Byron Tau
@ByronTau
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reporter at @notusreports . author of 'means of control,' a book on government surveillance 🕵️♂️ and big data 🧑💻. buy:
washington, d.c.
Joined September 2008
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It's publication day for Means of Control.
Here it is at every stage. From left to right: June 2021 book proposal, Jan 2022 outline and reporting plan, October 2022 first draft, Fall 2023 galley and then the finished book. On shelves today!
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France's national railway SNCF tried to help California build its high speed rail project but ended up quitting, saying "they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."
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It brings me great pleasure to have removed this sign from my window.
Welcome home, Evan.
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NEW: Border communities in Texas have purchased a technology that tracks people through their Bluetooth and WiFi signals. It can track you through your wireless earbuds. The product is called Trafficatch & it's integrated into license plate reader systems
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Twitter in 2017 appears to have assisted in keeping a U.S. backed online psychological operations campaign on the platform running at the U.S. military's request — a U.S. version of state-sponsored online inauthentic behavior denounced widely after 2016.
4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others.
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The entire continental railroad was built in less time than it took to just do the environmental impact statement for expanding an existing railroad station.
The process begun in 2015 and nearly 9 years later, we have final EIS so that we can take the next steps. You can read the executive summary of the Record of Decision released by federal DOT and Federal Railroad Administration here:
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Refreshing to see CNN covering Supreme Court deliberations citing to anonymous sources — and I mean this sincerely. It is one of three branches of government that should be covered as aggressively as any other part of our government.
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No reporter thoroughly dominated this beat like Kate. WSJ's loss is Bloomberg's gain — but more importantly, the public will continue to benefit from her sharp reporting on an issue of growing global importance.
***Today is my first day at Bloomberg, where I will continue investigating U.S.-China tech and national security issues!***
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In a report quietly released on Friday, the U.S. intelligence community acknowledged that the breadth and depth of data available for sale on the global population had begun to provide insights on par with more intrusive surveillance techniques.
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NEW with
@patiencehaggin
: a Midwest nonprofit was "geofencing" abortion clinics and extracting the unique IDs of devices that appeared there to serve them antiabortion messaging. It's a real-life example of what privacy activists warned about after Dobbs.
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TikTok accessed data on two US journalists. All reporters—not just those covering national security—need to understand the risks of letting *any* company have access to their data in order to best protect sources from retaliation, job loss and lawsuits.
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Henry Cuellar's sister, Rosie, had a job as a judge where she has heard no cases in a town with no court and no police department.
And their brother Martin, a Texas sheriff, was named in a federal subpoena in an investigation into cleaning contracts.
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Hello! After nearly 9 years and four different beats, I'm leaving the WSJ for the new
@AJI_Fellowships
where I'll keep doing much of what I've been doing: law, courts, national security, etc. Sad to leave the Journal but I'm excited for this next chapter!
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@jbrowder1
@donotpay
You know many (most?) courts have flat bans on electronics and/or recording, right?
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Modern Roombas now have cameras and iRobot is sharing those images with human contractors, who are doing object recognition scudwork. Those contractors are watching and sharing those images on social media, including this one of a woman on the toilet.
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Every American should be outraged by the unjustified detention of WSJ reporter and U.S. citizen Evan Gershkovich. First and foremost, he was in Russian to bring readers the truth about what's happening there.
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Trump's media company hired a Macedonian chief technology officer on a hard-to-obtain foreign worker visa after U.S. Rep. Don Bacon intervened. The person was an attractive hire because "American candidates for the same work were more expensive."
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I'm proud to announce the return of NEWSROOM DINNERS. I took 2020 off because 1.) I wasn't really covering politics and 2.) it was a weird cycle where a lot of stuff happened from home.
So without further ado...
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Hello world, I have a fresh new investigation in
@NOTUSreports
about the billions in taxpayer money set aside for small businesses that are going to the nation's biggest tech companies. I've been working on it for a while and I hope you enjoy it.
