#because both law and custom are meaningless if no one will enforce them

[fialleril]

Since the beginning of President Trump’s term, he’s been under scrutiny for running the country while profiting off his business empire. A few incidents revealed in recent weeks have heightened that scrutiny.

And as evidenced by this explanation from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Republicans don't have a way to defend it. Here's what McCarthy told reporters Tuesday when asked whether he thinks the federal government should be spending money at the president's resorts:

“The president’s resorts are hotels that he owns. And people are traveling. It’s just like any other hotel. I know people will look at it. I don’t know that that’s different than anything else. Is it different than if I go and stay or eat at a Marriott here or eat at the Trump?”

Such an explanation ignores reality. The president’s hotels aren’t just any hotels. Trump the businessman and Trump the politician are the same, and Trump refuses to do much to extricate one persona from the other.

Though he transferred management responsibilities of the Trump Organization, which runs the hotels, to his sons when he was elected, he didn’t divest from the company. That means when someone stays overnight, or books an event, or buys a meal at a Trump property, Trump still stands to reap some of the profit. That’s true if the one picking up the tab is a private citizen, a campaign organization, a foreign government or company or the U.S. government.

And they all have.

The Washington Post reported in June that White House aides pushed back on his extensive use of Trump properties to facilitate official business. Here’s what my colleagues found then:

Trump has rebuffed such warnings, overruling a recommendation that he not visit his Turnberry golf club in Scotland last summer, according to aides. And in recent months, he has scheduled even more detours from official trips to visit his businesses — golf courses in Ireland, Los Angeles and Doral.

In all, his scores of trips have brought his private businesses at least $1.6 million in revenue, from federal officials and GOP campaigns who pay to go where Trump goes, according to a Washington Post analysis.

...

The actual amount of money Trump has received as a result of his visits and campaign events is probably much higher than the $1.6 million The Post identified. That’s because most of the records available about government spending date to the first half of 2017 — covering just the first few months of Trump’s presidency so far. And the records of campaign spending don’t account for other revenue that Trump may have made off campaign events, including overnight stays by donors attending the event.

This past weekend, Politico reported that the Air Force has been refueling at airports near Trump properties rather than military bases, and in at least four instances, crews have stayed at a Trump property. That revelation has prompted a House Democratic investigation. And on his recent trip to Ireland, Vice President Pence stayed at a Trump property 180 miles from Dublin, where all his meetings were held.

Trump himself has gone hundreds of miles out of the way to go to his resort in Ireland while visiting two entirely different countries, Britain and France.

And Trump recently said that when it’s the United States’ turn to host the Group of Seven global summit next summer, it will probably be held at his struggling resort in Doral, Fla., despite lawsuits about bedbugs and the fact that it will be hurricane season then.

McCarthy is saying that all these visits are totally fair and nothing to be concerned about. “If it’s in the process,” he finished, “they can stay there.”

The problem with McCarthy defaulting to “the process” to defend what’s happening is that there is no “process” for when a president is also a businessman who hasn’t divested from his business.

There’s no modern-day protocol for this. Trump isn’t required by law to divest, even though most ethics experts agree that he should have; when he became president, the Office of Government Ethics highly recommended it. Instead, Trump handed over the day-to-day running of his business to his sons and told Americans to trust him that he wouldn’t talk about it, therefore avoiding potential conflicts of interest.

A Post analysis has found that Trump’s businesses have been declining in recent years, with a few notable exceptions. Some Trump-branded hotels have cut ties with the president and even taken his name off their properties since his election, but the Trump hotel in Washington started making a profit after he took office. It’s blocks from the White House.

Saudi government and business executives have boosted Trump’s hotels in Chicago and New York, a fact that became more conspicuous after Trump’s refusal to condemn Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman following the death of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. (Senate Republicans rebuked Trump’s handling of this and even essentially accused Trump of covering up Mohammed’s involvement.) Robert De Niro held an anti-Trump rally outside Trump Tower in New York.

Republicans may not have an answer for why the government under Trump is spending lots of money at Trump properties. But they’ll probably have to talk much more about it: House Democrats are wrapping this issue into their impeachment inquiry.

10 September 2019

[sadbi-hours]

Title: hope in my bones; rock-'n'-roll on my phone [Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall]

Rating: R

Pairing(s): Nick Goode/Ziggy Berman, Cindy Berman/Tommy Slater, and Alice Hart/Tommy Slater/Cindy Berman

A/N: I love both of The Last of Us video games, played them multiple times...and I would love to pay an aesthetic homage to them through my writing. I hope to someday be able to do so, without being exhausted by the world building involved. We'll see what happens...

Image Credits: Banner made by me with the help of PicsArt and Google Images

Created for :

@anyfandomgoesbingo: Custom Card- Zicky Ship Bing: B3- Dystopian AU

@anyfandomdarkbingo: N4- Dystopian AU

@anyfandomaubingo: G5-Zombie Apocalypse

@fandombingo: B4-Apocalypse AU

@mfbingo: I1-Dark

Description:

Two counties in Ohio, Sunnyvale and Shadyside; quarantined off from the rest of society after a natural disaster.

That was in 1978. Now, sixteen years later, the entirety of structured civilization is gone—and all that's left is a smattering of survivors left to find their way around a new world order.

Nick:

Civilization came to an end on a summer night on July 19th; all because Nick Goode wouldn't write a name on the wall and reignite the Goode family's pact with the devil.

He ends the town curse, all for some unrequited crush on a Shadysider. Except it's not so unrequited as he thought...

Ziggy Berman likes him, as much as Nick Goode likes her. But the devil is a petty bitch, and no Goode is meant to have a happily ever-after... and Nick, he especially isn't meant to have Ziggy's love.

Because no matter how hard he's tried to escape it, Nick Goode had a destiny. He was to become sheriff; it was always written in the cards for him, somehow to continue on his father's legency.

But with 1994 nearing an end, and with the dead walking around and infecting people—and the town's growing desolation on both sides of the coin.

He's slowly becoming the one and only enforcing the law, followed by a small group of volunteer deputies, who help keep what's left of Sunnyvale and Shadyside population in check—and alive.

Ziggy:

She never thought she'd get out of Shadyside. It seemed more likely that a bus 'd hit her on her way out, then it was escaping towards something better.

She thought the curse of Shadyside would kill her, not the walking dead.

But then, Nick Goode had wished her back to life... and promptly abandoned her soon after.

And now, sixteen years have passed and she can't die. Not by the dead walking around looking to eat anything with a heartbeat, not an illness or a shot to the head can keep her down long.

Ziggy's died so many times, only to come back to life for her to remember the exact count. She's still cursed, but no longer for being born on the wrong side of the tracks. She's cursed by her first love, to live forever in the devil's playground.

It's almost enough to make her loathe him, and on some level she does... but she can admit, even if only to herself, that some day's she misses seeing Nick Goode smile at her.

Alice:

"We all have our ways of dealing with living in Shadyside."

She had once said that...and had meant it then, wholeheartedly. But how do you find a way to deal with the whole world gone to shit? No escape for somewhere better?

Does she keep cutting herself? Fuck no, that just attracts those fucking walking demons on your ass... and she's not looking to be one of those fuckers happy meal.

Does she keep on partying, having meaningless sex, and taking mindless drugs? No, because even if those things still existed for her to do and take part in, she's got a sixteen-year-old son to take care of... and she'd rather die, then be the kind of the parent her's had been to him.

