Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

In Guantánamo Case, U.S. Government Says It Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone — Even U.S. Citizens

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Moath al-Alwi, in which the government has made some eyebrow-raising claims about detention and rendition.

The post In Guantánamo Case, U.S. Government Says It Can Indefinitely Detain Anyone — Even U.S. Citizens appeared first on The Intercept.

This Palestinian Activist Got Swept Up in the War on Terror. Decades Later, ICE Tried to Secretly Deport Him to Israel.

bdelhaleem Ashqar woke up early in his two-story, suburban Virginia home and put on a nice suit. It was June 4, 2019, and according to the Muslim calendar, it was Eid al-Fitr, the joyous holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting. A devout Muslim, he got ready for a day of>>

The post This Palestinian Activist Got Swept Up in the War on Terror. Decades Later, ICE Tried to Secretly Deport Him to Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

More People Than Ever Say They Support Trans Rights. But Do They Support the Policies?

A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute made headlines last week with its finding that 62 percent of Americans say they have become more supportive of transgender rights in the last five years. Media outlets celebrated this “boost” in “support for trans people”. Though the survey, which posed an extensive range of questions to 1,100 people, hints […]

The 2020 Democrats are Running on an Outmoded Obama Climate Policy

All the candidates seeking the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination have offered climate change platforms that share a few basic tenets, yet news outlets seem to ask them the same two questions again and again: Would you rejoin the Paris climate agreement? Would you reinstate Obama-era climate rules, including the Clean Power Plan?  Everyone’s answer to […]

Canadian Arctic Permafrost Melting 70 Years Earlier Than Scientists Predicted: Study
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/canada-arctic-permafrost-study_ca_5d0a4414e4b06ad4d2598a27 #climatechange #climatecrisis

#FossilFuels produce less than half of #UK #electricity for first time | Business | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon-energy-overtakes-fossil-fuels-as-the-uks-largest-electricity-source

#Environment #RenewableEnergy #Renewables

E.U. Leaders Fail to Strengthen Climate Target
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/climate/europe-carbon-neutral.html #climatechange #climatecrisis

It’s All in the Family

Five interesting family trees, from the media you consume to life in the ocean.

The Dream of a Gay Separatist Town

Two people who dreamed of the space where queer people could be themselves, finally, without fear.

A Victory Against Gerrymandering in Virginia

SCOTUS threw out a challenge to Virginia’s electoral maps after a GOP-led racial gerrymander was redrawn.

Chart of the Day: Has Facebook Usage Collapsed?

I don’t know if I really believe this, but Facebook usage has plummeted in the past year according to a report in the Guardian: According to the analysis, Facebook has more users than it did a year ago but they’re spending less time on the site and they’re engaging less with what they see. If […]

Sen. Hawley’s “Bias” Bill Would Let the Government Decide Who Speaks

Despite its name, Sen. Josh Hawley’s Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act (PDF) would make the Internet less safe for free expression, not more. It would violate the First Amendment by allowing a government agency to strip platforms of legal protection based on their decisions to host or remove users’ speech when the federal government deems that action to be politically biased. Major online platforms’ moderation policies and practices are deeply flawed, but putting a government agency in charge of policing bias would only make matters worse.

The bill targets Section 230, the law that shields online platforms, services, and users from liability for most speech created by others. Section 230 protects intermediaries from liability both when they choose to edit, curate, or moderate speech and when they choose not to. Without Section 230, social media would not exist in its current form—the risks of liability would be too great given the volume of user speech published through them—and neither would thousands of websites and apps that host users’ speech and media.

Under the bill, platforms over a certain size—30 million active users in the U.S. or 300 million worldwide—would lose their immunity under Section 230. In order to regain its immunity, a company would have to pay the Federal Trade Commission for an audit to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that it doesn’t moderate users’ posts “in a manner that is biased against a political party, political candidate, or political viewpoint.”

It’s foolish to assume that anyone could objectively judge a platform’s “bias,” but particularly dangerous to put a government agency in charge of making those judgments.

It’s foolish to assume that anyone could objectively judge a platform’s “bias,” but particularly dangerous to put a government agency in charge of making those judgments.

It might be tempting to understate the bill’s danger given that it limits its scope to very large platforms. But therein lies one of the bill’s most insidious features. Google, Facebook, and Twitter would never have climbed to dominance without Section 230. This bill could effectively set a ceiling on the success of any future competitor. Once again, members of Congress have attempted to punish social media platforms by introducing a bill that will only reinforce those companies’ dominance. Don’t forget that last time Congress undermined Section 230, large tech companies cheered it on.

