At the start of 2023, Germany’s far right descended on Dresden for its annual “March of Mourning.” Their show of force was a fist meant to punch a hole in Germany’s traditionally subdued “silent commemoration” of the anniversary of the firebombing of the city by the Allied forces in February 1945. “It’s part of an attempt to create an idea of Germans being not perpetrators but victims,” Stephan Petzold, a lecturer in German history at Leeds University, explained to Alexander Wells, who wrote a piece on the subject for us.

In May, Coda Story teamed with the investigative outfit Lighthouse Reports to mine a year’s worth of Instagram and other social media posts of Russian oligarchs and their families. Their accounts, once monuments to unashamed excess, reflected the desperate tactics they used to resist the sledgehammer of Western sanctions, which cost oligarchs a combined $67 billion in the first year of the war alone.

In October, Coda Story took a close look at dissent in Russia. Katia Patin, Coda’s multimedia editor, reported on Memorial, the decentralized human rights organization that had been ordered “liquidated” by Russia’s judges but is still operating out in the open, giving sold-out walking tours of the country’s history of repression in Moscow.

And in December, Coda staff reporter Isobel Cockerel returned from Sweden’s Arctic wilderness to unfurl a wrenching story that explores the fault line between the existential defense of an Indigenous people and a vision of carbon-free mining, a technofix that could help save our warming planet.

These are four of Coda Story’s best stories of 2023. They all began life by asking the same urgent questions that all of our journalism asks: In what places are abuses of power manifesting? How are new forms of authoritarianism impacting people’s lived experiences? What is at stake and why does it matter?

1. Dresden doesn’t know how to mourn its past: A symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general is transformed into a rallying cry for Germany’s far right.

2. Putin’s Oligarchs: A year in the sanctioned lives of Russia’s richest men: In partnership with Lighthouse Reports, an analysis of 69 publicly accessible accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms of Russia’s wealthiest families under sanctions gleaned unique insights into their lives before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

3. Surviving Russia’s control: The downfall of Russia’s most important human rights group has been greatly exaggerated.

4. In the Swedish Arctic, a battle for the climate rages: In Sweden, everyone is aware the climate is in crisis. And everyone has very different ideas on how to fix it.

By contesting historical understanding, undermining empirical science, subverting known facts, deploying technologies to roll back liberties, and operating with impunity across sovereign borders, authoritarians are rapidly adding all manner of cudgels to their toolkit. In 2023, these four stories and others listed below pried open people’s lives in more than a dozen countries to reveal how the unrelenting intrusion of the continuous present (to use Gertrude Stein’s observation about "Mrs. Dalloway") makes impossible the enjoyment of going about their days.

• Around the world, an estimated 100,000 people work for third-party contractors that supply content moderation services for the likes of Meta, Google and TikTok. In Kenya, content moderators are fighting back against their disturbing conditions.
• A secretive network of wealthy wildlife preservationists are returning species back into Europe — without asking permission first. 
• The contested region between China and India is a fulcrum for the national aspirations and self-identity of both countries, as well as emblematic of the new ways strongmen governments are redefining international borders.
• A little known agency enables European Union member states to carry out operations along EU borders with much less transparency, accountability or regulation than what would be required of any EU government.
• Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of World War I and finds a warning for the United States.
• The surveillance cameras of Colombia’s police are no match for the hundreds of “eyes” employed by street gangs.
• An investigation into New Mexico’s child welfare agency finds an overreliance on software meant to safeguard children from harm.
• The medical establishment has a long history of ignoring patients with “unexplained” symptoms. Then came long Covid.
• How American-made surveillance tech helped protect power — and the drug trade — in Honduras.
• A movement to empty Hindu pilgrimage sites of their Muslim residents gains momentum with help from the Indian government.

The post Year in review: Coda’s best stories of 2023 appeared first on Coda Story.

In a movement associated with the far-right, where its leaders liken vaccine passports to full-blown totalitarianism, and at a demonstration where the mostly white speakers declared themselves “not woke but awake,” the organizers had clearly gone out of their way to also try to present a welcoming, inclusive context. In posters and in speeches, they co-opted the language of diversity to give the impression of appealing to a wide audience and the appearance of embracing mainstream values. 

It was hardly the sole instance of cognitive dissonance at the demonstration. Conservative YouTube comedian JP Sears got the ball rolling, telling the thousands of protesters –“We didn’t come here to agree with each other.”

