It served her well when she worked in child protective services in Hobbs, a small oil town in southeastern New Mexico.

She looks at it this way: “If you give in to emotion, the job’s not going to get done. You don’t process emotion. You walk in on a scene, and the first thing you see isn’t a tragedy. The first thing you see is a checklist of things you need to do to resolve the issue.”

But when Woodward looks back on all the horrible things that she witnessed as a caseworker, the weight of the decisions she had to make is almost too much to bear.

“Each decision that you make changes your life. Every single, solitary decision that I made, I still carry it,” Woodward said when we met in the spring.

Woodward used to work for the state of New Mexico’s Children, Youth, and Families Department, supporting children who had been the victims of abuse or neglect. She was part of the CYFD staff teams that deliberated on whether to take kids away from their parents and put them into foster care.

Woodward is still haunted by the memories of one little girl in particular. Woodward had reason to believe that the girl, who was living in foster care with her grandfather, was being abused.

But something stood in the way: It was a safety assessment tool that the state requires caseworkers like Woodward to use. Formally known by its somewhat clunky brand name — “Structured Decision Making” — the tool is meant to help determine whether a child is in great enough danger to be removed from their home. 

Her concern was based on more than just a hunch. The girl’s mother had told Woodward that the grandfather was an abuser – he had raped her when she was young. Woodward took this information to her team and called for another office to send a caseworker to investigate. But that caseworker’s report, based on the tool, indicated that there was no reason for concern about the girl’s safety. Despite Woodward’s pleas, CYFD staff decided to keep the girl with her grandfather.

It became clear months later that Woodward was right — the little girl’s grandfather had been sexually abusing her all along. The girl was eventually taken away from her grandfather and placed in a different foster home.

The agency is adamant that the tool isn’t meant to supersede a caseworker’s judgment. “It's not about giving the job of a caseworker to an electronic tool,” said Sarah Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau. “That’s 100% not what it’s intended to do.”

But in cases like this one, it felt to Woodward as if the tool had won out.

“You can no longer go on all of your training, all of your experience in the field. It’s a moot point because the tool said so,” Woodward told me.

“You're going off of a scoring system now. And if the family doesn’t meet the score, you have to turn around and walk out.”

Across the U.S., child welfare agencies are looking to algorithms and risk assessment tools to help support the arduous labor of caseworkers in child protective services agencies. The hope is that these tools will help caseworkers make better and more equitable decisions that will ultimately improve outcomes for vulnerable children. But these agencies’ problems run deep. Oftentimes, there is no single tool or policy solution that can fix them.

Facing high rates of child abuse and neglect, the New Mexico Children, Youth, and Families Department rolled out the Structured Decision Making safety scoring tool in 2020. The goal was to help the agency decide whether or not children are safe living with their parents and to assess the risk of future abuse if a child remains in their home. But in the face of severe staffing shortages and a push to remove kids from their families in only the most extreme cases, former CYFD staff and children’s attorneys in New Mexico say that the safety scoring tool has been replacing caseworker judgment and leaving some kids in harm’s way.

New Mexico had the 15th highest rate of child abuse or neglect in the 2021 fiscal year, a drop from the 8th highest in 2020. About a third of children who died from abuse, neglect or homicide between 2015 and 2021 had prior involvement with child welfare, according to the New Mexico Department of Health.

One of them was named James Dunklee Cruz. There were countless warning signs that the little boy was at risk of harm. When he was just a few months old, caseworkers found ample evidence of neglect: The home where he lived with his mother was roach-infested and strewn with trash and dog feces. 

In October 2019, when Dunklee Cruz was four, he was brought to the hospital with multiple injuries, including a black eye, a bruised penis and an injured shoulder. He told a CYFD investigator that he had been abused by three people in his life. But somehow those allegations were declared unsubstantiated. The Strategic Decision Making tool classified Dunklee Cruz as “safe with a plan,” allowing him to stay with his mother.

Two months later, James Dunklee Cruz died as a result of blunt force trauma to his head and torso at the hands of Zerrick Marquez, one of the men he had named as his abuser two months before. Marquez pleaded guilty to killing Dunklee Cruz and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

CYFD conducted nine investigations into allegations of abuse and neglect during the boy’s short life. Caseworkers put what they call “safety plans” in place for Dunklee Cruz, but this wasn’t enough to keep him safe. These details appear in a publicly posted child fatality review summary report. The section of the document drawing on the child’s autopsy also describes a litany of injuries, including “healing jaw fractures and healing subdural hemorrhage indicating significant blunt head trauma that occurred earlier than the acute injuries” — in other words, injuries that didn’t kill him but proved that Dunklee Cruz was at risk of serious harm before his final days.

A wrongful death lawsuit is also working its way through the court. A complaint filed in December 2022 in a federal district court in New Mexico accuses CYFD of failing in their duty to protect the boy and states that Dunklee Cruz’s mother repeatedly violated the safety plans CYFD put in place. The complaint also specifically points to the Structured Decision Making tool. 

It reads: “Over the span of his four years of life, CYFD investigators repeatedly failed to rely on accurate and well-documented facts when it utilized the agency’s Safety Risk Assessment Tool, causing its repeated contacts with James to result in flawed and underestimated risk assessment and flawed decision-making resulting in James’ death.”

When I asked about the boy’s case, CYFD offered this response: “The death of James Dunklee Cruz is tragic. The loss of any child is felt deeply and grieved by our caseworkers and staff. Regarding the function of the tool in this case, he was identified as safe with a plan. This means that the safety assessment tool identified at least one danger indicator and that in order for the child to stay in the custody of the parent, a plan was required. Our caseworkers worked with James’ mother to find a safe place for her to live and alternative childcare for James to mitigate against the threats that were identified by the caseworker.”

What happened to James Dunklee Cruz reflects the most significant problem that former CYFD workers raised when they talked to me about the Structured Decision Making safety tool: It doesn’t always convey how much danger kids are truly facing.

The tool’s launch coincided with a change in the agency’s approach to decision-making about when to remove a child from their family’s home. This was a part of a nationwide shift with the passage of the federal Family First Preservation Services Act, a policy that was designed to keep children “safely with their families to avoid the trauma that results when children are placed in out-of-home care.”

The safety tool doesn’t tell caseworkers what to do. It is meant to facilitate a conversation between the worker and their supervisor about whether to declare the child “safe,” “safe with plan” or “unsafe.” The tool sets the tone for what, ideally, should be an extensive, in-depth dialogue between people from across the agency. But due to staffing shortages, it doesn’t always play out this way. The tool “doesn’t take into account that there's not enough workers, there's not enough supervisors,” said Matt Esquibel, a regional manager at CYFD.

Some former caseworkers have told me that, in this context, the assessment takes on an outsized role in determining a child’s fate.

“It's not meant to streamline or fast-track decisions, but it helps focus the conversations, which is helpful to supervisors and to workers,” said Meadows, the head of the agency’s research, assessment and data bureau.

Former CYFD workers told me that the risk and safety assessments did not always match what they observed about the level of danger a child was facing, particularly when it came to substance abuse, domestic violence or repeated involvement with child protective services.

“We saw issues with the safety tool immediately,” said one former CYFD worker who had knowledge of the tool and reviewed investigations in which it was used. She requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. 

The former CYFD worker said she would see cases in which she thought a child should have been removed from the home but the safety tool didn’t reflect that.

“I’m reading a report that comes and I’m reading their notes that they’ve entered. And then I’m looking at their safety assessment, [and it] does not match what I’m reading,” she said.

Workers are only allowed to check off a danger on the safety tool if they can observe or otherwise prove it. But investigators don’t always have time to do multiple home visits or to gather more information, said Esquibel. They may not be able to gather all the details right away, and children may not initially disclose abuse. There is an “override” for the risk assessment that requires supervisor approval. If the worker thinks that the risk score is too low, they can bump the score up one level. CYFD’s Meadows emphasized that workers should use their judgment and critical thinking, work with supervisors and override the tool if necessary.

“I think the workers and supervisors do the best that they can when they’re out there,” Esquibel said. “But your assessment is only as good as what information you're gathering or who’s available at the time.” 

Ultimately, the former CYFD staff member who requested anonymity thinks the assessments are not capturing the seriousness of some cases and that the consequences for kids are real.

“I think it’s leading to dangerous situations for children,” she said. “I think the agency is leaving the children in situations based on that tool when they should be removing them.”

Meadows said that shouldn’t happen. “If a worker feels strongly that a child is unsafe and they don’t want to walk away from that child in that home, they shouldn't. Safety tool be damned,” she said.

Even though she’s moved on from CYFD, this all still weighs heavily on Ivy Woodward, who has worked with children for most of her career. Before working in child welfare, Woodward, who is Native American and Hispanic, taught elementary school on the Apache reservation in San Carlos, Arizona and in southwestern New Mexico. In 2017, CYFD brought her on as a permanency planning supervisor. This meant she worked on cases where the agency had credible evidence that a child was being abused or neglected at home. The work spoke to core elements of Woodward’s personality. 

“I’m a protector,” Woodward told me. “You can do a lot to me and get away with it. But if I see somebody doing something to someone else, that triggers my inner anger.” 

She calls it like she sees it and pushes back when she disagrees. “I don’t know what is broken in my head, but I question everything,” Woodward said.

When Woodward left CYFD in the summer of 2020, she and a colleague filed a lawsuit alleging that they faced retaliation after raising concerns about a case in which a child was severely injured after she and her siblings were returned to their parents. The agency settled the lawsuit for more than $300,000 without acknowledging liability.

Woodward has a fast, forceful way of speaking, a reflection of her often overly-caffeinated state. But when she talks about the kids she worked with at CYFD and the horrible things she heard or saw on the job, her voice gets a little higher. Her emotions begin to flow.

“You do have to be able to turn off the emotions and make those cold, hard decisions when the time comes to make them,” she said. “But until that time comes, you have to see people, not casework.”

Woodward now lives across the border in a tiny county in West Texas with her husband and two daughters. She works as the chief of juvenile probation and coordinates emergency management for the county.

In some ways, Woodward was an outlier among other CYFD staff. Many start working with the agency soon after college and have little or no experience in child welfare. The agency struggles to stay fully staffed — this spring, nearly a quarter of positions were unfilled. A July 2022 review by an outside consultancy found that CYFD employees felt overwhelmed by the work they were being asked to do. Staff said they would rush from one emergency to the next and had little ability to make progress on other cases.

This is not unique to New Mexico. A caseworker I spoke with in Indiana described feeling like he was stretched so thin that he would race from one emergency to the next without ever having time to put out the fires. He felt like he was just identifying a fire and then moving on to the next one.

The issues of understaffing and high turnover rates were top of mind for many CYFD workers. High turnover isn’t just bad for morale. It directly affects the ability of those who remain on staff to do their work. When one person leaves, those who stay have to absorb their caseload. It is daunting. The review described a “culture of fear” in which staff were afraid that if something bad were to happen with a case, they would be punished or “scapegoated.”

And the forced intimacy of the work can be grating and even traumatic. Caseworkers must regularly intervene in painful moments of struggle and conflict within families, and they are sometimes met with resistance. As agents of the state, they are caught between a bureaucracy that requires them to treat each situation as consistently and objectively as possible and real life-and-death conflicts in which people’s actions are largely driven by emotion.

For strained child welfare agencies, algorithms and risk assessment tools are an attractive solution to the vexing challenge of maintaining consistent decision-making practices.

Some states have experimented with predictive analytics, with limited success. Illinois used an algorithm to estimate the likelihood that a child would die or be seriously injured as a result of abuse or neglect. Social workers were flooded with cases erroneously determined to be urgent, while children that the algorithm deemed low-risk were dying. The state soon stopped using the tool after the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services declared it ineffective. 

A child welfare algorithm in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is currently facing scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. Using arrest records, Medicaid data and documented struggles with substance abuse, the algorithm generates a score from 1 to 20 that determines whether to open a neglect investigation. Reporting by the AP found that the algorithm disproportionately flagged Black children for neglect investigations. There was also evidence that the algorithm did the same for parents with disabilities.

Torn between pushback against opaque algorithms and the desire to use technology to streamline decision-making, some states are turning to scoring tools that are less opaque and less automated. New Mexico’s Structured Decision Making tool, created by the nonprofit Evident Change, is one of them. Oregon, New Hampshire and California also use assessment tools built by Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making offers a checklist that is meant to help the investigator understand “the risk of imminent and serious harm,” according to a CYFD progress and impact report. Children are ranked safe, safe with plan, which involves in-home services, or unsafe, which is grounds for removal. There’s also an actuarial risk scoring tool, which is meant to assess “the likelihood of any future maltreatment” and additional CYFD involvement in the next 18 to 24 months, if the child remains with the family.

The safety scoring tool asks about abuse or neglect, including physical or sexual abuse, failure to meet the child’s basic needs, unsafe living conditions, emotional harm or unexplained injuries. Both assessments are intended to guide caseworkers to think about risk factors, vulnerabilities and the impact on the child.

“What Structured Decision Making tries to do is to help workers and supervisors make accurate, consistent and equitable decisions at these high-stakes moments,” said Phil Decter, the director of child welfare at Evident Change.

Structured Decision Making is also “intended to reduce bias, whether that's related to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, making sure that we're not conflating poverty with neglect,” said CYFD’s Meadows.

But in New Mexico, as the Dunklee Cruz case and insights from caseworkers make clear, the tool does not always work as intended. And the tool can't solve some of CYFD's biggest problems. The agency doesn’t have the workers to meet the needs of the population. Emblematic of a national trend, CYFD is chronically understaffed. Workers juggle heavy caseloads and often have precious little time to dedicate to each child’s case.

The safety tool isn’t meant to fix that. CYFD says hiring is a priority. “Structured Decision Making is not intended to replace human beings in terms of lightening their caseload,” Meadows said. “The role of it is to create consistency, making sure that we're looking at every angle of the case, every potential impact to a child.”

But for caseworkers racing from one emergency to the next, the tool begins to play a different role. It sometimes becomes a shortcut, they told me — a stand-in for real human decision-making, in a system already weighed down by the rigid requirements of the state.

Reed Ridens remembers everything about the day the state took him away from his father almost seven years ago. It was a typical January afternoon at school. About an hour before classes ended, Ridens, who was 15 at the time, was pulled out of orchestra practice and brought to a conference room. Waiting for him were two of his teachers, the school social worker, representatives from CYFD, a police officer and his dad. 

“I’m just looking around like, what is going on?” Ridens recalled. 

For nearly an hour, the adults in the room went back and forth about whether Ridens’ dad could take care of him. There were concerns, they said, about neglect and his father’s alcoholism. 

“The entire time, I was just sitting there, crying, like, ‘Hey, please don’t take me out of my home,’” Ridens said.  

His protests were futile. Ridens stayed in the foster care system until he was 18, moving between 15 different placements. It left him with a deep-seated trauma, compounded by his father’s death four years ago.

“I felt like the state was taking me out of my household and then not doing any better for me than my father did. And in fact, actually putting me in worse-off situations,” he said. 

“I don’t really feel like they saw me as a person,” he told me when we met in Albuquerque.

“I feel like they didn’t see me as more than a list of checkmarks. I feel like they didn’t see my dad as anything more than a monster.”

Today, kids in a position like Ridens’ are not only dealing with adults trying to decide what’s best for them. Their fate is also shaped by tools like Structured Decision Making.

How did New Mexico get here? In part, the objective was to prevent the wrong kids from entering foster care, said Beth Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“Foster care really should be the absolute last resort in extreme circumstances where needs cannot be met in the home and where a child cannot be safe at home,” she told me.

The state paid the nonprofit organization Evident Change $1.3 million to develop a risk and safety assessment tool, according to a state legislative finance committee report. The nonprofit creates similar tools for criminal justice, education and adult protective services. 

After a pilot in some counties in 2019, including in the country where James Dunklee Cruz lived, Structured Decision Making was rolled out statewide in January 2020.

The tool works best in situations where there is plenty of time and staff capacity to dedicate to this kind of deliberation. But CYFD’s investigations unit was short almost 25% of its workforce as of May 2023, according to the state’s public statistics dashboard, and maintains a steep turnover rate.

“If a child welfare organization is not being resourced well, if it’s understaffed or if caseloads are high, it’s going to be hard for optimal work to happen in any situation,” said Decter, who previously worked in child welfare in Massachusetts. “Good decision-making takes time.”

A report presented to a CYFD steering committee found that, according to focus groups made of CYFD workers, Structured Decision Making is “not being used as it was designed to be utilized. They go out and do their investigation and then come back in and click whatever needs to be clicked to show it has been done.” 

A former investigator in Hobbs told me that the Structured Decision Making tool just added more work to her plate. 

“It didn’t take a whole lot of time, but it was just another tedious step that you’re going through when you’ve already made up your mind,” she said.

As a result, she said, some people rushed through checking boxes on the safety tool. 

“I watched people go click, click, click, click, click, and just move on,” she said. It wasn’t the deciding factor. But she did feel like it could be “manipulated” to justify a certain decision.

CYFD says this isn’t how it’s supposed to be used. “Safety assessment is not a quick activity,” said Meadows. “Workers should take their time with it, really do their best to engage the family to get as much information as possible so that the safety assessment is accurate.”

Ivy Woodward, the former supervisor in Hobbs, had concerns about the safety scoring tool from the very beginning. In particular, she worried about how it dealt with a caregiver’s substance use, which is not listed as one of the danger indicators that must be checked in order for the agency to remove a child. In a sharp pivot from New Mexico’s previous assessment, substance use is treated as a “complicating factor” rather than a deciding one.

The risk tool adds points if the parent struggles with substance abuse. However, the tool doesn’t weigh substances differently. Meth gets the same number of points as marijuana, for example. 

In the Structured Decision Making training, Woodward and some of the other experienced caseworkers challenged this, fearing that it would put children at risk. The discussion got so heated that the head of the agency came to intervene. Woodward said she was effectively shut down. It was clear that the agency would be using the tool, whether she liked it or not.

Other CYFD workers and child welfare attorneys also raised concerns about how the safety and risk assessments handle drug abuse, a factor affecting almost one-third of children who were victims of maltreatment in 2020, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

While investigators are supposed to consider substance use in their decision about removing a child, it’s not supposed to be the sole reason for removal. This is part of a recent change in the agency’s approach to substance use. Caseworkers are now told to focus not solely on substance use, but rather on the impact substance use has on the caregiver’s ability to care for their children, said Gillia, the former deputy secretary of CYFD. 

“It’s only if the substance use interferes with parenting that it becomes abuse or neglect,” Gillia said. “So I think what the tool is trying to do is force a look at what parenting behavior is impacted by the substance use.” 

Phil Decter at Evident Change says the safety tool also helps when it comes to an inexperienced workforce. It has detailed instructions that help workers decide whether to check ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for a danger indicator. It points staff without a background in child welfare in the direction of things to look for, he said. 

But out in the field, Woodward sees problems with this. The decisions are so monumental — literally life or death. For Woodward, the tool is not a substitute for a seasoned supervisor guiding less experienced staff through decisions.

“It becomes a crutch for a lack of confidence,” said Woodward. “I don't think that being armed with a piece of paper and a laptop is an adequate replacement for someone who's been in the trenches for 20 years and can tell them this is what you do.”

And the tool doesn’t capture the unspoken cues that an investigator may notice, like a child who can’t make eye contact with a family member or won’t answer open-ended questions, Woodward said. 

The safety tool has an “other” option where investigators can write in safety concerns not addressed by the nine danger indicators. But that should be used “rarely and infrequently,” said Decter. “That’s by design. The other danger indicators should be sufficient.”

The success of the tool depends on how it’s used, and this is where Woodward hit roadblocks in Hobbs. She said her supervisors would tell her she was paying attention to things that the safety tool said weren’t an issue, rather than focusing on what she was called upon to investigate. Woodward felt like she was being instructed to ignore history, context and other dangers that she knew were significant from past experience. 

Information about those more subtle cues may be presented to a judge if CYFD files a petition to remove a child. But if the tool indicates that the child doesn’t need to be removed, the case likely won’t reach that stage.

Former CYFD staff like Gillia emphasized that the agency wants to keep kids living with their families unless they are clearly at risk of imminent and grave harm. The agency settled a lawsuit in 2020 that accused the state of failing to take adequate care of foster children in CYFD custody.

But former caseworkers I spoke with worried that the tool was being used as a way to all but ensure that kids would remain in the home, even in cases where it might leave them at risk. The worry, for people like Ivy Woodward, was that the tool was being used to justify decisions that had already been made.

Evident Change emphasizes that “tools don’t make decisions, people make decisions.” But former CYFD workers told me they worried that this particular tool has an outsized impact on the agency’s final decision.

CYFD commissioned a report from an outside group, Collaborative Safety, to look at what went wrong in five specific cases from 2021 in which children died. In the report, released in July 2022, staff involved in those cases said that sometimes the Structured Decision Making tool would say the child is “safe,” even if the worker felt there were “significant concerns with the family.”

“This places staff in the position where they perceive they cannot act on those concerns as it would go against what the tool’s output is,” wrote the report’s authors.

“Investigators were just using the tool as the end-all-be-all to a decision and an assessment. That’s not correct. We don’t want it to substitute their good judgment,” former CYFD Secretary Barbara Vigil told members of the New Mexico House Appropriations and Finance Committee in February 2023. In response to the Collaborative Safety report, CYFD announced they would overhaul their training protocols and pledged to “make sure that every member of staff uniformly knows how to use the tool, including through enhanced training to investigators and supervisors statewide.”

The former CYFD worker I spoke to who requested anonymity saw this reflected in the investigations she reviewed. “I don’t even know how many cases I reviewed where it’s like, you should have removed that kid immediately. And they didn’t because of the safety tool,” she said. “We would always say, use your common sense. This is a guide.” But some workers and managers still put too much emphasis on the tool.

Esquibel said the tool played a major role in facilitating decision-making. “The weight is 100% on your safety assessment because that's really the snapshot of what happened the day that that worker was there,” he said.

CYFD’s Meadows put it differently: “It's not just a snapshot in time,” she said. “Safety assessments are not a one-off, one and done thing. Safety is assessed on an ongoing basis when we have an open case because sometimes it does take effort and time to learn more about a family or child situation.”

Woodward doesn’t think the tool should carry so much weight. Instead, it should be “something in your toolbox that you utilize to help you through the process,” she said. “I don't think they should be used as the ultimate decision maker.”

When Vanna was first removed from her parents at age five, the adults in her life told her that her parents were going on vacation. 

She remembers a woman pulling up to their house and talking to her parents. Her mother was crying, her father was trying to calm her down. The strange woman went up to her younger brother, who was four at the time, and said, “How would you like to go somewhere else?”

“I looked at her, I said, ‘You’re not taking my brother,” said Vanna. 

Vanna, who is now 21 and using a nickname to preserve her privacy, has been fiercely protective of her little brother since they were small. 

As the woman stood talking to her parents, Vanna tried to get him out of his car seat. “And I tried to run with him, and she started running after us. And she said, ‘I’m not trying to take your brother. I’m trying to take you both. You’re going to this lady. Your parents are going on vacation.” 

She didn’t realize until later that she wasn’t returning home. Vanna spent 13 years in foster care until she aged out at 18. She estimates she lived in more than 50 placements. 

In foster care, Vanna felt like she was treated like a case number. Someone else made decisions about every aspect of her life. Someone else had power over her.

“I got numb. I became this robot. You want me to be a puppet, guys? I’ll be a puppet. Pull my strings and do whatever you want because that’s how you treat me,” she said. 

Vanna would tell the adults around her what she wanted, but she didn’t feel like they listened.

“They would always say, ‘Honey, we wouldn't make any decision if it wasn't going to be safe for you or if we weren't keeping your best interests in mind,’” she said. “How do you know what my best interest is?”

The safety assessment that’s currently in place rolled out statewide the year Vanna aged out of the system. But when she looks back at her own experience, systems like this still worry her. She thinks the assessments used to make decisions need to be more personalized, otherwise they do more harm than good. 

“How do you put everyone in the same box, the same population? You put them under the same microscope, but they’re not the same. They’ve had individual situations,” she said.

If the assessments are too generalized, kids won’t end up getting the help they need, Vanna said. Just as the assessments used to evaluate their needs are flattened and standardized, the care kids get is too.

For people like Vanna, many aspects of the child welfare system were dehumanizing. Ernie Holland, who worked at CYFD for 25 years, thinks that by relying on assessment tools like Strategic Decision Making, the agency could make these effects even worse. When he left, he ran the Guidance Center, a nonprofit that offers mental health and other community-based services in Hobbs. 

Even as a young child protective services investigator, the weight of the decisions he was making never escaped him. He shares Ivy Woodward’s belief that “each decision you make changes your life.”

“Unless you’ve gone around the block three or four times to screw up your courage to knock on somebody’s door and ask them why they sodomized their infant, you don’t know what it’s like,” he said. “I’ve been there, done that, and I know what it's like. And I know you’re risking some of yourself doing that work.”

That pressure never goes away. Holland still remembers a family whose case he managed nearly 50 years ago. He’s still not sure he made the right decision. 

As the agency relies more on standardized assessments, he worries humanity gets removed from the equation. 

For Holland, there’s a big difference between being able to say, “I made the decision based on this tool” and “I made the decision.”

“If you can hide behind an assessment tool,” Holland told me, “it’s not personal anymore. If you get it to where it’s not a personal decision, the kid loses. If you’re making life and death decisions, you damn well better own ‘em.”

This project was supported by the Global Reporting Centre and The Citizens through the Tiny Foundation Fellowships for Investigative Journalism.

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The post Inside New Mexico’s struggle to protect kids from abuse appeared first on Coda Story.

Now White Castle could be on the hook for upward of $17 billion. 

On February 17, the Illinois Supreme Court made a decision on Cothron’s case that sent the state’s business community reeling. According to the court, every time a company collects an individual’s biometric data without getting informed written consent, it counts as a separate BIPA violation with potential damages from $1,000 to $5,000. In the past, courts interpreted the law to mean one violation per person. Now, if an employee uses their fingerprint to sign into work, or every time they clock in and out for shifts or breaks, the number of infractions rack up quickly, and so does the amount of money to be paid out in damages. 

“So now six times a day, 340 days a year for five years, one person is potentially a $1 million risk,” said Jason Stiehl, an attorney who works on litigation, technology and brand protection for Crowell & Moring LLP in Chicago.

Justices on the Illinois Supreme Court acknowledged that the extent of damages could be “harsh, unjust, absurd or unwise” but said the court is bound to interpret laws as they are written by state legislators.  

This court decision in the White Castle case comes on the heels of another decision in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers. The ruling, announced on February 2, set the statute of limitations for BIPA violations at five years. Previously, that number had been unclear, but the courts had largely interpreted it to be about two years. So now not only are the damages potentially much higher but the number of incidents in violation could be much larger.

BIPA has been held up as the gold standard for consumer privacy acts. But the court’s latest interpretation of the Illinois law shows the pitfalls of some of its key aspects. The rulings underscore the risks of creating vague regulations for evolving technology and illustrate the tension between business interests and privacy. 

When Ted Claypoole, an Atlanta-based data, technology and privacy lawyer, heard the news about the court’s ruling in the White Castle and Black Horse Carriers cases, his first thought was “Oh crap.” 

But as a lawyer who advises clients on compliance with data laws, the court’s decision wasn’t a surprise to Claypoole. BIPA is vaguely written, and issues like the statute of limitations or whether violations are measured per person or per scan aren’t clearly written out.

“It’s not a crazy reading of the statute. It just is a crazy result,” said Claypoole. 

