Messages to Humans

CISA Has Lost a Third of Its Staff. Its Nominee Comes From Palantir.

On Monday, November 9, the White House sent the Senate a name for an agency that has gone nearly two years without a confirmed leader: Michael LoSapio, chief information security officer at Palantir. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is the federal government's main civilian cyber defense unit, the office that helps protect federal networks, water systems, power grids and telecom. It has lost roughly a third of its workforce since January 2025. Its next director, if confirmed, would arrive from the security desk of a company that sells data and targeting software to the Department of Homeland Security, the department CISA sits inside.

What If We Have Been Played? The Revolution Script and Who Writes It

A cartoon skull in a straw hat has turned up at protests in Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, France and beyond, and in at least one country the protests helped bring down a government. That much is documented. What nobody outside the platforms can say is how much of it was

Two empty wooden chairs in the snow facing a northern sunset over a frozen lake

The Joke Canada Didn’t Laugh At: What the 51st-State Bit Cost Washington

For nearly two years, Americans were told that the talk about Canada becoming the 51st state was a bit, a negotiating posture, the president being the president. Canadians heard something else: a country of 40 million people being addressed as a territory. On October 30, 2026 in Montréal, Canada answered

A license-plate reader camera on a small-town street at dusk, its lens dissolving to reveal a glowing web of surveillance data nodes

Cities Are Dumping Flock’s Surveillance Cameras — Here’s What the Network Was Actually Used For

In August, an American city or county walked away from Flock Safety's camera network roughly every eight hours. Ninety jurisdictions terminated contracts that month alone — a fourfold jump from July, and part of a run of 214 cancellations since 2021, according to the Oakland-based watchdog group Secure

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