What Happened Today: July 20, 2022
Closed courts driving up crime; DHS warrantless surveillance; The Borg of the Gargoyles
The Big Story
New data from New York City officials this week suggests 2022 could be a record-breaking year for major crimes, already up 37% this year compared to 2021. A new investigation suggests that courtroom closures could be one of the factors driving the increase. While murders and shooting incidents respectively fell 5.6% and 10% compared to the year prior, auto thefts have surged by a whopping 46%, rapes are up 11%, and felony assaults jumped more than 18%. New York’s trend line is similar to nearby Philadelphia, which crossed the grim milestone this week of 300 homicides in less than 200 days in 2022, a murder rate tracking closely to last year’s recording-breaking 562 killings, which had been the largest number of murders in more than 50 years. What holds in New York and Philly has been true in big cities across the country, where violent crimes have increased dramatically over the past two years.
Criminologists are batting around several working theories to explain the surge in crime since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Causes include the fraying of the social fabric because of closed schools and other essential community institutions; police staffing shortages; and a drop in arrests following the George Floyd protests as police officers, responding to the risks and rewards of their profession, disengaged from the job of policing while prominent district attorneys decided to stop prosecuting certain crimes as part of a larger political campaign to reform the criminal justice system. More recent analysis of the crime wave, however, has pointed to another factor: the closure of criminal jury courtrooms in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. In a new article for The Atlantic and ProPublica, Alec MacGillis writes that while some courtroom proceedings moved online, criminal trials required in-person juries, and the suspension of criminal hearings might have been responsible for a surge in “more violence in a number of ways”—for example, when defendants committed more crimes because cases against them weakened as witnesses dropped out over time and prosecutors dismissed charges to expedite the backlog. “Above all, experts say, the shutdowns undermined the promise that crimes would be promptly punished.” That sudden lack of swift justice ultimately undermined the justice system, California Partnership for Safe Communities senior partner Reygan Cunningham told MacGillis, and “sent a message that there are no consequences, and there is no help.”
In the Back Pages: The Borg of the Gargoyles
The Rest
→ In the latest salvo in Europe’s energy war with Russia, the state gas company Gazprom sent a letter to its European clients that a “force majeure” that took place this past June legally frees the company from its previous contracts. Beginning on June 14, Gazprom had reduced its shipments to Europe to 40% capacity, and last week the company shut down the Nord Stream 1 pipeline entirely for annual maintenance—without clarifying whether Russia would turn the pipeline back on at all. In remarks on Tuesday in Tehran, President Putin offered his assurances that Gazprom “has always fulfilled and will fulfill all of its obligations,” although he noted ongoing sanctions thwarting maintenance parts could cut gas flows by as much as 20%. Amid so much uncertainty, the European Union announced plans on Wednesday for a bloc-wide voluntary rationing of gas to prevent a precarious energy-supply shortage come winter.
→ New public records obtained by the ACLU this week found that the Department of Homeland Security and agencies under its aegis have spent millions of public dollars “to buy access to cell phone location information being aggregated and sold by two shadowy data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street.” According to Venntel’s own marketing material, the data it provides can “identify repeat visitors, frequented locations, pinpoint known associates, and discover pattern of life.” Government agencies buying private location data in bulk without the use of a warrant largely sidesteps the Fourth Amendment and grants the DHS access to a vast trove of sensitive information, with some surveillance hoovering up as many as 26 points of location data per minute. The unchecked surveillance is a piece of San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s new proposal to give local police sweeping access to private security cameras to deter drug dealing and rampant street theft. It’s also an increasingly popular “weapon of enforcement against private language and opinions judged to be politically undesirable,” as Tablet’s News Editor Jeremy Stern and tech industry veteran Jeff Garzik write in a new Tablet feature in today’s Back Pages about how “government, tech, finance, and law enforcement converged into an all-knowing criminalization complex.”
