Tag: in-the-news

Did anyone truly believe that the government cares about our privacy on social media? At the same time that Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) were taking Facebook to task for neglecting user data, the FBI was soliciting bids for technologies to hoover up and analyze your social media posts—just in case you are a threat.

It’s yet another example of state double talk on online surveillance. Politicians preen for the cameras when a private company fails their users. But that same championing of our privacy rarely extends to government programs. When it comes to their own surveillance programs, it’s just in the public interest.

In early July, the FBI posted a solicitation notice for a “Social Media Alerting Subscription,” which would “acquire the services of a company to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests through a means of online sources.” The request singles out Twitter, Facebook, Instagram “and other social media platforms” for snooping.

Essentially, the FBI is looking for companies to build a tool to comb through “lawfully access[ed]” social media posts and pinpoint possible threats ahead of time. Think of it like a meme-illiterate Facebook-stalking precog from Minority Report.

Although the notice was posted well before this month’s mass shootings, it is easy to see how this system could empower the Red Flag law ideas that have since gained prominence. This kind of “proactive identification” could allow law enforcement to target and even disenfranchise social media users whose posts may have been merely misinterpreted. So let’s call this the Red Flag tool for short.

The FBI’s Red Flag tool statement of objectives provides a glimpse into the agency’s sprawling “social media exploitation” efforts. There are “operations centers and watch floors,” which monitor news and events to create reports for the relevant FBI team. These spur the activation of “fusion centers,” tactical teams which use “early notification, accurate geo-locations, and the mobility” of social media data to issue their own reports. There are also FBI agents in the field, “legal attaches” whose jobs would be much easier with a translation-enabled Red Flag tool. And last are the “command posts,” teams of “power users” assigned to monitor specific large events or theaters of operations.

To be clear, the proposed tool does not seek to access private messages or other hidden data. Rather, it would scrape and rationalize publicly accessible posts. This could be fortuitously combined with other FBI data to build detailed, but possibly inaccurate, portraits of suspected ne’er-do-wells.

Unsurprisingly, social media companies are not pleased. Although they are often criticized for their own data practices, many of them have explicit bans against building such tools to share data with intelligence agencies.

Facebook disallows developers from “[using] data from us to provide tools that our used for surveillance.” This seems to fit the bill. Twitter similarly forbids developers from making Twitter content available to “any public sector entity (or any entities providing services to such entities) whose primary function or mission includes conducting surveillance or gathering intelligence.” Sounds like the FBI to me.

But despite these company policies, similar tools already exist. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, collects social media data on the many people who apply for visas each year. Germany’s NetzDG law, which requires social media companies to proactively monitor and take down posts for hate speech, doesn’t mandate that companies share data with intelligence bodies, but it requires comparable infrastructure. The European Union (EU) has proposed a similar system for terrorist content.

The FBI says that the system will “ensure that all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met.” Few will find that comforting. But let’s be extremely charitable and assume that the system will be fully on the up-and-up. There is still the problem of interpretation, which is formidable.

These kinds of systems are predictably ridden with errors and false positives. In Germany, posts that are clearly critical or satirical are taken down by proactive social media monitoring systems. To a dumb algorithm, there isn’t much of a difference. It sees a blacklisted word and pulls or flags the post, regardless of whether the post was actually opposing the taboo concept.

Computers just aren’t that great at parsing tone or intent. One algorithmic study of Twitter posts was only able to accurately gauge users’ political stances based on their posts about a third of the time. And this was in standard English. The problem gets worse when users use slang or a different language. Yet the FBI apparently expects these programs to quickly and accurately separate meme from menace.

So the FBI’s desired “red flag” tool is creepy and dubious. It’s also a bit schizophrenic, given last month’s grand brouhaha over Facebook data sharing.

The FTC just issued a record-breaking $5 billion settlement with Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Facebook had allowed developers access to user data that violated their terms of service, as well as a 2012 FTC consent decree against the company for its data practices. This means that data was exploited in ways that users thought were verboten. Granting programming access for tools to shuttle data to intelligence agencies, which is also against Facebook policies, won’t seem much different to users.

But the Red Flag tool may violate more than Facebook’s own policies. It could also go against the FTC’s recent settlement, which ties Facebook to a “comprehensive data security program.” The Wall Street Journal quotes an FTC spokesman stating that the consent decree protects all data from being gathered without user knowledge. How can Facebook square this circle?

Few will be surprised that the FBI would seek this kind of Red Flag tool for social media. Yet polls show that most Americans support more federal data privacy regulation in the vein of the EU’s sweeping General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).

Social media companies make fine foes, especially for politicians. But we shouldn’t forget that the same governments that we expect to “protect our privacy” are all too willing to junk it at the first sign of a snooping opportunity.

Robust solutions to social media woes are unlikely to come from the same governments that would sacrifice our privacy at their earliest convenience. Rather, we should look to advances in decentralizing and cryptographic technologies that will place the user in control of their own data.

