in the context of "privilege escalation." In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to "techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.""

The whole enterprise is silly, of course, but this is an incredibly bad way to go about it. Words have meaning, and sometimes you need to use them. A global search and replace isn't a perfect way to revamp the whole apparatus of federal government.

[Link]

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If MSN comments reveal the soul of America, we're done

Right-wing and incredibly stupid, this seems to be the state of normie discourse.

3 min read

For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be a mix of people from the tech and media worlds alongside people I otherwise know, MSN encompasses Windows users who the algorithm thinks should be sent my stuff.

The comments have long fascinated me: they’re incredibly right-wing. I’d initially dismissed them as being part of some influence campaign on the network, but I now see them as an important barometer of a cross-section of what the American public thinks. It’s not good news.

For example, here’s a selection of comments on the MSN version of my link blog post for The 19th’s article about USAID’s lifesaving reproductive healthcare. There’s a lot of this kind of thing:

“Women need to be responsible for their own behaviors. If they become pregnant then they need to seek and pay for their care to ensure the baby is born healthy. Just another waste of taxpayer money.”

And:

“It takes two to tango, where are all these dead beat dads? Why is the American taxpayer responsible for the entire planet? Have any of you women ever heard the word no? Not in your language? Then cross your legs. MSN doesn't like the truth. Communist sensors.”

And, bafflingly:

“How do contraceptives prevent STDs and HIV? They don’t.”

And the absolutely nihilistic but also inherently counterproductive:

“worlds overpopulated as it is.”

As well as the top-rated comment at the time of writing:

“USAID has only used a small portion of the funds for humanitarian purposes. The vast majority has been used for crazy liberal agendas that have nothing to do with humanitarian purposes. Corrupt Democrats have been caught red handed that's why they are trying to cover up what the taxpayers' funds have really been used for.”

My fear is that this is America. These comments are ill-informed, occasionally wildly racist, and light years away from the debate I’d expect to have in other forums. It’s easy to dismiss most of these people as being idiots (something I can’t easily avoid). There are almost no tolerant or left-wing voices in the mix; instead, we’re left with the kind of rhetoric you might otherwise expect to see in communities that have dismissed Fox News as being too soft.

If I’m right, which I’d prefer not to be, it doesn’t say great things about our prospects over the next four years, or for the future of the country. If this is where normie discourse is at, it’s going to be rough.

Anyway, I’ll leave you with two more comments, from other posts:

“Thank you President Trump for putting America and Americans first. When the far left crooks scream loud we know we are on target. FEAR !”

And:

“what maga when both parties just care more about a foreign country while democrats just engage in h ate speech toward the majority and republicans dont care and wont call them ra cists as they are being called that for everything.”

Oof.

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Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

[Iker Seisdedos interviewing Judith Butler in EL PAÍS English]

Judith Butler is as on-point as ever:

"Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few people.

A. You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?"

This is exactly it. I've also heard voices say that there should have been less discussion of racial equity: less Black Lives Matter, less 1619 Project, less discussion of systemic inequality. It's nonsense, and as Butler says, it's a road that leads us down an inevitably fascist path.

The whole interview is very much worth your time: nuanced and well-considered.

[Link]

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USAID’s reproductive health spending has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.

[Jessica Kutz at The 19th]

USAID's defunding will lead directly to women's deaths:

"As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections like HIV. According to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, if no contraceptive care is provided by USAID in 2025, that will lead to about 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,000 deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth complications."

The article goes on to detail efforts in countries like Afghanistan, Senegal, India, and Nigeria. The idea that we should simply rug-pull these efforts is ludicrous: it sends a clear message that we no longer care about the well-being of people overseas, and that we don't think their quality of life is important to us or affects us. This is an obvious, profound mistake.

