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On Interning at Slack – Code Like A Girl

From On Interning at Slack – Code Like A Girl:

I’ve had a rough year so far. After coming back to college, I got hit by a car and my grandfather passed away within two weeks of each other. I was diagnosed with a mental disorder. My grades slipped from As to Ds. I had to discontinue my classes in April, and missed two months of classes. I developed PTSD around cars and loud noises, and mourned my grandfather. I partied to not feel the pain and the fear of going outside. In May, I admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital so I could be sure that I wouldn’t hurt myself.

This probably doesn’t seem like it’s relevant. But it is. It felt like everything that could have gone wrong did. Slack was at every point in the process to support me.

I was given permission to call in black. I was allowed to work from home on the days I was too afraid to go outside. I was given a week to help transition my puppy to my house before he was to begin his service dog training. My mentor and manager, a woman and a woman of color, checked in with me at least once a week to make sure I was ok and asked about the ways they could best support me. I called in sick often on the days where every noise made me fear my life. I drew support from the greater Slack community when I needed help.

I made friends with other interns, and didn’t treat me differently after talking about my disabilities. I bonded over boba and makeup with the other engineers and writers at Slack. I spammed the #dogs channel with pictures of my dogs, and created #acai-bowls for those trendy connoisseurs. I was no longer a brown female queer intern with the service dog, but just another engineer. I gave a presentation to the Slack community about ableism and why it was important. And people listened.

This is what a company that genuinely commits to inclusivity and supporting employees looks like.

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Privacy experts fear Donald Trump accessing global surveillance network

Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who predated Snowden, offered an equally bleak assessment. He said: “The electronic infrastructure is fully in place – and ex post facto legalised by Congress and executive orders – and ripe for further abuse under an autocratic, power-obsessed president. History is just not kind here. Trump leans quite autocratic. The temptations to use secret NSA surveillance powers, some still not fully revealed, will present themselves to him as sirens.”

Bush and Cheney functionally authorized the NSA to undertake unlawful operations and actively sought to hinder authorizing courts from understanding what was going on. At the same time, that administration established black sites and novel detention rules for persons kidnapped by the CIA from around the world.

Obama and Biden developed legal theories that were accompanied by authorizing legislation to make the NSA’s previously unlawful activities lawful. The Obama presidency also failed to close Gitmo or convince the American public that torture should be forbidden or that criminal (as opposed to military) courts are the appropriate ways of dealing with suspected terror suspects. And thoughout the NSA deliberately misled and lied to its authorizing court, the CIA deliberately withheld documents from investigators and spied on those working for the intelligence oversight committees, and the FBI continued to conceal its own surveillance operations as best it could.

There are a lot of things to be worried about when it comes to the United States’ current trajectory. But one of the more significant items to note is that the most sophisticated and best financed surveillance and policing infrastructure in the world is going to be working at the behest of an entirely unproven, misogynistic, racist, and bigoted president.

It’s cause to be very, very nervous for the next few years.

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How sexism and bigotry won Donald Trump the presidency

This election is already being spun as “voter backlash,” as if the most widely touted legislative policies and court decisions over the last eight years – the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – don’t say something about the people who wish to reverse them. There will soon be conversations about the transformation of the American electoral landscape which dance around the deliberate naming of sexism and bigotry as the proximate cause for nearly causing President-elect Donald Trump. All of this misses the point unless that darker urge in American politics is finally identified and examined.

That urge to halt progress, to let people who traditionally have not held power know their proper place in the hierarchy, is a familiar one. That a man as unpopular, temperamental, and inexperienced as Donald Trump could pull this off speaks not only to the inevitability of this cycle, but to the fact that even the worst possible candidate can be the best possible President when the mood is right.

God help us all.

The implications of this election are entirely unknowable: America has done something that is practically unthinkable. Everyone who examines and advocates for policies, regardless of political stripe or interest, has no idea what is going to follow. And it’s not evident that the lack of stability is a problem given that a significant swathe of Americans have given a mandate to a man who possesses a resevoir of ideology and, at best, a thimble of policy prescriptions.

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Links Writing

WikiLeaks Isn’t Whistleblowing

Mass data releases, like the Podesta emails, conflate things that the public has a right to know with things we have no business knowing, with a lot of material in the middle about things we may be curious about and may be of some historical interest, but should not be released in this manner.

All campaigns need to have internal discussions. Taking one campaign manager’s email account and releasing it with zero curation in the last month of an election needs to be treated as what it is: political sabotage, not whistle-blowing.

These hacks also function as a form of censorship. Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. In this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. These dumps, combined with the news media’s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing: In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one.

This is one of the best arguments against the recent activities of Wikileaks. Not because Wikileaks is operating as a front for Russia. Not because the contents of the recent leaks aren’t newsworthy. Not because the public doesn’t find the revelations to be interesting and fun.

No, the core issue with the latest rafts of leaks is that they were not sufficiently currated, with the impact being that obstensibly private information is taken and circulated and mischaracterized. This has the effect of stunting the electoral process while, simultaneously, reconfirming to persons in power that they need to adopt a culture of oral communications and decisions. This is not a governance direction that is in the public’s best interests.

