#surveillance

[zoobus]

The worst part of normalized surveillance is the normalization.

It's the thousands of followers who react to your secretly taken videos of noble good deeds with encouragement. It's them feeling cheered up, day made, hearts filled with warmth by your brazen voyeurism.

It's scrolling past a Tumblr post of a reddit post of a Twitter screenshot of a father and daughter sharing an intimate, family moment, oblivious to the tweeter taking a photo of them.

It's minding your business at the grocery store, hearing a weird noise, and realizing some teens are filming a tiktok dance and either did not notice or did not care that you are in the shot.

It's walking home with a mask on because every single condo and floor apartment in your neighborhood has Ring and you don't know what that means for you yet.

It's thinking about talking to a PR person just in case your recurring nightmare of your mental breakdown in the parking lot suddenly going viral comes true, hoping against hope a professional knows the magic set of words that will mitigate the harassment, stop you from losing your job.

It's that reddit post of the Sikh woman who found her and her mustache on the frontpage, forced to turn public humiliation into a teaching moment. It's some jackass redditor posting a couples photo, ostensibly to mock that his fly was down yet 70% of the comments target his girlfriend's appearance. It's seeing a top reddit pic with a headline demonizing a person in it months after you saw this same pic taken down after mods discovered op was lying. It's a lot of reddit.

It's wondering how many times your face has been posted online and if it was in a positive context at least.

It's that this is all normal, that so many of these things feel neutral to individuals, not a risk they're taking on behalf of a stranger.

[guerrillatech]

13 people were arrested for protesting Palantir

[kalmidnight]

Just to be clear

on what Israeli "foreign defense" means, in short, it's cooperation with United States and European militaries, intelligence agencies, state departments, law enforcement, related industries (especially arms and information), media, and political institutions, especially lobbyists and think tanks.

Foreign defense is "Participation by civilian and military agencies of a government in any of the action programs taken by another government or other designated organization to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, and insurgency."

"A major purchaser and user of U.S. military equipment, Israel is also involved in the joint development of military technology and it regularly engages in joint military exercises with United States and other forces."

Israel is the 10th largest arms dealer in the world, despite being the 29th by GDP. Surveillance technology and weapons developed by Israel with US and European backing is used by the US and European countries and exported worldwide.

US law enforcement agencies routinely train with Israelis in exchange programs or training programs which Israelis learn American "broken windows" style policing, and Americans learn Israeli "counterterrorism." For example:

"Since 2002, the New York Police Department has blurred the work of urban policing, counterterrorism and intelligence to a degree that is unprecedented for any American police department. This transformation included the creation of the infamous “Demographics Unit,” which ran a secret program monitoring Muslim communities"

I could keep going, but I've made my point enough.

TL;DR: The US and Europe won't stop Israel because they won't stop themselves.

Here's Arsen Ostrovsky, international human rights lawyer, CEO of the International Legal Forum and Senior Fellow of the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, calling for the murder of Greta Thunberg:

So this is Israel's *foreign-defense* policy, the murder of a Swedish citizen, a 22yo woman.

foreign

defense

[weirdsatellites]

Update #9484 from NROL-129 (Q CLEARANCE) 1. Cannibal Generator 2. Cursed Cruise Ships

[typhlonectes]

[nyancrimew]

very great coverage of stalkerware use by government workers in australia, im very happy to have worked with crikey to make this reporting possible!

[zegalba]

Julia Scher: Surveillance Bed III (1994)

[probablyasocialecologist]

At least 25 undercover police officers who infiltrated political groups formed sexual relationships with members of the public without disclosing their true identity to them, the Guardian can disclose. The total shows how women were deceived on a systemic basis over more than three decades. It equates to nearly a fifth of all the police spies who were sent to infiltrate political movements. Four of the police spies fathered, or are alleged to have fathered, children with women they met while using their fake identities to infiltrate campaigners. One woman, known as Jacqui, has said her life was “absolutely ruined” after she discovered by chance that the father of her son was an undercover officer, more than 20 years after his birth. The officer, Bob Lambert, abandoned them when the son was an infant, claiming falsely that��he had to go on the run abroad to escape being arrested by police. Other women had intimate relationships lasting up to six years with men who concealed the fact they were undercover officers who had been sent to spy on them and their friends. More than 50 women are so far known to have been deceived by the undercover officers, although the total is unknown at the moment and is likely to be higher. They unknowingly shared their most intimate lives with the spies and some attended weddings and funerals with them. The women were devastated when they discovered how the men had betrayed them, leaving them profoundly traumatised and unable to form trusting intimate relationships again. The scale of the deception has been revealed as ITV starts to broadcast a major series on what has become known as the “spy cops” scandal.

[...]

In total, about 139 undercover officers – employed in two covert squads – spied on more than 1,000 political groups. Tens of thousands of mainly leftwing and progressive campaigners were put under surveillance. Many of the spies created aliases based on the identities of dead children after searching through archives containing birth and death records to locate suitable matches. The officers typically spent four years pretending to be campaigners while they infiltrated political groups, befriending activists while simultaneously hoovering up information about their protests. They routinely gathered huge amounts of information about the personal lives of political activists, such as their holiday plans, sexuality and bank accounts.

2 March 2025

[liberaljane]

With Trump headed back to office, now is a good time to beef up your digital security.

Here's the Feminist Guide to Digital Security & 4 tips to get started.

Alt-text included on all pieces.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You should be using an RSS reader

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

[charliejaneanders]

Seriously, call your Senators now. This needs to be stopped before it goes any further. They want to drive LGBTQIA+ off the internet entirely, and Democrats are going along with this.

[weirdsatellites]

MASINT #2370 from NROL-82 (Q CLEARANCE) 1. Source of Essays 2. Old Plutonium

[tentacion3099]

"This smart camera is able to collect information about customers in a coffee shop as well as workers, converting their actions to readable data. Fooling a camera from recognizing the form of a human is easy enough, but what happens when they track actions instead?"

[nyancrimew]

joined by Phil Zimmermann (creator of PGP), Vikram Subramanian (ex-googler) and Dr. Jaya Klara Brekke (CSO Nym Technologies) i will be giving a talk about surveillance at ETH Zürich next tuesday

sign up for in person or live stream attendance: privacytalk.thealternative.ch/en

[389]

by Jump Jirakaweeku