BIPA has been around since 2008, and Claypoole and privacy advocates consider it to be one of the most important privacy laws in the U.S. because it allows individuals to sue companies using their biometric information without written consent. 

But consumers or employees don’t actually need to show that they were harmed by their data being collected, thanks to a 2019 ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court in a case involving the Six Flags theme park. 

After that decision, there was an increase in the number of BIPA complaints filed because anyone whose biometrics had been collected without proper consent could file a lawsuit. 

This led to what Jeff Keicher, a Republican in the Illinois State House of Representatives, called “an obscene shakedown of business communities.” 

Many of these cases have been large class-action lawsuits, resulting in companies like McDonald’s and its franchises across the state paying millions in damages. 

In the first case to go to trial, BNSF Railway had to pay $228 million after truck drivers brought a class-action suit over the company’s policy of scanning their fingerprints when they went to BNSF rail yards. 

But the recent decision in the White Castle case brings the potential damages to another level. Trade associations in Illinois are raising alarms that these large settlements will drive companies out of business and force Illinois residents out of their jobs.

 “Getting a $2 million complaint is one kind of problem. Getting a $10 billion award against you is a whole other kind of problem,” said Claypoole. “It's not just that it's higher. It's that it is existential. It's life threatening to a business.”

Since the rulings, the number of BIPA complaints filed has gone up, according to Anne Mayette, a labor and employment lawyer who advises clients on BIPA compliance at Husch Blackwell, a national law firm. The number of cases expanded after the Six Flags ruling determined that plaintiffs don’t need to prove that harm was inflicted by the use of their biometrics, but the pace slowed down after a while. After the two latest decisions, Mayette estimates she sees 3 to 10 BIPA suits a day, compared to a few per week previously.    

It’s not all panic for businesses though. Many of the companies who were vulnerable to lawsuits have already built policies to be compliant with BIPA. 

Stiehl, the attorney, also sees a “silver lining.” The amount in damages is discretionary, not mandatory, meaning a jury can decide to order a smaller payment. Stiehl thinks the White Castle case will go on to trial court, and the company will not be hit with the full $17 billion in damages. “It sends a larger message,” he said, “saying this is not your pot of gold.” 

The typical pattern is for regulation to lag behind technology. BIPA is the opposite. In the years since the law passed in 2008, biometrics have changed significantly. That’s why Keicher, the house representative, thinks that it’s time to make some changes to the Illinois law. 

“We're dealing with a statute that's 15 years old that didn't even foresee any of the technological advances that we have today,” he said. “To say that it doesn't need any attention, I think, is naive to the way our society is progressing.”

Keicher has brought forward two bills regarding BIPA this year that decrease a company’s liability to BIPA lawsuits. One clarifies that a company only needs to get consent to collect a person’s biometrics once and makes it clear that BIPA doesn’t apply to biometrics that are stored as mathematical representations. The other says that if a company fixes the problem within 15 days of receiving notice of a violation of BIPA, it can’t be subject to legal action in pursuit of damages. 

In particular, attorneys like Claypoole and Stiehl want to get rid of the ability for individuals to directly sue companies through a legal mechanism known as the right to private action. It’s what makes Illinois law unique and allows for these types of suits with statutory damages in the millions. 

“Frankly, the easiest way is to take it out of the plaintiffs’ counsels’ hands,” said Stiehl. “ There are paths to still enforce these things in a reasonable way.”

A reckoning over BIPA could have an impact on potential legislation in states like New York, which is considering a similar law that includes the right to private action.

But BIPA isn’t the only model. Texas and Washington have similar biometric privacy laws, but they are enforced by the states’ attorney general, rather than individuals taking direct legal action against companies. 

Keicher, for one, thinks handing the enforcement power to the attorney general, particularly in cases involving the employees of a company using biometrics, is a good idea.

Keicher is hopeful that there will be some amendments to BIPA made by the time the legislative session wraps up in May. 

“I can't imagine we walk away at the end of the day without having some sort of accomplished guidepost of where this needs to go,” he said. 

But not everyone shares that optimism. Bills amending BIPA historically haven’t gotten very far.

“I'm fully convinced a company will have to be bankrupted by this for a change to be made,” said Mayette, the lawyer at Husch Blackwell. 

Keicher thinks that the current way BIPA is working in practice has gone beyond what the lawmakers who wrote the bill intended.

“I certainly don't think that the framers of the original bill would have wanted a $17 billion judgment against White Castle,” he said. “You can’t sell enough sliders to make that make sense.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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A darker tale emerges from a company called Neuralink, owned by Elon Musk. While Musk roiled the internet with wild changes of direction and bewildering new rules of engagement at Twitter, Neuralink has been under investigation for allegations of animal abuse and suffering resulting from Musk’s orders to rush animal testing. The company is trying to invent implanted brain devices that will cure neurological impairments like enabling paralyzed people to walk again.

These may seem like something out of a sci-fi novel, but the underlying technology for both is not far-fetched. 

Implantable technology has evolved from life-sustaining things like pacemakers to what Dr. Katina Michael calls life-enhancing tech.

Michael is a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. She is a leading scholar in emerging technologies, and has interests in how technologies are used for national security and the social implications that may result. I sat down to talk with her about the risks that come with that life-enhancing tech being implanted in the human body. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Devices like Apple Watches or Fitbits aren’t new. Can you give us a brief history of the blurring of the line between human bodies and technology?

Humans used to fit inside the machine, if you look back into the 1940s and the ENIAC, the first general purpose computer. And then silicon came into the picture and changed everything. More and more, we went from large-scale computers to mini computers to microcomputers to wearable computers. And now we are looking at biomedical devices, for example, that are embedded in the human body. So we've juxtaposed being inside the machine and the machine being inside us. 

I think what has happened is computers used to store what we think; computers now know what we feel. There's a complete difference here. I used to have to ask somebody via telephone, “What's your opinion on this? How does it make you feel?” But with embedded or wearable sensors, you don't have to ask that question anymore. We know when someone has sweaty palms, if they're stressed, if their pulse rate is high or low. 

The greatest invention that has allowed this to come closer and closer to the body, of course, is the smartphone. But now, that's not enough because it's too cumbersome, and it's not as accurate as if it could be embedded. There were many patents in the 1990s for personal digital assistants before smartphones came onto the scene. They used to have embedded PDAs in the upper tricep or wearable PDAs on a head-mounted unit. But now we're saying, well, why do we need this clunkiness? Why not brain-to-brain interfaces? Why not brain-to-computer interfaces?

Are there certain technologies that are emblematic of the trend of tech increasingly becoming part of the human body?

You can't go past Elon Musk's Neuralink. But to be honest, this is really late in the game. He created Neuralink in 2017. 

But going back 20 years, there was a company on the New York Stock Exchange by the name of VeriChip. The parent company was Applied Digital Solutions. They had a patent for an implantable device in the right tricep that indicated they would be exploring a variety of applications, such as being able to secure a physical space. Instead of using a radio-frequency identification card, you would use the implantable. There was a veripay system. Instead of using a credit card that you had to lug around in a purse, you could actually use a free arm to get a read on an implantable device.  

I visited the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, Spain in 2009 that was using a system for frequent visitors. There were over a hundred patrons that were chipped in that club. There have been hundreds of use cases since then. There's been SJ Railways in Sweden that created implantables for VIP customers on their trains. So instead of somebody coming past and scanning your ticket to see if you were a valid passenger, they would simply scan your arm. 

These are all companies that exist or have existed that have tinkered in the implantable space. So I'm not really looking for a Musk-like figure to come in and say, “Oh, look, we've demonstrated the business case for implants.” People have been demonstrating that since around 1998. We just don't know about it because it comes and goes as a fad. The thing is, when will the market be ready for that next leap?    

At what point does this become more widespread? 

It could be in a number of different scenarios. I often talk about the three C's — control, care and convenience. There's a fourth one called the cool factor.

We just have to look at the pandemic. The Western Australian police bought $3 million worth of anklet devices to put on people that weren't adhering to quarantine if they had Covid-19.

It could be we’re just fed up with all the wires. I have a device for this and that. The big suppliers are probably waiting for that one-stop-shop security device. You don't have to remember passwords or use biometrics or two-factor authentication. It's just you. Of course, there are risks with that kind of approach. The other line of thinking is, well, it's time. Why are we still holding our keys in our hands? We could enter our vehicle and our home with a proximity chip. It can't be that bad. Surely, someone's not going to chop off our arm to get access to a physical location. So there are all these reasons we're being told the benefits far outweigh the risks. 

What are those risks?

I am concerned about control. I'm worried about how care and convenience will be used as an argument: I'm doing this because I care about you, and you need it because you have dementia or schizophrenia or you're a harm to yourself or you're incarcerated. So I'm doing this for your own good, and I care about you. 

In totality, it points to what we define as “uberveillance.” 

Uberveillance. What is that? 

It's embedded surveillance. It's the ultimate form of surveillance. Big Brother on the inside looking out. Which is subject to misinformation, information manipulation and misrepresentation.

The problem is the context is missing. You can have this near real-time omnipresence, but never omniscience. You can't play God. You can't pretend to be a star in the heavens that can see everything that's going on and know what you're thinking. Uberveillance attempts to infer your context without asking you what you are doing. 

Okay, maybe 95% of the time I might get the story right because of inferences, patterns of behavior, habits. Human activity monitoring will show us each week that we participate in almost exactly the same things at almost exactly the same time. That other 5% we can't infer and shouldn't infer. Context is missing. We can't take innocent people and convict them of crimes. We need to give people their space. We're not robots. 

Here’s an example. I was awarded an Australian Research Council grant to study location-based services and implantable devices. I gave my students three days of my personal data: GPS data showing my altitude, the direction of travel, time stamps every 30 seconds and the X and Y coordinates of my location. And I told them, you tell me what I've been doing in these three days. I wanted to see how different their responses would be. 

They found I was in Kiama in Australia one day and then in Derby in the U.K. the next day and then came back to Kiama. They asked me, how did you travel to the U.K. and come back? Now, obviously, I had not. There were errors in the GPS data that happened naturally. For some reason, the GPS locked me to Derby. I wasn't there. Then they said, oh, my goodness, you were speeding at 260 kilometers per hour. No, I was not. My car was old. It does not go that fast. But nobody questioned the data. They were questioning me about my ability to be in ten places at once. They all got it wrong because we trust the data. 

What does that tell you about the potential risk of relying heavily on implantable technology like this? 

Most of the proponents of these technologies basically say deploy now, worry about the risk later. I'm not of that opinion. You don't want to go down a path or a point of no return. 

We start to try to constrain people in a particular way. They can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you just want out. And so my fear is that this kind of technology will be used to track in an inhuman way. It's inhuman. We're not machines. We shouldn't be replicating models of machines.

And even if we do place digital technology in the human body, the brain is not stupid. We will override based on our intuition and intelligence. Our brain is smarter than the machine. We know we're being mechanized and digitized. 

What’s the path forward with this technology?

Many of the people I've spoken to through research have said the ideal scenario is to keep that technology on the outside. So if you want to rip it off your head or you want to do away with it for 24 hours because you just don't want to be connected to the grid, you can. You have the autonomy. 

In the end, that's what we're talking about — human dignity, human rights, autonomy, our ability to make decisions for ourselves. But if you embed devices, this notion of switching off is not so easy. You can switch off, but remotely, someone’s still tracking it. That's not switching off completely. 

Once you embed that device, the manipulation heightens. The ability to control others is much more heightened than we realize. You can have control, convenience, care and cool. But the dominant theme is control. It doesn't matter what application. The underlying concept is control.

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Northern Ireland

Today’s conflict isn’t waged with submachine guns. But the lack of accountability has allowed the wounds inflicted by the Troubles to fester.

Northern Ireland

The country’s failure to address its past has left room for permissible lies.

Northern Ireland

Families who lost loved ones during the conflict have pushed for answers for decades. Now, the British government may shatter any hope of justice.

Battling History

Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace

On January 3 in 1976, two Catholic brothers — John Michael and Brian Reavey — and two Protestant brothers — Reggie and Walter Chapman — were playing pool at a pub in a small town in South Armagh, Northern Ireland.

The men, all in their early 20s, had been friendly for years. They played soccer together. Amicable relationships between Catholics and Protestants had become increasingly rare, even in a small rural town.

The Reavey brothers went by fake names in the soccer league because they also played sports with the Gaelic Athletic Association, an Irish cultural group that prohibited its members from playing non-Gaelic sports until 1971. 

The Troubles had been raging for several years, and this area, south of Belfast and a short distance from the border with the Republic of Ireland, had been especially hard hit. About 400 people in South Armagh were killed over 30 years — a higher death toll than any other part of Northern Ireland aside from Belfast. 

It’s hard to imagine the violence that plagued South Armagh during the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s until peace was brokered by the Clinton administration in 1998. Northern Ireland is still segregated. Only 7% of children go to schools attended by both Catholics and Protestants. In Belfast, gates in towering walls topped with barbed wire close every evening. The deep wounds left on society by the Troubles still fester, represented by neatly kept memorials on roadsides. If you know where to look, each turn in a narrow country road, each old farmhouse at the top of a rolling hill tells the story of a dark moment in a traumatic history.

On that night in January 1976, the Reavey brothers were having a drink at the local pub when they bumped into the Chapman brothers. At one point, a bomb rolled into the bar, but it failed to go off. So once the police and the army had removed the threat, the men carried on with their game of pool. 

Within 48 hours, all four of them were murdered. 

The next day, on January 4, John Michael and Brian Reavey were at their farmhouse watching the comedy game show Celebrity Square with their 17-year-old brother, Anthony. A gunman barged through the front door and opened fire. John Michael was nearly cut in two by a spray of bullets from a machine gun. Brian was shot in the back trying to get upstairs to hide. The bullet came out through his heart. Anthony hid under the bed, but the gunman found him and filled his abdomen with 17 bullets. 

Somehow, Anthony managed to drag himself up the street to a nearby farmhouse. When the neighbor saw the boy, she called for the ambulance, the police and the priest. Anthony was making a miraculous recovery when he died suddenly 26 days later on January 30 in what the family maintains are suspicious circumstances.

The murder was meticulously planned. Gunmen drove from a farmhouse a mile away. Army checkpoints at both ends of the road ensured nobody saw them coming. After firing off the fatal rounds from a 9 mm Luger pistol, a .455 Webley revolver, a 9 mm Parabellum and a Sterling submachine gun, the gunmen sped away, switching cars, handing off the guns and burning the vehicle they drove to the attack. It took 12 minutes.

“I have done this journey at speed many, many times,” said Eugene Reavey, the older brother of John Michael, Brian and Anthony, as we drove the narrow country roads lined with tall brushes that the gunmen took to carry out the attack. In pursuit of justice for his brothers, Eugene has taken investigators on this route several times in recent years.

The gunmen “traveled these roads with impunity. They were never going to be stopped. Because it's all Protestant country here. So the police would have recognized all these people, and they just waved them on,” Eugene said, pointing across the fields to the road where an officer would have been standing, shining a light to give the gunmen the go-ahead.

Eugene Reavey, who was 28 in 1976, is now in his mid-70s.

He still gets angry when he talks about how a British soldier harassed his grieving mother at a checkpoint on her way home from the hospital. Or how the soldier dumped his brothers’ bloodied clothes on the road. 

Mr. and Mrs. Reavey never lived in that house again. Their son who discovered the carnage didn’t speak for a year after the attack. Eugene Reavey has known who killed his brothers for 41 years. A friend of his father’s overheard someone boasting about the murder in a local pub. 

Nobody has ever been held accountable. Eugene has dedicated his life to changing that. It has put him on the frontlines in a fight between survivors who want the truth and those who have something to lose from it coming out.

“I want the truth, if I can get it. Then I want justice, but there's no such thing,” said Eugene.

The small community was still reeling from the violence at the Reavey’s when tragedy struck again the next day. On January 5, 1976, Walter and Reggie Chapman were on their way home from work at the Kingsmill plant when their bus stopped suddenly on a secluded country road. Armed men forced the brothers and 10 others off the bus. The gunmen asked if there were any Catholics among them, and as one man went to step forward, the others pulled him back, thinking he was the target. The Catholic man was allowed to walk away. Eleven Protestants, including Walter and Reggie, were shot in their tracks, left to die on the pavement. Only one man survived. 

The South Armagh Republican Action Force, found to be a cover name for the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility for the fatal ambush. Many believed it was retaliation for the murders the day before of the Reavey brothers and members of another Catholic family — the O’Dowds — who lived about half an hour away.

The killings at Kingsmill put the Protestant community on edge. Neighborly tolerance turned to suspicion. The carnage of those 48 hours in the early days of 1976 stained South Armagh for decades.

Everybody in Northern Ireland has their own version of what happened during the Troubles. 

The Good Friday Agreement ended the bloodshed. But it did not offer a way to grapple with the history of violence. No one was appointed to look into the killings. The past festered. Later, there were attempts to create a framework to get at the truth of what happened and hold people accountable for their violence. All have failed.

The result is a system where the burden falls on families to push for answers.

Now, even this is under attack. In May, the British government introduced a piece of legislation that would effectively “draw a line under the Troubles,” as outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, granting qualified immunity to perpetrators of crimes committed during the conflict. For many, this would slam the door on any hope for justice.

Raymond McCord has come to blows with loyalist paramilitaries quite a few times. More than once it nearly cost him his life. 

He grew up in a notorious Protestant neighborhood in North Belfast that is intimidating to walk around to this day. Murals of men with balaclavas and machine guns tower over neatly kept houses. “UDA” is freshly spray-painted in red on a utility box, a reference to the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary. All the lamp posts are painted in the colors of the Union Jack — red, white and blue. 

But Raymond has never been one to fall into sectarian divides. When he was a kid, he played soccer on a Catholic team. As the Troubles picked up, Raymond was the last Protestant to stay on it, which counted Bobby Sands, the famous hunger striker, as a player. 

Raymond didn’t join the paramilitaries; he confronted them.

Once, the UDA severely beat him and left him to die with cement planks on his limbs. When he got out of the hospital, Raymond, hobbling on crutches with two broken legs, confronted the brigadier of the UDA at his house.

Raymond’s story, however extraordinary for his resistance, is also typical of the Troubles: a parent robbed of their child. His son, Raymond Jr. was found dead in a quarry beaten to death on November 9, 1997, just months before the Good Friday Agreement.

“People say as time goes by…” Raymond trails off. “It doesn’t get any better. It gets worse.” 

People were arrested for Raymond Jr.’s murder, but they were quickly released and nobody was ever charged. Raymond has blamed a loyalist paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force who was a police informant for his son’s death, and he accused police of protecting him.

“The only thing the police wanted to do was cover Raymond's murder up,” he said. So Raymond Sr. took the case to the police ombudsman, the watchdog body in charge of investigating allegations of crimes committed by police in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

After a three and a half year investigation, the police ombudsman determined that Raymond was right: a UVF man who was a police informant was indeed a suspect in his son’s murder, but he was never charged.

“I want to see the people charged. I want to see the policemen charged that covered it up in Raymond’s murder too, who were paying these people that were killing,” Raymond told me.

So he sued the chief of staff of the UVF and the men who killed his son in civil court. Days after he launched his lawsuit, police informed him there was a credible threat on his life. He refused to withdraw it.

Raymond McCord may be one of the last people to be able to file a private lawsuit for a murder that occurred during the Troubles. For many victims and survivors seeking truth, justice or accountability, the U.K. is about to pull the rug from underneath them.

The divide feels particularly vast this year. In elections in May, Sinn Fein, the republican party that was the political wing of the IRA during the conflict, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in history. The prospect of a united Ireland seems closer than ever, something unionists are dead set against.

It is in this context that the U.K. government came up with a plan to close the book on the Troubles. Almost nobody in Northern Ireland — Catholic and Protestant — supports it. Instead of burying the conflict in the past, it’s bringing the anger to the surface.

In July 2021, the British government released the outline for the bill to deal with the legacy of the Troubles which included an amnesty for crimes committed during the conflict. The uproar was immediate and came from all sides. All five major political parties in Northern Ireland came out against it.

The opposition to this bill has become a rare unifying force for groups who still hold a grudge against each other. But there’s perhaps nobody who despises this legislation more than Raymond McCord.

He was already two decades into fighting to bring his son’s killers to court when he heard the news last summer about the U.K. government’s amnesty proposal. He rang a friend whose father was killed in 1992. The two headed to London to protest at Downing Street. Then he gathered nine other victims to form the Truth and Justice Movement. They started calling politicians.

Just a month after the U.K. announced its plans, the group sat down in the Belfast City Hall across the table with politicians from every major political party in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Raymond circulated a document pledging to reject the U.K.’s amnesty proposal. Every politician signed it. They did the same thing at Westminster. Every political party except the Tories promised to oppose the legislation.

A revised version of the bill was introduced, and it includes substantial changes from the original proposal. Instead of a blanket amnesty, there will be a qualified immunity. The door remains open to prosecution of anyone who does not cooperate with an investigation. The bill creates a commission which will have the power to compel witnesses. There’s also an oral history project that “will allow people to tell their stories and share their experiences.”

Under the new proposed legislation, inquests that have reached a certain point will carry on, and civil action filed before the introduction of the law, like Raymond McCord’s case against paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force, will be allowed to continue. But other families won’t be able to file new civil lawsuits.

The bill is trying to walk a thin line between aging veterans of the security forces living in fear that they will be the next target of a spurious investigation and the families of victims long denied justice. But to Raymond McCord, the changes don’t make much of a difference. He’s planning to file a legal challenge if the bill does become law.

Francie McGuigan was the first person to break out of Long Kesh, the notorious prison where suspected paramilitaries, the vast majority of whom were Catholic or republican, were held without trial as political prisoners during internment from August 1971 to December 1975. 

He escaped dressed as a priest with an unsuspecting soldier in the passenger's seat. Francie was driving someone else’s car that he didn’t know how to put in reverse, so he had to ask the soldier to back it up for him as they pulled out of the prison.

Francie grew up in a prominent republican family in Ardoyne, a Catholic working class neighborhood in North Belfast. Nearly every member of his immediate family was interned at one point or another. Francie himself was in the IRA.

In 1971, Francie was sent to prison where he and 13 other men were subjected to “interrogation in depth.” Later, it would be called torture. The 14 prisoners became known as the Hooded Men.

The men were forced to hold stress positions, a hood over their heads, their legs spread apart, fingertips touching the wall supporting their body weight until they collapsed. They were deprived of sleep, food and water. They were taken up in helicopters, told they were hundreds of feet in the air, then pushed out the door, only to learn they weren’t far off the ground.

“There's no way they let me out of here alive because they're not going to let me tell the world what they've done,” Francie thought at the time.

It was during one of the numerous interrogations that he realized the toll the experience was taking on him. The interrogator asked him to spell his name. He couldn’t spell McGuigan.

The torture lasted seven days. Eventually, the Hooded Men were transported to the jail with other interned prisoners where they wrote down their stories. Francie didn’t think it would make a difference.

“We had no faith or nothing in British justice. We didn't believe in it, and we didn't believe it existed. We've since proved that we were right,” Francie said.

The Irish government filed a case against the U.K. at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. There were signs the British would be condemned on an international stage for their treatment of the Hooded Men. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, issued a report accusing the U.K. of torture.

But optimism that there would be accountability was shattered when in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights did not rule that the Hooded Men had been tortured. Instead, the court called the interrogation tactics “inhuman and degrading treatment.”

The United Kingdom was able to wipe its hands of the accusation that officers tortured political prisoners on its own soil. 

When a RTÉ Investigates documentary in 2014 showed new evidence of torture that had not been presented before the European Court of Human Rights, Francie joined forces with the daughter of Seán McKenna, one of the other Hooded Men who was so severely affected that he lived out the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital before he died in 1975.

They went to court to ask a judge to decide if the police should have investigated allegations of torture by British security forces. After years of appeals all the way up through the highest levels of the U.K.’s legal system, they were vindicated.

On December 15, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the tactics used against the Hooded Men were “deplorable” and had they happened today, it likely would be considered torture. The court ordered an investigation into the allegations of torture, but crucially, one that was not conducted by Northern Ireland's police force. The judge in the case did not have faith the police force could be impartial.

When I met Francie in the spring of 2022, the Hooded Men were still in limbo. An investigation hasn’t been opened. The future of that investigation is now even more uncertain.

For days after the murder of his brothers, Eugene Reavey waited for the police to come talk to the family, but nobody did.

“I was expecting something. We got nothing,” he told me.

Decades went by, and the Reavey family tried their best to heal. Along the way, a picture started to form of a secretive murder squad in South Armagh operating in the 1970s. International investigators started to look into evidence that security forces in the army and police had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Glenanne Gang, they were responsible for more than 120 murders.

An investigation into the Glenanne Gang in the mid-2000s was never completed. Efforts to give victims’ families answers were stalled until, in 2019, a court in Belfast ruled there should be a full report on how the gang operated.

The road to accountability for crimes committed during the Troubles is long, complicated and often stymied by people who have something to lose from the truth coming out. 

For Francie McGuigan and Eugene Reavey, the only way to get closer to that truth has been through the courts, relying on judges to order transparency and accountability that otherwise rarely exists.

There’s a view that “litigation and courts are used as a solution to the problem. And the reality is they’re not. They’re far from a solution, but they are the only solution at the moment,” said Darragh Mackin, a human rights lawyer in Belfast who represents both the Hooded Men and the families of the Glenanne Gang victims.

After the court ruling, the task of investigating alleged collusion by the Glenanne Gang fell to career detective and anti-terrorism expert Jon Boutcher. His team has taken on some of the most politically contentious cases from the conflict, and it has become the gold standard for inquiries into Troubles-era crimes.

“Somebody told me you’re rewriting history,” Boutcher said. “Actually, nobody knows what happened in Northern Ireland because it’s kept behind this curtain of secrecy. I’m setting out what happened.”

For many, Jon Boutcher feels like their last chance to correct the record on what happened to their loved ones. But the future of Operation Kenova may be short-lived. Under the proposed federal legislation, criminal investigations related to the Troubles can only be carried out by a newly created reconciliation commission; its leadership will be appointed by the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland. The work of Operation Kenova would cease. It’s not clear yet whether the new investigative body would take on the Glenanne Gang case.

The door that people like Eugene Reavey fought so hard to open could be slammed shut.

The torture of the Hooded Men and the murder of the Reavey brothers get at one of the most contentious features of the bloody conflict: the role security forces played during the Troubles. Were the army and police keeping the peace, protecting society from terrorists? Or were they active participants? Was it just a few bad apples? Was there a system of impunity or are veterans now the target of a witch hunt?

Tensions have far from disappeared. People on different sides seem to be living in completely different realities, convinced to their core that they are in the right and the other side is evil.

The pervasive narrative throughout the Troubles and into the present is that republican paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of violence. You hear the same numbers repeated: 60% of killings were committed by republican paramilitaries, 30% by loyalists and 10% by state security forces. Over half of the people killed were civilians. More than 250 were children under the age of 18.

Brandon Lewis, who was the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland until his resignation in July, has doubled down on this, claiming that “the vast majority of those state-related killings were lawful.”

The breakdown has significant political weight. It has been used to undermine the argument that the British fought a dirty war in Northern Ireland and to bolster the narrative that investigations into state killings are rewriting history in favor of republican paramilitaries by creating the illusion that security officers in uniform were responsible for violent acts to the same degree as groups like the IRA.

Being a policeman or a soldier in Northern Ireland was a dangerous job. I spoke with veterans who were blown up in car bombs and lost limbs or were ambushed and shot, narrowly escaping with their lives. I met one man now in his 80s who drove a school bus and served part-time in the Ulster Defense Regiment, which was part of the British army. He had to be followed by a police car on his bus route because of threats on his life. One day, a bomb under his seat went off. He and the students all survived, but his son later committed suicide due to the trauma.

