#kickback????

[breakdownsboobies]

i liked that grasshopper guy.

[spoopdeedoop]

mod stuff maybe

[notthatpublic]

stuffs

[mostlysignssomeportents]

America’s richest Medicare fraudsters are untouchable

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/13/last-gasp/#i-cant-breathe

"When you're famous, they let you do it": eight words that encapsulate the terrifying rot at the heart of our lived experience, a world where impunity for the powerful trumps the pain of their victims.

"Populism," is shorthand for many things: rage, despair, distrust of institutions and a desire to destroy them. True populism seeks to channel those totally legitimate feelings into transformative change for a caring and fair society for all. So-called "right populism" exploits those feelings, using them to drive a wedge between different groups of victims, turning them against each other, so that elites can go on screwing the squabbling factions.

The far-right parties that are marching to victory through a series global elections are different in many ways, but they all share one trait: they appeal to mistrust of institutions, claiming that the government has been captured by elites who serve them at the expense of the governed. This has the benefit of being actually true, and while the fact that far-right parties are owned by these government-capturing elites might erode their credibility, the fact that so many "progressive" parties have stepped in to defend the institutional status quo leaves an open field for reactionary wreckers:

https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-slogan-219908

Why would voters turn out to support a "Department of Government Efficiency," run by a bully whose career has been defined by abusing the people he is in charge of? Maybe they're turkeys voting for Christmas, but they also have personal, traumatic experience with government departments that protected the abusive corporations that preyed on them.

Today on Propublica, Peter Elkind tells the incredible story of Lincare, the nation's leading supplier of home oxygen, a repeat-offender fraudster and predator that has made billions in public money without any real consequences:

https://www.propublica.org/article/lincare-medicare-lawsuit-settlements-oxygen-equipment

Lincare has been repeatedly found guilty of defrauding Medicare; in this century alone, they have been put on probation four times, with a "death penalty" provision that would permanently disqualify them from ever doing business with the federal government. In every case, Lincare committed fresh acts of fraud, but never faced that death penalty.

Why not? Lincare is far too big to fail. In America's bizarre, worst-in-class, world-beatingly expensive privatized health care system, even public health provision (like Medicare) is outsourced to the private sector. Lincare has monopolized oxygen, a famously very important molecule for human survival, and if it were disqualified from serving Medicare, large numbers of Americans would literally asphyxiate.

Lincare clearly knows this. Too big to fail is too big to jail, and too big to jail is too big to care. They are the poster children for impunity, repeat offenders, multiply convicted, and still offending, even today. Lincare has been convicted of fraud under the administrations of GW Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, and they're still in business.

What a business it is! Elkind takes us to the asbestos-poisoned town of Libby, Montana, where more than 2,000 of the 2.857 population suffer from respiratory diseases from the open-pit mine that operated there from 1963-1990. The elderly, dying population of this town rely on Medicare and Medicare Advantage oxygen concentrators to draw breath, and that means they rely on Lincare.

That means they are prey to Lincare's signature scam: charging Medicare (and 20% co-paying patients) to rent an oxygen concentrator every month, until they have paid for it several times over. This is illegal: under federal rules, patients are deemed to have bought their oxygen concentrators after 36 months and contractors are no longer allowed to charge them. Lincare doesn't give a fuck: the bills keep coming, and Lincare patients who survive long enough have paid the company $16,000 for a $799 gadget.

When Brandon Haugen, a local Lincare customer service rep, noticed this and queried the company's home office in Clearwater, Florida (home to Scientology and the Flexidisc), he was given the brushoff. After multiple attempts to get company leadership to acknowledge that this was illegal, he quit his job, along with his colleague and childhood friend Ben Montgomery. Between them, Haugen and Montgomery had 14 children who depended on their Lincare paychecks. Despite this, they both quit and turned whistleblower, with no job lined up. Eventually, Lincare paid $29m to settle the claim, with $5.7m to the whistleblowers and their lawyers. For Lincare, this was part of the cost of doing business and the fraud rolls on.

Lincare doesn't just defraud Medicare, they also have a high-pressure commissioned sales force that has repeatedly been caught defrauding Lincare customers – overwhelming sick, poor, elderly people. Patients are pressured to accept auto-billing, then Lincare piles medically dubious gadgets onto their monthly bills, as well as useless, overpriced "patient monitoring" services. Customers with apnea machines are mis-sold ventilators by salesmen who falsely claim these are medically necessary.

