Walking down the busy aisle of a Costco outlet in the US, I saw a stack of boxes of newfangled, multi-functional gadgets positioned to attract the attention of passers-by. The gadget plugs into a wall socket, and its motion sensor will turn on an adjustable dimmer at night, and continuously disinfects the circulating air and kills the odors in the room.

No larger than 10 by 10 centimeters, the device needs no maintenance or any replacement of parts. This is an ideal and appealing product for staying home to avoid the Covid-19 pandemic. Costcos price? Under US$50 for a box of two units.

As I expected, the product was made in China. I couldnt imagine from whom China could have stolen the intellectual property (IP) for this idea and design, nor where such a product could be made in the US for anywhere near the selling price.

In fact, just as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan did before, China has moved on from copying and borrowing to innovating and introducing new products for the world market including, of course, American consumers.

Just like their Asian neighbors, China did its share of copying and reverse-engineering to catch up with the US. But the US also did its share of stealing from the UK in the 19th century to catch up to what was then the worlds leading industrial power.

None of these countries stopped at mere copying. While they make me-too products, they improve their skills and go on to innovate and create proprietary products for new markets. Yet US President Donald Trumps administration insists on accusing China of theft of IP as a reason for confrontation, even theft of IP that the US does not have, such as Huaweis 5G (fifth-generation telecom technology).

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr, among others in the Trump team, are unrelenting in accusing China of cyber-theft and hacking to steal American secrets.

Recent reports from multiple sources indicate that Russian hackers have been actively seeking to vacuum up Covid-19 vaccine developments from Western countries. Yet Barr spent 45 minutes at the podium recently accusing China of theft, while not presenting one shred of evidence or making any mention of Russia.

Barr and his colleagues seem to know all the ways Chinas hackers can attack Americas Internet without offering any actual proof. As we learned from Edward Snowden, no one is more sophisticated and skilled at cyber-theft than the US. I suppose its easy enough to accuse China of cyber-theft according to the way the US steals from others.

US Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio along with the Trump team have decided Chinese students should be barred from entering the US as a way of preventing loss of technology. The top tier US universities vehemently disagree. They depend on the brightest graduate students to make scientific advances, and they know many of these come from China.

However, the China hawks within and outside the White House are determined to inflict a hurt on China even if its at a cost of terrible blowback to the US. They just dont appreciate how much of their noses are sliced away to spite their faces.

The so-called trade war is a case in point. The tariffs on Chinese imports have caused China to sell less to the US. True enough. But it was Trump who had to beg China to buy more soybeans.

Seeing Trumps perfidious personality, China has prepared to wean itself from depending on exports to the US. China has been busy developing trade relations with the rest of the world. Now only about 3% of Chinas exports go to the US.

Furthermore, China has a robust, integrated economy with a strong manufacturing sector along with the worlds largest and fastest-growing consumer economy. Making things for its own consumers creates a virtuous cycle to keep the domestic economy revving.

In fact, Chinas consumer market is too big to ignore. Much as Trump would like to see American companies disengage from China, Apple has just increased its investment in China to open more retail stores there.

The trade war was supposed to bring manufacturing back to the US. Its not happening, because its not that simple. Unless Trump can drive the US economy down to a Third World level and not that he isnt trying and American labor is willing to work for peanuts, the low-end factories cant come back.

To bring high-end manufacturing back, Trump needs a lot of smart and well-educated graduates in science and technology and presumably without any ethnic Chinese. Indeed, one tiny itsy-bitsy step in that direction was to entice Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) note, not really American to build a small, modest fab in Arizona.

Now, perhaps the reader can appreciate why the International Monetary Fund expects the US economy to shrink by 8% while China is the only country that will still manage a net economic gain for this year.

Incredibly, Pompeo and his colleagues continue to accuse China of human-rights violations as another reason to make that country an enemy. This has to be the epitome of hypocrisy.

The US has more people incarcerated than any other nation. Whats more, black Americans are much more likely to be shot by the police and/or arrested and jailed. And because of the gun culture, the US has one of the highest per capita rates of fatal shootings.

No country is as brutal in stopping refugees at the border as the US under Trump. As a tactic to discourage others from coming, border enforcement has deliberately separated children from their parents. Then the record-keeping is so poor that distraught parents face formidable odds to find their kids again.

That cynical practice devoid of human decency speaks volumes on the sincerity of alleged American respect for human rights.

For years, China has had a national policy to help hundreds of millions out of poverty and has reached the point that very few are still living below the poverty line. By contrast, Trump has enacted massive tax cuts to benefit the top 10%, but he does not have a clue on how to help the rest of the Americans.

A long-term study from Harvard recently published revealed that the approval of the Chinese people of their central government increased from 86% in 2003 to 93% in 2016, the period of the study. The Trump White House would kill for an approval rating from the American people at half that number.

The study also found that low-income Chinese citizens in rural areas have closed the satisfaction gap with high-income citizens in the coastal areas. This is evidence that Chinas government, at all levels from local to central, has been diligent in improving the lives of all its people.

So why is Trump trying to pick a fight with China? There are at least two speculations attributed to contingency planning by Trumps advisers in case he loses his re-election bid.

Defense writer Michael Klare is fearful that by sending an aircraft-carrier strike force to the South China Sea already twice this month Trump is preparing for a repeat of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that triggered the Vietnam War. This one could provoke a military conflict with China that would give Trump the excuse to defer the November election and remain in office.

A regular MSNBC commentator has a similar worry. He speculates that Barr in concentrating on China and ignoring cyber trespasses by Russia is part of the plan to accuse China of nefarious interference with the election outcome if Trump were to lose.

The danger is not with China but that the Trump team will lie and cheat to steal the election a tactic Pompeo is well known for from his days as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. If the American people let the Trump team get away with this, they may not live to rue the consequences.

Dr George Koo recently retired from a global advisory services firm where he advised clients on their China strategies and business operations. Educated at MIT, Stevens Institute and Santa Clara University, he is the founder and former managing director of International Strategic Alliances. He is currently a board member of Freschfields, a novel green building platform.

Asia Times Financialis now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world'sfirst benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices.Read ATFnow.

See more here:
Re-election fears drive Trumps fight with China - Asia Times

The CJEU has released its judgment in the long running Max Schrems/Facebook Ireland story. We explain what the case is about and why it's important.

Background

To recap (and as set out in our briefing following the Attorney General's preliminary opinion at the end of last year), Max Schrems objected to the transfer by Facebook of his personal data from the EU to the US, following revelations made by one Mr Edward Snowden about access by US surveillance authorities to personal data. The initial case resulted in the downfall of the US "Safe Harbor" regime, which had been put in place as a mechanism for allowing personal data to be transferred from the EEA to the US in a way which complied with EU data protection laws requiring destination countries outside the EEA to keep the data safe and to the same standards as set out in the EEA. Today's decision of the CJEU, is important because it examined the ongoing validity of two important mechanisms, mandated by the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (GDPR), for transferring personal data outside the EEA in such as a way as to maintain the safety of that data in the destination country:

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE LATEST SCHREMS JUDGMENT

Impact on business

Whilst the judgment is going to be a big headache for those businesses, many of which are in the tech sector, which did rely on the EU-US Privacy Shield to govern their data transfers, standard contractual clauses can still, for now, provide a fall back for them, as they did in the immediate aftermath following the initial decision about the US "Safe Harbor" regime and, out of a range of transfer mechanisms which GDPR provides, such as BCRs (binding corporate rules), and specific derogations such as consent, they are the still often the most practical tool available for large scale, ongoing data transfers. In addition, many contracts will already deal with this issue (i.e. by stating that the parties will put in place an approved mechanism in the event that another falls away). For those businesses which haven't used them, and relied instead on the Privacy Shield, additional papering and due diligence (see below) will be required, but at least standard contractual clauses do provide another possible option.