The crowd roared in agreement. The short, balding man in front of me turned to the tall, balding man next to him and said, “Exactly.”

There to denounce government vaccination mandates (and Big Pharma, the medical establishment, school closures, Bill Gates, fascism, CNN and surveillance) and champion truth and freedom (and vitamin D supplements, ivermectin, dissident doctors, parental choice and Joe Rogan), Sears and subsequent speakers repeatedly cited Martin Luther King Jr. as inspiration. Reminding the protestors that he had given his “I have a dream” speech on the same steps 58 years ago, King, said Sears, “wasn’t a mandate kind of guy. He knew you can’t comply your way out of tyranny.”

But behind their abuse of language and their warping of science in support of their unscientific arguments, the organizers had identified correct currents of concern: authoritarianism, surveillance, loss of privacy, digital tools of social control, experts selling the public a false bill of goods. These are legitimate sources of dread, potential threats to everybody’s liberty and freedoms. They are topics deserving scrutiny. 

But by putting these issues in service of their right-wing populism and viral disinformation, it begs the question whether any of the anti-mandate crowd –speakers and protesters– actually care about these things in the first place. Hours into the event, when all the soaring language of liberty and freedom faded and muted by repetition, what was left were true motives: influence, power, attention, and profits from selling useless medical remedies. 

Organizers had been adamant that this was a demonstration against government vaccination mandates, not an anti-vax event. That party line fell away when the speakers took to the podium but it had been a crucial messaging tactic. Instead of getting deplatformed by social media companies for propagating vaccine disinformation, organizers quickly amassed tens of thousands of followers on their “anti-mandate” Facebook pages, galvanizing people to travel to DC from across the country. 

But from the start of the demonstration –or the “show,” as JP Sears described the rally– vaccination hostility shared center stage with an anti-mandate agenda. The event headliner, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (son of Senator Robert Kennedy), warned of a coming apocalypse stemming from vaccinations and mandates. Even under the Nazis, he said, his voice shaking, Anne Frank was able to hide. But those seeking relief from vaccine tyranny will have nowhere to go. Another key figure behind the march, Robert Malone, a virologist and immunologist, peddled misinformation, fake cures, and compared the United States to a psychotic society similar to Nazi Germany. 

At the March: Anti-mandate firefighters –local media reported 200 DC firefighters attended– around a giant flag they had carried horizontally from the Washington Monument; different groups of protestors giving interviews in Spanish; the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, mingling in the crowd.

Demonstrators and reporters lined up to take photos of a man with a white, wispy chin-beard, dressed head-to-toe as Uncle Sam with a giant syringe around his head. One man in his early 20s wore a Guy Fawkes mask; another man stood on stilts in a grim reaper costume, his sign warning of the deadly consequences of “In Pfizer we trust.” 

While the crowd thronged the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, around the edges, small groups held placards and commented on the proceedings with bullhorns, like an unhinged Greek chorus. One gaggle of people stood on the sidewalk, incessantly correcting the speakers that Christ is who matters here. “We need to remember what Lincoln stood for,” said a speaker. “You need to remember what Jesus stood for,” a member of the sidewalk group answered. This went on for about 30 minutes when, as three Hasidic Jews walked toward the Lincoln Monument, the group told them through the bullhorn to “get right with Jesus you dirty Jews.” 

Another scraggly group on the sidelines chanted “Darwin wins” as protesters passed. At first, I took them as counter-protesters, an anti-anti-mandate carve-out. But apparently, no: they were anti-vax and anti-mandate, and felt Darwin was on their side. The data shows otherwise: Although Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness decreased with emergence of the Delta variant and waning of vaccine-induced immunity, protection against hospitalization and death has remained high. 

Many of the protesters had drawn similar conclusions. Science is on their side. Speakers invoked Albert Einstein and Saint Augustine. While one particularly intricately drawn sign proclaimed “I trust and follow my intuition & instincts - discerning what is fight & true for me,” most of the others begged the world to follow the data. Echoing the ‘science is real’ lawn signs in front of progressive U.S. households, the rally signs urged people to believe in credentialed experts, but only the vanishingly small minority of medical experts who condemned vaccines and are unfairly persecuted by their colleagues, and realize, as one sign read, Galileo also was accused of spreading “misinformation.” 

