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FOCUS: My Commencement Speech to the Graduating Class of the University of Connecticut |
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Friday, 20 May 2016 11:48 |
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Stone writes: "The thing that people don't realize is that history can be fun, that the narrative can be taught with great sweep and power like a movie, not a museum."
Oliver Stone. (photo: Jean Paul Guilloteau/Express-Rea/Redux)
My Commencement Speech to the Graduating Class of the University of Connecticut
By Oliver Stone, The Oliver Stone Experience
20 May 16
 thank you both, Dr. Herbst and Dr. Choi for bringing me. And I’d also like to thank Professor Frank Costigliola, of your History Department, who’s written a new book on the Cold War that greatly enlarges our understanding of a time when countries resorted, once again, to paranoid fears of invasion and subterfuge.
And I’d like to extend a BIG CONGRAGULATIONS to all of you -- the Class of 2016 -- on this wonderful achievement in your lives. Today is a great day. And also congratulations to your parents and relatives who are here to celebrate your evolution. Bravo!
I actually went to 4 different colleges in my life, so I’m not necessarily the best-suited speaker for this ceremony, (but I think you knew that when you invited me). My first college was down the road at Yale. In my class, among others, was George Bush, two Olympic gold-medal athletes, one pro football star, several future multi-millionaires and billionaires who now have a big say in our destiny, Pulitzer Prize winners, a future Secretary of State, etc, etc, what I’d call ‘the Obama School of Ivy League Geniuses’. But the truth for me was that Yale was so incredibly difficult academically, and competitive in all things, that my 4 grueling years of preparation at a boys’ boarding school in Pennsylvania were not sufficient to compete. And the freedom given by the College was far too liberal for my discipline. Basically, all of a sudden, we were on our own -- study when you want; eat, sleep when you want; do what you want. Go to New York City for a week, it doesn’t matter. No one really cares as long as you pass the course. That was the point, no one cared, there was no headmaster around to scare the shit out of you. I barely survived the first year, failed Greek, and just made it through the most abstract course I ever had -- Economics. And after trying, I also failed to make any of the serious athletic teams. I was just another mediocrity and I quit school, shaken and depressed.
I went to Asia, Vietnam specifically, for almost a year, to teach high school and work in the US Merchant Marine, as a ‘wiper’ in the South China Seas. Then I gave Yale another try for half a year, and again I was profoundly disappointed -- in myself. Mr. Bush could get Cs and party and get through it all. And with a pedigree, he could become President. But I had no pedigree. I think, more importantly, I couldn’t stand any longer the air of Ivy League superiority and competition. There was a lack, essentially, of humanity -- a compulsive need to out-do your fellow man. I wanted something gentler, something like I’d seen in Asia, an ability simply to breathe a natural life. So I abandoned school once again, but it was clear this time there was no going back. In fact, I’d failed every single one of my courses. That’s pretty hard to do, 4 out of 4 zeros.
Dad was pissed; some 9,000 in tuition (no tax deduction here) blown away. And what would I do for the rest of my life? He’d expected me to get to Wall Street at the least -- sort of as an ‘idiot son’ like Bush. Or, at worst, a steady job at AT&T in New York, starting at a couple hundred bucks a week. I went home and hid my face from my Dad’s friends, who’d known me as a promising, conservative young man. I was a BUM now -- in my eyes as well as Dad’s. I had no real skills or earning power. I decided I had nothing to lose, so I’d join the Army, specifically the Infantry, and go to the front lines in Vietnam. And if it was intended by the Greek gods, or the monotheistic God from the Bible -- either way -- I was putting it on the line. The divine forces would cast their decision, and I’d either live or die.
It was literally on my 21st birthday -- I suspect many of you here are 21 or close -- I was on a plane bound for Vietnam a second time -- all 120 of us in Army khaki with buzzcuts. I never even had a 21st birthday; as we crossed the International Date Line, my birthday dropped away into the sea as the calendar jumped a day. It was like an omen -- that I’d never get to 21. I’d be lost in some crack of time in Vietnam.
After 15 months of… let’s say another kind of world, I went back to the US with no idea of what to do and no skills except camping, surviving, hunting, and not sleeping very well. I’d taken a few electronics courses through a college extension program. I’d talked with some Army buddies about opening a construction company down in Alabama, or maybe Latin America, getting contracts from the Government -- all that fantasy died on the return, and my buddies went to other small towns and cities in the country. And rarely did we see each other again. This reality, along with something we didn’t know much about at the time, since called PTSD, left us each in some dark holes. People simply didn’t understand because that war was crazy and made no sense. How can you explain it when it makes no sense?
After months of low-level depression, an old school friend who’d graduated from Yale was pursuing a career making low-budget porno films -- and making money at it; he told me I could actually go to one of these new “film schools”, and I could get 80% of my tuition paid from the GI Bill. It sounded nuts to me. “You mean I can actually get credit for watching movies all day?” It was too good to be true, but it was a new world. There were respected schools in California -- but now NYU had one too. So I thank you -- I mean it -- the US Government.