[Link]

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Donald Trump’s Immigration Executive Orders: Tracking the Most Impactful Changes

[Mica Rosenberg, Perla Trevizo, and Zisiga Mukulu in ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune]

This is a beautifully-designed co-production between ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, illustrating the immigration policies that Donald Trump enacted on day one. These encompassed dozens of policies that were revived from his first term, as well as seven new ones that hadn't been tried before.

"In order to provide a glimpse of the enormity of the changes that are underway, ProPublica and the Tribune identified nearly three dozen of the most impactful policy changes set in motion by the orders signed on the first day. Most were pulled from the playbook of Trump’s previous presidency. Others are unprecedented."

The new ones are pretty stark, including:

"Ending and clawing back funding from organizations that support migrants: Seeks to stop or limit money to nongovernmental organizations that provide shelter and services to migrants released at the border, as well as legal orientation programs for people in immigration proceedings."

And, of course much has been written about the unconstitutionality of:

"Seeks to end birthright citizenship: Attempts to end birthright citizenship of children born to parents either illegally in the United States or under a temporary legal status, something Trump had only said he wanted to do in his first term."

It's useful to have these written in one place, in an easy-to-digest form, together with updates on what's happened since. The news can feel like a deluge, and aggregating the updates into something parseable is important.

[Link]

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Shattering the Overton Window

[Natalia Antelava in Coda Story]

This is a useful framework for thinking about ongoing harm.

"It was 2014, and I was standing in the ruins of Donetsk airport, when a Russian-backed rebel commander launched into what seemed like an oddly academic lecture. Between bursts of artillery fire, he explained an American political science concept: the Overton Window – a theory that describes the range of policies and ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. Politicians can’t successfully propose anything outside this “window” of acceptability without risking their careers. “The West uses this window,” he said, smoke from his cigarette blowing into my face, “to destroy our traditional values by telling us it’s okay for me to marry a man and for you to marry a woman. But we won’t let them.”"

And that's the real, lasting impact of Trump and his worldview:

"As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine – the transformation of our societies isn’t happening by accident."

What will undoing this take? How can we shift the Overton Window back towards inclusion, communities, and compassion? How can we get to the mutualistic, integrated society we need to reach, and say goodbye to this disgustingly retrograde conservatism for good?

[Link]

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From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review]

The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE:

"We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—despite the very real consequences.

So we should plan for the worst, even if the likelihood of the worst is low."

The suggestions that follow - identifying risks, working together, standing up and saying "no" - are all sensible and needed.

[Link]

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'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook

[Gil Duran in The Nerd Reich]

Curtis Yarvin's influence is felt again:

" In an essay on his paywalled Substack, he imagined a second Trump presidency in which Trump would enable a radical government transformation. The proposal will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Musk wreak havoc on the United States Government (USG) over the past three weeks."

As Duran points out, none of what's happening right now is exactly new or a surprise:

"What surprises me most is how the political press generally fails to inform the public that Musk is taking a systematic approach, one that has been outlined in public forums for years. (Some press outlets, like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, are owned by billionaires keenly interested in kowtowing to Musk and Trump.)"

For many people, the myth of American exceptionalism may be so deeply in their bloodstream that they simply can't imagine our institutions falling to this. But of course they can: this is the country that gave us McCarthyism and Jim Crow. it's happening in plain sight.

[Link]

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The Key Figures Working Alongside Elon Musk at DOGE and in the Trump Administration

[Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw at ProPublica]

My colleagues at ProPublica have published the largest list yet of who is actually involved in DOGE:

"While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing."

This is a living document: ProPublica is still reporting. As the article points out:

"We are still reporting. Do you have information about any of the people listed below? Do you know of any other Musk associates who have entered the federal government? You can reach our tip line. Please be as specific, detailed and clear as you can."

The whole list is worth reviewing.

[Link]

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Update on the 2024/2025 End of Term Web Archive

[Caralee Adams at the Internet Archive]

The Internet Archive is always a gem, but it's been particularly important this year.

"With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.