Don’t Let the Government Decide What Bias Is

Sen. Hawley’s bill is clearly unconstitutional. A government agency can’t punish any person or company because of its political viewpoints, or because it favors certain political speech over others. And decisions about what speech to carry or remove are inherently political.

What does “in a manner that is biased against a political party, political candidate, or political viewpoint” mean, exactly? Would platforms be forced to host propaganda from hate groups and punished for doing anything to let users hide posts from the KKK that express its political viewpoints? Would a site catering to certain religious beliefs be forced to accommodate conflicting beliefs?

What about large platforms where users intentionally opt into partisan moderation decisions? For example, would Facebook be required to close private groups that leftist activists use to organize and share information, or instruct the administrators of those groups to let right-wing activists join too? Would Reddit have to delete r/The_Donald, the massively popular forum exclusively for fans of the current U.S. president?

The bill provides no guidance on any of these questions. In practice, the FTC would have broad license to enforce its own view on which platform moderation practices constitute bias. The commissioners’ enforcement decisions would almost certainly reflect the priorities of the party that nominated them. Since the bill requires that a supermajority of commissioners agree to grant a platform immunity, any two of the five FTC commissioners could decide together to withhold immunity from a platform.

That’s the problem: this bill would let the government make decisions about whose speech stays online, one thing that the government simply cannot do under the U.S. Constitution. To see how a government might attempt to push the FTC to focus only on certain types of bias or censorship, consider President Trump’s relentless focus on perceived anti-conservative bias on social media. Before supporting the bill, conservatives in Congress may want to consider how it might be used by future administrations.

The Problem Isn’t Bias; It’s Censorship

Hawley’s bill is rooted in a long-running meme about anti-conservative bias on social media. The White House recently launched a survey on bias on social media platforms with the obvious policy goal of bolstering President Trump’s claims that the big Internet companies are stacked against conservatives. Congress held a hearing last year to discuss platform moderation practices, but most of the discussion centered on Diamond and Silk, the conservative commentators who claim to have been censored on Facebook.

In reality, there is little evidence of systemic bias against conservatives on social media. The most egregious examples of censorship online spring not from political bias but from naïve platform moderation policies: YouTube scrubbing Syrian activists’ documentation of human rights violations under rules intended to curb extremism; state actors taking advantage of Facebook’s reporting mechanisms to remove political dissidents’ posts; Tumblr’s nudity filter censoring innocuous patent illustrations. The national discussion on bias in social media too often ignores such stories and under Sen. Hawley’s bill, it’s hard to imagine the FTC doing much about them.

Social media platforms must work to ensure that their moderation policies don’t silence innocent people, intentionally or unintentionally. That requires common sense measures like clear, transparent rules and letting users appeal inappropriate moderation decisions, not a highly politicized system where a government agency assesses a platform’s perceived bias.

As we have argued in several recent amicusbriefs, Internet users are best served by the existence of both moderated and unmoderated platforms, both those that are open forums for all speech and those that are tailored to certain interests, audiences, and user sensibilities. This bill threatens the existence of the latter.

Section 230 Doesn’t—and Shouldn’t—Preclude Platform Moderation

Sen. Hawley’s bill comes after a long campaign of misinformation about how Section 230 works. A few members of Congress—including Sen. Hawley—have repeatedly claimed that under current law, platforms must make a choice between their right under the First Amendment to moderate speech and the liability protections that they enjoy under Section 230. In truth, no such choice exists. Under the First Amendment, platforms have the right to moderate their online platforms however they like; Section 230 additionally shields them from most types of liability for their users’ activity. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.

Indeed, one of Congress’ motivations for passing Section 230 was to remove the legal obstacles that discouraged platforms from filtering out certain types of speech (at the time, Congress was focusing its attention on sexual material in particular). In two important early cases over Internet speech, courts allowed civil defamation claims against Prodigy but not against Compuserve. Because Prodigy deleted some messages for “offensiveness” and “bad taste,” a court reasoned, it could be treated as a publisher and held liable for its users’ posts even if it lacked knowledge of the contents.

Reps. Chris Cox and Ron Wyden realized in 1995 that that precedent would hamstring the nascent industry of online moderation. That’s why they introduced the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, which we now know as Section 230.

