breitbart--2019-09-24--Brazils Bolsonaro Accuses UN of Aiding Slave Labor at General Assembly

Brazil's Bolsonaro Accuses U.N. of Aiding ‘Slave Labor’ at General Assembly

Bolsonaro made the accusation in relation to Cuba’s slave doctor system, in which the communist regime forces doctors to work without pay abroad, taking almost the entirety of their salaries and investing them in the luxury lifestyles of the regime’s leaders. The doctors are expected to live off of a “stipend” that many say often fails to cover basic food needs. Cuba makes an estimated $11 billion off of the slave doctor trade in deals with African, Latin American, and Pacific Island states.  One of Bolsonaro’s first acts after taking office in January was to end the Brazilian Cuban slave doctor program, known as Mais Médicos (“More Doctors”). Bolsonaro demanded that Cuba give a reasonable salary to its doctors from the payments that Brasilia makes Havana, prompting the regime to end the program entirely.  In New York, Bolsonaro noted that U.N. bodies like the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) openly aid and benefit from the Cuban slave doctor trade.  “In 2013, an agreement between the former[ly ruling] Workers’ Party [PT] and the Cuban dictatorship brought to Brazil 10,000 doctors,” Bolsonaro explained. The agreement “prevented [the doctors] from bringing their spouses or children and 75 percent of their wages were confiscated by the Cuban regime.”  “They were further prevented from enjoying fundamental rights like, for example, coming and going [from Brazil,” Bolsonaro noted. “It is truly tantamount to slave labor.”  Bolsonaro made clear that this slave labor was “supported by human rights organizations in Brazil and United Nations organizations.”  The PAHO was a signatory to the deal between Brazil and Cuba that created Mais Médicos. Inviting PAHO to participate in the deal would allow the then-socialist government of Brazil not to have to put the plan to import thousands of Cuban slave doctors before Congress, where it would have failed. An agreement between only Brazil and Cuba would legally be a treaty and thus require legislative approval. An agreement with the aid of an international organization like PAHO made the terms of the agreement secret and out of reach of the voters or lawmakers.  PAHO took a payment from the Brazilian government to be involved in the deal.  The Brazilian president also made the case that his country had direct experience with the evils of Cuba’s communist regime, when mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara attempted to foment revolution in South America.  “In the 1960s, Cuban agents were sent out to several countries to collaborate towards implementing dictatorships in the region. A few decades ago, they tried to change the Brazilian regime … they were defeated,” Bolsonaro said, making a vague reference to the right-wing Brazilian military regime that took over in response to communist agitation.  Bolsonaro ended his remarks warning the world that socialism and communism have “left a path of death, ignorance, and stark poverty wherever [they go].”


breitbart--2019-11-19--China: Only Communist Courts Can Interpret Hong Kong Law

Chinese authorities berated the High Court of Hong Kong on Monday for ruling that banning face coverings in public is “unconstitutional,” claiming that only Beijing’s communist lawmakers have the right to rule on such matters.  In their ruling on Monday, two high court judges ruled that the emergency legislation imposing a ban on face masks in public areas that came into effect last month was incompatible with Hong Kong’s Basic Law. They also ruled that the law had violated people’s fundamental rights and freedoms.  “The need for an urgent response is no justification for departing from or impugning the constitutional scheme,” the judges wrote in their ruling “We believe [the ordinance] is not compatible with the constitutional order laid down by the Basic Law.”  The Basic Law is essentially the city’s constitution. Under the “One Country, Two Systems” policy, Hong Kong is not a sovereign entity, but China cannot impose its laws there.  In response, local authorities confirmed that they would impose a temporary ban on the masks after prosecutors sought adjournment “to consider the situation.”  The ruling sparked a furious reaction from Beijing. Jian Tiewei, a spokesperson for the Chinese legislative affairs commission, declared that the National People’s Congress had the sole authority to rule on constitutional matters in the region. The National People’s Congress is the chief lawmaking body of China.  “Whether the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region comply with the Basic Law of Hong Kong can only be judged and decided by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress,” said Jian. “No other authority has the right to make judgments and decisions.”  Jian added that the ruling “severely weakened the governance” of Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, who was appointed by China on the basis that she would bow to Beijing’s demands.  He did not explain how giving the Chinese legislature sole power to write and interpret Hong Kong law fits into the “One Country, Two Systems” policy.  According to the Chinese state propaganda outlet Global Times, the verdict will “further disrupt the value of right from wrong in Hong Kong society and make some people show more sympathy to rioters, instead of stepping up their criticism of violence.”  “Opposition in the city has always accused the police of ‘abuse of force,’ but never condemned those rioters who sabotage the city and attack the police lethally,” the Times argued. “The court’s verdict will let the opposition believe that this is their victory.”  Hong Kong has experienced widespread civil unrest since early June when pro-democracy activists took to the streets to oppose an extradition bill that would have permitted criminal suspects to be sent to China for trial. The protesters have since added four demands, including the direct election of lawmakers to ensure control over what laws get written, to their list.  “The growing violence has almost destroyed the rule of law in and the modernity of Hong Kong. The city is at its last gasp as an international financial center. And the current ruling has closed its door to the emergency room,” the Times continued. “It is a pity that some judges in Hong Kong have not fully fulfilled their responsibility to jointly fight violence.”  Although Carrie Lam has since scrapped the proposal, the demonstrations have continued for the four other demands.  Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com


breitbart--2019-11-22--PA Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf: Women ‘Must Be Able’ to Abort Babies with Down Syndrome

Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed legislation Thursday that would have prohibited abortions based on a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.  “There is no evidence that this bill is needed in Pennsylvania,” Wolf said in his veto message, and added:  This legislation is a restriction on women and medical professionals and interferes with women’s health care and the crucial decision-making between patients and their physicians. Physicians and their patients must be able to make choices about medical procedures based on best practices and standards of care. The prohibitions under this bill are not consistent with the fundamental rights vested by the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.  Wolf continued he was not aware of disability rights groups that support the bill, though elected representatives in both chambers of the state legislature passed it.  In an earlier message in which he indicated he would be vetoing the bill, Wolf criticized the pro-life community stating, “This bill masks yet another attempt to ban abortions and put politicians between a woman and her doctor.”  “[T]his is a particularly cynical way to impugn women seeking constitutionally protected health care options,” the governor added.  In December 2017, Wolf also vetoed a measure that would have banned dismemberment abortion — also known as dilation and evacuation abortion (D&E) — which is generally performed during the second trimester of pregnancy. During this procedure, the unborn baby’s limbs are torn off its body prior to removing him or her from the mother’s uterus. Wolf said the ban was “extreme” and “restrictive” for women.  Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business —announced in June 2018 it would be spending $1.5 million to ensure Wolf was re-elected last November.


breitbart--2019-12-23--Establishment Media Runs Away from J.K. Rowling's Transgender Debate