[...] As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage, where previous term archives are already stored. While separate from the EOT collaboration, this effort is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) support Democracy’s Library to ensure public access to government research and publications worldwide."

This is important on multiple levels: most importantly, it means that even if the Internet Archive is attacked or shut down for any reason, these archived versions of government websites and data will remain online and accessible.

As it happens, the current administration has been pulling down datasets and redacting websites with wild abandon, so although this is a routine activity for the Archive whenever there's a change in administration, it provides a vital historical record this year. Good news for researchers, future historians, journalists, and anyone who depended on this data.

[Link]

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You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism

[Janus Rose at 404 Media]

This is an important but hard pill to swallow:

"“The reality is you are oxygenating the things these people are saying even as you purport to debunk them,” Katherine Cross, a sociologist and author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix, told 404 Media. “Whether it’s [New York Times columnist] Ross Douthat providing a sane-washing gloss on Trump’s mania or people on social media vehemently disagreeing and dunking on it, they’re legitimizing it as part of the discourse.”"

Posting is not activism. But it's both easy and cathartic to take the bait and run with it - and get approving clicks and likes in return. In sharing outrage rather than concrete real-world steps, we end up just amplifying the message.

As Janus Rose points out:

"Under this status quo, everything becomes a myopic contest of who can best exploit peoples’ anxieties to command their attention and energy. If we don’t learn how to extract ourselves from this loop, none of the information we gain will manifest as tangible action—and the people in charge prefer it that way."

Instead, co-ordinate online but manifest in the real world. Join protests, call your representatives, work for organizations that seek to uncover truth and take steps forward. Fewer hot takes; more collective action.

[Link]

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Move fast and break democracy

The Capitol, upside down

For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We ignore its power at our peril.

As it turned out, OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of “artificial general intelligence” was that the technologies would reach one hundred billion dollars in revenue. It wasn’t tied to capabilities around reasoning, and did not, in actuality, relate to a Terminator future. It just meant that they’d be making a lot of money from it. All the talk of humanity-destroying intelligence and the existential questions that derived from it just served to draw attention to their services. The awe inspired by the tales they were weaving would, they hoped, lead to more signed contracts, more subscribers, more dollars on their balance sheets. People would treat the technologies as being insanely powerful even if they weren’t, and that would be enough.

A decade or more ago, a new ride-sharing service called Uber started to supplant taxi services in major cities like San Francisco. While taxi services were typically licensed, often at great cost to the individual drivers, Uber drivers operated without any such restrictions. It was illegal in many cities, but the company intentionally created workarounds to prevent police, city officials, and taxi firms from gathering evidence. A tool nicknamed Greyball allowed them to tag users who they decided were trying to conduct a sting on the service. Those users would see fake cars, and their drivers would cancel quickly. In the midst of this disinformation, it became hard to gather real evidence and make a case.

Eventually, despite its illegality, Uber became saturated in each market. Cities found themselves either acquiescing or making regulatory deals with the company. Uber had evaded the authorities while growing quickly, and it became widely used. It was clear that cities were going to have trouble shutting it down, so they ultimately adjusted to accept its existence. Law enforcement had been too slow; Uber had outrun and outmaneuvered it, and now it was here to stay.

The same playbooks that have allowed high-growth tech companies to become effective monopolies in America are now being used on American governance itself.

Donald Trump is not a king and does not have the right to wield absolute power. He and his parties control all three branches of government, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all Republican-dominated, but avenues for objection, checks on his power, and levers to limit his reach remain. But that doesn’t necessarily matter: Donald Trump is acting like a king. He is restructuring the government as if he were one, making statement after statement to reinforce that image. Much of it is hot air: things that will never come to pass. But just as if AI vendors pretend all-powerful artificial intelligence exists, people will act as if it does, I believe Trump’s CEO king act is designed to make us act as if there are no checks or limits on his abilities. We are meant to gaze in awe, and his critics to feel despondent, so that he can cement his imaginary powers for real and conduct his illegal business with impunity regardless of the regulations.

