The Cold War Has Already Turned Hot - on the Internet

By John Feffer, TomDispatch

27 April 21

 

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On June 1st, Songlands, the final volume of TomDispatch regular John Feffer’s three Splinterlands dystopian novels, will be published by Haymarket Books. It’s the latest in our Dispatch book series and a must-read for those of you who have already gobbled up his two previous, all-too-far-sighted and riveting novels, Splinterlands (Mike Davis: “John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London, and, like the latter’s Iron Heel, Splinterlands is a vivid, suspenseful warning about the ultimate incompatibility between capitalism and human survival”) and Frostlands (Ariel Dorfman: “By taking us on a cautionary journey into a future planetary collapse where the term ‘one per cent’ is redefined in a terrifying way, John Feffer forces us to look deeply at our own society’s blindness to ecological apocalypse and greed. But the novel’s enchantment goes beyond dystopia: the quest for salvation depends on a crusty female octogenarian who would make Wonder Woman salivate with envy”). My suggestion: order Songlands in advance to make sure you have a copy the moment it hits our world. If you haven’t read Feffer’s two previous novels on this shattering, endangered planet of ours, get them before Songlands comes out! Tom]

Let me try to put this in context: it was just months ago that I gave up my old flip phone and reluctantly got an iPhone. And though I can indeed make calls on it and use it to check how far I’ve walked each day, footstep by footstep, it’s remarkable how much I can’t do. Don’t ask me to send you a photo of anything or check my email on it or hail an Uber with it. In other words, call me a relic of another age, of a world in which telephones were significant-sized objects that sat somewhere in your house and that you hustled over to pick up when they rang. No one was capable of carrying them around in their pockets or checking the news on them, no less using them to text friends.

I’ve been introducing articles at TomDispatch for 18 years now — a strange form that developed because, once upon a time in another age, it was a listserv in which I gathered pieces from publications around the world and introduced them to my readers, email by email. And let me say that, in more than 18 years of writing such introductions for original articles at this website, I’ve never felt quite as inadequate or unprepared as I do for today’s remarkable piece by John Feffer.

Yes, in those years when I was growing up, our duck-and-cover thoughts often turned apocalyptic, given the looming threat of nuclear destruction then. But if, as I crouched under my school desk then waiting for a Russian nuclear bomb to explode, someone had told me that someday life could essentially be brought to a raging stand-still by a “cyber-apocalypse” (and you had explained to me what that was), I would have thought you the most inventive science-fiction writer of our times. And yet here we are. This is us, as John Feffer, author of the Dispatch novel Songlands (to be published June 1st), the final volume of his Splinterlands trilogy, makes clear today. Sci-fi is, it seems, now the essence of our lives. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Tom

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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Waiting for the Cyber-Apocalypse
The Cold War Has Already Turned Hot — on the Internet

merica has a serious infrastructure problem.

Maybe when I say that what comes to mind are all the potholes on your street. Or the dismal state of public transportation in your city. Or crumbling bridges all over the country. But that’s so twentieth century of you.

America’s most urgent infrastructure vulnerability is largely invisible and unlikely to be fixed by the Biden administration’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.

I’m thinking about vulnerabilities that lurk in your garage (your car), your house (your computer), and even your pocket (your phone). Like those devices of yours, all connected to the Internet and so hackable, American businesses, hospitals, and public utilities can also be hijacked from a distance thanks to the software that helps run their systems. And don’t think that the U.S. military and even cybersecurity agencies and firms aren’t seriously at risk, too.

Such vulnerabilities stem from bugs in the programs — and sometimes even the hardware — that run our increasingly wired society. Beware “zero-day” exploits — so named because you have zero days to fix them once they’re discovered — that can attract top-dollar investments from corporations, governments, and even black-market operators. Zero days allow backdoor access to iPhones, personal email programs, corporate personnel files, even the computers that run dams, voting systems, and nuclear power plants.

It’s as if all of America were now protected by nothing but a few old padlocks, the keys to which have been made available to anyone with enough money to buy them (or enough ingenuity to make a set for themselves). And as if that weren’t bad enough, it was America that inadvertently made these keys available to allies, adversaries, and potential blackmailers alike.

