Month: November 2017

As America debates how to handle terrorist attacks like the one in New York City yesterday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are busy helping small-town police arrest people for prostitution and marijuana.

In Louisiana this week, the FBI helped arrest—and publicly ridicule—57 men who responded to fake (adult) prostitution ads. Meanwhile in North Carolina, DHS has pitched in to help round-up people with small amounts of marijuana or cocaine on them.

Local media described the DHS efforts as a “human trafficking case.” But the only offenses any suspects were arrested for were drug possession, driving with a revoked license, and parole violations—all state-level offenses, and mostly misdemeanors.

The stunt—which the Burlington Times-News describes as a “covert investigative/outreach operation focusing on human trafficking”—took place Monday with assistance from the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office, the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, North Carolina Alcohol Enforcement, police officers from three local departments, and a group called Alamance for Freedom. About 30 law enforcement personnel were involved, according to the sheriff’s office.

What this alliance did was just an old-fashioned prostitution sting, with undercover detectives luring sex workers to appointments with a “customer” and cops pouncing when they arrive.

It yielded no human-trafficking arrests, no children were found, and no victims of sex trafficking were rescued.

Nonetheless, police still found cause to arrest some of the people they lured to their “secure location.” Two women, ages 22 and 46, were charged with possession of cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia; the younger woman was also booked for driving with a revoked license. A 22-year-old and a 31-year-old were arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession. Two other individuals were arrested as well, both for probation violations.

CBS North Carolina reported it as “a human trafficking ring” bust.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has been using human trafficking for a while now to garner good PR for his department—which certainly needs it. In 2012, Johnson was the subject of a Department of Justice lawsuit for allegedly targeting Latinos. North Carolinans compare Johnson to disgraced Arizonan Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Just last week, Johnson settled with a former deputy for $600,000 in a lawsuit alleging that the deputy was fired in retaliation for his testimony against the sheriff in the federal civil rights case. In addition, Alamance County has paid more than $400,000 over the past three years in lawsuits from former staff.

But as long as Johnson slaps “human-trafficking bust” on his shenanigans, he doesn’t need to actually catch any traffickers, or any illicit sex at all, to trigger hero headlines from local press.

At least Johnson’s motivations here make sense, even if they don’t make him commendable. But why are we, week after week, wasting federal resources on enforcing small-town misdemeanor vice laws?

For a particularly grim portrait of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which started 16 years ago last month, read the latest quarterly report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

Before we discuss what’s in that document, let’s pause to note what’s not in it. Information that these reports used to include—how many Afghan troop casualties there have been, how large the Afghan armed forces are, how well they’re recruiting, how well they’re equipped—is missing this time. This administration apparently believes that Americans need to be kept in the dark about the conduct and progress of the war, so as to let military leaders make the decisions they want.

Nonetheless, the information that the SIGAR report does provide makes a powerful case that any advantages to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan expired long ago. The Afghan government now controls less territory and population than at any point since SIGAR started tracking that data. More than 10 percent of Afghans now live in areas “under insurgent control or influence,” according to the report. This has happened even though the U.S. has dropped more munitions in Afghanistan than at any time since 2012. (The U.S. alone conducted more than 2,400 air strikes in the country this year.)

Meanwhile, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) says civilian casualties in air strikes conducted by the U.S. and its allies have gone up 50 percent since last year. Two-thirds of those casualties are women and children. (UNAMA attributes 177 civilian casualties this year to coalition air strikes. The United States military disputes that estimate, saying it has confirmed only 43 civilian casualties.)

The last year has also seen a big increase in so-called “insider attacks” on U.S. and Afghan personnel by other Afghan personnel—there were 54 through August 15 of this year, 26 more over the same period last year. Another recent SIGAR report finds that over the last 12 years, more than 47 percent of the foreign military trainees who have gone AWOL after being brought to the U.S. were from Afghanistan. In 2016, 13 percent of Afghan trainees brought to the U.S. went AWOL. This casts yet more doubt on the effectiveness of the intervention, which in recent years has been premised on the need to train Afghan forces.

Perhaps the president’s decision to be less transparent about the war will motivate his opponents to do something about it. Or perhaps we’ll just sink deeper into the quagmire. So far, the war is still mostly just forgotten.

Yesterday representatives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter testified before a Senate subcommittee about online “Russian disinformation,” sounding a note of alarm that echoed legislators’ concerns and therefore grossly exaggerated the threat. “When it comes to the 2016 election,” said Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, “the foreign interference we saw is reprehensible and outrageous and opened a new battleground for our company, our industry, and our society. That foreign actors, hiding behind fake accounts, abused our platform and other internet services to try to sow division and discord—and to try to undermine our election process—is an assault on democracy, and it violates all of our values.”

The idea that Russian ads on Facebook, Russian tweets on Twitter, and Russian videos on YouTube “undermine our election process” and constitute “an assault on democracy” (let alone that such propaganda “violates all of our values”) is hard to take seriously given what we know about the nature and scale of this operation. Social media platforms have every right to insist that users follow their terms of service, which in Facebook’s case ban phony source descriptions (falsely identifying a Russian’s posts as an American’s, for example). But the expectation that Facebook, Twitter, and Google will police political discourse to minimize “Russian influence” is not just impractical but, if backed by the threat of legislation, contrary to the First Amendment.

It is important to keep in mind that we are not talking about direct interference with the election process (by hacking computers that tally votes, say). We are talking about efforts to persuade people—or, as seems to have been more common, reinforce their pre-existing opinions—through words and images. While some of these messages can fairly be described as “disinformation” (such as a fake letter posted on Twitter supposedly documenting a $150 million contribution to Hillary Clinton’s campaign by the conservative Bradley Foundation), some (such as reports about police shootings) were entirely accurate, while others were expressions of opinion on subjects such as racism, LGBT issues, immigration, and gun rights.