The U.S. establishment media is running away from a lucrative click-bait debate on sex and science, which is sponsored by the wealthy and famous author of the Harry Potter franchise, J.K. Rowling.  The December 19 offer came when Rowling championed the free speech rights of one woman — Maya Forestator — while simultaneously supporting sexual freedom, science, and the public’s right to recognize the different, equal, and complementary biological sexes of women and men.  Rowling’s tweeted support for sexual freedom, and free speech was ignored by pro-transgender groups, who spent their time jeering and chanting repetitive slogans.  The slogans were amplified by establishment media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, which avoided the fundamental sex, science, and speech issues raised by Rowling.  The only establishment journalist who engaged the debate turned out to be Andrew Sullivan, a British-born, sometimes-conservative gay author. The first half of his December 20 column in New York magazine was a passionate criticism of President Donald Trump, while the second half championed Rowling:  It’s vital to note that Forstater is prepared to treat any trans woman as a woman in real life, defends trans people’s rights to define themselves as they wish, has not been charged with any kind of harassment or in-person abuse, is happy to accept anyone’s adoption of any of a thousand possible genders, but simply refuses to say what she doesn’t believe: that sex can be chosen or assigned, rather than simply observed as a matter of biology. “I accept everybody’s gender identity; I just do not believe it overrides their sex,” she told the court. “I refuse to believe human beings can change their sex.” This view — almost universally held for millennia until five minutes ago, and rooted in the plain facts of science — is now, the court ruled, subject to legal sanction. Such a view is “incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others“ and “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” So anyone expressing an opinion like Forstater’s can be fired with no recourse. This is how J.K. Rowling tweeted her support of Forstater’s freedom of speech: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” This completely liberal viewpoint defending a distinction between sex and gender was immediately trashed by the Twitter mob with the vitriol usually reserved for, well, Martina Navratilova, who also defended women’s sports as defined by sex, not gender, and was subject to mass obloquy. Note that the judgment against Forstater rests not on the idea that she is wrong but that her argument is fundamentally illegitimate and shouldn’t even be entertained, let alone accorded respect. It rests on the banishment of a valid viewpoint from all public debate on a highly controversial matter. When you study the actual judgment, though, you find a lengthy discussion of chromosomes, hormones, gender, and sex in a complex arena. It’s clear that this is a real debate, that we have only just begun to think it through, that there are some fascinating philosophical questions involved, and that more research and debate is needed. But the ruling determines that one side in that debate can participate only under the threat of punitive sanctions.  In contrast, the progressive staff at the Washington Post demoted the dispute to its “Internet culture” columnists, who focused almost entirely on those pro-transgender complaints. “J.K. Rowling tried to make her work more inclusive. Then she tweeted support for an anti-trans researcher,” said their headline.  The Post also printed a December 21 emotional op-ed response by a pro-transgender lobbyist:  In the magical world of Harry Potter, the justice-minded and rebellious adolescent characters drink something called “Polyjuice Potion” to temporarily take on the general appearance of other people, even those of entirely different anatomies and gender expressions. As a teenager, I remember reading this and thinking, “Oh God, I wish it were that easy.” Waking up Thursday morning to Rowling’s unequivocal defense of Forstater was searing. I felt foolish and betrayed. I felt guilty for not affirming my siblings in the trans and non-binary community who had the courage to speak out against her history with conviction.  The New York Times‘ article followed the same pro-transgender format, with its headline saying “J.K. Rowling Criticized After Tweeting Support for Anti-Transgender Researcher.” The article quoted three critics but offered no quotes from supporters of Rowling or Forstator.  The New York Times blocked reader comments. The Washington Post allowed comments on its news article, and the comments — were overwhelming in favor of Rowling and against the article’s authors.  Many other outlets were even worse.  Vox.com posted two pro-transgender articles, with the headlines “J.K. Rowling’s latest tweet seems like transphobic BS. Her fans are heartbroken,” and “J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture.”  Most media outlets just sketched the fight without describing the feminist case against the aggressive demands of the transgender ideology. Even the Associated Press spotlighted the transgender complaints while downplaying the arguments for Rowling’s sex-beats-gender experience.  Unexpectedly, CNN’s article looked past the pro-transgender complaints, but its London-based business reporter posted that article. She reported:  But aside from the outpouring of criticism, the author also received plenty of praise for what her defenders believe is a strong feminist statement. The clash that ensued illustrates an ongoing debate that’s been happening in Britain around trans rights and feminism. Writer and campaigner Helen Saxby was one of those who voiced her support for Forstater and Rowling. “If we are forced to say ‘transwomen are women,’ women’s rights disappear overnight, and we are left with people’s rights,” she said on Twitter, adding: “People’s rights favour men because men are the default people. That’s why we fought for women’s rights in the first place.”  But the establishment media cannot block the debate, partly because it is continuing in Breitbart, and online, despite Twitter’s skewed pro-transgender rules. For example, Twitter bars reference to the sex of transgender people, while allowing pro-transgender activists to stereotype their critics as ‘TERFs.”  The Women’s Liberation Front group spotlighted the growing left-wing opposition to the transgender push.  The pro-transgender groups responded with slogans, abuse, and emotional blackmail.  Breitbart has extensively covered the pro-transgender groups that say the government should force Americans to accept the chaotic claims of diverse sexual identities by people who claim to have a “gender” that somehow does not match their body and brain.  Breitbart has also covered the flip-side — the conservative and feminist Americans who want the government to support their evolved civic rules and laws which were developed to help women and men prosper equally and freely, and which recognize that the two sexes have different and complementary needs because they are biologically different and complementary.


buzzfeed--2019-07-23--Opinion Working People Need A New Bill Of Rights As President Ill Make One

Opinion: Working People Need A New Bill Of Rights. As President, I'll Make One.

Let’s cut to the chase: Working people are having their fundamental rights stripped away, and we’re running out of time to get them back.  For decades now, big corporations and the wealthiest Americans have counted on both parties to ram through an agenda that prevents the middle class from sharing in the fruits of their work. They’ve benefited from Reaganomics and the Trump Tax Giveaway, the bailout for the big banks, and Wall Street “reform” that let too many off easily.  While the 1 percent thrive, working people are going backward. A single full-time job used to be enough to support a family; now two parents both working multiple part-time jobs can struggle to put food on the table. They can lose their job if they get ill or their car needs repairs, trapping them permanently in the cycle of poverty.  These people power the economy, but the rewards have gone to those who often don’t know the meaning of hard work. After all, there’s plenty of money in this country – it’s just in the wrong hands.  We’ll need bold reforms to change that: a 21st Century Working People’s Bill of Rights. That’s what I’m introducing today, a comprehensive set of pro-worker policies that will ensure we restore the rights of working Americans. You can look at the full set of proposals on my website, but I wanted to share several with you today.    We’re beginning with the Right to Due Process at Work, which will end at-will employment, and guarantee that no employee can be fired without just cause. It’s shameful that employees can be fired at any time and for almost any reason — even if their boss is just in bad mood. With this new right, employees couldn’t be fired unless they’ve failed to do their job, and they’d have due process protections afterward to ensure that’s the case.  Every working American will also have the Right to Paid Time Off, thanks to the farthest-reaching paid leave policy of any 2020 candidate. It mandates paid family and medical leave, as well as paid sick days for all. It’s also the only proposal in the field to mandate two weeks of paid vacation time for every worker, a fundamental right enjoyed by every other developed country on earth. Americans work hard; they deserve to take a break.  One more right I’m particularly proud of: the Right to a Fair Job in the Gig Economy. Too often, companies like Uber care more about their profits than the people who do the work. It’s time to ensure the people who create the wealth for these apps share in it, by providing minimum pay and benefits standards for freelance workers. These companies need to treat their workers like employees when they are — not independent contractors for whom they can cut corners on pay and benefits. We’re also creating universal, transferable benefits systems for gig workers. They should be able to earn health and retirement benefits like anyone else, and they shouldn’t have to be tied to a single app to do so.  These are just some of the steps I’ll take as president to put power back in the hands of those who deserve it. Every Democratic candidate claims they’re for working people. But too few have spelled out concrete steps they’d take to help them, and fewer still have shown the leadership and know-how to make it happen.  As the mayor of our nation’s largest city, I've established many of these rights already, and they’re making a difference in the lives of 8.6 million Americans. We’ve led the way in the fight for a $15 minimum wage and enacted paid sick leave so that New Yorkers don’t have to worry about losing their livelihoods if they go to the hospital. We’ve already had fair scheduling on the books for two years.  Ensuring these rights for workers has helped make New York City the fairest big city in America. We’re putting money back in the right hands.  It’s time for our country — and our party — to do the same.


chicagosuntimes--2019-11-20--Aldermen propose paid city holiday to commemorate Juneteenth

The cash-strapped city of Chicago has been roundly criticized over the years for granting city employees far more paid holidays than their counterparts in private industry.  If Aldermen Maria Hadden (49th) and David Moore (17th) have their way, the city would add yet another: June 19th.  At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Hadden and Moore introduced an ordinance requiring City Hall and other local government buildings to be closed on the date known as “Juneteenth” to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.  “It is not enough for the city of Chicago to just have parades, barbecues and events celebrating Juneteenth. Chicago must recognize Juneteenth as an official city holiday, which will help support the campaign to recognize ‘Juneteenth National Freedom Day’ as a national holiday,” the preamble to the ordinance states.  The ordinance notes “millions of African-Americans fled to” Chicago “in two migration waves” and “shaped the face” of the city “through blood, sweat and tears.”  “Despite segregation and denial of fundamental rights, Chicago politics, entertainment, sports and civic life have all been impacted by the strength and heart of these descendants of enslaved people,” the ordinance states.  “A city founded by Jean Point du Sable, an African descendant, the home of Barack Obama, the first African-American President, and now led by its first African-American lesbian mayor can serve as a symbol and vessel that pushes this [national holiday] campaign forward.”  Already, city employees get 12 paid holidays: New Year’s Day; the birthdays of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; Casimir Pulaski Day; Memorial Day; July 4th; Labor Day; Columbus Day; Veteran’s Day; Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.  The cost of one more city holiday was not immediately known.  The ordinance was co-signed by 18 aldermen, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s City Council floor leader.  It comes as Black Caucus members also are pushing to at least begin a politically volatile debate about granting some form of reparations to Chicago descendants of slaves.


cnbc--2019-08-05--Heres how websites like 8chan get taken down

Here's how websites like 8chan get 'taken down'

