Meet ‘Blonde Supremacy’: Meet Trump’s Fox-Ready Press Squad
The Brookings Center on Regulations and Markets Regulatory Tracker (“Reg Tracker”) is a tool that tracks and provides insights into important regulatory actions by the federal government.
Originally launched in October 2017, the Reg Tracker monitors a curated selection of executive agency rules, guidance, and policy introductions or revocations, as well as executive actions like executive orders.
The rules span a wide range of policy areas, including but not limited to education, labor, environment, and transportation. This post provides context surrounding the regulatory process, details on what actions the Reg Tracker encompasses, and guidance on how to use its interactive features.”
Meet the tracking companies that follow you around the internet
Datawrapper – “Considering the cookie consent banners that have come to grace our screens on a daily basis, it might not come as a surprise that companies are interested in extracting data from your online activities, and that browsing the internet is not exactly a private affair.
Still, it is hard to grasp how this data collection actually happens and who is involved. In this post, I want to take a closer look at web tracking and the companies behind it. One website, many connections – When you visit a website, your web browser typically doesn’t just connect to the domain visible in the address bar, but to a variety of external services as well. Some of them might be required for the website’s basic functions, while others might serve advertisements, gather visitor statistics, or display embedded content from social media. All of these connections have one thing in common:
They give the parties on the other side an opportunity to collect data. Those parties can also use a variety of mechanisms to tell your connection apart from others, including storing browser cookies, loading invisible images (“tracking pixels”), and generating unique fingerprints from your device- and system-specific settings. The chart below shows the tracking services that have been observed on some of the web’s most popular websites. (Along with the other charts in this post, this one uses data collected by Ghostery, an ad-blocking browser plugin, and published in the open-source tracker database WhoTracks.Me.)…
Amazon’s 26 trackers, two thirds of which are used for advertising, already make up a considerable number. Yet it is not uncommon for websites to embed two, three, or even four times as many. Among the 100 websites most frequented by Ghostery users, the UK’s Daily Mail takes the top spot with a staggering 125 unique trackersobserved…” +Google, YouTube, Fiverr, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook. X and Wikipedia!
via EFF: “Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed. In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorizedSection 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches. This decision sheds light on the government’s liberal use of what is essential a “finders keepers” rule regarding your communication data. As a legal authority, FISA Section 702 allows the intelligence community to collect a massive amount of communications data from overseas in the name of “national security.”
But, in cases where one side of that conversation is a person on US soil, that data is still collected and retained in large databases searchable by federal law enforcement. Because the US-side of these communications is already collected and just sitting there, the government has claimed that law enforcement agencies do not need a warrant to sift through them. EFF argued for over a decade that this is unconstitutional, and now a federal court agrees with us…”
