President Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to block a New York grand jury subpoena seeking his tax returns, which he once promised to publicly release, makes you wonder anew why he is so keen to prevent anyone from looking at those records, even in secret. But the case also raises the more momentous question of whether presidents have an unqualified right to quash such demands as long as they occupy the White House.
Trump’s view, as U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero summarized it last month, is that “the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind.” Marrero rejected that claim as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed with Marrero.
The subpoena seeking Trump’s returns from his accounting firm is part of a probe by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is investigating hush payments received by two women who say they had sexual relationships with the president before he was elected. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, is serving a prison sentence for federal crimes related to those payments, and Vance reportedly is curious about whether the scheme also violated a state law prohibiting falsification of business records.
If political foes like Vance are allowed to launch criminal investigations that might implicate Trump, he worries, the proliferation of such probes could have a crippling effect on his presidency. While that concern is hardly frivolous, Trump’s audacious solution puts both the president and his cronies above the law at least temporarily and perhaps permanently, depending on statutes of limitation and the impact that the passage of time has on the availability of evidence.
Which brings us, weirdly enough, to Trump’s 2016 boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” If Trump actually committed such a crime while in office, 2nd Circuit Judge Denny Chin wondered during oral argument last month, what recourse would police and prosecutors have?
“Local authorities couldn’t investigate?” Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That is your position?”
Trump’s lawyer, William Consovoy, did not hesitate. “That is correct,” he said, while noting that Trump could be prosecuted after leaving office.
That position did not sit well with the appeals court, which noted that it seems inconsistent with the relevant precedents. Way back in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall, while overseeing the treason trial of Vice President Aaron Burr, upheld a subpoena seeking documents from President Thomas Jefferson for use by the defense.
Marshall deemed it “not controverted” that “the president of the United States may be subpoenaed, and examined as a witness, and required to produce any paper in his possession.” In 1974, when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a subpoena directing President Richard Nixon to produce audio recordings and documents for use in the Watergate-related prosecution of senior administration officials, it likewise held that “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high‐level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
The Court reiterated that point in 1997, when it allowed Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton to proceed. “The President is subject to judicial process in appropriate circumstances,” it noted.
The Trump case, which the Supreme Court is expected to hear on appeal, is novel in the sense that it involves a local criminal investigation, as opposed to a federal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. But unlike the Nixon case, it does not implicate the president’s conversations with his advisers. And unlike both the Nixon and Clinton cases, it does not even involve demands on the president himself.
It is surely possible to address Trump’s legitimate concerns about presidential prerogatives without granting him the blanket of protection he seeks. The rule of law requires a more discriminating approach.
Since the end of World War II, the United States dollar has been at the heart of international finance and trade. Over the decades, and despite the many ups and downs of the global economy, the dollar retained its role as the world’s favorite reserve asset. When times are tough or uncertainty reigns, investors flock to dollar-denominated assets, particularly US Treasury debt – ironically, even when there is a financial crisis in the US. As a result, the Federal Reserve – which sets US dollar interest rates – has enormous sway over economic conditions around the world.
For all the associated innovation evident since the launch of the decentralized blockchain-based currency Bitcoin in 2009, the arrival of modern cryptocurrencies has had essentially zero impact on the global taste for dollars. Promoters of these new forms of money still have their hopes, of course, that they can challenge the existing financial system, but the impact on global portfolios has proved minimal. The most powerful central banks (the Fed, the European Central Bank, and a few others) are still running the global money show.
Suddenly, however, there is a new, potentially serious player in town: Facebook’s Libra initiative. Facebook and a currently shifting coalition of firms are planning to launch their own private form of money that would, in some sense, be secured by holdings of major currencies.
Without question, Libra could become a widely used form of payment – partly because Facebook has over two billion monthly active users, but also because the existing financial system is full of inefficiencies. If private money could make it cheaper, easier, and safer to make payments, then consumers would be happy to use it. Few people care what is under the hood of the monetary engine; most just want crash-proof transactions.
The unfortunate truth is that our current payment system is expensive to run, including for sending money overseas in the form of remittances sent by workers back to their home countries. If Libra could allow people to send money as easily (and as cheaply!) as they post updates to Facebook, the currency would get a lot of likes.
We have repeatedly experienced how quickly a disruptive new digital technology can transform the economic landscape. Think of how fast taxis came under pressure from Uber and Lyft.
