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Recent polls indicate that climate change will be a central issue for voters in the upcoming 2020 presidential elections. According to the George Mason University poll, 38 percent of participants indicated that the topic is “very important” for their decision, while the lead researcher, Anthony Leiserowitz said, “This is truly a top-tier issue for the Democratic base.”

The poll, released in early May, only sampled 1,000 people, but the results are consistent with similar polls by Manmouth University and CNN, which showed that climate change ranks as the second most important topic, right below healthcare. According to CNN, 82 percent of Democrats say it is “very important” that candidates take aggressive action to combat the climate crisis.

The increased interest is likely due to a surge in both public awareness as well as extreme weather events ranging from wildfires to hurricanes.

Related: Climate activists will turn up the heat at presidential debate

“With the salience of wildfires in the West, sea-level rise in the Gulf Coast and Florida and the way that weather affects farmers, people are beginning to see the effects of climate change,” said Sean Hecht of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

In 2018, an alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report upped the urgency of climate change and massive protests broke out across the globe.

In 2016, no candidate had a specific climate platform, but reports indicate that this year, candidates will need to detail specific action plans if they hope to be taken seriously. With protests already planned for the first Democratic debate, it is almost certain that journalists will ask candidates tough questions about their positions on the environment and the fossil fuel industry.

According to Bill McKibbens from 350.org, voters will be looking for more than broad support. Many progressive democrats are demanding candidates formally endorse the Green New Deal, while others expect candidates to refuse campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry — a long standing tradition with presidential hopefuls.

Currently, only Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand and Jay Inslee have specific climate change platforms.

Via Reuters

Image via Molly Adams

If you’re ever sat at an undesirable table at a restaurant—like one right next to a bathroom or in between two others with barely enough room to squeeze by—it’s time you ask for the table you actually want.

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The Tesla Model 3 is a lot like the Buick Regal. Actually, no, not really. They do have a similar starting price, but the Model 3 is approximately three worlds better and also has a much lower cost of ownership

The bankruptcy of one of the largest domestic coal producers in the country has revealed that the company maintains financial ties to many of the leading groups that have sowed doubt over the human causes of global warming.

The disclosures are from Cloud Peak Energy, a Wyoming-based coal mining corporation that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 10. The company had been battered by low coal prices, including in international markets cultivated by the firm.

The documents in the court docket show that the coal giant gave contributions to leading think tanks that have attacked the link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, as well as to several conservative advocacy groups that have attempted to undermine policies intended to shift the economy toward renewable energy. The documents do not include information on the size of the contributions, yet, taken as a whole, the list of groups Cloud Peak Energy helped fund are indicative of how the company prioritized pushing climate denialism. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

The contributions are revealed in a filing that lists recipients of grants, creditors, and contractors. The document shows that Cloud Peak Energy helped fund the Institute of Energy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based group that has dismissed the “so-called scientific consensus” on climate change and regularly criticizes investments in renewable energy as a “waste” of resources.

Several of the groups that receive funding from Cloud Peak Energy have used aggressive tactics to attempt to discredit environmentalists. The Center for Consumer Freedom, one of the groups listed in the coal company’s filing, is part of a sprawling network of front groups set up by a lobbyist named Rick Berman geared toward attacking green groups such as the Sierra Club and Food & Water Watch as dangerous radicals.

Other organizations quietly bankrolled by Cloud Peak Energy have directly shaped state policy. The company provided funding to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that provides template legislation to state lawmakers. The model bills promote the fossil fuel agenda. One model bill declares that there is a “great deal of scientific uncertainty” around climate change; others are designed to repeal environmental regulations on coal-burning power plants.

The Montana Policy Institute — a local libertarian think tank that promotes a discredited claim that world temperatures are falling, not rising, and questions whether humans cause climate change — also received funding from the firm.

Cloud Peak Energy, the filing shows, funded Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-backed group that mobilizes political opposition to Democratic politicians and climate regulations. The mining firm also financed Crossroads GPS, a “dark-money” group that funneled millions of undisclosed dollars into Senate races in support of GOP politicians during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. The Western Caucus Foundation, which supports congressional efforts to deregulate the mining sector and sell off public lands for energy development, received funding as well.

Many of the political dollars listed in the filing appear routine among coal industry firms. The Wyoming coal firm provided financing to an array of trade groups, including the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the National Mining Association, and the American Coal Council, that lobby legislators on mine industry priorities.

Four years ago, falling coal prices led to a series of bankruptcies of the largest coal companies in America. The filings, first reported by The Intercept, similarly revealed that the coal industry had financed a range of activists and organizations dedicated to spreading doubt about the science underpinning climate change. Alpha Natural Resources disclosures showed that the firm had quietly paid Chris Horner, an activist known for hounding climate scientists.

Many political organizations are organized as 501(c) nonprofits, an Internal Revenue Service designation that allows donors to remain anonymous. Bankruptcy filings, which force companies to open their books, provide a rare window into secret political donations.

In 2016, Greg Zimmerman, an environmental activist, stumbled upon a presentation titled “Survival Is Victory: Lessons From the Tobacco Wars.” The slide deck was the creation of Richard Reavey, a vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy, and a former executive at Phillip Morris. Reavey argued that fossil fuel firms, particularly coal, should emulate the tactics of big tobacco, which similarly spent decades battling scientists and regulators over claims that its product harmed public health.

In the New York Times coverage of the episode, Reavey told the paper that his firm “has never fought climate change — never fought it, never denied it or funded anyone who does.” The bankruptcy filing from last week, however, suggests otherwise.

The post A Major Coal Company Went Bust. Its Bankruptcy Filing Shows That It Was Funding Climate Change Denialism. appeared first on The Intercept.

From the start, the murder that William Bonham was charged with looked like a case of self-defense.

Bonham was arrested for the stabbing death of his friend Kent “Frenchy” Brouillette in December 2015. The whole thing had started several months earlier, when Bonham, a musician who played gigs in New Orleans’s French Quarter, had $25,000 worth of instruments and equipment stolen from his room in a tenement house where both he and Brouillette lived. He reported the theft to police, but the cop assigned to the case was uninterested, suggesting that the situation sounded like a civil matter. Undeterred, Bonham did his own investigation and determined that others in the house, including Brouillette, were responsible. According to court records, Brouillette told Bonham to drop the matter or he would kill him.

Bonham had reason to take Brouillette’s threat seriously; the 79-year-old was a legendary figure in the city, known as a pimp and a fixer for longtime New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. He’d even written a book with a local author bragging about his life of crime.

Bonham sent a text to the cop assigned to the case relating the death threat. (In court, the cop would say he didn’t believe Bonham so he didn’t act on the message.) Since the theft, Bonham had been staying with Brouillette in his room at the flophouse, and thinking Brouillette was out, Bonham went back to gather his things. But Brouillette was there, and he had a knife. A struggle ensued and Bonham ended up with the weapon, inflicting what he would later learn was a fatal wound before fleeing the premises.

When Bonham was brought before an Orleans Parish magistrate judge to have his bail set on the murder charge, his attorneys, Graham Bosworth and Autumn Town, argued that the case was obviously self-defense. The magistrate seemed to agree; Bosworth said the judge was inclined to set a bond as opposed to releasing Bonham on his own recognizance — after all, someone was dead — but cautioned the prosecutor to consider carefully whether they actually wanted to seek a murder conviction. Bonham’s bond was set at $500,000.

It was a hefty sum — and would require more than $50,000 to get Bonham out while he awaited the resolution of the case — but there was a possibility that his family could come up with the money. They didn’t get the chance. While Bonham sat in jail, the state took the case to a grand jury, which indicted Bonham for murder. Then, without notifying Bonham or his lawyers, the prosecutor took the indictment to a district judge, arguing that Bonham’s bond should be increased — and it was, to $1.25 million.

That increase was a violation of Bonham’s constitutional rights. According to a new report from Court Watch NOLA, which monitors court proceedings in New Orleans, the so-called return-on-indictment process that led to Bonham’s bail being hiked so drastically — without him or his lawyers being notified or present to argue against the increase — was a clear violation of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, which guarantees representation during any “critical stage” of a prosecution. Moreover, says Derwyn Bunton, the chief public defender in Orleans Parish, the practice of prosecutors and judges convening alone to make an important decision about a case — an ex parte communication, where defense counsel isn’t privy to the meeting — is also a violation of the constitutional guarantee of due process. “The judge generally simply agrees with whatever the DA announces ought to be bail,” Bunton said. “That’s the ordinary injustice that happens all the time here with how indictments come out and how bond is associated with those indictments.”

According to the Court Watch report, in 2018, 2 percent of the cases moving through the criminal district court system in New Orleans were subject to a return on indictment, for a total of 151 affected cases.

And at least one veteran criminal defense attorney in the city, Gary Wainwright, says the practice has been going on for decades. “It’s very brutish here,” he said.

Gaming the System

For the most part, the pretrial bonding process is supposed to work like this: Individuals arrested for a felony offense are brought before the Orleans Parish magistrate court, where a judge will consider the circumstances of the charges and hear arguments from counsel on whether or how high to set a bond. Ostensibly, a bail bond (including non-financial conditions of release) should employ the least restrictive means to ensure that a defendant shows up for court dates and will not be rearrested on any new charges in the interim. The court is supposed to take into account any individual risk factors and is not supposed to set a bond that simply penalizes a person for being poor. If the bond conditions are met, the person is released to await trial; if they can’t meet the conditions, they’ll wait in jail.

In Louisiana, formal charges can be filed in writing by the prosecutor — called a bill of information — or taken to a grand jury for consideration. In cases where the charge could lead to life in prison or the death penalty, the prosecutor is required to take the case to a grand jury. When the grand jury determines that charges should be brought — known as a true bill of indictment — the results must be filed in open court, known as the return on indictment.

While grand jury proceedings are confidential, the return-on-indictment process is not. At this point, the prosecutor will often ask for bail to be increased. The problem, according to Court Watch NOLA, is that in these circumstances, prosecutors routinely fail to notify the defense — denying them the opportunity to argue against any increase in bail, a violation of due process and the right to counsel.

Court Watch NOLA works with whistleblowers and employs a fleet of lay volunteers who monitor court proceedings, taking notes on bright yellow clipboards. Those notes are turned into aggregate data about the system, which is used to ferret out constitutional violations. A whistleblower tipped off the group about violations during the return-on-indictment process. Digging deeper, they realized that court watchers had seen the process in action, says Simone Levine, the group’s executive director. “It is hard for court watchers to determine what is a constitutional rights violation,” she said. “But in this scenario, it is very clear because either you have an attorney or you don’t.”

Of the 151 cases subject to the return-on-indictment process last year, the average bail set by the magistrate — who also considered arguments from the defense — was $165,103. After prosecutors returned the indictment to a criminal district judge — who only heard arguments from the state — that bail amount increased by an average of $952,368. Court Watch did not find a single case in which the defense had been notified that the indictment would be returned. Where defense attorneys later took the issue back to the court to protest the bail hike, the amount was dropped by an average of $64,037 for a final bail amount that averaged just over $1 million — a far cry from the original bond.

The process is unfair and illegal, says Wainwright, who has been practicing criminal law in New Orleans for 30 years. He recalled a client whose bail was initially set at $60,000 and whose family scraped together enough money before the prosecutor took the case to the grand jury and secured an indictment. When Wainwright and his client returned to court for their next hearing, the prosecutor announced that Wainwright’s client should be arrested because during the return on indictment, a judge had hiked the client’s bail to $250,000. The irony, Wainwright noted, was that if the true purpose of bail is to assure a defendant’s presence in court, it had already worked. His client was there, only to face re-arrest — but not because the client had done anything to deserve it. “What you’re actually having is a proceeding of questionable legality, because what you’re having is this prosecutor engaging in an ex parte hearing with the judge,” Wainwright said. “The DA is gaming the system.”

In an email, a spokesperson for Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro did not respond directly to questions about the return-on-indictment process. Instead, he wrote that Court Watch NOLA has an “anti-law enforcement agenda,” and that the group’s annual reports are “propaganda.” The DA’s office, he wrote, does not comment on the “false assertions” contained in those reports.

De Facto Detention

The return-on-indictment process is not the only problem with bonding practices in New Orleans. In 2017, Civil Rights Corps and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit arguing, in part, that Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell arbitrarily set high bail amounts without considering less restrictive conditions of release or a person’s ability to pay the bond. In August 2018, a federal judge agreed. “The record indicates that Judge Cantrell’s bail procedures have not provided notice of the importance of the issue of the criminal defendant’s ability to pay, inquiry into the ability to pay, findings on the record regarding ability to pay and consideration of alternative conditions of release, or application of a legal standard in the determination of the necessity of pretrial detention,” Judge Eldon Fallon wrote. “Accordingly, these procedures violate plaintiff’s procedural due process rights.”

Although Fallon’s judgment outlined what Cantrell needed to do to get right with the law, MacArthur Justice Center attorney Eric Foley says there is reason to believe that Cantrell is not complying. “In essence, his practice really hasn’t changed,” Foley said. “He tells people he’s going to consider their finances and income, but … he doesn’t actually ask any of these questions or make findings on the record. That was a really important part of the opinion — that these findings be put on the record — and there’s really none of that happening.”

The parties are in discussion, Foley said, and a motion for injunctive relief is pending.

Not that any of this is particularly surprising. Louisiana long held the dubious honor of being the incarceration capital of the world (it was only recently beat out by Oklahoma), and several years ago, Orleans Parish had the highest per capita rate of people exonerated of a wrongful conviction among counties with more than 300,000 residents.

It is the specter of wrongful conviction that troubles Levine about the illegal return-on-indictment process. “This is a solid example of one of the factors that could lead to wrongful convictions,” she said. “When you look at the studies about people pleading guilty because they’re incarcerated and not necessarily because they’re guilty, and then you look to see why someone might be incarcerated and not able to be released, [it is] the fact that they do not have a defense attorney at a hearing that so clearly requires a defense attorney to be present for the exact reason of warding off wrongful convictions, so a defense attorney can actually talk about the weaknesses and strengths of a case. If the defense attorney is not there, they really don’t have that option.”

Colin Doyle, a staff attorney with the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Policy Program who works on bail and pretrial reforms, said that when he heard about the return-on-indictment process in New Orleans, he was stunned. “It’s brazen,” he said, “a pretty creative constitutional violation.” Still, it didn’t entirely shock him, he said, because across the country, the pretrial system is rife with problems — including the lack of counsel and exorbitant bonds. But the fact that bonds are being increased in violation of constitutional protections during post-indictment hearings is a new one for Doyle. “The staggering amount of these bail increases [makes it] just so obvious that it is a switch from any kind of meaningful release mechanism to de facto detention.”

He notes that for people who have already been released, as in the example of Wainwright’s client, the practice is particularly egregious. “I think everyone’s jaw should drop and hit the floor … that there is a hearing that is happening, post-indictment, in which someone’s conditions of release are changed, and then they’re asking immediately for … that person’s arrest for not complying with conditions that they didn’t have notice of,” he said. “That’s unconscionable.”

Levine says that not everyone in the courthouse is comfortable with the practice, including the parish’s chief judge, Keva Landrum-Johnson, who has signaled in court and to her colleagues on the bench that the practice should end.

Three Years of Insanity

With his bond increased to nearly triple the original amount, there was no way William Bonham was going to be released before the case against him for the murder of Frenchy Brouillette went to trial. In fact, the case would drag on for three years. “Of course we went back in to court and argued for a reduction in bail,” Bosworth said. “But once that $1.25 million bail was set, it became our burden to convince the judge that bail should be reduced. But, unfortunately, once the bell has been rung, the judge is unlikely to un-ring it and say, ‘My bail setting was a mistake.’”

The case was frustrating for Bosworth and Town as the years ticked by and prosecutors repeatedly failed to turn over relevant evidence that would help them to prove the murder was self-defense — including a police report that described how Brouillette had previously attacked Bonham, hitting him over the head with a vodka bottle. “It was three years of just insanity,” said Bosworth, “of withheld evidence, or turning over false evidence, or refusing to turn over additional evidence. It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been doing this for 15 years.”

In the end, the case resolved itself with a plea deal for time that Bonham had mostly already served while awaiting trial. He was finally released earlier this year.

Bonham’s case “is a perfect example of why the return-of-indictment bond setting has been such a bad idea,” Bosworth said. At the first hearing, “we were able to present evidence and argument … that Willie acted in self-defense, and that the DA’s office was overreaching. A magistrate was able to hear this testimony and these arguments and make a decision on bail based on firsthand knowledge of the evidence.” But the system then allowed the district attorney to do an end run around the defense, taking the case to “a secret proceeding” that allowed them to “present whatever version of the facts that they want,” secure a “quick indictment,” and run back to a district judge to inflate the bond “so high that Willie will never get out of jail,” he continued.

