Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

White Judges and Donald Trump

The Center for American Progress released a report today about the diversity of the federal judiciary, and you will be unsurprised to learn that it continues to be more male and more white than the general population. You can read the whole report here, but I want to highlight just a single chart: As you […]

Meet the Hawkish Liberal Think Tank Powering the Kamala Harris Campaign

If you liked Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy, you can keep it.  

That’s the message many Democratic voters are receiving this election, as they prepare to pick a contender from the gradually winnowing field of candidates to take on Donald Trump in 2020. And the reason is the continuing influence of a think-tank called the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

The influence of CNAS on the 2020 election, at this point, is being channeled through the campaign of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who has drawn heavily from its ranks to fill her line-up of foreign policy advisors. But given its status as the go-to fountainhead of Democratic foreign policy ideas, there is every chance its alumni could be part of another future Democratic administration.

Founded on the eve of what was thought to almost certainly be a coming Clinton presidency over a decade ago, CNAS has left its fingerprints all over the past ten years of Democratic foreign policy. With its bipartisan make-up and centrist approach, the think tank has served as a crucial wellspring for conventional foreign policy thinking that has shaped the actions and ideas of both the Obama administration and Clinton’s 2016 run.

Even as the American public has slowly turned against endless war, CNAS’ prescriptions have stayed soothingly familiar: Stay the course in ongoing wars, step up efforts to counter Russia, China and other adversaries, and dig deeper into the conflicts the United States has so far only dipped a toe into.

Though Clinton’s loss meant CNAS hasn’t had the influence over the halls of power it expected, a wide-open Democratic contest means a second opportunity. And it seems California Sen. Kamala Harris is its favored candidate, as her foreign policy advisory team is stocked with the think tank’s alumni and its co-founder.

The creation of CNAS

CNAS was born during the Bush years as the foreign policy equivalent to the Center for American Progress (CAP): a liberal-to-centrist think tank that would double as a policy house for an eventual Democratic president. Established in 2007, CNAS came onto the scene as the Bush presidency was coming to a close and the Democrats battled it out to see who would replace him. The timing was symbolic, suggesting the eclipse of neoconservative foreign policy by a new, liberal era.

CNAS had another similarity to CAP: its Clinton connections. It had been founded by two former Pentagon officials under Bill Clinton’s presidency, one of whom was Michèle Flournoy, and its board was stacked with that administration’s alumni: Clinton’s former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, his former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and longtime Clinton confidant and CAP President and CEO John Podesta. Aiming to be “strictly nonpartisan,” as Flournoy put it, CNAS also courted Republicans, and its board also featured Bush’s former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Hillary Clinton herself delivered the keynote speech at CNAS’s inaugural forum, speaking about the threat of “nuclear terrorism,” highlighting the challenges of a “rising China,” and calling for military intervention in Darfur. As the New York Timesnoted, CNAS looked “an awful lot like a shadow policy apparatus for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

At the time, Flournoy and the CNAS were described as a new batch of “liberal realists,” who crafted foreign policy supposedly based on pragmatism, not ideology—and stood on the opposite side of progressives who wanted to scale back U.S. involvement in the world. The United States, she explained in 2007, is a force for good in the world. Flournoy appeared to hold this view years later, telling the Council on Foreign Relations in 2013 that the United States “still has an indispensable leadership role to play” because “no other country” can “put together international coalitions to solve shared problems the way we can.”

Flournoy has a long history inside the foreign policy establishment. Under Bill Clinton, she cut her teeth as the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, and as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy. While there, Flournoy helped draft the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, which, among other things, “determined that U.S. forces must be capable of fighting and winning two major theater wars nearly simultaneously.” This two-war doctrine, arguably obsolete even during the post-Cold War moment in which the review was drafted, would eventually be jettisoned by the Bush administration. Flournoy came to agree, though only because its focus on ground war was incompatible with an age of more frequent air and sea power.