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Americans spent nearly $150 billion on marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine in 2016, according to a RAND Corporation report released today. Total spending on illegal drugs, including psychedelics and MDMA, would have been even higher. By comparison, Americans spent $227 billion on alcoholic beverages in 2016.

The fact that the illegal drug market and the alcohol market are in the same ballpark is pretty remarkable, given that drinkers outnumber illegal drug users by more than 3 to 1 if you look at consumption in the last year and nearly 5 to 1 among past-month consumers. The “risk premium” associated with prohibition helps explain why illegal drug users nevertheless manage to spend almost as much money as drinkers do. The near-parity in spending reflects the profits traffickers can earn thanks to prohibition and the welfare loss caused by artificially high prices. Prohibition enriches criminals and rips off consumers.

Of the four drugs considered by RAND, marijuana (including state-legal products), accounted for the biggest share of spending (36 percent), followed by heroin (29 percent), methamphetamine (18 percent), and cocaine (16 percent). Adjusting for inflation, the researchers found that cocaine spending fell by 59 percent from 2006 to 2016, while spending on methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana rose by 23 percent, 39 percent, and 53 percent, respectively.

These numbers are based on multi-step calculations drawing on several data sources related to drug use and prices. Some of those sources are more dependable than others. As RAND’s drug policy researchers have pointed out before, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) misses a lot of heroin users, both because they are underrepresented in the sample and because people are especially reluctant to admit the use of this drug.

In 2016, according to NSDUH, there were fewer than 1 million heroin users in the United States, including not quite half a million who had used heroin in the previous month. By contrast, the RAND report, which includes extrapolations based on information about drug use among arrestees, puts the number of “chronic heroin users” (those who took heroin on four or more days in the previous month) at 2.3 million that year. Furthermore, the authors “estimate there were 1.5 million daily/near-daily heroin users in 2016,” more than six times the number indicated by NSDUH’s results.

The authors conclude that “NSDUH is not a useful measure of the level of heroin use in the United States.” RAND’s estimate of chronic methamphetamine users is also a lot higher than NSDUH suggests: 3.2 million in 2016, compared to 667,000 past-month users (a broader category) in the survey. The cocaine and marijuana estimates are higher too, although the differences are not nearly as dramatic.

One striking finding in the RAND report is that the number of chronic heroin users rose by 44 percent from 2006 through 2016, a period when heroin-related deaths more than doubled, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, heroin became substantially deadlier during that decade, partly because it was more commonly mixed with fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, which made potency even harder to predict. As of 2017, the category of drugs that includes fentanyl was involved in 60 percent of opioid-related deaths, up from 15 percent in 2006.

“The introduction of fentanyl into heroin markets…has increased the risk of using heroin,” the RAND report notes. The authors do not mention that prohibition is responsible for this phenomenon, since it creates a black market where potency is highly variable and pushes traffickers toward stronger drugs, which are easier to smuggle.

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Fashion is fun, but it also serves a practical purpose responding to the environments in which we live. When the weather turns cold, we put on heavy clothes that we shed as the temperature rises. We cover our heads when it rains or under the glaring sun but doff the hats when we have ceilings over our heads. And when the society around us transforms into an all-seeing surveillance state, fashion adapts to conceal our identities from prying cameras and their creepy operators.

That all-seeing surveillance state is on the march from Britain through the U.S. and to Hong Kong. Governments and corporations around the world are stepping up the use of surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology to identify protesters, pedestrians, and customers and track their movements. Simultaneously, people at risk if recognized by unfriendly officials, or just uneasy at the prospect of living in a panopticon, are pushing back with inventive means of confusing or blinding cameras. They’re assisted in their efforts by innovative technologies and entrepreneurs who see a market among customers who value their privacy.

Among those fans of privacy are many residents of Hong Kong. In their continuing stand against China’s authoritarian government, inhabitants of the specially administered city have come up with a range of clever responses to government attempts to suppress protests and identify participants.

“By using umbrellas to shield identifying features from CCTV cameras—and in some cases using lasers, to fully derail image-capturing abilities—they have kept themselves safer from retribution,” Liz Wolfe recently noted for Reason. Protesters also wear helmets to protect against less-lethal munitions fired at the crowds, and to further hide their faces from observing cameras. If the protests continue, Hong Kong might become a natural market for products specifically intended to obscure people’s features.

“Can’t change your face. Once it is tied to your ID, there’s no going back,” Scott Urban, the developer of Reflectacles, tells me by email. His glasses frames and clip-ons interfere with both algorithm-based traditional facial recognition as well as more sophisticated technologies that map faces with infrared.

Reflectacles’ lenses are opaque to infrared, obscuring people’s faces, even as the frames reflect both visible and infrared light to blind surveillance cameras. Clip-ons can be fastened over prescription lenses for the benefit of people who need their eyesight corrected.

