What Happened Today: September 20, 2023

Brennan and Clapper to advise DHS; Jewish leaders urge Biden to include Palestinians; Is UFC a monopsony?

Sep 20, 2023

The Big Story

Former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper—both of whom signed the fraudulent letter labeling news reports about Hunter Biden’s laptops as “Russian disinformation” two weeks before the 2020 election—were enlisted as national security experts on a new board inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The mission of the new panel is to tackle “threats tied to an array of different terrorist and violent extremist ideologies and narratives,” according to DHS Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen.

Clapper continued to defend his support for the infamous letter, also signed by 50 other top U.S. national security officials, even after its claims were disproved, telling the New York Post, “I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME … I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.” During Brennan’s tenure as CIA director, the agency spied on the computers of members of Congress, and Brennan lied about it.

“The DHS setting up a new ‘intelligence experts working group’ with John Brennan and James Clapper—two of the most shameless liars and flouters of civil liberties in recent American history—shows the utter contempt the current administration has for the population,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote on X.

In The Back Pages: The Man Amazon Erased

The Rest

→ The almost yearlong blockade of the semi-autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan culminated in a full-scale offensive on Tuesday by Azeri troops against the mostly ethnically Armenian enclave, with the goal of bringing the territory fully back under Azeri control. The intense offensive claimed the lives of an estimated 100 people, Ruben Vardanyan, a former top official in Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian administration, told Reuters. By Wednesday, negotiators for both sides agreed to a cease-fire, and members of the local separatist forces were told to surrender their weapons and head for Armenia. According to Azeri officials, they have a plan to “reintegrate” the local ethnic Armenian population, though it’s unclear how many will choose to stay in a new Azeri-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh.

→ Charles Bronfman, co-founder of Birthright Israel, and Reform leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs, along with 73 other Jewish community leaders, sent a letter on Tuesday to President Joe Biden asking him to ensure that any conversation between the United States and Saudi Arabia about normalization with Israel “include measures that tangibly advance prospects for a two-state outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The letter comes in the context of a potential U.S.-Saudi deal, with the Saudis angling for protection guarantees, a domestic nuclear program, and weapons, while the United States hopes to lure its old ally away from Russia and China. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to propose a potential U.S.-Israeli defense pact on Wednesday, while both leaders attended the United Nations General Assembly.

→ As the Ukraine-Russia conflict drags on, with each side striking noticeable blows on Sunday against strategic oil and agricultural targets, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a Sunday interview that “we must prepare ourselves for a long war in Ukraine.” Echoing an old Israeli aphorism, Stoltenberg told Germany’s NDTV that if the “Ukrainians stop fighting, their country will no longer exist. If President Putin and Russia stop fighting, we will have peace.”

→ Remember those right-out-of-Hollywood alien corpses that were presented to the Mexican legislature last week? A Monday study that was streamed on YouTube and conducted by José de Jesús Zalce Benítez, director of the Health Sciences Research Institute in the secretary of the Mexican navy’s office, found that the bodies had a functional skeleton and were not the product of human hands. As well, according to journalist Jaime Maussan’s testimony to lawmakers, “These specimens are not part of our evolutionary history of Earth,” as a third of their DNA is not human.

→ Apparently, the Biden administration has set aside $5.7 million to support a program at George Washington University that will create a system to help journalists being harassed by “misinformation-driven harassment campaigns.” It will include access to “digital safety” assistance as well as “mental health-care specialists.” No way that will be abused! The overarching goal of the program is to … you guessed it … combat “misinformation” because when “experts” or journalists face harassment, it “undermines confidence in pivotal sources of knowledge.” Forget about fearless reporting and “democracy dying darkness”—let’s focus on what really matters: the emotional coddling of highly educated white-collar professional “journalists.”

→ Since 2018, when the Supreme Court made it possible for sports betting to occur outside of Las Vegas, Americans have thrown $65 billion at their favorite athletes, teams, and leagues. The new demand for insider tips has put some sports journalists, who previously might have been happy to gossip about the trade, hesitant to give insider details to people who are trying to get actionable information for their bets. In fact, says Brian Moritz, a professor at St. Bonaventure University who studies the practice of sports journalism, “The most pressing ethical question facing sports journalism over the next couple of years is codifying gambling rules.”

Read more about this fascinating niche problem: https://www.wsj.com/sports/journalists-inside-information-gambling-4e560bc6

→ Word of the Day: Monopsony

A cousin term to monopoly, in which one company is the sole buyer in an industry, rather than the sole seller. And that is exactly how 1,200 former UFC fighters are labeling the premier mixed martial arts league in a class action suit that will go to trial next year. According to Judge Richard Boulware of the US District Court for the District of Nevada, who assigned the case “class action” status, the UFC has used a “variety of ruthless coercive techniques to prevent fighters from becoming free agents—rendering these contracts effectively perpetual,” which in turn has prevented certain fighters from making what they’re worth. If the suit is successful, UFC might have to pay out as much as $4.8 billion to its former fighters. The company currently generates a little more than $1 billion per year.

