The Economist: Facebook faces a reputational meltdown Ed: The “regulation” that emerges from the clamor will create a surveillance monster far worse.

Reuters: Mozilla suspends ads on Facebook amid data privacy concerns

WSWS: Google sets up “news initiative” to censor political opposition and promote mainstream media

The Spectator: The Deep State media game

The American Conservative: The untold story of John Bolton’s campaign for war with Iran

Daily Mail: Laser weapon that produces haunting screams and voices from thin air could be used by U.S. military by 2021

New York Times: The Vietnam War is over. The bombs remain.

The Federalist: How the Second Amendment prevents tyranny

Engadget: Lab-grown meat is inevitable. Will we eat it? That’s a hard pass, thanks.

Aeon: The spirit molecule

Vanity Fair: Mark Zuckerberg emits facsimile of regret that mass-surveillance machine may have been used for evil 

CU Boulder: Who might be spying on your tweets in the name of science?

Boston Globe: Wake up, hapless technology users

Daily Mail: Facebook users shocked to find that thousands of third-party apps gather their data

Techdirt: How ‘regulating Facebook’ could make everyone’s concerns worse, not better

BoingBoing: You know who does creepier stuff with your data than Cambridge Analytica? Your ISP

NextGov: AT&T won secret $3.3 billion NSA contract despite more expensive bid

EFF: How Congress censored the internet

Activist Post: Los Angeles sheriff’s department launches massive facial recognition program

Harpers: How America boost the Afghan opium trade

Reason: One year later, Minneapolis cop finally charged for killing unarmed Australian woman who merely surprised him

Technology Review: US military wants A.I. to dream up weird new helicopters

TrustedReviews: Facebook privacy settings: 18 changes you should make right away

Biometric Update: Privacy advocates issue warnings as facial recognition planned for U.S. schools

Market Watch: How Europe is better at protecting data than the U.S.–And what the Nazis and Stasi have to do with it

Reason: Los Angeles reverse course on police body camera secrecy

The Federalist: People with Down Syndrome deserve our love, not genocide.  Sheds light on bizarre, modern-day eugenics movement.

High Times: UK government grants 6-year old permission to use medical marijuana

Bloomberg: Facebook has a long history of resolving privacy claims on the cheap

LA Times: Facebook needed third-party apps to grow. Now it’s left with a privacy crisis.

BoingBoing: Why did Facebook pitch in over $1 million to fight this California privacy ballot initiative?

Toronto Star: Let’s not trust Facebook to protect our privacy or our democracy

And probably the best headline from Wired: A hurricane flattens Facebook

Motherboard: Given Facebook’s privacy backlash, why aren’t we angrier about the broadband industry? Facebook has nothing on AT&T and Verizon.

RCP: Silicon Valley comes to the swamp

The Intercept: The NSA worked to “track down” bitcoin users, Snowden documents reveal

Medium: 16 articles that expose how they lied us into war in Iraq

American Conservative: Gina Haspel: As if Nuremburg never happened

PAT BUCHANAN: Remember the Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq’s WMD’s, before jumping to conclusions on Salisbury hit

New York Times: Facebook’s Surveillance Machine: “Facebook doesn’t just record every click and “like” on the site. It also collects browsing histories. It also purchases “external” data like financial information about users (though European nations have some regulations that block some of this). Facebook recently announced its intent to merge “offline” data — things you do in the physical world, such as making purchases in a brick-and-mortar store — with its vast online databases.

Facebook even creates “shadow profiles” of nonusers. That is, even if you are not on Facebook, the company may well have compiled a profile of you, inferred from data provided by your friends or from other data. This is an involuntary dossier from which you cannot opt out in the United States.”

And more from the New York Times: Facebook leaves its users’ data vulnerable

And it continues…Boston Globe: Facebook’s mentality: Anything for a buck

BoingBoing: A recipe for the deliberately obscured task of changing your Facebook settings to opt out of ‘platform’ sharing

Motherboard: This hat can fool facial recognition software into thinking you’re Moby

Techdirt: The future the FBI wants: Secure phones for criminals, broken encryption for everyone else

ShadowProof: Court asked to force DHS to release “race paper” on surveillance of black activists

The Intercept: FBI tracked an activist involved with Black Lives Matter as they traveled across the U.S., documents show

National Review: The social-media panic Ed: The tech giants will now be used as a tool by authoritarians of both parties to regain power and suppress online dissent, in exchange for favorable treatment.  There’s a name for this cozy arrangement between big business and the political class: fascism.

Activist Post: U.S. military working to deploy robot ground vehicles for urban combat by 2020

DAVID HARSANYI: Trump’s plan to execute drug dealers is bluster masquerading as a solution

TheFreeThoughtProject: Cop cleared in murder of 16-year old and unborn baby after donating $10,000 to DA

The Guardian: LSD blurs line between ourselves and others, study finds

Daily Beast: John Oliver’s gay bunny book outsells VP Pence’s family about their pet bunny, “Marlon Bundo”.  The name of Oliver’s gay bunny is also Marlon Bundo.

