“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Russia ready to coordinate efforts with US-led coalition on liberating Raqqa — FM
TASHKENT, May 24. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said Russia is ready to coordinate efforts with US-led coalition and Kurdish forces in Syria to liberate Raqqa.
“I cannot say whether reports that such actions have already started are true, but we are ready for coordination - that I can confirm," Lavrov said on Tuesday commenting on the statement of a representative of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party that soon an active phase an offensive at Raqqa will start with participation of Kurds, the United States and Russia.
"Raqqa is one of the aims of the anti-terrorist coalition, just like Iraq’s Mosul. We are confident that these cities could have been liberated more effectively and faster if our military officials (of Russia and US) would have started coordinating their actions much earlier,” the foreign minister noted.
"There is a chance now that such coordination will take place. We think that Russian Aerospace Defense Forces and US-led coalition’s aviation should work synchronously, in coordination, and help those on the ground to really resist terrorist units. First of all, among them [forces on the ground] are, of course, armed forces of the Syrian Arab Republic, and, of course, different groups of Kurdish forces, including the armed part of the Democratic Union Party," Lavrov said.
Russia, US agree to coordinate their anti-terrorism efforts
According to the minister, Russia and the United States have agreed to switch over from information exchange to coordination of their anti-terrorism efforts, practical aspects of these issues are now being discussed by the two countries’ military.
"We have agreed with our American partners, not overnight but through clearing up their doubts and reflections and even overcoming their resistance, to finally switch over from information exchange to coordination of anti-terrorism efforts. Practical aspects of these issues are now being looked at by our defense ministries. As you know, full-time communications channels have been established between the Russia airbase at Khmeimim and U.S. representatives in the Jordanian capital city. There is a direct Moscow-Washington link. Naturally, we have the Geneva-based round-the-clock Russian-U.S. center for Syria truce monitoring," Lavrov told journalists.GROZNY, May 24. /TASS/. Russia’s operation in Syria is a “pin-point military plan" and it will never grow into a "new Afghanistan," Deputy Russian Security Council Secretary Yevgeny Lukyanov told reporters on Tuesday.
"Someone predicted that this will be a new Afghanistan or something else. That will never happen," Lukyanov stressed. “This is a pin-point limited military plan," he said, describing Russia’s campaign in Syria.
"The main goal of our military operation was to launch a political dialogue," he said. “There needs to be an agreement, an agreement only through compromise."
"We are not Syrians, we will not fight for Syria there," Lukyanov said. "They should solve all issues themselves. We are helping but you see in what a limited format."
33,000 gunmen already killed in Syria
According to the official, some 33,000 gunmen have already been destroyed in Syria in the operation against terrorists, and 5,000 of them have been killed by the coalition forces.
“According to our estimates, in the beginning of our operation Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh had around 80,000 gunmen," Yevgeny Lukyanov said. "28,000 have been already destroyed, and the coalition destroyed another 5,000 over two years."
He said a turning point in the fight against terrorism in Syria has already come. “I believe that not only we think so," Lukyanov added.
“Judging from the reaction of the so-called actors on this theater of war and sometimes aggressive manifestations of the terrorist irreconcilable opposition, they strive to disrupt the process that is already a sign of a turning point."
Another sign is the withdrawal of a major part of Russia’s forces from Syria. "More than 100 settlements have acknowledged the ceasefire as a legal fact and observe it," he said. “Naturally, in these conditions the forces opposing this process will do everything to torpedo it."
Russia launched the operation against terrorists in Syria on September 30, 2015 at the request of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Ceasefire took effect in Syria on February 27, 2016. Russia withdrew the main part of its forces from Syria in mid-March but its air task force continued delivering strikes against terrorists.
Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign moved directly into the scandals over Bill Clinton’s extracurricular sexual antics on Monday, releasing a brief online ad that features the voice of Juanita Broaddrick explaining how Clinton bit her lip and she tried “to pull away from him” during a 1978 encounter she has long described as rape.
The words come from Broaddrick’s 1999 “Dateline” interview that recently has come back into focus for newly stated network claims that her contention has been “discredited,” even though NBC’s interviewer at the time was convinced of the legitimacy of Broaddrick’s complaint.
The black-and-white clip runs only about 20 seconds and features Broaddrick speaking while an image of Bill Clinton, cigar in mouth, is on screen. It ends with the words, “Here we go again,” while Hillary Clinton’s unmistakable laugh is in the background.
Roger Waters and Sut Jhally discuss their new film about the Israeli public relations campaign to influence U.S. public opinion:
THE BIG LIE
How Israel, the Israeli Lobby and the US Media has deceived the American Public: JAY: So Roger, talk a bit about the clip we just saw, and why you think this campaign has been so successful.
WATERS: Well that's a very interesting point. Why it's been so successful. Because it's so transparent. And any rational man would think "this cannot possibly work." But unfortunately, there's a lot of precedent for this, this particular technique. You know, if you tell the big lie often enough and loud enough, people will believe it. And, you know, as it's explained in this thing, in that clip, this has been used to sell soap powder, or shampoo, or motorcars often in the past, and it's used now to sell policy.
