I’ve been very busy with event jobs recently and haven’t posted on the blog as much as I would like to. Because of this, I have not kept you up to date with episodes of The Private Citizen. So here’s a list of the shows I’ve released during the last four weeks:

→ The Private Citizen 114: War and Justice

In response to some input from listeners, I feel it is necessary to explain some things about how I cover the war in Ukraine and how I feel about wars in general. Let’s talk about wars, international law and justice.

→ The Private Citizen 115: A Second Winter War?

What does the Russian war in Ukraine have in common with the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939? What is different? And what can we learn from this about how the current war is going?

→ The Private Citizen 116: The Left’s Fear of Musk

I don’t like Elon Musk. But I think him buying Twitter isn’t a bad thing. The people who do, however, are either unintentionally wrong or they are actively fighting on the side of censorship and propaganda, like the US intelligence community.

→ The Private Citizen 117: Blockchain Basics

Blockchain technology is one of the biggest buzzwords in tech in recent times. But what are blockchains and what do you need them for, really? Spoiler: Not much, actually.

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Finally managed to record another episode of the podcast. Enjoy!

→ The Private Citizen 113: Lex Draconis

In Germany, telling someone on the internet that you will hurt and injure them if they visit you at home is apparently a valid defence for actually hitting them now.

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I’m pretty behind on my podcast The Private Citizen. I’ve actually missed two releases now. This is mostly due to a trip to Hanover for work-related reasons in the last week of March and many work commitments I could not postpone coming down to deadlines in the previous week. On top of that, I have to admit, I also used the dropping of almost all of the SARS-CoV-2-related restrictions to finally spend some time with friends and at parties and such. I promise I will give my best to start catching up in the coming week. I do have some work commitments, but it should be more manageable. I already have a lot of interesting topics lined up for the show and can’t wait to record some episodes!

The current episode of my podcast The Private Citizen looks at Russia’s war goal in Ukraine.

→ The Private Citizen 112: What Does Putin Want?

What are Putin’s war goals in Ukraine? What is the Russian military trying to achieve? And how is it going?

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Last week’s episode of The Private Citizen deals with Facebook finally showing its true colours when it comes to fighting hate speech.

→ The Private Citizen 111: Peak Hypocrisy

Facebook just made a mockery of the fight against hate speech by admitting that it’s okay if you call for the murder of people the political mainstream doesn’t like. It’s only hate speech if you want to murder the wrong people. What the actual fuck.

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I recorded another Private Citizen episode on the whole Drachenlord situation. I think it’s an important topic that might have significant consequences for people’s civil rights. Especially because mainstream journalism continues to get the story wrong.

→ The Private Citizen 110: Drachenlord on Tour

German YouTuber Drachenlord has sold his infamous Drachenschanze and is travelling in a pickup truck around Germany. Meanwhile, well-meaning people, who have no idea what’s actually going on, think he’s being bullied.

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I’m back with The Private Citizen! Last night, I released a new episode focused on, what else, the Russian war in Ukraine.

→ The Private Citizen 109: Agitprop Ahoy!

The war in Ukraine has been raging for eight years, largely ignored by the West. It is not new. Neither are the policy blunders by NATO and the EU that have led to the current full-scale invasion. Putin is to blame for the war, but the West has created the situation that enabled Putin to wage it.

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Here you go. I’ve just released the last episode of The Private Citizen in a while. I’m going to take a month off now. I’ll be back with more episodes in March.

→ The Private Citizen 108: The Biggest Security Vulnerability of All Time

Log4Shell, a vulnerability in the Java application logging framework Log4J has been called the worst security vulnerability ever. Is that just the usual hype, though? Or why haven’t we seen the forecast large scale exploitation of this bug? Is there something more sinister at play here?

