I remember that being reported in newspapers in 2020 but did those allegations make it into "The Epstein Files"? (I have paid almost no attention since it's the most obvious limited hangout ever hung out.)
Some junky news site claimed nine, but saw eleven and thirteen more widely reported. Read some JMail but didn’t dig into the files beyond that. Sick stuff, respect to those whose jobs demand they closely follow everything.
That and "ordinary" prostitution and "sleeziness" aren't important plus ignoring that Epstein wasn't just a pimp, he was very much a human trafficker, in the sense that he effectively coerced women into continuing their involvement with his operation.
When the Epstein news first really broke into the mainstream in 2019/2020, there were a ton of victim testimonials that were absolutely harrowing (and pointed to much weirder and more consequential stuff than "just" sex trafficking), it's been really surreal and disheartening to see the Trump-era releases successfully trivialize and downplay it.
It would be nice to think this will significantly hamper Flock and its goals and methods in any way, but it will probably just have the effect of selecting for the employees who are either true believers, or are desperate enough that they'll keep their heads down and get good work done just to keep their jobs.
Sporadic vandalism, a handful of canceled contracts, some employee morale problems, all of this falls far short of the organized campaign of resistance that would be needed to roll back Flock at this point. Flock really should be the last nail in the coffin of Edward Snowden's libertarian take that mass surveillance can be fought only with individual action and technology rather than political movements.
It's the phones and the propaganda being streamed through them 24/7. And if your reaction is, "the rest of the Western world has that too," well, they're really not all that far behind us.
I know that this is old, but allowing an entertainment network to look, smell like, and carry the moniker of 'news' has done incalculable damage to the world.
Informed? How about the 'Informed Trading' that was observed September 10, 2001? Yesterday I transcribed https://youtu.be/PrI8g3yHxAM after having just found and learned about Marc Chesney.
> everything you know about Epstein and his circle was already public knowledge after his first conviction 20 years ago
Complete nonsense, a lot of Epstein's deep ties to Silicon Valley and academia weren't even developed until after his conviction, and weren't reported to the public until much later.
The more lurid takes on Epstein and his network/influence popularized by the QAnon psyop certainly did a lot to encourage everyone to look the other way, but the facts themselves were reported by a handful of responsible and even-keeled gumshoes in fringe/alt media until Julie Brown came along.
Are you referring to the start of the 12 Day War here? If so, are you leaving out Israel's unprovoked airstrikes on Iran out of ignorance or dishonesty?
They're not going to drive much "I went to see this movie because I loved the video games" traffic, but I've always thought the Gabriel Knight games could be great IP for a movie series.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
> Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism.
"Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).
> Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
I'm not sure where you got "near-unanimous" from. I think Flock cameras were rolled out en masse because public video surveillance has been common for a long time, and polling data has historically suggested (e.g. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
> But why would Jobs, a child of the counterculture who had practiced Buddhism under a Zen master and cited taking LSD as a formative experience, tether his company’s future to spies?
That's a funny sentence to read when you know the actual history of LSD, how it was brought to and disseminated throughout the U.S., and the role it played in de-fanging the counterculture.
Fun fact: Ellison was the one who orchestrated Jobs' late-'90s return to Apple (after failing to purchase Apple outright) as part of a decades-long campaign of trying to help the spy sector take General Purpose Computing away from people. In the '90s their preferred approach to this was ‘Network Computing’, and Apple almost shipped a ‘Macintosh NC’ that would have connected to Oracle software on its backend, but that project turned into the iMac instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_NC
“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?
A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.
Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
They were finally able to do it with the iPhone by leveraging nerds' well-intentioned-but-naïve weakness to the fallacy that More Encryption == Better Than, so now we all have what could be General Purpose Computers in our pockets that just refuse to run any software that The System doesn't want us to have.
The moral of the story is don't trust anybody who expresses too much interest in putting things inside Black Cubes :p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCUBE
As a slightly different take on this, a pervasive rumour in the pen computing circles is that one of the reasons Jobs killed the Newton was that the USMC had just had a very successful test of the Newton MessagePad and some sort of wireless communication system and was looking to get Apple registered as a defense contractor so that they could implement them service-wide.
Unfortunately, this story was playing out in _Pen Computing Magazine_ and so forth, which doesn't seem to have a digitized/searchable archive --- anyone have any links or insights?
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