Sut is exactly right, that everything changed in '82, after the invasion of Lebanon. So, I think it's about getting spokespeople, as well, particularly politicians, to repeat the mantra. And this is one of the problems. That the fact that Congress is for sale in this country, particularly after Citizens United. That the disasterous ratification of that bill by your Supreme Court, which means effectively that members of Congress, in both the Senate and the House, are for sale. You can buy them. And we all know that. Everybody knows it. But it's kind of something that people prefer not to talk about. Because, if you had owned up to it, you would need to start looking at the whole way that your society works, and politics in the United States in a grown up and rational way, which would be very very difficult, based, as the whole thing is, on commerce.
I know I'm rambling, but, you know, it's a complex issue. So, if we get back to Hasbara, they have discovered that they can do it. They can operate policies that are murderous, and genocidal. And operate apartheids, which is a dirty word. Here, particularly, but all over the world it's a dirty word. And recognized, that apartheid is unforgivable and indefensible. And yet, the Israelis operated in the territory that they occupied in 1967, and nobody says boo, here. And you're asking the question, well why does nobody say boo? Why is there no response to any of this? And I think Sut can answer that question much better than I can, because, I confess, I'm flabbergasted and flummoxed whenever I come up against this question. Because, their answers are so clearly a tissue of untruth, that for us, we the people, that we the people cannot see through it. And there are still large numbers of us, support Israeli policy. It's very hard to penetrate.
Ask Sut. He'll tell you.
JAY: Well, he's here. I'll ask him. And not only do you find this, you know, support for Israel, even in the midst of an attack on Gaza. And I should point out, even a Bernie Sanders, who took, you know, recently, a much more balanced and complex view of how America should approach the question. But even Sanders voted for the resolution, saying Israel had a right to defend itself at the time they're bombing Gaza. So, even in the Democratic party, you have people with relatively progressive ideas, that opposed the war in Iraq and other things...and here, I'm not isolating Sanders, there's others, certainly, far more in this way. But they see Israel as this sort of outpost of civilization or something. And surrounded by, you know, the forces of anarchy and chaos, and they kind of really internalize that.
WATERS: That's why the right to defend itself is part of the Frank Luntz mantra, because it covers a multitude of sins with one simple phrase, that sounds on the face of it defensible. But, defending a country like Israel by operating a collective, murderous, genocidal policy upon a neighboring people, who are entirely under your control, is not defense. It is aggressive beyond all imagination. This is the slaughter of people locked up in a concrete pen, and kept there with guns, tanks, planes, ships, navies, machine guns. They are contained in a prison. It is exactly as if they were all in prison. And then, if some of them resist, if some of them say...and I'm not defending the use of Kassim rockets to fire into farmland in Israel, which is where they go. They do not rain down on cities. There has never been any raining down of rockets. And certainly, they have caused almost no casualties. The fatalities caused by rockets, fired by Hamas or whoever else in Gaza, are tiny, certainly by comparison, with the loss of life Israel causes with its hugely sophisticated weaponry, when they attack the [inaud.] population.
So it's not defense. It has nothing to do with defense. That is the propaganda. That is Hasbara that is repeated. And Obama said it repeatedly. Hillary Clinton says it. Every politician, even Sanders as you say, he's said it, because it's something that you have to say. It's obligatory. You say, Israel has the right. Of course Israel has the right to defend itself. All states have the right to defend themselves. People who don't have a right to defend themselves is, of course, the Palestinian people, because they don't have a state. They are a stateless people. They are an inconvenience on the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean. And that is what this is about. This is what Sut and I are working for. We believe that these people should have rights like everybody else does. None of us, for a second, live under a situation where we had no civil right, no rights to our own religion, to anything. No vote. Nothing. Where we were considered second class citizens. We would resist.
Now they, to their eternal credit, have resisted, by and large, in peaceful ways. And they've done it as much as they can, but you can only push people so far. And they will respond. And they have a moral, and legal, right to respond.
JAY: Right. Sut, there's been a particular war, in this PR war, on American University campuses. And, it's interesting that as the BDS movement has grown, but it certainly predates the BDS movement, it's been considered a very serious front of struggle for this PR campaign. Talk a bit about that.
JHALLY: I mean, the PR campaign is based around...I mean, the film was called "The Occupation of the American Mind," and they've managed to occupy the American media, so this narrative is everywhere. And they've managed, also, to occupy the American Congress. So they've taken over the media and politics, and the culture in general. The one place they haven't is the universities, where there actually is some diversity of thinking around this.
JAY: Okay. Just before you go further, who's they?
JHALLY: Sorry, this is the Israeli PR campaign.
JAY: Which means the Israeli state. Some major funders in the United States. Himan Siban, Sheldon Adelson, and some others.
JHALLY: And also the American government itself. I mean, this is not Israel controlling a government that wants to do something else. The reason it's worked so well is that the interests of the American government are very congruent with the interest of the Israeli state as well, which is why it's worked so well.
JAY: Cause this is the narrative of the President, of the State Department.
JHALLY: Yeah, so this is not just an Israeli narrative. It becomes an American narrative as well.
JAY: Yeah. I want to talk about the campuses.
JHALLY: But the campuses, I mean, I think it's very significant. It's the one place where there is any diversity of thinking around these issues. And so, now of course, the Israeli PR campaign has turned its focus there. And it's become, I mean, I think it's almost the last stage where this battle will be fought.
