On Saturday morning, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City to demand answers.
Hundreds of people incarcerated at the federal detention facility in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn have been living without heat, light, telephone access, and lawyers for the past week, as the region endured arctic temperatures. After touring the facility with other elected officials, Nadler, the newly seated chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said what he found was disturbing.
“There’s a total lack of urgency or concern on the part of the prison administration with respect to getting the heat and the hot water.”“There’s a total lack of urgency or concern on the part of the prison administration with respect to getting the heat and the hot water, getting the services we need,” he said on the steps of the detention facility after his visit. Several hundred people, many of whom have family members inside, had gathered in protest outside the facility. While some cells did have heat, others were extremely cold, Nadler said, and all were without power.
While the elected officials toured the detention facility, the Metropolitan Detention Center’s surroundings echoed with the sound of incarcerated people banging on their windows in protest. In answer, hundreds of their family members and other supporters massed outside, chanting, “Humane treatment for all! Get those lights on! Get that heat on!”
“I’m just worried about my son’s health,” said Tina Mongo, through tears. “I haven’t been able to speak with him, and I haven’t been able to visit, and I don’t know if he’s alright. I just don’t know.”
A number of people incarcerated at Metropolitan Detention Center have a medical condition called sleep apnea and without functioning medical equipment they run the risk of a stroke, Nadler said. “When I said to the warden, how many people do you have people with CPAP machines, he said he didn’t know. I said, ‘Did you know there was a problem?’ He said, ‘No one raised it to me until now.’ Basic medical conditions are being ignored.”
Prison officials are in no rush to improve the situation, he said. “In an emergency condition, they are so eager to solve this condition that the contractors have left for the day and won’t be back until Monday.” Nadler said. “This shows the complete lack of urgency.”
Photo: Josh Begley
Other elected officials who toured the prison described similar medical concerns. New York City Council Member Jumaane Williams said he spoke to an incarcerated person with an untreated eye infection and another in need of psychiatric care who was not receiving it.
State Sen. Zellnor Myrie, D-Brooklyn, told The Intercept he was shown a cell in which an asthmatic man deprived of a nebulizer was lying on the floor of a poorly ventilated cell trying to suck air through the gap under the door.
“I saw a young man on the floor, holding a bright red inhaler, and he was saying through tears that he doesn’t know if he’s going to wake up tomorrow.”“As they took us inside, I saw a young man on the floor, holding a bright red inhaler, and he was saying through tears that he doesn’t know if he’s going to wake up tomorrow,” Myrie said. “This man is pre-trial, he hasn’t been convicted of anything. I grew up using a nebulizer, so I know what it’s like to need it and not have it.”
Bureau of Prisons Warden Herman Quay was standing next to Myrie during the exchange inside the prison, the state senator said. The warden was apparently unmoved. “There was no sense of urgency,” Myrie said. “He was extremely elusive, and all of his answers to our questions were non-committal.”
New York City Council Member Brad Lander, who toured the Metropolitan Detention Center with other elected officials, described the prison’s Facilities Manager John Maffeo as “openly contemptuous” of the congressional representatives’ inquiry into conditions at the incarceration site.
MDC right now. “Turn the heat on.” pic.twitter.com/TvaFGLvpSa
— Josh Begley (@joshbegley) February 2, 2019
The Metropolitan Detention Center houses more than 1,600 federal prisoners, ranging from around a half-dozen people convicted on federal terrorism charges to defendants who have not yet been found guilty of any crime. Union officials representing prison employees told the New York Times that power first went out at the jail on January 5, but that the heating issues began in earnest the week before last. On January 27, an electrical fire knocked out primary power to the jail. Under emergency power, lights were kept on in hallways, but not in the cells, and the prison went into lockdown.
“It’s awful,” said David Patton, the head of the public-interest legal advocates Federal Defenders of New York, who also toured the facility. “They’ve been on lockdown. There is no lighting. There is some heat, but it’s sporadic unit-to-unit. We were in one cell where the temperature was 50 degrees and there was water leaking into the cell.”
In some units, the heat is functioning, Patton said. “But even then,” he added, “you’re talking about the high 60s, and people are wearing essentially short-sleeve hospital scrubs.”
Patton said his office began getting frantic reports about conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center on Wednesday. He and his colleagues began filing dozens of emergency bail applications and applications to modify incarcerated people’s conditions of confinement in an effort to get people out of the freezing jail. Those motions are pending, but the earliest hearings scheduled aren’t until Monday in the Eastern District of New York and Tuesday in the Southern District.
The hearings, which will include testimony on conditions inside the prison, will force Bureau of Prison officials to defend their public assertions — contradicted by accounts from inside — that all cells in the prison have light, that the incarcerated people are receiving hot meals, and that the detention facility’s heat has been unaffected throughout the ordeal.
“He described the past week as ‘torturous,’ ‘vicious’ and ‘brutal;’ a ‘mindfuck.’ He was desperate for a hot cup of tea.”Armed with a court order, one defense lawyer made it into the Metropolitan Detention Center on Saturday to meet with this client. A publicly filed letter to the court from the lawyer, Anthony Cecutti, describes what he found. His client “arrived shivering and sick, with a cough and runny nose,” Cecutti wrote. “He described the past week as ‘torturous,’ ‘vicious’ and ‘brutal;’ a ‘mindfuck.’ He was desperate for a hot cup of tea, and grateful to walk from his unit to the West Building. He described himself as ‘broken.’” Cecutti’s client described a detention unit in which the cells are dark, meals are cold, and there continues to be neither heat nor hot water.
A spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city has offered the jail assistance in the form of generators, blankets, and handwarmers, but has so far been rebuffed. In a tweet sent Saturday evening, de Blasio announced the aid was coming anyway, “whether they like it or not.”
The Bureau of Prisons did not answer emailed questions Saturday, referring instead to a press release. “A work ticket has been submitted by the electrical contractor to schedule a work crew to restore power to the new temporary service switch,” the release reads in part. “The current estimate is that the work is expected be completed by Monday.” The release states that incarcerated people are receiving medical care and notes that the detention facility is accepting blankets from the New York City Office of Emergency Management.
Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., who was part of the delegation that visited the federal detention facility Saturday afternoon, announced on Twitter afterwards that she had spoken with the director of the Bureau of Prisons, who agreed that the situation was unacceptable.
For many family members gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center Saturday, the most resonant statement seemed to come from Williams, the city council member. “Those people in there do not care what’s happening,” Williams told the gathered crowd. “The only way they probably would have cared is if it was white, preppy students who were in there.”
In the wake of the fire, “nobody had a plan to make this system run; nobody cared about the people who were in there,” Williams said. “Whatever happened here only exacerbated the problem that already existed. When the heat finally comes on, we have to make sure that people are getting medical. We have to make sure people are treated as human beings.”
The post “‘Vicious’ And ‘Brutal'” — Life Inside a Freezing Federal Prison With No Heat appeared first on The Intercept.
Sixteen months into #MeToo, companies seeking sexual harassment insurance are facing intense scrutiny from insurers — a trend that could put pressure on firms to institute organizational change.
A recent report, authored by an insurance industry consultant, reveals new measures that insurers are taking to mitigate the risks of writing harassment policies, including decisions to exclude entire industries from their portfolios.
The increased vigilance comes as harassment complaints filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are on the rise, perhaps sparked by the wave of #MeToo revelations. The EEOC received 7,609 sexual harassment charges in its 2018 fiscal year, up nearly 14 percent from 2017. These numbers don’t include an unknown number of complaints settled by victims who never contacted the federal regulator.
Ten of the 32 insurance companies polled by Richard S. Betterley, publisher of the Betterley Report, said they were not underwriting the legal industry. Financial firms, including brokers, investment banks, and venture capital operations landed on the prohibited lists of eight insurers. Seven insurers said they’d blacklisted companies in the entertainment industry. Betterley shared a copy of his report, completed in December, exclusively with The Intercept and Type Investigations.
Betterley reached out to the biggest companies offering what is called “employment practices liability insurance,” or EPLI, which covers sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and other employee claims. Among the companies responding to Betterley’s survey were AIG, Chubb, The Hartford, and Travelers.
EPLI insurers christen their products with names like “ForceField” and “Employment Edge” and sometimes market their wares with #MeToo paranoia in mind. A blogger at a Manhattan insurance brokerage asks readers, “Is your industry a snake pit for sexual harassment claims?” At Nationwide, a webpage devoted to EPLI insurance warns that “a business is more likely to have an employment claim than experience a fire.” To attract clients for their expensive policies, which can demand seven-figure premiums for large firms, some insurers offer extras, such as free consultations with an outside law firm and sample employee handbooks.
Betterley said in an interview that, with dozens of insurers offering EPLI policies, being blocked by some major providers doesn’t mean that companies in frowned-upon industries can’t get insurance at all. But it could now mean agreeing to higher premiums and deductibles and demonstrating that their problems “are under control and have been addressed,” he said.
For example, a problem company might have to show that it had set up a confidential outside service for employees to report complaints anonymously, Betterley said. Or that the company had circulated anti-harassment policies and set up sexual harassment compliance programs. A large employer with a history of harassment complaints might see a deductible soar from $1 million to $5 million, he said.
Companies with high-profile executives, big-name stars, or iffy corporate cultures are getting increased scrutiny, several insurers who participated in the survey told Betterley. One insurer said it had become more cautious about underwriting “any account with celebrity involvement.” Another said it was taking a more in-depth look at companies’ track records on pay equity.
When Betterley began tracking the insurance market for sexual harassment and other employee claims in 1991, he said, there were only five companies in the business. “But EPLI really got big after Anita Hill testified in the Clarence Thomas hearings, when insurance companies saw a business opportunity,” said Paula Brantner, senior adviser to Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit organization that advocates for workers’ rights. By the end of the 1990s, in the wake of several high-profile sex discrimination lawsuits against Wall Street firms, 10 firms were offering the coverage. Today, 50 to 55 companies are in the business, according to Betterley.
Employers paid $2.5 billion in premiums for EPLI insurance in 2017, before #MeToo, according to ISO MarketStance, a data provider. ISO estimates that premiums for U.S. firms will total more than $2.7 billion this year.
I read the application forms for five of the insurers that participated in Betterley’s survey. They ask expansive questions about a company’s procedures, including queries as to whether the firm has put in place formal procedures for terminations and employee complaints. They also, of course, demand detailed information about previous charges of sexual harassment. One insurer wanted a list of all incidents, including ones that have not triggered a formal complaint, with the name of the claimant, the allegations made, the settlement amount any complainant received, and what remedial actions were taken.
“Past is prologue from an underwriter’s standpoint,” said Betterley. “If you have a history of problems, it’s probably a problem for the insurer too.” Along with collecting hard data from an applicant, though, underwriters may factor in whether a company’s reputation is, in Betterley’s words, “a little on the sleazy side.” Insurers don’t necessarily raise their rates after a single sexual harassment case, he said, but companies with a pattern of harassment complaints are at risk of paying more. And companies with egregious histories might find that no one will insure them at all anymore.
