When 2016 began, I was on the road, taking along with me a rather pessimistic message about disinformation to state and local election officials. Many were, to borrow a phrase, exhibiting learned helplessness in the face of relentless disinformation campaigns and because they were continually being warned my authorities, by…

(First published for free on Truthtelling for Storytelling, a free newsletter.) On April 10, when Apple and Google announced an unprecedented partnership to build a contact tracing protocol, some privacy advocates reacted with alarm and skepticism. Members of the world’s digital privacy community are right to be cautious, but they…

What I See When I Look Through Bart Gellman’s Dark Mirror Bart Gellman’s Dark Mirror is not a history of the National Security Agency, nor is it a biography of Edward Snowden, whose documents Gellman published in the Washington Post, and it’s not even a polemic about government surveillance. What it is, at its core, is an account of his reporting…

If states begin to manage the number of COVID-19 hospital admissions through mitigation and suppression, they will then need to adopt an aggressive and potentially invasive program of contact tracing to immediately squash flare ups. Singapore and China have used mandatory mobile apps to track the social lives of visitors…

(This post was first published in my free newsletter, Truth-telling for Storytellers.) President Trump’s regular news briefings spread harmful misinformation about public health. The gap between the lived reality of the coronavirus pandemic, on the one hand, and the common operating picture presented by the president, on the other, is…

(This first appeared in my free newsletter, https://MarcAmbinder.substack.com/ about digital security and countering disinformation.) A few days ago, thousands of Americans received text messages from “a very reliable intel” source warning of a nationwide quarantine, of a mandatory two-week, military-enforced lockdown of the entire nation. The “intel” was false, but…

Terror scrolling is a new term of art. When you wake up in the morning and check your twitter feed, the first thread you see might have been written by an epidemiologist who found a flaw in a model for curve-flattening that suggests that we are in for a rougher…

In the space of 96 hours, the residue of American civil society thickened, fortified: (a) state/ local governments stepping up, largely in a vacuum, (b) by journalism providing its core function, © by technology, (d) by individuals doing amazing things (and having horrible things happen to them), (e) by seeing…

I finally saw The Post last week, and like other reporters, I confess to feeling a chill when the audience cheered at Katherine Graham’s decision to publish… (Uh, Spoiler alert: the Post published, end of movie, beginning of Richard Nixon’s paranoia, segue to Watergate, and it’s always burning since the…