iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I don't always mention it in every single article I write on distillation - maybe I should - but I do try to make it a regular part of my reporting. cyberscoop.com/white-house-... cyberscoop.com/us-accuses-c...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

The burden of every reporting beat is to toil away in quiet obscurity writing about your topic with nuance until it becomes important enough for Matt Yglesias and Ryan Grim to fly in out of nowhere and insist they have the answers.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Hmm, not sure this is the argument I would go with if I were an AI booster, but by all means continue claiming that any desire to regulate big tech companies in the common good is incompatible with your beliefs.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Absolutely appalling but also lol at how this IG report is like "Despite protests, the agent regrettably made it rain on the young woman at the Secretary of Labor's request" oig.dol.gov/public/oifin...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This is why it's not great that frontier AI companies don't - as far as I know - let third party cybersecurity people pen test their tech outside of their own highly restrictive access programs. Caveat: This is from January 2026 - or approx 20 years in AI News time. cyberscoop.com/hackerone-in...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It's the most wonderful time of the year.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Re: Tina Peters and Shasta County: I reached out to Gov Jared Polis' office for comment. They referred me to Colorado Dept. of Corrections, who sent me this response saying that Peters has yet to request an interstate transfer, which she would need to do to meet her parole obligations.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Related! www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Kind of fascinated with learning who the second choice of McMorrow voters would have been. Four times larger than the margin of difference between El-Sayed and Stevens:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Me checking in on all the AI news from my vacation.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

CEIR's @beckerdavidj.bsky.social on this point in a press call with reporters: "I predict almost all...are actually citizens and actually states would be breaking federal law by removing them from the voter list...because of the shoddy methodology, data techniques" used to match voters.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

IMO: Suing someone already facing criminal charges bc they used YOUR product to create CSAM is 100% reputation damage control. Especially when they're one out of likely millions and other lawsuits accuse xAI of withholding details to law enforcement in other cases. cyberscoop.com/deepfake-csa...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

This quote from Arizona SoS Adrian Fontes is striking. There's a lot of talk about how the federal government has pulled back its support to states on elections. Less discussed is whether states would even WANT it given DOJ threats to prosecute election officials.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

When you're doing a great job representing your employer's brand on social media:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Georgia counted ballots for their primaries this May using both machines and hand counting methods. Then they did an audit comparing discrepancies between the two. 100% of the 23 errors were found to be mistakes by the hand counting side. From Secretary of State's office:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Interacted with NYT reporter on LinkedIn complaining BlueSky was the most nasty, hostile place. I asked what happened and noted 3-4 main things I find objectionable about say, X (which I noticed he posts on regularly). His responded that people wrote mean things about one of his stories. 🤷

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Not bad but I gotta step up my game.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Yeah Anthropic has said this is a real possibility for Fable, at least in the early days. cyberscoop.com/anthropic-cl...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Pretty incredible kicker for this story about Irish politicians grappling with an Elon Musk-led pogrom in Ireland on X: www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

And decades of industry consolidation and mergers in the U.S. have resulted in legacy systems, networks and equipment, creating exactly the kind attack surface that would allow Salt Typhoon unlimited entry points to networks. cyberscoop.com/salt-typhoon...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

Good scoop here from @alexmartin.bsky.social on UK watering down proposed telecom rules meant to respond to Salt Typhoon. Both the US and the UK have now done this, and the underlying reason behind both decisions is the same: therecord.media/uk-weakens-t...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Good story on the current state of play for the AI exec order. It also highlights something I noted when the EO was canceled: AI companies already voluntarily share their frontier models with US and UK agencies before release. But EO would have given gov testers more freedom to poke and prod.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Interesting to monitor the sudden shift in engagement/exposure for CyberScoop's content on TikTok leading up to (first image) and then right after (second) we wrote a story and shot a video about Tina Peters' commutation: www.tiktok.com/@cyberscoopn...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Oh wow but also they did a lot of notation as well:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