The pre-rally messaging of a solely anti-mandate agenda, instead of anti-vaccination, allowed organizers to focus on what they argued is the true peril facing the world: the loss of liberty and freedom to digital vaccine passports, coerced vaccine shots, and medical surveillance. Speakers cited the Chinese social credit tracking system, surveillance phone apps, and China’s one child policy, which was rescinded in 2015. Protesters’ signs echoed the same concerns.

Much of that isn’t viewed as over the top by millions of Americans, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. While about 75% of Americans eligible for the vaccine have taken at least one shot, conspiracies centering vaccinations, government mandates, and disinformation are on the rise. Since January 2020, the 153 most influential anti-vaccine social media accounts have gained 2.9 million new followers.

The number of protesters who showed up for the demonstration was far less than the 20,000 promised by the organizers. But in promoting the message of diversity and multiculturalism while simultaneously denouncing ‘woke culture’, in claiming to defend science while simultaneously contradicting it, in condemning authoritarianism, surveillance, and the theft of privacy while promoting right-wing populism and a conspiracy worldview that allows for these things to prosper, the organizers have struck a chord. It’s dissonant, but it works. The next march will be bigger.  

The post At the Washington anti-mandate rally, global concerns get infected with the anti-vax treatment appeared first on Coda Story.

But on a stop in Shanghai to present the University of Tokyo’s findings, scientific authorities revised the age of the mummies. They changed the date so it would be consistent with Han Chinese historical presence in the region. The mummies couldn’t be “older than Chinese history,” remembers the archeologist’s daughter, Gulchehra Hoja. Her father, she recalls, came home to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, shaking with rage. 

Eight years later, the museum where Abduqeyum worked was demolished, ostensibly to house its priceless collections in a more modern structure. But Abduqeyum believed the government ordered the building’s destruction in 2000 to help erase the Uyghur cultural record, and his anger flowed again. “So many things in that building went missing, just went away,” Gulchehra said.

And then so did Gulchehra. In July 2001, she had packed a single suitcase to embark on an exciting solo vacation, an itinerary that flew her from Urumqi to Vienna. She could afford a European vacation. Like her father, she had become a well-known figure in Xinjiang. Gulchehra was the host of a popular provincial children’s show, a role she enjoyed, although she had been under pressure to speak more Mandarin, instead of the channel’s primary Uyghur language, and to feature more Han Chinese children. 

Vacationing in Austria, she accessed the internet for the first time, connected with Uyghur activists, discovered CNN and Western newspapers. She was astonished at her own lack of awareness of acts of repression against Uyghurs at home. “I felt shame,” she recalls, and abruptly concluded that she would not return home, despite her closeness with an extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles, and a grandfather famous in Xinjiang for his traditional Uyghur musical compositions. 

In choosing to suddenly emigrate, Gulchehra, who had studied literature at Xinjiang Normal University, abandoned her television career and her father, with whom she had an especially close relationship. He had cultivated a bond with her, ever since she was a girl who obsessed over dreams of becoming a dancer and he obsessed over his dream that she should not. “My father taught me to love books. His knowledge is insane,” she says. 

Gulchehra had experienced the dawning of China’s decades-long crackdown on its Uyghur population, which after 2016 saw more than a million people sent to concentration camps and was labeled a genocide on the final day of the Trump administration. But human rights abuses at that scale were still in the future when in 2000, as the host of a children’s television show, the government sent Gulchehra on a tour of big Chinese cities — Shanbong, Beijing, Shanghai — to interview Uyghur children who had been sent to live in boarding schools. 

She describes what she witnessed as a “brainwashing:” children forced to eat non-halal food, speak Mandarin, and shed Uyghur cultural habits. Parents were allowed to visit once a month. 

By October 2001, Gulchehra had obtained a working visa and could move to the U.S. She spoke almost no English but, with a background in broadcasting, had found a job as a journalist at the Uyghur-language service of Radio Free Asia in Washington D.C.. 

Gulchehra rose in prominence as a Uyghur-language journalist and developed a large following. She has closely chronicled events in Xinjiang from Washington, conducting important interviews with camp survivors. China’s government has watched as she has been honored for her work, receiving the Magnitsky Human Rights Award and the Courage in Journalism Award

At first, China’s reprisals were aimed at her father. The regional government in Xinjiang severed Abduqeyum’s ties to the museum and any access to scholarship, and his books on the Taklamakan desert’s Buddhist-era societies were banned. 

A gregarious man who enjoyed public speaking and live music, Abduqeyum began to spend more and more time on his balcony, where he grew hundreds of blooming flowers in pots. Gulchehra said that her brother often visited their mother and father, and so did old classmates, who would help Gulchehra’s parents remember their long-absent daughter. “They would come to celebrate my birthday together, before the camps started of course, before most of them had been arrested,” she said.