Here are some of the players, where they stand and how they work.  As a result, the products that provide hosting or security services to these controversial sites have themselves become part of the story.  In particular, these forums rely on the products that keep them safe from large-scale web attacks, especially those known as "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attacks, which deliver an overload of information to servers, shutting the sites down. The sites are under constant threat of these attacks because of the controversial rhetoric hosted on them.  But 8chan and other similarly controversial sites have a very difficult time operating without the hosting infrastructure in place to support them.  Online forum 8chan is controversial because several people used it to espouse white supremacist views before allegedly committing mass shootings in El Paso, Texas; Poway, Calif. and Christchurch, New Zealand.  Cloudflare is one of the largest companies that provides DDoS protection services, and is reportedly preparing for an IPO later this year. The company has a full range of products, but the DDoS service is most relevant to 8chan's plight.  Cloudflare announced over the weekend it would no longer work with 8chan as a customer, meaning it would effectively end offering its protective capabilities against DDoS attacks. The 8chan site went down shortly after Cloudflare pulled its support, and said it expected "24-48 hours" of downtime in a tweet late Sunday.  "Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. At some level firing 8chan as a customer is easy. They are uniquely lawless and that lawlessness has contributed to multiple horrific tragedies. Enough is enough," CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post on the company's website.  Prince also went on to say that creating these policies can be difficult, because tech companies have not yet worked out how to apply them consistently and fairly to all purveyors of inflammatory or inciteful speech.  "What's hard is defining the policy that we can enforce transparently and consistently going forward. We, and other technology companies like us that enable the great parts of the Internet, have an obligation to help propose solutions to deal with the parts we're not proud of. That's our obligation and we're committed to it," he said.  In its place, 8chan reportedly sought the services of a smaller DDoS mitigation service called BitMitigate, owned by web hosting company Epik, based in Sammamish, Wash.  Epik is known for working with websites connected white supremacy, like the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, after they were dropped from Cloudflare's service. The company said that, despite reports, Epik has not "made a definitive decision about whether to provide DDoS mitigation or Content Delivery services for [8Chan]," according to an Epik spokesperson, via email.  For a while, it appeared 8Chan was getting back online intermittently on Monday. Then, another tech company called Voxility, which rents hardware to Epik, discoutinued its service to Epik. This made it impossible for BitMitigate to reach 8chan, and effectively shut down 8chan again.  Voxility wrote in response that "We are all in the same team here! Thank you for the support and for the notes. The 3rd party hoster is blocked completely."  According to the Epik spokesperson, the question of whether to provide services to these websites is related to freedom of speech. The spokesperson also said the company's stance was that 8Chan was complying with legal requirements.  "Freedom of speech and expression are fundamental rights in a free society. We enter into a slippery slope when we start to limit speech that makes us uncomfortable. The censorship we've seen across major social media platforms as of late has created a vacuum. Our services fill the ever growing need for a neutral service provider that will not arbitrarily terminate accounts based on social or political pressure."


cnn--2019-03-21--US sending diplomats to speak at migration summit

US sending diplomats to speak at migration summit -- in hardline Hungary

The US State Department is sending two high-level officials to a migration summit this weekend in Hungary -- a country whose controversial far-right ruling party has maintained a hardline anti-migration stance, with one of the strictest policies against immigrants in Europe, and has cracked down on civic organizations, the media and academic institutions.  It is notable that none of the US's key European allies -- Germany, France, or the United Kingdom -- are sending any representatives from their foreign ministries. And the decision by the US to take part comes amid concerns over the spreading influence of far-right ultra nationalist parties on the continent. Poland is the only other country besides the US and Hungary with a government official scheduled to speak; they're sending a minister for humanitarian aid programs.  Hungary has built a border fence, sent the bill for it to the EU, and made it a crime for citizens to offer help to undocumented immigrants. The State Department officials will speak at the summit just days after Hungary's ruling party was suspended from its EU Parliamentary coalition after refusing to moderate its views.  "We cannot compromise on democracy, rule of law, freedom of press, academic freedom or minorities rights. And anti-EU rhetoric is unacceptable. The divergences between EPP and Fidesz must cease," Joseph Daul, the president of that coalition (the European People's Party) said Wednesday.  Meanwhile, Balazs Orban, the deputy minister and parliamentary state secretary for the Prime Minister's Office, is touting this Budapest migration summit, which is organized by a Hungarian university, as a way to further their agenda, a place to "gather serious intellectual ammunition." "The migration policy of the Hungarian government, including determined, consistent, forward-looking strategic considerations, makes the country exciting for professionals who are concerned about massive illegal migration worldwide," Balazs Orban told a Hungarian news outlet. A State Department spokesperson said the officials who will attend and speak at the summit -- Andrew Veprek, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and Pete Marocco, deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations -- "are attending the conference to discuss the U.S. government's policies and approaches to international migration issues, stabilization, and conflict mitigation." The summit will feature speakers from a variety of think tanks, educational institutions and religious organizations, according to its website . Numerous officials from the Hungarian government are also listed as speakers. Among those taking part are several from organizations who say their missions center on the preservation of western values and Christianity. For example one of the partner groups, the Center for Fundamental Rights, which is based in Hungary, notes that it "considers preserving national identity, sovereignty and Christian social traditions as its mission." "It is a well-known aim of the Center to form a counter against today's overgrown human rights-fundamentalism and political correctness that have been affecting numerous aspects of our everyday life," the group's website says. Two speakers are coming from Harvard-- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam, and George Borjas, an economist who supports restricting immigration. Veprek, one of the State Department officials attending, has previously provoked controversy. As CNN reported exclusively in June 2018, Veprek disputed the idea that leaders have a "duty" to condemn hate speech and incitement, and repeatedly rejected use of the words nationalism, populism, and xenophobia. He sought to strike that language from standard UN documents, saying, "There are millions of Americans who likely would describe themselves as adhering to these concepts. (Maybe even the President.). So are we looking to here condemn our fellow-citizens, those who pay our salaries?". In September 2018 , House Democrats issued a scathing letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, expressing concern about the "Trump Administration's policy of remaining silent in international fora about racism and xenophobia and declining to condemn hate speech and incitement." The letter, signed by the ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee and the chairs of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, referenced that June report. Pompeo, who traveled to Budapest in February, defended the US' engagement with Hungary despite concerns about their respect for the rule of law, saying the US would "certainly make the case about the things that we see that we wish were different here." "I think they are welcoming United States engagement," he said at the time. "I'm confident they'll listen."


cnn--2019-05-28--Supreme Court agrees to hear cross-border shooting case

The teenager, 15-year-old Sergio Hernandez, was shot to death by the agent in 2010 as he cowered behind a pillar in Mexico. Hernandez's family says the agent violated his constitutional rights.  The case comes as lower courts have split on the issue of whether agents can be held liable for the deaths of migrants at the border, and as the Trump administration is considering more measures to reduce migration.  Solicitor General Noel Francisco has maintained that the family of the teen cannot come to court to sue for damages.  In court briefs, Francisco argued that "imposing a damages remedy on aliens injured abroad by US government officials would implicate foreign-policy considerations that are committed to the political branches" and would inject the courts into sensitive matters of international diplomacy that would "risk undermining the government's ability to speak with one voice in international affairs."  Francisco urged the justices to take up the case next term and affirm a lower court opinion that blocked the family's lawsuit from going forward. Francisco said the Supreme Court should hear the case because lower courts have split on the issue. The decision by the appeals court in the Hernandez case, for example, conflicts with a ruling in the case of another cross-border shooting, which occurred along the Arizona-Mexico border in 2012. In 2010, Hernandez was with friends on a cement culvert that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The international border runs down the middle of the culvert. Hernandez's parents say their son and the others were playing a game: crossing the border, touching a fence and then running back to Mexico soil. They accused Jesus Mesa Jr., the Border Patrol agent, of arriving on the scene and fatally shooting their son. US Border Patrol shooting of Mexican national goes to Supreme Court According to the government, Mesa resorted to force only after Hernandez refused to follow commands to stop throwing rocks. The Justice Department declined to bring a criminal charge against Mesa in 2012. Lawyers for Mexico filed a friend of the court brief with the justices urging them to take up the case, arguing that in "recent years" officers of the US border agencies have killed "dozens of individuals at or near the U.S. Mexico border." "When agents of the United States government violate fundamental rights of Mexican nationals and others within Mexico's jurisdiction, it is a priority to Mexico to see that the United States has provided adequate means to hold the agents accountable and to compensate the victims," they wrote, adding that the US would expect "no less" if the situation were reversed.


cnn--2019-06-01--Illinois Nevada approve legislation expanding access to abortion removing long-standing criminal p

Illinois, Nevada approve legislation expanding access to abortion, removing long-standing criminal penalties

