What Happened Today: April 18, 2023
Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Privacy Edition; Sudanese generals battle for control; President Herzog calls for unity
The Big Story
Infamous espionage software Pegasus apparently made its debut in Mexico, where the Mexican Army became the first official client of shadowy Israeli tech firm NSO Group after top military brass conducted preliminary negotiations with executives from the company at a strip club in March 2011. That’s according to a New York Times report on Tuesday, which also noted that after the initial meeting, execs demonstrated the technology to Mexico’s president at the time, Felipe Calderón, and his secretary of defense, Guillermo Galván Galván, whose military would soon use the surveillance software to stealthily infiltrate a target’s phone, siphoning data in real time without the user’s awareness.
Ostensibly part of the military’s attempts to crack down on the drug cartels that have embedded themselves in Mexico’s security agencies, the new surveillance tools have been used by Calderón as part of his attempt to become less reliant on U.S. intelligence. Authorities are supposed to go through a legal process before deploying this kind of surveillance in Mexico, but the Times report cites consistent, flagrant examples of abuse of the technology. Beginning in 2012, multiple departments of the Mexican government had access to the software, but since 2019, only the Army has had it, and while the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, promised to stop the illegal spying when he was elected in 2018, human rights lawyers have been targeted as recently as late 2022.
The Mexican Secretariat of National Defense has denied the country’s watchdog organization, the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Personal Data Protection, access to the current contracts with the supplier of Pegasus in the country, saying that it would be a national security risk for at least the next five years.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/world/americas/pegasus-spyware-mexico.html
In The Back Pages: The Borg of the Gargoyles
The Rest
→ Despite full knowledge of how undocumented migrant children have been funneled into labor traps, top government officials have done nothing to address the crisis, according to a New York Times follow-up exposé to an earlier piece on how migrant children are being used for hard, low-paying labor across the United States. The problem for the immigration officials and White House administrations overseeing this calamity is that there are just too many children to keep in government shelters, and it’s an easy solution to rely on the so-called American adult “sponsors” willing to take them out of the shelters, even if these sponsors are exploiting the children in dangerous work conditions. The ongoing approach has in effect encouraged parents in Latin America to send their children to the United States for work, despite the risks. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and the White House, meanwhile, all blame each other and deny responsibility.
Read the whole embarrassing tale, here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/us/politics/migrant-child-labor-biden.html
→ Two generals who once worked together to overthrow the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir in 2019 have now turned on each other, sparking a civil conflict in the country that started over the weekend. In 2021, the two generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, leader of the Sudanese Army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the offshoot Rapid Support Forces militia, overthrew the transitional government that had been put in place after they’d overthrown al-Bashir, steering the country into full military rule. For the past two years, tensions between the two men have been simmering over who would take control of the Army and therefore the nation. Dagalo claims that Al-Burhan is a “radical Islamist” and foe of democracy; Al-Burhan calls Dagalo’s group rebels and blames them for mounting civilian casualties. There have also been attacks on U.S. and E.U. diplomats, and both entities are calling for a cease-fire. Some cynical observers have pointed out that this conflict finally boiled over in the context of an impending deal between Russia and Sudan to give the Russians a naval base on the Red Sea, putting them in a strong position at one of the world’s most important shipping choke points, an obvious strategic nightmare for NATO and the United States.
→ An actual study at the University of Texas asked the following question:
Which socioeconomic group is most likely to repeatedly violate the rights of others in a pattern of behavior that includes violence, deceit, irresponsibility and a lack of remorse? (Hint: they also happen to hold the most social power and because of that can get away with the most wrongdoing) A. Middle-class Latino families? B. Wealthy white men? C. Asian men of all economic groups? D. Female dentists?
The survey, an exercise in academic scapegoating of evil “white men,” was administered by University of Texas at Austin psychology professor Kirsten Bradbury, who has since backtracked, apparently telling students that the quiz is “too stale to use.”
→ Thread of the Day:
https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1648306068215193600
Always ahead of the curve, Apple is now partnering with banking giant Goldman Sachs to offer a massive 4.15% interest savings rate in an attempt to outflank the traditional banking sector. The rate, which dwarfs the national average yield on savings accounts of just 0.35%, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, could contribute further to a crisis of confidence in consumer banks, as people pull money out over solvency fears to pursue a higher return on their cash. However, there is sure to be regulatory scrutiny of the move as Apple is slowly becoming an everything monopoly, with some users giving Apple data on their personal health metrics, their internet usage, their music taste, and now maybe even their personal finances.
