This is the fourth week in a row that @allthecitizens newsletter has majored in herd immunity.
This week the realisation of what the govt is doing finally broke through. And yet there's no way to stop it. Despite the collective horror of the international scientific community.
What we are seeing tomorrow is not Freedom Day. It's #UnFreedomDay. It's a day on which the powers of unreason & untruth will triumph. A triumph that will kill people you know. And leave 10s of 10000s with a debilitating, long-term condition.
It's what happens when a government has a reckless disregard for truth, facts, expertise. When it rides roughshod over norms & institutions. When there is no way of holding it to account.
This is not a separate problem from the 152k dead. It *is* the problem.
We've worked with @dgurdasani for 2 months to investigate the spread of the Delta variant in schools & the govt's cover-up.
A herd immunity by mass infection strategy in all but name.
This week, we literally staged an intervention. Britain, the addict destroying not only its own health, but that of everyone around the world. We brought together an amazing panel of international scientists who told us our govt's strategy is 'murderous'
It made headlines in Britain & around the world. The world is watching us with horror. But what now?
Even Prof Whitty says it's 'scary'. Scarier still when people who should speak up, don't.
We are entering the unknown. We're doing what we can. It's not enough. But if you're able to support our work, we can & will do more 🙏 crowdfunder.co.uk/the-citizens
NEW: My piece for the Observer on how I was so deep into my investigation into Cambridge Analytica that I failed to realise that Hannah - my ex's daughter - was facing a human version of it: a stalker who was harvesting her data and weaponising it against her. 1/ theguardian.com/world/2025/mar…
I write about how I finally realised the scale of what was happening to Hannah, how comprehensively the police had failed her & how another woman, from the same class as her at the same school had also had a stalker, Alice Ruggles. Her stalker had murdered her. 2/
Hannah had 9 different characters harassing her, including 'Premium Escorts' purporting to sell her services & folders of evidence. I was overwhelmed by my own trials but I landed on the idea of emailing Georgia Catt, the brilliant producer of a podcast series I'd loved, The Missing Cryptoqueen
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Last week, the new owners of the Observer wrote to tell me they would *not* be issuing me with a new contract.
So...I want to say publicly that it was an absolute privilege to speak on behalf of my Observer colleagues during our strike. I don't regret doing so. And I learned so much from it.
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It means my 20 years at the Guardian & Observer is drawing to a close 😢. For most of that time, it's been the journalistic job of my dreams. I worked with the best editors, photographers & designers & got to do stories that wouldn't have been possible anywhere else. I know how lucky I've been.
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And I'm lucky too, in a way, that this is happening as the world convulses. My beat has been trying to understand the information revolution, it's the crisis beneath the crisis...& now I'm throwing myself into its swirling eddies just as the wave hits the shore.
This is what should be on every front page right now. What's happening in the US right now is an illegal power grab by a private citizen.
IT'S A COUP.
It's a digital coup. It's Musk who's leading it. The consequences are terrifying. And it's coming for us next. 1/
Please read this. I'm far from alone in saying it. The great
@TimothyDSnyder, @RBReich, @ruthbenghiat have all been shouting it.
There's superb reporting happening into every aspect of what's happening. But there's no framing. It's all facts, no story. broligarchy.substack.com/p/it-is-a-coup
This is a digital coup. A data coup. What Musk's cyber troops - mercenaries - have done is take control of the federal government's operating systems. They've downloaded or scraped vast quantities of data. It's a hack on an unprecedented scale. 3/
Britain: we have to understand wtf we’ve done. We’ve allowed one of Trump’s closest allies have access to our entire NHS data systems. This is the CEO of Palantir telling shareholders that ‘when it’s necessary to scare enemies & on occasion kill them’
There is much more I want to say on this but if you’re in the US right now, you need to understand that Silicon Valley is your creepy ex boyfriend. Who’s now conspiring with Donald Trump. They have your data & it can & will be weaponized against you.
Understand: the first use case of all technology is always against woman. A predator(s) used technology to surveille, harass & intimidate Hannah. And this is now what’s coming for journalists, activists, civil servants, lawyers & many more in the USA now.
The technology we use in every day life is powered by what @shoshanazuboff christened ‘surveillance capitalism’. But now we are heading into‘surveillance authoritarianism’. We are already in a coercively controlling relationship with these platforms
NEW: Hannah is my ex-step daughter. And when I was in middle of my Cambridge Analytica investigation, she had a stalker. Stalkers. A whole cast of characters making her life hell. In 2021, I approached the BBC: could we try & nail the perpetrator(s)? 1/
This was Han during those years. You would never know how much she was hiding from the world. Every day brought a new wave of abuse & threats that she dealt with alone. She finally opened up & told me the whole story in the dark winter lockdown of 2021. 2/
It was wildly confusing. But it was also clear where this could end. A young woman from Hannah’s school, with whom she shared a group of friends, was murdered by her stalker. And there was a common thread: the police hadn’t taken the action required 3/