So, how do you survive in this new and messed up way of life? She honestly doesn't know the answer, she just keeps trucking on... and hoping for something better. For something more...

Cindy & Tommy:

Nothing was ever going to keep Cindy Berman stuck in Shadyside, not Tommy or Alice. Not even her sister, Ziggy. She was escaping the Curse of Shadyside no matter what it took for her to do so.

But then the dead didn't stay dead. Instead, they got up and ate people... and Cindy knew in that moment she was never leaving Shadyside behind, unless it was with her life.

And she was right. Her last breath saved her from ever having to go back to Shadyside again.

Until some preppy Sunnyvaler with a crush on her sister, brought her back to life and stuck her forever in the one place she's only ever wanted to escape from, never to die. Immune to death. Her sister might have trouble hating him for dooming them to hell, but Cindy has no quarrels, wanting to burn the asshole alive.

Sheriff Nick Goode, the one and only true law around their crumbling hometown. Keeping law and order; what a crock. Nick has only ever been out for what he's wanted, like any other Goode throughout the generations.

Only this Goode has ended the world--and he's also the only one who can help her stop the apocalypse...and end the Berman Sister's curse.

Fucking Nick Goode. She wished she'd put her axe through his head a long time ago...

[believerindaydreams]

that long-awaited diner scene

sweet lord I can’t possibly keep writing at this rate

but this does get the story to exactly where I wanted it

Her name is Gabriella Lopez, and there is nothing remarkable about her, nothing at all, except that she is the only waitress willing to make the long drive out to this lonely, profitless diner. There was a town here, once, but the world moved on and the people with it. A few mornings, she’s seen more than three customers walk through the door. Not often. 

The live-in owner is also cook, and gas-station attendant, and one of the few men she’s met who hasn’t tried making love or hate to her. Not because of any special virtue, the old misanthrope: but at this time in her life, that’s good enough to suit. The odd truck driver or lost tourist, she can handle them. 

She can certainly handle this soft, tired specimen who’s all but passed out on her counter, gratefully drinking up tepid air from their solitary wheezing fan. He couldn’t threaten anything more menacing than a hamburger. 

Without asking, Gabriella brings water; and waits for him to say the thing they all say.

“No ice, huh?”

“Ice water isn’t good for people, on a day this hot. Makes them sick. You cool off a little first, maybe I’ll let you have a few cubes in the second one.”

“Maybe you won’t want to give me anything more, for free,” he says. Rests his head on one arm, as he looks at her- studies, judges, appraises. “You want any dishes washed? I’m pretty hungry, I’m willing to work for a meal.“

She gestures at the sign behind the counter, next to the one advertising homemade pie (her employer’s pie is a horror that shouldn’t be wished on anyone, even weary migrants). We do our own dishwashing. Anyone too cheap to pay can enjoy a free trip in the paddy wagon. 

The police hate driving out this far, and told her last time not to bother calling for anything short of murder. But this man doesn’t need to know that. “Sorry, no. So you might as well drive on, you’d have better luck up in town.”

“If I was driving,” he says, and drains the rest of the water down his throat while she’s thinking about that. “It’s a long walk I’ve been on, you wouldn’t believe the inhumanity of some people. Serves me right! To think I trusted that blonde...just her and me and my good friend, you know how it is? And then they run off this morning together, leave me stranded... Senorita, I am very tired. Something to eat would come very welcome.”

She eyes him back, as boldly as he stared at her. A black and white jacket that would fetch precisely nothing at a flea market, unmentionable corduroy, a dull necklace with a saint’s medal dangling off it. Even the hat looks cheap. “Maybe we could arrange some sort of trade. That bag you have, for instance, that looks like it might be worth something...”

He scoops it up, holds it with the tenderness a child might lavish on the new puppy. “Do you ask this from everyone who comes in here?”

“Only the ones who say they can’t pay up.”

Something flickers in his expression; he laughs suddenly, slaps a big handful of change on the counter. “So you are too smart to be taken in, then. Fine by me. Maybe some other time I’ll do better- but believe me, this has been a very long day. Three eggs, over easy, plenty of hash and soft bacon and buttered rye toast. And a coke, with ice this time.”

Words rise to her lips, that he is much more attractive with that glint in his eye, and his posture no longer hunched with exhaustion, but laidback and easy. But telling a man he has reason to be confident is asking for trouble. She goes and shouts out his order instead. 

Half an hour later, he has demolished two platefuls and is toying with a last piece of bacon, while she keeps him company with a cup of ill-brewed coffee. He knows her name and why she’s here; she knows he goes by Tuco and that a certain pretty little blonde will be in for deep trouble, if the two of them should ever cross paths again. They have hammered out a price that neither of them quite consider reasonable, for her to drive him the rest of the way to civilisation after her shift is finished. One of her better days on this job. 

Then the door bangs open, and she feels a familiar tang of fear at uniforms and guns. Even though she’s done nothing wrong, even though the four of them talk of promotion in loud, satisfied voices and lug in their handcuffed prisoner with the pleasure of sated hunters. Gabriella goes silent, dishes out coffee and pie without comment. 

Tuco has no such inhibitions, and keeps glancing at the scruffy-haired captive with the rubbernecker’s purposeful curiosity. “He doesn’t look so good.”

“That’s what you get for resisting arrest,” one of the cops says. “Bullet wound right around here,“ he says, slapping first his own thigh, then the prisoner’s back. “You’re lucky we took the time to bandage it, little fish. Don’t worry, it’ll hold up until we get back to town...and if it doesn’t, cheer up, we won’t bother you with the dry-cleaning bill.”

The prisoner doesn’t respond, and it’s not clear to Gabriella whether the man’s stolid or faint or both; his bloodless lack of expression could mean either. Tentatively, casually, she pushes another glass of water down the counter. He leans forward to cup it between cuffed palms, until his wrists are slapped down hard. 

“We told you not to make any sudden movements, remember? And from where I’m sitting, near any kind of movement would count as sudden.”

“Now, Joe,” another of them drawls. “Man’s gotta be thirsty. Tell him he can have a drink, long as he can do it with no hands.“

There’s general laughter all around, at that; and Gabriella hates them all with a slow rage, all the more potent for its meaningless fervour. Whatever this man’s crimes are, she wants him to get away, knows he won’t. This is for real. No one in their right mind gets in the way of an arrest, that doesn’t happen-

Tuco blows the paper wrapping off a straw, the way a kid does. 

Walks over to place it between the prisoner’s lips. He sips, gratefully. And the tone of the room changes as surely as if someone had flicked off the light switch. She can’t guess what made him do it, amongst the raised voices and violent movements, cops encircling close to ask him hot searching questions. 

Anybody like that, anybody like her, ought to know better. Not get themselves hurt, maimed, imprisoned maybe, for the sake of a stranger they don’t even know. Unopposable authority, the inevitable blow, and she can’t stop herself crying out, as Tuco hits the floor hard and lets out a wail- 

and then, the miracle happens. 

Just a man, who makes no noise as he enters, but attracts everyone’s attention nevertheless. A man who points his gun at no one, but projects an air of instant, surefire violence. His voice is quiet. Nobody misses a word. 

“So you thought to catch me out, then. Get Blondie, and wait for me to walk into the trap. Well. I’m here.”

