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14 August 21
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But not, perhaps, for long: Sanders, just weeks from his 80th birthday, is on the cusp of leaving an indelible mark on the federal government, having shepherded a $3.5 trillion spending blueprint through the Senate this week. The legislation, backed by President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders, sets the stage for the most significant expansion of the federal social safety net in generations and the largest government response to climate change ever mounted.
“You think they will be making that criticism again if we get this done?” Sanders (I-Vt.) chuckled, after being reminded of his critics during an interview this week.
The self-described democratic socialist bristles at the suggestion that he has been a legislative lightweight — he helped orchestrate a major expansion of veterans health care in 2014 and an $11 billion investment in community health centers in 2010, among numerous smaller-bore initiatives. But he readily acknowledges that the pending legislation — which could include free community college, paid family and medical leave, universal pre-K, vast clean-energy investments and the largest-ever-proposed expansion of Medicare — outstrips them all.
“I’m proud of what we have accomplished,” he said. “But obviously this bill would be many levels above anything that I’ve ever been involved with before.”
Sanders’s Democratic colleagues — including some who had publicly minimized his legislative impact in the past — are now singing his praises, crediting him with both seeding the political atmosphere with an unabashedly liberal vision of federal government and now, as Senate Budget Committee chairman, putting that rhetoric in action.
“The fact that it has so much momentum is a huge tribute to Bernie,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who shared a ticket with Sanders’s 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton. “We would not be where we are in terms of talking about a package of this size and scope and impact but for two things: Bernie and a once-in-a-century public health crisis. . . . The man, the message and the moment are completely aligned right now.”
Sanders is not celebrating just yet: Not only has his budget outline not passed the House, but subsequent legislation actually turning that blueprint into law stands to be a grueling, months-long process. Already his $6 trillion ambitions had to be scaled back to accommodate more-moderate members of the Budget Committee, and other Democrats, such as Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), have indicated they intend to give the package an additional spending haircut.
But he remains electrified at the prospect of bringing his life’s work to fruition at what he sees as a pivotal historical moment.
“At this moment, where we have the power to do something good . . . we’re going to address them in a bold way,” Sanders said.
Republicans say they are equally elated at Sanders’s new prominence and influence over the Democrats’ agenda, signaling that they are perfectly happy to make an avowed socialist a mascot for the Biden agenda.
Lambasting the budget legislation on the Senate floor Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called it a “reckless taxing-and-spending spree that was authored by our self-described socialist colleague.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee and other groups have already made Sanders and his “Bernie budget” a centerpiece of their advertising, and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the commitee’s chairman, said he did not expect that to change any time soon.
“I talk about it all the time — they’re the socialist party now, not the Democrat Party,” he said. “It’s a good message.”
Sanders’s Democratic colleagues have shown little discomfort with his role leading the budget push, and Sanders himself has complete confidence that his agenda’s popularity will overwhelm the political attacks. His schedule allowing, he said, he plans to tour conservative areas of the country in the coming weeks to promote it.
If Republicans “want to be opposed to the $300 child tax credit, they want to be opposed to expanding Medicare, they want to be opposed to expanding child care,” he said, “if they want to tell their constituents that we can continue to ignore climate change, they’re going to lose the next election.”
Sanders became a household name for railing against “million-ahs and billion-ahs” in his Brooklyn rasp, but he said his mission has now gone beyond mere wealth redistribution and an environmental rescue mission to encompass the preservation of American democracy.
“A lot of people are losing faith in democratic government, with a small ‘d,’ and it’s just terribly important to me that we show people that we understand — we have a sense of what’s going on in their lives, we can address their crises and make life a little bit better,” he said. “Maybe we can restore some faith on the part of the American people in their government.”
That is a message he took inside closed-door meetings with fellow senators, including a pair of crucial gatherings in mid-July inside the office suite of Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, where the members of the Budget panel — ranging in ideology from Sanders on the left to Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) in the center — hashed out exactly how much to spend.
“What are people demanding of us right now?” Kaine recalled Sanders arguing, noting the mounting crises of health, climate and democracy. “Are you listening to what people are saying?”
While Sanders sought to go as high as $6 trillion, Warner wanted less than half of that — especially with a separate bipartisan infrastructure deal riding alongside. Over two nights, the group struggled to reach consensus before quickly coming together late July 13 — $3.5 trillion it would be.
Sanders described the meeting as “difficult and emotional” — in part because most members of the committee sided with him in wanting a larger figure, he said, and he believes as many as 40 senators felt the same. He relented, he said, because he knew he had to.
“Everybody in the room understood that there were members of the caucus who would find it very difficult to support” a $6 trillion budget, he said. “So compromise had to be reached.”
Sanders, Schumer and Biden have all insisted that while the price tag has been scaled back, the ambitions of the legislation have not. Sanders said the $3.5 trillion budget can include every program a $6 trillion one could fit, albeit for a shorter periods of time, leaving future Congresses to extend them.
That sort of flexibility belies the criticism of Sanders’s legislative chops — doubt that was frequently sowed by supporters of his presidential rivals who were intent on making the case that Sanders was simply too radical and too inflexible to govern.
Among them was former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a supporter of Clinton’s 2016 campaign who in several stories cast Sanders as a legislative nonfactor, a bomb thrower more interested in scoring ideological points than writing his views into permanent law.