→ Picture of the Day:
A new article in The Free Press combines narrative and cartoon to explain the insidious way an entire culture can be dissuaded from sharing their honest opinions. Free Press editor Bari Weiss writes of cartoonist Tim Urban: “By capturing the length of our days in, say, the amount of times we have left to swim in the ocean; the books we have left to read; or the dumplings we have left to eat, Tim takes an abstract subject like time and makes it tangible.” Here, Urban demonstrates visually what it would look like to be the only person in a social network whose inner thoughts match their outer expressions: totally cut off from everyone else who is, at least externally, holding the party line.
Read More: https://www.thefp.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-self-censorship
→ Quote of the Day:
At the high point of this sacred day, it seems that even the obvious must be stated: For the Nazi monster, opinions within our nation made not the slightest difference. None of the ideologies, beliefs, or ways of life, none of the differences or varieties within our people, bore any meaning. For them, we were all one people … whose fate was one: death and extinction.
That’s Israeli President Isaac Herzog, speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial on Monday for Yom Ha’Shoah, the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day. Unfortunately, due to the recent chaos in Israel over proposed changes to the judiciary, this years’ Yom Ha’Shoah ceremonies have been marred by partisan conflict. At a Tel Aviv synagogue, for instance, Likud MK Boaz Bismuth was shouted out of a memorial ceremony with cries of “Shame!” Herzog pulled no punches in his remembrance of the horrors inflicted on Jews, which occurred not 80 years ago, telling the story of two French Jews who were killed and dismembered by the Nazis, their skulls meant to be displayed in a future “museum of skulls and skeletons of an extinct race.”
→ Number of the Day: 4.5%
That’s the GDP growth of China in the first quarter of 2023, slightly lower than the 5% target, but a substantial rebound after a full reopening of the country that had been in so many ways crippled by COVID-19 restrictions. China was extremely isolated over the past three years, shaking investor confidence, with investment at a recent nadir, but more recently it saw a bounce of 7% in manufacturing investment and 5.1% in fixed asset investment, while private investment only notched a .6% gain.
→ Wall Street Journal reporter and accused spy Evan Gershkovich was denied bail on Tuesday and sent to await his trial in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow. The Wall Street Journal’s owner, Dow Jones, offered $600,000 bail but was denied, according to Gershkovich’s local legal team. His lawyer, Tatyana Nozhkina, also says that Gershkovich is ready to fight to prove his innocence and has been staying busy reading Russian novels and watching cooking shows in his cell. Gershkovich wrote his family a letter, telling them, “I am not losing hope.”
→ Video of the Day:
https://twitter.com/emilykschrader/status/1648224469406687235
Every year in Israel, on Yom Ha’Shoah, a siren blares for two minutes at 10 a.m., and the entire nation comes to a stop to stand in silence in memory of the 6 million. If you’ve been there to experience it, it’s one of the more miraculous things you’ll have ever witnessed. It is far greater poetry than any of us could put down in words, but nonetheless, here’s a poem for the desecrated dead, who will never know there came to be a Jewish state called Israel, much less that its citizens stand guard in their honor.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/eight-days-clayton-fox
TODAY IN TABLET:
Malines by Abraham Sutzkever
An excerpt from the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto
Atheists in Foxholes by Maggie Phillips
As an Army program tries to improve service members’ mental—and spiritual—well-being, nonbelievers see a chance to address bias
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, July 2022
The Borg of the Gargoyles
How government, tech, finance, and law enforcement converged into an all-knowing criminalization complex—and how to resist it
By Jeff Garzik and Jeremy Stern
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 publishedrecords 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.
The first thing to understand about the Borg that the gargoyles made for us is that it’s a product of evolution, not intelligent design. There was no conference of rootless cosmopolitans who descended on a chalet in the Alps to plot the destruction of the Constitution and turn the United States into Communist China. The Borg is simply what happens when a technologically advanced society is driven by default toward the naturally expansionist aims and incentives of government and law enforcement.
