#Data-Safety

[makingsenseofwhathappened]

What To Do When It Happens

Write it down. The date. The time. What they said. What you said. What you couldn’t. This isn’t overreacting. It’s documenting.

Tell someone you trust. Not the one who explains it away. The one who believes you.

Save everything. Emails, DMs, texts. Rename the folder something boring.

Find the policy. It’s probably buried under “Respect in the Workplace.” Highlight it like your job depends on it—because it might.

Pay attention to what happens next. The silence. The cold shoulder. The missed invites. That counts too.

If it gets worse, you're not imagining it. Retaliation is common. It’s also illegal.

Don’t quit just to make it stop. Not before you talk to someone. A lawyer. A hotline. A friend who’s been there.

Crying in the bathroom is not unprofessional. Neither is dissociating. Nor surviving.

It’s okay to stay. It’s okay to leave. Either way, you’re strong.

What happened to you matters. Even if you stayed quiet. Even if you laughed. Even if you stayed quiet for a long, long, time.

NOTE: I wrote this on paper first (pic above) but realised my handwriting is mostly indecipherable trash. Didn't want to put you through that. Also, can people born after 2000 even read cursive nowadays? I truly have no idea.

😇😌🫨

[ahb-writes]

(from The Mitchells vs. the Machines, 2021)

[ready-resist-rebuild]

U.S. RESIDENTS PLEASE READ

For those living in the United States who are unhappy with the state of the country and who wish to protect themselves, protect others, or those who wish to fight back, this message is for you. Below you will find a link to a Proton Drive containing a folder called Tipr Complete. In it are valuable resources regarding health, safety, rights, building national resilience, and more.

Each file is sorted into sub-folders, and a full list of source links for each document is provided in a text file to make it easier to access the information online if you wish. There is also a text file to assist with getting started as well as an index to help you navigate. This is a work in progress, so you can expect updates in the future.

As there is increasing concern over potential censorship, it is recommended to download these resources, either from the Proton Drive directly or by going to the original sources. This will help ensure the information is still accessible in the future. Please consider sharing this information and this post as much as you can so that it may reach those who need it most.

Thank you, and good luck.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[aeolianblues]

Fucking funniest thing is, the FBI seizes any links that lead to the genuine Z-Library, but without fail leave up all the scam ones that pretend to be fundraising for Z-Lib.

Anyway, if you have a Z-library login and use it on any z-lib link that ends .is, .io, .to babes you're being scammed! Check the security of the email address you've used and also if you're reusing that particular password anywhere, change it ASAP. If you have made a transaction, block it PRONTO!

Z-lib exists on the concept of free access to books, you have previously been and will always be allowed a limited download of 3 (or 5 or 10) downloads a day, depending on whether you have an account or have made donations.

See, Z-library has fundraised in the past, but they will never cut off your access for not donating. Do you know how much IP law-related trouble they'd be in if they were explicitly charging for access to books that the US legal system already views as 'stolen'?

There are a few ways of accessing them now, most are through torrenting (need help? Reddit or Telegram apparently), many of the regular browser web URLs have been seized.

When in doubt, do not click. Trust your instincts if you feel anything is off. If you're unsure about a z lib link, try a libgen mirror or something else instead.

Posting this here because I know a LOT of readers, students, broke folks that would like access to books, other folks with geographical barriers; basically a lot of folks who might potentially use something like Z-Library. So FYI and heads up, stay safe out there. Change that password! (And feel free to reblog this, again for aforementioned reasons)

[nostalgebraist]

Someone asked me about that "Utility Engineering" AI safety paper a few days ago and I impulse-deleted the ask because I didn't feel like answering it at the time, but more recently I got nerd-sniped and ended up reproducing/extending the paper, ending up pretty skeptical of it.

If you're curious, here's the resulting effortpost

[gaykarstaagforever]

They really missed an opportunity to send the Enterprise-D crew back to Classical Greece. They're trying to maintain the Prime Directive, but Diogenes figures out Data is "an automaton from the Future" and tells absolutely everyone because it helps him win all the arguments he's having with the other philosophers.