The foremost officer, the one who’d backhanded Tuco, doesn’t waver an inch. “You’re under arrest. We can do this politely, or not-”

Gabriella blinks; and in that blink, four men die. 

This can’t be real. There can’t be this much blood everywhere, soaking the white walls and blue stools and brown floor a scattered crimson. These can’t be four trained law enforcement officers lying here, lolling like broken dandelions. No one man could have wrecked this much devastation so quickly. It’d take an act of god. 

“Angel Eyes,” Tuco says, a little weakly; and Gabriella runs over to help him rise. “You took your time getting here.”

“Blondie screwed it up,” Angel Eyes says, tucking his gun away. “We hit the trail early so you wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire, and considering what a hash he made of the situation, it’s just as well you weren’t there. Tell me something. That long, beautiful resume he fed me, years of expertise as a bounty hunter, was that all complete nonsense?“

“Uh,” Tuco says, chewing his mustache. “It’s like this, you see-”

“It was nonsense,” Blondie interrupts, tossing aside his handcuffs. “The hell are you doing here? I said I’d handle it, I was handling it.“

Gabriella has no idea what happens in the next five minutes, a rapid back-and-forth of recriminations, disagreement, sardonic tones as though these men plan crimes with each other every day. They realise eventually that she’s there and listening, and then the argument trails off abruptly.  

(She ought to be afraid of them, maybe. She knows she isn’t.)

“We’d better get out of here,” Angel Eyes says, and helps Blondie to rise with a tenderness that belies all the preceding insults. Tuco downs a cup of milky coffee, piles food from the dead officers’ plates into a ziplock bag. He pauses for a moment, then slashes the lining of his pack with a red-handled knife. Tosses her a crumpled handful of dirty, unmarked twenties. 

“We’re the good guys. Honest.”

Which is the one detail she keeps to herself, when the other officers show up and the investigation starts; the one detail she hugs to her heart in ecstasy that night, as she yields to sleep in a dingy apartment. 

“An angel, he said. An angel, and a man, and the one caught in between...”

[atheistforhumanity]

Here is My Rebuttal To Fox’s Piece Against Net Neutrality

To start off I want to highlight that this Fox writer agrees with the principle of net neutrality, as do most Americans both red and blue. Hathaway writes, 

When information technology experts speak of “net neutrality,” they usually mean consumers should be able to access the legal content they want using the legal applications and devices they want. For example, Verizon’s network should not block data going to and from an AT&T customer’s computer.

However, under the Obama administration, liberal activists took a concept everyone agreed on and warped its definition to satisfy their goal to expand government’s power over the internet. 

So here we can see that he agrees that companies should not have such power or at least not take such action. That’s the core spirit of net neutrality. The 2015 law did not warp that at all it simply provided legal infrastructure to enforce that concept. 

Pay to Play

Pay to play is where companies would be forced by ISPs to pay fees to make their services run smoothly. Hathaway tries to make this sound like a good thing, “Netflix and YouTube – may wish to pay a little bit extra to a network company to guarantee better quality for its customers.” This is a complete distortion of the situation. No company wants to shell out more money. The idea is absurd on it’s face. Also, he makes it sound like it would be a choice. Well Netflix didn’t have much of a choice when Comcast and Verizon were both purposefully slowing their service until Netflix agreed to pay them. That is the real dynamic, they are advocating for legal extortion. Ajit Pai wants to give them the power to create these unbalanced relationships.

To drive the point further, what is to stop them from applying pay to play to other markets. They could do the same to colleges, businesses, non-profits, anyone. But with net neutrality, anyone can get on the internet and compete with the largest of companies in their market. They will fail and succeed and the merit of their service and ability to market themselves, not if they are willing or able to pay for the right to be noticed. ISPs should not have that type of control. What they are trying to create is not a fair and competitive market. 

Consumers Pay?

There are two possible outcomes of repealing net neutrality and imposing a pay to play system that people have legitimate reason to worry about. First is that companies that are required to pay ISPs for adequate service will likely pass costs on to their costumers. Every type of company does this when they take on new costs. It is rare that a company sacrifices profit when facing extra business expenses

Second, ISP companies could break down internet service into packages the way they do cable television. Here is a fictional example:

Maybe this is far fetched, maybe it’s not. The fact is that there are no laws stopping ISPs from implementing such policies. That would make access to the internet, and by extension information, a matter of economic status where many people could be priced out. Imagine if an ISP decided that since access to news is so important to everyone you had to pay $30 alone for news sites. People would pay because we need to be informed. Don’t believe they would be so ruthless? Take a look into the state of insulin prices. Companies are robbing people who would die without their product.

Innovation and Investment

Those against net neutrality claim that it ruins innovation. What they really mean is that it does not let them itemize internet access or impose pay for play systems, creating more ways to get money out of people.

The rest of country is not being impeded in anyway by net neutrality. Matter of fact, how can their ever be a next Youtube or Netflix if companies have to shell out millions to get their service to run smoothly. Without net neutrality, innovating entrepreneurs will have no chance to cut into these markets dominated by companies that already have the money to pay off ISPs. Would Verizon keep collecting millions from Netflix and Hulu to keep speeds high or let some new comer in and disrupt their profitable arrangement?

Are ISP’s profits hurting from net nuetrality? They say that net neutrality is ruining investment and expansion. This is completely false as well. ISP have steadily been telling their investors that everything is fine and have announced plans to expand service and infrastructure. (Also see this link here) (Or this link here) It has been thoroughly proven that there has been no dip in investment or slow down of expenditure by ISP companies. Their profits are just fine. Therefore the assertion that net neutrality needs to be ended for this purpose is an absolute lie.

Need For Protection

Hathaway goes on to address net neutrality supporters major point, but does so dishonestly. He writes,

Supporters of net neutrality say that it protected everyday Americans from having their internet slowed down or their favorite websites blocked by a greedy, evil internet service provider. Others have said net neutrality made sure free speech wasn’t stifled by ISPs. These claims are nothing more than myths.

Market forces already protected consumers, because if an ISP started deliberately slowing down people’s favorite websites and streaming services, or putting an end to free speech, consumers would simply switch to a different ISP.

Now, right off the bat I will admit that censorship of free speech has not been a prominent issue. I do believe that ISP’s are mostly afraid of the repercussions. That is with the exception of when AT&T censored Pearl Jam’s criticism of President Bush in 2007. That may have been only one incident, but it is an extreme action to stifle free speech for political partisanship. We have every right to demand there be laws against such actions.

The assertion that it is a myth that our internet and services will be slowed or blocked is an another lie. Here is where Hathaway could not even have the intellectual honestly or integrity to concede the reality of this point.

You have the example above of ISPs extorting Netflix for money. AT&T entered into what is called zero rating with Direct TV during net neutrality, where they decide that streaming from one company does not count toward your data cap. That sounds good for a minute until you realize that it means ISPs are controlling how much internet access you have and pushing you toward certain areas on the internet that benefit them. This is just like pay to play. In application it essentially breaks your right to access all information and services equally as YOU choose. That is the heart of the argument of data caps and zero rating, which I won’t go fully into now. The FCC under Tom Wheeler decided that zero rating violated the spirit of  net neutrality.

But those are not even close to the only problems. Here is a long list of where ISP companies have blocked and slowed down competing services! I know that list is not the complete history either. These may not be horrendous human rights violations, but that doesn’t make them meaningless. The point is that we have solid evidence over time that shows ISP companies cannot be trusted to act with integrity. If this is how they behave toward other tech giants, what will they do to small businesses and innovators who try to enter the scene?

