Dr. Tufekci, a computer programmer who became a sociologist, sounded an early alarm on the need for protective masks. It wasn’t the first time she was right about something big.
“It’s charmed that I get to do this, it feels good,” she said. “But in the ideal world, people like me are kind of superfluous, and we have these faceless nameless experts and bureaucrats who tell us: This is what you have to do.”
… And found himself at the dangerous intersection of a national racial reckoning and a world of internet-conspiracy fanaticism.
via Sports Illustrated: https://www.si.com/college/2020/08/20/barry-wesley-colorado-state-antifa-daily-cover
“You’re lucky,” Wesley remembers hearing from above. “I’m not going to kill you. The police are going to do that for me.”
The most terrifying thing is not that Putin might have issued orders to kill perceived enemies but that anyone from the ruling circle can use the over-all dysfunction and impunity of Putin’s system to do so on their own.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/what-navalnys-poisoning-really-says-about-the-current-state-of-putins-russia
In the killing of Nemtsov, the trail appeared to lead to security forces and officials close to Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman ruler of Chechnya who makes a demonstrative performance of his loyalty, regularly calling himself Putin’s “foot soldier.” A Moscow court convicted a handful of Chechen men for the murder, but prosecutors declined to follow the chain of culpability any higher. Similarly, when Verzilov was poisoned, he had been looking into the killings of three Russian journalists in Africa, who themselves had been investigating the private army of Evgeny Prigozhin, a powerful businessman close to the Kremlin and the defense ministry.
Bellingcat is pleased to launch season two of the Bellingcat Podcast in partnership with premium audio storytellers, Novel. Narrated by Bellingcat founder, Eliot Higgins, the two-part series tells the story of a gruesome video that captured the world’s at
via bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2020/07/21/the-bellingcat-podcast-season-2-the-executions/
Narrated by Bellingcat founder, Eliot Higgins, the two-part series tells the story of a gruesome video that captured the world’s attention in 2018 and how a remarkable open source investigation sought to unravel its secrets.
Baltimore almost had a revolution. On an April morning in 2015, Baltimore Police officers tackled a young black man named Freddie Gray and pulled him screaming into a van where his spine was brok…
via CrimeReads: https://crimereads.com/a-heist-on-time-and-a-half-inside-the-most-corrupt-police-squad-in-the-nation/
Ward opened the bag and heaved it, chunking stacks into the woods, the bundles of bills hitting the tangled brush, others landing in the dirt. He went inside, knowing, even if the money was gone, this was not over.
The brutality of the state’s response not only failed to scare people into staying home but united them against Alexander Lukashenka’s regime.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/we-were-locked-up-in-one-country-and-released-into-another-horror-and-hope-as-protests-in-belarus-continue
The following day was marked by absences. There was no food or water, and no formal charges or grounds for arrest presented to the inmates. More than twenty-four hours after they were detained, the women were taken out of their cell and told to sign a document that purported to describe the circumstances under which they were detained. “We heard people saying, ‘I was at a polling place,’ or ‘I was walking the dog,’ or ‘I was with my kids,’ and immediately the sound of blows, and you could hear that they are using their batons and, from their comments, that they are trying to impress each other with how hard they are hitting.” Svetlana couldn’t read what she was being asked to sign, because an officer covered the top part of the sheet with her hand. “I could see that the address and time of arrest were false,” she said. “So I wrote, ‘I do not certify.’ The woman officer started twisting my arms behind my back and made me kneel. She had some trouble getting me down to the floor, so she put me in a choke hold. I said, ‘You are going to strangle me now and will have to live with it on your conscience,’ and she loosened her grip. She then forced me to stand facing the wall, legs spread super-far apart. Then I was put back in a cell.”
Police monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots.
Link: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3aza95/how-police-took-over-encrochat-hacked
Unbeknownst to Mark, or the tens of thousands of other alleged Encrochat users, their messages weren’t really secure. French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users’ communications for months. Investigators then shared those messages with agencies around Europe.
