It looks more like she's saying that the tweet about Applebaum is less important, not the article about him
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Whittaker's phrasing is ambiguous. Could be read as expressing one of a number of things:
- The paper/article is misleading and distracting from meaningful threats to privacy.
- That the original tweet is using misleading accusations to distract us from the article's revelations of meaningful threats to privacy.
- That Appelbaum's authorship of the research is an unwanted negative association which undermines the attention deserved by the threats documented in the paper which are misleadingly justified as necessary by eg. governments.
It's difficult to know without a better understanding of Whittaker's position on the various matters at hand, so I don't know.
And if we can't tell for sure, it's stupid to start pointing fingers. If you don't have the facts, reading your (general) own narrative into her very short statement and presenting that as the objective truth is irrational. That's how conspiracy theories are made.
Personally, it sounds like the person on top is recommending backdoors to "protect the children," and Whittaker is rightly pointing out that that's a stupid take, given who is in charge in various governments and the dumb reasons many of them have used as justification for implementing backdoors.
Exit: clarification
OP, you may want to edit the title. It's as other commenters mentioned. It is about Applebaum not the whole article.
TLDR? Is this another "all CPU chips are CIA sponsored, gotta homebrew your own motherboard to be safe"
Duh , what do you think Intel IME doing or AMD PSP?
Tl;dr, 3 new revelations:
- The NSA listed Cavium, an American semiconductor company marketing Central Processing Units (CPUs) – the main processor in a computer which runs the operating system and applications – as a successful example of a “SIGINT-enabled” CPU supplier. Cavium, now owned by Marvell, said it does not implement back doors for any government.
- The NSA compromised lawful Russian interception infrastructure, SORM. The NSA archive contains slides showing two Russian officers wearing jackets with a slogan written in Cyrillic: “You talk, we listen.” The NSA and/or GCHQ has also compromised Key European LI [lawful interception] systems.
- Among example targets of its mass surveillance program, PRISM, the NSA listed the Tibetan government in exile.