But I think it's significant when Americans, American students actually have a choice. When American students actually have some...they have different perspectives. It's not surprising then that their opinion changes. And that is what the PR campaign is scared of.
PR always has two aspects. One is, control the narrative. And the other one is, maintain a monopoly. Make sure there's no counter-narrative. And on the universities you're starting to have a counter-narrative, and a very effective counter-narrative. And, you know, billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson are now starting to put lots of money into making sure that that alternative voice is wrapped up very quickly.
JAY: Right.
JHALLY: The way it's being done is through...I mean, they're scared stiff of BDS.
JAY: Boycott Divestment Sanctions.
JHALLY: Yeah, because it's actually...it's an effective story that's being told. And so, what they're trying to do on American campuses is call BDS, hate speech. And try to ban it on that basis. We're in the middle of that. I mean, where we'll end up on it will depend upon how we struggle against it.
JAY: And there's places in Canada, and even in Europe, in certain places where this whole idea of BDS is so equated with hatespeech that they're trying to make it illegal. Advocating for it.
Roger, one of the things that seems to me helps drive this thing...this thing being that critiquing Israel is anti-semitic, it's anti-Jewish, which is at the core of, you could say, this PR campaign. And one of the reasons why people can see images of children dying, and images of the war, and somehow get their head around "Oh yeah. It's collateral damage. And it's really these peoples fault, because they hate Jews." One of the reasons that works is that there is a kernel of truth, in the sense that while not all critique of Israel is anti-semitic, some is. And there's certainly a deep routed history of hating Jews. Of course, this is more European phenomena, than an Arab phenomena, but for a lot of people, they don't get...because of the cultural history of Juden-haus, that what's going on is not that. But isn't that an important piece of this?
WATERS: Well, I think it's a great tragedy for the Jewish people, and for the Jewish religion, that it is conflated in peoples minds with the policies of the government of Israel, and it's policies, colonization, and it's annexation of land that does not belong to it. The illegal occupation, occupation, occupation, occupation. That is the most important word in all of these conversations.
But I wanted to pick up on something that Sut said, which was that...the needs of the American government are in some way aligned with the goals and needs of the state of Israel. I don't necessarily agree with that, Sut. And I certainly don't think that the needs and goals of the American people are in line with the goals of the state of Israel. I think they conflict, hugely, because American support for the goals of the state of Israel goes a long way towards creating, not just an image, but a description of the United States of America, as an oppressor of the people of the Middle East. And in consequence, it creates a lot of [ ] towards this country, the United States of America, in that region as a whole. So, I think that the unthinking, and automatic support of the state of Israel, in its policies, vis-a-vis its surroundings, is actually bad for the people of the United States of America. It makes it harder for them to be respected, taken seriously...except it is a partner to conversations that may find more edifying ways of conflict resolution than dropping bombs on one another, which, routinely, the United States does as well, as we know, with the drone policies. So, I think it's actually very very harmful to the potential that the Unites States might have, to regain some of its position politically.
JHALLY: And there's certainly recognition of that among American elites. That this policy is resulting in blowback. I mean, the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" well, one of the reasons is because of the unconditional support of Israel. So even people like David Petraeus, you know, when he was in power, he was saying what the counter, you know, what the effects of this was, in terms of how America was being held. However, you know, on the one hand you have that, but until that outweighs the strategic value that the U.S has in supporting Israel in the Middle East...and the Nixon administration called it "a cop on the beat," you know, and to protect its strategic interests. Until that outweighs those strategic interests, it's not going to make a difference.
But there are, I mean, Roger's absolutely right...there are I think more and more, even American elites, who are starting to look at, you know, what are the costs of this type of support. The moment those costs have not outweighed what the benefits are...
JAY: Well, I think you're kind of really agreeing, because it's about whose national interests. The elites national interests and the American peoples national interests are more often than not, not the same national interests.
WATERS: What is super important is the issue of the campuses. There is now, because of the apartheid in the occupied territories, there is now a real ground swell of a genuine protest movement taking place, in the young people on the campuses. And a lot of these young people, one has to say, are young Jewish people, who care about their heritage. They care about their religion. They care about their own ethical standards. And they can see that they are being associated with a tyrannical regime...right-wing tyrannical regime that is running this small state in the Middle East...and they don't like it. They do not want their name taken in vain like that. So this is so important what is going on. It's on the campuses of the universities in North America, both in Canada and the United States, but it's also in the churches, which slowly but surely there is a creeping resistance to the slaughter. And more and more churches are gathering together in their annual [inaud.] and divesting from companies that support the settlements and the occupation. Companies like Motorola, and Caterpillar, and the rest of them, and G4, and so on and so forth. So, this movement is gaining momentum. There are many many people. And this is an iceberg. Just the tip of it is showing above the surface, but the reason Sheldon Adelson, HIam Sabam are pouring money to try and make this protest movement illegal, is because they can see how fast it's growing. And it's growing because the protestors are right. They have right on their side. The treatment of the Palestinian people is deeply unjust, and appalling. And the fact that we're not allowed to see Sut's film, because it shows how we're not allowed to see that part of the narrative...I'm just so glad that the Real News is taking the time and the trouble to expose this to people, because it's fundamentally important to all of our humanity, all of our humanity. Not just the students, God bless them, who are protesting on the campuses, but all of them.