Standard contractual clauses: some points to note

Although the court's ruling on standard contractual clauses is likely to be welcomed by many businesses, the following points are worth noting:

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT PAPERWORK

The CJEU's observations about standard contractual clauses were similar to the Advocate General's: businesses shouldn't just assume that once you've signed the paperwork the job is done; the parties need to do their due diligence to ensure that any data being transferred will in fact be kept safe by the data importer, and the clauses themselves do impose obligations on the data importer to put in place technical and organisational measures to keep the data safe and to verify and inform the data exporter if there are any local laws which might compromise the safety of the data, so that the transfer can then be suspended. The judgment also highlighted the role which supervisory authorities have to play too in stepping in to suspend or prohibit data transfers where they take a view that standard contractual clauses cannot be complied with in a particular country, and that the protection of the data cannot be ensured by other means. In a sense, none of this is new much of the judgment and the conclusions on why standard contractual clauses are still a valid mechanism, was based on wording contained in the clauses which has always been there. However, the judgment does shine a spotlight on the fact that there needs to be a genuine assessment by the parties in any given situation of all the risks associated with the transfer of personal data to a third country, taking into consideration the nature of the data that is being transferred, the volume, and how it will be used by the data importer in the third country.

THE BREXIT DIMENSION

The CJEU's decision on standard contractual clauses will be very welcome to UK businesses which rely on data flows from the EEA, if the UK is unable to persuade the EU to grant it an adequacy decision, as part of a trade deal or otherwise, before the expiry of the transition period at the end of the year. In this situation the main mechanism which EEA businesses will rely on to transfer personal data to the UK, will be standard contractual clauses and we recommend that you make contingency plans for that eventuality now. Readour guidance on preparing for Brexit. Having said this, the ruling does potentially have wider political ramifications, in terms of the UK's position post transition vis--vis data flows to the United States, and in terms of any assessment of the adequacy of the UK's own data protection regime, and the way these ramifications play out remains to be seen.

What next for EU-US data transfers?

There is a now a job to be done on what precisely will replace the EU-US Privacy Shield, and EU Justice Chief, Didier Reynders has already said that the EU will look at ways to boost data transfers to the US. How quickly and effectively that can be achieved in the current climate, remains to be seen. The CJEU's comments on how standard contractual clauses work to protect personal data, coupled with its conclusion about the US data protection regime (and the resulting decision to invalidate the Privacy Shield), mean that whilst they are likely to be the best (and in many cases the only) alternative mechanism for businesses to work with if they want to transfer data, their use in respect of transfers to the US, is not without risk though for the reasons set out above, it could be said that this has always been the case. The European Commission's recent Evaluation Report into GDPR implementation, did highlight the fact that standard contractual clauses are being modernised to cover all relevant transfer scenarios and better reflect modern business practices, however, we do not as yet have an indication of when a new version will become available for use, and in any event, it is difficult to see, given the CJEU's comments, how the clauses can be reconciled to apply in some situations where the data protection regime of a third country simply does not come anywhere near the standards set by the EU for protection of personal data. Meanwhile, we await the reaction of supervisory authorities. We will continue to monitor any guidance which is issued by such authorities over the coming weeks,as to whether the use of standard contractual clauses in respect of data transfers to the US, or indeed, any other jurisdiction, is problematic.

Go here to see the original:
Here we go again: CJEU issues its judgment in Schrems II - Lexology

In the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the countrys public health departments, still reliant on fax machines, were woefully unprepared for the massive amounts of data they needed to process. Looking for a tidy private sector solution to a messy government problem, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paid a shadowy Silicon Valley company with ties to the Trump administration to build something new. That company is called Palantir Technologies, and if you dont know much about it, thats by design.

Palantir specializes in data-gathering and analysis, most of which it does for government agencies. It has about $1.5 billion in federal government contracts alone, including, recently, with the Space Force and the Navy. Now, as new Covid-19 case numbers break records daily, Palantir is trying to help organize the information with a new platform called HHS Protect, which will be run by another private company called TeleTracking. This partnership has effectively replaced the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network, per the Trump administrations orders to hospitals to stop reporting their information to it. HHS Protect, which is not accessible to the general public, is now the only source for this information.

Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data, Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of the HHS for public affairs, told the New York Times. America requires it in real time. The new, faster, and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus.

Palantir, the architect of this complete data system, isnt a household name like its Palo Alto peers, but the 17-year-old company founded by Peter Thiel is one of the most valuable private companies in Silicon Valley. That anonymity is a feature, not a bug: Palantir does most of its work for the government, including national security and intelligence operations. In recent years, headlines about the company have stressed its access to everything about all of us, which privacy advocates have long criticized. Palantirs data-mining software has been credited with killing Osama bin Laden (a claim that has never been confirmed) and blamed for tearing unauthorized immigrant families apart.

Now the notoriously secretive surveillance startup that the White House is entrusting with the nations coronavirus data is about to go public.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by venture capitalist and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel along with Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings, and Alex Karp, its eccentric CEO who has a law degree and a PhD in neoclassical social theory and keeps 20 identical pairs of swimming goggles in his office. The companys name comes from J.R.R. Tolkiens palantri, which are magical orbs that let their possessors see anything happening in the world at any time. The name fits, too, as Palantirs vision has always been to create software that can mine and analyze large and disparate data sets, putting them all in one place and finding connections between them.

The company came together not long after 9/11, when Palantir was pitched as a tool that could have identified and stopped the hijackers and would prevent similar attacks from happening in the future. Sure enough, by 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek was calling Palantir an indispensable tool employed by the US intelligence community in the war on terrorism. The magazine added, Palantir technology essentially solves the Sept. 11 intelligence problem.

Indeed, the CIA was one of Palantirs earliest investors through its venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (yes, the CIA has a venture capital arm). It was Palantirs only customer for years as the company refined and improved its technology, according to Forbes. By 2010, Palantirs customers were mostly government agencies, though there were some private companies in the mix. Having managed to quietly work its way toward a $1 billion valuation, it was then one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley. By 2015, Palantir was valued at $20 billion.

I think its worth keeping in mind that Palantir sees itself not alongside Uber, Twitter, and Netflix, but alongside Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Booz Allen, said the Intercepts Sam Biddle, who has covered Palantir for years. Palantir wants to be a defense contractor, not a Silicon Valley unicorn.

Palantir has grown into a company with roughly 2,500 employees, most of them engineers who write the software that collects data, and embedded analysts who work on site with Palantirs customers to make sense of it. Company culture has been described as cult-like, big on T-shirts and Care Bears, and more Google than Lockheed. Employees are called Palantirians.

One of Palantirs product demonstrations, as described in Bloomberg Businessweeks 2011 article, presents a fictional example of the softwares capabilities: A terrorist leaves a trail of data across Florida, including one-way plane tickets, condo rentals, bank withdrawals, phone calls to Syria, and security camera footage from Walt Disney World. Taken separately, these details dont add up to much, but Palantirs software ties together thousands of databases across various agencies and helps clients see connections across them. In this case, actions that are innocuous on their own are much more suspicious when combined, and the CIA could identify and stop a terrorists plan to attack a theme park.

Again, that was a hypothetical product demonstration, but Palantirs technology has been credited with saving its financial institution customers hundreds of millions of dollars, being used to detect Chinese spyware on the Dalai Lamas computer, thwarting Pakistani suicide bombers, and unraveling Bernie Madoffs Ponzi scheme. Its customers have included the CDC, police departments in America and abroad, and large corporations like JPMorgan and Home Depot. Palantir even sued the US Army in 2016 to force it to consider using its intelligence software after the Army chose to go with its own. Palantir won the suit, and then it won an $800 million contract.

Despite its high valuation and lucrative contracts, however, Palantir has yet to make a profit.

Palantirs work, the government agencies that contract it, and the relative lack of details about the companys inner workings mean its often seen as secretive, all-knowing, and even malevolent. Seven years after touting Palantirs terrorism-fighting abilities, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature on the company with the headline Palantir Knows Everything About You. In a book with the phrase destroying democracy in the title, Robert Scheer called Palantir a monstrous government snoop, mining our most intimate data. The companys software has been criticized for its dragnet ways, pulling in records about millions of innocent people so it can catch a few possible criminals.

