Mario Trujillo · EFF
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[DHS] has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE’s activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.
Blog
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Open Letter to Tech Companies: Protect Your Users From Lawless DHS Subpoenas
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With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Jason Koebler · 404 Media
Ring had always, explicitly been intended to assist law enforcement. In a series of investigations we did back at VICE (mostly written by Caroline Haskins, who is still covering surveillance at WIRED), we uncovered thousands of pages of documents, emails, and chats via public records requests and leaks that highlighted Ring’s surveillance ambitions. The company threw parties for police, employees wore “FUCK CRIME” shirts to internal parties, and helped police facilitate the retrieval of footage from its customers’ cameras if they initially refused to cooperate.
. . .
With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool.
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Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown
Mark Keierleber of the 74 · The Guardian
Flock of Vultures – Flock of Terror
Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, the 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.
. . .
Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did”, Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them – no questions asked.” -
The pessimist who became a prophet
Martin Sandbu · FT Magazine
Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming
“One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”
FT Gift Link
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NTS Guide to: The Recordings of Joe Frank
Joe Frank · NTS
nts.live/…the-nts-guide-to…joe-frank-3rd-february-2026
I found Joe Frank in the mid 90s
via some low frequency station
KDVS?
people who’d come through our apartment
very much hated my playing KDVS
“they talk soooo much. wah wah boo hoo”
so they were forced
Joe Frank was esp good at cleansing the floor
those that’d stay were first caught off guard
then quickly drawn in
it was an acid test of sorts -
Obscura —> Mullvad —> Internet
I’m experimenting with Obscura VPN.
I’m largely curious about how they’re chaining Obscura —> Mullvad —> Internet.
“Traffic first passes through Obscura’s servers before exiting to the Internet via Mullvad’s WireGuard servers. This two-party architecture ensures that neither Obscura nor Mullvad can see both your identity and your Internet traffic.”
Via: Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPNAccording to Obscura’s FAQ:
Obscura is provably private by design.
Even “no-logs” VPNs see both your identity and your internet activity, meaning you have to blindly trust their pinky-promise for privacy. This is exactly why some privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all.
Obscura is different – we never see your decrypted internet packets. It’s simply impossible for us to log your internet activity, even if we were compelled to, or if our servers were compromised. You can even verify this yourself.
Obscura’s stealth protocol is much harder to block.
Our unique stealth protocol is designed to blend in with regular internet traffic. It does so by leveraging QUIC – the same technology that powers HTTP/3 – making it far harder for censors or network filters to detect or block.
Not too shabby:
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Meredith Whittaker + Signal + You Caring about Privacy
The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality · SXSW 2025
Meredith Whittaker making the case for why you should be using Signal.
No excuses.
Tolerance has been reduced to zero.Hero Image: Jan Zappner/re:publica
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Re-publica_23_-Tag_1(52952663983).jpg -
Launch of e-flux Index #8 — Piper Marshall’s Tribute to Dara Birnbaum
Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, February 10 at 7pm for the launch of e-flux Index #8, featuring Piper Marshall and a tribute to Dara Birnbaum. Marshall will read from her remembrance of Dara Birnbaum, published in e-flux Notes on the occasion of Birnbaum’s passing and re-published in e-flux Index #8. The reading will be followed by a screening of selected works from Birnbaum’s seminal oeuvre. Copies of e-flux Index #8 will be available for purchase at a discounted price at the event.
e-flux Index #8 v Piper Marshall v Dara Birnbaum
I’m pretty sure I first caught the piece at a party on to rooftop of Dia’s 548 West 22nd Street, Chelsea location. This must’ve been a summer evening around 2002 or 2003.
One thing making the experience unique was the party’s being held in and around Dan Graham’s, Rooftop Urban Park Project (1981–91). Again, while the memory is a bit hazy, and because there seems to be no documentation of the event online, through the haze I remember the tranquil feel of the event. While Wonder Woman transformed and transformed again, we were casually sitting inside Dan Graham’s piece with a six pack.
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