Surveillance, Militias, and the Limits of Data: Our Top Stories from 2021
Hatemail: Intel and Insight from the LaBac Hacker Collective
Hello! We’re Back From a Little Hiatus, Just in Time to Close Out the Year
2021 was… a lot. This past year we saw an attempted invasion of the U.S. Capitol, billionaires launching themselves into space, and the emergence of two new Covid-19 variants. Despite these dark moments, there has also been a fair bit of progress against a seeming dystopian landscape. We’ve also seen this year a growing national labor movement that is moving big tech away from a profit-only approach and Covid-19 vaccines were widely distributed across the globe, setting us on a path towards getting through the pandemic.
In the spirit of reflection, we’ve compiled our top hatemail posts and most-clicked featured articles from 2021. Let’s take these as tokens of what ways we can make the year 2022 better than the last. After all, it could always be worse!
Enjoy these 2021 hits, stay safe, and we’ll see you in the new year.
— The Collective
Our Most Popular Editorials of 2021
- Qoup d'état: What QAnon's Reddit Migration Tells Us About Misinformation
- Protect the Digital Peepshow
- The COVID-19 Vaccine Complicates the Bot Debate
- The Online Universe of Hate Speech is Still Alive and Well
- Welcome to Supply Chain Hell
Top-Clicked Articles Linked in hatemail This Year
- Surveillance Capitalism: How Your Data Means Dollars — Science Gallery Detroit
- How Do People Join Militias? A Leaked Oath Keepers Roster Has Answers. — Mother Jones
- Mozilla Says Chrome's Latest Feature Enables Surveillance — How to Geek
- A New Wave of Hacktivists is Turning the Surveillance State Against Itself — The Record
- The Mysterious Figure Stealing Books Before Their Release — Vulture
- Zoom to Pay $85M for Lying About Encryption and Sending Data to Facebook and Google — Ars Technica
- KiwiFarms Gets DDoS'd After Being Tied to Developer's Suicide — Gizmodo
- This Manual for a Popular Facial Recognition Tool Shows Just How Much the Software Tracks People — The Markup
- The Great DNS Vulnerability of 2008 by Dan Kaminsky — Duo Security
- After Working at Google, I'll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again — The New York Times
- What Data Can't Do — The New Yorker
- Facebook Research Reportedly Finds Small Number of Users Responsible for Spreading Vaccine Doubt — The Verge
LaBac is a hacker collective combatting tech-enabled abuse and serves on the NYC Cyber Sexual Assault Taskforce. Learn more here.