John Scott-Railton Profile picture
Jun 20, 2023 14 tweets 11 min read Read on X
What's happening at the #Titanic site will likely be a tragedy.

@OceanGate's page on why they didn't seek certifications / classing for the Titan submersible & that design safety regulations are slow & constrain innovation... reads differently now.

oceangate.com/news-and-media… ImageImageImage
Imagine if a car manufacturer told you: this car isn't crash certified because it won't prevent people from driving the car badly. Image
"No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring...we want to know why"

Hubris from @OceanGate even as they dismiss the existing standards derived from many tragedies that came before. Image
There's a nuanced, necessary risk balancing whenever you push at edges.

Innovation is hard if you over-constrain yourself to old rules... but scrap them all & you should expect to experience some irreversible lessons.

Nowhere more so than in the sea's unforgiving depths.
Exploration & adventure have unavoidable risks.

This is fine.

But I sincerely hope that the souls on that submersible truly understood them, and that @OceanGate objectively explained them *without* being colored by the kind of rhetoric found on their website.
"if you are lost so are we"

Comms failed & the #OceanGate submersible was lost for several hours on an earlier #Titanic dive.
The dark irony of what is unfolding is not lost on maritime historians
Those familiar w/marine environments will find the consumer grade electronics beyond puzzling.

Salt water, condensation, humidity, etc. are kryptonite to electronics.

And exactly the kinds of things you'd find in a submersible diving into cold places. ImageImageImageImage
Thinking on @mercoglianos' point that the #Titanic is what got us the first convention on Safety of Life at Sea aka #SOLAS.

It continues to save uncountable lives.

101 years later & an outcome we can hope for is a fresh focus on safety regs for subsurface adventure tourism. ImageImageImageImage
While the game controller (CEO said they had spares) is something we can all understand...

I think it's important to think of it as a indicator of the overall risk management & minimum-viable-submersible philosophy that seems to have been at work all over.

Pics: ballast. Image
"#OceanGate offers you the the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ...[of] SAFELY diving to the Titanic wreckage site"

The breathless 2023 #Titanic dive promotional video puts safety in the first sentence.

UPDATE: an #OceanGate employee was allegedly fired for refusing to greenlight manned tests over safety concerns.

The details look quite ominous.

By @DanielStrauss4 h/t @ThatVDOVault
newrepublic.com/post/173802/mi… ImageImageImageImage
"the current 'experimental' approach... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry"

Unanimous letter of concern from @MTSociety to the #OceanGate CEO.

Via @nytimes
int.nyt.com/data/documentt… Image
Correction: these are drop weights.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with John Scott-Railton

John Scott-Railton Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jsrailton

Jul 1
2.6 million people have been shown this deepfake.

It cites an AI-written disinformation site.

Don't believe me? Well. operators of this fake French news site often forgot to delete the prompts.

Perhaps they don't speak French?

Site is filled with generated content prompted as conservative attacks against @EmmanuelMacron and other disinformation.

Site became active ~ a week before yesterday's #French elections & is now pumping out tons of false content.

Very instructive..

h/t @KyleJGlen (recommended follow!) for flagging!
(2nd screenshot = machine translated)Image
Image
Image
2/ Lesson: the raw falsehoods laundered up through coordinated disinformation that gets to a viral false thread can be incredibly sloppy. Image
3/ Glad to see the community note. But by now the obviously fake content has reached a modest degree of virality.


Image
Read 6 tweets
Jun 21
WHOA @USTreasury just sanctioned leadership at 🇷🇺Russian antivirus company @kaspersky.

Comes on heels of yesterday's @CommerceGov ban on sales of their antivirus to the US.

Huge-but-somewhat-anticipated blow to #Kaspersky whose fortunes in the US have been falling since the 2017 @DHSgov binding directive to remove their products from gov systems.

Will be fascinating to see if other governments echo some of these actions.

home.treasury.gov/news/press-rel…Image
2/ The case of @Kaspersky is a good teachable moment to talk about some painful truths about antivirus software.

1- Massive marketing has instilled the instinctive and INCORRECT belief that in regular users that antivirus products are the most important security step.

This is massively out of step with expert security recommendations. Source: a consistent finding in surveys of expert vs regular user security perceptions.

People continue to get soaked by AV companies selling products that don't provide nearly as much protection as they think.

Source: usenix.org/system/files/s…Image
3/. It's not just that Antivirus products don't provide users the kind of security they think they do...

Antivirus products themselves must have, by design, a ridiculously invasive view into what you are doing on your computer.

How else could they check every file for badness, right?

And for the company to keep detecting new things, lots of information about your files are going to be headed up into their systems when you run scans.