For two decades, Gulchehra kept in touch with her family by phone. Although, said Dana, Gulchehra’s 16-year-old daughter, “If you say certain trigger words, the phone automatically hangs up. China controls that. So, it’s always stressful.”

In September 2017, when evidence of mass internment camps began streaming out of Xinjiang, Gulchehra learned that her brother had been picked up by the police. Less than a year later, 24 of her relatives were also arrested. Her father was, by then, partially paralyzed from a stroke and could no longer speak on the phone.

Then, in April, the Chinese government released a video about Gulchehra, a U.S. citizen living in Northern Virginia, and her 81-year-old father. It purports that they pose a violent threat to Chinese sovereignty and have been put on a roster called the Shanghai List.

According to the Chinese government, they are now terrorists.

“I was expecting a more serious reaction from the American government, for the State Department to give a statement, to condemn China and say, stop harassing a U.S. journalist,” she told me. “I’m using my voice but it’s not enough. This is mentally torture, separation from my parents for 20 years.”

The Chinese government has taken aggressive measures against citizens and former citizens living in foreign countries who it perceives to be a threat. A new report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs includes the first case-by-case map of China’s transnational repression against Uyghurs. It also reveals that, between 1997 and December 2016, China was involved in the detention or deportation back to China of over 851 Uyghurs across 23 countries. 

Since 2017, China’s actions against overseas Uyghurs have “expanded dramatically as part of the broader security sweep.” Since 2017, the report finds, at least 695 Uyghurs have been detained or deported to China from 15 separate countries. 

It also documents that since 1997, when the first cases of rendition of Uyghurs to China were recorded in Pakistan, China’s “transnational repression has expanded to include a full gamut of activities from espionage, cyberattacks, and physical assaults, to the issuance of Red Notices via Interpol.” 

The threat of retaliation looms constantly over Gulchehra. “My children are worried when I go to the supermarket, what might happen to me,” she said.

Surveillance and control

The modern crackdown in Xinjiang began when China seized on the Bush administration’s post-9/11 call for a globe-spanning assault on terrorism, in order to first erode and then to strip away the civil rights of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. 

China’s totalitarian apparatus of surveillance and control was installed under the cover of anti-terrorism measures. In the 2000s, punitive curfews were imposed after frequent police raids rounded up hundreds of Uyghurs in search of explosives and firearms. Communal violence — sparked by an influx of Han Chinese from outside Xinjiang — and riots in the streets were also cited to justify further crackdowns in the name of anti-terrorism. Uyghurs demonstrating against government policies were characterized by Chinese media as violent separatists. 

I traveled throughout Xinjiang on a reporting trip in the fall of 2008, at a time when large numbers of Han Chinese were being induced to relocate to the underdeveloped region, even as state media stoked fear of Uyghurs targeting them for muggings and robberies. Government goons dressed in black carrying a steampunk-looking camera trailed me in a black sedan, filming while I ate in restaurants. It felt like everybody was being watched. I emailed an editor that Xinjiang had “a patina of creepiness.”

Mosques had become avatars of religion, controlled by government minders. Mandarin-language posters peered over the walls of Uyghur bookstores. I interviewed Uyghurs who spoke of pressure to “become Chinese.” The attempt at erasure of their cultural identity I saw in 2008 foreshadowed the “re-education” camps a decade later. “They are trying to eliminate us by making us Chinese,” said Abdul, a 25-year-old English-speaking Uyghur man, who I met in Hotan, a city in southerwestern Xinjiang. 

Back in Northern Virginia, Gulchehra said she has been warned not to travel abroad. “My freedom of movement is controlled by the Chinese government. It’s ridiculous.”

Nightmares rule her sleep. 

“I feel like I don’t have much time, my father is 81 years old. The Chinese government wants to silence me. I want the American government to protect me. If I cannot go there, please use tools to bring my parents here.”

The investigation is supported by the JFJ Investigative Grant Program.

The post How China threatens prominent Uyghurs — in the US, in China and everywhere appeared first on Coda Story.

The Russian government has taken serious measures to combat COVID-19, which to date has killed more than 7,000 people worldwide. The Kremlin has closed most entry points along the country’s 2,600 mile border with China, ordered people returning from high-risk areas to self-quarantine, banned many flights and public gatherings, and is rushing to build a new $135 million hospital on the outskirts of Moscow. 