Reached this week, Frank said he considered Sanders’s performance “the most pleasant surprise of the year” and ascribed his success to his newfound power as Budget chairman — and a sea change in political attitudes prompted by the pandemic.
“Having responsibility can make you act in a very constructive way, as Sanders is doing,” he said. “I think he is doing an excellent job.”
Also delivering praise: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 presidential rival who feuded with Sanders as they competed for the affections of liberal primary voters.
“Bernie deserves enormous credit,” she said. “Without Bernie, we wouldn’t have our toes on the line to create universal child care, expand Medicare and money to fight the climate crisis — go Bernie.”
With his ascent to power, Sanders has become as close to an integral part of the Democratic establishment as at any point in his political career.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) — a friend who attended the same Brooklyn public schools — paid tribute to Sanders this week, using the same kind of historical comparisons that Sanders himself favors.
“He kept his nose to the grindstone and led our caucus,” he said. “As a result, the Democratic budget will be the most significant legislation for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. It is big, bold change — the kind of change America thirsts for.”
Relations with the White House have been similarly warm. Biden, whom Sanders quickly endorsed after his 2020 presidential campaign sputtered, has been solicitous of the Vermonter — reflecting both a long-standing personal relationship and his key role as Budget chairman.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Wednesday that Biden “deeply respects Senator Sanders’s unflinching commitment to fighting for working people” as well as his “skilled leadership in helping move the legislative process forward.”
While the Senate budget has largely followed Biden’s policy blueprints, Sanders has clearly put his own stamp on the document — most notably, the dramatic Medicare expansion, adding dental, hearing and vision coverage.
A senior White House aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings, said Sanders “repeatedly pressed” Biden on Medicare expansion — including in a July Oval Office meeting with other Budget Committee Democrats. “He made that case passionately and strongly in the Oval, and the president gave his full backing,” the aide said.
Sanders’s faith in his life’s work — restoring and building on the spirit of the New Deal — is nothing new, said Tad Devine, Sanders’s former political strategist. But the recent breakthroughs on Capitol Hill, he said, reflect not only his underappreciated legislative skills but the success of a grinding, decades-long campaign to bring his ideas into the political mainstream.
“Bernie is not just lucky to be there at this moment in time — he’s worked hard to be there,” Devine said. “He’s never been somebody who shied away from really big issues and really big fights, going back to the beginning of his political career. He’s just got partners now.”
In the interview, Sanders readily credited Biden, Schumer, his Senate colleagues and a new crop of young liberal House lawmakers for coalescing around an ambitious agenda “rather than simply 2 percent here and 3 percent there.” But he was also happy to acknowledge the role that his own advocacy, including his presidential campaigns, played in popularizing that kind of ambition.
“To finally begin to see that type of transformative legislation, in which we are going to begin to address many of the crises that have been ignored for so many years,” he said, “is very gratifying.”
Mussallina Muhaymin, left, and Zarinah Tavares, sisters of Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin Jr., a homeless man who died while in Phoenix police custody. (photo: Matt York/AP)
Qualified immunity should be abolished because in America we believe that no one is above the law - especially those whose job it is to enforce it.
n Jan. 4, 2017, my brother, Muhammad Muhaymin, tried to use the public restroom in Phoenix. It cost him his life.
As the Department of Justice opens an investigation into the Phoenix police, it’s time for us to again demand that police officers, like the ones who killed my brother, be held accountable for their actions. A little-known federal, legal doctrine called qualified immunity has kept thousands of Americans who have had their rights violated from having their day in court.
While the specifics of this story are about Muhammad, this injustice could happen to anyone if we don’t end qualified immunity by passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
A bathroom break ends in arrest
My brother suffered from schizophrenia, and on the day of his death, he was temporarily living in a park near Maryvale Community Center in Phoenix. That morning, Muhammad went into the center to use the restroom with his service dog – a chihuahua he had named Chiquita. Because of Chiquita, the manager of the community center refused to let Muhammad use the bathroom, even though he had every legal right to do so.
Then, community center employees called 911, falsely accusing Muhammad of shoving the manager. Bodycam footage from the four Phoenix police officers who responded show that Muhammad was at all times respectful and courteous.
Eventually, my brother was allowed to use the restroom, but while inside, the officers ran his name through their database and found that he had a no-show warrant from a misdemeanor offense – possession of a marijuana pipe.
As Muhammad walked out of the community center, the officers told him he was under arrest and ordered him to drop Chiquita. He never became combative or demonstrated any type of aggression. Instead, he simply begged for someone to take care of his dog.
The officers ignored his pleas and ripped Chiquita from my brother’s arms. They handcuffed Muhammad and dragged him to their police cruiser. Once there, they slammed him against the hood of their car and ripped his still-handcuffed arms over his head.
Muhammad let out a blood-curdling scream – one that haunts me to this day. The officers then threw him to the ground. And even though he was already handcuffed and subdued, as many as six police officers got on top of him. Two of the officers pressed their knees into Muhammad’s back and neck, pushing down with the full weight of their bodies.
My brother spent his last eight minutes and 30 seconds begging for his life. At least five times, he told the officers he could not breathe. He pleaded, “Pease help me” and “please stop.” In fact, Muhammad used the word “please” no fewer than 10 times in the bodycam video that I still cannot bear to watch.
