…I know these tend to go on a bit…& I can’t promise today’s won’t…but although some might be inclined to invoke the acronym this is actually about a different problem

The bill — known as the TLDR Act for, well, brevity — would require sites to display a “summary statement” that not only makes their terms “easy to understand,” but also discloses whether they have been hit by recent data breaches and what sensitive personal data they collect.
[…]
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), one of the bill’s lead sponsors, said companies are exploiting the fact that most users skip over their terms to lure them into compromising agreements that expose more of their personal information.
[…]
And she said convoluted service agreements are stripping consumers of the ability to make informed decisions about whether joining a given site or platform is worth the cost of entry.

Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) are introducing a counterpart of the measure […]

“Users should not have to comb through pages of legal jargon in a website’s terms of services to know how their data will be used,” Cassidy said in a statement. “Requiring companies to provide an easy-to-understand summary of their terms should be mandatory and is long overdue.”

The proposal arrives as momentum grows on Capitol Hill for legislation to force digital services, particularly social media platforms, to be more transparent with users about their practices, including around data collection.

[…]“This bill, of course, doesn’t answer every harm caused by Internet companies. … But this legislation does get at an important issue that affects every American, and that’s that terms of service are unreadable and it tilts the scales of power exclusively in favor of companies.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/13/no-one-reads-terms-service-lawmakers-want-fix-that-with-new-tldr-bill/

…& it might sound like exactly the sort of detail that inspires the tl;dr kind of response…but it’s not like there are indications it might get better as the tech advances

Buzz around shared, 3-D virtual spaces that companies including Meta are pitching as the “metaverse” may only get louder from here. This year’s CES was spattered with companies billing themselves as metaverse tech, with ideas ranging from virtual customer service representatives to a food-delivery robot controlled by real people watching from a perch in virtual reality. All are angling for space in an emerging industry spearheaded by tech giants including Meta and Microsoft, both of which announced their own metaverse products in the past few months. Even Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates weighed in, saying he expects the metaverse to be part of our workplaces in the next three years.

But virtual reality (VR) headsets can collect more data about us than traditional screens, which gives companies more opportunities to take and share that data for profiling and advertising. They could also give employers more ways to monitor our behavior and even our minds. There’s little stopping the government from getting its hands on body-related data from VR tech, and there’s little in place to protect us and our kids from unrestricted data gathering and psychological manipulation, say digital rights advocates and experts following the industry.
[…]
“In some respects, a 3-D headset is not really any different than a 3-D monitor,” said Jon Callas, director of technology projects at EFF. “But then there are other things being done that could be extraordinarily intrusive.”

One of the potential problems with virtual reality is that we still haven’t answered many of the privacy problems we encounter in normal reality, Callas said.
[…]
There are few limits on what information companies can collect, store and share about you. Investigations by The Washington Post and other publications have found companies sharing personal data such as your name, email and location with third parties without disclosing who those third parties are. Apps shoot off data about you while you cook, work and sleep — and even after you’ve asked them not to track you.

As our interactions with companies and their applications move from screens in our hands to headsets on our faces, the potential for invasive data collection grows, Callas said. VR itself isn’t a privacy concern, he noted, but it’s reasonable to feel concerned that a giant advertising company like Meta is positioning itself as a leader in the VR market.
[…]
So far, Facebook hasn’t had unfettered access to your data. At least on smartphones, it has to play by the rules of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. As privacy becomes a bigger marketing point for Apple, that’s seemingly caused problems for Facebook’s ad business: It ran campaigns against Apple’s decision to allow people to opt out of some ad tracking on their smartphones.

Facebook won’t want to make the same mistake again, says Rolf Illenberger, CEO of VRdirect, which makes software for VR and lists Nestle, Siemens and Porsche among its clients. That could be why Meta is building its own hardware and operating system for the metaverse.

“Mark Zuckerberg wants to make sure that in the new technology era, there’s no one between him and the customers,” he said.
[…]
Current and previous generation Oculus devices don’t come with eye-tracking technology, but the forthcoming model, nicknamed Project Cambria, will be able to mirror your face and eye movements in VR, Meta’s Morea said.
[…]
Meta doesn’t currently collect eye-tracking data, Morea said, but the company won’t commit to not collecting and sharing it in the future.

