The codebreaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman was born on this day in 1892. I got curious about her 6 years ago, found one of the wildest true stories I'd ever heard, and wrote "The Woman Who Smashed Codes." 1/
During Elizebeth's life, she never received anything close to proper credit. Not for her scientific discoveries, not for her puzzle-solving feats in the world wars, not for wrecking a whole crew of Nazi spies… almost nothing. 2/
But a lot has changed in the last few years. Technologists, public officials, professors, students, storytellers & readers are connecting with Elizebeth, researching what she meant (and still means) to her field and her country. I wanted to highlight some of these efforts.
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1/ I wanted to share some @sfchronicle pieces I worked on this year about Covid in California prisons. This isn’t my beat (I don’t have one), but we thought the story was important & our sources taught us a lot. I’m proud of this work.
@sfchronicle 2/ The tl;dr of it: CA allowed its prisons to become virus incubators, leading to deaths of prisoners & staff and spreading cases statewide. Why? Mainly because the prisons are too crowded and the Newsom admin resisted calls by experts and judges to release people.
@sfchronicle 3/ Let’s go back to Jan 1. California’s 35 prisons were overcrowded, operating at 130% of design capacity, with 8 prisons at 140% or higher. About 40% of the total population — 46,000 people — lived in closely packed dormitories, with bunks spaced a few feet apart.
The Covid outbreak at San Quentin prison is bad — 91 prisoner cases, 30+ staff cases — and getting worse by the hour. We talked to prisoners and a corrections officer who tested positive and are none too happy. New story w/ @meganrcassidy: sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…
@meganrcassidy ICYMI: Our story on the worsening Covid outbreak at San Quentin prison — an outbreak sparked by the Newsom administration’s errors. Newsom’s office declined comment to us and steered Qs to the corrections dept. instead. sfchronicle.com/bayarea/articl…
Another explanation for the COVID-19 testing backlog in California — hospitals & clinics are using slower, bottlenecked testing pipelines instead of fast academic labs that have capacity to spare
This is quite a quote that @amymaxmen got from a UC Berkeley scientist who runs a testing lab: "I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare.” nature.com/articles/d4158…
@amymaxmen OMG this Berkeley guy. "The business of American medicine and the way it is organized is astonishingly unprepared for this… I show up in a magic ship, with 20,000 free kits… and the major hospitals say: ‘Go away, we cannot interface with you.’” nature.com/articles/d4158…
Delaware County, where I used to live, has 560,000 people and NO public health department of any kind because Republicans didn’t want one and didn’t think it was important. inquirer.com/health/coronav…
How can a county of half million people have no health department? That style of GOP government is very simply going to kill people. We have friends there. inquirer.com/health/coronav…
Republicans ruled the county for decades, basically forever. Democrats campaigned to form a health department and won a council majority in November, but you can’t create a department from scratch in a few months. inquirer.com/health/coronav…
A little FOIA story: Last October, when Trump was talking about “cities going to hell” in California, he made a strange comment that San Francisco was "in total violation” of some sort of waste rule and “we’re going to be giving them a notice very soon.”
Sure enough, on Oct. 2, one of Trump’s EPA appointees sent a notice of violation to a San Francisco official, claiming the city was improperly discharging wastewater and sewage. I filed a FOIA for all EPA docs and comms related to the violation. epa.gov/ca/city-and-co…
I got the FOIA response back today. EPA is withholding 86 (!) records in full. That’s a lot of withheld documents for what I thought was a narrow request!