Despite Clinton’s primary loss in 2008, and her rival Barack Obama’s seemingly divergent approach to foreign policy, CNAS was neatly folded into the Obama general election campaign. The think tank had one of its first big victories when it helped push Obama away from the anti-war position he had campaigned on. While Obama had pledged during the primary race to start withdrawing troops from Iraq immediately upon entering office, with the CNAS having become “something like Obama’s foreign policy think-tank” in the words of the New Yorker’s George Packer, Obama now refined his position. He would instead adopt the Bush administration’s approach of staying the course in Iraq with no timetable for withdrawal. It was a significant early victory for CNAS, whose thinking would increasingly depart from the Obama administration over the following years.

Just as Obama handed his transition on domestic policy over to the Clintonites, allowing Podesta to staff the administration with various neoliberal appointees, he did the same on foreign policy. Obama named Flournoy and another former Clinton official, John White, to head his takeover of the defense department, and a host of others involved in CNAS found themselves on his list of national security personnel. Susan Rice, who would serve as Obama’s UN ambassador, was a CNAS board member, and in February, Flournoy would become the administration’s undersecretary of defense for policy.

Flournoy departed the administration in 2012, but Obama’s foreign policy continued to boast the CNAS’ imprint. Breaking his campaign pledge, Obama stayed the course in Iraq, only withdrawing troops by the end of 2011 because the Iraqi government refused to allow them to remain. He launched the disastrous war on Libya, further destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa, an action favored by Flournoy on humanitarian grounds, and pushed the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, something long endorsed by the think-tank, and which Flournoy called “the most important thing” and “foundational” to the administration’s “rebalance” toward Asia. While such decisions can’t be solely attributed to CNAS, the fact that his administration boasted multiple officials associated with the think-tank points to its influence over Obama’s foreign policy.

Yet Obama also rejected the CNAS line at times, as made clear in a major 2016 report published by the think-tank. Titled “Extending American Power,” the report bore Flournoy’s name on its list of endorsers. With Flournoy rumored to be Clinton’s defense secretary pick, the report was interpreted by news outlets as a peek into a future Clinton foreign policy, one that would be markedly more aggressive than Obama’s.

Among the report’s prescriptions were to “significantly increase U.S. national security and defense spending,” approve the TPP as a counterweight against China, ensure the international campaign against ISIS “is scaled up substantially,” and reserve the military option for Iran. Some of these proposals ran expressly counter to Obama’s approach, calling for the United States to send lethal arms to Ukraine and militarily intervene in Syria, both moves he had been resisting to varying extents. The CNAS report also dabbled in domestic policy, praising the explosion of fossil fuel extraction under Obama for “offer[ing] significant strategic advantage that can help extend American power,” and calling for “balancing taxes and entitlements to put U.S. debt on a more sustainable trajectory.” All of this was at the service of maintaining “the longevity of a rules-based international system favorable to U.S. interests.”

Clinton’s loss to Trump prevented this vision from coming to fruition. But the 2020 campaign has given CNAS another chance to insert its influence into the halls of power.

Advising the Harris campaign

Despite the large 2020 field, Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the heir to Hillary Clinton’s political network. By July, she had locked down the second most big-money former Obama and Clinton donors after Joe Biden, and Clinton’s wealthy donor network in California and Florida, in particular, coalesced around the California Senator. When it comes to staff, Harris’ sister and campaign chair Maya was Clinton’s 2015 senior policy advisor. Harris has also tapped Clinton’s general counsel Marc Elias, among other former Clinton staffers.

Harris has continued this pattern in the realm of foreign policy, stacking her team with CNAS personnel. One is David Cohen, Obama’s former under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence and then deputy director of the CIA, who is now the think-tank’s adjunct senior fellow focusing on technology and national security.  Another is Matt Olsen, the former general counsel for the NSA and former National Counterterrorism Center director, both under Obama, who serves in an identical role at CNAS. Harris’ National Security Advisor Halie Soifer, who had served in that same role for Harris in the Senate, came out of the think tank’s Next Generation National Security Fellow program.

But the most notable name on Harris’ list of foreign policy advisors is Michele Flournoy, who founded CNAS, served as its president for two years, and was once expected to help lead U.S. foreign policy under a prospective President Hillary Clinton.

In 2002, while a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Flournoy endorsed Bush’s emerging doctrine of pre-emptive war.