The B-plot is Worf "the Indian" off wowing a bunch of warriors by wrestling like 8 guys at once.

[staticespace]

Hey, so, offhand, I decided to change the password to my Microsoft account, and I happened to stumble upon my sign-in attempt history...

So here's your reminder to change your password!

If it's been over a year since your last password change, this is your sign to go change it now!

Change it every few months, even! And if you don't wanna do that, at least add two-factor authentication!

[the-daughter-of-lilith]

The reason I care about being in Cybersecurity runs much deeper to me than income.

I remember being 11 years old on YouTube and suddenly my video was bombarded with hundreds of antisemitic insults and threats. I knew I wasn't safe online.

If you are from Jewish descent please look into your OPSEC as soon as possible. The online interactions and influence isn't worth your safety. Form a community through decentralized and encrypted platforms to keep yourselves safe, please.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Just when you thought it hit rock bottom..." as drawn by Edith Pritchett

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 19, 2025

In a court filing last night, the Director of the Office of Administration in the Trump administration, Joshua Fisher, clarified the government position of billionaire Elon Musk. In a sworn declaration to the court, Fisher identified Musk as “a Senior Advisor to the President.” He explained: “In his role as a Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors. Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

Fisher’s statement went on to say that Musk is neither an employee nor the service administrator—that is, the leader—of the Department of Government Efficiency.

The statement is in response to a lawsuit filed by 14 states—New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—contending that Musk’s role is unconstitutional because he has such sweeping power in his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that the Constitution requires that his position be confirmed by the Senate.

President Trump has routinely referred to Musk as DOGE’s leader, and the media routinely refer to “Elon Musk’s DOGE.” Musk has flooded his social media site with claims that DOGE is cutting programs that he claims are wasteful or fraudulent, although so far he has yet to provide any proof of his extravagant claims. In the early hours of Monday, he reposted a picture of a leaner, meaner version of himself dressed as a Roman gladiator with the caption: “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.” Musk added: “And I am.”

Beginning on Friday, the Trump administration began mass purges of federal government employees. As Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Emily Davies reported in the Washington Post, the firings were haphazard and riddled with errors, but apparently most of those firings were of employees in the probationary period of employment, typically the first year of service but a status that’s triggered by promotions and lateral transfers as well. About 20 FDA employees who review neurological and physical medical devices were fired, hampering the agency’s ability to evaluate the devices produced by Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. Employment lawyers say the mass firings are illegal because they ignore employee protections.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, had noted: "This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency that has access to the entire workings of the federal government to hire, fire, slash contracts, terminate programs, all without any congressional oversight." Now the Trump administration is attempting to protect Musk by saying he is simply an advisor.

Department of Justice lawyer Joshua Gardner told Chutkan that he could not independently confirm the firings of thousands of federal employees last week, prompting her to note that his ignorance seemed willful: "The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small thing,” she said. “You haven't been able to learn if that's true?"

Peter Charalambous of ABC News noted that lawyers from the Department of Justice are also unable to explain what, exactly, DOGE is. They won’t say it’s an “agency,” which, as U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote, would be “subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act.” On Friday, Charalambous points out, when reporters asked senior advisor to the Treasury Department’s general counsel Christopher Healy, who runs DOGE, he answered: “I don’t know the answer to that.”

What is clear, though, is that the DOGE team is vacuuming up data from government agencies. It began its run shortly after Trump took office by accessing the Treasury Department payment system, prompting the resignation of career civil servant David Lebryk. Then on February 2 the DOGE people moved on to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where they struggled with security officers trying to stop them from accessing classified information. By February 12 they were at the General Services Agency, which oversees the government’s real estate.