But it was really a vocational school for me. I was older than the others. It was difficult for me to readjust to the mentality. I was quiet and didn’t mingle much. These students were in another world, and they probably looked at me like I was the guy in “Taxi Driver” who ends up blowing up the class.
But I had fun there. I also learned the beginnings of a skill. And then after 6/7 years of professional rejection and writing a lot of speculative scripts, making low-budget films, breaks started coming my way, and I actually made it into the film business with some success. In fact, much to my Father’s inability to think it possible, I actually started to make a living at this film thing.
I think a point to be made of this experience is no matter how dark it gets early, don’t get too down on yourself. You have -- you may not know them -- hidden talents, skills, passions. You simply cannot recognize it yet. So listen to the wind. The answer might be blowing right past you... But although I now had a degree and some success, I didn’t really have an education. Learning a trade is not a complete experience. I was a partly educated writer-director who’d never really studied with any rigor history, mathematics, English, science. All I had was curiosity, and thank god for that.
So almost 40 years later, like Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School”, in 2008 I went to my 3rd college -- not your normal campus with the bells beautifully tolling and the cries of young people in the air -- but a concentrated 5-year journey through American history from the 1890s to today. Guiding me was a highly intelligent mentor and professor at American University, and his staff of graduate students. (In fact, he’s here today, my co-author of “The Untold History of the United States”, Professor Peter Kuznick, who’s been teaching for 30 years). I learned a lot -- too much in many ways to function well in this culture. I learned how to check and recheck everything -- every little detail. I learned how to doubt and cross-examine myself. It took us almost 5 years and many drafts and edits to make our incredible thesis entertaining enough for a wide audience uninterested in history, able to watch it on a prestige cable company or read the 700-page book we wrote to back it up. That millions watched it and continued to watch it for ten weeks, and that it made the ‘New York Times’ Bestseller List, and that it was sold in many countries in the world -- and that we traveled to numerous colleges and high schools to share it, was proof enough to me that I’d finally earned, my self-declared and really proud-of-it college degree in History. And why not? The thing that people don’t realize is that history can be fun, that the narrative can be taught with great sweep and power like a movie, not a museum. Nor need it be a ‘Walt Disney movie’ of American history the way it’s taught now, which is mostly a pat on the back for being a great and special country -- singular in history and particularly blessed by God. That’s why young people have so often turned away from American history. They can smell Lies and Hypocrisy.
Well, needless to say, it was quite controversial and often ignored because that’s the price you pay to say something strong in this country. I’m proud to tell you our mainstream media blasted it or ignored it because that’s the same media -- you know them, all the ‘biggies’ -- that since Vietnam have helped cheer us on into so many pathetic wars without any purpose or validity, and yet have never apologized for their mistakes. And then a few years later they move on and recommend another set of disastrous choices that lead to war. Where did this ongoing delusion start? This was the main point of our series -- and why so many progressive historians praised it as a work that brought an entire century into one tent with its recurring pattern of militarism, false patriotism, racism, sexism, and financial greed (revealed).
All because we never really learned from our past. Because we never looked deeply in elementary or high school, and we went with this mythology that we were somehow exceptional and outside history. And, as a result over time, our memories became clouded, the history distorted by the politics of the powerful school boards in Texas and California. And over those 80 years since World War II, we began, on a grand scale, to truly lose our collective memory of what we’ve done in the world without recognizing the consequences (or apologizing), including the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing of Japan. As a result your generation suffers all the consequences of this. And you accept that, since 9/11, a policy of unending war is necessary and endurable. Policies of torture, detention, drones and undeclared wars, interfering in the affairs of every country in the world and declaring unilateral “regime change” as if we were gods, has given us an overwhelming arrogance that lives inside the skin and brain of the power elite in Washington, DC -- the feeling that the State itself has the right over its own citizenry to break the laws as it chooses, and most egregiously violate the 4th and 5th Amendments in the name of defending our National Security. In doing that we lose sight that security at any cost is a prison for all of us without end -- a panopticon that cows us all to surrender our sense of protest, of individuality, of privacy itself to this anonymous secret state that has eyes on all of us. This is the triumph of force over liberty, this is naked fascism, dress it however you like! -- and this has nothing to do with the country I was born in and went to war for as a young, conservative man.
Please don’t ever forget that Edward Snowden was 29 years old when he challenged this system on behalf of us all -- just a few years older than you. He’s an avatar for your generation. Do not be cynical and say, ‘Privacy? So what? I have nothing to hide.’ Because when you’re older you might understand what you’re surrendering without knowing it is your greatest secret of all -- yourself.
I told you I went to 4 colleges, but maybe I exaggerated a bit. Because the fourth college is one you never graduate from. For want of better words, I’d call it the ‘College of Older Age’. It’s the toughest of all because it makes you question -- everything. It teaches to those who listen the necessity for ambiguity in life’s grayer matters, nothing being black or white -- and it humbles us in ways we have never been before.