Hawley’s bill would bring us closer to that pre-230 Internet, punishing online platforms when they take measures to protect their users, including efforts to minimize the impacts of harassment and abuse—the very sorts of efforts that Section 230 was intended to preserve. While platforms often fail in such measures—and frequently silence innocent people in the process—giving the government discretion to shut down those efforts is not the solution.

Section 230 plays a crucial, historic role in protecting free speech and association online. That includes the right to participate in online communities organized around certain political viewpoints. It’s impossible to enforce an objective standard of “neutrality” on social media—giving government license to do so would pose a huge threat to speech online.

Discovery of a 'holy grail' with the invention of universal computer memory

A new type of computer memory to solve the digital technology energy crisis has been invented and patented by scientists. The device is the realization of the decades long search for a 'Universal Memory' to replace the $100 billion market for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and flash drives. It promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energy consumption, allowing computers which do not need to boot up and which could sleep between key strokes.

Felix Sater Will Testify in Private About Trump Tower Moscow. He Says He Was Willing to Do it Publicly.

Felix Sater, a real estate developer who helped Donald Trump secretly pursue Kremlin backing for a Trump-branded tower in Moscow, will testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Friday after months of delay, but it will be behind closed doors. Sater, though, tells Mother Jones he would have happily appeared in open session—begging the question of why he’s […]

This Louisiana Parish Allowed a Quarter of Its Sheriff’s Deputies To Work Security for a Pipeline

ST. MARTIN PARISH, LOUISIANA—As construction equipment roared back to life, opponents of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline—part of the larger projectconnecting the Dakota Access pipeline to refineries in Louisiana—shook their heads in dismay. They had spent hours explaining to sheriff’s deputies that Energy Transfer, the company building the pipeline, did not have the required permission from landowners to begin construction—a fact later confirmed by a judge.

But on that day in September 2018 under Louisiana’s scorching summer sun, there was no convincing the deputies from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office. Instead, they told the activists—who call themselves water protectors—they would be arrested on felony trespassing charges.

“Why are you working for this company?” asked an independent reporter. Like the water protectors, she had received permission to be there by a landowner.

“Do it look like I’m working for this company? Do this company pay me? I work for the sheriff’s office,” replied Lt. Jay Capterville.

Records show that Capterville—who was standing sock-footed, his issued uniform and weapon caked with mud, shoes lost hours before along the half-mile trek to the remote site—was, in fact, not on the clock for the sheriff’s office that day. As for why he was in the swamp in uniform, there’s a likely explanation: He’s among the 58 sheriff’s deputies granted permission to moonlight for Hub Enterprises, which is Energy Transfer’s security contractor for the Bayou Bridge project. Capterville did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.

In October 2018, the sheriff’s office granted the deputies retroactive permission to work with Hub Enterprises, accounting for 27% of the parish’s sheriff’s deputies. No request was denied. Of 19 deputies identified at the site between Aug. 1, 2018, and Oct. 13, 2018, all but five were off the clock. 

“Such a high percentage really calls into question the fundamental fairness of what people who go up against the pipeline can expect,” says Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans who is representing the arrested water protectors. “It looks like the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office is a branch of the pipeline company.”

Centered in Lafayette, Hub Enterprises describes itself as “among the largest security companies in the southern United States.” In These Times was unable to determine whether Hub Enterprises provides security for other companies in St. Martin Parish. Hub Enterprises declined a request for comment.

“Taking an example from the anti-labor movements around mining a century ago,” says Cherri Foytlin, a water protector who serves on the indigenous women’s advisory council of the L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life) protest camp, “the oil companies are now hiring Pinkerton men who serve corporate profits at the sacrifice of basic human rights and needs.”

[embedded content]

Sixteen people were arrested in the parish between Aug. 1, 2018, and Oct. 13, 2018, on charges of felony trespassing. Off-the-clock deputies made up the majority—or all—of the deputies who could be identified on the scene of the arrests. One of the arrestees was a journalist reporting on the pipeline and a coauthor of this report, Karen Savage; the other 15 were water protectors.

Arrestees had no way of knowing that they were being questioned, detained and handcuffed by off-duty police. The officers wore full uniforms and used parish-issued weapons and tech. Some, like Capterville, denied they were working for a third party.

The arrestees were charged under Louisiana’s new “critical infrastructure” law, which makes trespassing on oil pipelines a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Energy Transfer was among the oil companies that lobbied to pass the legislation in Louisiana and Iowa.  Based on a model bill by the American Legislative Exchange Council, such laws have been passed in five states, and the Trump administration recently proposed a federal version.

