Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

The revolution will be supervised.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

We still have time to mess this up!

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

T R E 4 5 O N

Consistently wrong since 2002

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

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Social Media Open Thread: ‘President’ Grampa Has PROBLEMS!!! With You People…

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… In a statement, Twitter said the meeting — initiated by the president — focused on “protecting the health of the public conversation ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections and efforts underway to respond to the opioid crisis.” Twitter partners with the federal government on a program to encourage Americans to dispose of prescription drugs they no longer need to prevent against abuse.

In March, Trump accused Silicon Valley’s largest companies of harboring a “hatred” for “a certain group of people that happen to be in power, that happen to have won the election.” In doing so, Trump threatened potential regulation, telling reporters at a press conference that the government may “have to do something about it.”

Previously, Trump joined a chorus of Republicans in claiming that Twitter secretly limits the reach of conservatives, a tactic known as “shadow banning” that Twitter has vehemently denied. And the president regularly has raised fears about changes in his follower count. Twitter’s heightened crackdown against spam, however, long has affected both liberals and conservatives on the site.

In response, Twitter regularly has stressed its political neutrality. “Impartiality is our guiding principle,” Dorsey told lawmakers last year who grilled him over allegations that the site and its social-media peers exhibit bias against conservatives. Over the past year, Dorsey has sought to huddle with high-profile right-leaning pundits and political figures, hoping to assuage their concerns about censorship…

Dorsey long has faced pressure to curtail Trump’s tweets, as critics contend that the president regularly violates the site’s policies against harassment and abuse. Twitter has long maintained that it applies a different standard to prominent public figures, given that their comments — even offensive ones — remain in the public interest. But the company in March said it soon would adopt a new approach, labeling offensive tweets so users know why such content hasn’t been removed…

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All About Assange

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After the initial schadenfreude, I think it’s wrong what is going on with Assange. I’m sure there are a host of things for which he probably should face some sort of criminal justice, but aiding Chelsea Manning in exposing American war crimes isn’t one of them.

He’s like the Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, tbh. I hate the fuckers but I believe in free speech. Same with Assange- he’s a malignant asshole with a ridiculous ego and delusions of grandeur, he’s allowed Wikileaks to meddle in our elections while pretending to support radical transparency, and let his personal pique dictate their mission in 2016, and well, all that and more. He also is much like Bernie Sanders in that his most ardent supporters are people who are so fucking annoying that were they on fire you wouldn’t piss on ’em.

But there was legitimate news value to what he was doing for what he was charged in the indictment, and he shouldn’t be extradited here for a show trial.

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Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Busy Days At Marred-A-Lago

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Not a cybersecurity expert, but seems like that’s hardly best practice?

A federal prosecutor argued in court Monday that Yujing Zhang, the Chinese woman arrested trying to enter President Donald Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach last month, “lies to everyone she encounters” and said a search of her hotel room uncovered more than $8,000 in cash, as well as a “signal-detector” device used to reveal hidden cameras.

Also uncovered in the search: $7,500 in U.S. hundred-dollar bills and $663 in Chinese currency, in addition to nine USB drives, five SIM cards and other electronics, according to federal prosecutor Rolando Garcia. Signal detectors are portable devices that can detect radio waves, magnetic fields and hidden-camera equipment.

Prosecutors are treating the case as a national-security matter and an FBI counterintelligence squad is investigating, sources familiar with the inquiry told the Miami Herald.

Zhang gave conflicting accounts of why she came to Mar-a-Lago on March 30, at one point saying she had been invited to attend a social event, according to an affidavit filed by a U.S. Secret Service agent. But she was found to be carrying several electronic devices, including a thumb-drive containing “malicious malware,” the Secret Service said. That raised suspicions among federal investigators already probing possible Chinese intelligence operations in South Florida that she could be engaged in espionage…

Investigators are still trying to determine the nature of the malware Zhang allegedly brought into the club, sources told the Herald. It is not clear how much of a threat the malware posed and whether it was intended to gather information at the president’s club or possibly to destroy an existing network or program, they said.

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Russiafvckery Open Thread: (Dis)Information Wants to Be… Leaked?

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Kevin Poulsen — there’s a name I don’t remember seeing since the Snowden days. Feels, to my untechnologically-clued-in self, that most of Wikileaks activity over the last several years seems to have been the online equivalent of dogs pissing on fenceposts. Or the couch:

… The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one place dozens of different archives of hacked material that, at best, have been difficult to locate, and in some cases appear to have disappeared entirely from the web.

“Stuff from politicians, journalists, bankers, folks in oligarch and religious circles, nationalists, separatists, terrorists operating in Ukraine,” said Best, a national-security journalist and transparency activist. “Hundreds of thousands of emails, Skype and Facebook messages, along with lots of docs.”

Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoS, is a volunteer effort that launched last month. Its objective is to provide researchers and journalists with a central repository where they can find the terabytes of hacked and leaked documents that are appearing on the internet with growing regularity. The site is a kind of academic library or a museum for leak scholars, housing such diverse artifacts as the files North Korea stole from Sony in 2014, and a leak from the Special State Protection Service of Azerbaijan…

Last year, Best agreed to help another journalist locate a particular Shaltai Boltai leak, a hunt that sent her into the world of Russian hacktivism. “Later I’m talking to some hackers—this is after DDoS’ public launch—and they hooked me up with a few archives,” Best told The Daily Beast. “A couple gigabytes, something like that. I do some digging, ask around, and manage to stir up a good bit more.”

Once word got around that Best was collecting Russian hacks, the floodgates opened. In late December, the project was on the verge of publishing its Russia collection when “middle of the night, more files come in,” Best said. Then an organization with its own collection of Russia leaks opened its archives to Best and her colleagues…

DDoS differs from WikiLeaks in that it doesn’t solicit direct leaks of unpublished data—its focus is on compiling, organizing, and curating leaks that have already appeared somewhere in public. “Emma Best, I think, is someone who will actually do a good job,” said Weaver, citing Best’s aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act to extract documents from recalcitrant U.S. agencies. “Things get so scattered that putting it all into one place is a huge benefit.”…

It’s past my bedtime, so if I’ve misinterpreted / botched this info, I’m sure y’all will make due corrections in the comments.

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Derp State

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That we have a scabrous, demented swine thrashing around the Oval Office causing untold domestic and international turmoil is on the American people, the Republican Party, and the Russian Federation (in no particular order). But assuming our little experiment in democracy survives and committees are impaneled to study what the fuck happened in the detail such a calamitous clusterfuck warrants, should the role of our national security organizations and their political apparatuses be scrutinized too?

Hell yes, they should. It’s already clear Trump is a Russian asset. The only remaining question is how long and actively he’s been in on Putin’s con. That such a destructive, incompetent, addled and compromised fool got within a country mile of the fucking White House points to national security failures as vast as those that allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen and enabled Cheney & Co. to falsely portray Saddam Hussein’s Potemkin nukes as an existential threat.

Like those monumental fuck-ups, I suspect the lapse that allowed a malignant orange clown to seize personal control of the world’s most fearsome nuclear arsenal was more a failure of imagination than a lack of dedication or skill, particularly on the part of the people doing the actual work. In other words, it was a strategic cock-up rather than a tactical one. But yeah, we’re gonna need a truth and reconciliation panel on national security too.

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Today’s Big Read: Russia’s Comprehensive Disinformation Campaign

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Pushing ten thousand comments on the Post’s online story, as of 6am:

… The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the first to study the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), its chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), its ranking Democrat. The bipartisan panel hasn’t said whether it endorses the findings. It plans to release it publicly along with another study later this week.

The research — by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm — offers new details of how Russians working at the Internet Research Agency, which U.S. officials have charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 campaign, sliced Americans into key interest groups for targeted messaging. These efforts shifted over time, peaking at key political moments, such as presidential debates or party conventions, the report found.

The data sets used by the researchers were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts. The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information on more recent political moments, such as November’s midterm elections.

“What is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican Party — and specifically Donald Trump,” the report says. “Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign. The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”…

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Open Thread: Steve ‘Pigmuck’ King, Old Man, Yells At (the) Cloud

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Post title borrowed from this response:

BUT SERIOUSLY… Per Newsweek:

Republican representative Steve King requested Google CEO Sundar Pichai give the government the names of more than 1,000 employees who oversee the company’s search engine to determine whether its algorithm was biased, The Hill reported. King said he wanted to look at employees’ social media and see if they’re biased.

As Pichai appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, Democrats questioned the tech giant’s privacy regulations, The New York Times reported. Republicans expressed distrust for the company, questioning whether it stifles conservative search results.

“There is a very strong conviction on this side of the aisle that the algorithms are written with a bias against conservatives,” King said, alleging that Google has an inherent ideological tilt because it is located in the Democrat-heavy Silicon Valley. “What we don’t know are who are these thousand people and we don’t know what their social media looks like.”

California Republican Kevin McCarthy voiced similar concerns. “All of these topics — competition, censorship, bias and others — point to one fundamental question that demands the nation’s attention,” he said. “Are America’s technology companies serving as instruments of freedom or instruments of control?”…

Pichai said at the beginning of his testimony, “I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” according to The Guardian. “To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions—and we have no shortage of them among our own employees.” He also said that the employees do not choose which news outlets show up in searches, saying the search engine adapts based on what users select…

King’s real butthurt: When you’ve brought up your kids to believe that everyone (who matters) hates immigrants, people of color, and diversity in all its forms…


“Some kinda hand-me-down”, indeed.

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