Bitcoin and its fellow crypto-travelers were designed to supersede financial intermediaries, such as banks. And, in theory, it would be possible to organize much of finance without the kind of banks and other intermediaries that currently exist. But as a matter of inconvenient reality, the crypto-market infrastructure that has developed can hardly be described as consumer-friendly. It’s too easy to lose your money or to have it stolen in myriad ways.
In contrast, Facebook represents a digital technology company that knows how to keep customers happy. Sure, people increasingly complain about its privacy policies or attitudes toward political speech, but they continue to use the service. There is a potentially potent combination lurking here: the rapid scale-up of digital technology, a focus on cheaper safe financial transactions, and a lack of concern for legacy systems.
Of course, Libra has some obvious disadvantages, including Facebook’s current reputation for not acting in the public interest. As a case study in public relations, it’s hard to imagine how the past year could have been worse for Libra’s prospects. And it is always possible for leading countries to block a private form of money by determining that it does not comply with regulations, such as anti-money laundering and Know Your Customer requirements.
But if Libra does not make progress, that just opens more space for some other, more careful corporate-backed entity. Or perhaps the challenge will come from a currency issued by a sovereign state, any of which is entitled to design and circulate its own form of money.
For some time now, there has been speculation that the Chinese renminbi could challenge or even one day displace the US dollar as the world’s main reserve currency. Perhaps, but it is not clear that we are moving closer to that day, because it is not clear that foreign investors will trust the Chinese political system with their rainy-day funds.
Still, the Fed is right to be concerned, if not worried. Growing potential competitive pressure – the Libra effect – creates an incentive to make the existing system work better, including through the new FedNow system, which will speed up payments.
In a recent speech, Fed Governor Lael Brainard argued that the Fed will innovate, to a moderate degree, and the dollar will be fine. She may be right. But for the first time in a long while, competition is coming to central banks. With a bit of luck, consumers may end up with a better deal.
President Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to block a New York grand jury subpoena seeking his tax returns, which he once promised to publicly release, makes you wonder anew why he is so keen to prevent anyone from looking at those records, even in secret. But the case also raises the more momentous question of whether presidents have an unqualified right to quash such demands as long as they occupy the White House.
Trump’s view, as U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero summarized it last month, is that “the person who serves as President, while in office, enjoys absolute immunity from criminal process of any kind.” Marrero rejected that claim as “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed with Marrero.
The subpoena seeking Trump’s returns from his accounting firm is part of a probe by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is investigating hush payments received by two women who say they had sexual relationships with the president before he was elected. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, is serving a prison sentence for federal crimes related to those payments, and Vance reportedly is curious about whether the scheme also violated a state law prohibiting falsification of business records.
If political foes like Vance are allowed to launch criminal investigations that might implicate Trump, he worries, the proliferation of such probes could have a crippling effect on his presidency. While that concern is hardly frivolous, Trump’s audacious solution puts both the president and his cronies above the law at least temporarily and perhaps permanently, depending on statutes of limitation and the impact that the passage of time has on the availability of evidence.
Which brings us, weirdly enough, to Trump’s 2016 boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” If Trump actually committed such a crime while in office, 2nd Circuit Judge Denny Chin wondered during oral argument last month, what recourse would police and prosecutors have?
“Local authorities couldn’t investigate?” Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That is your position?”
Trump’s lawyer, William Consovoy, did not hesitate. “That is correct,” he said, while noting that Trump could be prosecuted after leaving office.
That position did not sit well with the appeals court, which noted that it seems inconsistent with the relevant precedents. Way back in 1807, Chief Justice John Marshall, while overseeing the treason trial of Vice President Aaron Burr, upheld a subpoena seeking documents from President Thomas Jefferson for use by the defense.
Marshall deemed it “not controverted” that “the president of the United States may be subpoenaed, and examined as a witness, and required to produce any paper in his possession.” In 1974, when the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a subpoena directing President Richard Nixon to produce audio recordings and documents for use in the Watergate-related prosecution of senior administration officials, it likewise held that “neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high‐level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
The Court reiterated that point in 1997, when it allowed Paula Jones’ sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton to proceed. “The President is subject to judicial process in appropriate circumstances,” it noted.