Palantirs data-mining software is used to analyze vast amounts of personal data held by the federal government to make determinations that affect peoples lives with little to no oversight, said Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which successfully sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get records on its work with Palantir. Palantir analyzes databases containing telephone numbers, email addresses, financial data, call transaction records, and social media information. ... The documents EPIC obtained showed that ICEs Palantir-based databases could analyze call records and GPS data as well as conduct social network analysis of the information linking different individuals.

The company suffered one of its first rounds of bad press in 2011 when a hacker discovered it was part of a proposal to Bank of America to sabotage Wikileaks. In response, Palantir issued a public apology, created a Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties, and suspended but did not fire the engineer responsible.

The post-9/11 world that Palantir was born into in 2003 then changed considerably in 2013 when leaks from Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency used the directive of protecting the country at all costs in order to mass-collect the phone records of millions of Americans, leading to widespread outcry and some reforms. Palantir denied working with the NSA on that particular project but has worked with the agency on others, according to an internal video that was leaked to BuzzFeed News.

Palantirs work with various police departments across the country has also brought renewed scrutiny to the company, especially in light of recent protests against police brutality. Palantirs software powers the Los Angeles Police Departments predictive crime program, called Operation LASER, which tries to identify and target potential criminals for increased surveillance. The program ended in 2019 amid doubts that predictive policing was an effective crime deterrent, as well as criticism from civil rights organizations that it unfairly targeted minority communities. Its hard to get exact numbers on how many police departments Palantir has contracts with, but New Orleanss and New Yorks police departments are known customers, and Palantir boasts on its website of its work with the Salt Lake City Police Department.

Palantir declined Recodes request for comment, but the company has said its technology is built with protections for privacy and civil liberties. While the companys software obviously collects and works with data for its clients, the company says it doesnt collect or use any of that data for itself.

Palantirs less-than-great public image has come with some consequences. In the past few years, nonprofits have dropped Palantir as a corporate sponsor, and students regularly protest Palantir-related campus events and recruiting sessions. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Karp noted that a small group of protesters regularly assembles outside Palantirs offices, and hes said that his own home is the site of near-daily protests. He has a personal security guard at all times. The Investor Alliance for Human Rights criticized Palantirs work with the government and ICE, saying it was failing to fulfill its human rights responsibilities and noting that its use of personal data came with legal risks and could be in violation of state laws.

That reputation has followed Palantir even as its technology seems to be doing some good during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company is providing its services at almost no cost to the United Kingdoms National Health Service (NHS), but headlines focused on how much patient data the company was getting access to in order to do that work and what it would do with it. The NHS has also provided patient data to other companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.

Stateside, theres HHS Protect another example of Palantirs expansion into how the government collects and manages data and whom it trusts to do it (and, it seems, whom it does not). A spokesperson for HHS told NBC News last month that ICE would not have access to HHS Protect and that all information in it was de-identified anyway. But some politicians have still expressed their concerns about if and how patients personal health information will be protected, and that it wont be shared with other federal agencies. Theyve specifically cited Palantirs work on the project as one of their issues.

Our concerns that HHS Protect could be misused in this way are compounded by the fact that Palantir has a history of contracting with ICE, including two active awards worth over $38 million in total, they said in a June letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Palantir is also controversial because its co-founder and board chair, Peter Thiel, is controversial. Thiel, who was one of Facebooks first outside investors and maintains a position on its board of directors, has seen his share of criticism over the years, but the libertarian billionaire really came into the public eye in 2016 when he revealed himself as the money behind Hulk Hogans privacy lawsuit against Gawker (which would ultimately kill the site) and an early Trump supporter.

As most of liberal Silicon Valleys big names publicly came out against Trump, Thiel was one of relatively few public figures who supported his candidacy. After speaking at the Republican National Convention, he gave the Trump campaign $1.25 million, and when Trump won the election, New York magazine said he was poised to become a national villain. Thiel has been rewarded for his support: He was chosen to be a member of the presidents transition team; in the early days of the Trump presidency, Politico dubbed Thiel Donald Trumps shadow president in Silicon Valley; and Thiels chief of staff and protg, Michael Kratsios, served as the White Houses chief technology officer from 2017 until this month, when he was named acting undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense. Thiels Trump support is said to have changed going into the 2020 election, however, and he hasnt donated to Trumps campaign since October 2018.

Due, in part, to Thiels Trump links, the company has faced a new round of scrutiny. Its contract with ICE caused numerous civil rights organizations to blame Palantir for helping the agency find and deport unauthorized immigrants. While other companies were ending their relationships with certain government agencies over purported ethical concerns, Palantir renewed its ICE contract in 2019 despite reported opposition even from its own employees, some of whom left the company over it. Palantirs CEO, on the other hand, has said its not his companys place to decide how its software is used.

For a while, it suited Palantir to paint itself as this lean and mean secretive startup, said Biddle, who used to work at Gawker. Now that theyre established and have clearly weathered popular outrage over their work with ICE and a lifetime association with Peter Thiel, its time to cash in.

Karp famously and repeatedly said that he would never take his company public, believing that staying private gave Palantir an edge its public company competitors didnt have.

The minute companies go public, they are less competitive, Karp said in 2014. You need a lot of creative, wacky people that maybe Wall Street wont understand. They might say the wrong thing all the way through an interview. You really want your people to be focused on solving the problem.

But Karp has seemed more amenable to the idea in the last few years. When Palantir added its first female board member in June, a public filing seemed all but certain according to California law, public companies must have at least one female board member. Palantir filed its initial paperwork with the SEC on July 6 in a confidential filing that allowed it to avoid revealing much about its inner workings to the public. Twitter, Uber, and Spotify, among other startup giants, have done the same thing. Theres no timeline for when the company might actually go public.

Despite Palantirs enormous valuation, the company has reportedly never made a profit and struggled to live up to its hot startup image, as the Wall Street Journal said in 2018. Bloomberg reported last year that Palantirs valuation had plummeted to half, maybe even a quarter, of its 2015 peak, as investors wrote down the value of their holdings and the company offered discounted shares to employees to boost morale. Big corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Hershey, Nasdaq, Home Depot, and JPMorgan have dropped the service, as has the NSA, according to BuzzFeed News.

But 2020 has been mostly good to Palantir, if to no one else. The company says its on track to make $1 billion in 2020 and turn a profit for the first time. It has that $800 million contract with the Army and is said to be increasing its corporate customer base with its Foundry product, which requires significantly less time, money, and employees to set up than the companys custom-built solutions. Meanwhile, as evidenced by its recent work with HHS, the pandemic has increased worldwide demand for its software. Investors and employees alike have been itching for a return on their investment for years, and now might be the best time to make their wishes come true.

The market right now is crazy, Ashu Garg, a partner at venture capital firm Foundation Capital, told Recode. Theres a junk rally for tech stocks in the public markets, and most tech stocks are very richly valued without a lot of discrimination around quality.

Going public will mean Palantirs opaque business practices will have to be more transparent, and the company may not be able to simply wave off public outcry over its work as it has in the past. But experts and advocates seem to doubt much will really change on either of those fronts.

Going public might make some additional information public, but it does not guarantee oversight or accountability, Scott said.

Garg doesnt think Palantirs work with agencies like ICE and the resulting bad publicity will be too much of a detriment in the market, given how interwoven that work is and has always been with the companys business model not the case for, say, the Facebooks and Ubers and Zooms of the world.

Palantirs core business, and probably its most profitable business, is its government business especially work for three-letter agencies and the Department of Defense, Garg said. I dont think thats going to change.