The recent SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, as well as companies like Microsoft, for which the Biden administration recently sanctioned Russia and expelled several of its embassy staff, is only the latest example of how other countries have been able to hack basic U.S. infrastructure. Such intrusions, which actually date back to the early 2000s, are often still little more than tests, ways of getting a sense of how easy it might be to break into that infrastructure in more serious ways later. Occasionally, however, the intruders do damage by vacuuming up data or wiping out systems, especially if the targets fail to pay cyber-ransoms. More insidiously, hackers can also plant “timebombs” capable of going off at some future moment.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran have all hacked into this country’s infrastructure to steal corporate secrets, pilfer personal information, embarrass federal agencies, make money, or influence elections. For its part, the American government is anything but an innocent victim of such acts. In fact, it was an early pioneer in the field and continues to lead the way in cyberoperations overseas.

This country has a long history of making weapons that have later been used against it. When allies suddenly turn into adversaries like the Iranian government after the Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution or the mujahideen in Afghanistan after their war against the Red Army ended in 1989, the weapons switch sides, too. In other cases, like the atomic bomb or unmanned aerial vehicles, the know-how behind the latest technological advances inevitably leaks out, triggering an arms race.

In all these years, however, none of those weapons has been used with such devastating effect against the U.S. homeland as the technology of cyberwarfare.

The Worm That Turned

In 2009, the centrifuges capable of refining Iranian uranium to weapons-grade level began to malfunction. At first, the engineers there didn’t pay much attention to the problem. Notoriously finicky, such high-speed centrifuges were subject to frequent breakdowns. The Iranians regularly had to replace as many as one of every 10 of them. This time, however, the number of malfunctions began to multiply and then multiply again, while the computers that controlled the centrifuges started to behave strangely, too.

It was deep into 2010, however, before computer security specialists from Belarus examined the Iranian computers and discovered the explanation for all the malfunctioning. The culprit responsible was a virus, a worm that had managed to burrow deep into the innards of those computers through an astonishing series of zero-day exploits.

That worm, nicknamed Stuxnet, was the first of its kind. Admittedly, computer viruses had been creating havoc almost since the dawn of the information age, but this was something different. Stuxnet could damage not only computers but the machines that they controlled, in this case destroying about 1,000 centrifuges. Developed by U.S. intelligence agencies in cooperation with their Israeli counterparts, Stuxnet would prove to be but the first salvo in a cyberwar that continues to this day.

It didn’t take long before other countries developed their own versions of Stuxnet to exploit the same kind of zero-day vulnerabilities. In her book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth describes in horrifying detail how the new cyber arms race has escalated. It took Iran only three years to retaliate for Stuxnet by introducing malware into Aramco, the Saudi oil company, destroying 30,000 of its computers. In 2014, North Korea executed a similar attack against Sony Pictures in response to a film that imagined the assassination of that country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Meanwhile, Pelroth reports, Chinese hackers have targeted U.S. firms to harvest intellectual property, ranging from laser technology and high-efficiency gas turbines to the plans for “the next F-35 fighter” and “the formulas for Coca-Cola and Benjamin Moore paint.”

Over the years, Russia has become especially adept at the new technology. Kremlin-directed hackers interfered in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2014 in an effort to advance a far-right fringe candidate. The next year, they shut down Ukraine’s power grid for six hours. In the freezing cold of December 2016, they turned off the heat and power in Kyiv, that country’s capital. And it wasn’t just Ukraine either. Russian hackers paralyzed Estonia, interfered in England’s Brexit referendum, and nearly shut down the safety controls of a Saudi oil company.

Then Russia started to apply everything it learned from these efforts to the task of penetrating U.S. networks. In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, Russian hackers weaponized information stolen from Democratic Party operative John Podesta and wormed their way into state-level electoral systems. Later, they launched ransomware attacks against U.S. towns and cities, hacked into American hospitals, and even got inside the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant in Kansas. “The Russians,” Pelroth writes, “were mapping out the plant’s networks for a future attack.”