He asphyxiated and went into cardiac arrest. In the video, Chiquita can be seen anxiously circling my brother. Muhammad was pronounced dead at the local hospital.
My brother's killers evade justice
Maricopa County prosecutors refused to bring charges against the officers responsible for Muhammad’s death. So I decided to sue the officers responsible for violating Muhammad’s constitutional rights to be free from excessive force. I have thus far been kept from having my day in court due to qualified immunity.
Qualified immunity begins with the assumption that officers are ignorant of the law and cannot be held accountable unless the person suing can find a case with an identical set of facts in which the cops were found to be accountable. Without that exact precedent, there can be no trial. The case must be dismissed – even if the officers clearly violated the victim’s civil rights, as they did in my brother’s case.
This is what makes qualified immunity an echo chamber of injustice.
The Phoenix police officers responsible for Muhammad’s death have asked the court to dismiss the case against them because (they claim) there was no legal precedent that would have specifically put them on notice that what they did to Muhammad is illegal and violated his constitutional rights. This is the protection bad cops have because of qualified immunity.
Muhammad’s case isn’t unique. In fact, qualified immunity is the single biggest hurdle to holding the police accountable in the United States. Right now, after passage in the House, the Senate is negotiating the Justice in Policing Act, which would limit law enforcement’s ability to call on qualified immunity in cases of unlawful civil action, allowing people like myself to receive justice for the unconstitutional behavior of bad cops.
Opposition to this legislation has been fierce and based on the false notion that without qualified immunity, police officers cannot do their job. The truth, however, is that even with the removal of qualified immunity, officers would have the same rights as any American in a civil suit. Meaning cops like the ones who brutally killed Muhammad would be weeded out based on free market principles: They’d become too expensive to employ.
But above all, qualified immunity should be abolished because in America, we believe that no one is above the law. That should especially be true for those whose job it is to enforce it.
Immigrants in an ICE detention center. (photo: ACLU)
"They took out all of my teeth," Raudel says, "and they forced me to abandon my country."
When Raudel made it to the U.S. border, he was sent to Adams Correctional facility in Mississippi to begin the legal asylum process and have a "credible fear" interview to declare why he came to the U.S. He was then transferred to River Correctional in Louisiana. In total, he was in detention for about five months. And, he says, COVID-19 conditions during his time in detention weren't great.
He says COVID-19 positive detainees were put together in one room. There was very little social distancing or mask wearing, and both sick and healthy people were mixed together during transfers.
"Many people had coronavirus," he says. "And they weren't worried about it."
Shortly after COVID-19 first hit the U.S., the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, emptied its detention facilities to help slow the outbreak. But in the last year, amid a surge of migrants crossing the southern border, ICE has detained tens of thousands of migrants.
Now, the agency is under fire from immigration advocates for how it's handling COVID-19 protocols while the highly transmissible Delta variant surges across the country. NPR analysis of publicly available ICE data on COVID-19 online shows the weekly percentage of COVID-19 positive detainees in monitoring or isolation has more than doubled since June from 2% of the population to around 6% as of last week.
Immigration advocates sound the alarm
Immigration attorney Mich Gonzalez with Southern Poverty Law says ICE's New Orleans Field office has been holding, moving and releasing detainees under conditions that are not pandemic safe. ICE data show rapid declines and increases in the number of people with COVID-19 over time.
"It's a place where people are being transported and transferred out, transferred in and transferred out. Of course, they're going to be exposed there," Gonzalez says. "The precautions that are supposed to be taken don't really work well because they violate their own protocols."
Another immigration attorney, Max Meyers, with the Mississippi Center for Justice says his clients have described unsafe transfer processes.
"I've had clients that have described to me in detail being transferred from Texas to Mississippi and being transported, in some instances, maskless, as well as sitting one person next to another on airplanes and then upon arrival being grouped into medium sized multipurpose rooms."
But, ICE spokesman Dexter Henson says they do follow their transfer and COVID-19 protocols to move people only when absolutely necessary and make sure they are not sick.
"We're doing everything we can to make sure that those that are under our control, that they have ties to the community and a support network near the location that they're detained," Henson says.
ICE's COVID-19 transfer protocols indicate that when it's necessary to transport individuals with confirmed or suspected COVID-19, they can be transported in cars, but, "everyone in the vehicle must wear a mask."
Henson also says that the best way to stop spread is vaccination. He says the COVID-19 vaccination rate across ICE detention facilities is as high as 70%.
ICE data likely incomplete
Still, the Department of Homeland Security's office of inspector general says it found problems when it randomly inspected Adams Correctional facility in Mississippi.
Ellen McSweeney, senior assistant to the chief of staff for the DHS OIG says, "they didn't necessarily always follow sick calls with detailed notes. Nor follow up in terms of recordkeeping. The staff and the detainees were not consistently using masks, nor social distancing."
Josiah Rich, an epidemiologist at Brown University, has spoken out against COVID-19 prevention practices in detention facilities before. He also says it's hard to fully analyze ICE data because the same principles used to study public health can't be applied to disease in correctional facilities.
