Sam Biddle
@sambiddle
Senior Technology Reporter at The Intercept Got a tip? Signal: sambiddle.99 (Make sure you don’t contact me via a work-provided device)
I think this makes a lot of sense, "Russia hacked our democracy" discourse was largely an off-ramp from meaningful political action
I find it genuinely heartwarming that there are still guys like this/exchanges like this out there on the internet in 2026, a decades-long universal constant
beyond dismayed this arrived several orders of magnitude smaller than described on eBay
An analysis using Pangram (take that with a grain of salt) flagged a lot of the articles as being largely or entirely written using an LLM. A lot of the work is pretty shoddy, like the garbled newspaper headlines below
La Tilde mixes every 2010s millennial media startup cliche with Pentagon PR, creating a very strange mix of content.
An example of the kind of anti-AI data center meme that could put you under fusion center scrutiny
US counter-terror fusion centers are watching your anti-AI data center posts on social media, according to a document we obtained warning of “disruptive First Amendment activity." Keep in mind next time you joke about the Butlerian Jihad. theintercept.com/2026/06/01/a...
One thing I forgot to mention about my CENTCOM psyop story from yesterday. YouTube/Instagram/Facebook all say it's their policy to explicitly label state-controlled media outlets (see screenshots). Neither of the US military propaganda mills I wrote about have been given any such label.
Drone flight data compiled and visualized by @lemonodor.bsky.social and shared with The Intercept shows how, for example, the LAPD launched 32 separate drone flights to surveil the March 28 No Kings protest in downtown LA. The LAPD told me they only hit record when a crime happens.
On other occasions the sites seem to forget that they are supposed to be masquerading as news media operations.
Al-Fassel, meanwhile, may not realize that its tweets are geotagged to Lutz, FL, a stone's throw from CENTCOM and U.S. Special Operations Command.
Both sites appear to have been pretty sloppy about hiding their CENTCOM connection. Pishtaz News, for example, only follows one account on Instagram...
If you have the Criterion app this is phenomenal and worth watching ASAP
There's been something deeply annoying and off-putting about Project Hail Mary that's been keeping me from seeing it even as a huge sci-fi person, and I haven't been able to put my finger on why exactly, until I saw this tweet
My favorite new subgenre of article is "why aren't young people engaging in the activity we just spent months demonizing as racist terrorism orgies and advocated for outlawing?"
I tried to get McLaughlin to explain what exactly she meant here but she stopped responding after an initial exchange www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/crime/3...
Are routers intercepted and bugged by the NSA considered Made in the USA?
I'm a regular Digital Foundry viewer but generally speaking if a PR exec is congratulating you on what a good job you did discussing their new product you might need to reevaluate your approach