#political crisis and damaged reputations when exposed at the right time

[the-girl-with-too-many-ideas]

Shen Yuan's life would have actually been far more difficult if he was the only transmigrator. Instead of airplane, he would have been dealing with an active and malicious spy who would not have hesitated to take advantage of him and his situation.

Either he believes the entire amnesia story or picks up that SY is an imposter. Maybe even both. He believes the amnesia first but then realizes something more is going on when he tries to take advantage of the so-called "amnesia."

Whatever the case, Shen Yuan's life would have gone from easy mode to medium or even outright hard.

[bountyofbeads]

It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/us/politics/trump-g7-ethics.html

As Inquiry Widens, McConnell Is Said to See Impeachment Trial as Inevitable

By Carl Hulse | Published Oct. 18, 2019 Updated 9:31 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — It was only a few weeks ago that the top Senate Republican was hinting that his chamber would make short work of impeachment.

But this week, Senator Mitch McConnell sat his colleagues down over lunch in the Capitol and warned them to prepare for an extended impeachment trial of President Trump.

According to people who were there, he came equipped with a PowerPoint presentation, complete with quotes from the Constitution, as he schooled fellow senators on the intricacies of a process he portrayed as all but inevitable.

Few Republicans are inclined to convict Mr. Trump on charges that he abused his power to enlist Ukraine in an effort to smear his political rivals. Instead, Mr. McConnell sees the proceedings as necessary to protect a half a dozen moderates in states like Maine, Colorado and North Carolina who face re-election next year and must show voters they are giving the House impeachment charges a serious review.

It’s people like Senator Susan Collins of Maine who will be under immense political pressure as they decide the president’s fate.

“To overturn an election, to decide whether or not to convict a president is about as serious as it gets,” Ms. Collins said.

Mr. McConnell is walking a careful line of his own in managing the fast-moving impeachment process. On Friday, the senator wrote a scathing op-ed criticizing the president’s decision to pull back troops from northern Syria, calling it a “grave strategic mistake.” But Mr. McConnell views it as his role to protect a president of his own party from impeachment and in a recent fund-raising video, he vowed to stop it.

The mood among Republicans on Capitol Hill has shifted from indignant to anxious as a parade of administration witnesses has submitted to closed-door questioning by impeachment investigators and corroborated central elements of the whistle-blower complaint that sparked the inquiry.

They grew more worried still on Thursday, after Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, undercut the president’s defense by saying that Mr. Trump had indeed withheld security aid from Ukraine in order to spur an investigation of his political rivals. Mr. Mulvaney later backtracked, but the damage was done.

“I couldn’t believe it — I was very surprised that he said that,” said Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida, who mocked Mr. Mulvaney’s attempts to take back comments that had been broadcast live from the White House briefing room.

“It’s not an Etch A Sketch,” Mr. Rooney said, miming the tipping movement that erases the toy drawing board. “There were a lot of Republicans looking at that headline yesterday when it came up, I certainly was.”

Senator Lisa Murkowski — an Alaskan Republican who is seen as potentially open to removing Mr. Trump from office — told reporters that a president should never engage in the kinds of actions that Mr. Mulvaney appeared to acknowledge.

“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” she said. “Period.”

Still, Republicans said they did not detect a significant shift that would pose a serious threat to the president in the Senate. It would require 20 Republicans to side with Democrats in convicting Mr. Trump, and few observers believe that will happen.

Mr. McConnell, his allies said, regards the impeachment fight in much the same way as he did the struggle last year to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, in which he was primarily concerned with protecting his Senate majority by insulating vulnerable incumbents. Then, as now, they said, Mr. McConnell is focused on keeping Republicans as united as possible, while allowing those with reservations about Mr. Trump’s conduct and their own political considerations to justify their decision to their constituents.

“I think he will play it straight,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a close McConnell ally, who noted his party’s narrow voting margin. “I don’t think he has any alternative. When you are operating with 53 you have thin margins and you can’t jam anybody or you end up with undesirable consequences.”

Mr. McConnell has told colleagues he expects the House to impeach Mr. Trump quickly, possibly by Thanksgiving, an educated hunch based on the pace of the inquiry so far and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to keep the inquiry narrowly focused on Mr. Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. He plans to move swiftly too, he told colleagues, using the approach of Christmas to force the Senate to complete its work before the beginning of 2020.

Yet an impeachment trial is a spectacle that is by its nature unpredictable, and most of the senators who will act as jurors were not around for the last one, of Bill Clinton in 1999. Mr. McConnell reminded senators that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would preside over the trial, and would have wide latitude in handling motions that might be made, including any motion to dismiss the charges that Republicans might try to put forward to short circuit the process.

Mr. McConnell’s declaration that the Senate would move forward was in part designed to show he had no choice, an effort to deflect criticism from conservatives outraged that the Senate would even consider impeachment.

On Wednesday, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pushed for Senate Republicans to write a letter to Ms. Pelosi declaring that they would not remove the president. But some senators raised objections, worrying that some of their colleagues would not want to sign on, a result that would expose disunity among Republicans. Mr. Graham’s colleagues said they believe they staved off the letter, which they viewed as a mistake.

Mr. McConnell has made it clear that he plans to sit down with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to see if they can find a mutually acceptable way to move forward as Democrats and Republicans did in 1999 when they unanimously agreed on the framework for the impeachment trial. The Senate is much more polarized now, though Mr. Schumer this week held out hope.

“We have to do this trial in a fair and bipartisan way and I hope that Leader McConnell would obey those strictures,” Mr. Schumer said. In the battle for Senate control, Democrats have their own political risks to consider since impeachment could prompt a backlash against some of their candidates if enough voters conclude that the president was pursued unfairly.

Just 15 senators remain in office from the time Mr. Clinton was put on trial. Mr. McConnell warned them of the weight of the trial, where they can be required to be on the floor all afternoon six days a week without speaking — a major challenge for senators who relish their chances to be heard.

“It will mean day after day sitting in chamber, listening to the two sides, writing questions for them to answer that go through the chief justice,” said Ms. Collins, one of the Republicans who voted to acquit Mr. Clinton 20 years ago. “Members who have not been through this before will find it is a great deal of work.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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The Crisis of the Republican Party

The G.O.P. will not be able to postpone a reckoning on Donald Trump’s presidency for much longer.

By The Editorial Board | Published October 18, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

In the summer of 1950, outraged by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist inquisition, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator from Maine, stood to warn her party that its own behavior was threatening the integrity of the American republic. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear,” she said. “I doubt if the Republican Party could — simply because I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely, we Republicans aren’t that desperate for victory.”

Senator Smith surely knew her “Declaration of Conscience” would not carry the day. Her appeal to the better angels of her party was not made in the expectation of an immediate change; sometimes the point is just to get people to look up. In the end, four more years passed before the bulk of the Republican Party looked up and turned on Senator McCarthy — four years of public show trials and thought policing that pushed the country so hard to the right that the effects lasted decades. The problem with politicians who abuse power isn’t that they don’t get results. It’s that the results come at a high cost to the Republic — and to the reputations of those who lack the courage or wisdom to resist.

The Republican Party is again confronting a crisis of conscience, one that has been gathering force ever since Donald Trump captured the party’s nomination in 2016. Afraid of his political influence, and delighted with his largely conservative agenda, party leaders have compromised again and again, swallowing their criticisms and tacitly if not openly endorsing presidential behavior they would have excoriated in a Democrat. Compromise by compromise, Donald Trump has hammered away at what Republicans once saw as foundational virtues: decency, honesty, responsibility. He has asked them to substitute loyalty to him for their patriotism itself.

Mr. Trump privately pressed Ukraine to serve his political interests by investigating a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, as well as by looking into a long-debunked conspiracy theory about Democratic National Committee emails that were stolen by the Russians. Mr. Trump publicly made a similar request of China. His chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said publicly on Thursday that the administration threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine if it did not help “find” the D.N.C. servers.

These attempts to enlist foreign interference in American electoral democracy are an assault not only on our system of government but also on the integrity of the Republican Party. Republicans need to emulate the moral clarity of Margaret Chase Smith and recognize that they have a particular responsibility to condemn the president’s behavior and to reject his tactics.

Some have already done so. On Friday, John Kasich, the former Ohio governor, said that Mr. Mulvaney’s comments convinced him that the impeachment inquiry should move forward. Representative Justin Amash of Michigan had already called for impeachment, though he felt it necessary to leave the party as a consequence.

There was a time when Republicans like Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa said that soliciting foreign election assistance would be improper. But most congressional Republicans have taken to avoiding such questions as the evidence against Mr. Trump has piled up. Mr. Trump still feels so well-protected by his party that he has just named his own golf resort as the site for the next Group of 7 summit in 2020, a brazen act of self-dealing.

Yet Republicans will not be able to postpone a reckoning with Trumpism for much longer. The investigation by House Democrats appears likely to result in a vote for impeachment, despite efforts by the White House to obstruct the inquiry. That will force Senate Republicans to choose. Will they commit themselves and their party wholly to Mr. Trump, embracing even his most anti-democratic actions, or will they take the first step toward separating themselves from him and restoring confidence in the rule of law?

Thus far in office, Mr. Trump has acted against the national interest by maintaining his financial interests in his company and using the presidential podium to promote it; obstructed legitimate investigations into his conduct by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, and Congress; attacked the free press; given encouragement to white nationalists; established a de facto religious test for immigrants; undermined foreign alliances and emboldened American rivals; demanded personal loyalty from subordinates sworn to do their duty to the Constitution; and sent his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, around the world to conduct what could most charitably be described as shadow foreign policy with Mr. Trump’s personal benefit as its lodestar.

Some Republicans have clearly believed that they could control the president by staying close to him and talking him out of his worst ideas. Ask Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who has spent the last two years prostrating himself before Mr. Trump in the hope of achieving his political goals, including protecting the Kurds — how that worked out. Mr. Graham isn’t alone, of course; there is a long list of politicians who have debased themselves to please Mr. Trump, only to be abandoned by him like a sack of rotten fruit in the end. That’s the way of all autocrats; they eventually turn on everyone save perhaps their own relatives, because no one can live up to their demands for fealty.

The Constitution’s framers envisioned America’s political leaders as bound by a devotion to country above all else. That’s why all elected officials take an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. By protecting Donald Trump at all costs from all consequences, the Republicans risk violating that sacred oath.

Senator Smith’s question once again hangs over the Republican Party: Surely they are not so desperate for short-term victory as to tolerate this behavior? We’ll soon find out.

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Mulvaney, as Clouseau, Solves Mystery!

The acting chief of staff’s admission changes everything.

By Bret Stephen's, Opinion Columnist | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:45 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 18, 2019 |

John Maynard Keynes may not have been the one who said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” But the line, often attributed to him, remains a good one. And it captures my shifting view of the impeachment inquiry.

That view shifted again this week with Mick Mulvaney’s hallucinatory press conference on Thursday, in which he appeared to admit a version of the quid pro quo the president and his minions have spent the past few weeks fervently denying. “Did he also mention to me in passing the corruption related to the D.N.C. server?” the acting chief of staff said of the president. “Absolutely. No question about that.”

He added: “That’s why we held up the money.”

Mulvaney clarified his comments — which is to say, contradicted himself — a few hours later, insisting in a carefully scripted statement, “There never was any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the D.N.C. server.” For this, he offered as proof “the fact that the aid money was delivered without any action on the part of the Ukrainians regarding the server.”

True. Except, as everyone knows, the money was released only after several infuriated lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, pushed the administration to deliver the aid without ever being told the real story of why it had been delayed in the first place.

In other words, a White House that initially insisted it had nothing to hide was, in fact, hiding something. It then claimed that it didn’t intend to do what it clearly intended to do, based on the fact that it didn’t get away with doing it. Next, it compounded the prevarication by admitting to its intentions, and insisting there was nothing wrong with them. And, finally, it reverted to denying those intentions altogether.

What kind of fool is Mulvaney, to take the rest of us for such fools?

Mulvaney’s Inspector Clouseau routine follows a week of disclosures about the extent to which U.S. policy toward Ukraine became the province of Rudy Giuliani to the exclusion of the State Department and National Security Council. Giuliani, in turn, was paid $500,000 by the company of a shady business associate who was helping him dig for political dirt in Ukraine. That associate and his partner were recently pulled from a flight on one-way tickets and arrested on charges of campaign-finance violations connected to the ouster of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. No wonder John Bolton described this shadow foreign policy as a “drug deal.”

Donald Trump’s inveterate defenders insist that the president is entitled to conduct foreign policy any way he wants, and delegate authority to whomever he pleases. That just isn’t true.

No president has the right, ever, to use the powers of his office to enrich himself, which is what Trump appears to be doing by designating his Florida golf resort as the site of the next G7 meeting. No president has the automatic right to impound congressionally appropriated funds, above all for nakedly political ends. No president may delegate foreign policy to anyone who abuses that trust for personal profit. No president should derail the career of a foreign-service officer because she would not violate the trust of her office to enable his political vendettas.

And no president should lie so wantonly about his public conduct or enlist the officers of government in the concealment of that conduct. This has been the story of the Trump administration from its first day.

For Democrats, the question is whether impeachment is the right response to indisputably outrageous acts. I’ve previously been skeptical for several reasons, not least that a party-line vote in the House would simultaneously diminish the stigma of impeachment while boosting the president’s re-election chances. And I was particularly skeptical if the entire case against Trump rested on that one phone call.

Now it’s clear that it doesn’t. Whatever the political calculus, the impeachment inquiry needs to press on, aggressively.

As for Republicans, a question they might usefully ask themselves is whether the standard of behavior they now either accept or embrace in this president is one they are prepared to condone in a Democratic administration. All of their casuistry in Trump’s defense today may, and probably will, be used against them in the future. The wretched bargain that partisans inevitably make with demagogues on their side is that they inspire, and license, the demagoguery of the other.

A suggestion for Nancy Pelosi: Offer the House a vote on censure, neither as a substitute for the impeachment inquiry nor for impeachment itself, but as an opportunity for members to go on record as to how they judge the president. It would give at least a few Republicans, for whom an impeachment vote is a political bridge too far, an opportunity to save a piece of their souls. History will judge the rest.

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It Might Be Unethical or Even Illegal, but Not if You’re the President

By Eric Lipton | Published Oct. 18, 2019, 8:14 PM ET | New York Times |

WASHINGTON — The rules are clear for nearly everyone who works in the executive branch: Officials are prohibited from playing even a minor role in a decision that directly creates a financial benefit for the employee or the employee’s immediate family.

But those rules do not apply to the president and vice president, the only executive branch officials who are exempt from a criminal statute and a separate ethics regulation that govern conflicts of interest.

That exemption is the reason President Trump could legally play a role in the selection of the Trump National Doral resort near Miami as the site of next year’s summit meeting of the Group of 7. If anyone in the executive branch other than Mr. Trump or Vice President Mike Pence tried the same thing, they would likely have been blocked by government lawyers, faced an ethics investigation and perhaps become the subject of a criminal inquiry, federal ethics lawyers from both parties said Friday.

Violating the law, which dates to 1962, is a felony punishable with a prison sentence of up to five years.

”Suggesting that your own business be used for an expensive government event over which you have control would violate the prohibitions,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.

Steven L. Schooner, who served as the administrator for procurement law in the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Trump’s actions — if he were not exempt — would have “at least lead to a referral to the Justice Department.”

Besides this conflict-of-interest law, picking the 643-room Doral resort near Miami for an event that will generate hotel room reservations and other related sales worth millions of dollars raises questions about whether other constraints might apply to the situation, the legal experts said. Those include federal competitive bidding requirements and provisions in the Constitution that ban even the president from taking certain kinds of payments from foreign governments and the federal government.

It also highlights how Mr. Trump has often swept aside the ethical standard he set for himself as he was preparing to take office in early 2017.

Nine days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one of his lawyers, Sheri A. Dillon, released a document detailing how Mr. Trump would avoid conflicts of interest after he was sworn in, even if he was not prohibited under law from taking actions that would benefit his family financially.

“President-Elect Trump, as well as Don, Eric, and Alan are committed to ensuring that the activities of The Trump Organization are beyond reproach, and that the Organization avoids even the appearance of a conflict of interest, including through any advantage derived from the Office of the Presidency,” Ms. Dillon wrote in the six-page document, referring to Mr. Trump’s two oldest sons and Alan Garten, the chief legal officer at Trump Organization.

But that same day, Mr. Trump made clear he was aware that he had a legal exemption that provided him considerable flexibility to decide for himself what would be permissible.

“I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president,” Mr. Trump said. “It was many, many years old, this is for presidents. Because they don’t want presidents getting — I understand they don’t want presidents getting tangled up in minutia; they want a president to run the country. So I could actually run my business, I could actually run my business and run government at the same time.”

