watch this space!

No, the chatbot didn't cure that dog's cancer

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:44:41 +0100

It’s Easter Sunday. To celebrate, I took the Windrush line up to Hoxton, had festive Swedish meatballs at the Curious Yellow Kafe, then wandered through Shoreditch under that thin, deceptive spring sun London offered today. On the train back south, the miracle arrived in my idle-time phone scrolling. It happened somewhere between Whitechapel and where the internet cuts out when the train goes underground for a few stops. A tech bro cured his dog’s cancer with ChatGPT. It’s an Easter story, neatly packaged for the feed. Like, share, move on. Don’t miss your stop.

Read the story, why do that? There was a preview card. A toothy, smiling white man and his happy Staffy mix. The headline completes the Hallmark Channel story for our times: “He used AI to create a cancer vaccine to save his dying dog.” The ChatGPT logo floats just above the dog’s head, like a halo in a Renaissance painting of a saint. The story completes itself without the need of clicking through, or dealing with cookie consent forms, various pop-ups, a paywall, an e-newsletter subscription request, or whatever else nearly every commercial news site throws at you with javascript. We are living in miraculous times.

This is how most information moves now. Not through articles, but through surfaces. Preview cards, thumbnails, captions. Carefully assembled fragments designed to survive the scroll. The article itself exists, somewhere beneath, but it’s now almost incidental. By the time you might click, you’ve already decided what happened.

And this one lands because it’s engineered to. Cancer does the heavy lifting. The dog does the rest. It disarms you, makes scepticism feel inappropriate. It’s Easter after all.

But here’s the twist! It’s not just medicine, but AI! The bot we can all access to lazily respond to emails we’d like to ignore is being used by some wunderkind Down Under to cure cancer. We all have access to the thing that cures cancer. Or something like that. Or rather, no. It’s nothing like that.

Read these or don’t, can’t say you didn’t get the chance: To varying degrees, these are all hype headlines. The articles themselves vary in quality and detail. They all contain elements of the mythology that makes them sharable. The UNSW headline is especially egregious, it’s a university for fuck sake have some standards.

He Solved His Dog’s Cancer: Three AI Models Helped — Forbes
An Australian tech entrepreneur used AI to help create the first-ever bespoke cancer vaccine for a dog to treat his beloved pet Rosie — Fortune
ChatGPT and AlphaFold Help Design Personalized Vaccine for Dog with Cancer — The Scientist
Meet the man who designed a cancer vaccine for his dog — UNSW

What actually happened is slower, messier, and much less cinematic. It’s not even a particularly good Netflix series. Multiple rounds of conventional treatment didn’t work. The dog’s owner, with access, privilege and resources, pushed further into the system rather than bypassing it. DNA sequencing, researchers, lab work, a bespoke mRNA construct manufactured by specialists (not bots), layered with another form of immunotherapy. Ethics approvals. The AI is there throughout, but as a tool in the process, helping navigate research and make sense of data, not designing, manufacturing, or delivering treatment. The result isn’t a cure. It’s a partial response. It’s a treatment. Uneven, uncertain, and still unfolding.

That version of the story doesn’t travel. First off, it’s too complicated. Secondly, there’s no tidy hero element. No archetype pulled from the offspring of an Ayn Rand character template and a Robert F. Kennedy health policy. There’s a reason that Elizabeth Holmes conned people for so long. We’re conditioned to believe in unicorns. It slots neatly into something older. The founder myth: The outsider who breaks through where experts failed. The idea that you don’t need institutions, just ingenuity and the right tools. Being a drop out is even better. Not knowing the field is somehow an advantage, not a limitation. We want the dropout to win. It’s a comfortable tale because we’ve seen it before, in different forms, attached to different sectors, technologies, selling different shortcuts. The thing about unicorns, though, is that they aren’t real. It’s a team of special effects people.

“When an Australian tech entrepreneur with no background in biology or medicine said ChatGPT helped save his dog from cancer, the story couldn’t help but spread, wrote Robert Hart in The Verge. “It’s the kind of validation Big Tech has long craved: proof that AI will revolutionize medicine and take on one of its deadliest diseases. The reality, as usual, is more complicated.”

That Verge article gets it. “Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it’s not clear the mRNA vaccine was responsible for her improvement.” But it’s lobbing the truth bombs on the wrong side of a paywall. Misinformation runs free online while facts, context and details often need a monthly credit card payment. But even when an article isn’t paywalled, there’s increasing tendency to share before reading. A person could take that Verge article url and knock it into archive.ph and see the whole thing. But who knows that? How many people will do it? How many people will see the article at all compared to the more SEO tasty clickbait headlines that conform to our mythologies about tech founder genius? The funnel chart narrows pretty fast.

As is the custom on LinkedIn, it became fodder for everyone’s personal TED Talk script in the form of very long posts, often with single-sentence paragraphs. “This sounds like science fiction… but it actually happened,” wrote one person. “This is what can happen when a data scientist refuses to give up on his dog,” gushed another. Sorry folks, not this time.

“ChatGPT did not design or create Rosie’s treatment; human researchers did. At most, the chatbot served as a research assistant helping Conyngham parse medical literature — impressive, but a far cry from the breakthrough implied.” — Robert Hart, The Verge

This isn’t about AI. It’s about belief. Right now The Discourse is fermenting. AI enthusiasts are banging the drum. Utopia is nigh! AI bashers are pointing out that the hype machine has its new poster critter. It’s not that these technologies aren’t useful in medical research, they demonstratively are: “These technological innovations not only improve vaccine design but also enhance pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, offering promising avenues for personalized cancer immunotherapy.”

Humans don’t do lossless data compression. Information drops. It goes like this… Some event happens, a medical or technical breakthrough of some kind, let’s say. It’s complicated and contingent. Institutions frame it through teams of reviewers, cautiously, but optimistically. Companies try to leverage it for shareholder value. Media compresses it into something clickable to trigger as many monetisation scripts as possible before page exits hit. Social platforms format it into something that propels engagement and reduces departure. And then people take it, reshape it, and pass it on again for whatever reason. At each step, something is lost in a sort of social web non-random natural selection process. Nuance, complexity and uncertainty drop out of the pool early. Collaborative efforts are recessive, hero elements are dominant. What remains is the part that travels. To understand why it works this way, read fewer blog posts on social media engagement strategies and pick up some Joseph Campbell.

This isn’t Cambridge Analytica shenanigans. Those happen but they’re something else. This is default mode transmission: It comes with each transaction. The tools are technical, but behaviour is human. It doesn’t just spread information, it reshapes it into something that can move faster with each share that gets reshared. And in doing so, it often removes the parts needed to understand whether it’s true. It’s not necessarily false, but it’s often not accurate. And it’s optimised for people to be wrong.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:49:26 +0100

“So much of our past has been shaped by this petty proceduralism. You could draw a straight line between an amendment in Brussels and a mass grave in Kazakhstan.” — Molly Crabapple, ‘Here Where We Live is Our Country’

A lot of banging great lines in this book!

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:26:52 +0100

AI can take all the serious jobs and do whatever with them if we can just have these kinds of opportunities in exchange.

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:59:21 +0100

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:33:26 +0100

It strikes me that increasingly in the world it is becoming harder – that there are more people who are not really critically aware of the forces that are shaping them. That’s what most people are feeling today – and that’s the goal. That’s what authoritarian regimes do. — Raoul Peck, director of Orwell: 2+2=5

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:20:57 +0100

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It [cannot] anticipat[e] any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. — Ada Lovelace, on AI in 1843

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:08:12 +0100

More notes on sovereignty

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:56:56 +0100

Consider this post to be the afterbirth of the last one. It’s the bits and pieces I couldn’t cram into the last one, which was already haemorrhaging asides, segues and diversions. As such I’ll not even try hard to connect the dots presented this time.

