What Happened Today: December 8, 2022
FBI claws into Big Tech; COVID-19 is not nothing; pediatrics goes postal
The Big Story
The government just can’t seem to quit Big Tech. In three separate, but not unrelated, revelations over the past month, the Justice Department has been shown to be crudely, and perhaps unconstitutionally, interfering in the digital public square. In a lawsuit filed in May by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri against Biden administration officials for violating constitutional rights of free speech, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan describes a coordinated effort with other federal agencies to feed information about “Russian troll farms” to Big Tech platforms ahead of the 2020 election. Chan, who heads the cyber branch in the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said the agency was successful roughly 50% of the time when it requested that Twitter, Facebook, or Google remove content it deemed to be misinformation.
On Nov. 4, 2022, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee released a new report based on information provided by an FBI whistleblower that describes a “special relationship” between the FBI and Facebook in which the company provided the Bureau with private information about users “from one side of the political spectrum.” The new report corroborates statements that FBI agent Chan made in a deposition taken on Nov. 29, as well as comments Facebook parent Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg made in August explaining to podcast host Joe Rogan that the FBI warned the social platform of “Russian propaganda” and to “just be vigilant” about keeping it off the platform. Shortly after the conversation Zuckerberg described, the first reporting based on the Hunter Biden laptop story emerged and was quickly deemed to be a “likely Russian information operation” in a letter signed by 50 former national security officials, which led to it being censored by Facebook and Twitter. Subsequent reporting by Politico, The New York Times, and others has confirmed that, contrary to those early claims, the laptops were authentic.
Finally, on Tuesday, former FBI General Counsel James Baker was fired as legal counsel for Twitter after the company discovered he might have tampered with the “Twitter files” that Elon Musk provided to journalist Matt Taibbi. According to Taibbi, Baker was fired for “vetting” the first batch of internal communications to be published “without knowledge of new management.”
Read More: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-weekly-big-tech-ahead-2020-election-agent-testifies
In the Back Pages: The Borg of the Gargoyles
The Rest
→ The American Academy of Pediatrics has gone rogue, says a new report by reporter Aaron Sibarium in Common Sense. The AAP deep dive reveals an organization dominated by ideologues pushing radical approaches to gender identity and COVID-19 guidance into the mainstream for America’s children. One doctor, Jason Rafferty, wrote the AAP’s guidance memo on Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents in 2018 and drastically changed best practices from a “watchful waiting” approach taken by most of the world to a “gender-affirming” approach that condones doctors giving puberty blockers to children as young as 9 years old. The organization seems to have infused its COVID-19 guidance with similar political zeal, coming out against school closures until then-president Trump agreed with them. While countries like Denmark and Sweden stopped recommending any COVID-19 vaccination for their youngsters, the AAP recommended that Americans as young as 12 get the new bivalent shots, which have only been tested on mice. One pediatrician told Sibarium, “I now hear parents mock the AAP over even non-political guidance like breastfeeding recommendations … they’re just tuning everything out.”
Read More: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-hijacking-of-pediatric-medicine
→ In the latest horrifying tale from Gotham, a 24-year-old out for a walk with his girlfriend in Hell’s Kitchen was stabbed to death Tuesday night after asking a group of men for a cigarette. The act of random violence is in keeping with a surge of violent crime that seems to be taking New York City back to the more lawless and dangerous atmosphere of the 1980s. In Flushing, Queens, robberies are up 113% from the same period last year and grand larcenies are up 69%, and serious crimes (excluding murder) are up 25% overall citywide. On Monday, parolee Sundance Oliver shot a 96-year-old man in a wheelchair in Brooklyn, then shot and killed an “acquaintance” in Lower Manhattan before heading back to Brooklyn, where he shot and killed a teenage girl. A 21-year-old man was shot dead Monday inside a public housing development across the street from police headquarters. Mayor Eric Adams told The New York Times he’s sticking to his plan to increase policing and reduce crime in the city: “I think those who stated, ‘Don’t talk about crime,’ it was an insult to Black and brown communities where a lot of this crime was playing out.”