Bobby R. Burchfield, a lawyer who serves a the ethics adviser to the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust — which technically owns the family hotels and other properties that are now managed by his sons — said on Friday he is examining the matter.

“We are looking at the situation” he said. “The President, the Trump Organization and I are committed to ensuring that this is done in compliance with the ethics standards.”

Mr. Trump himself, in late August, at the end of the G7 summit in France, first confirmed publicly that the Trump family resort in Doral, Fla., was being considered for the June 2020 gathering.

“Having it at that particular place, because of the way it’s set up, each country can have their own villa, or their own bungalow,” Mr. Trump said in August, before continuing later in his remarks that “I think it just works out well.”

The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump was the first to recommend the Doral resort as a site for the G7.

“We were back in the dining room and I was going over it with a couple of our advance team,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “We had the list, and he goes, ‘What about Doral?’ And it was like, ‘That’s not the craziest idea. It makes perfect sense.’ “

These statements alone would likely be enough to create a conflict-of-interest problem for Mr. Trump if he were not president, ethics and procurement lawyers said.

“If this was the secretary of commerce who had the power to decide where an event like this would be held and he or she decides it should be held at a property he or she owns, and would generate income, that probably would be a conflict of interest” said Jan W. Baran, who served during President George Bush’s tenure on a presidential commission that studied federal ethics laws, and also previously served as general counsel at the Republican National Committee.

It is a violation of the law if an executive branch employee “participates personally,” in a “decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise,” in a matter that directly financially impacts a company owned by that employee’s spouse, children “or an organization that he is serving as officer, director, trustee, general partner,” the statue says.

A separate federal Standards of Conduct regulation issued by the Office of Government Ethics in 1992 says that ”employees shall not use public office for private gain,” although again these rules do not apply to the president.

The president and vice president are exempt, Mr. Baran said, because Congress generally cannot pass restrictions that apply to them as the president cannot be forced to recuse himself and delegate his constitutional powers to someone else.

Every president over the past four decades — with the exception of Mr. Trump — has placed his personal investments and assets in a blind trust while in the White House, or has sold everything and held cash equivalents, to avoid any potential conflicts, even though there has been no requirement to do this under the law.

Mr. Mulvaney on Thursday defended the approach the White House took in selecting the Doral, saying that a dozen locations were evaluated, which suggests that federal contracting rules might have been honored. But Mr. Mulvaney would not disclose the other locations or the process used to evaluate them.

He said the Doral would be the least expensive, because the Trump family will offer the hotel “at cost,” meaning it will not profit from the event.

Separately, the Trump Organization has vowed to “identify and donate profits derived from foreign government patrons” to the Treasury.

But a Trump Organization spokesman on Friday declined to explain how the company is going to determine what “at cost” means or how it will calculate what part of a hotel bill paid by a foreign government official is considered profit.

Mr. Schooner said the Doral, during the off-season in June when it is hot and muggy in Florida, has a low vacancy rate. So even if otherwise empty rooms are sold at a discount, it is still a major financial benefit to the company, as would be the global publicity from an event like the G7 meeting.

“The leaders of the free world walking around in someone’s resort: That is priceless advertising,” he said.

At least three different lawsuits are pending in federal court that are testing if Mr. Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by continuing to own, through a trust, the collection of hotels, golf courses and resorts that at times are taking payments from foreign government officials and the United States government.

After a series of decisions both for and against the president, a case brought by the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia will be heard by the full Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. It alleges that the Trump International Hotel in Washington has illegally siphoned off business from hotels and convention centers in which the local governments have a financial interest.

Democrats in Congress who filed one of these cases will now revise the lawsuit to include the plan by Mr. Trump to have the G7 meeting at the Doral.

“He is certainly digging deeper in his failing defense by violating the Constitution in plain sight, in real time,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that involves more than 200 House and Senate Democrats. “It is really absolutely striking.”

Steve Eder contributed reporting from New York

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[cassidyrooney772]

Special Issue Brief

People are and have been seeking asylum around the world for many years. It comes up in many political discourses and can also present itself in discussions among citizens. In Australia, the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees is a major public concern. It is not a new topic of concern, but rather has been an issue for many years and continues to challenge political leaders. With growing support from the public, the reformation of how individuals are being treated is at the forefront of both political and public discussions. There have been many changes to government control throughout the years, with changes to policies along the way. However, politicians, on both sides, have remained on the same page regarding this issue, holding refugees as a threat and fear to Australia. To this day, both the Liberal-National coalition and the Labor opposition support tough asylum policies (BBC).

The Refugee Council of Australiaprovides a detailed guide of Australia’s history of asylum policies. One of the ongoing major problems with these policies is the lack of safety given to the refugees. In 1970, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser resettled thousands of Vietnamese refugees when people started to flee Vietnam in boats. However, the position on fleeing refugees changed in 1990 when Cambodians started to flee to Australia. New laws were introduced to automictically detain these people. Then in 2001, Prime Minister John Howard started offshore processing. Agreements were made for Nauru and Papua New Guinea (PNG), both small islands off of Australia, to host refugees while claims were being determined. A few years later, in 2008, the Labor Government ended offshore processing. Not lasting long, offshore processing was resumed in 2012. There are still significant problems and concerns with offshore processing. These problems include “living conditions, access to healthcare, risks of sexual and other abuse, and the criminalization of abortion and homosexuality in Nauru and PNG” (Refugee Council of Australia). The current policies regarding people who seek asylum in Australia include 1) people are forced back by the navy if they enter Australian waters, 2) people are turned around at the airport, or 3) if they make it to Australia, people are sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Overall, the aim is to prevent people from making it to Australia.

Australia does not welcome asylum seekers, which is evident through the many policies put in place to try to prevent them from getting to Australia. However, those who do make it, there is a serious issue of inhumane treatment towards refugees. This issue has gained a lot of reaction from the public, making it an important and relevant issue to both politicians and citizens. The government claims “its policies have restored the integrity of its borders, and helped prevent deaths at sea” (BBC). Meanwhile, the critics’ position is that the “opposition to asylum is often racially motivated and is damaging Australia’s reputation.”

There have been many efforts to help and reform offshore processing and the overall treatment towards refugees. In the past few years, the health of people in the offshore detention centers became more and more critical. In 2018, the #KidsOffNauru campaign started in efforts to help those in the detention centers, specifically children. It brought the issue to greater political prominence and encouraged the government to speed up the process of transfers from Nauru. Another government response to public concern regarded the mental health of refugees. Australians were horrified at the reports of the mental health crisis among the children in detention. Reports of children as young as 11 attempting suicide made it to public knowledge (BBC). Just this month, in February, “Australian MPs have passed a landmark bill with an opposition amendment making it easier for sick refugees held offshore to be treated in the country” (BBC). The new bill allows doctors to recommend transfers for refugees for treatment. Not only is this a big improvement in improving the health of many refugees, but it is also politically huge. It is the first time in about 80 years that a “government has lost a key parliamentary vote in its lower house” (BBC). However, this remains to be a political battle. Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, reacted to the new bill claiming it would “weaken the nation’s tough border policies and embolden human traffickers, reported by a BBC article. He further said the government would re-open Christmas Island center, another offshore detention center, to “deal with the prospect of arrivals... and transfers.”

Australia’s populist leader, Pauline Hanson also takes the side of neglecting the safety to asylum seekers. In an argument between Pauline Hanson and Sam Dastyari, Hanson claimed the refugees on Nauru have not proven themselves to be genuine. However, when “fact checked”, this statement is wrong. According to ABC’s Fact Check, “the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers currently on Nauru have been deemed to be refugees by the Nauruan Government in accordance with international law and the United Nations refugee convention.” Hanson also previously made a comment accusing asylum seekers of breeding children to get to Australia (The New Daily). These accusations and incorrect statements are a continuous refusal to address the treatment of refugees. It is seen in all political parties, including the populist party, that this is not a concern to the government.

The problem of asylum seekers has gone beyond just Australian citizens and reached international attention. A Sundanese refugee detainee, Abdul Aziz Muhamat, recently received “a top human rights award for exposing what he has described as Australia’s ‘inhumane’ treatment of asylum seekers” (BBC). Muhamat sent thousands of WhatsApp messages, over six years, to a journalist who told his story in a podcast. Reported by BBC, “Phillip Lynch, head of the International Service for Human Rights organization, said the decision to honor Mr. Muhamat was ‘significant’ and he hoped it would put pressure on Australia to halt the practice of offshore detention.” This is a big breakthrough with releasing information about the detention centers. Australia’s offshore detention centers are hidden from the public and it is very hard for people to gain access to what they are like. One case study looked at the way social media has facilitated “self-represented witnessing” by looking at the ways detainees use social media networks to document their experiences (Holman, Rae, Nethery, 2018, 479). In their findings, they found self-represented witnessing to be a powerful form of communication. While it is very hard for people to document these stories and access is limited, the mainstream media help promote these stories and get it to the public’s attention (Holman, Rae, Nethery, 2018, 491). In return it forces these issues to be brought to political leaders, whether they choose to respond or not, it still gains attention.

The efforts made by Australian citizens and international support contribute to the public concern in Australia of refugee treatment. While there has been reforms and changes to policies, the government is still very resistant to the reformation and not in support of these changes. Political discourses contrast with public discussions, creating a difficult issue to be addressed and solved. However, this topic remains at the forefront of political leaders and is a significant issue.

[wuyuren5849]

George Soros's Next Target: The USA

George Soros, 90 years old,  said in his autobiography that his greatest wish was to be remembered as a philanthropist and philosopher. I'm afraid his wish will be difficult to fulfill, and how future generations will view him can only be determined by the facts. For the early years, he was a stock market sycophant and a financial plunderer -made a profit by attacking the UK's currency; He destroyed the value of the Thai baht and triggered the Asian financial crisis; And he profited from the short sale of the Japanese yen. Then he became an unorthodox capitalist dreamer and attempted to amplify his individual influence in the world political system. With his great wealth, he spreads US ideologies and values to the world through his Open Society Foundations. The organization allegedly fueled political changes in countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. It has also attempted to stir up color revolutions in multiple countries. In the last two decades, Soros, known more as the "initiator of the color revolutions" than as a Speculator, has brought the fires of the color revolutions to America. In 2015 and 2016 only, Mr. Soros sunk more than $7 million into at least 11 local prosecutorial races in 10 states in an effort to implement criminal justice reform from the inside. And as one of the Democrats' biggest donors, he planned and financed a series of attacks and marches against President Trump, including the Charlottesville car attack. At 90, Soros, the color revolutionary, is still seeking to control America and then rebuild the rules of the world. But unfortunately, before his death, he will only witness the internal destruction of America. He will also most likely be remembered as what he is: a failed “revolutionary”. Soros, the color revolutionary In August 2017, eight months into Trump's presidency, neo-Nazis held a torchlit procession in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clashes with counter-protesters ended in tragedy when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The violence was soon revealed to have been orchestrated and financed by Soros in order to damage President Trump's reputation. And they said the key to the secret plot was a man called Brennan Gilmore, who filmed the car being driven into the counter-protesters. Right-wing radio host Alex Jones claimed Gilmore was paid $320,000 a year by Soros and was part of a deep-state coup to oust the president. At that point, analysts recall that “This was effectively a semi-colored revolution in the U.S.-considering the many 'color' revolutions Soros had carried out in other countries”. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term “Color Revolution”, it refers to what has now become the routine for promoting “regime change” in targeted nations. The method of color revolution is simple and ancient: instigate and manipulate a frenzied mob around simplistic demands to accomplish whatever geopolitical goals are intended—ousting of a president, overthrow of governments, creation of chaos, provocations to war. The term “color” refers to how a single color, symbol, slogan, or demand is promoted and repeated, to inflame passion and retard reason. Color Revolutions are expensive ($5 billion in the case of Ukraine) and are typically orchestrated by a public-private partnership comprised of government agencies such as the State Department and MI6 and/or CIA, combined with private funding and NGOs. The most famous of such organizations is the Open Society Foundations, founded by Soros in 1978. Soros-affiliated organizations across the world are deeply connected to various color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and a number of other political uprisings across the globe. According to a report, the totality of what is revealed in three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kyiv. Soros Foundation’s Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power. Soros’ foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department. In 2004 just weeks after Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine. Anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe and around the world since the late 1980s will know that his supposedly philanthropic “democracy-building” projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990s allowed Soros the businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries’ wealth. Moreover, Soros and his foundation have made at least the following outstanding "contributions" to the color revolutions in these former Soviet countries: In 2003, the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia led to the ousting of President Shevardnadze and the election of opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili as president. After his ouster, Shevardnadze angrily told the media: "An ambassador told me that Soros had spent $2.5-3 million on the Rose Revolution campaign". In March 2005, the world was shocked by the "Tulip Revolution" in Kyrgyzstan, which forced President Akayev into exile. Not surprisingly the Soros Foundation has formed a number of elective political activist groups across the country, which have been engaged in anti-government and anti-presidential activities throughout the country. Of course, a shrewd businessman always has a plan B. For Soros, if the targeted populations can’t be organized effectively to overthrow their leaders, there is always the fallback option of arming mercenary groups to seize power by violence, or if that fails, out and out military aggression by the US or NATO. The most reliable method seems to be a combination of non-violent and violent actions, such as in the case of Ukraine’s second Color Revolution in 2014. A similar case was the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, where gang violence was deployed in hopes of provoking a crackdown by the state which could then be exploited for political propaganda purposes. Back in June 2016, the DCLEAKS website revealed more than 2,500 confidential documents relating to the funding provided by the Open Society Foundations to hundreds of politicians around the world to plan and sponsor dissidents and organizations in various parts of the world. Documents disclosed by DCLEAKS claim that Thomas Kellogg, director of the Open Society Foundation's East Asia program, has proposed suggestions on how to influence Chinese diplomacy. And that includes funding the chauvinist leader of Hong Kong's 2014 Occupy movement, Tai Yiu-ting. Soros, the American divider Soros's ambitions did not stop there. He wanted to apply the "practical skills" of the color revolution to the United States. Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of reducing US reliance on Regime Change wars and NATO “out-of-area deployments” as a centerpiece of foreign policy. This is unacceptable to the Soroses. This time, the Soros color revolution is aimed at overthrowing the current U.S. president. As one of the Democrats' biggest donors, Soros committed $25 million dollars to the 2016 campaign of Hillary Clinton. Per the standard Clinton operating procedure, this was indicative of the symbiotic relationship of favors between the billionaire and his array of political puppets across the globe. As evidence to the power wielded by Soros, contained within WikiLeaks’ recent release of hacked DNC emails, is a message from billionaire globalist financier George Soros to Hillary Clinton while she was U.S. Secretary of State, that clearly reveals Clinton as a Soros puppet and directs her to “bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha” and “appoint a senior European official as mediator.” Revealing the influence he wields within the corridors of power, Soros then provides Secretary of State Clinton with three names from which to choose. Unsurprisingly, Clinton acquiesced and chose one of the officials recommended by Soros — Miroslav Lajcak. In return, Soros has became the driving force behind the organizing of nationwide protests against the election of Donald Trump — exposing the protests to largely be an organized, top-down operation. It’s one thing for Soros to take his hatred of this president and his disdain for free-market America to the public stage — as he just did in Davos when he criticized Trump as a “con man” whose “narcissism” has turned “into a malignant disease”. It’s another for Soros to slide, on the sly, his anti-American influences deep into America’s politics and culture. Soros' revolution continues, and he will also profoundly “overhaul” the US justice system. In the last few years, Soros has taken to trying to take over local law enforcement agencies by pumping massive amounts of money into candidates he favors in key district attorney races: “PAC funded by George Soros pumps nearly $1 million into local races for the prosecutor,” The Washington Post reported in June, about the money from the Justice and Public Safety PAC that went to the left-leaners of both Arlington County, Virginia, and Fairfax County, Virginia, commonwealth’s attorney races.’ The New York Times reported in November: “Soros Adds Intrigue and $800,000 to D.A. Race.” In 2015 and 2016 Mr. Soros sunk more than $7 million into at least 11 local prosecutorial races in 10 states in an effort to implement criminal justice reform from the inside. Most of the time it paid off: Of the 11 races for county district attorney examined by The Washington Times, the Soros-backed candidate won nine. In two of those contests, Republicans took themselves out of the running before the election. The district attorney’s office is one of the first local lines of defense of the Constitution and the rule of law. That means the potential for immediate progressive impact is huge — and it’s an impact that can be had without all that costly political fighting over, say, a senator’s seat, or a Supreme Court slot. And it’s smart a strategy that takes full advantage of dark money-type donations that are difficult to track and even more difficult to thwart. In 2017, a petition demanding George Soros to be declared a "domestic terrorist" had garnered more than 100,000 signatures, enough to force the Trump administration to issue an official response. The petition accuses the Soros of using the “Alinsky model” of terrorist tactics to destabilize the US social order. Saul Alinsky was a Chicago-based community organizer who wrote the infamous “Rules for Radicals,” a book meant to be a guide to aid leftists in the violent overthrow of the US government. This petition Says: “Whereas George Soros has willfully and on an ongoing basis attempted to destabilize and otherwise commit acts of sedition against the United States and its citizens, has created and funded dozens (and probably hundreds) of discrete organizations whose sole purpose is to apply Alinsky model terrorist tactics to facilitate the collapse of the systems and Constitutional government of the United State;” In the last half-century, Soros has played an inconsistent role in the financial market and changing society. He is a financial predator who has been influenced by liberal philosophy and market Darwinism. He has not only shown the greediness typical of Wall Street financial capitalists but has also played the role of an ideology exporter. However, under circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, Soros continues to make enemies everywhere for the United States, leading to its division. He claims that President Putin is a bigger threat than ISIS. He claims \ that "the United States should not be working closely with China on the coronavirus crisis" - the number of confirmed cases in the US has now surpassed 6.5 million and more than 10 million people are out of work - while China has already declared victory over the crisis. Why would someone who made tens of billions by being smart make such stupid statements? Combine that with his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which he says his interest in defeating China "goes beyond US national interests”. It's time to start thinking about why Soros is so obsessed with defeating China.