The Trump case, which the Supreme Court is expected to hear on appeal, is novel in the sense that it involves a local criminal investigation, as opposed to a federal prosecution or a civil lawsuit. But unlike the Nixon case, it does not implicate the president’s conversations with his advisers. And unlike both the Nixon and Clinton cases, it does not even involve demands on the president himself.
It is surely possible to address Trump’s legitimate concerns about presidential prerogatives without granting him the blanket of protection he seeks. The rule of law requires a more discriminating approach.
US Navy Secretary Warns Of “Fragile” Supply Chain And “Great Power Competition”
The U.S. is attempting to not just decouple its economy from the rest of the world, which won’t happen until wartime, but now there’s new evidence that supply chains for military warships could soon be recognized after it was found Russia and China supply critical components.
U.S. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer told the Financial Times (FT) in an exclusive interview that a top-level report found many contractors building warships used “high-tech and high-precision parts” from foreign countries, some of those countries were Russia and China.
Spencer said the U.S. is in a “great power competition” with both countries, and it’s vital that critical components made in those countries aren’t used in U.S. warships. This means some of those supply chains of how contractors procure crucial components need to be reworked into allied countries and or produced domestically.
Spencer then warned about how Beijing is “weaponizing capital” across 152 countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). He accused China of forcing countries into a ‘debt trap’ to gain access and control over natural resources.
“You go to a country in need, you fill that need which they are grateful for, but at some point do they turn around and go: ‘You know what, everybody out, we’re going to use this now . . . the keys are mine’?” Spencer said. “There’s nothing that prevents that.”
China recently began BRI projects in Italy, near the site of Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri, a top finalist to develop the Navy’s new frigate. Spencer said he had a long talk with Fincantieri management about the need to protect internal networks from Chinese hackers.
Spencer said there has been a tremendous effort to restore domestic supply chains and invest in factories to build out manufacturing capabilities.
But he added one of the most challenging parts of restoring the U.S. industrial base is convincing investment banks to fund weapon manufacturing facilities.
Spencer launched a “trusted capital” program where private equity funds can obtain more access to funding military projects.
As we heard on Monday, the U.S. and its Asian allies have launched a global infrastructure program, called the Blue Dot Network, that will directly compete with BRI.
The U.S.’ attempt to decouple its economy from the world, reorganize military supply chains away from Russia and China, and launch an alternative BRI program is a clear indication that the “great power competition” is only in the beginning innings.
In The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum discuss a disturbing hypothetical scenario. A lone actor in Nigeria, “home to a great deal of spamming and online fraud activity,” tricks women and teenage girls into downloading malware that enables him to monitor and record their activity, for the purposes of blackmail. The real story involved a California man who the FBI eventually caught and sent to prison for six years, but if he had been elsewhere in the world he might have gotten away with it. Many countries, as Wittes and Blum note, “have neither the will nor the means to monitor cybercrime, prosecute offenders, or extradite suspects to the United States.”
Technology is, in other words, enabling criminals to target anyone anywhere and, due to democratization, increasingly at scale.
Emerging bio-, nano-, and cyber-technologies are becoming more and more accessible. The political scientist Daniel Deudney has a word for what can result: “omniviolence.” The ratio of killers to killed, or “K/K ratio,” is falling.
For example, computer scientist Stuart Russell has vividly described how a small group of malicious agents might engage in omniviolence:
“A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one-or two-gram shaped charge,” he says.
“You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: ‘Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.’ A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.”
Manufacturers will be producing millions of these drones, available for purchase just as with guns now, Russell points out, “except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch.”
In this scenario, the K/K ratio could be perhaps 3/1,000,000, assuming a 10-percent accuracy and only a single one-gram shaped charge per drone.
That’s completely—and horrifyingly—unprecedented. The terrorist or psychopath of the future, however, will have not just the Internet or drones—called “slaughterbots” in this video from the Future of Life Institute—but also synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and advanced AI systems at their disposal. These tools make wreaking havoc across international borders trivial, which raises the question: Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not.
What justifies the existence of the state, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, is a “social contract.”
People give up certain freedoms in exchange for state-provided security, whereby the state acts as a neutral “referee” that can intervene when people get into disputes, punish people who steal and murder, and enforce contracts signed by parties with competing interests.
The trouble is that if anyone anywhere can attack anyone anywhere else, then states will become – and are becoming – unable to satisfy their primary duty as referee. It’s a trend toward anarchy, “the war of all against all,” as Hobbes put it – in other words a condition of everyone living in constant fear of being harmed by their neighbors.
