Month: April 2022

Pandemic Policy Turned Schools Into Surveillance States


v1

Even before the pandemic, creeping surveillance was making the open campus a thing of the past. Exaggerated security fears intersected with the declining cost of technology to turn many schools into panopticons. ID tags tracked students, cameras watched their behavior, and software monitored their online activity. Then COVID-19 appeared and safety at all costs became a driving consideration, leaving a Big brother-ish legacy that will linger in public schools long after the virus has been forgotten.

In December 2020, in the midst of pandemic panic, education publication The 74 warned of a “massive ecosystem of products that have flooded the school-safety market this year as education leaders work to mitigate the pandemic’s enduring disruptions to student learning.”

“Student tracking badges, surveillance cameras and contact-tracing cell phone apps have come under significant scrutiny from privacy advocates, who question the products’ effectiveness and accuse them of subjecting youth to over-the-top surveillance,” author Mark Keierleber added. “But company executives and school leaders who’ve bought the products say they are here to stay.”

As was the case elsewhere in society, pandemic fears overwhelmed civil libertarian concerns about privacy with public health arguments that prioritized limiting the spread of disease. Companies that ran into headwinds peddling surveillance products in normal times eagerly latched onto concerns about contagion to market their products.

“As offices and schools around the country plan to reopen, the Volan system offers the only private location tracking and geo-fencing option available that provides [a] precise and fast contact tracing solution combined with emergency response capabilities,” boasted Volan Technology, which sells tracking badges among other things, in June 2020. 

Volan touts the use of artificial intelligence to ease contact tracing and social-distancing enforcement. That’s a feature also included in the modern incarnations of surveillance cameras, which claim the ability to not just monitor hallways and classrooms, but even to automatically identify what the lenses see.

“Motorola Solutions—whose security and communications systems are already installed in thousands of schools around the country—has developed artificial intelligence compatible with its existing cameras to recognize when an individual isn’t wearing a mask,” The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2020. 

For camera vendors, contact-tracing became a new way to sell facial recognition systems that would (theoretically) identify people believed to have been exposed to COVID-19. Facial recognition is deservedly controversial because of concerns about misidentification, intrusiveness, and security breaches. But public-health priorities steamrolled civil libertarian arguments without actually addressing them. In the end, repurposing existing security technology to address pandemic worries turned out to be an opportunity that paid off in big bucks.

“The US market for physical security equipment in K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) and higher education was worth $716 million in 2020,” according to the Security Industry Association. “This includes revenues generated by sales of video surveillance, access control and intruder alarm equipment and is measured at factory gate prices. The K-12 education market is estimated to account for around 56 percent of the total market in 2020, an equipment revenue opportunity of $405 million.”

Not that repurposed surveillance technology is a panacea. Unsurprisingly, tools that had always proven to be fallible demonstrated similar flaws, and some new ones, when put to public-health use.

“In Fulton county [Georgia], school officials wound up disabling the face mask detection feature in cafeterias because it was triggered by people eating lunch,” The Guardian reported this week. “Other times, it identified students who pulled their masks down briefly to take a drink of water. In suburban Houston…when white students wore light-colored masks, for example, the face detection sounded alarms. And if students rode bikes to school, the cameras flagged their elevated temperatures.”

But all of that surveillance technology remains in place even as pandemic concerns wane across the country. Badges and cameras purchased at considerable expense aren’t going to be put into storage just because COVID-19 fades into the background. After all, vendors already demonstrated the ability to reprogram software and repurpose technology to address concerns of the moment once; why wouldn’t they do it again? Administrators hope “to soon equip Fulton county campuses with AI-enabled cameras that identify students who bring guns to school” The Guardian adds.

And, of course, the federal government is right there to subsidize schools’ purchase of surveillance tools with gobs of cash. That makes the transformation of supposed learning environments into entry-level police states surprisingly affordable.

“There are several federal grant programs available to help schools pay for their security needs,” according to Security magazine. “These programs include the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act.”

Ultimately, resistance to the classroom panopticon has to come from parents and students. Encode Justice is a youth-driven group questioning the use of artificial intelligence in a variety of contexts, including school surveillance. Parents in Dearborn, Michigan, are pushing back against surveillance proposals by school officials, voicing worry that distrust and monitoring are being normalized. Families in Wisconsin sued over hidden cameras in their kids’ high school. And former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo barred the use of facial recognition in the state’s schools after the New York Civil Liberties Union took officials to court.