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Facebook has a secret program that exempts VIPS from some content moderation rules and misled its self-created quasi-judicial Oversight Board about the program.
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A rare CAN-SPAM Act enforcement action from the Justice Department and FTC against the data broker Experian, who will be enjoined from sending additional emails and pay a $650K civil penalty.
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Trump's legal bills are being paid by his political operation. But for many of his staunchest supporters, they've resorted to selling off property and pleading for money on the internet to pay their mounting expenses. W/
@benmause
and
@MaggieSeverns
.
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Nightmare for any author or journalist: Romance novelist locked out of her own novels-in-progress on Google Docs because Google decided the content was "inappropriate."
As they say, the cloud is just someone else's computer.
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The governor of Nebraska Jim Pillen, responding to a critical story about his family farms environmental impact, says about the Guangzhou-born journalist that wrote the story: "The author is from communist China. What more do you need to know?”
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Thanks to
@TheRickWilson
for having me on to discuss Means of Control!
NEW
#EnemieList
: Is there an alliance between tech companies and government agencies? Get ready -
@TheRickWilson
and author of book "Means of Control"
@ByronTau
of
@notusreports
discuss the birth of a new American surveillance state.
#data
#privacy
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Proud to announce my book "Means of Control" will be on sale 2.27.2024. It explores the growing phenomenon of governments buying bulk corporate data for surveillance — and growing threat this poses to our civil liberties and privacy. Pre-order here!
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No publication would allow a subject to pick and choose the reporter assigned to cover them or let their refusal to comment stop them from doing a story. This is journalism 101: a polite anodyne request for comment that tells the source they're doing the story no matter what.
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@WaltHickey
Coincidentally today I was reading "Industrial Society and Its Future" and noticed it had surprisingly good reviews on Goodreads and Audible.
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If only WAMU was owned by a public-spirited, tax exemption institution with deep ties to Washington D.C. and experienced staff with knowledge of archiving and preserving knowledge for the long-term.
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Ben is a great reporter and the kind of person you want in your newsroom. In 2017, after WSJ editors shrugged off the possibility of violence in Charlottesville, he took it upon himself to go there on his own and in doing so made sure the paper had someone on the ground.
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Per
@HelicoptersofDC
, which tracks government helicopters over the capital, Twitter suspended him for linking , a place to find unfiltered flight data.
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Journalist arrested for publishing an illegally-recorded audiotape that a source provided to him. He was charged with felony wiretapping, despite clear Supreme Court precedent that the media may broadcast illegally recorded material. (h/t
@adamsteinbaugh
)
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Just got the proofs for my book! After years of working on it in Scrivener, Word, and PDF, it's a somewhat surreal experience to finally hold it in my hands. March 5, 2024 feels like it's far off, but if you're interested, you can now preorder it here:
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It's the most wonderful time of the year — when this account springs back to life and tweets the events of the 1996 summer blockbuster "Independence Day" in real time.
BREAKING NEWS!!!!
A source inside the White House says that NORAD has confirmed that the unidentified object passing by the moon is indeed a spacecraft NOT FROM THIS PLANET.
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This case involving Twitter is a good look at how all modern governments collect information from digital platforms. It's not always showing up with a warrant. It's often inserting or cultivating an engineer as a source/informant and having them secretly access user data.
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The case for reporters using bicycles is that they are faster than any other method of transportation in downtown Washington D.C. And if they're e-bikes, you won't show up a sweaty mess.
Things I can tweet now: A few weeks ago we got nervous that the grand jury was working later than normal.
@ryanjreilly
made it from his desk to inside the courthouse in under 7 minutes. It was a herculean feat. I just need the world to know it happened.
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The Gaza strip is the size of the city limits of Philadelphia. It should be no more shocking that a photojournalist could arrive quickly at a unfolding news event somewhere in Gaza than for a big city paper to get a photographer to the site of a protest or civil unrest fast.