The Illinois Legislature has sent Senate Bill 25, also called the Reproductive Health Act, to the governor's desk that would protect the "fundamental rights of individuals to make autonomous decisions about one's own reproductive health." The measure passed the Illinois Democratic-led Senate late Friday with a 34-20 vote. Only one Democrat voted against the bill, and Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has said he will sign the legislation.  Under the bill, pregnant women have the "fundamental right" to have an abortion and a "fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus does not have independent rights."  It repeals the Illinois Abortion Law of 1975, which penalized doctors for performing the procedure, and the state's ban on partial-birth abortions. The bill also provides insurance requirements to cover abortion procedures.  Bush said there's a "real possibility" that in the coming years the Supreme Court could overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Her bill, she said, "guarantees that women in Illinois have the right to make decisions about their bodies, regardless of what happens at the federal level." The bill will immediately take effect once the governor signs it into law. "Today was a major step forward for every woman in this state and I look forward continuing my work as an ally by signing the Reproductive Healthcare Act into law," Pritzker wrote in tweet on Tuesday. In Nevada on Friday, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak signed the "Trust Nevada Women Act," Senate Bill 179, which removes long-standing criminal penalties for abortion and requirements for medical providers. "Nevada has a long history of trusting the women of our state to make their own reproductive health care decisions and protecting the right to reproductive freedom," Sisolak said at the bill signing ceremony. The new law decriminalizes certain actions related to performing abortions, abortion drugs and abortion prosecution. It rewrites existing state abortion laws that require physicians to notify a pregnant woman about the "emotional implications" of an abortion, instead requiring doctors "describe the nature and consequences of the procedure." Physicians in the state would also no longer have to certify in writing a pregnant woman's marital status and age before performing an abortion as previous laws required. "In light of increasing attacks at the federal level and in other states such as Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, and Louisiana, SB179 reaffirms Nevada's commitment to protecting reproductive freedom and access to reproductive health care," Sisolak said Friday. He continued, "I have been disappointed by the recent uptick in efforts in other states to restrict women's right to choose, and I am especially proud today to be a Nevadan, where we protect a woman's right to make her own decisions about her own body." Sisolak also signed Senate Bill 94, which allocates $6 million in funding for statewide family planning grants.


cnn--2019-12-18--Fact check: Trump's wild letter to Pelosi is filled with false and misleading claims

And it was just as dishonest.  On Tuesday afternoon, Trump released a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which -- employing his distinctive vocabulary and punctuation -- he blasted Democrats' push to impeach him, defended his dealings with Ukraine and touted his accomplishments in office.  Like much of his previous rhetoric about Ukraine and impeachment, much of the letter was false or misleading.  Trump repeated multiple false claims that have been debunked on numerous occasions. He also delivered some new claims that were false, misleading or lacking in context.  We're not finished going through all of Trump's claims in his letter, but here are some early fact checks.  Trump decried "the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made."  Trump claimed the whistleblower "disappeared" because "they got caught, their report was a fraud."  Facts First: There is no evidence the whistleblower has disappeared, let alone that they have vanished because they were shown to be inaccurate. Whistleblowers do not have an obligation to speak publicly after filing their anonymous complaints.  Trump wrote, "Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: 'No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on.'"  Trump wrote that the rough transcript of his call with Zelensky "was immediately made available."  Facts First: The call occurred in July. Trump released the rough transcript in September, after the public learned of the existence of the whistleblower complaint about the call.  Trump wrote, "President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that it was a 'good phone call,' that 'I don't feel pressure,' and explicitly stressed that 'nobody pushed me.'"  Trump wrote, "I said to President Zelensky: 'I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.' I said do a favor, not , and , not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States."  Trump wrote that Biden "used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars."  Trump wrote, "Biden openly stated: 'I said, "I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars"... I looked at them and said: "I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money." Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.'" Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it 'looked bad.'"  Trump wrote, "Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did."  Trump wrote, "I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses."  Trump wrote, "More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials."  Trump wrote of Hillary Clinton: "Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227)."  Trump said Pelosi has a policy of "open borders."  Trump again claimed the cost of the Mueller investigation was "45 million dollars."  Trump said that the world now knows that former FBI Director James Comey is "one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen."  Trump boasted of the US "becoming the world's top energy producer."  Trump claimed "a completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans."  Trump touted "the building of the Southern Border Wall."  Facts First: As of December 6, the date of the latest official update from Customs and Border Protection, no miles of border wall had been constructed where barriers did not previously exist. (Construction had started on some new barriers, the government said.) Trump has argued that the replacement of old barriers with newer barriers should count as the building of his wall; as of December 6, 90 miles of replacement barriers had been erected.


cnsnews--2019-02-13--Rep Omar Promotes Tweet That Israel Is Like the South Before 1963

Rep. Omar Promotes Tweet That 'Israel Is Like the South Before 1963'

(CNSNews.com) -- House Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who was chastised on Monday by her own Democratic Party leaders for releasing anti-Semitic tweets, in late January promoted a tweet that compared Israel to the segregated U.S. South in 1963 -- before the Civil rights Act of 1964 -- and claimed that "Israel is not a real democracy."  "Many of them truly know this, but don't want to accept it," said Omar in endorsing the Jan. 31 tweet from left-wing activist @maxberger.  In his initial tweet at 10:22PM on Jan. 31, @maxberger "No More Billionaires 2020" wrote, @IlhanMN is right: Israel is not a real democracy. Israel is like the south before 1963: millions of people under Israeli control are denied the right to vote, speak freely or assemble because of their ethnicity."  "It's a democracy for Jews only," said @maxberger. "That's not a real democracy."  Congressowoman Omar promoted that tweet to her 558,000 followers on Twitter 16 minutes later, at 10:38 PM on Jan. 31.  Above the piece she wrote, "Many of them truly know this, but don't want to accept it. In the same way many Americans knew separate yet equal was immoral but remained silent until brave few were silent no more."  "They can attack, spin my words and vilify me," wrote Omar, "but they will not succeed in silencing me!"  According to the U.S. State Department, "Israel is a multiparty parliamentary democracy. Although it has no constitution, the parliament, the unicameral 120-member Knesset, has enacted a series of 'Basic Laws' that enumerate fundamental rights. Certain fundamental laws, orders, and regulations legally depend on the existence of a 'state of emergency,' which has been in effect since 1948.  "Under the Basic Laws, the Knesset has the power to dissolve the government and mandate elections. The nationwide Knesset elections in 2015, which were considered free and fair, resulted in a coalition government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu."  "The law provides citizens the ability to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections held by secret ballot and based on universal and equal suffrage," said the U.S. State Department. "The Basic Laws prohibit the candidacy of any party or individual that denies the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people or the democratic character of the state or that incites racism. Otherwise, political parties operated without restriction or interference."


cnsnews--2019-06-17--VTs GOP Gov Signs Law Making Abortion a Fundamental Human Right Abortion Up To Birth

VT’s GOP Gov. Signs Law Making Abortion a ‘Fundamental Human Right,’ Abortion Up To Birth

(CNSNews.com) -- Last week, Vermont Governor Phil Scott signed H. 57, a bill affirming abortion as a “fundamental human right,” and which would allow abortion up to the moment of birth.  The bill states, “The State of Vermont recognizes the fundamental right of every individual who becomes pregnant to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to have an abortion.”  It also states, “A fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus shall not have independent rights under Vermont law.”  Another section of the bill prohibits any “interference with reproductive choice,” stating, “A public entity…shall not, in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information, deny or interfere with an individual’s fundamental rights to choose or refuse contraception or sterilization or to choose to carry a pregnancy to term, to give birth to a child, or to obtain an abortion.”  Finally, the bill states that any individual denied an abortion will have the right to sue the person who denied it.  “An individual injured as a result of a violation of this chapter shall have a private right of action in Superior Court against a public entity for injunctive relief arising from the violation.”  The bill gives no specifications or restrictions on abortion in relation to the pregnancy stage or fetal development.  The bill passed the legislature in May and was signed into law on June 10.  “We need a Vermont where every Vermonter should feel free to make their personal decisions about their sexual and reproductive health care,” said House Speaker Mitzi Johnson (D).  “They should be guaranteed unrestricted access to the doctors and the procedures that encompass the full range of that care, including abortion care.”  Governor Phil Scott sent out the following press release regarding the bill:  “Like many Vermonters, I have consistently supported a woman’s right to choose, which is why today I signed H.57 into law. This legislation affirms what is already allowable in Vermont – protecting reproductive rights and ensuring those decisions remain between a woman and her health care provider.”  “This means a healthy, viable baby could be killed at 8 months, thirty days gestation. It means the abortion could be delayed or done in a manner to permit organ harvesting,” Wesley Smith, an opponent of the bill wrote for Life Site News, “It means that a fetus whose brain was sufficiently developed to experience pain could be torn slowly apart in the womb in the most agonizing manner. It would also allow sex-selection abortion and, if it were ever possible to determine, termination to prevent a gay baby from being born.”


cnsnews--2019-06-26--Pompeo Visits India Amid Spat Over Religious Freedom Violations

