Every time someone says surveillance capitalism is a novel theory recently discovered, I think about decades of science like this:
Coastal Program biologist holding a radio telemetry transmitter for a monarch butterfly. Image: Colleen Grant/USFWS.
The more scientists know about a particular species, the easier it is to protect. So in an effort to eventually track how these pollinators use their overwintering habitat and nectar flowers close by, staff from organizations such as the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Coastal Program in Central California and the biological and environmental consulting firm Althouse & Meade tagged monarchs in three locations across San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties in November 2025.
The effort is part of a study testing technology that can monitor monarch movement and migration. These tags look like an antenna sticking out of a small rectangular box, and staff used eyelash glue to stick them to the back of the butterflies. The tagging system employs solar-powered radio telemetry tag technology, which sends geospatial data through radio waves.
Works for butterflies? That’s great news for people working on the surveillance of everything else.
Notice the “easier to protect” framing. Related: tracking insects leads to more effective methods of automation in killing them.
…Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
In case you were wondering how American-based tech service providers are running these days.
Euro News hosts this disinformation comment getting history all wrong. Nazi Germany violently invaded Hungary and occupied it, murdering hundreds of thousands of Hungarians. Nazis violently taking over Budapest refused to surrender, causing Hungarian death and casualties to explode because of the occupation.
Imagine the kind of person who comments that the end of genocide wouldn’t be called by the “many” a liberation. Their comment fails on the most obvious facts: Operation Margarethe, the German invasion of Hungary on 19 March 1944.
Germany militarily occupied Hungary because the Kállay government had been negotiating armistice terms with the Western Allies, and Horthy had refused Hitler’s repeated demands to hand over Hungarian Jews. Do you see the problem with the comment yet? Who exactly would falsely claim that the Nazis were not a genocidal occupation?
Hitler summoned Horthy to Klessheim on 18 March 1944, and the Wehrmacht crossed the border while Horthy was still on the train home. That’s not allied.
Wehrmacht troops took the country, Veesenmayer arrived as Reich plenipotentiary, Eichmann’s Sondereinsatzkommando followed, and over 400,000 Hungarians were suddenly shipped to Auschwitz between May and the beginning of July 1944 (over 300,000 murdered immediately on arrival). Hungarians were told the Nazis would put them in a “safe” ghetto, which turned out to be insufferably cramped and cruel, and then told they were being taken by train to agricultural labor at Kenyérmező, a work site that never existed. Hungarian gendarmes under Eichmann’s direction forced them into rail cars locked for days without food, water or sanitation, causing many to die, and the trains deposited them in a death camp to be rapidly murdered. Postcards postmarked from the fictional resort “Waldsee” then arrived back in Hungary, dictated at Auschwitz to keep the deception running.
Remigration (forced deportation) of that scale was during, and because of, the Nazi occupation.
The alliance was worthless, completely exploited and then ignored by Germany. Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 and bled its Second Army out on the Don in January 1943. Then German troops crossed the border to mass murder Hungarians and hold the rest hostage. Germany itself declared that the alliance didn’t exist, by force, twice!
On 15 October 1944, when Horthy announced he had achieved Hungarian armistice with the Soviets, Germany (still not an ally) ran Operation Panzerfaust. That meant Skorzeny kidnapped Horthy’s son to force the Hungarian leader to abdicate under extreme duress. Szálasi and the Arrow Cross were put under direct German installation, completely the opposite of any alliance. The occupation turned into a siege (26 December 1944 to 13 February 1945) as Budapest was commanded by Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order forbidding capitulation or withdrawal. A foreign German officer commanding a Hungarian city he refuses to surrender, driving up casualties and death of the Hungarians, is an occupation in its plainest form.
“Liberation” meant the Red Army reached the sealed Pest ghetto on 17-18 January 1945, with roughly 70,000 people still alive inside, while the Arrow Cross squads under Nazi command were shooting Hungarians into the Danube nightly. Liberation was a literal end of the genocidal and suicidal Nazi occupation of Hungary.
So I posted this reply and was informed it went into moderation:
As a formally trained historian, I find this kind of disinformation comment very interesting. Germany occupied Hungary twice in 1944. First it invaded against Horthy’s diplomacy in March, and then against his armistice in October. What kind of German “ally” invades by force and murders roughly 437,000 Hungarians between May and [early July] of 1944? Operation Panzerfaust wasn’t just genocidal, it kidnapped Horthy’s son to force abdication of self-rule. Karl Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, a German SS general, under Hitler’s Festung order then commanded the Hungarian city by refusing to surrender! That is by definition an occupation of Hungary to cause mass suffering in its plainest form. Where do you think Dan got his backwards story from and why?
Trump’s federal enforcement spending in the billions is justified on public safety grounds, and a new study shows the evidence contradicts that justification. Enforcement actually targets the population that the data identifies as victims.
The study tracked crime across 11,500 neighborhoods covering 46 million residents in U.S. cities from 2010 to 2018, the first to test the unauthorized immigration and crime relationship at the neighborhood level at national scale. Neighborhoods where the undocumented share grew saw larger reductions in property crime and flat violent crime.
I’ll say it again. Undocumented immigrants correlate to a drop in property crime and violent crime rates held flat. This is especially notable because the property crime that actually goes down when undocumented immigrants increase in number sits alongside the violent crime the Trump administration harps loudest about, which held flat.
There’s also a notable exception inside that flat violent crime aggregate. Robbery rose while every other category fell, and the authors identify undocumented immigrants as its likely victims. The authors mention undocumented residents are disproportionately targeted for robbery given their heavier participation in the cash economy. They call this a Walking ATM phenomenon: cash carriage from exclusion out of banking, plus underreporting driven by deportation fear. The data lacks robbery victim immigration status, so their victimization analysis is inference, based on the pattern across other categories.
Prior national tests of this question ran at the state and metro aggregation, while the far finer census tract at national scale is the unit being published now.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
