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Javier E

Why Students Should Care About the Wars America Fights - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545351

war history education wars military

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The more I asked my students about their thoughts on the Middle East, the more I realized that it was not simply a matter of disinterest (although that is certainly a factor among some), but rather that the subject only existed to them in an abstract manner.
  • My high-school experience was shaped by 9/11, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after the towers fell. It wasn’t until after I returned from deployment to Iraq and entering college that I began to think more about what this war meant and how it has fundamentally changed American society. But for my students, this was a war that had existed for almost their entire lives: In fact, from the moment many of them were born, the U.S. has been engaged in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the indelible mark that terrorism has left on Europe in recent years, or the very visible specter of ISIS operating within the Middle East and Africa today. How could there be no questions?
  • I wanted students to actively seek understanding of the region and the war that shaped a new generation of vets, including myself. I wanted to know that this history would not be lost, that a war costly in blood and treasure would not be forgotten; student detachment now would mean their detachment as they entered college and, ultimately, the “real world.” The consequences of a disinterested society are severe when considering the inevitability of future American military mobilization.
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  • I began to wonder if the disconnect is generational, whether today’s children are uniquely disconnected from the war that has shaped their lives
  • Consider the Vietnam War: The number of U.S. households owning a television increased by 75 percent between 1950 and 1960. By the time the Tet Offensive took place in 1968—a major turning point in the war—nearly 95 percent of households owned a TV. Images of the war were directly broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans via the big three networks
  • the fact that it was America’s first truly televised war speaks to its magnitude as a media event. Personal connections also rendered teenagers hyper-exposed to the war. Even though a minority of those who served in Vietnam were conscripted, the draft was still a salient aspect of the war, one of which families were all too aware
  • By contrast, in 2010, when the war in Iraq reached its seven-year mark, just 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the conflict. And currently, the proportion of Americans having served in the U.S.’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at less than 1 percent
  • With no relatives or family friends having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and with such little media exposure to the conflicts, many young people do not have any reference point for understanding the impact of war.
  • Fewer families maintain connections to the military today than in previous eras, and this fact is especially pronounced among younger Americans; the younger you are, the less likely you are to know anyone who served in the armed forces.
  • Experts argue history education—let alone nuanced history education that encourages critical thinking—is a low priority for America’s public schools, and if that’s the case this flaw only exacerbates the problem. As does the reality, according to some critics, that many modern-day textbooks teach a highly biased account of the “War on Terror.”
  • What does this mean? America’s youth aren’t apathetic—rather, they’ve grown up during a war obscured by modern American culture. If one doesn’t care to look at the war, then he doesn’t have to
  • . It’s not indifference per se, but instead lack of context.
  • If education is truly an investment in the future, then that education must involve addressing consequences of prolonged war.
  • It is today’s students who will foot the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan when they become taxpayers. It is today’s students who are now—and will continue to be—exposed to an entirely new set of policies and institutions have been developed in the name of the “War on Terror.” Today’s students, for instance, will continue to grow up in an era of both ever-increasing electronic surveillance and reduction of privacy.
  • Students’ silence speaks to the need for American schools to address a growing divide between the military and the American public—to include as a core part of the curriculum lessons on this ill-defined war that has left societies in ruin and changed American politics. At some point, students must learn that it is their civic responsibility to understand and assess violence being waged in their name.
Javier E

Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-ac6e-ef909e1c1284_story.html

fb russia influence election 2016 zuckerberg obama fake news culture social media

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior.
  • In particular, momentum is building in Congress and elsewhere in the federal government for a law requiring tech companies — like newspapers, television stations and other traditional carriers of campaign messages — to disclose who buys political ads and how much they spend on them.
  • “There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.
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  • the Russian disinformation effort has proven far harder to track and combat because Russian operatives were taking advantage of Facebook’s core functions, connecting users with shared content and with targeted native ads to shape the political environment in an unusually contentious political season, say people familiar with Facebook’s response.
  • Unlike the Islamic State, what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate.
  • Facebook’s cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts — including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks — to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.
  • The sophistication of the Russian tactics caught Facebook off-guard. Its highly regarded security team had erected formidable defenses against traditional cyber attacks but failed to anticipate that Facebook users — deploying easily available automated tools such as ad micro-targeting — pumped skillfully crafted propaganda through the social network without setting off any alarm bells.
  • One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.
  • The software tool was given a secret designation, and Facebook is now deploying it and others in the run-up to elections around the world. It was used in the French election in May, where it helped disable 30,000 fake accounts, the company said. It was put to the test again on Sunday when Germans went to the polls. Facebook declined to share the software tool’s code name. 
  • “It is our responsibility,” he wrote, “to amplify the good effects [of the Facebook platform] and mitigate the bad — to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world.”
  • The extent of Facebook’s internal self-examination became clear in April, when Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos co-authored a 13-page white paper detailing the results of a sprawling research effort that included input from experts from across the company, who in some cases also worked to build new software aimed specifically at detecting foreign propaganda.
  • “Facebook sits at a critical juncture,” Stamos wrote in the paper, adding that the effort focused on “actions taken by organized actors (governments or non-state actors) to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome.” He described how the company had used a technique known as machine learning to build specialized data-mining software that can detect patterns of behavior — for example, the repeated posting of the same content — that malevolent actors might use.  
  • the intelligence agencies had little data on Russia’s use of Facebook and other U.S.-based social media platforms, in part because of rules designed to protect the privacy of communications between Americans.
  • Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate. Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some probably existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.
  • Technicians then searched for “indicators” that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.
  • By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.
  • Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface. One called Facebook’s discoveries thus far “the tip of the iceberg.” Nobody really knows how many accounts are out there and how to prevent more of them from being created to shape the next election — and turn American society against itself.
Javier E