The executive director of the website that accused Palestinian photojournalists of knowing about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel in advance says it had no evidence to support that claim
The report led Israeli politicians to suggest the journalists be killed.
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I agree with a lot of this but I do think journalists are missing how their roles have evolved. We once were the gateway for presidents and other newsmakers to get their message in front the mass audience. That's no longer true.
There are serious conversations about the future of news media - whose stories are told, who is telling the stories, who benefits, what does objectivity mean, etc
If you want to believe content creators are equivalent to journalists, they should be subject to that same scrutiny!
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Top NIH official told colleagues: "I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly ... Don’t worry ... I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”
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WSJ interviewed dozens of Republicans and Democrats over months for a piece on Biden's mental acumen that stands up pretty darn well after the debate and yet for the sin of putting GOP sources on the record, the story still maligned as a partisan hit.
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Powerful
@WSJ
front page today — a reminder that American reporter
@evangershkovich
has been unjustly detained by Putin's Russia for a full year and the world has been denied his incisive and in-depth reporting.
#FreeEvan
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I spent 2 years in a "foxhole" with Kristina — our nickname for the tiny little bullpen in the Capitol where the WSJ Hill reporters sat — and I can confidently say any newsroom would be lucky to have a pro like her. She is versatile, whip smart, hard working and incredibly kind
My last two stories at WSJ ran today: one on Trump/House Republicans and one on milk. Pretty much sums up the last 14.5 years! It was a privilege to work with such talented -- and kind -- colleagues in DC, Chicago and NY.
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Good for
@SilvermanJacob
, who with the help of
@rcfp
intervened in a California lawsuit involving Twitter/X and forced disclosure of X's shareholders on a public docket. X had been trying to keep them sealed.
Journalists: Do👏More👏Legal👏Motions👏!
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Man killed on Capitol Hill was an Afghan interpreter for the U.S. military. He moved to D.C. after being robbed at gunpoint in Philly and was killed by D.C. teens who thought he was reaching for a gun while they carjacked him.
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Caesars legions built a bridge across the Rhine in 10 days, but it will take the D.C. government until 2025 to paint some lines and put up some plastic bollards on Connecticut Ave for a new bike lane
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If you ask me, this is a bit incoherent and maybe legislatures should fix it.
SCOTUS said in Carpenter that you do have a privacy interest in your historic cell site location records...
... yet they're also treated as ordinary third-party business records in some contexts.
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Most importantly in a paragraph that is still marked "secret," the government acknowledged that it buys location data sets that include vast quantities of information on Americans and that it can break the anonymization baked into such data sets.
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@LoganDobson
I have actually legitimately chosen the 9 hour train ride over the hell that is taking a flight in America numerous times.
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You can read all of Evan Gershkovich's reporting at the WSJ for free, no paywall. There's no better way to honor a reporter unjustly detained for doing the basic work of journalism than that.
#IStandWithEvan
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Along with some colleagues, I tracked a network of advertising firms, apps and data brokers that were providing data on as many as a billion devices worldwide to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. It's a strange tale. Follow me down the rabbit hole:
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"Denny Walsh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who was a consummate nuisance to mobsters, corrupt politicians and his editors — especially at The New York Times, which fired him — died on March 29."
Amazing obit.
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@esaagar
None of this is inherently duplicitous. They may have intended to do a positive profile and continued reporting around him when he declined to participate and unearthed the allegations during that reporting.
Contacting someone's family and high school friends is de rigueur for a
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Gonna throw this out there: maybe there's no conspiracy or attempt to put a thumb on the scale one way or another — just media outlets making difficult borderline calls in the pressure cooker of a 24/7 news cycle.
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@patiencehaggin
An ad tech company called Near had told regulators in 2022 that their platform couldn't be used to extract health information. At the same time, a client was doing exactly that: extracting devices it saw at Planned Parenthoods and other abortion providers.