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Last night, I released The Private Citizen episode 107 with my take on the Neil Young / Joe Rogan / Spotify story. I’m planning to release an additional episode tonight before taking February off from the podcast. But first, here’s episode 107:

→ The Private Citizen 107: Neil Young is Being a Dick

Neil Young has had his record label pull his music from Spotify because he doesn’t like that Joe Rogan interviews people who have a different opinion than Neil Young. The story of a counterculture rebel turned censorship advocate.

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On episode 106 of The Private Citizen, I once again try to wind down my coverage of the pandemic. Will I be able to manage it this time? Only time will tell…

→ The Private Citizen 106: Concluding the Coronavirus Coverage, Part 2

Taking stock of the civil liberty and privacy nightmare we have built for ourselves in the pandemic and explaining why I don’t think reporting on it accomplishes much at this point.

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This week’s episode of The Private Citizen was delayed, but yesterday, I finally managed to release it. It’s a bit of a companion piece to episodes 104 and 94. It is also unusually philosophical.

→ The Private Citizen 105: Law vs. Justice

The law is not the same as justice. There can be unjust laws and illegal actions can beget justice. So why is it that many people can’t tell the difference between these two concepts? And how can we reconcile them in our society?

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This week’s Private Citizen episode is about a Constitutional Court decision in Germany that has tasked the government with passing a law that regulates triage during the pandemic. This is an exceptionally bad idea, I think.

→ The Private Citizen 104: Triage is Too Logical for Germans

When who to save in case of a medical emergency becomes a moral, or even worse, a legal decision instead of a medical one, we all lose. This will soon be the reality in Germany, though, as the Constitutional Court has just passed a very unfortunate ruling in this regard.

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I’ve just released the last episode of The Private Citizen for the year. In this episode I recap the 52 other episodes I’ve recorded during 2021. It’s a very good episode to figure out what episodes you’d be interested in going back to if you haven’t listened to them for whatever reason.

I’m very glad that I’ve once again hit my goal of releasing an episode a week of the show on average over the year.

→ The Private Citizen 103: The Year 2021 in Review

A look back at the second year of the show, through the lens of the topics covered and the things discussed.

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Last night, I released the 100^th episode of my privacy and politics podcast The Private Citizen. This was a very special occasion for me as it marks only the second time one of my podcasts reached that mark (I’m discounting c’t Uplink here as I was only one of team of people who created that show).

To celebrate, I recorded a different kind of episode where I tell listeners a little bit about my life and the things in my past that made me what I am today.

→ The Private Citizen 100: Let Me Tell You a Bit about Myself

For the one-hundredths episode of this show, I’m telling the story of who I am, where I was born and how I was brought up, in the hope that it will help you understand my place in the world and my biases as a basis for further episodes.

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Because of my time in Spain and because I’ve plunged myself head-on into work afterwards, I haven’t been posting regularly about new Private Citizen episodes. If you’ve missed some because of that, you’ll have to play some catch-up now:

→ The Private Citizen 87: Afghaniscam?

14 September 2021

You expect me to believe that the best funded, best trained, best organised and most experienced military in history left military arms behind in a hasty retreat that are worth more than the annual military budget of all but two countries on the globe? Seriously?

→ The Private Citizen 88: Jamaican Traffic Lights

6 October 2021

Will the recent German federal election be followed by time of horrible uncertainty, that is will it be the country’s Brexit moment, or is it actually a good thing? This episode discusses the election result and gives a historic explainer of the German parliamentary system.

→ The Private Citizen 89: The Cult of the Vaccine

11 October 2021

How can the hope of a new drug that might help fight COVID-19 get turned into bad news? Bad journalism, that’s how. Let’s look at how Matt Taibbi breaks it down in his exemplary writing on the topic.

→ The Private Citizen 90: Blowing the Wrong Whistle

13 October 2021

What’s more in your interest? Stopping Facebook from leeching off the private data of your life to further its monopoly or forcing it to censor your speech? And now take a guess which of the two politicians want to do and journalists are ecstatic about?