JAY: So Sut, tell us one more time. As we know you can't see this on Netflix, at least not yet. Maybe if everybody writes Netflix and screams that we want it...that's an idea. For now, where do people see the film?
JHALLY: They can see it at www.occupationmovie.com. And you can stream it there, and you can buy the DVD as well. And one of the strategies that we have, I mean, we want as many people to see it as possible, I mean, we wish we could give it away, and it would be available for free...
JAY: It cost a lot of money to make this.
JHALLY: Oh, it cost us over a half million dollars to make this film. And trying to get it out...we knew it was going to be a struggle. We didn't actually realize it was going to be as much of a struggle as it has been. We thought we would be blanketed from the mainstream media, just because of what the movie is about.
JAY: But, you're not getting in...I've seen the film, as people who watch the Real News, they know I'm a documentary filmmaker. That's really my background. And this is a good film, but you're not getting into film festivals.
JHALLY: No, no. We're not getting into any American film festivals. We're getting into some foreign film festivals.
JAY: Or Canadian.
JHALLY: No, we're being blanketed in every single film festival that we've...we applied to North American film festivals.
JAY: Yeah, I mean I just found out. I mean, I started the hotdocs film festival, and I just found out. I'm not involved anymore in a day to day way...I just found out hotdocs didn't accept it....which.....Anyway, if you're in the Baltimore area, anywhere around, sometime in the next couple of months, we're going to screen the film. And, actually, I hope Roger and Sut might even be able to come here for the screening.
Edward Snowden has called for a complete overhaul of US whistleblower protections after a new source from deep inside the Pentagon came forward with a startling account of how the system became a “trap” for those seeking to expose wrongdoing.
The account of John Crane, a former senior Pentagon investigator, appears to undermine Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other major establishment figures who argue that there were established routes for Snowden other than leaking to the media.
Crane, a longtime assistant inspector general at the Pentagon, has accused his old office of retaliating against a major surveillance whistleblower, Thomas Drake, in an episode that helps explain Snowden’s 2013 National Security Agency disclosures. Not only did Pentagon officials provide Drake’s name to criminal investigators, Crane told the Guardian, they destroyed documents relevant to his defense.
Snowden, responding to Crane’s revelations, said he had tried to raise his concerns with colleagues, supervisors and lawyers and been told by all of them: “You’re playing with fire.”
Edward Snowden is calling for ‘iron-clad’ protections for whistleblowers. Photograph: Lotta Hardelin/AFP/Getty Images
He told the Guardian: “We need iron-clad, enforceable protections for whistleblowers, and we need a public record of success stories. Protect the people who go to members of Congress with oversight roles, and if their efforts lead to a positive change in policy – recognize them for their efforts. There are no incentives for people to stand up against an agency on the wrong side of the law today, and that’s got to change.”
Snowden continued: “The sad reality of today’s policies is that going to the inspector general with evidence of truly serious wrongdoing is often a mistake. Going to the press involves serious risks, but at least you’ve got a chance.”
Financially ruined
Thomas Drake’s legal ordeal ruined him financially and ended in 2011 with all serious accusations against him dropped. His case served as a prologue to Snowden’s. Now Crane’s account has led to a new investigation at the US justice department into whistleblower retaliation at the Pentagon that may serve as an epilogue – one Crane hopes will make the Pentagon a safe place for insiders to expose wrongdoing and illegality.
“If we have situations where we have whistleblowers investigated because they’re whistleblowers to the inspector general’s office, that will simply shut down the whole whistleblower system,” Crane told the Guardian.
Crane, who has not previously given interviews, has told his explosive story in a new book, Bravehearts: Whistle Blowing In The Age of Snowden by Mark Hertsgaard, from which the Guardian is running extracts. The Guardian has partnered with Der Spiegel and Newsweek Japan on Crane’s story.
Thomas Drake’s legal ordeal ruined him financially. Photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images
“When someone becomes a whistleblower, they’re making a serious, conscious decision,” Crane said.
“They’re making a decision that can change their lives, change their futures, impact family life, too. There needs to be this certain unbreakable trust. Confidentiality is that trust and that can’t ever be violated.”
Snowden cited Drake’s case as a reason for his lack of faith in the government’s official whistleblower channels.
“When I was at NSA, everybody knew that for anything more serious than workplace harassment, going through the official process was a career-ender at best. It’s part of the culture,” Snowden told the Guardian.
“If your boss in the mailroom lies on his timesheets, the IG might look into it. But if you’re Thomas Drake, and you find out the president of the United States ordered the warrantless wiretapping of everyone in the country, what’s the IG going to do? They’re going to flush it, and you with it.”
While Drake’s case is well known in US national security circles, its internal history is not.
Major source
In 2002, Drake and NSA colleagues contacted the Pentagon inspector general to blow the whistle on an expensive and poorly performing tool, Trailblazer, for mass-data analysis. Crane, head of the office’s whistleblower unit, assigned investigators. For over two years, with Drake as a major source, they acquired thousands of pages of documents, classified and unclassified, and prepared a lengthy secret report in December 2004 criticizing Trailblazer, eventually helping to kill the program. As far as Crane was concerned, the whistleblower system was working.
But after an aspect of the NSA’s warrantless mass surveillance leaked to the New York Times, Drake himself came under investigation and eventually indictment. Drake was suspected of hoarding documentation – exactly what inspector-general investigators tell their whistleblowers to do.