I’m sure in your lifetime you’ll see things we never thought would happen, as we were surprised by these wars, JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the theft of the 2000 election, 9/11, the incorporation of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, allowing money once again to suffocate our voices. More will happen to you, in the same way that everybody through the centuries feels that theirs is the most important time of all. But I still believe that we’ve been given a divine blessing to be alive in this world. And I believe the purpose of our journey is to grow our consciousness, our tolerance, and finally our love. This purpose allows us also to act badly at times, to indulge ourselves, and hopefully discover both our mistakes and our regrets. And with it comes an allowance for our weakness and strength because both are so similar. Enjoy what you can.
And in closing, I’d suggest you take a year off and do nothing! Be a bum -- or do something you’ve never done before. If you choose nothing, see for yourself if being a lazy person works for you or it bores you. Sit on a bench, walk around, fish. But go to the end of that feeling and find out for yourself. Be a janitor. Clean hotel rooms. Work with your hands. Learn how to plant, grow, cook. Travel to foreign countries second/third class and see how you relate to all kinds people and challenges. Above all, even if you want to make a fortune as quickly as you can, I urge you to break your pattern here and now, and don’t do what you did for 4 years.
So, go in peace, love justice and mercy -- and do well by this world. Thank you.
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FOCUS: Trump Isn't the Campaign Media's First Mistake |
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Friday, 20 May 2016 11:00 |
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Taibbi writes: "The tone of American political coverage for some time hasn't matched the reality of what voters have been going through. Even as America lost its manufacturing base and tens of millions of people were put out of good jobs, the campaign story for years remained the same weirdly celebratory soap opera."
Donald Trump. (photo: Joey Foley/Getty)
Trump Isn't the Campaign Media's First Mistake
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
20 May 16
We've been getting this story wrong for ages, and Trump is the consequence
 t FiveThirtyEight this week, statistics guru Nate Silver wrote a major apologia about his 2016 predictions called "How I acted like a pundit and screwed up on Donald Trump." Its ostensible purpose was to explain a string of apparent misdiagnoses from a statistician famed for getting things right.
Inadvertently, though, it explained a lot about what we campaign journalists in general have done wrong to pave the way for the seeming outlier of a Trump nomination.
Silver's voice is a big one in our business. After calling the presidential election for Barack Obama eight months early in 2008 and predicting 49 out of 50 state results, he re-wired the minds of a generation of campaign reporters. An ideological descendant of baseball statistician Bill James (whose Baseball Abstract was an annual purchase in my home growing up), Silver retrained political analysts to think in Moneyball terms, tuning out statistical noise and focusing on the actual path to electoral victory. The naming of his new site, FiveThirtyEight, was symbolic of this new emphasis on what mattered in presidential races, i.e. electoral votes.
A candidate who scored seemingly encouraging results in national polls while performing poorly on the state-by-state electoral map was the equivalent of the baseball player who hit for high average but didn't draw walks or hit for power.
With the analyses of Silver and his crew, reporters now had a much better grasp of who was actually winning races, especially primary/nomination races, which relied on arcane delegate rules that Silver made it his business to understand.
On the campaign trail, the success of FiveThirtyEight inspired heated in-plane debates. More than once I had to suppress a laugh listening to a reporter grumble that campaigns would now be less about "the issues" thanks to Silver and his lot, as though campaign coverage hadn't been 99.9% percent a horse race already.
Then 2016 happened. The normally cautious Silver howled from the rooftops that Trump was a temporary phenomenon. As late as November 23 of last year, he wrote a piece called, "Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump's Polls" that among other things noted that Trump's numbers at the time — about 25 percent of the 25 percent of Americans who identified as Republican — roughly matched the number of Americans who believe the moon landing was faked.
Silver's site repeatedly put hard numbers on Trump's chances of victory. The results weren't pretty, as he notes:
"In order of appearance — I may be missing a couple of instances — we put them at 2 percent (in August), 5 percent (in September), 6 percent (in November), around 7 percent (in early December), and 12 percent to 13 percent (in early January)."
To diagnose what went wrong, Silver among other things went back to see what the numbers said about other "Trump-like candidates." He defines those as "candidates who led national polls at some point in the year before the Iowa caucuses, but who lacked broad support from 'party elites' (such as measured by their number of endorsements, for example)."
Using these criteria, he came up with the following list of close matches to Trump: George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich.
Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani were added as "borderline" cases. Silver noted each had some degree of support among "elites," dimming a bit their status as "insurgents."
Because all of these candidates ultimately failed, Silver then called upon a statistical tool called a "uniform prior," which he explained thusly:
"According to the uniform prior, if an event has occurred x times in n observations, the chance of it occurring the next time around is this:
x+1/n+2"
As Silver explains it, this equation tells him that Trump had a slightly better chance of winning than he'd thought, despite the data showing that all eight previous "Trump-like candidates" had failed.
"Under a uniform prior," he wrote, "Trump's chances of winning the nomination [were] either 1 in 8 (12.5 percent) or 1 in 10 (10 percent) — still rather low, but higher than the single-digit probabilities we assigned him last fall."
