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n Sunday, a group of seventeen media organizations launched the Pegasus Project, a series of articles investigating the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group. The consortium of journalists, which works in conjunction with Amnesty International and the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories, found that dissidents, human-rights workers, and opposition politicians around the world have been tracked by an NSO Group spyware tool called Pegasus. Among the thousands of people targeted were reporters at the Times, political opponents of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and the two women closest to the murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.
One of the newspapers involved in the Pegasus Project is the Guardian. Its lead reporter on the series is Stephanie Kirchgaessner, who has written extensively about surveillance as the paper’s U.S. investigations correspondent. We spoke, by phone, on Monday morning, after the first wave of stories was released. (They will continue to be published throughout the week.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the story came together, why the spyware industry remains so unregulated, and what role the Israeli government played in allowing this to happen.
The Guardian story that you published says very clearly that authoritarian governments were behind this surveillance. Some of the other stories, from other news organizations, say that the spyware was sold to authoritarian governments, but don’t actually say they know who used it. How certain are you that this is the work of governments specifically?
We do know that the NSO Group only sells to governments, and there has been a body of research before this project that has identified the countries that we believe are clients. Some countries deny that they are clients, but we have overwhelming evidence from groups like Citizen Lab. So we have known since 2016, for example, that the U.A.E. is a client of the NSO Group. Saudi Arabia, as well. And then there are other countries in our coverage this week. Rwanda adamantly denies that they are a client of the NSO Group, but we see Rwandans all over the world who are being targeted with this technology. So we feel comfortable naming those countries as clients.
The NSO Group saying that it only sells to governments puts the group into a logical pickle, because it implies that the governments are the ones doing the spying. But do we feel certain that the NSO Group is being honest about this, and really only does sell to governments?
I would say there is one anomaly, which is Mexico, where we think there were various actors who might have had access to the technology. [In a statement to The New Yorker, NSO Group said it exclusively licenses its technology to “vetted governments.”] And there are countries where there are various clients within the country. It is as if the F.B.I. were one client and the C.I.A. were another. I am not saying they specifically are—we have no evidence of that. It’s just an example of how you could have different clients within the same country with a different focus or emphasis.
So, in an authoritarian government, it wouldn’t necessarily just be the dictator or leader of the country. There could be multiple agencies within the government.
Yes. By the end of this week, you will see a situation where there is an authoritarian leader who we think used it for very personal reasons, to target his own family. It’s quite personal.
How did this consortium and these stories come together?
My colleague in New York, Martin Hodgson, got a call from Forbidden Stories, which is this organization that takes up stories from journalists who are killed or threatened and gets huge journalistic consortiums together to pursue them. I had worked with them before on the Daphne Caruana Galizia story, in Malta. It was all very secretive. We had to be very careful with our communication, because of the subject matter, which is surveillance. We were told the basic information about the project and were asked to come to Paris, where all these media partners would gather and hear the full details. So we went to Paris with a good idea, but we didn’t have access to the data at that point. And then we met all of our colleagues, including the Washington Post.
When you are referring to “the data,” you are referring to the list of fifty thousand or so phone numbers?
Yeah. So, in Paris, we had access to a list of records of phone numbers. We believe that those phone numbers are indicators of the individuals who were potential targets of the surveillance by NSO clients.
Do you have a sense of how Forbidden Stories got these records? And what made you certain they were a list of numbers that NSO clients may have been spying on?
I can’t answer the first question, I’m afraid. And the second question—once we had access to this list, we could identify a significant number of those phone numbers. You had journalists from all over the world, and people who have tons of contacts. You would just match them, and a lot of numbers were found out that way, in countries like India, for example, and Mexico. We had a technical partner on this project, the Amnesty International tech lab, and once we had identified many of those numbers we started carefully approaching individuals who were on the list and asking them if they would let us do forensic examinations on their phones. And that yielded results where we see a very high correlation in the phones that were tested between being on that list and hacks or attempted hacks using Pegasus malware.
Just to clarify something: When you said you could not answer the first part of the question, is that because you don’t know or because it is privileged information?
I just can’t answer it—and that’s all I have to say. I’m sorry.
It’s O.K. Can you talk a little bit about the spyware industry, and if there are any regulations on it?
The NSO Group has been my area of focus in terms of surveillance companies. There are others. Israel is really one of the leading makers of this kind of spyware. And, in Israel, you see a lot of intelligence officials who deal with spyware who then go into private industry. David Kaye, who has looked into this very closely in his previous role with the United Nations, would call it an “unregulated industry,” which means there are no rules globally, really, for how this technology is sold or how it can be used. There are countries who are attacking citizens in other countries with spyware, and hacking their phones. That can go against domestic laws, but it is being used regardless.
In other ways, NSO specifically is a regulated company, and, by that, I mean it goes through a licensing process with the Israeli government, and specifically the Ministry of Defense, which has to approve the export of this weapon, Pegasus, to other countries. Israel says it vets the clients that NSO sells to. And NSO says that. They also get a marketing license to market their product and sell it to other countries.