With almost no limits on what data employers can gather about employees on the job, companies could also use eye-tracking and facial movements to determine whether we’re “paying enough attention” during virtual presentations at work, or even to try to measure our cognitive load during job interviews, Kavya Pearlman, CEO of Extended Reality Safety Initiative, said.
[…]
Additionally, it’s hard to know how easy it would be for law enforcement and government organizations to get their hands on this data. Right now, there are legal limitations on what data the government can collect, Callas explained, but few on what data it can buy.
[…]
Theoretical or not, VR headsets could provide a frightening pathway to biometric information previously inaccessible to companies, employers, law enforcement and the government, Pearlman and Callas said. And that includes any inferences drawn from that information, they noted. VR companies and their advertising partners could use the way we move our eyes, heads and arms to infer things about our personalities, health and habits, and use that information to market to us.
[…]
Until the federal government steps in to regulate Meta more strictly, people should be wary of the company’s plans for Meta-controlled virtual reality, Callas said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/13/privacy-vr-metaverse/

…now, I have various issues with what data gets hoovered up by the plethora of vaguely anonymous “third party vendors” & their “legitimate interests” that lurk behind the relatively innocuous surfaces of websites & apps we all spend probably more time with than we should…but I guess that’s pretty different from the sort of telling online behavior that some folks are presumably regretting about now…if not necessarily the ones you’d assume

Congressional investigators on Thursday issued subpoenas to Twitter, Reddit and the parent companies of Facebook and YouTube and accused them of failing to provide complete information on how their platforms spread falsehoods that fomented the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The move, a sharp escalation in a long-brewing standoff between investigators and the companies, came after months of seeking data that yielded “inadequate responses,” the chairman of the House committee investigating the Capitol siege, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), said.

“We cannot allow our work to be delayed any longer,” Thompson said in a statement. “Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds to radicalizing people to violence.”

Thompson said that, despite requests for information sent in August, “we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions.”
[…]
No social media company has provided a full account of its role in spreading those falsehoods, and on Aug. 26, the committee requested information from 15 companies seeking data on what their internal studies had shown about the role their platforms had in the Jan. 6 attack and its origins. The August letters requested evidence be submitted by Sept. 9.

In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, Thompson said the committee had issued follow-up requests to Facebook on Sept. 28 and Oct. 29 but that Facebook has “declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying” the materials sought.

Thompson made a similar complaint to the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, writing that “After over four months of good-faith negotiations … it has become clear that Twitter is unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously complying with the Select Committee’s requests.”

In his letter to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Thompson acknowledged that Reddit had shut down its most contentious Trump-supporting subreddit on June 29, 2020. But he said that “Reddit still has not committed to a thorough review of its records for documents relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation and has refused to produce internal documents to support its conclusory public statements that Reddit played no role in January 6th.”

A committee aide said the committee is still negotiating with other tech companies that were sent information requests in August. “The Select Committee is in various stages of engagement with the other companies and efforts are ongoing to obtain information that will advance the committee’s investigation,” the aide said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/13/meta-alphabet-twitter-reddit-subpoenas-house-committee/

…still…it’s hard to ignore the way that online matters are not without real-world implications these days

Hackers brought down dozens of Ukrainian government websites on Friday and posted a message on one saying, “Be afraid and expect the worst,” a day after a breakdown in diplomatic talks between Russia and the West intended to forestall a threatened Russian invasion of the country.

Diplomats and analysts have been anticipating a cyberattack on Ukraine, but proving the source of such actions is notoriously difficult. Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry did not directly blame Russia for the attack, but pointedly noted that there was a long record of Russian online assaults against Ukraine.
[…]
The attack came within hours of the conclusion of talks between Russia and the United States and NATO that were intended to find a diplomatic resolution after Russia massed tens of thousands of troops near the border with Ukraine.