Our economy is a hellscape for consumers. The United flier is the latest victim. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ted-flier-is-the-latest-victim

oligopoly market fundamentalism consumers economic

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • We are told that this is the era of the empowered consumer:
  • Better information means more competition, which means lower prices — all features, of course, of an open marketplace ostensibly presided over by a regulatory authority that, while distant, exists to protect our safety.
  • This vision is a lie. Air travel is the most concentrated version of an essentially authoritarian experience that can be found throughout today’s economy. We live, work, shop, and travel under a system of grossly asymmetric power relationships, in which consumers sign away most of their rights just by purchasing a ticket and companies deputize themselves to enforce contracts with hired goons.
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  • It doesn’t help that the Trump administration is rapidly stripping away as many regulations as it can, promising to repeal two for every new one implemented — an ultra-wealthy administration’s attempt to formalize the plutocratic free-for-all that has followed decades of growing corporate power, defined by massive income inequality, regulatory capture, a revolving door between agencies and the industries they oversee, and steadily eroding consumer rights. The empowered consumer is a figment of our imagination.
  • Experiences that used to be standardized are being divided into tiers denoting various rights, access and costs. The result is to both pit consumers against one another — as they compete for a limited pool of guaranteed seats on an airplane, for example — and to extract more money out of better-heeled customers.
  • If we violate any of the strictures of the contract we’ve implicitly signed by buying a ticket, then the airline — backed with the imprimatur of state authority, perhaps even with the help of local police — has every right to remove us from the plane without apology.
  • Survey the economic landscape and you’re likely to find similarly scrambled power relationships. During the foreclosure crisis, banks acted like arms of the state, with local sheriffs becoming the banking industry’s eviction force. Health insurers dictate access to health care for millions while a small coterie of chief executives reaps huge payouts. The telecommunications industry has consolidated into a handful of industry behemoths that maintain regional monopolies
  • The result is a lack of competition and slow, pricey service
  • Increasingly we’re not just paying more for less; we are sacrificing our privacy rights in the process, as personal data has become a huge driver of the digital economy
  • Those are the economic costs of this arrangement. The social and cultural costs are harder to define but no less important. As Sandel explains, common experiences become increasingly fragmented and subjected to the vicissitudes of the market: “At a time of rising inequality, the marketization of everything means that people of affluence and people of modest means lead increasingly separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools.”
  • traditionally guaranteed rights become more contingent and benefits accrue to the wealthy.
  • We get what we pay for, which increasingly means whatever a company like United decides.
Javier E

A Trust Buster for the New 'Knowledge Monopoly' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ithout-mind-franklin-foer.html

monopoly tech media disruption crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • We, the consuming public, have failed to properly understand the new tech superpowers, he suggests, leaving little hope for stodgy and reluctant American regulators. The scope of their influence is obscured by the sheer number of things they do and sell, or problems they purport to be solving, and by our outdated sense of what constitutes a monopoly. To that end, Foer promotes the concept of the “knowledge monopoly,” which he qualifies with a mischievous grin. “My hope is that we revive ‘monopoly’ as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers,” he says, rather than as a “technical” term referring to one company cornerning a market. (His new monopolists, after all, aren’t raising prices. They’re giving things away free).
  • His best assessment of what has happened to media in general in the last decade is tucked in an aside about what Facebook, Google and Amazon all offer, or threaten: They are the “primary bundlers” of commercial media, whether it’s books, articles or video. “They are the ones that create a usable, coherent product from its disparate parts. Their business model is infinitely better than the one it displaced.”
  • More broadly, truly ambitious tech companies are in the business of creating markets, not competing in them; of wrapping themselves around industries, not merely disrupting them.
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  • He reminds us that the issue of monopoly dominated our politics for generations, even as the companies in the crosshairs changed in form and ambition. Though he makes no radical or provocative case to, say, nationalize Facebook, or to break up Google, he does suggest creating a Data Protection Authority, in the mold of Elizabeth Warren’s post-financial-crisis Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and calling for government to protect privacy as it (in theory) protects the environment.
  • Is this idealistic, plain crazy, or just impotent
  • What does it mean that it could be all three?
Javier E

The first social media suicide | News | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...the-first-social-media-suicide