So, just to clarify: According to NSO and Israel, taking them at their word, if NSO is selling this to the Hungarian or Saudi regimes, that would be something approved by the Israeli government?
Absolutely. Up until this point, people who cover this industry or this company have known that Israel has some oversight over the licenses that are sold. But, I think, by the end of the week, there is going to be scrutiny of Israel that we have not seen to date, and especially of the previous government, because they were in charge at the time when most of our stories take place.
Your stories include some governments that are objectively unelected and authoritarian, such as Saudi Arabia, as well as governments, like India and Mexico, which are democracies and that have elected parliaments and so on. Has the NSO Group been asked about selling this technology to explicitly authoritarian governments?
They don’t talk about specific clients, and you will never really get them to talk about specific clients, so it’s very convenient for them. They can say that they judge a country’s human-rights record before they decide to sell. And then you say, ‘Well, in what universe does Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. pass a human-rights test?’
And what’s the response to that?
The response to that is we can’t possibly talk about our clients.
There have been stories, going back well before the creation of your journalistic consortium, about Mexican journalists and dissidents being spied on. What did we know before these stories, and what do we know now?
In Mexico, there were quite a lot of stories about the abuse, and the New York Times did a very good job reporting on that, using the research of Citizen Lab. There were stories of journalists being targeted, and there’s just a lot more detail about the scale of that espionage. Mexico was the NSO Group’s first client, and there’s a real sense that it was just a laboratory, with all sorts of people fighting against one another. [In a statement to The New Yorker, NSO Group declined to identify any of its customers.] And the penetration in all areas of society is just breathtaking. Everyone around the current President was spied on.
The current President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came to office a couple of years ago. He was in the opposition until then, correct?
Yeah. Everyone around him was being spied on during his candidacy.
What was Citizen Lab able to figure out before your stories? And what did you know coming into the stories? Because there were hints about stuff like this for a long time.
I’ve done a ton of work on the NSO Group in the last few years, with the help of Citizen Lab. They have really been the gold standard for reporting on this issue. They uncovered some major cases, beginning in 2016, where you had this U.A.E. dissident, Ahmed Mansoor, who alerted Citizen Lab to some bad text messages that he had been sent, and they discovered that those were attempts to hack him. Citizen Lab put out a report about that, and he was [arrested] a year later. That report showed the extent to which this very sophisticated tool was not just going to be saved for heads of state. It was also going to be deployed against people who were activists and dissidents. And I think, in some ways, the fact that a tool like this is deployed against them shows the ways they’re seen as a real threat, and the same is true of journalists. I think sometimes, as journalists, we don’t always appreciate that our work makes the lives of some governments very, very difficult—maybe even more than we realize. We are seen as a high target to snoop on.
But Citizen Lab, going back, has been able to map many of the likely government clients of the NSO Group. Over the years, they’ve just done more and more. And then, in 2019, we saw a big breakthrough, and Citizen Lab will say it was a pretty eye-opening moment, when WhatsApp reported that fourteen hundred of its users had been targeted with Pegasus and then sued the NSO Group. That lawsuit is ongoing. And the reason that Citizen Lab says it was a watershed moment was because it showed the capabilities of the NSO Group—people, in that case, were targeted with malware through simply having a missed call on their phone. There was literally nothing you had to click. It was just a missed call.
Your story refers to authoritarian governments, but some people who were targeted lived in countries like the United States or France. Are we to assume that the people targeted in these countries were targeted by third-party countries?
The NSO Group says that Pegasus does not work against U.S. numbers, and they’re very adamant about that. And yet we do see some in the data—a small handful compared with the tens of thousands, but still significant. One thing that we will be reporting by the end of the week is that there is an authoritarian government that asked for special permission to target a Western country’s phone numbers. So our understanding is that this is a tool that is not just used domestically by these authoritarian governments. Even before the Pegasus Project came out, we’ve had evidence that Rwanda, for example, has targeted people living in Europe and the U.K. It’s absolutely used as a tool of suppression against people around the world. And that’s what makes it really scary.
There’s also a very well-known case of a Saudi dissident living in Canada, a friend of Jamal Khashoggi, who was targeted with Pegasus by Saudi Arabia before Khashoggi was killed. This is one of the main issues with this spyware. You have dissidents, people who have escaped regimes that they’ve lived under, and they’re living in democracies. And yet that foreign government they’ve escaped from is essentially sitting on their phone.
You said that the NSO Group doesn’t target American +1 phone numbers. If they are making certain distinctions about who they will or won’t target, why would they not also say they’re not going to target Indian journalists or Mexican journalists? It’s a little confusing.
What they say is, well, we have no visibility into what our clients are doing. We can just tell you that we do not target U.S. phones. And I think the reason they don’t target U.S. phones is because that would just be seen as messing with the wrong country.
That’s what I was hinting at. It’s quite the rule to say we’re not going to target American phones because America is a big, powerful country, but, if you’re a dissident or an opposition politician in India or Hungary, you might be fair game.
