Joon Ian Wong

Tens of thousands of people are signing up for automated alerts on what is usually a dull affair: the intricate mechanics of government. IFTTT—”If this then that”—is a platform that lets non-programmers create and customize internet services, for example, automatically tweeting “Happy New Year!” every Jan 1. Now, more than 40,000 of the platform’s users are using simple bot-like programs called “applets” to track the Trump administration.

Users can get an email every time President Trump signs a new bill into law, for example, or have bills that are scheduled for a vote automatically added to their calendars. The number of IFTTT users tracking the government has risen dramatically since Trump’s victory in November, to more than 40,000 from 30,000 ahead of the Nov. 8 election.

If you like your privacy, don’t fly the friendly skies with your phone connected to in-flight networks. American and British intelligence have been surveilling phone use aboard civil aircraft since at least 2005, according to a new investigation by Le Monde based on secret documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Simply turning on your phone when the plane is flying above 10,000 feet will reveal your location to the NSA, according to an article from a classified internal newsletter.

The spy agencies were able to extract a range of information in near real-time under a program aptly named “Thieving Magpie.” They include: BlackBerry PINs and e-mail addresses, e-mail addresses, Skype identifying data, Facebook and identifying data. The agencies then correlate this data with other facts, like the plane’s passenger list, the flight number, and other details in order to pinpoint a particular user.

The head of the US’s National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, said Nov 15 that a “nation-state” consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election. In response to a question, Michael Rogers, a Naval officer and NSA director since 2014, said that Wikileaks was furthering a nation-state’s goals by publishing hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s presidential campaign weeks ahead of the election. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds, this was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” he said.