“It really does impact kids’ perspectives about schools, whether they’re safe, whether they’re themselves perceived as suspects, when they come to school,” Odis Johnson Jr., executive director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, told WDET. “Those things then relate to feelings of school connectedness, belongingness, trust.”

But perhaps the best of way of keeping children from marinating in a surveillance state is to empower families to choose the education environments that work for them. Those environments can involve preferred curricula, learning schedules, and teaching philosophy, but also respect for privacy and liberty when that’s what students and their parents value. Those who like to be tagged and monitored should be just as free to pick institutions that cater to their quirks as are families who want their kids to thrive beyond the watchful gaze of Big Brother.

The post Pandemic Policy Turned Schools Into Surveillance States appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/pJC97h1
via IFTTT

Ukrainian Forces Reportedly Blow Up Fuel Depot On Russian Territory In “Daring Cross-Border Attack”

Ukrainian Forces Reportedly Blow Up Fuel Depot On Russian Territory In “Daring Cross-Border Attack”

Ukraine forces pulled off a rare attack on Russian soil Friday when two military helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, situated roughly 40 miles north of the border with Ukraine.

The attack was purportedly carried out by two Ukrainian helicopters that crossed into Ukrainian territory. Videos circulating online purported to show Ukrainian Air Force Mi-24 helicopters flying low over Belgorod just before the strike.

The strike will certainly create an interesting backdrop to talks between the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, which are set to resume via video-conference on Friday.

Meanwhile, the UN said Friday that its relief convoys had failed to reach Mariupol, the southern port city devastated by weeks of shelling, after Russia said it had opened up a “humanitarian corridor” to allow the evacuation of civilians.

Video images of the purported attack posted online showed what looked like several missiles being fired from low altitude, followed by an explosion. Reuters has not yet been able to verify the images.

While Russian authorities have confirmed the attack, some Ukrainian defense analysts insisted that the strike  may have been a “false flag” planned by Moscow to further turn the tide of public opinion in favor of the war (although at least one recently released independent poll showed that the majority of Russians have rallied around the flag in support of the war, per the NYT).

The Ukrainian Foreign Minister said early Friday morning that he “could not confirm nor deny” Ukrainian involvement in the strike.

He’s not the first Ukrainian official to neither “confirm nor deny” the attack.

Still, video of the strike has circulated on Western social media.

Given the number of videos of the attack circulating online, many believe some sort of attack did occur.

A WSJ reporter described it as “the most daring known Ukrainian cross-border attack” since the start of the conflict.

A fire at the facility was raging uncontrolled up until a few hours ago.

Here’s video of the fire from another angle.

Video taken later in the morning showed the fire had been almost extinguished.

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said the strike wouldn’t help the cause of peace talks.

According to one media report, 8 tanks with fuel volume of 2,000 cubic meters each are burning. The Russian Defense Ministry hasn’t officially commented on the incident.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 07:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/cl89wJh Tyler Durden

Peter Schiff: Eurozone Inflation Exposes European Central Bank Lies

Peter Schiff: Eurozone Inflation Exposes European Central Bank Lies

Via SchiffGold.com,

During a recent podcast, Peter Schiff talked about how the Bank of Japan lied about inflation being too low in order to justify its reckless monetary policy and keep interest rates artificially low in order to prop up the country’s massive debt. In a subsequent podcast, Peter talked about similar lies coming out of the European Central Bank.

The United States isn’t the only country with an inflation problem. The month-over-month increase in the CPI in Germany for March came in at 2.5%. Year-over-year, the CPI increase was 7.3%. Meanwhile, in Italy, producer prices were up 41.4% year-over-year in February.

It’s clear there is a significant inflation problem in the eurozone and it will likely get worse.

The ECB has kept interest rates at zero, and sometimes below, for years. The European central bank has also run massive quantitative easing programs. Former ECB president Mario Draghi always justified this extraordinarily loose monetary policy by saying there wasn’t enough inflation in the eurozone.

Peter said he was one of the few people questioning the absurdity of calling low inflation a problem central banks need to solve.

Low inflation is not a problem. In fact, lower inflation is better than higher inflation. The lower the better. In fact, if prices fall, that’s actually better than prices rising by a little bit. It’s better if things get cheaper than more expensive.”

In reality, all of this talk about inflation being too low is really just a smokescreen to allow central banks and governments to continue their reckless monetary policy.

Keep in mind, when these bureaucrats and politicians tell you “there is not enough inflation,” they’re really saying the cost of living isn’t rising fast enough.

