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ilanaprincilus06

Review: 'MLK/FBI' Adds Dimension To The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...es-a-civil-rights-icons-legacy

MLK documentary FBI

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • and the responses to the ostensible hypocrisy of it all were no less colorful than they had been in previous years: expletive-filled kiss-offs, angry memes, and links or screenshots from articles detailing the agency's notoriously relentless surveillance of King in the final years of his life.
  • This is neither new nor little-known information, but that doesn't render Sam Pollard's documentary MLK/FBI
  • the film aims to restore dimensions to the now-flattened image of King, who today is often reduced to iconography and erroneously viewed by many as having been a noncontroversial figure during his lifetime.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • On a federal judge's order, the surveillance tapes of King are sealed in the National Archives until at least 2027, and ethical questions are posed about whether dissecting these details are yet another invasion of King's privacy.
  • And of course, there's the concern over King's legacy and how it might crack under revelations that seemingly contradict his near-deified memory.
  • "Does [the truth of his romantic dalliances] make him in my mind less of an historic civil rights leader?
  • King's legacy is complicated, but certainly not undone, by MLK/FBI. That's a good thing; the more we see him as an extraordinary but flawed human being, the easier it is to envision a path forward.
katherineharron

FBI arrests spotlight lessons learned after Charlottesville (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • On Thursday, the FBI arrested three men, Patrik J. Mathews, 27, Brian M. Lemley Jr., 33, and William G. Bilbrough IV, 19, with firearms charges, and they had plans, an official said, to attend a Virginia pro-gun rally. This followed Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam's declaration of a temporary state of emergency after authorities learned that extremists hoped to use the anti-gun control rally planned next Monday -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day -- to incite a violent clash.
  • These arrests add to mounting evidence that a decades-old and violent white-power movement is alive and well, perhaps even gaining strength. White power is a social movement that has united neo-Nazis, Klansmen, skinheads, and militiamen around a shared fear of racial annihilation and cultural change. Since 1983, when movement leaders declared war on the federal government, members of such groups have worked together to bring about a race war.
  • JUST WATCHEDOn GPS: What motivates white power activists?ReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH position: absol
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Silver linings aside, it will take many, many more instances of coordinated response to stop a movement generations in the making. In more than a decade of studying the earlier white power movement, I have become familiar with the themes of underground activity that are today clearly drawing from the earlier movement. In the absence of decisive action across multiple institutions, a rich record of criminal activity and violence will continue to provide these activists with a playbook for further chaos.
  • The Base, furthermore, is what experts call "accelerationist," meaning that its members hope to provoke what they see as an inevitable race war. They have conducted paramilitary training in the Pacific Northwest. Both of these strategies date back to the 1980s, when the Order trained in those forests with hopes of provoking the same race war.
  • One of the men arrested Thursday was formerly a reservist in the Canadian Army, where he received training in explosives and demolition, according to the New York Times. This kind of preparation, too, is common among extremists like these. To take just a few representative examples, in the 1960s, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Marine trained in demolition, helped fellow members of the United Klans of America to bomb the 16th Street Birmingham Baptist Church, killing four black girls.
  • This news out of Virginia shows that there is a real social benefit when people direct their attention to these events -- and sustain the public conversation about the presence of a renewed white-power movement and what it means for our society.
aliciathompson1

Apple backed by more online giants in FBI iPhone unlock battle - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-35722996

technology ethics

shared by aliciathompson1 on 07 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The FBI has a court order demanding Apple helps unlock an iPhone used by the gunman behind the San Bernardino terror attack, Syed Rizwan Farook.
  • Apple has argued that the move would jeopardise the trust it has with its customers and create a backdoor for government agencies to access customer data.
  • Apple has appealed against the court order, arguing that it should not be forced to weaken the security of its own products.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Twitter, AirBnB, Ebay, LinkedIn and Reddit are among a group of 17 major online companies to have formally backed Apple in its court dispute with the FBI.
aprossi