→ Small liberal arts colleges continue to struggle in the wake of the pandemic, with a growing number of schools being acquired by bigger, brand-name universities. Some 95 colleges have merged since 2018, a radical increase over the 78 mergers that had taken place over the 18 years prior, according to a new Wall Street Journal analysis.
Roughly 40% of college mergers are between private institutions and most often involve one institution absorbing another college with less than 5,000 students.
Competition from coding bootcamps that equip students with workforce-ready skills—the impact of extremely high tuitions and dwindling faith in the return on investment, along with disruptions caused by the pandemic—has hit small colleges particularly hard, and enrollments are rapidly declining. This spring, the total college enrollment hovered just over 16 million students, a significant decline from the 19.6 million students enrolled 11 years prior.
Bottomed-out revenues have put small schools in precarious positions and forced some to take on one-sided deals just to stay open. During the pandemic, Northeastern University absorbed the 170-year-old Mills College in California (as part of Northeastern’s decade-long push to open campuses in several U.S. cities as well as abroad), forking over $30 million to support Mills operations and taking on $21 million in debt in exchange for the 135-acre campus estimated to be worth a billion dollars and the college’s $191 million endowment.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/broke-colleges-resort-to-mergers-for-survival-11658239445
→ Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk will go to trial in October, with Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick noting that a “delay [to the trial] risks irreparable harm” to the social media platform. Such a delay is just what Musk had requested—and precisely in the hopes of harming Twitter, the company alleges. “Mr. Musk has been and remains contractually obligated to use his best efforts to close this deal,” Twitter’s lawyer said. “What he’s doing is the exact opposite of best efforts. It’s attempted sabotage.” Musk’s lawyers, meanwhile, are arguing that Twitter wants to rush to trial so that Musk’s investigators don’t have time to look at Twitter’s books, with Musk claiming that the platform inflates its stats with fake accounts. “What Twitter wants to do is continue to shroud in secrecy the issue regarding their less than 5% spam and false account representation,” Musk’s lawyer said. The trial, sure to be what legal scholars call “a shitshow,” will determine whether Musk is obligated to buy Twitter after all.
→ BY THE NUMBERS: 28,100 students
That’s how many children New York City education officials anticipate will drop from their school rolls this upcoming school year—a massive hemorrhaging of students, according to Mayor Eric Adams: “We’re in a very dangerous place in the number of students that we are dropping.” Education officials say the precipitous decline in the student body is being propelled by the number of people who left New York City during the pandemic, the cost of living in the city, and a decline in the birthrate. Yet the total number of students might ultimately be even less than the city’s estimate. A survey of the city’s 656 schools found that more than 30% believe their decrease in enrollments will be greater than the city’s current projections.
→ Since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked in early May, protestors gathering in front of the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the tony Washington, D.C., suburb of Chevy Chase are encountering a community that is largely sympathetic to their politics but entirely fed up with their tactics. “The vast majority of people here are pro-choice,” one neighbor noted, “and the very vast majority of people here think that these protestors have gotten out of control.” Protestors say they have cooperated with police during their weekly Wednesday-evening protests—that they no longer use megaphones or bullhorns out of respect for the residents in the area and don’t stop in front of the justices’ houses but rather chant as they walk by. But when asked by residents to leave the street altogether, the protestors refuse. “We’re there for about 30 minutes and then we leave,” one protestor said. “I understand where their passion comes from,” a resident told The Washington Post, “but I’ve had enough.”
→ The Rabbinical Assembly (RA), the international association for Conservative and Masorti rabbis, issued a statement condemning the Presbyterian Church of the United States on Tuesday after it passed several resolutions criticizing Israel at its 223rd general assembly. Presbyterian Church USA, as the denomination is known, is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the country, with some 1.7 million members. At its meeting last week, it passed 11 resolutions outlining its positions on Israel, one of them asserting that Israel practices “apartheid,” and another opposing the passage of anti-BDS boycott laws. The statement from the RA noted that Judaism’s Conservative movement has long treasured “interfaith allies and the pluralistic religious landscape that the United States offers, but the Presbyterian Church USA’s relentless attacks on Israel undermine multifaith cooperation and understanding and deserve condemnation not only from the Jewish movements, but also from our friends in the various Christian denominations.”