Right. And, by the way, it’s not just like dissidents in any other country and Western countries are fair game, but so are Americans. If you’re an American with a +44 U.K. number, or you have a number anywhere in Europe, there’s no special protection. That is not a U.S. phone, and, as far as I know, there is no protection. You definitely have evidence of Americans, especially journalists, who live in other countries and have been targeted.
Is it the same type of people targeted in every country, essentially journalists and dissidents?
There are similarities, for sure. Across the board, there are journalists, but what you’re going to find by the end of the week is that we also have heads of state in the data. I think the story that will emerge this week is the extent to which this technology is used as a tool for both domestic and foreign espionage. In the recent India story, we see the targeting, by Modi’s government, of political rivals, so that’s pretty serious.
Has there been a larger conversation about regulating this stuff internationally? I think you referred to Pegasus as a “weapon.”
Yes, there are definitely people who refer to it as a weapon, because it goes through the export-license process by the [Israeli] Ministry of Defense.
And there are international systems for regulating certain kinds of weapons, however haphazard or filled with double standards the processes are. Is there a conversation about some mechanism for regulating this?
My great hope is that there will be by the time we are done.
Thank you, Stephanie. I hope some government will not publish this audio before we publish the transcript.
Oh, we’re safe in America.
Trump supports at January 6th Riot. (photo: Shay Horse/Getty)
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That's awkward.
“Get away from me. You fucking did this,” Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, said to Jordan after he offered to help her during the riots, she recently told two Washington Post reporters.
Now she and the Ohio Republican may be serving on the same committee to investigate the insurrection.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy showed exactly how little he supports ongoing investigations into the January 6 Capitol riots by naming Jordan, one of President Trump’s closest allies, as one of his five picks for the committee.
Both McCarthy and Jordan have kept up close contact with former President Donald Trump. Jordan has said he regularly talks to Trump, while McCarthy most recently traveled to kiss the former president’s ring last week, meeting the former president at his Bedminster, N.J. golf course.
And the pair are in a potentially awkward spot, as both seemingly talked to Trump on the day of the riot. Some Democrats want to call them as possible witnesses to get a better sense of what Trump did and didn’t do as his supporters led an insurrection in his name.
Cheney is one of the few House Republicans who’s consistently criticized Trump for his role in inciting the January 6 riots. That criticism got her tossed out of House Republican leadership—but earned her a spot on the January 6 special committee from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Jordan, on the other hand, has made clear for months that he doesn’t think much of further investigations into the riots.
“I think this commission is ridiculous, and why would they subpoena me? I didn’t do anything wrong—I talked to the president,” Jordan said in May. “I talk to the president all the time. I just think that’s—you know where I’m at on this commission—this is all about going after President Trump. That seems obvious.”
And he played a role in ousting Cheney from GOP leadership for daring to continually criticize Trump.
“That fucking guy Jim Jordan,” Cheney said, two Washington Post journalists report in their upcoming book. “That son of a bitch.”
Jordan’s not the actual GOP lead on the committee, however. That honor goes to Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who accused Pelosi of creating the committee “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left's authoritarian agenda” in his statement announcing he’d serve on it.
“I will do everything possible to give the American people the facts about the lead up to January 6, the riot that day, and the responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration,” Banks continued, seeming to falsely suggest it was Biden and not Trump who was president on January 6. “I will not allow this committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans because of their political beliefs.”
Banks, the head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, voted against certifying Biden’s election victory in two states just hours after the insurrection was finally put down by Capitol police. He also pushed to remove Cheney from GOP leadership, and made a brief, ill-fated attempt to replace her, before the House GOP conference rallied around New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
The other members of the committee picked by McCarthy include Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.), North Dakota Rep. Kelly Armstrong (N.D.) and Texas Rep. Troy Nehls. Davis. Davis and Armstrong voted to certify Biden’s election victory. Nehls voted against certification. But during the attacks, the former sheriff helped Capitol police convince rioters not to try to break onto the House floor. He later called the riots a “disgrace.”
Pelosi has the power to accept or reject McCarthy’s nominees, and could decide to nix these members. It’s unclear at this point what she’ll do.
The Democratic-led committee only exists in the first place because McCarthy, at Trump’s urging, torpedoed a bipartisan agreement for a blue-ribbon commission to investigate the causes of the January 6 insurrection.
Jordan and McCarthy were once foes—Jordan was instrumental in blocking McCarthy from becoming House speaker in 2015, and ran against him for GOP leader in late 2018. But McCarthy has found it increasingly useful to bear-hug both Jordan and Trump in his quest to become House speaker after the 2022 midterm elections.
Judge blocks Arkansas law banning most abortions. (photo: Getty)
U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the law, which was set to take effect on July 28. The measure passed by the majority-Republican Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
The ban allows the procedure to save the life of the mother in a medical emergency and does not provide exceptions for those impregnated in an act of rape or incest.
Baker called the law “categorically unconstitutional” since it would ban the procedure before the fetus is considered viable.