Kevin Seefried, seen carrying Confederate flag inside Capitol during riot, arrested - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...e-flag-man-kevin-seefried-trnd

capitol knowledge social media trump

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Man carrying Confederate flag inside the US Capitol during riot arrested, identified as Kevin Seefried
  • The FBI has arrested Kevin Seefried, seen carrying a Confederate flag inside Capitol Hill, according to a federal criminal complaint.
  • Seefried had been a focus of the FBI's efforts to get the public to help them identify riot participants. The complaint identifies him as the man seen in the photos, widely circulated online, carrying a large Confederate flag inside the US Capitol during the January 6 siege.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Kevin Seefried told the FBI he had brought the Confederate flag with him to Washington from his home in Delaware, where he normally displays it outside.
  • Seefried was charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
  • Some people who stormed the Capitol have already come forward or have been identified by CNN and other news organizations. Many face criminal charges, and some have lost or left their jobs because of their participation.
ilanaprincilus06

'Ballistic Fingerprint' Database Expands Amid Questions About Its Precision : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-questions-about-its-precision

ballistic fingerprint cognitive bias crime

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • But now investigators are getting results in a matter of hours instead of months. And instead of just being a resource for prosecutors at trial, the NIBIN "match" is being used by investigators to generate leads, despite uncertainty about the precision of the match.
  • NIBIN was started in 1999 and has primarily been used by forensics examiners to testify at trial about the likelihood that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. But that's all changing now.
  • But some defense attorneys challenge the notion that the markings are unique, and the FBI says even expert testimony can't make that claim with certainty.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • flawed firearms forensics have led to exonerations in the past.
  • In 2013 a Mississippi man's life was spared hours before his scheduled execution after the FBI said experts had overstated the science. In a note sent to the district attorney in that case, the bureau clarified that "the science regarding firearms examinations does not permit examiner testimony that a specific gun fired a specific bullet to the exclusion of all other guns in the world."
  • Puracal says using NIBIN as an investigative tool is less problematic than using it in court, but she still takes issue with its use.
  • That's because a NIBIN match, she says, can lead to cognitive bias in the investigators — a kind of tunnel vision.
  • Wilbon said they found three loaded guns in the car. No one had the required conceal-carry permits, and the people in the car had outstanding warrants.In the past the investigation may have ended with three people arrested and the guns placed in an evidence locker. But, because the Portland police have this new equipment, the casings were immediately entered into NIBIN. And because the Seattle police also use NIBIN, the ATF database indicated a match to shootings in Seattle.
jmfinizio

Kevin Seefried, seen carrying Confederate flag inside Capitol during riot, arrested - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Delaware ConfederateFlag capitol

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The FBI has arrested Kevin Seefried, seen carrying a Confederate flag inside Capitol Hill, according to a federal criminal complaint.
  • Seefried had been a focus of the FBI's efforts to get the public to help them identify riot participants.
  • Kevin Seefried told the FBI he had brought the Confederate flag with him to Washington from his home in Delaware,
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Many face criminal charges, and some have lost or left their jobs because of their participation.
maxwellokolo

Senators ask FBI for evidence of Trump wiretap claim - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/39210869

shared by maxwellokolo on 08 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 08 Mar 17
     
    Two US senators have written to US law enforcement to inquire if there is any evidence to support President Donald Trump's claim that he was wiretapped. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Republican Lindsey Graham sent the letter to the FBI on Wednesday. They requested "any warrant applications and court orders...
edencottone