[khalilhumam]

Lebanon protests: Authorities prey on digital spaces to silence criticism

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/lebanon-protests-authorities-prey-on-digital-spaces-to-silence-criticism/

Lebanon protests: Authorities prey on digital spaces to silence criticism

‘Social media played a part in mobilizing the population’

Protestors in Tyre, Southern Lebanon, cheering to a female singer during a demonstration against government corruption and austerity measures on October 22, 2019. Credit: RomanDeckert via Wikimedia / CC BY-SA  4.0.

Editor's note: This article is part of UPROAR, a Small Media initiative that is urging governments to address digital rights challenges at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).  As new protests erupt in Lebanon, online repression is set to continue. In recent weeks, protests escalated as the country is crippled by the dire spill-overs of the 4 August Beirut port blast which damaged the city and left tens of thousands of people homeless in the Lebanese capital. In the face of a reported death toll of 190 dead and more than 6000 injured, the population revolted against the political elite’s long-denounced graft over the government’s negligent mismanagement of the thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate that were reported to be the cause of the explosion. Dumped for six years in a compound of Beirut’s port, the ammonium nitrate was stored next to 15 tons of fireworks and several jugs of kerosene and hydrochloric acid, setting the stage for the 4 August tragedy. So far, the Lebanese authorities have met with repression the population's demands for major political overhaul. Government crackdown on the streets has been coupled by repression online. As critics to the political elite’s ingrained corruption skyrocketed across the internet, Lebanese authorities prey on online digital spaces — from social networks to messaging services — to restrain freedom of speech and opinion online and mitigate anti-regime outbreaks, a practice which has been long denounced by activists and human rights defendants.   Since 2015, when anti-government protests rocked Lebanon over authorities’ mismanagement of waste, human rights activists have witnessed a surge in online repression against dissenters.  On October 17, 2019, another wave of nationwide protests erupted, unveiling the population’s deep-rooted discontent. Yet again, protesters hold the corrupted political elite responsible for driving the country to the brink of collapse.  This time demonstrations were sparked by the government’s attempt to introduce new taxes, including an umpteenth tax proposal on voice calls made through internet services such as WhatsApp, a freeware mobile application for messaging that is widely used in Lebanon, especially among young adults. Soon, the grievances turned into the largest anti-regime unrest that the country experienced in more than a decade.  As societal turmoil spiraled, the government’s online repression intensified. While social media and WhatsApp have been extensively leveraged by demonstrators to organize, document, and sprawl the protest, Lebanese authorities have resorted to identifying and persecuting dissenters based on their online activities.  Social Media Exchange (SMEX), a Lebanese nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa, tracked the recent soaring of state’s repression using Muhal, an observatory for the documentation of violations of online freedom of speech, reporting approximately 44 cases between October 2019 and August 2020.  Mariam al-Shafie, knowledge & impact manager at SMEX, told Global Voices:

Social media played a part in mobilizing the population during the mass protests; at the same time, we witnessed the increase of threats on the digital space with the calling in for investigations of many activists at the hands of different security agencies.

Ever since the garbage crisis in 2015 spurred the anti-establishment demonstrations, the government’s response to corruption and mismanagement allegations has been to stifle criticism and dissent on the current political and economic crisis, Human Rights Watch denounced in a November 2019 report.  The government’s repression strategy has widely relied on criminal defamation laws, which punish critics against the army, president and public officials, with up to three years of imprisonment.  According to the evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch, the use of these laws to silence online speech has skyrocketed in recent years, with a prevalence of cases of defamation filed by “powerful local individuals” who were accused of “allegations of misconduct, corruption, or fraud.” Leveraging its controversial criminal defamation laws, state authorities are prosecuting people on charges of tarnishing the state’s image by defaming state representatives’ reputation.  On the legal side, “Lebanon only offers conditional protection to freedom of expression, both offline and online, which enables judicial and non-judicial bodies to impose restrictions,” al-Shafie says. “Although Lebanon has signed a number of international conventions and treaties affirming its commitment to protecting freedom of expression, its laws fall short.”  On June 15, Lebanon's National News Agency reported that the Anti-Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Rights Bureau (Cybercrimes Bureau) has been put on the lookout for social media posts that violate criminal defamation laws by insulting the president, Amnesty International says. The risk is that this operation may further escalate the attacks on free speech perpetrated by state authorities, resulting in increased arrests and investigations.  On SMEX's Muhal, most cases of online repression look the same. Recently, Raed al-Masry, a professor of political and international studies, and Alwan Amin al-Din, the founder and director of the Sita Center for Studies, were summoned by the Cybercrimes Bureau on August 3, for an article written by Masry and published on the center’s website. The piece accused the president of the Lebanese University, Fouad Ayoub, of corruption. After they appeared before the bureau, both defendants were later released. In a similar case, an anonymous report exposing fiscal fraud at Lebanon’s Central Bank was disclosed by journalist Dima Sadek and released on the independent media platform Daraj. Later, Sadek was contacted by the Cybercrimes Bureau on May 18, as she was being investigated on the charge of “undermining the financial status of the state,” under Article 319 and 320 of the penal code, SMEX’s sources highlight. The complaint was filed by Riad Salamé, the governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank. SMEX reports that according to available sources, Sadek was questioned for 5 hours; as of today, there are no further updates on the case.   As protesters continue to use WhatsApp chat groups to organize and coordinate demonstrations, Lebanese authorities have started infiltrating these groups. According to insights gathered by a US-based national public radio (NPR) investigation, authorities use this strategy to identify and persecute protest leaders. The strategy has created fear among participants and protesters, whose identity and anonymity are at risk.  Arbitrary arrests and interrogations over online activities, social media posts, and WhatsApp chats jeopardize not only the life and the freedom of speech of journalists, activists, and protest leaders but the future of protests themselves. “Now, many young people feel that there are no results happening to the action they are doing. Because of the Lebanese authorities’ tactics, disengagement increased,” al-Shafie said. “After Beirut port explosion on August 4, we witnessed many coming back to the streets to protest the political elite and the people in power, whose corruption led to this massive explosion,” she adds, “Yet, the situation in Lebanon is always changing, and with the COVID-19 on the rise, we cannot guess what is going to happen.” Now more than ever, digital security and rights remain crucial for securing citizens, journalists, and activists’ freedom of speech and safeguard their rights to protest amid the mass uproar.

Written by Sofia Cherici

[windybunny]

Remaining politically neutral while a majority of the population faces systemic oppression is Taylor Swift’s trademark

After a peaceful year of silence during her recluse from the public eye, I regret to inform you Taylor “Snake-Ass Becky” Swift is at it again. Swift’s name has resurfaced in the media over the past couple of weeks with the details of court proceedings in DJ David Mueller’s lawsuit and her respective countersuit making their way around the Internet.

Mueller filed a $3 million lawsuit claiming defamation over Swift alleging that he sexually assaulted her at a meet-and-greet while she was on tour in 2013. The allegations, reported to his bosses by Swift’s mother, resulted in Mueller being fired from a Denver radio station. Mueller claimed that she ruined his career. Swift responded to the lawsuit by counter-claiming for sexual assault—she alleged that he grabbed her ass under her skirt while she posed for a photo with him and his girlfriend. She requested a whopping $1 in damages.

Surprisingly, the judge hearing the case dismissed Mueller’s lawsuit and found that he was guilty of sexual assaulting Swift. She won her $1 and, in a statement, acknowledged “the privilege that she benefits from in life” that allowed her to afford legal counsel, and pledged to donate to organizations that help survivors of sexual violence defend themselves.

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INTERSECTIONALITY AIN’T FOR WHITE WOMEN

No one deserves to be sexually assaulted or to endure brutal gaslighting in the form cross-examination in court. Survivors so rarely get to see justice served on the people who attack and traumatize us, and we all know that the system is adversarial against us and re-traumatizing. Swift’s victory in court is a significant milestone for survivors, and given that RAINN reported a 35% increase in calls to their crisis line the weekend following her testimony, her strength has certainly inspired confidence in many to seek support.

As a Filipina woman and survivor of sexual violence, I was hesitant to engage with Swift’s trial, especially given her status as Queen Becky of the White Feminists. From her “girlsquad” of thin, able-bodied, cishetero women, to accusing Nicki Minaj of tearing women (read: Swift) down while Minaj called out racism, Swift only ever cries feminism when it benefits her.

You can imagine how disgusted yet unsurprised I was when Swift wiped her social media presence following conclusion of the trial. Stan accounts across Twitter assumed she would be releasing new music, and they were right in their predictions. Shortly after her social media blackout, she announced her forthcoming album Reputation, and released the lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” last night.

Great, Swift donated to charities to help survivors, and she chose to fight back against her assailant in court. I’m glad she admitted that she’s in an incredibly privileged position—but she doesn’t get a cookie for pointing out the obvious. The work that goes into creating and marketing an album is time-consuming and laborious. Swift’s been planning her comeback for months, and legal proceedings are scheduled well in advance. The timing here is far too convenient to believe that the lawsuit and her subsequent victory aren’t a part of her strategy to promote her album. Feminism has never been a moral or ethical imperative for Swift—it’s a marketing strategy.

During the week of the trial, I came across a headline that read, “Taylor Swift Faces Alleged Assaulter in Trial, Suddenly We Aren’t Feminists Anymore” and my resulting eye-roll dislodged a contact lens. To sum up the article, a white woman, of course, exclaims, “you all love tearing her down, but when she’s kicking ass in court, suddenly you’re all silent!”

That’s rich, Becky. I can count on one hand the number of times she’s used her massive platform to take a stance on social issues: that time she donated money towards Kesha’s legal fees, and that time she tweeted about the Women’s March. She didn’t even bother to comment on last year’s election, and hasn’t said a word about Trump.

Remaining politically neutral while a majority of the population faces systemic oppression is Swift’s trademark. Leveraging feminism for a profit without doing any of the actual work has been her business model since at least 2014. Swift clearly isn’t interested in supporting anyone but herself so why should I waste one of my limited fucks on her? Why would I cape for someone who would rather fake-date Tom Hiddleston instead of using her platform to amplify major social issues?

White women love demanding emotional labour from other people. They love co-opting progressive social movements to feel better about themselves. But when you ask them to return the favor, when you turn to them for support, suddenly they’re too polite for politics. Suddenly, even the chattiest Becky is silent. Next thing you know, you’re being thrown under the bus and they’re driving.

In teasers leading the promotional effort behind the album’s announced, Swift’s seemingly embraced the snake imagery that Kim Kardashian West branded her with last year following the gossip around Kanye West’s “Famous.” Along with the collage of tabloid headlines on the cover, reminiscent of Britney Spears’ iconic, anti-paparazzi anthem “Piece of Me”, it’s no surprise that Swift’s lead single continues to push the image that she, a fragile, innocent white girl was victimized by a black man.

I get it—write what you know. Some of the best art is born of our most painful experiences, and frankly, if you’re gonna suffer, you may as well make money off of it. Swift, however, is excessively milking her victim narrative. She’s manipulates it to her advantage, often distorting the truth in the process. She was labelled her a snake because even though she knew and okayed the lyric with West beforehand, Swift still claims that she was a victim. Unsurprisingly, despite being exposed, “Look What You Made Me Do” only double downs on this narrative, even a year later.

I genuinely had some small glimmer of hope that the lawsuit proceedings would have had some profound effect on Swift, and inspired her to affect real change in the world. That kind of experience has the potential to change someone at their core. Of course, everyone’s version of healing is different, and we each have unique coping mechanisms. Being sexually assaulted magnified my capacity for compassion. If there were any lessons I took away from my experience, it was that no one deserves to feel the way that I did and still do as both a survivor and woman of color. I hoped Swift would have the same epiphany.

As I’ve been saying all along—trust no Becky.

Based on how her album promotion is playing out, it’s clear that Swift hasn’t learned any lessons in the past year. She’s hasn’t grown. She remains silent on the current political climate, she most likely planned to leverage the publicity around her sexual assault countersuit, and she’s still perpetuating the narrative that she, an innocent white girl, is being demonized by a vicious black man. Swift’s view as a self-proclaimed feminist remains as shallow and exclusive as ever—I just hope she doesn’t get in the way of the people actually doing the work.

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Labour now stands a real a chance of winning the next election