DOGE, which subsumed the USDS to become the awkwardly-named United States Department of Government Efficiency Service, is running ahead of regulations with the same gusto that Uber did during its early years. It should go without saying that inviting recent high school graduates and early twenty-somethings with no security clearance to wantonly access the personal data of every American, and to alter the source code that controls core government services, is illegal. It’s so outlandish that it sounds absolutely bizarre when you describe it out loud, like something from a speculative fiction fever dream, but it’s happening in plain sight. There are plenty of rules in place to prevent their activities from taking place. But who is going to catch up to them?

Eventually, DOGE will either be stopped or face regulatory restrictions on its activities and reach. But by then, it will be too late: the code will be altered, the personal information will be revealed, the funding spigot to core government services will have withered them on the vine. Legal objections have peppered up everywhere, but the cogs of justice are far slower than a bunch of entrepreneurial kids with the keys to the city. Lawmakers and civil rights organizations can shake their fists and say it’s illegal, but it’s done. DOGE isn’t just evading oversight: it’s moving fast and breaking things on a scale even Uber never dreamed of. It’s governance as a high-growth startup, where rule-breaking isn’t a side effect — it’s the entire strategy.

The important thing isn’t so much who is doing it as what is being done. Much has been made of the fact that Elon Musk is unelected, which is true: he is a private citizen with highly personal motives doing this work under dubious auspices. But the events of the last few weeks would be heinous even if they were conducted directly by elected officials acting in good faith. Stopping Musk from doing these things is a good idea, but the core problem is the acts, not the man.

The question, then, is what we do next.

In the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie points out that this wasn’t what brought most Trump voters to the polls:

For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.

One task is to pierce the reality distortion field of Trump’s court in the eyes of his opponents. We don’t live in a full-scale dictatorship (at least, not yet). All of this can be stopped. His power is limited, and can be curtailed. And at the center of it all, he is a small-minded former reality TV star with a tiny worldview who eats his steak overcooked and throws his plate at the wall when he’s having a tantrum. The emperor has no clothes, and those that oppose him must see that clearly. The bigger task is revealing that fact to the more reasonable of the people who elected him: people for whom the cost of living is more important than enacting some kind of perverse revenge on inclusive society.

Then I believe the next task is to build an alternative, not in reaction to Trump, but in itself, based on upholding core values and improving everybody’s quality of life. One of the challenges of being aghast at what is going on is that American institutions really have underserved the American people, and have often caused real harm overseas. It’s easy — and correct — to be worried about what it means to suddenly encourage the entire CIA to resign, but it’s an awkward rhetorical position to be put in to defend the institution. The CIA has a long history of arguably criminal behavior: conducting undemocratic coups, assassinating world leaders, and violating human rights in our name.

The status quo doesn’t work. The American people have made that clear. So it’s on us to invent something new. What does it mean to create a truly inclusive, peaceful, democratic society? What does it mean to have a peaceful foreign policy? What does it mean to focus on improving quality of life rather than an economic metric that encourages monopolies and billionaires while letting ordinary people suffer?

The playbooks of OpenAI, Uber, and others have long been countered by other modes of operating. Hockey-stick growth is not the only way to build software and serve people who need help. Co-operation, mutual aid, and collective collaboration have effectively re-made software, and through it the world, and we’re now seeing the fruit of that through movements like the open social web. High-growth tech has the flashy marketing moves and the attendant hype cycle, but quietly, other movements have been steadily building. The same is true for America.

As Bouie says in his piece:

Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.