“Since the record at this stage of the proceedings indicates that women seeking abortions in Arkansas face an imminent threat to their constitutional rights, the Court concludes that they will suffer irreparable harm without injunctive relief,” she wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court in May agreed to take up a case about whether states can ban abortions before a fetus can survive outside the womb, a showdown that could dramatically alter nearly 50 years of rulings on the procedure.
That case, which focuses on a Mississippi law banning abortion 15 weeks into a woman’s pregnancy, probably will be argued in the fall, with a decision likely in the spring of 2022.
Republican lawmakers in Arkansas and several other states, encouraged by former President Donald Trump’s appointments to the high court, enacted new abortion bans even before that case was announced.
The bans were pushed by Republicans who want to force the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, which had challenged the outright ban, hailed Baker’s decision. The groups are suing on behalf of Little Rock Family Planning Services, a Little Rock abortion clinic, and Planned Parenthood’s Little Rock health center. The groups are also representing a doctor who works at the Planned Parenthood clinic.
“We’re relieved that the court has blocked another cruel and harmful attempt to criminalize abortion care and intrude on Arkansans’ deeply personal medical decisions,” ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director Holly Dickson said in a statement.
Bill O’Reilly is attempting to silence Andrea Mackris, who he staled a sexual-harassment lawsuit with in 2004. (photo: Ilya S. Savenok/Getty)
ill O’Reilly is attempting to once again silence Andrea Mackris, the former producer who in 2004 settled a sexual-harassment lawsuit with the then-Fox News star and earlier this month told her story in vivid detail to The Daily Beast.Mackris was scheduled to appear Wednesday morning on ABC’s daytime talk show The View, but on Tuesday evening O’Reilly was granted a temporary restraining order against his ex-staffer, effectively canceling her TV hit in the process.
“We were notified late yesterday about a temporary restraining order issued by a court against Andrea Mackris. We decided to postpone her interview pending further developments,” an ABC spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast. “We look forward to welcoming her to The View at a later date.”
Upon learning that Mackris was set to appear on The View, O’Reilly’s attorneys petitioned the New York State Supreme Court in Nassau County for a restraining order because, they argued, “Mackris intends to further materially breach her legal obligations tomorrow morning, live on national television.” Her going public with the details of O’Reilly’s alleged conduct has caused “significant irreparable harm” to the former Fox News star, the lawyers further argued. The order was granted on Tuesday evening. O’Reilly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bizarrely, the restraining order was not served directly on Mackris. Instead, O’Reilly’s counsel suggested The Daily Beast should forward the court documents to her—a scenario shot down by the court, which wrote that O’Reilly’s team must notify the former producer.
“I have not been served with anything, but apparently Bill O’Reilly was able to interfere with my appearance on The View,” Mackris told The Daily Beast on Wednesday morning. “I hope the days of the law allowing the silencing of women are over. I will continue to fight for my voice.”
In its petition for a restraining order, O’Reilly’s legal team baselessly suggested The Daily Beast “coached” Mackris “concerning her legal obligations.”
As part of her $9 million settlement, Mackris signed a non-disclosure agreement, effectively buying her silence for nearly two decades until she spoke with The Daily Beast earlier this month and detailed the alleged harassment—including lewd, menacing telephone calls from O’Reilly. She said earlier this month that she chose to speak in potential violation of her NDA because “I may not get the past 17 years back, but there is one way I can retrieve my power from this storm of lies, loss, greed, and grief.”
O’Reilly’s lawyers said in a statement that the court “issued an order restraining Ms. Mackris from further violations of the Settlement Agreement with Mr. O’Reilly after learning of The Daily Beast interview with Ms. Mackris and its follow up pod-cast.”
The statement went on to say that “earlier, a federal court had determined the Settlement Agreement was valid and enforceable. Ms. Mackris cannot unilaterally decide that she no longer wants to honor its terms without consequences” and added that Disney, which is ABC’s parent company, “did the right thing by cancelling Ms. Mackris’ planned appearance on The View.”
In response to Mackris claims, O’Reilly’s lawyers wrote in a letter to The Daily Beast earlier this month that “Ms. Mackris issued a public statement in 2004 in which she stated that ‘there was no wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr. O’Reilly.’”
Mackris further discussed her ordeal and railed against the “terror” of forced non-disclosure agreements in an appearance on The Daily Beast’s The New Abnormal podcast earlier this week. “My act of breaking it is almost an act of self-defense. You know, it's like, no matter what [O’Reilly] tries to do to me, I’m going to be OK,” she said.
The construction industry hires formerly incarcerated workers, often at low pay and with no benefits. (photo: EPA)
ome employers around the US are responding to perceived worker shortages in their industries by pursuing cheap sources of labor, such as people currently or formerly in prison.
During a recent industry conference, a Waste Management Services executive discussed hiring immigrants to fill commercial driver’s license positions, and other executives suggested using prison or work release programs to address perceived labor shortages in the sanitation, waste and recycling industry.
Campaigners say the move would be exploitative and reflects a refusal to simply raise wages to attract employees.
“The talk about immigrant labor, prison labor, it’s all about exploitation, nothing else,” said Chuck Stiles, director of the Teamsters solid waste and recycling division, which represents about 32,000 workers in the private waste industry. “There is no driver shortage. There is a huge wage and benefits shortage that these waste companies refuse to give up anything on the bottom line.”
