Rebecca Williams
@internetrebecca
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I use this site in order to hate it properly. Privacy @ACLU , Board @MuckRock , Member @ACLUStaffUnited . she/her.
Brooklyn, New York
Joined January 2009
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best friend dot com / if you knew how many versions of this I made
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☑️ data lake
☑️ data cloud
☑️ data streams
☑️ data trees
☑️ data branch
🔲 data woods
🔲 data mountains
🔲 data sun
🔲 data meadows
🔲 data wind
🔲 data valley
🔲 data flowers
🔲 data rocks
🔲 data leaves
🔲 data dirt
🔲 data twig
🔲 data sky™️
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I am going to develop a course called "Data for Good & Evil" and each week will have readings on how data has been used for good and evil (including different concepts of good and evil) and at least one of evil readings will be from a campaign labeled "data for good"
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Today is my first day at
@ACLU
, working on data governance, I am so so incredibly excited to join this organization.
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now this is an opener
I reviewed Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk for the latest issue of the New York Review of Books. Themes include masculinity, sadness, Fordism, and poop
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Ask not what data your country can collect on you – ask what data you can collect on your country.
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meta is redefining identity authentication via images of your face to not be "face recognition" or "collecting biometric data"
(see bottom text in this image)
hmm I wonder why they might do that? (it's because the privacy laws they've been fighting in court use those terms)
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you can kick out the press and legal observers but the kids have phones
BREAKING:
NYPD officer at Columbia University texting “thought we fucking shot someone” while on campus outside of Hind Hall.
#cu4palestine
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gov is sold this idea that they can forget data standards and that a data lake and magic AI will solve all their messy data problems and provide insights and it’s a lie and it’s harmful and it’s taking advantage of people that don’t understand buzzwords
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furthering the surveillance state in the name of children is so sad because it’s false and because it will make these children’s future less free and less democratic and less able to organize against powerful forces that oppress them
UK Home Office's recent attack on e2e encryption moves into the realm of baseless propaganda, diverging significantly from much of the rest of UK gov & from established expert consensus, complete w media salvo
Let's review, it's important to recognize what they're doing...1/
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Maybe insane: I wish weather apps showed yesterday because I remember how I felt outside yesterday
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men (The House) will literally ban TikTok instead of going to therapy (passing comprehensive privacy legislation)
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this has had a soothing affect on me since I read it, who would have known Chuck P would soothe me
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Hannah Arendt on why she writes / me on why I tweet
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I think about this every time I do a captcha, which is often/very powerful
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I’m excited to share I’ve accepted a Technology & Public Purpose Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs for the 2020-21 academic year. I’ll be moving in August & emailing you research questions always.
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it’s tough because you know everyone is stressed so you want to be a source of levity but also you want to talk about the mounting facism
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basically every day someone tells me they figured it out & all the gov data should be on 1 enterprise system & according to 1 standard & linked & that’s it, no specific goal after that
🤔 fascinating idea w no understanding of reality or why things happen, ty for that, again
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🥁NEW REPORT ALERT🥁
Delighted to share the culmination of my
@TAPP_Project
research on the risks to civil liberties posed by "smart city" technology
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“full stack” policy developer =
- organizing
- lobbying
- stakeholder engagement
- value statements
- legislative language
- budget proposal
- implementation guidance
- performance analysis
- oversight & audit reports
- litigation
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I tested + for COVID-19—I AM WELL—& can confirm:
- testing was cumbersome (had to qualify, far away, took 6 days)
- symptoms vary (I had a bad flu/cold for a wk, no shortness of breath, & lost smell, quarantined housemates are still symptom-free🤞🏻)
- knowing is soothing
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I’m always saying this
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DC has turned me into a person who can only speak in trade offs which has its pros and cons
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if Black Mirror hadn’t taken a break from episodes because “reality is currently too dystopian” I know they would have gotten to this (maybe there is no blockchain in the Black Mirror universe)
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the best part of living in dc is being the exact kind of person that would call their congress rep but not having a congress rep
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I think aliens will find our use of landscapes as computer wallpapers to be v strange
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I think the reason so much
#civictech
discourse is hot air and the outcomes are disappointing is because it’s the intersection of like 32 disciplines and the people most interested in it seem to be fluent and well read in like 1-3
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federal civil servants did backend work to make 1/3 of this data indexed
When I was in graduate school, many of us complained there were only a few dozen public datasets to use for dissertation research. Today, Google released a tool that lets one search more than 6 million datasets:
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going fwd if anyone complains about open data/foia/gov websites on here I'll aggressively try to hire you into gov, don't make that mistake
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a cool thing is that the fate of humanity rests on figuring out a sustainable fourth estate funding model
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News: Today is my first day back working at the
@WhiteHouse
Office of Management and Budget Office of E-Government & Information Technology
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maybe we cannot have privacy on social media or access to trustworthy journalism or fair marketplaces because it all runs perversely on ads
maybe most internet problems are advertising problems
I’m mildly obsessed with our broken digital advertising system. I think you can trace a lot of the misery of the internet back to it.