I believe this is correct, and offer this idea for consideration:

The people with the ideas that can best save America are the people who are currently being pushed out of it. This is not a coincidence. Black women, trans activists, communities built on radical inclusion and emergent strategies, worker’s groups and communities bound in solidarity have created modes of communication and support that have transformed American society of the better. These are people for whom the shock and awe of a smoke and mirrors campaign does not work; who cannot be convinced to fit into a template designed to force people into being someone else’s profit engine; who have demonstrated the unstoppable nature of peer to peer mutual aid. It makes them dangerous. It also makes them more powerful than the dying gasp of the twentieth century we’re seeing sputter out before us.

We should listen to them: people who are often at the edges even though they deserve to sit at the center of society. They often see harms perpetuated before everybody else; they often see the solutions first, too. It’s not that it’s on them to save everybody else. It’s that they’ve been sounding the alarm and telling us what to do for decades, and nobody has been listening. It’s about time we did.

The same playbooks that have created monopolies, crushed labor rights, and gamed regulations are now being used to gut democratic governance itself. But these playbooks have always had an alternative: one rooted in cooperation, mutual aid, and community-driven solutions. That alternative exists; it’s just been drowned out by billionaires and venture-backed empire-builders. It’s time to listen to the people who have been building it all along.

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Google ends DEI hiring goals

[Alex Heath at The Verge]

And so begin the knock-on effects on companies across America:

"In a Wednesday memo to employees that I obtained (and you can read below), Google’s head of HR, Fiona Cicconi, said there will no longer be DEI hiring targets due to the company’s status as a federal contractor and recent “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic.” As The Wall Street Journal notes, Google also removed a line included in previous annual SEC reports saying that it’s “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do.”"

In other words, because DEI initiatives are now banned within the federal government, and because Google wants that sweet federal contractor money, it's ending the practice of overtly being inclusive as a company.

This is cowardice - and it's exactly what the Trump administration is going for. Its retrograde goals aren't simply for government; the idea is to remake the entire United States, and through changes to international relationships and the simple truth of America's global influence, the world.

[Link]

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The Making of an Anti-Woke Zealot: How Elon Musk Was Infected with the MAGA Mind-Virus

[Eoin Higgins, excerpted in Lit Hub]

This is a neat encapsulation of Musk’s rightward turn, and everything that happened next:

“By this point, Musk believed that part of the business problem of Twitter was that, somehow, the right wing was “suppressed.” As such, “woke culture” needed to be destroyed for Twitter the business—and democracy itself—to survive. In many ways this belief was a natural outgrowth of the Silicon Valley mythos of meritocracy and the tech industry’s opposition to diversity; a politics based on destroying wokeness was not far from the supremacist ideology he grew up with in South Africa.”

If you take a step back, it’s remarkable that the weirdest guy from PayPal has evolved into the world’s richest and most dangerous man. This serves as a reminder of what happened.

[Link]

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Google removes pledge to not use AI for weapons from website

[Maxwell Zeff at TechCrunch]

I know "don't be evil" is from another era of Google, but still, this rankles:

"Google removed a pledge to not build AI for weapons or surveillance from its website this week. The change was first spotted by Bloomberg. The company appears to have updated its public AI principles page, erasing a section titled “applications we will not pursue,” which was still included as recently as last week."

This dovetails with a piece from earlier this year about how AI is speeding up the military's kill chain:

"The “kill chain” refers to the military’s process of identifying, tracking, and eliminating threats, involving a complex system of sensors, platforms, and weapons. Generative AI is proving helpful during the planning and strategizing phases of the kill chain, according to [the Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Officer]."

So AI might not be used to pull the trigger, but it is being used to identify who should be in the crosshairs. All our concerns about AI hallucinations, and particularly about bias inherent in training data and therefore outcomes, apply.

[Link]

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A Push to Stop Police Ticketing in Illinois Schools Becomes Urgent in the Trump Era

[Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards at ProPublica]

From my colleagues at ProPublica:

"Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior."

This follows an investigation into how Illinois schools call on the police for infractions and - surprise, surprise - penalize Black students twice as often.