Stiles said several prison work release programs targeted by the waste industry fail to provide decent wages and benefits in an industry where workers face significant safety risks, poor weather conditions, long hours and scarce time off for holidays.
Employers and industry groups have claimed labor shortages were stifling recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with the US Chamber of Commerce and Republican governors blaming unemployment benefits. Some 26 states have canceled federal extended unemployment benefits early, though economists have noted the available jobs recovery data shows there is no economy-wide labor shortage.
That hasn’t stopped employers and business groups from using perceived labor shortages as a pretext to seek out cheap labor sources; employers are hiring teenagers to fill open jobs, automating some job roles to avoid raising wages, lobbying Congress to double the cap on work immigration visas and expanding the use of prison labor.
The restaurant industry in Michigan, Texas, Ohio and Delaware recently announced a prison work release program for the food service and hospitality industry.
In April, Russell Stover candy production facilities in Iola and Abilene, Kansas, began using prison labor through the Topeka correctional facility in response to staffing issues disrupting production lines.
About 150 prisoners work at the plant, making $14 an hour with no benefits or paid time off, while other workers start at higher wages with benefits and paid time off. Kansas also deducts 25% of prisoners’ pay for room and board, and another 5% goes toward a victim’s fund. The prisoners also must pay for gas for the nearly two-hour bus ride to and from the plant.
Brandilynn Parks, president of the Kansas Coalition for Sentence and Prison Reform, said these programs can be beneficial for prisoners, but often are a way for employers and the prison system to take advantage of a vulnerable population, while driving down wages and taking jobs from other workers in the community.
She noted many private companies that hire prison workers will not employ them after they are released and will not hire job applicants with criminal records. She added that these programs perpetuate mass incarceration.
“Whenever we have private industries coming into the Kansas department of corrections, they sign a contract guaranteeing a certain number of people will be working there,” said Parks. “That means there has to be a certain number of people incarcerated, so we’re not working to lower the prison population, but instead building the prison industrial complex as a working machine where people become numbers – and we need a certain amount of numbers to keep them employed to uphold the contracts.”
Parks argued employers refusing to pay living wages is the primary factor driving perceived labor shortages, and that the expansion of prison workforce programs are not good faith efforts to solve the problem.
Hiring people “who are at their lowest in life and then throwing them crumbs is despicable,” Parks said. “The contract guaranteeing this amount of people makes it difficult to release people because they’re making the department of corrections money. So the DOC and private industry wins and they try to make it appear as though the incarcerated win, when really they’re being taken advantage of.”
Even before the pandemic, the construction industry targeted prison labor sources amid what employers have claimed is a severe construction labor shortage that has only worsened under Covid-19. Construction is also one of the industries where significant numbers of formerly incarcerated people find work.
In New York City, construction industry employers recruit recently released prisoners who must seek and maintain employment as a condition of their release from prison.
Thousands of workers in New York City are siphoned from prison into low-paying construction jobs with no benefits, no health insurance and unsafe working conditions. These job sites, known as “body shops”, use subcontractors so that employers can offload risk insurance liability. The practice has been spreading, but the New York city council is considering legislation to regulate these employers.
“Throughout the pandemic, body shop laborers left their homes and took trains and buses to crowded job sites, building the NYC skyline. They did this without health insurance, without an economic safety net and with the constant threat of re-imprisonment if they refused to continue to work,’’ said Chaz Rynkiewicz, vice-president and director of organizing for Construction and General Building Laborers Local 79. “While other workers were called heroes for working during the pandemic, body shop workers are told that their criminal justice history sentences them to a lifetime of hard labor with negligible reward.”
Pedro Castillo, center, celebrates with his running mate Dina Boluarte after being declared president-elect of Peru by election authorities, at his party´s campaign headquarters in Lima Peru, Monday, July 19, 2021. (photo: Guadalupe Prado/AP)
Castillo, whose supporters included Peru’s poor and rural citizens, defeated right-wing politician Keiko Fujimori by just 44,000 votes. Electoral authorities released the final official results more than a month after the runoff election took place in the South American nation.
Wielding a pencil the size of a cane, symbol of his Peru Libre party, Castillo popularized the phrase “No more poor in a rich country.” The economy of Peru, the world’s second-largest copper producer, has been crushed by the coronavirus pandemic, increasing the poverty level to almost one-third of the population and eliminating the gains of a decade.
The shortfalls of Peru’s public health services have contributed to the country’s poor pandemic outcomes, leaving it with the highest global per capita death rate. Castillo has promised to use the revenues from the mining sector to improve public services, including education and health, whose inadequacies were highlighted by the pandemic.
“Those who do not have a car should have at least one bicycle,” Castillo, 51, told The Associated Press in mid-April at his adobe house in Anguía, Peru’s third poorest district.
Since surprising Peruvians and observers by advancing to the presidential runoff election, Castillo has softened his first proposals on nationalizing multinational mining and natural gas companies. Instead, his campaign has said he is considering raising taxes on profits due to high copper prices, which exceed $10,000 per ton.
