BC LEGAL
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.

1/

 Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.

2/
The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the service.

https://t.co/Syh7HCEFb0

3/
2020's #BLM uprising was subjected to the full array of military and national intelligence surveillance: drones, IMSI catchers, mass interception, infiltrators, wiretaps, "reverse warrants" to recover location data from Big Tech monopolists and more.

https://t.co/klUhDgzkXU

4/
And yet, federal and local agencies were seemingly totally unprepared for a mob of thousands of armed terrorists who stormed the capitol, disrupted the transition of presidential power, and threatened the lives of US legislators as well as the integrity of state documents.

5/
The thing is, the plans were in plain sight. For weeks, I've been seeing screengrabs from far-right forums that leaked onto public social media in which violent psychopaths laid out detailed plans to commit murder and overthrow the government.

6/
I wasn't even looking for this stuff. I was on vacation and only cursorily checking the internet. But it was obvious. How obvious? Well, the President was the keynote speaker at the riot and he openly called for violent insurrection. That might have tipped the cops off.

7/
Since 1999's Battle of Seattle, cops have acted like pants-wetting cowards at the first whiff of protest.

2017's plan for dozens of paralyzed, wheelchair-using Medicare For All activists to peacefully occupy the capitol begat violent police panic.

https://t.co/fkAo8X6J2l

8/
But when armed terrorists followed through on their widely proclaimed plan to invade the capitol building yesterday, law enforcement foundered. They weren't just unprepared to stop terrorists for breaking in, they were also unprepared to deal with them after the break-in.

9/
To get a visceral sense of the shitshow, listen to @ryangrim's interview with @mepfuller, recorded while Fuller was hiding in a secret bunker with other Congressional reporters, Members of Congress and their staffers.

https://t.co/ai5ThS9j77

10/
There's a lot of fingerpointing today between the agencies, with a starring role for the US @CapitolPolice, who get $460m/yr (10% of Congress's total budget) and have demanded a stonking increase for 2021.

https://t.co/INNmiMQHcT

11/
They definitely have some serious questions to answer (including why their officers posed for selfies and seem to have opened the gates to permit terrorists to storm the building).

https://t.co/XHJjWbHnRO

12/
But as @nealstephenson pointed out in his 1994 comic technothriller masterpiece INTERFACE, DC is a "cop zoo" with literally hundreds of different law enforcement agencies operating in its city limits.

https://t.co/SMMMnI7L4x

13/
Did none of these agencies see the terrorist plan that had been scrawled in 100' tall flaming letters across the internet? How could they be caught this flatfooted?

14/
From: @propublica: "a thin line of U.S. Capitol Police, with only a few riot shields between them...struggled with a flimsy set of barricades as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way toward the Capitol entrance."

https://t.co/b8WaKu3okA

15/
In her excellent @nakedcapitalism roundup of yesterday's failures, @yvessmith examines the theory that police were on the terrorists' side. After all, police unions rallied for and endorsed Trump. Would they support a coup to keep him in power?

https://t.co/kmUyQY1Bjd

16/
Biden is no defund-the-police radical. He pledged to INCREASE cop funding by 10%.

But Trump doesn't just promise money for cops: his offer is total impunity. Remember when he told police they should deliberately brutalize people during arrests?

https://t.co/2udGqejB8c

17/
US policing has its origin in "slave patrols" that abetted enslavers by kidnapping Black people and forcing them into slavery. Slave patrols' legacy lives on in modern policing, with US police forces riddled with white nationalist terror supporters:

https://t.co/cJkyaN1ZrO

18/
Trump himself is a white nationalist. A significant proportion of US police might be tempted to abet a coup to perpetuate the rule of a despot who promises them a free hand to torture and brutalize, and who backs white supremacy.

19/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/


It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/
TECH
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
While many Amazon warehouse workers in Europe have unionized, its brutalized, underpaid, routinely maimed US workforce remains tragically unorganized, thanks to the US's weak labor laws that make forming a union far harder than at any time since the Gilded Age.

1/


But all that may be about to change: 6000 warehouse workers in #BHM1, the massive Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, will vote next month on a push to unionize under the

Amazon, like other tech giants, is absolutely reliant on building and maintaining a competitive advantage by exploiting technology to drive wages ever downward while ducking responsibility for harming workers.

3/

Big Tech is pants-wettingly afraid of unionization, and that goes double for any solidarity between high-paid tech workers and misclassified/outsourced warehouse workers and other "unskilled" laborers.

4/

Amazon has gone so far as to hire the Pinkertons, renowned as some of history's most violent anti-worker terrorists, to bust unionization drives in its
BUSINESS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

1/


Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

2/


Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

3/


The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

4/


#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

5/
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/


While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/

Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/

But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/
BUSINESS

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MichaelOKeeffe
MichaelOKeeffe
@MickO_Keeffe
Diversity crimes....

https://t.co/uPAL7fI9vT


https://t.co/i4qRuFDm24


https://t.co/rgojynTya9


https://t.co/HJgFbvINPr


https://t.co/glVzcosx5u
LEGAL
Carissa Byrne Hessick
Carissa Byrne Hessick
@CBHessick
I have seen so many people (including folks on #lawtwitter) comparing what happened at the Capitol yesterday with the violence and property damage that happened in some cities during protests last summer.