Trump's disastrous end to his shocking presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

bias education

shared by edencottone on 12 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump is leaving America in a vortex of violence, sickness and death and more internally estranged than it has been for 150 years.
  • Hospitals are swamped and medical workers are shattered amid a faltering rollout of the vaccine supposed to end the crisis.
  • It took 200 years for the country to rack up its first two presidential impeachments.
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      made history but in a bad way. This president is deserving of the 2 impeachments
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Trump's malfeasance has led the country down that awful, divisive path twice in just more than a year.
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      though this line is opinionated I agree
  • The city Trump has called home for four years is being turned into an armed camp incongruous with the mood of joy and renewal that pulsates through most inaugurations.
  • In a symbol of a democracy under siege, the people's buildings -- the White House and the US Capitol -- are caged behind ugly iron and cement barriers.
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      a threat to our democracy
  • eight days
  • unintended irony, Biden's team has picked "America United"
  • It is becoming ever more obvious that the horrific scenes on Capitol Hill on Wednesday were not a one-off.
  • In a chilling new warning, the FBI revealed the possible next stage in this now nationwide wave of radicalization, saying armed protests were planned at state Capitols in all 50 states between January 16 and Inauguration Day, January 20.
  • Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was shocked by the magnitude of the bureau's intelligence on possible new violence.
  • "I don't think in the entire scope of my career working counter terrorism issues for many, many years, I don't think I ever saw a bulletin go out that concerned armed protest activity in 50 states in a three- or four-day period,"
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      we are in uncharted territory
  • he was not afraid of taking the oath of office outside next week
  • So far, after a massive domestic terror attack on the citadel of US democracy, there has been no major public briefing by any major federal law enforcement agency or the White House, an omission that fosters a sense of an absent government
  • By contrast, senior officials from the outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration worked closely together in the Situation Room on January 20, 2009, when there was concern about the authenticity of terror threat to the inauguration.
  • current atmosphere of fear and wild political insurrection
  • Momentum towards impeachment is now all but unstoppable
  • hinted at the insincerity of the Republican approach.
  • With a few exceptions, Republicans -- who indulged and in many cases supported Trump's blatantly false claims of electoral fraud for weeks -- have responded to the uproar over last week's Capitol attack by complaining that by pushing impeachment, Democrats are fracturing national unity.
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      good that they now acknowledge however should have been done much earlier
  • His comment eerily recalled the rationalizations of Republicans who declined to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial after he tried to get Ukraine to interfere in the election to damage Biden.
  • "Face the Nation."
  • has emerged from many dark periods since the Civil War
    • edencottone
      edencottone on 12 Jan 21
       
      we can do it again
  • Trump has not appeared in public for days.
  • The virus is meanwhile running rampant. Eleven states and Washington, DC, just recorded their highest 7-day average of new cases of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. For the first time, the country is averaging over 3,000 deaths from the pandemic per day.
  • hopes that the nation could soon turn a corner are being tempered by the glitches in the vaccine roll out.
lucieperloff

Facebook Decides Holocaust Denial Content Is Bad, Actually | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...als_n_5f8478dec5b62f97bac625c3

social media bias technology

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • A “well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people,” Bickert said, prompted the long-overdue change.
  • A “well-documented rise in anti-Semitism globally and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust, especially among young people,” Bickert said, prompted the long-overdue change.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Changing something once they realized something had to be done
  • Politicians have enjoyed lax enforcement of Facebook’s community standards, thanks to a loophole the social media company created that protects their posts as “newsworthy content.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The social media platform has become a clearinghouse for misinformation concerning virtually every subject, including Holocaust denials and anti-Semitism in general.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Facebook (and other social media platforms) have lots of influence on today's society
  • “By allowing this hate propaganda on Facebook,” the group warned the company in a letter, “you are exposing the public and, in particular, youth to the anti-Semitism which fueled the Holocaust.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      There are major reasons to fix this
  • The FBI has classified the group as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
mcginnisca