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@mattyglesias
Because in a misguided fit of urban renewal, cities largely tore down their public markets but it was a good idea all along and so they've been
#rebranded
.
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@MattZeitlin
I once did Boston to Toronto (550 miles) in a snowstorm to help someone move and then immediately the same day headed for D.C. (475 miles) because I didn't want to miss a NYE party.
Didn't make it — got too tired and stopped somewhere in rural PA to sleep.
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Good thread about how Mike Roman's lawyer got cell geolocation records from AT&T.
TLDR is that a 2018 SCOTUS case requires *the government* to get a warrant (rather than a subpoena) for such records but private plaintiffs can get cell phone geolocation records under subpoena.
How in the world did Trump’s defense attorneys obtain the phone records of prosecutor Nathan Wade?
Don’t they need a court-authorized warrant for that?
Did the divorce lawyer for Wade’s estranged wife have anything to do with this?
You’ve got questions, I’ve got answers.🧵
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Biden campaign is reportedly trying to stop people attending their rallies from saying negative things about Biden to the New York Times.
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NYT (NYC): "Mexican-ish"
WSJ (DC): Nooshi
Washington Post: I'm told "Tiger Folk" but I'm seeking confirmation from a second source.
CNN (DC): "Thai"
Bloomberg (DC): BBQ
NBC: "Thai"
Politico: Roots Natural Kitchen make-your-own bowl
Roll Call: Nothing
Send me what you're eating!
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Congrats to
@ryanjreilly
, whose book comes out tomorrow!
And check out this colorful excerpt in Politico while you anxious wait for the hard copy.
“The number of dicks I’ve had to see in the name of preserving our democracy, someone should give me a goddamn medal.”
🍆 🍆 🍆
New SEDITION HUNTERS except, in Politico Magazine:
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"The best practice for the press is to report what it knows. Often, media critics of limited imagination condemn the press for not reporting what they believe it should assume."
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"Means of Control" is pup-approved and available for pre-order anywhere books are sold!
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Wildest part of today's declassified FISC documents is that for four years, the FBI was routinely running the names of those who appeared in police homicide reports through its foreign intelligence database — including victims, witnesses and next of kin.
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I once overslept and was on the precipice of missing a White House event. On a bike I made it from Georgia Avenue to the White House in 11 minutes. Can't do that in an Uber. I plead the 5th on my compliance with traffic laws.
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For context, CTD = commercial telemetry data, a term that some government agencies use to refer to location information from phones or cars that is purchasable.
The report is here:
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Disable app microphone permissions, kids. Disable all app permissions, in fact.
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I have something nice to say about a federal agency. CBP released a final production today in a FOIA request that I submitted 8 days ago with minimal and eminently reasonable redactions. 👏👏👏
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An excerpt of Means of Control is out in Wired today!
How the Pentagon came to use targeted ads to find its targets — a tale of how advertising became a form of government surveillance.
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The story in question about Pillen's pig farms is available here and seems eminently fair, well-reported and in the public interest.
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CBP belated issues a privacy impact assessment for its nearly 5 year long "pilot" program where it bought access to the movement of tens if not hundreds of millions of people's cell phone records from commercial brokers. A few observations & thoughts /🧵
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A few days late to this, but the UK government is proposing making selling or possessing a "bespoke" encrypted phone a crime in and of itself in some cases. Several such phone vendors have been shut down by authorities.
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E-bikes solve many of the problems inherent in cycling-as-transportation in a hot city like D.C. I can bike to work in a 95 degree day in a full suit and not sweat. It's also far faster than a car or transit for most short trips. And you can throw them on the Metro if its raining
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In this case a magazine assigned a reporter to write about a major cultural institution and one person involved in that story decided she didn't want to be written about. No publication is obligated to drop a story because someone is upset over being written about. C'est a vie.
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"Western news agencies that posted reporters to Moscow under Stalin have determined that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is too dangerous for journalism."