To sum up, going forward, Silver would have given Trump a slightly higher chance of success than he did last year. "Basically, my view is that putting Trump's chances at 2 percent or 5 percent was too low," he wrote. "But having him at (for instance) 10 percent or 15 percent… would have been entirely appropriate."
I like Nate Silver. I was a Baseball Prospectus addict and I really enjoy his political analyses.
But this explanation — essentially X+Y = we were off by eight-to-ten points — blows off the bigger-picture problem of how pundits and analysts use misleading shortcuts and clichés to think about politics. He unwittingly references this issue in his article.
One of the things I was trying to get at in this week's feature about Trump's amazing takeover of the Republican Party is that we've all gotten this wrong, for decades.
The tone of American political coverage for some time hasn't matched the reality of what voters have been going through. Even as America lost its manufacturing base and tens of millions of people were put out of good jobs, the campaign story for years remained the same weirdly celebratory soap opera. Every four years, we whipped up audiences into a lather over the same patriotic fairy tale of political athletes engaged in high-stakes rhetorical combat while chasing the ultimate power prize, the White House.
Reporters traveled tens of thousands of miles to cover these races, but not to tell stories about people they met on the road who'd lost their jobs, been bankrupted by health problems, become addicted to pills, etc.
Instead, we traveled all that way to focus on the same candidates who'd been with us on the plane from day one. They were the players in this rolling, immensely popular sports story, and to make the game accessible, we dumbed things down as much as possible.
Candidates for instance were always divided into the same few archetypes. It's really about six in total. Each party has presumptive frontrunners, acceptable challengers, and insurgents.
The "insurgent" enters the race as a plainly unwelcome interloper, preaching politics that fall outside the Beltway conception of the norm. He or she may be a socialist like Bernie Sanders, or a libertarian like Ron Paul. Or the candidate may simply not look enough like the press' idea of a president, as was the case with Dennis Kucinich, who additionally alienated reporters with "out there" ideas like the creation of a Department of Peace (I remember trail reporters scoffing at the idea of creating a government agency devoted to preventing problems like domestic violence).
In Silver's analysis, such "insurgent" candidates have always failed in the end, which is why it made sense to predict the same for Trump this time.
The problem with this shorthand is that while it may accurately describe something, it's not the politics of the United States. There are not six basic groups of Americans, all of them healthy, polite, dressed in thousand-dollar outfits, and speaking against picturesque backdrops in perfect, poll-tested sound bites.
America instead is a place where a huge plurality of the population is underemployed, pissed off, in debt and barely keeping their heads above water. A good 15 percent or so are not even doing that well, sitting below the poverty line, living in homes without adequate heat, sanitation or food. That portion of America doesn't appear anywhere in campaign coverage, not even as background.
It would have made more sense to have different labels. If there was a Poor Peoples' Party, A Disappearing Middle Class Party, and a Minimum Six-Figure Income Party, and all of them were described as legitimate and reasonable options in the press, people would have no problem pulling levers for the candidates who actually represented them.
Instead, people were influenced by shorthand terms we in the press cooked up that, whether we realized it or not, were both inaccurate and rhetorically weighted toward the status quo.
Even though "populists" and "insurgents" often pushed policies that favored 80 to 90 percent of the population, they were inevitably described as fringe radicals riding waves of emotion. Meanwhile, the "centrists" whose policies were actually hand-crafted by lobbyists to fit to a tiny slice of upscale voters — they were the Six-Figure Minimum Candidates — were always portrayed as middle-of-the-road pragmatists who believed in "nuance" and "getting things done."
It was a Bolshevik-Menshevik situation. Populist candidates were cast as peripheral nuisances, and candidates representing a tiny minority of wealthy donors were upheld as the safe majority choice.
Silver assumes that Trump is an outlier, but the real outlier was that this upside-down capsule description of American politics held for so long. The pre-Trump era of election cycles that endlessly shifted a few points back and forth in genteel, orderly contests between two heavily corporate-funded parties shouldn't have been so statistically predictable.
Our economy has been in decline since at least the Seventies and our political system over that time increasingly disenfranchised enormous numbers of voters. It should have been a surprise whenever the "insurgent" candidate didn't win.
And the fact that the surprise now comes in the form of someone as crazy as Trump, a lot of that is on us for too long ignoring voters, in favor of this ridiculous, dumbed-down game show we created.
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Advice for Bernie Supporters |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 20 May 2016 09:01 |
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Reich writes: "Many of you who support Bernie ask me what you should do at this point. Here are my suggestions."
Robert Reich. (photo: Rolling Stone)
Advice for Bernie Supporters
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
20 May 16
 any of you who support Bernie ask me what you should do at this point. My suggestion:
- Continue to work like hell for Bernie, especially given upcoming primaries in California and New Jersey on June 7. Putting aside superdelegates, the difference between him and Hillary Clinton isn’t huge. So far, Bernie has won nearly 10 million votes and has 1,499 pledged delegates. Hillary Clinton has won 13 million votes and has 1,771 pledged delegates. California could make a huge difference.