“Without any sort of hearing, without us being involved, without any sort of notice, his bond is reset at $1.25 million — meaning that he’s never going to get out. There was no opportunity to be heard, it was just, bam,” Bosworth said. “Three years in jail when the magistrate was correct from the jump that the case appeared to be self-defense.”

The post New Orleans Prosecutors Routinely Violate Defendants’ Right to Counsel to Keep Them in Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

The Library of Congress hosts a vast library of public domain images that can be used for anything you want, including commercial use. And they occasionally curate small collections from their database of over 800,000 photos, prints, and drawings. The Library has built 28 themed collections of images, including a…

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Researchers at the Army Research Laboratory say they have created a battery that uses no cobalt or nickel and no flammable electrolyte that is lighter than conventional Li ion batteries but has the same or greater energy density.

Beto O’Rourke’s Thursday hiring of Jeff Berman, a Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton veteran, is the latest step his presidential campaign has taken away from the insurgent energy of his Senate run and toward a more centrist and corporate strategic direction.

Berman, who is joining O’Rourke’s campaign as senior adviser for delegate strategy, is perhaps most well known for his expertise in the arcane system of delegate selection, which he used to help Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination in 2008. An often overlooked part of his record, though, is his stint at law and lobbying firm Bryan Cave, a position for which he was hired immediately after Obama’s presidential campaign. (As reporter Ken Silverstein remarked in Harpers at the time: “That was fast.”) According to the federal lobbying registry, between 2009 and 2011 Berman’s clients on behalf of Bryan Cave included the private prison company GEO Group; TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline; and SeaWorld, which was then owned by massive private equity firm Blackstone.

Many of these clients are ostensibly on the opposite side of many of the issues that O’Rourke is campaigning on. Take, for example, immigration, a central theme of O’Rourke’s presidential run: He launched his campaign in the border town of El Paso, Texas, railing against Donald Trump’s immigration policies and stating, “For more than 100 years, this community has welcomed generations of immigrants from across the Rio Grande.” Yet the GEO Group, for which Berman’s work (along with other lobbyists) made Bryan Cave $60,000 in 2010, has profited handily from its business of running private prisons, including immigrant detention centers. According to reporting from the Daily Beast, the GEO Group made large donations to Trump’s campaign and has only seen its revenue soar under the current administration, earning $2.3 billion in 2018, up from $2.18 billion in 2016. Berman’s work on behalf of the GEO Group was for “outreach related to the Bureau of Prisons budget allocation in the Administration’s FY2011 budget,” according to federal filings.

O’Rourke has also been trying to shore up his climate change bonafides in response to the young activist base of the Democratic Party. After being heavily criticized for breaking his pledge to not take money from fossil fuel executives during his Senate campaign, O’Rourke made the first major policy proposal of his presidential run a $5 trillion plan to combat climate change. And, after much pressure, O’Rourke again pledged to take in no fossil fuel money, promising to return donations already made to his campaign by fossil fuel executives.

Yet Berman’s past work on behalf of TransCanada between 2009 and 2011 puts O’Rourke’s newest staffer squarely on the opposite side of one of the most contentious climate issues during Obama’s tenure. As HuffPost reported when the Clinton campaign hired Berman, he and other officials from Bryan Cave made the firm $980,000 for their lobbying work for TransCanada.

According to the filings, Berman and others lobbied to help obtain “approval for Keystone Pipeline path through Missouri tracts” and later to “monitor climate change legislation and [push for a] presidential permit process for TransCanada Keystone Pipeline.” (Other lobbying objectives were listed, but they largely mirrored these two.)

Berman made his name in Democratic politics when, under his advice, Obama successfully navigated the delegate landscape in 2008 to win the presidential primary over Hillary Clinton; at the time, Berman was termed the “unsung hero of the Obama effort.” In 2016, Clinton hired Berman as her own delegate strategist. As BuzzFeed put it, the O’Rourke campaign’s hiring of Berman “indicates that O’Rourke plans to emulate Obama in building a technical campaign machine under the surface of what he hopes will feel like a movement.”

Berman’s hire follows O’Rourke bringing on Jen O’Malley Dillon, another Obama veteran and former executive director of the Democratic National Committee, as his chief of staff in March. Just a month after O’Malley Dillon’s appointment, the Bernie Sanders alumni who helped build O’Rourke’s Senate field operation, Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, split from the campaign, signaling a move away from the progressive, grassroots organizing strategy of his Senate run. In her statement on Berman’s hiring, O’Malley Dillon said that he was “one of the first people I reached out to when I came on board because delegate strategy is so critical to our overall strategy.”

O’Malley Dillon co-founded the consulting firm Precision Strategies, which has taken on corporate clients like Pfizer, Bank of America, and Facebook, as well as Democratic political clients like the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Berman’s mixed record is standard for the wing of the Democratic Party that sees no issue with working toward progressive political ideals, while also advising the private sector. It seems to also be the wing that O’Rourke’s campaign is now firmly pivoting toward.

The post Newest Beto O’Rourke Hire Lobbied for Keystone XL, Seaworld, and Private Prisons appeared first on The Intercept.

Tesla presented its latest and greatest vehicle autonomy features at its recent Autonomy Investor Day. The brain of the system is the Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer, which is now included in all Teslas being produced. The Autopilot hardware suite includes 8 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, radar, GPS, an inertial measurement unit, and sensors that measure the angle of the steering wheel and accelerator pedal

Oil and gas are riding high now, but the US offshore wind industry is sucking talent and supply chain interest out of the fossil fuel balloon

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will announce her first major bill today, in partnership with Vermont Sen. and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. It’s something Sanders has proposed for many years: a 15 percent interest rate cap on all consumer loans, which would reduce what many Americans pay on their credit cards and effectively eliminate the payday loan industry.

The bill is called the Loan Shark Prevention Act, and it’s only two pages long. It includes language that would prevent lenders from adding fees to “evade” the interest rate cap and sets penalties for violators, including a forfeiture of all interest on the illegal loans.

According to Ocasio-Cortez’s office, the freshman representative plans to suggest postal banking as a public option for consumer lending, though that is not in the legislation. A postal lending option would in theory minimize the impact on access to credit from the rate cap. Sanders endorsed postal banking during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The interest rate cap, often referred to as a usury cap in a reference to the biblical term, has been a mainstay of Sanders’s left-wing agenda. He introduced similar legislation as far back as 2009, when Congress was debating the CARD Act, which added some more modest protections for credit card holders. While the 2009 bill specifically focused on credit cards, by 2016 Sanders had added all consumer loans to the plan.

“Today’s loan sharks wear expensive suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions of dollars in total compensation by charging sky-high fees and usurious interest rates,” Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement accompanying the plan.

The federal rate cap would nullify a critical 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Marquette National Bank v. First of Omaha Service Corp. At the time, most states had some sort of usury cap in place, dating back to the National Bank Acts of 1863-64. The high interest rates of the late 1970s increased bank borrowing costs, but the caps protected consumers from enduring the same rates.

Amid much clamor from bank lobbyists and free marketeers, First National Bank of Omaha, as was customary at the time, mailed out unsolicited credit cards across the country. The terms on these complied with Nebraska’s higher interest rate cap but violated the laws of the states that First National mailed them into. The court had to answer: When a credit card offer is made, does the bank’s home-state interest rate or the borrower’s home-state interest rate apply? Arguing for First National was notorious conservative lawyer, and future failed Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork.

The court unanimously chose the bank’s home state, and this revolutionized consumer lending. A handful of states lifted their usury caps entirely to entice banks to move their headquarters, most notably South Dakota and Delaware (in case you were wondering why your credit cards come out of those two states). Banks took the offer and could therefore export high interest rates anywhere in the country. Other states had usury laws on the books, but the Marquette decision made them irrelevant. (That’s also how Delaware’s Joe Biden became known as “the senator from MBNA,” and why Republicans regularly push to allow consumers to purchase health insurance “across state lines” — all of the insurers would set up shop in Delaware, or another low-regulation state, and sell junk plans from there, freed of state regulators elsewhere.)

The Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez proposal would allow the Federal Reserve Board to increase the rate cap for a period of 18 months but only if there are adverse circumstances threatening the “safety and soundness” of the financial system. Credit unions are exempt from this bill because a 1980 law already caps credit union interest rates to 15 percent. However, the National Credit Union Administration has used the “safety and soundness” provision since the cap was enacted; from a high of 21 percent in the 1980s, today it sits at 18 percent.

Current credit card interest rates range between 15 and 23 percent, and are higher for branded department store cards. Banks currently borrow from the Federal Reserve at a skinny 2.5 percent.

The real consumer savings from the Loan Shark Prevention Act would come from other short-term, small-dollar loans, which in an age of precarious finances at the low end have become commonplace. Payday loans carry annual percentage rates as high as 667 percent.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently gutted protections for payday lending customers that would have forced lenders to consider ability to repay before issuing the loan.

When Sanders made a similar proposal in 2016, bank trade publications warned that the plan would reduce access to credit for low-income families. No payday lender would offer a 15 percent rate for its services, at least not for anyone deemed a credit risk. The most aggressive consumer groups seeking changes to payday lending laws have asked for a 36 percent cap, as it exists in several states.

At a time when 40 percent of Americans don’t have $400 on hand for an emergency, demand for short-term loans would still exist. But if nobody will lend to such families at 15 percent, how will they cope? Will they go from loan sharks in three-piece suits to actual loan sharks?

The answer, to Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, is postal banking, which several Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed. Letting the nation’s 31,000 post offices issue simple bank accounts and even short-term loans would solve numerous problems, particularly for the over one in four households who have little or no access to banking services, which lead them to use high-cost alternatives. Returning to a postal banking system, which as many as 4 million Americans enjoyed when it was in place from 1911 to 1967, could promote financial inclusion, save billions of dollars for vulnerable populations, and help modernize and stabilize the postal system — a nationalized entity written directly into the Constitution — in an era of electronic communication.

“We must make sure that giant Wall Street financial institutions are not the only way Americans can gain access to banking services,” the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez statement reads. “Together, we are going to put predatory lenders out of business and provide affordable banking options to all Americans.”

The 2016 collective bargaining agreement between the U.S. Postal Service and the American Postal Workers Union included the rollout of postal banking pilot programs, but the Postal Service never enacted them. Those pilot programs would not have included short-term lending; that would likely require legislation.

The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders Team Up on Bank Legislation appeared first on The Intercept.

An immigrant rights advocate on the U.S.-Mexico border was arrested and accused of “illegal alien smuggling” as she accompanied an asylum-seeker to a port of entry in southern Arizona. Ana Adlerstein, a volunteer at Casa del Migrantes, a migrant shelter in the Mexican town of Sonoyta, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials told her that “the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply here” and “the border’s different,” as she was taken into custody Sunday.

Adlerstein was detained for more than four hours, and though she was not charged, she said CBP officials specifically told her that she was being placed under arrest, cited U.S. law prohibiting human smuggling, denied her access to an attorney, and informed her that investigators with the Department of Homeland Security would be following up with her as part of an “ongoing investigation.”

The arrest marks the latest in a series of aggressive actions the Trump administration’s frontline immigration enforcement agencies have taken against individuals and organizations working with migrants, which has included the arrest of nine humanitarian aid providers in Arizona, and sweeping surveillance, interrogation, and travel restrictions leveled against activists, journalists, and immigration attorneys in the San Diego-Tijuana area.

“Intimidation from CBP has been ramping up,” Adlerstein told The Intercept on Wednesday, with CBP routinely pulling individuals working on migrant issues into secondary screening, grilling them with questions and using words like “aiding and abetting.”

“We get that it’s intimidation,” Adlerstein said. “And it’s scary.”

Thursday morning, CBP’s press office in Washington D.C. told The Intercept it was in communication with officials in Arizona regarding the matter, but did not provide answers to questions prior to publication.

Adlerstein detailed her ordeal in both an interview and a statement of facts to Front Line Defenders, an international legal organization that works to protect human rights defenders, compiled after her arrest and shared with The Intercept. Her account was bolstered by Sean Wellock, a Missouri-based immigration attorney representing the asylum-seeker she was accompanying. Wellock asked that certain details regarding his client not be made public. “Reneé” is a young person from Central America, currently facing credible threats of violence in Mexico, Wellock told The Intercept, threats that are now exacerbated by a Trump administration policy of sending asylum-seekers to Mexico as their cases proceed.

Wellock took on Reneé’s case after learning that he had recently been forcibly turned away from the Lukeville port of entry. With Adlerstein acting as an observer on the ground, Wellock took steps to insure that Reneé would be able to exercise his right, under U.S. and international law, to apply for asylum. On Friday night, Wellock called the Lukeville port to inform officials there that he was Reneé’s attorney and that Reneé would be coming to the port to seek asylum. The official who picked up the phone said the port was at capacity and wouldn’t have room at that time.

On Sunday, Wellock called the port again. This time, he was able to speak to a CBP supervisor by the name of Noriega, who said that Reneé could come to the port to request asylum and that her agency did not have a policy of turning away asylum-seekers. With a signed immigration form and a cover letter from Wellock in hand, Reneé walked up to the port of entry with Adlerstein trailing behind shortly before 3 p.m. Noriega informed the pair that the facility was at capacity and to return in a couple of hours.

At approximately 5 p.m., Reneé and Adlerstein returned. As Reneé crossed the yellow line marking the beginning of U.S. soil, Adlerstein said, an officer demanded they stop. It was at that point that a new supervisor — with the last name Williams — came “rushing out,” asking his subordinate if there was “one or two.” Ultimately, Adlerstein recalled, Williams determined that there was “one and an illegal alien smuggler.”

The pair was taken into a CBP building. Adlerstein asked repeatedly if she was being placed under arrest. “Yes, I’m arresting you,” she recalls Williams telling her. “I know you’re recording this, you can record this, I don’t care.” (Adlerstein was not recording — she did not bring her phone to the port.) Adlerstein said Williams accused her of “illegal alien smuggling” and a second officer made specific reference to “1324,” the criminal statute for human smuggling, the same statute under which Scott Warren, a humanitarian aid volunteer in nearby Ajo, Arizona, is currently facing 20 years in prison.

“You are smuggling, you can be arrested for this,” Adlerstein recalls being told. “You don’t know the law.”

At the time, Adlerstein was carrying a signed letter from an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, explaining that she is a U.S. citizen and would not answer questions once her citizenship was established. Adlerstein says she told the CBP officer that if she was being placed under arrest, she wanted to speak to her attorney, whose phone number was on the letter. According to Adlerstein, Williams took the letter, tossed it on a desk, and said, “Tell your lawyer to come down here. We’ll arrest him too.”

Adlerstein was moved to a concrete cell, where she says she was subjected to what she described as an “invasive” body search by a female guard. Reneé was moved to a separate cell. On the outside, Wellock scrambled to find information on his client. “I didn’t hear anything for several hours,” he said. At one point, during a call to the processing center, a CBP officer told Wellock that he was not authorized to provide information to attorneys, and he would need to call the agency’s Tucson office.

“I was also concerned that Ana might be in trouble too,” Wellock said.

Back in the detention center, Adlerstein said multiple officers repeatedly told her that she had no Fourth Amendment rights and that “things are different at the border.” Three hours into her detention, she was presented with a form that would authorize the government to call her family to let them know that she was “safe” — Adlerstein’s mother was woken up by the call at approximately 11 p.m. ET.

As time ticked away, Adlerstein wondered how long she would be locked up. At one point, she said, an officer told her she could be held for up to eight hours; another said she could be held “indefinitely.” Fours hours in, Adlerstein started pounding on her cell door. A headache from the beginning of the episode started to worsen, and Adlerstein began requesting medical care. She was taken to an office, fingerprinted, and told that she was the subject of an “ongoing investigation,” with CBP awaiting word from DHS on whether she would receive a summons.

At approximately 9 p.m., Adlerstein was released, having been told that Homeland Security Investigations, the powerful investigative wing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, would be calling her. Reneé, meanwhile, was processed but his location in the immigration system was not immediately clear. As of Thursday, Wellock was still working with DHS to determine the asylum seeker’s precise location.

“This is supposed to be the most straightforward way to apply for asylum,” the immigration attorney said. “They are making it very difficult.”

The post “The Fourth Amendment Doesn’t Apply Here” — U.S. Border Guards Arrest Arizona Immigrant Rights Volunteer appeared first on The Intercept.

Google is giving you more control over how long you want the tech company to hold on to your location history and web activity data. Google has introduced a new, easier, privacy-focused auto-delete feature for your Google account that will allow you to automatically delete your Location History and Web and App Activity data after a set period of time. Google's Location History feature, if

During a group dinner in a small town in Norway in 2015, at an international conference for investigative journalists, a Ukrainian reporter told me that he used both Gmail and Mail.ru, Russia’s most popular email provider. “Every time I write an email,” he said, “I have to decide if I want Obama to read it, or if I want Putin to read it.”