social media suicide youth france crisis despair

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • Océane was oppressed by the trite and uncaring relations she observed between human beings. She poured scorn on the empty flirtation of social media, their desperate popularity theatre. She had no interest in the artificial animation of alcohol or drugs (though she constantly smoked cigarettes). The dulled existence of the Parisian suburbs, where no one seemed able to engage with anything consequential, depressed her (on the wall behind her as she made her last speech hung a poster with the words NEW YORK PARIS LONDON HONG KONG).
  • For a generation so fully embedded in social media, celebrity was not remote or atypical. It was latent in everyone. Schoolgirls debated with each other how they would deal with its burdens – paparazzi, extreme wealth, film-star boyfriends – when they grew up
  • . Social media, after all, supplied a publicity machinery with a reach and power previously available only to truly famous people, and now the condition of the celebrity was everyone’s condition. Suddenly everyone was broadcasting their life to the world, and measuring their worth on the basis of the libidinal pulses that came back – as only celebrities had before. Suddenly, the celebrity’s grief over privacy was everyone’s, and everyone was afflicted by her insecurity: do people realise there’s nothing behind it all except my own frail and disappointing humanity?
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  • Océane’s death was also intended as a kind of detonation, which would “take out” others apart from herself. On their side, the perpetrators of the Paris attacks were also, let us not forget, bent on their own destruction: they, too, were suicidal. All these people were young, and nearly all of them had grown up in the racialised ghettos of Paris and Brussels. All of them felt some kind of despair about the reality they lived in Europe, and all of them, crucially, decided that the only significant asset they had, in their negotiation with it, was their own existence.
  • If mid-20th-century western societies achieved a startling level of consensus, it was due to their extraordinary expansion of the share in the social surplus – to which the destruction (by war) of previous wealth concentrations, and the transformation of “labour” into “jobs”, were essential
  • Today, as western societies reverse those advances and drift back towards 19th-century arrangements, it should not be surprising that the malaise of that era is returning, too. This malaise is felt most keenly by the young, who have seen nothing during their lifetimes save the progressive re-exclusion of the majority from society’s wealth, and who embark on adulthood with very little hope that they will be able to “make it” as their parents and grandparents did. They have a strong sense, in fact, that now-ageing generations have taken everything for themselves, bequeathing to the young nothing but the burden of their own sins.
  • Malaise takes on particularly acute forms in the Parisian suburbs, where work has been informalised and automated almost into nothing; in the most depressed areas, a quarter of young women and nearly half of young men are without jobs. But there too, unemployment is only a symptom of the wider casting-out from French society, whose would-be universalism disguises one of the most consolidated power systems in the western world
  • militant Islam is spreading among French youth not just through the radicalisation of Muslims, but also through the conversion of non-Muslims, who wish for themselves the activist power it supplies
  • It was not, in other words, that they were Muslim, and therefore they wanted to destroy reality and themselves; it was rather that they wanted to destroy reality and themselves – and to rediscover, in the process, some kind of chivalry and nobility – and therefore they embraced the trenchant power of radical Islam.
  • There are many moments in history when young people have dreamed of glamorous self-destruction rather than embarking, drearily, on adulthood. But those who actually die are the exceptions. Far greater numbers are touched by the same current of despair, but are nevertheless held back from the ultimate act by life’s natural defences. These survivors are not left unscathed, however. They live astride the line between life and death, harbouring a kind of sentimental envy for those who have gone.
  • I saw traits in her common to a lot of people these days – and possibly to myself, even if they are most pronounced in the young: she was subdued, serious, intermittently funny, distracted by constant electronic tics, slightly unavailable to herself. In so many respects, Océane seemed entirely normal, and I sensed that her online exploit, too, would become more customary over time.
abbykleman

Trump Discards Obama Legacy, One Rule at a Time - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...p-overturning-regulations.html

shared by abbykleman on 01 May 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 01 May 17
     
    The result was a historic reversal of government rules in record time. Mr. Trump has used the review act as a regulatory wrecking ball, signing 13 bills that erased rules on the environment, labor, financial protections, internet privacy, abortion, education and gun rights.
proudsa

Even Trump Voters Hate This Bill He Just Signed | The Huffington Post - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ll_us_58e295e7e4b0f4a923b0d94a

shared by proudsa on 04 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Republicans pushed through the resolution last month that overturns Obama administration rules banning internet service providers, or ISPs, from sharing or selling “sensitive” data, like web browsing history and Social Security numbers, without customers’ explicit permission.
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 04 Apr 17
       
      why?
  • 83 percent oppose the concept, according to the HuffPost/YouGov poll
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 04 Apr 17
       
      How reliable is a poll taken by an organization with a clear political leaning (biased readership?)
  • Polarization being what it is, it’s rare for any political issue to face such an overwhelming rejection.
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  • Seventy-four percent of the public—including three-quarters of Republicans—said that Trump should veto the bill, with just 11 percent advocating for him to sign it.
clairemann

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano: Who will keep our liberties safe? | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...drew-napolitano-liberties-safe

Politics US economics history crisis

shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • What if the right to worship or not, to think as you wish, say what you think, to publish what you say, to associate -- or not -- with whomever you choose, to defend yourself using the same means as the government and bad guys, to enjoy the right to privacy, to keep the government off your property and back and out of your face, to travel wherever and whenever, to engage in commercial intercourse on private property freely and without the need for government permission are natural, personal rights that no government -- whether by edict, legislation or referendum -- can morally dismiss or discard?
  • What if the Fifth Amendment commands that the government cannot take property rights without paying the owner their fair market value?
  • What if state legislatures are utterly without power to interfere with our daily choices in the name of emergency and safety? What if those same state legislatures cannot give to governors powers that they do not have?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What if democracy and liberty can only co-exist when the government is faithful to the Constitution? What if the history of American government is its infidelity to the Constitution?
anonymous