“My concern with facial recognition is not with government, but much more so corporations,” says Urban, who eschews social media and loyalty cards and relies on a flip phone for communication. “For some reason people are under the persuasion that when governments use facial recognition, it is a breach of privacy, but at the same time they willingly give up all of their true privacy to corporations.”

Fretting over corporations instead of governments is a distinction that might make more sense for Americans than for Hong Kong residents, surrounded as we are by increasingly intrusive technology that observes our every move and that we often purchase ourselves. Conscious of privacy concerns, some local governments, such as in San Francisco, even promise not to use facial recognition technology—at least for now—even as identification technology becomes standard in consumer devices.

Then again, governments and corporations often work hand-in-hand. License plate scanning around the country is a joint public-private operation, with technology and databases maintained by companies including Vigilant Solutions on behalf of police departments and other government agencies. Is that a corporate or government threat? The answer probably depends on who drops the hammer on you—and government hammers tend to be nastier than those in the private sector.

Not that you need to worry about who operates the scanners when you set out to thwart them by donning shirts, dresses, and jackets that are printed with images of license plates.

“The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations,” Adversarial Fashion boasts about its products.

It’s an approach that’s not intended to protect individual identities, but instead to monkeywrench the surveillance state by jamming the system with crap scans of license plates in bogus locations. The idea is to chew up surveillance resources and render databases unreliable.

For more personal protection, you could just pull a hoody over your face. But that approach might get you in trouble in a Britain that’s not-so-slowly converting itself into a real-life version of George Orwell’s Airstrip One. Police there are now forcing people to reveal their faces to surveillance cameras—and even fining those who object.

As an alternative, you could hide your real face among a mass of “HyperFace” prints on your clothing that baffle facial recognition software.

“Amid a kinetic assortment of grid-like structures printed on the fabric, black squares suggest tiny eyes, noses and mouths,” reports the BBC. “The cameras’ facial recognition algorithms are confused. Your identity is secure; your privacy, protected.”

To complete the outfit, you might go full Juggalo, wearing the black and white makeup favored by fans of Insane Clown Posse that apparently confuses the hell out of facial recognition technology. Or, maybe you could add a little life to your ensemble with color printouts developed by Belgian scientists that make people essentially invisible to high-tech surveillance. “The researchers showed that the image they designed can hide a whole person from an AI-powered computer-vision system,” according to MIT Technology Review.

Are the powers-that-be going to ban vibrant prints and busy patterns that make their software sad?

Honestly, that’s a real possibility—at least in some jurisdictions. The surveillance state of the future may well come with a drab dress code. But, for now, all of these garments, accessories, and designs are legal and available to be deployed in the escalating conflict between surveillance-state snoops and privacy advocates.

Fashion has always changed in response to weather, and when it comes to surveillance, it’s pouring out with no signs of letting up.

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It has been a helluva weekend for national conversations about race. There was the Proud Boys vs. Antifa street theater in Portland. There was a campaign-pivoting Beto O’Rourke declaring that “Our country was founded on racism—and is still racist today.” There was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), in the midst of unveiling a sweeping new criminal justice plan, offering this vow: “We will go to war against white nationalism and racism in every aspect of our lives.” And as always, there was a Trump tweet.

The Failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting from their Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2019

What was the president referring to? Perhaps the Paper of Record’s sweeping and controversial new 1619 Project, which aims “to reframe American history, making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.” In the back half of today’s Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch offer a mixed preliminary verdict about the package, praising its ambition, agreeing with the importance of the topic, and disagreeing strenuously with its King Cottonesque take on capitalism.

Other items that come up for discussion: the potential impending global recession and its perceived culprits, where Democrats are at on trade, how ancient aliens did the prehistoric cave-paintings, and which podcaster has two thumbs and watched the key-changingest Ron Paul supporter this weekend (hint: this guy!!!).

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

‘Railroad’s Whiskey Co’ by Jahzzar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

Relevant links from the show:

“Slavery Did Not Make America Rich,” by Deirdre McCloskey

“White Supremacy Is Alien to Liberal and Libertarian Ideals,” by J.D. Tuccille

“White Identity Politics, Not Trump’s Racist Tweets, Is National Conservatism’s Real Problem,” by Steven Greenhut

“Libertarianism, the Anti-Slavery Movement, and Black History Month,” by Damon Root

“Classical Liberalism and the Fight for Equal Rights,” by Damon Root

“Proud Boys and Antifa Playact Protest in Portland,” by Nancy Rommelmann

“Beto’s Reboot: So You’re Saying There’s Still a Chance?” by Matt Welch

“Bernie Sanders Introduces Bill to Eliminate Cash Bail,” by Scott Shackford

“Sanders Suddenly Becomes Pot-Friendliest Major-Party Candidate,” by Jacob Sullum

“Bernie Sanders Calls for ‘Automatic’ Federal Investigations of Deaths in Police Custody,” by Anthony Fisher

“Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Private Prisons,” by Leonard Gilroy and Adrian Moore

“Beto vs. Warren Is the Trade Policy Debate Democrats Need To Have,” by Eric Boehm

“Biden Is Turning Trump’s Trade War Into a Major Campaign Issue. More Democrats Should Follow His Lead,” by Eric Boehm

“Elizabeth Warren Wants to Make Your Life More Annoying and More Expensive,” by Peter Suderman

“Is Deregulation to Blame?” by Katherine Mangu-Ward

“Is Barry Manilow a Closet Libertarian? (He Gave $2,300 to Ron Paul’s Campaign),” by Nick Gillespie

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Attorney General William Barr removed the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons today, nine days after billionaire Jeffrey Epstein died in a federal jail in Manhattan.