@swodinsky
spends more time in the weeds of this world than any journalist I know. Here’s our sprawling chat about bad ads
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the argument for banning facial recognition technology use by government isn’t that the technology is *inherently* harmful
it’s an admission that *government* isn’t ethically advanced enough to be trusted w it
it’s very very interesting, it’s hard to think of analogous examples
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okay now I like the chatbot, the rule should be if the chatbot gives you more rights/services than is real they must be upheld, but if it gives you less you should be compensated for the deception
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thinking about how responsibility is shifted away from gov this AM
- to you
- to the market
- to the contractor
- to the black box algorithm
and how you can't vote those things out
trying to visualize "responsibility" as a visible thing, gaseous and purple I think, shifting
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The House can kill this, call your reps!
Basically, people, from now on, your *full* browsing history will be sold to whomever. Use a (non-free) VPN if you don't already do so.
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exciting new program for young engineers who can't decide if they want to do gov surveillance or corporate surveillance
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if you professionalize what you love, you gotta come up with new things to love I think, keep a sacred back burner going all the time
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if private sector tech jobs' salaries were not so inflated bc of VCs, overall valuation in tech products, then it'd be easier get folks to work in "tech-for-good" jobs
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don’t pay for clout/boosts/downvote power & encourage your org not to either
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wow this dissertation by
@kaareeenah
on civic tech orgs spreading solutionism is great (via
@jathansadowski
)
still reading, but Ch 4 (pg 53) is mandatory reading
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I've been thankful for
@zeynep
's voice in response to the pandemic, so much of the issues have been information problems:
- missing information
- communicating/staying abreast of rapidly changing information
- outlier sensationalism
- misinformation
etc
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people who use gov services are not 'customers'
ux testing is not democracy
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I started outlining potential harms of Smart Cities:
1. Lack of Community Input
2. Erosion of Privacy and 4th Amendment Protections
3. Chilling of 1st Amendment Rights
4. Discrimination / Oppression
5. Loss of Accountable Government
Feedback welcomed!
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someone should write up how the delivery of government safety net programs has gotten better/worse/stayed the same since the 70s
the civic tech crowd is not wrong to identify efficiencies that tech can help w, but why efficiencies aren’t a priority is what really needs tackling
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twitter praised this recent
@safiyanoble
keynote & it's really so good, she replaces the typical AI/bias read w/ the depth of history, justice, & library science & recommends further reading @ every layer, if you'd only start here, you'd be way ahead:
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I went to a funeral yesterday and someone wrote part of the eulogy w/ chatGPT, I just need people to know I witnessed that (bare witness to my witnessing) & that I don’t want that at mine but if you do it I won’t know so also it’s fine
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it feels better if it breaks because workers had to protect & stand up for themselves than for any other reason it might break
Word inside Twitter is that A LOT of employees are not saying “yes” to staying at Musk’s “extremely hardcore Twitter 2.0.” He has been meeting today with engineers to convince them to stay. His deadline to decide to stay or leave expired 6 min ago.
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I talked to Nick for this.
NOLA is considering free internet for its people in exchange for data collection on its people. The people weren’t asked about this exchange.
What happens when your fiduciaries decide for you that you should be the product?
There’s a growing awareness, in New Orleans and across the country, that "smart city" technology can double as surveillance equipment—to be used by both the police and the private sector.
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your favorite federal tech offices aren’t mandated by Congress and spend taxpayer dollars from large general tech funds that predate them
• 18f uses the Federal Citizen Service Fund
• USDS uses the Information Technology Oversight Reform fund
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Be the Chief Data Officer of
@USNatArchives
!