“They made it clear to keep [documents] wherever possible, and obviously properly handle anything that was classified,” Drake remembered.
Crane feared that his own colleagues had told the FBI about Drake. He suspected the Pentagon inspector general’s lead attorney, Henry Shelley, whom Crane said had earlier suggested working with the justice department about the leak, had done so. A confrontation yielded what Crane considered to be evasions.
“The top lawyer would not reveal to me whether or not Drake’s confidentiality had been compromised or not. That was a concern … Normally I expect direct answers,” Crane said.
When Drake’s attorneys sought potentially exculpatory information from the inspector general’s office, they learned that much of it had been “destroyed before the defendant was charged, pursuant to a standard document destruction policy”, according to a 2011 letter from prosecutors.
Crane was livid. All relevant regulations mandated keeping the documents, not destroying them. But a high-ranking colleague, Lynne Halbrooks, prevented Crane from investigating the document destruction. He suspected Shelley and Halbrooks of sacrificing a whistleblower and misleading the justice department and a federal judge, all in a case centering around the cover-up of NSA bulk surveillance.
Forced out
Crane’s relationship with his superiors spiraled downward until they forced him out in 2013, months before Snowden’s revelations. The next year, he filed a complaint with a federal agency that works with whistleblowers, the Office of Special Counsel. In March this year, it found a “substantial likelihood” that the Pentagon inspector general’s office improperly destroyed the Drake documents and arranged, with Pentagon consent, for the justice department inspector general to investigate.
Shelley, still the Pentagon inspector general’s senior counsel, declined to answer questions but said he was “certain my name will be cleared” by the new investigation.
Hal brooks, the Office of Special Counsel and the justice department inspector general declined to comment for this story.
Bridget Serchak, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon inspector general, noted that her office and the Office of Special Counsel jointly requested the justice department investigation.
“It is important to point out that there has been no determination on the allegations, and it is unfair to characterize the allegations otherwise at this point. DoD OIG will cooperate fully with the DoJ OIG’s investigation of this matter and looks forward to the results of that investigation,” Serchak said.
Crane considers this latest inquiry a bellwether for whether the whistleblower system can reform itself in a post-Snowden era.
“Snowden responded to the way Drake was handled. The Office of Special Council investigation regarding destruction of possibly exculpatory documents regarding Drake might be the end of this saga,” Crane said.
For 15 years, Americans have been living in a constant state of “wartime” without any of the obvious signs of war. There is no draft. The public has in no way been mobilized. The fighting has all taken place in battle zones thousands of miles from the United States. Despite a rising homegrown fear of Islamic terrorism, an American in the continental U.S. faces greater danger from a toddler wielding a loaded gun. And yet, in ways often hard to chart, America’s endless wars -- Barack Obama is now slated to preside over the longest war presidency in our history -- have quietly come home. You can see them reflected in the strengthening powers and prominence of the national security state, in those Pentagon spy drones now flying patrols over “the homeland,” and, among other things, in the militarization of police departments nationwide.
Perhaps nowhere in these years, in fact, have America’s wars come home more fiercely or embedded themselves more deeply than in those police forces. It’s not just the multiplyingSWAT teams -- the police equivalent of Special Operations forces, often filled with ex-special ops types and other veterans from this country’s Iraqi and Afghan battlefields -- or the weaponry fed by the Pentagon to police departments, also from the battlefields of the Greater Middle East, including mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and even grenade launchers. It’s also, as Jay Stanley and TomDispatchregular Matthew Harwood, both of the American Civil Liberties Union, suggest today, intrusive new forms of technology, developed by or in conjunction with the Pentagon for battlefield use, that are coming to your neighborhood. So welcome to the war zone, America. Tom
☞☞☞☞☞
Power Loves the Dark
Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds’ Complicity By Matthew Harwood and Jay Stanley
Can’t you see the writing on the touchscreen? A techno-utopia is upon us. We’ve gone from smartphones at the turn of the twenty-first century to smart fridges and smart cars. The revolutionary changes to our everyday life will no doubt keep barreling along. By 2018, so predictsGartner, an information technology research and advisory company, more than three million employees will work for “robo-bosses” and soon enough we -- or at least the wealthiest among us -- will be shopping in fully automated supermarkets and sleeping in robotic hotels.
With all this techno-triumphalism permeating our digitally saturated world, it’s hardly surprising that law enforcement would look to technology -- “smart policing,” anyone? -- to help reestablish public trust after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the long list of other unarmed black men killed by cops in Anytown, USA. The idea that technology has a decisive role to play in improving policing was, in fact, a central plank of President Obama’s policing reform task force.
In its report, released last May, the Task Force on 21st Century Policing emphasized the crucial role of technology in promoting better law enforcement, highlighting the use of police body cameras in creating greater openness. “Implementing new technologies,” it claimed, “can give police departments an opportunity to fully engage and educate communities in a dialogue about their expectations for transparency, accountability, and privacy.”
Indeed, the report emphasized ways in which the police could engage communities, work collaboratively, and practice transparency in the use of those new technologies. Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn, however, that the on-the-ground reality of twenty-first-century policing looks nothing like what the task force was promoting. Police departments nationwide have been adopting powerful new technologies that are remarkably capable of intruding on people’s privacy, and much of the time these are being deployed in secret, without public notice or discussion, let alone permission.