The United States did not sit idly by watching such incursions. The National Security Agency (NSA) broke into Chinese companies like Huawei, as well as their customers in countries like Cuba and Syria. With a plan nicknamed Nitro Zeus, the U.S. was prepared to take down key elements of Iran’s infrastructure if the negotiations around a nuclear deal failed. In response to the Sony hack, Washington orchestrated a 10-hour Internet outage in North Korea.

As the leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the NSA had set up full-spectrum surveillance through various communications networks, even hacking into the private phones of leaders around the world like Germany’s Angela Merkel. By 2019, having boosted its annual budget to nearly $10 billion and created 133 Cyber Mission teams with a staff of 6,000, the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was planting malware in Russia’s energy grid and plotting other mischief.

Unbeknownst to Snowden or anyone else at the time, the NSA was also stockpiling a treasure trove of zero-day exploits for potential use against a range of targets. At first glance, this might seem like the cyber-equivalent of setting up a network of silos filled with ICBMs to maintain a rough system of deterrence. The best defense, according to the hawk’s catechism, is always an arsenal of offensive weapons.

But then the NSA got hacked.

In 2017, an outfit called the Shadow Brokers leaked 20 of the agency’s most powerful zero-day exploits. That May, WannaCry ransomware attacks suddenly began to strike targets as varied as British hospitals, Indian airlines, Chinese gas stations, and electrical utilities around the United States. The perpetrators were likely North Korean, but the code, as it happened, originated with the NSA, and the bill for the damages came to $4 billion.

Not to be outdone, Russian hackers turned two of the NSA zero-day exploits into a virus called NotPetya, which caused even more damage. Initially intended to devastate Ukraine, that malware spread quickly around the world, causing at least $10 billion in damages by briefly shutting down companies like Merck, Maersk, FedEx, and in an example of second-order blowback, the Russian oil giant Rosneft as well.

Sadly enough, in 2021, as Kim Zetter has written in Countdown to Zero Day, “[C]yberweapons can be easily obtained on underground markets or, depending on the complexity of the system being targeted, custom-built from scratch by a skilled teenage coder.” Such weapons then ricochet around the world before, more often than not, they return to sender.

Sooner or later, cyber-chickens always come home to roost.

Trump Makes Things Worse

Donald Trump notoriously dismissed Russian interference in the 2016 elections. His aides didn’t even bother bringing up additional examples of Russian cyber-meddling because the president just wasn’t interested. In 2018, he even eliminated the position of national cybersecurity coordinator, which helped National Security Advisor John Bolton consolidate his own power within the administration. Later, Trump would fire Christopher Krebs, who was in charge of protecting elections from cyberattacks, for validating the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections.

The SolarWinds attack at the end of last year highlighted the continued weakness of this country’s cybersecurity policy and Trump’s own denialism. Confronted with evidence from his intelligence agencies of Russian involvement, the president continued to insist that the perpetrators were Chinese.

The far right, for partisan reasons, abetted his denialism. Strangely enough, commentators on the left similarly attempted to debunk the idea that Russians were involved in the Podesta hack, 2016 election interference, and other intrusions, despite overwhelming evidence presented in the Mueller report, the Senate Intelligence Committee findings, and even from Russian sources.

But this denialism of the right and the left obscures a more important Trump administration failure. It made no attempt to work with Russia and China to orchestrate a truce in escalating global cyber-tensions.

Chastened by the original Stuxnet attack on Iran, the Putin government had actually proposed on several occasions that the international community should draw up a treaty to ban computer warfare and that Moscow and Washington should also sort out something similar bilaterally. The Obama administration ignored such overtures, not wanting to constrain the national security state’s ability to launch offensive cyber-operations, which the Pentagon euphemistically likes to label a “defend forward” strategy.

In the Trump years, even as he was pulling the U.S. out of one arms control deal after another with the Russians, The Donald was emphasizing his superb rapport with Putin. Instead of repeatedly covering for the Russian president — whatever his mix of personal, financial, and political reasons for doing so — Trump could have deployed his over-hyped art-of-the-deal skills to revive Putin’s own proposals for a cyber-truce.

With China, the Trump administration committed a more serious error.

