Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Trump Admin Is Scrubbing Information About Services for Migrant Children From Government Websites

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has systematically altered language and removed information about unaccompanied migrant children from the website of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency that oversees the children’s custody after they are transferred from the Department of Homeland Security. The changes are detailed in a new report by the Sunlight Foundation, a transparency watchdog organization. The ORR website changed how it refer to unaccompanied children, instead calling them unaccompanied “alien” children, or UACs. The website also reduced its emphasis on services and benefits available to children and refugees, and made frequent alterations—apparently in response to media enquiries and criticisms, according to the report.

Researchers at the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project compared a snapshot of the ORR website from January 19, 2017 to how it appeared at various time points up until early August 2019. Before Trump’s inauguration, the ORR website included the term “alien” 103 times. As of this August, the word appeared 720 times. The additions often occurred in the context of changing the term “unaccompanied child” to “unaccompanied alien child.” That shift was most notable in a policy guide about unaccompanied children; across the guide’s nine URLs, nearly all uses of the phrase “unaccompanied child” were removed, and instances of the word “alien” increased to 553. Prior to Trump’s inauguration, “alien” appeared in the guide just 10 times, according to the report. Many of these changes occurred between June and August 2017, when the agency’s family separation policy was being widely criticized.

Sarah John, the director of the Web Integrity Project, said one reason ORR has jurisdiction over unaccompanied children, rather than immigration agencies or Homeland Security, is “because of the unique vulnerability of children and the need to ensure they are properly cared for.” But the Trump administration’s hardline attitude towards immigrants while the number of unaccompanied children seeking asylum was increasing led to a failure to provide the children proper care, she explained. The administration’s zero-tolerance policy toward migrants seeking asylum resulted in the separation of at least 2,235 families between May 5 and June 9 of 2018 alone, according to one analysis. “On the website, we see this tough position manifest as a harshening of the language to align with the administration's view, a reeling back of language about the scope of services children are entitled to, perhaps to lower expectations about care, and an extreme defensiveness about agency actions in response to public outrage," John explains.­   

In a statement emailed to In These Times, the ACF said that the agency “inherited” its use of the term “alien” from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service. But the WIP report noted that as of May 2017, the ORR website’s definitions page still said that “ORR uses the term unaccompanied child instead of the term UAC.”

John said that while the new language is technically in line with the wording of the Homeland Security Act, which created the ORR program for unaccompanied children in 2002, the ORR had not used that term before. “It’s much harsher; ‘alien’ has certain connotations,” John said. “It makes people who are suffering seem less like people.”

Mason Kortz, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, who was not involved in preparing the report, said the changes are indicative of a general agenda by the Trump administration to dehumanize immigrants. “It’s a clear sign of how the administration wants the American public to view immigrants, as something very much other, literally alien to themselves,” he said.

The report also describes how ORR removed references to services it provides to children. Among other changes, a fact sheet on services provided to unaccompanied children removed information about legal aid available to children, the conditions children experience in HHS-funded facilities, and procedures for allowing children to communicate with their parents all disappeared.

In its statement to In These Times, the ACF said, “We treat the children in our care with dignity and respect.” But language alluding to this position was also removed from the website: A passage about treating children with “dignity, respect, and special concern for individual needs” disappeared from the Services Fact Sheet in 2018.

Kortz said the reduced emphasis on services and benefits may indicate that the stated purpose of the ORR—which, according to the agency, includes “linking [immigrants] to critical resources”—is being subverted by a larger, anti-immigrant agenda that exists within the Department of Homeland Security. “Making services and benefits harder to find, harder to access, is reflective of that,” Kortz said.

According to the report, the ORR has also reacted quickly to media reports on conditions in its facilities by changing and adding new sections to its website. Months before its family separation policy was announced in June 2018, the agency removed a staff directory from the website, perhaps anticipating likely blowback. And in the weeks after Trump signed an executive order on June 20, 2018, ending family separations, the ORR made repeated changes to its Unaccompanied Children Frequently Asked Questions page. It removed information about non-governmental organizations that accept donations to help refugee families. And it added a statement alleging that “in recent days, a great deal of misinformation about the UAC program” had been “intentionally” perpetuated, presumably by the media. It also added  images of clean and spacious classrooms and dormitories at ORR facilities around the same time. Elsewhere, the agency added content related to sexual abuse to the website around the same time a ProPublica report exposed a pattern of such abuse at more than 70 ORR shelters.

Kortz said he thinks the changes in response to media scrutiny “directly reflects not just the attitude of the [Trump] administration, but the personality of the president—specifically, his sensitivity to media criticism.”