Roberto Primero Luis set out across the U.S.-Mexico border last year as previous Guatemalan migrants had. But the crossing has changed.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/magazine/border-crossing.html
“Prevention through deterrence” worked. Apprehensions increased, reaching a peak of nearly 1.7 million in 2000. So did deaths. Migrant deaths weren’t new. People had always died trying to cross. It was where they were dying now, and how. Previously, the most common forms of death involved traffic accidents or drowning; migrants were hit by vehicles as they tried to run across Interstate 10 into El Paso, for instance, or went under when the Tijuana River flooded. Now they were dying on ranch lands and in mountain ranges and in the desert, of exposure, dehydration, heat stroke. Certain victims the desert took quickly. Others suffered more. “It is not unusual to find bodies of migrants who in a confused state have removed their clothing in freezing weather or attempted to drink desert sand to satisfy thirst in extreme heat,” according to one report from the American Civil Liberties Union and Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission. “Disoriented, migrants sometimes fall on cacti or rocks, suffering blunt trauma and lacerations in different parts of the body.”
When the Dutch politician Marietje Schaake arrived in Silicon Valley, she realized just how bizarre American thinking about the industry had become.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-can-america-learn-from-europe-about-regulating-big-tech
Schaake proceeded to answer her own question with a long wish list. “A.I. development should promote fairness and justice, protect the rights and interests of stakeholders, and promote equality of opportunity,” she said. “A.I. should promote green development and meet the requirements of environmental friendliness and resource conservation. A.I. systems should continuously improve transparency, explainability, reliability, and controllability, and gradually achieve auditability, supervisability, traceability, and trustworthiness.” She paused before revealing that she had been reading from “Principles of A.I. Government and Responsible A.I.,” an ethics statement produced by China’s national committee of A.I. experts the previous June.
Georgia reopened early, and the graduating seniors of the Lovett School celebrated at parties large and small. Then came the positive COVID-19 tests, the media coverage, and the refusals to speak to contact tracers.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/the-race-to-investigate-a-coronavirus-outbreak-at-a-georgia-prep-school
By Monday, Lovett was on CNN’s home page. That afternoon, a Fulton epidemiologist named Juliana Prieto provided scripts for contact tracers to use when calling Lovett families. “You do not have to answer any question you do not feel comfortable answering,” the scripts explained. A tracer soon reported that, of his first six calls, five went to voice mail, and the one parent he reached had “declined to talk.” That night, an epidemiologist named Carson Telford, who was helping with the tracing effort, informed his colleagues that he wasn’t having any luck either. “Only 1 parent would provide information,” he wrote. Later, Telford shared a text exchange he’d had with another Lovett parent. “I will not help you,” the parent wrote. “You are a fraud. Leave me and all the Lovett families and kids alone. Get the Lord on Board and go volunteer if you have this much time to stalk social media. The entire Lovett family is onto you and your dishonesty. You did not get our names from the nurse—that would be a violation and they would never provide that private info. Leave us alone, please.”
Inside the most disorganized, unscrupulous, self-sabotaging presidential campaign since the last one.
via Intelligencer: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-reelection-campaign-2020.html
It was a sign of impending doom, to some, when earlier this summer Parscale began coming in more often just as the target on his back swelled to carnival proportions. The polls? Trump trailed his almost-invisible challenger by double digits nationally and by a considerable margin in most battleground states. The messaging? Well, you try to “spin” six months in which 160,000 Americans died and at least 5 million more were infected by a virus you first said wouldn’t be much to worry about. Six months in which your best case for reelection — the greatest economy in the world — was destroyed too. The offense? Trump couldn’t even settle on a nickname for Joe Biden. Was he “Sleepy Joe,” or “Creepy Joe,” or “Beijing Biden”? That tiny Tulsa rally Parscale had organized — which followed weeks of massive hype — preceded a spike in coronavirus infections in the city that, local officials said, was probably born of the event, where the guest list included Herman Cain, who later died. Meanwhile, nationwide, there was civil unrest that Trump, whose political career had begun with a media tour to promote a racist conspiracy theory called birtherism, was unfit to handle. Yet there was an attitude, naïve and cocky, that led Parscale to compare the campaign to the Death Star, ready to fire but with no apparent idea where to aim. What was next? Locusts? How could the circumstances be any worse? The campaign was in a hole so deep it was actually historic — a deficit not just bigger, at this point in the race, than any an incumbent had ever overcome, but bigger than any an incumbent had ever even faced.