Betterley said that some industries were viewed as risky long before #MeToo. “Sales mentality industries have been in deep trouble from an employment practices standpoint and maybe always will be,” he said. That puts car dealerships and stock brokerage firms on insurers’ high-risk lists, he said. Some of the best salespeople can be “a little egotistical and a little tone deaf and a little locker-roomy,” Betterley explained, adding that management often shields big producers when harassment complaints are made. Law firms, which can have their own culture of tolerating aggressive behavior by high-billing rainmakers, are similarly viewed by harassment insurers as high risk.
Several insurers told Betterley that their underwriters were increasing scrutiny of financial firms. Spokespeople at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley either declined to comment or didn’t respond to emails asking if they were experiencing difficulty getting EPLI insurance or were facing higher premiums or higher deductibles.
Insurers also told Betterley that in the wake of widespread allegations of sexual harassment and assault across industries during the #MeToo era, they are increasingly vigilant about vetting companies in the entertainment business. Queries to the Walt Disney Co., Sony Pictures, and Viacom, owner of Paramount Pictures, went unanswered.
AM Best, a global ratings firm for the insurance industry, suggested in a January 28 report that to combat corporate misconduct, companies “may choose to be proactive” by providing training and education for employees. Training, though, gets mixed reviews. Brantner, the employee advocate, said training programs have historically been focused on limiting a company’s liability — not necessarily on improving the workplace.
And even a well-constructed training program has its limits, said Betterley. “There are real jerks out there in employment land,” he said. “If they were trainable, wouldn’t it have happened by now?”
This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations, where Susan Antilla is a reporting fellow.
The post Entire Industries Are Being Blacklisted by Insurers Over #MeToo Liability appeared first on The Intercept.
The signature effort that has become attached to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the “Green New Deal,” was originally intended to go by a different name, she told The Intercept in a recent podcast interview. But as social media and news outlets covering the platform began coalescing around the term, which had long been used by the Green Party, Ocasio-Cortez ceded to the public, she said.
With more than 2.6 million followers on Twitter and more than 2.1 million on Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez has a social media presence that surpasses any of her peers, including Democratic leadership, and her level of engagement on Twitter regularly rivals President Donald Trump. Key to that, she said, is using social media to gauge the public mood and respond accordingly.
Earlier this month, the 29-year-old democratic socialist held a crash course about Twitter for her Democratic colleagues in which she covered her approach “and how we can better get a party message to really resonate with people,” she said.
In addition to using social media to teach her followers about the inner workings of Congress and some of the more complex policy fights, Ocasio-Cortez said she also uses Twitter to listen and see what kind of messaging gains traction. “That’s probably one thing that I that I did not share in this Twitter 101, because maybe that’s more of a 201, in that it’s not just an outlet, it’s also an inlet, in that it is a place where you can — where you take temperature, where you take pulse, and it’s not just how to tweet but it’s also how to listen and how to read,” she said.
“And, and that really tells you where people are at, where the zeitgeist, so that you can kind of be speaking in a way that is not going against the tide of of the language and the mood in the sentiment of where people are.”
She cited the Green New Deal as an example of a time she used social media to gauge public reaction to the branding of a policy. Her campaign had been floating the idea of a Green New Deal before the general election, interviewing policy experts, academics, and activists about it. At the time, though, “Green New Deal” was only a working title and the campaign hadn’t yet settled on what they would call it or how they would talk about it to the public, “I wasn’t 1,000 percent sure on that kind of branding, if you will, or how we would talk about that.”
The term had long been floating around left-wing policy spaces. A Green New Deal has been part of the Green Party’s platform for more than a decade, and Jill Stein had been campaigning on it since 2012. Early use of the term traces back, oddly, to Thomas Friedman, who wrote a New York Times column in 2007 about the concept and later expanded the idea in a book. The following year, Barack Obama made a Green New Deal, or “Green Jobs,” part of his presidential platform, and brought Van Jones into his administration to try to implement a small a version of it. The concept didn’t fully take off until a new wave of progressive candidates campaigned on a more aggressive version of it — but its sudden surge into the mainstream happened after Sunrise, a youth-led environmental organization, held a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office.
Ocasio-Cortez dropped by to cheer on the young activists, and in the ensuing weeks Sunrise pushed dozens of members of Congress to adopt a resolution calling for a new select House committee on climate change. Ultimately, Democratic leadership didn’t completely give in to the demand, as the panel will not have any of the major features progressives were asking for. The committee won’t have the authority to approve legislation or any subpoena power to compel testimony from oil industry executives or obtain documents.
“Green New Deal was a working title, and we almost had the understanding that was going to be called something else,” she said. “But it kept leaking, and catching, and people just started writing articles calling it a Green New Deal before we even said anything or called it that ourselves. And so because of that, that was in a moment where it was listening, and I was like OK let’s not try to force our own thing on this, if this is building traction, if it’s easily being communicated, then let’s just run with it.”
The post How the Green New Deal Became the Green New Deal appeared first on The Intercept.
Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Karl Marx’s “Capital.” Zuboff’s book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it’s an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It’s hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff’s, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who’ve made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way.
Cover: Public Affairs Books
Tech’s privacy scandals, which seem to appear with increasing frequency both in private industry and in government, aren’t isolated incidents, but rather brief glimpses at an economic and social logic that’s overtaken the planet while we were enjoying Gmail and Instagram. The cliched refrain that if you’re “not paying for a product, you are the product”? Too weak, says Zuboff. You’re not technically the product, she explains over the course of several hundred tense pages, because you’re something even more degrading: an input for the real product, predictions about your future sold to the highest bidder so that this future can be altered. “Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends,” writes Zuboff. “At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
Zuboff recently took a moment to walk me through the implications of her urgent and crucial book. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
I was hoping you could say something about whatever semantic games Facebook and other similar data brokers are doing when they say they don’t sell data.
I remember sitting at my desk in my study early in 2012, and I was listening to a speech that [Google’s then-Executive Chair] Eric Schmidt gave somewhere. He was bragging about how privacy conscious Google is, and he said, “We don’t sell your data.” I got on the phone and started calling these various data scientists that I know and saying, “How can Eric Schmidt say we don’t sell your data, in public, knowing that it’s recorded? How does he get away with that?” It’s exactly the question I was trying to answer at the beginning of all this.
Let’s say you’re browsing, or you’re on Facebook putting stuff in a post. They’re not taking your words and going into some marketplace and selling your words. Those words, or if they’ve got you walking across the park or whatever, that’s the raw material. They’re just secretly scraping your private experience as raw material, and they’re stockpiling that raw material, constantly flowing through the pipes. They sell prediction products into a new marketplace. What are those guys really buying? They’re buying predictions of what you’re gonna do. There are a lot of businesses that want to know what you’re going to do, and they’re willing to pay for those predictions. That’s how they get away with saying, “We’re not selling your personal information.” That’s how they get away also with saying, as in the case of [recently implemented European privacy law] GDPR, “Yeah, you can have access to your data.” Because the data they’re going to give you access to is the data you already gave them. They’re not giving you access to everything that happens when the raw material goes into the sausage machine, to the prediction products.
Do you see that as substantively different than selling the raw material?
Why would they sell the raw material? Without the raw material, they’ve got nothing. They don’t want to sell raw material, they want to collect all of the raw material on earth and have it as proprietary. They sell the value added on the raw material.
It seems like what they’re actually selling is way more problematic and way more valuable.
That’s the whole point. Now we have markets of business customers that are selling and buying predictions of human futures. I believe in the values of human freedom and human autonomy as the necessary elements of a democratic society. As the competition of these prediction products heats up, it’s clear that surveillance capitalists have discovered that the most predictive sources of data are when they come in and intervene in our lives, in our real-time actions, to shape our action in a certain direction that aligns with the kind of outcomes they want to guarantee to their customers. That’s where they’re making their money. These are bald-faced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy, what I call the “right to the future tense.” The very idea that I can decide what I want my future to be and design the actions that get me from here to there, that’s the very material essence of the idea of free will.
“These are bald-faced interventions in the exercise of human autonomy.”I write about the Senate committee back in the ’70s that reviewed behavioral modification from the point of view of federal funding, and found behavioral mod a reprehensible threat to the values of human autonomy and democracy. And here we are, these years later, like, La-di-da, please pass the salt. This thing is growing all around us, this new means of behavioral modification, under the auspices of private capital, without constitutional protections, done in secret, specifically designed to keep us ignorant of its operations.
When you put it like that, it sure makes the question of whether Facebook is selling our phone number and email address kind of quaint.
Indeed. And that’s exactly the kind of misdirection that they rely on.
This made me reflect, not totally kindly, on the years I spent working at Gizmodo covering consumer tech. No matter how skeptical I tried to remain then, I look back on all the Google and Facebook product announcements that we covered just as “product news.”
[The press is] up against this massive juggernaut of private capital aiming to confuse, bamboozle, and misdirect. A long time ago, I think it was 2007, I was already researching this topic and I was at a conference with a bunch of Google people. Over lunch I was sitting with some other Google executives and I asked the question, “How do I opt out of Google Earth?” All of a sudden, the whole room goes silent. Marissa Mayer, [a Google vice president at the time], was sitting at a different table, but she turned around and looked at me and said “Shoshana, do you really want to get in the way of organizing and making accessible the world’s information?” It took me a few minutes to realize she was reciting the Google mission statement.
Author Shoshana Zuboff.
Photo: Michael D. Wilson
The other day, I was looking through the section of my Facebook account that actually lists the interests that Facebook has ascribed to you, the things it believes you’re into. I did the same with Twitter — and I was struck in both cases by how wrong they were. I wonder if you find it reassuring that a lot of this stuff seems to be pretty clunky and inaccurate right now.
I think there’s a range here. Some of it still feels clunky and irrelevant and produces in us perhaps a sigh of relief. But then on the other end, there are things that are uncannily precise, really hitting their mark at the moment they should be. And because we only have access to what they let us see, it’s still quite difficult for us to judge precisely what the range of that [accuracy] is.
What about the risk of behavioral intervention based on false premises? I don’t want a company trying to intervene in the course of my daily life based on the mistaken belief that I’m into fly fishing any more than I want them to intervene based on a real interest I have.
This is why I’m arguing we’ve got to look at these operations and break them down. They all derive from a fundamental premise that’s illegitimate: that our private experience is free for the taking as raw material. So it’s almost secondary if their conclusions are right or wrong about us. They’ve got no right to intervene in my behavior in the first place. They have no right to my future tense.
Is there such a thing as a good ad in 2019? Is it even possible to implement a form of online advertising that isn’t invasive and compromising of our rights?
An analogy I would draw would be negotiating how many hours a day a 7-year-old can work in a factory.
I take that as a no.
We’re supposed to be contesting the very legitimacy of child labor.
I’ve been surprised by the number of people I know, who I consider very savvy as far as technology, interested and concerned about technology, concerned by Facebook, who still have purchased an Alexa or Google Assistant device for their living room. It’s this weird mismatch of knowing better and surrendering to the convenience of it all. What would you say to someone like that?
Surveillance capitalism in general has been so successful because most of us feel so beleaguered, so unsupported by our real-world institutions, whether it’s health care, the educational system, the bank … It’s just a tale of woe wherever you go. The economic and political institutions right now leave us feeling so frustrated. We’ve all been driven in this way toward the internet, toward these services, because we need help. And no one else is helping us. That’s how we got hooked.
You think we turned to Alexa in despair?