But the numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases – 147 as of March 18, with zero fatalities, in a country of 140 million –  strike many Russians as outlandishly small and suggest that public health information is being hijacked by political considerations.

Already, Russian state television and media outlets with ties to the Kremlin have promoted the hoax that the coronavirus is a U.S.-created bioweapon. It is not alone in making such accusations, either. The conspiracy theory that COVID-19 is a bioweapon manufactured by hostile foreign powers has been advanced by politicians and commentators in nations including China, India, Iran and the U.S.  

While Kremlin-propagated disinformation campaigns are usually meant to influence Western audiences, Russian coronavirus disinformation appears to be designed for domestic consumption. But, according to Natalia Krapiva, legal counsel with the digital rights and privacy advocacy organization Access Now, this strategy may not be wholly successful. 

“We are closely following public discourse, and I noticed that serious doubts are surfacing about how realistic the numbers are,” Krapiva told Coda Story. “These doubts have grown over the past few days, turning into open distrust, because people are seeing what is happening in Europe and connecting it to the fact that in Russia doctors are suddenly reporting a big increase in pneumonia cases.”

Krapiva cited the example of a March 12 tweet by the mayor of Moscow, which claimed that the Department of Health was in a heightened state of preparedness for the treatment of the condition. Krapiva added, “People took the use of the word ‘pneumonia’ as a sign that the authorities are hiding something.”

Valery Solovei, a well-known Russian history professor and political commentator, has accused authorities of mismanaging the crisis and issuing false statistics. In an interview on a Moscow radio station on March 16, he said that doctors were attributing COVID-19 deaths to pneumonia. “They use the diagnosis of a side effect as the cause of death,” he alleged, “to show that our country isn't cursed by ‘freedom’ and that political, state management is marvelous.” 

Solovei also invoked a history of cover-ups stretching back to the country’s Soviet past. “The explanation is simple,” he told radio listeners. “Remember Chernobyl? Everything is always hidden here.” 

Some Russian doctors have echoed Solovei’s accusations. While no direct evidence has surfaced connecting Kremlin directives to underreported cases of coronavirus, five Russian virologists contacted by Coda Story described overwhelmed respiratory wards in hospitals widely believed to be designated to treat COVID-19 patients, shortages of protective gear and severe delays in testing for infection. All five doctors declined to go on the record, for fear of retribution. 

Doctors and nurses spoken to by Coda Story detailed chaotic conditions in Russian hospitals. "You can't imagine what is happening,” said one staff member at Mukhin State Hospital, on the eastern edge of Moscow, which has witnessed a surge in pneumonia patients. ”We don't even have gloves sometimes, let alone face masks.” 

“We are sterilizing disposable equipment,” she added. “If you throw it out, out of habit, you are forced to replace it out of pocket." 

A doctor in Saint Petersburg said the situation is reminiscent of the way the Soviet government dealt with another global disease outbreak. HIV and AIDS has long been in retreat around the world, but the virus continues to affect large numbers of Russians. Unlike most countries, Russia’s HIV epidemic is worsening – new cases are increasing by as much as 15 per cent every year. Meanwhile, HIV denialism and conspiracy theories run rampant, encouraged by a government eager to ingratiate itself with a socially conservative Orthodox Church.

“The problem here is not a lack of resources, because the Russian government has the resources to end the AIDS epidemic,” UNAIDS Special Advisor Vinay P Saldanha recently told The Los Angeles Times. “The problem has been for too long that HIV infection in Russia has not been given the attention and resources that are consistent with the magnitude of the epidemic.”

Russia’s inability to truthfully engage with AIDS can be traced  back to the 1980s, when the KGB’s “active measures” agents successfully promoted the conspiracy theory that the disease was hatched in American bioweapons programs. Eventually, strategies of contriving false narratives around matters of global health results in deadly blowback.

“Misinformation can affect society’s ability to deal with a pandemic at many different levels,” wrote Bruce Schneier last year in a prescient New York Times column titled “We Must Prepare for the Next Pandemic – We’ll have to battle both the disease and the fake news.” In the piece, Schneier cited how Ebola relief efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were stymied by mistrust of health workers and government officials who had lost credibility with the public.