Woman says she was near killed Oregon occupier Finicum - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

perception memory

shared by mcginnisca on 03 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Victoria Sharp says she is certain LaVoy Finicum was unjustly gunned down by state police after they and the FBI pursued his vehicle in southern Oregon.
  • "I know what I saw."
  • Sharp said she heard three shots and saw Finicum fall
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • You know, I can't say that he was reaching for a weapon or not," said Sharp.She watched the video again."OK, he was running through snow and it does not look like he is reaching to me. He's trying to keep his balance. He's running, I remember it. He didn't reach for anything."
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
selene viallard

Government dicloses document on Roswell crash - 0 views

vault.fbi.gov/...file

UFO Roswell crash

shared by selene viallard on 14 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • selene viallard on 14 Nov 11
     
    What do you think about this? Only a second hand account but very interesting, especially because it's been in government secret files for over fifty years.
kushnerha

What Drives Gun Sales: Terrorism, Obama and Calls for Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rorism-obama-restrictions.html

new york times gun control

shared by kushnerha on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • On Sunday, President Obama called for making it harder to buy assault weapons after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. On Monday, the stock prices of two top gun makers, Smith & Wesson and Ruger, soared.
  • “President Obama has actually been the best salesman for firearms,” said Brian W. Ruttenbur, an analyst with BB&T Capital Markets
  • Fear of gun-buying restrictions has been the main driver of spikes in gun sales, far surpassing the effects of mass shootings and terrorist attacks alone, according to federal background-check data
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • When a man shot and killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun sales did not set records until five days later, after President Obama called for banning assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.
  • “It would be like you’ve never owned a toaster, you don’t really want a toaster, but the federal government says they’re going to ban toasters,” Mr. Ruttenbur said. “So you go out and buy a toaster.”
  • Gun sales rose in New Jersey in 2013 after Gov. Chris Christie proposed measures that included expanding background checks and banning certain rifles. (Mr. Christie later vetoed one of the most stringent parts
  • Catch-22 for gun control proponents: Pushing for new restrictions can lead to an influx of new guns.
  • Maryland approved one of the nation’s strictest gun-control measures in May 2013, gun sales jumped as buyers tried to beat the October deadline specified in the measure
  • after Hurricane Katrina, legally registered guns were confiscated from civilians. The confiscations outraged gun owners and prompted an increase in gun sales in the area. Conservatives responded by pushing for a federal law prohibiting the seizure of firearms from civilians during an emergency
  • Gun sales have more than doubled in a decade, to about 15 million in 2013 from about seven million in 2002. More firearms are sold to residents in the United States than in any other country
  • These estimates undercount total sales because they omit some purchases in states that do not require background checks for private sales. They also exclude permits that allow people in some states to buy multiple guns with a single background check.
  • The increase is mostly due to higher sales of handguns, which are typically bought for self-defense. Two of the fastest-growing segments of the market are women and gun owners with concealed carry permits.
  • When Missouri repealed a requirement that gun buyers obtain a permit to buy a handgun in 2007, estimated gun sales went up and stayed up, by roughly 9,000 additional guns per month. The influx shifted gun-trafficking patterns, reducing the number of guns used in crimes that had been brought in from neighboring states.
  • Supreme Court invalidated a ban on handguns in Washington, estimated handgun sales in the city went from near-zero to about 40 every month.
Javier E

Uber, Arizona, and the Limits of Self-Driving Cars - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...556001