Also, let’s talk about that concept of market force protection. In most areas there are only a couple ISP companies. Sometimes there are two or even one. ISP companies are close to a monopoly. Here is a site where you can search providers in your area. They aren’t like pizza places! The assertion that if I’m getting taken advantage of by one company that I can just switch to a better one is ridiculous! It’s pretty commonly known that ISPs have horrible costumer service, but you can’t do anything because there are two companies in your town and they equally suck. That’s the reality of this market right now and repealing net neutrality will NOT improve that.

Okay, I think I have thoroughly refuted both the important points in Fox’s opinion article and arguments against net neutrality. If you would like you can read the letter I wrote to Ajit Pai about his efforts to repeal net neutrality. I hope that this post has shown clearly why the reasons for repealing net neutrality are not honest or reasonable. I hope that after reading this you will be able to better argue for and promote net neutrality. No matter what happens after this point, this act by the FCC has made it clear we need to push to make the internet a permanent public utility that can never be immorally manipulated for profit or used to control or disadvantage anyone in America.

[cryptswahili]

Is the Malta ICO regulation crypto-friendly?

Malta-based ICO regulation

In November, Malta passed a 63-page regulation detailing the requirements for issuing virtual financial assets, better known as cryptocurrencies, cryptoassets or tokens. While many in the crypto community welcome this change as the beginning of the end of the “Wild West” stage, it has both benefits and downsides to issuers of new tokens. When it comes to ICO whitepaper writing, it’s new territory.

Is the Malta regulation crypto-friendly?

As one of the first jurisdictions to pass clear and detailed requirements around ICOs, including details on ICO whitepapers, Malta has attracted a tremendous amount of attention as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction. On the one hand, clarity in regulation provides a level of protection and assurance for founders and investors. Just knowing what is and isn’t acceptable allows companies a level of certainty when establishing themselves. It’s impossible to know if you are going to run amiss of the law if you don’t know what the law is. As of November, the “Virtual Financial Assets Act, 2018” gives issuers of “virtual financial assets” the assurance of having a guideline to follow.

Yet, the Malta regulations are so extensive and specific, it’s hard to consider them crypto-friendly. As the experts on ICO and STO whitepaper writing, we’ll focus this article specifically on the aspects of ICO whitepapers within that law, and go through what we’ve seen. Before there were whitepapers, by the way, there were “business plans”, executive summaries, and slide decks. In other words, the world of investing in startups has always had documentation that goes along with it.

The Malta regulation, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt at defining what should be in a business plan presented to private investors. While stock market regulations have always been clear on what needs to be in an investor prospectus, for speculative investments in emerging technologies, there has never been such a specification.

Business plans and slide decks are varied in their content because businesses need flexibility to live. Market conditions and customer demands change. Technology changes. Most investors in early stage startups will tell you that they don’t believe any of the financial projections. Early-stage investing is risky and requires a founding team with agility and creativity. For that reason, a highly detailed business plan (ICO or STO whitepaper) can be too restrictive to allow the business breathing room for change with the market.

Already, we are seeing the closing of blockchain startups which can’t deliver, or who found the market doesn’t need what they promised. Because they don’t have the ability to “pivot” like a regular startup, they simply have to close the doors and return what’s left to the token holders. Perhaps this is a good thing. If you aren’t able to deliver, you should return whatever money you have left. In the past, that would require both the founders and the investors to agree on that step. Today, if you have a foundation, and you are authorized by law only to follow the letter of your whitepaper, there really is no other choice.

How long will my whitepaper be?

First of all, there’s the issue of length. Based on the current regulation, it’s unlikely that any compliant whitepaper will be able to cover all the items in less than 60 pages. In other words, your whitepaper length just doubled. Is that good for investors? I’m not sure. So far, our experience with long ICO whitepapers is that they include a fair amount of meaningless technical jargon (more on that later in this article).

The good: no more Satoshi

For investors, the good news is that the Malta regulations mandate that the issuers of the ICO need to be know people and provide their full contact information. In other words, if you claim your name is Satoshi Nakomoto, you have to prove it before you can issue a regulated whitepaper. For the cyberpunk revolutionary types, this isn’t great news, but let’s just say that the Satoshis of the world were never looking for legitimacy from the government in the first place. For the rest of us, in particular people who are looking for a real return on investment, this is good news.

The act goes even further, making sure that every board member is also identified, and requiring a financial history of the founders. The law also requires disclosure of legal proceedings that might affect the standing of the issuers of the ICO. All of this is good news, and if the whitepaper does comply with the law, this significantly simplifies the amount of researchers will need to do before investing in an ICO.

Caveat on the “good” part. For blockchain startups in areas such as privacy, security, freedom of speech and other areas that have reason to fear government intervention, this is not good news. Identifying and tracking of people has become one of the biggest issues of this century, particularly in totalitarian style governments and dictatorships. For blockchain startups looking to create a more free world, the Maltese requirement of identification is distinctly crypto-unfriendly.

The weird: Be honest.

One of the strangest parts of the Malta Virtual Financial Assets Act is a basic decency clause in article 9, basically stating that the issuer of financial assets should be honest, skillful, careful, manage conflicts, and have in place the appropriate administrative and security arrangements. Yes. Ok, we understand. You shouldn’t go into business unless you are competent and know how to run a business. At the same time, it just strikes us as odd that this would be the law. How are you going to enforce this? People are incompetent all the time and they think they have the right administrative procedures in place, but I’ve seen very few startups that actually do have the right people, operations, and security structures in place. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to find the parliamentarian or government worker with the qualifications to identify business acumen, competency or proper procedure. So, in theory, nice. In fact, not enforceable.

It gets weirder: you’re liable but not really

In a further attempt to say that dishonesty would be punished, the act goes on to state that the issuer is liable for damages based on any misinformation in the whitepaper, or if the information in the whitepaper contradicts other information in the whitepaper. Unless you had good reason to believe it was true. Or if you included a warning that includes key information (it’s not clear what “key information means”) about investing in this type of asset. So, don’t worry. Even though it says you are liable, all you need to do is believe it yourself or issue a warning and you are off the hook. Again, nice try, but not likely to create any level of enforcement. It is truly incredible what lawmakers can pass, isn’t it?

The basics: they stay basic

The Malta regulation provides clear directives regarding the ICO whitepaper writing required. The basics haven’t changed. A whitepaper, as defined in the law, is pretty much a business plan. You have to state what the business is about clearly, not omit anything of substance unless it would harm your company, and you need to write a summary. To comply with Maltese law the ICO whitepaper writing should be in English, and you can translate to any other language you like.

The technical details are the sticky part

To create a Malta-compliant ICO whitepaper becomes a serious undertaking when you dive into the details, 38 of them, to be precise. The regulation addresses the minutiae of the technical requirements in a way that reflects just how much regulators truly understand technology startups.

In order to be compliant the whitepaper needs to delve into the protocol and platform, describe the project’s scalability and sustainability, technological risks, functionality of the tokens, interoperability, consensus algorithm, incentivization model, details of the smartcontracts, smartcontract protocols, and auditing mechanisms. The details of the AML and KYC are also required.

While this seems like an admirable attempt to get a real sense of the technology being developed, the problem lies in the fact that developing new technology requires flexibility. The blockchain space is still in early stages, and while some areas are well-established, others are still being explored.