- Don’t demonize or denigrate Hillary Clinton. If she wins the Democratic nomination, I urge you to work like hell for her. She’ll be the only person standing between Donald Trump and the presidency of the United States. Besides, as I’ve said before, she’ll be an excellent president for the system we now have, even though Bernie would be the best president for the system we need.
- Never, ever give up fighting against the increasing concentration of wealth and power at the top, which is undermining our democracy and distorting our economy. That means, if Hillary Clinton is elected, I urge you to turn Bernie’s campaign into a movement – even a third party – to influence elections at the state level in 2018 and the presidency in 2020. No movement to change the allocation of power succeeds easily or quickly. We are in this for the long haul.
What do you think?
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Power Loves the Dark, Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds' Complicity |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39510"><span class="small">Matthew Harwood and Jay Stanley, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Friday, 20 May 2016 08:56 |
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Excerpt: "With little public debate, often in almost total secrecy, increasing numbers of police departments are wielding technology to empower themselves rather than the communities they protect and serve."
Police in Ferguson, Missouri. (photo: Reuters)
Power Loves the Dark, Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With the Feds' Complicity
By Matthew Harwood and Jay Stanley, TomDispatch
20 May 16
For 15 years, Americans have been living in a constant state of “wartime” without any of the obvious signs of war. There is no draft. The public has in no way been mobilized. The fighting has all taken place in battle zones thousands of miles from the United States. Despite a rising homegrown fear of Islamic terrorism, an American in the continental U.S. faces greater danger from a toddler wielding a loaded gun. And yet, in ways often hard to chart, America’s endless wars -- Barack Obama is now slated to preside over the longest war presidency in our history -- have quietly come home. You can see them reflected in the strengthening powers and prominence of the national security state, in those Pentagon spy drones now flying patrols over “the homeland,” and, among other things, in the militarization of police departments nationwide.
Perhaps nowhere in these years, in fact, have America’s wars come home more fiercely or embedded themselves more deeply than in those police forces. It’s not just the multiplying SWAT teams -- the police equivalent of Special Operations forces, often filled with ex-special ops types and other veterans from this country’s Iraqi and Afghan battlefields -- or the weaponry fed by the Pentagon to police departments, also from the battlefields of the Greater Middle East, including mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and even grenade launchers. It’s also, as Jay Stanley and TomDispatch regular Matthew Harwood, both of the American Civil Liberties Union, suggest today, intrusive new forms of technology, developed by or in conjunction with the Pentagon for battlefield use, that are coming to your neighborhood. So welcome to the war zone, America. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
 an’t you see the writing on the touchscreen? A techno-utopia is upon us. We’ve gone from smartphones at the turn of the twenty-first century to smart fridges and smart cars. The revolutionary changes to our everyday life will no doubt keep barreling along. By 2018, so predicts Gartner, an information technology research and advisory company, more than three million employees will work for “robo-bosses” and soon enough we -- or at least the wealthiest among us -- will be shopping in fully automated supermarkets and sleeping in robotic hotels.
With all this techno-triumphalism permeating our digitally saturated world, it’s hardly surprising that law enforcement would look to technology -- “smart policing,” anyone? -- to help reestablish public trust after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the long list of other unarmed black men killed by cops in Anytown, USA. The idea that technology has a decisive role to play in improving policing was, in fact, a central plank of President Obama’s policing reform task force.
In its report, released last May, the Task Force on 21st Century Policing emphasized the crucial role of technology in promoting better law enforcement, highlighting the use of police body cameras in creating greater openness. “Implementing new technologies,” it claimed, “can give police departments an opportunity to fully engage and educate communities in a dialogue about their expectations for transparency, accountability, and privacy.”
Indeed, the report emphasized ways in which the police could engage communities, work collaboratively, and practice transparency in the use of those new technologies. Perhaps it won’t shock you to learn, however, that the on-the-ground reality of twenty-first-century policing looks nothing like what the task force was promoting. Police departments nationwide have been adopting powerful new technologies that are remarkably capable of intruding on people’s privacy, and much of the time these are being deployed in secret, without public notice or discussion, let alone permission.
And while the task force’s report says all the right things, a little digging reveals that the feds not only aren’t putting the brakes on improper police use of technology, but are encouraging it -- even subsidizing the misuse of the very technology the task force believes will keep cops honest. To put it bluntly, a techno-utopia isn’t remotely on the horizon, but its flipside may be.
Getting Stung and Not Even Knowing It
Shemar Taylor was charged with robbing a pizza delivery driver at gunpoint. The police got a warrant to search his home and arrested him after learning that the cell phone used to order the pizza was located in his house. How the police tracked down the location of that cell phone is what Taylor's attorney wanted to know.
The Baltimore police detective called to the stand in Taylor’s trial was evasive. “There’s equipment we would use that I’m not going to discuss,” he said. When Judge Barry Williams ordered him to discuss it, he still refused, insisting that his department had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI.