Salespeople illegally auto-shipped parts and consumables for Lincare machines to patients, then billed them for it. To satisfy the legal requirement that they telephone patients before placing these orders, sales agents would call patients, put them on hold, then part the call until the patient hung up.

Salespeople are motivated by equal parts greed and terror. Make quota and you can get up to $8,000 per month in bonuses. Miss that punishing quota and you're out on your ass (which is why one salesperson ordered a medically unnecessary ventilator).

Lincare also habitually ignores requests to pick up medically unnecessary equipment, because so long as the equipment is on the patient's premises, they can continue to bill for it. As one Ohio manager wrote to their staff: "As we have already discussed, absolutely no pick-ups/inactivation’s are to be do[ne] until I give you the green light. Even if they are deceased." Execs send out company-wide emails celebrating regional managers who have abandoned pick-ups, like a Feb 2022 "Achievement Rankings" email that touted the fact that most regional centers had at least 150 overdue pickups.

Lincare represents a deep, structural rot in American society. They are too big to punish, and too powerful to regulate. A 2006 law meant to curb oxygen payments was gutted by industry lobbyists. Today, Congress is weighing legislation, the SOAR (Supplemental Oxygen Access Reform) Act, which will allow Lincare to bill the public for hundreds of millions more every year, raising rates and eliminating competitive billing. The bill is supported by patient advocates who are rightly interested in getting oxygen to patients who have been locked out of the system, but the cost of that inclusion is that Lincare will be even more firmly insulated from its corruption.

The Trump Administration will doubtless crack down on some of America's worst companies, and the furious voters who elected the only candidate who campaigned on the idea that America was rotten will cheer him on. But Trump has made it clear that he will select the targets of his administration based on whether they are loyal to him or stand in his way, without regard to whether they harm his supporters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Companies like Lincare, repeatedly caught paying illegal kickbacks, know how to play this game.

Image: p.Gordon (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smoke_bomb_with_burning_fuse.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[unhingedtransformers]

Season 2 | Episode 13 | The Insecticon Syndrome

[brosniffer]

[relicsongmel]

As a musician I will never not be obsessed with the plot of Turnabout Serenade. Like what do you mean a professional guitarist gets accused of murder by Some Guy and one of his bandmates backs it up because he's upset the dude couldn't play a fucking quarter-note triplet correctly. What do you mean he uses that as evidence he did the murder. WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE WAS RIGHT

[drill-teeth-art]

MAKE SOME NOISE!!!

[elili0000]

yes Insecticon valveplug comic,pls enjoy the meal

here

[jennamoran]

The real thing is that if you want to make money in this world you have to make sure you'll get a nickel every time a whole bunch of things happen, ideally, like, you'll even cover your bets and get a nickel when something happens or doesn't happen and inevitably by pure statistical mass balling up on itself like a snowball you will wind up with a nickel more than once from not just one but multiple niccoleanic events. If you're surprised that you have two nickels you need to up your miracle money side hustle is all I'm saying.

[toricoriot]

Thank you very much for your congratulations and interest in the event! I will try to draw as many requests as I can. enjoy:)

by the way, I made a tag for my fanfic comic. Use these when you want to search for comic.

#torikofanfic: idw1, #torikofanfic: idw2, #torikofanfic: idwSG

request: Shockwave, TFA Slipstream, Insecticon(Kickback), Rung

[rhythmdeception]

New rule for the Decepticons: Never play League of Legends... ever

I think my throat is sore from shouting

[transformers-synergize]

Moonracer thing

[crying-fantasies]

Insecticons

Masterlist

Featuring G1! Shrapnel, Bombshell and Kickback, smut/fluff/humor, CW: stretch marks fetish too(?), insect courting (goes with the mech I guess?), oral (receiving), the Insecticons do it like insects and you rock their world moving, Bombshell is into gore (caution).

Most wildlife on Earth are optic catching, sometimes colorful or dull, they have come to realize it is sometimes due to the species and the regulations of their environment or to attract a mate.

They've been on Earth for so long, they've seen it all and eaten it all, stripes and dots, wings and long legs, Kickback can't stop to compare those with the ones of his alt-mode, but also notices the lack of other patterns, he likes the stripes, for example, the way they look pretty and he has seen insects with them, shiny colors as they follow a possible mate around, flying and showing themselves to prove worthy of continuing their primitive organic coding.