By Jonathan Lis Perhaps the finest moment of the last few wretched days belonged to Keir Starmer. Interviewed by Sky News over the weekend, he gave voice to what millions were thinking. Boris Johnson had failed a key test of leadership, he said. He was treating the British people with contempt. In a flash of subtle but unquestionable anger, he declared: "If I were prime minister, I'd have sacked Cummings." This was not just the right thing to do. It also encapsulated why, after less than two months, Starmer is proving so effective. In just one brief clip, he was everything the prime minister was not: authentic, concerned, anxious about the public mood, and aware that it was more important to save thousands of lives than one man's job. Starmer is on something of a roll. A You Gov poll in The Times on Wednesday put the Conservatives down four points on 44% on a week ago, while Labour is up five at 38%. That is the most rapid swing in any public opinion for ten years. Meanwhile, a poll in the Mail finds that Starmer's approval ratings have jumped seven points, while Johnson's are down by five. Just three points now separate the two men – and this crisis has a long way to go. Much of this, of course, is because of the prime minister himself. Having botched his response to the virus from the very start, Johnson's unforced errors are for the first time getting noticed and cutting through. The Cummings incident has been politically devastating and may have caused permanent damage. In leaping to his adviser's defence against a united front of public opinion, Johnson has done something even more foolish than throwing away political capital and goodwill: he has handed it directly to his opponent. But opposition leaders do not become popular in direct relation to the unpopularity of prime ministers. If they did, Jeremy Corbyn would now be in No.10. Starmer deserves significant credit for the political platform and machine he has been assembling. Part of that is about political mechanics. Labour MPs talk about the enhanced professionalism of the frontbench team, with new chains of command and emphasis on message discipline. Yes, that will sometimes see Labour MPs repeating a simple message, which some will find irritating or even distasteful. The point, however, is not to make MPs robots, but to ensure they are communicating both authentically and effectively. Message discipline is what won both the Brexit referendum and 2019 general election. It is also about Starmer's personal manner. Over the last two months, amid an unprecedented crisis, he has conveyed an air of calm, measured authority. In this he has been able to play multiple roles: the benevolent supervisor ensuring the government is performing its work safely, the determined lawyer interrogating an unreliable witness, and – most traditionally – the opponent presenting a more empathetic prospectus. To this end he has sought to communicate three key lines: that he will not oppose for opposition's sake, that he will offer constructive criticism, and that we must "build a vision of a better society" as we recover from the virus. All of these are designed to maximise clarity and common cause. Labour must appeal to the party's existing wings and, importantly, those who have just voted for other people. Much of this dance involves knowing when to speak and when to hang back. For the first day of the Cummings row, for instance, Labour mainly chose not to interrupt its enemy while it was making mistakes. Then, Starmer was able to stage an intervention to present himself both as leading grown-up and moral guardian. But of course this strategy carries risks. Numerous figures have voiced concern that he is too quiet and too polite. His first few outings at Prime Minister's Questions were notable for the praise he offered, as well as the questions. Certainly, that wasn't helped by the fact the prime minister went into intensive care just a few days after Starmer became leader. He was thus also facing Dominic Raab, a figure who didn't have real power and wouldn't understand anything even if he did. Recently, however, that criticism has subsided. The word most commonly used to describe his performances is 'forensic'. The other one might as well be 'eviscerated'. In the Commons his grasp of detail has repeatedly exposed the chancer opposite him, who now finds he has no crowd to play to. On one outing Starmer trapped Johnson into deceiving the House, when the prime minister denied that the official guidance until mid-March had advised a low risk for care homes. His subsequent letter to Johnson, demanding he return to the House to correct the record, was a statement of intent, even though Johnson is hardly able to distinguish one lie from any other. The following week, Starmer's questioning over the NHS migrant surcharge so embarrassed Johnson – a man who literally owes his life to foreign NHS staff – that the following day he partially scrapped the charge. With such an approach, Starmer has gained credibility while the prime minister loses it. Not appearing too angry is also strategic. Starmer has calculated that the uniqueness of the crisis demands a new seriousness. His task is to convince the tens of thousands of recent Tory voters that they are not evil for voting Conservative and that he understands their concerns. But he is simultaneously pushing the envelope in some ways, not least through a pro-immigration message. If coronavirus has done anything positive, it is to bring home how much those people contribute and how much they need to be celebrated. Of course Starmer retains critics on all sides of the party. Sceptics on the left have muted their criticism in recent weeks, but the elevation of a defiantly New Labour - and anti-Corbyn - figure, David Evans, to lead the National Executive Committee, has caused unhappiness. On the Remain wing of the party, too, concern is mounting that Starmer has virtually ignored Brexit. The deadline to extend the transition period and prevent no-deal is just five weeks away. Brexit may in the end present a trickier political test for Starmer than covid. He would do anything to dispel the notion that he is a 'continuity Remainer', and Brexit plays into a culture war he needs to avoid. On the issue of extension, it is clever to hold back and watch the government implode – but if he doesn't apply pressure, the government can't respond to it. If we don't secure an extension, the government will do all it can to drag Labour down with it when the economy starts to tank. Besides anything else, pushing for an extension is the right thing to do for the economy and country. There is still time, and a chance to handle the issue sensitively. But for the moment, Starmer has everything going for him politically. Unlike Corbyn, who was untrained and unprepared when he became leader, Starmer immediately sounds like a prime minister and his opponents are taking him seriously. The right-wing media has either not wanted to mount an attack, or hasn't found any effective means to do it. The now-famous Mail on Sunday story about the donkey sanctuary was a masterful own goal. Corbyn had a long and colourful record waiting to be scrutinised. Starmer hasn't. Just a few months ago, the chance of a Labour revival in this parliament seemed remote. Today the prime minister looks fragile and the Conservatives are just six points ahead. The next four years offer an opportunity to build a reputation and consolidate public support. For now, Starmer's greatest problem is also his greatest asset: nobody knows much about him. But if he carries on the way he has, they soon will – and Labour will stand a real chance.

[rogueanalystblog]

The Bat Effect

When a weakened human organism is infected by the Corona Virus/SARS-CoV-2, it is more likely to suffer more damage and go through a more severe, if not critical, order of events up to ending up in intensive care or even facing death. 

This is by now probably not really a novelty to most readers, as I am writing this during the peak of the Corona crisis in Europe. However, this crisis exposes not just individual health related weaknesses, but also a much larger systemic and political one.

When the new kind of disease started to spread in Wuhan, Chinese authorities opted for a full lock-down of huge metropolitan area with more than 10 million people, all after counting just 400 cases, and sent in a well-oiled machine to combat and suppress the outbreak on January 23rd 2020. Today is March 19th 2020 and Mainland China did not report a single new case, apart from a few imported ones that they intercepted at the airport, while in Europe we are now surpassing the death toll of the Chinese with new infections still growing in an explosive manner and it is becoming more and more clear that each and every European state does not have the capacity to deal with a pandemic of this magnitude. And by European states we are not talking about Moldova or Ukraine, but Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Britain, Spain, Sweden et cetera, so realtively wealthy countries with a reputation for having very solid healthcare systems and well trained physicians and other specialists. So how on earth is it possible, that it is exactly here where the virus hits hardest? Has the disease not spread from Mainland China? Has Europe not had weeks or even months to brace for the impact? Why are they so unprepared? Did they not bother to formulate action plans in case of a pandemic outbreak? They had to deal with the threat of terror attacks for two decades now, so they should have had every reason to prepare for such scenarios.

Yet they did not. Even weeks and months into the outbreak, Europe did not even bother to cancel flights or screen passengers, let alone instruct doctors and hospitals to test patients with certain symptoms for Covid-19, the lung disease that follows from a Corona infection. Au contraire, it was European “specialists”, some of them not even physicians but veterinaries, like in the case of the German Robert Koch Institute, who posed as experts on a virus that they have never seen and that they did not fully understand. While even in China, the virus sent about 4% of all infected into their early grave, European virologists and health experts compared the SARS-CoV-2 with the normal Influenza or flu, which in fact has a death-rate of usually less than 0.1%. Instead of demanding decisive measures, controls, testings and ramping up of capacities across the board (hospital beds, desinfectants, consumables like masks et cetera), they downplayed the threat and advised for letting the virus spread through the population to allow for a  “herd immunity” to develop, a collective resistance against the virus. At the same time a number of Asian states have taken all sorts of measures to contain the virus and even reducing the number of new cases down to zero, effectively eradicating the virus, at least for the time being, and thus buying time to develop vaccines and medication to manage it better down the road.

Letting a virus, to which your population has not acquired said immunity (which by the playbook of mother nature is a rather cruel process that goes hand in hand with high casualties, just think of the smallpox that killed up to 90% of the native South American population a few centuries ago). demonstrates an almost criminal incompetence and negligance.

And while the death rate in Wuhan was just shy of 4%, the death rate in Italy stands currently at a whopping 8.3% (when you divide the number of deaths by the number of reported cases). And it is not just the old and sick that perish. It is doctors and nurses, who are under great stress. It is the younger ones who have a chronic condition, known or unknown, and it is in general people of all ages, whose immune system is just temporarily not in shipshape to combat this new virus  and who are thus affected most severly. In short: the virus is a threat to everyone across the board.

Now compared to the smallpox that hit the indigenious populations in South America, the Corona Virus is relatively “mild”, it will not wipe out the population. However letting the virus spread in this uncontrolled fashion is playing lottery with the lives of millions and effectively a euthanasia program for anyone whose health is already impacted by another condition. In short: it is something we would have expected from an autocratic corrupt dicatatorship or one-party state but not something that happens in relatively rich, civilized and democratic Europe. A continent which supposedly values the individual and which would be expected to go to extreme lengths to protect its population. And yet it is exactly European countries that play nonchalantly with an unknown disease and who are putting up with enormous risks for their citizens,while China and Vietnam, both undemocratic one-party regimes, keep the disease in check and effectively protect their nation against it.

By now, we have to ask ourselves the painful question: why has Europe let this happen? We have more than enough governments, institutions, universities and reasearch facilities and yet almost none alarmed the wider public, in fact they all downplayed the issue up to the point when it became clear that they were all massively wrong.

The even more painful answer is that this is a systemic failture. Our systems are not that democratic as we want to think they are. They are way more rotten and corrupt, in same cases even more than certain autocratic regimes, than we try to autosuggest to ourselves. And they are way more unprepared to deal with a real crisis, that cannot be inflated away by central bankers. In fact our systems have decayed to the point where they are not any more capable of sound decision making processes and probably have been already for some time. It is not a question of left or right, or individual politicians. It is a question of the whole sytem of government that buys support with empty promises and debt and yet fails to deliver in times of need. So far we were lucky and many government failures could be contained or their effects postponed to future generations, but this one is different. The virus does not care about interest rates or currency reforms. It does not change its deadly impact or just goes away by relabeling it or using the wrong statistics to downplay the effects. The virus itself is a fact that cannot be negotiated away and no PR campaign will be able to contain it. What Corona did, was exposing the rotten state of Europe (and maybe the US of A) and the collective incompetence of our elites and maybe our own because we put them there. 

And when the day comes and we will have survived the outbreak, surely with massive losses in terms of health and jobs and lives, we will have to get up and start another kind of therapy: fixing our democracies. 

You all have probably heard the phrase that crisis is just another word for opportunity. And in this case, Corona is exactly what the doctor ordered. A painful wakeup call. And if we gonna miss this, the next disaster will just just follow. And who knows, the next plague will not just contend itself with 3% or 8% but maybe 10 % or 60%? The next economic recession might not just result in bouncing back in the next 10 months but may become a full-fledged depression (as it partially has been in southern Europe already since 2009). In short: if we gonna miss this one, reality will most likely continue to punish us harder and harder, up to the point where we start to learn and adapt, or jump off the stage of history itself.

Agreed, today we all stick together, take care of our loved ones, our neighbours and ourselves. Today we have to fight this battle against this invisible enemy, but when this is over, we will have to start asking questions.

A bat made a Chinese man feel a bit funny in late autumn or summer and all of Europe came apart at the seams in spring...the bat effect. And before you try to blame the Chinese government for not “controlling enough” (oh the irony!) or the Chinese people for their exotic eating habits: this could have been anything, from a bat soup in Wuhan to an undercooked chicken in Madras or foul shrimp in your salad that was served in a bistro in your neighbourhood. These things happen, but it is your job to contain it and deal with it. And by these standards Europe (and by the looks of it America as well) has already failed spectacularly.

[englishchinesetranslations]

A photo of US freelance journalist Carl Goette-Luciak with a Nicaraguan Sandinista that Max Blumenthal misrepresented on his blog Grayzone to grave consequences (Photo: Twitter)

The first in a three part series on the toxic influence of psuedo-journalists in the digital age and the danger they represent to the self-determination of peoples across the globe.

Professional liars, conspiracy theorists and old-fashioned fanatics have existed since the dawn of civilization, but in a digital age where clicks are driven by outrage and sensational headlines, these bad actors find themselves in possession of a megaphone with global reach that has never before been seen in human history. But not all grifters and yellow journalists are created equal. That is to say, in media platforms prone to consolidation and driven by outrage, the most extreme voices have a tendency to dominate the field.

The game of exaggerations, baseless accusations and dictator apologia for cash and clout is becoming increasingly dominated by a small and particularly unhinged group of smear-merchants who boast a cultish group of very-online and very-aggressive followers. These electronic minions of misinformation spread the exaggerations, denials and half-truths they receive from their grifter masters with evangelical zeal, and an apparent imperviousness to facts or reality ¹.

Enter Grayzone, a supposedly leftist crew of “journalists” with opaque financing and Russian support.

This all-caps charge against responsible journalism is led by son of a wealthy Clinton advisor, Max Blumenthal and his zany “never met a Human Rights violation we didn’t like” cohorts at Grayzone ². They receive helping hands from a number of shady media organizations and fringe voices that include Russian disinformation network RT, TeleSur in South America, reknown racists Richard Spencer, Tucker Carlson, a nazi school shooter and even ex-KKK wizard David Duke.

Though they claim to write from the left, their digital fog-machine defies political boundaries, incorporating anti-semetic smears about Soros that have white-supremacist origins, genocide denial tricks pioneered by European fascist parties and the “always discredit or insult rather than respond to fact” tactics of sociopaths like Alex Jones.

Every social movement in the world they dislike is the fault of the CIA, and every government they support, which are unfailingly disturbingly authoritarian, can do no wrong.

These fearless champions of state-violence cheer police forces brutalizing protesters, deny well-documented death squads and rationalize oppression at every turn.

Despite Blumenthal’s attacks on journalists who work for publications funded by Soros, he has had no problem accepting money from that source in the past, such as when he worked for the Nation, whose parent company, TYPE Media Center is funded in part by grants from the man he so often demonizes, nor from his time at “Media Matters” which has also enjoyed Soros funding. Oh, and also AlterNet, who helped him develop Grayzone until 2018, when they fired him, presumably because his conspiracy theory mongering was damaging their reputation.

Nor has he been above accepting gifts from the regimes he writes so flatteringly about. Blumenthal and other writers at Grayzone have also been exposed accepting “journalism prizes” from pro-Assad lobby groups.

What are their motives? That varies from personality to personality, but they all share two traits: an inability to realize the world does not in fact revolve around the United States and the certainty that they know what should happen in countries they don’t live in infinitely better than people who do.

As David Smilde, senior fellow at human rights group WOLA and Professor at Tulane aptly stated, they “instrumentalize the realities of the global South for their own purposes — whether that be personal identity work or political battles they consider important — and it’s a form of colonialism”

It’s American exceptionalism turned on its head — an inability to imagine that people in other countries have the agency to form their own social movements and revolutions without help from the U.S. This worldview leads them to de-legitimize and dismiss protesters in Hong Kong, Iraq, Iran, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Venezuela as illegitimate, and to deny horrific human rights abuses in a score of countries across the globe from Russia to Bolivia.

Grayzone: Defenders of Authoritarians the World Over

I first heard of Max Blumenthal during Grayzone’s 2018–2019 “Latin American Human Rights Violation Denial Tour”. Someone sent me a video of Max Blumenthal in a rich neighborhood of Caracas as “proof” that the thousands of Venezuelan immigrants I saw daily did not, in fact, exist.

“You don’t know what it’s like to work all day only be to able to afford a few tomatoes and some lettuce, to make a little salad. And to wake up to your daughter telling you ‘I’m hungry’, but you have nothing to give her. You can’t imagine the feeling of powerless,” — a Venezuelan immigrant near Cucuta, Colombia in 2018

A couple catches a nap as we hitched a ride in a truck transporting scrap metal while travelling with the thousands fleeing VZ. Last year, I walked to Bogota from the Venezuelan border with the “caminantes”. Mini-doc of the trip here. (Photo: Joshua Collins)

The issue? The health crisis he was denying wasn’t happening in the luxury neighborhoods he prefers to frequent on his junket-journalism tourist trips, but rather in the barrios and the countryside where the majority of the country works for less money per month than minimum wage workers in the United States make in an hour.

As he crowed sarcastically to the camera, I dismissed him as a confused tourist and kept documenting the 5 million Venezuelans who have fled their collapsed country in the biggest mass-migration in South American history.

I talked daily with people suffering from years of healthcare neglect and insecurity while Max stayed in the capital, assuring everyone that the unfolding humanitarian crisis was nothing more than U.S State Department propaganda (reportedly never leaving the safety of rich Caracas neighborhoods).

“You don’t know what it’s like to work all day only be to able to afford a few tomatoes and some lettuce, to make a little salad. And to wake up to your daughter telling you ‘I’m hungry’, but you have nothing to give her. You can’t imagine the feeling of powerless,” one immigrant told me a few days after Blumenthal’s Potemkin Village video variety show, which included mocking employees at a mall in terrible Spanish — employees who at the time most likely worked for $7 a month. (The monthly minimum wage has since slipped to $3).

But that was just the beginning. I would hear much from the Grayzone crew over the next year, and learn a lot more about their checkered past, a record that has left a chain of victims around the globe for years.

Flipping Sides After a Trip to Russia

An interview in which Blumenthal laments leftists who would supports Bashar Al-Assad in Syria

Max Blumenthal got his start writing about Syria in 2011, where he was staunchly on the side of rebels against Assad. He spoke passionately of atrocities committed by the Assad regime, even resigning from a Beirut paper in 2012 because he claimed they were “Assad apologists”, who “paid me pathetically, barely enough to pay rent in my New York apartment.”

He even goes so far as to say that some of his colleagues in Syria were so caught up in “Anti-Imperialism” that they found themselves in the warped position of defending Assad, whom he viewed as a murderer.

He was accompanied in this endeavor by his mustachioed Brooklyn hipster side-kick Ben Norton, who, unlike Max, dispensed his Syria expertise via internet from New York.

It’s unclear what qualifications Norton possessed at the time however, other than a willingness to follow Max’s every editorial lead, a bitchin’ one-man noise band, and the sweetest chinstrap in Williamsburg, but he was on board, and he was vehemently anti-Assad.

Suddenly, in 2015 Max and his pet mustachio flipped sides. It just so happens that they became pro-Assad after attending a Moscow luxury Gala; the same event that got Jill Stein and Trump appointment Michael Flynn (who was paid $40,000 for attending) in hot water. They were new true-believers in the Assad regime, and enthusiastic apologists for the murderous actions they had previously railed against.

Was it a Russian buy-out that changed their views? That’s hard to say. Despite Grayzone’s constant evidence-free attacks on other journalists’ supposed connections to the pentagon and the NED (National Endowment of Democracy, which he claims is an instrument of “regime change”), the funding for Grayzone is completely opaque.