And the access to files doesn't end there.

You can learn a lot and, potentially, do a lot with the kind of access users have to grant an antivirus for it to work.

This is an under-appreciated privacy and security concern for anyone with an antivirus installed.

It is a big reason why the US, and every other government, is worried by the possibility that an antivirus vendor might be untrustworthy.
Read 6 tweets
May 28
Great. Just someone claiming to offer some #Pegasus spyware source code for sale.

True or scam, this reminds me of 2018, when an NSO employee stole code & did exactly that.

As I testified to Congress: the mercenary spyware industry continues to recklessly proliferate very sophisticated capabilities once limited to a handful of governments.

Given how many times the industry has gotten caught, I have a hard time believing that these companies can maintain enough control over all facets of their capabilities...

.... to prevent parts of their tech from inevitably leaking to criminals & other non-state actors, turbocharging cybercrime & disruptive ransomware attacks.Image
2/ Now for some grim good news in this case: even if the person is in fact offering some portion of Pegasus spyware source code, and not trying to scam people, they are not even claiming to have the working exploits used to infect phones.

Important distinction, since even if the spiciest & most-helpful-to-criminals aspects of NSO Group's codebase were leaked & incorporated into cyber criminal toolkits... criminals would still need to source the (expensive & complex) exploits required to actually infect phones. And then make them work reliably, etc etc.
3/ Here's the 2018 story of an employee stealing code.

By @josephfcox ft @RonDeibert & me.
vice.com/en/article/9km…



Image
Image
Image
Image
Read 4 tweets
May 20
Reading this? Your blood probably contains some amount of toxic forever chemicals made by @3m.

How much & is there enough to spike your risk of certain cancers & illnesses?

Without complex blood testing you have no idea.

Why is their toxin running in your veins? Well, the companies that made this stuff (3M & DuPont) kept their discoveries of the harms secret... even as their toxin was incorporated into...everything.

From french fry bags to chairs.

They even gaslit their own scientists.

And they regularly dumped & released their chemicals into the environments around their plants, creating toxic zones.

You should read this shocking profile of corporate greed and cynicism @fastlerner & @propublica.

propublica.org/article/3m-for…Image
Image
Image
Image
2/ Risks include Diabetes, obesity, testicular cancer, developmental delays...

Some researchers think that anyone exposed to these chemicals will have an elevated cancer risk.

At ANY concentration.

Since scientists estimate that we ALL have at least one of these forever chemicals in our blood...

That would be all of us.

If that framing for some reason doesn't bug you, consider the taxpayer costs.

The numbers are staggering.

$64 billion in estimated increased disease burden in a single year.

Meanwhile @3M is making $1.5 billion a year from making the stuff.

And 16,000 of @3M's products still contain the chemical.

While the company pledges to wind down manufacture. They haven't stopped.

To date, 3m has not admitted wrongdoing and faced no criminal liability.Image
Image
Image
Image
3/ We're all living in a nonconsensual lab experiment on the effect of forever chemicals on health.

Short of a rocket to mars, we're stuck in the cage. There is no control group.

Want to pull the thread? Good news: Dark Waters is on @netflix.

Oh, and its real-life lawyer hero is still fighting the good fight. You can follow him @RobertBilott👇
Read 5 tweets
May 9
I can confidently diagnose @betterhelp as sociopaths.

Promised therapy customers privacy...then gave their mental health info to advertisers.

Victims get less than ten bucks each.
wcnc.com/article/news/n…
Image
A billion+ dollars in revenue in 2023 alone.

Yet @betterhelp paid less than $8 million in fines for victimizing their *entire customer base* for 4+ years.

In a just society with comprehensive privacy legislation, they'd face existential civil & criminal consequences. Image
A single therapist that did this would lose their livelihood and probably wind up with local news camped in front of their office.

A company does it to 800,000 people and you can't even hear the wrist slap from the next room.
Read 7 tweets
May 2
BREAKING: Israeli private investigator arrested for cyberespionage on behalf of American PR firm.

Caught by UK under #RedNotice from 🇺🇸US while boarding a flight.

BIG TWIST in a wild case that began w/a @citizenlab investigation 1/🧵

By @samiotobin
reuters.com/world/israeli-…
Image
2/Israeli PI arrested at airport linked to hack for hire operation... Sound familiar?

Because Amit Forlit is the *second* Israeli PI arrested in this way for this case.

The first has already been convicted.

So, what's it about?
3/ There's a disgraceful ecosystem of public relations & lobbying firms that use hackers for hire.

Used in many businesses-on-business fights.

But.. also on behalf of businesses seeking to silence critics & advocacy groups

This is where our @citizenlab investigation began.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(