→ WNBA player Brittney Griner is finally on her way home from Russia today after the Biden administration managed to negotiate her release from a Russian penal colony in exchange for prisoner Viktor Bout, an international arms dealer. Griner was detained at a Russian airport in February for possession of cannabis oil cartridges she says she brought accidentally. Meanwhile, American prisoner Paul Whelan, sentenced in 2018 to 16 years in Russian prison for “espionage,” which both Whelan and the U.S. government deny, was not a part of the prisoner swap. “The choice became to either bring Brittney home or no one. As the president said this morning, he will never stop working to secure Paul’s release and return home, and he will never give up,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained to reporters today. “On a personal note, Brittney is more than an athlete, more than an Olympian—she is an important role model and inspiration to millions of Americans, particularly the LGBTQI+ Americans and women of color.”
→ The Kids Are Not Alright. In fact, the children of America are in a crisis: spiritual, moral, and mental. During the 2021-22 school year, nearly half of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s students were “chronically absent.” Their superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, told The Washington Post on Monday that the need for more mental health support “is dire”: His district mental health staff reported that suicidal thoughts had quadrupled among the student population. That need appears to be nationwide, as recent CDC data shows emergency room visits for girls aged 12-17 due to attempted suicide spiked 51% in early 2021 compared to early 2019. A new study from Stanford suggests at least some of the pressure weighing down upon American adolescents might be pandemic-related, with stress caused by the pandemic responsible for the equivalent of three years’ worth of stress on their developing brains.
→ COVID-19 may not be acutely dangerous to the majority of people, but that doesn’t mean it won’t leave you with some long-term damage. Dr. Firouzeh Heidari, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, presented new findings at the Radiological Society of North America showing that patients who’d tested positive for COVID-19 had a “statistically significant” higher liver stiffness than non-infected people. This comports with earlier findings that show even mild COVID-19 can cause a loss in brain volume equivalent to one normal year of aging, as well as with a massive Veterans Affairs study published in March that found a mild case of COVID-19 increases one’s risk of developing diabetes. Another VA study conducted around the same time showed that in the year after a COVID-19 infection, patients had increased risk of cardiovascular issues, including abnormal heart rhythms, heart muscle inflammation, blood clots, strokes, myocardial infarction, and heart failure.
→ “Within 10 years, every Jew in Ukraine will speak Ukrainian,” says Rabbi Meir Stambler from Dnipro, Ukraine. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it’s inevitable given the mass movement sweeping the country to drop the language of the oppressor. Ukranian Jews have historically been predominantly Russian-speaking, but that’s changing now, and fast, as the Russian war on Ukraine has ignited a flame of national pride in Jews and non-Jews alike. The rabbi says that previously, not more than 20% of Ukraine’s Jews spoke Ukrainian at home, including the now-famous Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky. According to Natan Meir, a professor of Judaic studies at Portland State University, the reason Jews didn’t adopt the local language in the 19th century is because Ukrainian was perceived as “a peasant language” with “no economic advantages.” As the country moves toward a more nationalist, anti-Russian future, the local tongue is sure to have advantages galore.
→ On Monday at the UJA-Federation of New York Wall Street dinner, CNN commentator Van Jones gave a speech about rising antisemitism that generated rounds of applause in the hall and then sustained backlash on social media. The Daily Beast referred to Van Jones’ remarks as “bizarre” and collected indignant comments from people like Philly Mag Editor at Large Ernest Jones, author of The Case for Cancel Culture, who called Jones a “disgusting liar” and accused him of profiting from “playing with Jewish alliances and the very antisemites you claim to disown.” So, what kind of outrageous remarks might have inspired this kind of reaction? Let’s go to the tape: “As this wave of hatred has been building against your community, we have rationalized over and over and over again, responding not with a roar, but often with barely a squeak, and sometimes a shrug,” said Jones. “As a result, we now have the shock to you, the pain to you, and the humiliation to us of having an African American icon praising Hitler and Nazis. And we act like we don’t know where the hatred came from.” From there, Jones went on to give an inspired speech about how to repair the bonds of the historical coalition. “The reason this country is a democracy at all is because Black and Jewish people have loved each other, and helped each other, and supported each other, and stood up for each other.” Crazy, right?
→ On Tuesday, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order requiring his state agencies to report all fees, fines, and suspensions due to COVID-19 lockdown rules to the state’s secretary of finance. As of Dec. 15, the governor is promising to halt any fines or enforcement of COVID-19 shutdown policies still in place, and going forward, he says, the state will work to reimburse those who were fined unfairly. The revisionist attitude toward COVID-19 mandates is being taken up in Washington, D.C., as well, with the House of Representatives set to pass legislation requiring the Pentagon to rescind vaccine mandates for American troops. “The Biden administration must correct service records and not stand in the way of re-enlisting any service member discharged simply for not taking the COVID vaccine,” Kevin McCarthy, who’s favored to become the future Speaker of the House, said in a statement on the matter.