The U.S. government is able to chase categories of speech and pockets of currency it doesn’t yet control because anyone the state would like to be deemed a criminal can easily be deemed a criminal. As the body of state and federal laws has accumulated over the last 100-plus years, it has become possible to find some law, any law, that any individual citizen has broken or is currently breaking. This allows the state to go after anyone it wants at any moment through prosecutorial overcharging; more than 95%of criminal convictions in the United States today are obtained through plea bargaining rather than jury trials, all but eliminating citizen participation in the justice system. (A surprising number of public figures who are well-known in the popular imagination for committing serious crimes were, in the absence of actual evidence of criminal activity, only ever charged with the spurious crime of “lying to a federal officer.”) The most significant consequence of overlegalization, therefore, is not inefficiency, risk aversion, or higher costs. It is the mass criminalization of an entire society. Technological advances have simply provided new tools for criminalizing and punishing U.S. citizens who, against all odds, still appear to maintain a heroic belief in due process and the right of appeal.
After the terror attacks of 9/11, the global war on terror provided a broadly popular justification for granting the Departments of Justice, Treasury, and other executive agencies with ever-more advanced and intrusive surveillance capabilities to pursue such ends. In the first decade after the twin towers fell, Americans got used to the idea of vastly expanded domestic surveillance (the Patriot Act), U.S. government coercion of foreign entities to report assets held by Americans (the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), and the fact that the president of the United States maintains a “kill list” of human beings—including U.S. citizens—not formally charged with any crime but who are chosen by metadata for targeted assassination.
Even many seemingly benign efforts to, for example, crack down on criminal money-laundering or tighten U.S. sanctions, are in fact extensions of this now deeply entrenched and extra-Constitutional process. Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the Treasury Department has advocated for adding a “know-your-customer” legal proviso requiring any crypto wallet belonging to a U.S. citizen to carry identity markers, like a Social Security number or commercial debit account. The whole point of crypto wallets, needless to say, is that they can be held anonymously. The Biden administration’s recent announcement that it is making progress on implementing these rules, first proposed in 2020 by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), was thus a warning that any owner of a crypto wallet who wishes to remain anonymous will soon be deemed a criminal.
Yet such relatively low-tech, often clumsy public sector efforts—driven predominately by lawyers, cops, civil servants, and politicians—do not by themselves constitute a juggernaut against which resistance is futile. It is their convergence with technology companies, which often contract with the U.S. government, that pushes the Borg toward its ultimate evolutionary goal of achieving perfection.
Because major data collectors and brokers like LexisNexis are private corporations, it is perfectly legal for them to dragnet information generated by internet users and their movements in the physical world and use it to construct massive surveillance databases. It would be unconstitutional for the government to do this work itself, but nothing stops it from purchasing these databases as a customer of the companies. When hackers breached OPM in 2014-15, SolarWinds in 2020, and, on more than one occasion, Aadhaar (an Indian government database containing the private biometric information of more than 1 billion Indian citizens), what they revealed was qualitatively different from Edward Snowden’s famous revelations of an NSA-based super-surveillance system: They demonstrated an unbroken chain of entirely legal contracts in which private companies siphon off citizen surveillance data and merge it with the government’s own data banks.
One practical manifestation of this high-low tech, public-private convergence is geofencing. Because we all carry personal surveillance devices—known as Samsung Galaxies or iPhones—in our pockets, a relatively easy way for the Borg to curtail certain First Amendment freedoms is for the U.S. government to designate a geofenced area, require Apple and Google to divulge all the phones active in that grid square, ban rideshare apps from entering it, and oblige commercial banks and digital payments companies to de-bank anyone who breaches it. With some laudable exceptions, most companies don’t have to be “forced” into such compliance—they know that everything from industry regulation to immigration policy, tariffs, and access to the Chinese market depends on their cooperation. After the experience of COVID lockdowns, Black Lives Matter protests, the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, and the trucker convoys, effective geofencing that not only surveils people but limits their freedom of assembly by herding and controlling their movements should no longer code as science fiction.
Nor should the most distinctive feature of the Borg itself: Whether you’re geofenced out of a public area, de-platformed by a faceless computer algorithm, de-banked by a faceless government bureaucracy, or criminalized by a faceless law enforcement agency, there’s never a real person or group of people who you can hold accountable.
Read the rest, here.