It may be hyperbolic to suggest that world leaders personally comb through individual email accounts, but the reporter’s point stands: When you use services like Gmail, Mail.ru, Facebook, Dropbox, Slack, or any other site that stores your data, they will hand your private information to governments when compelled to do so and in some cases, merely when asked. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the government usually needs a warrant to access private data held by third-party companies. But even with new legal protection, email remains all too easy for governments to quietly obtain. Many companies, like Facebook, have shared personal information even more widely, with private entities. When your personal data is stored on a company’s servers, as with the email in your Gmail account, there are no technical barriers to the host company sharing it when it sees fit.

Google provided private information to government agencies around the world more than 60,000 times in 2017, often turning over data from multiple Google accounts at once, according to its transparency report. And that doesn’t include over 100,000 Google accounts from which the company gave data in response to secret orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a U.S. national security tribunal whose meetings and decisions are kept from the public. Mail.ru doesn’t provide a transparency report, but the situation is no doubt much worse in Russia: All Russian internet companies are required to retain data they collect about their users and to hand it to FSB, a Russian spy agency, if asked.

Google gave data from over 100,000 accounts in response to secret national security orders — in one year.

If you want an email account that’s actually private, one solution is to run your own email server from your house. This way, if governments want to secretly ask your email provider for a copy of your inbox, they’ll have to ask you.

Until now, this hasn’t been a viable option for most people: Not only would you need an extra computer to act as a home email server, but you’d also need enough system administration skills to install, configure, and secure this server. In addition, you’d need to deal with headaches related to your broadband internet provider; such providers typically try to block email servers by interfering with connections to a particular networking channel, port 25, associated with mail delivery. After you solved that problem, you’d need to configure your router to forward inbound email deliveries to your server. Then you’d need to register a domain name where your email address will live, and then point that domain to your email server using a system known as DNS. This is complicated by the fact that most residential internet addresses change on a regular basis. And as much work as it is to initially set up this home email server, it’s even more work to maintain it over time — to promptly install security updates, set up monitoring so you’ll be notified when something breaks, block spam, and avoid getting your server added to spam block lists.

With the release of Helm, that has changed. Helm is a triangle-shaped personal server that can host email (on your own custom domain name), contacts, calendar, and a file server, and is about as easy to set up as a new smartphone. For being basically a sophisticated product for hosting your most private data — where there are many opportunities to screw up — Helm’s technical choices and business model are surprisingly well-thought-out. All you need is internet access at your home and an iPhone or Android phone to configure it.

The biggest hurdle prospective users will face, I suspect, is the price: You have to drop $500 to buy Helm to get started, and then pay a $100 per year subscription to continue using its cloud gateway and encrypted backup components.

I’ve been hosting my personal email, micah@micahflee.com, on a Helm device plugged into my router in my living room for several months now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned, starting with what it’s like to switch to Helm, then an assessment of Helm security, a comparison to Gmail, a nitty-gritty examination of how Helm works technically, a look to the future of Helm, and some important caveats about the product and the policies and realities around it.

Switching to Helm

The first step to switching to Helm is picking out the domain name you want to use for your new personal email address — in my case, micahflee.com. After ordering my Helm, I received simple instructions on how to proceed.

Properly configuring a domain name for an email server is complicated, and misconfigurations can cause other email servers to suspect that you’re running a spam operation. To avoid this, and to make it simpler for users, Helm handles the DNS for your domain name for you. If you ever need update your domain name’s DNS records, you can do it from the Helm mobile app.

If you don’t already own a domain name, you can get one while buying your Helm; all the fees associated with buying and renewing the domain name are included in the price. If you do already own a domain, you’ll need to log in to your registrar’s website and update your domain to point to DNS servers that Helm controls; Helm will handle the rest. If you host a website on your domain name — like I do with micahflee.com — you’ll also need to let Helm know about it first. (Helm supports multiple domain names, but this feature was added after I tried the product.)

The next step is waiting for the Helm device to ship to your house. Once mine arrived, I had it up and running in about 10 minutes, with an additional hour and a half to migrate all of my email from my old provider into my Helm.

Following the instructions, I plugged the Helm device into a power outlet in my living room, next to my Wi-Fi router. I connected the Helm to the router using the ethernet cable (you can also connect your Helm to your router over Wi-Fi, but ethernet is more reliable, faster, and more secure). And I installed the Helm mobile app on my Android phone, turned on Bluetooth, and paired with the Helm.

A quick note about the Android app: When I first opened the Helm app, it asked for permission to use my location. “This is an unfortunate requirement from Android since our app uses Bluetooth to pair with the Helm,” Helm CEO Giri Sreenivas told me. Apparently, Android apps can’t have Bluetooth permission without also requesting location services permission. “We do not note or store any location information.” The iOS app does not have this issue.

The next page asks for your activation code, which I already had in an email from Helm. After typing it in, the Helm app walked me through creating an administrator username and password for my domain, micahflee.com.

 

After creating an account, the app prompts you to insert the “recovery key” into the Helm device. This is part of Helm’s strategy to make sure you can access your data in case of disaster — like if you spill soda all over your Helm or your house burns down. If you ever need to restore your encrypted backups to a new Helm device, you’ll either need your logged-in phone or this recovery key. And if you get a new phone, you’ll need this recovery key to log in to the Helm app as your administrator user again.

After getting your recovery key squared away, put it in a safe location where you won’t lose it. I suggest a safe, if you have one, or a locked drawer.

The next step is to configure email on your devices, like your phone and laptop. Each device gets its own unique, unguessable password to login to your email. Unlike many email services, Helm doesn’t support web mail — you must use a standard email client, like the one built into your phone or laptop’s operating system, or like Mozilla Thunderbird.

After I set up Thunderbird to connect to my new home email server, I was presented with an empty inbox. About one minute later, I received my first email to my home email server. As soon as I activated my Helm device, incoming email for micahflee.com stopped getting delivered to my old provider and started getting delivered to my Helm.

The next step is importing your old email. Before going into how I did that, here is a quick aside: I used Gmail a decade ago. But as a privacy advocate, I was keenly aware that Google had access to all my email and couldn’t be relied on to protect it from government requests. This anxiety was heightened in 2013, around the time that National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s overreach, revealing, among other things, that the agency had “direct access” to the servers of major U.S. companies, including Google, through a mass surveillance program known as PRISM.

So I went searching for an email provider I felt I could trust more. Since then, I’ve hosted my email with a handful of small entities that, while lacking Google’s massive engineering, security, and usability resources, I judged were much more likely to protect my email from government requests based on their privacy policies and, in some cases, conversations with staff at these providers. These included Riseup, a tech collective that hosts communication tools for activists; Electric Embers, a tiny Bay Area work-owned cooperative; ProtonMail, a Swiss-based encrypted email provider; and Soverin, a tiny privacy-focused email provider based out of Amsterdam. (Unlike most email providers, Riseup and ProtonMail store your email encrypted to your password, but there’s still a lot of information they could provide to a government if compelled, including all your email metadata.)

Back in the Helm app, I started the process of importing my email from Soverin. I chose to import from Soverin’s IMAP server, so I had to supply an IMAP hostname, as well as my Soverin username and password. The process is even simpler if you’re switching from Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

It took about an hour and a half to download all of the emails from my old provider. When it was done, I logged into my Soverin account and deleted all of my email from its server. At this point, I was successfully self-hosting my email from my house! (If you’re changing email addresses while switching to Helm, like if you’re switching from a gmail.com address to a custom domain name, you’ll also want to configure your old email account to forward emails to your new address and set up an auto-responder message that tells people who email you that you’re using a new email address.)

Importing email from your old provider into Helm is simple and straightforward. But contacts and calendar, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complicated (after much troubleshooting, I ended up adding both my new and old contacts and calendar accounts to Evolution, a Linux-only email app, then exported data from my old accounts and imported it into my new accounts). I’d love to see future versions of Helm make migrating your contacts and calendar just as simple as it is to migrate your email.

How Secure Is Helm Against Hackers?

When you talk about the security of an email server, you’re really talking about two separate things: The security of individual user accounts and the security of the technical infrastructure itself, which includes server software choices, system hardening, monitoring, intrusion detection, incident response, and the operational and endpoint security of system administrators.

I believe that Helm’s technical infrastructure is well-engineered from a security prospective. It uses best practices (I go into greater detail in the “under the hood” section below), I don’t see any obvious flaws, and, though I haven’t made a thorough comparison, it appears to offer similar security as most small, well-run email providers. Basically, the only attackers who can get in are those armed with expensive zero-day exploits — exploits that rely on bugs that the software-makers themselves don’t even know exist and thus have not been able to release security updates for. An attacker would need to find a zero day for software Helm is known to run, like Dovecot, the open-source email server. The vast majority of attackers will remain locked out.

That said, there are some security tradeoffs involved with using Helm and some areas in which the system’s security could be improved.

If someone does manage to hack your Helm, you probably won’t notice, unfortunately. Sreenivas told me that Helm doesn’t have an intrusion detection system at this time. “We plan to summarize failed attempts in a weekly digest email,” he told me, “but alerting on actual intrusion is something we haven’t defined yet.”

Additionally, running a home server increases the risk to your home network. If someone successfully hacks your Helm, they could pivot from it, probing laptops, smartphones, and other devices in your house for weaknesses. But I don’t think this is much riskier than connecting your laptop or smartphone to a public Wi-Fi network, where anyone else on the network could try attacking your device.

Individual Helm email accounts are more secure than individual Gmail accounts.

Also, while Helm’s infrastructure is pretty good, you will get more robust security protections from a major enterprise like Google, which has a team dedicated to hunting, and fixing, zero-day exploits and warns you when state-sponsored hackers try to compromise your account.

Unlike Google, however, Helm will never share your emails with anyone or scan them to target advertisements at you, because it can’t. By design, the Helm company simply doesn’t have access to your email. So while Helm is probably not as secure as Gmail, it’s vastly more private.

What’s more, individual Helm email accounts are more secure than individual Gmail accounts, I would argue. Unlike with Google, and most other web-based services, hackers can’t use spearphishing to compromise your Helm account. It’s possible to lock down your Google account to defend against spearphishing, but accounts aren’t locked down by default, and adding security measures like 2-Step Verification, which I recommend every Google user enable, make it more annoying to use on a daily basis.

Before I go into how Helm account security works, first let me describe how spearphishing works. One of the most consequential email hacks in recent history happened against a Gmail account in March 2016. Officers working for GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, sent the following email to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chair John Podesta.

 

While it looked legitimate, it was far from it. When Podesta clicked the “change password” button, it actually linked to the URL shortener service Bitly, which redirected to a fake Gmail login page hosted at the domain myaccount.googlecom-securitysettingspage.tk. This fake address was the only visual indication that this was a spearphishing attack.

 

Like most people would, Podesta typed his password into the hackers’ convincing fake page. After GRU officers successfully gained access to his Gmail account, federal officials have said, they used their fake Guccifer 2.0 persona to send a copy of his inbox to WikiLeaks, which began publishing the messages at key points during the 2016 election.

In contrast, here’s how Helm security works. Managing your Helm account and devices is done exclusively through the mobile app and initially requires what the company calls “proximity-based” authentication: To associate your smartphone with the Helm, you need your username and password, and you also need to physically be in the same room as the Helm so you can pair with it over Bluetooth, which will create a shared authentication token between the Helm and the smartphone. So even if you use a weak password, or reuse the same password for Helm that has appeared in a data breach, attackers can’t log in to your account without getting physically close enough to your Helm to pair with it. Once you log in to the app, you stay logged in and generally won’t need to log in again unless you get a new phone. This means you do not need to be in the same room as the Helm merely to access your email, calendar, or other services.

(Proximity-based authentication has its downsides: If you want to give a friend who lives in another part of the world a user account hosted on your Helm, they’ll need to come visit you in person to login to their account for the first time, and again every time they switch phones.)

After logging into your account, you can add and delete devices that you’ll use to access your email. Each of these devices has a secure, unique device password such as “3mdxmh23kzjkv6hs.” For example, the password I use on my phone is different than the one I use on my laptop. If I get a new phone, I’ll delete the device name associated with it (“trackingdevice”), revoking access from my old phone, and I’ll add a device for my new phone, which will have its own unique name and password.

There is no way to check your Helm email from a web browser — you have to use native email clients installed on your computer or phone.

All of this together means that Helm is immune from spearphishing. If GRU hackers went after a Helm user with the same technique they used against Podesta, it wouldn’t work. They could send a spearphishing email, perhaps disguised as official communication from the Helm company, with a link they trick the user into clicking. But there’s no login page on Helm’s website for them to imitate — you host your email from the Helm device in your house, not from Helm’s website, after all. And that device also lacks a login page. If an attacker made up a login page anyway, and even if the Helm user typed their username and password into it (even though Helm users never do this, unlike with Google where users log in all the time), the Helm account is still protected by proximity-based authentication.

If resourced hackers, like GRU officers, really wanted access to your email, their best bet is to either compromise the Helm device itself, or compromise one of your devices that you’ve authorized to check your email. This is definitely possible, but it’s a much higher bar than compromising a single account, especially if you keep your devices updated (you don’t need to worry about the Helm device, which automatically updates itself).

Your User Experience Could Change

If you’re accustomed to Gmail, switching to Helm might take some getting used to. Here are a few differences to expect.

Helm does not have any web mail interface. This is undoubtedly a good thing for security — it protects you from spearphishing attacks, it allows you to strictly control which devices have access to your email, and it makes it simpler to encrypt your email with PGP, if you’re that type of nerd. It also means that you’ll have to use an email client with a user interface totally different from Gmail’s; Thunderbird isn’t as pretty or easy to use, for example. And finally, you can’t check your email on someone else’s computer — you can only log in on devices that you’ve added to your Helm account using the mobile app. This might be inconvenient, but it, too, is good for your email security. You don’t know what spyware is running on other people’s computers, and you don’t have to worry about forgetting to log out.

If GRU hackers went after a Helm user with the same technique they used against Podesta, it wouldn’t work.

I get a lot of email, including all sorts of email notifications, and I’m subscribed to several mailing lists. To keep things organized, I automatically filter incoming emails into their own folders. At the moment, Helm doesn’t support server-side filters, so if you want to filter your email, you need to do it from one of your email clients. For example, as a software developer, I get a lot of GitHub email notifications that I want filtered into my “github” folder, so I set up an email filter in Thunderbird that does this, and it works great. But because it’s a Thunderbird filter, when I check my email on my phone, new GitHub emails appear in my inbox and don’t get moved to my “github” folder until the next time I open Thunderbird. It’s not a big deal, but it would be nice for Helm to support server-side filters in the future.

Finally, there is the fight against spam. Gmail is excellent at recognizing and blocking spam because they use the private emails of their 1.5 billion users to create an incredibly accurate model of what spam looks like. Helm’s spam filtering isn’t bad, but chances are more spam will get through than you’re used to, at least to begin with. Every time you mark email as spam in your email client, Helm’s spam filtering will learn from this and get better at recognizing it, all while not sharing the contents of your email with any third parties.

How Helm Works Under the Hood

Helm includes different components: the mobile app, the recovery key, the gateway server in the cloud, and, most importantly, the Helm device itself, which stores all of your data on its 128GB solid-state hard disk. Since I’m trusting Helm with hosting my own email, I put effort into learning exactly how it works. This section dives pretty deep into the weeds and uses tech jargon without always explaining what it means. Feel free to skip ahead if this isn’t your thing.

The Helm Device

The Helm device is a computer running Linux, the popular open-source operating system. It doesn’t have a microphone, and it’s completely silent; instead of cooling with a loud fan, it dissipates heat through its aluminum base. And compared to a typical home Linux server, it’s quite a bit harder to hack thanks to hardware and software hardening tricks.

First, Helm uses a system called full-disk encryption to protect data stored on its local drive, ensuring that people with physical access to the device, like a burglar, can’t extract any private information from it, since everything on the drive would be indecipherable to the attacker. As with iPhone hardware, Helm has a “Secure Enclave” built into its processor — basically, a tiny, separate computer designed to be impenetrable and that manages encryption keys, tightly restricting in what circumstances, and by what software, the keys may be used to unlock stored data. And secure boot is enabled, meaning that an attacker cannot create malware to intercept encryption keys by impersonating the operating system as Helm starts up (a tactic classified as a type of “evil maid“ attack). (If you want to run unauthorized bootloader code on your own Helm, check out the reverse engineering section below.)

Once the Helm device is booted, the next security trick is that it stores files used to boot the system on what is known as a read-only root filesystem, where data cannot be changed. If your Helm gets compromised, this makes it more difficult for malware to modify any core operating system files or to survive a reboot. The server is also packed with proven open-source software for running email, contacts, calendar, file hosting, and user management services — these include Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDMARK, Apple’s Darwin Calendar and Contact Server, Nextcloud, OpenLDAP, and more — and each service is isolated in its own Docker container (a sort of virtual jail enforced by software). In another security win, Helm automatically keeps this wide array of software updated in order to eliminate vulnerabilities as they are discovered.