LoL at the DNC 2024 autopsy report having this disclaimer printed in bold red letters at the top of every single page: democrats.org/wp-content/u...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Yes. The most incredible thing about the calls for mercy around Peters is that precisely none of them are coming from her Mesa County neighbors, officials and others who know her personally. There's a reason for that! cyberscoop.com/tina-peters-...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Gonna be thinking about this paragraph for a bit:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Jeffrey Clark (the former DOJ official nearly made acting AG to help Trump overturn the 2020 election) is currently melting down over on the other site in response to John Eastman getting disbarred, insisting there should be no consequences bc "reasonable minds" can disagree on 2020 election.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

The list of Senior Administration Officials scheduled to read books to children at the First Lady's Easter event. Big ups to Michael Kratsios for being the only male member who wasn't too tough and rugged to say yes.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I have an alternative headline for you, Mr. New York Times. How about "This Reporter Spends the Equivalent of a Bougie $34 Dollar Burger 44 Times Every Single Month, Per Kid. Should He Have to Buy That Many Burgers Just To Have a Family?"

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Yeah, I am open to arguments from both optimists and pessimists, but until AI companies are forced to legally stand behind the reliability and efficacy of their product - LIKE IN ANY WAY - I am going to maintain a certain level of skepticism. You can't have it both ways.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 27/03/2026

It's clear the people who got us here weren't disciples of the Wise Master, Anton Chigurh:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Man, I love this answer from Louis Theroux: www.wired.com/story/louis-...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

In January, a day after the FBI raid of Fulton County, Georgia's election office, I asked Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes if he was concerned the government would take similar actions in Arizona. Here's how Fontes, who was Maricopa County recorder in 2020 (and LOST reelection) replied:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 27/02/2026

Actually some of the reports submitted by the Chinese law enforcement agency do mention the use of local Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek and Qwen. It seems like every threat actor is using multiple LLMs for their operations.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

Here's a bit more from DARPA in that 2024 piece about the accuracy challenges for AI detection tools over time:

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

This quote from elections expert David Becker gets at something that I think is important. You are going to hear "potential noncitizen" a lot over the next 9 months. It's a near meaningless term, untrue in 99% of cases, but will be the primary justification for throwing people off voter rolls.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

TFW when you're trying to do your pre-match angry face but you're worried the actual President of the United States might be watching, get mad and decide to drone strike the arena.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Interoperability between federal datasets is likely to be one of the long term impacts of the Trump administration. Most of these databases were designed not to easily share information with other systems/agencies. You'd need to be committed and willing to break ton of laws...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

One of these screenshots is from a real story and the other one is an Onion article.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

A decent part of why we're here today is because many of the people you would expect to provide ideological + political pushback against the Trumpist project were, as recently as 2024, still showing their asses and lack of curiosity about the real world. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/o...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Source made a similar point to me last week about some of the Maduro-related deepfakes that were circulated after his capture - in that they're less about being really convincing and more about aligning the latest news event X with your pre-existing emotional "truth." cyberscoop.com/ai-voting-ma...

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

While we're on the topic on Lincoln, I just watched Death By Lightning and read up more about James Garfield. He was awesome in many respects (early abolitionist, Union hero, anti-corruption) but he apparently thought VERY little of Lincoln at the time.

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

In this exchange, Susie Wiles says concerns that Trump will deploy military to cities to suppress the vote it's "categorically false" and "will not happen." Then immediately concedes it's reasonable for people to be concerned because they think he might be "too wrapped up in what happened in 2020."

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

When a reporter (not me!) is trying to get that knock out quote/analogy and the interview subject is like "Yeah no."

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Derek B. Johnson @derekbjohnson.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

Just an incredible passage here about the administration's stated preference for non-intervention, coming at the same time the US is blowing boats out of the water in the Caribbean to provoke Venezuela into a war.

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