If they said it that way, it would illustrate the absurdity. Why does anybody want the cost of living to go up? Doesn’t everybody want their cost of living to go down? Of course, they do! People don’t want higher gas prices. They want lower gas prices. People don’t want to pay more for health insurance. They want to pay less. They want to pay less for everything.”

The original ECB mandate was to keep inflation below 2%. Draghi reinvented the mandate so that the central bank would try to keep inflation as close to 2% as possible, without going over. In effect, Draghi was saying, “We want inflation to be 1.999%.” Peter called it “asinine.” In effect, that means if inflation is 1.8%, the central bank needs to keep rates at zero and continue QE.

It makes no sense to raise an inflation rate of 1.8 to 1.9. when you’re trying to stay below 2%. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense to try to raise an inflation rate of 1.5 to 1.9 and risk overshooting. The whole idea of the mandate being close to but below 2% was complete nonsense.”

At the time, Peter said it was crazy to think a central bank could micromanage the inflation rate to that degree. And he asked the key question: what happens when they overshoot?

Well, now we know.

It’s ignoring the overshoot. It is doing nothing. Because you have a 30-year high in German inflation. You have an inflation problem all over the world. Yet here you have the ECB continuing to hold rates at zero and continuing to do quantitative easing.”

Why?

If the ECB’s real goal was to create higher inflation but keep it below 2%, they’ve succeeded. In fact, they’ve more than tripled 2%.

Why are they pursuing the same monetary policy? They’re pursuing the same monetary policy today when they have too much inflation as they were using in the past when they claimed they had too little inflation.”

Just like with the Bank of Japan, this highlights the big lie Draghi and the current ECB president Christine Lagarde have been telling — that the artificially low interest rates and QE were driven by too little inflation.

Low inflation was never a problem. It was a manufactured problem to cover up the real problem. And now they have another real problem of too high inflation that they can’t solve. But the problem that they were trying to cover up was another insolvency issue. Why was the ECB continuing to print euros to buy government bonds, in particular Greek government bonds, Italian government bonds, Spanish government bonds? And the answer is those governments were profligate. They’re running big deficits. They are not complying with the original premise of the European Union. They are not holding their deficits down in relation to their GDP. And so the reason the ECB is interfering in those bond markets is to keep interest rates in a lot of these southern European countries artificially low. So, in order to justify intervening in the bond markets, to spare Italian or Spanish politicians from the hard choices of cutting government spending or raising taxes, the ECB monetized that debt. But they couldn’t say the reason we’re printing all of this money is so we can bail out the Italians or bail out the Spanish, so they had to come up with another excuse. And their lame excuse was that inflation was too low.”

The situation isn’t much different in the US. The Fed has also used “low” inflation to justify loose monetary policy so that it can continue to monetize the massive US debt.

In this podcast, Peter also talks about how politicians and central bankers are using COVID and Putin as an excuse for inflation, the problem of big government, and the reaction of gold and oil to the peace talks in Ukraine.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/01/2022 – 06:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/wITLHVg Tyler Durden

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy


minisCrack--Cocaine,-Corruption-_-Conspiracy_netflix

It “seemed like a good idea at the time,” former Rep. Charles Rangel (D–N.Y.) says in the Netflix documentary Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy. Rangel, who represented Harlem from 1971 to 2017, is talking about the draconian political response to the crack cocaine “epidemic” of the 1980s.

That response included a federal sentencing scheme, backed by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.), that treated crack as if it were 100 times worse than cocaine powder and imposed a five-year mandatory minimum for possessing as little as five grams. Crack reminds us of the circumstances in which policies like those, which overwhelmingly targeted African Americans, seemed like a good idea to supposedly liberal black Democrats such as Rangel. “Clearly,” he says now, “it was overkill.”

The documentary recalls seminal events in the tangled cultural history of crack, such as Nancy Reagan’s inane but widely echoed “Just Say No” campaign, the 1986 death of college basketball star Len Bias, the scientifically baseless “crack baby” panic, and the 1989 TV address in which President George H.W. Bush dramatically held up a bag of crack, telling America this “innocent-looking” substance was “turning our cities into battle zones.” The teenaged drug dealer who provided Bush’s prop after he was lured to “a park just across the street from the White House” ended up serving nearly a decade in prison.

“I can’t feel sorry for the fella,” Bush remarked, expressing a sentiment you’d expect from a politician who urged Americans to “rise up united and express our intolerance.” Alarmed by the violence and corruption caused by the very policies Bush was so keen to enforce, a bipartisan, transracial majority did just that, destroying many lives in the process.