“In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary's [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States,” she said then.

Flournoy laid out her views on the matter more fully in a June 2002 editorial for the Washington Post, co-written with Vince LaFleur, a former member of the National Security Council staff who was then a visiting fellow at the CSIS. Bush was “right to insist on preemption as a viable policy option,” they wrote, but wrong to treat it as the entire strategy, and more effort should be put into prevention, such as non-proliferation treaties. They noted the difficulties of applying a policy of pre-emption: the closer a country comes to developing a weapon of mass destruction, the harder it is to attack, but “the earlier a president wants to launch a first strike, the more difficult it will be politically.”

A year later, as the United States began its foray into Iraq, Flournoy warned the single-minded focus on the war was taking oxygen from other issues. “If we do nothing, North Korea will be a nuclear weapons power,” she said. “We should do everything in our power stop that.”

Under Obama, Flournoy “pushed hard” for military intervention in Libya, according to a 2011 Huffington Post profile of Flournoy. The Libyan adventure became arguably Obama’s greatest foreign policy blunder, the resulting anarchy creating a pipeline of arms to extremists across neighboring countries, and the country descended into ground zero for the migrant crisis while human slavery became a fixture. Even so, two years after former dictator Muammar Gaddafi had been deposed, Flournoy told the Council on Foreign Relations: “I think we were right to do it.”

Such a record helped Flournoy become the neoconservatives’ choice to replace Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2012. At the time, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel was the frontrunner to succeed Gates, a choice hated by the country’s war hawks due to Hagel’s criticism of the Iraq War, his affinity for diplomacy and engagement, and his distaste for economic sanctions. Faced with this choice, Flournoy was endorsed by neocons such as Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Jennifer Rubin, who cast a potential Flournoy appointment as a victory for diversity and feminism, despite the fact that Flournoy’s preferred policies had been destructive to the world’s population of women.

Under Obama, Flournoy had argued strenuously against the administration’s total withdrawal from Iraq, a view shared by the military brass, and she had pushed for a residual force to stay behind to no avail. She would later take a more aggressive line than the administration on several conflicts. She criticized the Obama administration’s ISIS policy for having “under-resourced” its “military dimensions,” called for greater U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war and urged the supplying of weapons to Ukraine. A 2016 report co-authored by Flournoy stated that “Washington and other capitals have not devoted sufficient attention to the threat posed by Russia and its implications for Western security,” and recommended “direct military assistance” to Ukraine “in far larger amounts than provided to date.”

After leaving the Obama administration, Flournoy bided her time, making recommendations from the outside while waiting to re-enter government under the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, whose campaign she was advising. She argued forcefully for passing the TPP, urging observers to “move beyond the usual economic arguments” over the deal and instead “consider the extraordinary geopolitical stakes involved.” She criticized the administration’s deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, by then already the longest war in U.S. history, and was one of 23 signatories calling on Obama to reverse course.

With domestic energy production emerging “as a new source of strength,” she urged Obama to rescind the “outdated and counterproductive” ban on domestic oil exports, a measure he took that has helped turn the United States into one of the world’s major fossil fuel exporters and sped up the climate crisis. She also called for a “broader and more intensive effort” against ISIS that involved giving arms to local tribes, ramping up the U.S. air war on the group, greater aid to the Syrian opposition, and even putting “boots on the ground” to fight them.

Almost all of these ideas would make their way into the CNAS’ “Extending American Power” report in 2016.

It’s difficult not to suspect a link between the sources of CNAS’ corporate funding and the foreign policy it pursues. According to its website, from 2017-2018, CNAS received $500,000 or more from defense contractor Northrop Grumman, between $100,000 and $249,000 from firms like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and between $50,000 to $99,999 from BAE Systems. And it’s not just arms manufacturers. Other financial contributors to CNAS include Prudential Financial, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BP, ExxonMobil, Comcast, Facebook and Google.