(CNSNews.com) – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is visiting India Wednesday, just days after his department, in a major annual report, highlighted serious incidents of religious persecution there, including “an increase in attacks against religious minorities and the perceived diminishing space for religious freedom.”  In an assessment that raised the ire of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, the State Department report released by Pompeo on Friday pointed to instances of Hindu mob violence against religious minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, in 2018.  It cited non-governmental organization (NGO) reports charging that “the government sometimes failed to act on mob attacks on religious minorities, marginalized communities, and critics of the government.”  Moreover, “some senior officials” in the BJP “made inflammatory speeches against minority communities,” it said.  The report identified as major triggers for mob violence accusations that non-Hindus are killing cows, which Hindus consider sacred, and accusations that Christians and others are converting Hindus, using inducements or coercion to do so.  “Mob attacks by violent extremist Hindu groups against minority communities, especially Muslims, continued throughout the year amid rumors that victims had traded or killed cows for beef,” it said. “According to some NGOs, authorities often protected perpetrators from prosecution.”  Nine of India’s 29 states have laws that restrict or criminalize religious conversion, and Christians accused of “forced conversions” faced criminal charges in several states.  Religious freedom is not the only potential irritant in the relationship between the world’s two biggest democracies, but it is a particularly sensitive issue.  “We see no locus standi [legal standing] for a foreign entity/government to pronounce on the state of our citizens’ constitutionally protected rights,” foreign minister spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in response to the report.  “India is proud of its secular credentials, its status as the largest democracy and a pluralistic society with a longstanding commitment to tolerance and inclusion,” Kumar said.  “The Indian constitution guarantees fundamental rights to all its citizens, including its minority communities. It is widely acknowledged that India is a vibrant democracy where the constitution provides protection of religious freedom, and where democratic governance and rule of law further promote and protect the fundamental rights.”  The national spokesperson of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP, Anil Baluni, said the U.S. report “shows clear bias against the Modi government and the BJP.”  “The basic presumption in this report that there is some grand design behind anti-minority violence is simply false,” he said. “On the contrary, in most of such cases, these instances are carried out as a result of local disputes and by criminal mindsets.”  India has slowly been edging up the Open Doors USA annual watch list of “countries where it is most dangerous to follow Jesus.” In 2012, it was in 32nd place, but by 2016 – two years after Modi’s BJP came to power – it had climbed to number 17. Last year it was in 11th place, and this year India is at number ten.  The BJP is closely affiliated to radical Hindu nationalist groups accused of violence against converts from Hinduism to other faiths.  Modi’s own record is controversial too. He was chief minister of Gujarat state during the worst episode of interreligious violence in modern Indian history, when more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in 2002.  After Muslims attacked a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, Hindus carried out retaliatory attacks against Muslims across the state. Modi was accused of doing nothing to stop the carnage.  The State Department subsequently charged that there was “a comprehensive failure on the part of the state government to control the persistent violation of rights of life, liberty, equality, and dignity of the people of the state.” Modi was consequently denied a visa to enter the U.S., a restriction only lifted when he became prime minister in 2014.  Other difficult issues in the bilateral relationship include trade tariffs, U.S. visas for Indian nationals, and Indian arms sales from Russia, a longstanding ally.  Still, the partnership is an important one, the State Department stressed in a statement on Tuesday.  “As vibrant democracies rooted in shared values, with fast-growing economies, cultures of entrepreneurship, and leadership positions on the global stage, the United States and India are natural strategic partners,” it said.  “President Trump and Prime Minister Modi are firmly committed to accelerating the upward trajectory of this partnership.”  The statement also focused on economic ties, noting that the U.S. is India’s most important trading partner and number one overseas market, while India is the fastest growing major market for U.S. goods.  “Two-way bilateral goods and services trade with India totaled $142 billion in 2018, up 12.6 percent, or almost $16 billion, over the prior year,” it said. “The United States exported nearly 50 million barrels of crude to India in 2018, compared to less than 10 million barrels in 2017, and is on pace to export even greater volumes in 2019.”


cnsnews--2019-07-03--The Fourth of July and Reflecting on the Meaning of American Citizenship

The celebration of the Fourth of July invites us to reflect on what it means to be an American citizen.  Today, such reflection is especially necessary, because the meaning of American citizenship has been distorted by ideology.  As I observe in a new “First Principles” paper for The Heritage Foundation, these distortions can be cured by referring to the thoughts of the American Founders.  We live in an age that demands rights and equality. We are accordingly conditioned to think about citizenship in terms of the equal possession of individual rights.  There’s truth in that view, but it’s not the whole truth.  America was founded upon the teaching of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings equally possess certain fundamental rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  These natural rights, however, are not the rights of the citizen, which depend instead upon the creation of particular political communities.  Nor is the meaning of citizenship to be found in its fullness in sharing in the individual rights protected by the Constitution.  For the most part, these rights—to protections in criminal procedure and to freedom of speech and religion, for example—extend even to those who are not citizens of the United States, but who live under its authority.  In truth, citizenship is not so much a sharing in individual rights as it is a sharing in communal responsibility.  Citizens vote, hold public office, and serve on juries. They, therefore, take a part in governing the community, in exercising power for the sake of the common good.  For that reason, we just as appropriately speak of citizenship not only as a right, but a privilege and a responsibility.  Thus, in the Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton referred to “the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government.”  That’s why a certain jealousy about the privileges of citizenship is warranted, and why some jurisdictions in the United States withhold some privileges of citizenship—such as voting—from those who are too young to exercise them responsibly or who have demonstrated contempt for the good of the community by breaking the law.  We also live in an age that venerates diversity and inclusivity. We are often reminded that America’s fundamental principles permit anyone, of any nation or background, to become an American citizen.  Here again, that’s true—but not the entire truth.  America is founded on the rights doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, which applies to all human beings. Since Americans’ identity as a people rests on respect for these rights, and not on any ancient sharing in “blood and soil,” any person of any background can become an American citizen.  To that extent, American citizenship can manifest a kind of diversity that isn’t characteristic of other nations whose identity is based on ethnicity.  Nevertheless, the Founders also emphasized the unity that citizenship demands: A unity is respect for, and capacity to uphold, the principles of our political way of life.  That’s why Founders as different as Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson both insisted that America should bestow citizenship carefully, looking to the new arrivals’ respect for a rights-based, self-governing way of life and their ability to live out the “temperate love of liberty so essential to real republicanism.”  Finally, we often think of citizenship only as participation in America’s political regime. As such, it has been said many times that “America is not just a country, it’s an idea.”  There’s truth in that, but we might with equal truth say that “America is not just an idea, it’s a country.”  That is, besides being a political regime based on respect for natural rights, and for the political structures and liberties embodied in the Constitution, America is a nation like any other, with concrete interests that it needs to protect and promote.  The Founders were mindful of this fact, too, when they wrote the Constitution.  The Constitution withholds some of the rights of citizenship for a certain period, to ensure that new citizens are firmly attached only to the interests of the United States—and not to those of any other nation.  Thus, the Constitution requires that one must be a citizen for seven years to be elected to the House of Representatives, be a citizen for nine years to be elected to the Senate, and be a natural-born citizen to be president of the United States.  These limits on inclusivity were included on the realistic view that America, despite being based on universally applicable political principles, is still a particular nation with concrete interests that differ from the interests of other nations.  Therefore, it’s the duty of a good citizen not only to preserve and protect America’s regime, but also to safeguard the nation’s more ordinary interests as well.  We learn from the Founders, then, that the meaning of American citizenship is more complex than we today often realize.  To be an American citizen is to share in a regime based on equality of natural rights, but it is also an exercise of political authority and therefore a responsibility and a privilege.  American citizenship is open to certain kinds of diversity, but it also depends on a certain kind of unity.  A good American will be committed to the universal principles on which our republic is based, but will also safeguard and cherish the particular interests and identity of our country.  Understanding these complexities is a necessary prerequisite to living out the full meaning of American citizenship and to preserving and passing on to the next generation the nation we have been blessed to inherit.  Carson Holloway is a visiting scholar in the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics of the Institute for Constitutional Government at The Heritage Foundation. He is also a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Omaha and is the author of "Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration."  : This piece was originally published by The Daily Signal.


dailymail--2019-05-23--Michael Avenatti admits that he flew too close to the sun after epic fall from grace

Michael Avenatti admits that he 'flew too close to the sun' after epic fall from grace

