We have a @lopatto.bsky.social piece on the hacker who breached Columbia and acquired Zohran Mamdani's college application. It's not great for NYT to be using hacked materials originating from an anime Nazi but this part especially stuck out to me. www.theverge.com/cyber-securi...
My personal opinion is that this is a form of regime hacking, and that it's wild to run a hit piece on an opposition politician using those materials.
This whole thing is an open secret and a certain segment of the right wing thinks it's super funny that NYT ran with a story based on materials acquired by a hacker whose pseudonym is a literal slur. www.theverge.com/cyber-securi...
As a reminder, this was NYT's framing of the political motivations of the hacker. Personally, I do not think that this is the most relevant way to frame the "politics" of a hacker who uses a slur as a username, calls themselves "violently racist," and RTs swastikas. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/n...
The Columbia hack is one of several attacks on university systems, including one on Ole Miss where the hacker displayed a Confederate flag on screens and played a midi of Dixie. Framing the Columbia hack as an attack on affirmative action has the effect of soft-pedaling what this is all about.
We did ask NYT if they knew about the hacker's X account, or that their bylined freelancer followed the hacker. We did not get a response aside from getting linked to Healy's old thread about the sourcing of the article.
This ‘violently racist’ hacker...
@sarahjeong.bsky.social No one cares how the material was obtained. People care about why academia is still hellbent on disenfranchising whites and asians. People also notice those trying to shift the discussion away from this topic towards meaningless details that do not matter.