However, it’s important to also situate Wikileaks’ activities in some context. Wikileaks is designed to clog up the machinery of government states and bureaucracies. Part of its mission is to scare organizations with the threat of leaks in an effort to hinder what Julian Assange/Wikileaks regards as harmful or objectional activities. So the leaks associated with the DNC and staff affiliated with Clinton are perfectly aligned with Wikileaks’ raison d’être. In the past such activities may have been regarded are more legitimate – the organization was principally focused on state level activities – but it is now focused on deliberately releasing information at core points in an electoral cycle. Doing so may have affected the unfolding of the election but it’s important to acknowledge that Wikileaks’ intent was not driven by Russia (presuming that was a source of at least some of the leaked information): instead, this was a case where Russian and Wikileaks just happened to have directly overlapping objectives.

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Links Writing

Dissecting CSIS’ Statement Concerning Indefinite Metadata Retention

The Canada Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) released a public statement after the Federal Court found the Service to be breaking the law by permanently retaining metadata they had been collecting. To date, the Public Safety Minister has refused to clarify the numbers of Canadians who have been caught up in this ‘catch once, catch forever’ surveillance regime.

The Service’s statement is incredibly misleading. It is designed to trick Canadians and parliamentarians into thinking that CSIS didn’t do anything that was really ‘that’ bad. I fundamentally disagree with CSIS’ activities in this regard and, as a result, I’ve conducted a detailed evaluation of each sentence of the Service’s statement.

You can read my dissection of CSIS’ statement at Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets.

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Police surveillance scandal: Quebec tightens rules for monitoring journalists

From the Montreal Gazette:

Mark Bantey, a specialist in media law (who is also the Montreal Gazette’s lawyer), said he was stunned by the scope of the warrant involved in the Lagacé case. He said it seems the police were more worried about who was leaking information to the press than the actual crime.

“It sure looks like they (the police) have gone overboard because they’re not out there investigating a crime, but trying to determine who in the police department is leaking information to the press. You can’t use search warrants to get that sort of information,” Bantey said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s an obligation to exhaust all other possible sources of information before targeting the media.”

As for Couillard’s new directive about obtaining search warrants, he called it a first step that was unlikely to bring an immediate change to police practices. A better solution might be to adopt new legislation — a shield law — that protects media sources, he said.

Legislation to protect journalists from police surveillance is a good idea…until you ask a question of ‘who constitutes a journalist’?

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“Stephen Colbert” from Fresh Air by NPR on iTunes

This was a really interesting interview with Colbert. His views on Catholicism, daily content creation linked with current events, and attitudes towards trust and working with teams make it particularly worth the listen.

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Canada’s spy agency illegally kept data for a decade, court rules

To be clear, the judge’s ruling:

  1. Found that CSIS had deliberately been misleading/lying to the court for a decade concerning the agency’s permanent retention of metadata;
  2. Raised the prospect of contempt of court proceedings against CSIS and its attorneys at the Department of Justice;
  3. Approved changes to unknown warrants (we’re not allowed, as members of the public, to know the warranting powers of CSIS it seems);
  4. Did not require CSIS to delete or stop using the metadata it had illegally collected, on grounds that doing so could raise jurisdictional issues. Translation: the information has been shared, or mixed with, foreign agencies’ metadata already and thus prevents the court from easily crafting a judgment around its use;
  5. CSIS did not believe that it was required to be fully transparent with the federal court that issues CSIS’ warrants on grounds that the court was ‘not an oversight body’;
  6. CSIS had internally, with Department of Justice guidance, secretly reinterpreted laws to cloak its actions in the guise of lawfulness (internally) while deliberately hiding such interpretations and the implications thereof from the court.

Canada has a national security consultation going on, and part of it raises the question of ‘does Canada have sufficient oversight and accountability for its national security operations?’ If you care about these issues, go and spend some time sending a message to the government.

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How Canada’s Anti-Cyberbullying Law Is Being Used to Spy on Journalists

From Motherboard:

According to Citizen Lab researcher Christopher Parsons, these same powers that target journalists can be used against non-journalists under C-13. And the only reason we know about the aforementioned cases is that the press has a platform to speak out.

“This is an area where transparency and accountability are essential,” Parsons said in an interview. “We’ve given piles and piles of new powers to law enforcement and security agencies alike. What’s happened to this journalist shows we desperately need to know how the government uses its powers to ensure they’re not abused in any way.”

…

“I expect that the use of these particular powers will become more common as the police get more used to using it and more savvy in using them,” Parsons said.

These were powers that were ultimately sold to the public (and passed into law) as needed to ‘child pornography’. And now they’re being used to snoop on journalists to figure out who their sources are, without being mandated to report on the regularity at which the powers are used to the efficacy of such uses. For some reason, this process doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in me.

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Donald Trump’s companies destroyed or hid documents in defiance of court orders

Newsweek:

Trump’s use of deception and untruthful affidavits, as well as the hiding or improper destruction of documents, dates back to at least 1973, when the Republican nominee, his father and their real estate company battled the federal government over civil charges that they refused to rent apartments to African-Americans. The Trump strategy was simple: deny, impede and delay, while destroying documents the court had ordered them to hand over.

Shortly after the government filed its case in October, Trump attacked: He falsely declared to reporters that the feds had no evidence he and his father discriminated against minorities, but instead were attempting to force them to lease to welfare recipients who couldn’t pay their rent.

The debates about who had hidden the most, and the significance of such hiding, continues unabated in the American election…