Inside: Ferris wheel fine dining; Monopolies Suck; The president's extraordinary powers; Comcast v Comcast; Surveillance startup protected sexual harassers; and more!
#1yrago Navy Yard worker outed by Unicorn Riot is indicted for lying to the FBI about his white nationalist group memberships inquirer.com/news/vanguard-…
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#1yrago Indigenous elder on Sidewalk Labs’s Toronto consultation: “like being given blankets and gun powder and whisky to trade for our participation” thestar.com/news/gta/2019/…
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Yesterday's threads: Phone surveillance, made in Canada; Chile restores democratic rule; Someone Comes to Town, Part 20; and more!
My latest novel is Attack Surface, a sequel to my bestselling Little Brother books. @washingtonpost called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance."
I have a (free) new book out! "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" is an anti-monopolist critique of Big Tech that connects the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise of tech monopolies and proposes a way to deal with both:
My ebooks and audiobooks (from @torbooks, @HoZ_Books, @mcsweeneys, and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
My first picture book is out! It's called Poesy the Monster Slayer and it's an epic tale of bedtime-refusal, toy-hacking and monster-hunting, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller. It's the monster book I dreamt of reading to my own daughter.
If you prefer a newsletter, subscribe to the plura-list, which is also ad- and tracker-free, and is utterly unadorned save a single daily emoji. Today's is "☔️". Suggestions solicited for future emojis!
One of my favorite podcasts is @armandalegshow, a show about self-defense from medical billing in the US health care system. As a Canadian in the US, I often feel gaslit by the system, as my doctors and their offices act as though predatory, disgusting practices are natural.
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Arm and a Leg documents these unethical practices in eye-watering detail, making it clear at ever turn that these are Not Okay, and that they are victimizing the American people, and must be overturned. And, in the meantime, they focus on practical ways to protect yourself.
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This week's episode is a short masterclass in using small claims courts to fight predatory billing. It builds on the tale of Jeffrey Fox, a lawyer's son who has mastered the small claims system as a means of holding corporate bullies to account.
Marsy's Law is a model victim's rights law that many states have adopted (it's on the ballot in Kentucky next week), often at the behest of law enforcement agencies that argue for the right to anonymity for the victims of crimes.
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But Marsy's Law is so broadly worded that one of its primary uses is to shield violent cops - even those who kill - from public scrutiny, as @USATODAY's @kennyjacoby and @propublica's @ryangabrielson write today.
A Florida deputy handcuffed an intoxicated homeless man to a hospital bed and pepper-sprayed him in the face, then invoked Marsy's Law to remain anonymous on the grounds that his shoulder had been grazed by the wire from a pulse monitor, making him victim of a "battery."
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If you visit Amazon's Prime Video homepage, you'll see that the title of that page is "Rent or Buy: Prime Video." There's a plain-language meaning of "buy" that most of us understand, but Amazon says we're wrong.
Amanda Caudel is a Prime user who brought suit against Amazon for embedding a gotcha clause in its sprawling terms of service that allows it to revoke the videos you "buy" from it, calling the practice deceptive.
Amazon's motion to dismiss is telling: they say that you're not buying a video, you're buying a license for "on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time." That is, a pig in a poke.
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Trumpism is an incompetent death cult. While the movement's incompetence (embodied by the inability of many of its worst monsters to keep their jobs long enough to enact their key policies) finally met its match with the pandemic, though.
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When the plague started, Trumpism's thought-leaders rushed to advise the elderly voters who constitute its base that they should engage in high-risk conduct: