REPUBLIC REBORN

Probably should keep this story posted every day now: Google’s new, $300 million fight against news it doesn’t like

Motherboard: State Department seemingly buys $15,000 iPhone-cracking tech GrayKey

Washington Times: Report: Police routinely using dead people’s fingerprints to unlock iPhones

Salt Lake Tribune: As YouTube bans firearms demonstrations, Utah firm launching its own pro-gun video platform

Reason: Obama harvested data from Facebook and bragged about it.  Why are we only freaking out about it now?

The Guardian: Seven days that shattered Facebook’s facade

Borneo Bulletin: ‘To prison for singing?”: Spanish rappers to serve time for their lyrics

Quartz: China’s censorship body keeps ruining fun on the internet

SHELDON RICHMAN: The Iraq War after 15 years: “Now we mark the 15th anniversary of a foreign-policy decision that rivals Woodrow Wilson’s entry into World War I in its recklessness and cruelty — yet a proper assessment of the atrocity perpetrated by the George W. Bush presidency, aided and abetted by the most prestigious newspapers and television networks in the land, is as elusive as ever. If anything, things have regressed. In an eagerness to paint Trump as the most evil person who has ever lived, many pundits, including Democrats, have found it expedient to look with favor on the execrable Mr. Bush despite the chain of disasters he set in motion in March 2003. As readers well know, my respect for Trump is at far less than zero, but I don’t think anyone looks good merely by comparison to him. Trump may end up doing something worse than Bush’s invasion of Iraq — here’s one reason why — but he hasn’t so far. Trump is bad, but that is no reason to blur history. All that does is help people forget Bush’s many victims.”

Important- FEE: Why one economist abhors Earth Hour

Cato: Small marijuana growers squeezed out by the regulation that follows legalization

National Review: Sociologist claims veganism is connected to ‘White Masculinity’

Bloomberg: Apple’s Tim Cook calls for more regulations on data privacy

Techdirt: New Orleans’ secret predictive-policing software challenged in court

BoingBoing: A tour of the manipulative, creepy BS that Facebook pulls to stop you from deleting your account

Zero Hedge: The digital-military-industrial complex exposed

MintPressNews: Google and corporate news giants forge alliance to defeat independent journalism

Quartz: Scientists who want to study magic mushrooms have to pay $7,000 per gram

Truthdig: School district arms teachers and students with…rocks

Motherboard: Congress enacts garbage surveillance legislation by attaching it to must-pass spending bill

Reason: The omnibus spending bill is a fiscal embarrassment

Every city needs this: East Bay Times: Berkeley law requires council approval of surveillance tech

Activist Post: Federal ruling could set dangerous precedent allowing law enforcement access to WhatsApp

The American Conservative: Was destructive ‘Slingshot’ malware deployed by Pentagon?

Too much to hope for, probably: ZDnet: Stingray spying: 5G will protect you against surveillance attacks, say standard-setters

Smithsonian: A brief history of surveillance in America

Common Dreams: ‘Outrageous’: With $700 billion for Pentagon, nearly half of $1.3 trillion budget headed for more war-making

Techdirt: Spain’s hate/anti-terrorism speech laws doing little but locking up comedians, artists, and dissidents

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Lost near the Beltway: Whatever happened to the libertarian movement?

High Times: NYPD must publish marijuana arrest demographics under new bill

Old but relevant: Salon: School is a prison–and damaging our kids

Gizmodo: Congress rushes to pass spending bill packed with disastrous global surveillance measures

The Register: U.S. Congress quietly slips cloud-spying powers into page 2,201 of spending mega-bill

Reason: 9 ridiculous things about the omnibus spending bill

VICE: Dutch voters just shut down a major spying law that would allow DNA database

CNET: Apple must warn about China privacy risk, says Amnesty International

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Bring back Bricker!

The Verge: CDs and vinyl are more popular than digital downloads once again

Forbes: Why do we think quantum mechanics is weird?

BoingBoing: John Hopkins University seeks DMT users who have encountered “autonomous beings” after taking the psychedelic

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