"You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court," replied the judge, threatening to hold the detective in contempt if he did not answer. And yet he refused again. In the end, rather than reveal the technology that had located Taylor’s cell phone to the court, prosecutors decided to withdraw the evidence, jeopardizing their case.
And don’t imagine that this courtroom scene was unique or even out of the ordinary these days. In fact, it was just one sign of a striking nationwide attempt to keep an invasive, constitutionally questionable technology from being scrutinized, whether by courts or communities.
The technology at issue is known as a "Stingray," a brand name for what’s generically called a cell site simulator or IMSI catcher. By mimicking a cell phone tower, this device, developed for overseas battlefields, gets nearby cell phones to connect to it. It operates a bit like the children's game Marco Polo. “Marco,” the cell-site simulator shouts out and every cell phone on that network in the vicinity replies, “Polo, and here's my ID!”
Thanks to this call-and-response process, the Stingray knows both what cell phones are in the area and where they are. In other words, it gathers information not only about a specific suspect, but any bystanders in the area as well. While the police may indeed use this technology to pinpoint a suspect’s location, by casting such a wide net there is also the potential for many kinds of constitutional abuses -- for instance, sweeping up the identities of every person attending a demonstration or a political meeting. Some Stingrays are capable of collecting not only cell phone ID numbers but also numbers those phones have dialed and even phone conversations. In other words, the Stingray is a technology that potentially opens the door for law enforcement to sweep up information that not so long ago wouldn’t have been available to them.
All of this raises the sorts of constitutional issues that might normally be settled through the courts and public debate... unless, of course, the technology is kept largely secret, which is exactly what's been happening.
After the use of Stingrays was first reported in 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other activist groups attempted to find out more about how the technology was being used, only to quickly run into heavy resistance from police departments nationwide. Served with “open-records requests” under Freedom of Information Act-like state laws, they almost uniformly resisted disclosing information about the devices and their uses. In doing so, they regularly cited nondisclosure agreements they had signed with the Harris Corporation, maker of the Stingray, and with the FBI, prohibiting them from telling anyone (including other government outfits) about how -- or even that -- they use the devices.
Sometimes such evasiveness reaches near-comical levels. For example, police in the city of Sunrise, Florida, served with an open-records request, refused to confirm or deny that they had any Stingray records at all. Under cover of a controversial national security court ruling, the CIA and the NSA sometimes resort to just this evasive tactic (known as a "Glomar response"). The Sunrise Police Department, however, is not the CIA, and no provision in Florida law would allow it to take such a tack. When the ACLU pointed out that the department had already posted purchase records for Stingrays on its public website, it generously provided duplicate copies of those very documents and then tried to charge the ACLU $20,000 for additional records.
In a no-less-bizarre incident, the Sarasota Police Department was about to turn some Stingray records over to the ACLU in accordance with Florida’s open-records law, when the U.S. Marshals Service swooped in and seized the records first, claiming ownership because it had deputized one local officer. And excessive efforts at secrecy are not unique to Florida, as those charged with enforcing the law commit themselves to Stingray secrecy in a way that makes them lawbreakers.
And it’s not just the public that’s being denied information about the devices and their uses; so are judges. Often, the police get a judge’s sign-off for surveillance without even bothering to mention that they will be using a Stingray. In fact, officers regularly avoid describing the technology to judges, claiming that they simply can’t violate those FBI nondisclosure agreements.
More often than not, police use Stingrays without bothering to get a warrant, instead seeking a court order on a more permissive legal standard. This is part of the charm of a new technology for the authorities: nothing is settled on how to use it. Appellate judges in Tallahassee, Florida, for instance, revealed that local police had used the tool more than 200 times without a warrant. In Sacramento, California, police admitted in court that they had, in more than 500 investigations, used Stingrays without telling judges or prosecutors. That was "an estimated guess," since they had no way of knowing the exact number because they had conveniently deleted records of Stingray use after passing evidence discovered by the devices on to detectives.
Much of this blanket of secrecy, spreading nationwide, has indeed been orchestrated by the FBI, which has required local departments eager for the hottest new technology around to sign those nondisclosure agreements. One agreement, unearthed in Oklahoma, explicitly instructs the local police to find "additional and independent investigative means" to corroborate Stingray evidence. In short, they are to cover up the use of Stingrays by pretending their information was obtained some other way -- the sort of dangerous constitutional runaround that is known euphemistically in law enforcement circles as a "parallel construction." Now that information about the widespread use of this new technology is coming out -- as in the Shemar Taylor trial in Baltimore -- judges are beginning to rule that Stingray use does indeed require a warrant. They are also insisting that police must accurately inform judges when they intend to use a Stingray and disclose its privacy implications.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
And it’s not just the Stingray that’s taking local police forces into new and unknown realms of constitutionally questionable but deeply seductive technology. Consider the hot new trend of “predictive policing.” Its products couldn’t be high-techier. They go by a variety of names like PredPol (yep, short for predictive policing) and HunchLab (and there’s nothing wrong with a hunch, is there?). What they all promise, however, is the same thing: supposedly bias-free policing built on the latest in computer software and capable of leveraging big data in ways that -- so their salesmen will tell you -- can coolly determine where crime is most likely to occur next.