"One of the things that many correctional systems do, and especially ICE seems to do a lot of, is shuffle people around, moving them from place to place. And that's the last thing you want to do when you have a contagious disease that's easily transmitted," he says.
"I think they've certainly improved their policies ... but, you know, people who run correctional and detention facilities ... they didn't train in public health. And how could they be expected to know that?" Rich asks.
McSweeney says by May, ICE had said it implemented many of the Office of Inspector General's recommendations at the Adams facility. But, OIG has received complaints about facilities from around the country.
"We have now an ongoing audit that is looking in greater depth at ICE's approach to covid-19 across detention facilities," McSweeney says.
That could take up to a year. In the meantime, immigration advocates and detainees say the best way to avoid COVID-19 spread is to avoid locking up so many people in the first place, in particular asylum seekers using legal means to enter the U.S.
Last month, hundreds were released on parole from detention centers in Louisiana, including Raudel. He and his friends were all vaccinated and tested negative for COVID-19 before being sent to a host home in New Orleans.
"I had the opportunity to have the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. And I took it," Raudel says.
Raudel says he's tired, but happy to be vaccinated and out of detention where he was scared to get sick.
A hand typing on a computer keyboard. (photo: Westend61/Imago Images)
pple’s new program for scanning images sent on iMessage steps back from the company’s prior support for the privacy and security of encrypted messages. The program, initially limited to the United States, narrows the understanding of end-to-end encryption to allow for client-side scanning. While Apple aims at the scourge of child exploitation and abuse, the company has created an infrastructure that is all too easy to redirect to greater surveillance and censorship. The program will undermine Apple’s defense that it can’t comply with the broader demands.
For years, countries around the world have asked for access to and control over encrypted messages, asking technology companies to “nerd harder” when faced with the pushback that access to messages in the clear was incompatible with strong encryption. The Apple child safety message scanning program is currently being rolled out only in the United States.
The United States has not been shy about seeking access to encrypted communications, pressuring the companies to make it easier to obtain data with warrants and to voluntarily turn over data. However, the U.S. faces serious constitutional issues if it wanted to pass a law that required warrantless screening and reporting of content. Even if conducted by a private party, a search ordered by the government is subject to the Fourth Amendment’s protections. Any “warrant” issued for suspicionless mass surveillance would be an unconstitutional general warrant. As the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has explained, "Search warrants . . . are fundamentally offensive to the underlying principles of the Fourth Amendment when they are so bountiful and expansive in their language that they constitute a virtual, all-encompassing dragnet[.]" With this new program, Apple has failed to hold a strong policy line against U.S. laws undermining encryption, but there remains a constitutional backstop to some of the worst excesses. But U.S constitutional protection may not necessarily be replicated in every country.
Apple is a global company, with phones and computers in use all over the world, and many governments pressure that comes along with that. Apple has promised it will refuse government “demands to build and deploy government-mandated changes that degrade the privacy of users.” It is good that Apple says it will not, but this is not nearly as strong a protection as saying it cannot, which could not honestly be said about any system of this type. Moreover, if it implements this change, Apple will need to not just fight for privacy, but win in legislatures and courts around the world. To keep its promise, Apple will have to resist the pressure to expand the iMessage scanning program to new countries, to scan for new types of content and to report outside parent-child relationships.
It is no surprise that authoritarian countries demand companies provide access and control to encrypted messages, often the last best hope for dissidents to organize and communicate. For example, Citizen Lab’s research shows that—right now—China’s unencrypted WeChat service already surveils images and files shared by users, and uses them to train censorship algorithms. “When a message is sent from one WeChat user to another, it passes through a server managed by Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) that detects if the message includes blacklisted keywords before a message is sent to the recipient.” As the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Riana Pfefferkorn explains, this type of technology is a roadmap showing “how a client-side scanning system originally built only for CSAM [Child Sexual Abuse Material] could and would be suborned for censorship and political persecution.” As Apple has found, China, with the world’s biggest market, can be hard to refuse. Other countries are not shy about applying extreme pressure on companies, including arresting local employees of the tech companies.
But many times potent pressure to access encrypted data also comes from democratic countries that strive to uphold the rule of law, at least at first. If companies fail to hold the line in such countries, the changes made to undermine encryption can easily be replicated by countries with weaker democratic institutions and poor human rights records—often using similar legal language, but with different ideas about public order and state security, as well as what constitutes impermissible content, from obscenity to indecency to political speech. This is very dangerous. These countries, with poor human rights records, will nevertheless contend that they are no different. They are sovereign nations, and will see their public-order needs as equally urgent. They will contend that if Apple is providing access to any nation-state under that state’s local laws, Apple must also provide access to other countries, at least, under the same terms.
'Five Eyes' Countries Will Seek to Scan Messages
For example, the Five Eyes—an alliance of the intelligence services of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—warned in 2018 that they will “pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions” if the companies didn’t voluntarily provide access to encrypted messages. More recently, the Five Eyes have pivoted from terrorism to the prevention of CSAM as the justification, but the demand for unencrypted access remains the same, and the Five Eyes are unlikely to be satisfied without changes to assist terrorism and criminal investigations too.