He felt jealous, he won't lie about it, looking at the two things canoodling, immersed in their world, interfacing could be good, but Shrapnel is mean, he likes to zap him, and Bombshell would pluck out his wings in his version of foreplay.

So when he finds you he can hardly stop his antenna and wings from picking up at the sight of you. Suddenly understanding the reason cicadas sing at dusk, and male mantis let their female eat their head, his alt-mode may be a grass jumper, but his song makes your hands hold your little audials in distress, he promises to practice more when Shrapnel tells him to shut up. He should tell them, they are his partners, but he is also sure Shrapnel will try to steal you away, Bombshell, Primus no, he could cut you open to see how you worked from the inside.

Too much risk, it was better to see you on the outskirts of their hideout, where they wouldn't see you, and to get you away from any other Decepticon, oh, but if Autobots dared to see you he was promising to snap their helms from their frames, such is the insecticon’s way.

Not much progress was made, and Kickback understood, that maybe you only mate in certain seasons or had to eat something nourishing, it was fine, he was good with holding your tiny hands, letting you sleep above his chassis, and even changing colors slightly, one day, after your session of sunbathing, he noticed.

Could have been the warm season, could have been the necessity to show off, but his optics centered over your exposed skin so much that his visor was glowing, how could you blame him? He just saw something he never expected to see in you.

Something that he never knew would make his spark bloom with excess energy.

“Kicky, dim off the lights I can't see”

You had stripes, pretty ones at that, of a slightly different color than the rest of your skin, his spark started to cycle along his biolights, and you smiled while asking a happy “What?” when his servos and digits started to roam over the different textures on your stripes, “stop it” There was no ounce of malice as you pushed him away by his helm, his sharp denta gripped at your wrist in a playful nip.

Maybe you were entering your mating season, or not, as you just continued to sunbathe above him, not minding where his servos roamed over more exposed skin as days passed by and the heat started to rise, more stripes started to appear, Kickback counted them as a way to pass the time, solar panels doing their work as you indulged in a collection of sheets done with plants, it was another day basking in your presence.

Until he felt the change of static in the area, a single designation popping on his processor as he tried to rush you out of their territory.

Shrapnel found out about you, most likely with Bombshell tailing behind him.

It was no surprise when his fits of protection did nothing more than give him a beating as you tried to get away as soon as possible, his leader reminding him of the no humans rule, to think with his tank was one thing that Shrapnel understood, but to think to mingle with a human was another different, still, that didn't stop Kickback to try and explain his case with the obvious interest from Bombshell.

Things were laid out clearly and strictly, no biting, no killing, no dismembering, “I’m serious, Bomb”, and if you said no, Kickback was sure to protect you even if he was the youngest, assuring you to come back, his partners wouldn't do you any harm, what's more, they would like you and you, them, little by little.

But Shrapnel wanted to try, showing off his alt-mode just as Bombshell did the same, “Are not all organics attracted to these displays?”, turns out, you don't, and it was agonizing, “How can you look at my frame and feel nothing but lustful desire?”

Unsaid rejection became common, but also did the scratches, and the collective sunbathing, sooner than later Shrapnel wasn't so opposed to the idea of you near and even eating with them, fruits were reserved for your consumption once you showed up, Bombshell stopped looking at you strangely and in change started to be attracted to your stripes in the same way Kickback did, just that his servo stopped from being pulled way sooner than later.

When or how you finally caught your place in their hierarchy was a mystery, as one day you came back as always, the sun was bright and the wetness promised rusty plating and achy joints, Bombshell was in his usual sunbathing spot when you plopped next to him and kissed a side of his helm.

Kickback was thrilled to finally see an accepting gesture on your part, Shrapnel was mad for not being the first.

But you let him be first, expecting on the ground over towels and blankets you didn't want to ask their origin, his servos roamed over your body, and a bolt of electricity was evident before his digit pressed over your ribs, Bombshell hissed in warning, earning a growl from Shrapnel, attempting to calm himself, but he couldn't while watching your face so close when he rolled you over your first thought was that he liked this position.

Nothing could have prepared you when he penetrated, pumping greedily as his arms hugged you to him, pressing you a little to the front, ass up, chattering as he always does, “so nice and full, such great Earthling, earthling”, Shrapnel mouthed over your neck once he finally slammed home.

He didn't move for a while, and it made Kickback retain a whimper, imagining for himself how nice it would be to lay his transfluid inside your body, did you have a forge? If you did and it was active, then all their problems about being outnumbered would be gone.