Such technology holds out the promise of allowing law enforcement agencies to deploy their resources to areas that need them most without that nasty element of human prejudice getting involved. “Predictive methods allow police to work more proactively with limited resources,” reports the RAND Corporation. But the new software offers something just as potentially alluring as efficient policing -- exactly what the president’s task force called for. According to market leader PredPol, its technology “provides officers an opportunity to interact with residents, aiding in relationship building and strengthening community ties.”
How idyllic! In post-Ferguson America, that’s a winning sales pitch for decision-makers in blue. Not so surprisingly, then, PredPol is now used by nearly 60 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and investment capital just keeps pouring into the company. In 2013, SF Weekly reported that over 150 departments across the nation were already using predictive policing software, and those numbers can only have risen as the potential for cashing in on the craze has attracted tech heavy hitters like IBM, Microsoft, and Palantir, the co-creation of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Like the Stingray, the software for predictive policing is yet another spillover from the country’s distant wars. PredPol was, according to SF Weekly, initially designed for “tracking insurgents and forecasting casualties in Iraq,” and was financed by the Pentagon. One of the company’s advisors, Harsh Patel, used to work for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.
Civil libertarians and civil rights activists, however, are less than impressed with what’s being hailed as breakthrough police technology. We tend to view it instead as a set of potential new ways for the police to continue a long history of profiling and pre-convicting poor and minority youth. We also question whether the technology even performs as advertised. As we see it, the old saying “garbage in, garbage out” is likely to best describe how the new software will operate, or as the RAND Corporation puts it, “predictions are only as good as the underlying data used to make them.”
If, for instance, the software depends on historical crime data from a racially biased police force, then it’s just going to send a flood of officers into the very same neighborhoods they’ve always over-policed. And if that happens, of course, more personnel will find more crime -- and presto, you have the potential for a perfect feedback loop of prejudice, arrests, and high-tech “success.” To understand what that means, keep in mind that, without a computer in sight, nearly four times as many blacks as whites are arrested for marijuana possession, even though usage among the two groups is about the same.
If you leave aside issues of bias, there’s still a fundamental question to answer about the new technology: Does the software actually work or, for that matter, reduce crime? Of course, the companies peddling such products insist that it does, but no independent analyses or reviews had yet verified its effectiveness until last year -- or so it seemed at first.
In December 2015, the Journal of the American Statistical Association published a study that brought joy to the predictive crime-fighting industry. The study’s researchers concluded that a predictive policing algorithm outperformed human analysts in indicating where crime would occur, which in turn led to real crime reductions after officers were dispatched to the flagged areas. Only one problem: five of the seven authors held PredPol stock, and two were co-founders of the company. On its website, PredPol identifies the research as a “UCLA study,” but only because PredPol co-founder Jeffery Brantingham is an anthropology professor there.
Predictive policing is a brand new area where question marks abound. Transparency should be vital in assessing this technology, but the companies generally won’t allow communities targeted by it to examine the code behind it. “We wanted a greater explanation for how this all worked, and we were told it was all proprietary,” Kim Harris, a spokeswoman for Bellingham, Washington’s Racial Justice Coalition, told the Marshall Project after the city purchased such software last August. “We haven’t been comforted by the process.”
The Bellingham Police Department, which bought predictive software made by Bair Analytics with a $21,200 Justice Department grant, didn’t need to go to the city council for approval and didn’t hold community meetings to discuss the development or explain how the software worked. Because the code is proprietary, the public is unable to independently verify that it doesn’t have serious problems.
Even if the data underlying most predictive policing software accurately anticipates where crime will indeed occur -- and that’s a gigantic if -- questions of fundamental fairness still arise. Innocent people living in or passing through identified high crime areas will have to deal with an increased police presence, which, given recent history, will likely mean more questioning or stopping and frisking -- and arrests for things like marijuana possession for which more affluent citizens are rarely brought in. Moreover, the potential inequality of all this may only worsen as police departments bring online other new technologies like facial recognition.
We’re on the verge of “big data policing,” suggests law professor Andrew Ferguson, which will “turn any unknown suspect into a known suspect,” allowing an officer to “search for information that might justify reasonable suspicion” and lead to stop-and-frisk incidents and aggressive questioning. Just imagine having a decades-old criminal record and facing police armed with such powerful, invasive technology.
This could lead to “the tyranny of the algorithm” and a Faustian bargain in which the public increasingly forfeits its freedoms in certain areas out of fears for its safety. “The Soviet Union had remarkably little street crime when they were at their worst of their totalitarian, authoritarian controls,” MIT sociologist Gary Marx observed. “But, my god, at what price?”