Let me explain what is wrong with that analogy . . . . .

To clarify -- my disagreement is not with those who are pointing out that law enforcement didn't respond with the same level of force and arrests at the capitol as it did during BLM protests.

That comparison deserves to be drawn and it raises some very important questions.

My disagreement is with those who are saying that what happened at the Capitol yesterday is so similar to what happened during protests this summer, that people's reactions ought to be similar--a suggestion that those reacting more strongly now are hypocritical.

Here's one example of someone (a law professor) making the argument. But I've seen it plastered across the site all day, it keeps cropping up in my mentions, and so I want to respond.


There are a number of things that distinguish what happened at the Capitol from what happened during BLM protests. The most obvious is the reason that people protested---some protested about factually false claims about election fraud; others about real police shootings.
LEGAL
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Corey Quinn
Corey Quinn
@QuinnyPig
And now a livetweet thread of a legal conference in the case of C21-31-BJR, Parler LLC v. @awscloud.

Parler suggests "AWS just has to flip a switch and Parler gets turned back on. Parler has been their customer for 2.5 years."

"They've met and conferred over some user content that violates not only Parler's user requirements, but also Amazon's." Yes, they'll do that, whether you want them to or not.

"I'm not on social media" says Parler's lawyer. "If I use any terms and you don't understand them, I can explain them your honor." Just go full bro and call it "dumbing things down for you" dude.

They're now saying an "algorithm" can solve their moderation problems.

Spoiler: it can not.
LEGAL
Clarisa Rosenfield\U0001f499In follow limbo, \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Clarisa Rosenfield💙In ...
@rosenfieldclar1
This is also the Rochester Police - dreadful mishandling of an altered mental status call - which led to their current crisis team, which was unavailable (and they didn't wait for in a low threat situation as they could have) for this 9 y/o!

https://t.co/UU2lUxD7Hd

https://t.co/UU2lUxD7Hd

In both cases there is a failure to use good judgement, make a valid threat assessment, to match in force to situation, failure to choose to wait for safer and appropriate staff/conditions and to use their time wisely. They also treat 'perp' as more object than human.

https://t.co/qoCofP6Rdt

By the way... Rochester is near Buffalo - where this happened...
LEGAL
Dena Grayson, MD, PhD
Dena Grayson, MD, PhD
@DrDenaGrayson
🚨#Seditionist Audrey Ann Southard—#Florida singer & vocal coach—used her soprano at the #TrumpInsurrection to scream at cops that they should “tell f**king Pelosi we’re coming for her! F**king traitorous c**ts, we’re coming! We’re coming for all of

‼️Just prior to storming the Capitol, #Seditionist Southard posted a now-deleted live video to Facebook: “We’re standing in front of the Capitol building, ready to take it. It’s gonna be fun.”

Clear premeditation. ARREST HER NOW.🤬

@lauferlaw #TrumpInsurrection #Sedition

While pushing a wooden pole with an American flag against an officer’s torso, Southard yelled: “Bulls**t! They’re going to feel us!We’re pushing through. Boys, ready to go again?” she shouted before yelling at an officer, “last breath or last bullet, what’s it going to be?”🤬

#Seditionist James Christenson used @gofundme to raise $475 to pay for the trip for himself & Southard: “Republic Patriots” would “secure our Constitution & that of our founding Republic values...we the patriots of America have borne the cost to make our presence known.”🤬

After Pence did not overturn the election, Christenson said thousands of people crushed forward. “I saw one Marine veteran tell a cop, just take your hand off your gun, b/c if you pull it this is going to be a bloodbath. The cop took his hand off it & started moving aside.”🤬
SEDITIONISTS , LEGAL

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Can we control the output of neural generation systems?
Can we build a better chatbot using this control?
And what makes a good conversation anyway?

Check out the blog post for our NAACL paper:

https://t.co/UAAUxSeA0L

#AI #NLProc #DeepLearning #ConversationalAI @facebookai

This post got a little delayed since the paper's publication, but the intervening time has given me an opportunity to reflect.

So this post has some extra thoughts regarding more recent NLG developments - e.g., pretrained models like GPT(2), and the suitability of beam search.
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Mitesh Patel
Mitesh Patel
@Mitesh_Engr
Again sharing bank nifty intraday weekly straddle. How to play by selling straddle.
Mostly will work on Monday to Wednesday. Sometimes on Friday.
Why to pay your money to learn this if u can get it here.
U need only practice.
Let’s go.