WSWS: New York University: A center of militarism, mass surveillance, and censorship

The Hill: Poll: Majority believes U.S. government tracks citizens

Business Insider: Facebook slides on report 50 million users had profiles accessed illegitimately

National Post: Show proof we poisoned ex-spy or apologize, Russia tells UK

Wired: Europe’s new privacy law will change the web, and more

The Federalist: Was social media a mistake? Here’s an experiment to find out

Market Mogul: Big Smart Brother: How smart cities may redefine the right to privacy in Europe

Antiwar.com: When and how did Evangelicals become Zionists?

Politico: When did ‘amnesty’ become a dirty word?

Telegraph: Hawking finished multiverse theory two weeks before we died

In the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune, the human race had already fought it’s war against the machines.  In the wake of the victory over the “thinking machines”, ten thousand years earlier, those that survived created the Orange Catholic Bible, a religious text that was to be strictly enforced.  Chief among this text’s tenets was, “Thou shalt not make a computer in the image of a man’s mind”, for the obvious reason that never again should the human race face the horrors of an A.I. holocaust.  I think about this tenet from a fictional world more and more lately because it sometimes feels we’re rapidly approaching a point in time when something similar may be necessary for technological progress and even our species to continue.

Everything is “connected” now. Appliances, cars, houses, even entire cities are networking as much technology as possible, all in the name of the god of our age, “Data”.  It’s all done for the sake of data, and algorithms and A.I.’s are created to sort and interpret that data, and then spit out directives.  “All things are possible through Data” is the implied invocation offered up to this information age god, and it’s full steam ahead to feed it as quickly as possible.  So the development of ever more intrusive ways to gather “data”, to track individuals to the point of predicting their future actions “Efficiency” is the supposed end-goal of data collection, but that data is being used by governments to build the most perfect prison that has ever existed: one in which the inmates believe they are still free.

The inmates of this prison gladly feed information necessary to sustain this prison through the use of “social media”, an ingenious platform that exploits a “flaw in human psychology” as Sean Parker aptly phrased it, where users quickly develop an addiction to the dopamine high of ‘likes’, views, more and more attention from their peers.  The “social-validation feedback loop” has become the Trojan horse that allows Big Tech and government to persuade us to surrender our private lives.

And so the technocratic Elite keep the masses subjugated with free ‘social media’, gladly gulping up the data produced by billions of fingers tapping away at phones.  The data is then consolidated, algorithmically synthesized, copied, and sold. To governments, other corporations, anyone who can pay.

Is there an escape from this technological opium den?  Our privacy gone, our movements tracked, our interests, friends, and plans known to those in power, and we stand naked before the State.  But the vast majority of us do so willingly.  And now, Big Tech has become the arbiters of acceptable speech, and the once-freewheeling, free speech internet is coming back under the yoke of the Elite.

It’s imperative to plainly ask ourselves whether this level of “connectedness” enhances our well-being in any meaningful sense, taking into account what is given up in the process. We should ask ourselves whether this sense of well-being is really nothing more than the addiction to the instant hit of dopamine we receive when we get the immediate feedback from posting a picture, a comment, etc. online.  Chances are, it’s the addiction.  Look at the Big Data industry that has been built upon that addiction.  Now we must ask ourselves, how much more “connectedness” is in store for us in the future?  Will it be more gadgets that we simply can’t refuse? Is the elimination of privacy really inevitable?  Does technological progress inexorably entail ever greater advances in social media and data collection only?  Is this the true end of history, when the human race has settled into an easy slavery to “connected” technology? How much digital “convenience” can we enjoy before it becomes self-defeating?  Is it worth the digital slavery to our devices, let alone the invisible Surveillance State being constructed around us?

Boston Globe: Facebook may have violated FTC privacy deal

Geek Wire: As Congress considers tech-backed CLOUD Act, privacy and human rights groups raise concerns

McClatchyDC: As U.S. indicts foreign hackers, American cyber spies fear retaliatory arrests

Washington Examiner: DOJ to seek death penalty in drug overdose cases “when appropriate”

Reason: Fear of a free, prosperous internet

The American Conservative: The indiscriminate bombing of Yemen and the failure of the Western media

Activist Post: Google’s search results for questions about the Parkland shooting are different from other search engines

SHELDON RICHMAN: Economic nationalism: Elitism in populist clothing

FEE: The 2nd Amendment empowers women more than lapel pins

Columbus Dispatch: ‘Magic’ mushroom research could lead to help for addicts

Motherboard: Will the ‘information paradox’ pioneered by Stephen Hawking ever be resolved?

The Independent: Russian official suggests nerve agent could have come from UK lab Porton Down

BoingBoing: Raleigh police are investigating crime by getting Google to reveal the identity of every mobile user within acres of the scene

Global Times: China’s lawmakers propose iris scans for all

Rappler: Prone to abuse: State surveillance as tool to silence critics

Mashable: How to see all the weird apps that can access your data on Facebook

Albuquerque Journal: Albuquerque PD admits to using cellphone tracking devices

FEE: How totalitarians weaponize loneliness

Washington Examiner: Edward Snowden: Facebook is a surveillance company rebranded as ‘social media’

Activist Post: Pentagon and DARPA seek predictive A.I. to uncover enemy thoughts

JOHN KIRIAKOU: Bloody Gina’ should not lead the CIA

JAMES BOVARD: Time for the U.S. to end democracy promotion flim-flams

FEE: Why ‘expert opinions’ are so often dead wrong

Mises: Why newspapers are going out of business

The Week: Rand’s stand