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I’ve got the following plan for the next few episode releases of my podcast The Private Citizen, which should get me back up to this year’s schedule of the four episodes a month that I’ve promised for the show:

The Private Citizen 91, 20 October 2021: Bugs in our Pockets

• Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning — Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman fame (co-invented public-key crypto), Ronald Rivest co-invented RSA, Steven M. Bellovin co-invented encrypted key exchange and is credited with inventing the firewall, Josh Benaloh invented the Benaloh cryptosystem, Jon Callas is one of the founders of PGP Inc. and co-founder of Silent Circle, Peter Neumann is the editor of the RISK Digest, Carmela Troncoso was the main author of the original DP-3T paper, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze and Ross Anderson are well-known crypto and security experts

The Private Citizen 92, 25 October 2021: CIA vs. WikiLeaks

• Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA’s secret war plans against WikiLeaks

The Private Citizen 93, 27 October 2021: iOS Do Not Track

• When you “Ask app not to track,” some iPhone apps keep snooping anyway
• Study: Effectiveness of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency

I also have the following topics on my list, which I want to cover as soon as possible in further episodes (I might do an episode where I lump a couple of smaller topics together, too):

• Geofence warrants: Google Report Spotlights Uptick in Controversial “Geofence Warrants” by Police
• Xiaomi censorship: Lithuania tells its citizens to throw Xiaomi mobile devices in the bin, Zensurvorwürfe: Will Xiaomi vor allem Porno-Werbung filtern?
• Quad vs. China cyber war: “Quad” group seeks to set security standards for global tech industry, Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use, India, Japan flex cyber-defence muscles as China kicks the Quad, FCC details $1.9 billion program to rip out Huawei and ZTE gear in the US
• Stasi spying on car phones in West Berlin: Stasi hörte seit 1975 Autotelefone in West-Berlin ab
• The Trump / Alfa Bank story: Indictment, Lawsuits Revive Trump-Alfa Bank Story
• Facebook account deletion: Top German Court Says Facebook Must Inform Users About Deleting Their Posts Or Suspending Their Account, Explain Why, And Allow Them To Respond

As promised, I’ve just released an extra episode of The Private Citizen. This is a long one, so I hope you have some time on your hand. Or, you know, just pause it in between.

→ The Private Citizen 86: The Sausage Wars

A discussion with my friend Mike about the current state of Brexit and what it means for the future of the European Union and the geopolitical situation on the continent and beyond.

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I’ve just released another episode of The Private Citizen, hopefully one of a couple this week. In this one, I examine an example of exceptionally bad journalism that hit the world recently. I’ve discussed this kind of thing before, but sadly, the journalistic landscape seems to be getting worse, not better.

→ The Private Citizen 85: The Latest in Despicable Journalism

Again and again, so-called journalists in big media outlets exaggerate or even outright invent stories to scare or outrage the public. The audience just buys it wholesale and never notices when, a day or two later, it all turns out to be complete bullshit. Today’s example: Ivermectin.

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I’ve also updated the album art for the show again. As you can see, I am aggressively fighting for your right to have something to hide!

This week on The Private Citizen, I explain Steve Gibson’s SQRL, which is a really cool solution to the problems we all face with passwords on the internet.

→ The Private Citizen 84: Steve Gibson’s Squirrel

Authentication on the internet is fundamentally broken. Weak passwords, password reuse, data leaks and untrustworthy third parties tracking us while they log us in are the unfortunate reality right now. One man decided to single-handedly fix this mess.

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I think the recent Pegasus spyware investigation and so-called “NSO scandal” was quite boring, personally. But people really wanted me to talk about it on The Private Citizen and, you know, I think they are right. It is a really important topic, even if it is boring to me. So I talked about it:

→ The Private Citizen 83: The Conspiracy Theorists Get It Right Again

Pegasus isn’t new. Anyone in the field has known about NSO Group’s spyware and its use against politicians, activists and journalists for half a decade. What’s worth discussing, though, is how the topic has been ignored for so long. Both by the press and by iPhone maker Apple.

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