Michael Avenatti has revealed the details surrounding his New York City arrest two months ago and admits that he 'flew too close to the sun' while representing his former client Stormy Daniels.  Avenatti gained notoriety when he represented the ex adult film star from February 2018 to February 2019 in her legal battles with Donald Trump over hush money she received for an alleged affair with the president in 2006.  His fall from grace began when he was arrested in November in Los Angeles for domestic violence, though he did not face felony charges.  The vocal Trump critic was then arrested in New York's Hudson Yards in March for allegedly attempting to extort millions of dollars from Nike.  In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Avenatti explained that he 'never imagined' that the Daniels case 'would take on the magnitude that it did'.  'I have said many, many times over the last year, this is either going to end really, really well, or really, really badly. I am most fearful of the fact that the rate of descent is greater than the rate of ascent.  'Some would argue at this point that I flew too close to the sun. As I sit here today, yes, absolutely, I know I did. No question. Icarus,' he added.  Avenatti was arrested in March after federal prosecutors said he threatened to expose that Nike improperly paid high school basketball players unless the company paid him up to $25million.  At the time, he was arrested on March 25 while walking in the newly opened Hudson Yards shopping mall. He told Vanity Fair that four FBI agents surrounded him.  'Michael Avenatti?' one agent asked. 'Yes,' he responded. 'FBI. You're under arrest,' they said.  The agents then pulled him aside and took his belongings. Avenatti said they even placed a large trench coat around his shoulders so they could handcuff him discreetly.  'I told them I appreciated the fact that I wasn't treated like Roger Stone,' Avenatti told Vanity Fair, 'and that CNN was not outside waiting for me'.  Stone was arrested by FBI agents in tactical gear as they raided his Florida home with guns drawn. Stone was charged with lying to Congress and witness tampering.  But in Avenatti's case, the FBI agents managed to get him out of the busy mall without being noticed and let him wait in a hidden area while one agent pulled a patrol car around.  Once he was booked at the police station, Avenatti told Vanity Fair that he used his one phone call to dial-up his mother.  But she already knew what had happened after she tuned into the news and saw US attorney Geoffrey Berman, holding a press conference detailing Nike's allegations against Avenatti.  'You never want to call your mother and tell her that you're in custody,' he told the magazine.  'And you especially don't want to call and tell her you're in custody when she's already seen it all over the news because they've had a f**king press conference.'  'But live by the sword, die by the sword,' Avenatti added.  On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged Avenatti with ripping off Daniels.  Avenatti, who helped set the political stage for Daniels' high-profile crusade against Trump, is accused of misappropriating funds belonging to the ex adult film star amounting to nearly $300,000, prosecutors announced.  The 48-year-old is accused of forging Daniels' signature which meant two payments of $148,750 were sent to a bank account under his control, which he then used for personal expenditure while lying to his client about the whereabouts of the money.  The indictment states that Daniels was owed four large installments in return for her tell-all book deal, which was negotiated and secured by Avenatti on her behalf.  Before the literary agent wired the second of four installments as part of the advance, Avenatti allegedly sent a forged letter instructing them to send all future payments to a client trust account, which was in Daniels' name but controlled by him.  The literary agent then wired $148,750 to the account, which Avenatti allegedly began spending for his own purposes including on airfare, hotels, car services, restaurants and meal delivery and online shopping - as well as on the payroll for his law firm and another business he owned, the damning charging document states.  When Daniels began to question why she had yet received her second installment, Avenatti allegedly claimed to be in the process of obtaining the payment from the publishers.  One month later, he allegedly used funds recently received from another source to pay Daniels back in a bid to cover his tracks.  The following week, the third installment of of $148,750 allegedly reached his account, which he then began spending on lease payments on his luxury car, airfare, hotels, restaurants and even payments to someone he had a close relationship with.  Avenatti then claimed that the book publisher was refusing to make the payment, despite Daniels' desperate demands for her missing funds.  He is charged with one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and one count of aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory prison term of two years.  On Wednesday, Avenatti told ABC News: 'No monies relating to Daniels were ever misappropriated or mishandled.  'She received millions of dollars worth of legal services and we expended huge sums in expenses. She directly paid only $100.00 for all that she received,' he said.  He has denied those allegations.  In April, Avenatti was accused of 36 counts of embezzlement, financial and bank fraud and bankruptcy fraud in Los Angeles. He has also denied those allegations.  He wrote: 'I expect an indictment to issue from SDNY in the next 48 hrs charging me in connection with my arrest in March,' the Tweet said.  'I intend on fighting these bogus/legally baseless allegations, and will plead not guilty to ALL CHARGES. I look forward to the trial where I can begin to clear my name.'  One of the alleged victims is Geoffrey Ernest Johnson, a mentally ill paraplegic who won a $4million settlement from Los Angeles County in 2015 stemming from his jailhouse suicide attempts.  Prosecutors said Avenatti hid the settlement from him for years and spent the money himself on his coffee business, Global Baristas US, and a race car team.  A grand jury indictment claimed that in 2017, Avenatti received $2.75million in a separate case but hid that from his client too.  The next day, he allegedly spent $2.5million of the money on a private plane. In one case, he allegedly lied about already wiring a client $4million, saying he had done it when he had not.  Avenatti is also accused of failing to file personal tax returns since 2010 and depositing millions of dollars into his personal bank accounts.  He also failed to file returns, it is claimed, for his law firms, Eagan Avenatti and Avenatti & Associates.  Not only did not not file his own returns but he allegedly stole $2.4million in taxes from the paychecks of employees of his coffee business.  He withheld it from them, claiming they were going to the IRS, but never sent the money, it is claimed.  The lawyer, who is free on $300,000 bond, has denied the charges, saying he had made powerful enemies and would plead not guilty and fight the case.  'The right to a presumption of innocence and the right to a jury trial are two fundamental rights that our founding fathers demanded when this country was formed over 200 years ago,' he said in a statement before the April hearing.


dailysignal--2019-12-17--‘Founded on a Creed’: Understanding America’s Unique Beginning

This is adapted from a talk Mike Gonzalez gave at The Heritage Foundation’s December event, “The Problem of Nationalism.”  One of the best enunciations of the theme of the creed that we have is from 1921. Having embarked on his first visit to the United States, G.K. Chesterton, an English writer, wrote that “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed.”  Other nations don’t have a need for a unifying doctrine because, as he put it, “England is English, France is French, and Ireland is Irish.” Nobody questioned that. He goes on to write that an Englishman never questions that fact that he’s English. What many have rightly remarked on the importance of this statement–it’s quoted all the time–nobody really talks about the timing of it.  Actually, 1921, when he wrote this, is an important year for Chesterton to make this observation. Just three years earlier, at the end of World War I, three large cosmopolitan empires that had a large landmass in Europe–I’m talking about the Ottoman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, and the Russian Empire–break up and out of this collapse emerge a gaggle of nation-states that were more or less expected to be territorial expressions of the leading ethnic group. They were not all one ethnic state, but they each had one main ethnic group. For example, Latvia was supposed to be the nation of the Latvians, Poland the nation of the Poles.  In 1921, also, we see finally the end of a very grueling three year War of Irish Independence and for the first time in centuries of English rule, you had the emergence of the Irish Free State. So lots of things are happening in Europe and they’re all understood to be ethnic based.  America was different, as Chesterton wrote. It wasn’t just that America was already very ethnically diverse at its founding–not culturally diverse, but ethnically diverse. It was the provenance of the authority of government that mattered, not where the people came from.  America was, from the start, the only nation that drew its authority from natural right, as Kim Holmes said, and remains so to this day, arguably. It derives its legitimacy from the idea that people are born with rights, not many. It’s not a whole panoply of rights, but a very fundamental rights.  These rights are negative in the sense that you possess them until somebody comes along and takes them again, a king or a dictator or a mob. It could be an electoral mob, as well.  These are the rights of free expression, the freedom of conscience, the right to life, the right to property, the right of assembly, not many more than that. As Kim said, they’re universal. Humans, as a result of being human, have these rights.  What is unique is that we are based on that, and the Founders discussed this ad infinitum, and they were very proud of the fact that they were unique in this. I think Hamilton puts it best when he wrote, “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide whether societies of man are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice and whether therefore are destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”  So America was created not by accident or force, but by reflection and choice.  Immigrants who came in in the tens of millions in the intervening 240 years … between 1850 and today, we have a hundred million immigrants. They’re expected to develop an emotional attachment to these principles and actually to the parchments in which the principles are codified. This, too, is uniquely American.  We have an echo of this in the Mayflower Compact that the Pilgrims signed with the non-dissenters who were on the ship, whom they called the Strangers, and they agreed to a civil bodied politic. This habit of writing principles into documents and then abiding by them stood in stark contrast, for example, to England which does not have a written constitution and definitely to the ethnic birth of nationalism in Europe.  But again, as Kim said, it couldn’t be just a creed. It couldn’t just be based on mere practicality. Man is not made that way.  A deeper loyalty was commanded, and Madison wrote that the documents required something more instinctive and primitive. They deserved veneration.  There’s a need for a culture to emerge that instills this veneration in the creed, and it’s precisely because of the exceptional nature of this culture and this creed that something I write about often, the attacks on America’s culture and creed over the last thirty or forty years is such a threat to our ability to sustain republican government. We can go later on, if you want, in the Q&A on the nature of this attack, whether it’s happenstance and benign or whether it’s part of a purposeful plan by ideologues to replace the tradition of small government that we have with the continental notion that puts man at the behest of a centralized large state.  I’ll just close out by saying one of the problems with nationalism is that it can contribute to a large state, as my colleagues Jim Carafano and Jack Spencer will explain, but we don’t want to be misunderstood. I believe that the nation state, although it shouldn’t, as Kim said, it shouldn’t be worshiped per se, but it is a rational way to safeguard our individual rights better than the clan or the empire. It is far better than transnationalism. But that is our understanding, that the government serves the people and not the other way around. Thanks.  >>> Read the first article in this series, “The Problem of Nationalism,” by Dr. Kim Holmes.


drudgereport--2019-01-17--Investors pressure Bezos to stop selling facial recognition

Investors pressure Bezos to stop selling facial recognition...