Finally, when you configure your Helm for the first time, it automatically enables a type of encryption known as TLS. TLS is often used to encrypt web traffic, but it is also used to allow email clients to connect securely and privately over the internet to your email server, which in my case, has the hostname of helm.micahflee.com. Helm gets a trusted TLS certificate using a popular nonprofit service known as Let’s Encrypt.

But, wait, how do connections to your hostname end up making it to your Helm device in your living room?

Gateway in the Cloud

Each Helm device makes a persistent, encrypted network connection to a dedicated gateway server hosted on Amazon’s platform for making cheap, virtual internet servers, known as Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. Unlike most residential internet connections, which are periodically assigned new IP addresses, EC2 provides gateways with static IP addresses and none of the headaches — blocked mail delivery ports, router reconfiguration — that make it hard to host an email server at home. Your Helm server, connected to your home network, connects to the gateway using the same technology you might use to access your employer’s office network from home: a virtual private network, or VPN. The gateway’s purpose is to forward encrypted traffic, including email delivery connections, through the VPN tunnel to the Helm device in your house. This architecture explains why, if you look up the IP address of my public email server, helm.micahflee.com, it resolves to the location of my gateway in an Amazon data center, not of my home.

For example, I configured the email app on my phone to connect to helm.micahflee.com, encrypted with TLS. Each time my email app checks for new messages, it connects over the internet to the gateway, which then forwards this encrypted traffic over the VPN tunnel to the Helm device in my house. In other words, the connection between my phone and my Helm device is end-to-end encrypted. Similarly, when there’s an incoming email, the connection between the remote email server and the Helm device is also end-to-end encrypted, but forwarded over the gateway.

So, while both Amazon and Helm (the company) have the technical ability to spy on this server, this spying can’t reveal my emails or my email metadata — all they can see is encrypted traffic. The exception to this is if I’m emailing with someone using a grossly insecure email server that doesn’t support TLS encryption. In this case, Amazon and Helm, and every router that forwards emails to and from that server across the internet, can spy on them. “Over 92% of email traffic is over TLS globally,” Sreenivas wrote in a blog post explaining how Helm’s networking works, “and we will have an option for Helm customers to require all email be transmitted over TLS with the consequence that insecure transmission of emails will be rejected.”

Encrypted Backups and Recovering From Disaster

As discussed previously, Helm protects all its files using full-disk encryption with a key stored in the Secure Enclave. In addition, it encrypts all private data, including emails, contacts, calendar events, and files, a second time using a separate key called the “recovery key.” When you authenticate as a Helm administrator using the mobile app, a copy of this recovery key gets copied to your phone. (Once on your phone, to provide additional security, it is stored in a private area that is not included in phone backups.) And during the Helm setup process, you also copy this key onto the physical key-shaped USB device (this USB device is designed only to store the recovery key; it doesn’t work like a normal USB drive). Having multiple backups of the recovery key, on your phone and on the key-shaped USB device, prevent a “single point of failure,” Sreenivas told me. Also, you’ll need to use the USB recovery key when you login as the administrator user on the mobile app — for example, the next time you get a new phone.

Both Amazon and Helm have the ability to spy on your gateway — but all they can see is encrypted traffic.

On the Helm device, the private data is stored in its own filesystem, encrypted using dm-crypt, an encryption system provided by Linux. The Helm then uses an open-source system known as duplicity to regularly upload incremental, encrypted backups to Helm’s servers. (This backup service, in addition to DNS hosting and your Helm’s gateway server, are what the $100 per year subscription goes toward.) While the Helm company has access to your backups, they don’t have access to the recovery key needed to access any of the data locked inside. Only you do, on your Helm device, your phone, and your key-shaped USB device.

If your Helm breaks, is stolen, or is otherwise destroyed in a disaster, you can get a new Helm device and restore the backup. But to do this, you’ll need either your phone (logged in as the administrator user) or your key-shaped USB device. If you don’t have either of these, you’re out of luck, and there’s nothing the Helm company can do to help you. Such is the price of using encryption and having control over your own keys.

The Mobile App

The final component is the mobile app, available for Android and iOS. As discussed above, this is the sole interface for configuring your Helm. Every user who has an account on the Helm uses the mobile app to log in using their username and password, as well as Bluetooth pairing for proximity-based authentication. Once logged in, users can add new devices, which create unique device passwords, as well as delete devices to revoke access. As an administrator, you can also use the mobile app to manage the DNS on your domain name and add new accounts.

Email Is Only the Beginning

One of the things I’m most excited about as a Helm user is that, over time, Helm plans to add new services to their plug-and-play home server beyond email, contacts, calendar, and files.

In fact, support for a home file server that allows you to sync files between your devices, share files with other users, and privately back up photos from your phone — powered by the open-source Nextcloud project — is a new feature I haven’t fully explored yet.

“We are working on a VPN service that runs off your Helm, which we plan to connect with an ad-blocker,” Sreenivas told me. This would allow you to securely connect into your home network from anywhere, making it more secure to use public Wi-Fi networks and allowing you to access services like Netflix, which normally block VPNs.

Helm also plans on building a password manager that syncs your password database to the device, as well as a private “family chat and messaging” service. New services will appear in updates and won’t cost anything extra, Sreenivas said. Instead they will all be covered in the $100 per year subscription fee.

How Helm Restricts Your Use of Your Server

While Helm is powered by open-source software, and the company has shown a commitment to transparency about the inner workings of its product, it’s important to remember that Helm is an investor-funded startup, and the Helm product is proprietary. Unlike a home Linux server, you can’t log in to it with software like SSH, install software packages (like, say, a web server), or tweak configuration files. You can’t inspect its source code or install Helm’s custom operating system on a computer of your choice, like you could with an open-source operating system such as Ubuntu. With this in mind, here’s what I learned from reviewing the legalese I had to agree to to become a Helm user.

The first thing that stood out in the privacy policy is that, like Google, Mail.ru, and all other companies everywhere in the world, Helm must comply with lawful government requests for data. “We may disclose your information if required to do so by law, in response to a court order, judicial or other government subpoena or warrant,” the privacy policy reads.

So if Helm received a data request, what information would they hand over? Sreenivas said the company will return customer information, including the customer’s name, billing address, shipping address, email address, domain name, and their DNS records; device information, including the serial number, software version, which services are enabled, and some diagnostic information like the operating temperature of the customer’s Helm device; and any emails or chats with customer support. They will not, however, be able to return any data that’s stored on the Helm, such as your private email, contact list, calendar events, or files. Sreenivas also told me that Helm will publish a transparency report about how many data requests the company receives and will alert its customers if it receives a request for user data, so long as the company is not prohibited from doing so with a gag order.

Next, Helm can’t guarantee your security. “Please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable,” the privacy policy states. “We cannot and do not guarantee that your information will not be accessed, viewed, disclosed, altered, or destroyed by breach of any of our physical, technical, or managerial safeguards.” This is true of Gmail too — just ask John Podesta. This is also true of everything else that relies on computer security. Perfect computer security is a myth, and companies that claim their products are “hacker-proof” are lying to you.

But the thing that stood out to me in Helm’s terms and conditions as most worrisome is this passage, forbidding users to reverse engineer their Helm devices: “Buyer acknowledges that the Product sold by Seller hereunder contains and embodies trade secrets belonging to Seller and Buyer shall not reverse engineer any products purchased hereunder.”

This is a ban on reverse engineering, preventing a type of close examination of computer hardware and code that can help uncover defects and add new functionality. Such bans are deeply problematic. Sreenivas outlined some plans to mitigate the ban, but at the moment, these are merely promises.

Reverse engineering bans like Helm’s have historically been abused by companies.

Reverse engineering bans have historically been abused by companies wanting to prevent security researchers from publicizing security flaws in their products. “We want to encourage security researchers to engage with us, so they will be granted an exception,” Sreenivas told me. In addition, Helm offers a bug bounty program in which security researchers can report vulnerabilities they discover and receive a bounty of up to $20,000.

The other way bans on reverse engineering have been abused is by going after “jailbreak” communities. You spent $500 on your Helm device, so what if you want to hack it yourself to run custom software? Sreenivas said that the company plans to make it easy for users to do this by including “effectively an unlock for a developer mode.” This seems like a reasonable compromise to me and is similar to how developer mode in Google’s Chromebooks works, allowing users who want complete control over their Helms to have it, but at the expense of security.

Even Though Helm Can’t Access Your Data, You Still Need to Trust It

If it were malicious, there are a few ways that the Helm company itself could launch an attack against your Helm device. Helm controls the DNS of your custom domain name and your gateway server, which means, if it were so inclined, it has the power it needs to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack against your email service, in which the company would spy on all of your email traffic by impersonating your Helm. The company also controls the updates that your Helm device receives, so it’s within its power to slip into one of the updates a backdoor — a way to surreptitiously log into your Helm device while it’s running, access your data, and install other software.

However, I don’t find this very likely to occur. Not only would it be against Helm’s own interests — the company’s entire business model is based around designing a product in which it does not have access to your emails — an attack like this would ultimately knock your email privacy down to the level of Gmail and Mail.ru, which already has all of this access. They wouldn’t be able to read any emails encrypted with PGP, for example. And additionally, Helm is far from the only company you need to trust not to be malicious. If your domain name registrar were malicious, they could also perform a similar man-in-the-middle attack against your mail server. And the makers of any software — from Microsoft Word to “Fortnite” — could slip a backdoor into an update without you knowing. So, while it’s something to consider, I’m not nearly as worried about this threat when compared to the threats posed by hackers and lawyers.

Helm will do a better job at securing your home email server than any lone individual could — myself included — with the possible exception of a talented DevOps engineer who does this work professionally. And by design, Helm protects your data from the much more serious threats of your email provider pilfering through your inbox, using it to target ads against you, and sending copies of your email to cops or spies who ask for it without your knowledge or consent.

Update, May 3: My explanation of proximity-based authentication has been changed to clarify that you need to be physically near the Helm to create a user account. It is technically possible to give a distant person an email address on your Helm, but you will have full access to their account, which most people would not want.

The post Avoid Surveillance With Helm, a Home Server Anyone Can Use to Keep Emails Truly Private appeared first on The Intercept.

How to Turn Off Amazon App Recommendations is a post by Cory Gunther from Gotta Be Mobile.

In this quick guide we’ll explain how to turn off Amazon app recommendations, notifications and deals from popping up on your phone. If you’re like me you use Amazon a lot, but that also means you’re constantly getting notifications or “here’s a great deal we picked for you” from Amazon.

And while Amazon suggestions are helpful at times and the deals can give you a heads up on a price drop, they’re often something random you clicked on and not necessarily a product you actually want. Basically, here’s how to customize and manage the Amazon app notifications.

How to Disable Amazon App Suggestions & Notifications

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone or tablet
2. Sign in then tap the 3-lines menu button near the top left
3. Scroll down and select Settings then click on Notifications
4. Uncheck “Your Recommendations” or any other notification from the list

From here you have access to just about any and all notifications from the Android app. And while we recommend keeping notifications on for products that ship, or important account alerts, everything else is optional and a personal preference.

Personally, I hate the “here’s a deal for you” notifications I get every few days for something I’ll never buy. Amazon will send you a pop-up and recommend a product based on your shopping activity. Go ahead and uncheck that box, uncheck the watched deals, or even scroll down and turn off Amazon Community notifications. That way you won’t get updates on questions, reviews, or followers from the online Amazon community.

Additionally, users can go to the Amazon website on a desktop, sign-in, and further refine some of the features and notifications for their specific account.

Before you go, take a peek at our Amazon Prime problems and fixes coverage, or learn how to share Amazon Prime shipping with your family.

How to Turn Off Amazon App Recommendations is a post by Cory Gunther from Gotta Be Mobile.

All of the Democratic presidential candidates have committed to rejecting the influence of special interests. To demonstrate their resolve, several of the candidates have promised to power their White House ambitions without a single dollar of lobbyist money.

In the waves of small-dollar donations reported on Monday — the first financial disclosure reporting period of the 2020 presidential race — lobbyist money had made its way into the coffers of major candidates’ campaigns.

Beto O’Rourke is one of the candidates who had pledge to run a campaign financed only by regular people — “not PACs, not lobbyists, not corporations, and not special interests.” His latest filing, however, shows that he accepted donations from a federal utility-company lobbyist and a top Chevron lobbyist in New Mexico.

Some lobbyist cash comes from individuals who are clearly lobbyists but have chosen not to register with a federal system rife with loopholes.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has also collected donations from registered corporate lobbyists in South Carolina, New York, and California. Several technology lobbyists from San Francisco have given to her campaign. Another Harris donor, Robert Crowe, from the firm, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, is a federal lobbyist who has worked to influence Congress on behalf of pipeline firm EQT Corporation and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., similarly announced that he would eschew campaign donations from federal lobbyists, and his campaign appears to be making most of the caveat about “federal” lobbyists. Though he has returned donations from lobbyists registered under the federal government’s system, Booker has taken half a dozen donations from lobbyists registered under state and municipal lobbyist registration laws, but who do not appear in federal disclosures.

The pledge to reject lobbyist cash is completely voluntary and self-defined. O’Rourke has made blanket statements that he will reject all donations from lobbyists. Harris has made promises in emails to her supporters to reject all lobbyist donations and, in other emails, to only reject donations from federal lobbyists. Booker’s campaign website only specifies that he will not accept money from federal lobbyists.

The flow of lobby cash comes in many forms. Some comes from registered lobbyists, others from individuals who are clearly lobbyists but have chosen not to register with a federal system rife with loopholes.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act, which governs the criteria over federal lobbyist registration, is notoriously easy to evade and historically poorly enforced. Many professional corporate influence peddlers — well-aware of the porous definitions set out in the statute — simply choose not to register.

Take, for instance, Jay Carney, the former White House press secretary under President Barack Obama, who took a job as the vice president for worldwide corporate affairs at Amazon in 2015. Carney, the new campaign disclosures show, donated to Booker, O’Rourke, Harris, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The Carney donations, however, would not technically violate the lobbyist money ban, depending on how it is read, because he is not a registered lobbyist.

The registration distinction makes little difference in the real world of professional public affairs. Amazon’s chief lobbyist reports to Carney, and Carney has been deeply involved in many of Amazon’s most high-profile efforts to sway public officials, including the bidding war over the company’s planned “HQ2″ expansion project. He also oversees Amazon’s lobbying office in Washington, D.C., which employs some 28 in-house lobbyists working on policy issues ranging from taxes to labor to artificial intelligence.

Since Carney is not personally registered, does his donation count as lobbyist money?

The donation disclosures released this week by the Federal Election Commission highlight a number of murky areas where candidates take special-interest cash despite pledges not to. John Buckley, chief executive officer of Subject Matter, a sprawling lobbying firm that represents corporate clients, such as health insurance giant UnitedHealth and oil giant BP, is an O’Rourke donor. Buckley, however, is not himself a registered lobbyist.

Some donations clearly cross the threshold. The FEC disclosures show that O’Rourke also received money from Amy Thomas, a federal lobbyist for the American Public Power Association, as well as from Patrick Killen, a registered state lobbyist for Chevron in New Mexico.

The Harris campaign received the most registered lobbyist donations of any Democratic presidential campaign that has said it would not take the cash.

Booker appears to have closely followed his no federal lobbyist rule. The campaign revealed on Monday that it had returned a $1,000 from Kristen Ludecke, a federal lobbyist for PSEG, the largest utility company in New Jersey. But the Booker campaign continues to embrace corporate lobbyists that register under state and municipal registration guidelines. His campaign received campaign funds from multiple lobbyists working at Mercury Public Affairs; Dennis Marco, a local health care and pharmaceutical lobbyist; and from Dennis Culnan, a New Jersey lobbyist closely tied to the Norcross family political machine.

The Harris campaign received the most registered lobbyist donations of any Democratic presidential campaign that has said it would not take the cash.

The long list of state- and municipal-registered lobbyists giving to the Harris campaign includes Leecia Eve, a Verizon lobbyist in New York; Alex Tourk, an Airbnb lobbyist in San Francisco; Alexander Clemons, who represents AT&T; Cliff Berg, registered to lobby on behalf of Novartis, Cemex, and Visa; Darrell Campbell, a South Carolina lobbyist for Pfizer, Juul, HCA health care and Duke Energy; Emily Giske, a former Democratic National Committee superdelegate who lobbies for Cigna, IBM, and Google; Jennifer Wada, a charter school lobbyist; and Justin Ross, a Maryland construction and real estate lobbyist.