The same dynamic of government disinformation, deception and distraction seems to be playing out with COVID-19. Anastasia Vassileva, a close associate of the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny and head of a trade union of doctors called the Alliance of Medics, posted a video on YouTube on March 10. In it, she spoke of being contacted by doctors who had told her that their hospital was “being turned into corona treatment wards, but instead of talking about it honestly, the government is hiding what these beds are being used for.” 

Vassileva also claims that doctors told her that, in the event of any fatalities, they have been instructed not to name COVID-19 as the cause of death. “You can’t write coronavirus,” she said in an interview with Coda Story. 

Owing to the school of diagnostics adhered to in Russia, official causes of death must always be attributed to the condition that directly leads to loss of life, rather than any precipitating illness. While this is standard practice in Russian hospitals, it still means that the country could be grossly underreporting the lethality of its COVID-19 outbreak.

A patient inside Mukhin State Hospital, one of the Moscow hospitals allegedly designated to care for respiratory patients, sent Coda Story text messages on Monday that described waiting for more than a week for the results of his COVID-19 test. In this time, he said, new patients had arrived and shared the same facilities as those awaiting test results. He also described alarming conditions in the hospital’s temporary infectious diseases ward.

He wrote that everyone in the ward is terrified of going home. “You are let go, and then you find out that you were there next to a corona patient and your entire family is infected,” he said.

Meanwhile, the government denies designating any hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. The Moscow Health Department last week issued a statement that “all the social media reports about repurposing of hospitals into facilities for coronavirus patients are untrue and highly provocative.”  

The staff member at Mukhin State Hospital said that the day after Vassileva’s video was posted and viewed by 200,000 people, doctors and nurses were suddenly handed masks, goggles and gloves. A camera crew was on hand to document the equipment being used.

Mukhin State Hospital promptly posted a video on its Facebook page, showing doctors in protective gear caring for patients. Looking straight into the camera, the hospital’s head doctor Aleksander Izvekov refuted what he described as rumors about the situation inside the hospital. However, he confirmed that the hospital had been recently repurposed to receive patients with respiratory problems, that all are tested for COVID-19 and, if the virus is confirmed, individuals are then transferred to special facilities. 

The hospital staff member said that once the camera crew had left, “I went to check myself and everything that was here for filming – all the goggles and face masks – all of it had been taken away.” 

Russia is not the only place where a low number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 has drawn widespread suspicion of underreporting. Other nations, including Iran, Italy and China have all been accused of not releasing accurate figures. Many other countries are also struggling to provide medical staff with sufficient protective clothing and equipment, but in Russia’s case, it appears that the authorities are in denial that any of these vital measures are even necessary.

Natalia Antelava contributed to the reporting.

The post Russia says it has hardly any coronavirus cases. Doctors say otherwise. appeared first on Coda Story.

Take the last few days of Ukraine news. Once upon a time, like perhaps in 2015 or 2016, activists working at anti-corruption NGOs operating in not fully consolidated democracies feared physical attacks; apart from personal safety, their big concern was usually where to find more funding. Now the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, or AntAC, which deals with only domestic corruption, has come under digital attack from high-tech Israeli mercenaries. And the U.S. president’s personal lawyer has dragged AntAC into a dizzying, high-stakes disinformation campaign as he seeks to invent a narrative to further Trump’s chances in the 2020 elections.

Roles are reversing, disinformation is coming from all sides, authoritarian tech is being pushed from and adopted in every direction, illiberal and liberal democracies, corrupt and rule-of-law governments, and the technologies they embrace are more entangled than ever.

In fact, authoritarian and liberal governments are moving toward each other lickety-split in their implementation of artificial intelligence and facial recognition to spy on their citizens and to build a pervasive surveillance system. More than 75 countries have developed or acquired AI technology so that they can surveil their citizens and monitor their public space. Huawei, Hikvision, NEC Corp, and IBM are the corporations around the world selling the most AI for surveillance (with Huawei far in the lead).

These are among the insights in a new, eye-opening Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report by Steven Feldstein, a leading scholar on advanced technology and governance. Feldstein determined that AI surveillance technology is spreading far more rapidly than previous understood, and his key findings include:

• Governments in autocratic and semi-autocratic countries are more prone to abuse AI surveillance than governments in liberal democracies. 
• Liberal democracies are major users of AI surveillance. The index shows that 51 percent of advanced democracies deploy AI surveillance systems, a higher percentage of autocratic regimes.
• China is a major driver of AI surveillance worldwide, and adoption closely tracks with countries having signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, suggesting the Chinese government is subsidizing and encouraging governments to purchase their equipment. These tactics are particularly relevant in countries like Kenya, Laos, Mongolia, Uganda, and Uzbekistan – which otherwise might not access this technology.

