Favorite For two years, Hannah Byrne was part of an invisible machine that determines what over 3 billion people around the world can say on the internet. From her perch within Meta’s Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history. Her work adhered…
Favorite When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy. While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and…
Favorite President-elect Donald Trump vows to start his second term with the immediate mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. Like everything else, deportations of the 21st century are an increasingly data-centric undertaking, tapping vast pools of personal information sold by a litany of companies. The Intercept asked more than three dozen companies in the…
Favorite The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats. Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried…
Favorite If Donald Trump wins on Tuesday, he will regain the keys to a global surveillance apparatus with few limits. Privacy advocates have warned since Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the government’s surveillance tools could be misused by presidents of any stripe. In the intervening decade, however, Congress has failed to rein in those…
Favorite Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI’s technology is “essential” for its mission. The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM’s rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from…
Favorite A former senior Israeli government official now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s…
Favorite Days after a leading crypto industry figure endorsed her, Vice President Kamala Harris gave cryptocurrencies a vague embrace this week — as part of a pitch to Black men. Along with a pledge to legalize weed, the policy document released by Harris’s campaign Monday made a bid for Black men’s votes with ambiguous wording…
Favorite Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, serves a primarily rural district anchored in Waco, a city of 150,000. It’s unclear why he is so interested in NSO Group, the infamous Israeli spyware firm that was blacklisted by the U.S. for its role in human rights abuses. Between February and July, though, Sessions and his team met…
Favorite Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader…