The police shouldn't get involved in troublesome kid stuff like truancy or vaping. That should be obvious. And, yet, here we are. This kind of police state nonsense absolutely paved the road towards where we are today.

[Link]

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The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos

[The Guardian Editorial]

The Guardian editorial board isn't mincing words:

"Donald Trump is provoking a US constitutional crisis, claiming sweeping powers to override or bypass Congress’s control over spending in a brazen attempt to centralise financial power in the executive branch. If he succeeds, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman warns, it would be a 21st-century coup – with power slipping from elected officials’ hands. The real story hidden behind the president’s trade war, he says, is the hijacking of government. And Mr Krugman’s right."

The board is clear-eyed in this piece about the harms committed under Trump's first Presidency, both to the economy and the American people. And then comes to this critical conclusion:

"Mr Trump’s chaos isn’t confidence – it’s desperation. He’s trying to conjure power he doesn’t actually have. He is manufacturing a perception of dominance in the hope that Americans will simply accept it. The real danger is letting his illusion of power become reality."

The trick is to cut through the shock and awe.

[Link]

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Settlements With Trump Are Weakening Press Freedoms

[Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times]

Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University:

"The spectacle of powerful media organizations debasing themselves before Mr. Trump has become so familiar that it is beginning to feel like scheduled programming.

[...] Mr. Trump captured the spirit of our times when he observed in December that, “In the first term, everyone was fighting me,” but “in this term, everybody wants to be my friend.” Certainly, some of the nation’s most powerful media institutions seem to have concluded that it is simply not in their commercial interests to inconvenience the president, even if sparing him inconvenience means abandoning their own First Amendment rights."

As Jaffer argues, the cases being settled by ABC News, Meta, and CBS are not slam dunks for Trump. This isn't about legal details; it's about capitulating to the new President and kissing the ring. That leaves us without an effective free press to hold truth to power.

The conclusion here is on point:

"The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning — sustaining their promise, generation after generation — depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply."

And that, to be honest, is terrifying.

[Link]

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Ask a CTO

I’ve been a technical leader a few times: CTO and Director of Technology at two nonprofit newsrooms; technical lead at five tech companies of varying sizes; investor and advisor in early-stage startups.

I’ve enjoyed reading Ask a Manager for years, and it occurred to me that a similar column for technical leadership might be interesting. So: let’s try it!

Ask me a question:

Ask a question anonymously and I’ll try to give you an impartial answer. This might be technical advice, questions about people leadership, questions about trends — or anything you wish you could ask experienced technical leadership.

Sounds good? Great. Submit a question to Ask a CTO by filling in this form.

By submitting a question, you agree that I can publish your questions and my answers here and/or in other media. Also, it should go without saying, but this is for entertainment purposes only. I am not actually your CTO, and you need to make your own technical decisions.

I’ll answer the first questions next week.

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Musk’s Takeover Of The Government’s Computer Systems Needs To Be Understood As A Cyberattack, Or Worse

[Cathy Gellis at TechDirt]

On point:

"So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into government offices to take over computer systems where they had no legitimate authorization or entitlement needs to be understood as a cyberattack by a rogue actor. And every ounce of outrage we ever would have had if any other rogue actor had taken over critical government infrastructure needs to be mustered here, because it is just as outrageous, and as dangerous, if not more so on both fronts, because this time the threat to America’s security came from within.

[...] Meanwhile, we know little to nothing about his team. Even some names are unknown, let alone the full range of their affiliations, which we usually ask about before giving anyone access to the country’s most sensitive information. They have had zero vetting and in many cases no known security clearance (and, in the case of Musk, there were limits to his, which was already in jeopardy).

[...] They are a bunch of strangers who have essentially busted into government offices and strong-armed the career staff there into giving them access to all these systems with all this critical function and data. Systems that it has heretofore been the priority of the United States government to protect because of their sensitivity and how vulnerable the nation would be if an adversary could access them."