I thought I was done with the sovereignty posting. There are other things I want to get onto. Other half-baked rants, sketchy musings and dubious epiphanies languish in draft mode. But I blog far slower than the world moves. I still had notes I couldn’t cram into the last post. Still a few tabs open I couldn’t bring myself to exile into the cold, forgotten but persistent realm of my browser history without processing them somewhere. This is somewhere.

This one’s about another kind of digital sovereignty. The personal kind. No, this isn’t about the weird far-right movement that spawned the Nick Offerman movie. Though there are lessons in that which may cross-pollinate here. There’s this notion that people have developed: Jurisdiction curation.

Companies are noticing. It’s becoming marketing hype lexicon. LinkedIn is filthy with tech ads suddenly promising everyone their own private sovereignty in the cloud.

Some FOSS developers are getting in on it.

But everything in a cloud is just on someone else’s machine, and machines are owned by people who are subject to laws. Consider Proton. Proton sells Switzerland as part of its privacy promise. Neutrality. Mountains. Banking secrecy. Nazi gold. A jurisdiction imagined as immune from foreign power. People fill in the gaps themselves. Reality fills in the gaps as well. Guess which one wins.

Switzerland participates in the same legal mesh as everyone else. Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (loads of these). Cross-border warrants. Structured cooperation between prosecutors who don’t care about marketing copy. Five years ago, Proton logged and handed over an IP address tied to a French climate activist after a Swiss order. More recently, payment data tied to an anonymous account was sufficient to unmask a protester in the U.S. for the FBI.

Proton’s defence is correct. Like something a lawyer would write. They minimise retained data, they can’t decrypt message content. None of that contradicts the outcome. They didn’t “help the FBI.” They complied with Swiss law… which helped the FBI. “We only respond to Swiss authorities” is accurate. It’s also doing a second job. Swiss authorities are exactly how foreign requests arrive.

“It is true that Proton is located in Switzerland and responded to a legal request from the Swiss authorities. But it is also true that most people do not know what an MLAT is and there is a widespread misunderstanding that using Proton will protect your account from US govt requests.” — Eva Galprin

Jurisdiction isn’t a magical barrier developed by the Elves around Rivendell. It’s a routing layer. You aren’t choosing whether law applies. You’re choosing which legal process applies first, and under what thresholds it hands off to another one. It’s a friction point. Stick this in your threat model: Navigating tech sovereignty is only going to be harder in this emerging world of backyard hegemonic geopolitics.

Still, we’re not all dodgy billionaires trying to remain afloat in international waters. Sovereignty is the new flavour for us common folk, too. There are plenty of valid reasons to move your stack out of an adversarial jurisdiction. The recent surge in “leave Big Tech” guides makes that clear, from mainstream pieces to a growing number of personal migration logs documenting the process in detail.

The Guardian — Leave Big Tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more
Coinerella — Made in EU: It was harder than I thought
Zeitgeist of Bytes — Bye Bye Big Tech: How I Migrated
Disconnect Blog — Getting off US tech: A guide

These are all good posts for those wanting to migrate their bits. The change they reflect is the impetus. These kinds of guides used to be about switching to open source. Now they’re about geography. The Faustian bargain trade-offs return when you go indy. Missing features. More payment gateways. Interoperability gaps. The quiet reintroduction of complexity that hyperscalers spent decades covering with UI development and SSO paths.

It’s still probably worth it, but what emerges is less of a clean break and more of a negotiated position. It’s partial exits, and hybrid stacks with work-arounds. It looks less like independence and more like jurisdiction curation. If you’re not escaping entirely, at least you’re selecting your dependencies. Maybe that’s enough for the period we’re in. For now. Or maybe not. We’ll find out. These are exciting times.

You can’t unscramble the egg and put it back in its shell. Both national and individual attempts at gaining technological “sovereignty” (or independence, or whatever) run up against the fact that we’ve already made the omelette. Yeah, I’m mixing a lot of metaphors. I’m not un-mixing them. It’s too late. Go with it. Consider torrents, Hollywood, Bollywood, the IIPA, and DNS (you didn’t see that coming).

Christian Dawson, Executive Director of the i2Coalition, recently wrote about anti-piracy enforcement rulings in the Delhi High Court that go beyond holding websites violating copyright laws accountable, or instructing Indian ISPs to block them, and are now green-lighting legal action against domain registrars. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) praised the court, Dawson noted, claiming hundreds of piracy sites have already been wiped from the internet as a result. This enthusiasm was share shared by many other U.S. rights holders, who have welcomed India’s approach as a model for tackling piracy globally.

“If you stop there, India’s approach sounds like a win because the temptation is to measure success in takedown numbers” wrote Dawson. “But enforcement architecture matters more than weekly disruption statistics. If the structure being built today erodes jurisdictional limits, proportionality, and procedural safeguards, rights holders may find that the same tools celebrated in one case become destabilizing in many others.”

“Are we prepared for a world in which a single national court can, under its own standards of proportionality, functionally shape global DNS operations through orders directed at infrastructure providers, including foreign companies? Because once that door is open, it does not stay limited to piracy. It never does.” — Christian Dawson

Where’s your sovereignty sit within any of that?

The urge to flee is growing more common. Migrants want to be where it’s safer. Don’t we all? What are they fleeing in this digitised context? No one before the start of 2025 talked about internet sovereignty outside of niche academic circles or the deepest pits of policy wonkery. Now it’s the stuff of blogs and launches hundreds of LinkedIn hot takes on a daily basis. What changed? America did.

Under the Trump administration the DOJ is ignoring the Privacy Protection Act to go after journalists it isn’t happy with. Congress is working across the aisle to abolish anonymous speech on the internet and speed through legal mechanisms that would open the floodgates for unprecedented levels mass surveillance and censorship.

And then there’s just stuff like this I can’t quite categorise, in which people are now looking at how to nip in the bud the worst possible elements of the forthcoming nightmare existence they see coming around the bend…

The [Washington] state Senate unanimously passed legislation Wednesday that prohibits employers from requesting, requiring or encouraging employees to have microchips implanted in their bodies. The bill previously passed the House of Representatives on an 87-6 vote last month. It now heads to the governor’s desk for final approval. — The Seattle times

This is all about fleeing the U.S. Even if you’re not in it, your bits probably are, at least to some degree. “Day by day, the United States is becoming more overt in using its economic and technological influence against its adversaries,” writes Reem Almasri, “which makes the question of independence from dominant US technology companies increasingly urgent.”

“The United States has become the world’s biggest bully, threatening any country that doesn’t do as it demands with tariffs, and its tech companies are taking full advantage by flexing their muscle and trying to avoid effective regulation around the world. The drawbacks of our dependence on US tech companies have become more obvious with every passing year, but now there can hardly be any denying that where we can pry ourselves away from them, we should make the effort to do so.” — Paris Marx

There’s good reason for all this distrust. But the problem is thornier than it might appear. American infrastructure is deeply entangled in the services we use every day. It isn’t always transparent about where it sits. The Dutch government commissioned a legal review of Amazon’s “European Sovereign Cloud” (marketed as sovereignty-friendly) only to quietly pull the report after experts pointed out all the gaping holes and risks. It doesn’t matter where the data centre sits or who staffs it. If the provider is an American company then the U.S. has a long arm of the law to compel access or suspend services entirely.

“The technology is delivered as a black box. To ensure the security of government data, you want to check at the source code level for backdoors.” — Nitesh Bharosa, Professor of Government Technology, Delft University of Technology

The opacity is the problem. Even a government department actively trying to assess the risks couldn’t see inside the product it was evaluating. For individuals, the challenge is even greater. American (and other) cloud infrastructure hides inside apps, services, and platforms in ways that are rarely disclosed and almost impossible to audit.

Writing in Sovereignty for Sale, Sam Freedman argues that this dependency is no longer just a commercial inconvenience. A case in point: Elon Musk’s decision to restrict Ukraine’s use of Starlink terminals showed how control over foreign-owned technology can alter the course of a war. For anyone — individual or nation — relying on infrastructure they don’t control and can’t inspect, the risk is real, even when it’s invisible.