The Justice Department announced in a press release today that Barr is appointing Kathleen Hawk Sawyer as director of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), replacing acting director Hugh Hurwitz, who will return to his former position as an assistant director.

Hawk Sawyer previously served as director from 1992 to 2003, overlapping with Barr’s previous tenure as attorney general, from 1991 to 1993.

Epstein’s alleged suicide has put the BOP, which holds roughly 177,000 inmates, under intense public scrutiny. Barr said in a speech last week that he was “appalled” by Epstein’s death, and multiple federal agencies, as well as the House Judiciary Committee, are now investigating the matter.

As Reason reported, the dysfunction that the Justice Department has reportedly uncovered at the Metropolitan Correctional Center—guards reportedly fell asleep when they were supposed to be monitoring Epstein and falsified logs to cover it up—is commonplace and has been reported on by news outlets and watchdogs for years.

Chronic staff shortages have led to overworked BOP staff, and in some cases nurses and other auxiliary staff are forced to guard cell blocks.

“It shouldn’t have taken the death of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein for the Attorney General to see that the BOP needs real oversight and has for quite some time,” says Holly Harris, the executive director of the Justice Action Network, a criminal justice reform group. “While we’re cautiously optimistic about these changes, we continue to call on Congress to exercise their authority to provide the oversight necessary for this entity, which is in dire need of systemic change.”

The BOP has been without a permanent director since 2018. Former Army general Mark Inch was appointed to the position in 2017, but he only lasted nine months before stepping down. He was reportedly caught in a power struggle between former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, who is also the president’s son-in-law.

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How old, exactly, is Joe Biden?

At 76, he is older than Dan Quayle, whose term as vice president began more than 30 years ago.  He’s older than George W. Bush, whose term as president ended more than a decade ago. He’s older than Bill or Hillary Clinton, older than Al Gore or John Kerry.

He’s so old that he’s not even technically a baby boomer—he’s from the prior generation. He was born in 1942, while World War II was under way, but before America tested the first atom bomb. He was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, before I was born—and I’m not that young.

All that accumulated wisdom and experience is valuable and is not to be discounted. But against it will be weighed the questions about Biden’s vigor—physical, mental, and verbal.

The Democratic presidential candidate who is leading in the polls has a tendency to misspeak. On Friday night at a fundraiser in Delaware, according to a pool report, “Biden mentioned a speech he made last week about President Donald Trump and the rise of white nationalism in America. He first said the speech took place in Burlington, Vermont. He immediately corrected himself to say it was in Burlington, Iowa.”

On August 4, at a fundraiser in California, according to a different pool report, “Biden almost immediately spoke of the two recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, at first referring to them as ‘the tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan the day before’ but later correcting himself.”

On August 8, Biden confused British Prime Minister Theresa May with Margaret Thatcher, the second time he’s done that since May, a CNN reporter noticed.

Mike Allen of Axios has compiled a slew of other “Biden blunders.” Biden erroneously claimed that he was vice president during or after the Parkland, Fla. school shooting: “Those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president.” The Parkland shooting happened in 2018, during the Trump administration.

Biden misspoke on the campaign trail when he confused race and income, saying, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

Campaigning in Iowa, he mystifyingly insisted, “We choose truth over facts!”

During the most recent debate, Biden appeared to confuse Cory Booker with Barack Obama, referring to Booker as “the president—that, excuse me, the future president here.”

Biden is usually pretty good about catching himself and self-correcting, as he did in the Booker case and in many of the other instances. If it’s just clumsy talking, voters are unlike to care much. But in politicians, clumsy talking often signals clumsy thinking. If Biden is now losing what mental acuity he had, imagine what he’ll be like three years into the presidency. That these blunders keep happening speaks to a lack of discipline by his campaign. It’s admirable in some sense that Biden is providing press access. Other campaigns, though, are running closed-door fundraisers, so at least some of their candidates’ blunders are not captured and amplified by pool reporters. At public events, some other candidates are sticking more tightly and carefully to a prepared script.

I point out these problems not as a reflexive Biden-basher. I’ve been publicly urging Biden to run for president since August of 2015. I start out generally more sympathetic to his more centrist views than to the views of more ideologically extreme, farther left candidates such as Senators Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. President Trump, while younger than Biden, is also in his 70s.