Historians say he is the first peasant to become president of Peru, where until now, Indigenous people almost always have received the worst of the deficient public services even though the nation boasted of being the economic star of Latin America in the first two decades of the century.
“There are no cases of a person unrelated to the professional, military or economic elites who reaches the presidency,” Cecilia Méndez, a Peruvian historian and professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara, told a radio station.
Fujimori, a former congresswoman, ran for a third time for president with the support of the business elites. She is the daughter of imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori.
Hundreds of Peruvians from various regions camped out for more than a month in front of the Electoral Tribunal in Lima, Peru’s capital, to await Castillo’s proclamation. Many do not belong to Castillo’s party, but they trust the professor because “he will not be like the other politicians who have not kept their promises and do not defend the poor,” said Maruja Inquilla, an environmental activist who arrived from a town near Titicaca, the mythical lake of the Incas.
Castillo’s meteoric rise from unknown to president elect has divided the Andean nation deeply.
Author Mario Vargas Llosa, a holder of a Nobel Prize for literature, has said Castillo “represents the disappearance of democracy and freedom in Peru.” Meanwhile, retired soldiers sent a letter to the commander of the armed forces asking him not to respect Castillo’s victory.
Fujimori said Monday that she will accept Castillo’s victory, after accusing him for a month of electoral fraud without offering any evidence. The accusation delayed his appointment as president-elect as she asked electoral authorities to annul thousands of votes, many in Indigenous and poor communities in the Andes.
“Let’s not put the obstacles to move this country forward,” Castillo asked Fujimori in his first remarks in front of hundreds of followers in Lima.
The United States, European Union and 14 electoral missions determined that the voting was fair. The U.S. called the election a “model of democracy” for the region.
Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, told a radio station that Castillo is arriving to the presidency “very weak,” and in some sense in a “very similar” position to Salvador Allende when he came to power in Chile in 1970 and to Joao Goulart, who became president of Brazil in 1962.
“He has almost the entire establishment of Lima against him,” said Levitsky, an expert on Latin American politics.
He added that if Castillo tried to change the constitution of Peru — enacted in 1993 during the tenure of Alberto Fujimori — “without building a consensus, (without) alliances with center games, it would be very dangerous because it would be a justification for a coup.”
The president-elect has never held office. He worked as an elementary school teacher for the last 25 years in his native San Luis de Puna, a remote village in Cajamarca, a northern region. He campaigned wearing rubber sandals and a wide-brimmed hat, like the peasants in his community, where 40% of children are chronically malnourished.
In 2017, he led the largest teacher strike in 30 years in search of better pay and, although he did not achieve substantial improvements, he sat down to talk with Cabinet ministers, legislators and bureaucrats.
Over the past two decades, Peruvians have seen that the previous political experience and university degrees of their five former presidents did not help fight corruption. All former Peruvian presidents who governed since 1985 have been ensnared in corruption allegations, some imprisoned or arrested in their mansions. One died by suicide before police could take him into custody. The South American country cycled through three presidents last November.
Castillo recalled that the first turn in his life occurred one night as a child when his teacher persuaded his father to allow him to finish his primary education at a school two hours from home. It happened while both adults chewed coca leaves, an Andean custom to reduce fatigue.
“He suffered a lot in his childhood,” his wife, teacher Lilia Paredes, told AP while doing dishes at home. The couple has two children.
He got used to long walks. He would arrive at the classroom with his peasant sandals, with a woolen saddlebag on his shoulder, a notebook and his lunch, which consisted of sweet potatoes or tamales that cooled with the hours.
Castillo said his life was marked by the work he did as a child with his eight siblings, but also by the memory of the treatment that his illiterate parents received from the owner of the land where they lived. He cried when he remembered that if the rent was not paid, the landowner kept the best crops.
“You kept looking at what you had sown, you clutched your stomach, and I will not forget that, I will not forgive it either,” he said.
A pump jack works near Firestone, CO. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
A new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council confirms Rolling Stone‘s bombshell investigation into the fossil fuel industry’s waste problem
assive amounts of radioactive waste brought to the surface by oil and gas wells have overwhelmed the industry and the state and federal agencies that regulate it, according to a report released today by the prominent environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. The waste poses “significant health threats,” including the increased risk of cancer to oil and gas workers and their families and also nearby communities.
“We know that the waste has radioactive elements, we know that it can have very high and dangerous levels, we know that some of the waste gets into the environment, and we know that people who live or work near various oil and gas sites are exposed to the waste. What we don’t know are the full extent of the health impacts,” says Amy Mall, an analyst with NRDC who has been researching oilfield waste for 15 years and is a co-author on the report.
The report conveys that radioactive oilfield waste is piling up at landfills across America — and in at least some documented cases leaching radioactivity through treatment plants and into waterways. It is also being spread on farm fields in states like Oklahoma and Texas and on roads across the Midwest and Northeast under the belief that it melts ice and suppresses dust.