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@bungarsargon
In fairness, that line came in the context of remarks about places that employ reporters. I don't believe her to be saying that nobody listens to radio. Only that the last place in radio that still employs reporters (as opposed to commentators) is NPR, which is basically true.
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Be sure to read this heartbreaking story on on the parents of unjustly detained WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been in Russian custody since March 29th for the crime of doing journalism.
#IStandWithEvan
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My commute by car or public transit is between 45 minutes and an hour, depending on time of day. 30 minutes flat on an e-bike. I'm not joking when I say that riding my bike to work is my favorite part of the day. Takes me around the Capitol, down the Mall and along the Potomac.
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D.C. residents will soon be able to get major discounts on e-bikes: up to $2,000 for low income residents & $750 for everyone else. If you've been thinking about buying one, I cannot recommend it highly enough as a means of urban transportation.
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NEW: California's new privacy regulator, the California Privacy Protection Agency, it is embarking on its first-ever enforcement action: a review of the privacy practices of connected automobiles which have essentially become "computers on wheels"
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Disturbing
@mckaycoppins
piece about what happens when a vortex of true-crime podcasters, internet sleuths and news media outlets descend on a small town, in this case the University of Idaho campus in the aftermath of a quadruple homicide.
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Our colleague, Evan Gershkovich, remains unjustly detained by the Russian government for the crime of fearless, independent reporting in the best tradition of the
@WSJ
— and should be freed immediately.
🧵 Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained in Russia on March 29 during a reporting trip and remains in prison. We’re offering resources for those who want to show their support for him.
#IStandWithEvan
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Or this one about defiant, ordinary Russians spontaneously laying flowers in honor of the Ukrainian victims of their own country's airstrikes in the heart of Moscow.
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Insane story about how a woman, through an AirTag on her missing luggage, watched as a vendor for United took her luggage all over the DC area. She visited the apartment complex where her bag was pinging from and found discarded suitcases.
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Very excited for
@josephfcox
"Dark Wire" which tells the tale of how the FBI secretly ran an encrypted phone service called Anom. And if you preorder now, you will get a digital booklet of behind-the-scenes reporting.
Check it out!
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So excited to read the fruits of
@ryanjreilly
's masterful coverage of the aftermath of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol in book form. Congratulations! And of course, you can get your own copy of "Sedition Hunters" here or wherever books are sold:
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More from the NYT on the arrest of an Alabama reporter and editor for writing about a grand jury subpoena in an active investigation.
Publishing details about grand jury subpoenas is extremely common in journalism and is protected by the First Amendment.
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@jbrowder1
@bitcoinbella_
Have you ever been in a federal court? Or a federal building for that matter? There is are airline-line security checkpoints for people and belongings and almost every court bans electronics, including phones.
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It's the time of year when we have to re-up these
@jbarro
classics
1.)
2.)
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Bryant Gumbel says he's ending Real Sports in part because it's hard to find skilled reporters. “Finding people who can do long-form journalism is almost extinct because young people coming into the business don’t have a chance to do long-form journalism."
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An old journalism adage: Always get the name of the tunnel boring machine.
"All Boring had to do was bring its machine and start digging, former Maryland officials said. But months, and then years, passed. Maryland was waiting for Godot."
Great look by
@thetrough
@bykowicz
at Boring Company's pattern of ghosting:
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Thank you to
@lawfare
and
@jacklgoldsmith
for having me on the Lawfare podcast!
On today's Lawfare Podcast,
@jacklgoldsmith
talked to
@ByronTau
about his book, “Means of Control,” why the government can purchase bulk private data with few legal restrictions, and the threat to privacy and civil liberties that inheres in the practice.
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4th Circuit says live-streaming a traffic stop is First Amendment protected activity. Winterville, NC police tried to seize a man's phone after he told them he was livestreaming a police encounter, citing the need to protect officer safety.
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