Stung by a series of Chinese cyber-thefts, not just of intellectual property but of millions of the security-clearance files of federal employees, the Obama administration reached an agreement with Beijing in 2015 to stop mutual espionage in cyberspace. “We have agreed that neither the U.S. [n]or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage,” Obama said then. “We’ll work together and with other nations to promote other rules of the road.”

In the wake of that agreement, Chinese intrusions in U.S. infrastructure dropped by an astonishing 90%. Then Trump took office and began to impose tariffs on Chinese goods. That trade war with Beijing would devastate American farmers and manufacturers, while padding the bills of American consumers, even as the president made it ever more difficult for Chinese firms to buy American products and technology. Not surprisingly, China once again turned to its hackers to acquire the know-how it could no longer get legitimately. In 2017, those hackers also siphoned off the personal information of nearly half of all Americans through a breach in the Equifax credit reporting agency.

As part of his determination to destroy everything that Obama achieved, of course, Trump completely ignored that administration’s 2015 agreement with Beijing.

Head for the Bunkers?

Larry Hall once worked for the Defense Department. Now, he’s selling luxury apartments in a former nuclear missile silo in the middle of Kansas. It burrows 15 stories into the ground and he calls it Survival Condo. The smallest units go for $1.5 million and the complex features a gym, swimming pool, and shooting range in its deep underground communal space.

When asked why he’d built Survival Condo, Hall replied, “You don’t want to know.”

Perhaps he was worried about a future nuclear exchange, another even more devastating pandemic, or the steady ratcheting up of the climate crisis. Those, however, are well-known doomsday scenarios and he was evidently alluding to a threat to which most Americans remain oblivious. What the Survival Condo website emphasizes is living through five years “completely off-grid,” suggesting a fear that the whole U.S. infrastructure could be taken down via a massive hack.

And it’s true that modern life as most of us know it has become increasingly tied up with the so-called Internet of Things, or IoT. By 2023, it’s estimated that every person on Earth will have, on average, 3.6 networked devices. Short of moving to a big hole in the ground in Kansas and living completely off the grid, it will be difficult indeed to extricate yourself from the consequences of a truly coordinated attack on such an IoT.

A mixture of short-sighted government action — as well as inaction — and a laissez-faire approach to markets have led to the present impasse. The U.S. government has refused to put anything but the most minimal controls on the development of spyware, has done little to engage the rest of the world in regulating hostile activities in cyberspace, and continues to believe that its “defend forward” strategy will be capable of protecting U.S. assets. (Dream on, national security state!)

Plugging the holes in the IoT dike is guaranteed to be an inadequate solution. Building a better dike might be a marginally better approach, but a truly more sensible option would be to address the underlying problem of the surging threat. Like the current efforts to control the spread of nuclear material, a non-proliferation approach to cyberweapons requires international cooperation across ideological lines.

It’s not too late. But to prevent a rush to the bunkers will take a concerted effort by the major players — the United States, Russia, and China — to recognize that cyberwar would, at best, produce the most pyrrhic of victories. If they don’t work together to protect the cyber-commons, the digital highway will, at the very least, continue to be plagued by potholes, broken guardrails, and improvised explosive devices whose detonations threaten to disrupt all our lives.

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Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series and the final novel, Songlands, will be published in June. He has also written The Pandemic Pivot.

"A Warrant Is Not a License to Kill": Rev. William Barber Condemns Police "Execution" of Andrew Brown

By Democracy Now!

27 April 21

 

MY GOODMAN: Hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, for a fifth day to protest last week’s police killing of Andrew Brown, a 42-year-old Black father. On Monday, authorities allowed Brown’s family and attorneys to watch a 20-second video clip of the shooting. The family says it shows Andrew Brown was shot in the back of the head while his hands were on the steering wheel of his car. His son, Khalil Ferebee, described the shooting as an “execution.”

KHALIL FEREBEE: It’s like we’re against all odds in this world. My dad got executed just by trying to save his own life. You know, he was not in no — the officers was not in no harm of him at all. It’s just messed up how this happened, for real. For real. He got executed. It ain’t right. It ain’t right at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Chantel Cherry-Lassiter, an attorney for Andrew Brown’s family, described what she saw in the 20-second snippet.