My point — and I do have one — is that we need another way. Signal is a U.S. based platform, but I trust it, for good reasons. Telegram has a global network of servers and is based in Dubai. For good reasons no one should trust it as a secure messenger. I see your jurisdiction, and raise you a security posture, protocol selection or technology architecture that renders it moot.

One size never fits all. This isn’t off-the-rack on the high street. That’s what you were escaping, remember? For file storage, encrypt locally before anything touches a cloud. Your keys, your ciphertext, nobody else’s problem to solve. For email, client-side end-to-end encryption means mathematically unreadable, not “we promise we can’t read it” unreadable. For social, federated protocols like ActivityPub mean your identity isn’t owned by a single company in a single jurisdiction that can be leaned on. For web traffic, encrypted DNS stops queries being snooped at the network level, where a lot of quiet surveillance actually happens. For messaging, the question is how useless that encrypted blob will be when a subpoena lands and metadata was never logged to begin with.

What if it’s building blocks instead of borders? Open protocols offer part of our third path. They invite participation in shaping them rather than simply consuming. They’re transparent instead of uninspecticable intellectual property. And that’s the rub. We’ve been trained by decades of internet concentration and user interface design to see it purely within consumer contexts instead of a series of technical decisions that have consequences, trade-offs and alternatives. You don’t solve all of these things with a re-occurring monthly ding on your credit card. You can’t subscribe your way to safety.

“The sovereignty offered by this approach is not about ownership, but about institutions understanding how their systems work, being able to participate in them, and retaining the option to move or adapt if needed.” — Kelly Roegies

That last part is the key. The goal isn’t to build a bunker. It’s to avoid being trapped. We can’t unmake the omelette. We can only use it as an ingredient to mix into something new. It’s not that your data location isn’t relevant, of course it can be. It’s just that it’s far from the only ingredient that’s relevant.

Sovereignty ≠ Freedom

On sovereignty and freedom and the internet

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:42:25 +0100

I was getting ready to hit “publish” on this post at the weekend. But then the world changed… again. So, I put this draft down for a few days and switched back to my current day (sometimes night) job. Now it’s Wednesday. Or Thursday. Time’s a blur.

This post started out to be about internet sovereignty. It’s a topic keeping way too many tabs open in my browser these days. The war the Trump Administration chose to start in Iran at Israel’s request — yeah, I said what I said — is about physical sovereignty. Borders. Airspace. Territory. Kinetic force. But there’s no tidy border between these two realms.

Another sovereignty dispute unfolded in Wash., D.C. where noted town drunk Pete Hegseth issued Anthropic’s CEO an ultimatum: give his Department of War unrestricted access to Claude or risk being declared a “supply chain risk.” Or be compelled under the Defence Production Act to tailor the model to military needs. Anthropic’s red lines were clear — no domestic mass surveillance, no autonomous killing without meaningful human oversight. On CNN Trump claimed he had banned government use of the “radical left” AI. The military used it anyway. The technology was already embedded. Capacity is policy.

Consider the fast-tracked debut in Iran of new, low-cost loitering munitions — a ‘suicide’ drone platform accelerated from unveiling to battlefield in just months… not years, because that’s how things work now.

Not everyone in Silicon Valley (colloquially geolocating) wants to end up on the wrong side of history. Employees at Google and OpenAI published an open letter warning that the Pentagon was attempting to force AI companies to compete over who’d relax safeguards the fastest. The fight’s been framed as patriotism vs. principle. It’s more accurately a contest over who governs machine intelligence and to what ends.

These aren’t separate stories. They are the same one. And that brings us full circle. Everyone’s pissing to mark territory, and more splash is hitting internet policy.

‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Internet freedom, as a policy focus, died, quietly at home, surrounded by loved ones. It’s no mystery, we know what killed it. Attending RightsCon in 2025 was like being at its wake. People reminisced. The food was good. Now internet sovereignty is rising quickly in its place. Funding is even surfacing around it. They aren’t the same thing.

For a generation, the internet was mostly narrated as a sprawling borderless commons. In 1996, John Perry Barlow declared cyberspace independent of governments, a realm where sovereignty dissolved into protocol and participation. Good times. That mythology held long after it became obvious it wasn’t true.

The early governance model worked not because power was absent, but because it operated in the background. Root servers, backbone infrastructure, cloud platforms and semiconductor supply chains were overwhelmingly anchored in the U.S. The system functioned because that dominance was exercised with restraint. Sovereignty was invisible because it didn’t need to announce itself.

“Washington need not seize the DNS or nationalize infrastructure to shape global outcomes for instance. Influence is embedded in architecture: jurisdiction over key firms, extraterritorial enforcement of domestic law, sanctions regimes, export controls on advanced chips and AI models, and the policy alignment of globally dominant companies.” — Konstantinos Komaitis

That restraint became a competitive advantage. U.S. hyperscalers didn’t just sell compute and storage, they sold confidence in the rule of law underpinning them. Trust was the product. But trust isn’t structural. It’s contingent. And it’s ephemeral.

“As the footprint of these hyperscalers has increased, policymakers in Washington have found ways to serve U.S. foreign policy goals by weaponizing this digital infrastructure. In response, other nations have increasingly sought to reduce their dependence on the U.S. for their critical digital infrastructure. — Kat Duffy

When U.S. sanctions led to the suspension of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s Microsoft email account, the abstraction collapsed. It wasn’t DNS. It was an angry America. The invisible sovereign became visible.

Europe has noticed. A Wall Street Journal headline captured the shift bluntly: Europe prepares for a “nightmare scenario” in which the U.S. blocks access to critical technology. A decade ago, that would have sounded conspiratorial. Today it’s contingency planning.

The U.S. had been seen for decades as a stable steward of a vast terrain of the internet’s core infrastructure. That assumption is eroding. Access can be weaponised. When Washington demands compliance, companies within its jurisdiction comply. The U.S. once invested hundreds of millions into the internet freedom model — decentralisation, interoperability, tunnels, proxies, encryption, encryption, some more encryption. The U.S. is now more interested in something else.

As confidence falters, trust migrates inward. Money follows, moving away from circumvention tools and open protocols and toward national AI models, domestic clouds and state-controlled routing capacity. This is less a technical shift than a transfer of power from users to states and from global networks to firewalls that increasingly resemble national borders.

Sovereignty as insurance policy

Across Europe it’s all kicking off. Procurement teams are weighing jurisdictional risk against cost and convenience. France announced that 2.5 million civil servants will migrate away from Zoom, Teams and Webex toward a French-built platform hosted on national infrastructure. Austria’s armed forces is shifting thousands of workstations to LibreOffice and Nextcloud. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 government PCs from Windows to Linux. Danish regulators are scrutinising Google deployments in schools under GDPR exposure. Switzerland’s ETH Zürich and EPFL released Apertus, a fully open large language model trained on domestic infrastructure. Spain’s ALIA initiative is building open multilingual models under national supervision.

Many of these substitutions do involve FOSS systems, but the primary driver isn’t an ideological commitment to open source. It’s reducing reliance on American hyperscalers. Now the calculus is leverage, sanctions risk and supply chains.

At an EU Open Source Policy Summit, Ruth Suehle argued that “digital sovereignty doesn’t mean a digital fortress. It means openness, and options, not being locked in.” That is the aspiration. Sovereignty as diversification. Sovereignty as insurance policy. That seems nice.

Sovereignty begins as hedging behaviour. It rarely stays there.

The walls go up faster

“None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!” — Rorschach, Watchmen

In authoritarian contexts, digital sovereignty isn’t an insurance policy. It’s an instrument of control.

Iran’s National Information Network and its recently approved “electronic passive defence” doctrine formalise the ability to disconnect external networks during “crises.” Shutdowns are engineered in advance. Spectrum becomes sovereign terrain.