On Friday, the Biden administration also accused Moscow of sending saboteurs into eastern Ukraine to stage an incident that could provide Russia with a pretext for invasion. The White House did not release details of the evidence it said it had collected.
[…]
Often, untangling the digital threads of such cyberoperations can takes days or weeks, which is one of the appeals of their use in modern conflicts. Sophisticated cybertools have turned up in standoffs between Israel and Iran, and the United States blamed Russia for using hacking to influence the 2016 election in the United States to benefit Donald J. Trump.

Ukraine has long been viewed as a testing ground for Russian online operations, a sort of free-fire zone for cyberweaponry in a country already entangled in a real world shooting war with Russian-backed separatists in two eastern provinces. The U.S. government has traced some of the most drastic cyberattacks of the past decade to Russian actions in Ukraine.

Tactics seen first in Ukraine have later popped up elsewhere. A Russian military spyware strain called X-Agent, or Sofacy, that Ukrainian cyber experts say was used to hack Ukraine’s Central Election Commission during a 2014 presidential election, for example, was later found in the server of the Democratic National Committee in the United States after the electoral hacking attacks in 2016.

Other types of malware like BlackEnergy, Industroyer and KillDisk, intended to sabotage computers used to control industrial processes, shut down electrical substations in Ukraine in 2015 and 2016, causing blackouts, including in the capital, Kyiv.

The next year, a cyberattack targeting Ukrainian businesses and government agencies that spread, perhaps inadvertently, around the world in what Wired magazine later called “the most devastating cyberattack in history.” The malware, known as NotPetya, had targeted a type of Ukrainian tax preparation software but apparently spun out of control, according to experts.

[…] NotPetya spread around the world, with devastating results, illustrating the risks of collateral damage from military cyberattacks for people and businesses whose lives are increasingly conducted online, even if they live far from conflict zones. Russian companies, too, suffered when the malware started to circulate in Russia.

A U.S. grand jury in Pittsburgh in 2020 indicted six Russian military intelligence officers for the electrical grid shutdowns and the NotPetya attack, in a court filing showing the costs of releasing military grade malware onto the open internet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/14/world/europe/hackers-ukraine-government-sites.html

…& much as I’m not a massive fan of wired (I kind of got bored with the lazy “X is dead” cover story headlines) I’m inclined to include another piece of theirs about the unforeseen “knock on effects” of stuff that starts with an idea of what might look tempting on a screen but can lead to a different order of cascade failure

https://www.wired.com/story/kazakhstan-cryptocurrency-mining-unrest-energy/

…so…it’s one thing to pretty much know to expect a thing

Ukrainian and U.S. officials told CBS News on Thursday that a potential military assault against Ukraine would not necessarily begin with Russian tanks rolling across the frozen border in the coming weeks. Alternate methods of attack, including airstrikes as well as a staged provocation that could originate from neighboring Belarus or other Russia-friendly territory in the region, were among the possibilities expected — along with a preceding cyberattack.
[…]
“If Russia decides on a full invasion, then we know that we should expect increased cyberattacks before that,” Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Oksana Markarova told CBS News on Thursday.
[…]
The assumption is that Russian President Vladimir Putin may attempt to use such tactics to predicate a military attack.
[…]
“Our intelligence community has developed information, which has now been downgraded, that Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for an invasion — including through sabotage activities and information operations — by accusing Ukraine of preparing an imminent attack against Russian forces in eastern Ukraine,” Sullivan told reporters.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine-cyber-attack-russia-us-nato-donbas-war-amabssador-markarova/

…but being prepared…that’s kind of another story

The US has alleged Russia has already positioned saboteurs in Ukraine to carry out a “false flag” operation to use as a pretext for a Russian attack, which Washington says could begin in the coming month.
[…]
“We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine,” Jen Psaki, the White House spokeswoman, said. “The operatives are trained in urban warfare and using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.”

The allegation was echoed by the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, who said that Russia was preparing “an operation designed to look like an attack on … Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, again as an excuse to go in.”