CHANTEL CHERRY-LASSITER: Andrew Brown was in his driveway. The sheriff truck blocked him in his driveway so he could not exit his driveway. Andrew had his hands on his steering wheel. He was not reaching for anything. He wasn’t touching anything. He wasn’t throwing anything around. He had his hands firmly on the steering wheel. They run up to his vehicle shooting. He still stood there — sat there in his vehicle with his hands on the steering wheel while being shot at. Now, keep in mind, this is 20 seconds. I have three pages of notes for 20 seconds. We watched this over and over and over to make sure we were clear at what was being — going on and what was transpiring.

AMY GOODMAN: Attorney Ben Crump, who’s also representing Andrew Brown’s family, called on authorities to publicly release all bodycam footage.

BENJAMIN CRUMP: We want to say on the record from the onset: We do not feel that we got transparency. We only saw a snippet of the video, when we know that the video started before and after what they showed the family, and they determined what was pertinent. Why couldn’t the family see all the video? They only show one bodycam video, even though we know there were several bodycam videos, if they were following the law and the policy in this county that everybody has video cameras on their uniforms.

AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Brown was shot dead April 21st while the County Sheriff’s Office was attempting to serve him an arrest warrant on drug charges. Officials in Elizabeth City have already declared a state of emergency ahead of the public release of the bodycam footage, warning it could result in a “period of civil unrest.” At least eight officers were at the scene of the shooting. Seven sheriff’s deputies have already been placed on paid administrative leave; two other deputies have resigned, and another retired over the past week. This is attorney Bakari Sellers, who’s also representing the Brown family.

BAKARI SELLERS: Only in this country can you have the trial of Derek Chauvin be interrupted by the death of Daunte Wright, be interrupted by the death of Adam Toledo, be interrupted by the death of Ma’Khia Bryant, and now we find ourselves here in Elizabeth City.

AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend William Barber was also there yesterday. On Saturday, Reverend Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign traveled to Elizabeth City to meet with the family of Andrew Brown.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: It happened to a man. It happened to a father of seven. It happened to a cousin, to a nephew. He is not a caricature. He is a man, a young, 42-year-old Black man. Say his name.

CROWD: Andrew Brown.

AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend William Barber joins us now, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president of Repairers of the Breach.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Reverend. Let’s begin with yesterday. What a scene unfolded, as the family had been promised at 11:30 in the morning they’d be shown unedited video of what happened to Andrew Brown. It went on. They waited for hour after hour. And then they go inside, and they’re shown a 20-second snippet. Can you explain what took place — you were there outside — what they saw and what you’re demanding?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you so much, Amy.

And, you know, we have three powerful attorneys that are representing the family. Harry Daniels, who’s representing one of the mothers and five siblings — people ought to know there are five minor children and two grown children. And he’s also representing one of the aunts. And then you have attorney Ben Crump and Bakari Sellers representing the older children. And they’re all combined and working together.

Let me set a context, Amy. And that is, the sheriff and the DA — we need to start saying the DA, because the county lawyer is not the DA. The sheriff and the DA could have gotten all of this done within an hour or so. The law simply says a judge has to do it. And all it would have needed was the sheriff and the DA, or the DA alone could have gone to the judge and said this needs to be released. And we’re in the context of when something happened like this in Columbus, it was released — Columbus, Ohio, was released almost immediately. And the same thing could happen in North Carolina, just would have been one extra step.

When we went there, this young man, 42 years old — and by the way, never have — no gun was found. No drugs were found. And this boy has no history of any kind of violence or violence on his record.

They had been promised — we had been promised to see the tape. I was there. They didn’t even let all the family in. They didn’t let some of the aunts in. They literally closed the door and wouldn’t let them in.

And yesterday represented 120 hours — 120 hours — since this murder. And, in fact, I want to mention to you that this is the second one on the East Coast since and during the Chauvin trial. There’s another one called Donovan Lynch in Virginia Beach, who was also shot. And in his instance, there were no body cameras. They cut the cameras off. So, now we have Andrew Brown. They waited 120 hours to get 20 seconds. A hundred and twenty hours to get 20 seconds. That is absolutely ridiculous.