What remains to be seen, then, is if Palantirs ability to marry 21st-century Silicon Valley disruption to 20th-century defense contracting will live up to its valuation when it hits the stock market. At a time when Big Tech companies are trying to make their data collection practices more transparent and say theyll give consumers more control over them (and are facing increased pressure from lawmakers to do so), Palantir has been able to keep much of its work with our data secret. A successful IPO will only give it more reasons and opportunities to do so.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

Support Voxs explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Voxs work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

More here:
How Palantir and Peter Thiel might lead the biggest tech IPO of the year - Vox.com

If youre a world leader, you may be wondering how to prepare for a Joe Biden win in Novembers U.S. presidential election. If you arent thinking about this, maybe a look at Donald Trumps latest polling numbers in key battlegrounds will get you going. And if youve spent the last 3 years sucking up to Trump, you really, really need to prepare a Biden game plan, because aides to the former vice president have long memories.

But first, an introduction: Im Nahal Toosi, foreign affairs correspondent at POLITICO, and Im filling in this week for the illustrious Ryan Heath. Ive never written a newsletter before, so this could get a little weird.

I recently asked my personal brain trust (a mix of policy, political and diplomatic gurus, including a few Biden campaign advisers) how the rest of the world should prepare for a Biden presidency. Few answered the question directly -- and all insisted theyre not ruling out a Trump win -- but some nuggets from the conversations stood out:

TRUST ISSUES: People expect Biden to embrace alliances and multilateral agreements that Trump spurned, from NATO to the Paris climate deal. But they harbor doubts about long-term U.S. reliability: What if the next GOP president reverses everything Biden does? It wont be enough for Biden to win, an Asian diplomat said. To re-establish global trust in the U.S. brand, Republican lawmakers need to show some unity on foreign policy with the Biden team, he said. Maybe Biden could even appoint a Republican to his Cabinet? And ideally, the diplomat added, Wed like to have Senate confirmation of agreements.

POINT OF LEVERAGE: Some countries may try to use that lack of trust in America as leverage, people close to the Biden campaign concede. Iran, for one, may demand that the U.S. pay it reparations on top of lifting sanctions for it to fully comply once again with the Iran nuclear deal that Trump abandoned. The Palestinians, too, may insist that a Biden-led U.S. make up for the loss of financial aid they suffered under Trump, and then some. Its easy to imagine Americas European allies not coming to Americas defense in such cases. But if Biden appears too conciliatory, even to allies, Republicans are sure to use that against him. Remember the whole apology tours thing?

SEE ME, MAYBE? If you want to perplex global affairs nerds, ask which foreign country Biden should visit first as president. A country in Europe, some said, citing the need to repair a transatlantic relationship battered by Trump. Mexico, countered others, arguing Biden needs to mend ties with a neighbor and key trading partner while also presenting a more humane vision of immigration policy. One person (the Asian diplomat again) stood out with this idea: Biden should first visit the United Nations, sending a signal about his commitment to multilateralism without favoring any one country. A former European ambassador, meanwhile, said that upon taking office, one of Bidens first phone calls must be to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, if only to say this is an important relationship. We have to set it straight.

LOOKING OUT FOR NO. 2: Many foreign officials expect Biden to leave office after one term, so theres lots of interest in his pick for vice president. Much depends on who that is, but theres every expectation that person a woman, Biden has pledged will run for the White House as early as 2024. Some of the rumored candidates have little to no international experience. For now, the Biden campaign is restricting its contacts with foreign officials. Once those limits are lifted, expect diplomats to rush to meet his No. 2.

A FRUSTRATING FRIEND: Should Israels Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu call Biden if he wins? Yes. Will Biden answer? Yes. Will Netanyahu like everything he says? Probably not. True, little is likely to change at the core of the U.S.-Israel relationship, especially U.S. military support for Israel. Biden and Netanyahu also have been friends a long time. But within the Democratic party, theres growing frustration over Israels treatment of the Palestinians, deepened by Netanyahus desire to annex parts of the West Bank. And neither Biden nor his aides can forget Netanyahus efforts to undermine Barack Obamas Iran policy, nor how the Israeli leader has cozied up to Trump. If Biden makes an early move to restore the Iran nuclear deal and Netanyahu publicly fights it, Biden will be furious, a person familiar with the issue told POLITICO. Added one Democratic strategist: Bibi has some atoning to do.

NOTA BENE: Progressives are pressuring Biden to hire aides who meet certain principles some might call it a purity test including having opposed covert operations that harmed civilians. Biden is unlikely to meet all their demands, but that rift in the party is something to watch.

A message from Bank of America:

As we grapple with hard questions about the society we live in, we have an opportunity to reflect on what individuals and organizations can do to bring about positive change. Bank of Americas podcast, That Made All the Difference, explores the power to shape the future.

BORDER LINES

Remember those video games where you had to maneuver around all sorts of barriers and slay a dragon or two to reach a destination? (Are those still around?) Well, thats what overseas travel is going to be like for a while.

With the coronavirus pandemic hitting different countries at different rates, travel rules are constantly shifting. Whats emerging is a spaghetti bowl of travel regulations that will likely act as a brake on the global economic recovery for a long time, the Wall Street Journal says.

These recent headlines alone convey the global jumble:

France, China engage in spat over corona flight restrictions

EU to exclude Serbia, Montenegro from global travel list

Croatia Opens Border to US, flouts EU ban

Reopen the Canada-U.S. border? Canadians say sorry, but no thanks

Thailand tightens borders over fears of second wave of coronavirus

And lets not forget the non-coronavirus reasons countries are citing to restrict who enters their territory. Brexit is one. Another is concern about asylum seekers and refugees.

Slaying dragons might be easier than figuring out this mess.

REALITY CHECK CORNER

China this week imposed unspecified sanctions on three U.S. lawmakers and a American diplomat. And guess what: Some of the targets are thrilled.

Im actually proud of it, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said. Anytime a totalitarian and evil regime is against you, you know youre on the right side.

Bummer, joked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Twitter. I was going to take my family to Beijing for summer vacation, right after visiting Tehran.

Beijings sanctions may even help cement unusual alliances in Washington, given the growing bipartisan consensus that the U.S. has to be tougher on China.

One of the sanctioned lawmakers, Rep. Chris Smith, told POLITICO hes not happy about being sanctioned because hed planned to go to China and speak truth to the dictatorship. The New Jersey Republican is a leading human rights voice on Capitol Hill and is accustomed to such attacks. He said the sanctions wont silence him. I fully intend on trying to go again, he said. The sooner, the better.

Beijing may have felt it had no choice but to issue the sanctions as a response to recent American sanctions on Chinese officials. But as my colleague, David Wertime, noted in his China Watcher newsletter, it was a relatively restrained, largely optical response.

If the Trump administration follows through with a blanket travel ban on Chinese Communist Party members, as floated in The New York Times, expect that restraint to disappear fast.

A message from Bank of America:

TECH TOCK, TECH TOCK

NO WAY TO HUAWEI: Britain now says it will ban Chinese telecom firm Huawei from its 5G networks. The about-face is a win for the U.S., which wants other nations to bar the company for security reasons. White House national security adviser Robert OBrien this week met in Paris with European officials about China, while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to the U.K. next week, with China high on top of that agenda. Still, it appears U.S. diplomacy, alone, didnt prompt the U.K. move; U.S. sanctions helped.

YOU WIN SOME ... Apple won a big round in its legal fight with the European Union when the blocs second-highest court ruled that the U.S. company was not on the hook for a tax bill of at least 13 billion, plus interest. The decision is a rebuke to EU competition czar Margrethe Vestager, who has pushed policies designed to ensure that multinational firms pay their fair share of taxes. Vestager could appeal the case, but analysts indicate the odds of a win are slim.

... YOU LOSE SOME The U.S. tech industry and Trump administration suffered a blow, however, in a new decision from Europe's top court, which ruled for the second time that EU data would not be safe from snooping under a transatlantic data protection deal. "The ruling, which cancels the Privacy Shield agreement, throws billions of dollars in digital trade into legal limbo and reignites a spat over surveillance that dates back more than five years to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations about American spying," POLITICO Europe's Vincent Manancourt writes.