So perhaps it’s no wonder that its current CEO is Richard Fontaine, a former foreign policy advisor to the late Sen. John McCain, whose history of pushing for wars is nearly unparalleled even in Washington. Or that CNAS puts out reports like this 2019 publication, titled “Why America Needs a New Way of War,” that describes U.S. armed forces as “critical to sustaining the US-led global order,” and advocates a peace-through-strength approach to foreign policy. Or that challenging the power of Russia and China continues to dominate the think tank, rather than advocating a foreign policy that centers international co-operation to tackle an intensifying worldwide ecological crisis, as figures such as Bernie Sanders have beenadvocating.

Toward 2020

If personnel is policy, Kamala Harris’ line-up of foreign policy advisors suggests that the Washington consensus on foreign policy will continue unimpeded should Harris secure the nomination and defeat President Trump. More than that, it suggests the so-called military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned about nearly 60 years ago will stay untouched, with Harris’ line-up of advisors a walking embodiment of the intersection of interventionist foreign policy and corporate interests.

And if Harris does not win the Democratic nomination, CNAS will likely maintain its influence. As a think-tank with deep ties to the Democratic and national security establishments, CNAS personnel are on deck to be tapped to fill any future Democratic administration’s foreign policy team, the same way CAP personnel are expected to on the domestic side.

For some, this will be a welcome return to “normalcy” after Trump’s erratic and often contradictory foreign policy. Yet it holds significant risks, not just for this coming election, but for the future of the United States. There is evidence that the more interventionist foreign policy touted by Clinton in 2016, thanks in part to her consultation with Flournoy, helped cost her votes in the key blue states that flipped to Trump that year.

It’s also an open question how long the United States can sustain massive military spending and an overstretched overseas presence as it grapples with accumulating domestic crises. And that’s not to mention the stresses on regions like the Middle East and North Africa that have been consistently destabilized by U.S. actions, decade after decade.

For those looking to make a break from decades of Clintonite foreign policy, this will mean more than just not voting for the candidates whose staff are packed with its proponents. It will also mean battling against their inclusion in a future Democratic administration, whoever wins.

Trump Signed an Executive Order to “Protect” Medicare. Good Luck if You Have Any Other Type of Insurance.

In an apparent attempt to appeal to senior voters—and to divert attention away from the impeachment inquiry rocking the White House—President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that changes aspects of Medicare Advantage, the private-sector health plan that covers one third of the nation’s Medicare beneficiaries. During his speech, though, the president was far […]

Why the Left Needs To Stop Worrying and Learn To Love Impeachment

If you’re trying to build a mass political organization while ignoring the political issue everybody in the country is talking about, you’re doing it wrong.

Why in the world not impeach Donald Trump? You’re a socialist and you don’t want to see him impeached? Really? My friend Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin, acknowledges that Trump is reprehensible in the extreme, yet he dismisses impeachment as “squandering a historic opening to advocate for social reforms in exchange for some political theater.”

I disagree. This career draft dodger, tax evader, adulterer, debt-defaulter, chiseler, four-flusher and all-around gonif —Donald Trump, our fucking president—is the poster boy for everything we despise. And the entire Republican Party has stood foursquare behind him from the beginning.

Impeachment formalizes and emphasizes that the current Administration and all its works—its legislation, its deregulation, its judicial appointments—are fundamentally illegitimate. Impeachment does not only challenge current authority; it challenges its genesis.

A distinction between the current priorities of the Left—Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, etc.—and impeachment is illogical. For the foreseeable future, if not indefinitely, democratic socialists will have to work within the framework of the U.S. state. For this to be feasible, the State’s democratic processes need to be preserved, if not strengthened. We need to attack the legitimacy of the administration in order to defend our increasingly embattled democratic institutions. We need democracy to pursue all our priorities in social reform.

Democracy is not merely an identifier or assertion of bona fides for socialists. It is an operational requirement, both to attain power and to employ it.

Impeachment is not a substitute for a social justice agenda, or a positive electoral outcome in 2020. It is a facilitator. Immediately, it preoccupies the Trump administration and limits the damage it would do on other fronts. It dramatizes a wealth of detail on the administration’s malfeasance. It strengthens the case for whoever opposes Trump, against any Republicans who support him, and against any Democrats who fail to prosecute the case against him energetically.