This is a dangerous situation and it's evolving quickly. Who knows what it will look like tomorrow, or this time next week. But it doesn't look good.

[Link]

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A guide to using Signal for government workers

[Matt Haughey]

I really like the way this guide to Signal lays it all out. As Matt Haughey explains:

"A friend of mine works in the federal government and wrote a guide for their fellow federal workers on how to use Signal. There are lots of good reasons for switching to Signal for messaging, and this does a great job of laying it all out. This friend doesn't currently have a blog, so they asked me to post it for them, and I obliged since I think it's a straightforward introduction to protecting yourself when communicating with others."

This doesn't just go into the what - it talks a little about the why for Signal, including some of the protections you'll get on Signal that you won't get anywhere else.

Take a look - and then start using it.

[Link]

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I want you to do these four things right now

Security

Okay, friends. Here’s what we’re going to do. It’s not going to take long.

Let’s install Signal.

Signal is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging app. When you message someone with Signal, nobody can intercept your conversation to learn what you’re saying. It’s very easy to use and completely free.

Unlike WhatsApp (which is owned by Meta) and Telegram (which doesn’t encrypt messages by default), Signal is fully open-source, doesn’t store metadata, and is designed for privacy first.

Navigate to the Get Signal page on the Signal website.

Signal needs to be installed on your phone first. Choose the version that makes sense for you: iPhone or Android.

The cool part is that, once you’re logged in, Signal will tell you which of the people in your contacts are already using it, and as more sign up, they’ll just show up in your Signal contacts list over time.

I recommend also setting up a Signal username. Navigate to your Signal app’s settings pane, click on your profile, and then create a username. Then you don’t need to reveal your phone number to new contacts you want to chat with: you can just tell them your username.

Finally, Signal conversations can be set to auto-delete. I recommend that you do this. Four weeks is comfortable; one week is very safe.

My Signal username is benwerd.01. Once you’re signed up, send me a message to let me know you did it.

Signal

It’s time for a password manager.

Do you use the same password for every service? Or maybe you have an easy-to-remember formula for each one — something like the name of the service with the vowels replaced by numbers?

Those passwords are easy to guess and break into. It’s time to install a password manager.

1Password is the best-in-class password manager. You can install it on every device you own.

It’s really cheap to sign up. Set up your account, and then install the apps for your desktop, your phone, and your web browser.

Then, when you sign up for a new account, use 1Password’s suggested passwords instead of inventing your own:

When you go back to sign into a service, 1Password will show that you have a login for it, and logging in is one-click:

So not only are your credentials more secure, it’s actually easier to log in. You don’t need to struggle to remember what your password is anymore.

The passwords are encrypted, so nobody else, including 1Password itself, can ever see them.

Using a saved set of credentials is incredibly simple:

1Password

And so is creating and saving a new password:

1Password suggesting a new password

A VPN is a great idea.

Do me a favor: whenever you’re on public wifi — that is to say, an internet connection that isn’t your home or your workplace — run your internet connection through an encrypted VPN. This will make your internet activities harder to track and harder to intercept.

A VPN encrypts your internet traffic, which protects you from eavesdropping on public WiFi and makes it harder for advertisers to track you. However, it’s worth saying that it doesn’t make you completely anonymous — your online accounts and browsing habits still matter. (We’ll get to your social media accounts next.)

Mullvad is a great VPN choice for the privacy-conscious, but can be a little harder to use. (In particular, because it doesn’t ever want to know who you are, it assigns you a numeric account ID and charges on a time-based pay as you go basis.) ExpressVPN may be easier to use if you’re less technically-inclined. In both cases, you sign up, install an app, and simply turn it on and off from the app’s UI.

Mullvad VPN

Let’s make your social media more secure.