China’s doctrine of cyber sovereignty layers law, licensing, gateways and deep packet inspection into a coherent architecture. Through companies exporting firewall technology, it offers sovereignty as a service to other autocratic and closed regimes. When filtering infrastructure is built and maintained by foreign firms, sovereignty becomes outsourced control.

Flexing the sovereign muscle takes subtler forms in democracies. The United Kingdom’s rollout of age verification requirements led to predictable VPN surges. The response is to consider regulating VPNs. Control begets circumvention. Circumvention justifies deeper control. On it goes.

Among allies, sovereignty now collides. The U.S. is launching a government portal intended to help Europeans bypass domestic content restrictions. Circumvention reframed as foreign policy. The splinternet is not merely fragmentation between blocs. Shutdowns are getting cheaper and easier to impose. Fragmentation is increasingly deployed for political ends.

Where freedom and sovereignty collide

“Before I built a wall,” Robert Frost wrote, “I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out.” The question rarely features in policy briefings.

Freedom House warned that the future of internet freedom would depend on how governments deploy incentives and controls over the next wave of technological innovation. Many are deploying it this way: “Sovereign AI development in authoritarian contexts is likely to advance ongoing efforts to wall off the domestic internet from global networks, often referred to as ‘cyber sovereignty.'”

Sovereignty language proliferates discourse. At SplinterCon in Paris, the theme was sovereignty: autonomy or isolation. At RightsCon in Taipei, a session centred on undersea cables and the island’s digital resilience. Indigenous communities articulated digital sovereignty as cultural survival. 7amleh launched #ReconnectGaza, which is very much based on Palestinian telecommunications sovereignty.

“Gaza is one of the last places on earth with 2G. Regular access to fibre options, essential for modern telecommunications, has been restricted too, and any international connectivity has been channelled through Israeli-controlled networks, leaving Gaza’s connections vulnerable to intentional disruptions. — #ReconnectGaza

Internet freedom assumes permeability. It’s outward-facing. It’s not just some circumvention tools; It’s connectivity as a universal right. Sovereignty framing is conditional on context. For Palestinians, it’s access to the outside world, free of an occupier’s surveillance. For the Turkmenistan government, sovereignty is a tightly controlled state internet blocking external traffic getting in and internal traffic getting out.

Freedom protects users from states. Sovereignty aims to protect states from each other. There are good elements in some sovereignty initiatives. Data protection matters. Transparency matters. Supply chain resilience matters. But sovereignty is a poor substitute for internet freedom. In many ways, it’s a retreat. The world now wants to put its borders online.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Users route around filters. Signals seek paths. Even in blackout, packets move. I still want to believe. But We’re in “mending season.” Governments “walk the line and set the wall between us once again.” The question isn’t whether sovereignty will shape the network. It already does. The question is what we’re walling in as we build, and what we’re keeping out.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:10:21 +0000

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Clouds without rain

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:46:58 +0000

These are notes. The triggering MacGuffin: I was recently asked to take part in an upcoming set of workshops. In general terms it’s around what happens when rapid AI infrastructure expansion collides with accelerating climate stress and other emerging security dynamics that make up the whole shit show of our times. I said sure. Of course I did, why not? It’s the opportunity to bring both my work and my doomscrolling together in some online panels.

It wasn’t a formal brief. Just an invitation to grapple with a question that is equal parts exploratory, open-ended, and deceptively simple. I’ve already started mulling it. On the surface it seemed like a narrow infrastructure question: water use, data centres, local protest. And on and on. But the more I mind-map the threads, the less contained it becomes. Water scarcity pulls in sovereignty disputes. Sovereignty disputes pulls in grievance. Grievance pulls in mobilisation, disinformation, extremism. I’m down rabbit holes. The deeper I’ve gone, the clearer it becomes: this isn’t about some servers. It’s not about the tech stack that constitutes what we call “AI.” It’s about compound pressure building inside already fragile systems. Everything is thirsty.

Bonfires instead of clouds

Everyone keeps talking about artificial intelligence like it floats in the cloud. The cloud has always been a horrible analogy for serverless computing. It invokes the idea of a happy replenishing loop — A hydrologic cycle — in which evaporation leads to condensation which leads to precipitation. That’s not how this works. It’s extractive, not replenishing. It runs on water. It runs on land. It runs on rare earth minerals pulled from the earth by environmentally devastating practices, or sometimes by children forced into the work to fund some side in a civil war. It runs on electricity sequestered from fragile grids in places already running at capacity. And as climate stress tightens its grip, AI infrastructure isn’t just expanding. It’s inserting itself directly into water-scarce, politically decaying regions — and pretending it’s neutral. It isn’t neutral. A natural cloud is neutral. This is combustible. It’s bonfire fuel.

Climate stress Is just the spark

Let’s kick off with some basics. Let’s start with drought, with heatwaves, with fire. Throw in energy volatility. Add generous portions of inflation and a cost of living crisis. Climate stress increases scarcity. Scarcity sharpens questions nobody wants to answer: Who gets water? Who gets power? Who absorbs the externalities? Who profits? You can already hear how that call-in show on the AM dial sounds, the one that you listen to on long road trips in areas where the radio doesn’t pick up anything else. When you’re not listening to podcasts.

Drop some hyperscaler’s data centre into that equation — a facility that consumes millions of gallons of water and enormous amounts of electricity — and you’ve just turned background tension into a visible symbol. Data centres are quiet, windowless, secretive. They hum. They don’t explain themselves. They don’t look like hospitals or schools. They look like extraction. That makes them narratively perfect.

Scarcity becomes the story

Once scarcity becomes visible, it becomes political. Water restrictions hit households and farmers. Energy prices spike. Meanwhile, a massive AI facility continues operating behind fences. It doesn’t matter whether the water accounting is technically defensible. In conditions of stress, perception outruns spreadsheets. That’s when mobilisation begins.

Environmental grievance. Anti-capitalist anger. Anti-technology backlash. Sovereignty disputes. Indigenous land rights conflicts. “AI colonisation.” “Water theft.” “Corporate takeover.” Some of these grievances are legitimate. Some are opportunistic. Some are engineered. Extremist ecosystems don’t care about the distinction. They care about narrative density. And nothing generates narrative density like visible scarcity plus opaque infrastructure. There are still things to smash even when the building has no windows.

The narrative battlefield

Here’s the part policymakers underestimate: data centres are easy to mythologise. They are technically complex but visually simple. That makes them ideal vessels for conspiracy and accelerationist framing. There was a whole movie about it.

Eco-fascists can weaponise water scarcity. Anti-technology movements can cast AI as civilisational decay. Far-right groups can fold local grievance into broader anti-globalist rhetoric. Disinformation actors can seed stories about contamination, secret surveillance, or “elite water pipelines.” The more technical the infrastructure, the easier it is to distort.

Mobilisation rarely begins with sabotage. It begins with a story. That story becomes outrage. Outrage fuels targeting.

Targeting prefaces sabotage

This is the stage most security planning ignores. When mobilisation escalates, it doesn’t jump straight to cutting cables. It starts with people. Local officials negotiating permits. Tribal leaders weighing partnerships. Journalists reporting on water allocations. Employees working inside the facility. Doxing. Harassment. Phishing disguised as activism. Insider recruitment framed as moral resistance. Coordinated smear campaigns. Manufactured leaks.

Eventually there is a memo. Facility hardening increases. Guards get hired. Perimeter fencing improves while legitimacy erodes. And once legitimacy erodes, insider risk grows. Cyber risk grows. Physical risk grows. Because the escalation pathway isn’t linear. It’s cumulative.

Compound risk is the replenishing loop

Remember the happy replenishing loop we already dismissed? Here’s where the cyclical system lives. It’s not happy. Climate stress increases scarcity. Scarcity increases grievance. Grievance gets captured and amplified. Narrative warfare increases hostility. Hostility increases targeting. Targeting increases cyber, insider, and physical risk. Then a disruption happens — a ransomware attack during a heatwave, a shutdown during drought restrictions, a clash at a protest — and the disruption itself becomes proof of the grievance narrative. The loop tightens.