After two months in office, Kamala Harris is still living out of suitcases -- and she's getting frustrated with it - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It has been more than two months since Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States, a historic moment for the country, as Harris is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the second highest office in the land. Yet, Harris -- along with her husband, Georgetown Law professor Douglas Emhoff -- is still, ostensibly, living out of suitcases, unable to move into the private residence reserved for the vice president because it's still undergoing renovations.
  • It's unclear why the renovations are taking so long, said one administration official, but it's a situation that has left Harris increasingly and understandably bothered, according to several people who spoke to CNN about her situation. "She is getting frustrated," said another administration official, noting with each passing day the desire to move in to her designated house -- a stately, turreted mansion two-and-a-half miles from the White House -- grows more intense.
  • CNN has looked at various government contracts, awarded for myriad issues at the vice president's residence over the last few years, many of which detail intensive foundational work. From recently wrapped projects on a retention pond to a replaced tank system for $164,000 from last September, repairs and upkeep appear constant. There's also an ongoing $3.8 million contract for "plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors," according to the contract on the United States government spending website.
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  • The contracts, while substantial, aren't overtly egregious in terms of cost and expectation, considering the home is 9,000-plus square feet and was built in 1893. Tax records from 2018 indicate $119,000 in expenses were used to provide updates and improvements in and around the grounds of the residence, for example. However, the current contracts do not address specifically why the vice president is still not living there, which is leading to growing questions -- and agitation -- about the pace of the work.
  • Harris has recently been spotted at her future home, popping in for an hour-long visit three weeks ago, per CNN. Two administration staff with knowledge of the ongoing updates told CNN that Harris -- who likes to cook -- requested work be done on the kitchen.
  • It is not unusual for there to be at least a couple of weeks between residents, so the Naval staff who operate the home can refresh, said Elizabeth Haenle, who served as vice president residence manager and social secretary for former Vice President Dick Cheney. "From time to time, the Navy will ask the vice president and their respective families to delay moving in so that they have time for maintenance and upgrades that are not easy to perform once the vice president takes up residence," Haenle said.
  • Shortly after inauguration, a Harris aide told CNN the vice president wouldn't be immediately moving in, citing the need for some repairs to the home "that are more easily conducted with the home unoccupied." A move-in date was still to be determined at the time. Another administration official told CNN some of the work included renovating the home's chimneys -- there are seven working fireplaces -- as well as other updates.
  • Although Blair House provides comfortable, even luxurious, accommodations, Harris and Emhoff's current surroundings lack the creature comforts of a home. Antiques and museum-quality pieces of American history deck each of the 100-plus rooms, which include a gym and a private hair salon. And although the professional, full-time staff of more than a dozen provide amenities as accommodating as a luxury hotel, Blair House does not offer the laid-back vibe Harris and Emhoff are said to prefer when they are home. The couple enjoy a more casual, West Coast informality, with frequent visits from family and large Sunday suppers, the former California senator has said.
  • The main bedroom suite at Blair House was redecorated by celebrity interior designer Thomas Pheasant, brought on in 2012 to make updates to overall décor, and includes a massive, canopied bed draped in luxe fabrics and furnishings that are more reminiscent of Mount Vernon than a California modern mood. Her condo in Washington, DC, which she moved out of to live at Blair House, was inside a sleek, eco-chic, minimalist building in the city's West End neighborhood.
  • When the second couple does finally move into One Observatory Circle, where the vice president's residence is located on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, they will find a home quite unlike their city condo or Blair House, but also very different from the White House. There are far fewer formalities, fewer staff and more freedom.
  • The dozens of acres that make up the grounds of the Naval Observatory offer privacy and the ability to move about with more leisure than can the President and first lady at the White House. Biden last month at a CNN Town Hall referred to the White House as a "gilded cage," and lamented not having the same accoutrements at his disposal as when he lived at the vice president's residence for eight years.
  • It was former Vice President Dan Quayle who had the heated pool installed, and it became Biden's treasured refuge. While vice president, Biden would throw raucous summer pool parties for staff and their families, bringing out water cannons and partaking in drenching shoot-outs with the children who attended. In 2017, shortly after moving in, then-second lady Karen Pence shared in an interview Biden's parting words to her just after her husband, Mike Pence, was sworn in: "That's the thing that Joe Biden said to us as he got into the limo and left the Capitol on Inauguration Day — he said, 'You're gonna love the pool.'"
  • Harris, who early in her vice presidency was spotted running up and down the steps at the Lincoln Memorial for her workout, Secret Service agents nearby, will have the outdoor space to jog, swim and workout at her new home -- without the public spotting her and posting videos on social media. Harris has said she works out every morning, and swimming can sometimes be a part of her routine -- another reason the vice presidential pool is a perk.
  • Should she wish to add her personal signature to the residence or its grounds -- such as Quayle did with the pool or George H.W. Bush did with an outdoor horseshoe pit or the Bidens did with a garden where the names of all the home's occupants, pets included, are engraved -- updates and tweaks can circumvent the elaborate process of approvals that any changes at the White House must go through.
  • However, as with the White House, a separate foundation has been established to cover most updates with government-provided funds. Also like the White House, the vice president has at her disposal roomfuls of historic furnishings and decorative arts from which to choose from as part of a private collection reserved for the President and vice president to make their temporary homes feel homey and to their personal tastes. Karen Pence once said she left the residence rooms set up in much the same way as the Biden's had it before them, since the Pences liked the layout and saw no reason to upend it.
  • Harris is known to derive satisfaction from cooking, and she's no doubt hungering for the personal space to do that. She once said in an interview with New York Magazine's "The Cut," "If I'm cooking, I feel like I'm in control of my life." Harris and Emhoff are fond of their nights in, and enjoy sharing time in the kitchen and good food. The couple, separately and together, are frequent patrons of Stachowski's Market, a butcher shop and mini-gourmet provisions store located on a quaint corner in Georgetown.
  • For at-home entertaining, the residence offers "a wrap-around veranda that faces away from the busy streets of Northwest Washington," notes Haenle. "It is a special place and makes for great Sunday afternoon family gatherings," while still being formal enough to welcome heads of state.
hannahcarter11

California attorney general cuts off researchers' access to gun violence data | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...vier-becerra-gun-violence-data