A US official claimed that social media disinformation had been stepped up well in advance, saying: “The Russian military plans to begin these activities several weeks before a military invasion, which could begin between mid-January and mid-February.”
[…]
On Friday, there was more confirmation of Russian forces being moved towards Ukraine from across the country. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab analysed pictures posted on TikTok and other social media this month, which it said showed Iskander mobile short-range missiles and T-72 tanks being transported westwards from the far east.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/14/us-russia-false-flag-ukraine-attack-claim

…so it’s good to know everyone’s keeping things in perspective

Mike Pence has equated Democratic efforts to pass voting rights protections with the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, writing in a staggeringly misleading and inaccurate op-ed that both were “power grabs” which posed a threat to the US constitution.
[…]
Pence argued that Democratic proposals to expand voter access – such as requiring mail-in ballot drop boxes, loosening voter ID requirements and allowing for same-day registration and voter access – were just as unconstitutional as an attempt to upend constitutional procedure with violence.

The other Democratic proposal Pence said was akin to the Capitol siege was a proposal to restore a key piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get changes approved by the federal government before they go into effect.
[…]
The characterization was inaccurate. The US constitution explicitly gives Congress a role in setting the rules for federal elections.

Article I, Section IV reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
[…]
Republican legislators have also sought to make it easier to overturn election results, while Trump allies seek to fill key elections posts from which they would control the counting of votes in future elections.
[…]
Because no Republicans support doing away with the filibuster, the Democratic voting rights bills cannot pass right now.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/mike-pence-equates-voting-rights-capitol-attack

…you might think there was a word for that…possibly one that starts with an “s”

The seditious conspiracy charges against the leader of the Oath Keepers militia and 10 others related to the January 6 Capitol attack have revealed an armed plot against American democracy that involved tactical planning and a formidable arsenal of weapons.
[…]
The documents describe the creation of rapid-response teams of armed militia members, the deployment of tactical gear and the stockpiling of weapons in a deliberate attempt to overturn the election of Democrat Joe Biden, who beat Donald Trump.
[…]
The federal indictment alleges Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group, conspired with 10 other members to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power. The group stationed armed members on the outskirts of Washington to serve as so-called “quick reaction force” teams. Rhodes has pleaded not guilty to seditious conspiracy charges.

The Oath Keepers even discussed a naval operation to ferry in guns to the militia. One Oath Keeper, Thomas Caldwell, asked fellow members if anyone had a boat that could handle crossing the Potomac River. “If we had someone standing by at a dock ramp (one near the Pentagon for sure) we could have our Quick Response Team with the heavy weapons standing by, quickly load them and ferry them across the river to our waiting arms,” the documents quoted him as saying.

Rhodes went on a buying spree in the days leading up to the attack, spending more than $20,000 on guns and equipment for the attack. In December Rhodes bought two pairs of night-vision goggles and a weapons sight for about $7,000 and shipped them to Virginia. In January he spent another $5,000 on a shotgun, scope, magazine, sights, optics, a bipod, a mount, a case of ammunition and gun cleaning supplies. Two days later he spent $6,000 more, and then about $4,500 the next day.

In group chats the Oath Keepers discussed how their quick reaction force (QRF) teams would set up at the Comfort Inn in Ballston Arlington, Virginia, to “use as its base of operations for January 6, 2021”. They reserved three rooms; one was occupied by the so-called North Carolina “QRF” team while Arizona and Florida “QRF teams” stayed in the two others. They used the hotel rooms to store firearms and ammunition.
[…]
The planning for some kind of operation appeared to begin right after the election last November, as Trump baselessly disputed the results of the election. Two days after the election Rhodes invited some members of the Oath Keepers to a group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, that was titled “Leadership intel sharing secured”.

Rhodes texted the group: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body and spirit.”

On 7 November 2020, when Trump was finally projected to have lost the election, Rhodes began plotting, texting the group chat: “We must now do what the people of Serbia did when Milosevic stole their election. Refuse to accept it and march en-mass on the nations Capitol.” Rhodes then shared a video on Bitchute, an alt-tech video platform, of a step-by-step procedure of how to overthrow a government based on the Serbian example.