The United Kingdom’s Investigatory Powers Act, following through on the Five Eyes’ threat, allows their Secretary of State to issue “technical capacity notices,” which oblige telecommunications operators to make the technical ability of “providing assistance in giving effect to an interception warrant, equipment interference warrant, or a warrant or authorisation for obtaining communications data.” As the UK Parliament considered the IPA, we warned that a “company could be compelled to distribute an update in order to facilitate the execution of an equipment interference warrant, and ordered to refrain from notifying their customers.”
Under the IPA, the Secretary of State must consider “the technical feasibility of complying with the notice.” But the infrastructure needed to roll out Apple’s proposed changes makes it harder to say that additional surveillance is not technically feasible. With Apple’s new program, we worry that the UK might try to compel an update that would expand the current functionality of the iMessage scanning program, with different algorithmic targets and wider reporting. As the iMessage “communication safety” feature is entirely Apple’s own invention, Apple can all too easily change its own criteria for what will be flagged for reporting. Apple may receive an order to adopt its hash matching program for iPhoto into the message pre-screening. Likewise, the criteria for which accounts will apply this scanning, and where positive hits get reported, are wholly within Apple’s control.
Australia followed suit with its Assistance and Access Act, which likewise allows for requirements to provide technical assistance and capabilities, with the disturbing potential to undermine encryption. While the Act contains some safeguards, a coalition of civil society organizations, tech companies, and trade associations, including EFF and—wait for it—Apple, explained that they were insufficient.
Indeed, in Apple’s own submission to the Australian government, Apple warned “the government may seek to compel providers to install or test software or equipment, facilitate access to customer equipment, turn over source code, remove forms of electronic protection, modify characteristics of a service, or substitute a service, among other things.” If only Apple would remember that these very techniques could also be used in an attempt to mandate or change the scope of Apple’s scanning program.
While Canada has yet to adopt an explicit requirement for plain text access, the Canadian government is actively pursuing filtering obligations for various online platforms, which raise the spectre of a more aggressive set of obligations targeting private messaging applications.
Censorship Regimes Are In Place And Ready to Go
For the Five Eyes, the ask is mostly for surveillance capabilities, but India and Indonesia are already down the slippery slope to content censorship. The Indian government’s new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (“2021 Rules”), in effect earlier this year, directly imposes dangerous requirements for platforms to pre-screen content. Rule 4(4) compels content filtering, requiring that providers “endeavor to deploy technology-based measures,” including automated tools or other mechanisms, to “proactively identify information” that has been forbidden under the Rules.
India’s defense of the 2021 rules, written in response to the criticism from three UN Special Rapporteurs, was to highlight the very real dangers to children, and skips over the much broader mandate of the scanning and censorship rules. The 2021 Rules impose proactive and automatic enforcement of its content takedown provisions, requiring the proactive blocking of material previously held to be forbidden under Indian law. These laws broadly include those protecting “the sovereignty and integrity of India; security of the State; friendly relations with foreign States; public order; decency or morality.” This is no hypothetical slippery slope—it’s not hard to see how this language could be dangerous to freedom of expression and political dissent. Indeed, India’s track record on its Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which has reportedly been used to arrest academics, writers and poets for leading rallies and posting political messages on social media, highlight this danger.
It would be no surprise if India claimed that Apple’s scanning program was a great start towards compliance, with a few more tweaks needed to address the 2021 Rules’ wider mandate. Apple has promised to protest any expansion, and could argue in court, as WhatsApp and others have, that the 2021 Rules should be struck down, or that Apple does not fit the definition of a social media intermediary regulated under these 2021 Rules. But the Indian rules illustrate both the governmental desire and the legal backing for pre-screening encrypted content, and Apple’s changes makes it all the easier to slip into this dystopia.
This is, unfortunately, an ever-growing trend. Indonesia, too, has adopted Ministerial Regulation MR5 to require service providers (including “instant messaging” providers) to “ensure” that their system “does not contain any prohibited [information]; and [...] does not facilitate the dissemination of prohibited [information]”. MR5 defines prohibited information as anything that violates any provision of Indonesia’s laws and regulations, or creates “community anxiety” or “disturbance in public order.” MR5 also imposes disproportionate sanctions, including a general blocking of systems for those who fail to ensure there is no prohibited content and information in their systems. Indonesia may also see the iMessage scanning functionality as a tool for compliance with Regulation MR5, and pressure Apple to adopt a broader and more invasive version in their country.
Pressure Will Grow
The pressure to expand Apple’s program to more countries and more types of content will only continue. In fall of 2020, in the European Union, a series of leaked documents from the European Commission foreshadowed an anti-encryption law to the European Parliament, perhaps this year. Fortunately, there is a backstop in the EU. Under the e-commerce directive, EU Member States are not allowed to impose a general obligation to monitor the information that users transmit or store, as stated in the Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC). Indeed, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has stated explicitly that intermediaries may not be obliged to monitor their services in a general manner in order to detect and prevent illegal activity of their users. Such an obligation will be incompatible with fairness and proportionality. Despite this, in a leaked internal document published by Politico, the European Commission committed itself to an action plan for mandatory detection of CSAM by relevant online service providers (expected in December 2021) that pointed to client-side scanning as the solution, which can potentially apply to secure private messaging apps, and seizing upon the notion that it preserves the protection of end-to-end encryption.
For governmental policymakers who have been urging companies to nerd harder, wordsmithing harder is just as good. The end result of access to unencrypted communication is the goal, and if that can be achieved in a way that arguably leaves a more narrowly defined end-to-end encryption in place, all the better for them.