Indeed, in a recent paper, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis,” published in Global Policy, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom argues that the only way to defend against a global catastrophe is to employ a universal and invasive surveillance system, what he calls a “High-tech Panopticon.” Sound dystopian? It sure does to me.
“Creating and operating the High-tech Panopticon would require substantial investment,” Bostrom writes, “but thanks to the falling price of cameras, data transmission, storage, and computing, and the rapid advances in AI-enabled content analysis, it may soon become both technologically feasible and affordable.”
Bostrom is well-aware of the downsides—corrupt actors in a state could exploit this surveillance for totalitarian ends, or hackers could blackmail unsuspecting victims. Yet the fact is that it may still be a better option than suffering one global catastrophe after another.
How can societies counterattack omniviolence? One strategy could be a superintelligent machine—essentially, an extremely powerful algorithm—that’s specifically designed to govern fairly. We could then put the algorithm in political charge and, insofar as it governs as something like a “Philosopher King,” not worry constantly about the data collected being misused or abused. Of course, this is a fantastical proposal. Even the real-world use of AI in the justice system is fraught with problems. But at this point, do we have a better idea for preventing the collapse of the state system under the weight of widespread technological empowerment?
Perhaps a completely new idea will emerge that can preserve the current system—if we even want it preserved. Or perhaps emerging technologies won’t empower people as much as I and others anticipate. It could be that offensive technologies will actually lag behind defensive technologies, making it very difficult to execute a successful attack. It could also be that before omniviolence and democratization undercut the state, civilization collapses because of climate change-linked stressors like lethal heatwaves, megadroughts, coastal flooding, rising sea-levels, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, desertification, food supply disruptions, disease outbreaks, biodiversity loss, species extinctions, and mass migrations. If we ended up living as hunter-gatherers again, the main worry would be sticks and stones, not designer pathogens and artificial intelligence.
Civilization is an experiment. We may not get the results we’re expecting. So humanity would do well to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
* * *
Phil Torres is a scholar of global catastrophic risks, and author of several books. His essay, “Superintelligence and the Future of Governance: On Prioritizing the Control Problem at the End of History,” appears in the 2018 anthology, Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security.
China Launches High-Res Satellite To Monitor Belt And Road Projects
China on Sunday launched a new high-resolution remote sensing satellite, called the Gaofen-7, which will be used to monitor Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure projects, reported Xinhua.
The Gaofen-7 was launched on top of a Long March-4B rocket on Sunday at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre in northern China.
Video of Long March 4B carrier rocket sending Gaofen 7 high-resolution Earth-observation #satellite into space on Sunday morning from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in N China’s Shanxi. pic.twitter.com/Cq1DuA3mWL
China Central Television (CCTV), citing China National Space Administration (CNSA), said the optical surveying and mapping satellite would mostly be used for urban planning and statistical research, which will allow China to reduce its dependence on foreign satellites.
China’s Gaofen-7 Earth observation satellite was successfully sent into space on Sunday.
The satellite is a camera system composed of two line-scan cameras to capture 3D images of the Earth, and a laser altimeter to measure height more precisely. pic.twitter.com/QVsPTFhnz6
The Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Housing, and Urban-Rural Development and the National Bureau of Statistics will be the three most active users of Gaofen-7.
According to CNSA, the Gaofen series of satellites will support a surveillance network above Earth that will monitor the atmosphere, the ground, and oceans on a 24-hour basis.
The Gaofen project began in 2010. The first satellite was launched in 2013, and five more have been launched since (Gaofen satellite list via Xinhua):
Gaofen-1, launched into space in April 2013, is a high-resolution observation satellite.
Gaofen-2, sent into space in August 2014, is accurate to 0.8 meters in full color and can collect multispectral images of objects greater than 3.2 meters in length.
Gaofen-4, launched in late 2015, is China’s first geosynchronous orbit high-definition optical imaging satellite.
Gaofen-3, launched in August 2016, is China’s first synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite.
Gaofen-5, launched in May 2018, has the highest spectral resolution of China’s remote sensing satellites.
Gaofen-6, launched in June 2018, has a similar function to that of Gaofen-1, but with better cameras, and its high-resolution images can cover a large area of the earth.
The launch of Gaofen-1 coincides with the start date of BRI infrastructure development and investment projects.