It is unclear how they fly a dozen employees around the world and still manage to rent expensive apartments in New York and Washington D.C.

But suddenly Max had a new girlfriend, Anya Parampil (who joined RT in 2014). He also had a new media sponsor and an “Anti-Imperial” axe to grind. Grayzone coverage immediately became pro-Assad. Parampil would soon be fired from RT and go to work full-time for their shadily financed project as they expanded markets and found new countries to exploit outside of the Middle East.

I’m sure it is completely coincidental that everything Grayzone has published since then has towed exactly with the official propaganda coming from the Kremlin, that he suddenly became obsessed with “Russia hysteria” and that his work is now amplified by RT.

But Syria isn’t my area of expertise. Much has been written on Grayzone’s disaster junket-journalism coverage of the Middle East that includes selfies next to torture sites, promoting conspiracy theories about aid group the White Helmets and denying atrocities committed by Assad. My experience lies more in how they have misrepresented Latin America — which they have done with vigor.

On Nicaragua, Grayzone and Death Squads

When I first heard of their antics as I worked on the Venezuelan border, Grayzone were recently returned from a trip to Nicaragua. One in which they framed a fiercely violent government oppression of protests that killed hundreds, and injured thousands , as a justified response.

Human rights investigators invited to the country by Nicaraguan president Ortega however, did not agree with those claims. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights stated that the regime had “used lethal weapons against children and students” and had arbitrarily detained hundreds of peaceful protesters who had been subsequently exposed to treatment that amounted to torture, including mass-beatings, death-threats, sexual assault and psychological abuse that included “threats of rape”, witholding food and water, “threatening to kill their relatives” and even threats of “burning them alive”.

Whether the protests were “valid” or not, would become a moot point; Ortega outlawed public protests shortly after crushing them violently.

As these events were occurring, Max Blumenthal and the Grayzone crew were portraying Daniel Ortega as a hero, hyping his baseless assertions that the students weren’t a legitimate protest movement, but rather a CIA front in a series of articles claiming international conspiracy. These claims were as without evidence as those of the government. Their effort culminated in an absolutely exhausting and fawning hour-long interview with the Nicaraguan president, in which Ortega blamed the hundreds of student deaths on everything from “crime” to “car accidents”.

Before Grayzone left Nicaragua, they would attack a number of journalists and protesters who presented accounts that didn’t fit their pre-conceived narrative. They misrepresented a young protester who released a video of police killing her fellow students that went viral. She was later captured by police and forced to record a “confession” obtained under state torture.

Grayzone ran a story on the event, stating the killings at the University were a hoax, a claim Max would repeat in various interviews while in Nicaragua.

The story Max published however, was penned by an author who doesn’t even exist, as exposed in a 2018 report by Charles Davis at the Daily Beast.

It was a breath-taking display of a lack of journalistic ethics on the part of Blumenthal.

Also while in Nicaragua, Max penned a lengthy piece in Mintpress heavily implying, if not stating directly, that Carl David Goette-Luciak, an independent reporter who wrote for NPR and the Guardian, was actually a regime-change plant. In the same piece, he represents a journalist who was killed by government snipers while livestreaming, as being killed by protesters.

His claims were accompanied with a photo of Luciak beside an armed soldier whom Max claimed was opposition. He wasn’t. Luciak was actually posing with a Sandinista — a leftist. The picture was taken as part of a pro-bono project with Azucena Castillo, a Nicaraguan journalist currently in exile for her work at independent media organization Radio de la Ciudadania. It’s unclear if Max was simply making up the accusation or fooled by government claims. Either way it’s a lie that led to grave consequences.

An image that circulated on social media following Max’s lie. The photo is accompanied with a caption that falsely claims Luciak was posing with a “A leader of the MRS party”. He wasn’t

These false claims led to thousands of people publishing Goette-Luciak’s address as well as death threats that forced him into hiding. Eventually Luciak was captured by State forces, threatened with torture and charged with disseminating “fake news” by the Nicaraguan government before being deported from the country.

Defending the use of live ammunition against Nicaraguan citizens, mass-detainment and State-sponsored torture wasn’t enough however, they had to shift the onus of blame onto the people being massacred. You see, in the bizarro Grayzone worldview, oppressive and murderous police forces are actually champions of the people. When they kill hundreds of protesters, it is always justified.

The Grayzone tactics of cheer-leading state violence, smearing and attacking critics with distortions that put their lives in danger, misrepresenting protesters as hapless, violent pawns of foreign powers and obfuscating facts on the ground have become the trademarked tactics of this crew as they tour the world in search of social media “likes”.

These breaches of journalism ethics, white-washing human rights violations and editorializing breaking news against protesters have very dangerous real-world effects.

And as they champion these attacks on the liberty of people in countries they don’t live in, they damage the credibility of brave protesters and journalists putting their lives on the line who do.

Max Blumenthal said something back when he opposed war crimes in 2013 that resonated with me.

“People have a right to rise up against oppression”

I agree. It’s a shame he seems to now stand for the opposite.

Joshua Collins is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Colombia. He has worked for Al Jazeera, the New Humanitarian and various other organizations in Latin America. For more stories you can follow him on twitter or at his website Muros Invisibles.

[totalconservative]

New Post has been published on Total Conservative News

New Post has been published on http://totalconservative.com/fake-news-nation-these-two-stories-prove-the-medias-liberal-agenda/

Fake News Nation: These Two Stories PROVE the Media’s Liberal Agenda

We’re not sure how anyone of any political stripe could still be in denial about the U.S. mainstream media’s abject liberal bias. The last three years of anti-Trump hysteria, combined with an utter disregard for the facts, has proven it conclusively for anyone who has ears to hear. But if there were a few fence-stragglers who still wanted to put their faith in our legacy media institutions, the godawful double-assault of the Covington Catholic story and the Jussie Smollett hoax should be enough to drag them kicking and screaming to the truth.

This past week, “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was charged in Chicago for orchestrating a fake hate crime, wasting police resources, and doing everything other than putting the country into a trumped-up racial crisis. But while Smollett is wholly responsible for his own deranged behavior, he could not have succeeded in spreading his narrative far and wide without the help of a credulous and ethically-challenged media. All too eager to believe that a gay black man might have been attacked by MAGA-loving thugs, the media reported Smollett’s take without the slightest whiff of disbelief.

What makes the media’s coverage of the Smollett case even more ridiculous is that they JUST CAME OFF a story where they were made to look like lying, mob-driven fools. One of the worst cases of media malpractice – the Covington Catholic story – was hardly cool by the time this fake hate crime emerged from Smollett’s diseased mind.

You would think, after ruining their credibility irrevocably by trying to destroy the reputation of an innocent high school kid from Kentucky, the media would have exercised some caution. You’d think they might have thought a little more seriously about some of the intensely-doubtful aspects of Smollett’s tale. But no, they plunged full steam ahead, once again plunging the nation into a scandal of utterly fake proportions.

In the former case, the media might have to pay a price. Nick Sandmann, the teen at the center of the Covington controversy, is suing the Washington Post for $250 million.

But whether or not the Post is found liable for libel in a court of law, the damage done to the paper – along with CNN, NBC, The New York Times, and many others – will be far worse than any legal settlement. The media is riding high right now on a wave of Trump-centered interest, but it’s only a matter of time before that interest dies down. When it does, these outlets will be naturally exposed for the years of nonsense, tabloid-level reporting they indulged.

Frankly, it’s a reckoning long overdue.

[theconservativebrief]

Almost a year ago, on October 5, 2017, the New York Times published an article accusing Harvey Weinstein of a pattern of sexual misconduct that almost single-handedly launched the most public phase of the #MeToo movement. What followed was a year of powerful men across industries being accused of using their power to sexually harass and assault those around them with impunity; a year of cultural discourse around the politics of gender and sex and consent; a year of demands for systemic change.

And now, as the one-year anniversary of the movement approaches, nearly every one of #MeToo’s major themes is converging in the sexual assault accusations facing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, says that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were both teenagers in the 1980s. According to Ford, Kavanaugh and a friend “corralled her” into a bedroom, where Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and groped her, covering her mouth when she tried to scream. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford told the Washington Post. She was able to escape, she says, only after Kavanaugh and his friend toppled into a drunken heap.

Kavanaugh denies the accusation. “This is a completely false allegation,” he said in a statement. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone.”

On Sunday, a second woman came forward. In an interview with the New Yorker, Deborah Ramirez said that while she was at Yale with Kavanaugh in 1983, he exposed his genitalia to her at a dorm party, shoving his penis into her face.

Kavanaugh denies this claim as well, saying, “This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name—and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building—against these last-minute allegations.”

Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 4, 2018 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Ford is set to testify before Congress, as is Kavanaugh. But in the lead-up to Ford’s testimony, the media, politicians, and ordinary Americans have managed to relitigate nearly all the major questions that the #MeToo movement has brought up over the past year.

The Kavanaugh confirmation process has brought to the surface the many fallacies our culture repeats about rape and other sexual misconduct: that committing sexual violence is normal male behavior (boys will be boys, after all); that real victims come forward right away (and anyone who waits must be a liar); that depriving someone of a powerful position is the same as locking him in prison (or even killing him); that it takes the word of multiple women (at least more than one, and probably more than two) to equal the worth of a man’s word; and that the country owes accused men a path to redemption (even if they haven’t acknowledged what they did wrong).

These are the stories that we repeat in our culture over and over again: quietly among ourselves when someone we know comes forward with an accusation of sexual misconduct, and more loudly, in the press, when stories of sexual misconduct make the news. They’re the stories that we repeated again and again over the course of the past year as the #MeToo movement rose and swelled, and they’re the stories we’re repeating now as Brett Kavanaugh fights for a supreme court seat.

Here are the myths our culture tells about sexual misconduct and how they have played out in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process — and how they damage us.

After Ford went public with her allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee’s supporters soon began deploying what Megan Garber at the Atlantic calls the “the boys-being-boys defense.”

This defense has two parts to it; first, it minimizes harassment and assault, likening these behaviors to harmless games or roughhousing. Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted about the Kavanaugh allegations, “It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Meanwhile, Carrie Severino, a lawyer for the Judicial Crisis Network, a group backing Kavanaugh, suggested in a CNN interview that the actions Ford describes could perhaps be interpreted as “rough horseplay.”

Next, it claims that this type of behavior is so widespread as to be unremarkable. A lawyer close to the White House told Politico: “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

We’ve seen both pieces of the “boys-will-be-boys” defense over and over in the past year, whenever a high-profile man has become the subject of sexual misconduct allegations. Again and again, we’ve heard that what a woman or girl experienced as assault or harassment was actually just flirting or playing around. Again and again, we’ve heard the argument that sexually coercive or even violent behavior is normal and to be expected from boys and men.

Critics of the #MeToo have routinely redefined sexual misconduct as mere “seduction” gone wrong, worrying that a movement aimed at exposing the prevalence of harassment and assault will instead destroy “flirtation.” In a much-discussed op-ed in January in the New York Times, Daphne Merkin quoted an unnamed “feminist friend”: “What ever happened to flirting?”

“What one woman considers annoyance or even mild harassment, another might consider harmless flirtation, or even seduction,” wrote Heather Robinson in the New York Post in December. She asked, “will the fear of being branded a harasser cast a pall over opportunities for singles to find romance and fun this holiday season?”

Never mind the fact that survivors speaking up as part of #MeToo weren’t talking about holiday fun — they were sharing stories of abusive behavior, often by those in positions of power over them, that frequently left them traumatized.

Meanwhile, other critics of the movement argued that what looked like sexual misconduct to #MeToo advocates was simply the way of all men. Andrew Sullivan said it in New York magazine in January: Male sexuality “as men would naturally express it, if they could get away with it,” he wrote, is “full of handsiness and groping and objectification and lust and aggression and passion and the ruthless pursuit of yet another conquest.”

He allowed that, yes, “we can and should be restrained, tamed, kept under control” — but according to him, “groping” is just part of men’s nature. If the #MeToo movement fails to accept this, he wrote, “it is going to alienate a lot of people.”

As Rosalind Wiseman, author of Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World, told Vox, the behavior Ford describes is not “horseplay”: “Horseplay means there is equality and consent between two people.” This is also true of “seven minutes in heaven,” or any of the many other sexually tinged games young people play — they can be fun if all parties are enthusiastic. If one person is forcing another person to participate, it’s not a game anymore — it’s abusive and harmful.

Protesters march during the Women’s March in Washington DC, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Moreover, as Wiseman notes, sexual assault by teenage boys may be common — many men have told her that it is, at least anecdotally — but that doesn’t make it right. To treat this behavior as in any way acceptable, as just “boys being boys,” normalizes something that can leave survivors with lasting trauma. It helps create an environment in which “all violence is basically accepted and begins to be tolerated,” Niobe Way, a psychology professor who studies boys, told Vox.

It’s unlikely that, as the lawyer put it to Politico, “every man” is guilty of something like what Ford describes. But the #MeToo movement has shown how prevalent sexual assault and sexual harassment are. In a survey conducted earlier this year by the group Stop Street Harassment, 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men said they’d been harassed or assaulted at some point in their lives.

If we respond to this prevalence by throwing up our hands and deciding that sexual misconduct is simply something men do (for one thing, sometimes the perpetrators aren’t men), nothing will ever change. Instead, anti-sexual assault advocates have long been working to spread the message that assault and harassment are never normal or acceptable, regardless of one’s age. In the last year, the #MeToo movement has helped to amplify their calls.

One of the recurring critiques of Ford’s story is that she didn’t tell enough people when it happened.

“Ford never mentioned the purported assault to anyone at the time, or at any time over the following 20-plus years,” noted the Federalist, arguing that “the facts seemed to support” the idea that “Ford had been dispatched by the left to thwart Kavanaugh’s impending confirmation.”

“Ford never told anyone of any supposed incident until 2012, when she discussed the matter with a therapist during marital counseling,” reported Breitbart in its first Ford story, giving the point a place of honor in the second paragraph and ostentatiously referring to Ford’s account as a “supposed incident.”

It’s a critique with which President Donald Trump wholeheartedly agrees. In a series of tweets on Friday morning, Trump — reportedly pleased by the positive response he’s earned by not personally attacking Ford — argued that she is undoubtedly lying now because she didn’t report Kavanaugh’s alleged actions when she was a teenager.

I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 21, 2018

The idea behind this argument is that if Kavanaugh had really attacked Ford at a house party back then, she should have told people right away. She should have reported it to the police or a teacher or her parents or another trusted adult; she should have put it on the record when it happened. Since she didn’t, the argument concludes, we can safely assume that the “supposed incident” never actually happened.

It’s an argument we saw before with Bill Cosby’s accusers and in the past year as part of the general backlash to the #MeToo movement: If it really happened, she would have said something at the time. She wouldn’t have waited.

As German Lopez has already outlined for Vox, that argument ignores the data that we have on survivors of sexual assault, which says that most of them choose not to report what happened to them. Mostly, that’s not because the survivors are making false claims or because what happened to them wasn’t a big deal. It’s because what happened is a very big deal, and our system is very poorly set up to handle it.

That means many survivors fear that if they come forward, they’ll only have to suffer repeated trauma at the hands of the legal system and have nothing to show for it afterward — and the data suggests that they’re not wrong to have this fear.

As Lopez wrote: “Part of this is the result of sexual assault victims fearing the repercussions of speaking out — the shaming, stigma, and retaliation, not to mention the difficulty of potentially reliving a traumatic event over and over in the course of an investigation.” Another factor is that “even when sexual assault survivors do come forward, police don’t appear to pursue their claims as vigorously as they would other crimes.”

We know this to be the case for survivors of sexual assault now, in 2018. In the early ’80s, the experience of coming forward with a sexual assault report was even worse — and the idea of coming forward with a story about an assault by an acquaintance at a party was nearly unthinkable.

The term “date rape” did not exist until the 1970s, and the earliest known usage is by feminist theorist Susan Brownmiller in her 1975 book Against Our Will. The first major national date rape case came in 1990, and it was met with widespread confusion and dismissal. Reportedly, when the victim told her father that she’d been raped by a date that she took back to her dorm room, he responded, “It would not have happened if you had not let him in your room.”

Four decades ago, outside of feminist circles, rape was understood to mean “stranger rape.” It was a violent assault by a masked man in a dark alley. Getting assaulted by an acquaintance at a party would have been considered “horseplay.” For those who weren’t affected by it — those who weren’t actually getting assaulted by their acquaintances at parties — it wasn’t considered scary. It was primarily considered funny.

