Blocked and reported
On history books, data breaches, and the likely origins of a nasty wave of racist text messages sent after the election
People in at least six states received racist text messages following the election, suggesting that they were being taken to "plantations". The stunt is not funny, nor clever, nor even remotely tolerable.
■ But it's also probably not domestic, either. The language of the text messages sounds like the kind of thing a person with a 19th-Century understanding of the United States might write if they hadn't ever been to the country. Even the stupidest American knows there aren't any working plantations.
■ It also appears to have been conducted at scale, meaning that the messages had to have been sent at a cost of some resources. Bulk text messages aren't really that expensive, but they aren't free, either.
■ Moreover, it seems evident that the messages were racially targeted, which suggests that the perpetrators used a database that contained profiles containing names, telephone numbers, and racial identity information. This is the kind of information exposed during large-scale data breaches.
■ The messages have been traced to a VPN operation in Poland, which could make it difficult if not impossible to hunt down the original perpetrators. It fits a pattern of general mayhem and discord that is consistent with what a malicious foreign government might try to do. If that is the case, this incident is probably a pretty nasty harbinger of what more is to come.