Other lobbyists who gave to Harris fall into the gray area of unregistered influence peddlers. William Castleberry is not technically registered, but he is an influential Facebook lobbyist who oversees the Menlo Park, California, company’s expansive state-level government affairs operations; he gave $2,700 to Harris. Matthew Gerst, who gave $500, falls into similar territory: He leads the regulatory lobbying for CTIA, a trade group for wireless-telecom companies, such as Verizon and AT&T, but is not registered to lobby.

Democrats across the board have raised huge sums of grassroots money this cycle, in large part by promising that they will reject cash from Super PACs, corporate PACs, and lobbyists.

“Our campaign is not taking a dime from corporate PACs or lobbyists — and that was a very deliberate choice. Yes, it means we are leaving money on the table. But that’s ok with me,” Harris wrote in an email to supporters in February.

The Harris email made clear the purpose of the lobby donation ban: “I never want there to be any question about whether I’m listening to the people or corporate lobbyists. The answer will always be the people.”

The post Democratic 2020 Candidates Promised to Reject Lobbyist Donations, but Many Accepted the Cash Anyway appeared first on The Intercept.

The Bernie Sanders campaign kicked off its massive volunteer program this weekend by holding nearly 5,000 house parties across the country and unveiling a new organizing app that gives campaign supporters a way to share political information on friends, family, and neighbors. 

Sanders’s strategy to emerge from the crowded primary field revolves around energizing and empowering his army of supporters, and giving them easy-to-use tools in the hopes of expanding the electoral map in both the primary and general elections. More than 60,000 people attended the events, which took place in every state and more than 30 countries outside the U.S., according to the campaign.

Sanders, along with campaign manager Faiz Shakir and campaign co-chair Nina Turner, addressed supporters through a pre-recorded broadcast that was streamed at the parties. “So let’s do it, let’s run a historic grassroots campaign,” Sanders told supporters. “And when we do that, the 1 percent can spend all of the money that they want. We’re gonna beat them.”

The campaign’s new organizing tool, called BERN, helps volunteers track potential supporters and voters, allowing them to log the name and background of anyone they talk to, from friends and family members to a stranger on the street. The app will also help volunteers know how to participate in the Democratic primary or caucus in their state and register voters.

On friend-to-friend mode, supporters are asked to add the name, city, and state of everyone they know, information that is then matched to their voter record. The app also asks about the person’s level of support, union membership, and other candidates they might vote for.

Some critics have called the app invasive, arguing that the database of personal information could open non-supporters up to harassment. Though much of the information the app requests is publicly available, critics say that having the data neatly compiled — while not giving people a way to opt out of it — presents safety concerns.

The skepticism appears rooted in (hostility to Sanders and) a basic lack of familiarity with how campaigns work. Voter rolls are public, and the Democratic Party has long been aggregating additional information about voters to aid with fundraising and turnout operations, data that all major campaigns have access to. The difference is that the Sanders app democratizes the process with the goal of expanding the electorate, while the party operations are aimed at identifying existing supporters so they can be motivated to vote. The party data is generally available to campaign volunteers, but because Sanders lowers the bar to volunteering, more people will now have access to the data. The goal, though, is to get more people to vote for Sanders, not to attack Sanders opponents.

To that end, they’ll be relying heavily on supporters.“We don’t think, in the national office, that we have all of the answers,” Sanders said. “Trust me, we don’t. Every person out there knows your own community better than we do. Can you put on a concert, can you have a potluck event? Whatever it may be, bring people together. Develop a sense of community, reach out to people who might feel uncomfortable about being involved in politics.”

Sanders has a list of 1.1 million people who’ve pledged to volunteer so far, meaning roughly 6 percent showed up to a house party over the weekend. Sanders told them that the goal is to have volunteers engaging on social media in addition to the “old-fashioned stuff,” like knocking on doors and handing out literature. Unlike the typical political campaign, where volunteers work under the supervision of paid campaign staff, Sanders volunteers will be given the tools to help grow the movement at an exponential scale, free of the restraints of traditional top-down campaigns.

“And remember,” Sanders said. “It’s not Bernie! It’s us! Don’t forget that: Us! Us! Us!”

Sanders supporters, with and without previous organizing experience, gathered this weekend in libraries, living rooms, restaurants, and classrooms. They wore Bernie shirts, made Bernie signs, Bernie cookies, and Bernie cakes. Some groups even received a surprise phone call from the candidate himself.

In Oakland, Bay Area Muslims for Bernie held its party at a local Palestinian street food restaurant. A group of around 25 people, which included supporters from Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Yemen, Afghanistan, and around the United States, joined the organizing kickoff. “We even had refugees attend who cannot vote but still wanted to support and promote Bernie’s message,” Reyhaneh Rajabzadeh told The Intercept in a message.

Bay Area Muslims are here in Oakland, California to #OrganizeWithBernie and put @BernieSanders in the White House. ? we are in. #Bernie2020 pic.twitter.com/MzkQyQqg2b

— Reyhaneh ?????? (@Rey_ha_neh) April 27, 2019

“We talked about how a lot of us can relate to the ‘Not Me. Us’ movement because it shares the energy of the Arab Spring, which we all were involved directly or indirectly in. After watching the video, we immediately got to work and planned teams to begin canvassing and mobilizing other immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and Iranians in California. The upcoming month of Ramadan will be key for us.”

Marco Alcivar Perez in Mooresville, North Carolina, hosted a Bernie house party, which 12 people attended. He said he felt motivated to host his own event after noticing that there weren’t any planned in his area and in part because of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former Sanders volunteer herself, who showed that “anyone can get involved and make a positive change.”

Alcivar Perez said most of the attendees at his party cited Sanders’s consistency on policy issues as the primary reason they were drawn to his campaign. “They mentioned they could go on YouTube and see him advocating for health care as a right since the 80s and that he was a genuine guy.”

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a Sanders supporter, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from his employer, hosted an event attended by about 10 people. “The majority of people who attended were there because of horrific health care stories,” he told The Intercept in a message.

“Personally, my wife and I support Bernie for a plethora of reasons, but mostly because we lost a child, and as devastating and painful as that was and continues to be, the medical bills we accumulated made the situation that much worse. It’s been almost six years since our world was torn apart, and our bills are still with us.”

Nearly 20 people attended a Sanders party in Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. “We were all surprised when one of the attendees introduced himself as Faiz Shakir, Bernie’s campaign manager,” Thomas Henry told The Intercept.

I crashed a house party. #OrganizeWithBernie pic.twitter.com/H2x9sKr9Dq

— Faiz (@fshakir) April 27, 2019

Women of Color for Bernie, which organizes and campaigns in several neighborhoods in Los Angeles, tweeted photos of the group wearing shirts they made at their event. “We’re debunking the false narratives about Bernie’s troubles with POC!” they tweeted.

 

The Vermont senator has been leading almost every other presidential candidate in early fundraising, another indicator of his campaign’s strength. In the first quarter, he raised more than $18.2 million, with 900,000 donations from 525,000 individual donors.

Only former Vice President Joe Biden has had a larger first-day primary fundraising haul than Sanders, raising $6.3 million in the first 24 hours after formally launching his campaign. But Biden had far fewer donors, receiving 107,431 online donations from 96,926 individual donors. Unlike Sanders, he kicked off his presidential bid hosting a private event with corporate lobbyists and GOP donors at the home of Comcast executive David Cohen.

“That’s fine, there is a limit to how many max checks one can collect,” Shakir said in a fundraising email following the news of Biden’s haul. “Our advantage is the sheer number of people who support our campaign and are willing to chip in to help us win.”

The post New Bernie Sanders App Democratizes Organizing — and Panics People Unfamiliar With Organizing appeared first on The Intercept.

For better or for worse (most would argue for worse), Inbox is dead. Google killed the Gmail-based email app leaving us with the standard version of Gmail, which admittedly has gotten some of the features of Inbox in updates. You can also bring back the look of Inbox with a Chrome extension, but it won’t bring back the feature set.

Fortunately, Spark for Android has come at an opportune time. Spark was a previously iOS-exclusive email app with a unique set of features aimed at bringing you to inbox zero. It’s heavily customizable, offers email scheduling, a smart search for finding emails easier, sorting between personal and work, and a lot more. It’s not exactly an Inbox replacement, but it offers the more advanced features some of us have been yearning for in Gmail.

The app has now launched on Android and you can download it from the Google Play Store today! It’s not for everyone, and the average user may prefer the simplicity of Gmail. But if you want more, give it a shot. It’s rough around the edges but it gives you a taste of what’s to come.

Via: The Verge

A new report has revealed that Amazon has thousands of employees and contractors listening to audio clips that have been recorded with the company’s Echo voice assistant devices. While this may come as a shock to some, it’s been assumed for a very long time that Amazon and other companies with voice assistants have been using real people to analyze small samples of user data in an effort to improve voice recognition and capabilities of their services.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon has full-time employees and contractors on the project. While the audio clips that are manually transcribed are generally mundane, some of the workers mentioned that they often listen to clips which were recorded when Alexa was inadvertently triggered. In at least two instances, Amazon workers say that they listened to clips which could have been sexual assault, but were unable to do anything about it since no identifying information is provided to them and because Amazon’s stance is to not interfere.

While all the details reported by Bloomberg have not been corroborated, Amazon did admit that it does have employees and contractors who are listening in on select audio clips recorded when users are talking to Alexa.

“We take the security and privacy of our customer’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”

Now that we know for sure the requests we pose to Amazon’s Echo speakers could be heard by someone at Amazon, does that change your view on smart speakers powered by Alexa? There isn’t any evidence (yet) that Google is doing the same with Google Assistant, but we honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they are.

Source: Bloomberg

It's no secret that Google tracks you everywhere, even when you keep Google's Location History feature disabled. As revealed by an Associated Press investigation in 2018, other Google apps like Maps or daily weather update service on Android allows the tech giant to continuously collect your precise latitude and longitude. According to Google, the company uses this location-tracking

In an advance that could improve the treatment options available for osteoarthritis, engineers have designed a new material that can administer drugs directly to the cartilage.

At the beginning of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help determine their accent. Should Amazon’s patent become a reality, or if accent detection is already possible, it would introduce questions of surveillance and privacy violations, as well as possible discriminatory advertising, experts said.

The civil rights issues raised by the patent are similar to those around facial recognition, another technology Amazon has used as an anchor of its artificial intelligence strategy, and one that it controversially marketed to law enforcement. Like facial recognition, voice analysis underlines how existing laws and privacy safeguards simply aren’t capable of protecting users from new categories of data collection — or government spying, for that matter. Unlike facial recognition, voice analysis relies not on cameras in public spaces, but microphones inside smart speakers in our homes. It also raises its own thorny issues around advertising that targets or excludes certain groups of people based on derived characteristics like nationality, native language, and so on (the sort of controversy that Facebook has stumbled into again and again).

Why the Government Might Be Interested in Accent Data

If voice-based accent detection can determine a person’s ethnic background, it opens up a new category of information that is incredibly interesting to the government, said Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.

“If you’re a company and you’re creating new classifications of data, and the government is interested in them, you’d be naive to think that law enforcement isn’t going to come after it,” she said.

She described a scenario in which knowing a user’s purchase history, existing demographic data, and whether they speak Arabic or Arabic-accented English, Amazon could identify the user as belonging to a religious or ethnic group. King said it’s plausible that the FBI would compel the production of such data from Amazon if it could help determine a user’s membership to a terrorist group. Data demands focused on terrorism are tougher for companies to fight, she said, as opposed to those that are vague or otherwise overbroad, which they have pushed back on.

Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, makes it possible for the government to covertly demand such data. FISA governs electronic spying conducted to acquire information on foreign powers, allowing such monitoring without a warrant in some circumstances and in others under warrants issued by a court closed to the public, with only the government represented. The communications of U.S. citizens and residents are routinely acquired under the law, in many cases incidentally, but even incidentally collected communications may later be used against Americans in FBI investigations. Under FISA, the government could “get information in secret more easily, and there are mass or bulk surveillance capabilities that don’t exist in domestic law,” said Crocker. “Certainly it could be done in secret with less court oversight.”

“You’d be naive to think that law enforcement isn’t going to come after it.”

Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, suggested that Amazon’s accent data could also provide the government with information for the purpose of immigration control.

“Let’s say you have ICE go to one of these providers and say, ‘Give us all the subscription information of people who have Spanish accents’ … in order to identify people of a particular race or who theoretically might have relatives who are undocumented,” she said. “So you can see that this type information can definitely be abused.”

Though King said she hasn’t seen evidence of these types of government requests, she has witnessed “parallel things happen in other contexts.” It’s also possible that if Amazon was sent a National Security Letter by the FBI, a gag order would prevent the company from disclosing much, including the exact number of letters it received. National Security Letters compel the disclosure of certain types of information from communications firms, like a subpoena would, but often in secret. The letters require the companies to hand over select data, like the name of an account owner and the age of an account, but the FBI has routinely asked for more, including email headers and internet browsing history.

Compared to some other tech giants, however, Amazon is less detailed in its disclosures about National Security Letters it receives and about data requests in general. For example, in its information request reports, it does not disclose how many NSLs it has received or how many accounts are affected by national security requests, as Apple and Google do. These more specific disclosures from other companies show a trend: From mid-2016 to the first half of 2017, national security requests sent to Apple, Facebook, and Google increased significantly.

But even if the government hasn’t yet made such requests of Amazon, we know that it has been paying attention to voice and speech technology for some time. In January, The Intercept reported that the National Security Agency had developed technology not just to record and transcribe private conversations, but also to automatically identify speakers. An individual’s “voiceprint” was created, which could be cross-referenced with millions of intercepted and recorded telephone, video, and internet calls.

To create an American citizen’s “voiceprint,” which government documents don’t explicitly indicate has been done, experts said the NSA would need only to tap into Amazon or Google’s existing voice data.

Over the past year, Amazon’s relationship with the government has become increasingly cozy. BuzzFeed recently revealed details about how the Orlando Police Department was piloting Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition technology, to identify “persons of interest.” A few months earlier, Amazon was outed by the ACLU for “marketing Rekognition for government surveillance.” Meanwhile, in June, the company was busy pitching Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on its technology.

Though these revelations have set off alarm bells, even for Amazon employees, experts said that speech recognition presents similar concerns that are equally if not more pressing. Amazon’s voice processing patent dates to March of last year. The company, in response to questions from The Intercept, described the patent as exploratory and pledged to abide by its privacy policy when collecting and using data.

Privacy Law Lags Behind Technology

Weak privacy laws in the U.S. are one reason consumers are vulnerable when tech companies start gathering new types of data about them. There is nothing in the law that protects data collected about a person’s mood or accent, said Granick.

In the absence of strong legal protections, consumers are forced to make their own decisions about trade-offs between their privacy and the convenience of virtual assistants. “Being able to use really robust voice control would be great if it meant you weren’t just being put into a giant AI algorithm and being used to improve your pitchability for new products, especially when you’re paying for these systems,” said King.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, first passed in 1986, was a major step forward in privacy protection at the time. But now, over 30 years later, it has yet to catch up with the pace of technological innovation. Generally, under ECPA, government agencies need a subpoena, court order, or search warrant to compel companies to disclose protected user information. Unlike court orders and search warrants, subpoenas don’t necessarily require judicial review.

Amazon’s most recent information request report, which covers the first half of this year, reveals that the company received 1,736 subpoenas during that time, 1,283 of which it turned over some or all of the information requested. Since Amazon began publishing these reports three years ago, the number of data requests it receives has steadily increased, with a huge jump between 2015 and 2016. Echo, its Alexa-enabled speaker for use at home, was released in 2015, and Amazon has not said whether the increase is related to the growing popularity of its speaker.

While ECPA protects the data associated with our digital conversations, Granick said its application to information collected by providers like Amazon is “anemic.” “The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think is Chinese, Latino’ and the provider has to argue why they shouldn’t. That kind of conclusory data isn’t protected by ECPA, and it means the government can compel its disclosure with a subpoena,” she said.

“The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think is Chinese, Latino.’”

Since ECPA is not explicit, there’s a legal question of whether Amazon could voluntarily turn over the conversations its users have with Alexa. Granick said Amazon could argue that such data is a protected electronic communication under ECPA — and require that the government get a warrant to access it — but as a party to the communication, Amazon also has the right to divulge it. There have been no court cases addressing the issue so far, she said.

Crocker, of the EFF, argued that communications with Alexa — voice searches and commands, for example — are protected by ECPA, but agreed that the government could obtain the data through a warrant or other legal process.

He added that the way Amazon stores accent information could impact the government’s ability to access it. If Amazon keeps it stored long term in customer profiles in the cloud, those profiles are easier to obtain than real-time voice communications, the interception of which invokes protections under the Wiretap Act, a federal law governing the interception and disclosure of communications. (ECPA amended the Wiretap Act to include electronic communications.) And if it’s stored in metadata associated with Alexa voice searches, the government has obtained those in past cases and could get to it that way.