In other news:

• Trump and Modi: together in an arena in Houston this weekend;
• Mining companies, environmental groups, former Republican politicians and economists got behind a carbon tax campaign;
• A repo company built a very effective private surveillance network;
• China spread its anti-Islam campaign to other Muslim minority groups.

On more context for that last one: Haiyun Ma, an assistant professor at Frostburg State University in Maryland, wrote in June an important research report for the Hudson Institute on the scope of the PRC’s anti-Muslim goals:  

“Xinjiang’s so-called ‘de-extremification’ campaign clearly has become a struggle against Islam itself, which is meant to de-Islamicize the daily lives of Uyghur Muslims by criminalizing their normal religious practices. As a result, in large parts of western China, the Communist government’s policies toward Islam have become virtually indistinguishable from the demands made by Chinese anti-Muslim activists online. This toxic amalgam has led to some of the most egregious human rights abuses in today’s world.”

Write me: greenberg@codastory.com

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Coda Story shares their outrage and calls for the end of her persecution and a halt of government attacks on press freedom in the Philippines. We stand with Ressa as she confronts a clearly ludicrous allegation of trespassing “cyber-libel” laws that were enacted and applied to her retroactively.

Government harassment of Ressa and the journalists at Rappler has been building for years, apparently as retaliation for the new site's relentless coverage of the thousands of extrajudicial killings rampant in President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign against the country’s illegal drug trade. Ressa has been targeted for financial crime prosecutions and her editors have long endured vicious verbal attacks, the revocation of press credentials, and acts of intimidation such as the leaving of a black funeral wreath on an editor’s front door.

None of this has halted Ressa's courageous work building a crusading, first-rate news organization or her team’s ardor for their defense of a free press. Ressa has been justifiably recognized recently with a number of honors. She won the 2018 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award given by the Committee to Protect Journalists and was named last year a Time Magazine person of the year. The acclaim comes after spending decades holding the powerful to account in the Philippines.

Recently, Coda has partnered with Rappler to launch coverage of ‘authoritarian tech’ –stories about the people, companies, policies and technologies enabling the world’s creeping authoritarianism, especially focused on countries like the Philippines in the Global South.

During this partnership, working with Coda on our editorial collaboration, Ressa and her team were under intense legal pressure from the Philippine government. Yet throughout, they have been singularly dedicated to their journalism mission. “In every conversation we’ve had recently, Maria would rush through answers to questions about her situation as though it’s some irritating minutia she had to get through to talk about what really mattered to her – stories, investigations, and trying to figure out the dynamics of what she described to me as 'the global assault on truth,'” said Natalia Antelava, Coda’s editor in chief. 

We call on the end of persecution against Ressa, the attempts to muzzle the journalism generated at Rappler, and the attacks on press freedoms in the Philippines and around the world. Violence against journalists, censorship, Kafkaesque legal proceedings against media executives, and press repression are on the rise globally, from murders of investigative journalists in Slovakia and Malta, mass imprisonment of journalists in Turkey, to severe media repression in China and Russia and a stark erosion of the media freedom environment in the United States.

Denied immediate bail, Ressa spent at least one night in jail. It should be her last.

The post The Deplorable Arrest of Maria Ressa appeared first on Coda Story.

The group’s leader Dmitry Enteo — a pudgy, bearded man who goes around in jeans and a T-shirt — was taken in for questioning, but quickly released. He received similar treatment after being arrested while at a protest the previous year. Russian state authorities are clearly not in the business of imprisoning Orthodox activists.

In fact, Vladimir Putin is closely allied to Orthodox hardliners. The most famous indicator of this has been the state’s treatment of the punk group Pussy Riot, who were put on trial after they screamed and smashed their guitars in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral in 2012, and whipped through the streets by Cossacks when they protested anti-LGBT discrimination in the run up to the Winter Olympics in 2014.

The discourse of Orthodox activists and the conservative Orthodox priesthood mostly echoes the official line of the Kremlin, a convergence starting at the top with Patriarch Kirill, who recently blessed the Kremlin’s bombing campaign in Syria as a necessary “holy war.”

The Church was an important component of Tsarist autocracy and never strayed far from the Kremlin line when it was severely suppressed during Soviet times, and since then its growing role in society predates Putin. But Putin’s political entwinement with the Church has become more knotted, and has become was a much more visible alliance than anything seen in the 90s or 2000s.