We also learned on Saturday, because one of the local reporters asked us in our press — in the press conference: What did we think about them using a SWAT-like team to go get this one person that they allegedly had a warrant for? And, you know, a warrant is not a license to kill. A warrant doesn’t mean you get executed on the spot. A warrant doesn’t mean you’re guilty. And there’s no — the Supreme Court has said if you flee, it is not illegal, that people don’t have a right to shoot you in the back. And we know from the audio reports he was shot in the back.

AMY GOODMAN: The back of the head.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: In the back of the head, that’s right. And we don’t know how many shots. You know, today there’s going to be an independent autopsy that will be actually released. But 20 seconds after 120 hours, that is absolutely unacceptable. And they were promised that they would be able to see it.

Now, one last thing. They said they needed to redact the film. Now, this is the people that’s supposed to be doing the investigation. You know, in national security matters, you redact. But the national security here is, they haven’t shown the tapes. And the family wasn’t even asking that they see — that they see, the whole public; they were saying, “Can we and our lawyers see this?” And they said, “No, we have to redact the tape. We’ve got to do certain things with the tape.” And this is problematic.

The last thing you should know is the DA there could have asked the state attorney general to come take this over, because they bungled it and fumbled it. He could easily say, “I want the state attorney general.” And you have to know, in North Carolina, the state attorney general can’t just take it over. The law says the local DA must ask.

And today we’re meeting with pastors, the North Carolina NAACP, Repairers of the Breach, the AME Zion Church, the North Carolina Council of Churches. We’re meeting with some of the lawyers. And afterwards, we are going to announce and declare a moral emergency and a justice emergency. There is no real emergency in the city. There has been no violence. It’s all been peaceful and everything. So the real emergency here is a moral emergency and a judicial emergency.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Reverend Barber, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned that the autopsy results will be available soon. But this issue of the number of shots fired, the police know that — they knew that immediately. They could have at least said this number of shells were spent by all of the officers on the scene. It seems to me, especially given the fact that we’re hearing that two officers have already resigned and one retired, that that clearly is a signal, when some police are leaving immediately, before even any investigation is through, that this is a horrendous shooting. Your thoughts about this whole issue of not even giving information on the number of bullets fired? And also, is there a role for the governor here to step in, in some way or other, on this case?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah. The governor has already said that the tapes should be released, and so has the state attorney general. The tapes should be released. You know, North Carolina does not make its bodycam automatic public record. Now, that bill is sitting in the General Assembly right now, and the Republican Legislature has blocked it. And even some of the police associations have fought against it. But it could be passed in 20 seconds right now, if they wanted to do that.

But you’re exactly right in terms of things that could have been done immediately. We could have known exactly how many officers went and why that many officers went. We could know what kind of team went. Was this just sheriffs? Was this some kind of SWAT team? We could know what kind of weapons they used. Was it pistols? Was it assault rifles? And we should be able to know exactly how many shots were fired. All of those things could have been done almost immediately, or at least within the first day. And none of that has taken place.

You know, this is one of the reasons why we have to challenge this issue. I was looking at a report from NewsOne, that was done last year, I believe, and it showed how there were these eight white killers, some of them mass murderers, like Dylann Roof, who was arrested and, some say, even got a hamburger. But all of these persons were white. They were arrested. Some of them resisted arrest. They killed people. All were arrested. None of them ended up dead.

But too often we hear about Black men being shot in the back or Black women being shot in their beds by these police. And what we say is — and it doesn’t matter even if some of the cops were Black. That doesn’t matter. The fact of the matter is, a gun and a badge and the ability to take a piece of paper and extract your loved one from your home, or wherever they are, is too much power for a bigot and for a trigger-happy officer that kills — that can literally kill people in my name, because they get their power from the state.