John said that the language government agencies use on their websites matters. “It can affect how citizens view their rights, policy issues, and others in society,” she said. “If the agency in charge of caring for unaccompanied children uses less and less humanizing language about children on its website it may contribute to changes in how Americans talk, think, and feel about immigrant children, especially their level of empathy or sympathy toward unaccompanied children.”

Victory! EFF Wins Access to License Plate Reader Data to Study How Law Enforcement Uses the Privacy Invasive Technology

EFF, ACLU SoCal Successfully Sued Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments For ALPR Data

San Francisco—Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) have reached an agreement with Los Angeles law enforcement agencies under which the police and sheriff’s departments will turn over license plate data they indiscriminately collected on millions of law-abiding drivers in Southern California.
The data, which has been deidentified to protect drivers’ privacy, will allow EFF and ACLU SoCal to learn how the agencies are using automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems throughout the city and county of Los Angeles and educate the public on the privacy risks posed by this intrusive technology. A weeks’ worth of data, composed of nearly 3 million data points, will be examined.
ALPR systems include cameras mounted on police cars and at fixed locations that scan every license plate that comes into view—up to 1,800 plates per minute. They record data on each plate, including the precise time, date, and place it was encountered. The two Los Angeles agencies scan about 3 million plates every week and store the data for years at a time. Using this data, police can learn where we were in the past and infer intimate details of our daily lives such as where we work and live, who our friends are, what religious or political activities we attend, and much more.
Millions of vehicles across the country have had their license plates scanned by police—and more than 99% of them weren’t associated with any crimes. Yet law enforcement agencies often share ALPR information with their counterparts in other jurisdictions, as well as with border agents,  airport security, and university police.
EFF and ACLU SoCal reached the agreement with the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments after winning a precedent-setting decision in 2017 from the California Supreme Court in our public records lawsuit against the two agencies. The court held that the data are not investigative records under the California Public Records Act that law enforcement can keep secret.
“After six years of litigation, EFF and ACLU SoCal are finally getting access to millions of ALPR scans that will shed light on how the technology is being used, where it’s being used, and how it affects people’s privacy,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Jennifer Lynch. “We persevered and won a tough battle against law enforcement agencies that wanted to keep this information from the public. We have a right to information about how government agencies are using high-tech systems to track our locations, surveil our neighborhoods, and collect private information without our knowledge and consent.”
The California Supreme Court ruling has significance beyond the ALPR case. It set a groundbreaking precedent that mass, indiscriminate data collection by the police can’t be withheld just because the information may contain some data related to criminal investigations.
For more on this case:
https://www.eff.org/cases/automated-license-plate-readers-aclu-eff-v-lapd-lasd
For more on ALPRs:
https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr

Contact:  Jennifer Lynch Surveillance Litigation Director jlynch@eff.org

Today in the Fever Swamp: China!

This morning’s big impeachment-related news is that President Trump publicly called on China to investigate Hunter Biden over— Well, it doesn’t matter what it’s over, does it? As usual, there’s no evidence that either of the Bidens did anything wrong except in the fever swamps of Sean Hannity and Foxland. But Trump marinates in that […]

Northern forests have lost crucial cold, snowy conditions

Winter conditions are changing more rapidly than any other season and researchers have found clear signs of a decline in frost days, snow covered days and other indicators of winter that could have lasting impacts on ecosystems, water supplies, the economy, tourism and human health.

House Democrats Are So Focused on Ukraine That They’re Overlooking Another Impeachable Offense

This is the way things work now: Donald Trump is credibly reported to have given aid and comfort to an enemy that attacked the United States—and this allegation, several days later, is not part of the news cycle or the scandal that is fueling the impeachment drive on Capitol Hill. The story of the most […]

Elizabeth Warren Just Released a Wide-Ranging Plan to Give Power Back to Workers

Just two weeks after she joined the picket line outside a General Motors assembly plant in Detroit, Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday morning released a wide ranging labor plan, which promises to tackle an overarching problem: “American workers don’t have enough power.” The 14-page document, significantly longer than both Vice President Joe Biden’s and Senator Bernie Sanders’ […]

#Ocean cleanup device successfully collects #plastic for first time | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/03/ocean-cleanup-device-successfully-collects-plastic-for-first-time

#Pollution #Waste #Plastics #FossilFuels

Golden ratio observed in human skulls

The Golden Ratio, described by Leonardo da Vinci and Luca Pacioli as the Divine Proportion, is an infinite number often found in nature, art and mathematics. It's a pattern in pinecones, seashells, galaxies and hurricanes.

Impeachment Scandal Shows Why Congress Desperately Needs to Reform What’s Kept Secret

The Trump administration is again potentially abusing government secrecy — this time in an effort to distract from impeachment and punish rivals.

The post Impeachment Scandal Shows Why Congress Desperately Needs to Reform What’s Kept Secret appeared first on The Intercept.

Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands

The swirling mix of far-right politics and the actual threats posed by the climate crisis raises questions about what’s happening in the Arizona desert.

The post Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands appeared first on The Intercept.

#Abortion: #NI law 'breaches #HumanRights’ - BBC News

#NorthernIreland may at last be falling in line with the rest of the #UK and civilization.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-49900668

The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism

The renowned novelist joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss her country's drift toward authoritarianism.

The post The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism appeared first on The Intercept.

Credit Where it’s Due

Hitler chimes in on Trump’s desire to shoot migrants and build a moat and border wall topped with spikes.

Donald the Boy President Gets Impeached

A parody of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes featuring the much less beloved Donald Trump.

Leading by Example

Representation isn’t everything

Adversarial Interoperability

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them.

But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability. From the flurry of absurd software patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted in the dark years between the first software patents and the Alice decision to the growing use of "digital rights management" to create legal obligations to use the products you purchase in ways that benefit shareholders at your expense, Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them.

That can and should change. As Big Tech grows ever more concentrated, restoring adversarial interoperability must be a piece of the solution to that concentration: making big companies smaller makes their mistakes less consequential, and it deprives them of the monopoly profits they rely on to lobby for rules that make competing with them even harder.

For months, we have written about the history, theory, and practice of adversarial interoperability. This page rounds up our writing on the subject in one convenient resource that you can send your friends, Members of Congress, teachers, investors, and bosses as we all struggle to figure out how to re-decentralize the Internet and spread decision-making power around to millions of individuals and firms, rather than the executives of a handful of tech giants.

Interoperability: Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Companies: a taxonomy of different kinds of interoperability, from “indifferent interoperability” (I don't care if you plug your thing into my product) to “cooperative interoperability” (please plug your thing into my product) to “adversarial interoperability” (dang it, stop plugging your thing into my product!).
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies: The history of adversarial interoperability and how it drove the tech revolutions of the past four decades, and what we can do to restore it.
Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle: Big Tech companies created a privacy dumpster fire on the Internet, but now they say they can’t fix it unless we use the law to ban competitors from plugging new services into their flaming dumpsters. That’s awfully convenient, don't you think?
A Cycle of Renewal, Broken: How Big Tech and Big Media Abuse Copyright Law to Slay Competition: Cable TV exists because of adversarial interoperability, which gave it the power to disrupt the broadcasters. Today, Big Cable is doing everything it can to stop anyone from disrupting it.
‘IBM PC Compatible’: How Adversarial Interoperability Saved PCs From Monopolization: IBM spent more than a decade on the wrong end of an antitrust action over its mainframe monopoly, but when it created its first PCs, scrappy upstarts like Phoenix and Compaq were able to clone its ROM chips and create a vibrant, fast-moving marketplace.
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects: Microsoft came this close to owning the modern office by locking up the intranet in a proprietary network protocol called SMB...That is, until a PhD candidate released SAMBA, a free/open product that adversarially interoperated with SMB and allows Macs, Unix systems, and other rivals to live on the same LANs as Windows machines.
Felony Contempt of Business Model: Lexmark’s Anti-Competitive Legacy: Printer companies are notorious for abusive practices, but Lexmark reached a new low in 2002, when it argued that copyright gave it the right to decide who could put carbon powder into empty toner cartridges. Even though Lexmark failed, it blazed a trail that other companies have enthusiastically followed, successfully distorting copyright to cover everything from tractor parts to browser plugins.
Adblocking: How About Nah?: The early Web was infested with intrusive pop-up ads, and adversarial interoperability rendered them invisible. Today, adblocking is the largest boycott in history, doing more to curb bad ads and the surveillance that goes with them than any regulator.

Aspirin may halve air pollution harms

A new study is the first to report evidence that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin may lessen the adverse effects of air pollution exposure on lung function. The researchers found that the use of any NSAID nearly halved of the effect of PM on lung function, with the association consistent across all four weekly air pollution measurements from same-day to 28 days prior to the lung function test.

After Largest Workplace Raid in a Decade, Immigrant Workers Are Organizing

On August 7 the poultry towns of central Mississippi suffered the largest workplace raid in the U.S. since 2006. Some 680 chicken-processing workers from seven factories were detained and incarcerated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

#coop fact of the day!

Socialists are better at running businesses than capitalists?

These daily facts are part of a marketing campaign for #CoopExchange, consider subscribing to our email list in our website here: https://coop.exchange/.

Black Workers Are the Heartbeat of the GM Strike

The news she had been anticipating finally arrived, and Leatrice Strong, a 33-year-old Black woman and mother of four, felt a wave of nervous energy wash over her. Not because she doubted that striking against General Motors was the right thing to do. “We’re just all standing for what’s right,” she told me. But the […]