In the last six years, China has expanded BRI projects in 152 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas.
It seems like China has just built a giant surveillance network of satellites that will monitor its global infrastructure projects.
The hawkish mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace…
Last week’s vote by House Democrats to formally open an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump followed testimony that appeared to boost their case. Several US officials told Congress that the Trump administration sought to leverage US military aid to pressure Ukraine into opening politically tainted investigations. But liberals cheering on these developments should be mindful of their limitations—and their potential consequences. The available testimony does not strike me as being as damning for Trump as it is being portrayed. More importantly, even if that proves to be a faulty interpretation, the impeachment frenzy is enrolling liberals in a dangerous Cold War mentality that could threaten their own election chances in 2020.
The Democrats’ theory of the case is plausible: At the same time as Trump’s chosen point man, EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, pressured Ukraine to launch politically beneficial investigations, the president froze military aid as a tool of added leverage. But although the available testimony helps the impeachment case so far, we have not uncovered a smoking gun.
Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, says that Sondland told him that the military assistance was conditioned on a Ukrainian pledge to open investigations into Burisma, the company where Hunter Biden got his lucrative board seat, and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election. Taylor also offered the first known testimony that this demand was made explicit to the Ukrainian side: According to Taylor, National Security Council aide Tim Morrison told him that Sondland directly communicated the quid pro quo to Andriy Yermak, an aide to Ukraine’s prime minister, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a meeting in Warsaw in September 1.
Morrison corroborated Taylor’s testimony in his appearance last week. But we do not yet know whether Morrison witnessed the Sondland-Yermak conversation that he told Taylor about, or is relying on his recollection of what Sondland told him. This would allow Sondland to claim that Morrison misinterpreted him.
What is certain is that Morrison left some wiggle room for Trump. His opening statement says that he and Taylor “had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation” until he spoke to Sondland in Warsaw on September 1. “Even then,” he added, “I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own,” and not Trump’s. According to CNN, Morrison testified that he tried to find out whether Sondland was relaying demands to the Ukrainian side on Trump’s behalf, or was “going rogue” as a “free radical.” The fact that Morrison suspected that Sondland’s “strategy was exclusively his own” means that his testimony did not directly implicate Trump. And it leaves Trump with the leeway to claim that Sondland, and perhaps Rudolph Giuliani, were indeed “going rogue.”
It is perfectly reasonable to deduce from all of this that what Sondland relayed—if that is what he did—is exactly what Trump intended. Or indeed that Sondland was acting on Trump’s orders. But a case that can only be made from inference may have limited impact beyond those who have already made up their mind. Even if Trump knew exactly what Sondland was doing, Morrison’s testimony leaves him with the opportunity to throw Sondland under the bus. For his part, Sondland has said through his attorney that he rejects Taylor’s characterizations and does not recall the Warsaw conversation that Taylor (and now Morrison) claim to have heard about.
For Taylor and Morrison’s testimony to prove dispositive—and to make a convincing case to the broader US public and the Senate Republicans who will decide Trump’s fate—corroborating testimony or evidence will have to emerge that Trump explicitly linked the military aid to investigations of Biden and that this demand was explicitly communicated to the Ukrainian side.
That corroboration has yet to come from Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has said that it did not feel pressured. The New York Timesreported that Ukrainian officials were made aware that US military aid was on hold by the first week in August, earlier than previously known. Yet communications between US and Ukrainian officials, the Times writes, “did not explicitly link the assistance freeze to the push by Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani for the investigations.” Nor was the aid freeze mentioned in Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky.
Yermak, reached via WhatsApp, did not respond to The Nation’s request for comment. His testimony will now be critical. As will follow-up testimony by Sondland. Perhaps Taylor and Morrison are accurately recounting Sondland’s words. Or perhaps Sondland will contradict them, or claim that they are conflating the investigations that Trump sought from Ukraine. As I’ve arguedpreviously, demanding an investigation of documented (and openly acknowledged) Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 elections is different from demanding one of a political rival.
All of this positions us for a “he said, he said” impeachment scandal: The question of whether or not Trump is guilty of attempting to extort Ukraine could come down to which US bureaucrat, one chooses to believe.