All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, the adoption of the iPhoto hash matching to iMessage, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. Apple has a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the necessary changes. China and doubtless other countries already have hashes and content classifiers to identify messages impermissible under their laws, even if they are protected by international human rights law. The abuse cases are easy to imagine: governments that outlaw homosexuality might require a classifier to be trained to restrict apparent LGBTQ+ content, or an authoritarian regime might demand a classifier able to spot popular satirical images or protest flyers.
Now that Apple has built it, they will come. With good intentions, Apple has paved the road to mandated security weakness around the world, enabling and reinforcing the arguments that, should the intentions be good enough, scanning through your personal life and private communications is acceptable. We urge Apple to reconsider and return to the mantra Apple so memorably emblazoned on a billboard at 2019’s CES conference in Las Vegas: What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.
'The mayor's announcement came as part of his 2022 budget proposal.' (photo: Rich Legg/Getty Images)
olice officers in Minneapolis no longer will conduct “pretextual” traffic stops for low-level offenses, Mayor Jacob Frey announced Friday.
Frey and Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo “have finalized another series of reforms in ongoing efforts to create a more just and accountable system of community safety,” according to a news release.
“Effective today, Minneapolis Police Officers will no longer be conducting pretextual stops for offenses like expired tabs, an item dangling from a mirror, or an expired license,” the release said.
The announcement came after Arradondo previously told officers in an internal memo that the policy change was being made to recognize “the continued importance” of how the department can “better utilize time, resources and operational effectiveness,” according to the Star Tribune.
Arradondo’s memo said the city attorney’s office would no longer issue tickets for driving after suspension if the driver was unable to pay a fine or fees or if there was no accident or erratic driving that “would impact public safety,” according to the report.
In June, Portland, Ore., similarly announced it would no longer conduct minor traffic stops “in the name of racial justice.”
The mayor’s announcement came as part of his 2022 budget proposal, which includes funding to hire more staff in the city attorney’s office for reviewing police disciplinary investigations and a full-time analyst for body-camera footage.
The budget allots money for five recruit classes for MPD with a focus on “community-oriented officers,” as well as $7.8 million for the Office of Violence Prevention. It also includes investments in youth recreation and programming — including $500,000 for youth-specific violence prevention— and another $500,000 “for a state-of-the-art early intervention system to ensure supervisors and department leadership have access to real-time data to help inform when an officer may need additional support or are no longer fit to serve.”
The news comes after a judge ordered the city to hire more police officers last month after the council had previously unanimously voted to “defund” the department, though it ultimately only reduced the operating budget.
'In Madrid, the Zapatistas are commemorating the fall of Tenochtitlan with a demonstration under the slogan 'We weren't conquered - we won't surrender.'' (photo: Luca Piergiovanni/EFE)
Rebels hold a defiant commemoration in the Spanish capital to say they are ‘still here resisting’.
Today, 500 years later, Mexico’s indigenous Zapatistas are holding their own “invasion” of the Spanish capital to mark the anniversary.
A delegation of seven Zapatistas set out by boat from Mexico’s most eastern point, Isla Mujeres, weeks ago in May, following the inverse route Spanish invaders took half a century earlier.
They crossed the Atlantic in 50 days and disembarked in Vigo, in northern Spain, on June 22.
Once they set foot on European soil, Zapatistas renamed the continent “Slumil K’ajxemk’op” which means “rebel land” in Tzotzil, a Mayan language.
But the Zapatistas say they did not come to conquer or to dominate.
Their mission, they said in a statement, was to “listen and to learn” from local struggles for social justice.
The purpose of the trip is “to talk about our mutual histories, our suffering, our rage, our successes and our failures”.
Spanish conquistadors, aided by an alliance of indigenous people, laid siege to Tenochtitlan until it surrendered on August 13, 1521.
The Aztec capital was devastated by violence and disease brought by Europeans.
Mexico City was built on its ruins.
“Even with the lowest estimates, around eight out of 10 people died from disease,” said Caroline Pennock, a senior lecturer who specialises in Aztec history.
“There was also horrendous violence and enslavement. The disruption and devastation of [indigenous] people’s lives are unimaginable.”
In 2019, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador asked Spain to apologise for the brutal conquest of Mexico. But the Zapatistas have made it clear they are not looking for an apology, and have reframed the anniversary as a commemoration of “500 years of indigenous resistance”.
“We are going to tell the people of Spain two simple things: one, they didn’t conquer us, we are still here resisting, in rebellion. Second, they don’t have to ask that we forgive them for anything,” they said.
‘We weren’t conquered’
In Madrid, the Zapatistas are commemorating the fall of Tenochtitlan on Friday with a demonstration under the slogan “We weren’t conquered – we won’t surrender.”
Zapatistas and their supporters will march from the city centre’s Puerta del Sol to Columbus Square, which features monuments to Spain’s colonial empire.
After the events in Madrid, the Zapatistas will continue their journey and visit other European countries, where they are planning meetings with groups that share the movement’s anti-capitalist and environmentalist values – from feminist collectives to migrant support initiatives and climate justice movements.