Except for the fact that the messages appear to have been sponsored by the Russian government, there was nothing especially sinister or insidious about them. Cases of broken English and awkward phrasing aside, they were indistinguishable from the mixture of facts, lies, and blather that constitutes good, old-fashioned, American-produced political discourse. So when The New York Times reports that Russian-sponsored “political ads and other content” (including videos from the government-sponsored news outlet RT) “were meant to sow discord or chaos,” it is either being hysterical or ascribing absurdly unrealistic ambitions to the Russian government. Our social and political order is not one viral video or inflammatory tweet away from catastrophic collapse.

Russian participation in the online U.S. political debate looks even less scary when you consider how tiny its footprint seems to be. On Monday a Times headline proclaimed that “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone,” which sounds impressive unless you realize that an ad can “reach” people without being noticed or read, let alone persuading anyone. What the headline really meant, as the Times explained in its report on yesterday’s hearing, is that “more than 126 million users potentially saw inflammatory political ads bought by a Kremlin-linked company, the Internet Research Agency.” Yes, and since the post you are reading is available on the internet, it could potentially be seen by 3.6 billion people.

No doubt Vladimir Putin would love to determine the outcome of presidential elections by spending $100,000 on Facebook ads. It is far less clear that he (or anyone else) has the power to do that, no matter how big the ad buy. As Brian Doherty noted here on Monday, the evidence suggests that politicians and campaign “reformers” greatly overestimate the effectiveness of political advertising.

According to Facebook, the ads bought by the Internet Research Agency represented “four-thousandths of one percent (0.004%) of content in News Feed, or approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content.” The Times concedes that “Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users’ News Feeds every day.” Between 2015 and 2017, the paper notes, “people in the United States saw more than 11 trillion posts from pages on Facebook.”

The Russian contribution on other platforms looks similarly unimpressive. Twitter Acting General Counsel Sean Edgett testified that “the 1.4 million election-related Tweets that we identified through our retrospective review as generated by Russian-linked, automated accounts constituted less than three-quarters of a percent (0.74%) of the overall election-related Tweets on Twitter at the time.” The Times admits that tweets by Russian operatives posing as Americans “may have added only modestly to the din of genuine American voices in the pre-election melee,” and “many of the suspect posts were not widely shared.”

Still, the paper insists, the tweets “helped fuel a fire of anger and suspicion in a polarized country.” As Ed Krayewski noted a few weeks ago, the headline over another Times story breathlessly claimed that “Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics.” Talk about disinformation.

Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were “uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort.” The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, “mostly had low view counts,” with less than 3 percent attracting mored than 5,000 views.

“While this is a relatively small amount of content,” Salgado hastened to add, “we understand that any misuse of our platforms for this purpose is a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy.” I assume Salgado was trying to placate senators outraged (or pretending to be outraged) by “Russian interference in our electoral process.” But if our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it is already doomed.

New research provides more evidence that despite all the doomsaying about the post-millennial generation, “Gen Z” is doing just fine—perhaps even better than its predecessors. John Protzko, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, analyzed 50 years of data on the famous “marshmallow test,” which ostensibly measures children’s ability to delay gratification. Protzko found that from the 1960s to this year, American kids have gotten steadily better at waiting to get what they want.

In the marshmallow test, a child is left alone in the test room with a marshmallow or some other edible treat. Subjects are told that they can eat the treat now, but also that if they wait a few minutes until the researcher returns they’ll get a second treat too. Researchers measure not only whether a child eats the treat before the researcher returns but, if so, how long he or she waits before doing so.

When Protzko asked cognitive development scholars whether they believed children’s ability to delay gratification had been diminished over the past half century, 52 percent predicted a decrease and 20 percent predicted no change. Only 16 percent expected kids’ capacity to delay gratification to have improved. Many cited modern children’s use of computers, phones, tablets, and similar technologies as a reason for the expected decline.

But such concerns “may be overblown,” according to the (pre-publication) paper. “Overall, contrary to not only popular wisdom, but also expert prediction, kids these days are better at delaying gratification on the marshmallow test—and they are getting better,” the researchers found.

For Protzko’s analysis, researches looked at the results of marshmallow tests in both published and unpublished research from the past 50 years. All the children who participated were under the age of 10. The increase in the ability to delay gratification held true “for all children, not [just] those at the bottom of ability…for those at the top of the ability.”

The length of time kids were able to resist the marshmallow increased an average of six seconds per year, or around a minute per decade. “This is a little less than a fifth of a standard deviation per decade,” the authors note, which “corresponds to the fifth of a standard deviation per decade observed in increases in IQ”—otherwise known as the Flynn Effect.

As Reason‘s Ron Bailey pointed out in 2011, years of research on the effect, first identified by James R. Flynn in the 1980s, showed that IQ scores have been rising among both the lowest and highest scorers. Much of the explanation for “this dramatic across the board increase in intelligence” can be attributed to television. (For more on the why behind the Flynn Effect, see this Michael Shermer piece from Reason‘s archives.) Perhaps digital culture is having similarly positive effects.

“While it is easy to look at kids these days and deride their inability to control themselves and decry the downfall of civilization, it is much harder to accurately recall our own selves as children,” Protzko’s paper points out. But “contrary to historical and present complaints, kids these days appear to be better than we were. A supposed modern culture of instant gratification has not stemmed the march of improvement.”