Earlier this year, I saw Biden greet and take selfies with voters for hours at an outdoor event on a cold, rainy day in New Hampshire. It dispelled doubts I had about his endurance. When he spoke to the reporters who remained at the end of the event, he seemed as sharp as he did when I first encountered him on Capitol Hill about 25 years earlier.

It’s possible that the visibility of the way Biden is wrestling with his own aging could make him a more relatable and sympathetic figure for the American electorate, or for that matter, for the country itself. Plenty of old people vote, and they deserve representation in Washington, too. Or it’s possible that the Biden blunders will confirm the idea that he is a politician whose moment has passed. One big risk facing the Democrats now is that their primary electorate gives Biden a pass that he won’t get in the general election.

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Only half of all Americans now have a positive view of colleges and universities, according to a new survey from Pew Research. The number of people who take a negative view has increased from 26 percent in 2012 to 38 percent in 2019.

The change largely reflects a growing dissatisfaction on the right with the culture of college campuses. The percentage of Republicans who see value in higher education has collapsed in recent years, from 53 percent in 2012 to just 23 percent in 2019.

According to Pew:

Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans (79%) say professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom is a major reason why the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction (only 17% of Democrats say the same). And three-quarters of Republicans (vs. 31% of Democrats) point to too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive as a major reason for their views. In addition, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say students not getting the skills they need to succeed in the workplace is a major reason why the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction (73% vs. 56%).

Democrats who take a negative view of higher ed are most likely to cite rising costs as the issue.

I do not think “professors bringer their political and social views into the classroom” is a significant issue, or even necessarily a bad thing: Professors should feel free to express their opinions, even if these opinions are controversial or make some students uncomfortable. And while the ideological composition of academia is heavily tilted toward progressivism, there’s little evidence that progressive professors tend to be biased against non-progressive students.

Those concerns aside, the issues being raised by both Republican and Democratic survey respondents are valid. It’s reasonable to question a system that takes young people out of the workforce at a pivotal time in their lives, saddles them with tons of debt, obliges them to learn a bunch of things they are likely to forget, gives them delusional ideas about the degree of protection from harmful speech to which they are entitled, and then churns out graduates who are overqualified for the jobs they find.

Higher-education leaders need to be cognizant of the public’s concerns. The majority of people—Republicans and Democrats; whites, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics—do not believe race should be a factor in admissions decisions, and yet some of the most elite institutional educations in the country have defiantly maintained such a practice.

Colleges and universities are not the only major institution suffering a crisis of public confidence, of course: Pew also found that Americans increasingly take a negative view of tech companies, churches, and the media. (Banks and labor unions, on the other hand, are enjoying a relative resurgence in popularity.)

“The partisan gaps underlying these views are reflective of our politics more broadly,” writes Pew. “But views on the nation’s educational institutions have not traditionally been politicized. Higher education faces a host of challenges in the future—controlling costs amid increased fiscal pressures, ensuring that graduates are prepared for the jobs of the future, adapting to changing technology and responding to the country’s changing demographics. Ideological battles waged over the climate and culture on college campuses may make addressing these broader issues more difficult.”

Pew writes as if these “ideological” concerns are entirely unfounded. This seems wrong to me. I’ll turn again to Harvard, which recently removed a law professor as faculty dean because some leftist students decided his principled defense of Harvey Weinstein’s right to effective legal counsel would make the campus an unsafe place. The ACLU accused Harvard of “sacrificing principles central to our legal system.”

Disciplining Sullivan was an extremely bad decision. If it prompted some number of Americans to take an increasingly view of negative higher education—citing concerns that administrators are coddling students and failing to prepare them for real life—could you really blame them?

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Five years after Officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner, the New York Police Department (NYPD) has fired him.

In 2014, Pantaleo was part of a group that attempted to arrest Garner, who they suspected of selling individual untaxed cigarettes. In the ensuing confrontation, which was captured on video, Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold. Garner told the officers repeatedly that he was unable to breathe. They ignored his pleas, and he died. Garner has since become a symbol of the movement against police brutality.

An internal disciplinary hearing followed, and The New York Times obtained and released its results yesterday. In the report, Deputy Commissioner of Trials Rosemarie Maldonado writes that while she does not believe that Pantaleo intended to choke Garner, the autopsy results, the video, and Pantaleo’s own interviews led her to conclude that he used the prohibited move. Maldonado also called Pantaleo “untruthful” about his behavior. “I found [Pantaleo] to be disingenuous when he viewed the video and denied using a chokehold,” she wrote.

Maldonado found Pantaleo guilty of recklessly causing physical injury and not guilty of strangulation with intent to impede breathing. She recommended Pantaleo’s dismissal, and NYPD Commissioner James P. O’Neill announced today that Pantaleo is being fired.