Groups protesting lockdown measures see the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext for tyranny—and as an opportunity for spreading rage.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/the-militias-against-masks
This strikes many people of color as disingenuous. “How about when the rights of Hispanics, Black Americans, and Muslims are trampled on?” an activist in Lansing said. “Where are these rallies? Where is all this outcry? We don’t see it.” Attorney General Nessel, who, as a private lawyer, successfully challenged Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage in a case that, along with others, was upheld by the Supreme Court, told me, “You didn’t see these people who now refuse to enforce the Governor’s orders saying, ‘Well, if you’re a county clerk and you don’t like the law, go ahead and start handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples.’ These same sheriffs would have been horrified had that happened.”
The president’s restrictions on Chinese tech may be part of an eye-for-an-eye logic called reciprocity. The price could be a global patchwork of online fiefs.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/technology/trump-tiktok-wechat-ban.html
Mr. Wang did not address China’s own restrictions on American websites, saying only that other countries might begin using national security as an excuse to act against U.S. companies. “The United States must not open Pandora’s box, or it will suffer the consequences,” he said.
The widespread protests over George Floyd’s death helped prompt legislators to repeal a law known as Section 50-A, which kept police disciplinary records from public view.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-a-coalition-of-new-york-activists-revealed-police-department-secrets
In March, 2018, BuzzFeed began publishing a series of articles based on the records and announced plans to publish them in its own online database. Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch was so alarmed that he asked city officials to identify the source of what he termed “stolen records” and to “hold those responsible accountable.” No such efforts were made, but the city’s law department directed the Municipal Library to restrict access to its archive of personnel orders, a library official confirmed. “I couldn’t believe that I was watching a progressive mayor remove from public view records of government misconduct from a public archive,” Conti-Cook said.
Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/
By 2030, AI supremacy might be within range for China. The country will likely have the world’s largest economy, and new money to spend on AI applications for its military. It may have the most sophisticated drone swarms. It may have autonomous weapons systems that can forecast an adversary’s actions after a brief exposure to a theater of war, and make battlefield decisions much faster than human cognition allows. Its missile-detection algorithms could void America’s first-strike nuclear advantage. AI could upturn the global balance of power.
What if the Olympic Games never come back?
via Longreads: https://longreads.com/2020/08/07/the-endgame-of-the-olympics/
That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
The world is consumed by violent fights and hostile disagreements. The author and activist sees a way out of them.
via The Cut: https://www.thecut.com/2020/08/sarah-schulman-conflict-is-not-abuse.html
Schulman describes this episode in a book she wrote some years later, Conflict Is Not Abuse. The book’s central insight is that people experiencing the inevitable discomfort of human misunderstanding often overstate the harm that has been done to them — they describe themselves as victims rather than as participants in a shared situation. And overstating harm itself can cause harm, whether it leads to social shunning or physical violence.
An engineering professor has proved—and exploited—its vulnerabilities.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-vulnerable-is-gps
Once they had logged where and when the spoofing incidents occurred, researchers cross-referenced this information with the travel schedule of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. On a fall afternoon in 2017, six minutes before Putin gave a speech in the coastal town of Bolshoy Kamen, a nearby ship’s G.P.S. coordinates showed it jumping to the airport in Vladivostok. In 2018, when Putin attended the official opening of a bridge across the Kerch Strait, at least twenty-four ships in the area reported their location as Anapa Airport, sixty-five kilometres away. What was going on? It seemed increasingly likely that the President’s security detail was travelling with a portable software-defined spoofer, in the hope of protecting Putin from drone attacks.
Last year, intelligence officials gathered to write a classified report on Russia’s interest in the 2020 election. An investigation from the magazine uncovered what happened next.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/08/magazine/us-russia-intelligence.html
Under Trump, intelligence officials have been placed in the unusual position of being pressured to justify the importance of their work, protect their colleagues from political retribution and demonstrate fealty to a president. Though intelligence officials have been loath to admit it publicly, the cumulative result has been devastating. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, compared the O.D.N.I.’s decline under Trump to that of the Justice Department, where “they have, step by step, set out to destroy one of the crown jewels of the American government,” he told me. “And they’re using the same playbook with the intelligence community.”