There is no reason to put faith in Sondland, who, in line with a longstanding tradition in US diplomacy, owes his plush diplomatic posting to a lucrative campaign donation to the winning presidential candidate. But before we embrace bureaucrats Taylor, Morrison, and another key witness, NSC official Alexander Vindman, as liberal heroes, it is worth taking stock of their impartiality and espoused views. Despite efforts to portray them as nonpartisan civil servants, the trio’s opening statements show them to be Cold Warriors devoted to continuing the US-Russia proxy war in Ukraine. As their testimony makes clear, that proxy war was imperiled by the very action that Trump took—briefly freezing the military aid that they all unabashedly support.
In the case of Taylor, arming Ukraine was a condition of his willingness to serve in the job. When the Trump administration asked him to take the position in Kiev, Taylor recalls thinking, “I could be effective only if the US policy of strong support for Ukraine… were to continue.” Taylor even told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, “If US policy toward Ukraine changed, he would not want me posted there and I could not stay.” No wonder then, that Taylor was upset when he began to hear rumblings that US military assistance to Ukraine was in jeopardy.
Another star witness, Vindman, offers a similar outlook. Russia, he says, “has manifested an overtly aggressive foreign policy” necessitating “a deterrent.” To Vindman, that deterrent is “a strong and independent Ukraine,” which, he believes, is “critical to US national security interests because Ukraine is a frontline state and a bulwark against Russian aggression.” Morrison concurs, declaring that the administration’s policy “was to make sure the United States’ longstanding bipartisan commitment to strengthen Ukraine’s security remained unaltered.” In his view, “security sector assistance… is, therefore, essential to Ukraine.”
Given their open dedication to ensuring the continuation of US military aid to Ukraine, it is reasonable to question if the trio’s interpretations of decisions and conversations about freezing military aid were colored by their own policy preferences. As The Washington Post put it, Vindman “told lawmakers that he was deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy.” While undoubtedly many Democrats and Republicans share Vindman’s foreign policy views, it should be up to the president, not unelected bureaucrats, to decide US foreign policy.
Even if their recollections are accurate, the consequence of embracing their collective worldview is worth considering. We do not need wade far into the intricacies of the Russia-Ukraine conflict to know that the position of Taylor, Vindman, and Morrison—and by extension, the entire liberal political and media establishment now cheering them—is well to the right of what the Democratic Party embodied just one administration ago.
The very US military assistance that Trump froze is the same that President Barack Obama refused to provide during his last years in office. Obama feared, as The New York Times noted in 2015, that US weapons sent to Ukraine “would only escalate the bloodshed” in the Donbass and possibly “[end] up in the hands of thugs” (a likely reference to far-right Ukrainians, which proved prescient).
In refusing to send that US military aid, Obama rejected intense pressure from the bipartisan DC foreign policy establishment. This includes Taylor himself, who, as he notes in his opening statement, unsuccessfully lobbied Obama to arm Ukraine. Taylor’s contemporaneous view is captured in a December 2014 letter he wrote to TheWashington Post. Taylor denounced an opinion article, co-authored by a former Obama State Department official, that had opposed sending US arms to Ukraine and advocated an agreement between NATO and Russia to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. Backers of such steps, Taylor wrote, are “advocating that the West appease Russia.… Now is not the time for appeasement.”
The very fact that Ukrainegate now has Democrats advocating a policy that Obama rejected should be enough to spark consideration of whether briefly not arming Ukraine is really the issue on which to pin removing a president from office. Moving toward impeachment over Ukraine policy also has potential electoral consequences: In 2016, voters rejected the neoconservative worldview that national security bureaucrats like Taylor, Vindman, and Morrison now espouse. Trump, after all, campaigned on improving ties with Russia and falsely presented himself as an opponent of the hawkish legacy that these star impeachment witnesses embody. On this note, the fact that John Bolton may become the Democrats’ next star witness might also hasten some reflection.
The Cold War mindset that liberals have embraced threatens not just their own political fortunes but also global peace. Lost in the outrage over Trump’s potential—and ultimately unrealized—interruption of US military assistance to Ukraine is that Zelensky, the new Ukrainian president, openly campaigned on ending the war with Russia that this military assistance fuels. Zelensky is now under heavy pressure from Ukraine’s far right to abandon his pledge to make peace with Moscow. It does not bode well for Zelensky’s chances if the official opposition party of his US patron is effectively joining hands with his country’s own right-wing forces to continue the war.