For example, in the area of AML and KYC, there are off-the-shelf and SaaS platforms to perform those basic functions. It doesn’t make sense to develop your own KYC, because if you use these platforms, they’ll keep you protected. In the same way, you can use off-the-shelf token issuance platforms with built-in smartcontract auditing. On the other extreme, consensus mechanisms, particularly in the area of governance, are still in the emergent stages. Proof-of-work is on its way out and proof-of-stake mechanisms are still being improved.

The longer it gets, the stranger the tale

The Malta regulation requires a high level of detail on the technology, including the blockchain technology, security mechanisms, etc. Is this something that either investors or government officials can understand well enough to regulate?

As writers in the tech world for cumulatively over a century, we’ve been flatly unimpressed by many of extensive technical sections we’ve read in recent ICO whitepapers and STO whitepapers. (Some of the technology sections are fantastic, but the majority are not.) One of our observations is that companies that have absolutely no reason to develop proprietary blockchains are saying that they will do so, expounding on the reasons why their blockchain is necessary. These whitepapers utilize terminology which may have been interesting 3 years ago, but today is common knowledge. These technical sections tend to lack imagination and generally point to the fact that their CTO probably isn’t qualified.

In fact, recently I had inquiries from companies that asked us to help find them a blockchain engineer to write these sections. Does this mean they are scammers? Sometimes. More frequently it means they are legitimate startup people with a business idea that makes sense but they don’t need blockchain. They are just using the blockchain terminology and the ICO in order to raise money. They are inflating the technology section around blockchain because that’s what investors want to hear. At least, that’s what they tell me investors want to hear.

In short, the technology section requirement isn’t likely to help anyone make better investments, but it will inflate your whitepaper, take you longer to write, and cost more.

In conclusion

In conclusion, we are neutral about the Malta regulation. From our business perspective, it’s good for service providers but not so good for founders. Theoretically, once there is a standardized process, it should be cheaper and faster to issue a Security Token Offering (STO) or a Initial Coin Offering (ICO), but in fact, we are seeing just the opposite. Most of the companies we’ve been working with lately are finding the process harrowing and the legal fees even higher than before.

Similarly, for us as ICO whitepaper writers there will be more opportunities, and the whitepapers are longer. In other words, the whitepapers will cost more. Is more better? We doubt it.

Business will go on as usual, regardless of the level of detail of your business plan, STO whitepaper or ICO whitepaper. Having a great whitepaper isn’t the same as having a good business, and having a good business isn’t the same as being good at raising capital.

The best thing we can say about the regulation is that it creates a greater barrier to entry for ICO and STO fundraising. Unfortunately, that’s also the worst thing we can say about it.

Is the Malta ICO regulation crypto-friendly? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[neptunecreek]

Chicago Should Reject a Proposal for Private-Sector Face Surveillance

A proposed amendment to the Chicago municipal code would allow businesses to use face surveillance systems that could invade biometric and location privacy, and violate a pioneering state privacy law adopted by Illinois a decade ago. EFF joined a letter with several allied privacy organizations explaining our concerns, which include issues with both the proposed law and the invasive technology it would irresponsibly expand.

At its core, facial recognition technology is an extraordinary menace to our digital liberties. 

At its core, facial recognition technology is an extraordinary menace to our digital liberties. Unchecked, the expanding proliferation of surveillance cameras, coupled with constant improvements in facial recognition technology, can create a surveillance infrastructure that the government and big companies can use to track everywhere we go in public places, including who we are with and what we are doing.

This system will deter law-abiding people from exercising their First Amendment rights in public places. Given continued inaccuracies in facial recognition systems, many people will be falsely identified as dangerous or wanted on warrants, which will subject them to unwanted—and often dangerous—interactions with law enforcement. This system will disparately burden people of color, who suffer a higher “false positive” rate due to additional flaws in these emerging systems. 

In short, police should not be using facial recognition technology at all. Nor should businesses that wire their surveillance cameras into police spying networks. 

Moreover, the Chicago ordinance would violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). This state law, adopted by Illinois statewide in 2008, is a groundbreaking measure that set a national standard. It requires companies to gain informed, opt-in consent from any individual before collecting biometric information from that person, or disclosing it to a third party. It also requires companies to store biometric information securely, sets a three-year limit on retaining information before it must be deleted, and empowers individuals whose rights are violated to enforce its provisions in court. 

Having overcome several previous attempts to rescind or water down its requirements at the state level, BIPA now faces a new threat in a recently proposed municipal amendment in Chicago. The proposal to add a section on “Face Geometry Data” to the city’s municipal code would allow businesses to use controversial and discriminatory face surveillance systems pursuant to licensing agreements with the Chicago Police Department.

As the letter we joined makes clear, the proposal suffers from numerous defects.

For example, the proposal does not effectively limit authorized uses. While it prohibits “commercial uses” of biometric information, it authorizes “security purposes.” That distinction  is meaningless in the context of predictable commercial security efforts, like for-profit mining and deployment of face recognition data to prevent shoplifting. The attempt to differentiate permissible from impermissible uses also rings hollow because the proposal in no way restricts how biometric data can be shared with other companies, who might not be subject to Chicago’s municipal regulation.

Contradicting the consent required by Illinois BIPA, the Chicago ordinance would allow businesses to collect biometric information from customers and visitors without their consent, by merely posting signs giving patrons notice about some—but not all—of their surveillance practices. In particular, the required notice would need not address corporate use of biometric information beyond in-store collection. It would also fail to inform customers who are visually impaired.

The Chicago proposal also invites misuse by the police department, which would face no reporting requirements. Transparency is critical, especially given Chicago’s unfortunate history of racial profiling, and other police misconduct (which includes unconstitutionally detaining suspects without access to counsel, and torturing hundreds of African-American suspects into false confessions). Even in cities with fewer historical problems, police secrecy is incompatible with the trend elsewhere across the country towards greater transparency and accountability in local policing.

 Also, despite the documented susceptibility of face recognition systems to discrimination and bias, the Chicago ordinance would not require any documentation of, for instance, how often biometric information collected from businesses may be used to inaccurately identify a supposed criminal suspect. And it would violate BIPA’s requirements for data retention limits and secure data storage. 

We oppose the proposed municipal code amendment in Chicago. We hope you will join us in encouraging the city’s policymakers to reject the proposal. It would violate existing and well-established state law. More importantly, businesses working hand-in-glove with police surveillance centers should not be imposing facial recognition on their patrons—especially under an ordinance as unprotective as the one proposed in Chicago.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2OefMJN

[d33-alex]

Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche

The prophets of illiberal progress  Terrible things have been done in their name

LIBERALISM is a broad church. We have ranged from libertarians such as Robert Nozick to interventionists such as John Maynard Keynes. Small-government fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek have rubbed shoulders with pragmatists such as John Stuart Mill. But there are limits. This brief seeks to sharpen the definition of liberalism by setting it in opposition to a particular aspect of the thought of three anti-liberals: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a superstar of the French Enlightenment; Karl Marx, a 19th-century German revolutionary communist; and Friedrich Nietzsche, 30 years Marx’s junior and one of philosophy’s great dissidents. Each has a vast and distinct universe of ideas. But all of them dismiss the liberal view of progress. Liberals believe that things tend to get better. Wealth grows, science deepens understanding, wisdom spreads and society improves. But liberals are not Pollyannas. They saw how the Enlightenment led to the upheaval of the French revolution and the murderous Terror that consumed it. Progress is always under threat. And so liberals set out to define the conditions for progress to come about. They believe that argument and free speech establish good ideas and propagate them. They reject concentrations of power because dominant groups tend to abuse their privileges, oppressing others and subverting the common good. And they affirm individual dignity, which means that nobody, however certain they are, can force others to give up their beliefs. In their different ways Rousseau, Marx and Nietzsche rejected all these ideas. Rousseau doubted that progress takes place at all. Marx thought progress is ordained, but that it is generated by class struggle and revolution. Nietzsche feared that society was descending into nihilism, but appealed to the heroic übermensch in each person as its saviour. Those coming after them did terrible things in their name. Rousseau (1712-78) was the most straightforwardly pessimistic. David Hume, Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Rousseau’s other contemporaries believed the Enlightenment could begin to put right society’s many wrongs. Rousseau, who in time became their bitter foe, thought the source of those wrongs was society itself. In “A Discourse on Inequality” he explains that mankind is truly free only in the state of nature. There the notion of inequality is meaningless because the primitive human being is solitary and has nobody to look up to or down upon. The rot set in when a person first fenced off some land and declared: “This is mine”. “Equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, where slavery and poverty were soon seen to germinate and grow along with the crops.” Rousseau’s political philosophy is an attempt to cope with society’s regression from the pristine state of nature. He opens “The Social Contract” with a thundering declamation: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Mankind is naturally good, but political society corrupts him. Social order does not come from nature, it is founded on conventions. The social contract sets out to limit the harm. Sovereignty, he says, wells up from the people—as individuals. Government is the servant of the sovereign people and its mandate needs to be renewed periodically. If the government fails the people, they can replace it. Today that may seem like common sense. In a society founded on monarchy and aristocracy, it was revolutionary. But society makes people selfish. “The laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing.” Religion adds to its ills. “True Christians are made to be slaves.” Equality, though not an end in itself, thus needs to be enforced as a way to counteract the selfish desires and subservience that society breeds in individuals. “For the social compact not to be an empty formula...whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body: which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.” Revolutionaries have seized on that formula as justification for the tyrannical use of violence in pursuit of a Utopia. Scholars generally dispute this reading. Leo Damrosch, in his biography, couches the notion of the general will in terms of Rousseau’s pessimism. People are so removed from the state of nature that they need help to be free. Anthony Gottlieb, in his history of the Enlightenment, quotes Rousseau as having “the greatest aversion to revolutions”. Yet that unbroken train of thought from regression to coercion, even in its milder form, rubs up against liberalism. Whenever a person in a position of power compels someone else to act against their free, unimpeded will for their own good, they are invoking the ghost of Rousseau. Marx (1818-83) believed that progress was produced not by inquiry and debate, but by class struggle acting across history. Like Rousseau, he thought that society—in particular, its economic underpinnings—was the source of oppression. In 1847, shortly before a wave of unrest swept across Europe, he wrote: “The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and immediate labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days.” The surplus created by labour is seized by capitalists, who own the factories and machinery. Capitalism thus turns workers into commodities and denies their humanity. While the bourgeois sate their appetite for sex and food, the workers must endure the treadmill and rotten potatoes. For this reason, capitalism contains the seeds of its own downfall. Competition compels it to spread: “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” As it does so, it creates and organises an ever-larger proletariat that it goes on to immiserate. Capitalists will never willingly surrender their privileges. Eventually, therefore, the workers will rise up to sweep away both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and create a new—better—order. This revolutionary job does not fall to a heroic leader, but to the workers as a class. “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim,” Marx wrote with Friedrich Engels, his collaborator, in 1844. “It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will be historically compelled to do.” Four years later, in the opening of “The Communist Manifesto” they predicted revolution: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” Liberals believe that all individuals share the same fundamental needs, so reason and compassion can bring about a better world. Marx thought that view was at best delusional and at worst a vicious ploy to pacify the workers. He scorned the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a manifesto for the French revolution, as a charter for private property and bourgeois individualism. Ideologies like religion and nationalism are nothing more than self-deception. Attempts to bring about gradual change are traps set by the ruling class. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin summed it up in his book on Marx: “Socialism does not appeal, it demands.” Yet Marx underestimated the staying power of capitalism. It avoided revolution by bringing about change through debate and compromise; it reformed itself by breaking up monopolies and regulating excesses; and it turned workers into customers by supplying them with things that in his day would have been fit for a king. Indeed, in his later years, as Gareth Stedman Jones, a recent biographer, explains, Marx was defeated by the effort to show why the economic relations between capitalist and worker necessarily had to end in violence. Marx nevertheless stands as a warning against liberal complacency. Today outrage is replacing debate. Entrenched corporate interests are capturing politics and generating inequality. If those forces block the liberal conditions for general progress, pressure will once again begin to rise. Whereas Marx looked to class struggle as the engine of progress, Nietzsche (1844-1900) peered inward, down dark passages into the forgotten corners of individual consciousness. He saw a society teetering on the brink of moral collapse. The will to power Nietzsche sets out his view of progress in “On the Genealogy of Morality”, written in 1887, two years before he was struck down by insanity. In writing of extraordinary vitality, he describes how there was a time in human history when noble and powerful values, such as courage, pride and honour, had prevailed. But they had been supplanted during a “slave revolt in morality”, begun by the Jews and inherited by the Christians under the yoke of the Babylonians and later the Romans. Naturally, the slaves elevated everything low in themselves that contrasted with their masters’ nobility: “The miserable alone are the good...the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly are also the only pious, the only blessed...”. The search for truth remained. But this has led ineluctably to atheism, “the awe-inspiring catastrophe of a 2,000-year discipline in truth, which in the end forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God.” “God is dead…” Nietzsche had written earlier. “And we have killed him.” It takes courage to stare into the abyss but, in a life of pain and loneliness, courage was something Nietzsche never lacked. Sue Prideaux, in a new biography, explains how he tried desperately to warn the rationalists who had embraced atheism that the world could not sustain the Christian slave morality without its theology. Unable to comprehend suffering in terms of religious virtue or the carapace of virtue vacated by religion, humanity was doomed to sink into nihilism, in a bleak and meaningless existence. Nietzsche’s solution is deeply subjective. Individuals must look within themselves to rediscover noble morality by becoming the übermensch prophesied in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, Nietzsche’s most famous work. Characteristically, he is vague about who exactly an übermensch is. Napoleon counted as one; so did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer and statesman. In his lucid survey of Nietzsche’s thought, Michael Tanner writes that the übermensch is the heroic soul eager to say Yes to anything, joy and sorrow alike. Nietzsche is not susceptible to conventional criticism—because ideas pour out of him in a torrent of constantly evolving thought. But both left and right have found inspiration in his subjectivity; in linguistic game-playing as a philosophical method; and in how he merges truth, power and morality so that might is right and speech is itself an assertion of strength. He is father to the notion that you cannot divorce what is being said from who is saying it. The illiberal view of progress has a terrible record. Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, invoked Rousseau; Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong invoked Marx; and Adolf Hitler invoked Nietzsche. The path from illiberal progress to terror is easy to plot. Debate about how to improve the world loses its purpose—because of Marx’s certitude about progress, Rousseau’s pessimism or Nietzsche’s subjectivity. Power accretes—explicitly to economic classes in the thought of Marx and the übermenschen in Nietzsche, and through the subversive manipulation of the general will in Rousseau. And accreted power tramples over the dignity of the individual—because that is what power does. Liberalism, by contrast, does not believe it has all the answers. That is possibly its greatest strength. "The prophets of illiberal progress" – published in The Economist magazine, Sept 8th 2018.