In this week's spotlight we examine the intensified cooperation of drug regulators around the world despite their governments' fierce competition for coronavirus treatments and potential vaccines. Guido Rasi, the boss of the European Medicines Agency, says it will help regulators withstand political pressure at home.

POWER PLAYS

WATER WARS: The United States this week declared in unusually explicit terms that it rejects most of Chinas claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea, aligning itself with a 2016 ruling by an international tribunal. The announcement, however, may be more symbolic than anything. That said, Chinas assertiveness is leading its neighbors to step up defense spending. Nowhere has the impact been stronger than in Japan, the Wall Street Journal reports.

EXPLOSIVE IRAN: A string of fires and explosions, some of them at sensitive nuclear and military sites, have bedeviled Iran in recent weeks. The incidents have raised the possibility that Israel and the United States are engaging in covert sabotage of the Islamic Republic. The latest reports say seven ships caught on fire at the Iranian port city of Bushehr.

FIVE MORE YEARS: My colleague Zosia Wanat at POLITICO Europe has four takeaways from Polish President Andrzej Duda's reelection after a knife-edge runoff vote last weekend. As she highlights, the West should brace for five more contentious years on issues like civil liberties, rule of law and climate. Over at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum dives into how Duda rode a fear of the rainbow plague to victory.

Earlier this week, Trump tweeted congratulations to his friend on his reelection. Duda, however, lamented that Trump hadnt phoned him. Maybe he sent an official letter, he told U.N. Secretary General Antnio Guterres. At least, he thought it was Guterres. Turns out Duda was actually speaking to Russian pranksters.

UNREST IN MALI: Malis president formally dissolved a constitutional court, meeting a demand of protesters whose demonstrations have convulsed the capital, Bamako. It was yet another bid by President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita to defuse tensions over contested parliamentary elections, an unstable security situation and alleged corruption. Many in the opposition June 5th Movement are unlikely to be satisfied, however, unless Keita resigns. The political instability has alarmed neighbors in West Africa and allies such as France given Malis position as a key front in the fight against Islamist jihadists.

The U.S. secretary of State wants to reshape the international dialogue on human rights. On Thursday, Pompeo unveiled a draft report from his Commission on Unalienable Rights, a panel he created to delve into questions such as whether there are too many human rights and whether some matter more than others.

Theres a lot in the draft report for both critics and supporters, including its cautious endorsement of the idea that it sometimes makes sense to prioritize some rights above others. The report could gather dust, especially if Trump loses in November. But if theres a second Trump term or a future Pompeo presidency expect this document to influence how the U.S. approaches human rights.

That has implications for international institutions such as the U.N. Human Rights Council, which Pompeo slammed during his speech unveiling the report. Pompeos remarks were much less nuanced than the draft report. But his claim that the U.S. Declaration of Independence is the most important statement of human rights ever written, also suggests he has less interest in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or other international instruments.

HUNGER GOAL GETTING FURTHER AWAY: The United Nations estimates that nearly 690 million people went hungry in 2019, an increase of 60 million people over the last five years, according to an annual study published July 13. And the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report warns that the Covid-19 pandemic could tip over 130 million more people into chronic hunger by the end of 2020, casting yet more doubt on the world's ability to reach the U.N. goal of Zero Hunger by 2030.

TAIWAN FILLS WTO VACANCY: Former Grand Justice of Taiwan's Constitutional Court Lo Chang-fa has been named the new Taiwanese representative to the World Trade Organization, filling a position left vacant since September, the Taiwan News reports.

A message from Bank of America:

On the second season of That Made All the Difference, Host and Bank of America executive Alicia Burke explores how people like Dr. Wayne A. I. Frederick, president of Howard University, and Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, are responding to current events, and what theyre doing to better themselves, their communities and the world.

This is a time to reflect and build habits. Sal Khan, Founder of Khan Academy

Listen to the latest podcast now.

BRAIN FOOD

Azeem Ibrahim argues that Narendra Modi is changing India into a Russian-style managed democracy and describes how the roots of his rise can be traced, in part, to historical differences over how one defines Hindu.

In memoriam: Iraq scholar Husham Al-Hashimi was gunned down in Baghdad earlier this month. Hed submitted several pieces to the Center for Global Policy, which is publishing them posthumously.

William Burns, one of Americas most celebrated diplomatic figures, writes that the U.S. must choose from three broad strategic approaches: retrenchment, restoration and reinvention. The answer is not necessarily more cowbell.

Foreign policy? How about interstellar policy? Check out Dust, an immersive sci-fi podcast that seems designed for internationalists. While youre at it, listen to The Second Oil Age, a sci-fi podcast about a post-energy crisis world.

Watch for these:

Losing the Long Game, by Philip Gordon. The book, written by a former top aide to Barack Obama, tries to understand why the United States is so bad at regime change. It comes out in October.

Friendly Fire, by Ami Ayalon, with Anthony David. Ayalon, a former Shin Bet chief, reflects on his life, Israels trajectory and whether the country could become an Orwellian dystopia. The book is due out in September.

ODDS AND ENDS

Barbados is devising a special visa for people who want to work remotely while on its glorious beaches (cc: my editors). Abu Dhabi, meanwhile, wants the world to know its gradually opening back up for visitors.

Uighur activists are using special emojis to draw attention to the plight of their brethren in China, where more than a million Uighur Muslims face detention and abuse that some say is verging on genocide.

Brazils President Jair Bolsonaro, a coronavirus skeptic now in quarantine because he contracted the disease, gets pecked by a large bird known as a rhea. The bird represents us, tweeted one Brazilian politician.

THANKS to editor Emily Cadei, Carmen Paun, Luiza Ch. Savage, David Wertime. Your regular host, Ryan Heath, will be back next week.

See more here:
If Biden wins, will the world take America back? - Politico

South Americas largest country by landmass and economy is also a flashpoint for criminal organizations, narcotics trafficking, and terrorism financing.

Brazil once provided vital intelligence to prevent transnational threats from reaching the U.S. homeland. Then, Edward Snowden published a trove of classified information in 2013, revealing wiretaps of then-Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Intelligence cooperation and military partnerships with Brazil broke down, and the United States lost a key partner.

But a renewed security partnership under a new Brazilian president is one of U.S. Southern Commands chief priorities, its leader, Adm. Craig Faller, told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview.

We get our best intelligence from our very capable partners, Faller said on a Zoom call from Southcom headquarters in Miami.

With a narcotics fight in full force across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and gaping intelligence holes in places such as Venezuela, protecting the homeland requires partners and trust, he explained.

Intelligence is foundational to anything we do, any decision I make, Faller said.

Former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and 33-year CIA veteran David Shedd said the relationship with Brazil is vital in the hemisphere.

In Brazil, it's very important for us to have an intelligence relationship with them because of the tri-border area, Shedd, now a Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, told the Washington Examiner.

The porous border region of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay is a center point of money laundering, false documents, terrorism financing, and other illicit activities.

Even 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed is known to have spent time there.

None of these things stay within their borders. They become transnational organized crime, Shedd said.

The damage done by Edward Snowden is enormous, he added. So, when Dilma did not want the exercises or the visits, and then the intel sharing, that tone came from the top.

Rebuilding a relationship with a partner country is a whole of government effort, but the security interests are coordinated in large part by military to military cooperation. Southcom has the lead for the countries of the Caribbean, as well as those in Central and South America.

This is a focus of United States Southern Command with any country, with Brazil as one of our key partners, said Faller, who noted that a Brazilian two-star general will be joining Southern Command as a liaison, putting Brazil on par with Americas closest partner in the region, Colombia.

We have tangibly thickened our intelligence sharing processes and procedures and actually our understanding, and we benefit greatly from that, Faller said.

A military president

Former army captain and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is known for inflammatory statements, his kinship with President Trump, and his controversial pro-military stance. That has included speaking positively about Brazils 1964-1985 military dictatorship, a time when freedom of speech was stifled and democracy advocates disappeared.

While Brazil is now one of the most vibrant democracies in the region, strengthening ties under Bolsonaro is delicate, Faller explained.