In all, 1,441 members of the British armed forces, including 197 serving UDR soldiers, were killed during Operation Banner, the deployment that lasted from 1969 to 2007. Another 319 members of the RUC were also killed. Many still live with the scars, either physical or psychological.

But there is a growing body of evidence that there was collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the police ombudsman, the watchdog body tasked with investigating police killings, has found that RUC officers protected members of loyalist paramilitaries and turned a blind eye as those groups armed themselves with weapons later used in sectarian killings.

In 2001, the RUC was dissolved and replaced with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Many of the former officers or soldiers I spoke to see the investigations into members of security forces as a witch hunt coming decades after they risked their lives to keep the peace.

“All the legacy structures are either being designed or are being subverted for the purpose of introducing a false narrative to demonize the police and the security structures and the work that they did,” said Chris Albiston, a former chief constable of the Ulster police.

Albiston is particularly enraged by allegations of widespread collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Together with his colleagues at the Northern Ireland Retired Police Association, a welfare and lobbying group for former officers, they are using the courts to curtail the power of the ombudsman to release reports concluding collusion occurred.

The police didn’t talk to any witnesses of Paul Whitter’s murder. On April 15, 1981, the 15-year-old boy was walking past a bakery when he was shot in the head by a plastic bullet fired out the window of a tank by the Ulster police in the city that most Protestants call Londonderry and Catholics call Derry. He died 10 days later.

I met his mother, Helen Whitters, exactly 41 years later, around the corner from where he was shot.

“I’ve never spoken to an RUC man. They have never spoken to me, ever, ever, ever,” she said of the government police.

Only once did an officer come to the Whitters’ house.

"They had a black bag with Paul’s clothes, bloodied clothes, and they handed them in and that was it. That was it. Nothing. To this day,” Mrs. Whitters told me.

Paul Whitter’s family is still waiting for answers. The records on his death were sealed until 2059. When the family tried to request them, they were sealed for an additional three decades. The British government released partial files on Paul Whitters’ murder in June, but the rest remain sealed until 2084 — over 100 years after Paul died. Everyone who knew the boy will be gone before the information his mother wants becomes public.

People who are opposed to investigations into crimes that happened during the Troubles sometimes accuse victims of trying to rewrite history. But for decades, the truth was unattainable for many families. Large parts of history were never written.

During the Troubles, there was a system in place to ensure killings by security forces were not investigated. Crimes committed by the army were not handled by the police. Instead the Royal Military Police did an internal review.

Investigations into atrocities committed by paramilitaries were dangerous and difficult. Violent groups were adept at picking up shells and covering their tracks. Authorities risked their lives to go through paramilitary-controlled neighborhoods to examine the scene.

Overall, the rate of investigations and prosecutions during the conflict was dismally low. Only four soldiers were convicted during the Troubles. Even now, only six have been charged.

Investigations that did occur were often heavily flawed. Take, for example, the Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday when British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry on January 30, 1972. Conducted in the immediate aftermath, the report found that soldiers were fired upon first. This was later proven to be false by a public inquiry released in 2010 that took 12 years to complete and cost £195 million, roughly $280 million.

Things only started to change in 2010 when Northern Ireland began to build a judicial system that was not governed by the British one. As Northern Ireland’s first director of public prosecutions that was truly independent from England, Barra McGrory has had a front seat to the decades-delayed effort to write those chapters into history books.

“​​Specifically these British army shootings were never really scrutinized. The odd one was. But by and large, they were never properly investigated. And then all of a sudden, there was a focus on them. And files started to come in,” McGrory said.

Still, the system was overly complex and under-resourced. At the current rate, it will take investigators 20 years to get through the cases in the queue.

For some, transparency would go a long way. As Paul Whitter’s mother told me, “a wee bit of honesty on their part would help, wouldn’t it.”

Eugene Reavey was on his way to the hospital to pick up the bodies of his brothers, John Michael and Brian, on January 5, 1976, the day after their murder at the family’s home.

“And I was coming up that hill. There was a fellow waving his arms frantically,” Eugene told me as we retraced his steps one morning this May.

“I put the window down and he says, ‘Come on up here, quick. There's been an awful slaughter.’”

Eugene got out of his car and started walking up the hill when he saw it. At first, he thought there had been an accident and a neighbor’s cows were lying on the street. “There was steam rising out of these bodies, you know,” he said. “It was raining.”

It’s as if Eugene can see the bloodied street in his mind’s eye as he described “the smell of death” to me. “It haunts me to this day. And such carnage.”

Almost immediately, the accusations started flying. None of the Reaveys were involved in any paramilitary. But police told people the IRA shot the Reavey brothers because they wouldn’t go along with a plot to kill security forces. Or that Eugene was responsible for the murders at Kingsmill.

“It was the next morning. ‘Eugene Reavey was in the IRA.’ Eugene Reavey was never in the IRA in his fucking life. Or had anything to do with them. And that’s the sort of shit and nonsense that they were coming out with. So we had to put up with that every time they stopped us at a checkpoint,” Eugene told me over breakfast, sipping the second cup of coffee that had gone cold as we talked.

Northern Ireland’s failure to address its contested history has left room for what some historians call permissible lies. In the absence of truth, people fill in their own narratives.

For Eugene, things got worse. For four days after his brothers’ death, police stopped him driving to work, pulled him out of his car and down into a field where they held him on his knees in the river at gunpoint.

“And the water was up to there,” he said, pointing to his chin. “And the big guy takes out a gun and puts it to my head and he says, ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ I say, ‘I don’t fucking know, you needn’t be asking me.’ ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ And that went on five times.”

The rumor that Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmill killings in which his murdered brothers’ friends, the Protestant brothers Walter and Reggie Chapman perished, persisted for decades.

Twenty-five years later, he was driving home from work when he heard on the radio that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Protestant political party, was going to reveal the killers at Kingsmill on the floor of the House of Commons. Eugene didn’t think much of it until he learned that Paisley had named him as the mastermind of the attack.

“I nearly died. And my wife, god help her, she was nuts.”

Eugene spent years trying to clear his name. It was later proved, after a lengthy legal battle and an investigation by the Historical Equires Team at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that Eugene Reavey had nothing to do with the murders at Kingsmill.

But the damage had been done.

“People I had known for years just turned their back, walked away. Neighbors wouldn't speak to me,” Eugene said.

“Because no matter where you went. See that man, that's the man that shot the people at Kingsmill. That went on for years and years and years.”

The area along the Shankill Road in North Belfast, just a few blocks from a peace wall gate that closes at 6pm, is unmistakably Protestant. You don’t have to look hard before you spot the red hand of Ulster, red poppies, the Union Jack.

On one corner, behind a black metal gate, there’s a memorial that has a very different tone from the others that dot the city. It’s not about tradition, history or the bravery of those who fought on one side or another. It’s just angry.

On the walls, there are photos of young children with the captions like “murdered by Sinn Fein/IRA for being Protestant,” or “Sinn Fein/IRA’s slaughter of the innocents.”

Violent images of carnage caused by bombings are intermixed with photos of IRA members who are now in government. I can’t pull my eyes away from one block of photos of terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and an IRA bombing in London: “IRA — Sinn Fein — ISIS no difference,” reads the caption.

The monument is graphic, inflammatory. But it’s only one symbol of the embers of the Troubles that are still burning today.

In Derry, there are indications of the same anger coming from the opposite side. In one mural, two men wearing balaclavas point machine guns. If you stand directly in front of the wall, one of the guns is pointed straight at you. “Unfinished revolution” is written across the top in block letters. Around the city, there are symbols of modern-day paramilitaries, like a sign for the fringe republican group Saoradh with the slogan “salute the men and women of violence.”

These memorials represent the margins. The vast majority in Northern Ireland support the Good Friday Agreement and do not want a return to violence. But these symbols contribute to an ever present uneasiness in the air, a fear that peace is tenuous.

Failing to grapple with the past has kept this anger alive.

“It's still raw. Every fifth person you stop on that road will know somebody who died, possibly a relative. And that still hurts people,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican political prisoner and former Sinn Fein director of publicity.

“We are, in a sense, captives of the dead.”

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The post Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace appeared first on Coda Story.

But on March 26, Domozhifoff was blocked. He wasn’t surprised. 

“This is another bad sign in a series of bad signs,” he said. 

Online censorship in Russia is escalating at breakneck speed. Russia has clamped down on access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram since the country invaded Ukraine Feb. 24. This has narrowed online social media choices to homegrown options like VKontakte, also called VK. With a dominant position in Russia –80% of Russians online use VK– the winnowing of competitive options is an opportunity for VK, but as Domozhiroff discovered, domestic platforms have moved quickly to squelch any criticism of Kremlin policy.  

The latest expulsions of foreign social media occurred suddenly, but for years the Russian government had been diminishing the role of platforms like YouTube and Facebook, where media-savvy political opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny encouraged dissent and promoted protests. 

The Kremlin’s dedication to establish a sovereign internet, which would allow authorities to monitor and censor online traffic in and out of the country, vacillated and was sometimes tepid. LinkedIn was banned from the country in 2017, but that platform had only 6 million Russian users at the time. In 2017, the Russian communications watchdog Roskomnadzor threatened to block Facebook unless the company complied with a law requiring the storing of Russian personal data on servers physically located in the country. But when Facebook refused to comply, it was hit with a miniscule $53,000 fine. Roskomnadzor also went after Twitter last year by slowing down access to it in Russia. 

The Kremlin’s bid to control social media is no longer indecisive. Since February 24, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube were blocked in rapid succession. Roskomnadzor classified Meta, the corporation that owns Facebook and Instagram, an extremist organization. Meanwhile, the last of Russian independent media,TV-Rain and Ekho Moskvy radio, liquidated their operations in Russia, and access to foreign media like the BBC was restricted. 

The Kremlin’s hope was that by blocking foreign social media, “people would turn to local options which are easier to police and control,” said Tanya Lokot, an associate professor in Digital Media and Society at Dublin City University.

To some extent, it worked. From February 24 to March 15, VKontakte, used by over 50 million people, saw an increase of 4 million users.

The U.S. has sanctioned VK, which was bought by a company that is partly owned by the state and partly owned by a close associate of Putin. 

VK “is a digital playground for whoever controls the company,” said Lukas Andriukaitis, associate director of DFRLab, a disinformation think tank. 

As with the banning of foreign social media sites, the invasion of Ukraine has accelerated a crackdown on speech occurring on domestic social media that run counter to the Kremlin’s approved narratives. “VK censorship is escalating,” warned Lokot. 

On March 10, the VK blocked the pages of Voice of America’s Russian service, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian service, and Current Time, a 24-hour Russian-language television and digital news network. On March 22, Navalny, who is imprisoned, and opposition politician Ilya Yashin’s pages were blocked for VKontakte users in Russia because of anti-war messages. 

The logic behind which pages get blocked has been unclear. “We do not have extensive knowledge on how exactly VK censorship works. It is pretty much a wild wild west out there,” said Andriukaitis. Certainly, posts about the war in Ukraine are especially risky, and using banned language to describe the conflict, such as “war,” is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. 

With accurate news on VK about the war nonexistent, Russians are turning to VPNs to access blocked social media and news sites. A VPN or “virtual private network” is a digital tool that masks your online activity, so that it can’t be tracked or blocked at the local level. Russians have used the services to continue to access some foreign social media. Instagram, the most popular Western platform in Russia, still had on March 24 around 34 million daily users, only a 16% decrease since it was blocked the day before. 

But in most of the country, the severing of foreign social media has been effective. “Even though those tech-savvy urban dwellers will most likely be able to bypass the restrictions using VPN, they are not the majority of Russia,” said Andriukaitis.

In the past, the Kremlin has been able to prevent Russians from accessing VPNs. It had successfully banned six popular VPNs, and regulated others.

That still leaves Telegram. The messaging platform played an important role for both dissenters and government-affiliated actors in the 2021 civil strife in Myanmar and during protests against the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020. Telegram has been a pivotal channel in Russia too, where the number of users increased by 46% between February 24 and March 15. It remains one of the last independent news sources. Groups fearful of getting shut out of VKontakte are posting in Telegram channels.

Telegram’s position, however, is tenuous. Roskomnadzor tried to block the platform in 2018, only to lift the ban two years later. Rashid Gabdulhakov at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands warns that Telegram faces a grim future.

“The most important question, of course, is what will happen once everyone moves their activities to Telegram? Will the state deem it extremist also or will it use the opportunity to spy on everyone?” said Gabdulhakov.

Domozhiroff, the local opposition politician, is not optimistic. “I think that unblocking and resuming full-fledged work is possible only after a radical regime change and the restoration of Russia's democratic path of development,” he said.

The post Russians face grim options on social media appeared first on Coda Story.

This decision has become urgent in Myanmar, where the Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor has been trying to untangle itself from the country since the junta seized power in a coup on February 1, 2021. In doing so, Telenor is torn between selling its Myanmar subsidiary quickly or protecting the millions of users whose data could end up in the hands of the military.

Now the company faces a new hurdle, one that could have broader implications for how European companies do business in illiberal countries. 

On February 8, an anonymous Myanmar citizen and a Norwegian law firm filed a complaint with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority alleging that Telenor’s sale violates Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which applies to countries in the European Economic Area, which includes Norway. The complaint asks Norway’s state  privacy agency to investigate and intervene to ensure that the sale does not violate the right to privacy of its customers and put them at risk of exposure to military surveillance.

If successful, the GDPR complaint would require Telenor to delete or anonymize the data belonging to its 18 million Myanmar customers before selling its Myanmar subsidiary. In doing so, it is poised to set a precedent for how European companies operate inside authoritarian regimes.

The tussle over Telenor's exit from Myanmar is a microcosm of the struggle facing many executives at Western corporations interested in acting at least with a minimum of responsibility inside countries which challenge that impulse at every turn.  

“What we are hoping to bring across to Telenor is indeed that it's not not a question of wanting them to stay and continue to serve in that environment, but to act responsibly and act legally," said Ketil Sellæg Ramberg, a privacy and data security law specialist at SANDS, the Norwegian law firm that filed the GDPR complaint.

WHAT IS TELENOR AND WHY ARE THEY SELLING? 

The Norwegian government is a majority shareholder in Telenor Group. It’s subsidiary, Telenor Myanmar, is the second largest telecoms firm in the country with a population of over 54 million people. 

Telenor has been trying to exit Myanmar because of military pressure to install intercept spyware that would give authorities a straight line of access to users’ information, which would violate Norwegian and EU sanctions.

Installing the intercept tech is “unacceptable” and “would constitute a breach of our values and standards as a company,” said Telenor Group in a press release in September 2021. 

The likely buyers for control of Telenor Myanmar's data are M1 Group, a Lebanese company with a history of doing business in authoritarian countries like Syria and Sudan, and Shwe Byain Phyu Group, a group of  Myanmar companies with ties to the military involved in gem mining and petrol stations, The sale is expected to be finalized on February 15. 

Human rights groups in Myanmar are strongly opposed to the new buyers. The lives of civil society activists and journalists are “endangered by this secretive sale to a military-linked conglomerate,” said Yadanar Maung, the spokesperson for the human rights group Justice For Myanmar. 

“We are also concerned that Shwe Byain Phyu is a front for the junta, who want control of Telenor as a source of revenue, at a time when they are desperate for funds to finance their campaign of terror,” Maung added.

WHAT’S AT STAKE? 

The junta has extensive control over telecoms companies in Myanmar. By law, the government can request user data without a warrant, intercept communications or take control of telecoms services in “emergency situations.”

This data is valuable to the military, which has been carrying out a brutal crackdown since it staged a coup that has  killed over 1,500 people, according to the human rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. 

Authorities can use phone records and mobile payment receipts to map out pro-democracy networks, identify who is providing financial support to opposition groups and ultimately, target activists and squash dissent.

“They want it to crush the opposition,” said Oliver Spencer at the human rights group Free Expression Myanmar. “They want information about who’s criticizing the military and who’s organizing the military. And the Norwegian company owned by the Norwegian people is about to hand that information over.”

According to reporting by Myanmar Now, Telenor has complied with at least 200 requests for information by the junta-controlled Ministry of Transport and Communications since the coup. Some of these requests were for sensitive data, like the last recorded location of a phone number. 

Despite this, Telenor does stand out as the most sensitive to data privacy concerns in a country where the junta has significant sway over the other two leading telecom options, said Spencer. 

Telenor is “far better than their competitors in regards to the protection of data and therefore their users’ privacy. Without a doubt, they were far better,” Spencer said. 

It’s not a high bar. The Myanmar government runs 50% of MPT, the largest telecoms provider. Another firm, Mytel, is owned half by the Myanmar military and half by the Vietnamese military. Mytel or MPT SIM cards are likely being monitored.

If Telenor leaves the market, people “will all be forced to use companies that are directly or indirectly controlled by the military. Then, of course, the military has access to everything that flows through those telecoms pipes,” Spencer told me.

WHAT’S THIS GDPR COMPLAINT ALL ABOUT?

A GDPR complaint is a consumer’s tool to hold European companies accountable for how their data is used and protected. 

The major concern behind the complaint against Telenor is that, without proper privacy safeguards, the data of millions of users will be subject to surveillance by the junta in Myanmar, exposing activists, journalists and citizens and putting their safety at risk.

The use of GDPR in this context is unconventional. The privacy law is designed to protect EU residents and citizens, and it is rarely applied to international subsidiaries. But Ramberg, the law specialist at the firm that filed the complaint, argues that Telenor Myanmar is bound by GDPR because Telenor Group, based in Norway, has sufficient control over the company. “This actually has real life consequences for real life people,” said Ramberg, “This endangers people’s right to speak freely about issues that might not necessarily be in line with the dictatorship.”

The company disagrees, stating that Telenor Group “does not exert any control on the handling of customer data by Telenor Myanmar, and therefore GDPR does not apply to customer data in Myanmar,” wrote director of communications Cathrine Stang Lund.

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But 34 years ago, there was another seismic protest in Almaty. In December 1986, Almaty — then called Alma-Ata — was the site of some of the first large demonstrations protesting communist rule. When Mikhail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, installed an ethnic Russian with no connection to or knowledge of Kazakhstan to head the Kazakh Soviet Republic, students took to the streets.

Moscow sent in armed forces to violently suppress the crowds. Estimates range widely from 10 to 170 casualties. Over 2,000 people were wounded. The tragedy came to be known as Zheltoksan, which means December in Kazakh.

Then the whole thing was swept under the rug.

For years, Zheltoksan was not talked about — in Kazakhstan or anywhere in the former Soviet Union. Like scores of other rebel acts and repressive countermeasures in the Soviet Union, Zheltoksan pixelated into visual fragments, shards of aging memory hidden from history.

But amid the current unrest, the 1986 protests have been mentioned over and over on social media. Coda Story spoke to historians, sociologists and local journalists to understand Zheltoksan’s significance, how the trauma of suppressed historical memory impacts the thinking of protestors battling Kazakh and imported Russian police on the street’s of Kazakhstan’s far-flung, freezing cities.

In 1986 Kazakhstan was one of the first places where anti-Soviet protests started. Why there? What does it tell us about the political climate in Kazakhstan at that moment in history?

In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made a big mistake, explained Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg. He replaced the ethnic-Kazakh leader of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan with Gennady Kolbin, an ethnic Russian, who knew nothing about the country. This triggered the youth and intelligentsia.

“Kolbin didn't spend a day in Kazakhstan, didn't know Kazakh language, and he wasn’t familiar with Kazakh culture and politics. Ergo, his appointment was perceived as an insult by many Kazakhstanis. For by 1986 this country played an important role in the Soviet Union: it was the second republic by size, fourth by population, and its industrial and agricultural input was enormous,” said Shelekpayev.

One of the reasons anti-Soviet protests first erupted in Kazakhstan comes as a surprise to many is the false stereotype that Kazakhs are political conformists reluctant to upset the status quo.

“Kazakhs protested many times during the 20th century. They protested before the communists — let me remind you about the Central Asian revolt of 1916, which anticipated the 1917 Revolution, and they also protested after 1991. There were many worker’s protests in the 1990s, for example,” Shelekpayev said, pointing to a dearth of media coverage. 

Back then the protests were violently put down. The country’s independence followed just five years later. What significant impact did they have? 

For many people in Kazakhstan, the protests in 1986 are considered the first blow to the Soviet Union’s hold over the republics, said Aitolkyn Kourmanova, the senior editor of Central Asia Analytical Network at George Washington University. “That was the first display of the fact that the Soviet Union was not so uniform and the fact that the republics really wanted independence, which they achieved in five years.” 

The legacy of the 1986 protests has continued to shape political protests in Kazakhstan to this day. “In one way or another, they all go back to December 1986. It was a very defining moment in our history,” said Diana Kudaibergenova, who researches nationalism and political art in Central Asia at the University of Cambridge. 

She points to the civil rights movement Wake Up, Kazakhstan, which invoked December 1986 in their own protests. In 2019, when the group first emerged, activists gathered at Republic Square, formerly called Brezhnev Square, where the 1986 protests took place. They raised hands wrapped in red cloth to symbolize the blood they said was on the regime’s hands.

But the memory of the 1986 Zheltoksan protests is severely fractured.  

“We never know what to call these things,” said Kudaibergenova. “We still call the 1986 protests as events. Or in Russian, uprisings sometimes. But in Kazakh or in English, every time we write it, it’s always events because we don’t know what kind of vocabulary to use. It’s a traumatic event, but also it’s one that people are still trying to make sense of.” 

Zheltoksan is tremendously important yet never discussed. Why? 

Zheltoksan is omitted from Kazakhstan’s history books. It’s not by mistake, said Kudaibergenova.

With the power of the Soviet Union waning and the cracks in the relationship between Moscow and the republics starting to show, Gorbachev tried to keep the protests in Kazakhstan from spiraling. 

“They tried to silence it. They tried to forget about it. That erasure is very important,” Kudaibergenova said.

The protests were kept under wraps. Students were branded as hooligans, drunks and drug users. People who participated in the protests and survivors of the violent crackdown were silenced.

The Soviet leadership in Moscow also tried to pass off the protests as a provincial issue. “They tried to localize this conflict so that it wouldn’t grow further to some bigger conflictual situation.”

It worked. Many people across Central Asia don’t remember 1986, when in fact it was a defining moment in the  Soviet Union’s crack-up. Kudaibergenova is unsure how much fault lies with Soviet historical suppression and now much to blame Kazakhstan’s failure to recapitulate its own history. 

“It’s very much telling that we’re still trying to formulate that particular history and that particular discourse. For me, it’s still very unfinished business.” 

How has the Kazakh regime framed the protests of 1986?

The 1986 protests bolstered the power and influence of Kazakhstan’s founding dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, a towering figure in Kazakhstan’s politics, who in 1986 held the position of prime minister of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. He became the first president of Kazakhstan in 1990 and ruled until 2019 when he was replaced by his handpicked successor, the current president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

Nazarbayev attempted to fit Zheltoksan into a self-serving narrative, while ignoring his own role in the events that precipitated the protests and what he could have done to prevent the violent response directed by Moscow. It’s a tricky line to walk. 

“For the political system at this moment, which is a continuity of Nazarbayev rule from the 1990s, it's inconvenient to discuss Zheltoksan as it was because some current or past leaders of the country were either part of the government in 1986 or participated in the repression against the protesters after the events,” said Nari Shelekpayev, associate professor of history at European University at St. Petersburg.

From the outside, it appears as if these latest protests came out of nowhere. The official cause is the rising liquid gas prices, but very quickly people demanded the government resign. What are these protests really about? 

“To be honest, I understand why many people had the impression that it was sudden because there has never been anything like that in the history of modern Kazakhstan,” said Assem Zhapisheva, a journalist based in Almaty and founder of Masa Media, a digital newsroom.

In reality, tension has been building amid pandemic mismanagement, rampant corruption, wealth disparity and social stratification. 

The rising gas prices were not just an economic reason behind the uprising, but also a political one, said Aigerim Toleukhanova, a journalist from Kazakhstan and a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Kazakhstan is so rich in oil and natural gas, but clearly people do not benefit from these things. So I think it just shows that it reached this point where people would say that enough is enough.”

The post An anti-Soviet protest in Kazakhstan haunts the country’s current unrest appeared first on Coda Story.

“Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,” Trump wrote on January 3 in an endorsement of Orbán’s bid to be reelected in Hungary’s race for prime minister to take place in April or May of this year. “He is a strong leader and respected by all.” 

Early on in Trump’s political career, his praise of an authoritarian leader would have raised eyebrows. His admiration of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un at first vexed and infuriated Republicans. But after years of coming to the defense of despots around the world, Trump’s embrace of authoritarians has become a defining characteristic of his foreign policy. From Jair Bolsonaro to Orbán, Trump emerged as the leader of a group of wily, "soft" authoritarians who de-legitimize elections, demonize the press and take a xenophobic approach to immigration. 

I spoke to experts on authoritarianism to understand why Trump’s endorsement of Orbán isn’t just more flattery. 

Trump is known for publicly praising authoritarians from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to China’s Xi Jinping. Is it saying the quiet part aloud — authoritarians stick together? 

It’s no secret that Trump has a soft spot for authoritarians, and he has shown his support for autocrats facing reelection before. In 2020, Trump endorsed Polish President Andrzej Duda, who weaponized homophobia to fuel his campaign. He continued the practice even after he left office and endorsed Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in October 2021. “Brazil is lucky to have a man such as Jair Bolsonaro working for them,” Trump wrote. 

Trump has admitted that he sees himself in Orbán. According to David Cornstein, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary under the Trump administration, the former president compared Orbán to a twin brother when the two leaders met in 2019. 

“Trump correctly believes that Orbán is fighting the same forces as Trump fought in America: democratic institutions, a free press, an independent judiciary, ethics rules, and opponents who still try to insist on democracy and rule of law. Birds of a feather flock together,” said Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at the University College London and author of “How to Rig an Election.” 

Have other former U.S. presidents endorsed foreign leaders? 

Yes. Former President Obama endorsed Emmanuel Macron in 2017 during the French presidential election which pitted Macron against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. But it’s not a common practice for a U.S. president to endorse a candidate in a foreign election once they’ve left office.

Are there elements of Hungary’s style of authoritarianism reflected in Trump’s way of governing? 

“Authoritarians learn from one another,” Klaas wrote in an email to me. “Their playbooks draw on similar tactics: attack the press, demonize opponents, particularly if they're ethnic or religious minorities, engage in nepotism and cronyism, undermine rule of law, steal, blame your opponents for the things that you're guilty of, and attempt to subvert free and fair elections.” 

All of this is characteristic of both Orbán and Trump.

What about the GOP more broadly? 

The embrace of Hungarian-style authoritarianism isn’t limited to Trump. It’s a facet of the GOP, argues David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of "Laboratories of Authoritarianism."

Hungary is a competitive authoritarian country where the facade of democracy hides an autocratic reality. Elections take place, but districts are heavily gerrymandered and mail-in voting rules favor Orbán’s supporters. The government controls the national election agency and packs the courts with conservative allies. 

Pepper sees similar patterns in the U.S. He points to Ohio, where Republicans in the state legislature pushed to change the election process for judges to require candidates' party ID on the ballot. Or Wisconsin and Georgia where the Republicans have fought to take control of the states’ electoral commissions. 

Orbán’s brand of competitive authoritarianism is “a system where they cling to keeping an appearance of legitimacy while predetermining all the outcomes,” said Pepper. “And that’s, I think, the closest parallel to what we see in so many states, and if those states and people like Trump have their way, what we would see nationally.”