Obviously there’s a range here. For some people, the sort of caricature of “We just want convenience, we’re so lazy” — for some people that caricature holds. But I feel much more forgiving of these needs than the caricature would lead us to believe. We do need help. We shouldn’t need so much help because our institutions in the real world need to be fixed. But to the extent that we do need help and we do look to the internet, it is a fundamentally illegitimate choice that we are now forced to make as 21st century citizens. In order to get the help I need, I’ve got to march through surveillance capitalism supply chains. Because Alexa and Google Home and every other gewgaw that has the word “smart” in front of it, every service that has “personalized” in front of it is nothing but supply chain interfaces for the flow of raw material to be translated into data, to be fashioned into prediction products, to be sold in behavioral futures markets so that we end up funding our own domination. If we’re gonna fix this, no matter how much we feel like we need this stuff, we’ve got to get to a place where we are willing to say no.
“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is available at bookstores everywhere, though you may cringe a bit after finishing it if you ordered from Amazon.
The post “A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice”: Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism appeared first on The Intercept.
Venezuela’s National Assembly president Juan Guaidó speaks before a crowd of opposition supporters during an open meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, on Jan. 16, 2019.
Photo: Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images
Washington has been trying to topple Venezuela’s government for at least 17 years, but the Trump administration has taken a more openly aggressive tack than its predecessors. Last week, administration officials kicked their efforts into high gear by anointing their chosen successor to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moros in advance of any coup d’etat. The 35-year-old Venezuelan member of Congress Juan Guaidó announced that he was now president, and the Trump administration, along with allied governments, immediately recognized him — in accordance with a previously arranged plan.
It is clear that President Donald Trump’s goal is regime change; his administration is not even trying to hide it. And his allies, like Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., have long made it obvious what they are after.
It would be a terrible mistake to keep going down this road. Trump’s policies have only worsened the suffering of Venezuelans and made it almost impossible for the country to pull out of its prolonged economic depression and hyperinflation.
A negotiated solution is necessary to resolve the political conflict in Venezuela, yet the Trump administration’s commitment to extralegal regime change is rapidly precluding this option.A negotiated solution is necessary to resolve the political conflict in Venezuela, yet the Trump administration’s commitment to extralegal regime change is rapidly precluding this option. Worse still, Trump’s apparent strategy is to increase suffering through sanctions — more of which were just announced — until a fraction of the military carries out a coup to create a new, pro-Washington government.
The fairness of the 2018 presidential election, which the opposition boycotted, is up for debate, but the main problems with the regime change strategy have to do with other considerations. Venezuela is a polarized country and overthrowing the government — even if Washington were not involved in the fight — would only increase this polarization and the chances of greater violence or even civil war.
Consider the example of Nicaragua, where in 1990 the leftist Sandinistas and their U.S.-backed opponents agreed to settle their differences through an election. The sides had to agree on certain conditions so that the losers would not be persecuted: The Sandinistas kept control over the army after they lost the elections, and peace was maintained.
These sorts of necessary compromises would be impossible under the regime change strategy being pursued by the Trump administration.
Venezuela is polarized along political lines and has been ever since Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998 and launched his Bolivarian Revolution. The opposition’s attempt to overthrow Chávez in a military coup in 2002, aided and abetted by officials in the George W. Bush administration, as well as the opposition leadership’s vacillating willingness to accept the results of democratic elections in subsequent years laid the groundwork for many years of distrust.
Venezuela’s political polarization, however, also intersects with a great chasm that permeates most of Latin American society: a division by class and race. As in most of the Americas, the two are correlated. In the opposition protests that have occurred over the past decade, one could see these differences in the clothes worn by pro- versus anti-government protesters and in their skin tones. The opposition crowds and their leaders have been considerably whiter and from higher income groups than Venezuelans who supported the government. In the most recent protests, there has been an increase in anti-government actions in working-class and poor areas in Caracas, but the class and racial divide between Chavistas and opposition has not gone away.
Another line of Venezuelan polarization is the belief in sovereignty and self-determination. The Chavistas have made independence from the U.S. a centerpiece of their agenda, and their government, when it had money, pursued policies in the hemisphere that sought more independence for the region as well. The opposition and enemies of the Chavista governments, by contrast, have worked closely with the U.S. government for the past two decades — as can be seen in the coordination of this latest attempted coup. Washington’s intervention aggravates the polarization along the lines of sovereignty, and opens the opposition to charges of alignment with a foreign power — and a power that has historically played a terrible role in the region. To appreciate the animosity that this would create, think of how much ill will has been generated in the U.S. by Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, and multiply that by a few orders of magnitude.
The polarizing impact of the Trump regime change operation is what makes it so dangerous.The polarizing impact of the Trump regime change operation is what makes it so dangerous. Inflation is probably over 1 million percent annually, and the economy is estimated to have shrunk by a Latin American record of 50 percent over the past five years. Millions have left the country to look for work. The opposition would almost certainly have won the last presidential election if they had participated. (For the record, the U.S. reportedly threatened an opposition candidate who did participate, Henri Falcón, with personal financial sanctions if he ran for president.)
Though the government’s economic policies have played a role in Venezuela’s woes, the Trump sanctions have made things considerably worse since August 2017, decimating the oil industry and worsening shortages of medicine that have killed many Venezuelans. The Trump sanctions also make it nearly impossible for the government to take the necessary measures to exit from hyperinflation and depression.
Though the U.S. media is quiet on the matter, it’s important to note that the Trump sanctions are both violently immoral — again, they kill people — and illegal. They are prohibited under the Organization of American States Charter, the United Nations Charter, and other international conventions that the U.S. is party to. The sanctions also violate U.S. law, since the U.S. president must state, absurdly, that Venezuela presents “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States in order to impose these measures.
Venezuela cannot exit from this political crisis by one side vanquishing the other, as the proponents of regime change assume. The Vatican played a role as mediator in 2016, and Uruguay and Mexico — who have remained neutral in the political conflict — offered this week to help mediate. But the Trump team is a powerful influence on the opposition, and they have so far shown no interest in a peaceful solution.
The post The U.S. Helped Push Venezuela Into Chaos — and Trump’s Regime Change Policy Will Make Sure It Stays That Way appeared first on The Intercept.
Austin Murphy began delivering packages for Amazon after his writing career slowed down and he and his wife decided to refinance their home. In December, Murphy wrote an essay for TheAtlantic.com about the experience. From the satisfaction of getting to the end of his route to the discomfort of being unable to relieve himself, Murphy’s daily journeys, he has realized, are, “in their minor way, heroic.”
I felt for Mr. Murphy in his search for a bathroom in unfamiliar territory—and while in a hurry. So I felt I should write.
Something he can get from Amazon—and one might make a point that they should provide these as a matter of workplace comfort for drivers: A neat tapered cup firmly adhered to a longish bag with crystals that turn to gel on contact with liquid. Will not spill. Usable by all genders. A must for a glove compartment. Why suffer?
Cat litter and a lidded bucket make short work of the other necessities.
Other drivers may laugh, but they may also be flagging him down at intersections.
Dale Forbes
Corvallis, Ore.
I loved Austin Murphy’s piece on transitioning from a writing gig for Sports Illustrated to delivering packages for Amazon. Lots of people have been needing to transition in this economy. I suppose we should count ourselves, the readers, lucky that Mr. Murphy has the writing skills to convey that experience so well.
Jim Smeenge
Los Gatos, Calif.
Being the wife of a UPS driver for the better part of the past 14 years, I must admit I was curious.
Reading though the article, I was bombarded with how degrading the job is thought to be by the man who now does it, despite his resolution at the end that delivering 279 packages in one day out of a small van made him feel heroic. It made me think: Do people who see a delivery man really think that this hardworking person is insignificant? Does the general population need to hear the well-written words of a freelance writer in order to know that the men and women who make our obsession with online shopping possible are heroes? This saddened me.
Is being a delivery driver what my husband went to college for? Is it what he saw himself doing for the majority of his “prime years”? Absolutely not, but when we found out we were pregnant when I was 21 and he was 25, he did what he had to do to provide for us. He has worked at a job he never planned on for almost 13 years to provide a roof over our head, procure us health insurance, put me through my bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and allow me to obtain my Certified Public Accountant license. His job allowed me to be a stay-at-home mom for four years while my son was young. It allowed us to send our kids to a private school when the public schools failed them. He gave up the future he planned on so that my kids and I could chase our dreams.
My loving husband has spent the past 14 years sacrificing time with his family to provide for us. Delivering packages to ungrateful people who don’t understand why he couldn’t have gotten to their house earlier in the day and don’t think about what his life is like. Being blamed by a large company for all the missteps of his management and still coming home laughing. This man, this lowly deliver driver, is my best friend, the love of my life, and he is my hero.
Jennifer J. Heim
Saint Charles, Mo.
I too am no longer working at a job I had for more than a third of my life. I was laid off two years ago from a large telecom company where I was a technical writer. Because of my age (64), I have not been able to find any other employment. So I am now driving for Uber and Lyft.
As this employment does not pay well (after expenses, I estimate that the job pays approximately $9 an hour), it is sometimes difficult to make ends meet. I can enumerate the hassles and existential fear of not being able to get by financially for the rest of my life, but that didn’t seem to worry the author of this article, and I am beginning to see I shouldn’t be too frantic about it, either. In that, the article helped me better understand the circumstances of my life at this moment.
To be truthful, I am enjoying helping people get to and fro. I meet interesting people every day, and, for those who are willing to chat, learn a good deal about life. I especially enjoy meeting people from other countries around the world who give me insights into their culture I wouldn’t get anywhere else, even if I visited their country.
I have not been shy about letting friends know that I work for ride-sharing companies, although at first I was unhappy that I had to do it at all. But things change, life changes. It doesn’t give you any warning, either. And I hope this doesn’t seem too condescending, but it is what it is. It’s honorable work, and someone has to help these people get home when they’ve had too much to drink.
Gary Nash
San Diego, Calif.
I loved Austin Murphy’s piece on driving for Amazon. It allowed me a window into the lives of so many men I see, especially this time of the year. In fact, it made me want to run out when the doorbell rings and offer them the use of a bathroom! Thank you for providing your readers with really good writing, the kind that pulls you in with a relatable story and allows you to walk in somebody else’s shoes. After all, “our feet are the same!”
Pauline Urbano Hechler
Phoenix, Ariz.
I was, well, deluged with creative solutions to the issue posed by nature’s call (many involving funnels). Dale Forbes’s may be the best. Thank you.
To Jennifer J. Heim: While I strove to be self-deprecating, I intended no disrespect to anyone else, in particular the brown-clad legions of UPS drivers, who occupy the highest reaches of the delivery pyramid. I never used “degrading,” or any variant of it. It’s simply not how I feel. I salute your spouse’s skill, and celebrate your family’s roll-with-it resilience.
On Friday, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam apologized for appearing in a photograph that featured one person in blackface and another wearing the robe and hood of a terrorist organization that murdered thousands of African Americans, burned crosses on the lawns of petrified families, whipped up bigotry against Catholics and Jews, and systematically suppressed the civil rights of black voters for decades. The Democrat “did not say whether he was the man dressed in blackface or the one in a Klan robe and hood,” The Washington Post noted.
