MattVadney

Reader, Writer, Teacher, Friend

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

"Trumpism is a betrayal of [what] we are meant to be celebrating...All the more reason to reject Trump and his intellectual lackeys, and to join with Lincoln in honoring the Declaration’s promise—our founding commitment to human equality and freedom."

https://t.co/rZKVY5uVwL

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Hi @NYTimesPR, thanks for responding. Appreciate it. I'm a subscriber and I think some of your reporters do some great reporting.
Just to respond to your response to my post:
1) There were no facts "misstated" by me. You cited three examples in response. Only one of them was about specific *named* GOP House members (and it wasn't from "yesterday", it was from a year ago.) So I stand by my post.
2) As others have pointed out already, none of the 3 articles you cited have the names of any GOP individuals in the titles ("Right-Wing Republicans" "a Kansas Republican" "G.O.P. Fingerprints"), in comparison to your original "Who is Darializa" takedown piece. Where is your "Who is Brandon Gill" or "Who is Keith Self" or "Who Is Randy Fine" or "Who Is Mary Miller" critical profile pieces? How about "Who is Tom Emmer," given the GOP House Majority Whip just a few days ago spewed racist crap about Somalis? And where are the Peter Baker tweets summarizing *their* most controversial claims?
3) This isn't a new criticism. Many have made it against your paper for many years; that you go harder on the left than the right, that you even occasionally whitewash the far right. Remember when you had to do a public response in 2017 to a NYT profile that went super soft on a... Nazi? https://t.co/IF6DhTwcrp. Remember when you guys did a softball piece about a far-right, Islamophobic Trump aide's love for cooking? https://t.co/dp0Sf9PQg9.
Oh, and dare I ask: where are the fawning 'Trump voters' in diners' equivalent pieces for DSA members in NYC bodegas? Isn't it time?
4) Finally, that your response to my post was to proudly say you guys at the Times have "been documenting the increasingly extreme viewpoints on both sides of the political spectrum" kinda makes my point for me. One side's extreme wants universal healthcare and an end to genocide. The other side's extreme says Somalis are "garbage" and wants "remigration", mass deportations and white supremacy.
But, hey, "Both sides!"

[Democrats @TheDemocrats]

The 14th Amendment is the law of the land.

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@ggreenwald @emilyjashinsky It could just be the shift in the type of people who identify as a Repubican, or not. The official members of the party tend to be more right-leaning that other Americans. So, I don't think the poll means very much.

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@RichLowry Wait....What did they concede? It appears the US is the only side conceding...

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@daveweigel I don't quite see the celebration of the nuclear family by conservatives as "against LGBT Pride". It's just about something else. You know...those LGBT people come from nuclear families...

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@USATODAY I find it annoying that people's rights are put up to a popularity poll. Who cares about this? Why should this opinion matters? People's rights to choose their partner have nothing to do with whether it's popular or not.

[Dan Savage @fakedansavage]

Homosexuality has a place in America — my place. Homosexuality can come and hang at my place anytime.

[Jake Justice @jakecobb]

They want you to forget. They don’t want you to see this.

Keep sharing this so we can’t forget what they did to us that day.

[Rebecca Aguilar (on Blue Sky & LinkedIn) @RebeccaAguilar]

Everyone COPY this video, share it far and wide. Paramount Skydance billionaire baby David Ellison can’t handle that Stephen Colbert is getting millions of views . @Youtube we will cancel our subscription as we did when we dumped @paramountplus.

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@danpfeiffer I'm a huge fan of yours. I love Pod Save America. I'm a Democrat. I could care less about this issue.

[Jake Justice @jakecobb]

Keep posting this so people don’t forget how truly bad this event was.

Don’t let people gaslight you into thinking it was peaceful and worthy of 1500+ pardons and slush fund payoffs.

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This is horrifying and every American needs to hear this

California resident exposes what’s really going on with Flock Cameras in America

“I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that with somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies, I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents and I know how it works.

Flock advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. But their own patents tell a different story.

They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle and person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queryable by a multitude of state and federal agencies. The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against a private company's servers. Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation, that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us. Flock did not reach that valuation on their per-camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up

The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. Flock CEO was asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie.

Public records revealed that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the US Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras.

Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. Flock integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform, with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors. These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They are connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure.

Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument, designed to reduce the political power of certain voters. And that's the ecosystem that our Corona cameras are feeding into.

We're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception, built by investors with a stated political agenda. We're asking the City Council to start auditing the queries made against Flock's database, to disclose any data sharing agreements, and to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract”

I looked more into this and he is 100% right

Patents describe broader object detection, including tracking people and pedestrians, patents like US11416545B1. The system uses a centralized cloud database for nationwide queries

Data goes to Flock’s private cloud, AWS-based, encrypted. Nationwide lookup is common, 75%+ of customers are enrolled enabling cross-jurisdictional searches. Residents have no direct public records access to the corporate servers.

This creates a mass surveillance network feeding a private company’s infrastructure

If you ask me this is laying the infrastructure for a mass surveillance network in America. We are being lied to. Cancel all contracts nationwide

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@DanielTurnerPTF A war of choice?

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@Acyn Comey should probably send him flowers for making his case so easily...

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Took a video of this cool shell formation on my beach walk.

If all of you repost it as many times as you can maybe some journalists will see it and do something about it

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@HQNewsNow So....we pay those medicare taxes all our adult lives, and then we will be subject to a work requirement...when many no longer can work???? If we paid for it, we should get it. What an a*.

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@aviralbhat $170k is quite a lot after taxes, rent, groceries, and travel. It's much more than what I make in a year. No sympathy from me.

[Evan Doji @evan_doji]

@ginamilan_ That question doesn't say what you are stating. Here is the actual approval question you left out.

[MattVadney @MHVadney]

@atrupar The Senator needs to read about world events in 1989.