Derek B. Johnson

Scamerica must be defeated.

To be fair (derogatory), DOJ, along with DHS and the White House, have spent the past two years doing a LOT to try to gain federal supremacy over state/local run elections. It's just that 90-95% of those schemes have been rejected by even Republican states and have failed in court challenges.

Gotta admit I'm a little surprised at how little juice the DOJ has leading into the midterms. One idiotic suit against Alaska and two small ballot cases is.. well a lot less than I expected.

NEW from @timstarks.bsky.social: CISA published a strategy Monday that focuses on taking a leading role in cyber defense, prioritizing protection of critical infrastructure and building the ability to withstand attacks. cyberscoop.com/cisa-2030-cy...

when people say the two parties are the same, one thing they aren’t just different but extremely meaningfully different on is Dems rank and file and the elite level very quickly shouted down or ignored the BlueAnon weirdos saying 2024 was stolen; the Republicans and Trump just put theirs in power

On Lula’s win: an outstanding achievement of popular mobilisation, but this will be his toughest term yet. And the project of generational transition in leadership of Brazil’s left is extremely urgent.

What's striking to me are the rules of engagement and the methodology of action here, which more or less is predicated on burying liberal delusions about "debate" or the "marketplace of ideas". The rules were ultimately very simple: amplify your own message and suppress your opponent's.

What is true is that this was a conflict—and make no mistake, this was a conflict; this was a protracted battle in a hybrid war, more than anything—that was largely fought by large numbers of people laboriously working to unfuck the nation's informational environment.

SAO PAULO - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won an unprecedented fourth term […] in a shock result that defied polls, precedent and global ​anti-incumbent sentiment to put the brakes on a wave of right-wing election victories across Latin America. www.reuters.com/world/americ...

The "voter fraud" rumors out of AZ, based on an "undercover investigation" into voter registration efforts, are spreading via a slightly new arrangement (since 2024) of right-wing & conservative influencers. Interactive version of this graph: faculty.washington.edu/kstarbi/Spot...

Folks: there is pretty much zero legal basis for this suit. High chance it gets thrown out for lack of standing and likely loses on merit anyway bc there's no law making it a crime for 2 guys with the same name to run for the same office. Lots of stuff Trump can do on elections. This is nonsense.

Former Support King CEO, Scott Zuckerman, a spyware operator who was banned from the surveillance industry by the FTC after a data breach exposed people's private data... has been sued by the FTC *again* for allegedly running a government impersonation scheme for visa and passport seekers.

parts of it's money—their network & subscribers are in the 'anti-woke' side part, i think, it's psychological—people can't admit to themselves that, for the sake of a few more clicks, they eagerly joined the persecution of a vulnerable minority

A new bipartisan House bill would charge the federal government with developing formal guidance for defending AI models against distillation attacks. Read more by @derekbjohnson.bsky.social: cyberscoop.com/bipartisan-b...

What the Attorney General of the United States seems to not understand, but the people who matter do, is that Congress hasn’t given DOJ any authority to block states from certifying the election. This isn’t a thing. And we don’t have to pretend it’s a thing just because he says it’s a thing.

I'm not totally thrilled about @fiftyplusone.news having to be the poll police this week. But somebody has to do it, and our investigations have results. We have uncovered two admitted or likely fraudsters this week, and caught another manipulating its respondent-level data in August.

Doing the Lord's work out here, exposing fraudulent or scammy polling firms left and right.

Exclusive from @derekbjohnson.bsky.social : bipartisan bill would develop federal guidance for distillation attacks, convene industry on defensive cyber cyberscoop.com/bipartisan-b...

🧵 w/ some NEWS You may have missed it but recently DHS started using HSI (the same arm that raided Ilhan Omar's home) to conduct voter raids on suspected noncitizen voters. www.latimes.com/california/s...

LMAO this commercial blew me away when I saw it play (many times) TV during football Sunday.

We were investigating Wedgewood for faking their data and emailed them for comment this morning, ahead of publishing the findings tomorrow. They are now trying to cover up their fraud with the "we were doing a social experiment" excuse. Full story here: blog.fiftyplusone.news/p/fiftypluso...

The thing about young dodgy men who think the world should be built around them is that they're also 1) cowards and 2) lazy so if the going gets tough, they tend to evaporate

Patches drop at 10 AM EST or earlier, "should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild." No technical details yet, and no info on affected or fixed versions. www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/securit...

The arrests were paired with comments from DOJ and DHS officials, threatening to investigate, arrest or prosecute tens of thousands of California voters if they vote in November. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYFL... More by @derekbjohnson.bsky.social: cyberscoop.com/justice-depa...

but this is true of everything. literally every trump scandal is the worst of its kind or in the running to be the worst of its kind.

This Amy Acton ad thing might help expose the reckless stupidity of influencer culture: how little these so-called 'influencers' could be bothered to do the most basic, easy research. Regular people ran circles around them, while they all just blindly regurgitated their fed lines

Because parents have been cutting off their kids (and/or threatening to) since the dawn of time, and NYT editors regard it as normal? (You date that girl. You want to leave the familly business. You chose the arts over med school. You're gay. You're trans.... It's endlesss... & then there's wills!)

Another one. The premise: Young people are cutting off their parents for minor mistakes and misunderstandings. The lead anecdote: A woman severs ties with her family for refusing to get vaccinated before her wedding — to a man who *lost his mother and brother to COVID*

and I can do my banking on this app???

This may be a moral panic but it’s highly concentrated among the sorts of people who control editorial decisions at major newspapers. Every millennial and younger knows someone who cut off their parents.

Yuzu Kato ‘Borrowing from the Tiger’s Majesty’.

This is one of - if not the most - openly partisan Secretary of State in the country. That he's now running campaign ads in a Trump +46 state that don't mention his party affiliation or Trump at all is really interesting. x.com/AndrewSolend...

Reporters I've spoken with are determined to write the story about how about 10,000 fewer Georgians are voting by mail compared to 2022 but are ignoring in-person early voting is running at record high levels for a midterm election. Mail is just a small slice of GA early voters!

X's Community Notes are increasingly submitted by AI writers. In a new preprint, X open-sourced its Community Writer tool. A dive into the data underpinning it revealed that in Sept, six AI writers run by X's team wrote 90%+ of all AI-written notes, and 55% of notes that showed up on posts.

how claims of body snatchers fell apart how claims of the boogeyman fell apart how claims of the man in the moon fell apart

Between the two possibilities, his Chinese colleagues thought it was more likely that their government was making up all the coverage of our school shootings than that the shootings kept happening and we did nothing to stop it.