[theconservativebrief]

Many people view the call to abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as an irresponsible act of radicalism. Republicans certainly frame it that way.

But there is nothing inevitable — or even especially long-lived — about ICE. In 2003, Congress detached different components of immigration and customs functions from the Departments of Justice and Treasury to form ICE. Its new home in Department of Homeland Security dictated an institutional posture that all immigration to the United States posed a threat. That reorganization — including the startling proposition that supports it — is at least as radical as its unwinding would be.

Left unchecked, the egregious harms imposed by ICE — deportations that do more to disrupt than protect American communities; the ill-conceived preference for immigration detention executed via a system that is a human rights disgrace — will resolve into a “new normal.”

That is the fate of recent conservative state-building in the United States: Policies and offices do not survive scrutiny so much as simply evade it.

I can say this with confidence because five years ago, I published a book examining the history of the worst policy failure in modern US history: the government’s war on drugs. In light of drug prohibition’s abysmal results, I made several recommendations, including abolishing the Drug Enforcement Administration, the architect and emblem of the government’s war on drugs.

I did so not because I think illicit drugs present trivial dangers, but because I know they carry very real and distressing ones. When evaluated on the basis of its own selected benchmarks, the drug war has driven key performance indicators like illicit drug price and potency in exactly the wrong direction.

But conservative state-building is never judged on the basis of results — a simple point that bears closer inspection. Take, for example, the remarkably similar history and trajectory of ICE and the DEA. Like ICE, the DEA was formed by combining two offices — one from the White House, and one from the Treasury Department. Typically, executive departments are organized around a particular policy portfolio (like education), and they focus on overarching goals, weighing various tools and approaches to meet those goals.

Whether those tools work to advance an agency’s valued objective is a question that the officials in and out of the organization attempt to answer. If found wanting, tools can be modified or abandoned — unless they happen to belong to units dedicated overwhelmingly to enforcement, tucked into executive departments that dramatically misconceptualize the target of their intentions. In that case, no meaningful evaluation takes place at all.

The US government once construed drugs as a trade. The Bureau of Narcotics (the main predecessor agency to the DEA), seated in the Department of Treasury, was armed with sanctions that could diminish the flow of illicit drugs. The formation of the DEA crystallized a very different notion —namely, that illicit drugs were a crime.

In an analogous fashion, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) once sat in the Department of Labor, on the supposition that people came to this country seeking work; it later moved to the Department of Justice. Before the creation of ICE, as the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer points out, “enforcement was housed in an agency devoted to both deportation and naturalization.”

Today these functions belong to an agency predicated on thwarting terrorist threats, and the instruments it deploys have not been shown to deter illegal immigration, nor do terrorist threats concentrate in the migrant communities most subjected to its punitive measures.

Tasked with Sisyphean chores and supplied with counterproductive tools, it is not surprising that the DEA and ICE share some dysfunctions. Their leadership rejects meaningful distinctions — whether between drugs, or between and among undocumented migrants — because drawing them would raise real questions about the implicit premise that resides in their institutional location. The workforce of both ICE and the DEA features agents who harbor a siege mentality, fostered by a culture of secrecy and resentment of oversight, and susceptible to corruption.

Neither is overseen by an official who must weigh the effectiveness, and decide the budget, of enforcement relative to a different approach to the same problem. Both are capable of moderating only the degree of the application of punitive enforcement, and incentivized in the direction of ever-greater amounts. To think differently, to drop one set of tools in favor of another, would amount to an act of institutional self-repudiation.

No matter how many indictments and interdiction efforts the DEA claims as a success, it has no measurable impact on the drugs wending their way through black markets. Inspecting the record, it’s surprising that these misplaced enforcement agencies command much approval at all.

A heroin user. Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty Images

That brings us to the second simple but crucial observation regarding conservative state-building: Agencies like the DEA do not draw political strength from defenders so much as they do from a kind of aggressive complacency — a Beltway mindset that treats change as an antagonist.

Unless faced with a committed opposition, an agency like the DEA will easily defeat critics, not because its proponents will mount superior arguments, but because those proponents won’t feel compelled to make any arguments at all. One of the most astonishing things about the DEA’s pervasive, passive support is the way in which policy discussions deemed “serious” omit drug prohibition from the very problems it is most implicated in.

Examinations of the falling rate by which US law enforcement makes an arrest in cases of homicide is one example of this “motivated” silence. Once more than 90 percent, the so-called “clearance rate” for homicides now holds steady at roughly 65 percent; in some places, like Chicago, the clearance rate for homicide in 2017 came in at 17.5 percent.

The reason for this collapse is well known: Other than forensic evidence, witness testimony remains the crucial factor in building a case against a suspect. But in the same neighborhoods that experience the most murders, witnesses have gone silent, unable or unwilling to confide in members of a police force viewed as adversaries.

Rather than consider why the police mission has been discredited in the places where it is most needed, we typically lament “community mistrust,” on the apparent belief that ordinary people have invented some suspicion that was too convenient to resist, too hard to dispel, yet without reason or rationale.

That’s simply not the case: As I discuss in my book, residents of urban black neighborhoods that had long gone unpoliced were first able to regard themselves as clients, not just targets, of law enforcement services in the 1950s. Yet this newfound status of “citizens worthy of service provision” was heavily conditioned by different agendas of social control: Arrests for loitering and public drunkenness were common, for instance.

Among the various police tactics of subjugation, by the 1970s, only the drug war toolkit survived challenges of civil rights jurisprudence and police professionalization. It nurtured a mode of policing that offended onlookers and alienated potential allies.

When combined with the profits made available to criminal gangs via drug prohibition — a policy enshrined in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 — our drug war has produced a toxic combination: entrenched networks of crime sustained by gun violence, and a legacy of community suspicion of police. Yet we treat both phenomena as ex nihilo, sprung from nothing and out of nowhere.

Other conversations bear the imprint of a failed drug war, though we inspect the tracks as if laid by the mysterious Bigfoot. Drug prohibition drives but is inexplicably absent from analyses of the mounting lethality of the opioid crisis. Few who chide illicit opioid manufacturers for overprescribing opioids recall that a century ago, heroin was among the pain medications they sold.

As reports of misuse mounted, legislators responded by declaring heroin contraband, surrendering the drug to underground production and forfeiting the ability to regulate it in any way. The result is a drug many times more dangerous than its original formulation; with the recent addition of chemical synthetics like fentanyl, illicit heroin now regularly kills its consumers.

The drug war, a creature of our own creation, stalks us with its perverse consequences; still, we report being mugged by a stranger.

To be clear, illicit drug trafficking is now a fact of global trade, not a genie we can put back in the bottle. But to be equally clear, our refusal to acknowledge the drug war’s ever-present failure, including our refusal to consider abolishing the DEA, impoverishes analysis and blinds us to possible alternatives. Instead of trying to arrest and interdict our way out of the program, for instance, we might follow the advice of Sen. Rob Portman, who represents the heavily opioid-afflicted state Ohio, and prioritize the illicit production of fentanyl in trade talks with China.