→ In a galaxy adjacent to our Milky Way, some 160,000 light years from earth and floating alongside a luminous blue star 25 times larger than our sun, is a black hole that scientists have described as a “needle in the haystack.” An international team of researchers published its findings this month in nature astronomy, describing the unprecedented sighting of a black hole that appears to be dormant—meaning it does not emit any high-level radiation, making it very difficult for researchers to capture—and was not born in the blast of a supernova. “It’s the first object of its kind discovered after astronomers have been searching for decades,” said one of the study’s co-authors, Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The scientists will now watch to see if that enormous blue star becomes a black hole, too, and proceeds to merge with its neighbor.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“I wasn’t trying to bust them. I just wanted to hear what they had to say about what they were doing, what their relationship is to the mystic arts, and how they justify what they’re doing.”
Michelle Tea, author, podcast host, and tarot reader, on the scourge of Instagram impersonators pretending to be her in order to cash in on her spiritual labor. Some tarot card readers with popular Instagram platforms have been impersonated as many as 15 times; mystics will then go to great lengths to get Instagram to address these scams, to no avail. One witch reported that they had to send Instagram 30 examples of stolen content before a fake account was taken down. “In 24 hours, it was reactivated,” the witch said. “The only way to counter that would be to go through the whole process again. It’s way too time-consuming and not effective.” With Instagram unwilling to do anything about the issue, mystics, psychics, and witches are now banding together in an effort to foster greater community and to find strength in numbers. “Doing intuitive or psychic labor is really lonely,” Eliza Swann, a psychic said. “We don’t have benefits. We don’t do the work with others. Most of us can’t afford to have an assistant so we’re booking sessions, running the sessions, dealing with payment, advertising ourselves, and coming up against corporate platforms like Instagram by ourselves.” Swann is now organizing residency programs and support groups and working to build a community that might solve a problem Instagram seems uninterested in solving.
TODAY IN TABLET:
My Body, My Choice? Blake Smith weighs in on how the abortion debate has been irreversibly altered by the partisan biopolitics of COVID-19.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/my-body-my-choice-abortion-blake-smith
Looking for the Heart of Jewish Krakow. Joe Baur notes that the annual cultural festival gets bigger and bigger. But has the city become a Jewish theme park, or is it proof that Jewish life in Poland continues to endure and even thrive?
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/heart-of-jewish-krakow
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Today’s Back Pages, by Tablet’s news editor Jeremy Stern and tech industry veteran Jeff Garzik, looks at “how government, tech, finance, and law enforcement converged into an all-knowing criminalization complex—and how to resist it.”
The Borg of the Gargoyles
In Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, the Central Intelligence Corporation—the result of a merger between the Library of Congress and the CIA—employs a number of people who remain continuously connected to the Metaverse. These grotesque characters, who Stephenson calls “gargoyles,” wear computer components on their heads and bodies and serve as “human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them,” passively but perpetually dragnetting data and intelligence on human beings, their movements, and their interactions with the surrounding physical environment.
On July 7, 2014, Popular Science reported on “scan artists”—repo men whose tow trucks are “customized with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cameras and image processors and can scan [license] plates even while tearing down a highway.” These scan artists feed massive centralized databases with plate scans, historical coordinates, and drivers’ personal details, which private companies use to build predictive models of the whereabouts of vehicles targeted by banks for repossession. The scan artists, of course, are not limited to surveillance of cars already in default. They are not even limited to cars—or to car owners, or to debtors, or to deadbeats. They are gargoyles, vacuuming up all the data that people generate by participating in the internet and by moving in the physical world.