self-driving car automation ethics

shared by Javier E on 20 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • it’s a good time for a critical review of the technical literature of self-driving cars. This literature reveals that autonomous vehicles don’t work as well as their creators might like the public to believe.
  • The world is a 3-D grid with x, y, and z coordinates. The car moves through the grid from point A to point B, using highly precise GPS measurements gathered from nearby satellites. Several other systems operate at the same time. The car’s sensors bounce out laser radar waves and measure the response time to build a “picture” of what is outside.
  • It is a masterfully designed, intricate computational system. However, there are dangers.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Self-driving cars navigate by GPS. What happens if a self-driving school bus is speeding down the highway and loses its navigation system at 75 mph because of a jammer in the next lane?
  • Because they are not calculating the trajectory for the stationary fire truck, only for objects in motion (like pedestrians or bicyclists), they can’t react quickly to register a previously stationary object as an object in motion.
  • If the car was programmed to save the car’s occupants at the expense of pedestrians, the autonomous-car industry is facing its first public moment of moral reckoning.
  • This kind of blind optimism about technology, the assumption that tech is always the right answer, is a kind of bias that I call technochauvinism.
  • an overwhelming number of tech people (and investors) seem to want self-driving cars so badly that they are willing to ignore evidence suggesting that self-driving cars could cause as much harm as good
  • By this point, many people know about the trolley problem as an example of an ethical decision that has to be programmed into a self-driving car.
  • With driving, the stakes are much higher. In a self-driving car, death is an unavoidable feature, not a bug.
  • t imagine the opposite scenario: The car is programmed to sacrifice the driver and the occupants to preserve the lives of bystanders. Would you get into that car with your child? Would you let anyone in your family ride in it? Do you want to be on the road, or on the sidewalk, or on a bicycle, next to cars that have no drivers and have unreliable software that is designed to kill you or the driver?
  • Plenty of people want self-driving cars to make their lives easier, but self-driving cars aren’t the only way to fix America’s traffic problems. One straightforward solution would be to invest more in public transportation.
  • Public-transportation funding is a complex issue that requires massive, collaborative effort over a period of years. It involves government bureaucracy. This is exactly the kind of project that tech people often avoid attacking, because it takes a really long time and the fixes are complicated.
  • Plenty of people, including technologists, are sounding warnings about self-driving cars and how they attempt to tackle very hard problems that haven’t yet been solved. People are warning of a likely future for self-driving cars that is neither safe nor ethical nor toward the greater good. Still,  the idea that self-driving cars are nifty and coming soon is often the accepted wisdom, and there’s a tendency to forget that technologists have been saying “coming soon” for decades now.
Javier E

Most Americans believe politicians' heated rhetoric can lead to violence, report finds ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ssive-rhetoric-violence-report

dangerous speech language racism populism provocateur

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • A report published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday found that 78% of Americans believed such rhetoric from elected officials makes violence against targeted groups more likely. A similar majority, 73% of those surveyed, believed elected officials should avoid heated language because it encourages violence.
  • Among those surveyed, 55% said Trump had changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse. Given a list of positive and negative sentiments, ranging from “hopeful” to “concerned”, a large majority said the president’s statements often or sometimes made them “concerned”, “confused” and “embarrassed”.
  • The most popular positive reaction, from 54% of those polled, was “entertained”.
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  • Recent studies have nonetheless pointed to an increase in crimes against some groups following Trump’s White House run and election victory. After years of falling, hate crimes have risen in the last three years. One analysis from the Washington Post found that counties that hosted a Trump rally in 2016 saw a 226% increase in hate crimes. Student surveys from Virginia found higher rates of bullying and teasing in areas that voted for Trump.
  • Benesch coined the term “dangerous speech” – meaning rhetoric that is used to turn one group of people violently against another – after years of studying speech used to instigate atrocities like the Holocaust.
  • “He absolutely uses the language of threat,” Benesch said. “He describes non-citizens as ‘invaders’ and as an ‘invasion’ – that is highly characteristic language of dangerous speech.
  • “It will be only when people have enough courage and love of country to call out dangerous rhetoric on their own side that we will see norms shifting in the right direction,” Benesch said. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.”
sissij

The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html

new york times bias social media technology

shared by sissij on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
  • No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week.
  • “You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you’re a designer of reality.”
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  • It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.
  • The proof, you would have heard him say, was already out there in the mainstream media — what with a report on the website Heat Street saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had secured a warrant to investigate ties between people in Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and articles in The New York Times, in The Washington Post and elsewhere about intelligence linking people in Mr. Trump’s campaign to Russia, some of it from wiretaps.
  • You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality — don the goggles and go live full time in the adventure of your choosing: A, B or C.
  • Just watch out for that wall you’re about to walk into IRL (in real life). Or, hey, don’t — knock yourself out.
  • sissij on 14 Mar 17
     