The Church is flexing its new-found muscle. A youth music festival was recently canceled by the government when the church objected, and a major staging of a Wagner opera in Novosibirsk called off because it offended Orthodox tastes.

For Putin, the alliance with the Church offers the chance to advance an idea of Russianness that is defined by what it is not: not European, not soft, not Muslim nor any other religious minority, not multicultural and not newly invented but ancient and traditional, and very much not gay. Orthodoxy gilds this stance with a kind of Old Muscovy aesthetic and veneer of doctrinal coherence.

There are potential fractures within this alliance. Competing claims to ultimate social authority can eventually butt against each other. The Kremlin looks to the Church for legitimacy, but what happens if the state and the church find their interests diverging? Objection to homosexuality from within the Church can seem visceral, unyielding, even existential. While the Kremlin has made even publicly proclaiming oneself gay a crime, it mostly allows (discreet) gay life to go on unchallenged. What happens if the Church decides this is entirely too tolerant?

Russian foreign policy priorities too are not always perfectly aligned with the Orthodox interests. The Orthodox religion represents various national churches though the Russian church is its largest denomination. In a 2013 editorial on Syria in the New York Times, Putin inveighed against nations considering themselves “exceptional” solemnly declaring that God had created them all equal. The following year he invaded Ukraine, causing major tensions between the Ukrainian Orthodox church and its sister organization in Russia.

National exceptionalism, as we see here, was bad until it was good. The Orthodox Church may find itself the victim of the same sudden shifts of logic.

The post The Kremlin and the Cross appeared first on Coda Story.

There are also ways of dealing with the aftermath of the violence. One common technique is to blame the victim’s party, such as the liberals who the government claimed were responsible for gunning down dissident Boris Nemtsov inside the Kremlin’s walls in February 2015.

Proportionally, attacks against members of Russia’s LGBT community are significantly lower than against opposition supporters, but they emanate from the same Kremlin-sanctioned political weather system. When zealous defenders of so-called Russian values attack gay people in the streets, they are secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face prosecution.

Some of the actions flourishing under this system are documented in License to Harm, a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, which describes a long list of abuses committed on the street, or in the subway, or in offices. A vigilante network calling themselves Occupy Pedophilia is shown to pour urine over its victims, in some cases forcing them to drink it. Occupy Pedophilia’s founder, Maxim Martsinkevich, likes to be called “Tesak,” which means cleaver or hatchet in Russian. Common Occupy Pedophilia tactics include striking victims with dildos or forcing victims to pose with dildos, then stripping them naked, painting or drawing slurs on them, and then wrapping up the attack by spraying victims with construction foam in their groin.

The St. Petersburg-based Russian LGBT Network conducted an anonymous survey in 2014 which found that fully half of gay and lesbian respondents had been harassed and 15 percent physically attacked — a number is suspected to have gone up significantly in the last year as the intensity of anti-LGBT rhetoric from prominent people in government, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the media has increased.

The Kremlin’s political violence franchising isn’t limited by Russia’s borders. After protesters toppled the Russian-backed president of Ukraine in 2013, the Night Wolves — a Moscow biker gang allied with the Kremlin — turned up in Ukraine, galvanizing violent reprisals against activists who were protesting Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region of eastern Ukraine. Zealous defenders of so-called Russian values attack LGBT people in the streets, secure in the knowledge that they are unlikely to face prosecution.

An even more sinister franchise partner is warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin has cultivated as his in-house thug to maintain control over Chechnya. With an estimated 15,000 men in his security force, Kadyrov is alleged to have played a role in many deaths not only in Chechnya but in Moscow, where his men reportedly have special security clearances.

State-sanctioned political violence can be a means of authoritarian control. But the Kremlin’s policy of spinning off the dirty work to vigilante organizations, outlaw clubs, powerful henchmen and semi-private militias can also be seen as a loss of control. In its report on Russia’s “Uncontrolled Violence”, The Economist compared contemporary Russia to 1970s Latin America or Italy — a place where the state is just another criminal enterprise among many.

This ambiguity may suit Putin well enough, but it makes for an unpredictable environment. For non-heterosexual people trying to navigate it, the trends are hard to read and the stakes enormously high. Will persecution escalate, or will attention shift to a new group? Where will the Kremlin’s violence franchise take them?

The post Political Violence, Inc. appeared first on Coda Story.