The photo dates back to 1984, when Northam graduated from Eastern Virginia Medical School. It was published on his yearbook page.
Calls for his resignation are widespread.
Every day for years, Americans have been bombarded with calls to be outraged about matters large, small, and absurd. Given our culture’s inability to reserve stigma for when it is most appropriate, fatigue is inevitable. But every so often, something actually warrants public opprobrium.
This is one of those matters.
The affair may stoke the pernicious impulse to dig into people’s distant past. Often, these public airings of old offenses harm innocent people and don’t help anyone at all.
But one can oppose the general trend without having to ignore the uncovered misdeeds of the most powerful public officials.
The image in question is inexcusable. Nothing in American history is more odious than the KKK. The strong social stigma against white supremacists, anti-black terrorism, and the dehumanization of African Americans is among the triumphs of the past decades of the 20th century. Our charge is to conserve it, for the sake of justice and the viability of a diverse nation.
The newness of what we’re conserving is underscored by the fact that it wasn’t 1864, 1924, or 1954 when the photograph in question appeared in a yearbook.
It was 1984.
Not only did the young men think dressing up as they did was acceptable; they lived in a milieu where, apparently, no shame was associated with their actions. Northam didn’t think, I’d better make sure no one ever sees this. He thought, I’ll pose for a picture and make this the image I share with the faculty, staff, and students of my professional school—the one that they’ll remember me by.
His subsequent career seems to reflect better decision making. His apology may be sincere.
“The racist and offensive attitudes it represents does not reflect the person I am today, or the way that I have conducted myself as a soldier, a doctor, and a public servant,” he said. “I am deeply sorry. I cannot change the decisions I made, nor can I undo the harm that my behavior caused then and today, but I accept responsibility for my past actions and I am ready to do the hard work of regaining your trust.”
While I do not consider anyone irredeemable, especially when the transgression happened decades ago and seems to have been anomalous, it is not fair for Northam to tell Virginians––especially black Virginians––that he’ll stay on in the state’s most powerful job when he acknowledges that he has lost their trust.
A more decent course is available to him: Resign the governorship in a way that powerfully reaffirms the stigma against white supremacy. That’s the best way that he can serve the commonwealth right now. Later, if he regains the trust of Virginians, of course including African American Virginians, he can run again. If never reelected, he wasn’t indispensable.
Bennett College needed to collect $5 million to survive. The historically black women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, was appealing a decision to revoke its accreditation—based largely on its feeble financial situation—and wanted to show that it could raise funds. The school gave itself 50 days to prove its case.
Donations dribbled in from everywhere: $10,000 from a local credit union; $40,000 from Mount Zion Baptist Church; $1 and $10 and $50 donations from students; $500,000 from Papa John’s, which has been trying to rehab its image with the black community after its founder made a racist remark on a conference call; $77.25 from students at the Erwin Montessori elementary school. The money trickled in and the clock ticked as the school raced toward its February 1 deadline to raise the money. With two days left, Bennett was only 62 percent of the way to its goal; one day left, 65 percent; 14 hours, 72 percent. Then, a $1 million lifeline from another institution, High Point University. One hour, 95 percent. When the clock ran out, money still needed to be counted, so the college extended its deadline to do so.
[Read: Why America still needs historically black colleges]
The valiant effort, and the accompanying headlines, overshadows the fact that one large donation could have solved the school’s problems. Black colleges rarely receive transformational donations, the ones that get glowing press releases and New York Times–worthy rollouts. Papa John’s, for example, could have donated $5 million, and the rest of the funds raised by the college could have been put away in a rainy-day fund—or built into the school’s endowment. Spelman College, the only other historically black women’s college, received a $30 million donation in December 2018, which is the largest gift to an HBCU from a living donor in history. But that gift is the exception, not the rule. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of large charitable gifts, more than a dozen donations of $5 million or more were made to universities in the first month of 2019 alone—none of which went to an HBCU.
Black colleges—which were founded, primarily after the Civil War, to educate black people who were shut out of most higher education—have been underfunded for decades. That they are now overlooked for big donations in favor of wealthier schools seems like insult on top of injury.
Of course, financial woes like those Bennett is dealing with aren’t limited to black colleges. Small liberal-arts institutions are struggling, too—and those troubles have led some schools to close or merge with other colleges in the past several years. According to Alvin Schexnider, a former chancellor of Winston-Salem State University who now operates a higher-education management-consulting firm, any institution that has a high tuition-discount rate, is located in a rural area, has fewer than 1,000 students, or has a small endowment will likely face existence-threatening struggles in the coming years.
The risk is amplified at black colleges, where even less existence-threatening challenges such as taking on debt to pay for building improvements on campus are more expensive. The lack of transformational gifts means that they rely on smaller donations year after year. And when they are on the ropes, they often have to consider fundamentally restructuring their business model, whereas some other institutions—most notably, Sweet Briar College, whose alumnae raised $21 million in three months to help keep the institution open—are able to marshal resources in a serious pinch.
Getting large donations is “like getting a small-business loan,” Schexnider told me. Donors, he said, are asking, “Where else does this lead us? Are we going to be back here, being asked for money again, two, three, four years down the road?” The goal, of course, is to build a consistent stream of private gifts, but donors would prefer not to provide bailout funds on an ongoing basis.
[Read: The limits of a billion-dollar donation to Johns Hopkins]
In 1986, Hugh Gloster, a former president of Morehouse College, offered a prescient assessment. “History has shown that the private black college experiences a very slow death,” he said. “You will have an increasing number of weak private colleges lose accreditation, and they will lose enrollment, and then they will lose financial stability.” He stopped short of saying that the institutions would die off, but he foreshadowed the fate of several HBCUs in the following three decades.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS, Bennett’s accreditor, will review the school’s appeal on February 18. Though the school may have been able to marshal the $5 million, it does not guarantee that its accreditation will be restored. The college will maintain its accreditation while the appeal process is ongoing. If its appeal is unsuccessful, administrators have said the college will sue SACS, and maintain its accreditation while the lawsuit works its way through court. Meanwhile, the school has applied to another accreditor, the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.
Black colleges are historically important institutions that still produce more than 25 percent of black STEM-degree holders, and a quarter of black education-degree holders. But the private ones are dealing with the issues small liberal-arts colleges also face—low enrollments, smaller endowments—and many of them are doing so without the safety net of wealthy donors who can bail them out in an emergency.
Esther AartsThe lynx, in our eyes, is a wildcat of unthreatening dimensions. It has tufted ears and a spotted coat. The ruff beneath its chin grows in two bunches, recalling the beards of the men of Byzantium. Its stubby, black-tipped tail makes you think it might have lost a more splendid appendage to a fire. The lynx is mostly solitary, and rarely seen. Its dens are found in forests and between boulders, in Europe, Asia, and North America. The bobcat, a species of lynx, lives in the Catskill Mountains—do you hear cat-skill or cats-kill?—hunting little mammals. Another species, the Iberian lynx, was once the rarest cat on Earth: For a time, there were just 94. Today, more than 500 Iberian lynxes live in Portugal and Spain; bringing them back cost more than $76 million.
The lynx, to a louse, is—but doesn’t this sound like the start of a Jorge Luis Borges story? To a louse a lynx is a meal of preposterous magnitude. Also, habitat. Unlike, say, fleas—ready defectors—lice are loyal. Each species tends to colonize a specific type of animal. And almost every furred creature is populated by a unique kind of louse. Though bobcat lice are strangers to the lice that roam lynxes in Romania, they have some similarities: They have dozens of young but care for none; they emit no noise. Some lice suck, and these tend to be homebodies (they live at the base of a hair). The Iberian lynx’s louse, by contrast, likes to chew. It wanders the lynx, stopping to lever up flakes of skin and create tiny blood lagoons from which to drink. It is intrepid, a description further justified by the fact that it is eyeless. The louse has no idea what its lynx looks like, and the lynx cannot see the louse either—though the lynx feels the louse acutely.
We had scarcely discovered the Iberian lynx’s louse before it vanished. The creature was identified in 1997 when an adult louse and a nymph (a baby louse) were removed from the pelt of a dead lynx; it was later named Felicola isidoroi. At the time, Iberian lynxes were in severe decline as a result of a virus in rabbits, their prey. With this decline, the domain of the isidoroi louse dwindled and its habitat fragmented, as lynxes were less likely to cross paths with one another.
When conservationists took Iberian lynxes into captive breeding programs, they deloused them, dewilding the natural environment that is a lynx. Even if the lynxes hadn’t been deloused, their lice may not have survived captivity. Wildcats in enclosures tend to overgroom and pace. These can be fatal events for a louse that’s scratched off or dislodged by fretful movement.
A given lynx likely does not mourn his lice (they itched him!), so why should we care about the lynx’s louse? As it turns out, we have good reason to pay heed to vanishing lice. Some biologists argue that parasites and their hosts should be viewed as one entity, because their interaction drives the evolution and health of both species. Their relationship may even render whole ecosystems more resilient. Perhaps, then, if we can’t save all endangered species, we should focus on saving those animals that host unique and rare clingers-on, both on the skin and within. Several parasites have been shown to aid immunity. The intestinal worms inside some fish sop up noxious heavy metals from the tissue of their carriers. A few parasites have been called “ecological puppeteers” for the ways they change the behavior of their hosts and alter the ecosystem—for example, prompting crickets to jump into streams, where insect-eating fish eventually flourish; or making moose more feeble, therefore supporting wolf packs.
Parasites can also teach us about their hosts. Because lice evolve alongside their hosts, the genome of a species-specific louse is an index card showing the history of its carrier species: former abundances of the larger animal, its adaptations and demographics. With the loss of the isidoroi louse, science lost a means of exploring the lynx’s past.
Another lesson we can learn from the lynx and its louse is that a host need not become extinct for the creatures that subtend it to disappear. We’re certain to have shared the world with other things that have died out, unmet and un-observed, altering entire ecosystems in the process. Every organism exists in relation to other organisms, and even the tiny, the irksome and squirming, warrant attention.
This article appears in the March 2019 print edition with the headline “A Parasitic Relationship.”
In America today, it’s quite normal for a family to adopt a child and maintain some degree of contact with the child’s birth parents. But as accepted as this is now, it’s a significant departure from the adoption practices that dominated for most of the 20th century, when “closed” adoptions were preferred (that is, adoptions in which children’s biological parents cease to be a part of their life after the adoption). Slowly, in the later decades of the century, experts came to favor these more open processes. As the journalist-turned-adoption-advocate Adam Pertman wrote in his 2006 book, Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution Is Transforming Our Families—And America, “Social-work and mental-health experts have reached a consensus that greater openness offers an array of benefits for adoptees—from ongoing information about family medical issues to fulfillment of their innate desire to know about their genealogical histories, even if the expanded relationships prove difficult or complicated for some of the participants.”
Some 13 years later, Vanessa McGrady’s new book, Rock Needs River: A Memoir About a Very Open Adoption, reads like a real-life manifestation of Pertman’s theory on open adoptions—but it sheds some revealing light on the “difficult or complicated” part. Like Pertman, McGrady posits in her book that “open adoption is better … for the mental health of all involved,” but what Rock Needs River does most effectively is lay bare the stressful, painful, psychologically taxing situations that can result from open adoption. (Full disclosure: I am adopted, and my adoption is closed.)