violence gun california

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For decades, America’s gun violence researchers fought an uphill battle against the National Rifle Association to obtain the data and funding they need to study the effects of US gun laws.
  • California, which has much stricter gun laws than most American states, also has more detailed government data available, including records of individual handgun purchasers going back decades and statewide records about the restraining orders filed to temporarily bar at-risk people from owning or buying guns.
  • This more detailed personal information has allowed California researchers to conduct rigorous analyses of the state’s gun laws and policies, looking at early evidence of whether the state’s new gun violence restraining orders have helped to prevent mass shootings, studying whether buying a handgun puts a person at higher risk of dying from gun suicide, and examining whether expanding the category of people with violent records who are barred from buying guns might reduce gun violence.
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  • The justice department has cited privacy concerns as a justification for the data restrictions, and has said it believes current California law does not permit the agency to release certain kinds of data to researchers.
  • Wintemute said the center’s problems with accessing firearms data access started in 2017, when Becerra became California’s attorney general, and escalated in early 2020. “They’re refusing to provide any detailed explanation. They’re simply saying: you can’t have the data,” Wintemute said of the department’s decisions. “One of the mysteries is why this is happening: the law has not changed.”
  • In statements justifying the department’s current policy, Becerra’s office repeatedly cited a piece of new legislation drafted by Wintemute himself, which would mandate the department of justice provide data to researchers as evidence that the current law was ambiguous and needed to be clarified.
  • While some Republicans and gun rights activists have pushed back against public health research on guns for decades, “I can’t think of an example” of another Democratic politician serving as a barrier to this kind of work, Webster said.
  • “Becerra’s repeated unwillingness to share various types of information suggests he’s more concerned about politics than truth. Is this latest cover-up an effort to hide data that reflects poorly on the effectiveness of his policies?”, Chuck Michel, the president of the California Rifle and Pistol Association, said in a statement.
  • Wintemute, who was one of the public health experts whose federal research funding to study firearms issues was cut off after pressure from the National Rifle Association in the early 1990s, said the standoff felt strangely familiar.
  • The behavior of California’s justice department is “similar to what happened in the 1990s”, Wintemute said, when Republicans responded to a taxpayer-funded study finding that gun ownership was linked to an increased risk of homicide in the home by making symbolic cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget and warning that federal public health funding could not be used to “advocate or promote gun control”.
aidenborst

Merrick Garland finally got his Senate vote. Now comes the hard part - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

Politics US Culture Policy gop Garland Biden Biden-Administration

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Merrick Garland faces multiple crises to address and politically tough decisions to make as he belatedly takes the reins at the Justice Department as attorney general.
  • He'll try to heal a workforce that was battered during the Trump era, deliver on President Joe Biden's liberal priorities and campaign promises and oversee some of the most complex investigations in a generation.
  • Garland got a bipartisan nod of approval of 70-30, earning the support of 20 Republicans in a Senate where zero-sum partisanship is the new normal. But that was the easy part for Garland, who's been a federal appellate judge since 1997.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Other issues pose long-term challenges. Biden made big promises on criminal justice and police reform. At the peak of last summer's protests against racial inequality, Biden said at an NAACP town hall that the US had reached "a moment where we must make substantive changes now."
  • Some issues percolated to the front-burner before Garland was confirmed. Under Biden, the Justice Department already revoked some hardline immigration policies and told the Supreme Court that it was reversing the Trump-era position that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.
  • "He is exactly what the DOJ needs at this historic moment in our nation's history," said Michael Zeldin, a former CNN contributor who previously served in several senior roles at the Justice Department. "He knows the department, he's a legal scholar, and he recognizes the inflection point the criminal justice system is at and understands the imperative of getting it right."
  • Another related priority looms at the Justice Department. Biden vowed to crack down on White supremacists and right-wing extremist groups. It's now up to Garland to make that happen.
  • "Garland will be watched closely for his handling of domestic terrorism matters," said Jessica Carmichael, a DC-area defense attorney who specializes in privacy and surveillance issues. "I hope (that he) approaches this issue in keeping with a broader goal of criminal justice reform and not simply advocating for more criminal laws, more surveillance, and more incarceration."
  • It will be an uphill climb -- especially in this heated political climate and with disinformation running rampant -- to convince Americans that these investigations are being handled without bias. After repeated abuses and attempts by Trump to politicize the Justice Department, experts have said that it could take many years to restore the public's faith in federal law enforcement.
  • If Democrats stay united, they can confirm Lisa Monaco to the No. 2 post, Vanita Gupta to the No. 3 spot, and Kristen Clarke to run the Civil Rights Division. But the GOP hasn't made it easy.
  • Gorelick continued, "He was talking about the Justice Department as 'we' during his confirmation hearing because he grew up there, and it will be very natural for him to return."
martinelligi

Vaccine Passports? From Colleges To Cruise Ships, Proof of Vaccinations Required : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...tatus-the-idea-is-here-to-stay

vaccine pandemic

shared by martinelligi on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • A political debate has erupted over the idea of requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccination for entry into certain settings. While politicians argue over equity and privacy concerns, some businesses and institutions are moving ahead and developing apps for people to easily and securely prove their status.
  • Schools and colleges have long required proof of vaccination for diseases such as measles and mumps. Kotlikoff says this requirement is similar
  • If some institutions and businesses aim to require vaccination, how will they ask people to show proof — or certification –- of immunity? The Biden administration has ruled out having federally mandated vaccination credentials, so it's up to the private sector to develop their own systems.
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  • "The digital health pass is an electronic version of the index card that you get when you get your full immunization," explains Tim Paydos, a vice president of government industry solutions at IBM. Given that paper records can be misplaced, or forged, there's a benefit to the digital pass. He says it's a free, voluntary and convenient way to share your COVID-19 vaccination or test status.
  • He says there are several ways employers, event venues, cruise lines, or airlines could help ensure a safe environment, and still give people choices. "It may be acceptable to have people show either proof of vaccination, proof of a negative test, or proof of a recent episode with COVID," Parasidis says. "There are a lot of different options."
yehbru

Miami Shooting: 3 Masked Suspects Opened Fire At Banquet Hall : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...cts-in-a-banquet-hall-shooting

US Miami Banquet Shooting

shared by yehbru on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A manhunt continued into Memorial Day for three masked suspects who opened fire early Sunday morning outside a Miami banquet hall, killing two men and wounding 21 others
  • The video shows three people getting out of the vehicle, one gripping a handgun, while the other two carried what police described as "assault-style rifles."
  • That's when the gunmen sprayed bullets indiscriminately into the crowd, even though police said the assailants had specific targets in mind.
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  • Police said some in the crowd returned fire
  • In all, 23 people were shot. In addition to the two fatalities, three others were in the hospital in critical condition. Because of privacy laws, police were not releasing the names of any of the victims.
  • Sunday's shooting came a little more than a day after a drive-by shooting claimed the life of one person outside another venue about 13 miles (about 21 kilometers) away in the Wynwood area. Six others were injured. Some witnesses likened the scene to a "war zone" after a barrage of dozens of bullets sent people scurrying in the night.
rerobinson03