That pattern has continued. Over the weekend, Fatima Hussein of the Associated Press reported that DOGE was trying to get access to taxpayer data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), specifically the Integrated Data Retrieval System that enables examinations of tax returns, deep troves of information about hundreds of millions of American citizens and businesses. Access to individuals’ bank account numbers and private information has, in the past, been tightly guarded. Indeed, compromising access to that information is a felony.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), the top Democrat on the Committee on Finance, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, wrote to Douglas O’Donnell, acting commissioner of the IRS, demanding information about DOGE’s access to taxpayer information and noting that the request for access raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”

DOGE worked over the weekend to get access to Social Security Administration databases as well. Amanda Becker of The 19th notes that these records contain information about individuals’ income, addresses, children, retirement benefits, and even medical records. Lisa Rein, Holly Bailey, Jeff Stein, and Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reported that acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration Michelle King, who had been with the agency for decades before Trump elevated her to acting commissioner last month, resigned after a clash over access to the data.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media reported today that workers at the General Services Administration resigned in protest after Musk ally Thomas Shedd, who now runs the group of coders DOGE has embedded in that agency, requested access to “all components of the Notify[DOT]gov system.” That system is used to send mass text messages to the public. Information about it is highly sensitive and gives anyone with access “unilateral, private access to the personal data of members of the public,” according to Koebler. That includes not just names and phone numbers, but information about, for example, whether individuals are enrolled in public benefit programs that are based on financial status.

A White House spokesperson defended DOGE’s access to the IRS by saying that “waste, fraud, and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” adding: “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.” But DOGE has been unable to document what it claims are cost-saving measures. On Monday it listed what it said were $16 billion in canceled contracts, but Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer of the New York Times corrected the record, noting that a contract DOGE valued at $8 billion was actually closer to $8 million. Further, they noted, claims of $55 billion in savings lacked documentation.

Musk’s recent claims that the Social Security Administration is sending out payments to tens of millions of dead people more than 100 years old—a claim echoed by President Trump—were wrong: the software system defaults missing birthdates to more than 150 years ago and the Social Security Administration decided not to spend more than $9 million on upgrading its system to include death information. Right-wing podcaster Trish Regan warned DOGE that “it’s critical to present the math CORRECTLY” and noted: “Looks like the team got out over its skis on this one.”

Aside from the many legal problems with the argument that the opaque DOGE can alter programs established by Congress, and the problems with documenting its actual work, it is undeniable that Musk’s team has had access to a treasure trove of information about Americans and American businesses and the ways in which they interact with the government. This information can feed the AI projects that Musk envisions putting at the center of American life. It also opens the way for Musk and his cronies to weaponize private information against business competitors as well as political enemies.

In addition, it can also feed a larger technological project for controlling politics.

The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.

Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”

Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bravecrab]

"Children" - Ryoko Kui

[verschlimmbesserung]

Cars with DLC features ping towers with your location, wether you are subscribed or not!, and cops get it without warrant https://www.wired.com/story/police-records

... anyone interested in digital safety?

[luxu-loveskh]

Remind fun

Made data greetings

First namixi

then terrariam,where i once again am reminded maru is fucking tall

soriku my beloved boys

training sessions!

Several idiots trying to figure out things(idiots kn lovingly way)

Xigbar vs dark inferno χ because why not

[nando161mando]

A Senate probe found Amazon manipulated injury data to make warehouses appear safer. It's twice as high as other warehouse jobs.

[brick-van-dyke]

So, I've been doing some thinking. This could either be a meaningless little ramble that no one will care about, or something seen as really dangerous and putting a target on my back.

So, what if we, those most weary of the far right created an international group of activists in light of the US election? See, the thing is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are very dangerous, but they are also very incompetent and could lead the government down a path that weakens it. It could create a very unique opportunity to address the far right problem and the US Imperialist system itself in one go. Or maybe I'm being overly ambitious.

This group I have in mind would have several purposes, such as keeping communities safe and protecting people from the harm the far right would do in the name of winning the election. Or, most importantly of all, connecting activists from all over the world and allowing us to dismantle the system as a concrete and united movement. Maybe it's just me being naive and hopeful, but maybe it's also something we've all wanted deep down but been too afraid to initialise? If so, maybe this is a sign to really stand up and start trying to make those connections.

[voiceofchange]

Sign to help get Privacy Bills passed before Trump takes office so that he can't buy our personal data

https://action.aclu.org/reg-action/keep-trump-administrations-hands-our-data

The ACLU is an organization prepared to handle the Trump presidency and is proactively fighting for our rights. donate if you can, and they may have other resources or ways to help on their website.