For Sylvia Marcos, a Mexican researcher and lecturer who focuses on indigenous movements, the main goal of the trip is to promote cooperation and solidarity.
“The Zapatistas are building connections with other places where people are also fighting to defend their land, to defend nature. Where people are fighting against extractivism and mega-projects, fighting for the survival of the planet,” she told Al Jazeera.
“These grassroots groups are marginal, but their power comes from these connections, from the attempts to join forces,” she said.
In July, a Zapatista delegation was in France to participate in a feminist meeting held at ZAD, a community built in opposition to the construction of an airport in Nantes, and joined a protest march held by undocumented workers in Montreuil, in the suburbs of Paris.
Other Zapatista delegations were to fly to Europe to join commemorations, but faced COVID-19 movement restrictions and ran into problems getting passports, which were denounced as “racist” by spokesperson Subcomandante Galeano, formerly known as Marcos.
From local autonomy to global relevance
Named after Emiliano Zapata, who led an agrarian rebellion in Mexico’s 1910 revolution, the Zapatistas first made international headlines on New Year’s Day 1994, when mostly Mayan indigenous rebels briefly seized several towns in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
Chiapas is rich in natural resources, but many of its indigenous communities lacked access to running water, basic healthcare and education, while much of the land and resources were controlled by a small elite.
The rebellion was timed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Zapatistas called the agreement a “death sentence” for impoverished indigenous farmers since it revoked their constitutional right to communal land and flooded local markets with cheaper US imports.
Since their uprising against inequality and the marginalisation of indigenous communities, the rebels have built autonomous municipalities with their own education and health system.
They reject government aid, and instead rely on land collectives and coffee and artisan cooperatives.
But beyond the local struggle for indigenous dignity and autonomy, the Zapatistas’ proposal of more democratic and equitable societies has inspired people and movements around the world.
“We can learn a lot from Zapatismo,” said Lola Sepulveda, who is from Madrid and has been following the movement since the 90s.
She was hosted in Chiapas several times, and is now part of one of the collectives organising Zapatista events in Madrid.
“They showed us there is another way of doing things,” she tells Al Jazeera, “a way that places life and human dignity at the centre.”
A firefighter during nighttime operations at the Bootleg Fire, near Klamath Falls, Oregon. (photo: U.S. Forest Service/AFP/Getty Images)
very seven or eight years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its latest report reviewing the available science assessing the state of climate change. The most recent, the Sixth Assessment Report, was published this week in the midst of a summer of extreme heat and devastating flooding.
These reports feel like landmark moments in the history of climate change. While politicians, corporations, and activists make little to no progress endlessly arguing, scientists cut through the bullshit with a sober and objective picture of where we’re at and what more there is still to do.
What’s New?
So, what new information does the latest IPCC report give us to aid in the fight against climate change? On a fundamental level, not much. Emissions are still rising, and the planet is still heating. We still need to decarbonize the economy as a matter of urgency.
The Sixth Assessment Report’s headlines tend to focus on the widely vaunted target to limit global average temperature rises to 1.5oC. This target was the cornerstone of the Paris Agreement and is upheld by climate wonks as the limit past which warming becomes unsafe. In reality, the target is crude: we have already reached 1.1 or 1.2oC of warming, and our current climate can hardly be described as safe.
Regardless, the international community has cohered around 1.5oC as a collective ambition, for better or worse. Among the most striking headlines of the IPCC report was that, in all scenarios modeled, we will hit that level by 2040. That point will come much sooner (around a decade from now) if we don’t start bringing emissions down fast.
At 1.5oC, we will see sea level rises of between two and three meters. Instances of extreme heat will be around four times more likely. Heavy rainfall will be around 10 percent wetter and 1.5 times more likely to occur. The question, then, is how soon.
If there is optimism in the IPCC report, it’s that if we achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 globally, there is a good chance of stabilizing temperatures at 1.5oC. Of course, the bad news is that this would still be a much more dangerous climate than today’s — and that the optimistic scenario is certainly not the most likely. The model of a higher-emissions scenario would take us to 1.9oC by 2040 (at which point I will be forty-six years old), 3oC by 2060 (at which point I am unlikely to have yet retired), and 5.7oC by 2100 (at which point I could be 104, if the extreme heat doesn’t kill me first).
These numbers underline what my generation is facing in our lifetime if we do not change course, though it’s nothing we didn’t know already. António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, responded to the report by taking aim at the fossil fuel industry: “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”
This has become a self-evident truth for all concerned with climate change, but simply making the statement is no longer enough. Less than three months before the delayed COP26 conference in Glasgow, can we really say we expect this one to be any different? The previous two major conferences produced nothing at all: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, and COP21 in 2015 (the Paris Agreement), which only committed nations to voluntary emissions reductions targets that would guarantee about 2.9oC of warming if achieved. Glasgow is shaping up to be no less of a failure.
This report is as stark as any other, but it gives us no new reason to believe that established international processes and current governments are prepared to coordinate the global economic shift we urgently need. John Kerry, the United States special presidential envoy for climate, says that Glasgow must be a “turning point in this crisis.” We’ve heard it all before. The only turning point we can bank on now is away from a capitalist political economy, which has produced and entrenched this crisis, and toward a new economy based on equity, justice, and shared prosperity.