→ Graph of the Day:

It’s never been a more confusing time to be a major landlord of single-family homes. Companies like AMH and Invitation Homes that have spent the past 15 years snapping up foreclosures and even fair-market single-family homes in order to rent them out have greatly slowed their purchases this year due to rising interest rates and overly competitive family buyers. But now the companies are pivoting to building homes that they will then be able to rent out to the masses who cannot afford to buy in this economic environment. Building their own properties offers them a much better yield, and with lumber prices back down, it’s feasible. According to AMH, it could raise rents 30% before it would match the cost of buying a new home. Profitable!

TODAY IN TABLET:

The Cult of ‘Antizionism’ by Izabella Tabarovsky

American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call ‘Zionism.’ To fight them, we need to understand the origins of their beliefs in the Soviet academic propaganda apparatus.

A Tale of Two Atonements by Thomas Balazs

Why I couldn’t forgive my brother as a Christian—but could ask his forgiveness as a Jew

The Man Amazon Erased

Where do you go when your Smart Home decides you’re not welcome?

By Jarod Facundo

On Thursday, May 25, Brandon Jackson, a software engineer in Baltimore County, Maryland discovered that he was locked out of his Amazon account. Jackson couldn’t get packages delivered to his home by the retail giant. He couldn’t access any files and data he had stored with Amazon Web Services, the company’s powerful cloud computing wing. It also meant that Jackson, a self-described home automation enthusiast, could no longer use Alexa for his smart home devices. He could turn on his lights manually, but only in the knowledge that Amazon could still operate them remotely.

Jackson soon discovered that Amazon suspended his account because a Black delivery driver who’d come to his house the previous day had reported hearing racist remarks from his video doorbell. In a brief email sent to Jackson at 3 A.M., the company explained how it unilaterally placed all of his linked devices and services on hold as it commenced an internal investigation.

The accusations baffled Jackson. He and his family are Black. When he reviewed the doorbell’s footage, he saw that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. At a loss for what could have prompted the accusation of racism, he suspected the driver had misinterpreted the doorbell’s automated response: “Excuse me, can I help you?”

Submitting the surveillance video “appeared to have little impact on [Amazon’s] decision to disable my account,” Jackson explained on his blog on June 4. “In the end, my account was unlocked on Wednesday [May 31, 6 days later], with no follow-up to inform me of the resolution.” By now, many months later, Amazon's investigation into the matter appears to have concluded though the issue remains far from resolved. Contacted for a response, the company wrote: "In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

It was only Jackson’s technical skills and particular automated home setup that saved him from what could have been a larger lock out. “My home was fine as I just used Siri or [a] locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature,” he explained. His week of digital exile amounted to a frustrating inconvenience only because, as a tech-savvy user and professional software engineer, he had the ability to set up his own locally hosted network that acted as a failsafe. But Jackson’s experience is a warning to the vast majority of Alexa users and smart home dwellers who, lacking his particular skills and foresight, are increasingly at the mercy of the tech they have embedded into their lives and bedrooms.

“I came forward,” Jackson told Tablet, “because I don’t think it’s right that Amazon could say, ‘I know you bought all these devices, but we think you are racist. So we’re going to take [you] offline.’” On one side, critics lambasted Jackson as a dupe for having smart devices in the first place; others said his criticisms of Amazon implied that he didn’t support a company protecting its employees. “People missed the main point,” he said. “I don't really care who you are, what you do, or what you believe in. If you bought something, you should own it.”

Jackson’s story of being temporarily canceled by the tech behemoth spread across the Internet after it was discussed in a Youtube video by Louis Rossman, a right to repair activist, independent technician, and popular Youtube personality. Right to repair, or fair repair, is a consumer-focused movement advocating for the public to be able to repair the equipment they own instead of being forced to use the manufacturer’s repair services or upgrade products that have been arbitrarily made obsolete. In the early twentieth century, fair repair advocacy began with automobiles and heavy machinery, but its tenets have spread as computer chips have come to undergird contemporary life.

Following Rossman’s initial video about Jackons’s case, Amazon alleged that Rossman had abused its affilate marketing program and placed restrictions on the Youtuber’s business account, leading him to speculate in a follow-up video that the corporate giant was retaliating against him for covering Jackson’s travails. Rossman alleges that this was the first time Amazon made any allegation against him of abusing its affiliate marketing program since he enrolled in the marketing program 7.5 years ago.