→ The big ugly building on 8th Avenue is a lot quieter today, as 1,100 of the Gray Lady’s finest did not show up to work. The strikers, asking for a 10% pay raise and the ability to work from home, are protesting the ongoing contract negotiations that have left them without a signed agreement since March of last year. The New York Times had already agreed to a 5.5% raise upon ratification, followed by 3% raises in each of the next two years, as well as a new pension plan, giving the union more choice. But that seems to not be enough for the staffers, who are the first in 40 years to walk out on the paper.
→ Photo of the Day:
It’s 50 years and one day since the famous “Blue Marble” photo of earth was taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17. Meanwhile, the revival of space exploration continues, with the return of the successful Orion mission from the moon. NASA’s victorious vessel will conclude its 25.5-day mission this Sunday with a splashdown somewhere off the coast of Southern California. According to NASA Flight Director Judd Frieling, the Orion could land off the San Diego coast, near Los Angeles’ Catalina Island, or “short,” about 1,200 nautical miles south of San Diego, depending on where Johnson Space Center decides to put her. The recovery team has to be prepared for anything, and it’s been doing a three-day dress rehearsal to get ready for the big moment. The team consists of approximately 95 people from NASA, the Navy, the Air Force, and Lockheed Martin, as well as J. Travis Hunsucker, a professor of ocean engineering and marine sciences who has spent four years analyzing ocean data to create the best possible wave forecast for bringing the capsule home. While there are only test mannequins on this flight, someday soon there will be four astronauts stepping out of the capsule, after our first manned trip back to the moon since 1972. Something to dream about.
→ That nagging suspicion that life just isn’t as fun anymore, and that post-Industrial Revolution Western culture reached its apex in the 1970s, is demonstrably proven by the music industry’s move toward health treatments. For all the damage it wrought, what made Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac and David Bowie great was their insatiable need to live on the edge. Now, “Grammy award-winning electronic dance trio” Rüfüs Du Sol, whoever that is, has hired a personal trainer to give the group ice baths, ginger shots, workouts, meals, and preshow breathwork routines. Lady Gaga and Harry Styles are apparently also into the icy inflammation-reducing dips. Other contemporary artists are turning to B-12 injections and lymphatic massages—or, in the case of the Zac Brown Band, a mobile tractor-trailer gym with a sauna. Gone are the days of Ozzy Osbourne eating a live bird onstage. Well, maybe that’s for the best.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Fever Dream of Jewish Cultural Power by Richard A. Kaye
Josh Lambert’s ‘The Literary Mafia’ retells the story of Jewish literary achievement in postwar America as the sordid maneuverings of a gang of racist, misogynist white men who, above all, looked out for each other
Reframing the Conversation Around Parenting by Jamie Betesh Carter
Jessica Grose offers a crash course on the history of motherhood in America in her new book
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 article first appeared in Tablet this July
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 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.
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.
Read the rest of the piece here.
There’s some important missing context on the “Covid is not nothing” bit. Two new studies with far more rigorous designs really undermine the conclusions of the VA database data trawls. Covid is not nothing, but it is now nothing out of the ordinary when studies are properly controlled:
https://open.substack.com/pub/vinayprasadmdmph/p/long-covid-in-children-and-young?r=7y9s4&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/long-covid-vs-long-uri
Aloha - commenting on the fact that many students of the Los Angeles school district have excessive absenteeism following COVID lockdowns. Several questions arise:
1. Is it safe to be in school? My brothers tell me that in High School they were repeatedly attacked, beat up, and verbally abused in what should have been a "safe" school as we lived in a middle class neighborhood. The reason? They got good grades. The violence occurred on the school campus, in the presence of the teachers and administrative staff. I've seen worse violence especially in the local middle schools.
2. Is the curriculum interesting and challenging? If it's same old, of course kids will cut if they can get away with it. Their parents are currently dropping out via "presentism", so why shouldn't they?
3. Are kids faceless and nameless in classes of 40 and 50, as seems to be the norm these days? If students don't matter to overworked, underpaid and burned out teachers, there's no incentive to be in school
So before looking at mental health issues (teacher code for "these kids can't learn, or are bad") take a look at what the schools are able to offer with their very limited budgets.
Peggy in Hawaii.