“While this is some measure of long-overdue relief, we have a long way to go to achieve true police accountability,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, said in a statement. “The NYPD must take further steps to rebuild trust between officers and the communities they serve, put an end to police brutality against communities of color, and ensure what happened to Eric Garner will never happen again.”

Patrick J. Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, responded to the decision by accusing O’Neill of choosing “politics and his own self-interest” over the interests of NYPD officers. He continued: “Now it is time for every police officer in this city to make their own choice. We are urging all New York City police officers to proceed with the utmost caution in this new reality, in which they may be deemed ‘reckless’ just for doing their job.”

Garner’s daughter, Emerald Garner, thanked O’Neill for “doing the right thing”:

“Eric Garner was killed five years ago. It took five years for the officer to be fired. I don’t want another Eric Garner,” says one of his daughters, Emerald Garner, after the firing of NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo. pic.twitter.com/7k5VDKolt8

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) August 19, 2019

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NIMBYs are suing to stop the redevelopment of a historic business over the objections of the business’s owners. Again.

In July, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) sued Los Angeles over its approval of a plan to redevelop Amoeba Music’s Hollywood location into a 26-story, 200-unit apartment building.

Since the record store chain opened its Hollywood location in 2001, the store has become famous for its distinctive neon signs and murals and for hosting famous musicians like Paul McCartney. These features, the AHF argues, make the Amoeba Music building a significant historic resource that the city cannot lawfully allow to be demolished without further environmental study.

Amoeba Music’s owners feel differently. The lawsuit, they say, is actively harming their ability to keep their record store alive.

“Using Amoeba without our consent in their battle against development is more likely to permanently close our doors than anything else we have faced to date,” Amoeba co-owner Jim Henderson told the Los Angeles Times.

Amoeba sold its Hollywood building four years ago for $34 million and has since been looking for another, more affordable storefront.

The lawsuit, Henderson tells the Times, is turning off potential landlords who fear they too could run into legal trouble if they rent to Amoeba and later choose to redevelop their property. Henderson also said that declaring the current building a historic landmark could prevent Amoeba from moving its distinctive neon signs to a new location.

The lawsuit, which AHF filed in conjunction with the Coalition to Preserve L.A., has also argued that the city did not do enough to study the impact of a 26-story tower on nearby utilities and that the city did not require the developer to include rent-restricted affordable units that would be rented out at below-market rates.

AHF and its various advocacy arms have gotten deeply enmeshed in housing politics both in Los Angeles and at the state level.

The non-profit was the primary funder of 2018’s failed Proposition 10, a ballot measure that would have repealed state-level restrictions on local governments’ ability to impose rent control policies. AHF and its allies are currently gathering signatures to place a second rent control initiative on the 2020 ballot.

In Los Angeles, AHF has sued the Los Angeles city government multiple times over its approval of Hollywood-area developments, arguing that these approvals violated federal and state housing laws and that the new developments themselves will lead to gentrification and displacement.

Its attempt to preserve the current Amoeba Music building over the objections of its owners is reminiscent of other historic landmarking battles.

In Seattle, a coalition of preservationists, musicians, and most of the Seattle City Council is trying to prevent the redevelopment of the Showbox music venue into apartments over the objections of Showbox’s current owner.

New York City landmarked the Strand bookstore, despite pleading from the store’s owner that such landmarking would be detrimental to her business.

Similarly, in Denver, activists tried to landmark the popular downtown restaurant Tom’s Diner to prevent its owner from selling it to a developer. The preservationists eventually dropped their landmarking attempt last week after a fierce public backlash.

The desire to preserve old buildings is an understandable one. However, that desire is also often in tension with demands for new housing and commercial space. Ideally, markets would relieve this tension by letting preservationists and developers offer competing bids for urban properties.

But by allowing activists to landmark buildings without having to actually buy a property, and oftentimes over an owner’s objections, cities have heavily tilted the scales toward too much preservation and not enough development.

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At 9 a.m. we drive west over the Morrison Bridge. The bridge that would dump us closest to today’s rally in Portland, Oregon, the Hawthorne Bridge, has been closed by police. We pass 20 more cops, costumed in full riot gear, as we exit onto the other side of the Willamette River.

Downtown, which should be busy on a Saturday morning, is a ghost town. Only one coffee shop is open.

“It’s Portland,” says my friend Ben. “Can’t have a riot without coffee.”

The riot in question, which it’s been announced will start at 10:30 a.m., has been billed for weeks as the next big confrontation between leftists and the alt-right. This showdown is ostensibly in response to a June 29 incident in which journalist Andy Ngo was attacked by alleged members of the radical group antifa. When video of the attack went viral, antifa’s critics saw it as evidence that the movement is violent; antifa’s defenders argued that Ngo, who often writes critically of the group, brought the attack on himself and was profiting from it. Pundit Michelle Malkin started a GoFundMe for Ngo (currently clocking in at $194,000), and former InfoWars reporter Joe Biggs—now affiliated with a right-wing group, the Proud Boys—announced he and his crew would come from Florida to stage an “End Domestic Terrorism” rally in Portland.