In 2016, a hot tub murder in Arkansas put in the spotlight the defendant’s Echo. Police seized the device and tried to obtain its recordings, prompting Amazon to argue that any communications with Alexa, and its responses, were protected as a form of free speech under the First Amendment. Amazon eventually turned over the records after the defendant gave his permission to do so. Last week, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over Echo recordings in a new murder case, again hoping it could provide criminal evidence.

Dynamic, Targeted, and Discriminatory Ads

Beyond government surveillance, experts also expressed concern that Amazon’s new classification of data increases the likelihood of discriminatory advertising. When demographic profiling — the basis of traditional advertising — is layered with additional, algorithmically assessed information from Alexa, ads can quickly become invasive or offensive.

Granick said that if Amazon “gave one set of [housing] ads to people who had Chinese accents and a different set of ads to people who have a Finnish accent … highlighting primarily Chinese neighborhoods for one and European neighbors for another,” it would be discriminating on the basis of national origin or race.

King said Amazon also opens itself to charges of price discrimination, and even racism, if it allows advertisers to show and hide ads from certain ethnic or gender groups. “If you live in the O.C. and you have a Chinese accent and are upper middle-class, it could show you things that are higher price. [Alexa] might say, ‘I’m gonna send you Louis Vuitton bags based on those things,’” she said.

Selling products based on emotions also offers opportunities for advertisers to manipulate consumers. “If you’re a woman in a certain demographic and you’re depressed, and we know that binge shopping is something you do … knowing that you’re in kind of a vulnerable state, there’s no regulation preventing them from doing something like this,” King said.

An example from the patent envisions marketing to Chinese speakers, albeit in a more innocuous context, describing how ads might be targeted to “middle-aged users who speak Mandarin or have a Chinese accent and live in the United States.” If the user asks, “Alexa, what’s the news today?” Alexa might reply, “Before your news brief, you might be interested in the Xiaomi TV box, which allows you to watch over 1,000 real-time Chinese TV channels for just $49.99. Do you want to buy it?”

According to the patent, the ads may be presented in response to user voice input, but could also be “presented at any time.” They could even be injected into existing audio streams, such as a news briefing or playback of tracks from a music playlist.

New Rules Emerge for Data Privacy

In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, lawmakers have grown increasingly wary of tech companies and their privacy practices. In late September, the Senate Commerce Committee held a fresh round of hearings with tech executives on the issue — also giving them an opportunity to explain how they’re addressing the new, stringent data privacy laws in the European Union and California.

California’s regulation, which passed in June and goes into effect in 2020, sets a new precedent for consumer privacy law in the country. It expands the definition of personal information and gives state residents greater control over the sharing and sale of their data to third parties.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon and other big tech companies pushed back forcefully on the new reforms, citing excessive penalties, compliance costs, and data collection restrictions — and each spent nearly $200,000 to defeat it. During the Senate hearing, Amazon Vice President and Associate General Counsel Andrew DeVore asked the committee to consider the “unintended consequences” of California’s law, which he called “confusing and difficult to comply with.”

Now that the midterm elections have passed, privacy advocates hope that congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into legislative action; thus far, it has not. The Federal Trade Commission is also considering updates to its consumer protection enforcement priorities. In September, it kicked off a series of hearings examining the impact of “new technologies” and other economic changes.

Advocates hope congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into legislative action; thus far, it has not.

Granick said that as states move to protect consumers where the federal government has not, California could serve as a model for the rest of the country. In August, California also became the first state to pass an internet of things cybersecurity law, requiring that manufacturers add a “reasonable security feature” to protect the information it collects from unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure.

In 2008, Illinois became the first state to pass a law regulating biometric data, placing restrictions on the collection and storing of iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, hand scan, and face geometry data. (Granick says it’s unclear if accent data is covered under the law.) Being the first state to pass landmark legislation, Illinois presents a cautionary tale for California. Though its bill was once considered a model law, only two other states — Texas and Washington — have passed biometric privacy laws over the past 10 years. Similar efforts elsewhere were largely killed by corporate lobbying.

A Growing and Global Problem

Activists have looked to other countries as examples of what could go wrong if tech companies and government agencies become too friendly, and voice accent data gets misused.

Human Rights Watch reported last year that the Chinese government was creating a national voice biometric database using data from Chinese tech company iFlyTek, which provides its consumer voice recognition apps for free and claims its system can support 22 Chinese dialects. On its English website, iFlyTek said that its technology has been “inspected and praised” by “many party and state leaders,” including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.

The company is also the supplier of voice pattern collection systems used by regional police bureaus and runs a lab that develops voice surveillance technology for the Ministry of Public Security. Its technology has “helped solve cases” for law enforcement in Anhui, Gansu, Tibet, and Xinjiang, according to a state press report cited by Human Rights Watch. Activists warn that one possible use of the government’s voice database, which could contain dialect and accent-rich voice data from minority groups, is the surveillance of Tibetans and Uighurs.

Last year, Die Welt reported that the German government was testing voice analysis software to help verify where its refugees are coming from. They hoped it would determine the dialects of people seeking asylum in Germany, which migration officers would use as one of several “indicators” when reviewing applications. The test was met with skepticism, as speech experts questioned the ability of software to make such a complex determination.

The amount of information people voluntarily give tech companies through smart speakers is growing, along with the purchases users are allowed to make. A Gallup survey conducted last year found that 22 percent of Americans currently use smart home personal assistants like Echo — placing them in living rooms, kitchens, and other intimate spaces. And 44 percent of U.S. adult internet users are planning to buy one, according to a Consumer Technology Association study.

Amazon’s move into the home with more sophisticated voice abilities for Alexa has been a long time coming. In 2016, it was already discussing emotion detection as a way to stay ahead of competitors Google and Apple. Also that year, it filed a patent application for a real-time language accent translator — a blend of accent detection and translation technologies. When its emotion and accent patent was issued last month, Alexa’s potential ability to read emotions and detect if customers are sick was called out as creepy.

Amazon Grapples With an “Accent Gap”

Amazon’s current accent handling capabilities are lackluster. In July, the Washington Post charged that Amazon and Google had created an “accent gap,” leaving non-native English speakers behind in the voice-activated technology revolution. Both Alexa and Google Assistant had the most difficulty understanding Chinese- and Spanish-accented English.

Since the advent of speech recognition technology, picking up on dialects, speech impediments, and accents has been a persistent challenge. If the technology in Amazon’s patent was available today, natural language processing experts said that the accent and emotion detection would not be able to draw precise conclusions. The training data that teaches artificial intelligence lacks diversity in the first place, and because language itself is constantly changing, any AI would have a hard time keeping up.

Though Amazon’s new patent is a sign that it’s paying attention to the “accent gap,” it may be doing so for the wrong reasons. Improved language accent detection makes voice technology more equitable and accessible, but it comes at a cost.

Regarding Patents

Patents are not a surefire sign of what tech companies have built, or what is even possible for them to build. Tech companies in particular submit a dizzying number of patent applications.

In an emailed statement, Amazon said that it filed “a number of forward-looking patent applications that explore the full possibilities of new technology. Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect current developments to products and services.” The company also said that it “will only collect and use data in accordance with our privacy policy,” and did not elaborate on other uses of its technology or data.

But King, who has also reviewed numerous Facebook patents, said that they can be used to infer the direction a company is headed.

“You’re seeing a future where the interactions with people and their interior spaces is getting a lot more aggressive,” she said. “That’s the next frontier for companies. Not just tracking your behavior, where you’ve gone, what they think you might buy. Now it’s what you’re thinking, feeling, and that is what makes people deeply uncomfortable.”

For now, people who want to hold onto their privacy and minimize surveillance risk shouldn’t buy a speaker at all, recommended Granick. “You’re basically installing a microphone for the government to listen in to you in your home,” she said.

The post Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From appeared first on The Intercept.

Amazon’s announcement this week that it will open its new headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia came with the mind-boggling revelation that the corporate giant will rake in $2.1 billion in local government subsidies. But an analysis by the nation’s leading tracker of corporate subsidies finds that the government handouts will actually amount to at least $4.6 billion.

But even that figure, which accounts for state and local perks, doesn’t take into account a gift that Amazon will also enjoy from the federal government, a testament to the old adage that in Washington, bad ideas never die.

The Amazon location in Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens, is situated in a federal opportunity zone, a Jack Kemp-era concept resurrected in the 2017 tax law that, in theory, is supposed to bring money into poverty-stricken areas. The northern Virginia site, in the Arlington neighborhood of Crystal City (which developers and local officials have rebranded as “National Landing”), is not directly in an opportunity zone but is virtually surrounded by other geographic areas that are.

Under the tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump last year, investors in opportunity zones can defer payments of capital gains taxes until 2026, and if they hold them for seven years, they can exclude 15 percent of the gains from taxation. If investors carry the opportunity zone investment for 10 years, they eliminate taxes on future appreciation entirely. Investment managers have been salivating at the chance to take advantage of opportunity zones. Special funds have been built to cater to people holding unrealized capital gains — such as Amazon employees with large holdings of company stock.

Not only could Amazon benefit from the opportunity zone directly in Long Island City, but Virginia employees with unrealized capital gains will have an escape valve next door to an Amazon campus. “People who happen to be sitting around with long-term capital gains may now have vehicles for hiding them,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that scrutinizes economic development incentive deals between cities and companies, and has analyzed the Amazon deal.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the opportunity zone or the Good Jobs First estimate of the subsidies it could receive.

Supporters claim opportunity zones spur renewal and revitalization in impoverished areas. It’s a decades-old bipartisan fantasy that sits uncomfortably at odds with the demonstrated results. Researchers who have studied opportunity zones find that these tax schemes rarely ever help cities, and often financially cripple them.

“At best, they divert investment from one part of the city from another, resulting in no net gain for the city as a whole,” wrote Timothy Weaver, an urban policy and politics professor at the University of Albany, last year. “At worst, they result in tax-giveaways to firms that would have been operating anyway, thereby generating a net loss to city revenues.”

Still, Republicans and Democrats are loathe to give up on what they continually tell themselves can be a win-win for everyone, if we just try really hard. And now a major beneficiary of this federal largesse happens to be one of the world’s richest companies, led by the world’s richest man.

According to Good Jobs First’s calculations, Amazon will get $4.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its new headquarters — and that’s not counting the opportunity zone benefit.

Amazon’s press release cited two New York state incentives, a $1.2 billion grant over the next decade from the Excelsior Program and a $325 million, 10-year grant from Empire State Development. But Amazon did not quantify proceeds from two other city incentives, the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program, or ICAP, and the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program, or REAP.

ICAP gives a partial tax abatement for 25 years, and based on the expected $3.6 billion campus in Long Island City, Good Jobs First estimates that value at $386 million. REAP, a per-employee tax credit of $3,000 per year for 12 years, comes out to $897 million if Amazon meets its projection of hiring 25,000 employees.

Those estimates, combined with what Amazon already cited for the Long Island City location, brings the total to $2.808 billion. That results in a cost per job of $112,000, far more than the $48,000 per job Amazon claimed they would get in the Long Island City deal.

LeRoy, of Good Jobs First, noted that ICAP and REAP are available to most businesses relocating into New York, but a single entity’s ability to combine all their benefits distorts the purpose of attracting economic development. “I don’t think the original sponsors ever envisioned individual transactions costing 10 figures,” he said. “There’s a strong argument for capping programs on a per-deal basis.”

LeRoy added that this is not a full accounting of the benefits out of New York. Amazon will benefit from a payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, in which a portion of the company’s property taxes will flow directly into enhancements for the project area. Plus, there’s the federal opportunity zone.

That Long Island City is a designated opportunity zone Amazon might exploit is especially mind-boggling given that the fast-gentrifying area has had no trouble attracting new investment, has a 10 percent poverty rate (half that of New York City), and has a median income of $130,000 per year.

While the overwhelming majority of opportunity zones are defined by having high poverty rates, about 200 of the 8,700 Treasury Department-approved census tracts are like Long Island City, economically prosperous but adjacent to poverty. This includes neighborhoods in well-off cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, and Portland. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that he expects the opportunity zones to attract $100 billion in investments.

Amazon’s estimate for Virginia — $573 million in cash grants — also leaves out a huge benefit for Amazon. “They’re planning a big Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria, adjacent to the site,” LeRoy said. “It’s a public university, the money is coming from taxpayers.” In a press release, Virginia Tech puts the cost of the campus at $1 billion and added that Amazon “credited the Innovation Campus in Alexandria as a key component in its decision to locate in Northern Virginia.”

Good Jobs First added that a redevelopment subsidy known as tax increment financing for on-site infrastructure and green space in the area could also benefit Amazon at the northern Virginia site. There was no cost estimate provided for this, though the Amazon press release mentions $195 million in commonwealth-funded infrastructure projects in the neighborhood, and another $28 million in funding from the city of Arlington.

The total amount of subsidies in northern Virginia, according to Good Jobs First, is at least $1.8 billion, almost as much as Amazon said it would be reaping in government subsidies overall.

Previously, Amazon has reaped $1.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its warehouses and data centers elsewhere across the country. On the same day as the New York and Virginia announcements, Amazon also announced a new “Operations Center of Excellence” in Nashville, Tennessee, a 5,000-worker facility for which the city gave Amazon $102 million in subsidies. Nashville was one of the top 20 finalists for the HQ2 auction, and parts of the city are also opportunity zones.

The cash handouts also do not take into account regulatory leniency and accelerated permitting that characterizes the Amazon projects. “There is a strain of thought that says if you give a company prompt variances, because time is money, companies would value that more than property tax abatement,” said LeRoy. In this case, the cities are offering both!”

The deals do not appear to include guard rails for what is expected to be rapid gentrification in the locations. Condo sellers in Crystal City took note of overnight price hikes of as much as $20,000 the day after the announcement. As gentrification likely pushes out residents in the opportunity zones surrounding the northern Virginia site, Amazon employees who buy real estate could not only find a place to live, but also avoid unrealized capital gains taxes.

Progressive politicians like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and conservative commentators have joined forces to question the deal. Community organizations held a rally in New York on Wednesday, urging a re-channeling of the taxpayer subsidies. Following Amazon’s announcement, Ron Kim, a Queens assembly member, introduced new legislation to redirect taxpayer funds designated for corporate subsidies to canceling or buying student debt. Virginia delegate Lee Carter, a democratic socialist, also criticized the deal for its exorbitant tax giveaways and the lack of transparency under which the terms were negotiated, calling it “comic book villain stuff.”

If Amazon fails to live up to their end of the agreement, they can just cancel it with 5 days notice, and keep the money.

If Virginia's elected government fails to live up to its end of the agreement at any time between now and 2043, no cancelation and AMZN still keeps the money pic.twitter.com/kyCH6FEXkI

— Lee J. Carter (@carterforva) November 13, 2018

Here we have language that mandates the next 6 governors to deliver LEGISLATIVE action, or else Amazon is released from their end of the contract. But they could still sue us for the rest of the payments even after they're released.

One of the worst contracts I've ever read. pic.twitter.com/hm2tG6MmVh

— Lee J. Carter (@carterforva) November 13, 2018

Carter will have the opportunity to weigh in on the deal. According to the contract language, the grant payments to Amazon are subject to appropriations by the Virginia General Assembly, though the governor is obligated to put the payments in the draft budget request.

The post Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More Than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows appeared first on The Intercept.

The United States Postal Service has patched a critical security vulnerability that exposed the data of more than 60 million customers to anyone who has an account at the USPS.com website. The U.S.P.S. is an independent agency of the American federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States and is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the

Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an unrelated ongoing sex crime case in the Eastern District of Virginia. Assistant US Attorney Kellen

How many people have been killed in the post-9/11 war on terror? The question is a contentious one, as there has been no formal accounting for the deadly cost of the initial U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the secondary conflicts that continue to wreak havoc across the Middle East and the opaque, covert war still expanding across Asia and Africa.

But even as the U.S. government evades responsibility for the human cost of its overseas endeavors, some researchers are determined to keep count.

Brown University’s Costs of War Project this month released a new estimate of the total death toll from the U.S. wars in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The numbers, while conservatively estimated, are staggering. Brown’s researchers estimate that at least 480,000 people have been directly killed by violence over the course of these conflicts, more than 244,000 of them civilians. In addition to those killed by direct acts violence, the number of indirect deaths — those resulting from disease, displacement, and the loss of critical infrastructure — is believed to be several times higher, running into the millions.

The report, which uses data spanning from October 2001 to October 2018, compiles previous analysis from nongovernmental organizations, U.S. and foreign government data, and media reports. In a statement, the report authors said the figures still just “scratches the surface of the human consequences of 17 years of war.” Due to challenges in data collection, their total estimate is an undercount, they added. The study also focuses on only the three countries where the United States launched its so-called war on terror. If the conflicts in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, or Syria — where the U.S. has conducted major military operations in recent years — had been included, the death toll would likely be significantly higher.