I stay out of the noise, he said.

We focus on strengthening our partnership, whether it's intel sharing, whether it's the ability to exercise together, planning, we stay out of policy and politics, he said. Their officers, just like ours, they swear an oath, and they're swearing their oath to the constitution.

Shedd, who dined with Bolsonaro during his 2019 visit to Washington, said the Brazilian president is eager to strengthen ties to the U.S. at all levels, and that benefits people in the U.S.

He had just a really big vision of putting Brazil on the path to a strategic partnership with the United States, he explained, describing economic, military, and judicial cooperation.

In the military area, he very much wanted to see a reversal of the agenda with [former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva] first and then Dilma afterwards (which, of course, was rife with corruption) and really rebuild that relationship, he said.

Bolsonaros visit to Southcom in March, the first by a Brazilian president, while it later caused a scare when his press chief tested positive for the coronavirus, served as a sign of the rising military relationship with the South American giant.

Strengthening partnerships with countries that Faller refers to as neighbors compensates where resources fall short of U.S. Central Command, which manages the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which counters China's influence in the Pacific.

Russia made more port visits to Latin America in 2019 than it had in decades, Faller said, while China has ramped up its gifts of military equipment, including trucks and small boats, to countries in the region.

We just don't have a lot of assets down there to see what they're doing, Faller said of the great power rivals. So, a lot of this is we pick up bits and pieces and pull together.

Shedd said in a country such as Venezuela, where the U.S. no longer has a diplomatic presence, relationships with neighboring nations fill intelligence gaps.

Presence matters, he said. And when you don't have it, we do it by a proxy with friends and allies.

Shedd explained, Colombia, Brazil may be running sources inside Venezuela. They have a presence in Venezuela that we may not have.

Faller used a sports analogy to make the case for continued regional engagement and strengthening partnerships to counter great power influence and regional security threats.

Our partners want to do that with us. We just have to be there, he said. I never was in a sporting game yet that I won by not being on the field.

Visit link:
EXCLUSIVE: Southern Command rebuilds intelligence relationship with Brazil years after Snowden damage - Washington Examiner

Back at the 2012 Emmys, Homeland started a two-season winning streak with eight awards and then lost all 19 of its nominations in its next five. After a powerful eighth final season, the Showtime drama series is poised to finish strong. Back in the fray is two-time Best Actress winner Claire Danes, who has taken bipolar CIA spy Carrie Mathison through a tumultuous trajectory as she ricocheted around her mentor, intelligence operative Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin).

Making this complicated woman believable is not as easy as Danes makes it look. Mathisons a superagent operating in a naturalistic world that is grounded in real reporting. Every year, during their Homeland hiatus, Danes and Patinkin joined executive producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon and director Lesli Linka Glatter for a weeklong Washington, D.C. spy camp. Over eight seasons, they developed relationships with intelligence experts, think-tank heads on the right and left, and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors who filled them in on whats going on in the government and the world. Memorably, the Homeland team interviewed players such as Russian president Vladimir Putin and whistleblower Edward Snowden (via closed-circuit TV in Moscow). Thats how the Homeland writers learned what was keeping intelligence professionals up at night, and that formed the basis of each season.

Over eight seasons, Danes is front and center, carrying us on adventures that could seem far-fetched if she didnt make us believe them. Early on, Danes established Mathisons athletic and intellectual prowess as well as her unwavering commitment to guarding the national interest. The CIA agent starts out falling in love with the man shes charged with debriefing, Marine Corps Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), after he is released by al-Qaeda after eight years as a prisoner of war. Their tempestuous affair yields a daughter before Brody is abruptly killed.

Over the series, the writers kept throwing Mathison into charged moral territory, like refusing to look after her child. Still, its conditional, said Danes from upstate New York where she was in lockdown with her husband Hugh Dancy and their two young sons. You can only forgive Carrie for abandoning Franny if she never makes that mistake again. She cant go off and have another child, for example, but that idea came up. You just cant make that choice. Its all proportionate, and relative. So she can transgress and she can falter, in profound ways. If she learned from those mistakes, then we can forgive her. She does absorb her losses and her missteps.

As far as Danes is concerned, Mathison is kind of a James Bond. Shes like a superhero. You know she shouldnt exist. She doesnt exist, shes so exaggerated. Shes suffers a lot, shes not having the kind of great time Bond is having. She does, despite all of the pain, take deep joy from her work. Shes professional. Shes always the smartest person in the room, ultimately the most trustworthy, even though she is volatile.

Mathison moves on to loving Brody replacement Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) as well as using other men for sex and/or information, while always staying anchored to Berenson. Her priority remains the same: saving the world, no matter the cost. But her psyche absorbs the collateral damage she racks up along the way. Mathison is vulnerable (and dangerous) when her meds fail, and tortured by abandoning her daughter, but nothing is more satisfying than watching her grab a head scarf and a motorcycle and hit the ground in Kabul.

This season, she chases down vital intel, even when the local CIA considers her unreliable and gets in her way, forcing her to get assistance from Yevgeny Gromov (Costa Ronin), the respectful Russian spy who clapped her in prison. Even though they are on opposing teams, they are equally matched and believe in the same things.

Erica Parise / Showtime

One of the most challenging scenes in the finale was the sexiest. When Mathison tracks down the flight recorder from the late presidents helicopter crash, Yevgeny catches her, said Danes. She has to make an impossible pitch to him, and in her Hail Mary, starts offering him sex, finally. Oh my God! He injects her with a needle. Its all so preposterous! As we were filming, Im rolling my eyes. You know this is never going to be remotely plausible. Thats ridiculous! It works, youre with her.

Thats the tightrope Danes had to walk on the show. The quality of the writing is so consistently wonderful, she said. Even when the scenarios were extreme and challenging, there was always cogency there. It was always thought through in the writers room and ultimately on the page. It was charted out. But it was fun to be able to take such big swings, to do something that was just so much.

The only way through was finding ways to make it also feel possible, she said. That was the trick. Somehow we were able to figure that out. We got more facile with it as we went along, we all found our rhythms. Her scenes with Patinkin were literally so musical. He was sonorous, reflective, sturdy and careful. She was the opposite. He was an oboe and she was this frenetic flute. We played with the musicality off the words and ideas. She was manic sometimes, I got to accentuate and lean further into that.

Alert: Season 8 spoilers ahead.

Danes felt the challenge of winding up the series. Its an impossible task really, she said. But we came as close as we could. Did we try! We were not casual about it. At the end of Season 7, when Berenson maneuvers to get Mathison back, her mind is so far gone that she doesnt recognize him. Once she is recovered, he sends her back to Kabul. But is it too early? This final mission pits spy and boss against each other in a fraught moral duel as she demands that he give up a Russian asset he has been working with for decades. He refuses to betray a loyal source; she insists that the price must be paid for the greater good. Is Mathison capable of destroying her beloved Saul? And yet, the twisty plot winds up in a satisfying switch where she winds up replacing the Russian asset herself.

The actress saw the parallels between Brody and Mathison in the first and last season. Its kind of poetic she finds herself in this position, she said. But theyre both taken to the edge of their moral integrity and their patriotism, and they both ultimately do the right thing, in the same way that Brody doesnt blow himself and everyone else up, but he comes very close. But Carrie and Brody are driven by the same motivating principle throughout: they are patriots. Brody became a perverse version of that, and the same is true of Carrie.

And yet there are lines that Mathison cannot cross. You know we like to thrill, said Danes. But we also had to protect her heroism, right? We have to be frustrated by her, in real tension about whether shes going to do the right thing or not. But you know she cant kill Saul, we would not be able to forgive her that. We were always probing those ideas and playing with how far we could stretch the dramatic circumstances.

Erica Parise / Showtime

Working with writers is the best part of the process for Danes. Its an alive back and forth, she said. You really do work in tandem, like in the theatre, youre establishing a new play with the writer in rehearsals. And you tweak things as you go along, tailored to the performers. With television, you become this one organism, you interpret their work, and then they interpret yours, and its like kneading bread, it goes on for so long. It got to the point where it was really clear which writer had written which episode because you get to know each writer so intimately.