The post Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/ZQEG0I7
via IFTTT

Unmask


minisunmask

Those getting red in the face over mask mandates can breathe a little easier now thanks to the subversive innovation of UnMask. The brand offers consumers a lightweight mesh face covering that fulfills the requirements of those persistent public health orders while doing nothing to prevent the wearer from sucking in all the oxygen and aerosols she desires.

Easier respiration is only one benefit. The product also creates that juvenile joy that only comes from simultaneously honoring and undermining an arbitrary restriction—the COVID-era equivalent of wearing a tuxedo T-shirt to a black-tie event. A variety of colors and patterns lets you add a little style to your subversion.

Like the constricting cloth mask it replaces, UnMask is not the best product for someone with a cough who is visiting grandma. You’ll still want an actually effective N95 mask for that. But for those less sensitive occasions where mask mandates are purely performative, UnMask helps you look and perform at your best.

The post Unmask appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/w6n9E7S
via IFTTT

Brickbats: April 2022


BB1

As Jerod Draper was dying of a meth overdose, video shows that staff at the Harrison County, Indiana, jail did not immediately seek medical attention for him. Instead, they placed him in a restraint chair and placed a hood over his head, used their Tasers on him repeatedly, stomped his feet, and used pain compliance holds on him. Harrison County officials agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Draper’s family, but no one at the jail has been criminally charged in the incident.

Hong Kong police have charged two former editors of the pro-democracy newspaper Stand News with sedition. Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, who face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($640), were denied bail. Police also detained four Stand News board members for questioning. The newspaper said in December it was ceasing publication and laying off all its staff.

Former Ventura County, California, Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Charles Barrios III has been sentenced to one year in prison followed by two years’ probation after pleading guilty to destroying physical evidence. Barrios trashed the results of a drug test showing that a woman he had arrested for driving under the influence was clean. He then told a supervisor the woman refused to give a urine sample. After the woman complained to another deputy, the second deputy found the drug test. The woman provided a second sample, which also tested negative, and the charges against her were dropped.

As omicron cases soared in the winter, Quebec Premier François Legault imposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to battle the spread of COVID-19. Legault has also barred gatherings at private homes and indoor dining at restaurants.

When a Redmond, Washington, police officer shot Andrea Thomas Churna six times, killing her, she was lying on the floor of the hallway outside her apartment and complying with police orders. That was September 20, 2020. The King County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the shooting, says the officer who fired the shots and other officers on the scene have refused to cooperate with the investigation, and the local prosecutor has yet to file any charges. Churna, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other emotional and psychological issues, called police because she believed someone was trying to kill her. When they arrived, she was armed and admitted to firing a shot. But The Seattle Times reports she had put the weapon down and had been lying on the ground for more than three minutes before she was shot.

Trent Kellee Freeman, a former sheriff’s office detective in Florida’s Gilchrist County, has been charged with filing fraudulent Family Medical Leave Act paperwork, forging the signatures of doctors, and falsely claiming to have been hospitalized and even in a coma for medical issues including COVID-19. In reality, she had started a new job elsewhere. The agency also said Freeman bilked coworkers out of about $4,000 in donated sick leave.

The school board in Lorain, Ohio, has fired Palm Elementary School Principal Debra Pustulka and paraprofessional Monika Sommers-Fridenstine after an investigation found that the two forced a 9-year-old student to eat food retrieved from a garbage can. A lawsuit filed by the girl’s family says Pustulka told the girl she had to finish what was on her tray. The girl didn’t want the food and threw it away. Sommers-Fridenstine retrieved the food and forced the girl to eat it as other students watched.

The post Brickbats: April 2022 appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/haqINz4
via IFTTT

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy


minisCrack--Cocaine,-Corruption-_-Conspiracy_netflix

It “seemed like a good idea at the time,” former Rep. Charles Rangel (D–N.Y.) says in the Netflix documentary Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy. Rangel, who represented Harlem from 1971 to 2017, is talking about the draconian political response to the crack cocaine “epidemic” of the 1980s.

That response included a federal sentencing scheme, backed by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D–Del.), that treated crack as if it were 100 times worse than cocaine powder and imposed a five-year mandatory minimum for possessing as little as five grams. Crack reminds us of the circumstances in which policies like those, which overwhelmingly targeted African Americans, seemed like a good idea to supposedly liberal black Democrats such as Rangel. “Clearly,” he says now, “it was overkill.”

