I can’t even make it through these testimonials of the cruelty of Trump’s deportation.

Angelica Rebeca Gonzalez-Garcia (Guatemala) Backstory: The 31-year-old mother fled domestic abuse with her then seven-year-old daughter.

Testimony: “On May 10, 2018, the day after our arrest, Officers came into the room and told me that they intended to take my daughter away from me… Most devastating of all, the Officers said I would never see my daughter again. When the Officers told me this, I felt like collapsing and dying. I cannot express the pain and fear I felt at that point. My daughter was only seven years old and she was much too young to be taken from me.

“When I asked why, the Officers said that I had ‘endangered’ her by bringing her here… During this same conversation one of the officers asked me ‘In Guatemala do they celebrate mother’s day?’ When I answered yes he said, ‘Then Happy Mother’s Day,’ because the next Sunday was Mother’s day. I lowered my head so that my daughter would not see the tears forming in my eyes. That particular act of cruelty astonished me then as it does now. I could not understand why they hated me so much, or wanted to hurt me so much.”

Again, as a parent… as a HUMAN, I am grief-stricken. How can we be treating people with this level of cruelty?! I feel so helpless. I feel sick.

I can’t handle this. It’s just too much. How is this even allowed to happen in our country. It’s unbearable, and I’m just READING about it. Those kids. KIDS!

Kinda makes you wonder about all those Alexa devices, eh? Amazon isn’t doing itself any favors. I’m getting rid of mine and I won’t be the only one.

Amazon Teams Up With Law Enforcement to Deploy Dangerous New Facial Recognition Technology

You thought Cambridge Analytica was scary. Bloomberg just published a long read on Palantir.

Of all days…

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Instead of complying, Lavabit shuts down. Help them out by donating to their legal defense fund.

So now who do we use for email?

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.

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For anyone not freaked out about the NSA just having metadata on every email you’ve sent and received in Gmail, make sure you take a look at this little project/experiment some MIT students put together. The graphic you see above is a diagram of who I email, how often I’ve emailed with them and how and if they are related to other people I’ve emailed with. I removed the name labels, but you can view the diagram with names as well. This is approximately 10 years of email. So yeah, just having metadata can tell someone a lot. MIT lets you delete the info. The US government does not.

BTW, something I figured out was that because I had Gmail (on the web) configured to only give access to my 1000 most recent emails via IMAP, I had to remove that limitation in order to give this project access to all of my email.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

Watched this last night and was floored. It’s enough to make any reasonable person feel angry and pretty hopeless. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to feel after watching this except to get more involved in politics. 

apoplecticskeptic:

60 Minutes — Jack Abramoff: The Lobbyist’s Playbook

Without massive overhaul of our current system, we are so completely screwed. Let this be the beginning of the end of the wholesale abduction of our democracy.

WATCH. THIS. VIDEO.