[Read: America soured on my multiracial family]
McGrady became a mother in her 40s, when she adopted a newborn baby girl from a local couple who wanted to pursue music careers instead of becoming parents. She’d always planned on having an open adoption, but never the possibility that she would later take her daughter’s biological parents, whom she identifies only as Bill and Bridgett, into her home for a few months when they found themselves homeless—or that their relationship would sour when she eventually stopped welcoming their last-minute requests to crash with her.
McGrady entered into the open-adoption arrangement without much of a plan for what lay ahead, and the consequences bear out as McGrady’s relationship with her daughter’s birth parents metamorphoses repeatedly. At first, Bill and Bridgett are like random but tentatively friendly strangers on the opposite side of an important transaction; soon they become something like extended family members, then something like dependents, and ultimately something like bitterly estranged relatives.
Open-adoption arrangements make many adoptive and biological parents feel as if they’re bound together for life, though sometimes not all that closely. And by McGrady’s account, her ties with Bill and Bridgett have several hallmarks of an extended-relative relationship, including the heightened sense of obligation to help out in a time of need. When it gets cold a few months after they start living in a tent in downtown Los Angeles, McGrady writes, “the thought occurred that I should invite Bridgett and Bill to stay with me until the weather got better. But then I shooed it away like a pesky mosquito. Because, you know, boundaries.” Yet, “they occupied an uncomfortably large space in my brain. Something had shifted. Like a debt becoming obvious and, in a way, deeper.” Later, even though she’s grown weary of Bridgett and Bill’s persistent presence and what she describes as their minimal efforts to get jobs, they “had nobody. Not one person within a five-hundred-mile radius who would know, or care, if they were alive or dead.” In other words, an open-adoption arrangement gave McGrady and her daughter more family members to love—which also meant more family members to feel emotionally, and financially, responsible for.
McGrady reiterates throughout Rock Needs River how much the adoption of her daughter, Grace, has changed her life for the better. Still, she describes times when she found herself stricken by jealousy and insecurity as a direct result of her daughter’s birth parents being present in her daughter’s life. When Bill and Bridgett are living with McGrady, she feels “angst” over the possibility that they will stay too long and that Grace will get confused about who her parents are. “I spend every moment of every day wanting to be the biggest star in her life. The one who loves her the most. The one she loves the most,” McGrady writes. She’s proud that even when Bill and Bridgett are around, Grace “always turned to me first for cuddles or help.” And she worries when her daughter throws a fit that Bill and Bridgett will doubt her parenting skills: “Would they still think I was a good mom?”
[Read: The fraught language of adoption]
McGrady also suggests that the unstable, unpredictable nature of her relationship with her daughter’s birth parents took a separate toll on Grace. One reason that McGrady stopped welcoming them into her home, she writes, is because Grace developed what she believed to be anxiety issues, and “the only denominator I could pinpoint was Bill and Bridgett’s comings and goings.” (Meanwhile, Bill and Bridgett’s relationship with McGrady seems to have caused them some pain and stress, too. For one thing, had they not entered into the open-adoption arrangement, they might not now be dealing with the release of a book that Bill recently described in the press as “exploitation and lies.”)
Praise for Rock Needs River frames it as a “moving” story about “lives intertwining” and “the complex creation of a family”; its jacket describes the memoir as “Vanessa’s love letter to her daughter, one that illuminates the heroine’s journey to find her tribe.” And in the book, McGrady is careful to emphasize that adoption is a good thing, and that open adoption is a good thing. “I never, ever wanted [Grace] to have an untrue version of her origin story. I never wanted her to have fantasies about her birth parents,” she writes in the penultimate chapter.
But while Rock Needs River markets itself as an uplifting work about cobbling together a family from nontraditional parts, McGrady’s adoption story is rare and important for another reason. While the notion of the tidy, streamlined closed adoption has drawn criticism and become frowned-upon, stories like McGrady’s illustrate why people used to—and sometimes still do—opt for the scenario that, at least in theory, offers clean breaks. Rock Needs River reminds the reader that although open adoption is often characterized nowadays as the enlightened, humane way to adopt a child, it can come with its own complications. Adoption of any kind inevitably creates unusual and challenging situations for everyone involved, and not all can be fixed by an open arrangement.
The rovers moved like migratory birds.
Opportunity and Spirit arrived on Mars within days of each other, at different locations along the planet’s equator, in January 2004, equipped with instruments to study the rust-colored soil. During the Martian winter, engineers directed the rovers to north-facing slopes, so that their solar panels could soak up as much sunlight as possible each day. When one of Spirit’s wheels stopped working, it kept going by driving backwards, dragging the defunct wheel behind it.
But in 2009, the rover’s wheels broke through some crust and slipped into a sand pit. Engineers tried maneuvering the wheels this way and that, but the rover was stuck. For the first time, Spirit couldn’t make its way to a sunny slope.
“We saw it coming,” Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the NASA mission, told me. “I knew from day one, if Spirit has to spend a winter on flat ground, that was going to be Spirit’s last winter.”
Spirit entered hibernation mode and never woke up. The mission was declared over more than a year after the rover’s last message to Earth and months of attempts to restore contact.
Now it could be Opportunity’s turn. The rover hasn’t called home in 237 days.
Last June, an enormous storm swept across the planet, clogging the atmosphere with sunlight-blocking dust, and the rover, unable to charge its batteries in the darkness, slipped into a deep sleep.
“I haven’t given up yet,” Squyres said.
But the end seems closer now than before. The team has attempted to contact Opportunity more than 600 times since it stopped communicating with Earth last June. At NASA, engineers operate in a realm with the motto “Failure is not an option,” and the agency has a long record of successfully repairing and reviving missions, from Apollo capsules to robotic probes. But the silence feels heavier with each passing day.
Dust storms are common during Martian summer, and Opportunity, about the size of a golf cart, had weathered a similar tempest about a decade earlier.
This time, as the Martian sky darkened, the rover automatically shut off nearly all functions to preserve energy. Engineers suspected that when the storm passed, Opportunity would recharge and awaken with a chirp sent back to Earth. But the skies cleared in September, and the rover didn’t wake up.
The team was not deterred. A season known for dust devils would soon begin on Mars. Perhaps Opportunity’s solar panels were coated in a thick layer of dust, and the wind gusts would wipe it away. But that season ends soon, and Opportunity remains silent.
Last week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates Opportunity, announced that engineers would send a new set of commands to the rover in the next several weeks. The instructions assume some worst-case scenarios for the rover’s systems. “We have not exhausted all the possibilities yet, but we’ve exhausted quite a few of them,” Squyres said.
I asked Squyres whether the team had any more ideas for how to command the rover awake, in case their latest strategy doesn’t work. “No,” he said.
After that, the final call regarding Opportunity’s fate is up to NASA leadership. If the news is bad, the Opportunity team will join a grim club in space exploration: engineers and scientists who have said goodbye to spacecraft after years, sometimes decades, of effort and devotion. Some have known when the end would come, even deliberately planned for it. Others had no warning. In either case, letting go is painful.
The attempts to communicate, the wait, the uncertainty—these can be excruciating when the loss is unexpected, as Jim Spann, a chief scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, knows. In 2005, Spann was working on a spacecraft called IMAGE, or Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, when it suddenly stopped talking to Earth.
Its stewards, stunned, scrambled to troubleshoot. String after string of commands went unanswered. After a year of silence from IMAGE, NASA concluded that it had been knocked out by the cosmic radiation that permeates space. Its hardware had suffered a particularly direct and unlucky hit.
The team remained hopeful. They waited for a solar eclipse in 2007, when IMAGE would be in Earth’s shadow. The spacecraft was designed to reset its computers when its solar-powered battery drained, and perhaps some time in darkness would help. But it didn’t work. “It took me a while to be able to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to close the door on that and work on the next thing,’” Spann says.
The team took some comfort in the knowledge that IMAGE had exceeded expectations. The spacecraft had performed so well after its first two years in orbit that NASA decided to extend the mission. “You’re sitting on maybe, hopefully, years of data that needs work, so that’s what you’re going to do, is just go focus on the data,” says Thom Moore, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who worked on the mission.
Julie Webster knew exactly when her spacecraft would die, seven whole years in advance. Like all spacecraft, Cassini launched to Saturn with a finite amount of fuel. In 2010, Webster, the operations manager, and her colleagues mapped out its final years around the ringed planet. Webster was responsible for flying Cassini and, when the time came, crashing it into Saturn’s atmosphere. The loss didn’t sink in until then.
“I never know exactly how I’m going to feel about something until I get there,” Webster says. “When it was over, the whole team went around in a funk for about six months. It was just like, Oh my God, oh my God, it’s over.”
Webster has bid farewell to other spacecraft in her career, and her reaction has depended on the circumstances of their demise. She wasn’t too torn up about the Magellan spacecraft, a mission launched in 1989 to map the surface of Venus. Magellan was scraped together using spare parts from several other NASA missions, and Webster said team members wore the spacecraft out trying to get as much data as they could. “We were always trying to keep it going, so by the time it was ready to go, it was really ready to go,” Webster says.
The loss of Mars Observer, on the other hand, was traumatic. Engineers lost contact with the spacecraft just three days before it was scheduled to arrive on Mars in 1993. Investigators believe that an explosion in the hardware spun the probe out of control, but no one knows for sure what happened. Webster says it still hurts to talk about Mars Observer.
When a mission ends, scientists and engineers part with more than their spacecraft. They move on to new jobs, on new missions, and their camaraderie, sharpened over years of late nights and stressful moments, dissipates. The mission, vivid and urgent in their mind for so long, fades into a fuzzy memory. And sometimes, even then, it’s still not over.
Last year, IMAGE came back.
An amateur astronomer scanning the skies for radio transmissions detected something broadcasting at the same frequency that IMAGE once used. The former members of the mission, now scattered across different programs, confirmed the signal. After 13 years, IMAGE was awake and calling home.
The data revealed that IMAGE was, miraculously, in good health. Its stewards were overjoyed. But they soon realized that the spacecraft could only receive commands, not act on them. Engineers marked their calendars for upcoming solar eclipses, hoping, as they did years earlier, that a dose of darkness could restart the system.
IMAGE emerged from the most recent eclipse, in mid-January, in the same state. “A successful and lasting recovery is probably unlikely,” says Rick Burley, the engineer leading the recovery effort. Now, more than a decade after the first goodbye, the IMAGE team faces another.
Opportunity and Spirit were never meant to live long lives—they were designed to last just three months. Their years-long sojourns across the Martian surface have produced a rich catalog of data that scientists never imagined. But their minders have also had plenty of time to become attached. If Opportunity remains silent, the time will have come to mourn its end. No delight in discovery comes without some pain.
The year was 2007, and Myspace was king. With more than 300 million registered users, it was the world’s largest social-networking platform by a mile and, since overtaking Google the previous year, the most visited website in the United States. Friendster had been thoroughly eclipsed. Google’s first attempt at a social network, Orkut, was a domestic flop. Twitter, founded in 2006, still hosted only a fraction of a percent of Myspace’s user base. Snapchat and Instagram weren’t even a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye.