In a lawsuit filed in May, water protectors, landowners and several environmental organizations asked a federal court to declare the law a violation of the First Amendment. (Co-author Karen Savage is a plaintiff.)

Quigley, who also represents the plaintiffs in the constitutional challenge, tells In These Times, “It's particularly troubling in this circumstance because the petrochemical lobby created and passed this law over the objection of citizens, then they hired taxpayer funded public law enforcement to be their private security, then directed those private security people to arrest people under the law that's questionable to begin with.”

Many of the arrests occurred on contested property, where a judge later ruled Energy Transfer did not have permission to be. The off-duty deputies choked and pepper-sprayed water protectors, and allegedly stunned one individual with a Taser and tackled Foytlin.    

Anne White Hat, an indigenous water protector who serves with Foytlin on the camp’s advisory council, was arrested moments after leading a prayer ceremony at a public boat ramp on Sept., 2018. Every deputy who could be identified at the scene was off-duty.

Deputies claimed there was a warrant out for White Hat’s arrest. "If you have a warrant for my arrest, I want you to show it to me now," said White Hat as a deputy pulled back her arms and handcuffed her. Months later, she said she has still not seen evidence that the warrant existed at the time.

She says she was placed in the back of a St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Office cruiser and driven for about an hour on narrow country roads through the sugar cane fields of south Louisiana before reaching the jail, a trip that should have taken about 25 minutes.

About halfway into the ride, she says, she was transferred to another vehicle.

“When the cop car stopped and the ETP cop in St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s uniform got out and walked to the back of the truck, the thought did cross my mind if this is the part where I disappear,” White Hat says.

“It was terrifying for sure—there was no one around to witness the exchange and I wasn’t actually sure at that point if I would make it to the jail. Now I’m even more angry that ETP literally bought St Martin Parish Sheriff’s deputies.”

Hub previously hired off-duty Louisiana probation and parole officers to work security for the Energy Transfer project. But after officers using department-issued gear refused to identify themselves and violently pulled water protectors from kayaks in early August, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections revoked its officers’ permission to work for Hub.

Two months later, the St. Martin Parish Sheriff’s Office started granting deputies retroactive permission to work for Hub Enterprises on Saturdays and Sundays.

The St. Martin deputies appeared to be working more than their approved shifts, however. Records and photos show off-duty deputies routinely present at the site on days other than Saturday or Sunday, and at least four arrests were made on weekdays by off-duty officers.

Energy Transfer, formerly known as Energy Transfer Partners, is the same company whose security likened Standing Rock water protectors to jihadists, brutally attacked them with dogs and sprayed them with water cannons in freezing temperatures.

Alexis Daniel, spokesperson for Energy Transfer, told In These Times that the company hired security “to monitor our construction sites for the safety of our workers and those in the surrounding area” and that they “do not tolerate illegal activity on our right of ways, nor activities that would put our workers or other landowners in close proximity in danger.”

Foytlin rejects this narrative: “Why would this sheriff's department be allowed to be a traitor to working-class folks by not protecting life, but protecting profit as a priority?”

A radical legal ideology nurtured our era of economic inequality | Aeon Ideas https://prismo.xyz/posts/ba714b83-569b-4e00-9f51-6b583ceffdd4

Sudan’s Military Is Killing Pro-Democracy Protesters. Trump Doesn’t Care — but We Should.

After the ousting of dictator Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese military has cracked down and killed at least 100 civil rights protesters.

The post Sudan’s Military Is Killing Pro-Democracy Protesters. Trump Doesn’t Care — but We Should. appeared first on The Intercept.

An Invitation You Can’t Refuse: How Rep. Steny Hoyer Makes Sure AIPAC’s Israel Junket Is Well Attended

Pressure on freshmen in Congress to sign up for Steny Hoyer’s Israeli adventure has intensified as AIPAC is determined to prove its continued relevance.

The post An Invitation You Can’t Refuse: How Rep. Steny Hoyer Makes Sure AIPAC’s Israel Junket Is Well Attended appeared first on The Intercept.

U.N. Concludes That Saudi Arabia Needs to Be Held Accoutable for Khashoggi. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen.

As long as the U.S. stands firmly by Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom won’t face justice — or restrain itself.

The post U.N. Concludes That Saudi Arabia Needs to Be Held Accoutable for Khashoggi. Here’s Why That Won’t Happen. appeared first on The Intercept.