August 28, 2025
A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for a variety of uses.
Sources, usually Internet-based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites, court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing.
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May 13, 2025
Zersetzung [zer-set-zung] (German for ‘decomposition’ and ‘disruption’) was a psychological warfare technique used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. Zersetzung served to combat alleged and actual dissidents through covert means, using secret methods of abusive control and psychological manipulation to prevent anti-government activities.
Among the defining features of it was the widespread use of offensive counterespionage methods as a means of repression. People were commonly targeted on a preemptive and preventive basis, to limit or stop activities of political dissent and cultural incorrectness that they may have gone on to perform, and not on the basis of crimes they had actually committed. Zersetzung methods were designed to break down, undermine, and paralyze people behind ‘a facade of social normality’ in a form of ‘silent repression.’
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March 31, 2025
Steganography [steg-uh-nog-ruh-fee] is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the concealed information would not be evident to an unsuspecting person’s examination.
The word steganography comes from Greek words steganós (‘covered or concealed’) and graphia (‘writing’). The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic.
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March 19, 2025
A stele [stee-lee] or stela [stee-lah] is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.
Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler’s exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, independently, by Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Olmec and Maya.
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February 3, 2025
The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto’s claim to the Holy Roman Empire.
Illig suggested this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a ‘phantom time’ of 297 years (614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages. Substantial evidence contradicts the hypothesis and it failed to gain the support of historians, and calendars in other European countries, most of Asia and parts of pre-Columbian America contradict this.
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January 7, 2025
The Outrage Industrial Complex (OIC) is a combination of forces including media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy that in the late 20th and early 21st centuries exploited differences of opinion and what was termed a culture of contempt drawn along political and social lines, increasing distrust of institutions and society, to advance their own desires for fame, wealth, higher office, or for geopolitical reasons.
The OIC creates and distributes outrage media, digital or print content specifically intended to provoke anger or outrage among its consumers to increase engagement. The complex includes media outlets, social media influencers, political fundraising messaging, and individuals in media, political leadership or advocacy who call out ‘outrages,’ hoping to generate what Richard Thompson Ford, writing for ‘The American Interest,’ calls a sense of ‘righteous indignation’ and rage borne of frustration in their readers or listeners, often for their own purposes of attracting advertisers or fame or to intentionally cause social disruption in a country or region.
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December 2, 2024
Video nasty is a colloquial term popularized by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) in the United Kingdom to refer to a number of films, typically low-budget horror or exploitation films, distributed on video cassette in the early 1980s that were criticized by the press, social commentators, and various religious organisations for their violent content.
These video releases were not brought before the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) due to a loophole in film classification laws that allowed videos to bypass the review process. The resulting uncensored video releases led to public debate concerning the availability of these films to children due to the unregulated nature of the market.
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August 14, 2024
A reverse search warrant is a type of search warrant used in the U.S., in which law enforcement obtains a court order for information from technology companies to identify a group of people who may be suspects in a crime. They differ from traditional search warrants, which typically apply to specific individuals. Geofence warrants, which seek data on mobile phone users who were in a specific location at a given time, and keyword warrants, which request information on users who searched specific phrases, are two types of reverse search warrants.
Reverse location warrants were first used in 2016, and have become increasingly widely used by law enforcement. Google reported that it had received 982 reverse location warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019, and 11,554 in 2020. A 2021 transparency report showed that 25% of data requests from law enforcement to Google were geofence data requests. Google is the most common recipient of reverse location warrants and the main provider of such data, although companies including Apple, Snapchat, Lyft, and Uber have also received such warrants.
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June 25, 2024
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a Latin phrase found in the ‘Satires,’ a work of the 1st–2nd century Roman poet Juvenal. It may be translated as ‘Who will guard the guards themselves?’ or ‘Who will watch the watchmen?”.
The original context deals with the problem of ensuring marital fidelity, though the phrase is now commonly used more generally to refer to the problem of controlling the actions of persons in positions of power, an issue discussed by Plato in the ‘Republic.’ It is not clear whether the phrase was written by Juvenal, or whether the passage in which it appears was interpolated into his works.
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April 20, 2024
Killing baby Hitler is a thought experiment in ethics and theoretical physics which poses the question of using time travel to assassinate an infant Adolf Hitler. It presents an ethical dilemma in both the action and its consequences, as well as a temporal paradox in the logical consistency of time. Killing baby Hitler first became a literary trope of science fiction during World War II and has since been used to explore these ethical and metaphysical debates.
Public debate around the question of killing baby Hitler reached its height in late 2015, after ‘The New York Times’ published a poll asking its readers the question. 42% said they would kill baby Hitler, 30% said they would not and 28% were undecided. Advocates of killing baby Hitler included Florida governor Jeb Bush and film actor Tom Hanks, while comedian Stephen Colbert and pundit Ben Shapiro were counted among the opponents of the policy.
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April 19, 2024
The Kia Challenge is a viral TikTok trend to which a series of motor vehicle thefts is attributed, targeting Kia and Hyundai vehicles in the U.S. manufactured between 2011 and 2021. The trend, which began in October 2022, has led to eight fatalities, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Until 2011, most Kia vehicles were manufactured with immobilizers—electronic security devices that prevent the engine from being started unless a proper key is inserted—a system present in most Hyundai vehicles until 2016. In Kia Sportage models manufactured in 2010, the immobilizer system comprised a transponder in the ignition key, an antenna coil in the key cylinder, and a SMARTRA unit. Kia vehicles manufactured from 2011 to 2021 and Hyundai vehicles manufactured from 2016 to 2021 that use a steel key, in comparison to a key fob and a push-button start mechanism, lack immobilizers.
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April 11, 2024
”No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens’ is the title of a series of articles perennially published by the American news satire organization ‘The Onion’ satirizing the frequency of mass shootings in the United States and the lack of action taken in the wake of such incidents.
Each article is about 200 words long, detailing the location of the shooting and the number of victims, but otherwise remaining essentially the same. A fictitious resident—usually of a state in which the shooting did not take place—is quoted as saying that the shooting was ‘a terrible tragedy,’ but ‘there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them.’ The article ends by saying that the United States is the ‘only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years,’ and that Americans view themselves and the situation as ‘helpless.’
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