Indian Country as a flashpoint

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has one of my favourite restaurants in Washington, DC. That’s not the only reason to visit. It also has the definitive exhibit detailing every treaty between the U.S. and Native American tribes, including all the broken ones. There are a lot of broken ones. The Trump regime is reviving that tradition. Columbia Basin Salmon Agreement canceled. Tribal Food Grants canceled. Climate and Green Energy Funding, cut. He once tried to revoke the reservation status of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe. Meanwhile, the federal government dangles shiny new treaty offers. The federal government now wants tribes to make deals to develop crops of data centres. That means leasing land or selling power. It means diverting water. The US Department of Energy apparently has a whole webinar about it. This is one particular rabbit hole I’ve stayed in for a while. In parts of the American West, the future of AI is being routed through Tribal lands. It’s already planned. The asking comes as an afterthought.

Federal agencies frame data centres as economic opportunity. Partnerships promise revenue, energy sales, infrastructure investment. But in water-stressed states with contested sovereignty histories, the stakes hit different. Land and water are not just commodities. They are treaty rights. They are cultural survival. That means disputes over AI infrastructure are never just about cooling systems. They are about sovereignty, extraction history, and trust. External actors, the extremist groups, disinformation networks, political opportunists — the various grievance entrepreneurs — will not ignore that. They will exploit it.

As I click through various news and papers on federal government promises and Tech hyperscaler plans already in progress I just think back to the Dakota Access pipeline protests at Standing Rock. This rabbit hole goes back even further. It goes back centuries. But I digress. Kind of.

The Illusion of technical neutrality

The industry still talks as if AI infrastructure is apolitical. It isn’t. It never is. It is being built in regions already strained by drought and inequality. It draws heavily on shared resources. It often operates with limited transparency. It depends on stable grids in an era of instability. And it is emerging at the same moment as mass distrust in institutions. The very software that requires these vast fields of data centres is built to fabricate. It’s built to lie. Another feedback loop in a volatile mix of them.

Most resilience planning focuses on the facility: redundancy, cyber controls, perimeter security, OT segmentation. But the escalation usually starts with legitimacy failure. If communities believe water is being diverted unfairly, if leaders feel pressured or silenced, if activists are harassed or co-opted, the social environment around the infrastructure becomes hostile. In hostile environments, security costs rise. Insider risk increases. Attack surfaces widen. Infrastructure does not exist outside politics. It sits inside grievance.

Here it is

My point — and I do have one — is that dropping AI infrastructure into the middle of fragile systems isn’t just an environmental issue. It’s a conflict multiplier. Climate volatility raises scarcity. Scarcity raises grievance. Grievance fuels narrative capture. Narrative capture increases targeting. Targeting destabilises both people and infrastructure.

And when instability sets in, everyone will claim they’re surprised. They shouldn’t be. This cloud doesn’t rain. It sucks the water out and doesn’t give it back. And water is running out.

Links and such

I caught the latest episode of the ‘This Is Not A Drill’ podcast at the weekend, in which its host Gavin Esler interviewed Alex Hern, the AI writer at The Economist. It was like they were eavesdropping on my internal monologue. Give it a listen.

Informing parts of this post (not exhaustive)

Dakota Access Pipeline: What’s at stake? (CNN) Remember this?
What to know about the National Museum of the American Indian amid Trump’s Smithsonian review (USAToday)
As Trump cancels Columbia River deal, promises to Indigenous American tribes are still being broken (Idaho Capital Sun)
The local and global environmental footprint of the AI-driven boom in data centers (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Tribal Digital Sovereignty: How Native Communities Are Powering Their Own Tech Future (Ford Foundation) This isn’t about AI or data centres directly. It’s about technology sovereignty, which none the less relates here, and more and more, everywhere.
The AI boom is heralding a new gold rush in the American west (The Guardian)
The Future of AI Runs Through Indian Country (The Payne Institute for Public Policy)
Data Centers: Exploring the Opportunity for Tribes (The US Department of Energy)
Proposed Data Centers in Indian Country This is Honor the Earth’s tracking website for “hyperscale data centers on/near Indigenous lands.”
The No Data Centers on Native Land Campaign An Indigenous women led organisation.
Decolonizing AI Data Centers: A Critique Through the Native Feminist Lens (UCLA’s Queered Science and Technology Center) This one’s all about the power dynamics.

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:32:31 +0000

What happens when Iran turns the internet off?

YouTube Video

Yalda Hakim with Mahsa Alimardani, associate director of technology threats and opportunities at WITNESS

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 16:24:03 +0000

Everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager.

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:44:36 +0000

For 2026 I decided on some personal Bluesky glasnost to start the year. But there’re no free tools to open the floodgates. Blockenheimer used to do that as well as be a great blocking service, but I noticed it’s dead now. So I made a wee script for it: github.com/drew3000/…

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:15:35 +0000

Trump regime just ordered the the U.S. to withdraw from international agreements or work that “are contrary to the Interests of the United States.” Let’s look at what these include:

climate / environment
human rights / conflict prevention
internet freedom / cyber security
anti-corruption / legal

Insurrection is still a value-neutral term

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:53:58 +0000

Note: Welcome to the first of my redux posts. Occasionally I’ll dig out a banger from the Ghost markdown export of my old blog that seems timely or still relevant and give it some new life. Instead of a straight copy paste there will be slight updates. Less of a re-release and more of an update. Like when George Lucas put the original Star Wars trilogy back in the cinemas with some added CGI. For better or worse.

Today I’m regurgitating an earlier one from my old blog, the groovily-named Dystopia.Report. The Internet Archive didn’t back it up very well. The text is there minus the website design and some images. It’s fine. Why re-run it now? Welp, we’re at the beginning of Year Two of the Trump regime, and I think it still resonates. I’ve tweaked bits that annoyed me for clarity or typos.

Preface to the current edition

It’s been a long year, but it’s only been one year of Trump Round 2. Here’s a small sampling of items from the highlights reel: Earlier in 2025 the new White House administration started off with an attack on USAID (with the help of Elon), obliterating it and leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths before the year was out and still counting. It also weaponized the DOJ against Trump’s critics and opponents. This administration also created its own secret police force of unaccountable, masked thugs who disappear people from the streets and sometimes smuggle them to planes for exfiltration to third-country prisons without due process. It’s put in place a Health Secretary who actively works to increase viral sickness. Today it has invaded another country and abducted its president. The president’s cuts to healthcare access have been particularly targeted at women. This could go on, but it isn’t meant to be the whole laundry list. Add your own top Trump traumas to the list. It’s estimated that this MAGA regime has already fulfilled up to 50% of what Project 2025 had promised, so there’s a lot to choose from. There are still three more years left.

Even before he returned to the White House, Trump repeatedly referenced the Insurrection Act of 1804 as a way of putting the military on U.S. streets to enforce mass deportations. It was one of many things President Biden refused to fix during the brief Trump intermission. But in that time people thought about insurrection in a different light. Federal prosecutors charged about 1,500 people in relation to the January 6, 2021, mad siege on the Capitol Building. The Democrats made a website about them. On his first day back in office, Trump granted blanket clemency to the lot of them the same year he talked up using the Insurrection Act against protests in several cities. He’d end up using other legal mechanisms to send troops, or at least try to. But he’s got three years still to use the Insurrection Act, and he’s been gagging to do it during both terms in office and the golf break in between. I’d put betting money on it happening. It’s time to accept that Insurrection isn’t a dirty word… contextually.

From October 10, 2024

Insurrection is a value-neutral term

As we get ready for another election in the U.S., insurrection may become a left-wing value again. That’s fine.

As another U.S. presidential election looms — one that’s entirely too tight to call — history threatens to act like a needle skipping on an old vinyl record, back when music happened on physical replay artifacts. We may well be in for a continuity of the current regime or the second part of the preceding one, in which case we’ve just had a four-year intermission in what can fairly be called the Trump era.