Two days later Rhodes held an online conference with Oath Keepers members outlining a plan to overturn the election. Two days later after that a member of the group, Caldwell, reached out to Rhodes to share the results of a “recce” – a military colloquialism for reconnaissance operation – to Washington and begin planning for an upcoming “op” to the Capitol.
[…]
On 21 December 2020, Oath Keepers mentioned January 6 for the first time. James Wakins, one of the 11 Oath Keepers charged in the case, texted the signal chat about a “National call to action for DC Jan 6th” and said Oath Keepers from three states were mobilizing “Everyone in this channel should understand the magnitude of what I just said,” Wakins wrote.

Rhodes told a regional Oath Keeper leader that if Biden assumed the presidency, “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That’s whats going to have to happen.”
[…]
At 6.27am on the morning of January 6 Rhodes texted the group chat: “We will have several well equipped QRF’s outside D.C.” At about 8.30am Rhodes and other Oath Keepers left from their hotel and drove to the Capitol in Washington DC.
[…]
At the Capitol, Oath Keepers marched in formation wearing tactical gear including protective vests, helmets and eye goggles as they carried radios, chemical sprays and hard-knuckle gloves. In the group chat one member shared the rumor that it was leftwing groups that had breached the Capitol. “Nope I’m right here, these are Patriots,” replied Rhodes.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/oath-keepers-leader-charges-armed-plot-us-capitol-attack

…& despite any false equivalence the likes of pence might try to float…one of those things is very much not like the other

The government arrested Stewart Rhodes today and charged him with other Oath Keepers in a seditious conspiracy indictment. Effectively, this charges everyone who conspired — including by participating in the planning — to bring weapons to Virginia on January 6 (and spins the other Oath Keepers off onto their own indictment). The charges effectively incorporate the material from this post on the Quick Reaction Force and this post on discussion of an insurrection after January 6, with additional details on Rhodes and Edward Vallejo, the guy who organized the QRF.

The charges are, at once, no big deal, because they’re really just the same conspiracy charged in a different way with two conspiracies added. They’re a huge deal, because now Republicans will be hard pressed to continue to downplay January 6. And they’re a solution to some problems and a tool to move on.

First consider the problems DOJ was trying to solve:

– How to split up an unwieldy 17-person conspiracy into two trials?
– How to charge Stewart Rhodes (and Vallejo) for roles central to the conspiracy when they didn’t do anything like trespassing to make that easy?
– How to backstop the sedition charges so white terrorists won’t go free?
– How to add leverage to flip key witnesses to move beyond just the Oath Keepers?
[…]
As mentioned, they’ve added a bunch of charges:

– Added Seditious Conspiracy tied to Rhodes’ repeated efforts to arm and train for war
– Swapped the 18 USC 371 conspiracy charge for a 18 USC 1512k conspiracy; as I’ve noted, that provides additional enhancements for threats of assassination and kidnapping, as this indictment inches closer to alleging
– Added a conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging any duty (18 USC 372)

What this does is raise the sentencing exposure for the co-conspirators from around 20 years to, with terrorism enhancements for the broken door, maybe 80. It backstops the sedition charges (with the original obstruction charge, but also with the 372 charge) so white terrorists won’t be able to beat the charges. It charges all the other efforts to obstruct this investigation.

But it’s the latter new charge I’m most interested in, even more than sedition:

If two or more persons in any State, Territory, Possession, or District conspire to prevent, by force, intimidation, or threat, any person from accepting or holding any office, trust, or place of confidence under the United States, or from discharging any duties thereof, or to induce by like means any officer of the United States to leave the place, where his duties as an officer are required to be performed, or to injure him in his person or property on account of his lawful discharge of the duties of his office, or while engaged in the lawful discharge thereof, or to injure his property so as to molest, interrupt, hinder, or impede him in the discharge of his official duties, each of such persons shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six years, or both.

This is what Eric Swalwell has argued some of these same people did. But it is, more clearly, what Donald Trump did to Mike Pence.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/01/13/the-first-seditious-conspiracy-charges-drop/

…because…much as it seems like sedition is at the heart of all of this shit…in that curious fashion terms have of twisting under scrutiny in a legal context…that part isn’t as straightforward as you’d think

Judge Amit Mehta noted that,”The conspiracy to sow distrust in the election is not illegal, no[] matter what we think about conduct,”
[…]
I’ve said that I believe the phone call to Brad Raffensperger is illegal on its own right. The Fulton County DA says she’s getting closer to a charging decision on it, and whatever she decides she can likely share her findings with DOJ. Politico reported on some of the other damning information that the Select Committee has received, including other calls to pressure Georgia officials.