But humans work differently from insects, “huh, who could've thought”, Shrapnel said after he growled over your squirming body, trying to keep you close and immovable as he mounted you from behind, finally letting go of the stiffness as you, the innovative, delightful creature that you are, started rocking your hips against him, earning a different kind of growl, words chocked on his glossa as he began to move too, “Wait, Earthling, wait, wait” feeling all the crevices inside, your innermost flesh pushing and turning over his nodes just right as he was a mess, sprawled over your rear, holding to you, dripping noises could be heard, Bombshell only watched, calculative as always, apparently impressed by the way Shrapnel seemed so lost in you, eagerly waiting for his turn, Kickback wasn't so lucky, last in the hierarchy meant last to be served, he was soon to reach a newfound limit while watching you pursuit release, moving and working hard for it, ready to overload as your face showed nothing but pleasure once Shrapnel started to move too.

His painful and hot array was noticed by Bombshell, but he only watched for a second before returning his optics to his leader and you, whimpering almost in silence as your face contorted in full bliss as Shrapnel dumped loads inside you.

It was messy, the way Shrapnel’s spike was drenched by transfluid and whatever your body secreted was nauseating but also made them go and clean both with purring content, Kickback was soon to start cleaning his leader but Bombshell stopped him, servo over his midsection and throwing him next to your trembling body, “go first” is all he said while tending to his leader, who almost overloads again, Kickback didn't have to be told twice before holding your hips with his servos, massaging over the stripes on your rear and the beginning of your leg struts, purring so hard at the surprised sound you made once the clarity came back to your foggy mind, just to find him grinning like a maniac between your legs, showing off sharp fangs, dermas soon touching over your array panel, or lack thereof, glossa soon following, cleaning transfluid that has already dripped away and pushed what he can save inside once again, content at the sound you make as he frags you with his glossa and the way your hips can hardly move, held back by his servos as he has dropped to the floor, kneeling to let you have some leverage, your hands come to his helm, trying to rut against his faceplate, his chuckle makes you moan by how it vibrates to your tender flesh, “told you they would like you”.

.

The G1 Insecticons always was a soft spot for me, I like their madness and whole destructive factor, but there is little of them in the series or the fandom, praying this little work gets people more worked up on them because damn, they're so fine.

@tf-kinktober2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech is a scam - and a harbinger of your future

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Here's how the shitty technology adoption curve works: when you want to roll out a new, abusive technology, look for a group of vulnerable people whose complaints are roundly ignored and subject them to your bad idea. Sand the rough edges off on their bodies and lives. Normalize the technological abuse you seek to inflict.

Next: work your way up the privilege gradient. Maybe you start with prisoners, then work your way up to asylum seekers, parolees and mental patients. Then try it on kids and gig workers. Now, college students and blue collar workers. Climb that curve, bit by bit, until you've reached its apex and everyone is living with your shitty technology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Prisoners, asylum seekers, drug addicts and other marginalized people are the involuntary early adopters of every form of disciplinary technology. They are the leading indicators of the ways that technology will be ruining your life in the future. They are the harbingers of all our technological doom.

Which brings me to Minnesota.

Minnesota is one of the first states make prison phone-calls free. This is a big deal, because prison phone-calls are a big business. Prisoners are literally a captive audience, and the telecommunications sector is populated by sociopaths, bred and trained to spot and exploit abusive monopoly opportunities. As states across America locked up more and more people for longer and longer terms, the cost of operating prisons skyrocketed, even as states slashed taxes on the rich and turned a blind eye to tax evasion.

This presented telco predators with an unbeatable opportunity: they approached state prison operators and offered them a bargain: "Let us take over the telephone service to your carceral facility and we will levy eye-watering per-minute charges on the most desperate people in the world. Their families – struggling with one breadwinner behind bars – will find the money to pay this ransom, and we'll split the profits with you, the cash-strapped, incarceration-happy state government."

This was the opening salvo, and it turned into a fantastic little money-spinner. Prison telco companies and state prison operators were the public-private partnership from hell. Prison-tech companies openly funneled money to state coffers in the form of kickbacks, even as they secretly bribed prison officials to let them gouge their inmates and inmates' families:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/02/mississippi-corrections-corruption-bribery-private-prison-hustle/

As digital technology got cheaper and prison-tech companies got greedier, the low end of the shitty tech adoption curve got a lot more crowded. Prison-tech companies started handing out "free" cheap Android tablets to prisoners, laying the groundwork for the next phase of the scam. Once prisoners had tablets, prisons could get rid of phones altogether and charge prisoners – and their families – even higher rates to place calls right to the prisoner's cell.