That’s also why, Amy and Juan, we need federal laws. You know, what we really need is, when and if police murder or execute someone, and we know that, we need accountability. We need arrests. We need prosecution without immunity. We need the appropriate prison time. And some of us are beginning to say we need payment. And it doesn’t all need to come from an insurance company that’s paid for by the taxpayers. It needs to come out of these people’s pensions and from these police departments. And then we need pattern and practices investigations.

You know, this is eastern North Carolina. There is a long history of this. My father — I was raised here in this area. And I’m about — just a few miles from where I live is Elizabeth City. It’s the home of Elizabeth City State University. It’s the Black Belt of North Carolina. It’s where slave patrols used to chase down Black people heavily, because this is where most of the slavery was in North Carolina. I can remember, in the 1970s, my father was fighting against police in the eastern North Carolina and a sheriff in another county, who almost made it a habit to shoot somebody every so often who was African American. So, there is a lot of undercover things that are going on here. This is the same eastern North Carolina where, in the last few years, we helped two — what was it? — one, two, three African American men who were put in jail for murder, only to be found that they were not guilty, and released after 20 and 22 years in jail, and even a young man over in Wilson, which is in eastern North Carolina, that was put in jail and was threatened with life imprisonment, only to find out he didn’t do the killing.

So, this is eastern North Carolina. This is the South. And that’s why we must pay a lot of attention to this and understand what’s going on here, because this case is about Andrew Brown, it’s about the South, and it could break open some things in the South, because some of the most horrendous laws, the most restrictive laws, when it comes to policing, some of the most egregious things that have happened down through the years have happened in these Southern, small, rural counties across America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering, Reverend Barber, in the wake of the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin and after now nearly a year of massive protests all around the country in terms of Black Lives Matter, your sense of — these killings continue to happen as if these police departments are not heeding or listening to the massive outcry in the — not only in the African American community, but among people of color and people of goodwill everywhere. Your thoughts about what’s happening right now in terms of law enforcement in the country?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, it makes everybody unsafe. I mean, you look at these marches even in eastern North Carolina. They’re mixed, Black and white and Brown and Native and Asian, gay and straight, young and old. I mean, that’s one of the things people understand, that rogue cops or a systemic problem within policing makes us all unsafe. When you don’t have any transparency and trust, we are all in tremendous danger. It is a violation not only of humanity; it is a violation of fundamental constitutional rights, and it is very dangerous.

As I said, I’m a nonviolent person. I practice nonviolence. But the only person I know that can come to my door with a piece of paper and take my wife and my children out, or someone I love, and just take them, and I don’t resist and don’t say, “No, you can’t have them,” is an officer of the law. That’s the only person that I’ll say to my loved ones, “I’ll see you downtown.” That is too much power. And we’ve got to get — that’s why we have to have these federal laws. We can’t have one standard in one county with one DA and one sheriff and then another standard in another county and then another standard in another county.

And I will tell you what people are saying. You know, even my sons, they said, “Daddy, it almost looks like and feels like Chauvin gets arrested and gets prosecuted, and there is an increase, you know, like, ’We’re going to get them now.’” Now, that can’t be proven, but people feel like that. They say, “What is going on?” The more these officers get exposed, it seems like they’re getting more reckless. I watched the tape —

AMY GOODMAN: And, Reverend Barber, just making that point, you have Chauvin verdict comes down last Tuesday; on Wednesday, two men are shot. I mean, for people who are confused, you have [Andrew] Brown in North Carolina. He is shot dead by sheriff’s deputies.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: You got it.

AMY GOODMAN: On the same day, in Virginia, a Black man was hospitalized after he was shot by a sheriff’s deputy who responded to a 911 call. Less than an hour earlier, the same sheriff’s deputy drove that same man, Isaiah Brown — not [Andrew] Brown, Isaiah Brown — home after Brown’s car broke down.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Isaiah Brown was unarmed, was holding a cordless phone in his hand, when the officer fired seven shots at him. Brown’s family said he was on the line with the police, with 911, when he was shot. Can you comment on this, and then, finally, this demand for the George Floyd Police Accountability Act?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah. Yeah, well, you’re exactly right, and shot seven times. I want folks to hear the multiplicity of bullets. We’re not talking about — you know, one time is enough, but shot seven times. And we said we don’t know how many shots — they said the car was riddled with bullets with Andrew Brown.