Some American politicians have lately evinced a refreshing willingness to make call for public accountability for the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is the party that is doing the immediate harm to civilians, albeit with logistical support and weapons from the U.S. But there has been far less appetite to similarly criticize, or even account for, the many conflicts in which the United States is directly responsible for the violence — despite monumental death tolls, refugee crises, and other sobering evidence of human suffering.

“With everything going on in the United States at the moment, the fact that we’re even at war has largely fallen off the radar.”

“The major challenge in tracking the full costs of these wars is that the U.S. military doesn’t even meaningfully investigate civilian death tolls. Generally, they know it’s not good to have civilian casualties, but their focus is mainly on fighting, and there is little pressure to make protecting civilians a key priority,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA. “Meanwhile, the U.S. public simply doesn’t see deaths in other countries. They don’t see civilians being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. With everything going on in the United States at the moment, the fact that we’re even at war has largely fallen off the radar.”

The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have raged on for well over a decade now. In that time, both the nature of the warfare and the enemies the U.S. is at war with have evolved. In addition, the initial invasions have generated violent new conflicts across the region between local governments and non-state actors, some of which the U.S. is also involved in.

Although public attention has almost completely drifted from Afghanistan — the war there was not even mentioned during the last two 2016 presidential debates — the United States actually dropped more bombs in that country this year than in any year since the war began. American casualties have been minimized in recent years by a greater reliance on airstrikes over ground forces, something that has also helped take American minds off the war. But U.S.-allied Afghans fighting on the ground continue to pay a horrendous toll, with thousands killed this year in the face of advances by a resurgent Taliban.

Despite all these deaths, it remains highly questionable what exactly the United States has gained from these wars. The initial confrontation with Al Qaeda, a clandestine organization numbering perhaps a few hundred people at the time of the 9/11 attacks, has somehow metamorphosed into an endless war against an expanding universe of even more extreme terrorist groups, many of which did not even exist on September 11, 2001. Entire cities have been left in ruins, with the United States offering no coherent strategy for a return to stability, or even normalcy, in the places it has been at war.

“It matters how you fight and what you do afterwards,” said Eviatar. “Hundreds of thousands of people have now been killed in the name of fighting terrorism. We need to ask who has benefitted from this, who has suffered, and what the cumulative effects are.”

Studies like the one published by Brown University add to a steadily growing body of scholarship showing the horrifying human costs of the wars. The media has also made some significant contributions to improving public awareness. Journalists Anand Gopal and Azmat Khan, for example, published a groundbreaking New York Times report last year on civilian casualties in Iraq. Their reporting showed the actual death rate to be a stunning 31 times higher than the one officially reported by the U.S. military. It can hardly be said now that the truth isn’t out there. But some experts say that it isn’t surprising that this information has failed to translate into public action.

John Tirman, author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars,” a study of the impact on foreign civilians of American military operations, argues that psychological factors might help explain why Americans don’t seem to care about the human cost of their wars. Faced with a terrible situation requiring complex solutions and sustained attention, people are likely to just ignore it if they have the option to do so.

“They turn away … because the carnage challenges their strongly held self-perception that their country is a force for good in the world.”

“People tend to turn away from disasters such as a war gone bad very quickly. They turn away because it bothers them morally, but also because the carnage challenges their strongly held self-perception that their country is a force for good in the world,” said Tirman. “In the face of something horrible, people are much more likely to become indifferent than they are to protest. Oftentimes it’s even easier to just blame the victims for causing their own suffering.”

The Brown University researchers also reported the number of U.S. military deaths, which, unlike civilian deaths, the government generally keeps track of. Around 7,000 American soldiers have lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 9/11. Roughly double that number of private contractors, who performed supporting tasks that in previous conflicts were handled directly by the military, have also been killed. Improved battlefield medical procedures have lowered the overall number of American deaths, but tens of thousands of Americans have also been wounded in battle, with many suffering grievous lifelong injuries.

During the Vietnam War, the institution of the draft forced the public to maintain at least some basic level of awareness about the war. But the creation of an all-volunteer military has made the conflicts much easier to ignore. As public attention has waned, it has become easier for the U.S. government to obscure its own role in helping foment violent crises that have sent waves of desperate refugees streaming across the world. It has also helped deflect attention from wartime expenditures that are now estimated to have sucked up over $6 trillion in public funds — money that could have done much good in a country that is starving for infrastructure and public health spending.

While Americans continue to search for explanations for their own eroding domestic national stability, the wars that continue to rage outside of public notice may help explain some of the ugly direction of U.S. politics in recent years.

“There is a perverse dynamic at play, in which we’re killing more people, creating adverse consequences like mass displacement and refugees, and then banning those very people from our shores,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “We really need to question both the fairness and necessity of these policies, which are inflicting devastating human costs abroad while harming our own civil rights at home.”

The post It’s Time for America to Reckon With the Staggering Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars appeared first on The Intercept.

After a wildly successful election for House Democrats, progressives in Congress did something relatively novel: They tried to wield power.

Last week, the heads of the Congressional Progressive Caucus won a major concession from Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, but it’s now an open question whether they’ll have the foot soldiers to complete the mission.

The particular play the CPC is making will have a dual end result, if successful. First, it will build progressive power within the House caucus, which is currently in scarce supply. And it will throw a wrench into the gears of the money-and-politics machinery of Washington, by making it more difficult for corporate-friendly Democrats to do legislative favors for lobbyists.

Taking advantage of Pelosi’s need for votes to return as House speaker, the CPC’s honchos, Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, secured a commitment that at least 40 percent of Democrats on five key committees would be members of the CPC. This would give the caucus a greater ability to impact critical legislation, which runs through those committees and helps prepare the ground for a time when a Democratic president is in place to sign those bills.

It would also deprive members of the centrist Blue Dog or New Democrat coalitions access to the seats, along with the campaign contributions that can come with them. The key panels in question are Intelligence, Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Financial Services, and Appropriations.

But finding enough progressives to sit on those committees has thus far proven difficult, The Intercept has learned. CPC members who already have committee assignments of their own on less powerful committees are reluctant to switch, as they would lose the seniority they’ve built up over the years. Separately, they worry about the jockeying that would be required on the new committees, which would put them in confrontations with centrist members that many would rather avoid for internal political reasons. Broadly speaking, incoming progressives are not traditionally captivated by the notion of slogging it out on the “money committees,” as they are sometimes known on Capitol Hill.

In the past, progressives have ceded these committees to New Dems and Blue Dogs, who have long understood their importance, both for setting the direction of policy and earning access to corporate donors. “Progressives come to Congress to change the world, and New Dems come to Congress to get on the Ways and Means Committee,” said Alex Lawson of Social Security Works, who has spent months on an inside-outside effort to increase progressive committee representation. (The Ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over tax policy.)

As the jockeying for committee assignments unfolds, other fights have taken on importance, like stopping Pelosi from putting in House rules that limit spending without revenue offsets and bar increases in taxes on 80 percent of low-income earners. But committee assignments have been foregrounded as an achievable and critical goal for the future of progressive politics.

And yet, it’s a precarious situation for the CPC. Several key retirements and the blue wave adding between 38 and 40 House Democrats has led to an unprecedented number of open slots on the money committees. The unsettled race for speaker provides a unique opportunity for influence. But if progressives cannot find the warm bodies willing to fill committee slots, they’ll have put their reputation on the line in a bid for power, without being able to follow through.

Last week’s meeting between Pelosi, Pocan, and Jayapal, which led to the committee deal, was months in the making. As Democratic success in the midterms looked more likely, labor unions and progressive groups strategized over how to build power in the House. Committee assignments were an obvious target.

The CPC currently has 77 House members, with two additional members, Brad Sherman and Jimmy Panetta of California, joining since the elections. The caucus expects around 20 more to join for the next Congress, meaning that it will comprise roughly 40 percent of the entire Democratic caucus.

Yet on the committees that control most domestic policy, progressives are more scarce. Currently, CPC members hold 27 percent of the seats on the House Financial Services Committee, 28 percent on the Energy and Commerce Committee, 31 percent on Ways and Means, and 36 percent on Appropriations. On the Intelligence Committee, it’s even worse: Just one of the nine Democrats on the panel, Andre Carson of Indiana, is a CPC member.

The underrepresentation can handcuff progressive priorities. Incoming member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has pushed strongly for a select committee on climate change, but any legislation on a “Green New Deal” will ultimately get reviewed by the Energy and Commerce Committee, and if it includes revenues, the Ways and Means Committee will have a look at it too. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., just wrote a new bill with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to force competition for patented prescription drug monopolies if prices are too high. But he’s not on the committees — Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means — that would have jurisdiction over such legislation. Instead, for instance, Rep. Anna Eshoo of California, regarded as one of the most pharma-friendly Democrats in Congress, chairs the health subcommittee on Energy and Commerce that could bottle the bill up.

“Medicare for All” would need to go through those two committees as well. Legislation to fix America’s affordable housing crisis would go through the Financial Services Committee. And any new programs would have to be designated funding through the Appropriations Committees. Practically nothing with a major impact can avoid one of these four committees.

That’s what makes them magnets for corporate lobbyists, seeking to curry favor with members. Corporations spend heavily to get their way onto these committees. But this year, scores of incoming Democrats took a pledge to reject corporate PAC donations, and sitting members are getting pressured to join in that promise as well. Candidates managed to raise millions of dollars in grassroots donations, avoid corporate money, and win.

Where they will land in Congress is an open question, however. The money committees can seem intimidating to incoming members who don’t have specific technical expertise. They might even seem boring; the minutiae of tax policy or overnight repo lending does not typically animate people to get into politics. “There’s a self-selecting that has happened,” said Lawson. “This is the progressive committee, and they’ll work together. And this is the New Dem one.”

In particular, the House Judiciary Committee has become packed with progressives, who hold over three-quarters of the seats. That makes it easier for progressives to get important things done on justice-related issues, but harder to broadly affect policy in all areas. “A lot of the things we’re worried about, we can fix with better representation,” said Mike Darner, executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Because Pelosi needs near-unanimous support to get the necessary votes for speaker, progressives were in a novel position to dictate terms. Committee assignments became the main ask, and once Pelosi agreed in principle to 40 percent representation, CPC leaders endorsed her for speaker. But getting this win and implementing it are two very different things.

Rebalancing the committees may sound simple. But it’s the equivalent of putting together a seating chart for a giant wedding, if there were all sorts of arcane and unwritten rules on who can sit next to whom.

For example, Democrats have historically sought regional diversity on the committees. Lawson relayed one example. “I was in a meeting, and someone said ‘New York City has to get a seat on Ways and Means no matter what.’ I had no idea.”

The committees the CPC has targeted are all “A” committees, which are exclusive: Members cannot be on more than one. Staying on a committee like Judiciary while getting onto another “A” committee requires a special waiver from leadership, which is such a rare occurrence that most members consider it impossible to obtain. Similarly, freshmen are generally forbidden from the Ways and Means Committee, though the number of seats available — as many as 10 — could render that inoperative this cycle.

If progressives can make it through that Jenga game and come up with a plan, they have to find members willing to switch committees. Power at the committee level relies on the seniority system; senior members get the plum subcommittee chairs and put themselves in line to take over the committee. There’s an understandable reluctance to give that up or to start from scratch deep into a career. While the conventional wisdom on the Hill holds that it’s hard to get on the A-list committees, it may be even harder to get a member to say yes to that assignment if it means giving up seniority on their current committee.

“We fully acknowledge it as a sacrifice,” Lawson said. “We say that we know it’s hard for you. We’re going to recognize you’re doing it for the movement and hold you up as a champion.”

Reluctance to switch isn’t a problem limited to one side of the aisle; Republicans have found it difficult to get a female senator to move onto the Judiciary Committee, avoiding the embarrassing spectacle of an all-male panel doing the questioning in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. But in this case, progressives’ resistance to filling out the committee rosters has real policy implications. And there’s an odd code of silence around committees; not only does it rarely play out in public, but it’s almost considered impolite to push internally for an assignment.

You’ll be shocked to know that committee assignments also come with some politics. State delegations feel compelled to spread members across numerous committees for parochial reasons, even if that means losing progressive representation. Members with designs on future leadership roles don’t want to mess with the committee assignments of colleagues who may be willing to vote for them. On the committees themselves, the ranking Democrat plays a role in blessing new entrants, though that role can vary depending on the committee. Having a member on the committee as an internal champion, like a sponsor, is important.

Perhaps nowhere else have these dynamics played out more in recent years than the House Financial Services Committee.

After the financial crisis of 2008, Democrats had a top priority of re-regulating the financial system. However, after successive waves in 2006 and 2008, freshmen and sophomore Blue Dogs and New Democrats took over the lower rungs of the Financial Services Committee, placed there by leadership to help them hoover up campaign donations from Wall Street. The size of the committee was even expanded so that 11 freshman representatives from conservative-leaning districts, designated as “frontline” members, could be given precious spots on the committee. From that perch, they raised on average twice as much as the typical House Democrat, using the committee as an ATM.

It’s not just New Dems, though. Nearly all CPC members still take corporate PAC money, which risks a situation in which progressives are giving cover to bad — rather than helping write good — legislation.

This ecosystem frustrated progressive goals for Wall Street reform. Conservative Democrats weakened Dodd-Frank at the committee level, like when they voted for a Republican amendment to exempt auto deals of oversight from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez of Illinois, at the time a senior member of the committee who is retiring this year, referred to the frontline members as “the unreliable bottom row.” (The committee room is an amphitheater, with more senior members sitting higher up.)  

This year, because of the departures of five members, and elections of many more new ones, as many as a dozen seats might need to be filled. Maxine Waters, a CPC member, will take over the gavel in January, and she has expressed a desire to go after President Donald Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, as well as the continual malfeasance at Wells Fargo, as part of the committee’s oversight duties.

But New Dems currently have four more seats on Financial Services than progressive caucus members have. This year, when Congress passed a bank deregulation bill, 27 of the 33 Democrats who supported it were New Democrats. And they’re already pushing back on Waters’s agenda. “The American people … will bridle at investigations that seem overtly political,” said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., to Politico. Himes is both a former Goldman Sachs banker and the chair of the New Democrat Coalition.

These tensions between progressives and moderates have played out behind the scenes as well: At a meeting attended by numerous committee oversight staff members, the strategy was set for “measured, discreet, and narrowly focused” investigations, without public disclosure of the probes before findings are in hand. A source inside the room relayed the information to The Intercept.

New Democrats are not as reticent about joining the committee, fully aware of its power. Josh Gottheimer, a New Democrat from New Jersey, has been recruiting several ideological allies to join the panel, according to numerous sources who preferred to remain anonymous, as they are not authorized to speak publicly about committee politics. Gottheimer won a congressional seat in 2016 and immediately got on the Financial Services Committee. He received nearly $1 million in donations from the securities and investment banking industries during the 2018 cycle, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.  

A source with knowledge of the situation told The Intercept that Gottheimer was approached by a member of the New Jersey delegation with a more progressive profile, asking if Gottheimer would sponsor the lawmaker for the committee. Gottheimer, according to the source, told the lawmaker that they weren’t wanted on the committee. Gottheimer denied it. “I’ll tell you on the record, that’s not a conversation I’ve had; your story is completely fabricated. I’d love to have another Member of the New Jersey delegation on Financial Services — that would be great for New Jersey,” he said.

By contrast, the progressive organizing around the committee has been tepid. A coalition of unions and progressive groups called Take on Wall Street publicly listed five potential incoming freshmen that would be pro-regulatory voices on the committee: Katie Porter and Katie Hill of California, Colin Allred of Texas, Jason Crow of Colorado, and Andy Kim of New Jersey.

But the list left many progressives scratching their heads. Porter, an Elizabeth Warren protégé and foreclosure expert, would be a natural choice. But three of the others — Crow, Allred, and Hill — were endorsed by the New Democrat PAC in the election. (Hill also got a progressive cCaucus endorsement.) And Crow worked for a top law and lobbying firm in Colorado with a host of corporate clients.

More worrying, the members seemed to have no knowledge of this recruitment effort. Mitch Schwartz, a spokesperson for Crow’s campaign, was surprised to hear of Take on Wall Street’s mentioning the congressman-elect’s name. “It’s interesting when a reporter breaks news to me about my boss,” Schwartz said. He added that Crow was still making up his mind about committees.

Crow’s issue page does have a section on consumer protection. Allred worked briefly at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and once issued a press release condemning the Financial CHOICE Act, a Republican bank deregulation measure. Kim criticized his opponent, Tom McArthur, for scheduling a fundraiser with Interim CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney.

