Top all-time · #9622
Yasha Levine
Personal blog · yashalevine.com/articlespoliticssecurity
Yasha Levine's personal blog at yashalevine.com covers politics and security. Since 2016, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Almost everyone developing Tor was or is funded by the US government (2014)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for investigative writing on surveillance, Tor, Google and government location tracking, often as support for comments. One commenter recommends his book Surveillance Valley as excellent, though controversial.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Homepage of journalist and author Yasha Levine
Most-linked posts?
- Almost everyone developing Tor was or is funded by the US government (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-01-15
- /surveillance-valley2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-13
What Hacker News says?
It's somewhat interesting that there was never a major public pressure campaign by the FBI to force Android phones to be backdoored, as there was with Apple. Maybe this was the tactic used by law enforcement (and others most likely) to unlock Android phones? Maybe Google knew about it and that accounts for their stalling on providing a fix? Yes, that's how you start thinking after reading Yasha Levine's Surveillance…
Comment linking /surveillance-valley
on “Accidental Google Pixel Lock Screen Bypass”Submitted Almost everyone developing Tor was or is funded by the US government (2014) as a story · 76 points
HN discussionhttp://yashalevine.com/articles/tor-spooks http://surveillancevalley.com/blog/fact-checking-the-tor-pro...
Comment linking /articles/tor-spooks
on “Is Tor still safe to use?”Submitted Google's War Against the Homeless in Los Angeles as a story · 47 points
HN discussionNote that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the m…
Comment linking /surveillance-valley
on “New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking”Submitted Privacy Spooks: Tor was (and is) funded by the US Government as a story · 1 points
HN discussionGoogle is already punishing people physically: http://yashalevine.com/articles/we-got-geeks-inside-google-s...
Comment linking /articles/we-got-geeks-inside-google-s-ugly-war-against-the-homeless-in-la
on “Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism”https://yashalevine.com/books/oligarch-valley
Comment linking /books/oligarch-valley
on “California Drought Update May 2022 [pdf]”This is a just so story. The main issue today is the lack of democracy in the country and the use of technology to surveil and govern a restive population as the government has less and less legitimacy. The narrative you are telling is the heroic tale of computing and the internet c. 1990-2010. Yasha Levine wrote about how this narrative was preceded by a forgotten one where MIT students protested because the comput…
Comment linking /surveillance-valley
on “AI 2040: Plan A”One of the people involved in the film this is related to (Pistachio Wars) is Yasha Levine, whose book about the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley, is excellent (if controversial!). Background on the film: https://yasha.substack.com/p/pistachio-wars-the-back-story-5... Surveillance Valley: http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley
Comment linking /surveillance-valley
on “Pistachio Billionaires Accused of Artwashing California's Water Crisis”