To Record and Serve... Those in Blue
On a June night in 2013, Augustin Reynoso discovered that his bicycle had been stolen from a CVS in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. A store security guard called the police while Reynoso’s brother Ricardo Diaz Zeferino and two friends tried to find the missing bike in the neighborhood. When the police arrived, they promptly ordered his two friends to put their hands up. Zeferino ran over, protesting that the police had the wrong men. At that point, they told him to raise his hands, too. He then lowered and raised his hands as the police yelled at him. When he removed his baseball hat, lowered his hands, and began to raise them again, he was shot to death.
The police insisted that Zeferino's actions were "threatening" and so their shooting justified. They had two videos of it taken by police car cameras -- but refused to release them.
Although police departments nationwide have been fighting any spirit of new openness, car and body cameras have at least offered the promise of bringing new transparency to the actions of officers on the beat. That’s why the ACLU and many civil rights groups, as well as President Obama, have spoken out in favor of the technology’s potential to improve police-community relations -- but only, of course, if the police are obliged to release videos in situations involving allegations of abuse. And many departments are fighting that fiercely.
In Chicago, for instance, the police notoriously opposed the release of dashcam video in the shooting death of Laquan McDonald, citing the supposed imperative of an “ongoing investigation.” After more than a year of such resistance, a judge finally ordered the video made public. Only then did the scandal of seeing Officer Jason Van Dyke unnecessarily pump 16 bullets into the 17-year-old’s body explode into national consciousness.
In Zeferino's case, the police settled a lawsuit with his family for $4.7 million and yet continued to refuse to release the videos. It took two years before a judge finally ordered their release, allowing the public to see the shooting for itself.
Despite this, in April 2015 the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners approved a body-camera policy that failed to ensure future transparency, while protecting and serving the needs of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In doing so, it ignored the sort of best practices advocated by the White House, the president’s task force on policing, and even the Police Executive Research Forum, one of the profession’s most respected think tanks.
On the possibility of releasing videos of alleged police misconduct and abuse, the new policy remained silent, but LAPD officials, including Chief Charlie Beck, didn’t. They made it clear that such videos would generally be exempt from California’s public records law and wouldn’t be released without a judge’s orders. Essentially, the police reserved the right to release video when and how they saw fit. This self-serving policy comes from the most lethal large police department in the country, whose officers shot and killed 21 people last year.
Other departments around the country have made similar moves to ensure control over body camera videos. Texas and South Carolina, among other states, have even changed their open-records laws to give the police power over when such footage should (or should not) be released. In other words, when a heroic cop saves a drowning child, you’ll see the video; when that same cop guns down a fleeing suspect, don’t count on it.
Curiously, given the stated positions of the president and his task force, the federal government seems to have no fundamental problem with that. In May 2015, for example, the Justice Department announced competitive grants for the purchase of police body cameras, officially tying funding to good body-cam-use policies. The LAPD applied. Despite letters from groups like the ACLU pointing out just how poor its version of body-cam policy was, the Justice Department awarded it $1 million to purchase approximately 700 cameras -- accountability and transparency be damned.
To receive public money for a tool theoretically meant for transparency and accountability and turn it into one of secrecy and impunity, with the feds’ complicity and financial backing, sends an unmistakable message on how new technology is likely to affect America’s future policing practices. Think of it as a door slowly opening onto a potential policing dystopia.
Hello Darkness, Power’s Old Friend
Keep in mind that this article barely scratches the surface when it comes to the increasing numbers of ways in which the police’s use of technology has infiltrated our everyday lives.
In states and cities across America, some public bus and train systems have begun to add to video surveillance, the surreptitious recording of the conversations of passengers, a potential body blow to the concept of a private conversation in public space. And whether or not the earliest versions of predictive policing actually work, the law enforcement community is already moving to technology that will try to predict who will commit crimes in the future. In Chicago, the police are using social networking analysis and prediction technology to draw up “heat lists” of those who might perpetuate violent crimes someday and pay them visits now. You won’t be shocked to learn which side of the tracks such future perpetrators live on. The rationale behind all this, as always, is “public safety.”
Nor can anyone begin to predict how law enforcement will avail itself of science-fiction-like technology in the decade to come, much less decades from now, though cops on patrol may very soon know a lot about you and your past. They will be able to cull such information from a multitude of databases at their fingertips, while you will know little or nothing about them -- a striking power imbalance in a situation in which one person can deprive the other of liberty or even life itself.
With little public debate, often in almost total secrecy, increasing numbers of police departments are wielding technology to empower themselves rather than the communities they protect and serve. At a time when trust in law enforcement is dangerously low, police departments should be embracing technology’s democratizing potential rather than its ability to give them almost superhuman powers at the expense of the public trust.
Unfortunately, power loves the dark.
Matthew Harwood is senior writer/editor with the American Civil Liberties Union. His work has appeared at Al Jazeera America, the American Conservative, the Guardian, Guernica, Salon, War is Boring, and the Washington Monthly. He is a TomDispatch regular.
Jay Stanley is senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He is the editor of the ACLU's "Free Future" blog and has authored and co-authored a variety of ACLU reports on privacy and technology topics.
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