    This new design reminds me of how the internet is limiting us in our comfort zone. Although in theory, there is almost infinite amount of information on the internet, we can only get a very small proportion of it. And people tends to read the information that support their idea or fit their interests. So the news servers start to design system that only provide readers with what they want to see or like to see. It does not do good to diversify people's mind as what internet should be doing. In the quote, Dan Wagner said: "you're a designer of reality", but I interpret this as we are the designer of our own reality. This will only isolate people from each other. Without living in the same reality, people won't have real communication, so I think this new design does have cons. --Sissi (3/14/2017)
sissij

Is Crime Forensics Flawed? | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...is-crime-forensics-flawed

science research bias

shared by sissij on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • This is concerning because in recent years, time honored methods such as fingerprinting, hair and fiber analysis, firearm analysis, and others, have come under intense scrutiny.
  • Sessions plans to replace the commission with an internal body called the department crime task force, headed by a senior forensic adviser who will report to him directly. No one has been named for the position as of yet.
  • Since 1989, DNA evidence has exonerated 329 individuals. Bite mark and hair analysis—part of what is known as pattern forensics, helped convict 25% of them.
  • sissij on 21 Apr 17
     
    I have long been interested in forensics. There was a late night show called forensic files that I really like to watch. As I learned in biology that human fingerprint is very unique, I have never imagined that there are actually serious flaws in forensics. As long as there is human involvement in this activity, it couldn't be one hundred percent reliable. --Sissi (4/21/2017)
clairemann

Why We Can't Ignore Conspiracy Theories Anymore, Experts Say | Time - 0 views

time.com/...cy-theories-domestic-terrorism

psychology research knowledge brain science bias

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Conspiracy theories, both powerful and enduring, can wreak havoc on society. In recent years, fringe ideas prompted a gunman to storm a Washington, D.C. pizzeria and may have motivated another to fatally shoot 11 worshippers inside a Pittsburgh synagogue. They are also largely to blame for a worldwide surge in measles cases that has sickened more people in the U.S. in the first half of 2019 than in any full year since 1994.
  • “very likely” inspire domestic terrorists to commit criminal and sometimes violent acts and “very likely will emerge, spread and evolve” on internet platforms, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.
  • “It’s increasingly becoming clear that lots and lots of people believe in them, and they have negative outcomes,” says Viren Swami, a social psychology professor at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., who has published several studies on conspiracy theories.
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  • More recently, following Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide in federal jail, Trump retweeted an uncorroborated theory that suggested the death of the well-connected financier, who was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy, was suspicious and somehow linked to former President Bill Clinton.
  • “The chief conspiratorialist of the last 10 years is now the President of the United States,” says Harvard University researcher Joseph Vitriol, who studies political psychology. “Because of that, what we might be seeing is increased influence and pervasiveness of these beliefs.”
  • “It used to be a lot harder for things to go viral,” says Micah Schaffer, a technology policy consultant who crafted YouTube’s first policies when he worked for the company between 2006 and 2009. “Now, without any human intervention, you could have a machine that says a lot of people are watching this and put it on blast to a mass audience.”
  • Facebook faced its own pressures to act in March after an Ohio teenager, who got vaccinated against his mother’s wishes, testified about the dangers of misinformation during a widely viewed Senate hearing
  • “Conspiracy theories are effective at doing the things that they do,” says Mike Wood, a lecturer at England’s University of Winchester, who specializes in the psychology of conspiracy theories. “They motivate people to take actions—to vote or to not vote, to vaccinate their kids or not to vaccinate their kids, to do all of these things that are important.”
caelengrubb