And while the task force’s report says all the right things, a little digging reveals that the feds not only aren’t putting the brakes on improper police use of technology, but are encouraging it -- even subsidizing the misuse of the very technology the task force believes will keep cops honest. To put it bluntly, a techno-utopia isn’t remotely on the horizon, but its flipside may be.
Getting Stung and Not Even Knowing It
Shemar Taylor was charged with robbing a pizza delivery driver at gunpoint. The police got a warrant to search his home and arrested him after learning that the cell phone used to order the pizza was located in his house. How the police tracked down the location of that cell phone is what Taylor's attorney wanted to know.
The Baltimore police detective called to the stand in Taylor’s trial was evasive. “There’s equipment we would use that I’m not going to discuss,” he said. When Judge Barry Williams ordered him to discuss it, he still refused, insisting that his department had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI.
"You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court," replied the judge, threatening to hold the detective in contempt if he did not answer. And yet he refused again. In the end, rather than reveal the technology that had located Taylor’s cell phone to the court, prosecutors decided to withdraw the evidence, jeopardizing their case.
And don’t imagine that this courtroom scene was unique or even out of the ordinary these days. In fact, it was just one sign of a striking nationwide attempt to keep an invasive, constitutionally questionable technology from being scrutinized, whether by courts or communities.
The technology at issue is known as a "Stingray," a brand name for what’s generically called a cell site simulator or IMSI catcher. By mimicking a cell phone tower, this device, developed for overseas battlefields, gets nearby cell phones to connect to it. It operates a bit like the children's game Marco Polo. “Marco,” the cell-site simulator shouts out and every cell phone on that network in the vicinity replies, “Polo, and here's my ID!”
Thanks to this call-and-response process, the Stingray knows both what cell phones are in the area and where they are. In other words, it gathers information not only about a specific suspect, but any bystanders in the area as well. While the police may indeed use this technology to pinpoint a suspect’s location, by casting such a wide net there is also the potential for many kinds of constitutional abuses -- for instance, sweeping up the identities of every person attending a demonstration or a political meeting. Some Stingrays are capable of collecting not only cell phone ID numbers but also numbers those phones have dialed and even phone conversations. In other words, the Stingray is a technology that potentially opens the door for law enforcement to sweep up information that not so long ago wouldn’t have been available to them.
All of this raises the sorts of constitutional issues that might normally be settled through the courts and public debate... unless, of course, the technology is kept largely secret, which is exactly what's been happening.
After the use of Stingrays was first reported in 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other activist groups attempted to find out more about how the technology was being used, only to quickly run into heavy resistance from police departments nationwide. Served with “open-records requests” under Freedom of Information Act-like state laws, they almost uniformly resisted disclosing information about the devices and their uses. In doing so, they regularly cited nondisclosure agreements they had signed with the Harris Corporation, maker of the Stingray, and with the FBI, prohibiting them from telling anyone (including other government outfits) about how -- or even that -- they use the devices.
Sometimes such evasiveness reaches near-comical levels. For example, police in the city of Sunrise, Florida, served with an open-records request, refused to confirm or deny that they had any Stingray records at all. Under cover of a controversial national security court ruling, the CIA and the NSA sometimes resort to just this evasive tactic (known as a "Glomar response"). The Sunrise Police Department, however, is not the CIA, and no provision in Florida law would allow it to take such a tack. When the ACLU pointed out that the department had already posted purchase records for Stingrays on its public website, it generously provided duplicate copies of those very documents and then tried to charge the ACLU $20,000 for additional records.
In a no-less-bizarre incident, the Sarasota Police Department was about to turn some Stingray records over to the ACLU in accordance with Florida’s open-records law, when the U.S. Marshals Service swooped in and seized the records first, claiming ownership because it had deputized one local officer. And excessive efforts at secrecy are not unique to Florida, as those charged with enforcing the law commit themselves to Stingray secrecy in a way that makes them lawbreakers.
And it’s not just the public that’s being denied information about the devices and their uses; so are judges. Often, the police get a judge’s sign-off for surveillance without even bothering to mention that they will be using a Stingray. In fact, officers regularly avoid describing the technology to judges, claiming that they simply can’t violate those FBI nondisclosure agreements.
More often than not, police use Stingrays without bothering to get a warrant, instead seeking a court order on a more permissive legal standard. This is part of the charm of a new technology for the authorities: nothing is settled on how to use it. Appellate judges in Tallahassee, Florida, for instance, revealedthat local police had used the tool more than 200 times without a warrant. In Sacramento, California, police admitted in court that they had, in more than 500 investigations, used Stingrays without telling judges or prosecutors. That was "an estimated guess," since they had no way of knowing the exact number because they had conveniently deleted records of Stingray use after passing evidence discovered by the devices on to detectives.