The actors could continue interacting with the writer responsible for each episode on set, to guide the director and actors if they ever had any questions, said Danes, who missed writer Meredith Stiehm when she left after two seasons, the only woman writer on the show. She was the person who established the bipolar aspect of Carries character. She had some personal history in her family.

Sifeddine Elamine/SHOWTIME

Saying goodbye

During the final season, after closing each location, from Morocco to Alabama, the cast and crew said a series of farewells. There was not one cumulative climactic goodbye, but a few, said Danes. There wasnt ever going to be a moment of epiphany when the clouds parted and I wept. Its weird to have it be released into the world and truly, conclusively, unequivocally end, during the pandemic.

Shes trying to process saying goodbye to the show that dragged us all over the planet, she said. Its been such a big, bold, ambitious, active, adventure, and now were all burrowed into our little dens, the exact opposite. We were pining for home, so looking forward to returning to a normal life, whatever that meant. But I wasnt thinking of this!

Up next: Danes is discussing various television and film projects in the abstract I dont know when anything will happen. Clearly, TV remains the more fertile environment for female characters than film, she said. Id love to make a movie again, its tough, especially right now in the corona era when people are not going to theaters and films are being streamed almost immediately to TV. Thats going to become that much more true. You always want to do something different. I wont be playing a bipolar CIA agent anytime soon. Yeah, Id like to play somebody who is maybe not saving the world literally every day? But she was just such a good time. I will miss her, deeply, shell always be in there, shell always be kicking around. Maybe I can bring her out to play in my own living room.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

Read more:
With Homeland in the Rearview, Claire Danes Explains Why Carrie Could Not Kill Saul - IndieWire

Special thanks to legal intern Rachel Sommers, who was the lead author of this post.

Visa applicants to the United States are required to disclose personal information including their work, travel, and family histories. And as of May 2019, they are required to register their social media accounts with the U.S. government. According to the State Department, approximately 14.7 million people will be affected by this new policy each year.

EFF recently filed an amicus brief in Doc Society v. Pompeo, a case challenging this Registration Requirement under the First Amendment. The plaintiffs in the case, two U.S.-based documentary film organizations that regularly collaborate with non-U.S. filmmakers and other international partners, argue that the Registration Requirement violates the expressive and associational rights of both their non-U.S.-based and U.S.-based members and partners. After the government filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, we filed our brief in district court in support of the plaintiffs opposition to dismissal.

In our brief, we argue that the Registration Requirement invades privacy and chills free speech and association of both visa applicants and those in their social networks, including U.S. persons, despite the fact that the policy targets only publicly available information. This is amplified by the staggering number of social media users affected and the vast amounts of personal information they publicly shareboth intentionally and unintentionallyon their social media accounts.

Social media profiles paint alarmingly detailed pictures of their users personal lives. By monitoring applicants social media profiles, the government can obtain information that it otherwise would not have access to through the visa application process. For example, visa applicants are not required to disclose their political views. However, applicants might choose to post their beliefs on their social media profiles. Those seeking to conceal such information might still be exposed by comments and tags made by other users. And due to the complex interactions of social media networks, studies have shown that personal information about users such as sexual orientation can reliably be inferred even when the user doesnt expressly share that information. Although consular officers might be instructed to ignore this information, it is not unreasonable to fear that it might influence their decisions anyway.

Just as other users online activity can reveal information about visa applicants, so too can visa applicants online activity reveal information about other users, including U.S. persons. For example, if a visa applicant tags another user in a political rant or posts photographs of themselves and the other user at a political rally, government officials might correctly infer that the other user shares the applicants political beliefs. In fact, one study demonstrated that it is possible to accurately predict personal information about those who do not use any form of social media based solely on personal information and contact lists shared by those who do. The governments surveillance of visa applicants social media profiles thus facilitates the surveillance of millionsif not billionsmore people.

Because social media users have privacy interests in their public social media profiles, government surveillance of digital content risks chilling free speech. If visa applicants know that the government can glean vast amounts of personal information about them from their profilesor that their anonymous or pseudonymous accounts can be linked to their real-world identitiesthey will be inclined to engage in self-censorship. Many will likely curtail or alter their behavior onlineor even disengage from social media altogether. Importantly, because of the interconnected nature of social media, these chilling effects extend to those in visa applicants social networks, including U.S. persons.

Studies confirm these chilling effects. Citizen Lab found that 62 percent of survey respondents would be less likely to speak or write about certain topics online if they knew that the government was engaged in online surveillance. A Pew Research Center survey found that 34 percent of its survey respondents who were aware of the online surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden had taken at least one step to shield their information from the government, including using social media less often, uninstalling certain apps, and avoiding the use of certain terms in their digital communications.

One might be tempted to argue that concerned applicants can simply set their accounts to private. Some users choose to share their personal informationincluding their names, locations, photographs, relationships, interests, and opinionswith the public writ large. But others do so unintentionally. Given the difficulties associated with navigating privacy settings within and across platforms and the fact that privacy settings often change without warning, there is good reason to believe that many users publicly share more personal information than they think they do. Moreover, some applicants might fear that setting their accounts to private will negatively impact their applications. Othersespecially those using social media anonymously or pseudonymouslymight be loath to maximize their privacy settings because they use their platforms with the specific intention of reaching large audiences.

These chilling effects are further strengthened by the broad scope of the Registration Requirement, which allows the government to continue surveilling applicants social media profiles once the application process is over. Personal information obtained from those profiles can also be collected and stored in government databases for decades. And that information can be shared with other domestic and foreign governmental entities, as well as current and prospective employers and other third parties. It is no wonder, then, that social media users might severely limit or change the way they use social media.

Secrecy should not be a prerequisite for privacyand the review and collection by the government of personal information that is clearly outside the scope of the visa application process creates unwarranted chilling effects on both visa applicants and their social media associates, including U.S. persons. We hope that the D.C. district court denies the governments motion to dismiss the case and ultimately strikes down the Registration Requirement as unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Read the original:
EFF to Court: Social Media Users Have Privacy and Free Speech Interests in Their Public Information - EFF

Seven Stories Press just released Ted Ralls new book,Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.Rall is a graphic novelist, a syndicated columnist and the author of many books of art and prose, including biographies of Edward Snowden, Bernie Sanders and Pope Francis. Youve probably seen his political cartoons, which are often published in urban weeklies.

Political Suicide uses the graphic novel form to trace the history of the Democratic Partys rightward movement over the last few decades, and how its leadership has worked to suppress the partys progressive wing.

Ted & I talked on June 27thfor my podcast, Voice for Nature & Peace.You can listen to the full conversation here. What follows are two extended excerpts, edited for clarity.

Kollibri:Theres often been a discussion about the Democrats: How comethey dont win as much as they should? How come people like Trump are able to win? It often comes down to this argument of, Is it incompetence or is it corruption? And your book comes down pretty solidly on the side of corruption.

Ted:Yes. The question is: Is it a plan? Is it a conspiracy or is it a system? I think its more a system that ends up creating systemic corruption. Thats my conclusion. Obviously, its impossible toknowwithout being a fly on the wall in the room where it happened. But, since were not, you kind of have to draw the conclusion that these are people who know what theyre doing, but they dont know why.

I think they sort of have articles of religious faith within the DNC. For example, the whole centrist/triangulation thing. You know: If you go too far to the left you just cant win. But theres no real data to support that it. It may be true but [they need to] prove it. They havent been winning much with their current approach. This is not a party that sweeps a lot of elections.

There are more registered Democrats than registered Republicans. So by definition, if everybody votes in roughly equal numbers, Democrats should win most of the time. But they dont, so obviously whats happening is that Democrats are less motivated to vote than Republicans. So the question is, Why is that?

Are people who are left of center intrinsically more apathetic of lazier or less likely to vote when its drizzling on a cold day in November? Or, are they just simply less excited about their candidates and feel that less is at stake. We can argue about this, but obviously you know where I come down on this point: I think theyre just less excited.