Worse yet — and similar to a punitive approach to immigration enforcement — in perpetuating meaningless enforcement, we pathologize poverty, criminalize and imprison difference, perpetuate institutional racism, and degrade legal practices long considered essential to our freedom. We cheat ourselves of honest and productive relations with other countries, especially those in Central and South America.

Claiming the right to name and discuss these failures, and confronting conservative state-building of any sort, involves seeing the past in our present; it means grounding our analysis in the problem as it exists, rather than in the terms in which it is typically couched; it demands acknowledging something other than the white experience.

It has never been more important to enrich our perspective in precisely these ways. Typically institutions like the DEA and ICE loiter, like uninvited guests, at the margins of public discussion. Our post-9/11 world makes this neglect untenable. A war on terror, like the one waged against drugs, is both a mindset and a massive proliferation of enforcement policy and institutions — effectively a New Deal for the carceral and surveillance state.

Progressive approaches to recurring problems like terrorism, drugs, or illegal immigration do not suffer from poor evidence; they struggle for narrative context. Our political establishment caricatures progressive designs as extreme even when cautious: It appraises them as costly despite material savings; it judges them according to any failure, no matter how infrequent, unrelated, or trivial; it marginalizes these ideas as eccentric and irrelevant.

The opposite assumptions frame an approach of the “gun and the badge” (my phrase to denote enforcement-centric policy solutions): always treated as reasonable regardless of how radical; absolved of all sins, no matter the gravity or number; and received by serious people as indispensable and efficient, even when ineffective and expensive.

In this light, the call to “abolish ICE” has a place among efforts to expose other kinds of double standards in our world. It may well rank as among the most difficult. A progressive institutional and policy agenda is the ultimate outsider, a perpetual interloper who must do twice the work to garner half the credit. Meanwhile, the “gun and the badge” proves nothing to no one yet is accorded great deference.

And so, in league with other politics intended to challenge privilege, I say again: Abolish the DEA, and abolish ICE. Any redeeming aspect of their respective agencies can be transferred to a place where enforcement must demonstrate its effectiveness when judged against other approaches, operate under an appropriate executive mission, and show a return on investment based on outcomes that improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

Kathleen Frydl has examined conservative state-building in an award-winning book on the GI bill; a book on the drug war; and in articles on the FBI as well as the care of foundlings. Find her on Twitter @kfrydl.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Original Source -> Why we should abolish ICE — and the DEA too

via The Conservative Brief

[nancydhooper]

The Department of Homeland Security’s Own Watchdog Says ICE Detention Inspections Are Meaningless

Independent government report finds that deficient inspections contribute to systemic failures in the ICE detention system.

In response to its own nightmarish family separation and zero-tolerance policies, the Trump administration is claiming that in order to keep families together, it must jail them. This isn’t only untrue — it’s expanding a system that puts the health and welfare of immigrants at risk, according to an independent oversight agency.

A new report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General confirms that Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails are profoundly dangerous places with few safeguards to protect the rights of those detained, much less children and families. The inspector general’s report details how ICE inspections and monitoring of immigrant detention facilities fail on multiple levels.

Rather than address these abject failures, the Trump administration is damningly taking the opposite tack. It now wants to detain tens of thousands of immigrant children and families in ad hoc family jails, including on military bases or in newly constructed facilities under Department of Homeland Security control.

Over the last week alone, DHS asked the Department of Defense to jail 12,000 immigrant children and parents on military bases and issued a request for information to detain an additional 15,000 people in family jails.  

The Trump administration thinks it can get away with swiftly expanding detention by building family jails and contracting with the Bureau of Prisons because the existing patchwork of over 200 immigration detention facilities — including private prisons and county jails — operates with impunity. Oversight and accountability of these failed operations, reports the inspector general, is predictably scant.

Inspections of ICE jails are conducted by a private company, Nakamoto Group, as well as ICE’s own Office of Detention Oversight (ODO). Notably, neither entity will investigate all 211 ICE facilities in any given year. Nakamoto inspects an average of 100 facilities each year, and ODO has inspected an average of 28 facilities each year in the last three fiscal years. Finally, there is supposed to be a “continuous” monitoring program, which also does not occur at every facility. The bottom line is that the inspector general found that none of these inspections ensure compliance with detention standards.

The agency’s watchdog also highlights that inspections do not occur with enough frequency, do not meaningfully address facility conditions, and are limited to review of a narrow set of standards. Even worse, according to the report, when there are clear violations, ICE fails to “systematically hold facilities accountable” and “some deficiencies remain unaddressed for years.”

Some of the documented violations that were ignored for years are shocking, including strip searches with no reasonable suspicion and repeated failures by the facilities to notify ICE about sexual assaults, both in violation of detention standards and legal obligations. Furthermore, the report notes inspections are so incomplete that they are ineffective at providing the necessary level of oversight. One ICE official even suggested to the inspector general that the Nakamoto inspections are “useless.”

In one case, Nakamoto inspectors were required to conduct private and confidential interviews with detained immigrants. They failed to do so. Instead, they simply conducted brief group conversations, in English, with no translators present, and asked only very basic questions about food and recreation. In another case, two immigrants were held in “administrative segregation” or solitary confinement simply because there was no other space in which to detain them. The Nakamoto inspector didn’t even bother looking into whether policies on isolation were followed.

Even more troubling, some inspectors actually lied.

In one instance, Nakamoto reported that immigrants in detention “understood how to obtain assistance from ICE officers... [and had] positive comments regarding access to library services.” Yet the inspector general’s investigators did not witness a single Nakamoto inspector asking about the law library, and they even heard immigrants telling inspectors they didn’t know the identity of ICE officers, let alone how to contact them.

These inspections are a pantomime of federal responsibility at best. ICE has no real oversight and certainly no accountability. And now, ICE wants to expand its massive network to jail even more people, including thousands of children and families.

Our nation now boasts, shamefully, the largest immigration detention system in the world. The number of people impacted by the immigration detention system has dramatically increased over the past few decades despite the fact that there are clear alternatives to jailing immigrants.

Today there are on average over 40,000 people locked up every day by immigration authorities, costing taxpayers over $2 billion per year. The treatment of immigrants in detention is nothing less than a human rights crisis, and one that needs immediate action.

The OIG’s report is damning, but it is not the first of its kind. It is the latest condemnation after years of reporting that has made it clear that the system of monitoring and inspections is woefully inadequate and fails to address even the most serious issues, including deaths.     

In the whirlwind of announcements about the administration’s zero tolerance and family separation policies, CBP’s statement clarified the Trump administration’s intentions: “We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody.”

If the Trump administration succeeds in expanding the failing detention system it will accomplish two things: hurt immigrant families and line the pockets of private prison companies, like CoreCivic (formerly CCA) and GEO Group. Already, the nation’s two largest family jails, located in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas, are operated by these prison profiteers.

The jailing of immigrants is a cruel and harmful practice. We cannot allow this administration to lock up more immigrants in a system that is already so broken. We must demand Congress reduce the number of detention beds, cut funding for Trump’s massive deportation force, and reject all funding and proposals for any new plans to jail immigrants and families. It’s up to us to demand how our taxpayer dollars are being spent, and we must collectively say: Not one more cent.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/immigrants-rights-and-detention/department-homeland-securitys-own-watchdog via http://www.rssmix.com/