The number of households adopting smart home devices in the United States is expected to reach 93 million by 2027 and most consumers rely on cloud services for their daily online use. But the cloud is not just a metaphor to explain a connected network; it describes the complete reorganization of digital life under the power of remote centralized databases. Light switches, lightbulbs, locks, thermostats, coffeemakers, air conditioners, speakers, exercise equipment and virtually every other piece of equipment you can find in the average home can now all be operated as interconnected pieces of a single digital network, run by an outside host, such as Amazon, which operates the massive server banks that make up “the cloud.” For consumers, this arrangement offers convenience and optimization. You can turn on the heat in your house from another state, or re-order a household good with a simple voice command. But the cost of that convenience is that consumers no longer independently control how their tech—or their homes, since the two are increasingly integrated—is operated. As Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and another right to repair activist put it, “Who really owns our things? It used to be us.”

Alexa’s terms of use includes a clause stating that Amazon is permitted to terminate “access” to Alexa at the company’s discretion without notice. Jackson was told by a customer relations executive over the phone that he needed to assure the company that he would not ridicule or put future delivery drivers in harm’s way. Nearly a month later, Amazon admitted no wrongdoing, only apologizing for “inconveniences.” Given absolute power over its users, there is no pressure on Amazon to explain its decision. Indeed, the company used the same statement Tablet received for an earlier June Newsweek article regarding Jackson's lockout.

Amazon's claims of being concerned about the safety of blue collar workers strain credibility. According to a 2021 article published in VICE, when minority delivery drivers faced violent threats and racial harassment, the company’s penchant for efficiency took priority over worker safety. Unsustainable demands from delivery drivers have translated to drivers peeing in bottles and defecating in garbage bags, a problem Amazon internally acknowledged even as it publicly denies the allegations. Inside its “fulfillment centers”—the term the company uses for its warehouses—workers suffer 5.9 serious injuries for every 100 workers, an 80% greater injury rate than competitors. Indeed employee turnover is so high in these facilities that a leaked company memo from 2022 warned that the company was on track to deplete its number of available workers by 2024.

Amazon’s intrusion into Jackson’s life, then, should not be understood within the context of protecting workers—which might begin by giving them adequate time to use the restroom—but rather as part of an emergent regime of technological control. The culmination of years of debate about political and civic norm moderation on social media and in public discourse has created a new normative standard in which “innocent until proven guilty” is now viewed as an oppressive and antiquated relic. As the new unelected masters of public discourse, tech giants like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, have been encouraged to execute summary punishments of users for mere accusations of racism or “disinformation.”

Amazon’s enormous power in the global economy and ubiquitous presence in the U.S. supply chain and cloud computing sectors allows the company to take the power of surveillance and cancellation even further. Unlike purely social media companies like X (formerly known as Twitter), Amazon’s suite of smart home gadgets and services gives it a direct physical presence inside of people’s homes. That means that when Amazon wades into cultural issues, or decides to punish people based on offensive speech, its political values are mapped onto objects and processes used in the real world.

In Jackson’s case, in order to regain access to things he had already paid for, he was forced to submit the surveillance video from his home to Amazon to prove his innocence. Somehow, in the new cloud-based networked world these corporations are building for us, the solution to every problem always involves individuals handing over more of their private data.

Debates over censorship, free speech and its limits typically revolve around social media use. But Hayley Tsukayama, a senior legislative activist for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, suggested to Tablet that Jackson’s case shared a similar architecture to conversations around content moderation. Companies can choose not to allow certain forms of speech, but in doing so they can no longer be treated as neutral platforms. Tsukayama argues that social media users are offered a recourse, even if the process is stacked against them. “If [Amazon] is going to look at customer behavior as being part of the terms of service,” she said, “they [should] make that clear and set up a process that’s perhaps not unlike what we see at Facebook, YouTube or others who deal with content takedown.”

But, of course, we now know that millions of social media users had their accounts censored or banned without explanation or recourse for posts, including many that were classified as "disinformation" at the time of the alleged offense but contained statements that authorities later acknowledged as true. In that light, placing more trust in a content moderation model seems like a dangerous gamble. It could also lead to even more surveillance online as companies like Amazon claim a need to monitor their customers every move so they can judge them “fairly.”

Like many digital technologies, the smart home offers connectivity at a steep price—it makes individuals passive subjects of the products that surround them, including the things they own. Few of us have any real understanding of the “terms of service” on the devices and services that we rely on. Consider how streaming services replaced physical media and how the arrival of smartphones, with all their wonders, also meant that the owners of such phones became incapable of replacing their own batteries, SIM cards, and physical storage. If we ponder that relationship for a moment, we might conclude that many of the things that we believe we control are really on loan as a means of controlling us.

Jarod Facundo is a reporter based in Washington, D.C. His work focuses on labor, business, and politics.

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