Facebook, though, was on the upswing. For nearly three years, it had slowly spread through schools and businesses. In September 2006, it opened fully to the public for the first time. By October 2007, it had 50 million active users around the world. By July 2008, it would have 90 million. In 2009, it would overtake Myspace for good.
Facebook first appeared in the pages of The Atlantic during the early stages of this precipitous rise. Michael Hirschorn’s 2007 article, titled simply “About Facebook,” acts as a time capsule for all the uncertain potential of that moment in the social network’s history. It was also a prescient assessment of what came next.
Hirschorn believed that Myspace’s popularity was tenuous and not built to last. He asserted that the site relied “too much on the packaging and marketing of tools that exist elsewhere on the web.” Without a “compelling retention mechanism,” he argued, the platform was vulnerable to losing its users when greener pastures presented themselves, just as Friendster had lost its own to Myspace years earlier. But Facebook, Hirschorn thought, was different. It was “the site that, in my experience, comes closest to fulfilling the promise of social media,” he wrote.
He likened Myspace to “Times Square circa 1977”: open, disjointed, blaring, crowded; a mishmash of personalities and widgets and ads. In contrast, he wrote, Facebook reflected the community and order of suburban life. The cohesive aesthetic and intuitive interface lent the site a simple elegance of use, while the restrictions on who could access which aspects of which profiles seemed to prevent spam or marketing ploys from making disruptive inroads into the platform. In this way, he argued, Facebook was like Google’s search engine, iTunes, or the recently released Nintendo Wii. They all dominated not by providing boundless options but by offering a limited and orderly set of them.
The appeal of Facebook, Hirschorn explained, was that it offered its users control—or, at least, the appearance of control. They could restrict access to their profiles, select their friends, erect privacy walls, and interact with people or apps only in the limited ways they opted to. “It is a connection engine,” he wrote, “that successfully mirrors how most of us want to live our lives.”
Many of the particular features that Hirschorn highlighted to illustrate the site’s charms have since fallen by the wayside. Among them: messages prompting users “to explain how they know each other,” “a cool little app called Friend Wheel” that visualized friendship networks, and an app for “the popular music-sharing social network iLike.”
But his broader observations and predictions have held water. He saw, for instance, Facebook’s potential to become a sort of global homepage through which users interact with the web. He also suggested that Facebook “could use its base to start offering more-advanced e-mail and IM applications, universal search, photo and video sharing”—all of which it went on to do, with varying degrees of success. And he noted that “Facebook has detailed and deep information about [its users’] interests and preferences” that it could eventually monetize, though it had “shown an almost tantric restraint about exploiting its ever-growing audience” to that point.
Twelve years later, the version of Facebook that Hirschorn described feels quaint and foreign: an online space, centered around real communities, where user control was paramount and outside interests felt remote. But the article also serves as a reminder that even in that quaint iteration, the seeds existed for much of the fruit, both connective and invasive, that the site has borne since.
It all seemed so sudden. Venezuela's authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro had made yet another power grab, one of many over years of democratic decline in the country. Yet what followed from Washington wasn’t the usual condemnations and expressions of concern. Within days, the Trump administration declared Maduro illegitimate, and more than a dozen other countries did the same, recognizing instead the National Assembly’s president as the constitutionally legitimate ruler.
But if the crisis has moved quickly in the past week, culminating in the U.S. imposing a de facto oil embargo on the country and vowing to clamp down on the Maduro government’s assets and gold trade around the world, it’s been building for much longer. The president, emotionally invested in the issue from the get-go, has proven receptive to the arguments of an array of advisers—from Florida Republicans opposed to Cuban influence on Venezuela to freedom evangelists like Mike Pence and hardline interventionists like John Bolton—who have now made their influence felt at a critical moment.
The result is that a U.S. president who campaigned in part on opposition to American interventions overseas, and has earned a reputation as friendly to authoritarian rulers, has come to embrace the idea of regime change in Venezuela.
The concept of regime change, so sullied by the Iraq War and the U.S. overthrow of unfriendly Latin American governments during the Cold War, is suddenly back—this time with a mission of restoring democracy, a more multilateral bent, and, for now, a less militaristic posture. Its comeback seems so complete that it is now spoken of casually. “I wish Nicolas Maduro and his top advisors a long, quiet retirement, living on a nice beach somewhere far from Venezuela,” Bolton, Trump’s national-security adviser, tweeted on Thursday.
[Read: How seriously should the world take Trump’s Venezuela threat?]
The administration came to this point after two years of escalating pressure on Venezuela and deteriorating conditions within the country. Trump took a personal interest in the issue almost from the beginning. It started somewhat small in February 2017, with focused sanctions —followed that summer by Trump’s sudden, open speculation about a military option. It escalated sharply in 2018 with a call from Vice President Mike Pence for Venezuela to return to democracy, and his suggestion that it could not do so with Maduro in charge. It culminated in the drama of this week, when over a period of about six days the Trump administration recognized a new Venezuelan president, slapped on crippling oil sanctions, and loudly called on Maduro to go.
If anyone in the administration knows what the consequences will be, they aren’t saying so in public.
Within his first weeks in the White House, Trump designated Venezuela’s then-vice president a drug kingpin and called for the release of the prominent political prisoner Leopoldo López after meeting with his wife in the Oval Office. He’s frequently pointed to the country as a prime example of socialism’s failures and a cautionary tale of what will befall the United States if his opponents come to power (a popular talking point on the American right).
Fernando Cutz, who as director for South America on the National Security Council was summoned to brief Trump on the issue during the first days of his presidency, said the president has, in private, focused on the humanitarian emergency in Venezuela. Maduro’s reign as Hugo Chávez’s anointed successor has brought severe political repression, hyperinflation, acute food and medicine shortages, and an exodus of millions of desperate Venezuelans—now the largest refugee and migrant crisis anywhere in the world outside Syria.
He “would ask, ‘Why are [the Venezuelan people] suffering so much? They're all going hungry. … They have everything to be a rich country. How is this happening?’” Cutz recalled.
Cutz, who left his post in April after Trump replaced then-National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with Bolton, helped design a series of escalating measures to respond to various contingencies. The most severe step under discussion was an oil embargo rather like the sanctions that the United States finally imposed on Venezuela’s state-owned oil company this week. The administration nearly resorted to it in the summer of 2017, when Maduro moved to sideline the opposition-dominated—and democratically elected—National Assembly.
[Read: The White House’s move on Venezuela is the least Trumpian thing it’s done]
This week’s sanctions, which will divert the proceeds of Venezuelan oil sold to the United States to the opposition and starve the regime of funds, are “the last tool in our diplomatic or economic arsenal,” said Cutz. “When you unleash this thing, essentially you bring about chaos in Venezuela.”
Cutz explained that during his tenure, the administration was primarily deterred from such a measure by the harm it could cause the Venezuelan people. “We were very close,” he noted, but “we didn’t think we had enough of a guarantee of [what] the outcome would be to merit the chaos we'd be unleashing, the humanitarian consequences.”
Yet the administration kept pressing the issue in other ways, and adding Cuba and Venezuela hawks to their ranks. Trump was also getting advice from outside, with the Florida Republican Marco Rubio, a vehement anti-Castro figure in the Senate, speaking to the president frequently on the issue: He helped arrange the Oval Office visit of López’s wife, and encouraged the appointment of anti-Castro hard-liner Mauricio Claver-Carone to the National Security Council, according to The New York Times. Rubio only gained more allies in the administration when, in the space of just over a week in the spring of 2018, Trump chose Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and Bolton as national-security adviser. The senator tweeted his approval of the successive appointments: “trust me when I say the last 8 days have not been good ones for #Venezuela dictator Nicolas Maduro.”
Pence, whose broadsides against Maduro’s repression have won him the nickname “poisonous viper” from the repressor himself, escalated the confrontation later that spring by calling on regional states to raise the pressure on Venezuela, and all but called for Maduro to go. “The truth is,” he said in a speech to the Organization of American States, “the Venezuelan people would choose a better path if they could. But under Nicolás Maduro, they will never have that chance.”
That moment, however, lacked the confluence of circumstances in Venezuela and the wider region that led to the overt push for Maduro’s ouster this past week: the election of right-wing governments in regional powers such as Brazil and Colombia that are prepared to challenge the leftist regime in Venezuela; Maduro’s inauguration in January for a second term after presiding over a sham election; Juan Guaidó becoming head of the National Assembly that same month and uniting the opposition by declaring the president a usurper and claiming the mantle of leadership under the country’s constitution; and the persistence of mass anti-government protests in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities.“The regime that is holding to power in Venezuela should be changed” and democracy restored in the country through new elections, Gonzalo Koncke, chief of staff to the secretary general of the Organization of American States, told The Atlantic, reflecting the prevailing mood in the region at the moment.
The administration official perhaps most closely associated with the idea of regime change is Bolton, who in recent days has served as a vocal spokesman of Trump’s Venezuela policy. (His aggressive reputation was only further burnished when he was spotted with the note “5,000 troops to Colombia” scrawled on his legal pad. Cutz said an imminent U.S. invasion is “highly unlikely” and speculated that the national-security adviser could have been engaging in psychological warfare against Maduro or exploring a humanitarian operation on Venezuela’s borders.)
[Read: Colombia’s radical plan to welcome millions of Venezuelan migrants]
Bolton has called for the toppling of U.S. enemies since at least 1998, when he signed a letter urging President Clinton to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. (Another signatory, Elliott Abrams, is now Pompeo’s newly minted point person for Venezuela.) He helped implement that policy as an official in the George W. Bush administration and later argued for ousting, through a range of coercive measures including military force, the leaders of Iran, Libya, and North Korea to similarly prevent them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
As recently as a couple years ago, he was advocating for the U.S. to do no more than quietly convey its support to the Venezuelan opposition. But in the months before joining the Trump administration, Bolton warmed to the goal of uprooting the government in Caracas, noting how unseating Maduro could also bring down the Castro regime in Cuba and how a failed Venezuelan state could become a haven for international terrorism and drug trafficking in the Western hemisphere.
When he first joined the administration, though, Bolton was much more focused on Iran—and Trump duly pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal within a month of his appointment. Yet for someone who has advocated preventive strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and vowed that there would be “hell to pay” for Iran’s continuing deception, Bolton has softened his tone. He’s stated that the Trump administration is seeking to change Tehran’s “behavior” rather than its regime. He’s backed off of previous calls for regime change in North Korea, too, while his boss conducts sunny, strung-out nuclear diplomacy with Kim Jong Un. But in recent days he’s come far closer to realizing his regime-change reveries in Venezuela, which last year he included in a Latin American “troika of tyranny” that recalled Bush’s infamous “axis of evil.”
In playing up the military option, “Bolton adds an edge” to the Trump administration’s approach that wasn’t present when he worked at the National Security Council, Cutz said, even if McMaster likely would have pursued similar policies to those implemented under Bolton so far.
What remains a mystery, at least publicly, is what comes next, and what the plan is if Maduro refuses to step down. “Dictators don’t go out peacefully,” remarked Manuel Cáceres, the Paraguayan ambassador to the U.S., at an event on Wednesday with the interim Venezuelan government’s envoy to Washington. Paraguay was the first country to recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. But Cáceres warned that autocrats often get violent if cornered. They don’t, to paraphrase John Bolton, tend to jet off to a faraway beach for some R & R.