These may not seem like deep and considered vows to stand up to big banks. But other incoming members have not even gone this far. It would be a good regional fit to replace departing progressive committee members Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Michael Capuano, D-Mass., with the progressives filling their seats, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley. But neither have expressed interest in the committee.

The Take On Wall Street coalition has gone so far as to write up a fact sheet for progressives on the importance of the committee, citing its centrality to tackling homelessness and the housing crisis, ensuring racial and economic justice, and fighting poverty. The pitch cited laws like the Truth in Lending Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the Community Reinvestment Act, which ensures lending in low-income areas, as well as Federal Reserve policy, which aims to prevent recessions and ensure full employment in all communities. “(House Financial Services Committee) is an especially compelling assignment for House progressives, both to lay the foundation for bold policies and to exercise critical oversight,” the document reads.

Whether that pitch lands, and progressive members-elect decide to go after a Financial Services seat, could have wide-ranging consequences for banking policy, corporate governance, fair housing, student loans, retirement security, and virtually every aspect of the national economy.

The final verdict on committee assignments is likely to come together quickly. The Democrats’ steering and policy committee formally hands out assignments, although leadership plays an enormous role in who gets what; indeed, Pelosi is the chair of the committee, as is custom. Intelligence Committee seats are directly appointed by the Democratic leader, avoiding the steering and policy committee altogether.

Even if the CPC had a dream list for the committees where they want expanded representation, they cannot present it to Pelosi without firm commitments from the members. CPC staffers are talking directly to members and their chiefs of staff to secure those commitments. The pitch is that this is the perfect time to make the switch, because the seats are open and this big a wave may not come again soon.

This is all happening as the CPC tries to redefine what it means to be a member, toughening up the policy for whether members can make anti-progressive votes or simultaneously be part of the CPC and their ideological opposites, the New Dems. It’s smart for them to make a play for power — but they need to be able to back it up and persuade reluctant members to take advantage.

The coalition of groups pushing for committee assignments have stressed common cause in their meetings with members, promising to push agenda items important to the members if they just switch committees. “There’s a reason why Wall Street gets a stranglehold on these committees,” said Lawson. “We diagram everything progressives care about and how it narrows to these committees. We’re trying to change the mentality on the outside to a more sophisticated understanding.”

Those outside groups have started to pick up on the necessity of caring about internal House politics, demanding that progressives get a place at the table commensurate with their numbers. “The blue wave that sent Republicans packing because of their aggressive anti-consumer record should move all recommendations toward people who are actually champions of consumer financial protection,” said Beverly Brown Ruggia of New Jersey Citizen Action, a statewide social and economic justice group. “We will be watching this process very closely.”

Update: November 21, 2018

This story was updated with a denial from Rep. Gottheimer that he declined to help a colleague acquire a spot on the Financial Services Committee.

The post House Progressives Are Facing an Unexpected Problem in the Quest for Committee Power appeared first on The Intercept.

Iowa faith leaders are demanding that backers of white nationalist Rep. Steve King pull their financial support of his re-election bid, as his history of racist rhetoric faces heightened scrutiny following a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue and a wave of pipe bombs mailed to prominent critics of President Donald Trump.

King’s Republican colleagues have long shrugged off his promotion of white supremacist ideology, but the recent attacks have renewed national outrage. Under intense pressure, at least three of his donors — dairy company Land O’Lakes, tech giant Intel, and pet food company Purina — have withdrawn their support.

A new poll by Change Research found that the race between King and his Democratic opponent, J.D. Scholten, has tightened amid the backlash, and there’s now just a single point separating the two. The poll also found that King’s approval rating is sinking, with just 38 percent of respondents saying they view him favorably, and 48 percent viewing him unfavorably. Prognosticators say that if an incumbent’s favorability rating falls below 50 percent, it’s trouble for re-election.

Hours after the release of the poll showing that King may lose, National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Rep. Steve Stivers tweeted a general condemnation of King’s recent comments and behavior.

Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior.

— Steve Stivers (@RepSteveStivers) October 30, 2018

Jewish leaders from King’s congressional district, in a letter published in the Des Moines Register on Tuesday, denounced the eight-term incumbent’s record of anti-Semitism and called on his donors to follow the lead of the companies that have left him.

“We are writing from the depths of our grief, in horror at the news of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh,” wrote Alan Steckman from Adas Israel in Mason City and John Pleasants from the Ames Jewish Congregation. “We feel we must speak out because our Congressional Representative, Steve King, is an enthusiastic crusader for the same types of abhorrent beliefs held by the Pittsburgh shooter.”

After it was revealed that Land O’Lakes contributed $2,500 to King’s campaign, online critics quickly amplified calls for a boycott of the company’s products. Most of King’s other donors, which include Berkshire Hathaway and its subsidiary, MidAmerican Energy Company, AT&T, and the American Bankers Association, have so far remained silent.

“King’s regular meetings with the white supremacist group in Austria founded by an SS officer are not new,” the letter continued. “But the recent discovery, that King used funds from a Holocaust education organization to meet with a notoriously anti-Semitic propaganda site is shocking beyond any previous outrage. King’s latest cynical machinations are intolerable to us as Iowans and as Jews.”

 

The letter from Jewish leaders was followed by a separate letter from an Iowa interfaith group, which included people of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish faiths. “The Pittsburgh murderer was motivated by anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric,” they wrote in a letter sent to both the Register and The Intercept. “Steve King espouses similar ideas and associates himself with others who share them. He bears some responsibility for inciting the kind of hatred that led to last week’s horrific violence.”

The letter, signed by more than two dozen faith leaders from Ames, Iowa, cited King’s endorsement of a self-proclaimed white nationalist for mayor of Toronto, adding that King has also criticized billionaire philanthropist George Soros as “a target of one of last week’s pipe bombs and frequent focus of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”

“King cannot refute charges of anti-Semitism by claiming to be a supporter of Israel while associating with a racist, xenophobic movement that includes anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers,” they wrote.

A race Republicans initially expected to be effortless is now looking tough. There’s a week left until the election and King is nearly broke, with just $176,000 on hand, while Scholten has heavily out-raised him without taking corporate PAC money. Scholten has already spent $1.4 million, some of which has gone to ads that have run unopposed on air for two weeks.

Scholten has been holding town halls and meetups in each of the overwhelmingly red counties in his district, campaigning on progressive policies like “Medicare for All” and raising the minimum wage, but leading specifically with a critique of the farm economy, as The Intercept previously reported.

King has also lost the longtime support of his hometown newspaper. On Friday, the editorial board of the Sioux City Journal broke from tradition and endorsed Scholten. “Those were not easy words for us to write,” the board wrote of their decision.

The post Local Paper and Interfaith Leaders Blast Iowa Rep. Steve King: “Those Were Not Easy Words for Us to Write” appeared first on The Intercept.

The United States National Institute of Health (NIH) announced on Tuesday that it will soon end a three-year moratorium on funding research projects that aim to make pathogens more powerful than they are naturally. The restrictions were put in place during the Obama Administration while the NIH created a more comprehensive system of risk-benefit analysis for the research. Now that such a system has been developed, the NIH is moving forward with its plans to develop more dangerous forms of deadly viruses. The goal is to study these lab-grown super-viruses to determine how these viruses might evolve in the real world, enabling experts and institutions to prepare antiviral medicines or other public health responses.

Projects that engineer super viruses in the hopes of learning their weaknesses are called “gain-of-function” studies. Scientists seek to learn how a virus interacts with its hosts may change based on evolution. While research involving highly dangerous pathogens is strictly regulated, the potential cost from a mistake or malicious action could be devastating. Former CIA director John Brennan recently highlighted biological weapons, like a weaponized form of the ebola virus, as one of the most pressing existential threats facing the United States.

Related: Scientists harness tobacco plants to produce polio vaccine

Between 2003 and 2009, there were 395 reported incidents in which human error created a situation in which people were at risk of infection from these deadly viruses. Only seven infections resulted from these 395 events. Although this research is ostensibly to serve the public’s interest, some scientists question whether the risks are worth any potential reward. Gain-of-function studies have “done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic, said Marc Lipsitch, epidemiologist at Harvard University, according to Nature. It would seem that the NIH did its due diligence in preparing a comprehensive policy concerning the research of deadly pathogens. Hopefully it is enough to keep these super viruses behind tightly closed doors.

Via Motherboard

Images via NIAID (1) 

Late last month, a group of five national progressive organizations announced their support for Marie Newman, a Democrat running for Congress in Illinois. Nothing unusual there: Newman is a down-the-line progressive on everything from economic populism, immigration, LGBT rights, gun violence and a woman’s right to choose.

What made the move so unusual is that there is already a Democrat safely in the seat.

In a year defined by fierce resistance to President Donald Trump, the move marked the most aggressive challenge to a sitting Democrat this cycle, because it wasn’t organized by groups that have been set up specifically to challenge Democrats from the left, but rather by ones that often support those who’ve already been elected, while training their fire instead on Republicans.

The groups broadly come from the activist wing of the party that is comfortable working with establishment Democrats, if at occasionally an arms-length distance: NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. The five joined Daily Kos, which had previously endorsed Newman.

As a signal of how significant the move was, take note of who did not join in the endorsement: Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, or organized labor.

The latter absence is not hard to explain, as Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., much like his father before him, has long commanded the loyalty of unions in the district, who are closely tied to the party machinery, a machine that can still move a lot of ground in the state. “We’ve been gunning for Lipinski for something like 10 years now, and until organized labor abandons him, it’s always an uphill slog. But he certainly has no business being a Democrat and would love to see Newman catch fire,” Markos Moulitsas, head of Daily Kos, told The Intercept.

But for Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List, the abstention is a window into the power of incumbency and the influence of the national Democratic Party.

The letter “D” might come after Lipinski’s name, but he doesn’t vote like a Democrat in 2017. Anti-choice, skeptical of LGBT rights, and often on the side of anti-immigrant efforts, Lipinski’s record is far out of step with his district, which went for Bernie Sanders by roughly eight points in the Democratic primary, and to Hillary Clinton by about 16 points in the 2016 general election.

On paper, there is no question which candidate EMILY’s List or Planned Parenthood would be supporting in a straight-up race between a pro-choice, progressive woman and an anti-choice, conservative man. Newman knows the 3rd District well; she was raised in Palos Park, attended Carl Sandburg High School, and currently resides in La Grange with her husband and two children. She comes from a corporate background and made her career as a marketing professional, but she became a rights advocate and formed a nationwide coalition of anti-bullying nonprofits after her child, who is transgender, was bullied at school. More recently, Newman met with state and federal lawmakers to discuss gun control, as part of her work with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

EMILY’s List is specifically dedicated to electing pro-choice women and didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on its decision not to back Newman. Erica Sackin, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said that the organization has yet to make decisions on 2018 elections, but did not look fondly on the record of Lipinski. “It’s essential to elect people who will be champions for reproductive health and rights,” she said in a statement. “We’ve seen over the years that Rep. Dan Lipinski has not been a champion for women or women’s rights, and in fact has only a 23 percent voting record rating from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.”

But the race is not fought on paper, but rather in the world in which taking on the establishment and losing can come with payback. “I’d welcome their support,” Newman told The Intercept.

Just how dramatic those consequences would be for EMILY’s List is not obvious, however. The fact that NARAL and HRC, which often work closely with establishment Democrats, are willing to challenge Lipinski openly suggests that party leadership is not going to war to defend Lipinski, who couples his conservative politics with an abrasive personality. If Lipinski loses his primary, the party is no worse off, as Newman would easily win the general election.

The calculation for Planned Parenthood is different, as the Illinois machine controls some of the purse strings that keeps the organization funded. And that machine has been good in Illinois on abortion rights. In a move that was seen as a way to box in Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, Democratic state House Speaker Mike Madigan pushed the most progressive pro-choice bill in the country on to the governor’s desk. If he signed it, he’d get a primary from the right, and if he vetoed it, Democrats would use it to crush him. He signed it and got a primary.

Madigan was a longtime ally of Lipinski’s father and is tight with the younger Lipinski, as well, whose career he is partly responsible for. Lipinski became a member of Congress in 2005, when he inherited his father Bill Lipinski’s public service career. He is staunchly opposed to providing federal funding for abortions and has continuously voted against including abortion coverage in qualified health care plans. This was partly the reason why he was the only Illinois Democrat who voted against the Affordable Care Act in 2010, even though he is currently one of Obamacare’s public defenders. Most recently, he supported a bill that would criminalize abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

“Congressman Lipinski is way out of touch with the values of his district. He used his position in Congress to advance an anti-choice, anti-LGBT, anti-immigrant agenda,” said James Owen, NARAL states communications director.

If a member of Congress is out of step with his district, one way to remedy it is to change the district. In the 2010 redistricting, controlled by the Illinois machine, Lipinski swapped some of his voters out for new ones. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, a fellow Illinois Democrat, watched it happen. “All of a sudden, one day I woke up and I saw the 2011 map that I was going to run in 2012 under, and I said, ‘Whoa! What happened to Bucktown? Wicker Park? What happened to all my inner-city folks? All of a sudden I have cul-de-sacs, I have Brookfield Zoo, I have southern suburbs. Doesn’t sound like part of a Hispanic congressional district, right?” Gutiérrez said. “But I guess the question is, why did he jettison them?”

The answer is simple: to make his district more conservative and fend off a primary challenge from the left. In a redistricting that affected a number of different members of Congress, Lipinski gave up white, lefty enclaves like Brookfield and Riverside in exchange for more conservative white voters. “He gerrymandered it to suit his very far-right, radical needs,” is how Newman put it.

Whether Newman can pull it off will likely depend not just on national progressive groups and the power of the local machine, but in how active the local immigrant rights community decides to get.

Lipinski has a deplorable record on the issue, in a community dominated by immigrants both recent — a third of the district is Latino — and less recent, like those from Poland. While Lipinski has major labor groups locked down, the Hispanic American Labor Council has gotten behind Newman. Gutiérrez, who represents the 4th District in Illinois and is outspoken on immigration issues, told The Intercept he’s “definitely going to sit down with the challenger.”

“Lipinski on a whole array of issues is outside the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” he said.

On immigration, Lipinski has voted yes to building a fence along the Mexican border and voted against the DREAM Act in 2010. But then in July, he co-sponsored a bill that would protect the recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program from deportation.

Lipinski voted against government recognition of same-sex marriage and was the only Democrat to co-sponsor legislation that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT people based on their religious beliefs.

Lipinski hasn’t responded to The Intercept’s interview requests but told The Hill that his voting record is “very much in line” with his district. The suburbs in the southwest side of Chicago tend to vote conservative, according to Dick Simpson, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former Chicago alderman.

In March, frustrated constituents organized a town hall meeting and aired their grievances at a cardboard cutout of Lipinski. Newman told The Intercept that without polling or surveying his constituents, Lipinski “has no idea what his district wants.”

The Illinois primary race is surfacing as “a battle for the soul of the Democratic party,” according to Kate Sweeney, press secretary of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

“There is this belief that the way forward for the Democratic Party runs through going moderate, or supporting corporate issues, or doing for Republicans more than you do for Democrats. It’s a broken translation. It’s false. We saw in Virginia just a month ago that you can engage a whole new generation of voters by really putting economic populism at the center of your campaigns,” she said.

But going against Lipinski will be an uphill battle for Newman. Lipinski’s campaign has $1.5 million cash on hand, to Newman’s $97,600. The odds are also in his favor: Incumbents have a 90 percent re-election rate.

Newman said she has spoken with 40 or 50 unions and that while some unions will continue backing Lipinski, “ultimately some of them will end positively with me.” Even though Newman seems like a more logical candidate for labor unions, they wouldn’t want Lipinski as an opponent, because of his powerful position in Congress, particularly on transportation issues.

Newman told The Intercept she has received support and mentorship from individuals within the Democratic Party, but no financial support from the party as a whole. Both Lipinski’s father and son were supported by the Chicago Democratic machine, which puts in precinct workers who go door to door and make sure Democratic voters show up and elect their chosen candidate. It’s in the Illinois Democratic establishment’s interest to support Lipinski, because his congressional district controls a lot of the southwest side wards that Rahm Emanuel would need to secure another term as mayor.

When asked if there might be repercussions to coming out against the establishment-backed Democrat, Neil Sroka of Democracy for America said he doubted it. “I think if the national Democrats are smart, they’ll stay the hell away from this race, because few representatives in Congress more poorly reflect where the Democrats are right now than Dan Lipinski,” he said.

Newman added an additional reason that progressive groups might want to get behind her: she plans to win. “Never bet against Marie Newman,” she said. “Don’t do it.”

Update: December 12, 2017

This story was updated to include comment from Planned Parenthood Action Fund. 

Top photo: Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., and fellow Democratic members of Congress hold a news conference to voice their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal at the U.S. Capitol on June 10, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

The post A Primary Challenge to a Right-Wing Democrat in Illinois Divides the Resistance appeared first on The Intercept.