Say bank nifty future is at 32000.
Sell both 32000 call and put.
Considering current volatile market lest say premium on Monday morning is 350 on both sides.
Sold with 700 points combine premium.
If bank nifty will trade in narrow range say +\- 100 hold it.
If moving 200 points

then exit previous sold straddle. Sell new one. Let’s say BN moved +200
Now sell 32200. If bank nifty will move here within range then u will get profit through theta decay. Follow same procedure for next 150-200 pts move.

This is only for single straddle sell position.

Now in second case sell three straddle. 31900/32000/32100
In case of 100 points move no need to change.
If 200 + then future is 32200.
Exit 31900 and sell 31200 straddle.
If moving another 100 then exit 32000 and sell 32300. Continue same with 100 points move.
If no move then

it will consolidate between 32000-32200 or 32100 to 32300 and u will get theta decay.

This is for normal move. Sudden big move may come anytime. So keep SL in system.
If u r selling at 350-350 then keep SL in system 475 for both legs.
Practice it. No need to attend webinar.
BNF , MPATELOPTIONSLEARNINGS , OPTIONSLEARNING
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Seth Abramson
Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
(THREAD) The Whitaker scandal is deepening, as it becomes clear that Sessions' Russia recusal was a coordinated sham and his firing an act of obstruction—and that his replacement is a White House plant inside the Mueller probe. I hope you'll retweet and read on for more details.


1/ From 2014-17 Whitaker worked for World Patent Marketing—which during his tenure defrauded consumers out of $26 million and was successfully prosecuted by the feds. His involvement in the scam confirmed he had loose morals and that the feds would never want to employ him again.

2/ Despite the seeming impossibility of a man with Whitaker's background getting a job at Justice ever again—he'd been found to have used his former title as a US attorney to fraudulently threaten consumers with valid complaints with criminal penalties—Whitaker found an opening.

3/ Within 60 days of parachuting out of World Patent Marketing as it was being fined $26 million by the feds, Whitaker was working for CNN and telling a fellow attorney panelist that his purpose in working for CNN was to get noticed by one man—Donald Trump—and thereby get a job.

4/ Whitaker spent his time at CNN making ludicrous statements about the Mueller probe: there was no obstruction or collusion, he said; Mueller had no authority to look into any aspect of Trump's finances or to subpoena him, he said. All the while, he hoped Trump was watching him.
POLITICS
Mike DiCenzo
Mike DiCenzo
@mikedicenzo
"How the Avengers would respond to the Capitol riot" (a thread)

CAPTAIN AMERICA - tells Falcon, "I fought Nazis once before. They're extremely dangerous." They then see the guy scaling the Capitol wall fall into the shrubs. Falcon: "You sure these are the same Nazis?"

IRON MAN - lands by the guy carrying the podium. Says, "Mind if I borrow this?" then tosses it to Hulk, who swings it like a bat at the mob. Guy: "Hey, that's MY podium!" Iron Man: "Actually it's the Speaker's. And technically, it's a lectern." Then punches him through a wall.

BLACK WIDOW - enters hotel room where Jack Dorsey is tied up. Rips duct tape off his mouth. Jack: "I'll do anything you want!" BW: "Disable POTUS's Twitter. NOW!" Jack fumbles with his phone. "Done. Anything else?" BW: "Yeah. Trim your beard for God's sake." *tosses him clippers*

HULK - grabs a selfie stick from one of the guys and beats him over the head with it. Deeming it too small, he grabs another guy's Confederate flag and takes out a whole swath of rioters. He then tosses the flag to Cap, who uses it as a javelin to impale a fleeing Ted Cruz.

HAWKEYE - hears Iron Man in his earpiece say, "Looks like Orange Julius is tweeting from another account." Hawkeye: "On it." He locks in on Trump through the White House window and fires an arrow, knocking the phone out of Trump's hands. Hawkeye: "Damn that felt good."
GOVERNMENT
TWABMPTLPAFA
TWABMPTLPAFA
@SeekerIIIII
Act of 1871
This is Long but it will end with a BOOM

With no constitutional authority to do so, Congress created a separate form of government for the District of Columbia, a ten-mile square parcel of land (see, Acts of the Forty-first Congress,”

Section 34, Session III, chapters 61 and 62).
The act — passed when the country was weakened and financially depleted in the aftermath of the Civil War — was a strategic move by foreign interests (international bankers) who were intent upon gaining a stranglehold on the coffers

and neck of America.
Congress cut a deal with the international bankers (specifically Rothschilds of London) to incur a DEBT to said bankers. Because the bankers were not about to lend money to a floundering nation without serious stipulations, they devised a way to get their

foot in the door of the United States.
The Act of 1871 formed a corporation called THE UNITED STATES. The corporation, OWNED by foreign interests, moved in and shoved the original Constitution into a dustbin.

With the Act of 1871, the organic Constitution was defaced — in effect vandalized and sabotage — when the title was capitalized and the word “for” was changed to “of” in the title.
HISTORY