Then, prisons could end in-person visits and replace them with sub-skype, postage-stamp-sized videoconferencing, at rates even higher than the voice-call rates. Combine that with a ban on mailing letters to and from prisoners – replaced with a service that charged even higher rates to scan mail sent to prisoners, and then charged prisoners to download the scans – and prison-tech companies could claim to be at the vanguard of prison safety, ending the smuggling of dope-impregnated letters and other contraband into the prison system.

Prison-tech invented some wild shit, like the "digital stamp," a mainstay of industry giant Jpay, which requires prisoners to pay for "stamps" to send or receive a "page" of email. If you're keeping score, you've realized that this is a system where prisoners and their families have to pay for calls, "in-person" visits, handwritten letters, and email.

It goes on: prisons shuttered their libraries and replaced them with ebook stores that charged 2-4 times the prices you'd pay for books on the outside. Prisoners were sold digital music at 200-300% markups relative to, say, iTunes.

Remember, these are prisoners: locked up for years or decades, decades during which their families scraped by with a breadwinner behind bars. Prisoners can earn money, sure – as much as $0.89/hour, doing forced labor for companies that contract with prisons for their workforce:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

Of course, there's the odd chance for prisoners to make really big bucks – $2-5/day. All they have to do is "volunteer" to fight raging wildfires:

https://www.hcn.org/articles/climate-desk-wildfire-california-incarcerated-firefighters-face-dangerous-work-low-pay-and-covid19/

So those $3 digital music tracks are being bought by people earning as little as $0.10/hour. Which makes it especially galling when prisons change prison-tech suppliers, whereupon all that digital music is deleted, wiping prisoners' media collection out – forever (literally, for prisoners serving life terms):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

Let's recap: America goes on a prison rampage, locking up ever-larger numbers of people for ever-longer sentences. Once inside, prisoners had their access to friends and family rationed, along with access to books, music, education and communities outside. This is very bad for prisoners – strong ties to people outside is closely tied to successful reentry – but it's great for state budgets, and for wardens, thanks to kickbacks:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/12/21/family_contact/

Back to Minnesota: when Minnesota became the fourth state in the USA where the state, not prisoners, would pay for prison calls, it seemed like they were finally breaking the vicious cycle in which every dollar ripped off of prisoners' family paid 40 cents to the state treasury:

https://www.kaaltv.com/news/no-cost-phone-calls-for-those-incarcerated-in-minnesota/

But – as Katya Schwenk writes for The Lever – what happened next is "a case study in how prison communication companies and their private equity owners have managed to preserve their symbiotic relationship with state corrections agencies despite reforms — at the major expense of incarcerated people and their families":

https://www.levernews.com/wall-streets-new-prison-scam/

Immediately after the state ended the ransoming of prisoners' phone calls, the private-equity backed prison-tech companies that had dug their mouth-parts into the state's prison jacked up the price of all their other digital services. For example, the price of a digital song in a Minnesota prison just jumped from $1.99 to $2.36 (for prisoners earning as little as $0.25/hour).

As Paul Wright from the Human Rights Defense Center told Schwenk, "The ideal world for the private equity owners of these companies is every prisoner has one of their tablets, and every one of those tablets is hooked up to the bank account of someone outside of prison that they can just drain."

The state's new prison-tech supplier promises to double the amount of kickbacks it pays the state each year, thanks to an aggressive expansion into games, money transfers, and other "services." The perverse incentive isn't hard to spot: the more these prison-tech companies charge, the more kickbacks they pay to the prisons.

The primary prison-tech company for Minnesota's prisons is Viapath (nee Global Tel Link), which pioneered price-gouging on in-prison phone calls. Viapath has spent the past two decades being bought and sold by different private equity firms: Goldman Sachs, Veritas Capital, and now the $46b/year American Securities.

Viapath competes with another private equity-backed prison-tech giant: Aventiv (Securus, Jpay), owned by Platinum Equity. Together, Viapath and Aventiv control 90% of the prison-tech market. These companies have a rap-sheet as long as your arm: bribing wardens, stealing from prisoners and their families, and recording prisoner-attorney calls. But these are the kinds of crimes the state punishes with fines and settlements – not by terminating its contracts with these predators.

