Linked List: March 25, 2022

Friday, 25 March 2022

The New Yorker: ‘Legal Scholars Are Shocked by Ginni Thomas’s “Stop the Steal” Texts’ 

Jane Mayer, reporting for The New Yorker:

Several of the country’s most respected legal scholars say that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas must immediately recuse himself from any cases relating to the 2020 election and its aftermath, now that it has been revealed that his wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, colluded extensively with a top White House adviser about overturning Joe Biden’s victory over then President Donald Trump. On March 24th, the Washington Post and CBS News revealed that they had obtained copies of twenty-nine text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, the Trump White House chief of staff, in which she militated relentlessly for invalidating the results of the Presidential election, which she described as an “obvious fraud.” It was necessary, she told Meadows, to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down.” Ginni Thomas’s texts to Meadows also refer to conversations that she’d had with “Jared”—possibly Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also served as a senior adviser to the Administration. (“Just forwarded to yr gmail an email I sent Jared this am.”)

Stephen Gillers, a law professor at N.Y.U. and a prominent judicial ethicist, described the revelations as “a game changer.” In the past, he explained, he had supported the notion that a Justice and his spouse could pursue their interests in autonomous spheres. “For that reason, I was prepared to, and did tolerate a great deal of Ginni’s political activism,” he said. But “Ginni has now crossed a line.” In an e-mail reacting to the texts, Gillers concluded, “Clarence Thomas cannot sit on any matter involving the election, the invasion of the Capitol, or the work of the January 6 Committee.”

And we thought it was bad back in 1991 when we learned he joked to his employees about pubic hair being planted on his can of Coke.

Twitter Adds Support for Searching DM’s 

Twitter Support:

We know you’ve been waiting for the option to search your DMs…

Now you can use the search bar in your inbox to find specific messages using keywords and names.

No-sarcasm finally on this one. The lack of search for DMs has been utterly baffling for at least a decade. Good on Twitter for adding this though — truly better late than never.

Telegram Is Not End-to-End Encrypted by Default 

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, on Twitter a month ago:

Telegram is the most popular messenger in urban Ukraine. After a decade of misleading marketing and press, most ppl there believe it’s an “encrypted app”.

The reality is the opposite — TG is by default a cloud database w/ a plaintext copy of every msg everyone has ever sent/recvd.

Every msg, photo, video, doc sent/received for the past 10 yrs; all contacts, group memberships, etc are all available to anyone w/ access to that DB.

Many TG employees have family in Russia. If Russia doesn’t want to bother w/ hacking, they can leverage family safety for access.

He links to a longer thread he wrote in December about Telegram and the common misconception that it uses E2EE across the board. I made this mistake yesterday. (We regret the error.)