And then, don’t forget, in the midst of the Chauvin trial, you’ve got Donovan Lynch who was shot in Virginia Beach and killed. And that case is being dealt with. And then we’ve had two teenagers that were killed — all of this during and after the trial. I mean, this is the pandemic of injustice and the pandemic of police brutality and violence. And it must be held accountable. I mean, a police person must be held accountable, murder.

And let us not forget, in the South, when Walter Scott was shot in the back, it took federal prosecution to get that particular officer, Michael Slager, I believe. It took federal prosecution. The state didn’t even prosecute him. It took federal. And then, let us not forget what it took to get Chauvin. It took millions of people marching. It took a nine-minute video by a young girl. It took the attorney general. It took calling a prosecutor out of retirement. It took police turning on themselves. People who thought the Chauvin trial represented some fundamental shift are actually mistaken. That is one case. But that has not dealt with the systematic issues that we’re addressing.

And, Amy, we must have this bill. Many of us are looking at it to see if it needs to be even stronger, because, I’m going to tell you, one of the things that a lot of these people count on is to continue the immunity, but also they know that if they kill someone and they’re tried in the state and they get acquitted in the state, they can’t be tried again. And you know from the civil rights movement, oftentimes the Klan did things because they knew they weren’t going to get found guilty at the local level, and if they got charged at the federal level, they only faced five years. We must make sure that these federal laws are of such that it’s automatic that there’s going to be prosecution and there will be a penalty that meets what a penalty for murder ought to be, and there’s not going to be any immunity, and there will be arrest. And we’re going to have to have laws that say there will be independent prosecution, not these local prosecutors that are tied in with the police departments and those things. That’s what has to happen.

And I like what Garland is doing, the new attorney general. And it’s going to have to happen not only in Louisville, not only in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but it’s going to have to happen in places like Elizabeth City in Pasquotank County and in the South. This is serious business. It is systemic. I don’t care even if Lindsey Graham says racism is not systemic. It’s systemic in voting. It’s systemic in healthcare. It’s systemic in economics. And it’s certainly systemic when it comes to police violence against people of color.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Reverend Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, president of Repairers of the Breach, longtime North Carolina reverend, as he continues to deal with what’s happening in Elizabeth City, in Virginia, in Columbus, Ohio. And a correction: I said Anthony Brown; I meant Andrew Brown, the man who was killed in North Carolina. Ma’Khia Bryant, the 16-year-old, was killed in Columbus, Ohio, the teenager who was 16 years old, one year younger than the video — than the young woman who filmed the murder of George Floyd. Ma’Khia Bryant was killed by police on the day that the Chauvin verdict came down. Then, the next day, Andrew Brown was killed, Isaiah Brown was shot by police.

REV. WILLIAM BARBER II: And Donovan Lynch. Don’t forget Donovan Lynch. We need to know about that case, because in this fight, Amy, we can’t just be bothered when a white cop kills a Black person. Even if it’s a Black person who shoots an unarmed Black person — and in Donovan Lynch’s case, it was a Black and a white officer — it does not matter. Police don’t care what your color is. I don’t care if you shoot somebody white, Black, Brown, Native. If it’s a bad shoot, it’s a murder or an execution, they must be prosecuted. So, call Donovan Lynch. Call Andrew Brown. Call Ma’Khia, little Adam Toledo up in Chicago. This is just too much. And we must unite. We must fight this. And we’ve got to [inaudible] laws and standards. They got 20 seconds after 120 hours. A hundred and twenty hours, they only got a chance to see 20 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Reverend William Barber, thank you so much for being with us. And be safe.

Next up, we’re heading to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to look at a shocking report about how two Ivy League schools — University of Pennsylvania and Princeton — have been using the bones of a child killed in the 1985 MOVE bombing, when the city bombed the house of the radical Black group MOVE, killing 11 people, including five kids. How is it possible these bones have been used for decades? We’ll get response from Mike Africa Jr., a second-generation-born MOVE member. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “La Cigarra” by Afro Yaqui Music Collective, a tribute to political prisoners around the world.