There are multiple ’80s teen comedies that built ostensibly lighthearted comedic sequences out of the sheer hilarity of the idea of girls getting assaulted at a party — most notably, as Helaine Olen pointed out on Twitter, Sixteen Candles.

Sixteen Candles was celebrated for decades for the dreaminess of its romantic hero, Jake Ryan. Jake Ryan was the perfect dream boy of the ’80s. (“Jake is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school,” wrote Hank Stuever, tongue in cheek, in the Washington Post in 2004. “Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”)

Jake Ryan also makes a speech about how his girlfriend Caroline — perhaps the closest thing this movie has to a villain — is so drunk that “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” before passing her unconscious body over to another boy and saying, “Have fun.” When Caroline wakes up the next morning, she finds that while she was unconscious, the other boy had sex with her, which is to say that the boy raped her.

“I’m really sorry about getting you mixed up with that guy,” Jake tells Caroline the next day.

“Oh, it’s okay,” she says blithely. “He wasn’t too terrible.”

The Caroline subplot is a neat encapsulation of how mainstream culture thought about date rape in 1984. It is the girl’s fault. (Caroline is sexually aggressive and drunk, so therefore, she deserves what she gets.) It is acceptable because the boy is entitled to sex. (The boy who rapes Caroline is a nerd who is roundly ignored by other girls; his status is presented as a tragedy for the poor, unjustly overlooked nerd rather than the result of a sensible self-preservation strategy by the girls, and Caroline is presented as the recompense he is owed.) And after all, it is nothing worth complaining about.

If Caroline didn’t want to be raped, Sixteen Candles suggests, she wouldn’t have gone to a party and gotten drunk. If she didn’t want to be raped, she wouldn’t have been around a boy. If she didn’t want to be raped, she would have been a nice girl. Because she is not a nice girl, she has no grounds for complaint. And anyway, what happened to her definitely wasn’t rape.

For a teenage girl like Ford or like Ramirez, the culture around her would have reminded her that if a boy assaulted her at a party, it was her own fault, it wasn’t a big deal, and it certainly wasn’t assault. And if, two years after her alleged attack, she felt any doubts or regrets about her silence, she just had to look at what dreamy and perfect Jake Ryan thought.

As the #MeToo movement has gained steam over the past year, many — though by no means all — powerful people who have been the subject of sexual misconduct allegations have lost prestigious positions. Talk show host Charlie Rose and CBS chair Les Moonves were fired from the network. Democrat Al Franken resigned from the Senate under pressure from his party. Mario Batali stepped away from his restaurants.

Relatively few people accused as part of #MeToo have faced any sort of criminal prosecution in connection with the allegations. But critics of the movement routinely conflate the loss of an impressive job with imprisonment or even death. John Hockenberry, for instance, a former public radio host who was accused by multiple women of sexually harassing them or sending them inappropriate messages, recently wrote about his experience being “swept away” by the allegations in a Harper’s essay titled “Exile.”

Writing in Canada’s National Post, Christie Blatchford cast the #MeToo movement in even more dire language. “This is where we are now,” she wrote. “An execution, then no trial. Just an execution.”

Related to the idea that losing a job is akin to criminal conviction is the notion that those who’ve been accused as part of #MeToo are entitled to the same protections as criminal defendants, even if they are not facing criminal charges. Daphne Merkin, for instance, lamented in the New York Times in January that “due process is nowhere to be found” for men like Garrison Keillor, Jonathan Schwartz, Ryan Lizza, and Franken — all of whom had lost jobs as a result of #MeToo, but none of whom had faced any criminal proceedings.

Supporters of Kavanaugh and critics of Ford’s allegations have performed a similar kind of conflation. “This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters on Tuesday, before adding, “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close.”

“Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is in crisis,” writes Edward Morrissey at the Week. “So is our commitment to impartial justice and due process.”

But since he is not undergoing a criminal trial, Kavanaugh is not actually entitled to “due process” in a legal sense. The criminal court system in this country has a high bar for convictions, requiring prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, because the consequences of a criminal conviction are so serious — the defendant can be deprived of liberty, or even of life.

For civil cases, the bar is lower; the potential penalties are less severe. And when what is at stake is the loss of a job — serious, certainly, but not the same as imprisonment, no matter what #MeToo critics say — then the high standards set up for criminal cases are not necessarily appropriate.

This is doubly true in the case of Kavanaugh, who stands not to lose a job he already holds but instead to lose the opportunity to serve on the country’s highest court. As Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes at the New Yorker, Kavanaugh “is petitioning the public for the privilege of holding one of the highest public offices in the country, and he should have to persuade us that he didn’t do what he is accused of doing.”

A protester holds up a sign during a rally in Washington, DC, against the confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh on September 4, 2018. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

No one is entitled to a seat on the Supreme Court. It’s certainly reasonable to investigate Ford’s account; she herself has called for such an investigation. But that doesn’t mean that if she can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Kavanaugh assaulted her, the American people owe him a lifetime job deciding some of the country’s most difficult and consequential cases, including those that affect women’s right to make decisions about their bodies.

Many critics of #MeToo have lost sight of an important fact: Our legal protections in court exist to balance the rights of the accused with the rights of the victim and the interests of society. In other situations, we should also think about balancing those rights and interests. It’s important to consider the right of accused men to defend themselves, but it’s also important to consider the rights of survivors, and the right we all have to be led and governed by people who treat women — indeed, who treat all people — with respect.

Before Ramirez came forward, one of the recurring defenses of Kavanaugh was that since Ford was the only person accusing him of assault, it probably didn’t happen.

“If there’s one thing we’ve seen time and again, it’s that one allegation often triggers a cascade of additional claims,” wrote David French in the National Review. “There seem to be precious few men who engage in serious sexual misconduct just once. If this was the kind of behavior that Kavanaugh engaged in, then look for more people to come forward.”

In a separate article in the National Review Online, Mona Charen wrote, “Maybe [Kavanaugh’s soccer dad persona] is all a charade, but we should be loath to draw that conclusion without at least one more woman stepping up to recount a similar experience. Absent that, his whole adult life tips the scales far more than one uncorroborated accusation.”

This argument draws from data that suggests that most sexual predators are repeat offenders. Generally, few predators stop at one groping: They tend to consistently cross boundaries with women, even escalating their behavior over time. On that level, it’s totally reasonable to argue that if Kavanaugh really is a predator, then statistically, he should have more than one victim.

However, we’ve already seen that there are all kinds of structural and social barriers in place that prevent women from telling anyone that they’ve been assaulted. So if a person has assaulted multiple women, there’s plenty of reason for those women not to come forward. And that means that making multiple accusers a prerequisite of taking any accusation against Kavanaugh seriously feels less like a genuine attempt due diligence than like a balancing act: how many women’s word does it take to equal the word of one man?

It took more than 80 women going on the record about Harvey Weinstein to get criminal charges brought against him. Now that Ramirez has stepped forward, there are two women on the record about Kavanaugh.

How many women would it take, not to bring criminal charges against Brett Kavanaugh, but just to disqualify him from one of the most prestigious seats of power in the country?

For some of Kavanaugh’s supporters, it apparently would take more than two. Shortly after Ramirez’s story went live, National Review editor Rich Lowry pointedly quoted from a section of Ramirez’s New Yorker article that he found less than convincing on Twitter. “After six days of carefully assessing her memories…” he wrote. One woman’s word might not equal the word of a man, but two apparently doesn’t either.

The Kavanaugh scandal hit at roughly the same time that some of the more high-profile men accused of sexual misconduct last fall (including Louis C.K. and Matt Lauer) began to put out feelers to return to the center of public life, raising the question: What do these accused men need to do to be granted forgiveness?

As a result, Kavanaugh has found himself looped into this redemption narrative as well: Shouldn’t he, supporters demand, be given the chance to redeem himself for his youthful indiscretion? The fact that Kavanaugh has denied all of the accusations against him, so that officially, there is nothing for him to redeem himself from, has not prevented this narrative from taking off.

“We were taught to extend forgiveness when people demonstrate through their actions that they have changed,” argued Dennis Prager at National Review. “As a well-known ancient Jewish adage put it: ‘Where the penitent stands, the most righteous cannot stand.’ In other words, the highest moral achievement is moral improvement.”

The argument is, roughly, that Kavanaugh didn’t assault Ford, but if he did, he should still be able to redeem himself enough to participate in public life again.

This is a tricky bit of preemptive doublethink. Many people are happy to wrestle with the question of how men accused of sexual misconduct can redeem themselves and earn the public’s goodwill again. But if you believe that Kavanaugh assaulted someone as a teenager, and you also believe that he should be able to redeem himself enough to occupy a seat on the Supreme Court, surely the first step toward redemption would be for him to say that he did it?

This argument relies on the belief that no matter what Kavanaugh might ever have done, and no matter how he responds to it, he is owed a powerful and prestigious position in public life if he wants it. We’ve seen the same belief undergirding the great redemption debate of the past few months, as the famous men who lost their jobs last year begin to clamber back into the spotlight.

“One next step, among many steps [for #MeToo] has to be figuring out a way for the men who are caught up in it to find redemption,” wrote Michael Ian Black on Twitter following Louis C.K.’s first major public performance after admitting to sexual misconduct. C.K. has admitted to having masturbated in front of women without their consent and has acknowledged that this was wrong, but as far as we know, he has not done anything to make restitution to his victims or to assure the public that he will not hurt women again in the future.

“Nobody has quite figured out what should happen in cases like [Jian Ghomeshi’s],” said now-former New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma after publishing an essay by Ghomeshi, “where you have been legally acquitted but you are still judged as undesirable in public opinion, and how far that should go, how long that should last, and whether people should make a comeback or can make a comeback at all.”

Ghomeshi spent his entire essay explaining how, if you think about it, he is the real victim of his situation. He spared seemingly little concern for the 24 women he was accused of assaulting, with behavior going as far as nonconsensual beating and choking. (Ghomeshi was legally cleared of all charges after signing a peace bond and apologizing to one of his accusers.)

When this argument is applied again and again to men who have shown no interest in atoning for their actions, it begins to sound less like a call for restorative justice and more like a cheap and easy attempt to score a second chance for people who will not put in the work to earn one. The argument is less “everyone deserves a shot at a second chance” and more “the people I like deserve a shot at a second chance without working for it because they want it.”

The redemption fallacy is converging on the Kavanaugh case along with all of the rest of the rape fallacies that the #MeToo movement has painstakingly dragged out and reexamined because they are all very effective. They all disguise the fact that our culture does not actually think that sexual assault is a big deal or that sexual predators should be punished.

Anita Hill testifies on her charges of sexual assault by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 14, 1991. Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

Our culture mostly thinks that sexual predators are entitled to do whatever they want with women’s bodies and to go wherever they please — including to the White House and the Supreme Court. And even if they momentarily have to face consequences for their actions, our culture mostly thinks that sexual predators should get to return to positions of power, where they will continue to make decisions for the rest of us.

The #MeToo movement has already succeeded in bringing to light the many problems with the way we talk about sexual harassment and assault in America. Since women came forward to report their experiences with Harvey Weinstein, we’ve seen an unprecedented public conversation around how high-profile people (most — but not all — of them men) abuse their power, and how difficult it can be for survivors to tell their stories.

One recent example: In response to President Trump’s tweet claiming that Ford would have reported right away if her charges were real, survivors began sharing their own experiences under the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport. Alyssa Milano, who helped kick off the current #MeToo movement with her tweet in October, wrote that she had not reported her assaults, and she encouraged others to add their experiences.

Hey, @realDonaldTrump, Listen the fuck up.

I was sexually assaulted twice. Once when I was a teenager. I never filed a police report and it took me 30 years to tell me parents.

If any survivor of sexual assault would like to add to this please do so in the replies. #MeToo https://t.co/n0Aymv3vCi

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) September 21, 2018

The public conversation has been groundbreaking in its own right, making some survivors feel comfortable coming forward after years or decades of silence. But we have yet to see whether the movement can eliminate the myths and fallacies about rape and harassment it has brought to light.

What happens next in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process will be a test of that question. Nearly 30 years ago, under very similar circumstances, Anita Hill testified that Clarence Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee, had subjected her to repeated sexual harassment. We saw her shamed in the press and on the floor of the Senate. We saw Senate Democrats fail to investigate her claims as aggressively as they could have. (Joe Biden is still apologizing for his role in the proceedings.) We saw the nominee get the last word, in a statement televised for the American people in primetime on a Friday. We saw him join the Supreme Court.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of #MeToo. Whether things are different this time around — whether Ford gets a full and fair hearing, and whether Congress and the American people give her words the same weight they’d give a man’s — will say a lot about how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.

Original Source -> How the Kavanaugh allegations became a test for #MeToo

via The Conservative Brief

[soulcentralmedia]

Hearing exposes Facebook’s toothless 'fake news' policy

Image copyright Reuters Image caption InfoWars' Alex Jones has pushed the idea that some of America's most awful tragedies were fabrications To an audience of more than two million, Alex Jones uses Facebook to push some of the most dangerous conspiracy theories in American discourse. His InfoWars outlet - you can't in good faith call it news - has called the Sandy Hook massacre a hoax (it wasn't). It said Parkland survivors were crisis actors (they weren't). It claimed a pizza restaurant in Washington DC was the headquarters of a paedophilia ring (it wasn't). Democrats, InfoWars told viewers on Independence Day, are about to declare civil war (they're not). On Tuesday, Facebook was asked by Congress why it continued to allow InfoWars to use its platform. "If they posted sufficient content that it violated our threshold, the page would come down," said Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of policy. "That threshold varies depending on the severity of different types of violations."Facebook moderators 'keep child abuse online' Facebook will not remove fake news Earlier in the hearing Ms Bickert said Facebook had a three-strikes policy for inappropriate behaviour. You simply must wonder what it would take for Facebook to consider something a strike against InfoWars. Ms Bickert wouldn't be drawn on anymore details of the "threshold". Tuesday's hearing was called by Republicans who accuse the site of disproportionately silencing conservative views. What limited data we have on the issue suggests otherwise - one study published just this week suggests right-leaning pages on Facebook have a greater presence than those on the left (though the source of the study quite openly says it is pushing the views of "progressives").There might be one very simple explanation as to why Facebook is acting in this manner - and that's fear. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption (L-R) Facebook's Monika Bickert, Juniper Downs, of YouTube, and Nick Pickles, senior strategist at Twitter Facebook is tremendously worried about being seen as anti-right. In a Republican-controlled Congress, it could mean it faces greater controls on its business. It has taken several steps to address the issue - its independent advisers are made up of both sides of the US political spectrum, a chasm that gets wider every day. As the company said on Tuesday, in our divided world it's perhaps impossible to put together a fact-checking operation that is considered by all to be non-partisan. That said, Facebook is apparently trying. Yet the result of Facebook's efforts has led to bizarre meetings in which outlets with little-to-no journalistic standards are being consulted alongside publications with a long record of accountability and accuracy. No publication is infallible, but no serious observer could consider the New York Times in the same bracket as the Daily Caller. And yet Facebook calls upon them both, apparently equally, to help shape policy.Facebook is currently in the middle of an advertising campaign, both on its platform and with billboards, declaring "fake news is not your friend".

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionFacebook says it's up to parents to ask for posts to be removed, Nicci Astin tells TodayThe company is doing what it can to reduce the reputation damage caused by Russian manipulation of its service. But it can be said that values don't truly exist until they are tested. And at Tuesday's hearing, we learnt fake news still has a place on Facebook. "We don't have a policy of removing fake news," Ms Bickert said, echoing a position the company stated last week when it argued, that fake news to one person might just be opinion and analysis to another. That's true in some instances, sure. But claiming, as Alex Jones did in 2015, that contaminated water is "making the friggin' frogs gay" isn't offering a different opinion - it's offering a different reality. Facebook has for now decided this is all above board. InfoWars has not had its three strikes. Facebook will, though, hinder the distribution of material deemed to be fake, if so judged by its fact-checking groups. But that's a limited measure - the content is of course still there. And when much of Alex Jones' work goes out live - thanks to Facebook's streaming platform, naturally - it's difficult to see how fact checkers could retrospectively limit its spread or impact. Facebook scandal- Who is selling your personal data?Facebook is worried that banning InfoWars would provide fuel to the fire that it silences right-wing voices. It's not wrong - it would create outrage in some quarters. But for how long? The social media platform has helped create a lightning-fast news agenda that moves on at an alarming pace. The dramatic stock price hit it suffered in the wake of its biggest crisis, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, has been wiped out. This too would pass - pretty quickly, I'd wager. More damaging, long-term, will be Facebook's failure to take the scourge of fake news seriously. The site will of course be accused of removing all doubt they are liberal Silicon Valley elites intent on censorship - but let's be real here, that accusation will be made no matter how it behaves.Members of Congress may well take issue, but if they want to come out and take on Facebook, it'll mean defending Alex Jones and his message. Defending the idea that some of America's most awful tragedies were fabrications. If elected politicians believe that, Facebook would perhaps be doing the American people a service by making them say so in public. Source link Read the full article

[endenogatai]

Yet another massive Facebook fail: Quiz app leaked data on ~120M users for years

Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet.