New York Turns to Smart Thermometers for Disease Detection in Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...insa-thermometer-new-york.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Over the past few years, a California-based tech start-up has repeatedly made headlines for beating public health agencies at their own game.The start-up, Kinsa, which makes internet-connected thermometers, has routinely detected the spread of seasonal flu weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And when Covid hit last year, the company saw unusual spikes in fevers about 18 days before states recorded peaks in deaths.
  • Now, the company is putting its pandemic prognostication skills to a new test in a partnership with the New York City Department of Health. Over the coming months, Kinsa will distribute as many as 100,000 free smart thermometers through the city’s elementary schools and will make the resulting data available to local health officials.
  • The program is entirely voluntary, officials at both Kinsa and City Hall stress. Schools that opt into the program will send Kinsa’s brochures home to students’ families; if parents want to participate, they can download Kinsa’s app and order a free thermometer.
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  • The data, aggregated by ZIP code, will also be incorporated into illness signals that Kinsa makes available in its public HealthWeather map. The company sometimes shares this ZIP-code-level information with pharmacies, vaccine distributors and other companies. Clorox, for instance, has used Kinsa’s data to determine where to target its ads. (Lysol will have no special access to the data, Kinsa says.)
  • And then, of course, there are the inevitable privacy concerns. Kinsa emphasizes that all data provided to the city will be aggregated and anonymized.
  • City health officials will also have access to this aggregated, anonymized data, which they hope will help them identify unusual illness clusters earlier than is currently possible. “It’s measuring something that we’ve never really been able to measure before,” Dr. Varma said. “This is information about people’s biological measurements, being taken by somebody in their home before they’ve actually, in many situations, sought care.”
  • Over the coming months, city officials will keep close tabs on how well the program is working, Dr. Varma said.
Javier E

Opinion | If Stalin Had a Smartphone - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chnology-stalin-dictators.html

smartphone tech dictator surveillance privacy authoritarian crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 13 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • As online life expands, neighborhood life and social trust decline. As the social fabric decays, social isolation rises and online viciousness and swindling accumulate, you tell people that the state has to step in to restore trust. By a series of small ratcheted steps, you’ve been given permission to completely regulate their online life.
  • This, too, is essentially what is happening in China.As George Orwell and Aldous Huxley understood, if you want to be a good totalitarian, it isn’t enough to control behavior. To have total power you have to be able to control people’s minds. With modern information technology, the state can shape the intimate information pond in which we swim
  • Human history is a series of struggles for power. Every few generations, just for fun, the gods give us a new set of equipment that radically alters the game. We thought the new tools would democratize power, but they seem to have centralized it. It’s springtime for dictators
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  • Back in Stalin’s day, social discipline was so drastic. You had to stage a show trial (so expensive!), send somebody to the gulag or organize a purge. Now your tyranny can be small, subtle and omnipresent. It’s like the broken windows theory of despotism. By punishing the small deviations, you prevent the big ones from ever happening.
  • Third, thanks to big data, today’s Stalin would be able to build a massive Social Credit System to score and rank citizens, like the systems the Chinese are now using. Governments, banks and online dating sites gather data on, well, everybody. Do you pay your debts? How many hours do you spend playing video games? Do you jaywalk?
  • some of the best minds in the world have spent tens of billions of dollars improving tools that predict personal consumption. This technology, too, has got to come in handy for any modern-day Stalin.
  • One Chinese firm, Yitu, installed a system that keeps a record of employees’ movements as they walk to the break room or rest room. It records them with blue dotted lines on a monitor. That would be so helpful for your thoroughly modern dictator.
  • this is not even to mention the facial recognition technology the Chinese are using to keep track of their own citizens. In Beijing, facial recognition is used in apartment buildings to prevent renters from subletting their apartments.
  • I feel bad for Joseph Stalin. He dreamed of creating a totalitarian society where every individual’s behavior could be predicted and controlled. But he was born a century too early. He lived before the technology that would have made being a dictator so much easier!
  • The internet of things means that our refrigerators, watches, glasses, phones and security cameras will soon be recording every move we make.
  • In the second place, thanks to artificial intelligence, Uncle Joe would have much better tools for predicting how his subjects are about to behave.
  • f your score is too low, you can get put on a blacklist. You may not be able to visit a museum. You may not be able to fly on a plane, check into a hotel, visit the mall or graduate from high school. Your daughter gets rejected by her favorite university.
anonymous