Social media is a magnet for harassment, doxing, stalkers and worse. In fact, one of the biggest vectors for attacks of all kinds on the internet is your social media accounts. If you haven’t locked them down in the right ways, you run the risk of sharing more than you intended with strangers, or even losing your account altogether to a hacker. Keeping all the settings straight is a real pain.

Block Party comes as an extension for the browser of your choice. Install it, sign up, and it’ll look at your social media accounts in turn and make informed suggestions about how you can lock them down for better privacy — and better mental wellness. Better yet, it gives you one-click options to make those settings changes itself.

One quick tune-up later, and your social media is safer and better for you. Which can’t be bad.

Block Party

And that’s it for now.

I’ve given you four quick steps that dramatically improve your online security. None of these take long, but they can make a huge difference.

If you found this useful, feel free to share it with a friend who could use a digital security boost. Let’s make the internet safer — one smart step at a time.

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Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites

[Naseem S. Miller at the Journalist's Resource]

A massive, last-minute data preservation effort was undertaken this week as important federal datasets were taken offline:

"The new Trump administration has at least temporality halted most communications from the Department of Health and Human Services and has begun taking down government websites, including many pages that include DEI initiatives. CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey site, which monitors health behaviors of high-school students, including sexual behavior, mental health and tobacco use, is no longer available."

This is another reason why the Internet Archive is vitally important infrastructure: websites and datasets were saved, among other places, to the Wayback Machine. Teams including at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health raced to capture the data before it went dark.

These datasets include important information about health (including vaccine information); gender; climate; mortality. They enable reporting and allow us to have a clearer picture of how well our democracy is functioning. At least for now, they're now historical datasets: it's not clear that any further data will be published. Researchers, journalists, medical professionals and more will need to look elsewhere for important information that helps them do their jobs and keep us safe.

[Link]

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The Bitcoin ghouls

1 min read

Imagine being so genuinely empty as a human being that you support a regime that conducts mass deportations and runs concentration camps because they support Bitcoin.

Imagine watching the rights, freedoms, and safety of trans people being torn down over the course of 72 hours and thinking, man, I'm really glad crypto is unencumbered now.

Just soulless, ghoulish people.

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On its birthday, The 19th announces a new model for funding media

The 19th celebrated its fifth birthday yesterday. CEO Emily Ramshaw’s reflective post is quite lovely, but also announces a very bold strategy:

On our fifth anniversary, we’re launching our first-ever endowment campaign, with a goal of raising $20 million over the next three years to protect our financial sustainability indefinitely. We’re getting started with a leadership gift of $2 million from Cindy and Greg Kozmetsky in honor of Greg’s mother, Ronya Kozmetsky, who was a tireless advocate for women in business, for equal access to education and for democracy. In recognition of this gift and her legacy, The 19th is thrilled to establish the Ronya Kozmetsky Legacy Fund for Representative Journalism.

I think that’s pretty neat — a really radical approach to independence — and something that other non-profit newsrooms (like ProPublica, where I currently work) should take note of. It’s also something that I think other non-profits should think about; what would it look like to have a Fediverse endowment, for example?

I was its first-ever CTO, so I’ve also sort of got an inside view, albeit one that is now a year or two out of date. Not only is The 19th’s mission (to report at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy) very obviously more vital than ever before, but I have been very impressed with how the organization itself is run.

Although every organization has its frictions and growing pains (and my view in the senior leadership team was not necessarily the same as the perspective elsewhere in the org chart), it is one of the most intentional cultures I’ve ever had the pleasure of being a part of. While many organizations have coasted or allowed their culture to organically evolve without much design, I felt like the details at The 19th were connected, nurturing, and leagues above most American workplaces. I’ve often joked that the best American benefits packages just approximate European legal minimums, but this was the closest I’ve ever come in the US to hit that standard. That’s particularly important in a place that seeks to inclusively employ reporters from diverse communities.

All of which is to say: if you get a chance, you should support The 19th. And I dearly hope that more organizations in media, tech, and beyond follow its model.

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