Many of the issues mentioned in the NRDC report were reported by Rolling Stone in a 20-month investigation published in January 2020 that found a sweeping arc of contamination. “There is little public awareness of this enormous waste stream, the disposal of which could present dangers at every step,” the story stated, “from being transported along America’s highways in unmarked trucks; handled by workers who are often misinformed and under-protected; leaked into waterways; and stored in dumps that are not equipped to contain the toxicity. Brine has even been used in commercial products sold at hardwares stores and is spread on local roads as a de-icer.”
“Radioactive elements are naturally present in many soil and rock formations, as well as the water that flows through them,” the NRDC report explains. Oil and gas production brings those elements to the surface. Wells generate a highly salty toxic liquid called brine at the rate of about a trillion gallons a year in the U.S. It contains heavy metals and can contain significant amounts of the carcinogenic radioactive element radium. The U.S. EPA’s webpage on oilfield waste indicates that radium and lead-210, a radioactive isotope of lead, can also accumulate and concentrate in a sludge at the bottom of storage containers and in the hardened mineral deposits that form on the inside of oilfield piping. Crushed dirt and rock called drilled cuttings, which are produced through fracking, can contain elevated levels of uranium and thorium.
“My first major concern is that workers don’t know they are working with radioactive materials, and there is no protection to ensure that they don’t face dangerous exposures to radiation,” says Bemnet Alemayehu, the report’s other co-author and an NRDC staff scientist with a Ph.D. in radiation health physics. “Those are alpha emitters, and from an internal dose perspective [inhalation or ingestion], this is one area where I am very concerned,” he continued. “If workers’ clothes or skin get dusted or splashed in waste, they may take contamination home to their families.”
The NRDC report, entitled “A Hot Fracking Mess: How Weak Regulation of Oil and Gas Production Leads to Radioactive Waste in Our Water, Air, and Communities,” shows that despite the industry and regulators knowing about the radioactivity issue, the risks have been patently ignored. A 1982 American Petroleum Institute paper obtained by Rolling Stone laid out hazards but warned the industry that regulation “could impose a severe burden.” A 1987 EPA report to Congress detailed numerous harms, but according to one EPA employee cited in the NRDC report, was ignored for “solely political reasons.” To this day there remains no single federal rule governing the radioactivity brought to the surface in oil and gas development, says the NRDC, and state regulators have failed to pick up the pieces and fill in the gaps.
“Our bedrock federal environmental, health, and safety laws have gaping loopholes and exemptions that allow radioactive oil and gas materials to go virtually unregulated,” the NRDC report states. While some states have established rules to address gaps in federal regulations, “no state has adequately protected health and the environment from this dangerous material.”
The report details regulatory gaps in transportation and trucking, worker safety, and in some of the nation’s benchmark environmental laws, such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act. One of the most notorious exemptions involves oilfield radioactivity not being covered by the Atomic Energy Act, which was passed in 1946 and is the nation’s chief law for regulating radioactive materials. The mother of all exemptions is the 1980 Bentsen and Bevill Amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which labels oilfield waste as non-hazardous, despite the EPA having found that the wastes contain multiple hazards, including uranium at “levels that exceed 100 times EPA’s health-based standards.”
While some states, like North Dakota or Pennsylvania, have instituted some regulatory measures, it is typically after something particularly egregious occurs, says Mall. For example, the report documents how in North Dakota in the mid-2010s, radioactive oilfield waste was dumped in trash bags at an abandoned gas station. In the early days of Pennsylvania’s fracking boom, shale waste was being disposed of at waste treatment plants that leaked radioactivity into rivers that could be sources of drinking water or used for recreation. But even then, Mall says, the rules are so narrow as to be ineffective. North Dakota mandated new rules for certain waste streams, but waste continues to be illegally dumped, the report found — the problem was just exported to other states. Between 2016 and 2019, some 2 million pounds of radioactive fracking waste from North Dakota ended up at a landfill in Oregon near the Columbia River.
“With both the federal government and state governments declining to adequately regulate the radioactive material in oil and gas waste,” states the NRDC report, “industry is often free to release this waste into surrounding communities, endangering human health and the environment with impunity.”
“I would add that all these gaps and loopholes in the law that allow the industry to operate in a way that is unsafe to workers and communities are basically subsidies or gifts to the industry that allow oil and gas production to appear cheaper than it actually is, so they skew the economics,” says Mall. “There is human harm from these exemptions and there is an economic effect as well.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s main oil and gas lobby, when notified by Rolling Stone about the NRDC report, and reminded that their own documents express concern about radioactive contamination to workers and the public, conveyed that they believe the issue is under control.
“Health and safety is our industry’s top priority, and we take stringent and significant measures to protect our workers, the environment and the communities where we live and operate,” says spokesperson Jess Szymanski. “Natural gas and oil companies meet or exceed strict federal and state regulations, as well as undergo routine inspections to ensure that all materials are managed, stored, transported, and disposed of safely and responsibly.”