Blame Capitalism, Not “Humanity”
The science of the Sixth Assessment Report cannot be disputed, and the potency of its implications give us impetus to question the suitability of our current political and economic system. However, the report doesn’t go so far as to ask those questions itself. In fact, throughout the report, we can see language that functions to uphold the dominance of the ruling class.
The first statement in the “Summary for Policymakers” claims that climate change is “unequivocally caused by human activities.” The phrase “human-induced climate change” appears throughout the report. The certainty of humanity’s responsibility for the climate crisis thus became a prominent headline in media reporting, including in stories published by the BBC and the Guardian.
Unlike the IPPC report’s assessments of likely degrees of warming, anticipated extreme heat, and predicted sea level rises, the suggestion that humanity in general is to blame is not a scientific claim. It is an ideological one. In this instance, it insulates the ruling class from blame.
This is unlikely to be the explicit intention of the scientists at the IPCC. The popular tendency to talk about human-caused climate change is surely a response to well-funded climate denial. However, climate denial is now no longer the main blockage — instead, it’s the delay and inaction of the capitalist class.
It is capitalists who profit from the climate crisis while the poorest suffer. It is the capitalist system putting profit above all else that blocks decarbonization while the world burns. Of course, it is technically correct to say that climate change is human-induced. As far as I know, the capitalist class are all human (unless David Icke knows something we don’t). But this doesn’t mean that all humans have played a role in producing the crisis.
True, some of us benefit materially from the fruits of fossil capitalism. It’s unavoidable that fossil fuel extraction has been the basis of modern civilization and provided improvements to many lives. But most people are also exploited, alienated, and marginalized within this system. We consume the carbon-intensive products of capitalism, but we have no say about the fundamental conditions of production that are driving our climate to breakdown.
A worker on an oil refinery does not share culpability with the capitalist who exploits them to profit from oil production. Indigenous communities violently displaced from their land to make way for a coal mine do not share blame with the governments forcing these projects through. We might as well talk about mammal-induced or earthling-induced climate change. It would be just as true, only at an even further level of abstraction from the real culprits.
It would, of course, be true to say that climate change is not necessarily unique to the capitalist mode of production. To briefly engage in a counter-history, it is surely true that any human civilization to have discovered fossil fuels would have harnessed them and inadvertently set the wheels of climate change in motion. The unique malice of capitalism, though, is in its inability to reverse the trend. We have now known about the causes and effects of climate change for several decades, yet capitalism’s priority of maximizing short-term profits has crowded out the need to transition our energy system.
We are not all equally responsible for climate breakdown. Our individual behaviors, even taken in aggregate, cannot propel rapid and just decarbonization without a planned transformation of the economy. We can either choose to indulge in a misanthropic climate politics that puts humanity in general on the hook while obfuscating the true cause of the crisis — or we can embrace a humanist and socialist vision of climate justice that tells a story of human potential and the possibility of a better world, making the best of the climate we inherent.
The World at 1.5
If 1.5oC of warming is the best we can aim for, and if, as the Sixth Assessment Report tells us, so many changes to the climate are now inevitable and irreversible, then the current wildfires in Greece, Turkey, and Algeria are just the beginning of a new normal. In this context, we will need to unlock the best features of humanity rather than emphasizing the worst. As well as fighting against every fraction of a degree of warming, we should also accept the permanence of an even more dangerous climate than that which we currently inhabit. This is where the principles of solidarity and justice become so crucial.
Our primary mission is to limit warming by decarbonizing as quickly and equitably as possible. We should also consider how we adapt to this new climate. The Left and the climate movement should demand, and integrate into our own political platform, a program of just adaptation to climate change. We need to see resilient buildings and infrastructure, flood defenses, evacuation plans, well-funded emergency services, state-guaranteed insurance to cover loss and damage, and policies to accept and support refugees. These cannot be the end point of our political ambition or act as an excuse to abandon the fight for decarbonization, but they must factor into any vision of justice in a world of 1.5oC.
As the IPCC report makes clear, there are multiple scenarios of warming over the coming decades. Implied in some of these is a failure of both governments and climate movements to bring emissions down on the timescale required. Of course, our ambition should be to capture state power and use it to transform the economy and bring about justice. We should also be prepared to operate within scenarios where politicians uphold the status quo and do not decarbonize, or where decarbonization happens to the benefit of the rich while sacrificing the poor and marginalized. In these scenarios of relative defeat, we must be prepared to defend ourselves by building power and solidarity in our communities. We should be prepared with collective resilience for when the state fails us by setting up robust systems of food distribution, emergency shelter, and rescue.
It is understandable that moments like these, when IPCC reports are published amid relentless and devastating extreme weather, induce a collective sense of despair, anxiety, and powerlessness. The entirety of my working life will, in most of the IPCC’s modeled scenarios, happen in the context of a heating planet. We should acknowledge and respect these feelings without letting them slip into hopelessness or misanthropy.
Despite what the media, the ruling class, and even the scientists tell us, “we” are not to blame for the climate crisis. But those who are to blame don’t plan to do anything meaningful about it — so it’s up to us anyway. In that knowledge, we can form a militant and radical mass movement prepared to build a new economy based on equity, justice, and shared prosperity. We know we will have to live with the legacy of fossil capitalism regardless, but we can be sure to consign it to history.
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