After the Jan 6 insurrection, there were tons of demoralizing stories about how much pro-insurrection lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley were raising in small-dollar donations, suggesting a vast base supporting authoritarian overthrow of the US government.
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But it turns out that those numbers were hugely and deliberately distorted by Taylor Greene and Hawley, as @propublica reveals in a new reporting from @derekwillis and @iarnsdorf.
The report analyzes campaign finance disclosures from the pair and learns that they spent vast sums - $600,000 in total - renting out mailing lists from sleazy GOP operatives whose business is compiling databases of suckers who give whenever they're asked.
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The cost of those donations is high even by GOP standards, where half the money donors cough up can be skimmed off by "consultants," and it echoes the tactics used by Trump to artificially goose his own fundraising figures through straight-up fraud:
The lists in this case come from one of the GOP's leading sleazemongers, Bryan G Rudnick (though his company LGM Consulting Group), who attained notoriety by spamming Jewish voters in 2008 with warnings that an Obama victory would lead to another Holocaust.
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Spending a lot of money to raise a little money sounds like a losing proposition, but only if you discount the value that comes from fronting the appearance of popularity and support that comes from grossing a fortune in small-dollar donations (nevermind the net).
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Hawley and Taylor Greene's fundraisers were political theater, and they worked, sending progressives into a panic at the thought of a vast groundswell of support for insurrection, and reassuring conservatives who worried that the pair were too extreme to garner support.
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It was a canny - but ultimately easily discovered - ruse.
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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The wildest forensic stories are the ones where you pull at a loose thread and discover that you've got hold of a the tip of the tentacle of some kind of cthulhoid monster from the depths of hell. That's the story of #Eliminalia, global fraudsters for hire.
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The story starts with Qurium, a secure hosting provider that focuses on at-risk civil society groups, the kinds of people who piss off dictators with their own snatch-squads they can use against their enemies.
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Two of Qurium's clients are @makaangola and @theelephantinfo, who had done extensive reporting on corruption in Angola related to Isabel dos Santos ("Africa's richest woman") and Vincent Miclet ("the Gatsby of Africa").
Inside: The awesome destructive power of billionaires; Banks made bank on covid overdrafts; Moxie hacks Cellebrite; Fighting FLoC compatible with fighting monopoly; EFF sues Proctorio; and more!
Faced with remote learning, educators had to figure out what to do about high-stakes testing: a pedagogically bankrupt adversarial practice of measuring students' educational outcomes by testing their performance in a circumstance that they will never face in the real world.
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It was an opportunity to rethink assessment and education. Instead, it was reinvented with the help of #DisciplinaryTechnology grifters from the "remote invigilation" industry, who peddled spyware that claimed to be able to fight cheating by taking over students' computers.
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In a crowded field of awful companies, one stands out as the worst: @proctorio, which uses digital phrenology to monitor students' faces while they take tests, setting them up for punishment for looking away while thinking, going to the bathroom, or throwing up from anxiety.
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Google has announced a step to kill the third-party cookie, a source of enormous and pernicious privacy violations. This would be great news, except for the fact that Google is replacing it with #FLoC, a way for Google (and Google alone) to track you around the web.
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Predictably, privacy advocates are pissed off about this and crying foul, because Google's FLoC, while billed as a privacy-preserving technology, is just another way to violate your privacy.
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Likewise predictably, the ad-tech industry is in a fury about this, claiming (correctly) that it is wildly anti-competitive.
Taken together, these two criticisms can make it seem like you can't be both pro-competition and pro-privacy, but that's not true.
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The "lawful interception" industry is a hive of scum and villainy: these are powerful, wildly profitable companies who search out defects in widely used software, then weaponize them and sell them to the world's most brutal dictators and death squads.
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Their names are curses: The NSO Group, Palantir, and, of course, Cellebrite, who have pulled publicity stunts like offering $1m bounties for exploitable Iphone defects that can be turned into cyberweapons.
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Late last year, Cellebrite announced that they'd added "support" for @signalapp to their top-selling cyberweapons, UFED and Physical Analyzer. The announcement was deliberately misleading, claiming to have "cracked the encryption" (they haven't and can't do this).
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