It’s not a coincidence that Hungary shares anti-democratic strategies like gerrymandering with the U.S. In fact, Hungarian autocrats have learned from the GOP, argues Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist with the independent newsroom Direct36.

“I think Orbán learned a lot from Republican policies and also mostly from Republican spin doctors. So it’s Orbán who has been importing and implementing Republican tactics into Hungarian politics, not the other way around,” said Panyi. 

Other people in Trump’s inner circle have been friendly towards Orbán recently. Tucker Carlson took a trip last summer to Hungary where his interview with Orbán made headlines. What does this say about the GOP and Trumpism right now? 

Trump’s support of Orbán ahead of Hungarian elections goes beyond his praise of Bolsonaro or Putin, argues Klaas. “The authoritarian Republican base has made Orbán into a sort of folk hero,” he said. “They have created a false caricature of Orbán as some sort of conservative who defends Western values, rather than as a racist, anti-Semitic authoritarian who is using state power to destroy dissent while steadily enriching himself.”

In August 2021, Tucker Carlson took his viewers to Hungary to show off what he claimed was an exemplar of conserviatve nationalism. In a full week of coverage and one-on-one interviews with Orbán himself, Carlson praised the crackdowns on immigration and the pro-family stance that has fostered blanently homophobic policies.

On a visit to the Hungarian capital in September 2021, Former Vice President Mike Pence praised Orbán’s restrictive abortion policies. 

“Hungary has become the GOP’s new model in terms of racist demographic politics and electoral autocracy,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy. 

It isn’t a coincidence, Ben-Ghiat argues, that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of American conservatives, will be held in Budapest later this year. 

What’s the message Trump and his inner circle are sending?

In a way, Trump is endorsing his own brand of authoritarianism too, argues Pepper, the former former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.

“I think it says that they’re all in on this form of governing,” he said. It legitimizes Orbán, but “it also legitimizes that brand of politics.”

Pepper is worried conservatives in the U.S. are taking notes on Orbán’s authoritarian strategy.  Tucker Carlson’s visit to Hungary, CPAC’s upcoming conference in Budapest and Trump’s endorsement are all signs that conservatives are “studying how they can build something here where they have a minority party and view of the world locked into power through an Orbán-style competitive autocracy.”

Hungarians aren’t going to be swayed to vote for Orbán because of Trump’s endorsement. So what does this mean for Hungary?

The Hungarian election between Orbán and the opposition is tight, but it’s hard to imagine that someone on the fence is going to be convinced by Trump’s endorsement. But that doesn’t mean the endorsement is unimportant. 

Orbán has few allies in the European Union, and prior to Trump’s administration, the Hungarian government was on the outs with the U.S. too. But because of Trump’s public support, Orbán can claim he has allies who share his autocratic worldview, according to Panyi, the Hungarian journalist. 

“This is material that Orbán and his people can use to fuel their propaganda, saying that ‘Oh, even Trump supports us,’” said Panyi. “He can still portray himself as having some kind of backing from influential people. But in reality, Trump’s out of power,” he added.  

Hungary is a small country with the population the size of Michigan. But a former U.S. president’s support allows Orbán to claim legitimacy and relevance on the international stage. “Think about it this way: do you think Trump knows the name of the president of Estonia? Absolutely not. The fact that Trump knows Orbán shows that Hungary is punching above its geopolitical weight, and Orbán and his followers will try to exploit that for their political gain,” said Klaas, the political scientist at University College London.

So will Trump’s endorsement add extra votes for Orbán? Probably not. But let’s say the election doesn’t go the way Orbán wants. By refusing to accept the results of the U.S. 2020 election, Trump created a roadmap for authoritarians to claim unfavorable elections were rigged. This cozy relationship between Orbán and Trump might set the stage for the Hungarian autocrat to make the same argument, said Orsolya Lehotai, a doctoral student in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research. “It basically endorses aspects of what happens when a political leader accuses its opponents of cheating with elections,” said Lehotai. 

The post Trump admires a lot of authoritarians. Viktor Orbán is special appeared first on Coda Story.

But fortunately, investigative journalists went all out this year. From a deep dive into the dark side of pandemic tech in Singapore’s techno-utopia to an in-depth look at how schools are spending thousands on unreliable “aggression detectors” in the name of student safety, global reporters have been holding Big Tech accountable for its role in fueling authoritarianism worldwide. 

These are a few of the investigations that held our attention this year and continue to have an impact. 

1. If you still hear “Pegasus” and think fictional flying horse, where have you been? 

It’s hard to overestimate the sprawling reach of Pegasus spyware. The tool, made by the Israeli company NSO Group, has been found on phones belonging to dozens of journalists and activists around the world.

Pegasus turns a phone into the swiss army knife of surveillance tools. It can copy messages, record calls and secretly turn on the phone’s camera or microphone.

An international coalition of newsrooms, known as the Pegasus Project, found the technology was used in the successful or attempted hacking of 37 phones, including those belonging to investigative journalists in Azerbaijan, Mexico and India. 

Since then, the revelations have kept rolling in. Among those targeted are journalists and activists from some of the world’s most repressive countries, including nine activists from Bahrain, which is believed to have acquired Pegasus in 2017, and a photojournalist in Hungary who investigated the luxury lifestyle of the country’s rich and powerful.

The fallout from the international investigation steadily continues. The U.S. has blacklisted NSO Group and India’s supreme court ordered an independent inquiry. The French were the first to corroborate the Pegasus Project findings with an investigation by an independent government authority, which ultimately confirmed Pegasus had targeted French journalists’ phones.

2. Los Angeles police officers became brand ambassadors for Amazon Ring cameras

If you’ve ever filed a Freedom of Information Act Request with a police department about a specific surveillance tool, you’ll know that police receive a lot of marketing emails from tech companies. But what the LA Times uncovered goes way beyond a few “Hi, let me tell you about our product!” notes that go unanswered. 

Investigative reporter Johana Bhuyian uncovered a striking relationship between LA police officers and representatives from Ring, which makes doorbell cameras and other home surveillance tech.

Ring gave officers free devices or discount codes, and officers turned around and promoted the product to the public. Emails showed that Ring donated doorbell cameras to raffle off at a beach party put on by a police station in West LA. Ring even asked police to hand out promo codes and fliers to influential people in the community.

Ring also relied on police to encourage people in the community to use the Neighbors app. Police have used the platform to gain access to footage without having to get a warrant.

Shortly after the LA Times story broke, LAPD launched an internal investigation.  

I knew this sort of thing happened. I talked to one privacy advocate in California who told me about a community meeting in San Francisco where police promoted Ring to residents. But this investigation is a look under the hood at how exactly Ring courts police officers and then relies on them to endorse their product within the community. 

3. ShotSpotter comes under fire 

ShotSpotter, which claims to detect and locate gunshots, erroneously landed a man in jail for a murder he didn’t commit, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. 

ShotSpotter had been used in around 200 court cases by the time AP published the investigation in August. But journalists found that it doesn’t always work. ShotSpotter misses gunfire that it should have caught. It mistakes motorcycles, trash pickup and even church bells for gunshots. Police in Fall River, Massachusetts told the AP the tech worked less than 50% of the time. 

What is more, ShotSpotter's algorithm is not open to scrutiny from anyone outside the company. The company claims it’s proprietary. So prosecutors, judges and juries are making decisions based on this technology when they cannot know whether it is accurate.

4. Clearview AI goes global

Clearview AI, the infamous facial recognition, has a global footprint, according to an investigation by Buzzfeed News. As of February 2020, 88 law enforcement and government-affiliated agencies in 24 countries had used the tech.

The Federal Police of Brazil used Clearview between 501 and 1,000 times. So did police in Queensland, Australia and the National Crime Agency in the UK. In some cases, like in Thunder Bay, Canada, law enforcement employees were using the technology without their superiors’ knowledge. 

Since the Buzzfeed investigation was published in August, Clearview was fined $22.6 million by the UK privacy commissioner for violating data protection law. 

This is the second groundbreaking investigation into the controversial company from the Buzzfeed team this year. In April, the newsroom reported that Clearview AI’s  facial recognition was tested or used by more than 1,800 tax-payer funded agencies in the U.S. with little to no oversight or accountability.

“Prior to our reporting, there was no oversight,” Ryan Mac told me in regards to his team’s investigation into the use of Clearview in the U.S. “If we're having to inform police chiefs and sheriffs and government leaders that their officers or their employees are using a policing tool that illustrates there’s fundamentally no oversight.”

5. Border surveillance is driving migrants into even more danger 

Of course, we cover surveillance frequently at Coda Story, so no list of incredible investigations into its proliferation would be complete without a shoutout to my colleagues. One trend on our minds a lot this year — the ever-expanding matrix of surveillance along borders.

Coda senior reporter Erica Hellerstein went to the U.S.-Mexico border to map out the expansive corridor of surveillance tech that has deadly consequences. The list of tools is long: facial recognition at border crossings. Drones and blimps watching people crossing the desert from above. Underground sensors that detect movement. Infrared cameras, radar sensors, mobile surveillance towers. And it’s forcing migrants to take even more dangerous routes into the U.S.

"This technology is killing them," said Cesar Ortigoza searches for migrants who vanished while trying to cross through the desert. “It’s pushing them to find their own death.” 
Meanwhile, the same thing is playing out on the opposite side of the Atlantic. As Coda’s Isobel Cockerell reported, the French and U.K. governments are pouring millions into the latest tech, all under the auspices of saving the lives of migrants trying to cross the perilous English Channel. But migrants aren’t deterred by the cameras or the drones. They’re still braving the frigid waters in small dinghies. And they’re still dying on the journey.

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The post Biggest surveillance investigations in 2021 appeared first on Coda Story.

Meanwhile, a narrative began to take shape in pro-Kremlin Russian media. The Ukrainians on the streets weren’t actually pro-democracy. They were neo-Nazis and members of an ultra-nationalist group called Right Sector. And also they were sponsored by the CIA. The conspiracy theory spread like wildfire on Russian television. The film director Oliver Stone repeated the claim. 

Figuring the CIA in a multi-actor conspiracy theory wasn’t a new tactic for that part of the world, but it proved to be particularly noxious this time around in fomenting opinions in Russia about Euromaidan. 

Scott Radnitz is a professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Revealing Schemes: the Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region. We sat down with him to talk about the role of conspiracy theories in modern politics.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Conspiracy theories are in vogue. Why are they such a useful political tool?

The reason that a lot of politicians use conspiracy theories is number one: many people believe them. They find that kind of rhetoric attractive because they see the world in conspiratorial ways. Or they are attracted to rhetoric that makes them feel like they're on the inside with the people who know what's going on and feel solidarity in the fact that everybody recognizes that they have a common enemy. In some ways, conspiracy theories are just a different, maybe more extreme form of what politicians typically do in their rhetoric anyway, which is to try to create coalitions to attract enough votes so they can win elections. Creating in-groups and out-groups, stoking emotion and fear — these are age old political tactics.

Your book largely focuses on Russia and the post-Soviet space. What are the main themes in political conspiracy theories in the region?

A conspiracy theory that is most prominent in Russia claims that the West or America wants to weaken, destroy or dismantle Russia as part of a broader geopolitical game. There are variations on how the U.S.,the West, the CIA or NATO accomplishes that. That’s one very large set of conspiracy claims, which should not come as news to anybody who's been following Russian politics for the last 20 years. 

Another theme is at the domestic level. It has to do with jockeying among politicians. That's mostly about creating narratives that make my political opponents look as bad as possible. It's a form of demonization and character assassination.

Then there are the fifth column claims where there's a domestic element and a foreign element. The conspiracy theory is that an insider is secretly working with outsiders in nefarious ways to overthrow the government, undermine the regime or destroy the nation. 

What stands out to you as the most important conspiracy theory in Putin's Russia? Is it that narrative about Western infiltration? 

Examples of the first kind happen on a daily basis if you just follow the narratives that come from the Kremlin. That is the overarching theme of the Putin era. And I think a subset of those claims is important for Russian politics and the decline of Russian democracy, which is that Russian insiders — opposition figures, activists, non-governmental organizations, liberals — they’re playing a role as a fifth column, somehow working with outsiders to bring in alien values or to work with the U.S., either as spies or infiltrators, to overthrow the government. Fifth column claims have paralleled and facilitated crackdowns on opposition to a greater or lesser degree throughout at least the second half of the Putin era. 

I always thought of these conspiracies about Western infiltration as a tool for stirring up nationalism and creating an outside enemy to coalesce against. But you also talk about how conspiracy theories can create in-groups and out-groups domestically, too. 

One thing I show in my book is that it's not simply a matter of the leaders of a country positioning themselves against other countries in order to control the nation. Often it's about politicians within a country competing against their domestic opponents. Conspiracy theories are a way of distinguishing oneself from one's political adversary and creating coalitions within the country. So domestic politics has a lot to do with it. There's been an assumption that the most notorious conspiracists are dictators who are already in control of a country and use conspiracy theories in order to maintain iron fisted rule by propagating these narratives to keep the entire population subdued. Political competition also produces incentives for conspiracy theories within the domestic political arena. 

In your book, you say conspiracy theories can be used as a sword and as a shield. What do you mean by that?

 Often, the people in power who are making conspiracy theories are feeling threatened at the moment. They're playing defense,and they feel a need to restore control. One of the ways in which they do that is rhetorically. When leaders are fighting a rearguard action, that's when they're using conspiracy theories as a shield to fend off these challenges. 

And conspiracy theories’ use as a sword is most visible when there's no imminent, prominent threat. But you still see conspiracy theories put out every day as a drumbeat on state media. It’s used offensively, where there's no clear threat, but the regime feels the need to keep laying the groundwork, probably because they assume that will come in handy. 

What are some examples that come to mind?

The same theory can be used for offensive and defensive purposes. What matters here is who is making the claim and the position they find themselves in when they're doing that. So what I'm doing in my book is situating this rhetoric in the broader view of what's happening politically in the country. 

Take the example of the fifth column narrative that the West is working with insiders to weaken Russia. On Russian political talk shows, this is just something that's assumed to be true. Some of the more prominent pundits who appear on Russian TV like Vladimir Zhirinovsky often claim it as common sense. That’s using the conspiracy theory as a sword. And that might not get a lot of attention because it fades into the background noise eventually. Zhirinovsky saying something crazy isn't news just like Trump by his second year saying something crazy or ridiculous or making a bald faced lie wasn't news. 

And then a defensive variant of that would occur during a heightened political drama like in the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine. Now, say, the head of the FSB [intelligence agency] in Russia or some adviser to former president Viktor Yanukovych would say that these protesters in the Euromaidan are not authentic. They're paid by the Obama administration or they're working with John McCain. Using what has been established as common sense now defensively or tactically in the moment to explain what's going on and to demonstrate that the people who are making these claims actually have more control than you might assume.  

Is there a difference between propaganda and conspiracy theories?  

Yes. They’re not the same thing. Propaganda is usually understood as political rhetoric, not necessarily anchored to the truth that's intended to push emotional buttons in order to change minds or persuade people to believe something. But that can come in many flavors. It can be conspiratorial. It could be simply false, but not a conspiracy theory. It could be positive, but false. Or positive, but highly exaggerated. The kind of rhetoric that you might see in North Korean state propaganda that Kim Jong Un wrestles bears and shoots down missiles with his pistol— it’s propaganda, but that's not conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories can also be used for purposes other than for propaganda. As we know, a lot of conspiracy theories don't come from the top. They come from regular people surmising what's happening in the world, reading Twitter, sharing ideas about vaccines. This doesn't become propaganda until the state starts appropriating it and then feeding it back out to the citizenry.

The post How conspiracies work in Russia appeared first on Coda Story.

The attack put ransomware on the map, but companies and individuals have been painfully slow to shore up their systems against similar assaults. Ransomware attacks increased by 93% in the first six months of 2021 as compared to the same time last year, according to the cybersecurity company CheckPoint. JBS USA, one of the largest meat suppliers in the US, paid an $11 million ransom after a breach forced five of its plants to temporarily halt operations in May. The Japanese tech giants Fujifilm and Toshiba have both been hit this year. Even the Houston Rockets, an NBA basketball team, was a target.

While the motivations behind WannaCry and many similar ransomware attacks appear to be financial, ransomware has the potential to become a powerful geopolitical tool. We spoke with Jenny Jun, non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative about how ransomware can be used coercively against adversaries and hostile governments.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: Let’s look into the history of ransomware. From what I know, it emerged a long time ago, demanding small amounts of money — typically less than $500 — from individuals. Now, we’re seeing massive attacks on companies and governments, asking for millions.

Jenny Jun: The first case of ransomware ever recorded was in 1989. It was basically some guy who spread this virus on a floppy disk. It wasn't really for money. He was interested in this novel thing. I think he ended up donating all the proceeds to some foundation or other. That's how it first started. Then people forgot about it. Then in 1996, some computer scientists — Adam Young and Moti Yung —wrote an influential paper on how to use encryption coercively. That's when it resurfaced again. That idea, coupled with the rise of cryptocurrency, which makes it really easy for criminals to get the money without risking their capture or revealing their identity, facilitated its evolution into an organized criminal enterprise.

In the early 2010s you started to see some of the early variants of ransomware, the rudimentary stuff. It was like spam. You spray and pray, and hope that at least one person will click on it. The ransom demand was not tailored to you specifically. They set what they thought was the average price that any individual would be willing to pay. Anyone who was willing to pay about $300, they paid and got their decryption key. For a long time, that was the business model. It wasn't really making a lot of money. It was just nickels and dimes.

In 2016 to 2017, things started to change. These criminal groups were realizing that, usually, people would rather pay a couple of hundred bucks to instantly get their data back and their hardware unlocked than to brute force their way through the encryption. Once they realized that, they started going for individuals or enterprises who would be willing to pay more. That's when we started to see a shift towards targeted ransomware, also called “big game hunting.” That was a whole different game.

So, this assumes that the fundamental goal is often financial. What about nation states? Why would a country be interested in conducting ransomware attacks?

So far, here are two cases where a nation state was involved in ransomware. The most famous is North Korea’s WannaCry. North Korea is famous for using cyber attacks to generate money. They’ve been doing illicit trade, they've been selling illegal weapons all over the world. They're making counterfeit currency. So, this is like an extension of that. They're dabbling in cybercrime, they're stealing money from banks, they're hacking cryptocurrency exchanges. 

WannaCry was a nickels and dimes ransomware attack. It's a worm-based ransomware, so it spreads from network to network. It self-propagates. The goal was to try to infect as many systems as possible. Per system infected, it asked for $300. The goal was presumably to make cash. 

But what if they don't have a financial interest? Why are they using ransomware? There are two examples here. One is Russia. In 2017, hackers from there used a ransomware worm called NotPetya, which worked like WannaCry and encrypted a lot of systems mainly in Ukraine, but elsewhere too. It locked up a lot of critical infrastructure. There, the goal was pure disruption. They weren't really interested in getting anything in return.

Another example is Iran, which has been using ransomware called Pay2Key against Israel since early last year. For context, Iran and Israel have been fighting a shadow war, assassinating nuclear scientists, blowing up ships. Pay2Key was used as one of the means to get back at Israel. It is suspected that it wasn't really used for financial purposes, but for disruptive ones.

Is “ransomware as a geopolitical tool” the general direction that you’re seeing? 

That's one of my main predictions. I would go even further and say that, yes, ransomware can be used as a quasi-wiper attack, which basically fries computer systems. But it can go further, because the encryption is not totally destructive. It’s reversible and you can ask for something in return. There's no rule saying that it has to be bitcoin or cash. 

For example, Iran is under sanctions, and a lot of U.S. allies hold Iranian financial assets frozen in their country's banks. South Korea has a lot of frozen Iranian oil funds. So, early this year, Iran hijacked a South Korean oil tanker off the Strait of Hormuz. They said, “We're gonna hold the ship and crew hostage, but, we'll let them go if you unfreeze some of that money that you're holding in your banks.” They ended up doing a swap. Iran released the crew and South Korea unfroze some of Iran’s assets. Then Iran returned the ship and got paid some more. 

Ransomware can be used in that way. That's my prediction for the next five to 10 years, that ransomware will be used coercively — as a bargaining tool.

So, rather than being restricted to espionage and information gathering, we’re going to start to see hacking as a tool of state coercion? Which states do you think will be first to adopt it? 

I think so. I think it will be more useful in Iran and North Korea than in, say, Russia. I say that because Iran and North Korea don't have much to lose. Victims can always retaliate and, if you think about a state like Russia, their grids, their businesses and their economy are vulnerable. Let's say Russia encrypted a significant U.S. target and issued serious geopolitical demands —  the U.S. is not going to just say, “OK, we'll do that.” It’s going to also encrypt targets in Russia. We're just going to have the usual hostage situation. Attacking North Korea will cause fewer problems, because there’s less at stake there. 

Why is ransomware a powerful tool for coercion, as opposed to other kinds of cyber attacks, like wiper attacks, which essentially erase all the data?

For a long time, scholars and policymakers, government officials have been saying that we can't really use cyber tools for coercion. The reason why they said that is that when you're trying to use a tool coercively, you have to say “I want a certain thing in return,” and also demonstrate that you have the capability to inflict harm if they don’t listen.  

A lot of cyber operations rely on deception and surprise. That makes coercion really awkward, because for you to convey that you want something in return, you have to let them know that you're in their network. Then the other side will say, “Well, screw you, I'm just gonna unplug my computer from the network, or mitigate that vulnerability.” 

Then ransomware comes along, which is extremely effective at coercing victims and extorting money. Theory tells me that cyber attacks are ineffective for coercion, and yet they’re coercing the hell out of everyone. 

So, I’ve been thinking about ransomware and its similarities to disinformation campaigns. They’re both low-cost, high-impact. And disinformation is becoming more accessible— disinformation for hire is now a reality. Isa the same true for ransomware? 

There's a whole industry in the cyber-criminal world where they're offering ransomware as a service. You and I, who know nothing about coding and nothing about how the encryption algorithm works under the hood, can go to the dark web and purchase ransomware. You pay $100 or something — it depends on the company — and then they give it to you. It’s a point-and-click system where you don't code a single thing. There is very little barrier of entry. 

That means that it’s a lot cheaper for poorer, isolated states, like North Korea, than waging actual war. You can do a lot of damage without firing a single shot. Are we going to see more states making that kind of calculation?

I do a little bit of digging on North Korea's cyber strategy. The reason that they got into it is that it’s a good tool to advance their national strategy. For example, they wanted to influence South Korea and change its policy in ways that benefit them. But, because of the deterrence structures that exist between the two countries, it's very hard to do that with conventional forces. I think cyber attacks emerged as a loophole in that deterrence framework. There are no set red lines. There’s a fuzziness and ambiguity around how we respond to a cyber attack, as opposed to artillery fire. 

However, it is also empirically true that overall, states have used cyber capabilities overwhelmingly for espionage rather than as a strategic weapon. In reality, planning a cyber operation takes considerable time and resources, and systems must be compromised well in advance in order to create effects when you want to. The use of these capabilities must also serve some political or military purpose beyond simple destruction, and for aforementioned reasons it was relatively difficult to translate cyber power alone into such strategic victories. I think it’s more realistic to think that cyber capabilities would be used in tandem with existing conventional capabilities in a future conflict, rather than by itself.

Institutional victims, like hospitals or companies, aren’t concerned about calling out whoever carried out the attack, so much as they just want their data back so they can get back to business, right?

This used to be the culture, but I think it’s changing after high-profile ransomware events this year like Colonial and Kaseya. Government agencies are encouraging victims to report ransomware incidents, and there are even several bills in Congress right now to mandate such reporting. The U.S. government is using these reports to investigate and actively go after ransomware gangs such as REvil and intermediary money launderers. 

Unlike the typical cyber attribution problem, the problem isn’t necessarily coming from attributing the identity of the attackers - often the ransomware operators make their brand clear in the ransom note. The problem is that ransomware victims often do not want to disclose that they have been attacked and/or that they have paid. There is a trust issue that needs to be managed between these victims and federal agencies who handle this information, and making the reporting process clear and easy. 

Right, you could flip it and incentivize stronger cybersecurity, training, updated software and the backing up of data.

The critical flaw of ransomware is that, if you have a shadow copy of everything, then they can't really coerce you. Invest in real-time, offline backup technology. There's cloud technology — use that to back up your stuff. Migrate your legacy system. Subsidize the adoption of such technologies and recovery processes, or incorporate such features in cyber insurance underwriting. Update everything. It’s not rocket science.

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The post Ransomware could soon be about more than just money appeared first on Coda Story.

“Everything had been encrypted,” said Sice. “All the children’s records, staff records, all the teaching and learning, all the data, all the finances, internet. Everything.” 

Lanesend Primary, which serves roughly 400 students, aged four to 11 years old, had experienced IT problems the day before. Staff couldn’t access their emails or remotely log into the school’s systems. Sice was aware of the issues, but attributed them to routine maintenance. 

“I really, really hadn’t thought that it would be a cyber attack,” she said.

Lanesend was not the main target. The Isle of Wight Education Federation (IWEF), a multi-academy trust of three secondary schools, serving a total of over 2,000 students, provides technical support and data storage for Lanesend and two other primary schools on the island. A week into the summer holiday, its systems and those of the six schools for which it is responsible were crippled by hackers. 

To regain access to them, a ransom of more than $1 million was demanded from IWEF. Payment was to be made in bitcoin, as has become common in similar attacks, but IWEF refused to comply. Now, it faces massive administrative disruption and thousands of dollars’ worth of bills to recover.

A worsening trend

In recent years, education has become one of the sectors most frequently subjected to ransomware attacks. According to one British independent authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the number launched against U.K. universities and schools increased by 148% between 2019 and 2020. 
In the U.S., however, the figures are even more stark. Attacks on schools from kindergarten through to 12th grade increased by 860% in 2019 — a record high. In July that year, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency after three school districts were taken offline, just weeks before students were set to return from summer vacation. The number of incidents involving educational institutions decreased slightly in 2020, but the targets have become much bigger, including large school districts with higher budgets. In total 1.36 million American students were potentially affected last year alone.

The problem has become so bad that the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center have warned schools about a growing number of attacks that have exploited increased cybersecurity weaknesses connected to remote learning during the pandemic. 

According to Doug Levin, founder of the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, which helps schools improve cybersecurity and conducts an annual study of ransomware attacks in the U.S., hackers are also demanding more money.   

Levin first started tracking the phenomenon in 2015. “The extortion demands for schools at the time were $5,000, $10,000, $25,000,” he said. “It’s not unheard of for those ransomware demands to be $1 million or more now. That’s a dramatic change.” 

After a hack in March, the Harris Federation, which runs 50 primary and secondary schools in London, received a ransom request for $4 million. But that was nothing compared to the demand issued to Broward County Public Schools of Florida in March, which came in at a whopping $40 million. The district refused to pay. 

The ransom faced by IWEF was nowhere near that high, but it was still far beyond the organization’s means. “They asked for an amount that we couldn’t afford,” said executive headteacher Matthew Parr-Burman. “It was an easy decision, because it was like. ‘Well, this is a stupid amount.” 

So, why schools?

Educational institutions can be a lucrative option for hackers — especially in parts of the U.S., where high property taxes contribute to big budgets, explained Levin. 

As for the $40 million demand received by Broward County Public Schools, the district’s annual revenue sits at $4 billion. While that figure is not actually enough to meet the needs of the sixth largest school district in the United States, it’s still enough to be very attractive to cyber-criminals. 