- Apps due Friday 11/8, lmk if you need tips on your gov app
- They've had a hard time getting good candidates
- All records should be electronic by 2022
- They do cool things like partner w
@internetarchive
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Every "tech for good"/"data for good"/"public interest tech" program should have this on their reading list to really challenge students to grapple w/ limits of "for good" versus business models:
Nine months ago, I learned that Facebook has a Responsible AI team, and has had some form of it since Cambridge Analytica. I began to wonder: what has it been doing these past three years? Nearly four-dozen interviews later, here's what I found.
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one way around FOIA is to just have the person tweet out the info
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the civics matter 99.9% more than the techs
Please quote this tweet with a thing that everyone in your field knows and nobody in your industry talks about because it would lead to general chaos.
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I wrote up a long-ish guide on how to track surveillance tech in your city:
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👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻 I still want the government data to be better, do you?
If so, please share and submit feedback to by July 27th!
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I am working on making the government data better and more accessible.
19-year-old Kylie Jenner is worth $900 million and on pace to become the youngest self-made billionaire ever.
What are you doing with your life?
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I'm excited to report that today is my 1st day at
@centerforgov
to work on
@WhatWorksCities
! Cities! Data! Do you have a city?
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Pro Tip: Identify early on how your crush feels about copyright
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imagining my working memory works this way as well for funsies
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shout out to the fed civil servants that slogged through the last four years with less people, less budget, no leadership or compromising leadership, and no thanks
w/ deep love, I hope things return to the regular levels of bureaucratic miserable soon 💌
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the best part about LLMs is we are no longer talking about web3
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655 police misconduct lawsuits in ~3yrs cost Chicago $210,752,752. PDFs ➡️ searchable data:
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the tech folks that want to apply “user-centered design” & “agile” processes to law & policy have their heart in the right place (I think) but if they studied up would realize these aren’t the big insights they think they are, the concepts under different names have been known
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my favorite part about the new
@Google
Dataset Search is you can see a variety of sources including backups
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tech billionaires are all taking different approaches of taking over the press
Thiel: sue them into oblivion
Musk: buy their fav distribution app
Bezos: buy the paper
Zuck: be the distributor
Which crazed tech billionaire will history look back on as having done more damage to a free press/the fourth estate?
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best parts of working for gov, in my view:
- lots of constraints to spur creative thinking, it’s always project runway or iron chef
- working for people not profit or clicks or anything else
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The FBI's entire file on
#MLK
121 parts, 16,600+ pgs, in 12 zip files is available to dl here: CC - Public Domain
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I’m constantly surrounded by data thought leaders that can’t do a vlookup and data scientists that fit data to their personal preconceived worldview and their peers that can’t tell that’s bad
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I had an epiphany about trust & gov today
in trauma therapy there is a big emphasis not on trusting others again (bc you really never know) but regaining trust in yourself to recognize & handle such situations in the future, these concepts can be transferred to institutions
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this list of sites to opt out from seems helpful, is this the most comprehensive out there?
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@xor
hi where is the tweet you tweeted a long time ago that was something like: "I can turn any conversation to one about copyright"
I am trying to find it right now and can't
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if you were cringe in the past you can use that cringe knowledge to have specific compassion for the person and angles for conversation, but this is harder to do if you pretend you were never cringe or are not currently cringe or that cringe is escapable
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I’m definitely here for the dictionary definitions of “civic” + “technology” and not the weird tattered tech savior complex branded version of civic technology, though yes, I know those people
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- don’t use a phone case
- plain soda water is cooler than La Croix and Diet Coke
- sleep a lot
- your time & labor (aka calories) are you in the history books
- moving on from things that don’t work means you’re a genius
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it'd be nice to see a new version of this aimed at *eliminating* means-testing from programs, e.g., it costs this much to test (IT stack, verifying this thing, etc), and its burden prevents this many eligible ppl from being helped.
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fyi if you follow me expecting to get memes or commentary that the internet is falling apart you will not be disappointed
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Bryan Johnson is a living breathing mascot for the ideology of our technocapitalist times:
- immortality/control fantasy
- worship of arbitrary metrics & optimization
- expensive, puritanical, exploitative, fearful
- press loves it
- if that wasn’t bad enough, likely doesn’t work
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