Wired's Attack on Privacy

When you own a trademark that is for publishing and you let people slap your logo on their writing, you take responsibility for what they say. That's the whole point of the trademark, to take credit for publishing the words. You can't have it both ways.

Wired can choose to be known for publishing conflicting view points though, of course.

(though if that is the case it hasn’t really made it through to me until now)

Usually, when real journalism publications do this, they make sure to prominently display "OPINION" before these writings, along with a disclaimer that the views of the author do not reflect the views of the editorial board.

In my mind, magazines have had more editorial discretion than "papers of record" like the News section of a national paper.

Though I would expect a magazine to have some more consistency in ideology.

Normally (at least in the now-distant pre-internet past), newspapers were supposed to be as unbiased as reasonably possible and just report the news, though they frequently had opinion sections ("op-ed") which were clearly marked as such. Magazines catered to specific groups of people with specific interests, so those could be more biased (e.g., Motor Trend was quite blatant about its pro-car bias, for obvious reasons). But yes, along with this was consistency in ideology: you wouldn't buy Motor Trend and expect to see both pro- and anti-car opinions expressed there, and if you didn't like cars and car culture, you wouldn't buy the magazine to begin with.

If I were charitable, I would say there are technologists who are skeptical of completely unauditable, untraceable communication and they don't necessarily need to be government stooges to think that.

Same way we might read an article from a muscle-car-lover glowing about a Land Rover right before an article calling for bans on pure-ICE vehicles in MotorTrend.

It's perfectly possible that Wired is a brand known for its high quality writers, and those writers just happen to write well-written, well-researched articles with opposing viewpoints.

It's also possible that's not the case and they just publish whatever.

In any case what I mean is that I find it odd to ascribe intent to everything a publication publishes. They publish a lot of things by a lot of authors. They probably have more than one editor checking the articles. It's not possible to control the whole narrative.

Even if you assume that Wired has an agenda and that it exercises editorial control to further that agenda, that agenda isn't necessarily related to this particular topic. There are hundreds of topics to have agendas for. They may have a general pro-technology bias without bothering to decide their stance on every single sub-topic within their niche, for example.