A lot of us were heavily relieved when Trump lost the 2020 election. It concluded a four-year misery in which every day seemed to feature some new shitshow. It both seems like an age ago and just the other day. If Trump loses this election, his supporters will likely run riot once more. If he wins, they may just do so as well. But there could be worse outcomes if/when America once again has a president that’s bent on dismantling democracy itself. It’s at times like this that we need to get really pedantic. When the Powers That Be are rapidly trying to redefine everything around us, we need to remember that words mean things. Depending on how bad things go, we may need to reclaim the word insurrection. But really, we never should have lost it.

Many news outlets covered the melee on January 6, 2021 in different ways. Riot, mob, attack, siege, etc. were all pretty fair descriptions of the crazed throng of MAGAs throwing one last hissy fit after their saffron-tinged despot wannabe lost the election but refused to admit it. Some coverage, editorials, and no small amount of extremely online political pundits really latched onto the insurrection angle. I didn’t. In fact, I actively avoided it. It was problematic, to use the parlance of our time. Not because the attack on the Capitol by the angry if dim horde didn’t qualify as one… maybe it did and maybe it didn’t. The word carries legal weight and shouldn’t be thrown around willy-nilly, but this isn’t the main reason to use other words if the point is to be critical.

Why? Well, one reason is that using it buries what people were really angry about when we saw that riot. We were angry because the mob was protesting democratic systems and the Constitution and were trying to subvert a reasonably good system for transferring power with a flailing temper tantrum. No one was really angry about an insurrection, but that these people wanted to destroy good things.

Insurrection is not a pejorative word. It’s inherently value-neutral. Our opposition or support of one is based on two things: the system it opposes, and whatever it seeks to replace that system with. Given the right context, nearly everyone is for an insurrection somewhere. It’s a mechanism. The U.S. exists because of one; France is a republic; Haiti freed itself from its slaveholders. Be the regime change you want to see in the world.

In the TNG film, Star Trek: Insurrection, Picard and the crew uncovered Starfleet Command’s secret alliance with the Son’a to forcibly displace the indigenous people of Ba’ku from their planet for resource exploitation. They soon joined forces with the besieged people and turned on the Federation. I think we can all get behind that one.

Depending on how things go in the U.S., over the next year or four, you, mainstream liberal or left-leaning person, may find yourself not being entirely opposed to one. Never say never.

Original post meta info:

title: Insurrection is a value-neutral term
slug: insurrection-is-a-value-neutral-term
date_published: 2024-10-25T23:39:10.000Z
date_updated: 2024-12-01T21:25:36.000Z
tags: all politics is local

Afterword

Happy new year. It’s 2026. How are things going?

Secure file sharing back on the new blog with OnionShare

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:05:52 +0000

As one of my Twixmas projects I’ve decided to reboot my OnionShare site. It’s a secure and anonymous way for someone in the world to send files straight to a Raspberry Pi on my desk over the Tor network. I had it set up for a while two blog domains ago, and today decided it’s time to plug it all back in. In order to reach it you need to use the Tor Browser, and with it visit:

http://entyms3fdn4fyl6lizog6hoztvaqkvv2njmcovslkm55xhahs7nnmiqd.onion

OnionShare was developed by Micah Lee, a programmer who develops spiffy open source privacy and security tools for journalists to better work with whistle blowers and hacked or leaked files. You can find out more about it, and other potentially useful programs at Lockdown Systems.

Larger news organisations can operate super locked-down and managed whistle blowing platforms like SecureDrop or GlobaLeaks. OnionShare is a nice, reasonably secure option for small outfits, freelance journalists or others. I’m operating a persistent (always on) version, but its most common use case is an app that someone can fire up when it’s needed and then shut it off when it isn’t.

I posted a Github Gist about how I’m running it. There are threat models around using these kinds of tools, and then the whole workflow of handling files that may or may not be malicious. Will get into it in other posts. Watch this space.

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:30:31 +0000

Watched: Hedda 🍿

It’s a well done adaptation from stage to screen in a sort of alternating fever dream / nightmare set of sequences, each more chaotic than the last. Great to see Tessa Thompson lead a dramatic film after so many (entertaining) sci-fi action movies.

Situations wanted

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:37:05 +0000

In my headcannon, I’ve been trying to model my career, to the extent that’s possible, after one of my favourite sci-fi action heroes. You know the one I mean, of course. Yep! Archibald “Harry” Tuttle, the outlaw plumber in the dystopian bureaucracypunk film Brazil.

Yes, I’ve just coined “bureaucracypunk.” It’s soon to be part of the cultural zeitgeist of our times. Adminpunk may be a shorter, snappier alternative, but it doesn’t quite get to the point of what it is. Kafka’s The Trial would be a kind of proto-bureaucracypunk. Other classics of my genre would be Office Space, The Death of Stalin, or possibly the series Severance. Roll with it.

Harry’s only got 15 minutes in Terry Gilliam’s two-and-a-half-hour film about the tyranny of the administrative layer. He monitors radio waves for signs of distress calls to Central Services from people whose heating or air conditioning is on the fritz, breaks into their flats to repair a thermostat or reroute a sewage line, and then rappels away into the night. Awesome. 2026 may be the year for it.Anyway…

This blog post is a longer version of the already too-long post I published on LinkedIn. That site generously gives you 2,000 characters to shoot your shot. But if you can’t plagiarise yourself on your other platforms, then what good is having any of them?

I changed my LinkedIn profile to light the green #OpenToWork beacon a week before Christmas. It may have been a year in the making. Like many others working across the NGO world (in media development and beyond), the funding cuts domino effect started by the Trump administration in the U.S. in January has continued to ripple around the globe, reaching me in December. The world is changing (an understatement). As a result, the work I’ve been doing feels more pressing now than ever. The challenge for 2026 will be finding new ways to continue working in these areas, and discovering what shape this work can take.

For the last 10+ years at Internews, I developed, scaled, and led the Global Technology Hub (GTH), an internationally distributed unit of multi-disciplinary technologists providing direct assistance to media, human rights, and civil society groups worldwide. GTH focused on digital safety, secure communications and infrastructure, censorship circumvention, and sustainable organisational resilience through hands-on support, incident response, and long-term capacity building. It worked with hundreds of organisations across nearly 40 countries to help them stay online, operate securely, communicate privately, access an uncensored web or deal with an internet shutdown, and keep working under pressure from war, regime change, creeping autocracy, or entrenched authoritarianism.

Nothing in world events suggests that need has gone away.

Back in June, Internews, in collaboration with a consortia of media development organisations, released Crisis in Journalism: The Impact of the US Government Funding Cuts on Global Media, which examined the consequences of eliminating $150 million in annual support for journalism worldwide. The report catalogued the immediate consequences: the media outlet closures, widespread staff reductions, and the overall global damage to public interest journalism among them. It also touched on how journalists face increasingly tougher digital security risks at a very time when these cuts have also reduced their access to the technical support systems and expertise needed to deal with them.

Media support and internet freedom work have always been fellow travellers. The internet isn’t as useful without good, fact-based news and information, and that information isn’t as available without a securely accessible, open internet. 2025 has seen serious setbacks to both. It has been several months since January — when the U.S. government rapidly shuttered its foreign assistance programmes, including those that had for decades supported diverse, independent media efforts globally as well as numerous vital internet freedom and technology initiatives — and the damage is still unfolding.

This halt in foreign aid funding for technology initiatives that support online access, digital safety, privacy and other internet freedom needs damaged not only news gathering organisations, of course. It affected civil society organisations more broadly, as well. These CSOs also provide locally relevant information. They tackle environmental issues, do humanitarian work, support gender rights, promote civic engagement, human rights, etc., and aim to hold power to account. It cut funding to their budgets, sure. But beyond that it also hit the projects and organisations that develop the tools they use to circumvent censorship or surveillance, communicate securely, and even publish their work. It reduced access to the expertise they rely on to mitigate the chances of an attack, or to recover after one."