Schools are also a relatively soft target. Unlike major corporations, educational institutions rarely employ cybersecurity experts and their IT teams are often spread thin, tasked with both keeping their networks safe and more routine technical needs. 

Many schools use older versions of software, with unpatched vulnerabilities, and frequently fail to put in place basic security measures. The Isle of Wight Education Federation, for example, had not enabled two-step authentication.

“Everything has been run for the convenience of the teacher, which is obviously quite convenient for a hacker too,” Parr-Burman explained. 

That changed after the ransomware attack. Now, IWEF is one of many around the world directing significant resources towards the strengthening of its cybersecurity. 

“The fact of the matter is that, in the last five or so years, school districts have flipped from where technology is a nice thing to have to it being really integral to their operations, not just in the classroom but in the back office,” said Levin. 

He went on to explain that everything from locks on doors to telephone systems and school bus routing is now controlled and organized by computers. The growing reliance on technology seen during the pandemic could leave schools even more exposed.

According to Levin, distance learning could “increase the threat profile of school districts, because now you have people working on their personal networks and personal devices.” It is also likely that disruptions will be felt more widely in education systems with remote learning at their core. In September, a ransomware attack forced Howard University in Washington, D.C. to cancel all of its online classes. 

Like hospitals — another prime target for ransomware — schools cannot afford to be offline for long. This means that the educational sector is more likely to pay out than other industries. In a survey of IT decision makers at nearly 500 schools around the world, conducted by the British security software company Sophos, 35% of those targeted by ransomware paid off the hackers. 

But, for cybercriminals, ransoms are not the only potential source of revenue. In addition to demanding fees to decrypt data, they are stealing information and threatening to leak it online if they are not paid. 

“On the dark web, identity information for minors and young children is actually more valuable,” explained Levin. “That is because they have a fresh credit record that they can start to abuse and that no one is monitoring.”

So far, Parr-Burman doesn’t believe that any student or staff data was stolen from the Isle of Wight Education Federation, but it has happened to other schools. When Toledo Public Schools in Ohio was targeted by hackers in September 2020, the district refused to pay. Data was dumped on the dark web, including the addresses and social security numbers of current and former students. Months later, one parent was notified that someone had tried to open a credit card in the name of his elementary-school-aged son.

Wide-ranging disruption

As soon as Caroline Sice got the call informing her about the ransomware attack on Lanesend Primary, she snapped into problem-solving mode. She telephoned the school’s chair of trustees, business manager and leadership team to set up a meeting. She then sent an email to teachers, letting them know that she was on the case. 

For a moment, it felt like the matter was under control. But, as the scale of the problem became clearer, she started to lose hope.

“Over the weekend, it got heavier and heavier and heavier,” she said. “Suddenly, it begins to dawn on you that you’ve got nothing. Nothing. All the lesson plans. Oh my goodness, how are the teachers going to respond? This is years and years of their work, years of learning. The more you thought of it, the bigger and bigger it grew.”

The hackers also encrypted the backups of all of the data for Lanesend Primary and the five other schools, which meant the easiest way to resolve the problem was off the table. Staff would have to recreate all of the schools’ records from scratch. Then the Isle of Wight Education Federation informed Sice that it would no longer provide data storage or technical support to the primary schools including Lanesend after October 31. On top of recovering from the ransomware attack, Sice now has to find a new place to host all of her school’s information. 

Ultimately, Parr-Burman, Sice and the headteachers of the other affected schools made the decision to delay the start of classes by three days, to allow staff time to regroup and bring students back safely amid the pandemic. For the first six weeks of school, everything was done on paper. 

Kids are now back at their desks, but the upheaval caused by the attack is far from over. Some of the problems have been minor, like supplies not being delivered because schools could not pay bills after losing all of their financial information. Other things were unexpected. Hackers encrypted access to the digitized bells in one of the secondary school’s buildings, so for the first three weeks of classes, they rang at random intervals. Because the schools lost all their contact lists and access to email, the IWEF couldn’t inform parents or staff that the systems were down and the start of term would be delayed, so Parr-Burman put out a notice in the local paper. 

Some of the lost data was more important and more laborious to reassemble. The medical information of staff and students, financial records, payroll details, staff background checks — all of it was gone and none of it has been decrypted. 

On top of all the administrative challenges created by the ransomware attack, Caroline Sice is concerned teachers who lost lesson plans that they had devised will be forced to turn to a more rote curriculum.

“We’re a very creative school,” she said. “We learn from what interests the children. So every year is different. I’m worried that actually what they’ll now pull on is just whatever they can get rather than it being what was really made for the children.” 

Lanesend has about a dozen students with special needs, who have individual education, health and care plans, a government program to identify a child’s needs and ensure that they are met. It took three weeks, even with two people working on it, to recreate the learning plans for each of those students.

IWEF is facing high costs, as well. To prevent a future attack, the federation will now back up the secondary schools’ data, apart from the three primary schools, on a daily basis and store it separately so it can't be encrypted during another attack. This will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.  

Overall, Parr-Burman estimates the ransomware attack will cost IWEF up to $160,000, plus an additional $53,000 each year for increased security. 

Rebuilding databases, lesson plans and records will take hundreds of hours, on top of staff’s other responsibilities. The emotional toll is weighing on Sice and the team at Lanesend Primary. The school’s head of finance resigned recently, owing to stress. Sice says that she is trying to maintain a brave face for the children, but that she has trouble sleeping at night.   

“As head teacher, I’ve done some pretty tough things. This is the toughest. And it’s come on the back of Covid,” she said. “It’s challenging because it’s out of my control. It’s out of my expertise. And I’m relying on other people to try and get it back together. I would say it’s bent me towards breaking.” 

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The post Ransomware attackers are going after schools appeared first on Coda Story.

Witness, a global organization dedicated to training and assisting activists to use video in the defense of human rights, was founded in the wake of the Rodney King case. Now, the group is teaming up with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), which supports the creation of open-source software and protocols for decentralized data storage. 

We sat down with Sam Gregory, program director at Witness, to talk about ways to build a digital record of human rights violations that is resilient to internet shutdowns, deepfakes and the erasure of content that all too often results from overzealous platform moderation policies. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Coda Story: Technology has evolved significantly since the Rodney King camcorder footage. Often, we think that this rapid progress has made it easier to document the world around us and provided smarter, better and faster tools for journalists and activists. I’m curious what new challenges there have been. 

Sam Gregory: The past 30 years have taught us that technology changes, but human rights issues don’t. The underlying questions about how you enable more people to document abuses in ways that are safe, ethical and effective remain the same. 

About a decade ago, we noticed that we were helping people create trustworthy content that protected the truth, but an increasing amount of falsehoods, lies and manipulations of video also started to emerge. We saw that particularly in the Syrian conflict where footage of atrocities was weaponized to fit specific and often conflicting narratives. Footage is easy to record, but it's also easy to ignore and easy for it to lead to harm. 

As it becomes easier for more and more people to post video online, including that of rights abuses, has verifying such material become harder? 

About a decade ago, we started to see new challenges to the integrity of video. For instance, people would question the stories that clips were telling and say, “That wasn't filmed in that place, it was filmed in this place.” So, we partnered with an organization called The Guardian Project to start building tools like ProofMode, which adds rich metadata to videos and photographs and cryptographically signs that piece of media to increase verifiability, show if an image has been changed and provide a chain of custody. 

The human rights community was really early in this because we saw the need. It’s vital that we show evidence of war crimes or police violence and show when and where it’s happening. We have been doing that by giving signals of trustworthiness for specific pieces of media, based on what you can see in the image and the additional data attached to it. The idea behind authenticity infrastructure is to provide tools that allow people to choose better opt-in data to attach to their media, which will help the viewer understand where it came from and how it was made. 

Many cameras and phones will add location data or dates to the metadata by default. But  do these identifiers potentially pose a risk to people filming and distributing it? How do you authenticate a video while protecting privacy and anonymity for people in vulnerable situations? 

We could see right from the start that if you can better understand the provenance of videos and images, that's great for the person trying to verify them, but that it also raises potential privacy risks for the person who shot them. We saw the potential for governments to weaponize these technologies. Many citizen journalists who work with us can't add all that extra data, and you don't want them to be excluded just because they haven’t used a specific technology. It's important that these tools be opt-in, that they aim to offer signals of trustworthiness, rather than absolute confirmation of truth, and that you don't force people to use them when they don't want to or can't. 

We need to have a way for images and video to still be trusted, even if you do things like blur out a face to protect a person’s privacy. People also need to be able to make choices about how much information they disclose, such as the location it was shot in. Journalists and human rights defenders live in a real-world context where that data poses real risks. 

How has the rise of deepfakes created new challenges for people documenting human rights abuses?  

Deepfakes make it easier to dismiss footage of critical events. The “Infopocalypse, the world is collapsing, you can't believe anything you see,” rhetoric that we’ve all heard in recent years has been deeply harmful. Deepfakes have gotten easier to make. However, they're still not prevalent in the really sophisticated way that I think many people believe they are. 

There’s what we call the “liar's dividend,” which is the ability to easily dismiss something true as a deepfake. We've seen this in some high-profile cases recently. Witness was involved in a case in Myanmar, involving the former chief minister of Yangon. A video was released by the military government in March this year, in which he appears to accuse Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader before the February 2021 coup, of corruption. In the video, he looks very static, his mouth looks out of sync and he sounds unlike his normal self. People saw this and were like, “It’s a deepfake.” 

They put it through an online deepfake detector, which came back saying 95% likely a deepfake. The news spread really quickly after that. The narrative was that Myanmar’s military was able to manipulate the lips of this political prisoner to make him say stuff he would never say. But, it turns out that the footage wasn’t a deepfake at all. It was most likely a forced confession. Are the underlying claims true? We don’t know, there’s no legitimate rule of law in Myanmar at the moment, and the video was released by the military government. The problem was that the narrative spread so quickly on Twitter that this was a deepfake created by the government, and there was no expertise to counter that. 

We’re seeing this happen towards video evidence globally. Increasingly, people are just saying, “You can’t believe anything.” We need to be investing in equity of access to tools that authenticate videos and debunk fakes, so they are available broadly.

Let’s talk about the decentralized web. It’s basically the opposite of the internet infrastructure we have now, which is largely dependent on large platforms and service providers. With the support from FFDW, Witness is exploring how it can be used to build an online digital record of human rights abuses. Tell us about that. 

The decentralized web can potentially support a similarly decentralized approach to controlling and managing content; a more robust way to preserve the integrity of that content over time and to verify it. And it can provide a way for human rights communities around the world to set governance rules specific to them.  

We're increasingly seeing the challenges of the centralized web in terms of government-enforced internet shutdowns in repressive states, takedown requests and the forced removal of content. Also, when you put content on YouTube, you’re putting it in a very vulnerable spot anyway. A couple of years ago, the Syrian human rights group Mnemonic saw hundreds of thousands of videos of the Syrian conflict disappear overnight, because of a change in YouTube’s moderation algorithm. Now, you have a real dependence on commercial platforms, for which human rights issues are not a primary business concern. Their moderation decisions really affect the ability of human rights defenders to leverage and control the footage they shoot.

The decentralized web better allows for that. It’s decentralized, it’s robust, it's verifiable, it's less subject to decisions made by social media giants. So, we’re trying to make sure that people in that community are paying attention to the needs of people who are not in Silicon Valley and are thinking about these global issues and grappling with some of the tensions we see. For example, having immutable records is a powerful way to resist censorship and prove the origins of media, but sometimes people do need to delete media that drives hate or violence or compromises privacy. 

With the support of FFDW, we’re exploring how the decentralized web can power our work in supporting activists globally, preserving videos of human rights abuses and sharing best practices for archiving evidence.

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However, the technology has attracted significant criticism, citing biases inherent to its algorithms and alleging that its use contributes to the over-policing of marginalized communities. 

Now, following a number of high-profile examples, including the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the conversation is turning to how the same methods can be used to combat police brutality.

Enter Future Wake, an interactive website that has received the Mozilla 2021 Creative Media Award. The project uses artificial intelligence to analyze data on fatal police encounters in the U.S. and predict future incidents. It then creates computer-generated avatars to tell the stories of each composite victim.

We sat down with two of its creators — Oz, based in New York, and Tim in the Netherlands — to talk about the motivations behind their work. Both asked to be referred to by their given names only.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about Future Wake. What was your goal with this project?

Oz: Future Wake focuses on using the principles of predictive policing to predict when the next fatal encounter with the police will occur. The tactics of predictive policing and the way it’s implemented are relatively unknown. Most of the time, whenever we mention it, people bring up “Minority Report.” They only have a fictionalized understanding of the technology. A lot of people don't realize that it's actually in their own cities. So, in order to bring attention to it, we thought about just flipping its application.

When someone enters the website, what do they see?

Tim: At first, you see a warning. We are very much aware of trauma for people who've lived through police violence. You don't see any data immediately. You see the five faces. I thought it was the most important thing to show that we're talking about humans here, not numbers. 

Oz: Each face is a computer-generated image of the next victim from one of the five most populous cities in the U.S. — Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix. Below each victim, you see a countdown that refers to the moment we predict that they're going to die. The people are animated to bring this awareness that they are still alive. Once the countdown ends, that will be the end of their lives. We want to breathe life into the people we predicted. 

Tim: When you click on a person, you enter their space. We predicted the location of the fatal encounter with police. We have a Google Streetview in the background, and it's like you're having a call with them. Then this person tells the story of their own demise. 

The project has two elements. You ran data about fatal encounters with police in the U.S. through predictive algorithms to determine the details of future victims. Then you use deepfake technology to create avatars that represent them. Why did you feel like you needed both? 

Oz: Our data set starts from 2000 until now. We wanted to highlight these recurring patterns of police brutality in the U.S and to hone in on the fact that a prediction still has consequences for a human being. 

Tell us about the databases you worked with. 

Oz: We used two main ones, called Fatal Encounters and Mapping Police Violence. These are citizen-initiated projects that try to capture every fatal encounter with police officers in the U.S. We did try to find police databases. The FBI has one that it started in 2018, but they're mainly relying on self-reported outcomes from police agencies. It’s actually under-representative of what's going on. We put that data through algorithms to predict who — which consists of the gender and ethnicity of the victim — where and when the next fatal encounter would occur.

Each potential victim has a backstory that describes the circumstances in which they were killed. When you click on their face, they tell their story. You used AI text-generation software to do this, right?

Oz: In the databases we used, there were two or three sentences detailing if it was a car chase, if somebody was wielding a weapon or how they were shot. We use this algorithm called GPT-2 to learn the aesthetic of all of these media reports. GTP-2 would then generate future police-related media reports. We then edited the text slightly, to make it in the future tense and the first person.

Why did you use the future tense?

Oz: I see more talk about the horrific events that happened to victims of police brutality after the fact. Occasionally, there are little bubbles of conversation about how we can prevent this in the future. By predicting future victims and showing that this is an ongoing issue, we're asking, ”How can we protect this person from being a future victim?”

Let’s talk about the countdown clock…

Oz: In traditional predictive policing, they use spatial-temporal models to predict where and when a crime will occur. We replicate that. We want to say that this person is going to die at this specific moment. I used a time series algorithm to predict recurring police-related fatal encounters, and was able to predict an estimated day of when someone would die. The clock is supposed to generate a sense of urgency. 

Was there anything that surprised you in the data?

Oz: We looked at the average time between each fatal encounter for each city and for each demographic. It was pretty creepy. Based on the data that we had, in Chicago, Black males had the shortest time in between each incident. It was an average of 34 days. It was quite shocking. Minorities are overrepresented in the database, but I was still surprised by the fact that everyone is represented.

The post Future Wake: the AI art project that predicts police violence appeared first on Coda Story.

Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has referred to himself as “Europe’s last dictator.” However, over the past 18 months, historic demonstrations have rocked the country. Beginning in the lead-up to the August 2020 presidential election, the protest movement reached a peak when Lukashenko won a sixth term in office with a landslide 80% of the vote. Numerous countries and international bodies, including the United States and the European Union, refused to accept the result, alleging widespread fraud and repression.

The Belarusian regime launched a swift crackdown on opposition voices. Over the past year, more than 35,000 people have been arbitrarily detained. Similar filmed confessions have provided a chilling illustration of the state’s zero-tolerance policy on dissent.

This is not the first time such footage has appeared as a YouTube ad. On May 23, a plane carrying the Belarusian blogger Roman Protasevich from Athens to Vilnius was diverted to Minsk after a report of explosives on board. Protasevich was promptly arrested and, the next day, filmed stating that he instigated anti-government protests. The video, in which the 26-year-old appeared dazed and distressed, was broadcast on Belarusian state TV. 

Immediately, the footage appeared on YouTube as an ad. A similar video of his girlfriend Sofia Sapega was also promoted on the platform. According to screenshots, both appear to direct viewers to the Zheltye Slivy Telegram channel. The online news organization Rest of World reported that the ads appeared to have been paid for by a pro-government YouTube channel.

YouTube promptly removed the ads of Protasevich and Sapega, but in the months since, similar footage of other young Belarusians has appeared on the platform, repurposed as advertisements, a number of times. So, why does this keep happening and what does YouTube plan to do about it? 

From to rare free space to tool for oppression 

According the Belarusian journalist and Atlantic Council fellow Hanna Liubakova, YouTube ads provide Lukashenko’s government with a powerful tool to control the narrative surrounding the protests. 

“All media in Belarus is either banned or pushed out. YouTube is one of those services where media is actually able to publish, and that’s how many people in the regions may get access to independent information,” she said.  

The ads can also be viewed as an attempt to intimidate opposition voices and a show of strength by the regime. By allowing them to be shown on the platform, YouTube is “legitimizing the regime’s actions,” Liubakova added. 

How does this keep happening?

It is not clear how content of this nature continues to make it through YouTube’s approval process. The review system, which is run by Google, the platform’s parent company, should flag material that violates its terms of service, including  “bullying or intimidation of an individual or group.”

“I think that there was just a lack of moderation,”Liubakova said. “Or they just closed their eyes and ignored the fact that these ads are related to the regime and security forces.” 

According to Anastasiya Zhyrmont of the global digital rights organization Access Now, YouTube needs to be much more transparent and consistent as to what does and does not violate its policies. If Protasevich’s purported confession video was determined to violate the platform’s guidelines, she said, “others should be considered the same.”

What does YouTube have to say?

“YouTube has always had strict policies around the type of content that is allowed to serve as ads on our platform. We quickly remove any ads that violate these policies,” said a company spokesperson in response to questions for this story. According to Google, YouTube has taken action against the ad featuring Dalivelia, according to its inappropriate content policies.

The post YouTube is still showing propagandist ads featuring detained Belarusians appeared first on Coda Story.

Twitter’s headquarters are a 15-minute walk away, the cloud-based software giant Salesforce is 20 minutes in the opposite direction. But right here — in the epicenter of a chronic housing crisis, recently exacerbated by high tech industry salaries — you would barely be able to guess that this city is home to some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. According to the latest count in 2019, there are around 8,035 people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, a per capita rate comparable to much larger cities like New York.

For the thousands experiencing homelessness in the Tenderloin, their chance of getting off the streets comes down to a single number, generated by an algorithm. It is meant to assess each person’s unique vulnerabilities and allocate assistance accordingly. But now, even the designers of such systems say that, far from solving the problem of homelessness in the United States, these algorithms are used by local governments to deny assistance to large numbers of people in need.

In 2013, Iain De Jong and his colleagues at OrgCode, a consulting firm specializing in issues relevant to the homeless, created the Vulnerability Index — Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool, a scoring algorithm to help address America’s homelessness crisis. They were so successful that versions were adopted by authorities in at least 40 states. Other local governments, like San Francisco, have followed suit and created their own similar tools. Eight years later, De Jong and OrgCode say that cities are misusing their system — and that this has to stop. 

VI-SPDAT was meant to help local social service providers assess what type of housing assistance might best suit a homeless person’s needs. Instead, resource-strapped cities are relying solely on tools such as VI-SPDAT to make a binary choice: who gets housing and who doesn’t. 

“One of the gross misunderstandings and misuses of the tool was making housing decisions based upon the outputs of it,” De Jong told me. “It was never designed to do that.”  In December, OrgCode announced that it would begin phasing out VI-SPDAT and will no longer provide support for cities using the most common version of it. 

But it might be too late. The tool was rolled out one year after the Department of Housing and Urban Development required all cities receiving federal funding for programs that house people who are homeless to adopt centralized assessment processes known as “coordinated entry systems," built on tools such as VI-SPDAT, to allocate accommodation. 

Today, VI-SPDAT offers a cautionary tale of how an algorithm meant to help people resolve a thorny societal dilemma replaced human decision making entirely, with devastating effects for its intended beneficiaries. Yet, it is not the classic story of viewing a complex human crisis through a reductive tech-bro lens. Instead, it is an example of the wilful misuse of a well-intentioned tool by city administers, who have turned to such systems to deflect attention from a persistent and multi-layered problem, rather than attempting to marshal the resources and political will to solve it.

VI-SPDAT grew out of a collaboration between OrgCode and Common Ground, a national organization working to house homeless people. The system generates a vulnerability score out of 17 based on a set of questions about mental health, physical health and risk factors for chronic homelessness, with the aim of aiding case managers to triage people to appropriate resources.

“It was intended to try and help frontline staff better understand, across multiple dimensions, what people's vulnerabilities were, what their risks to housing stability were, so that you can work with the individual to guide a plan of support,” said De Jong, explaining that the score was not meant to be the ultimate criteria for deciding whether or not a person should receive housing assistance. 

But that, unfortunately, is exactly what happened. City administrators simply ignored the fact that VI-SPDAT was intended to provide a starting point for offering assistance and facilitating further conversations between homeless individuals and case workers.

“People just skipped over that step,” he said. “We even heard things like, ‘Well, we just don't have time,’ or, ‘It's inconvenient,” or, ‘Following up with people to get that sort of information is hard work and the survey isn't.’”

Prior to the widespread adoption of coordinated entry systems, the process of providing housing for homeless people was built on relationships between case workers and the individuals in question. Social workers were supposed to develop an understanding of their clients’ needs and assist them accordingly. 

Coordinated entry replaced individualized case management with a standardized system that is — depending on where you stand or who you talk to — either objective and less prone to favoritism, or cold, rigid and brutally mechanical.

“The goal of coordinated entry is to promote equity, and to ensure everyone has the equal ability to access resources,” wrote Denny Machuca-Grebe, the public information officer for the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) in San Francisco. 

Service providers working with people experiencing homelessness say that deemphasizing human relationships has created an unbending and soulless system that actively impedes the provision of individualized help. Tools such as VI-SPDAT or San Francisco’s similar Primary Assessment algorithm, critics say, have become a way to quickly eliminate people from housing eligibility under the guise of fairness and efficiency.

“You can propose a solution to meet the scale of the problem. Or you can shrink the problem to meet the available solution,” said Joe Wilson, the executive director of Hospitality House, a community-based organization in the Tenderloin that provides services for people experiencing homelessness and runs a shelter. “Coordinated entry reduces the scale of the problem.”

The reality is there simply isn’t enough housing. As of February, 225 of the roughly 7,755 supportive housing units allocated for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco were vacant and ready for occupancy, according to reporting by the San Francisco Public Press. While over 10,800 people lived in permanent supportive housing as of June of last year, 5,180 people are sleeping on the streets and another 2,855 are living in cars, on couches or in temporary shelters, according to the latest count in 2019.

Wilson, who was homeless in San Francisco himself in the early 1980s, has been a vocal critic of coordinated entry since its launch. “It’s designed not to help people get in, but to keep them out,” he said. 

“I think we went from one extreme to the other,” De Jong said. “We went from a system of care that had really come down to luck, self-advocacy or first come, first served, in terms of how people got housing, to a very hands-off numeric-based approach that was very dehumanizing, in which people were not, in my opinion, always seen as people with potential, strengths and resiliency. They were resigned to a number on a waiting list. And that was just overwhelmingly disheartening.” 

Across the park from San Francisco City Hall, a few blocks south of the Tenderloin, rows of tents are hidden behind a concrete barricade. It’s one of half a dozen city-sanctioned areas with 24/7 security and access to food, water and sanitation. These “safe sleep” sites are the city’s latest experiment in controlling sprawling sidewalk encampments and a strategy to limit the spread of Covid-19 among the homeless population. But, for many, permanent housing remains an unattainable dream.

Primary Assessment, the city’s scoring tool, was created by the local government with community input, but it functions in a similar way to VI-SPDAT. Its questions are phrased and weighted differently, but the fundamental principle of an algorithm assessing vulnerability is exactly the same.

If a person’s score meets or exceeds a certain threshold, they enter the queue to be allocated a housing placement. If their score is too low, they are put into what is known as “problem-solving status,” to be matched with programs that provide assistance other than permanent housing. 

The questions asked of applicants are deeply personal: information on drug or alcohol use, mental health issues, developmental disorders and experiences with sexual assault or domestic abuse. Single adults and people aged 18 to 24 are asked if they have visited detox centers or called into suicide hotlines, or if they have traded sex for a place to sleep.

“You're not my therapist. You don't need to know how many times I've been sexually assaulted in my life,” said Roxie, who had been homeless for most of the past four years, before they were finally housed in a subsidized unit. “I hate the fact that the coordinated entry system is based on how traumatizing your life has been, essentially.” 

Roxie is based in San Francisco, but has traveled the country from Nashville to St. Louis. They have been through the Primary Assessment process on four occasions, and each time, it reopened old wounds. 

"The Department is transparent and respectful about the reality of trauma for the people we serve, and we strive to minimize such impacts through training and standardization across the Homelessness Response System," Deborah Bouck, communications lead at HSH, wrote in response to questions for this article. 

Applicants are advised that they don’t need to go into detail during the assessment, but not answering a question can adversely affect their score, which leads to people like Roxie feeling compelled to share far more than they are comfortable with. 

Xander, whose mother was homeless and grandmother lived in supportive housing, has taken the assessment twice and experienced panic attacks both times. 

“It really sucks trying to bring up these topics,” Xander said. “When I did my housing assessment, I was fresh out of an abusive situation with my family, so it was all raw. When I tried talking about it, I'm like, `Hey, can we skip this question?’”

Xander walked out without finishing their first assessment or getting a score and was forced to return to a bad situation with their family.

“Stepping back from the complex system and how it all works, fundamentally, that is a really intense thing to ask anyone to do, to offer up even a piece of their vulnerability to somebody,” said Kenn Sutto, who conducts Primary Assessments at the Homeless Youth Alliance, a grassroots harm reduction coalition which is contracted by the city to serve as an access point for young people experiencing homelessness. Because these access points are contracted by the city, they are required to use the Primary Assessment. People have told Sutto that the coordinated entry assessment feels like the “trauma Olympics.”

“If you need to know to be able to determine how much support someone is going to need in housing, that's a legitimate case,” said Wilson, explaining that it is necessary to know if an individual has a disability that makes it difficult to use stairs or a medical condition that requires a private bathroom. But he believes that questions about substance use or sexual violence should not be relevant to determining whether someone qualifies for housing. 

“If you're asking it to determine the severity of one's homelessness, why do you need to know that? Everybody that comes needs a roof over their head,” he said.

For De Jong, the designer of VI-SPDAT, these intrusive questions conflate two very different concepts — eligibility, which determines the specific housing program from which they will gain assistance, such as veteran or HIV-positive housing, and “depth of need,” which simply refers to a person’s unique risks and vulnerabilities.

“That's where I'll say the failure of implementation of VI-SPDAT to its true intention is remarkably pronounced,” he said. 

San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing doesn’t share this view. "The assessment is used to prioritize those most vulnerable,” said Bouck at HSH. But in practice, many people don’t score high enough to be considered for housing assistance.

Roxie got lucky and recently moved into an apartment in San Francisco’s Mission district, but the trauma of the repeated assessments remains with them. 

“It’s such bullshit that we have to be willing to expose ourselves and be that vulnerable in order to get housing. It’s exploitative,” they said.

If you believe the strategic five-year plan, issued by San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing in 2017, coordinated entry is supposed to “make homelessness a rare, brief, and one-time event.” 

On the other hand, you could listen to Jamale, whose experiences suggest an uncomfortable truth: coordinated entry systems will never fix homelessness. Instead, they will keep kicking people to the back of the queue, until the system deems them homeless enough for housing assistance.

Jamele, who asked that his name be changed for reasons of privacy, has taken the assessment twice. Both times he didn’t make the cut for housing priority status. 

“I felt like being honest and trustworthy gets me nowhere in that system, because I didn't qualify,” he said. “And I opened myself up to every little incident that I've had, just to be told. ‘Nope, not now.’ It really drains you. It makes you wonder, ‘Why am I still here, or what's my purpose in society, if I can't access help?’”

Jamale, who is originally from Los Angeles, moved north about 15 years ago. A quiet, kind man in his early 30s, he enjoys building model rockets. In college, his favorite course was on legal terminology. “I wanted to be an attorney that could help people get out and stay out of jail,” he said. 

But Jamale didn’t know anyone in San Francisco when he first arrived, and he couldn’t afford rent. Without any idea where to turn for help, he ended up on the streets, where he has stayed for most of the past 10 years.

By focusing on a specific definition of vulnerability, San Francisco is inadvertently excluding people like Jamale from housing services. With a roof over his head and support to process the trauma caused by years of homelessness, he could be one of the success stories that many service providers hope to find. Ironically, that could be part of the reason why he hasn’t been allocated housing yet. 

Like the vast majority of people who go through the coordinated entry system in San Francisco, Jamale wasn’t determined to be vulnerable enough for permanent supportive housing. According to data from HSH, only 17% of the 18,327 assessments conducted from January 2019 through May 2021 resulted in people moving into a new home.

Of the 11,979 single adults who were assessed between July 2018 and June 2021,  a staggering 69% did not meet the threshold for housing priority status, according to HSH data obtained by Coda Story via a public records request. The numbers are better for other demographics — 88% of families and 58% of youth applicants receive housing referrals. 

“We're basically saying, ‘Wait until you're sick enough, until you've been impacted to a point that's very detrimental to a person who is experiencing homelessness, or until that point when this algorithm is going to score you very high,’” said Laura Valdez, executive director of Dolores Street Community Services, a nonprofit which will become a coordinated entry access point for adults later this year. Currently, there are only two such offices in the whole city. Valdez hopes that operating a third will give her team greater insight into how the system works. 

It is hard to say why Jamale has not yet been housed. Coordinated entry’s scoring system is deliberately opaque. The people conducting the assessments are not even told how the questions are weighted. According to Jeff Kositsky, who served as director of HSH from 2016 to March 2020 and led the department throughout the implementation of coordinated entry, this is to avoid service providers coaching their clients. 

“We want to make sure we’re getting an accurate picture, and we don’t want case managers to game the system to get their people to the top of the list. It’s a best practice,” Kositsky told the local online newsroom The Frisc in 2017. 

“Any large, complex system that renders critical social services is subject to potential manipulation. While HSH understands there is a possibility for coaching, we also are aware such behavior occurs because staff care about those they serve and want to assist community members in getting housed,” said Bouck, communications lead at HSH, in a statement to Coda Story.

Still, people have guesses as to how it works. Joe Wilson believes that “chronicity of homelessness” — how long an individual has been unhoused — makes up a significant part of the score. He’s right, according to a breakdown of how questions are weighted reviewed by Coda Story, which has not been made public before and was obtained via a public records request by the Coalition on Homelessness. People who have been homeless for more than 15 years get 15 points added to their score. Someone who needs help carrying out daily activities or maintaining housing receives nine points. Experiencing sexual or physical violence in their current living situation can count for 12 points, but only applies if the person is 24 years old or younger. 

Sometimes, things don’t add up. One of Wilson’s clients at Hospitality House is an 87-year-old woman, who has been homeless for 40 years. After going through the coordinated entry process, she didn’t qualify for a housing referral. 

For many, the algorithm’s word is final. Case managers and the people conducting assessments can’t change a score. Individuals placed in problem-solving status can challenge the decision via a clinical case review, but that route is time consuming and requires clients to hand over even more personal information. Many don’t pursue it and instead opt to take the assessment again in six months, remaining homeless in the meantime. Others, like Jamale, just walk away for good. He doesn’t plan on trying a third time.

Without permanent housing, it can be harder to stay engaged with social services like child care, mental health and addiction treatment. Megan Geary is the program director at Central City Access Point, which is contracted by the city to conduct coordinated entry assessments for families. She told me that a significant number of people turn away from other avenues of help after being told that they do not qualify for housing. “We see people cycling through the system much longer. It just feels counterintuitive.” 

For Jamale, it feels like the system is telling him that things need to get much worse before he is deemed worthy of a home.

“Why do I need to be in a hospital bed fighting for my life in order to get housed? If that's the case, what do I have to do? Walking in off the street and asking for help, it seems like a dead road,” he said.

Joe Wilson has been working in homeless services for the better part of the 20 years, starting while he was sleeping at the Hospitality House shelter. He’s furious that human judgement has been replaced by an algorithm. 

“To cede that kind of decision-making authority to a computer, is that what we want to do in our field?” he asked. “We can’t do any better than that? That’s not what I came here to do. I came here to bring me to this mix.”

Because of the rigidity of the coordinated entry system, service providers now can’t get their clients into their own housing programs, even when they can clearly see that doing so is the right course of action. Mary Kate Bacalao, the policy director at Compass Family Services, said her team worked with a client who needed a place to live after giving birth to a baby with special needs. Compass runs a housing program for pregnant women and new mothers, but because the scoring system put the woman in problem-solving status, they couldn’t place her. Social workers ultimately lost track of her. 

HSH disagrees with criticism of the assessment. “Human decision-making is still very much a part of the process. The pandemic has shown that coordinated entry still very much incorporates human decision-making into the model,” wrote public information officer Denny Machuca-Grebe in response to questions for this story. 

He went on to say that the coordinated entry system “strives to center client choice.” To a degree, it does. Families who have made it through the process and receive a temporary rapid rehousing rental subsidy can request a housing case review when a spot in permanent supportive housing becomes available. People who qualify for permanent supportive housing can also be offered up to three units, in the hope of finding one that matches their needs. But many people don’t get that far. 

Service providers highlight that not all types of housing intervention will work for everyone. For example, a rapid rehousing subsidy may not be a good fit for people who need more support.

“The housing resolutions at the end of the assessment are a very cookie cutter approach,” said Geary at Central City Access Point. “We can't really pivot to triaging them to a housing intervention that would maybe better meet those needs and be more helpful to them to be able to achieve longer-term stability. We kind of just have to refer them to whatever is available.” 

The first time Roxie went through coordinated entry several years ago, they were placed in a single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) in the Mission district. It was right after they were sexually assaulted.

“It was one of the worst places that you could put somebody that had just recently been assaulted. It was like a crack den SRO,” they said. 

“I ended up leaving after two weeks. I just said, fuck it, I’m done.”

Meanwhile, people like Kenn Sutto are doing their best to operate within the system. When he conducts a primary assessment, he tries to make people feel as comfortable as possible. Even though he is supposed to ask the questions exactly as written, he is allowed to clarify and steers clear of terms like “substance abuse,” in favor of less stigmatizing phrasing. 

“I'm not here to be a person that's reading off a computer screen,” he said. “My job is to be there for people experiencing homelessness.”

For Wilson, handing a decision as monumental as whether someone gets housing over to an algorithm just isn’t a sustainable or moral option. 

“There were people in my life, particularly when I became homeless, who refused to turn away from me,” he said. “I refuse to do less than that. No computer is going to help me decide the worth of another human being, and who gets what, when and how much.”

The post Who’s homeless enough for housing? In San Francisco, an algorithm decides appeared first on Coda Story.

However, the technology behind them can have serious implications for our privacy and civil rights. In 2016, San Diego rolled out street lights equipped with surveillance cameras to monitor traffic, but police have since used their footage during investigations. In the spring of 2020, they were even turned on Black Lives Matter protests. The city council is now considering new regulations to govern their use. 

In 2017, Dr. Ann Cavoukian agreed to work as an advisor on a now-abandoned project, in which Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs planned to equip Toronto’s waterfront with robots to move waste to disposal facilities, heated pavements to melt snow and myriad ways to collect data in preparation for the use of autonomous vehicles. She resigned in 2018 over concerns that other companies associated with the project could not guarantee privacy.

Cavoukian, who also served as Canada’s information and privacy commissioner from 1997 to 2014, went on to create “privacy by design,” a framework for embedding safeguards in smart city technology at the point of development. She sat down with Coda Story to talk about how we can create modern urban environments with privacy baked into them. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Coda Story: What is privacy by design? 

Dr. Ann Cavoukian: We can develop smart cities that will do amazing things and preserve our privacy. It shouldn’t be the zero-sum model of either or, which so many people lead with. They say, “Well, you want a smart city, you’ve got to give up privacy.” The hell you do. Privacy is the foundation of our freedom. You don't give that up for a smart city or smart tech. You do both. 

I was the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, in Canada, for many years. What I know from that time is that privacy laws do not apply if there's no personally identifiable data. We make it a win-win. That's what the concept of privacy by design, which I created, is all about. Make it a win-win. Data utility and total privacy. We can do both.

What does privacy by design look like in the context of a smart city?

A while back, I was retained by Sidewalk Labs, when they were going to build SmartCity Toronto. That fell apart, and I can explain why. I looked at all the technologies that would be on 24/7. I said, “OK, there's going to be data collected all the time. We're going to have to de-identify it at source.” By that, I meant all data, no matter what it is, the minute it's picked up, scrub it of any possible personal identifiers. You still have very valuable data that can be used for a variety of purposes in the smart city context that will not have privacy risks, because all associated Identifiers will have been removed. 

You headed up that project, but you resigned. What went wrong?  

When I started working with Sidewalk Labs, they were all committed to embedding privacy and de-identifying data at source. But, then, they got some criticism. They had a board meeting with all the companies involved, and they said, “Look, we will ask the companies involved in the IT to de-identify data, but we can't make them do it.” The minute they said that, I had to leave, because you're not going to leave it up to companies to decide that on their own. 

So much smart city technology is built by private companies. How do we ensure that they are building privacy into their own tools? 

We can basically mandate that data must be de-identified at source. If there is a governing body or legislative body that can lay down the law and insist on that, then you will have a much better outcome. 

I can understand when de-identifying data will be effective. If you want to use a smart streetlight to know how many cars are driving through an intersection, you don’t need license plates. But, in circumstances where you need to identify someone, in order for the technology to serve its intended purpose, what do you do?

What you need to do is obtain the positive consent of the individuals involved, proactively. Privacy is all about personal control, relating to the use and disclosure of your personal information. If you have an individual's positive consent upfront, they know how you intend to use it and they consent to that, great. 

Is privacy by design a technological fix, a legislative fix or both?

I think it's primarily a technological fix. What you want to do is ensure that your measures to protect data are embedded in the tech that you're using as its default setting. You can't forget about it, because it's always there. That's what's critical. This doesn't rely on someone remembering to make the right policy or whatever. It has to be automatic. 

What prevents cities from rolling out technology with privacy by design?

It's early days. They're just beginning to address these issues. I think they will come to embrace privacy by design within a smart city, but we have to overcome the zero-sum mindset. Of course you have to focus on the tech, but not at the expense of privacy. You do both. That's the biggest hurdle that we have to overcome. We can do it, but it takes time. 

Where is this working? Where are you seeing smart cities rolled out without privacy by design?

All of the Smart Cities coming out in the east — Shanghai, Dubai — forget about privacy. That's not what we want to do. Look for models that do this properly. For example, the city of Mississauga, here in Ontario. They are just crafting a smart city and they are embedding privacy by design before anything begins. They’re wedded to de-identifying data at source, and I'm working with them to make this happen, so it is beginning.

The post ‘People say that if you want a smart city, you’ve got to give up privacy. The hell you do’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Pegasus was used in the attempted or successful hacking of 37 phones, including devices belonging to investigative journalists in Azerbaijan, Mexico, India, and two women close to the murdered Saudi Arabian Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

Coda Story has previously reported on the Indian government’s alleged use of Pegasus to target dissidents, including the late Father Stan Swamy, a prominent Jesuit priest and human rights activist.

The telephones infected with Pegasus spyware were included on a list of 50,000 phone numbers, according to Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International. It is unknown how many of the numbers on that list were subject to surveillance using Pegasus, but at least 10 of the countries represented — including Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Hungary — are reportedly NSO Group clients.

NSO Group has pledged to investigate allegations of human rights abuses connected to Pegasus. “From a sensational headline screaming ‘50,000 phone numbers’ we are left with 37, that we are still seeking any proof of their relation to NSO,” said an NSO Group spokesperson in a statement to Coda Story.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and was United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression from 2014 to 2020. While at the U.N., he recommended a moratorium on the sale of spyware. He spoke to us about why he thinks this is necessary. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Coda Story: We already knew that governments use Pegasus against journalists and dissidents, but the latest leak shows the scale of the problem. What was your reaction? 

David Kaye: We've had example after example of journalists, activists and political opposition figures being targeted by tools like Pegasus. The surprising thing here is that this hasn't been exposed before, and that the international community even needs this kind of wake-up call in order to do something.

When you look at all the phone numbers that have been put on lists by governments, it’s striking to see that, even if they don’t follow through on targeting all those people, they are thinking about how they can use this incredibly intrusive tool in order to get at those who are reporting on issues that hit close to home, like corruption and government criticism. The fact that companies have the ability and freedom to continue to sell these tools is really shocking to a lot of people. 

Coda Story: In 2019, when you were U.N. special rapporteur, you called for a moratorium on selling spyware like this. Why did you feel like that was necessary?

We've already had a huge amount of reporting on this industry and its lawlessness. The thinking that I had at the time was, ‘I'm not calling for a ban.’ It was a call for a moratorium so that, while there’s a pause, there’s no transfer of the technology, there’s no sales. During that period, governments develop the regulatory environment and also develop a set of guidelines so that companies understand the red lines. 

Governments are going to say, like the surveillance industry itself says, that some of these tools are needed in order to counter terrorism and crime. Fine. If that’s true, then neither the government nor the industry should complain if we want to have very strict controls, so that they are only used for those purposes and only used in the context of the rule of law. The moratorium creates space for that kind of policy-making.

Coda Story: Two years on, do you think Pegasus should be banned outright? 

I'm open to thinking about Pegasus as a tool that should just be banned. But we need to be realistic about what governments will do as a first order of business.

If you have a moratorium, it's a temporary ban that allows governments to think through the implications of this tool to see whether it's possible to imagine rule of law constraints, whether constraints on the export and use of these tools could meaningfully address all of the concerns that we're seeing around Pegasus. I'm in a middle space where I'm not sure that's possible.

The big question is that Pegasus and other surveillance tools are used in such a secretive way, is it possible to put them under constraint?  

Coda Story: It sometimes feels like regulations are playing catch up with systems like Pegasus. Is it too late to regulate them? 

It's a vast industry and we hardly know the contours of it. It may very well be that it is too late. Companies are developing tools that can very easily evade these kinds of regulatory constraints. 

There was a report on Saturday in the New York Times that suggests that the government of Israel not only green-lit the use of Pegasus by Saudi Arabia, but actually encouraged it. So, we're not just talking about a question of private actors who are operating in a lawless environment. Governments may also be implicated in these abuses. It's a much more complicated situation than simply saying, ‘Well we need to find a way to regulate these companies.’ We also need to find a way to regulate the governments that are enabling the spread of the technology.

The post Governments around the world used Pegasus spyware to target journalists and activists. What do we do about it? appeared first on Coda Story.

The radiation levels of the wastewater from Fukushima, the site of a devastating nuclear disaster in 2011, should fall within the safe standards for drinking water. However, the decision to dump it into the ocean has been heavily criticized by environmental groups and neighboring countries, including China. 

According to new research shared exclusively with Coda Story from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which analyzes global disinformation networks, prominent Chinese journalists, government officials, and a cluster of five pro-China “super-spreader” Twitter accounts are misrepresenting a 2012 simulation of the dispersal of radioactive materials after the Fukushima disaster, in order to claim that the wastewater is dangerous. The simulation, conducted by scientists at the German research institute GEOMAR, is about the long-term impact of the nuclear accident, not Japan’s wastewater disposal plans.

“We are aware that the 2012 study is repeatedly taken out of context and misquoted in social media and by others,” said Jan Steffen, a communications representative at Geomar, in a statement to Coda Story. “A direct transfer of the modeling at that time to current events is therefore not serious from a scientific point of view.”

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s team identified thousands of posts from pro-China social media accounts, including those of state media and government officials, which falsely claim that the GEOMAR research predicts the level of radioactive pollution after Japan releases the Fukushima wastewater. 

At the root of this outpouring of disinformation lies a tweet on April 11 from Shen Shiwei, a journalist at CGTN, a Chinese state media outlet. The post falsely states that GEOMAR’s research found that the U.S. and Canada will be affected by radioactive pollution three years after the wastewater is released into the ocean. Shiwei’s tweet includes a cropped version of GEOMAR’s video simulation, which has been viewed over 346,700 times. Other accounts that appear to be bots have also misquoted the simulation, in addition to promoting pro-Communist Party of China narratives on Hong Kong and detention camps in Xinjiang, all pointing to a coordinated campaign.

This apparently organized network also distributes disinformation using a method familiar to China experts. Pro-China accounts are pushing their narrative in Twitter comments, in order to “piggyback” accounts of Western media outlets with significant reach, explained Daniel Maki, who was part of the team that conducted the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s analysis.  

Shiwei’s Twitter post, which has attracted over 52,000 impressions, has been shared in the comments to tweets by Western media outlets, including Reuters, CNBC and CNN. Often the text of the messages is identical.

Maki believes that citing scientific research out of context, in order to push a specific geopolitical narrative could be a new and effective gambit for pro-China disinformation networks.

“It does signify an evolution in tactics,” he said. “Rather than outright disinformation and propaganda, such as a narrative that is favorable to China or the CCP’s views specifically, they’ve shifted to the appropriation of legitimate research.

“You can take any piece of relatively punchy research, even stuff that’s pretty dated, and you can reuse it in such a way that fits the narrative that you’re trying to promote. Gosh, that becomes really difficult to fact check.” 

The post Pro-China disinformation network weaponizes scientific research to attack Japan appeared first on Coda Story.

Police showed Williams a blurry surveillance photograph taken during a robbery. It wasn’t him. “The cops looked at each other. I heard one say that ‘the computer must have gotten it wrong,” Williams told lawmakers on July 13, during a hearing on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition. 

Williams, who is Black, had been incorrectly identified by facial recognition. 

“It was so backwards,” he said. “I thought I knew the law, and I was wrong.”

The U.S. federal government has not limited law enforcement’s use of facial recognition. The hearing at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security was tasked with exploring what to do about that.

Why is Congress considering regulating or banning facial recognition? 

Robert Williams is not alone. Research shows that facial recognition is particularly bad at correctly identifying people of color. 

Alongside concerns over bias and accuracy, there is an ongoing national conversation about how facial recognition fits into a broader picture of over-policing communities of color.

“I don't want anyone to walk away thinking that if only the technology was made more accurate, its problems would be solved,” said Williams, in his written testimony to the subcommittee. 

Facial recognition frequently operates in secret. Often, people don’t know it was used in a police investigation, leaving them unable to challenge it. The U.S. Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, found that 20 federal agencies used facial recognition with virtually no oversight. 

However, public opinion on facial recognition is mixed. While 55% of Americans think the government should limit police use of the technology, 65% don’t support an outright ban, according to a 2019 survey by independent research body the Ada Lovelace Institute. 

What are the U.S. laws now? 

There is no nationwide regulation of facial recognition. Guardrails are enacted only at a state, county or city level. In May, Massachusetts imposed one of the first statewide restrictions on police use of the technology. California placed a three-year moratorium on using it in police body cameras. Cities including San Francisco and Portland, Oregon have banned it entirely.  

However, national attempts to regulate facial recognition have repeatedly failed. Last year, the Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Bill did not make it past introduction in the Senate. The 2020 Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act met a similar fate.

It has also fallen on companies to self-regulate. Amazon and Microsoft have promised not to sell facial recognition to police, while IBM has abandoned its facial recognition products. 

Is there a bipartisan appetite to curb police use of facial recognition?

Seems like it.

Representative Andy Biggs (Republican, Arizona), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said that even if the technology works properly, it remains problematic. 

“I think the issues which we've discussed today are not just issues with the accuracy of the technology. I think we're talking about a total invasion of privacy, which is absolutely unacceptable,” he said. 

Albert Fox Cahn, a privacy expert at the privacy advocacy group Surveillance Transparency Oversight Project, is hopeful that lawmakers are moving in the direction of an outright ban.

 
“People clearly know that Congress has waited too long. I think there are some people who still are using the language of regulation, but when you actually dive into the details of what those regulations look like, a lot of the time, it's closer to a moratorium than anything else,” he said. 

What would federal regulation even look like?

Some lawmakers, like Representative Ted Lieu (Democratic, California), acknowledged that a ban will be difficult. Representative David Cicilline (Democratic, Rhode Island) weighed whether any amount of regulation would solve the problems with bias and inaccuracy. 

“Is there even any training that might help law enforcement to overcome these inaccuracies, or are they so embedded in the system that we should ban facial recognition?” asked Cicilline.

Other lawmakers questioned whether a warrant should be required for use of the technology, which is not always the case. Subcommittee chairwoman Sheila Jackson Lee (Democratic, Texas) explored whether prosecutors should be required to inform defendants if facial recognition was used.

However, privacy advocates will not be pleased, should federal action fall short of a ban. 

“Facial recognition surveillance is more like nuclear or biological weapons than it is like alcohol and cigarettes. It’s too dangerous to be effectively regulated. We need to simply prohibit its use,” wrote Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, in a statement following the hearing.

So, will Congress actually do it? 

Hypothetically, we’ll get an answer soon enough. 

“There's a bill in Congress right now that every single member of that committee should be supporting, if they're serious about preventing things like what happened to Robert Williams from happening again. If they're not supporting it, they're talking out of their butts,” Greer told me. 

Greer is referring to the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. It was first introduced by Democrats in 2020, but it went nowhere. Democrats have reintroduced the bill, which would prohibit federal funding for facial recognition and other biometric technologies, restrict its use by federal agencies and require state and local entities to place their own moratoriums on the tools in order to receive federal money. 

Then there’s the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which aims to prevent the use of facial recognition in body cameras. It has passed in the House, but the Senate has yet to vote on it. 

“I’ve given up on predicting what bills will pass and which won’t,” said Fox Cahn. “All I will say is that it really is a good sign that we continue to see lawmakers on both sides of the aisle recognize the urgency of acting.”

The post Will Congress actually ban facial recognition? appeared first on Coda Story.

Roads flood regularly, cutting off people in isolated areas from their jobs, schools and basic necessities. Hurricanes and powerful storms are frequent, the most recent being Tropical Storm Claudette in June. The county sits at sea level and is surrounded by water on two sides — the Albemarle Sound to the north and the Alligator River to the east.  

Saltwater intrusion is dramatically shaping the environment and its economy. Acres of forests and farms are being replaced by grassland. 

“These are the ghost forests,” said Willy Phillips, pointing through the window of his rumbling white truck towards haunting fields of dead pine trees. “Forests that give in as the sea level rises. Gradually, it becomes uninhabitable for them.” 

Phillips has been a fisherman on the North Carolina coast for most of his life. Now 71, he runs a crab fishing business and sells his catch at Full Circle Crabs. His store is located in Columbia, the largest town in the county. “Our blood is as close to sea water as you can get,” he told me.  

Phillips has also been involved in environmental issues on a state and local level for years. 

“Adaptation is the key,” he said. “You have to be nimble, you have to be quick, and you have to recognize the signals.” 

But nine years ago, North Carolina lawmakers took action that scientists and climate activists worried would undermine the state’s ability to respond to environmental change. 

A 2010 report by scientists at the state Coastal Resource Commission predicted that sea level would rise 39 inches over the next 100 years, threatening more than 2,000 square miles of coastal land. Conservative lawmakers and real estate interests took issue with those findings. In 2011, Republican State Representative Pat McElraft introduced House Bill 819, which limited government agencies to using only historical data on sea level rise when drafting development policies and regulations. 

The bill was widely criticized as being anti-science and suppressing important information on climate change. North Carolina was ridiculed on the national stage. Jokes on the satirical news show “The Colbert Report” particularly stung. “If your science gives you a result you don’t like, pass a law saying that result is illegal,” said host Stephen Colbert in a 2011 episode. 

The expectation was that HB 819 would be disastrous for North Carolina’s climate adaptation efforts. However, by the time the bill became law in 2012, it was significantly weakened. The version that remains in effect today allowed the state to account for future projections of accelerated sea level rise — a major sticking point in the original draft.   

According to Jessica Whitehead, former chief resilience officer at the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, “When you look at the long-term impact, there wasn’t one.” 

Nearly ten years after it was passed, HB 819 serves as a rosetta stone of the contradictory strands of climate change policy in America. The law, born of political grandstanding and based on the partisan repudiation of scientific evidence, turned rising sea-levels into a politically charged subject. But while local officials in wealthy towns have found creative ways to simply work around the law and invest in climate-resistant infrastructure, poorer towns have suffered from a shortage of resources and lack of public conversation that could push local officials to prioritize climate adaptation.

As a consequence, the global dynamic of climate change — where the world's poorest nations and communities are disproportionately affected — has been replicated in two neighboring towns in North Carolina.

Life goes on

The small town of Nags Head sits along the Outer Banks, a chain of islands that buffer the North Carolina coast against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the kind of resort town where Mayor Ben Cahoon rides his bike — complete with “Mayor” license plate — everywhere. Given its tourist spot status, there is a general awareness that climate change, erosion and flooding could cause significant harm to the economy.

HB 819 limited how the state’s Department of Coastal Management could account for sea level rise in its planning, but it did not stop local governments from addressing the issue however they saw fit. 

“That’s why Nags Head had the complete freedom to explore all these neat projects that we’ve been able to do,” Cahoon told me, sitting outside the cafe where he grabs coffee every morning.

Nags Head, with a population of roughly 3,000 people, was building towards climate adaptation before the advent of HB 819. Since 2012, it has improved canals that drain into the ocean and invested in beach nourishment, which adds sand to the shore to protect against erosion. It also adopted new local elevation standards in 2020, exceeding state regulations, which require buildings to be 12 feet off the ground on the oceanfront and nine feet elsewhere, regardless of whether the location is in a flood zone. Towns up and down the coast have also raised local elevation requirements.

The town’s approach to resiliency centers on creating systems that can be replicated in the future, Cahoon explained. He points to the outfalls where water from around the town collects to empty into the ocean. Local authorities increased the capacity of one of these drains and have established a process to do the same to the remaining ones, if necessary.

Located in one of the wealthiest counties in the state and with a municipal budget of nearly $26 million for the current fiscal year, Nags Head has plenty of resources to devote to climate adaptation, often with the support of grants.