Amazon shareholders are upping the pressure on CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling the company's facial recognition technology to government agencies — unless it can provide assurances it does not pose a human rights risk.  A group of five investors, with $1.32 billion of Amazon shares under management, have filed a resolution calling for Amazon to take a step back from sales of its Rekognition software.  The resolution is spearheaded by Long Island-based Catholic women's order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, with the support of Open Mic, an organization that helps shareholders campaign to improve governance at some of America's biggest companies.  It is the first time an investor proposal has been put forward on Rekognition, and Open Mic thinks it might be the first protest of its kind against facial recognition software at any US company.  The activist investors want Amazon's board to investigate the technology and conclude it "does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights" before selling it government bodies, including law enforcement. They recommend consulting with civil liberties experts and human rights advocates.  Amazon has described Rekognition as a facial recognition tool that can be used for such purposes as "preventing human trafficking" and "inhibiting child exploitation."  But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed in May last year that Amazon had sold Rekognition to government and police agencies for the purpose of public surveillance and to identify "people of interest." The ACLU also found last year that Rekognition incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress as people who had previously been arrested.  Read more: Amazon employees are reportedly gearing up to confront CEO Jeff Bezos at an all-staff meeting this week about selling facial recognition software to law enforcement  Civil liberties organizations, academics, and Amazon employees have all protested against the technology, with the latest intervention coming just this week when 85 activist groups, such as the ACLU, sent letters to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google demanding they stop selling facial recognition software.  Amazon investors have also voiced their concerns previously. In June last year, 19 shareholder groups wrote to Bezos with similar demands to those made on Thursday. One of the co-filers of today's proposal, the Maryknoll Sisters, signed that letter to Bezos in 2018, which can be read in full here.  "Sales of Rekognition to government represent considerable risk for the company and investors. That's why it's imperative those sales be halted immediately," said Michael Connor, executive director of Open Mic.  He and the five co-filers want investors to vote on the resolution at Amazon's annual shareholder meeting over the summer. Amazon can engage in a dialogue, ask the investors to withdraw the proposal, argue with the SEC that it should not go to a vote, or do nothing. If Amazon submits to the SEC that the vote should not go ahead, investors will fight that claim.  As well as the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood, the co-filers are: The Sisters of St. Francis Charitable Trust (Dubuque), Sisters Of St Francis Of Philadelphia, Maryknoll Sisters, and Azzad Asset Management.  Amazon is yet to respond to Business Insider's request for comment.  Whereas, shareholders are concerned Amazon's facial recognition technology ("Rekognition") poses risk to civil and human rights and shareholder value.  Civil liberties organizations, academics, and shareholders have demanded Amazon halt sales of Rekognition to government, concerned that our Company is enabling a surveillance system "readily available to violate rights and target communities of color." Four hundred fifty Amazon employees echoed this demand, posing a talent and retention risk.  Brian Brackeen, former Chief Executive Officer of facial recognition company Kairos, said, "Any company in this space that willingly hands [facial recognition] software over to a government, be it America or another nation's, is willfully endangering people's lives."  In Florida and Oregon, police have piloted Rekognition. Amazon Web Services already provides cloud computing services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and is reportedly marketing Rekognition to ICE, despite concerns Rekognition could facilitate immigrant surveillance and racial profiling.  Rekognition contradicts Amazon's opposition to facilitating surveillance. In 2016, Amazon supported a lawsuit against government "gag orders," stating: "the fear of secret surveillance could limit the adoption and use of cloud services … Users should not be put to a choice between reaping the benefits of technological innovation and maintaining the privacy rights guaranteed by the Constitution."  Shareholders have little evidence our Company is effectively restricting the use of Rekognition to protect privacy and civil rights. In July 2018, a reporter asked Amazon executive Teresa Carlson whether Amazon has "drawn any red lines, any standards, guidelines, on what you will and you will not do in terms of defense work." Carlson responded: "We have not drawn any lines there...We are unwaveringly in support of our law enforcement, defense, and intelligence community."  In July 2018, lawmakers asked the Government Accountability Office to study whether "commercial entities selling facial recognition adequately audit use of their technology to ensure that use is not unlawful, inconsistent with terms of service, or otherwise raise privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties concerns."  Microsoft has called for government regulation of facial recognition technology, saying, "if we move too fast, we may find that people's fundamental rights are being broken."  Resolved, shareholders request that the Board of Directors prohibit sales of facial recognition technology to government agencies unless the Board concludes, after an evaluation using independent evidence, that the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights.  Supporting Statement: Proponents recommend the Board consult with technology and civil liberties experts and civil and human rights advocates to assess:


drudgereport--2019-03-12--Facial recognitions dirty little secret Millions of online photos scraped without consent

Facial recognition's 'dirty little secret': Millions of online photos scraped without consent...

Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores.  The technology — which is imperfect but improving rapidly — is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique.  To do this well, the algorithms must be fed hundreds of thousands of images of a diverse array of faces. Increasingly, those photos are coming from the internet, where they’re swept up by the millions without the knowledge of the people who posted them, categorized by age, gender, skin tone and dozens of other metrics, and shared with researchers at universities and companies.  As the algorithms get more advanced — meaning they are better able to identify women and people of color, a task they have historically struggled with — legal experts and civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm on researchers’ use of photos of ordinary people. These people’s faces are being used without their consent, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them.  That’s a particular concern for minorities who could be profiled and targeted, the experts and advocates say.  “This is the dirty little secret of AI training sets. Researchers often just grab whatever images are available in the wild,” said NYU School of Law professor Jason Schultz.  The latest company to enter this territory was IBM, which in January released a collection of nearly a million photos that were scraped from the photo hosting site Flickr and coded to describe the subjects’ appearance. IBM promoted the collection to researchers as a progressive step toward reducing bias in facial recognition.  But some of the photographers whose images were included in IBM’s dataset were surprised and disconcerted when NBC News told them that their photographs had been annotated with details including facial geometry and skin tone and may be used to develop facial recognition algorithms. (NBC News obtained IBM’s dataset from a source after the company declined to share it, saying it could be used only by academic or corporate research groups.)  “None of the people I photographed had any idea their images were being used in this way,” said Greg Peverill-Conti, a Boston-based public relations executive who has more than 700 photos in IBM’s collection, known as a “training dataset.”  “It seems a little sketchy that IBM can use these pictures without saying anything to anybody,” he said.  John Smith, who oversees AI research at IBM, said that the company was committed to “protecting the privacy of individuals” and “will work with anyone who requests a URL to be removed from the dataset.”  Despite IBM’s assurances that Flickr users can opt out of the database, NBC News discovered that it’s almost impossible to get photos removed. IBM requires photographers to email links to photos they want removed, but the company has not publicly shared the list of Flickr users and photos included in the dataset, so there is no easy way of finding out whose photos are included. IBM did not respond to questions about this process.  To see if your Flickr photos are part of the dataset, enter your username in a tool NBC News created based on the IBM dataset:  IBM says that its dataset is designed to help academic researchers make facial recognition technology fairer. The company is not alone in using publicly available photos on the internet in this way. Dozens of other research organizations have collected photos for training facial recognition systems, and many of the larger, more recent collections have been scraped from the web.  Some experts and activists argue that this is not just an infringement on the privacy of the millions of people whose images have been swept up — it also raises broader concerns about the improvement of facial recognition technology, and the fear that it will be used by law enforcement agencies to disproportionately target minorities.  “People gave their consent to sharing their photos in a different internet ecosystem,” said Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the AI Now Institute, which studies the social implications of artificial intelligence. “Now they are being unwillingly or unknowingly cast in the training of systems that could potentially be used in oppressive ways against their communities.”  In the early days of building facial recognition tools, researchers paid people to come to their labs, sign consent forms and have their photo taken in different poses and lighting conditions. Because this was expensive and time consuming, early datasets were limited to a few hundred subjects.  With the rise of the web during the 2000s, researchers suddenly had access to millions of photos of people.  “They would go into a search engine, type in the name of a famous person and download all of the images,” said P. Jonathon Phillips, who collects datasets for measuring the performance of face recognition algorithms for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “At the start these tended to be famous people, celebrities, actors and sports people.”  As social media and user-generated content took over, photos of regular people were increasingly available. Researchers treated this as a free-for-all, scraping faces from YouTube videos, Facebook, Google Images, Wikipedia and mugshot databases.  Academics often appeal to the noncommercial nature of their work to bypass questions of copyright. Flickr became an appealing resource for facial recognition researchers because many users published their images under “Creative Commons” licenses, which means that others can reuse their pictures without paying license fees. Some of these licenses allow commercial use.  To build its Diversity in Faces dataset, IBM says it drew upon a collection of 100 million images published with Creative Commons licenses that Flickr’s owner, Yahoo, released as a batch for researchers to download in 2014. IBM narrowed that dataset down to about 1 million photos of faces that have each been annotated, using automated coding and human estimates, with almost 200 values for details such as measurements of facial features, pose, skin tone and estimated age and gender, according to the dataset obtained by NBC News.  It’s a single case study in a sea of datasets scraped from the web. According to Google Scholar, hundreds of academic papers have been written on the back of these huge collections of photos — which have names like MegaFace, CelebFaces and Faces in the Wild — contributing to major leaps in the accuracy of facial recognition and analysis tools. It was difficult to find academics who would speak on the record about the origins of their training datasets; many have advanced their research using collections of images scraped from the web without explicit licensing or informed consent.  The researchers who built those datasets did not respond to requests for comment.  IBM released its collection of annotated images to other researchers so that it can be used to develop “fairer” facial recognition systems. That means systems can more accurately identify people of all races, ages and genders.  “For the facial recognition systems to perform as desired, and the outcomes to become increasingly accurate, training data must be diverse and offer a breadth of coverage,” said IBM’s John Smith, in a blog post announcing the release of the data.  The dataset does not link the photos of people’s faces to their names, which means any system trained to use the photos would not be able to identify named individuals. But civil liberty advocates and tech ethics researchers have still questioned the motives of IBM, which has a history of selling surveillance tools that have been criticized for infringing on civil liberties.  For example, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the company sold technology to the New York City police department that allowed it to search CCTV feeds for people with particular skin tones or hair color. IBM has also released an “intelligent video analytics” product that uses body camera surveillance to detect people by “ethnicity” tags, such as Asian, black or white.  IBM said in an email that the systems are “not inherently discriminatory,” but added: “We believe that both the developers of these systems and the organizations deploying them have a responsibility to work actively to mitigate bias. It’s the only way to ensure that AI systems will earn the trust of their users and the public. IBM fully accepts this responsibility and would not participate in work involving racial profiling.”  Today, the company sells a system called IBM Watson Visual Recognition, which IBM says can estimate the age and gender of people depicted in images and, with the right training data, can be used by clients to identify specific people from photos or videos.  NBC News asked IBM what training data IBM Watson used for its commercial facial recognition abilities, pointing to a company blog post that stated that Watson is “transparent about who trains our AI systems, what data was used to train those systems.” The company responded that it uses data “acquired from various sources” to train its AI models but does not disclose this data publicly to “protect our insights and intellectual property.”  IBM said both in public statements and directly to NBC News that the Diversity in Faces dataset is purely for academic research and won’t be used to improve the company’s commercial facial recognition tools. This seems to conflict with the company’s assertion in January in promotional materials that the release of the dataset is a direct response to research by MIT’s Joy Buolamwini that showed that IBM’s commercial facial recognition technology was much worse at accurately identifying darker-skinned women than lighter-skinned men.  When asked about this conflict, and particularly about how the Diversity in Faces dataset might have a real-world impact on reducing bias if IBM is not using it in commercial facial recognition products, Smith said in an email that the “scientific learnings on facial diversity will advance our understanding and allow us to create more fair and accurate systems in practice.”  “We recognize that societal bias is not necessarily something we can fully tackle with science, but our aim is to address mathematical and algorithmic bias,” Smith said.  Experts note that the distinction between the research wings and commercial operations of corporations such as IBM and Facebook is a blurry one. Ultimately, IBM owns any intellectual property developed by its research unit.  Even when algorithms are developed by academic researchers using noncommercial datasets, those algorithms are often later used by businesses, said Brian Brackeen, CEO of the facial recognition company Kairos.  As an analogy, he said, “think of it as the money laundering of facial recognition. You are laundering the IP and privacy rights out of the faces.”  IBM said it would not use the Diversity in Faces dataset in this way.  An Austrian photographer and entrepreneur, Georg Holzer, uploaded his photos to Flickr to remember great moments with his family and friends, and he used Creative Commons licenses to allow nonprofits and artists to use his photos for free. He did not expect more than 700 of his images to be swept up to study facial recognition technology.  “I know about the harm such a technology can cause,” he said over Skype, after NBC News told him his photos were in IBM’s dataset. “Of course, you can never forget about the good uses of image recognition such as finding family pictures faster, but it can also be used to restrict fundamental rights and privacy. I can never approve or accept the widespread use of such a technology.”  Holzer was concerned that a company like IBM — even its research division — had used photos he published under a noncommercial license.  “Since I assume that IBM is not a charitable organization and at the end of the day wants to make money with this technology, this is clearly a commercial use,” he said.  Dolan Halbrook, who is based in Portland, Oregon, and has 452 photos in the dataset, agreed that IBM should have asked his permission.  “I'm annoyed at them being used without prior notification and a chance to review which ones would be included,” Halbrook said. “I'm ambivalent about improving the technology itself.”  Other photographers were glad to hear that their images may be used to advance the field of facial recognition.  “Facial recognition is one of those things we can’t uninvent, so having a reliable system is better than one that generates errors and false identifications,” said Neil Moralee, a food consultant and photographer based in the U.K. who specializes in portraits.  Guillaume Boppe from Switzerland agreed. “If the pictures of faces I shot are helping AI to improve, reducing false detection and ultimately improving global safety, I’m fine with it,” he said.  Sebastian Gambolati, from Argentina, was happy to contribute to more accurate technology for finding missing people or tracking criminals, but he said it would have been “nice if they asked.”  “In my Flickr account there are a lot of photos I took from people in events that aren’t close to me,” he said, “and I don't know what they think about the company using their photos without their consent.”  IBM does offer an opt-out model of sorts: People can contact IBM with individual links to photographs they want removed from the dataset — either ones they have taken or ones they are featured in — and IBM says it will remove them, according to its privacy notice.“ However, there’s no easy way to know if you are featured in the dataset, and even if you find out that you are, IBM said it will not remove photos on the basis of your Flickr user ID unless you also have links to each of the photographs.  When NBC News alerted one photographer, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, that more than 1,000 of his photos were included in IBM’s dataset, he tried to opt out by sending IBM his Flickr user ID. IBM told him that none of his photos were in the dataset, according to an email viewed by NBC News. When NBC News shared specific links to some of his photos in IBM’s dataset, the company blamed an “indexing bug” for its initial inability to confirm that his images were included.After more than a week, IBM confirmed it had removed the four photos he had provided links to. According to NBC News’ analysis, he still has 1,001 photos in the dataset.  Smith, of IBM, said in a statement that all URL removal requests had been completed.  Even once an image is removed from the IBM dataset, it won’t be removed from the versions of the dataset already shared with research partners (about 250 organizations have requested access so far), IBM said. Nor will it be removed from the underlying Flickr dataset.  For those caught up in IBM’s dataset or others like it, this makes the notion of opting out seem hopeless.  There may, however, be legal recourse in some jurisdictions thanks to the rise of privacy laws acknowledging the unique value of photos of people’s faces. Under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, photos are considered “sensitive personal information” if they are used to confirm an individual’s identity. Residents of Europe who don’t want their data included can ask IBM to delete it. If IBM doesn’t comply, they can complain to their country’s data protection authority, which, if the particular photos fall under the definition of “sensitive personal information,” can levy fines against companies that violate the law.  In the U.S., some states have laws that could be relevant. Under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, for example, it can be a violation to capture, store and share biometric information without a person’s written consent. According to the act, biometric information includes fingerprints, iris scans and face geometry.  "This is the type of mass collection and use of biometric data that can be easily abused, and appears to be taking place without the knowledge of those in the photos,” said Jay Edelson, a Chicago-based class-action lawyer currently suing Facebook for its use of facial recognition tools.  So far neither of these laws has been rigorously tested.  IBM declined to comment on the laws.  Aside from the privacy issues, a bigger question remains: Are more accurate facial recognition systems actually “fairer”? And is it possible for facial recognition to be fair at all?  “You’ve really got a rock-and-a-hard-place situation happening here,” said Woody Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “Facial recognition can be incredibly harmful when it’s inaccurate and incredibly oppressive the more accurate it gets.”  While there are benign uses for facial recognition, it can also be used to surveil and target people of color and other vulnerable and minority communities. Facial recognition databases of mugshots are more likely to include African-Americans, Latinos and immigrants, since those groups are targeted by biased policing practices, civil rights groups say. This means that those people are far more “findable” by facial recognition technology, even if they were wrongly arrested when their mugshot was taken.  The use of facial recognition surveillance systems by law enforcement is so controversial that a coalition of more than 85 racial justice and civil rights groups have called for tech companies to refuse to sell the technology to governments. These groups argue that the technology exacerbates “historical and existing bias” that harms communities that are already “over-policed and over-surveilled.”  “These systems are being deployed in oppressive contexts, often by law enforcement,” said Whittaker, of the AI Now Institute, “and the goal of making them better able to surveil anyone is one we should look at very skeptically.”