Much of this blanket of secrecy, spreading nationwide, has indeed been orchestrated by the FBI, which has required local departments eager for the hottest new technology around to sign those nondisclosure agreements. One agreement, unearthed in Oklahoma, explicitly instructs the local police to find "additional and independent investigative means" to corroborate Stingray evidence. In short, they are to cover up the use of Stingrays by pretending their information was obtained some other way -- the sort of dangerous constitutional runaround that is known euphemistically in law enforcement circles as a "parallel construction." Now that information about the widespread use of this new technology is coming out -- as in the Shemar Taylor trial in Baltimore --judges are beginning to rule that Stingray use does indeed require a warrant. They are also insisting that police must accurately inform judges when they intend to use a Stingray and disclose its privacy implications.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
And it’s not just the Stingray that’s taking local police forces into new and unknown realms of constitutionally questionable but deeply seductive technology. Consider the hot new trend of “predictive policing.” Its products couldn’t be high-techier. They go by a variety of names like PredPol (yep, short for predictive policing) and HunchLab (and there’s nothing wrong with a hunch, is there?). What they all promise, however, is the same thing: supposedly bias-free policing built on the latest in computer software and capable of leveraging big data in ways that -- so their salesmen will tell you -- can coolly determine where crime is most likely to occur next.
Such technology holds out the promise of allowing law enforcement agencies to deploy their resources to areas that need them most without that nasty element of human prejudice getting involved. “Predictive methods allow police to work more proactively with limited resources,” reports the RAND Corporation. But the new software offers something just as potentially alluring as efficient policing -- exactly what the president’s task force called for. According to market leader PredPol, its technology “provides officers an opportunity to interact with residents, aiding in relationship building and strengthening community ties.”
How idyllic! In post-Ferguson America, that’s a winning sales pitch for decision-makers in blue. Not so surprisingly, then, PredPol is now used by nearly 60 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and investment capital just keeps pouring into the company. In 2013, SF Weeklyreported that over 150 departments across the nation were already using predictive policing software, and those numbers can only have risen as the potential for cashing in on the craze has attracted tech heavy hitters like IBM, Microsoft, and Palantir, the co-creation of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Like the Stingray, the software for predictive policing is yet another spillover from the country’s distant wars. PredPol was, according to SF Weekly, initially designed for “tracking insurgents and forecasting casualties in Iraq,” and was financed by the Pentagon. One of the company’s advisors, Harsh Patel, used to work for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.
Civil libertarians and civil rights activists, however, are less than impressed with what’s being hailed as breakthrough police technology. We tend to view it instead as a set of potential new ways for the police to continue a long history of profiling and pre-convicting poor and minority youth. We also question whether the technology even performs as advertised.As we see it, the old saying “garbage in, garbage out” is likely to best describe how the new software will operate, or as the RAND Corporation puts it, “predictions are only as good as the underlying data used to make them.”
If, for instance, the software depends on historical crime data from a racially biased police force, then it’s just going to send a flood of officers into the very same neighborhoods they’ve always over-policed. And if that happens, of course, more personnel will find more crime -- and presto, you have the potential for a perfect feedback loop of prejudice, arrests, and high-tech “success.” To understand what that means, keep in mind that, without a computer in sight, nearly four times as many blacks as whites are arrested for marijuana possession, even though usage among the two groups is about the same.
If you leave aside issues of bias, there’s still a fundamental question to answer about the new technology: Does the software actually work or, for that matter, reduce crime? Of course, the companies peddling such products insist that it does, but no independent analyses or reviews had yet verified its effectiveness until last year -- or so it seemed at first.
In December 2015, the Journal of the American Statistical Association published a study that brought joy to the predictive crime-fighting industry. The study’s researchers concluded that a predictive policing algorithm outperformed human analysts in indicating where crime would occur, which in turn led to real crime reductions after officers were dispatched to the flagged areas. Only one problem: five of the seven authors held PredPol stock, and two were co-founders of the company. On its website, PredPol identifies the research as a “UCLA study,” but only because PredPol co-founder Jeffery Brantingham is an anthropology professor there.
Predictive policing is a brand new area where question marks abound. Transparency should be vital in assessing this technology, but the companies generally won’t allow communities targeted by it to examine the code behind it. “We wanted a greater explanation for how this all worked, and we were told it was all proprietary,” Kim Harris, a spokeswoman for Bellingham, Washington’s Racial Justice Coalition, told the Marshall Project after the city purchased such software last August. “We haven’t been comforted by the process.”
The Bellingham Police Department, which bought predictive software made by Bair Analytics with a $21,200 Justice Department grant, didn’t need to go to the city council for approval and didn’t hold community meetings to discuss the development or explain how the software worked. Because the code is proprietary, the public is unable to independently verify that it doesn’t have serious problems.
Even if the data underlying most predictive policing software accurately anticipates where crime will indeed occur --and that’s a gigantic if -- questions of fundamental fairness still arise. Innocent people living in or passing through identified high crime areas will have to deal with an increased police presence, which, given recent history, will likely mean more questioning or stopping and frisking -- and arrests for things like marijuana possession for which more affluent citizens are rarely brought in. Moreover, the potential inequality of all this may only worsen as police departments bring online other new technologies like facial recognition.
We’re on the verge of “big data policing,” suggests law professor Andrew Ferguson, which will “turn any unknown suspect into a known suspect,” allowing an officer to “search for information that might justify reasonable suspicion” and lead to stop-and-frisk incidents and aggressive questioning. Just imagine having a decades-old criminal record and facing police armed with such powerful, invasive technology.