It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the process (and any associated investigations that flow from it) will be concluded.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the audit on March 21, writing then that the company would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”.

But you do have to question how much the audit exercise is, first and foremost, intended to function as PR damage limitation for Facebook’s brand — given the company’s relaxed response to a data abuse report concerning a quiz app with ~120M monthly users, which it received right in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Because despite Facebook being alerted about the risk posed by the leaky quiz apps in late April — via its own data abuse bug bounty program — they were still live on its platform a month later.

It took about a further month for the vulnerability to be fixed.

And, sure, Facebook was certainly busy over that period. Busy dealing with a major privacy scandal.

Perhaps the company was putting rather more effort into pumping out a steady stream of crisis PR — including taking out full page newspaper adverts (where it wrote that: “we have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it”) — vs actually ‘locking down the platform’, per its repeat claims, even though the company’s long and rich privacy-hostile history suggests otherwise.

Let’s also not forget that, in early April, Facebook quietly confessed to a major security flaw of its own — when it admitted that an account search and recovery feature had been abused by “malicious actors” who, over what must have been a period of several years, had been able to surreptitiously collect personal data on a majority of Facebook’s ~2BN users — and use that intel for whatever they fancied.

So Facebook users already have plenty reasons to doubt the company’s claims to be able to “protect your information”. But this latest data fail facepalm suggests it’s hardly scrambling to make amends for its own stinkingly bad legacy either.

Change will require regulation. And in Europe that has arrived, in the form of the GDPR.

Although it remains to be seen whether Facebook will face any data breach complaints in this specific instance, i.e. for not disclosing to affected users that their information was at risk of being exposed by the leaky quiz apps.

The regulation came into force on May 25 — and the javascript vulnerability was not fixed until June. So there may be grounds for concerned consumers to complain.

Which Facebook data abuse victim am I?

Writing in a Medium post, the security researcher who filed the report — self-styled “hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire — explains he went hunting for data abusers on Facebook’s platform after the company announced a data abuse bounty on April 10, as the company scrambled to present a responsible face to the world following revelations that a quiz app running on its platform had surreptitiously harvested millions of users’ data — data that had been passed to a controversial UK firm which intended to use it to target political ads at US voters.

De Ceukelaire says he began his search by noting down what third party apps his Facebook friends were using — finding quizzes were one of the most popular apps. Plus he already knew quizzes had a reputation for being data-suckers in a distracting wrapper. So he took his first ever Facebook quiz, from a brand called NameTests.com, and quickly realized the company was exposing Facebook users’ data to “any third-party that requested it”.

The issue was that NameTests was displaying the quiz taker’s personal data (such as full name, location, age, birthday) in a javascript file — thereby potentially exposing the identify and other data on logged in Facebook users to any external website they happened to visit.

He also found it was providing an access token that allowed it to grant even more expansive data access permissions to third party websites — such as to users’ Facebook posts, photos and friends.

It’s not clear exactly why — but presumably relates to the quiz app company’s own ad targeting activities. (Its privacy policy states: “We work together with various technological partners who, for example, display advertisements on the basis of user data. We make sure that the user’s data is pseudonymised (e.g. no clear data such as names or e-mail addresses) and that users have simple rights of revocation at their disposal. We also conclude special data protection agreements with our partners, in which they commit themselves to the protection of user data.” — which sounds great until you realize its javascript was just leaking people’s personally identified data… [facepalm])

“Depending on what quizzes you took, the javascript could leak your facebook ID, first name, last name, language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, cover photo, currency, devices you use, when your information was last updated, your posts and statuses, your photos and your friends,” writes De Ceukelaire.

He reckons people’s data had been being publicly exposed since at least the end of 2016.

On Facebook, NameTests describes its purpose thusly: “Our goal is simple: To make people smile!” — adding that its quizzes are intended as a bit of “fun”.

It doesn’t shout so loudly that the ‘price’ for taking one of its quizzes, say to find out what Disney princess you ‘are’, or what you could look like as an oil painting, is not only that it will suck out masses of your personal data (and potentially your friends’ data) from Facebook’s platform for its own ad targeting purposes but was also, until recently, that your and other people’s information could have been exposed to goodness knows who, for goodness knows what nefarious purposes… 

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal has underlined that ostensibly frivolous social data can end up being repurposed for all sorts of manipulative and power-grabbing purposes. (And not only can end up, but that quizzes are deliberately built to be data-harvesting tools… So think of that the next time you get a ‘take this quiz’ notification asking ‘what is in your fact file?’ or ‘what has your date of birth imprinted on you’? And hope ads is all you’re being targeted for… )

De Ceukelaire found that NameTests would still reveal Facebook users’ identity even after its app was deleted.

“In order to prevent this from happening, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device, since NameTests.com does not offer a log out functionality,” he writes.

“I would imagine you wouldn’t want any website to know who you are, let alone steal your information or photos. Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends,” he adds, fleshing out the risks for affected Facebook users.

As well as alerting Facebook to the vulnerability, De Ceukelaire says he contacted NameTests — and they claimed to have found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also said they would make changes to fix the issue.

We’ve reached out to NameTests’ parent company — a German firm called Social Sweethearts — for comment. Its website touts a “data-driven approach” — and claims its portfolio of products achieve “a global organic reach of several billion page views per month”.

After De Ceukelaire reported the problem to Facebook, he says he received an initial response from the company on April 30 saying they were looking into it. Then, hearing nothing for some weeks, he sent a follow up email, on May 14, asking whether they had contacted the app developers.

A week later Facebook replied saying it could take three to six months to investigate the issue (i.e. the same timeframe mentioned in their initial automated reply), adding they would keep him in the loop.

Yet at that time — which was a month after his original report — the leaky NameTests quizzes were still up and running,  meaning Facebook users’ data was still being exposed and at risk. And Facebook knew about the risk.

The next development came on June 25, when De Ceukelaire says he noticed NameTests had changed the way they process data to close down the access they had been exposing to third parties.

Two days later Facebook also confirmed the flaw in writing, admitting: “[T]his could have allowed an attacker to determine the details of a logged-in user to Facebook’s platform.”

It also told him it had confirmed with NameTests the issue had been fixed. And its apps continue to be available on Facebook’s platform — suggesting Facebook did not find the kind of suspicious activity that has led it to suspend other third party apps. (At least, assuming it conducted an investigation.)

Facebook paid out a $4,000 x2 bounty to a charity under the terms of its data abuse bug bounty program — and per De Ceukelaire’s request.

We asked it what took it so long to respond to the data abuse report, especially given the issue was so topical when De Ceukelaire filed the report. But Facebook declined to answer specific questions.

Instead it sent us the following statement, attributed to Ime Archibong, its VP of product partnerships:

A researcher brought the issue with the nametests.com website to our attention through our Data Abuse Bounty Program that we launched in April to encourage reports involving Facebook data. We worked with nametests.com to resolve the vulnerability on their website, which was completed in June.

Facebook also claims it received De Ceukelaire’s report on April 27, rather than April 22, as he recounts it. Though it’s possible the former date is when Facebook’s own staff retrieved the report from its systems. 

Beyond displaying a disturbingly relaxed attitude to other people’s privacy — which risks getting Facebook into regulatory trouble, given GDPR’s strict requirements around breach disclosure, for example — the other core issue of concern here is the company’s apparent failure to enforce its own developer policy. 

The underlying issue is whether or not Facebook performs any checks on apps running on its platform. It’s no good having T&Cs if you don’t have any active processes to enforce your T&Cs. Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Historical evidence suggests Facebook did not actively enforce its developer T&Cs — even if it’s now “locking down the platform”, as it claims, as a result of so many privacy scandals. 

The quiz app developer at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Aleksandr Kogan — who harvested and sold/passed Facebook user data to third parties — has accused Facebook of essentially not having a policy. He contends it is therefore Facebook who is responsible for the massive data abuses that have played out on its platform — only a portion of which have so far come to light. 

Fresh examples such as NameTests’ leaky quiz apps merely bolster the case Kogan made for Facebook being the guilty party where data misuse is concerned. After all, if you built some stables without any doors at all would you really blame your horses for bolting?

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[technicalsolutions88]

Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet.

It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the process (and any associated investigations that flow from it) will be concluded.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the audit on March 21, writing then that the company would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”.

But you do have to question how much the audit exercise is, first and foremost, intended to function as PR damage limitation for Facebook’s brand — given the company’s relaxed response to a data abuse report concerning a quiz app with ~120M monthly users, which it received right in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Because despite Facebook being alerted about the risk posed by the leaky quiz apps in late April — via its own data abuse bug bounty program — they were still live on its platform a month later.

It took about a further month for the vulnerability to be fixed.

And, sure, Facebook was certainly busy over that period. Busy dealing with a major privacy scandal.

Perhaps the company was putting rather more effort into pumping out a steady stream of crisis PR — including taking out full page newspaper adverts (where it wrote that: “we have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it”) — vs actually ‘locking down the platform’, per its repeat claims, even though the company’s long and rich privacy-hostile history suggests otherwise.

Let’s also not forget that, in early April, Facebook quietly confessed to a major security flaw of its own — when it admitted that an account search and recovery feature had been abused by “malicious actors” who, over what must have been a period of several years, had been able to surreptitiously collect personal data on a majority of Facebook’s ~2BN users — and use that intel for whatever they fancied.

So Facebook users already have plenty reasons to doubt the company’s claims to be able to “protect your information”. But this latest data fail facepalm suggests it’s hardly scrambling to make amends for its own stinkingly bad legacy either.

Change will require regulation. And in Europe that has arrived, in the form of the GDPR.

Although it remains to be seen whether Facebook will face any data breach complaints in this specific instance, i.e. for not disclosing to affected users that their information was at risk of being exposed by the leaky quiz apps.

The regulation came into force on May 25 — and the javascript vulnerability was not fixed until June. So there may be grounds for concerned consumers to complain.

Which Facebook data abuse victim am I?

Writing in a Medium post, the security researcher who filed the report — self-styled “hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire — explains he went hunting for data abusers on Facebook’s platform after the company announced a data abuse bounty on April 10, as the company scrambled to present a responsible face to the world following revelations that a quiz app running on its platform had surreptitiously harvested millions of users’ data — data that had been passed to a controversial UK firm which intended to use it to target political ads at US voters.

De Ceukelaire says he began his search by noting down what third party apps his Facebook friends were using — finding quizzes were one of the most popular apps. Plus he already knew quizzes had a reputation for being data-suckers in a distracting wrapper. So he took his first ever Facebook quiz, from a brand called NameTests.com, and quickly realized the company was exposing Facebook users’ data to “any third-party that requested it”.

The issue was that NameTests was displaying the quiz taker’s personal data (such as full name, location, age, birthday) in a javascript file — thereby potentially exposing the identify and other data on logged in Facebook users to any external website they happened to visit.

He also found it was providing an access token that allowed it to grant even more expansive data access permissions to third party websites — such as to users’ Facebook posts, photos and friends.

It’s not clear exactly why — but presumably relates to the quiz app company’s own ad targeting activities. (Its privacy policy states: “We work together with various technological partners who, for example, display advertisements on the basis of user data. We make sure that the user’s data is pseudonymised (e.g. no clear data such as names or e-mail addresses) and that users have simple rights of revocation at their disposal. We also conclude special data protection agreements with our partners, in which they commit themselves to the protection of user data.” — which sounds great until you realize its javascript was just leaking people’s personally identified data… [facepalm])

“Depending on what quizzes you took, the javascript could leak your facebook ID, first name, last name, language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, cover photo, currency, devices you use, when your information was last updated, your posts and statuses, your photos and your friends,” writes De Ceukelaire.

He reckons people’s data had been being publicly exposed since at least the end of 2016.

On Facebook, NameTests describes its purpose thusly: “Our goal is simple: To make people smile!” — adding that its quizzes are intended as a bit of “fun”.

It doesn’t shout so loudly that the ‘price’ for taking one of its quizzes, say to find out what Disney princess you ‘are’, or what you could look like as an oil painting, is not only that it will suck out masses of your personal data (and potentially your friends’ data) from Facebook’s platform for its own ad targeting purposes but was also, until recently, that your and other people’s information could have been exposed to goodness knows who, for goodness knows what nefarious purposes… 

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal has underlined that ostensibly frivolous social data can end up being repurposed for all sorts of manipulative and power-grabbing purposes. (And not only can end up, but that quizzes are deliberately built to be data-harvesting tools… So think of that the next time you get a ‘take this quiz’ notification asking ‘what is in your fact file?’ or ‘what has your date of birth imprinted on you’? And hope ads is all you’re being targeted for… )

De Ceukelaire found that NameTests would still reveal Facebook users’ identity even after its app was deleted.

“In order to prevent this from happening, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device, since NameTests.com does not offer a log out functionality,” he writes.

“I would imagine you wouldn’t want any website to know who you are, let alone steal your information or photos. Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends,” he adds, fleshing out the risks for affected Facebook users.

As well as alerting Facebook to the vulnerability, De Ceukelaire says he contacted NameTests — and they claimed to have found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also said they would make changes to fix the issue.

We’ve reached out to NameTests’ parent company — a German firm called Social Sweethearts — for comment. Its website touts a “data-driven approach” — and claims its portfolio of products achieve “a global organic reach of several billion page views per month”.

After De Ceukelaire reported the problem to Facebook, he says he received an initial response from the company on April 30 saying they were looking into it. Then, hearing nothing for some weeks, he sent a follow up email, on May 14, asking whether they had contacted the app developers.

A week later Facebook replied saying it could take three to six months to investigate the issue (i.e. the same timeframe mentioned in their initial automated reply), adding they would keep him in the loop.

Yet at that time — which was a month after his original report — the leaky NameTests quizzes were still up and running,  meaning Facebook users’ data was still being exposed and at risk. And Facebook knew about the risk.

The next development came on June 25, when De Ceukelaire says he noticed NameTests had changed the way they process data to close down the access they had been exposing to third parties.

Two days later Facebook also confirmed the flaw in writing, admitting: “[T]his could have allowed an attacker to determine the details of a logged-in user to Facebook’s platform.”

It also told him it had confirmed with NameTests the issue had been fixed. And its apps continue to be available on Facebook’s platform — suggesting Facebook did not find the kind of suspicious activity that has led it to suspend other third party apps. (At least, assuming it conducted an investigation.)

Facebook paid out a $4,000 x2 bounty to a charity under the terms of its data abuse bug bounty program — and per De Ceukelaire’s request.

We asked it what took it so long to respond to the data abuse report, especially given the issue was so topical when De Ceukelaire filed the report. But Facebook declined to answer specific questions.

Instead it sent us the following statement, attributed to Ime Archibong, its VP of product partnerships:

A researcher brought the issue with the nametests.com website to our attention through our Data Abuse Bounty Program that we launched in April to encourage reports involving Facebook data. We worked with nametests.com to resolve the vulnerability on their website, which was completed in June.

Facebook also claims it received De Ceukelaire’s report on April 27, rather than April 22, as he recounts it. Though it’s possible the former date is when Facebook’s own staff retrieved the report from its systems. 

Beyond displaying a disturbingly relaxed attitude to other people’s privacy — which risks getting Facebook into regulatory trouble, given GDPR’s strict requirements around breach disclosure, for example — the other core issue of concern here is the company’s apparent failure to enforce its own developer policy. 

The underlying issue is whether or not Facebook performs any checks on apps running on its platform. It’s no good having T&Cs if you don’t have any active processes to enforce your T&Cs. Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Historical evidence suggests Facebook did not actively enforce its developer T&Cs — even if it’s now “locking down the platform”, as it claims, as a result of so many privacy scandals. 

The quiz app developer at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Aleksandr Kogan — who harvested and sold/passed Facebook user data to third parties — has accused Facebook of essentially not having a policy. He contends it is therefore Facebook who is responsible for the massive data abuses that have played out on its platform — only a portion of which have so far come to light. 

Fresh examples such as NameTests’ leaky quiz apps merely bolster the case Kogan made for Facebook being the guilty party where data misuse is concerned. After all, if you built some stables without any doors at all would you really blame your horses for bolting?

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Mrphjh Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[latestnews2018-blog]

Yet another massive Facebook fail: Quiz app leaked data on ~120M users for years

New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/yet-another-massive-facebook-fail-quiz-app-leaked-data-on-120m-users-for-years/

Yet another massive Facebook fail: Quiz app leaked data on ~120M users for years

Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet.