In response, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler pinned to his Twitter feed: “A message to anyone who plans on using Portland on August 18th to commit violence and spread hate: We. Don’t. Want. You. Here.”

They came anyway. Yet by 10 a.m. there are more police than demonstrators along Portland’s waterfront. There are also park rangers in their Mountie-like uniforms (one never sees rangers here), concrete barriers (no one wants another Charlottesville), and a police boat doing a slow trawl on the west side of the Willamette.

There are also a lot of camera-toting news people with not a lot of news to cover, unless you count a lone Proud Boy yelling, “The Portland Police Bureau took my flagpole! The Portland Police Bureau took my flagpole!”

One of the few people watching this is a 20-year-old holding a flag that reads “Come and Take It” below a drawing of a cannon. Christian tells me he’s driven from Dallas, Texas, to be here.

“I have a girlfriend here anyway,” he says. “But I’m not the biggest fan of antifa. I’ve been to a couple of Proud Boys events. I never saw them start anything. I’m here to support them.”

An expanse the length of maybe two football fields is where today’s confrontation is set to be staged. On the south end is a smattering of right-wingers: men in flak jackets carrying American flags plus one guy in a QAnon shirt. On the north end, on what might be called the anti–Proud Boy side are hundreds of people. These include Black Bloc anarchists wearing the equivalent of riot gear: black face masks, black motorcycle or bicycle helmets, black clothes. Some carry black umbrellas, maybe to shield themselves from photos and the press. (Antifa demonstrators don’t like to speak with the media.)

Leavening the mood is a quartet in chef’s toques, carrying signs that read WHITE FLOUR and WIFE POWER. “We’re standing up to white supremacy with a little humor, highlighting the absurdity,” one says before asking if she can “anoint” me with a sprinkling of flour. Kudos to these folks and others who dressed up and brightened the day.

Effie Baum is a spokesperson for Popular Mobilization, or PopMob, which organized today’s event after learning of the Proud Boys’ decision to again descend on Portland.

“We were the ones who also helped with the rally on the 29th,” she says, and that she’s gratified to see about eight times as many people on her “end” of the field than the other.

“Excellent. That’s our entire goal,” she says. “I hope that we outnumber them and that they are not able to get any of the things they’re looking for, which is provocation and any type of altercations and that they aren’t able to make their toxic masculinity riot porn, which allows them to do more recruiting on the internet.”

What might be seen as the opposite of toxic masculinity riot porn is gathered nearby, random grown-ups who identify as left if not as part of any particular group—”keep Portland weird” mainstays dressed as superheroes and mermaids and anarchist clowns and bananas and houseplants and more, including two young men wearing full-body Winnie the Pooh outfits.

“One of them is maybe a fake!” shouts one college-age Pooh boy, before tunelessly strumming a ukulele with an A (for anarchy) sticker.

There is also a middle-aged man in a shirt from the John Brown Gun Club. On July 19, a member of this self-proclaimed “anti-racist, pro-worker” firearms club was killed by police after allegedly throwing incendiary objects at a Tacoma immigration center.

I ask him why he’s here. “We don’t really talk about this,” the man replies, politely. Then: “We are here and stand up for what we believe in. These groups [the Proud Boys] make incursions into Portland every six months. We want to show up for what they are against.”

Which is? “Liberal democracy,” he says. “We want to keep people safe, generally.”

A little before 11, there’s a perceptible shimmy in the air. Police are lining up at the south end of the field, preventing people from crossing the line. Ben, who served six years in Iraq and Afghanistan, points out there are at least four grenade launchers set to shoot tear gas canisters.

“They’re also called ‘bloop guns,’ for the sound they make when they shoot,” he says as the first real altercation of the day begins, an antifa guy getting right in the face of a Proud Boy. There’s a lot of shouting and chest-thumping as at least 100 people press in on them, filming with their phones, everyone yelling, though no one as loudly and as repetitively and as a man shouting, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! No hate! No hate!” He is trying, I realize, to bring down the temperature. An hour later I will see this man again, again putting himself between combatants, his shirt soaked with sweat, his eyes almost spilling tears.

The first confrontation unknots as quickly as it formed, leaving behind a young woman with a shaved head under a camo baseball cap. “I am here to support everyone in the anti-antifa movement,” she says. “What I hope is going to happen is we have a peaceful demonstration. What I think is going to happen is what always happens. Antifa is going to throw a punch and there’s going to be a fight. There always is a fight. Look at June 29. Wait, what’s happening?”

What’s happening is that police are cinching people in, surreptitiously corralling the antifa crowd. Shouts of, “NO MORE NA-ZIS! NO MORE NA-ZIS” start as a news chopper hovers overhead. Whether by design or spontaneously, the crowd of maybe six hundred swarms below the Morrison Bridge. It becomes very loud very fast, shouts and drumbeats banging off the concrete stanchions overhead.