HB 819 did manage to influence public opinion in North Carolina. Shortly after the law was introduced, sea level rise became a charged subject. “It was like a dirty word. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. It was so politicized and too volatile," said Holly White, who became the principal planner of Nags Head in December of 2014, referring broadly to communities across the state.

Still, Nags Head has found a way to address these concerns, and resistance to discussing sea level rise has dissipated. In 2015, three years after HB 819, former mayor Robert Edwards pushed the town to participate in a vulnerability, consequences and adaptation planning scenario (VCAPS). The program is run by research agencies and facilitates community outreach and climate resiliency preparation. Throughout a two-day workshop and follow-up interviews, about 60 residents described the environmental issues they saw around the island, from drainage problems to beach loss.

The process offered a valuable lesson on how to frame adaptation projects in a way that resonates with the community. Instead of focusing on the cause of the town’s problems — sea level rise — Nags Head officials opted to place the emphasis of the conversation on consequences that people could see all around them. 

“When you go into a neighborhood to solve a flooding problem that we believe is caused by sea level rise, you don’t have to go into that neighborhood and talk about sea level rise,” explained Cahoon, who has been in office since 2017. “You say ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help you, and we’re going to solve your flooding problem.” 

“That’s what citizens really care about,” he added. “Is your problem solved?” 

On the western side of Nags Head, across town from the ocean, undeveloped marshland stretches out a couple of hundred yards into the Roanoke Sound. Shallow islands of vegetation dot the water offshore. Over the years, the marsh has receded, making properties along the sound more vulnerable to flooding. Nags Head has plans to build a living shoreline, designed to be more environmentally friendly than the concrete embankments that have traditionally protected homes from the waves.

Building up this brackish stretch of land will better mitigate erosion and high waves during storms, but it also makes the area more resilient to sea level rise. It will be one of Nags Head’s most ambitious climate adaptation projects and is popular among residents. Rather than focusing on sea level rise specifically, the conversation with the community has addressed resiliency in broad terms.

Waiting for the flood

In the low-lying neighborhood of Goat Neck in Tyrrell County, about 45 minutes from Nags Head, the response to sea level rise has been very different. Tucked deep in the woods and  surrounded by marshes, Goat Neck floods frequently and its residents have standing water in their yards for eight or nine months of the year. The amount of water in the ground is steadily increasing, so the land remains muddy even on a hot spring day.

“People say when sea level rises, the tide comes into the yard. No, it comes up through the yard,” said Willy Phillips, who has lived in the county for decades. 

The soil is so wet that people can only bury their relatives in the community’s small graveyard during the hottest seasons, and coffins are covered in concrete to keep them from rising to the surface after they are interred. 

Goat Neck, which consists of around 17 inhabited homes and several more abandoned ones, is one of the most vulnerable areas in North Carolina. However, owing to its location on the edge of the Albemarle Sound, which flows into the Atlantic Ocean, all of Tyrrell County feels the effects of environmental change. 

People are accustomed to frequent damage to their houses caused by repeat flooding, so many have either built more space underneath or put ducts for heating and air conditioner units higher off the ground.

Saltwater intrusion is destroying agricultural land. Most farmers grow cash crops like corn, wheat and soybeans, which don’t do well in saline soils. Farmers are installing expensive pumps to drain excess water, but that’s a temporary solution, at best. 

“It’s sort of like the finger in the dike. You’re just able to hold it back long enough to get a couple more harvest seasons out of it,” said Phillips. 

Now, farmers are abandoning their fields, thereby slashing their profits. Agriculture is the largest industry in the county, but the acres of arable farmland decreased 18% from 2012 to 2017, according to the US Department of Agriculture. 

Despite the obvious damage that sea level rise is causing, Tyrrell County has been powerless to react in any meaningful way. The reasons for this reflect a global trend in which the communities hit hardest by climate change are often the ones least able to do anything about it. 

This inability to take action is due, in large part, to a lack of resources. Tyrrell County is one of the poorest in the state, with a median household income of around $35,000 a year — about half the national average — and 25% of its residents live below the federal poverty level of $26,500 a year for a family of four.

Many homeowners in Goat Neck don’t have the resources to elevate their houses, which sit a foot off the ground, at risk of sustained damage from rising water. Deserted trailers dot the neighborhood. The people who remain have done what they can to adapt. Philips and I passed one house that had several two-by-four planks stacked on cinder blocks, forming a makeshift bridge from the front door to the road. There was a heatwave that day and the yard was dry, but people are always prepared for the next flood.

Tyrrell County doesn’t have the money to take on the big infrastructure projects that would make neighborhoods like Goat Neck more resilient to climate change. Around 4,000 people live there now, making it the least populated county in the state, and the population has declined nearly 9 percent since 2010. As residents age and younger people move away, the tax base is diminishing, leaving the government with limited funds.  

“The bottom line is when it comes back to implementing some of the things that we recommended that we do, they're just too darn expensive,” said Rhett White, town manager of Columbia, the largest town in Tyrrell County.

As a result, county leadership tends to focus on projects that experts believe to be short-sighted, like dredging drainage canals. In Goat Neck, the canal that drains excess water into the Albemarle Sound is filled with debris, fallen trees and sediment. While clearing it could dry the ground, the ditch will eventually be lower than the water level. 

“You can’t drain landscapes that are a foot below sea level,” explained Dr. Ryan Emanuel, a hydrologist at North Carolina State University. 

Longer-term solutions include the installation of pumps to dry out the ground, but such measures are expensive. “Who’s going to maintain them? Who's going to pay for the electricity or the diesel fuel to run those pumps,” said Ty Flemming, the director of the Tyrrell Soil and Water Conservation Department.

The ongoing Band Aid fixes applied in places like Goat Neck are not rooted in denial of science. They simply cannot afford to invest in climate adaptation that will adequately serve residents in the future. 

Without massive financial investment, the Goat Neck community, which has existed since before the Civil War, will soon cease to exist. Recently, the county commissioner asked Phillips if he would see if residents, many of whom are older, would be willing to take a relocation buyout. Everyone he asked declined. 

“They said, “We can’t leave our people in the ground.’ It’s the people in the cemetery, you know. They just can’t go,” he told me. “But sooner or later, they make their choice and they leave.” 

A present-day imperative

The challenges that Tyrrell County faces in responding to climate change also extend beyond finances. There is little in the way of local conversation, or effective outreach and education. For some, it seems like the subject of rapidly encroaching environmental change is not even on the agenda. 

Angus Spencer, 28, only remembers learning about sea level rise once in middle school. In 2017, he met scientists working with the nonprofit North Carolina Sea Grant and North Carolina State University, who came to town to talk about climate resiliency, but the topic hasn’t come up since.

Matt Jurjonas, an environmental social scientist, was part of that outreach effort. He explained that people in Tyrrell County know that they are vulnerable to flooding and severe storms, however, many have never seen projections for sea level rise and what it could mean for them.

“If they aren’t aware, they’re obviously not planning for it,” he said.

Spencer grew up in the county and now leads youth groups and Bible study classes at the Columbia Christian Church. He thinks there needs to be a sustained dialogue about the environmental threats the area faces. 

“Even if it was just a week within the community, this is what we’re going to talk about,” he said. “But nobody has gotten to that level. There’s nobody to really start that conversation.”

Columbia’s residents appear to want to learn about environmental change. Spencer’s 19-year-old cousins Da’Shawn and Ka’Shawn told me that they have questions about climate adaptation for their elected representatives, but that there have been no community meetings where they could raise them. 

But precedents for community-driven change do exist. In the past, people in Tyrrell County have successfully advocated for and secured environmental protections. Years ago, the state government wanted to build a hazardous waste incinerator in the area. Locals, including Phillips, dragged an old TV to the grocery store, set up chairs, gave out popcorn and played a short documentary about the health risks it could bring. Within days, the community united against the proposal, and the development was shelved. 

To date, similar action has not been taken regarding climate adaptation. After all, it’s not a top priority for many people, said Spencer. In a poor and isolated rural area with few jobs and high unemployment, people are more focused on supporting their families today than they are on considering environmental threats that feel far in the future. 

For Spencer, outreach on sea level rise and climate change needs to be framed as a present-day imperative.

“Don’t bring it to us as a want, bring it to us as a need,” he said. “‘You need to have knowledge about this, if you want this community to be able to survive and not become Atlantis.’”

Small gains

In the nine years since HB 819 was passed, the apocalyptic warnings about anti-science lawmakers setting the state back years in its response to climate change have not panned out. Sea level rise is acknowledged by the state government, including in the June 2020 North Carolina Climate Risk Assessment and Resilience Plan, which says it is “virtually certain” that oceans along North Carolina’s coast will continue to rise and that the intensity of storms will increase.

The law may have even been beneficial in a roundabout way, said Jessica Whitehead, the state’s former chief resiliency officer. In places like Nags Head, it forced state agencies and local governments to be creative about how they framed an often politically charged topic  to engage as many people as possible.

“If we could just say sea level rise and run with it, in the long run, would we have lost ground?” Whitehead asked. “In terms of getting things done, I think we had to think more carefully about what do we need to get out of this. What does this really mean for people? We couldn’t fall back on scientific jargon.” 

While HB 819 may have caused national outrage, the factors that have undermined the ability of communities to respond to climate change are deeper and more systemic than the edicts of anti-science politicians. Now, In Tyrrell County, even drastic action may be too little too late. 

As Phillips told me, the trees in the ghost forests are “dying in parallel with the community.” 

“It’s going to be under water. That’s just what’s going to happen. The county will cease to exist. There’s nobody that’s going to save Tyrrell County.” 

Photos by Caitlin Thompson.

The post North Carolina’s notorious climate change law — the rich are ok, the poor aren’t appeared first on Coda Story.

Carlson adopted the theory from the right-wing outlet Revolver News, which is run by former Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, who was fired in 2018 after appearing on a panel with a white nationalist.

“Strangely, some people who participated in the riot haven’t been charged. Look at the documents. The government calls these people ‘unindicted co-conspirators.’ What does that mean? It means that in potentially every case, they’re F.B.I. operatives,” Carlson told his 3 million viewers.

It’s a clear cut example of how disinformation works. Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of rhetoric and public affairs at Texas A&M University, did a blow-by-blow analysis of how Tucker Carlson’s segment was designed to capitalize on viewers’ fears and pull them into his conspiracy theory.

Dr. Mercieca sat down with Coda Story to talk about why disinformation like this is so effective. 

Coda Story: How does disinformation work? What’s happening to Tucker Carlson’s audience when they hear him pushing conspiracy theories?

JM: Rhetoric scholars like me have known since Aristotle that appealing to people's emotions is effective for persuasion. We have a very prominent fight, flight or freeze response to scary threats in our environment. 

Media can transmit affect, so we feel what they tell us to feel. What conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson do, and what I think Fox News uses as a basic business model, is activate those negative emotional states. So appealing to polarization, fear, outrage, disgust. That keeps us engaged with their content. It's an engagement strategy in the attention economy. And it's a great way to manipulate, deceive your viewers.

Coda Story: Fox News creates an entire worldview. Tucker Carlson isn’t just telling you one conspiracy theory, he’s telling you how to perceive the world. How does that work? 

JM: Cultivation theory says that we understand the world mostly through first-hand experience. All media is very powerful in terms of creating reality for us. Everything is a conspiracy in Fox world. So the rhetorical fallacy tu quoque — an appeal to hypocrisy. Colloquially, that’s “what about-ism.” It’s a form of ad hominem attack, attacking the person instead of their argument. So it doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter what the facts are. They're self-interested, they're cheaters. They're liars. You can never trust them. Every story is just another iteration of that.  

Tucker Carlson has built a circular narrative. Trust no one except for me. There’s a plot against you and I’m here to tell you about it.

Coda Story: As part of that worldview, there’s often an implication that the people who believe it are in on something that the rest of us don’t understand. How does that feed the conspiracy theory?

There’s a strategy of propaganda — and Trump did this all the time — where you don’t provide the answer. You use that ambiguity so that the viewer feeds the answer to you. 

Conspiracy theories are incredibly useful for connecting a leader or news organization to their followers, the people who are in on what the conspiracy is. 

Coda Story: Presenters like Carlson often plant certain ideas in the minds of their viewers. How do they do this? 

Keyword squatting is one. They seed all the information they want you to find on the internet. You’ve never heard of a crisis actor? You’re going to look that up. Then you find the content they want you to find. But the conspiracy theory is so pernicious because it can never be disproven. It can never be proven true, but it can never be disproven either because of the logic of the conspiracy itself.

Coda Story: So if you can’t argue against the conspiracy theory, what do you do?

JM: You can’t puncture these narratives, so one thing I think that could possibly help is to use a concept like Occam’s razor — the simplest solution is usually the right one. So do you think that it is the case that somehow the Democratic Party could steal the election in every precinct, every county, every state? Literally making the point that there were thousands and thousands of people who somehow coordinated in secret to defraud the election and overthrow the government. How could that possibly happen? People are terrible secret keepers.

The post Decoding Tucker Carlson’s latest conspiracy theory appeared first on Coda Story.

But little is known about how the companies leading the charge on voice recognition will use our data. 

Joseph Turow is an author and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. He’s been writing for decades about how the marketing industry tracks consumers. His latest book is “The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy and Your Wallet.” 

He talked with Coda Story about how voice recognition and voice profiling will turn advertising on its head.

This conversation also appeared on this week’s episode of Coda Currents.

Coda Story: If I’m going about my daily life — going to the store, taking the metro — what sort of voice recognition technology am I going to run into?

Joseph Turow: Most of what happens with voice recognition will be between you and your phone. But also remember, people talk to their cars. They communicate with 800-number-type contact centers, and there’s a lot of voice recognition and voice profiling that goes on in those places. 

Coda Story: So, we’re coming across voice recognition and voice profiling more and more in our daily lives, especially when we consider relatively inexpensive virtual assistants or speakers like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. You can buy a smart speaker for under $50 from Amazon or Google. What’s the risk of surveillance hidden under this convenience and affordability? 

JT: So much of what you just described is what I call seductive surveillance. It means seducing people with the technology and, at the same time, hiding the surveillance aspects of it. So, for example, Amazon Prime Day is coming up soon. You're going to be able to buy these Amazon speakers like Alexa or Echo Dot at incredibly low prices. And Google's also doing it on the cheap, mainly to get people used to the idea that this is part of life, you know, getting up in the morning and saying, “Alexa, what's the weather?” So it really is an era of seductive surveillance.

Coda Story: This industry is evolving very quickly. In your book, you write about a few patents that give an indication of where voice profiling is going. What stood out to you?

JT: There’s one really interesting Amazon patent. They actually have a cartoon. A woman walks into her apartment and says “Sniff... Alexa, give me a recipe for dinner.” Alexa says,” You sound like you have a cold. How about chicken soup?” Alexa, according to Amazon, got that idea based on the sound of her voice and various pitches and tonal changes. She says, “No thank you.” And Alexa says “How about I order some cough drops to be delivered within half an hour?” Of course, Amazon owns a pharmacy. 

Another technology that Google has patented involves placing microphones around your house. It figures out what people are doing and how long at what time of day. And, in some cases, the computing system like this can actually shut down certain things. So if you think, ‘Gee, the kids are playing too many video games,’ well, Google will listen to where they are, figure out what they're doing, and if they're doing it for too long, shut it down. 

The patents suggest a huge realm of situations where technology will listen to what we say, and companies and marketers will benefit, without us knowing where that’s going and without checks.  

Coda Story: You mentioned 800-number call centers earlier. It sounds like customer service by phone is a place where a lot of this voice profiling is happening. Can you tell us a bit about that?

JT: That is at the leading edge. And, I would argue, partly because people don’t even know about it. When you dial an 800 number, their software now can detect — supposedly, allegedly — your emotions. In some cases, it will trigger you to a representative who the company has discovered is better with people with those kinds of emotions. Or they will connect your history of purchasing to what they know from previous interactions about your voice personality, and then triage you to certain kinds of people and give them ideas of what kinds of discounts you could get based upon how you sound and your history with companies. 

Coda Story: This voice recognition technology is often used in marketing. Is there a risk that it’s going to move into other parts of our lives?

JT: It’s not just the risk. It’s a definite activity. We get used to this idea, and then it begins to spill over.

The post The ‘seductive surveillance’ of voice recognition appeared first on Coda Story.

The event was a stark reminder that QAnon has not disappeared since Donald Trump's election defeat. Its followers have simply adapted, changing tactics to avoid getting kicked off mainstream social media platforms. 

However, the language usually employed by QAnon followers, who believe that the levers of power are controlled by a shadowy cabal of Satanist pedophiles, is becoming less common online, according to new research from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab).

Jared Holt is a resident fellow at the DFR Lab, where he oversees research on domestic extremism. He’s the co-author of a new study, which analyzed more than 40 million appearances of QAnon catchphrases online from January 1, 2020 to April 1, 2021.

Holt spoke with me about what this change in QAnon’s language indicates about the conspiracy theory’s progression and the effectiveness of deplatforming its followers.

This conversation was also featured on Coda Currents, our weekly podcast.

Coda Story: It used to be easy to see who was a QAnon follower on Facebook or Twitter because they had Q-related hashtags in their bios. Often these hashtags came from messages from Q, the conspiracy’s anonymous leader or leaders who first started posting about the theory in 2017. Has that changed?

Jared Holt: There were slogans that you could pick out as a dead ringer that this is a QAnon follower. Phrases like “Where we go one, we go all” or “The storm is upon us.” That has changed in wake of deplatforming and the Q author — or authors — explicitly encouraging people to mask their language in response to moderation efforts. We're starting to see the language of QAnon shift. It’s morphing into almost a second-gen QAnon.

Coda Story: Does it indicate to you that the conspiracy theory has changed substantially? 

JH: What it doesn't indicate is that QAnon's dead. Communities built around QAnon are still very active. 

One thing that the data could indicate is that there's less discussion of hallmark postings from Q. A lot of these communities, since the January 6 riot at the Capitol, have moved on to include a whole umbrella of other topics. Extremist worldviews like QAnon require constant disinformation to keep themselves alive. In the absence of material from the poster writing as Q, there is likely a motivation to scour the rest of the information landscape for things that can fill that void. 

Coda Story: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all cracked down on QAnon. What’s the impact of that deplatforming?

JH: As these moderation actions started to kick in and communities became fearful that they were going to be banned.

Even just the threat of moderation is a very big risk for these communities. Movements like QAnon were able to get as big as they did because they were able to operate in plain sight on mainstream platforms and leverage the nooks and crannies of the algorithm to get their message in front of a lot of people. Taking away those tools makes it a lot harder to keep the thing going, whether it’s by virtue of getting ejected or it’s the fact that an alternative platform like Gab or Parler has a small fraction of the user base that a huge platform like Facebook would.  

Coda Story: Let's talk about Parler and Gab, because there was this concern that, as QAnon was kicked off Facebook and Twitter, they would just go to more fringe platforms. Did QAnon ever reach that level of chatter there? 

JH: I have to make the caveat here that we didn't have a way to assess Telegram widely, and Telegram is a huge venue for QAnon. But you have Parler and Gab as places where these communities continued to post. What we found on those platforms is that there wasn't that translation over.

Even a slow day on Twitter would outpace all the alternative sites we were able to analyze, like 4chan, 8Kun, Parler, Gab. It would outpace them like 40 to one, and that was after moderation efforts. It really did seem to contradict this idea that if you deplatform people from these mainstream sites, they'll just go to a new place. It doesn't seem like that really happened at a scale that supports this notion.

Coda Story: So does deplatforming work?  

JH: Deplatforming works, but with that asterisk there of making sure that we're clear about what we think platforming does. Removing content does not remove the social conditions that caused people to create that content to begin with. By kicking QAnon to the curb on a mainstream social media platform, you're not undermining the social, economic, personal conditions that might have led people to be susceptible to those kinds of beliefs. 

It does make it harder for that ideology to spread to an audience that is not already plugged into that universe. And it disrupts any organizing or community building that might be happening attached to a movement. So, destroying these Facebook groups, where there were tens of thousands of QAnon believers, that goes a long way, because the community is the backbone. 

Coda Story: Let’s talk about the four-day long QAnon conference in Texas over Memorial Day weekend, which brought together Trump supporters, election conspiracy theorists, and some big names within QAnon circles, including Michael Flynn. What does that tell you about QAnon’s ability to gather offline? 

JH: The QAnon movement has had real-life events before. A big part of that was this desire to put faces to screen names and build something more solid than a group chat on a social media platform. 

I couldn't help but think, “This is very expensive.” You've got camera work, professional sound, all this graphic design. This was a lot of money and influence, all coming together into one big event. It hit a scale that I haven't seen really play out before. My gut fear is that this might be an indication of what's yet to come.

The post QAnon gets a second gen update appeared first on Coda Story.

If technology is sold on the basis of this law, said Caitlin Bishop, a campaign manager at Privacy International, “that’s a problem.”

Critical reaction to the European Commission’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Act was sparked on April 14 by a leak in Politico. The draft law is the first legal framework on the use of AI in the world, and it also creates standards for the use of remote biometric mass surveillance tools in public spaces. However, there are significant exemptions and it does not outlaw facial recognition, as many had deemed essential to be effective.

An important advisor to the European Commission on privacy issues, known as the European Data Protection Supervisor, called for an outright ban on facial recognition. 

Experts argue that the draft legislation is not sufficiently focused on privacy rights. “It feels to us that the regulation, more than anything, determines what AI can be sold, and focuses more on the relationship between the people that are kind of developing the AI and deploying the AI than the people who will be surveilled,” said Bishop. 

The legislation does not cover private companies’ use of facial recognition, for example. 

“Face recognition isn't less concerning, invasive or harmful when it's being used by private companies,” Bishop said. “In fact, sometimes it's more so, because you have fewer rights when it comes to your interactions with those companies.” 

It is also unclear whether biometric surveillance tools like facial recognition, gait recognition (technology that identifies people by their walk) or emotion recognition can be used by public entities other than law enforcement, like welfare services or transportation authorities.

The European Commission’s proposal only provides narrow restrictions in live, real-time facial recognition, explained Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of Surveillance Transparency Oversight Project. 

“But there is no ban on historical facial recognition where you take a crime scene photo or CCTV photo and run it through facial recognition, which is the dominant form of facial recognition being used around the world,” he explained. 

The proposal has been met with frustration by member states, as well. 

In a letter addressed to the European Commission, 40 Members of the European Parliament criticized an important exemption that allows public authorities, and potentially private companies acting on their behalf, to use AI-enabled biometric surveillance tools “in order to safeguard public security.” 

European regulations have been used as a yardstick for other privacy legislation from California to Uganda. Similar conversations about regulating facial recognition are happening in parallel around the world. On May 7, a court in São Paolo, Brazil blocked the use of the technology on the city’s metro. 

The post EU’s weak AI law sets a low bar for global facial recognition regulations appeared first on Coda Story.

“After entangling with this spy for years, Swalwell hypocritically went on to be one of the lead instigators of the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachment sham,” White House Press Secretary Kaleigh McEnany told reporters on December 15 from the briefing room lectern.

McEnany’s focus on Swalwell echoes a growing Trumpland obsession with a story first published by Axios the previous week, detailing how a suspected Chinese intelligence operative targeted public officials five years ago including small-town mayors, California Democrat Representative Ro Khanna and Swalwell, among others. 

On his Fox News show, Sean Hannity summed up what quickly became the default narrative: “Democrats — they refuse to hold Swalwell accountable for what is blatant hypocrisy, rampant lies, even after he spread the Russia hoax for years.”

The FBI alerted Swalwell to suspicions that a young Chinese national named Christine Fang was connected to Chinese intelligence. Swalwell ceased communication with her, and has been accused of no wrongdoing. U.S. intelligence officers told Axios they do not believe Fang obtained or passed on classified information.

Journalists and news organizations are increasingly seeing their stories distorted and used as political fodder. In line with this trend, right-wing media and the Trump team seized upon the Axios report. 

“There's no way that you could publish this without knowing that it was going to be weaponized,” said Maria Bustillos, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. 

The feedback loop between conservative media, the Trump administration and Republican politicians is well-established, but the stakes are rising. “They are all playing the same political board game,” said Kelly McBride, senior vice-president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the Poynter Institute. “It becomes a building block for this overarching narrative that they are constantly beating a drum on around what’s happening in America, in ways that are not true.” 

Axios wrote in a statement to Coda Story that “The best antidote to distortion is fact. Our story was rigorously reported, conscientiously edited, and accurate. No person mentioned in the story disputed any fact we presented. To the contrary, both Eric Swalwell and Nancy Pelosi have publicly confirmed key elements of our reporting. This is the gold standard for investigative reporting.”

Swalwell, a prominent critic of Donald Trump during the investigation into ties between the presidency and Russia, sits on the House Intelligence Committee and ran for president in 2020. His connection to a suspected Chinese spy is an enticing opportunity for Trump allies eager to portray the president’s critics as hypocrites: guilty of purveying the same sort of foreign influence and collusion they accuse Trump of.

“It’s a dream come true,” said Steve Livingston, the founding director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics and a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Here we have one of the most vocal critics of Trump being revealed as a possible person who was too comfortably close to Chinese operatives, so it has that juicy ironic element to it.” 

In the hours and days following the Axios story, right-wing media including Fox News, Brietbart, the New York Post and the Daily Caller jumped on it, attempting to discredit Swalwell by painting him as a Chinese agent. 

“At every turn, Swalwell has remained a reliable source of Chinese government propaganda,” said Tucker Carlson, in a monologue on his Fox show. 

Political repercussions were almost immediate. Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Fox & Friends that Swalwell is a “national security threat.” Seventeen top Republicans, including Senator Rick Scott of Florida, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, and Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama have called for Swalwell to be removed from the House Intelligence Committee.  

The right-wing reaction to the story is a textbook example of distortion as disinformation. 

“Axios is just doing its job. It's a legitimate story,” said Livingston. “It was also an opportunity for that right-wing information ecosystem to take that as a weapon to use to delegitimize other news organizations, or in this case, this congressman.”  

In a media environment where legitimate reporting is often turned into disinformation, there is no clear consensus as to whether or how newsrooms should consider the likelihood of a given story being transformed into political spin.

Experts like Erik Wemple, media critic for the Washington Post, and Gabriel Snyder of Columbia Journalism Review, argue that reporters are not responsible for what others choose to do with their stories. 

But not everyone agrees. “I do think that journalists are responsible for distortions that emanate from a launchpad that they worked on,” said Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School. “I think it’s a moral obligation to correct the record.” 

The right-wing co-option of the Axios story also raises larger questions about fact-based and ideologically driven approaches to journalism in an increasingly polarized media landscape. 

“When you operate in a world where people are often looking to twist facts to suit whatever their agenda is,” said Snyder. “The traditional journalistic approach of ‘I’m just going to lay the facts out there, and everyone else can decide’ is really poorly suited to this information environment. That creates a vacuum that other people can fill.”

The post How Fox News distorted a story about Representative Eric Swalwell appeared first on Coda Story.

The following day, Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent host on the state-owned TV channel Russia-1, welcomed her back, saying: “Psaki is a professional woman with a sense of humor, who, however, did not always understand that she was joking.”

As a career Democrat communications officer who has spent a considerable amount of time in Russia, Psaki has been a punching bag for Russia’s media for years, which painted her as a mouthpiece of American propaganda and a symbol of the Obama administration’s hardline approach to Moscow. After a few public gaffes — including mistakenly saying that Russia imports natural gas from Western Europe to Russia — a new phrase was coined: “The Great Psakiing,” meaning the egregious confusion of facts.

Despite Psaki’s awkward relationship with Russia, right-wing media outlets in the U.S. are now painting her as a communist-sympathizing, Kremlin-colluding pawn. 