But there is ample evidence this is not the case. The Rolling Stone story published in 2020, which relied on historical industry and government documents, dozens of academic, industry and government experts, and industry workers, found many examples of the waste being stored or transported in ways that put people at risk of exposure. “If we caught some ISIS terrorist cells dumping this into our waterways, they’d be tried for terrorism and the use of a WMD on U.S. citizens,” said Silverio Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist in Ohio. “However the frac industry is given a pass on all this.” One Ohio truck driver who learned the waste he was hauling was radioactive was unable to get help or clarification from his employer or the government, so he started collecting samples on his own. Through a grassroots network of Ohio activists, he was able to get them tested in a lab at the University of Pittsburgh. The radioactive element radium measured at levels thousands of times above EPA safe drinking water limits and hundreds of times above limits imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Though it is still grossly under-studied, in the past few years there has been an increase in academic research focused on the radioactivity issue. The NRDC cites a study published last year by Harvard researchers that analyzed air samples downwind from more than 150,000 unconventional oil and gas wells across the country and found elevated levels of airborne radioactive particles. “As a side effect of the shale boom, academic experts started paying a lot more attention to this issue,” says Mall.
Physicians for Social Responsibility, which together with Concerned Health Professionals of NY publishes a regular compendium that documents all of the scientific and medical research demonstrating risks and harms of fracking, paid special attention to radioactivity in their latest edition, published last December.
Civic engagement has also been increasing around the issue. Medina County, Ohio resident Kathie Jones had long been worried about the radioactive oilfield brine being spread on roads in her community and within the last year was able to get her City Council to halt the practice. “If nothing else, people should think of their children, grandchildren and the harm they are permitting these companies, and the government, to do if they do not speak up and fight back,” Jones tells Rolling Stone. Radium-226, which has been shown by Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources to be present in the brine being spread on roads at levels well above Nuclear Regulatory Commission discharge limits, has a half-life of 1,600 years.
Yet Ohio as a whole is still pushing to expand the practice. Ohio House Bill 282, presently in committee, would classify “treated” brine with radium levels up to 4,000 times EPA’s safe drinking water limits as a commodity so it could be sold legally for de-icing purposes.
In New York, however, environmental groups and concerned residents won a major victory last summer when the state legislature passed a bill to close the loophole that exempts oil and gas waste from hazardous-waste regulations. On August 3rd, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law. Still, “strong action is needed at the federal level to deal with this threat in an appropriately comprehensive way,” Mitch Jones, policy director with Food & Water Watch, one of the main groups that promoted the bill, tells Rolling Stone. “After all, toxic air and water pollution doesn’t recognize state lines.”
And perhaps no state legislator has been following the oilfield radioactivity issue more closely than state Rep. Sara Innamorato in Pennsylvania, who has introduced a pair of bills to close the oil and gas industry’s hazardous waste loophole in her state. “We are actually meeting with a number of organizations from across Pennsylvania as I type this,” Innamorato says. “Since Pennsylvania is the second largest extractor of shale gas in America, we produce an enormous amount of waste. These bills are common sense and place the onus on fracking companies to prove that their waste is not harmful to human health and the environment and be subjected to the same regulations as other industries that handle hazardous waste, instead of using Pennsylvania’s families who live near these municipal waste sites and other disposal wells as experimental test subjects.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Congressman from California Ro Khanna, chairman of the House’s Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on the Environment, held a hearing on Earth Day this past April that took aim at various oil and gas industry loopholes and discussed how fossil fuel subsidies are preventing action on the climate crisis. It featured comments from Ohio resident Jill Antares Hunkler, who was forced to flee a house she built by hand to escape toxic emissions from adjacent fracked gas wells and compressor stations. She calls herself a “fracking refugee.”
“Under the current regulatory framework, there is very limited accountability for the oil and gas companies who engage in fracking,” Khanna tells Rolling Stone. “There is also little ability for the federal government to effectively protect workers and major supplies of drinking water.”
The NRDC report recommends that Congress close the loopholes that put the industry’s workers and the public at risk from radioactive oilfield waste, and that states should institute “state-of-the-art, protective regulations” for the radioactive material generated by the oil and gas industry, as well as a much more robust set of standards to protect industry workers, including training, proper PPE, and monitoring of emissions and levels.
Rolling Stone asked the EPA whether they believed oilfield waste is putting oil and gas industry workers and the public at risk, why the agency had not done more to collect data on the topic, and if the agency believes the oil and gas industry enjoys an inappropriate exemption with the Bentsen and Bevill Amendments. “EPA takes its mission to protect public health and the environment seriously, and is committed to holding violators accountable for pollution in American communities, especially in overburdened communities,” replied Tim Carroll, deputy press secretary. “EPA looks forward to reviewing the NRDC report and will respond accordingly.”
“The challenge here is that the lack of regulation means that we don’t have all the data that we should, and then the lack of data is used as an excuse for why we don’t have regulations,” says Mall. “Without the information the public doesn’t know how best to protect themselves.”
She adds, “I think it would be wonderful for EPA to do a study, but we have enough information now to know that we need stronger rules. We don’t need to wait for more studies to strengthen the rules.”
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