“GO HOME FAS-CISTS! GO HOME FAS-CISTS!” the crowd chants, though the Proud Boys and their supporters are nowhere in view. It later turns out they are still on the other side of the river. Nevertheless, the group under the bridge is pumped, visibly agitated, except for a line of young men in black masks standing very still. They carry canes and those umbrellas and, in one case, a Louisville slugger made of metal. A young man whom, maybe because I look so threatening with my notepad, flashes his black brass knuckles at me.

The crowd continues to chant as a tape blaring from a nearby police car warns on repeat, “NO MARCHING IN THE STREET—IF YOU ARE IN THE STREETS YOU WILL BE SUBJECT TO ARREST.” I ask Gregory McKelvey, who is handing out stickers that read “SARAH for Portland Mayor—#OurPortland,” what he’s doing here today, besides managing Sarah Iannarone’s 2020 campaign.

“I’m here because I think it’s important for the city of Portland to show that anti-fascism doesn’t necessarily look like black-clad protestors,” he shouts above the racket. “That anti-fascism looks like fathers like me, nurses, teachers and really all of the Portland community.”

Including, evidently, a man standing nearby dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“I think it’s important for everyday anti-fascists to come out and show that this city opposes the bigots that oftentimes infiltrate our city,” McKelvey continues. “I think it’s important that we show up and outnumber these out-of-town, out-of-state bigots.”

How does he think Ted Wheeler’s handled the situation?

“I think that the mayor has promoted a lot of rhetoric that both sides contribute to this violence,” he says. “I think having police in riot gear contributes to a militarized and violent presence here and I think there’s been a lack of guidance and leadership at the top levels that’s led to the situation we’re in.”

Portland Police further kettle the pack, keeping them on this end of the field, keeping them under the bridge. This just as the Proud Boys have marched over a bridge and reached the south end of the park. Portland Police have gotten grief from many quarters in the run-up to the rally, but they do appear to know where the today’s groups are going to amass and how to keep them away from each other. This may well be the result of cooperation from an unlikely quarter: According to Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who flew in from Florida for the rally, “As soon as we landed, we spoke with Portland [Police Department]. I was telling them, look, you guys tell me what the best marching route is.”

As for their intent today, Tarrio told his crew the night before the rally that there was to be “no fighting whatsoever….We go in together, and we leave together….We’re going to have a badass time in the park, while [antifa] go and burn down the city.”

The Proud Boys and their supporters spend less than an hour in the park before starting a walk back over the river, this time on the Hawthorne Bridge, which has been reopened for them for this purpose. Entering the bridge’s roadway, the roughly 200 Proud Boys and supporters shout, “USA! USA! USA!” to several construction workers on a scaffold. The workers seem a little bewildered. The group shouts, “Thank you for your service!” to police officers, who say nothing in return.

The march back is subdued, the tenor and energy completely different than being on the ground on the other side. A few people start singing, “Na-na-na-na, hey hey hey, good-bye.” It doesn’t catch on and they continue over the bridge in relative quiet.

“I knew it was going to be calm, but I didn’t know it would be this calm,” says guerrilla street artist and Proud Boy member Sabo, who came up from Los Angeles to march.

Once on the other side, the Proud Boy leadership poses for a group photo. Everyone is smiling and seems relaxed, maybe relieved. Asked if he thinks the day was a success, a Seattle Proud Boy says about his own people, “Absolutely. Not a single person injured, no one arrested.”

“It was healthy discourse in a controlled environment,” says a young man wearing the Proud Boy “uniform” of black Fred Perry polo shirt. “That’s all we can ask.”

“Let’s go fucking barbecue!” someone shouts.

One wonders: What has been accomplished? To what discourse does the young man refer? Antifa was angry that the Proud Boys would show up in “their” city—that they would dare to come here. The Proud Boys countered: You can’t stop us. (Before the day is over, Joe Biggs announces they’ll be back again next month.) Both groups insist it’s the other side making trouble, the other side that’s violent. Each side is reactionary, fed on hatred and on our willingness to keep tuning in for the next episode.

Which, for today, is essentially over by early afternoon. There are a dozen arrests, but very little stemming from confrontation between the groups, more stragglers siphoning off last bits of rage.

Looking like one big fizzle, incidents will be amped and misreported before the sun is down. A video of a man dressed as some sort of gladiator being attacked by a mob while trying to protect his “12-year-old daughter” will be streamed and tweeted, including by Andy Ngo and picked up by Michelle Malkin. It will take me 35 seconds online to learn the gladiator is a serial provocateur and if the person he’s shown with is his daughter, she’s 24. That they appear to have dressed her so she looks like a child strikes me as particularly reprehensible.

“It’s all show business,” says Ben as we walk back over a bridge. Several guys in MAGA caps are yelling “USA!” at a few anarchists; a young man in a black body suit is doing some sort of wiggle dance. “If it were real, there would be bodies stacked.”

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