The Popular Science report became a favorite among Stephenson fans, tech lords, and presumably law enforcement. But otherwise the story made little impact, casting no greater imprint on the public consciousness than contemporaneous reports that Chinese state-sponsored hackers breached the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), obtaining over 22 million records on U.S. government employees and contractors, their families, and their friends.
In the years since, however, gargoyles have become more ubiquitous—and more grotesque. Consider the last couple months alone. On May 11, Vice reported that the San Francisco Police Department has been using driverless cars—assumed by onlookers to be harmless beta tests from Silicon Valley tech companies—as mobile surveillance cameras to “[record] their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads.” On June 1, a joint investigation by provincial privacy commissions in Canada found that TDL Group Corp., which operates the Tim Hortons fast food chain, used location data to infer where customers “lived, worked, and whether they were travelling” and “generated an ‘event’ every time users entered and left their homes, entered and exited their office, or travelled.” On June 29, Politico reported that Canada’s national police admitted to using “spyware to infiltrate mobile devices and collect data, including by remotely turning on the camera and microphone of a suspect’s phone or laptop.” Last week, the European Union proposed a regulation allowing “artificial intelligence with subsequent review conducted by a human” to scan private messages for evidence of “grooming.” Yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union published records detailing how the Department of Homeland Security purchases the cellphone location information of U.S. citizens from private data brokers.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, most of America’s biggest tech and social media companies have so far declined to clarify whether they would comply with law enforcement requests for data related to investigations involving citizens seeking or providing abortions in states that ban them. Regardless of the decisions of individual corporations, we can be certain of two things: No. 1, Americans who seek or provide abortions in states where it is illegal will unwittingly generate mountains of data documenting their newfound criminality; No. 2, that data will be dragnetted by gargoyles and maintained by private companies with government contracts.
Now that “location awareness” is customary in mobile phone apps, which also record private conversations between users and their family, friends, and lovers, a degree of intrusion into the private lives of human beings never thought possible is happening on a minute-to-minute basis. Every day, gargoyles are collecting information on our speech, movements, and purchases; every second, our mobile phones are exfiltrating data from our private lives to corporations, local police, and federal law enforcement, as well as foreign intelligence services.
If there was ever a point at which we could plausibly regard this reality as trivial, that point has been crossed. During the Ottawa trucker protests in February, Canadian authorities demonstrated how easily modern governments—including democracies with robust rule of law—can use the digital financial and payments system to freeze the bank accounts and seize, block, or escrow the funds of citizens without even obtaining convictions. At the end of March, Google announced that Google Docs will soon start flagging “potentially discriminatory or inappropriate language” and providing “suggestions on how to make your writing more inclusive and appropriate.” Google later paused the rollout of this feature, presumably in response to popular backlash. But it’s not hard to see how the two developments could conceivably be linked in the near future: The ability of governments to wield the financial system as a weapon of enforcement against private language and opinions judged to be politically undesirable.
The consolidation of government, tech, finance, and law enforcement into a Borg-like hive mind that continually collects data on our private lives—allowing it to criminalize, de-bank, and de-platform any citizen at will, without any pretense of due process—has emerged as an imminent civilizational threat. Even the most radically liberal thinkers of our past couldn’t have imagined the totality of rights that the Borg is eliminating simultaneously—rights so obvious and intrinsic to human life that no one ever thought to codify them. A star-crossed couple in 1950 kept apart by their families, communities, or police due to race or sexuality could still—even if only in secret—speak in private, exchange letters, keep diaries, and if they took special care, meet in person to consummate their love.
Today, no matter what protections they still nominally enjoy under the Bill of Rights, Americans trapped in the modern equivalent of such circumstances would have their messages instantaneously siphoned, their conversations recorded, their diaries digitally copied, their trysts interdicted. Their lives and fate would be held hostage—as all of us now are, whether we’ve fully realized it yet or not—by the Borg…
I demand my Tarot card and palm readings in person. Settle for nothing less ;-)