Opinion | History is repeating itself - right before our eyes - 1 views

dailynorthwestern.com/...g-itself-right-before-our-eyes

shared by caelengrubb on 26 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • History has a tendency to repeat itself. As memory fades, events from the past can become events of the present.
  • this is due to the cyclical nature of history — history repeats itself and flows based on the generations
  • According to them, four generations are needed to cycle through before similar events begin to occur, which would put the coming of age of the millennial generation in parallel to the events of the early 20th century.
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  • Hate crime reports increased 17 percent in the United States in 2017 according to the FBI, increasing for the third consecutive year.
  • It is not just LGBTQ+ hate crime that is on the rise. 2018 saw a 99 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents versus 2015, according to the Anti-Defamation League. When it strictly came to race/ethnicity/ancestry motivated crimes, the increase was 18.4 percent between 2016 and 2017. It is a dangerous time if you are not a cisgender, white, Christian in America, but that is not new.
  • A hundred years ago, in 1920, the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party was founded in Germany. It started a generation of Germans that came of age around World War II, meaning they were young adults in 1939.
  • The Nazis held a rally in New York City, where they were protected from protesters by the NYPD. This occurred a full six years after the concentration camps started in Germany. American history sometimes casually likes to omit those events in its recounting of World War II. Americans were undoubtedly the good guys of World War II, saving many countries and millions of people worldwide from fascism, but it has also done a poor job at ensuring these fascists ideas stay out of the country in recent years.
  • The Anti-Defamation League says it like it is: Anti-Semitism in the U.S. is as bad as it was in the 1930s
  • This is not really surprising. History repeats itself. And people forget about history.
  • How can we protect history and avoid making the same mistakes we made in the past when we forget what happened?
  • In the same survey, 93 percent of respondents said that students should learn about the Holocaust in school. Americans understand the importance of passing down the knowledge of this dark past, but we have a government that still refuses to condemn groups promoting the same ideas that tore the world apart 80 years ago.
  • Those events took so many lives, led to a collective awakening to the plight of the Jewish people and now, 80 years later, we are falling back into old patterns.
runlai_jiang

What If Martin Luther King Jr. Was Never Assassinated? - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...alternate-history-civil-rights

shared by runlai_jiang on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • King’s contemporaries’ real lives can bridge the gap between reality and fiction—especially the life of Coretta Scott King, his wife and fellow activist. “The scope of her activism and the breadth of the issues she was working on are an indication of where [Martin Luther King] would be,” suggests Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College political science professor and author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History.
  • King, if he had lived, would very likely have taken up those same banners—perhaps even marching them into the White House, speculates Komozi Woodard, a professor of history, public policy, and Africana studies at Sarah Lawrence College. “Hopefully, White America would have matured to the point of decriminalizing Dr. King as time went on” just as Nelson Mandela’s image shifted from terrorist to savior in South Africa, Woodard tells National Geographic. “Dr. King may have successfully run for president as Mandela did.”
  • A Living King One difference is a little easier to imagine, though it speaks volumes: we might not celebrate Martin Luther King Day in a world where he wasn’t assassinated.
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  • , was vastly unpopular among political leaders and white Americans at the time of his death. “FBI leadership at that time saw King’s stature as a ‘black messiah’ in criminal terms,” Woodard says, describing how King was “alienated, isolated and eliminated” by the Johnson administration.
  • Woodard describes how King’s views were becoming more aligned with those of the more radical Malcolm X. “That doesn’t mean that King would have abandoned nonviolent protest,” he says, “but it means that King was increasingly militant in his anti-poverty agenda.”
  • a ladder of legacies Woodard traces from King through Stokely Carmichael, to whose youthful Black Power movement Woodard imagines King would have added “a core of stability.”
  • If King had lived, his presumed connection to—or involvement with—today’s polarizing racial justice activists would counter, as Theoharis puts it, America’s “fable that we’ve gotten past the race problem.”
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