These cuts have had cascading effects," reported the TechGlobal Institute in its impact analysis. “legal aid for persecuted journalists has dwindled, digital safety training for activists has been reduced, and critical network interference monitoring efforts have been abandoned. This crisis has left tens of thousands of pro-democracy advocates, civil society groups, and whistleblowers without essential digital protections at a time when online repression is intensifying. One survey respondent reported that over 5,000 indirect beneficiaries have already been impacted by the funding shortfall.”

“Across the sector, organizations are not only losing the people whose expertise helps them prepare for digital attacks, but also the services and hardware they need to protect themselves and their work,” stated Access Now in its own assessment. “Meanwhile, some digital security help desks that relied on U.S. funding to assist civil society are shutting down completely, while others are having to cut services and staff to survive, leaving civil society partners and peers without access to external expert support. Ultimately, this undermines activists’ ability to organize and challenge people in power, journalists’ efforts to expose the truth, and whistleblowers’ work to document and expose human rights violations.”

At Internews, U.S.-funded, groundbreaking digital safety initiatives and programming were brought to an almost complete halt. Any digital security or support services to media organisations falling under those funds were also rapidly cut, leaving many media organisations around the world in a tougher situation. Central to this was the Civic Defenders Initiative. This was to carry on the work of the Greater Internet Freedom (GIF) Project, the largest global effort of its kind, working across 39 countries to support locally relevant digital security trainings and assistance mechanisms for civil society and media, and increased citizen engagement in internet governance. Across regions around the globe, the necessary groundwork that these programmes had started has been damaged, and multiple systems of support for at-risk communities have had to close or severely scale back their operations.

This trend is still unfolding today. In November I went to The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI)’s workshop future of media development. The impact has been “especially acute in places like Syria (Radio Rozana), Uganda, Cuba, and the Western Balkans. Investigative units in Latin America have folded. Local actors are stepping up—regional funds, civic tech, and journalist networks—but they operate with limited resources. Meanwhile, authoritarian actors are rushing in to fill the void—offering funding, narrative dominance, and repression.” I would add the U.S. to that group, having pivoted from being a problematic ally to being an increasing threat.

Over in my GTH corner of it all, I was privileged to work alongside an exceptional group of engineers, developers, trainers, incident responders, and security specialists, and to learn from them every day, while collaborating at the intersection of technology, security, and human rights with a wider ecosystem of support initiatives through the Journalists in Distress Network, NGO-ISAC, CiviCERT, the Journalism Cloud Alliance, and many others. That work shaped how I think about this field and where I want to contribute next. As the CAMRI event asked: “If the golden era of donor-funded media development has ended—what now?”

And so, if you’re hiring, building something new, or just want to compare notes on where this space is heading, I’d welcome the conversation. If you know others navigating similar transitions, feel free to point them my way too. I’m always happy to grab a coffee online, or in person if you happen to be in London. And if I can’t help directly, I’ve got a reasonably good roster of contacts who might.

My work has spanned strategy and direct delivery, from leading teams and managing programmes to hands-on technical work, service design, platform development, fundraising, and building the operational, governance, and learning systems needed to sustain the work at any scale. What I do, and what I’m interested in, can broadly fit into these areas:

Cybersecurity and digital resilience: organisational security, incident response, risk, governance, and operating under pressure.
Leadership of global teams and programmes: building services, processes, and teams that work across borders and contexts.
Bridging technical, policy, and organisational worlds: translating between engineers, leadership, legal, funders, platforms, and other partners.
Advising on and developing new models and methods for digital resilience: shaping strategies, services, tools, or organisations from early concept through launch and beyond.
Exploring what comes next: open to conversations about roles, projects, collaborations, or ideas where any of my background could be helpful.

And there it is. Thanks for scrolling this far. I’m looking at roles, advisory work, or projects where my experience, skills or, expertise can be useful. In particular, I’m keen to continue supporting media, civil society, and others operating under various kinds of challenges, in whatever shape that work takes next. Drop me a line and say hey.

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:43:17 +0000

AP reports that files are going missing from the DOJ Epstein Files archive, and now I see on social platforms multiple accounts promising to have zip files of the ‘complete’ archive you can download (no, there are no previews) and, well, this is a super great way to get malware. Don’t do that.

'The strawberry is dead.'

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 03:21:41 +0000

Some things on the regular doom scroll can still give me pause. Not because they’re particularly horrible, or somehow hastening my own desensitisation to every turn of the screw in the decline of liberal democracies around the world. I’m used to that. But it’s the occasional lone voice or appeal from one of the decks of the sinking ship that just stands out. In this case it was a TikTok video of a BBC science show presenter who was tired of being told to keep quiet about things that have no bearing on his ability to educate or entertain.

On Friday evening in Manchester, the audience at a live recording of Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage heard something they were not expecting. They heard an ending. Not of the show. Not yet. Series 35 is still set to broadcast early next year. Should it continue afterwards, it just won’t be with Robin Ince. After 16 years of co-hosting the show he named and developed with Professor Brian Cox, the comedian is out. There is no punch line here. Just a punch to the gut.

Instead of repeating what he said, here’s the video. You can get it first hand.

This kind of departure will become more common. It rarely happens with a formal dismissal. It begins with pressure. Quiet meetings. Warnings about tone and conduct. Requests to be careful, to be quieter, to keep certain views out of sight. In this case, Ince was asked to self censor about his support for trans people, his criticism of Donald Trump, and other views that were deemed to somehow be incompatible with his role as the comedy relief portion of an educational radio programme. Considering the U.S. has leadership that regularly dismisses science whether it’s about vaccines or climate change, it would seem to me that Ince has been remarkably well behaved. Just not enough for the BBC.

He was offered a choice: Obedience, or departure. He chose to leave. It hasn’t been the first, and it won’t be the last.

This moment does not stand alone. It arrives after sustained pressure on the BBC, particularly from the U.S. president as of late. Loaded allegations of bias from the White House have been amplified by the right wing publications in the UK, and a noticeable lack of comment by the government here. The same “impartial” memo cited by the Trump White House to accuse a BBC Panorama documentary of fabricating that Trump’s own words may have encouraged the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021 (it didn’t) had more to say: It accused (without basis) the BBC’s Arabic service of showing systemic anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the war in Gaza. It also alleged that the BBC was promoting a pro-trans agenda.

Robin Ince would not recognise that characterisation. Neither would Gary Lineker, the long-standing Match of the Day presenter, who was forced out of his role over his views against Israel’s war crimes and acts of genocide in Gaza. Not even the recently resigned director general Tim Davie should agree with this characterisation, having personally stepped in to suppress the documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. The 100 BBC staff who signed a letter alleging the public broadcaster had constantly given “favourable coverage to Israel” certainly would have a different take.

This memo on BBC’s supposed leftwing bias seems to have been written to be leaked, and that would make sense. Its author is the lobbyist, Michael Prescott, whose company receives large sums of cash from technology and media giants in the U.S. who are also on the Trump campaign’s large donor list.

It was money well spent.

The language was familiar. So was the intent. Discredit the institution. Intimidate the people who work within it. Force conformity through fear. It’s working. This isn’t censorship by law. It’s something quieter, more corrosive. It asks individuals to narrow themselves to survive. It rewards conformity with the chorus, tolerates silence, and punishes empathy when it becomes inconvenient or is aimed at the wrong people.

I kept thinking about all the extremist voices promoting hate and division. They are being given so many platforms, while voices that represent kindness, open mindedness, empathy seem to be scarcer and scarcer. I felt I couldn’t pamper myself with the luxury of silence. — Robin Ince

Institutions do not collapse all at once. They are hollowed out. They lose the people who give them texture and trust. When presenters, editors, and producers conclude that honesty carries too high a price, the public is left with something thinner. Something that can seem safer, but is in substance less reliable. Something less true.