I’ve laid out how Trump’s pressure on Mike Pence is already a key focus of both investigations (which the NYT wrote about […]).

But as to the rest of it, thus far, the vast majority of what has been made public is — as Judge Mehta qualified it — a legal conspiracy to undermine trust in elections. As I noted, the reason why Peter Navarro’s confessions aren’t enough to charge him with sedition is because as confessed, the coordinated effort to get Republicans to raise bad faith challenges to the vote certification is not illegal.

But there are two ways to think about these events leading up to the mob. The first […] is as proof of mens rea. When Trump called up Raffensperger and asked for the precise number of votes he needed to win, it was a (recorded) admission that he knew he had lost the state.
[…]
But Trump already told DOJ (the people conducting this investigation, the ones that got a privilege waiver for this material back in the summer) when it started, all the way back in 2020. By December 27, he had a plan that required DOJ to claim fraud, so that Trump and Republican Congressmen could implement what would ultimately be called the Green Bay Sweep.

But even before he had done that, on December 19, he sent out the Tweet that insurrectionists great and small took as their cue to start planning to attend a riot.

Trump tweets: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election” and “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

DOJ has had, since before January 6, the proof that these two efforts worked in conjunction.

And that’s what changes the (as Judge Mehta described it) legal conspiracy to sow distrust in the election into an illegal conspiracy, with demonstrated mens rea of corrupt intent, to obstruct the vote count.

This is why DOJ has been pursuing a conspiracy to obstruct the vote count and not incitement. Because only the former can reach to those who helped Trump commit his crime.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/01/11/the-green-bay-sweep-is-inextricably-tied-to-the-violent-mob/

It notes the addition of 18 USC 372 new with this indictment.

At one level, that just backstops the two other conspiracies, so the OKs can't go free if they beat sedition.

But it, along with 18 USC1512(k), is what Trump also did. pic.twitter.com/52z1Q5Mpwj

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 14, 2022

But this indictment is, effectively prosecutorial screw-turning. Everyone on that indictment has something DOJ would like them to flip for.

For Minuta and James, it's Stone.

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) January 14, 2022

…anyway…as you might have noticed by now (even if you weren’t here early enough to notice how once again I was late getting this posted this morning) I may have been down a rabbit hole or two lately…so I haven’t really left myself time (or space) for some other things that you might feel like following up on

“Menace to public health”: 270 doctors call out Spotify over Joe Rogan’s podcast [Guardian]

…which reminds me of some good news

Martin Shkreli barred from drug industry and fined $64.6m by US court [Guardian]

…or how, when you get down to it…the royal family are sometimes more like the common folk than you’d think…well, in some ways anyway

After 70 years on the throne, every aspect of the relationship between the monarch and her prime ministers must surely have become deeply, even sometimes wearyingly, familiar to Elizabeth II. Fourteen very different men and women have held the country’s highest political office since 1952 – 10 Conservatives and four Labour. Ideologically, they cover a wide spectrum of views.

Yet they have all been united by one thing: the intense care they have taken never to embarrass the Queen in the slightest way.

Until Boris Johnson.

The thought of having to make a public apology to the monarch like the one that Johnson made on Friday would likely have sent shivers of shame down the spines of every one of his Downing Street predecessors.

But Johnson is a precedent buster as well as a rule breaker.

He is said to have also apologised to the Queen in 2019 when the unlawful prorogation of parliament was overturned by the supreme court.

But there has never been a more humiliating prime ministerial grovel than the one he made this week.
[…]
Long ago, the Victorian constitutional expert Walter Bagehot said the British monarch had three rights when meeting a prime minister: to be consulted, to encourage and to warn.

Johnson has added another one to the list: the right to an apology.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/14/johnsons-apology-to-the-queen-marks-a-new-low-for-a-prime-minister-

…so feel free to throw in anything it seems like I might have overlooked…& I’ll try to add a few tunes when I get my act together?