This could lead to “the tyranny of the algorithm” and a Faustian bargain in which the public increasingly forfeits its freedoms in certain areas out of fears for its safety. “The Soviet Union had remarkably little street crime when they were at their worst of their totalitarian, authoritarian controls,” MIT sociologist Gary Marx observed. “But, my god, at what price?”
To Record and Serve... Those in Blue
On a June night in 2013, Augustin Reynoso discovered that his bicycle had been stolen from a CVS in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. A store security guard called the police while Reynoso’s brother Ricardo Diaz Zeferino and two friends tried to find the missing bike in the neighborhood. When the police arrived, they promptly ordered his two friends to put their hands up. Zeferino ran over, protesting that the police had the wrong men. At that point, they told him to raise his hands, too. He then lowered and raised his hands as the police yelled at him. When he removed his baseball hat, lowered his hands, and began to raise them again, he was shot to death.
The police insisted that Zeferino's actions were "threatening" and so their shooting justified. They had two videos of it taken by police car cameras -- but refused to release them.
Although police departments nationwide have been fighting any spirit of new openness, car and body cameras have at least offered the promise of bringing new transparency to the actions of officers on the beat. That’s why the ACLU and many civil rights groups, as well as President Obama, have spoken out in favor of the technology’s potential to improve police-community relations -- but only, of course, if the police are obliged to release videos in situations involving allegations of abuse. And many departments are fighting that fiercely.
In Chicago, for instance, the police notoriously opposed the release of dashcam video in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, citing the supposed imperative of an “ongoing investigation.” After more than a year of such resistance, a judge finally ordered the video made public. Only then did the scandal of seeing Officer Jason Van Dyke unnecessarily pump 16 bullets into the 17-year-old’s body explode into national consciousness.
In Zeferino's case, the police settled a lawsuit with his family for $4.7 million and yet continued to refuse to release the videos. It took two years before a judge finally ordered their release, allowing the public to see the shooting for itself.
Despite this, in April 2015 the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners approved a body-camera policy that failed to ensure future transparency, while protecting and serving the needs of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In doing so, it ignored the sort of best practices advocated by the White House, the president’s task force on policing, and even the Police Executive Research Forum, one of the profession’s most respected think tanks.
On the possibility of releasing videos of alleged police misconduct and abuse, the new policy remained silent, but LAPD officials, including Chief Charlie Beck, didn’t. They made it clear that such videos would generally be exempt from California’s public records law and wouldn’t be released without a judge’s orders. Essentially, the police reserved the right to release video when and how they saw fit. This self-serving policy comes from the most lethal large police department in the country, whose officers shot and killed 21 people last year.
Other departments around the country have made similar moves to ensure control over body camera videos. Texas and South Carolina, among other states, have even changed their open-records laws to give the police power over when such footage should (or should not) be released. In other words, when a heroic cop saves a drowning child, you’ll see the video; when that same cop guns down a fleeing suspect, don’t count on it.
Curiously, given the stated positions of the president and his task force, the federal government seems to have no fundamental problem with that. In May 2015, for example, the Justice Department announced competitive grants for the purchase of police body cameras, officially tying funding to good body-cam-use policies. The LAPD applied. Despite letters from groups like the ACLU pointing out just how poor its version of body-cam policy was, the Justice Department awarded it $1 million to purchase approximately 700 cameras -- accountability and transparency be damned.
To receive public money fora tool theoretically meant for transparency and accountability and turn it into one of secrecy and impunity, with the feds’ complicity and financial backing, sends an unmistakable message on how new technology is likely to affect America’s future policing practices. Think of it as a door slowly opening onto a potential policing dystopia.
Hello Darkness, Power’s Old Friend
Keep in mind that this article barely scratches the surface when it comes to the increasing numbers of ways in which the police’s use of technology has infiltrated our everyday lives.
In states and cities across America, some public bus and train systems havebegun to add to video surveillance, the surreptitious recording of the conversations of passengers, a potential body blow to the concept of a private conversation in public space. And whether or not the earliest versions of predictive policing actually work, the law enforcement community is already moving to technology that will try to predict who will commit crimes in the future. In Chicago, the police are using social networking analysis and prediction technology to draw up “heat lists” of those who might perpetuate violent crimes someday and pay them visits now. You won’t be shocked to learn which side of the tracks such future perpetrators live on. The rationale behind all this, as always, is “public safety.”
Nor can anyone begin to predict how law enforcement will avail itself of science-fiction-like technology in the decade to come, much less decades from now, though cops on patrol may very soon know a lot about you and your past. They will be able to cull such information from a multitude of databases at their fingertips, while you will know little or nothing about them -- a striking power imbalance in a situation in which one person can deprive the other of liberty or even life itself.
With little public debate, often in almost total secrecy, increasing numbers of police departments are wielding technology to empower themselves rather than the communities they protect and serve. At a time when trust in law enforcement is dangerously low, police departments should be embracing technology’s democratizing potential rather than its ability to give them almost superhuman powers at the expense of the public trust.
Unfortunately, power loves the dark.
Matthew Harwood is senior writer/editor with the American Civil Liberties Union. His work has appeared at Al Jazeera America, the American Conservative, the Guardian, Guernica, Salon, War is Boring, and the Washington Monthly. He is a TomDispatch regular.
Jay Stanley is senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He is the editor of the ACLU's "Free Future" blog and has authored and co-authored a variety of ACLU reports on privacy and technology topics.