The recent string of attacks started with a photograph of Psaki in a pink fur hat, taken in 2014. At the time, she was the State Department spokesperson. In the picture, she is flanked by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then Secretary of State John Kerry. The hat, a gift from Lavrov, was adorned with the red star emblem of the Soviet Union.

It’s the kind of souvenir sold at virtually any tourist kiosk in Moscow, alongside nesting dolls and Putin T-shirts. But that didn’t stop Matt Wolking, deputy communications director of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, posting the image on Twitter:

Fox News, Breitbart and right-wing news site The Daily Caller joined the fray — the latter offering a helpful history lesson, pointing out that the Soviet Union “caused the deaths of tens of millions of people in the 20th century.”

“Nice commie hat,” tweeted conservative radio host Andrew Wilkow.

According to Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the goal is to portray Psaki and, by extension, Biden and the Democratic Party as being in thrall to Russia, thus shifting the narrative of collusion that has plagued the Trump administration.

“It doesn’t require evidence to be used against someone,” said Jamieson in a telephone interview. “The claim is going to be made as long as the charge sits there in Republican circles that Putin elected Donald Trump.” 

Psaki is a veteran Democrat staffer, but it was as White House communications director during the final years of the Obama administration that she really grabbed Russia’s attention.

The comedy TV segment “Psaki at Night” was the epitome of that obsession.  

“There’re a lot of things in the world that trigger the same reaction as appearances by Jen Psaki, the U.S. State Department’s representative: confusion, laughter and of course, a lot of questions,” said the show’s host Mikhail Gendelev, during a broadcast on Russia’s NTV channel in February 2015.

There were viral blooper reels from her briefings, memes and even the ironic hashtag #SavePsaki, after rumors that she had been fired. However, much of the coverage went beyond humor. Psaki became an easy target for Russian media, with much of its attention fixed on her gender.

“The fact that Psaki is a woman is an important element of why Russian state-aligned media has spent so much time trying to discredit her,” explained Vasily Gatov, the former head of development at the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

On one TV broadcast in 2015, head of Russia Today Dmitry Kiselyov joked that Psaki had announced that she was pregnant and fielded a question about the paternity of her child. “She lowered her head, said, ‘Hmm, I can’t say for sure. Let me get back to my office and look around,’” he said.

“They took her as a placeholder for their disgust with Hillary and generally the Obama administration, and just made a lot of nasty jokes about her and her performance,” said Gatov, during a telephone interview. “It was anti-Americanism, but it was personalized in the direction of Jen Psaki.”

Now that Psaki is poised to take on a new high-level role in the Biden administration, these old narratives are being recycled. Conservative media in the U.S. is following a similarly misogynistic line. While some praised the Biden administration’s all-female press team, pundits like Ben Shapiro have criticized the decision, saying that it is “not the most diverse team in history because there are no men.”

For now, Psaki is better-known in Russia than she is at home, but if such commentators have their way she will soon be a household name — for all the wrong reasons.

The post From Russian trolls to right-wing pundits, Jen Psaki just can’t catch a break appeared first on Coda Story.

The clip was posted to Flynn’s Twitter account on the Fourth of July. It shows the former White House national security advisor standing shoulder to shoulder with his family, their right hands raised. After vowing to protect the United States from “enemies foreign and domestic,” they repeat the QAnon mantra: “Where we go one, we go all.” 

“Oh my God, I was flabbergasted,” recalled 40-year old Smith, who lives in California and has been following the sprawling and increasingly popular conspiracy theory since its birth on the online messageboard 4Chan in 2017.

Ahead of the upcoming presidential election, QAnon has exploded in popularity across the U.S. Its adherents believe that President Donald Trump is a lone savior figure battling a corrupt “deep state” that shelters and aids a powerful network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. According to a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll, 56% of Republicans believe QAnon is mostly or somewhat true. This base of support also includes a growing number of military veterans who, in turn, form an important voting bloc. 

Smith’s father, grandfather and uncle all served their country. He walked the same path, as an Army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division from 1999 to 2003. Like thousands of others across the U.S., he had taken the QAnon oath before Flynn. But watching a high-ranking military official pledge allegiance to the cause reinforced his commitment. 

“The fact that General Flynn basically said it — I was like, ‘That’s all the proof I need, right there,’” said Smith. 

“The symbolism of having Michael Flynn take that oath cannot be overstated,” said Alex Newhouse, a researcher with the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury Institute for International Studies. “That’s such a massive message to communities who are associated with the military or with the police.”

In just three years, QAnon has proliferated around the world, from the U.S. to Europe and Australia. As it has spread, its themes have influenced anti-vaccination activists, lockdown protesters and a host of other movements. As a decentralized online phenomenon, it is hard to say exactly how many former military members have become “digital warriors,” as many Q adherents refer to themselves. However, according to experts like Newhouse, the number is significant.

Anecdotal evidence certainly backs this up. Even the most cursory look at QAnon hashtags on Twitter turns up scores of profiles citing a military past. Some experts also believe that the close relationship between veterans and Q fits into a long-running and complicated relationship between veterans and conspiracist movements. 

The lure of conspiracy theories 

Jack Murphy joined the Army in 2002 and was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, first with the Ranger Battalion and later with the Special Forces. He remembers some of the men he served with sharing conspiracy theories. 

“I noticed that some of the other guys, other young Rangers, were really into this stuff,” he told me. 

Some were fans of David Icke, the notorious British conspiracy theorist who believes that politicians and powerful figures such as Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II are reptiles masquerading as human beings. Others thought the moon landing was faked and that humans walked among dinosaurs. 

“I came across people like that, who believed really strange things,” said Murphy, who has since left the military and now works as a journalist.

When Murphy joined the Special Forces, his team sergeant believed a number of outlandish theories, and has since fallen into QAnon. Once good friends, the two men no longer speak. 

“It’s very destabilizing for me and my own psychology that the people I admired so much became this,” Murphy said. 

A distinguishing feature of QAnon is that it has managed to drag completely new demographics into the darkest corners of conspiracist thinking, from Instagram moms to political candidates such as Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene to celebrities like the actress Roseanne Barr. 

“Veterans are not that sort of group,” explained Newhouse. “They have been long targeted by extremist movements and conspiratorial communities.”

Some experts believe that the shared life experiences and personality traits of many veterans make this group particularly susceptible to such narratives. QAnon has proved especially potent by playing directly to a sense of responsibility to protect the vulnerable that may have drawn many of these people to the military in the first place. 

In recent months, the movement has pushed its theme of Satanic child sex slavery hard. These efforts have included the creation of the widely used hashtag Save the Children. Claiming to rescue young people from sexual abuse and ritual murder has helped Q pull in large numbers of new followers, but Murphy believes that such themes will resonate strongly with veterans. 

“These are people who very much exist inside that frame of reference of good versus evil,” he explained. “They cast themselves as the hero in their own story.”

“The conspiracy theory is just the scaffolding that supports what you already believe about yourself.” 

That is certainly true for Smith. He joined the Army because of a desire to serve his country and help people. Before he was injured jumping out of a helicopter and honorably discharged in 2003, his goal was to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and join the Green Berets — the elite special force that marches under the Latin motto “De Oppresso Liber” (Free the oppressed). 

He has three daughters and a stepson. Of the many strands that QAnon comprises, Save the Children was the one that affected him most. 

“I have always been the protector. Especially small children — people that can't do it themselves,” he said. “So, yeah, that's a huge part of it.” 

Some consider that the isolation many veterans experience after military service could also increase their vulnerability to conspiracy theories. Entering civilian life can be a shocking change, in which a highly structured, cohesive community is suddenly replaced by a society that doesn’t always understand what they have been through. 

“This kind of social turbulence that happens when a guy leaves the military and becomes a civilian — the harder you try to fit in, from my experience, the less you do,” said Murphy. 

“Social alienation is the single best predictor of radicalization that we have,” Newhouse explained. “For alienated groups, conspiracy theories provide the answers, they provide the structure that is lost.” 

Some QAnon followers have also spoken of becoming estranged from friends and loved ones after embracing the movement. For many, the conspiracist community has stepped in to fill this gap. When adherents report such experiences on social media, others will often respond: “We are your family now.” 

A connection to power

QAnon followers believe that a high-level intelligence or military insider has been posting cryptic dispatches, or “Q drops,” on online messageboards for the past three years. Within them is a supposed wealth of classified information related to the deep state and its activities.

But QAnon isn’t the only conspiracy theory built on the ideas it espouses.

“It is really a mishmash of a whole bunch of different things and overlaps very often with some other extremist movements,” explained Newhouse.

QAnon crosses over with a wide range of conspiracist beliefs that have been in circulation for decades, spread by the likes of Icke and the far-right broadcaster Alex Jones. According to Newhouse, such ideas have also been adopted by earlier anti-government militias, such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, both of which were formed after the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

Some such militias share a number of similarities with QAnon. Taking a pledge is integral to the Oath Keepers, founded by former Army paratrooper Stewart Rhodes in 2009. The group also claims to be dedicated to upholding the promise to defend the constitution made by veterans, former police officers and first responders when they first sign up for duty. Meanwhile, the right-wing United Constitutional Patriots frequently referenced Q drops in their daily YouTube briefings.

Some fear that, as QAnon gains popularity, there is a danger that veterans will be introduced to more violent anti-government groups. For instance, in the lead up to the election, the Oath Keepers’ Rhodes has warned of an impending civil war. 

“Q has bridged the gap between fringe and mainstream and allowed a lot more people to become familiar with these ideas,” said Freddy Cruz, who researches anti-government militias for the civil rights advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center. 

“It has created this pipeline that facilitates it for people and puts them down this rabbit hole,” he said.

“Maybe just exploring Q, it’s not very hard to find yourself learning and exploring ideas that are staples within the anti-government circle.”” 

Reaching out

As QAnon grows in size and influence, some concerned individuals are wondering how to persuade people out of the movement. While some veterans may be especially receptive to conspiracist groups, the bonds of service may open doors for dialogue with other former members of the military who disagree with them. 

Newhouse believes that encouraging veterans to engage with their peers is crucial.

“People don't listen to The New York Times,” he said. “They listen to people who look like them and have similar experiences to them.” 

Murphy, however, has tried to talk to people like his former sergeant. It makes for difficult conversation, requires a considerable amount of time and patience, and is not guaranteed to succeed.

“They’re not going to change their mind overnight,” he said. “You have to be cool with them. If you start blowing up on them, they’re going to turn away from it. 

“You try to gently push them in the right direction, and maybe hope that they figure it out.”

The post How US veterans get sucked into QAnon appeared first on Coda Story.

“My thought process going in was ‘Yeah, I know for sure they’re watching,” said the 25-year-old software engineer. Still, he felt compelled to take the risk and attend the demonstration. “I’d rather fight to feel human than live feeling like I’m not,” he said.

As they gathered in Union Square, it turns out that the protesters were being observed — and in a way that few suspected. According to a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco Police Department obtained access to private surveillance cameras at the end of May and beginning of June that indiscriminately filmed footage of the protests. The cameras were owned and managed by the Union Square Business Improvement District (USBID).

It is not uncommon for police to use video captured by private cameras in their investigations. The San Francisco District Attorney’s office maintains a database of about 2,400 such devices, owned by individuals and businesses or attached to public buildings across the city. Usually, police will ask for footage from specific cameras at a particular time to gather evidence of a crime. 

But that is not what happened in this case. While crimes, including looting, did occur in Union Square over that weekend, the footage that SFPD obtained showed much more than that. The cameras, positioned on storefronts and pointing to the sidewalk, recorded protesters moving through the area and other people simply going about their daily lives.  

The Homeland Security Unit of the San Francisco Police Department gained live access to the entire system of 375 cameras owned and maintained by USBID from May 31 — the day that Rosier joined the protests — to June 6. It also received a data dump of all their footage from 5pm on May 30 to 5am on May 31.

According to police, although they had the option of live access to the district's cameras, they did not avail themselves of it. “As looting, vandalism and rioting did not continue in the areas covered by BID, SFPD did not monitor BID’s network of security cameras,” the San Francisco Police Department said in a statement issued in response to questions for this article. Officers did, however, use recorded footage from the data dump to collect evidence of illegal activity. 

What took place in San Francisco put the Black Lives Matter movement at the center of a debate about the effect of surveillance on civil rights protests. 

“Surveillance magnifies existing problems in police forces,” said Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “And these are problems that people were taking to the streets to try and change after the murder of George Floyd,” referring to the killing of a Black man by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May that sparked nation-wide protests.

The use of non-municipal cameras adds another layer of complexity and raises questions about how to regulate law enforcement’s access to private surveillance networks.

From the perspective of law enforcement, mass surveillance of demonstrations is in the interest of public safety. But for activists and privacy experts, knowing police are watching has a chilling effect and undermines the civil liberties of anyone using their right to protest. 

San Francisco has a law designed to regulate the use of surveillance technology by city departments. The Surveillance Oversight and Transparency Ordinance was passed by the city’s Board of Supervisors in May 2019. In addition to banning the use of facial recognition technology, it outlines procedures that city departments must follow before any new surveillance methods can be used. These include a report on the potential impacts of the technology, an opportunity for community feedback and board approval. 

Cagle believes that the SFPD’s actions violated the ordinance. 

“San Francisco residents and elected leaders rejected the idea that police could conduct suspicionless dragnet surveillance of the community like this,” he said.

The ordinance does contain a clause whereby law enforcement can bypass its procedures in “exigent circumstances.” These are outlined as “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.” However, whether the events of May 30 to June 6 meet that threshold is open to interpretation. 

USBID granted police access to its cameras on a weekend when businesses in the area had been hit hard by looting. 

“We wanted to support police and protect ourselves when there was an imminent threat like that,” said Karin Flood, the company’s executive director.

On May 31, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a local emergency in response to looting throughout the city and the shooting of a Federal Protective Service Officer, allegedly by a member of the Boogaloo movement, in the neighboring city of Oakland on May 29.

In its statement for this article, SFPD said that because looting, vandalism and rioting took place in Union Square that weekend, its use of private surveillance cameras fell under the exigent circumstances clause and, therefore, did not require prior board approval. It added that officers confiscated one firearm, a Molotov cocktail and explosive devices. These objects were seized after a curfew had come into effect and most protesters had left, according to a statement from SFPD on May 31.

“The request was made in direct response to burglaries, vandalism and arson. Access to cameras was not requested to monitor peaceful First Amendment activity,” wrote SFPD Public Information Officer Adam Lobsinger.

However, there is a legal disagreement as to whether that exception was applicable. “The suggestion that this was justified by exigent circumstances, we think, is completely wrong,” said Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Looting and property damage likely do not meet the definition of exigent circumstances, according to Schwartz. “There was not imminence of a particular threat of violence, as opposed to just a generalized concern about what had happened,” he said.

Lee Hepner, the legislative aide for Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who spearheaded the Board’s ordinance, agreed. “If a threat to property downtown is an exigent circumstance, I would suggest we need to drastically narrow that exemption,” he said.

Schwartz added that the SFPD should not gain live access to private cameras until that use of surveillance technology has been presented to the public and approved by the board. 

The law was designed to prevent dragnet surveillance and give San Franciscans a say in how surveillance technology is used in their city.  Some believe that the way the SFPD went about getting access to these cameras goes against what the ordinance set out to do. 

“The law was passed to prevent these kinds of harms from coming to pass,” said Cagle. 

“The public and elected leaders should never be in the dark about decisions relating to surveillance technology. And that's exactly what happened here,” he added.

A chilling effect on protests

San Francisco wasn’t the only city where law enforcement monitored Black Lives Matter protests that erupted around the country after the killing of George Floyd. Police in San Diego, California used footage from cameras attached to the city’s smart streetlights to investigate incidents of vandalism and looting. In Portland, Oregon, federal agents monitored social media videos and livestreams of the protests, and this footage was used as evidence in charges against at least two people.

Indiscriminate surveillance of lawful protests creates an environment in which people are treated with suspicion for simply exercising their rights to freedom of speech and assembly, according to activists and privacy advocates. 

It “is absolutely a threat to First Amendment rights,” said Cagle. 

But USBID does not see it that way. “If no one’s doing anything wrong, then they shouldn’t be worried about being viewed,” said Flood. “I think people should feel free to protest.”

Rosier said that the idea of police surveillance did make him think twice about attending the protests. 

“I was definitely afraid to do something that is baked into the Constitution, that we should be doing in order to make this a better society. Absolutely afraid,” he said.

He described how he wrote the numbers of pro-bono lawyers on his arm before joining the demonstration. Moving around the city for the next few days, he felt on edge, thinking that he could be on some kind of watch list and that police could show up at his door at any moment. One day in June after the protest, he was cycling through a park when a patrol car drove past him. It made him nervous. 

Even now, Rosier is wary. “I really feel like they are watching or listening,” he told me. “I feel like they're monitoring me. I really do.” 

Privacy advocates fear that heavy-handed policing and indiscriminate surveillance represent an erosion of fundamental rights. 

“If people are aware that this surveillance is taking place and deciding not to show up to a protest, then that is harm done,” said Hepner.

Historical context

Draconian surveillance tactics affect us all, but they are of particular concern to Black activists like Rosier. The reasons for this stretch back for decades. 

Take, for example, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, which ran 1956 to 1971 and is widely referred to as Cointelpro. During this period, agents infiltrated civil rights groups, with the aim of disrupting and discrediting the whole movement. The program particularly targeted the Black Panthers, a radical left-wing group founded in Oakland, California in 1966.

This historical memory informs how activists operate today. 

“We learn a lot from what has happened to those who come before us, when it comes to state surveillance,” said James Burch, policy director for the Oakland-based Anti-Police Terror Project. “Something that I’ve been taught as an organizer in the Bay Area is, you need to take the state as seriously as the state takes you.” 

Fifty years after Cointelpro, the Black Lives Matter movement is being threatened by similar tactics. For instance, the New York Police Department appears to have infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter organizers after Eric Garner was killed by police in 2014. Officers gained access to their text messages containing information about protests, according to records obtained by The Guardian via a Freedom of Information Law request. 

According to Cagle, dragnet surveillance immediately places individuals on law enforcement’s radar for nothing more than exercising their rights. 

“Surveillance is an on-ramp into the criminal justice system,” he said.

The post How San Francisco police surveillance closed in on Black Lives Matter protests appeared first on Coda Story.

“I don’t have reason to doubt that there’s something going in Xinjiang, that there could even be repression,” said Blumenthal. “But we haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims.” He went on to describe reports of Beijing’s abuse of Uyghurs as “the hostile language of a Cold War, weaponizing a minority group.”

Blumenthal’s statements met with outrage online and many social media users accused him of ignoring one of the largest-scale human rights violations of the 21st century.

This is not the first time a writer from The Grayzone has sought to refute or downplay reports of Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang, and there is precedent for Blumenthal’s words. With a hardline anti-imperialist ideology and a deep-seated antagonism towards U.S. interventionist foreign policy, The Grayzone has followed a similar path on Syria, challenging reports of atrocities by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. What is more, these fringe views appear to be creeping into other areas of the American left.

Ideological spread

In April, a small left-wing blog named LA Progressive began to publish articles denying the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In one, Margaret Kimberely wrote that widespread reports on the mass detention of Muslim minorities are “a falsehood.” In a subsequent essay, Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers dismissed such narratives as “vast exaggerations used to stoke anti-China views.” 

LA Progressive’s denial of human rights abuses in Xinjiang is particularly jarring considering the rest of its content. Most of the site’s articles concentrate on issues of racial and economic inequality, LGBTQ rights and healthcare reform. But, in recent months, it has run three pieces stating that the Chinese state is being subjected to a disinformation campaign over its treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.  

Founded in 2008 by husband and wife Dick Price and Sharon Kyle, LA Progressive states that it is “committed to advocating for the public interest, as opposed to the corporate agenda.” Price and Kyle are active in Los Angeles left-wing circles and have ties to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, on whose national board of directors Kyle represents Southern California. 

When asked why the site had published the pieces cited above, Price said, “We don't necessarily agree with every sentence in every opinion piece we publish, but we do feel these two articles are worthy of people's consideration.”

Small but loud

While the number of left-wing voices denying China’s ongoing repression of the Uyghur people is few, those that do exist are vociferous and well-organized. Of these, The Grayzone is by far the most influential. In recent years, it has taken a variety of contrarian stances on world affairs, from supporting the Assad regime in Syria to backing Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro.

Blumenthal began his career as part of the more mainstream left. The son of Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, he has written for The New York Times, The Nation and The Daily Beast on subjects ranging from Sarah Palin’s 2008 vice-presidential campaign to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He has also published a number of books, two of which are based on his experiences in Palestine. 

Once a supporter of the Syrian revolution and a critic of Assad, Blumenthal has made frequent appearances on state-run broadcasters such as Russia’s RT and Sputnik radio, and China’s television news channel CGTN. In December 2015, he attended a 10th anniversary party for RT in Moscow. Around this time, he became a fervent advocate for the Syrian regime and set up The Grayzone. 

Initially hosted by the progressive website AlterNet, The Grayzone left the platform in early 2018. In March 2020, Wikipedia marked The Grayzone as a "deprecated source" and discouraged editors from linking to it — a designation shared with RT, the far-right TV channel One America News Network and Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory site InfoWars. 

While many of The Grayzone’s ideas push hard at the edges of left-wing discourse, it still commands a significant audience. The project has 112,000 YouTube subscribers and over 67,200 followers on Twitter. Blumenthal was recently retweeted by President Donald Trump. He has also appeared on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight and Rolling Stone magazine’s popular podcast Useful Idiots.

Unsurprisingly, The Grayzone is viewed favorably in Beijing. Blumenthal was recently the subject of a three-part interview with Global Times, a newspaper run under the auspices of the Communist Party of China. Ajit Singh, who has written two articles for The Grayzone questioning reports that Uyghurs were being held in camps in Xinjiang, has appeared on the state-owned news channel CGTN multiple times. Meanwhile, between December 2019 and March 2020, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao both tweeted a Grayzone article that claimed reports of Uyghur oppression were unreliable and overblown. 

The existence of U.S.-based outlets, run and staffed by American residents who are ready and willing to refute criticism of China’s actions in Xinjiang is of great benefit to Beijing, according to experts.

“Having westerners say things that are in line with the state narrative helps bolster their claims,” explained Darren Byler of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Asian Studies. “It’s coming from Grayzone, rather than from Chinese state media, although it’s saying the same thing.”

Nury Turkel, a Uyghur lawyer and the Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, said that The Grayzone goes one step further than simply repeating Beijing’s line. “It’s almost like these guys are providing talking points to the Chinese propaganda machine,” he said.

Since 2018, The Grayzone has published at least four articles undermining reports of the repression in Xinjiang. “Information about camps containing 1 million prisoners has originated almost exclusively from media outlets and organizations funded and weaponized by the U.S. government to turn up the heat on Beijing,” wrote Singh and assistant editor Ben Norton in one August 2018 piece. 

In recent months, a blog named Black Agenda Report has taken similar stances. Founded in 2006 by veteran broadcaster Glen Ford, and activists Margaret Kimberely and Leutisha Stills, the site gained some recognition in progressive circles around 2012 for its critiques of President Barack Obama from a radical left-wing African-American perspective. 

In January, contributing editor Danny Haiphong published an article titled “My Trip to China Exposed the Shameful Lies Peddled by the American Empire.” In it, he explained that he had taken a two-week tour of the country with an organization named the China-U.S. Solidarity Network. While there, he visited a number of cities, including Beijing and Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. 

“I did not see concentration camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang,” he wrote. “In fact, it is difficult to walk more than a mile without running into a mosque. Every street sign in the city is translated in both Mandarin and Uyghur languages.”

Haiphong later repeated these points on Grayzone’s YouTube show Red Lines, which is hosted by Anya Parampil, a former correspondent for RT America and Blumenthal’s wife.

In a response to questions for this piece, Haiphong wrote, "Shouldn’t reporters be curious, rather than assume the dominant narrative peddled by US intelligence and corporate media? If you want to cover disinformation, you may want to redirect your attention to those with power rather than come question me." 

The left-wing magazine CounterPunch has published a significant number of articles condemning Beijing’s repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. However, it has also occasionally featured pieces that deny any such thing is taking place. 

“The deluge of fake news from Western corporate media since the beginning of this year seeks to demonize the Chinese government, painting it as a gross violator of human rights, when the truth is the exact opposite,” wrote Thomas Hon Wing Polin and Gerry Brown in September 2018.

The same people who take pro-Beijing positions on Xinjiang often follow suit on China’s ongoing crackdown in Hong Kong. Popular Resistance, a blog run out of Baltimore, Maryland, by Zeese and Flowers — the authors of one of LA Progressive’s Xinjiang denialist pieces — is one example. 

“What is happening in Hong Kong is not actually a people’s uprising for democracy, but a tool for anti-China rhetoric and Great Power Conflict,” they wrote. 

Popular Resistance has repeatedly cited Grayzone in its coverage of Xinjiang and republished Haiphong’s Black Agenda Report article. 

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”

Left-wing support and equivocation for authoritarian regimes is by no means a new phenomenon. In the past, notable figures such as Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn have questioned the scale of atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge and Stalin. These positions have generally been rooted in anti-imperialism and a deep suspicion of America’s dominance in global affairs.

Many on the U.S. left take issue with the hegemonic position occupied by their country, but very few end up defending Bashar al-Assad’s bombing of the Syrian people or Xi Jinping’s mass incarceration of religious and ethnic minorities. 

However, publications such as The Grayzone function on a purely ideological level. Based on a desire for a multipolar world, in which global military, cultural and economic power is distributed among multiple nation states and Western influence greatly diminished, they have been quick to argue on behalf of authoritarian regimes such as China and Syria. 

Weaponizing doubt

While a few fringe media outlets are unlikely to shift mainstream political opinion on China’s actions in Xinjiang, they can create significant problems in some areas of the left. Some experts believe that the spread of pro-Beijing narratives is a particular risk in light of the Trump administration’s intensifying rhetoric against China. 

“The narrative has gotten louder in response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Byler. 

“There’s been a real ratcheting up of anti-China sentiment at a grassroots level in the U.S.,” he explained. “I think that’s causing people to think more about China than they have.” 

As a result, people who oppose Trump and look for information that corresponds with their concerns over his presidency could be more exposed than before to the ideas put forward by organizations like The Grayzone. 

While underplaying China’s actions in Xinjiang fits neatly into Grayzone’s multipolar philosophy, such a position is more difficult to reconcile with a broader left-wing worldview that places primacy on the principles of equality, social justice and solidarity with oppressed people. 

“It makes it problematic, both because it undermines the Uyghur stories themselves, but also because it makes effective responses more difficult,” said Byler.

“I don’t mince words, it’s a matter of conscience,” said Turkel. “We’re talking about crimes against humanity.” Denying the systematic oppression in Xinjiang, he said, ignores its effect on the lives of millions of people who “have names and aspirations just like anyone else.” 

For Uyghurs in Xinjiang, mass imprisonment and surveillance, the separation of families and forced sterilization of women are all part of a grim reality. But even as new details come to light on the scale of these abuses, The Grayzone is sticking to its line. 

In an email responding to a request for comment for this article, Blumenthal wrote, “We consider Coda Story to be a NATO propaganda shop wrapped in a boring neocon blog, so we’re not interested in any back and forth. But we do encourage you to run the following statement: ‘The Grayzone does not favor re-education centers for anyone except smarmy warmongering neoconservative fraudsters.’”

Illustration by Gogi Kamushadze

The post Enter the Grayzone: fringe leftists deny the scale of China’s Uyghur oppression appeared first on Coda Story.