It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the process (and any associated investigations that flow from it) will be concluded.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the audit on March 21, writing then that the company would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”.

But you do have to question how much the audit exercise is, first and foremost, intended to function as PR damage limitation for Facebook’s brand — given the company’s relaxed response to a data abuse report concerning a quiz app with ~120M monthly users, which it received right in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Because despite Facebook being alerted about the risk posed by the leaky quiz apps in late April — via its own data abuse bug bounty program — they were still live on its platform a month later.

It took about a further month for the vulnerability to be fixed.

And, sure, Facebook was certainly busy over that period. Busy dealing with a major privacy scandal.

Perhaps the company was putting rather more effort into pumping out a steady stream of crisis PR — including taking out full page newspaper adverts (where it wrote that: “we have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it”) — vs actually ‘locking down the platform’, per its repeat claims, even though the company’s long and rich privacy-hostile history suggests otherwise.

Let’s also not forget that, in early April, Facebook quietly confessed to a major security flaw of its own — when it admitted that an account search and recovery feature had been abused by “malicious actors” who, over what must have been a period of several years, had been able to surreptitiously collect personal data on a majority of Facebook’s ~2BN users — and use that intel for whatever they fancied.

So Facebook users already have plenty reasons to doubt the company’s claims to be able to “protect your information”. But this latest data fail facepalm suggests it’s hardly scrambling to make amends for its own stinkingly bad legacy either.

Change will require regulation. And in Europe that has arrived, in the form of the GDPR.

Although it remains to be seen whether Facebook will face any data breach complaints in this specific instance, i.e. for not disclosing to affected users that their information was at risk of being exposed by the leaky quiz apps.

The regulation came into force on May 25 — and the javascript vulnerability was not fixed until June. So there may be grounds for concerned consumers to complain.

Which Facebook data abuse victim am I?

Writing in a Medium post, the security researcher who filed the report — self-styled “hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire — explains he went hunting for data abusers on Facebook’s platform after the company announced a data abuse bounty on April 10, as the company scrambled to present a responsible face to the world following revelations that a quiz app running on its platform had surreptitiously harvested millions of users’ data — data that had been passed to a controversial UK firm which intended to use it to target political ads at US voters.

De Ceukelaire says he began his search by noting down what third party apps his Facebook friends were using — finding quizzes were one of the most popular apps. Plus he already knew quizzes had a reputation for being data-suckers in a distracting wrapper. So he took his first ever Facebook quiz, from a brand called NameTests.com, and quickly realized the company was exposing Facebook users’ data to “any third-party that requested it”.

The issue was that NameTests was displaying the quiz taker’s personal data (such as full name, location, age, birthday) in a javascript file — thereby potentially exposing the identify and other data on logged in Facebook users to any external website they happened to visit.

He also found it was providing an access token that allowed it to grant even more expansive data access permissions to third party websites — such as to users’ Facebook posts, photos and friends.

It’s not clear exactly why — but presumably relates to the quiz app company’s own ad targeting activities. (Its privacy policy states: “We work together with various technological partners who, for example, display advertisements on the basis of user data. We make sure that the user’s data is pseudonymised (e.g. no clear data such as names or e-mail addresses) and that users have simple rights of revocation at their disposal. We also conclude special data protection agreements with our partners, in which they commit themselves to the protection of user data.” — which sounds great until you realize its javascript was just leaking people’s personally identified data… [facepalm])

“Depending on what quizzes you took, the javascript could leak your facebook ID, first name, last name, language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, cover photo, currency, devices you use, when your information was last updated, your posts and statuses, your photos and your friends,” writes De Ceukelaire.

He reckons people’s data had been being publicly exposed since at least the end of 2016.

On Facebook, NameTests describes its purpose thusly: “Our goal is simple: To make people smile!” — adding that its quizzes are intended as a bit of “fun”.

It doesn’t shout so loudly that the ‘price’ for taking one of its quizzes, say to find out what Disney princess you ‘are’, or what you could look like as an oil painting, is not only that it will suck out masses of your personal data (and potentially your friends’ data) from Facebook’s platform for its own ad targeting purposes but was also, until recently, that your and other people’s information could have been exposed to goodness knows who, for goodness knows what nefarious purposes… 

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal has underlined that ostensibly frivolous social data can end up being repurposed for all sorts of manipulative and power-grabbing purposes. (And not only can end up, but that quizzes are deliberately built to be data-harvesting tools… So think of that the next time you get a ‘take this quiz’ notification asking ‘what is in your fact file?’ or ‘what has your date of birth imprinted on you’? And hope ads is all you’re being targeted for… )

De Ceukelaire found that NameTests would still reveal Facebook users’ identity even after its app was deleted.

“In order to prevent this from happening, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device, since NameTests.com does not offer a log out functionality,” he writes.

“I would imagine you wouldn’t want any website to know who you are, let alone steal your information or photos. Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends,” he adds, fleshing out the risks for affected Facebook users.

As well as alerting Facebook to the vulnerability, De Ceukelaire says he contacted NameTests — and they claimed to have found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also said they would make changes to fix the issue.

We’ve reached out to NameTests’ parent company — a German firm called Social Sweethearts — for comment. Its website touts a “data-driven approach” — and claims its portfolio of products achieve “a global organic reach of several billion page views per month”.

After De Ceukelaire reported the problem to Facebook, he says he received an initial response from the company on April 30 saying they were looking into it. Then, hearing nothing for some weeks, he sent a follow up email, on May 14, asking whether they had contacted the app developers.

A week later Facebook replied saying it could take three to six months to investigate the issue (i.e. the same timeframe mentioned in their initial automated reply), adding they would keep him in the loop.

Yet at that time — which was a month after his original report — the leaky NameTests quizzes were still up and running,  meaning Facebook users’ data was still being exposed and at risk. And Facebook knew about the risk.

The next development came on June 25, when De Ceukelaire says he noticed NameTests had changed the way they process data to close down the access they had been exposing to third parties.

Two days later Facebook also confirmed the flaw in writing, admitting: “[T]his could have allowed an attacker to determine the details of a logged-in user to Facebook’s platform.”

It also told him it had confirmed with NameTests the issue had been fixed. And its apps continue to be available on Facebook’s platform — suggesting Facebook did not find the kind of suspicious activity that has led it to suspend other third party apps. (At least, assuming it conducted an investigation.)

Facebook paid out a $4,000 x2 bounty to a charity under the terms of its data abuse bug bounty program — and per De Ceukelaire’s request.

We asked it what took it so long to respond to the data abuse report, especially given the issue was so topical when De Ceukelaire filed the report. But Facebook declined to answer specific questions.

Instead it sent us the following statement, attributed to Ime Archibong, its VP of product partnerships:

A researcher brought the issue with the nametests.com website to our attention through our Data Abuse Bounty Program that we launched in April to encourage reports involving Facebook data. We worked with nametests.com to resolve the vulnerability on their website, which was completed in June.

Facebook also claims it received De Ceukelaire’s report on April 27, rather than April 22, as he recounts it. Though it’s possible the former date is when Facebook’s own staff retrieved the report from its systems. 

Beyond displaying a disturbingly relaxed attitude to other people’s privacy — which risks getting Facebook into regulatory trouble, given GDPR’s strict requirements around breach disclosure, for example — the other core issue of concern here is the company’s apparent failure to enforce its own developer policy. 

The underlying issue is whether or not Facebook performs any checks on apps running on its platform. It’s no good having T&Cs if you don’t have any active processes to enforce your T&Cs. Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Historical evidence suggests Facebook did not actively enforce its developer T&Cs — even if it’s now “locking down the platform”, as it claims, as a result of so many privacy scandals. 

The quiz app developer at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Aleksandr Kogan — who harvested and sold/passed Facebook user data to third parties — has accused Facebook of essentially not having a policy. He contends it is therefore Facebook who is responsible for the massive data abuses that have played out on its platform — only a portion of which have so far come to light. 

Fresh examples such as NameTests’ leaky quiz apps merely bolster the case Kogan made for Facebook being the guilty party where data misuse is concerned. After all, if you built some stables without any doors at all would you really blame your horses for bolting?

[theinvinciblenoob]

Facebook knows the historical app audit it’s conducting in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal is going to result in a tsunami of skeletons tumbling out of its closet.

It’s already suspended around 200 apps as a result of the audit — which remains ongoing, with no formal timeline announced for when the process (and any associated investigations that flow from it) will be concluded.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the audit on March 21, writing then that the company would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”.

But you do have to question how much the audit exercise is, first and foremost, intended to function as PR damage limitation for Facebook’s brand — given the company’s relaxed response to a data abuse report concerning a quiz app with ~120M monthly users, which it received right in the midst of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Because despite Facebook being alerted about the risk posed by the leaky quiz apps in late April — via its own data abuse bug bounty program — they were still live on its platform a month later.

It took about a further month for the vulnerability to be fixed.

And, sure, Facebook was certainly busy over that period. Busy dealing with a major privacy scandal.

Perhaps the company was putting rather more effort into pumping out a steady stream of crisis PR — including taking out full page newspaper adverts (where it wrote that: “we have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it”) — vs actually ‘locking down the platform’, per its repeat claims, even though the company’s long and rich privacy-hostile history suggests otherwise.

Let’s also not forget that, in early April, Facebook quietly confessed to a major security flaw of its own — when it admitted that an account search and recovery feature had been abused by “malicious actors” who, over what must have been a period of several years, had been able to surreptitiously collect personal data on a majority of Facebook’s ~2BN users — and use that intel for whatever they fancied.

So Facebook users already have plenty reasons to doubt the company’s claims to be able to “protect your information”. But this latest data fail facepalm suggests it’s hardly scrambling to make amends for its own stinkingly bad legacy either.

Change will require regulation. And in Europe that has arrived, in the form of the GDPR.

Although it remains to be seen whether Facebook will face any data breach complaints in this specific instance, i.e. for not disclosing to affected users that their information was at risk of being exposed by the leaky quiz apps.

The regulation came into force on May 25 — and the javascript vulnerability was not fixed until June. So there may be grounds for concerned consumers to complain.

Which Facebook data abuse victim am I?

Writing in a Medium post, the security researcher who filed the report — self-styled “hacker” Inti De Ceukelaire — explains he went hunting for data abusers on Facebook’s platform after the company announced a data abuse bounty on April 10, as the company scrambled to present a responsible face to the world following revelations that a quiz app running on its platform had surreptitiously harvested millions of users’ data — data that had been passed to a controversial UK firm which intended to use it to target political ads at US voters.

De Ceukelaire says he began his search by noting down what third party apps his Facebook friends were using — finding quizzes were one of the most popular apps. Plus he already knew quizzes had a reputation for being data-suckers in a distracting wrapper. So he took his first ever Facebook quiz, from a brand called NameTests.com, and quickly realized the company was exposing Facebook users’ data to “any third-party that requested it”.

The issue was that NameTests was displaying the quiz taker’s personal data (such as full name, location, age, birthday) in a javascript file — thereby potentially exposing the identify and other data on logged in Facebook users to any external website they happened to visit.

He also found it was providing an access token that allowed it to grant even more expansive data access permissions to third party websites — such as to users’ Facebook posts, photos and friends.

It’s not clear exactly why — but presumably relates to the quiz app company’s own ad targeting activities. (Its privacy policy states: “We work together with various technological partners who, for example, display advertisements on the basis of user data. We make sure that the user’s data is pseudonymised (e.g. no clear data such as names or e-mail addresses) and that users have simple rights of revocation at their disposal. We also conclude special data protection agreements with our partners, in which they commit themselves to the protection of user data.” — which sounds great until you realize its javascript was just leaking people’s personally identified data… [facepalm])

“Depending on what quizzes you took, the javascript could leak your facebook ID, first name, last name, language, gender, date of birth, profile picture, cover photo, currency, devices you use, when your information was last updated, your posts and statuses, your photos and your friends,” writes De Ceukelaire.

He reckons people’s data had been being publicly exposed since at least the end of 2016.

On Facebook, NameTests describes its purpose thusly: “Our goal is simple: To make people smile!” — adding that its quizzes are intended as a bit of “fun”.

It doesn’t shout so loudly that the ‘price’ for taking one of its quizzes, say to find out what Disney princess you ‘are’, or what you could look like as an oil painting, is not only that it will suck out masses of your personal data (and potentially your friends’ data) from Facebook’s platform for its own ad targeting purposes but was also, until recently, that your and other people’s information could have been exposed to goodness knows who, for goodness knows what nefarious purposes… 

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal has underlined that ostensibly frivolous social data can end up being repurposed for all sorts of manipulative and power-grabbing purposes. (And not only can end up, but that quizzes are deliberately built to be data-harvesting tools… So think of that the next time you get a ‘take this quiz’ notification asking ‘what is in your fact file?’ or ‘what has your date of birth imprinted on you’? And hope ads is all you’re being targeted for… )

De Ceukelaire found that NameTests would still reveal Facebook users’ identity even after its app was deleted.

“In order to prevent this from happening, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device, since NameTests.com does not offer a log out functionality,” he writes.

“I would imagine you wouldn’t want any website to know who you are, let alone steal your information or photos. Abusing this flaw, advertisers could have targeted (political) ads based on your Facebook posts and friends. More explicit websites could have abused this flaw to blackmail their visitors, threatening to leak your sneaky search history to your friends,” he adds, fleshing out the risks for affected Facebook users.

As well as alerting Facebook to the vulnerability, De Ceukelaire says he contacted NameTests — and they claimed to have found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also said they would make changes to fix the issue.

We’ve reached out to NameTests’ parent company — a German firm called Social Sweethearts — for comment. Its website touts a “data-driven approach” — and claims its portfolio of products achieve “a global organic reach of several billion page views per month”.

After De Ceukelaire reported the problem to Facebook, he says he received an initial response from the company on April 30 saying they were looking into it. Then, hearing nothing for some weeks, he sent a follow up email, on May 14, asking whether they had contacted the app developers.

A week later Facebook replied saying it could take three to six months to investigate the issue (i.e. the same timeframe mentioned in their initial automated reply), adding they would keep him in the loop.

Yet at that time — which was a month after his original report — the leaky NameTests quizzes were still up and running,  meaning Facebook users’ data was still being exposed and at risk. And Facebook knew about the risk.

The next development came on June 25, when De Ceukelaire says he noticed NameTests had changed the way they process data to close down the access they had been exposing to third parties.

Two days later Facebook also confirmed the flaw in writing, admitting: “[T]his could have allowed an attacker to determine the details of a logged-in user to Facebook’s platform.”

It also told him it had confirmed with NameTests the issue had been fixed. And its apps continue to be available on Facebook’s platform — suggesting Facebook did not find the kind of suspicious activity that has led it to suspend other third party apps. (At least, assuming it conducted an investigation.)

Facebook paid out a $4,000 x2 bounty to a charity under the terms of its data abuse bug bounty program — and per De Ceukelaire’s request.

We asked it what took it so long to respond to the data abuse report, especially given the issue was so topical when De Ceukelaire filed the report. But Facebook declined to answer specific questions.

Instead it sent us the following statement, attributed to Ime Archibong, its VP of product partnerships:

A researcher brought the issue with the nametests.com website to our attention through our Data Abuse Bounty Program that we launched in April to encourage reports involving Facebook data. We worked with nametests.com to resolve the vulnerability on their website, which was completed in June.

Facebook also claims it received De Ceukelaire’s report on April 27, rather than April 22, as he recounts it. Though it’s possible the former date is when Facebook’s own staff retrieved the report from its systems. 

Beyond displaying a disturbingly relaxed attitude to other people’s privacy — which risks getting Facebook into regulatory trouble, given GDPR’s strict requirements around breach disclosure, for example — the other core issue of concern here is the company’s apparent failure to enforce its own developer policy. 

The underlying issue is whether or not Facebook performs any checks on apps running on its platform. It’s no good having T&Cs if you don’t have any active processes to enforce your T&Cs. Rules without enforcement aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

Historical evidence suggests Facebook did not actively enforce its developer T&Cs — even if it’s now “locking down the platform”, as it claims, as a result of so many privacy scandals. 

The quiz app developer at the center of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Aleksandr Kogan — who harvested and sold/passed Facebook user data to third parties — has accused Facebook of essentially not having a policy. He contends it is therefore Facebook who is responsible for the massive data abuses that have played out on its platform — only a portion of which have so far come to light. 

Fresh examples such as NameTests’ leaky quiz apps merely bolster the case Kogan made for Facebook being the guilty party where data misuse is concerned. After all, if you built some stables without any doors at all would you really blame your horses for bolting?

via TechCrunch