There is a risk that the impeachment proceedings will be narrow and legalistic, and even worse, that they will feature neoconservative attacks on Trump for failing to support Ukraine against Russia. As with every other issue, the debate within the Democratic caucus in Congress on how to do impeachment will be ideological.

It is up to the Left to promote a progressive frame for impeachment. The chief prospective victim in the Ukraine affair was not Ukraine—it was our own democracy. The degradation of our democratic institutions, from voter suppression to gerrymandering to the stonewalling of Merrick Garland, is the source of Republicans’ current political advantage and prevents urgent reforms supported by strong majorities of the public.

A leading objection offered by Sunkara and others is that “no one thinks that this can happen given the current composition of Congress.” Everyone is aware that there are not enough Republican votes in the Senate to remove Trump from office. But the politics of impeachment lie more in the process than in the conclusion. And incidentally, if there is no chance of a Senate vote to remove Trump, there is nothing to fear in a President Pence. In any case, one useful way to broaden the impeachment inquiry is to rope Pence into it, not to mention the Secretary of State and the Attorney General. Trump has been helpful in this regard, in effect threatening to take his cronies down with him. This is a good thing!

Sunkara dismisses the upcoming hearings as “theater,” but politics substantially is theater. Picket lines and marches are theater. There is bad theater, and there is constructive theater. Impeachment can be constructive. Sunkara imagines the hearings will be boring. Tastes may differ on this, but watching guilty miscreants—and rest assured, they are all guilty—be abused by Members of Congress could prove to be very entertaining. For Members with a killer instinct, impeachment can be blood sport. Must-see TV.

Impeachment is a political weapon. The meticulous elaboration of charges and evidence in a due-process setting is the education that the country needs. Knowing something in general is never as compelling as learning all the gory details. If you think such a process would fall on deaf ears, you have to think there is no good case to make against Trump—a strange conclusion for any reader of In These Times.

Another reservation on the Left is that impeachment lets Democrats off the hook for their numerous deficiencies. Professor Samuel Moyn would like the Left to use impeachment to indict both parties, as well as their roles in the growth of the “imperial presidency,” a growth which certainly raises the likelihood of misbegotten military adventurism. But such a posture would surely render the Left irrelevant to this debate, which is grounded in partisan party conflict.

As noted at the outset, when the nation’s attention is focused on a thing, it does little good to say you really should be listening to me talk about something entirely different. A failure of the Left to take up impeachment leaves the field to lowest-common-denominator neocon/neoliberal politics, with which after all we are competing. Every presidential candidate with a lick of sense understands they can’t let the likes of Joe Biden monopolize the anti-Trump franchise.

The root of the case against Trump is the struggle for democracy. As Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski say in The People’s Republic of Walmart, “Democracy is the beating heart of socialism.” Democratic socialists must become serious about democracy: It should be more than merely a means of distinguishing ourselves from some other dudes.

In political competition with craven Republicans and assorted weak-kneed Democrats, democracy is our super-power.

The Plastics Industry’s Long Fight to Blame Pollution on You

The plastics industry has been promoting recycling and shaming “litterbugs” while fighting legislation that would limit plastics production.

The post The Plastics Industry’s Long Fight to Blame Pollution on You appeared first on The Intercept.

#Scotland becomes first country in #UK to #ban #smacking of #children | UK news | The Guardian

Good thing too.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/03/scotland-becomes-first-country-in-uk-to-ban-smacking-of-children

EITC or $15 Minimum Wage? Why Not Both?

The Earned-Income Tax Credit is one of the largest social welfare programs run by the federal government. It’s available only to people who work—primarily those with children—and takes the form of a tax refund that generally amounts to a few thousand dollars each year. Conventional wisdom has long held that the EITC motivates people to […]

Facebook Just Gave Trump Permission to Lie

President Donald Trump is taking advantage of a Facebook exemption that allows politicians to lie in advertisements to spread disinformation about former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2015 diplomatic trip to Ukraine. Even though the ads contain misinformation, a Facebook spokesperson says they did not violate their company’s advertising policy because of carveout for politicians. The […]

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.