“The only world in which [Maduro] steps down—and this is I think the best-case scenario for him—[is] a world where he finds out the military has turned on him before he's killed” and “immediately tries to flee the country,” Cutz said. “A worst-case scenario for him would be for him not to find that out before it happens.”
“If there are any cracks within the regime, if there are any cracks within the military leadership, this is how you smoke it out,” he added. If not, however, the administration’s bet could prove a reckless one.
Unilateral U.S. military intervention, he said, would be the worst of all outcomes because it would antagonize many Venezuelans and others in the region, and once again potentially place Washington in the position of spending decades rebuilding a shattered nation. (Koncke, the OAS chief of staff, told The Atlantic when asked about the possibility, that the OAS “does not support unlawful military interventions.”) The Trump administration has never disavowed the military option, with Bolton intoning again this week that “all options are on the table.”
Yet thus far, despite a couple government officials stationed in Washington, D.C. and Miami shifting their support to Guaidó, military and government officials back in Venezuela are standing by Maduro. Venezuela’s supreme court has gone so far as to freeze Guaidó’s assets and bar him from leaving the country. On Thursday, Guaidó claimed that special police agents had visited his home in order to intimidate him and his family.
Patrick Shanahan, the acting secretary of defense, provided no clarity on the U.S. military’s plans this week except to say that it would continue to provide options to policymakers. Officials working on the issue at the National Security Council did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Paraguay’s own transition from dictatorship is instructive; it took a bloody military coup to bring it about. But this weekend, the country will mark three decades of democracy. In an interview on Wednesday, Cáceres, the Paraguayan ambassador, wouldn’t speculate on where Venezuela goes from here. But he did describe what it means when the transition finally comes. “I read about democracy when I was growing up in books,” he said. “Now my kids read about dictatorship in books, and that’s a great thing.”
A new court filing submitted on Wednesday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that a Russian troll farm currently locked in a legal battle over its alleged interference in the 2016 election appeared to wage yet another disinformation campaign late last year—this time targeting Mueller himself.
According to the filing, the special counsel’s office turned over 1 million pages of evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting as part of the discovery process. The firm is accused of funding the troll farm, known as the Internet Research Agency. But someone connected to Concord allegedly manipulated the documents and leaked them to reporters, hoping the documents would make people think that Mueller’s evidence against the troll farm and its owners was flimsy. The tactic didn’t seem to convince anyone, but it appeared to mark yet another example of Russia exploiting the U.S. justice system to undercut its rivals abroad.
Last year, I detailed how Russia has figured out how to use the U.S. immigration courts and so-called red notices issued by Interpol to harass and even detain its enemies. But it doesn’t end there. Experts say Kremlin proxies have targeted their rivals and other disfavored individuals by exploiting U.S. courts to pursue bogus claims via “superficially legitimate lawsuits,” Anders Aslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a recent report. He worked as an economic adviser to the Russian government from 1991 to 1994. The Kremlin proxies have done so not only to perpetuate global harassment campaigns against their perceived enemies, Aslund argued, but also to “enrich themselves through bad faith claims made possible by the Russian state’s abuse of disfavored individuals and their businesses.”
When Mueller indicted Concord in February 2018, along with two other corporate entities and 13 Russian nationals allegedly connected to the Internet Research Agency, it seemed highly unlikely that the indictment would result in a trial, because Russians cannot be extradited to the United States. But Concord unexpectedly hired the well-connected American law firm Reed Smith to fight Mueller, arguing that the charges should be dropped because the special counsel was illegally appointed. The judge in the case, Dabney Friedrich, has twice refused to dismiss the case and recently lambasted Concord’s American lawyers for submitting “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” court filings, and the legal battle has raged on.
Now, according to the Mueller filing this week, unidentified actors working out of Russia appear to have weaponized the U.S. discovery process to Concord’s benefit. More than 1,000 files on the website that hosted the leaked documents “match those produced in discovery,” the special counsel said. The documents were published from a computer with a Russian IP address, according to Mueller, and whoever released them clearly “had access to at least some of the non-sensitive discovery produced by the government.” But forged documents were mixed into the trove, too, apparently in an attempt to accuse Mueller of characterizing American websites and Facebook pages such as Occupy Democrats as Russian disinformation operations. The website also inserted irrelevant documents into the unique folder names—known only to those with access to the discovery materials—and characterized them as the sum total of Mueller’s evidence “in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation,” the special counsel said.
In a statement issued on Thursday, Reed Smith denied responsibility for the breach, claiming that the data at issue were hosted by a third-party vendor working for Concord and were never stored on Reed Smith’s internal computer systems. “Reed Smith and its lawyers have at all times complied with the protective order in this case,” the firm said. A Reed Smith attorney representing Concord didn’t return a request for comment.
In October, legal and national-security experts expressed concern to ABC News that, in the Concord case specifically, the Russian government may be trying to use the discovery process in a “graymail” strategy designed to make Mueller drop the case in order to prevent sensitive U.S. national-security information from being made public. Mark Zaid, an attorney based in Washington, D.C., who focuses on national-security law, said he viewed the latest incident involving Concord and the hoax website “as part of a consistent strategy by the Russians to hinder, obstruct, and derail” Mueller’s probe. “One wonders whether pursuing the criminal charges against the Russians was worth the difficulty and these current problems,” Zaid said, “particularly given the odds of ever gaining custody of any individual is unlikely.”
But the Concord case is just one example of this phenomenon—and it “helps expose the deliberate efforts of the Russians to continually attack our democratic systems,” he added.
In 2017, the Russian state-owned Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA) filed two applications for judicial assistance from the federal courts in New York and Massachusetts to obtain discovery on two former shareholders of the privately owned Probusinessbank, Sergey Leontiev and Alexander Zheleznyak. Leontiev and Zheleznyak had fled to the United States by that point, but that didn’t stop the DIA from pursuing them through the U.S. courts. Leontiev had run afoul of Vladimir Putin when one of the bank’s subsidiaries attempted to launch the “Navalny card”—a debit card that would donate a percentage of transactions to an anti-corruption organization led by the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. The Central Bank of Russia revoked Probusinessbank’s operating license shortly thereafter and forced the company into bankruptcy, despite having deemed the bank financially sound just two months before it was seized. The DIA immediately began dividing up Probusinessbank’s assets to Kremlin-friendly institutions such as B&N Bank after being appointed its temporary administrator and liquidator in 2015.
When Leontiev moved to quash a federal-court subpoena against him in 2017—arguing that it had been orchestrated by two Russian agents sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act, Andrey Pavlov and Victor Grin—the court denied his motion. The court wrote that it was “not blind to Leontiev’s claims that the discovery sought here is intended for other proceedings or impermissible purposes” and had its own concerns “about the legitimacy of these requests,” which were “heightened by the involvement of two sanctioned individuals.” Despite all of those reservations, the court ruled against Leontiev on the narrow grounds that it was only helping provide discovery in “underlying litigation … before a foreign tribunal.” When Leontiev’s lawyers asked that the discovery documents not be provided to any entity that Pavlov was associated with, the DIA’s lawyers refused. “The same cast of Russian operatives sanctioned by the U.S. government for their participation in the Magnitsky Affair now attempt to exploit Western institutions, including the U.S. judicial system and Interpol, to further their corrupt pursuit of Mr. Leontiev and others using the cover of legitimate courts and institutions,” Bob Weigel, Leontiev’s lead outside counsel in the case, said in a statement.
Michelle Estlund, a criminal-defense attorney who focuses on international criminal prosecutions and politically motivated prosecutions, told me last year that the problem is that while the U.S. courts operate in good faith to assist Russian authorities, the Russian courts frequently do not. “Our courts act like, and think that, they are operating on the same type of playing field as the Russians,” Estlund said. “But they’re not. The system there is completely different from here. And when the courts are properly responding to what appears to be a legally authorized request for assistance with discovery, often what they’re doing is assisting with an extremely corrupt court proceeding.” Another lawyer who follows this phenomenon closely and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press echoed Estlund’s assessment. “The Russians have figured out how to weaponize this,” he said. “We have this tremendous system of justice here, which isn’t equipped to address nonjudicial questions like ‘Is this litigant seeking to abuse our entire judicial system?’ ”
The issue arose again just last month, when the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment against the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. According to prosecutors, Veselnitskaya had tried to obstruct an investigation into her client Prevezon, a company founded by a Kremlin ally that was accused of laundering millions of stolen Russian taxpayer dollars through Manhattan real estate. Veselnitskaya had secretly worked with the Russian government to draft a document purporting to be an independent assessment made by Russian prosecutors saying that Prevezon was innocent of laundering funds, the indictment said. That document was then filed in federal court in an attempt “to affect the outcome” of a lawsuit filed against Prevezon by federal prosecutors, according to Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. The scheme threatened “the ability of our courts and our government to ensure that justice is done,” he said. And it worked: The court decided to deny the U.S. government’s motion for summary judgment against Prevezon based on the fraudulent document, according to the indictment.
Mueller, for his part, appears to have foreseen how the Russians connected to Concord (it is owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is often referred to as “Putin’s chef”) might try to exploit the legal process: In June 2018, he asked Friedrich, the judge, for a protective order that would prevent Concord’s lawyers from sharing any discovery documents with the Russians named in the troll-farm indictment, as well as with other foreigners, such as lawyers outside the United States. If the data were to be distributed outside of American law firms, Mueller said, “foreign individuals may try to use that avenue as a way to obtain sensitive materials as part of an intelligence collection effort.” The hoax website aimed at discrediting his investigation largely failed, but seemed to prove Mueller’s prescience, beyond any doubt.
Federal courts struck down Texas’s original voter-ID law, which would have required certain forms of government-issued identification in order to vote, deeming it intentional discrimination against minorities. But GOP officials who lead the state argued that the passage and implementation of the law was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and last year Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accepted the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to uphold a slightly revised version of the law that would allow other forms of identity verification for people who can’t get the proper government-issued documentation.
Yet Republicans still don’t think the regulation has done the job. Last week, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office sent an advisory to counties involving a list of people who’d been identified as potential noncitizens with a matching voter-registration record. Activists and media criticized the list as inaccurate and misleading. But that didn’t stop GOP officials from using the list as definitive proof of rampant voter fraud, despite having no evidence that anyone had voted illegally. Their fervor seemed to add to the suspicion that the party has an endgame well beyond “ballot security,” and to the fear that new forms of voter suppression are just on the horizon.
On January 25, Whitley sent out letters to counties with a list of 95,000 registered voters who were matched with people flagged by the Texas Department of Public Safety as being noncitizens. Whitley and his office did not provide much in the way of the methodology used in their 11-month-long review of public records, nor did they respond to requests for comment. But Whitley’s spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that the release was “part of the process of ensuring no eligible voters were impacted by any list maintenance activity.” Ostensibly, the letters were intended to begin a formal citizenship-review process, which would verify any claims of fraudulent ballots and also purge nonrespondents from voter rolls.
