Roel Schouwenberg

Intelligence, IO, Cyber, Privacy and Burgers

[CARO Workshop 2027 @caroworkshop]

The Call for Papers for the CARO Workshop 2027 (Brussels) is now halfway. Theme: Cybersecurity in the Evolving World of Personal Data and Agentic AI Challenges. We also accept other abstracts. Submit your paper and find the submission guidelines at https://t.co/RFElSKnPbo

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

History books were rewritten and replaced. An unequivocal yes is the only answer.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

The cancel culture debate is entering a new phase. The question now is whether its excesses were ever serious enough to matter. @RIKKISCHLOTT and I wrote The Canceling of the American Mind because memory is selective, but records are stubborn.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

“Hate speech laws would have stopped the Nazis.”

There’s just one problem. They already tried.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Centralized linguistics is here, and with it the end of free thought is near.
https://t.co/UJ0LfOK8Xu

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

"We have identified a coordinated operation to influence American lawmakers by five foreign NGOs and their US affiliates. These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy: use the rhetoric of ‘child safety’ to end digital anonymity."
https://t.co/7Qey6a0zGa

[Andrew McLuhan @amicusadastra]

happy ‘laws of media’ day to all who celebrate.

[Richard Nixon Foundation @nixonfoundation]

"Today we must oppose democratic socialism because it won't work. The trouble with the socialists is that they promise the golden egg and then kill the goose that lays it."

- RN, 1990

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Great to see a conversation on the import of the transformational shift from literary-educated censors to STEM-based ones. This is an under-explored area that has already had a profound impact. Classification of AI under cyber instead of information will accelerate this change.

[So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast @freespeechtalk]

Ep. 277: Ada Palmer on the history of censorship from the Renaissance to AI

Censorship is often associated with authoritarian governments. But throughout history, efforts to control ideas have taken many different forms — and they haven't always come from the state.

In this episode, @TheFIREorg's @NicoPerrino sits down with @UChicago's professor @Ada_Palmer to explore the history of censorship from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss what motivates censorship, why it evolves alongside new communication technologies, how effective it has been throughout history, and what historical patterns can teach us about today’s free speech debates.

Ada Palmer is a professor of early modern European history at the University of Chicago and the author of Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. She is also an acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author, composer, singer, and expert on anime and Japanese popular culture. Visit her website to read her blog and explore her other projects.

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:29 Palmer’s interest in censorship
03:13 Renaissance censorship
13:15 The Inquisition and Jansenism
22:50 The blurry line between state and private censorship
31:35 Fear and self-censorship
35:12 Does America hide its censorship efforts?
38:45 The case of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
43:50 Will AI change censorship?
53:36 Censorship will always be with us
01:06:47 Are you a free speech absolutist?
01:13:46 Outro

[The European Conservative @EuroConOfficial]

Germany Plans Secret Home Raids and Teenage Informants

A draft law would hand Germany’s domestic intelligence service sweeping new powers to hack computers, manipulate data and covertly enter private homes.
https://t.co/aBI1aZl3Jq

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

News of the Declaration of Independence reaches Boston after one week.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

The US constitution and BoR were the result of having a society shaped around the Gutenberg press. The new technological environment does not value freedom of speech or privacy in the same way.

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Americans were once members of a proudly literate society, but today, reading has declined across age groups, gender, and education levels. For The Atlantic’s August issue, @rosehorowitch explores the reading collapse—and its effects on civilization: https://t.co/AWuYlYRts1

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Bureaucracy, uh... finds a way.

[Nym @nym]

BREAKING
🇪🇺The EU Parliament voted against Chat Control.
314 to 276.

It passed anyway.

Democracy is when you need a supermajority to say no but a simple trick to say yes.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Yet another indicator that we have passed beyond the "surveillance economy" and have arrived in the alignment/adjudication/enforcement paradigm.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

If government officials don’t want to be compared to authoritarians, they should start by not sending government agents to the doors of their critics.

My latest in The Washington Post:

https://t.co/waMnI7OWeh

[Reclaim The Net @ReclaimTheNetHQ]

The EU Parliament rejected mass scanning of private messages in March.

Yesterday, it approved an urgent procedure to revive the measure, setting up a decisive vote on Thursday, the last sitting day before summer recess.

At second reading, the text passes automatically unless 361 MEPs vote against it, and some MEPs have already left for the Summer break...

https://t.co/JI7cIxIhu6

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

The indictment revealing Microsoft Windows GDID telemetry capability is your casual reminder that we are not in a surveillance economy. That was the previous paradigm. We have fully arrived in the adjudication/enforcement paradigm. Digital ID would solidify this shift.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the greatest project in human history many writings of the founders and framers come to mind.

The following Jefferson quote resonates particularly well:
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty & property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

Happy Independence Day!

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Literacy-rates are destiny. 18th century America was peak literacy and the constitution was the ultimate effect of the Gutenberg printing press. Our current literacy rates, or lack thereof, should be treated as a top tier strategic national security priority.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Disappointed to see this using the “conservative pounce” formulation.

I’m Gen X. All of us, including liberals like me, were there when we watched a nation filled with brilliant people put its best minds to making socialism work. It was an unparalleled disaster — not just economically, but environmentally, and certainly from a human rights perspective as well.

The fact that we now have people on both the right and the left who think Lenin was on to something, or that “real socialism has never been tried,” is mind-blowing. It represents a massive generational failure of our K–PhD system. They didn’t learn the history, philosophy, or economics that would have prevented them from falling for the same midwittery that too many of our grandparents fell for.

Sure, it sounds nice. Utopia always does. But it was a colossal disaster that we must not repeat.

So no, Axios. The news isn’t that the GOP is sounding the alarm. It’s that more genuine liberals aren’t.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Not even a decade ago "ID verification" was an absolute no-go in the EU. "We are not Russia or China," is what the career bureaucrats said back then.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

If you’re wondering why I’m so worried about identity and age verification in the UK and EU, start here.

These governments already have a known disregard for free speech. We have no reason to trust them with new tools to identify who is saying what online.

[Roel Schouwenberg @Schouw]

Changing unpopular policy is hard, blocking information is easy. It's a tragedy Western politicians can't come up with something more elegant than copying the approach of the tyrannical systems they were fighting a generation ago.

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

the purpose is not to remove young people from the internet. the purpose is to remove anonymity from the internet in a country where the government routinely punishes dissent with jail. the british caliphate is no longer free.

[Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers @UnderSecPD]

For the first time following a recent reorganization, the State Dept’s Public Diplomacy enterprise includes the office of Digital Freedom — focused on free speech, digital liberties, privacy, and protection from surveillance / malware / scams online.

If you follow me for coverage of these issues, please follow @State_DF below!