The BBC will continue, for now. The programme may or may not resume after season 35. But there’s been a signal. A warning about the cost of speaking plainly in an age that claims to value openness while punishing those who practise it. In his own words, spoken to his audience on his final night, Ince explained why he could not stay: “I have to accept that I am not what the current BBC expects of their freelance presenters.”

McCarthyism is back in vogue, and it’s increasingly globalised. We have to wonder, how much editorial policy of the nation’s public broadcaster should be outsourced to American political circles across the Atlantic? These are “meet the moment” times, and we’ve already seen a lot of them go unmet. Eventually, the clock runs out of them.

“The strawberry is dead. Long live the strawberry."

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 01:47:28 +0000

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has embarked on a spending spree, signing contracts worth up to $25 million for a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.” ….

“What’s new is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions.”

— The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law

Notes on the Palestine Action proscription appeal

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 13:14:21 +0000

Amnesty UK and Liberty joined the judicial review challenging Keir Starmer’s Labour Government’s nonsense proscription of Palestine Action, which would designate a nonviolent protest group populated by a mix of British citizens — such as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, a blind man in a wheelchair, and several hundred people with more in common with your gran — as being exactly the same as Al Qaeda.

The arrest of peaceful protestors is a violation of the UK’s international obligations to protect the rights of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. This can’t go unchallenged." — Amnesty UK

It was a silly, reactionary decision by this government, embarrassed by the fact that a small, informal group of activists were able to casually ride some e-scooters onto an air base with seemingly no security and daub a bit of paint on some planes. But it’s what happens when we have a prime minister who takes his marching orders from Trump’s White House.

This is essentially a question over whether UK has all the facets needed for a participatory liberal democracy or not. Supporting Palestinian liberation is how you test the health of your own liberty, it seems. If this Labour government fails to uphold the designation, then it’s a calamitous embarrassment for Keir. If it’s able to win, then Labour will have damaged to the country. Take your pick.

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:31:24 +0000

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” — Carl Sagan

Note: I’m reading The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, and I’m futzing with the blockquote css on this website so wanted a test quote to experiment with on main.

The best doom reports from 2025

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:14:19 +0000

This was the year of Project 2025, a sort of dystopian teaser of coming attractions once the MAGA regime moved back into the White House after the Biden administration retired. It was published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation during the intermission between Trump sagas when one could suppose they had some time to kill, and was sort of a New Year’s Resolution shitty things the far right could get on with when it inevitably got back into position this year. And, say what you will, they haven’t been slackers. The Project 2025 Tracker estimates overall progress of dismantling liberal democracy in the U.S. is at 48%. In just the first year!

It’s only the middle of November, but I’m calling time with a list of the best (worst?) of the doom reports I’ve doom scrolled. If you, like me, are drawn to well structured and sourced reporting on The Situation as it is with your Saturday morning coffee, then you may have seen a few of these already. They’re my picks of the crème de la crème of dark reading from the year: covering the slow, grinding collapse of democracy, the fragmenting and increasingly closed, monitored or pay-walled internet, and irreversible damage to our favourite punching bag: the climate… Enjoy.

The Authoritarian Stack — Here’s how tech billionaires are designing the post-democratic America, and what’s coming for Europe in the coming years. It’s a grim, well-researched roadmap for how a handful of oligarchs are constructing parallel governance architectures nobody voted for. (A project led by Prof. Francesca Bria with xof-research.org)

Digital sovereignty or digital dictatorship? — It’s hard to imagine how things can get worse, and you don’t have to because the Kremlin is already on the job, mixing technological isolationism, intimidation tactics and regulatory hellscapes that make more people just want to shut up, leaving the state free to just get on with more war crimes in Ukraine. (New Eurasian Strategy Centre)

The 2025 Global Report of the Lancet Countdown — The people of earth have decided to double down on fossil fuels, ignore the 546,000 heat-related deaths and direct our efforts toward raising the transmission potential of dengue. Huge accomplishments. This report contains a fun scrollable summary of how we’re causing our own demise. (The Lancet Countdown)

The Internet Coup — This is detailed technical analysis and nightmare material about how a Chinese company (Geedge) is exporting components of the Great Firewall to its autocratic friends and neighbours need of a helping hand. It’s working disturbingly well. (InterSecLab)

Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market — I will forgive the Potterverse reference for this one. It’s harder than you’d think to make people care about the global spyware industry that’s targeting the world’s journalists, human rights defenders, environmental activists and opponents to despots and autocrats. This one features a neat interactive map connecting the dots between 435 companies and other organisational entities across 42 countries that make up the distributed panopticon of oppressive fuckery. (The Atlantic Council)

The Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction — Disasters are no longer “acts of god” (always found that phrase odd) but rather an act of self-harm that humans do to themselves as a matter of course. While this one tries to put a positive spin on things with sections like a “hazardous future is not inevitable,” yeah it kind of is. All the solutions require everyone going along. Until the planet is essentially experiencing the story line of Pluribus, everybody never goes along. This report is neat in how it identifies three spiring conditions of doom that underpin our current shitshow, all of them economic:

Increasing debt and decreasing income that leave a majority of national economies fucked and unable to invest in ‘going green’
An unsustainable transfer of risk to the countries that are more intensely hit by the effects of global warming, meaning they’re spending more money on disaster related risk and less on intervention or mitigation.
The respond-repeat cycle of disaster relief and humanitarian aid that has zero impact on sustained recovery let alone prevention.

We could fix this issue, sure. Easy. It minimally requires changing how we’ve evolved as a species to respond to literally everything. But I digress. Ignore me, it’ll be fine. Enjoy today, be kind to people around you. (UN Office of Disaster Risk Reduction)

V-Dem Democracy Report 2025 — Democracy worldwide has regressed to mid-1980s levels but without the synth pop sound track and fashion trend that included far too many zippers. More people are now living under autocracies than democracies. Freedom of expression continues its slide. Essentially an autopsy of global liberalism. (V-Dem)

Freedom on the Net 2025 — The fifteenth straight year of global decline. Details the rise of “sovereign AI” censorship systems and increasingly militarised national internets. Information may in fact “want to be free” but its increasingly traveling along infrastructure controlled by states that have other ideas. (Freedom House)

CIVICUS State of Civil Society Report 2025 — Civil society is being sucker punched from every direction. This one contains a particularly bleak technology chapter around biometric surveillance, emotional-recognition systems (smile, don’t stop smiling), private-sector repression, and billionaire politics that continue their trend of just saying quiet parts out load around authoritarianism and other horrible beliefs. (CIVICUS)

International AI Safety Report (2025) — The first of its kind, lengthy, in-depth, nuanced, comprehensive, authoritative, contributed to by 100+ experts in their fields across 30 countries, and likely to be absolutely ignored by the government that commissioned it. While it has those boo-scary nods to how an AI might “misbehave,” there’s more on how it could perform very well as intended to help users with cyberwar efforts, develop bioweapons, further concentrate power, build smarter surveillance tools, peddle disinformation, build autonomous weapons, and just keep disrupting global systems in evermore destabilising ways. It’s got a lot of the elements of a Michael Crichton novel and none of the readability. (Commissioned by UK Government, led by Professor Yoshua Bengio)

How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy: The Fusion of Agentic AI and LLMs Marks a New Frontier in Information Warfare — Here is a fun one. This is an academic study outlining how coordinated AI agents could overwhelm information ecosystems, fabricate synthetic consensus, and destabilise institutions. A glimpse into a Fully Automated Luxury Disinformation future, except it’s already here. (citations: arXiv:2506.06299)

And that’s my list for 2025. Leave me a reply if you’ve got one or two that should be in the list.

In every book or article or show on how bad some existential threat is, there’s always that last section that I’ll call the “there’s still time” PSA. Every author who writes about climate change has an agent begging them to tack on a hopeful last chapter. Many of the reports linked to above have one of those sections as well. Comforting. Until I have agent representation I’ll spare you from the needless extra words, dear reader.

“Good night, and good luck."