But from the outset, other forces were at work. The secretary of state’s office referred the members of the list to Paxton, who sounded the alarm via Twitter. “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” Paxton tweeted on January 25, “the [secretary of state] discovered approx 95,000 individuals identified by DPS as non-U.S. citizens have a matching voter registration record in TX, approx 58,000 of whom have voted in TX elections. Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.” Said Paxton in a separate statement: “Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott also tweeted about voter fraud that day, mentioning the case of Enrique Salazar Ortiz, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico in San Antonio who pleaded guilty to illegal voting in the 2016 election and to identity theft in October 2018, and who was apparently sentenced just the day before Whitley published his list.
Paxton, who has aggressively pursued isolated reports of voter fraud during his time in office, took care to only insinuate that the list referred to him was definitive evidence of mass voter fraud. President Donald Trump, however, managed no such nuance. “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,” he tweeted Sunday. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!”
[Read: Fighting for the right to vote in a tiny Texas county]
This isn’t the first time Trump has spread misinformation about voter fraud, and it probably won’t be the last. But even assuming he simply misread the original notice from Whitley’s office or Paxton’s announcement, it’s now clear that both of those are on shaky ground. Texas Director of Elections Keith Ingram noted that the matches from the advisory list were only “weak matches” that could have improperly flagged people with identical or similar names to those in the voter-registration files. The Texas Tribune reports that several county elections officials have gotten notice from Whitley that perhaps thousands of the names on the original list shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Among those flagged properly, many who are in the files over the 22-year period they cover could have become naturalized citizens and then registered to vote, which could still trigger their inclusion on the list. And for the remaining registered voters who are actually noncitizens, many or most are added to rolls by clerical errors that are easily fixed. As of yet, there aren’t indications that any of the records on the list refer to anyone who’s voted fraudulently.
Friday, Ingram released a new advisory to all of Texas’s counties acknowledging that many of the records in the files likely belonged to naturalized citizens, calling the list a “starting point,” and outlining scenarios in which county officials wouldn’t need to send notices to flagged citizens.
Voting-rights advocates see the secretary of state’s advisory both as a mechanism of voter suppression itself and as a way of fomenting animus against immigrants in service of pursuing ever more restrictive voting laws. County officials are authorized to purge registered voters who don’t respond to their inquiries from the rolls, even if they aren’t fraudulent. As was the case with Georgia’s infamous voter purges under then–Secretary of State Brian Kemp, this kind of purging will likely affect voters of color, poor voters, and those with unstable housing most. For voting-rights experts, this kind of activity, both from party apparatuses and from state authorities, is the leading edge of modern voter suppression.
That’s a real concern in Texas. “With this new Advisory, Texas officials have taken another page straight out of the voter suppression handbook,” said Beth Stevens, the voting-rights legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a statement. “The ‘investigation’ outlined by the Secretary of State is woefully inadequate and risks purging thousands of eligible Texans from the voting rolls.”
But there are other concerns, too. Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who was the vice chairman for Trump’s ill-fated voter-fraud commission, used the argument that a scattering of noncitizens found on voter rolls was the “tip of the iceberg” in a grand conspiracy of fraud. He championed a law that required new voters in Kansas to show proof of citizenship in order to register. That law would have added more restrictions to Kansas’s voter-ID law, already one of the strictest in the country. But last summer, a federal district court ruled against that additional requirement, writing: “Instead, the Court draws the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
With Kobach and Trump as its face, it seems clear enough now that hard conservatism doesn’t see voter-ID laws as the necessary end of its crusade against what it calls voter fraud. Nor does it appear that this effort has necessarily been swayed by the total absence of data showing widespread in-person voter fraud—by citizens or noncitizens. But, as illustrated by Georgia’s example in 2018, it also seems clear that the purges and new voting restrictions favored by Republicans in order to deal with “new” whispers of fraud uniquely and disproportionately disadvantage legitimate voters who tend to vote for Democrats. There’s advantage enough for the GOP in chasing the conspiracy forever, voting-rights advocates maintain, even if it never quite proves it exists.
I used to think we didn’t have enough strategic documents guiding U.S. cyber policy. Now I think we have at least one too many. In September, the Trump administration published a National Cyber Strategy—proudly declaring that it was the first fully articulated cyber strategy in 15 years. This week, the annual intelligence threat hearing laid bare the fantasy world of that four-month-old document and the cold hard reality of, well, reality.
The National Cyber Strategy paints an aspirational view of how the U.S. is doing in cyberspace and what we should do in the future. To be fair, aspirational isn’t all bad. Strategy documents need to inspire, not depress. And the strategy’s four pillars seem as unobjectionable as motherhood and apple pie: defending the homeland and America’s way of life; promoting American prosperity; preserving peace through strength; and advancing American interests. Who could argue with that? The best strategies articulate a future world, lay out a pathway to get there, generate new ideas, and align the disparate elements of government on a common path to succeed. Given how hard it is to keep the government lights on these days, getting on the same page about anything is a big deal.
But there’s aspiration and then there’s fiction. This week, the director of national intelligence’s threat assessment threw cold water on two big cyber ideas in the strategy. The first is the claim that the U.S. will maintain its leadership in emerging technologies. Nobody doubts that emerging technologies are crucial for America’s military and economic competitiveness. But China has also realized how important these emerging technologies are to its national success. Artificial intelligence (AI), for example, has assumed a major role in Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” plan. And that plan is aggressive, calling for China to keep pace by 2020, achieve breakthroughs by 2025, and become the world leader in AI by 2030.
Just like the nuclear race and the space race, it’s now the tech race that will define global dynamics for years to come. In the U.S. National Cyber Strategy, the White House hopes to “catalyze United States leadership in emerging technologies and promote government identification and support to these technologies.” That’s some vague optimism all right. The real question is whether it’s even possible for the U.S. to maintain its current edge.
The DNI’s answer: Nuh-uh. In his prepared testimony, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats made it clear that U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded the U.S. was already losing its edge in emerging technologies, and we’d better get used to it. He even provided a devastating chart with the title “Researchers Worldwide Citing More Foreign and Less US Research,” which showed a steeply rising line for Chinese research citations around the world over the past 10 years and a precipitous decline for American citations. The evidence didn’t lie. “For 2019 and beyond,” Coats wrote, “the innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside the United States, as the overall U.S. lead in science and technology shrinks; the capability gap between commercial and military technologies evaporates; and foreign actors increase their efforts to acquire top talent, companies, data, and intelligence property via licit and illicit means.”
The National Cyber Strategy also declared that the U.S. would “preserve peace through strength” in cyberspace by, among other things, encouraging adherence to global cyber norms. Here, too, this week’s DNI testimony put the kibosh on all that hopey-changey talk, making clear that cyber norms have been very much contested by China, Russia, and their autocratic buddies who believe that every country should repress free expression within their own borders and free enterprise from outside them. Not only that, but Team Autocrat seems to be winning through a devious strategy of populating international organizations like the UN with their own countrymen to push their own views of “global norms.” In case you missed it, China is now the second-largest contributor to the United Nations budget. “[China] is successfully lobbying for its nationals to obtain senior posts in the UN Secretariat and associated organizations,” notes the intelligence threat assessment, “and it is using its influence to press the UN and member states to acquiesce in China’s preferences on issues such as human rights and Taiwan.”
Cyber competition is here and it is getting worse, threatening to undermine democracies, upend the international order, and erode American power. America has 17 intelligence agencies whose jobs are to penetrate uncertainties, to understand what’s happening today as well as identify the drivers of possible tomorrows so that policy makers can make better policy. Other recent major government documents, including the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy and United States Cyber Command’s Command Vision, depict a world riven by competition that requires more confidence, competence, and action by the United States to advance national interests. Which makes the National Cyber Strategy a head-scratcher. It’s time our cyber strategy got with the program. Starting with intelligence would help. Any strategy untethered to reality is no strategy at all.
With Sarah Phelps at the helm, it’s now clear that the BBC’s Agatha Christie adaptations are entering their Zack Snyder–DC–Universe era. Everything is gray. Everyone is agonized. Phelps has taken the grande dame of drawing-room detective fiction and made her stories so grotesque, so deranged, that they’re almost comical. The low point for me in The ABC Murders, Phelps’s newest three-part series to land on Amazon, was the focus on a yellow, pus-filled boil on the back of a man’s neck—so swollen, it seemed almost to vibrate on camera—as another man grimly spears open the yolk of his fried egg. In another scene, the actor Shirley Henderson’s character, lipstick smeared all over her face, berates the daughter she rents out to men for a shilling, screeching, “I wish I’d used a knitting needle on you.”
These moments are, to be clear, not in Christie’s original text. Nor are the scenes Phelps has dreamed up featuring the use of high heels and silk stockings in sexualized torture rituals, or a burgeoning nativist movement clumsily intended to comment on Brexit. It might seem unimaginable to take Christie’s genteel but biting stories and insert, say, a visual of an overflowing receptacle of urine. Not for Phelps, though, who’s now used this motif twice, in The ABC Murders as well as in the grimly vicious Ordeal by Innocence.
It’s tempting to pity John Malkovich, who makes his debut in The ABC Murders playing Hercule Poirot, Christie’s fastidious, preening, and entirely endearing Belgian supersleuth. Malkovich signed on to play a detective best known for a calligraphic mustache and a weakness for luxury, and what he got was a character who’s left wading through a fetid swamp of human folly, oozing cholesterol, and unsightly excrescences. The story is set in 1933 Britain, which is facing two new evils: a rising fascist and anti-immigrant movement (“We must stem the alien tide: March for your country and your blood,” its posters exhort), and a serial killer using a railway guide as an alphabetical almanac.
Curiously, given that a star of Malkovich’s caliber has been persuaded to sign on, The ABC Murders feels like an origin story and an end point for Phelps’s conception of Poirot, without a clear path forward. At the beginning of the series, he’s old and obsolete. His friends at Scotland Yard have left the force; an ambitious new investigator, Inspector Crome (Harry Potter’s Rupert Grint), wants nothing to do with Poirot, having dug into his past and found some glaring inconsistencies. Poirot begins receiving letters from a person identifying himself as ABC, but is rudely rebuffed by Crome until random murders start occurring in alphabetical order: Alice Asher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, Sir Carmichael Clarke in Churston.
While everyone else is hamming it up playing monstrous psychopaths on an operatic scale, Malkovich wafts glumly from scene to scene, his facial expressions rarely more animated than someone trying to do long division in his head. He seems to have put sincere effort into Poirot’s Belgian accent, which I’m sure is brilliantly accurate, but it’s nevertheless excruciating (“A leest of your salespeople, pliz. In Lorndon”). Meanwhile, Henderson’s lunatic landlady is lurking around corners and frothing about foreigners, a loner named Alexander Bonaparte Cust is waking up in states of curiously bloody disorder, and random strangers are sharing details about their hemorrhoids with the increasingly world-weary Poirot.
It’s not that television writers shouldn’t imaginatively update canonical texts. The BBC’s contemporary Sherlock, before it careened wildly off the rails, proved how well classic detective stories can stand up to modern-day themes. Christie’s reputation as a chintz-and-cream-tea kind of writer is undermined by the actual darkness within her stories, which plenty of previous adaptations have teased out. But it’s difficult to imagine what Phelps is trying to achieve by making her series so viscerally icky, and so intent on stirring things—and people—up. She ends her adaptation by inventing a backstory for Poirot that’s entirely disproved by Christie’s books, and that seems to end this incarnation of the pompous private investigator right in its tracks. Which, in the end, feels like no loss at all.
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