These companies continue to flout the law. Minnesota's new free-calls system bans prison-tech companies from paying kickbacks to prisons and prison-officials for telcoms services, so the prison-tech companies have rebranded ebooks, music, and money-transfers as non-communications products, and the kickbacks are bigger than ever.

This is the bottom end of the shitty technology adoption curve. Long before Ubisoft started deleting games that you'd bought a "perpetual license" for, prisoners were having their media ganked by an uncaring corporation that knew it was untouchable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIqyvquTEVU

Revoking your media, charging by the byte for messaging, confiscating things in the name of security and then selling them back to you – these are all tactics that were developed in the prison system, refined, normalized, and then worked up the privilege gradient. Prisoners are living in your technology future. It's just not evenly distributed – yet.

As it happens, prison-tech is at the heart of my next novel, The Bezzle, which comes out on Feb 20. This is a followup to last year's bestselling Red Team Blues, which introduced the world to Marty Hench, a two-fisted, hard-bitten, high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years busting Silicon Valley finance scams:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

In The Bezzle, we travel with Marty back to the mid 2000s (Hench is a kind of tech-scam Zelig and every book is a standalone tale of high-tech ripoffs from a different time and place). Marty's trying to help his old pal Scott Warms, a once-high-flying founder who's fallen prey to California's three-strikes law and is now facing decades in a state pen. As bad as things are, they get worse when the prison starts handing out "free" tablet and closing down the visitation room, the library, and the payphones.

This is an entry to the thing I love most about the Hench novels: the opportunity to turn all this dry, financial skullduggery into high-intensity, high-stakes technothriller plot. For me, Marty Hench is a tool for flensing the scam economy of all its layers of respectability bullshit and exposing the rot at the core.

It's not a coincidence that I've got a book coming out in a week that's about something that's in the news right now. I didn't "predict" this current turn – I observed it. The world comes at you fast and technology news flutters past before you can register it. Luckily, I have a method for capturing this stuff as it happens:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Writing about tech issues that are long-simmering but still in the periphery is a technique I call "predicting the present." It's the technique I used when I wrote Little Brother, about out-of-control state surveillance of the internet. When Snowden revealed the extent of NSA spying in 2013, people acted as though I'd "predicted" the Snowden revelations:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-writing-radicalized-young-hackers-now-he-wants-to-redeem-them/

But Little Brother and Snowden's own heroic decision have a common origin: the brave whistleblower Mark Klein, who walked into EFF's offices in 2006 and revealed that he'd been ordered by his boss at AT&T to install a beam-splitter into the main fiber trunk so that the NSA could illegally wiretap the entire internet:

https://www.eff.org/document/public-unredacted-klein-declaration

Mark Klein inspired me to write Little Brother – but despite national press attention, the Klein revelations didn't put a stop to NSA spying. The NSA was still conducting its lawless surveillance campaign in 2013, when Snowden, disgusted with NSA leadership for lying to Congress under oath, decided to blow the whistle again:

https://apnews.com/article/business-33a88feb083ea35515de3c73e3d854ad

The assumption that let the NSA get away with mass surveillance was that it would only be weaponized against the people at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve: brown people, mostly in other countries. The Snowden revelations made it clear that these were just the beginning, and sure enough, more than a decade later, we have data-brokers sucking up billions in cop kickbacks to enable warrantless surveillance, while virtually following people to abortion clinics, churches, and protests. Mass surveillance is chugging its way up the shitty tech adoption curve with no sign of stopping.

Like Little Brother, The Bezzle is intended as a kind of virtual flythrough of what life is like further down on that curve – a way for readers who have too much agency to be in the crosshairs of a company like Viapath or Avently right now to wake up before that kind of technology comes for them, and to inspire them to take up the cause of the people further down the curve who are mired in it.

The Bezzle is an intense book, but it's also a very fun story – just like Little Brother. It's a book that lays bare the internal technical workings of so many scams, from multi-level marketing to real-estate investment trusts, from music royalty theft to prison-tech, in the course of an ice-cold revenge plot that keeps twisting to the very last page.

It'll drop in six days. I hope you'll check it out:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

[todaysbird]

I still think it’s incredible that people blindly accept big brands = unquestionably good when regarding pet care. If you can accept that human care products have been at times poorly researched or downright harmful (and with the brand’s knowledge) like in the Johnson & Johnson scandal, why do you not believe that a brand would mislead or lie to you when it’s regarding your pet?