The documentary recalls seminal events in the tangled cultural history of crack, such as Nancy Reagan’s inane but widely echoed “Just Say No” campaign, the 1986 death of college basketball star Len Bias, the scientifically baseless “crack baby” panic, and the 1989 TV address in which President George H.W. Bush dramatically held up a bag of crack, telling America this “innocent-looking” substance was “turning our cities into battle zones.” The teenaged drug dealer who provided Bush’s prop after he was lured to “a park just across the street from the White House” ended up serving nearly a decade in prison.

“I can’t feel sorry for the fella,” Bush remarked, expressing a sentiment you’d expect from a politician who urged Americans to “rise up united and express our intolerance.” Alarmed by the violence and corruption caused by the very policies Bush was so keen to enforce, a bipartisan, transracial majority did just that, destroying many lives in the process.

The post Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/ZQEG0I7
via IFTTT

Unmask


minisunmask

Those getting red in the face over mask mandates can breathe a little easier now thanks to the subversive innovation of UnMask. The brand offers consumers a lightweight mesh face covering that fulfills the requirements of those persistent public health orders while doing nothing to prevent the wearer from sucking in all the oxygen and aerosols she desires.

Easier respiration is only one benefit. The product also creates that juvenile joy that only comes from simultaneously honoring and undermining an arbitrary restriction—the COVID-era equivalent of wearing a tuxedo T-shirt to a black-tie event. A variety of colors and patterns lets you add a little style to your subversion.

Like the constricting cloth mask it replaces, UnMask is not the best product for someone with a cough who is visiting grandma. You’ll still want an actually effective N95 mask for that. But for those less sensitive occasions where mask mandates are purely performative, UnMask helps you look and perform at your best.

The post Unmask appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/w6n9E7S
via IFTTT

Brickbats: April 2022


BB1

As Jerod Draper was dying of a meth overdose, video shows that staff at the Harrison County, Indiana, jail did not immediately seek medical attention for him. Instead, they placed him in a restraint chair and placed a hood over his head, used their Tasers on him repeatedly, stomped his feet, and used pain compliance holds on him. Harrison County officials agreed to pay $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Draper’s family, but no one at the jail has been criminally charged in the incident.

Hong Kong police have charged two former editors of the pro-democracy newspaper Stand News with sedition. Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, who face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($640), were denied bail. Police also detained four Stand News board members for questioning. The newspaper said in December it was ceasing publication and laying off all its staff.

Former Ventura County, California, Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Charles Barrios III has been sentenced to one year in prison followed by two years’ probation after pleading guilty to destroying physical evidence. Barrios trashed the results of a drug test showing that a woman he had arrested for driving under the influence was clean. He then told a supervisor the woman refused to give a urine sample. After the woman complained to another deputy, the second deputy found the drug test. The woman provided a second sample, which also tested negative, and the charges against her were dropped.

As omicron cases soared in the winter, Quebec Premier François Legault imposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to battle the spread of COVID-19. Legault has also barred gatherings at private homes and indoor dining at restaurants.

When a Redmond, Washington, police officer shot Andrea Thomas Churna six times, killing her, she was lying on the floor of the hallway outside her apartment and complying with police orders. That was September 20, 2020. The King County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the shooting, says the officer who fired the shots and other officers on the scene have refused to cooperate with the investigation, and the local prosecutor has yet to file any charges. Churna, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other emotional and psychological issues, called police because she believed someone was trying to kill her. When they arrived, she was armed and admitted to firing a shot. But The Seattle Times reports she had put the weapon down and had been lying on the ground for more than three minutes before she was shot.

Trent Kellee Freeman, a former sheriff’s office detective in Florida’s Gilchrist County, has been charged with filing fraudulent Family Medical Leave Act paperwork, forging the signatures of doctors, and falsely claiming to have been hospitalized and even in a coma for medical issues including COVID-19. In reality, she had started a new job elsewhere. The agency also said Freeman bilked coworkers out of about $4,000 in donated sick leave.

The school board in Lorain, Ohio, has fired Palm Elementary School Principal Debra Pustulka and paraprofessional Monika Sommers-Fridenstine after an investigation found that the two forced a 9-year-old student to eat food retrieved from a garbage can. A lawsuit filed by the girl’s family says Pustulka told the girl she had to finish what was on her tray. The girl didn’t want the food and threw it away. Sommers-Fridenstine retrieved the food and forced the girl to eat it as other students watched.

The post Brickbats: April 2022 appeared first on Reason.com.

from Latest https://ift.tt/haqINz4
via IFTTT