The dangers extend beyond Ukraine’s borders. The day after the House impeachment vote, Russia warned that there is not enough time left to renegotiate the New START Treaty, the last remaining accord limiting the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, before it expires in 2021. The treaty’s demise, TheNew York Times notes, would leave the world’s top two nuclear powers “free to expand their arsenals without limits” on “the most powerful weapons both sides can launch.” According to Vladimir Leontyev, Russia’s top arms control official, the Kremlin hopes to renew or revise the accord, but “the US administration is silent about it.” The Russians’ impression, Leontyev added, is that the Trump White House “is organically against any restrictions being imposed on the United States.”
The Russian warning, the Times adds, is “the latest in a sobering list of signals that the great powers appear headed for a new arms race,” following Trump’s earlier withdrawal from another critical nuclear accord, the INF Treaty. It is also the latest in along listofTrumpadministrationpoliciesthathaveescalatedtensionswith nuclear-armedRussia—including authorizing the US military assistance to Ukraine that Obama once opposed and that Democrats now seek to impeach him over. The fact that this list includes increasing the threat of nuclear conflict should be sobering to any liberal who continues to push the falsehood that Trump does Russia’s bidding—all the more so given that the propagation of this falsehood helps worsen, rather than reduce, those tensions.
There is another list worth being mindful of: The many Trump administration scandals that Ukrainegate, like Russiagate before it, overshadows. The day after the House impeachment vote also coincided with the end of the comment period for a Trump administration plan to cut food programs for low-income Americans. According to government estimates, around 3 million recipients face the loss of food stamp benefits and close to 1 million children are at risk of losing automatic placement in federal school lunch programs.
“Instead of declaring a war on poverty, this president has declared war on our most vulnerable citizens,” Representative Marcia Fudge (D-OH), the chairwoman of the House Agriculture Committee’s subcommittee on nutrition, said last month. That is undoubtedly correct, which makes it all the more puzzling that Democrats are preoccupied with an impeachment scandal that overshadows Trump’s attacks on the vulnerable and encourages him to escalate wars abroad. The same goes for their stance on Syria, which saw bipartisan opposition to an announced US withdrawal but next to no opposition to Trump’s sudden reversal with the explicit aim of stealing Syria’s oil.
It is true that polls currently show that a majority of Americans support impeachment. It is also encouraging that Democratic presidential candidates are sidelining the impeachment drama to focus on serious policy issues on the campaign trail. At the same time, it appears that Democrats are not moving the needle in the battleground states that will decide the next election. A new New York Times/Siena College poll of the six closest swing states that went Republican in 2016 finds that Trump’s “advantage in the Electoral College relative to the nation as a whole remains intact or has even grown since 2016.”
With 2020 on the horizon, the dangers of the Democratic establishment’s priorities cannot be emphasized enough.
A new report from Bloomberg details how African swine fever has likely been exported to Russia. This could be problematic for Russia, due in part that if the hog-killing disease spreads, it could start wiping out large swaths of herds, as it has already done in China.
In the last several months, about 60 cases of African swine fever have been reported to Russian authorities in the Amur Oblast region in Russia, a federal district that borders China in the Russian Far East.
Dirk Pfeiffer, a professor of veterinary medicine and life sciences at the City University of Hong Kong, told Bloomberg that a cross-border spread between the two countries is likely underway. “Wild boar are very likely to now also be infected in northern China,” Pfeiffer said.
Russia’s hog population in the Far East accounts for barely 2% of the country’s total hog population, which for now, could be contained.
Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s biosecurity watchdog, has been on guard for a cross-border spread since summer, there have been several reports of Chinse citizens attempting to sneak infected meat across checkpoints into Russia.
Andriy Rozstalnyy, an animal health officer with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, told Bloomberg that once the wild pig population is infected with African swine fever, then the spread of the disease is virtually uncontrollable.
In the last month, 275 pigs have died, and 2,473 have been killed in the Amur Oblast region, a move spurred by authorities to limit the outbreak.
The cross-border spread of African swine fever, from China to Russia, is undoubtedly a significant cause for concern because now countries bordering China are being affected.
Attorney General William Barr recently sent a memo to law enforcement officials announcing a new federal initiative that would use techniques and tools developed in the war on terror, such as mass surveillance, to identify potential mass shooters. Those so identified would be targets of early interventions, which would include the disregarding of Second Amendment rights, as well as the imposing of mandatory counseling and involuntary commitment.
