Highlights

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The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else.

✏️ At face value, this sounds okay, if a bit suspicious. They tug at you through an extreme and provocative thread. 🔗 View Highlight

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he Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

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the way the network operated called to mind perhaps the most famous right-wing philanthropy and dark-money political network: the constellation of groups run and supported by the billionaire owners of Koch Industries.

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campaign to diminish encryption for the sake of public safety — known as the “Crypto Wars” — has in recent years pivoted from stoking fears of terrorists chatting in secret to child predators evading police scrutiny. No matter the subject area, the battle is being waged between those who think privacy is an absolute right and those who believe it ought to be limited for expanded oversight from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

✏️ The reasons shift, but the essence is a solid and dedicated path towards removing privacy. After all, information is power.. a government that has full access to all the inner thoughts and info of its people can wield it unequivocally and for whatever purpose it deems. This is control, pure and simple. 🔗 View Highlight

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“I’m uncomfortable with anonymous rich people with unknown agendas pushing these massive invasions of our privacy,”

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