Afternoon Tea 1.11.21 - Technical Difficulties

You forget digital panopticon exists when it's not used on you.

January 11, 2021

If you work in technology for any length of time, you learn the difference between posers and pros. Pros get paid well to do their job well. Posers get paid less well to feign doing their job just as well. If you don’t know the difference, it’s hard to spot, until the shit hits the fan. Parler looks to have been staffed by mostly posers. A few other things happened, but this hack & the Capitol sacking fallout will be most of this newsletter. It’s Monday, January 11th 2021, and this is the Tea.

Before this hack, Parler might have just been a honeypot funded by the Mercers, but after Twilio dropped Parler, its press release kinda sorta accidentally exposed the security authentication stack to…anyone savvy. This resulted in most comprehensive hacks and access events in the history of social networks. Seriously, the entire network was downloaded, because of how poorly structured Parler was as a website and a company. The “deleted content not being deleted” is just one perfect example of an admin decision that made the hack much, much worse. Also this:

For anyone who doesn’t speak “digital camera,” Facebook, Twitter, and every other social network coded by adults delete the EXIF data by default from your photos when you post them. EXIF data is extra info saved to a digital photo, like location, aperture, device, even the Fstop. In other words, FB keeps your ex from being able to find your location and phone that took the picture by analyzing your photos. Parler did not, and now, hackers have…all of Parler.

And this is in addition to the dozens of people who have been identified using the footage already available from the digital panopticon in & around the Capitol. Is a salvo of those stories incoming? You betcha!

Surprise, Surprise: Off-Duty Cops From All Over the Country Were in DC During Capitol Coup Attempt (Yahoo!) Boise man who stormed US Capitol building: ‘I got caught up in the moment’ (Idaho News) FBI arrests Nashville zip-tie suspect from assault on US Capitol (NewsCh5 Nashville) & Army investigating officer who led group to Washington rally (AP) What Just Happened (Patrick Wyman) Zip tie guy was ID’d & arrested, so was Podium guy, along with anyone who stood out on video. We need to remember, this wasn’t a fringe event staffed with crisis actors to strike at the heart of America by ISISorosRussians. This mob was made up of cops, firefighters, veterans, small business owners, yogis, shamans, and Americans who worked every other job in the wildly outdated Richard Scarry book.

Capitol Riot Prompts Some Big Banks and Companies to Pause Political Funding (Wall Street Journal) You know you fucked up when Citibank and JP Morgan pull funding.

We Freaking Warned You (MischiefsOffAction) This historian gives everyone who supported Trump and ignored historians the absolute business.

We warned you that his baseless and cruel attacks on reporters threatened the freedom of the press. We warned you that he was seeking to undermine the independence of the judiciary. We warned you that his racist nationalistic attacks challenged American traditions of citizenship.

We warned you that he was dangerous and that his presence made policymaking and governing harder. We warned you that his use of Twitter was death to policymaking and productive politics. We warned you that he was functionally a toddler.

Bill Moyers & Heather Cox Richardson: The Day the Confederate Flag Flew in the United States Capitol (Moyers on Democracy) Two of the seminal historians and commentators of our age discuss the events of last week. Not the biggest fan of podcasts (hey, want to go ride bikes?!), but this should be logged for posterity in the coming era.

‘It Was No Accident’ Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal on surviving the siege (The Cut) A lot of commentary ignored the disabled, elderly, and vulnerable staffers, members of congress, and Capitol employees. Many were forced to lock their doors or hide because they couldn’t evacuate in time. What, do you think they were going to high-five AOC if they found her? The more we learn, the worse it gets.

The narrative of a member of the House live-blogging Nancy Pelosi’s location is a perfect example showing that, it doesn’t matter if it was malicious or not. Bad Opsec gets people hurt, as everyone on Parler has found out. Leftists are accusing Lauren Boebert (Editor’s note: semi-gross, biased site, ad block recommended) recently elected VisiGOPth QAnon adherent Lauren Boebert of coordinating with the insurrectionists. Whether it was on purpose or not, just following her made the sacking worse.

The Inaction of Capitol Police Was by Design (The Atlantic) This paragraph from Professor Kellie Carter Jackson at Wellesley College has stuck in my mind:

It is not a coincidence that on the same day of the riot, the first Black and Jewish Americans were elected to Senate seats in Georgia. Wednesday’s violence claims no legitimate grievances. It is merely the perpetual retaliation to racial progress, as evidenced by the insurrectionists’ parading of Trump flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, and neo-Nazi symbols. This was not an uprising against a tyrannical government; it was an uprising against a multicultural government. And the police reaction—calm, measured, tolerant—to that uprising suggests that when it comes to engaging in violence against the state, white perpetrators have nothing to lose.

Inside India’s booming dark data economy (RestOfWorld) Big Tech might have set the tempo for the data privacy tango the world is engaged in, but don’t worry, other countries are improvising quickly.

Platforms Must Pay for Their Role in the Insurrection (WIRED) Given how the next insurrection event is currently being planned in private groups and DM lists on FB & Twitter, calls for this are only going to get louder. To the point where I agree with Scott Galloway’s prediction that Amazon will prophylactically spin AWS to stay out of the anti-trust crosshairs.

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea Tests Positive for COVID-19 (Gothamist) Given the NYPD’s insanely strict adherence to masking and social distancing, this must come as a gigantic surprise to everyone involved.

As a palate cleanser, here’s Arnold being dare I say presidential for almost eight minutes straight. Oh, and there’s a prop you might recognize….

Song of the Tea: The drum and bass Mandalorian remix you didn’t know you needed. The kids love their laser arpeggios, and we are all better for it.

I can’t wait for Infrastructure Week.

Yours,T