Capitol Police Faces Public Scrutiny After Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...capitol-police-washington.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As old as the Capitol itself, the Capitol Police began in 1801 with the appointment of a single guard to oversee the move of Congress from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. His task, according to a court filing, was to “take as much care as possible with the property of the United States.”
  • Today, it is in crisis once again, with calls for a full investigation into what lawmakers have called a “severe systemic failure” that allowed an angry mob of Trump loyalists to storm the Capitol last week, an episode that left five people dead, including one Capitol Police officer.
  • The department is accustomed to being shielded from the type of public disclosure that is routine for ordinary police agencies. But since last week’s rampage, the department’s chief and two other top security officials have resigned, and its congressional overseers have pressed for answers.
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  • “We’re having a hell of a time getting information from Capitol Police leadership,” said Mr. Ryan, who chairs the House committee that oversees the department’s budget. “We fund the Capitol Police. Congress funds the Capitol Police through the Appropriations Committee. We deserve to know and understand what the hell is going on.”
  • But it has long suffered from the same troubles that afflict many other police forces: claims of an old boys’ network, glass ceilings, racial bias and retaliation. There have been complaints, too, of lax discipline and of promotions for white commanders who faced misconduct allegations, but harsh treatment for women and Black officers.
  • Many who are familiar with the department now suggest that these longstanding problems contributed to how easily its officers were overrun last Wednesday.
  • “Why was I not surprised?” said Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, the lead plaintiff in a racial discrimination lawsuit against the department that has languished for years, while she and a handful of other retired Black officers have staged regular demonstrations on Capitol Hill. “Because I’m going back to the environment in which I worked in all those years.”
  • The officers who have been suspended include one who took selfies with members of the crowd and another who put on a “Make America Great Again” hat and directed rioters into the Capitol, according to Mr. Ryan.
  • The Capitol Police does not. And its officers do not wear body cameras, in part out of concerns over lawmakers’ privacy.A bill that would have required the department to report crime statistics and strengthen its disciplinary process was introduced last summer by Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the committee that oversees the department. The bill went nowhere.
  • The department has also faced repeated complaints of racism. A lawsuit filed in 2001 by more than 250 Black officers, including Ms. Blackmon-Malloy, remains unresolved, and current and former officers say the problems persist. There are no Black men on the force with a rank higher than captain.
  • In 2015, an email from the department’s intelligence office before the Million Man March warned of potential “fireworks,” citing the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and “rabble-rousing rhetoric” by the organizer, Louis Farrakhan. A year later, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, who is Black, said he had attracted suspicion from the Capitol Police on more than one occasion.
Javier E

Here's a Look Inside Facebook's Data Wars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-data.html

facebook data privacy transparency right-wing

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform — good, bad or ugly.
  • On the other side were executives, including the company’s chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much.
  • One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
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  • They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful — showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets.
  • These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves.Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost.
  • the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook’s obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform
  • The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.
  • Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content. Transparency, they said, ultimately took a back seat to image management.
  • the executives who pushed hardest for transparency appear to have been sidelined. Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, has been taking time off and no longer has a clearly defined role at the company, several people with knowledge of the situation said. (Mr. Silverman declined to comment about his status.) And Mr. Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook, left the company in November.
  • “One of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products,” Mr. Boland said, in his first interview since departing. “And it doesn’t want to make the data available for others to do the hard work and hold them accountable.”
  • Mr. Boland, who oversaw CrowdTangle as well as other Facebook transparency efforts, said the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year’s presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.
  • “People were enthusiastic about the transparency CrowdTangle provided until it became a problem and created press cycles Facebook didn’t like,” he said. “Then, the tone at the executive level changed.”
  • Facebook was happy that I and other journalists were finding its tool useful. With only about 25,000 users, CrowdTangle is one of Facebook’s smallest products, but it has become a valuable resource for power users including global health organizations, election officials and digital marketers, and it has made Facebook look transparent compared with rival platforms like YouTube and TikTok, which don’t release nearly as much data.
  • Last fall, the leaderboard was full of posts by Mr. Trump and pro-Trump media personalities. Since Mr. Trump was barred from Facebook in January, it has been dominated by a handful of right-wing polemicists like Mr. Shapiro, Mr. Bongino and Sean Hannity, with the occasional mainstream news article, cute animal story or K-pop fan blog sprinkled in.
  • But the mood shifted last year when I started a Twitter account called @FacebooksTop10, on which I posted a daily leaderboard showing the sources of the most-engaged link posts by U.S. pages, based on CrowdTangle data.
  • The account went semi-viral, racking up more than 35,000 followers. Thousands of people retweeted the lists, including conservatives who were happy to see pro-Trump pundits beating the mainstream media and liberals who shared them with jokes like “Look at all this conservative censorship!” (If you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, conservatives in the United States frequently complain that Facebook is censoring them.)
  • Inside Facebook, the account drove executives crazy. Some believed that the data was being misconstrued and worried that it was painting Facebook as a far-right echo chamber. Others worried that the lists might spook investors by suggesting that Facebook’s U.S. user base was getting older and more conservative. Every time a tweet went viral, I got grumpy calls from Facebook executives who were embarrassed by the disparity between what they thought Facebook was — a clean, well-lit public square where civility and tolerance reign — and the image they saw reflected in the Twitter lists.
  • Mr. Boland, the former Facebook vice president, said that was a convenient deflection. He said that in internal discussions, Facebook executives were less concerned about the accuracy of the data than about the image of Facebook it presented.“It told a story they didn’t like,” he said of the Twitter account, “and frankly didn’t want to admit was true.”
  • Several executives proposed making reach data public on CrowdTangle, in hopes that reporters would cite that data instead of the engagement data they thought made Facebook look bad.But Mr. Silverman, CrowdTangle’s chief executive, replied in an email that the CrowdTangle team had already tested a feature to do that and found problems with it. One issue was that false and misleading news stories also rose to the top of those lists.“Reach leaderboard isn’t a total win from a comms point of view,” Mr. Silverman wrote.
  • executives argued that my Top 10 lists were misleading. They said CrowdTangle measured only “engagement,” while the true measure of Facebook popularity would be based on “reach,” or the number of people who actually see a given post. (With the exception of video views, reach data isn’t public, and only Facebook employees and page owners have access to it.)
  • Mr. Schultz, Facebook’s chief marketing officer, had the dimmest view of CrowdTangle. He wrote that he thought “the only way to avoid stories like this” would be for Facebook to publish its own reports about the most popular content on its platform, rather than releasing data through CrowdTangle.“If we go down the route of just offering more self-service data you will get different, exciting, negative stories in my opinion,” he wrote.
  • there’s a problem with reach data: Most of it is inaccessible and can’t be vetted or fact-checked by outsiders. We simply have to trust that Facebook’s own, private data tells a story that’s very different from the data it shares with the public.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Facebook is not a giant right-wing echo chamber.But it does contain a giant right-wing echo chamber — a kind of AM talk radio built into the heart of Facebook’s news ecosystem, with a hyper-engaged audience of loyal partisans who love liking, sharing and clicking on posts from right-wing pages, many of which have gotten good at serving up Facebook-optimized outrage bait at a consistent clip.
  • CrowdTangle’s data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn’t create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.
  • It’s worth noting that these transparency efforts are voluntary, and could disappear at any time. There are no regulations that require Facebook or any other social media companies to reveal what content performs well on their platforms, and American politicians appear to be more interested in fighting over claims of censorship than getting access to better data.
  • It’s also worth noting that Facebook can turn down the outrage dials and show its users calmer, less divisive news any time it wants. (In fact, it briefly did so after the 2020 election, when it worried that election-related misinformation could spiral into mass violence.) And there is some evidence that it is at least considering more permanent changes.
  • The project, which some employees refer to as the “Top 10” project, is still underway, the people said, and it’s unclear whether its findings have been put in place. Mr. Osborne, the Facebook spokesman, said that the team looks at a variety of ranking changes, and that the experiment wasn’t driven by a desire to change the Top 10 lists.
  • This year, Mr. Hegeman, the executive in charge of Facebook’s news feed, asked a team to figure out how tweaking certain variables in the core news feed ranking algorithm would change the resulting Top 10 lists, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
  • As for CrowdTangle, the tool is still available, and Facebook is not expected to cut off access to journalists and researchers in the short term, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans.
  • Mr. Boland, however, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook executives decided to kill off CrowdTangle entirely or starve it of resources, rather than dealing with the headaches its data creates.
johnsonel7