The program would likely match data collected via mass surveillance with algorithms designed to identify those with mental problems that would lead them to commit violent crimes. So, this program would deprive Americans of respect for their rights not because they committed, or even threaten to commit, a violent act but because their tweets, texts, or Facebook posts trigger a government algorithm.
In order to enhance the government’s ability to conduct mass surveillance, Barr has been trying to force tech companies to allow the government to have a “backdoor” for accessing electronic information. This would allow the government to read all messages — even those that are encrypted, making it all but impossible to escape the government’s watchful eye.
Many mental health professionals admit that diagnosing mental health issues involves a degree of subjectivity. So how can we trust a government-designed computer algorithm to accurately identify those with mental health problems? The answer is we can’t. Barr’s program will no doubt result in many individuals who are not a threat to anyone being deprived of respect for their rights. The program will also fail in detecting future mass shooters.
Some mental health professionals argue that holding certain political beliefs is a sign of mental illness. Not surprisingly, federal agencies like the FBI agree that those expressing “anti-government extremism”— like supporting a constitutional republic instead of a welfare-warfare state — are potential threats.
A recent internal FBI memo warned that a belief in “conspiracy theories” is a sign that someone could be a domestic terrorist. “Conspiracy theorist” is an all-purpose smear used against anyone who questions the government’s official narrative on an event or issue. Tying a belief in “conspiracy theory” to terrorism is an effort to not just stigmatize but actually criminalize dissenting thoughts on matters such as foreign policy, climate change, gun control, and the Federal Reserve.
Some people support using political beliefs as a basis for labeling someone as “mentally disturbed” because they think it will mainly affect “right-wing extremists.” These people are ignoring the FBI’s history of harassing civil rights and antiwar activists, as well as the recent controversy over the FBI labeling “black identity extremists” as a threat.
A government program to monitor electronic communications to identify potential mass shooters puts all Americans at risk of losing their liberty due to their political views or a few social media posts. All those who value liberty must oppose this dangerous program.
Adobe Is Leading The Charge Against The Growing Epidemic Of Deepfake Videos
The reality of deepfakes – or human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence to fake human participation in videos – is becoming so widespread and alarming that some of the biggest names in technology are teaming up with the New York Times to combat the problem.
With advances in editing tools and AI, fake videos – used for purposes spanning political motives to good old revenge porn – are becoming more prominent and certainly more convincing. “It will soon be possible to make convincing videos showing anyone saying anything and photos of things that never happened,” according to Axios.
As a result, Twitter, Adobe and the New York Times are now proposing a collaborative effort to make clear who makes photos or videos, and what changes have been made to them along the way.
Adobe is hoping to implement a system that allows publishers to append secure distribution data to content. The company could include the technology in its own tools, but it seeks for the technology to be an “open standard” that others would also use. The company showed a prototype of this tool earlier this week at its MAX conference in Los Angeles.
The companies are joined by a startup called Truepic, which also aims to create a “secure path” from the moment a photo or video is captured that can then be used to verify its authenticity.
Axios’ Kaveh Waddell said that the idea: “…solves a small but important layer of the online trust crisis. This would allow a reader to verify that something came from Axios — but if they are skeptical of Axios to begin with, that won’t matter. Verification that isn’t easily accessible threatens to bifurcate online information into ‘trusted content’ from those who have the resources to verify it and an easily dismissed information underclass.”
Many companies are looking to prove authenticity via means of blockchain or decentralized lists of transactions that can’t be altered. An alternative idea involves a database held by a single company. Adobe has commented that it has not yet finalized what type of mechanism it will use.
Adobe general counsel Dana Rao said: “When it comes to the problem of deepfakes, we think the answer really is around ‘knowledge is power’ and transparency. We feel if we give people information about who and what to trust, we think they will have the ability to make good choices.”
New York Times’ head of R&D Marc Lavallee commented: “Discerning trusted news on the internet is one of the biggest challenges news consumers face today. Combating misinformation will require the entire ecosystem — creators, publishers and platforms — to work together.”
Finally, Twitter trust and safety head Del Harvey said: “Serving and enhancing global public conversation is our core mission at Twitter. Everyone has a role to play in information quality and media literacy.”
Adobe will be hosting a summit at its headquarters next month to continue the discussion. “We do look at this as a shared responsibility,” Rao concluded.