Preventing digital feudalism | New Europe - 1 views

www.neweurope.eu/...preventing-digital-feudalism

technology feudalism

shared by johnsonel7 on 07 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • With personal data becoming the world’s most valuable commodity, will users be the platform economy’s masters or its slaves?
  • Worse, the algorithmic processes being used often perpetuate gender and racial biases, and can be manipulated for profit or political gain. While we all benefit immensely from digital services such as Google search, we didn’t sign up to have our behaviour catalogued, shaped, and sold.
  • Just as landowners in the seventeenth century extracted rents from land-price inflation, and just as robber barons profited from the scarcity of oil, today’s platform firms are extracting value through the monopolisation of search and e-commerce services.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Thus, we need to develop a new governance structure, which starts with creating a new vocabulary. For example, calling platform companies “tech giants” implies they have invested in the technologies from which they are profiting, when it was really taxpayers who funded the key underlying technologies – from the Internet to GPS.
  • Rather than talking about regulation, then, we need to go further, embracing concepts such as co-creation. Governments can and should be shaping markets to ensure that collectively created value serves collective ends.
  • Algorithms and big data could be used to improve public services, working conditions, and the wellbeing of all people. But these technologies are currently being used to undermine public services, promote zero-hour contracts, violate individual privacy, and destabilise the world’s democracies – all in the interest of personal gain.
Javier E

TikTok's owner is helping China's campaign of repression in Xinjiang, report finds - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-bf62-eadd5d11f559_story.html

tech campaign repression china corporations Policy ethnic

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • In a detailed new report, experts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre concluded that many Chinese tech companies “are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”
  • “Some of these companies lead the world in cutting-edge technology development, particularly in the AI and surveillance sectors,” Fergus Ryan, Danielle Cave and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu write in the report. “But this technology development is focused on servicing authoritarian needs, and as these companies go global (an expansion often funded by [Chinese] loans and aid) this technology is going global as well.”
  • Xinjiang Internet Police began working with Douyin, the local version of TikTok, last year and built a “new public security and Internet social governance model” in 2018. Then in April, the Ministry of Public Security’s Press and Publicity Bureau signed a strategic cooperation agreement with ByteDance to promote the “influence and credibility” of police departments nationwide, the ASPI experts said.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Over the same period, ByteDance has flourished. Its TikTok app has been downloaded a billion times, of which nearly 100 million came from the United States, and it has a jaw-dropping valuation of $75 billion.
  • ByteDance has also been working with Xinjiang authorities under a program called “Xinjiang Aid,” whereby Chinese companies open subsidiaries or factories in Xinjiang and employ locals who have been detained in the camps. Its operations are centered on Hotan, an area of Xinjiang considered backward by the Communist Party and where the repression has been among the most severe.
  • Leaked documents have previously shown how ByteDance censors content that the Chinese government disapproves of, including Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
  • ByteDance has been guiding and helping Xinjiang authorities and media outlets to use its news aggregation app and Douyin to “propagate and showcase Hotan’s new image,” according to the ASPI report.
  • In the case of Huawei, which is locked in an existential battle with the Trump administration, there is evidence of extensive and direct work with Chinese security organs in Xinjiang, including helping authorities there with the “digitization requirements” of public security projects.
  • “Together with the Public Security Bureau, Huawei will unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society,” a Xinjiang government website quoted one Huawei director as saying last year.
  • When the Xinjiang Public Security Department and Huawei signed the agreement to establish an “intelligent security industry” innovation lab in the regional capital of Urumqi last year, a local official said Huawei had been supplying “reliable technical support” for the department, according to the report
  • Huawei has also participated in a program called “Safe Xinjiang,” which the ASPI experts said was “code for a police surveillance system.”
  • “The Chinese tech companies in this report enjoy a highly favorable regulatory environment and are unencumbered by privacy and human rights concerns,” it concludes. Many are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in Xinjiang, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses.”
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