You know that, for example, if Joe Biden is elected, youre not going to have an exciting new policy agenda thats really going to thrill us. Where, if say, Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren had been [nominated], youd know there would be a possibility that some exciting policies would be at least proposed and fought for, if not necessarily enacted.

Kollibri:It seems to me that with Biden, this is the toughest case theyve made for themselves in years that theyre the lesser of the two evils.

Ted:Yes. No doubt. Whats funny about this is that Biden is asking, essentially, for a blank check. Its not very likely that hell even be alive in four years. So, we dont even really know who the president will be because itll be the vice president. But we dont know who his vice presidential pick is. Yet were being asked to support this future, unknown president.

Also, the country effectively will be run by the cabinet and a shadow cabinet of DNC power-brokers. And we dont know who any of those people are either. Literally, its, Vote for this unknown cabal. All we can tell you is that theyre not Donald Trump. We will also tell you that on all the key issues that progressives currently care aboutwhether its defunding the police: Biden says hes against that; the Green New Deal: Biden says hes against that too, cant afford it; or Medicare-For-All: Biden says hes against that, too; student-loan forgiveness: on that, Biden has been downright Scrooge-like, which is especially weird. Its like the COVID-19 pandemic hasnt changed his thinking on anything. Youd think that with the economy in the toilet, youd say, Well, its too much to ask for a country with at least 25% unemployment to pay back their student loans. Or maybe its a lot to ask people in the age of COVID to go work for less than $15 an hour. Or maybe Medicare-For-All isnt even as much as we need because people are literally not going to the doctor because people feel like they cant afford it, and the pandemic shows the insanity of that.

But he hasnt changed any of it

I was thinking about framing. The sales pitch for each candidate: we all know it. Hillarys sales pitch was, I have an awesome resume, Im really experienced, Im very qualified. Donald Trumps sales pitch was, America has become a shit-hole country. Our infrastructure is falling apart. The streets of our Midwestern Rust Belt cities are crumbling. I will make this country the way it looked in the 1950s during the post-War expansion, and also, incidentally, white males will be back in charge. It will look like the 1950s again. We understand the sales pitch: Make America great again.

But with Biden, the sales pitch is: A return to normalcy. Quote-end-quote, a return to Obama-era normalcy. The problem with that it is two-fold. One, Obama wasnt that great. Things werent that great under Obama. But I think the bigger problem with the sales pitch is, this isnt really normalcy. It isnt normalcy to have a president who is clearly mentally decomposing before our eyes.

The last two years of Woodrow Wilson, the last two years of Eisenhower, the last years of Ronald Reagan: were all presidents who were mentally impaired in some way. But the thing is, they werent elected that way. Here were being asked to literally vote for a guy who tells us, Im not that sharp. Thats why Im only going to be a one-term president. Theres this implication: Im going to have all these awesome people running the show behind the scenes. Im going to have my own team of best and brightest. Parenthetically, theres no evidence to support that because he wont tell us who they are. I assume theyll just be a bunch of Obama-era hacks because those are the people he knows. They werent great either.

So the sales pitch doesnt work, because weve never been asked to vote for, basically, a president whose already mentally impaired out of the gate, and that everythings going to be run by a shadow government that we dont even know. Thats never been something the American people have been asked to sign up for. Its not really normalcy. Its something else

Kollibri:A lot of your bookto turn to how we got herecovers the recent history (and further back than that) of the Democratic Party, showing the patterns here, and showing how theyve presented themselves as one party but theyve been something else, basically the entire time. I think that a lot of this history is really whats valuable about your book, and what people wouldnt ve have known before.

For example, I was fascinated particularly by the section on Jimmy Carter, because hes presented as such a saint these days, and yet he did have a very checkered history in that office, and he was the beginning of the rightward lurch.

Ted:Yes. Carter is super old and obviously could dieand will die soonand when he does, just watch how hes a lionized as a hero of American liberalism. But thats bullshit. He absolutely was the beginning of the whole Democratic southern strategy which Clinton followed Carter definitely ran as a moderate and governed as a right-wing Democrat. People forget that he brought back draft registration. He funded the Mujahideen, who ultimately morphed into Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Afghanistan looks the way it does now because he listened to Brzezinski.

The Reagan defense build-up of the 1980swe call it the Reagan build-upbut it really began in 1978 under Jimmy Carter and just continued under Reagan.

Carter was a hawk. In fact his policy with Iran was hawkish enough to provoke the hostage crisis. It didnt just befall him. It was something he brought on himself by propping up the Shah, and inviting the Shah to come to the United States to seek medical care.

Any progressive historian has to look at Jimmy Carter and say, This guy is the beginning of the end of the Democratic Party as a party that represents working class people.

Kollibri:Then just a few years later, we had Jesse Jackson running in sort of a similar role as Sanders was the last two years, coming from the progressive left. Jackson was the first candidate I supported. 1988 was the year I turned 18 and I was able to caucus for Jesse Jackson where I was going to college that year. I remember looking back at Jesse Jacksons platform a couple years back and being like, Wow, this is almost unrecognizable as being a Democratic Party platform at this point.

Ted:Jesse Jacksons achievement was remarkable. His foreign and domestic policy agenda was far to the left of anything that even Bernie Sanders could contemplate today. He ran twice84 and 8888 was the bigger run. I was 25 in that election and I voted for him too. I think its been forgotten to history because the Democratic Party and their media allies have covered it up.

But he won a lot of primaries. He really well against Dukakis. He absolutely gave the Democratic Party a major run for its money. He did better than anyone expected that he could havepossibly including himself! After that primary run, you have to look back and say, You know, he may not have necessarily been ahead of his time. He may not have realized that it reallywashis time. But then, thats all been swept under the rug ever since and the Democratic Party really didnt want to have anything to do with him.

Kollibri:No. One of the ways his platform really stood out [was] he was actually calling for defense cuts. I recall that the Democrats used to be the party that would call for defense cuts but I believe that stopped with Clinton.

Ted:Yeah, it did. And Clinton definitely helped move the needle to the right. Look, were talking about a party that has not proposed defense cuts in many decades. It also hasnt proposed an anti-poverty program since the 1960s. Literally. I use the word, proposed very carefully. In other words, its not like Obama or Clinton ever put forward a bill and then the Republicansthe big bad Republicanskilled it. No, they never even asked for it. It obviously, clearly was never a concern of the Democratic Party, or the White House, at all. They didnt care. They didnt even want to put themselves on the record as saying, This is something that ought to be something we care about in this country.

Kollibri:Right. So at this point, its basically just a hollow reputation that the Democrats are just coasting on.

Ted:I believe so, yes. It reminds me a lot of how people come from all over the world to the United States, to a country that they think the streets are paved with gold, and Im always like, You know guys, were just coating on our old rep. But it aint true. This country is just not that great. When you come here as an immigrant, its not much fun.

The Democratic Party is very similar. Theyre still coasting on the reputation created by FDR, and to a lesser extent I would say, by LBJ. And thats pretty much it. LBJ was the last president who really made fighting poverty and income inequality any kind of priority.

Kollibri:So now were in this place where: Wheres a progressive supposed to go? And maybe there just isnt any place for a progressive to go within the electoral arena.

Ted:Theres the Green Party. People can say thats not viable. Well, its not viable because people choose to not vote for it. Obviously, both major parties at one time were minor parties and then people donated money to them and voted for them and they became bigger. At some point, people had to be willing to quote-end-quote waste their vote in order to change the existing dynamic, like in say 1832 or 1856 or 1860.

The same thing is true now. If you want a party like the Greens or a new partyIve been advocating for a new progressive partybut if you want that to happen, youre going to have to vote for them and create it. Youre going to have to be willing to quote-end-quote waste your vote.

But I think the truth is that the system is set up to keep third parties from having ballot access. The die is caste. The game is fixed. Its very very difficult to get any traction because the duopoly really controls everything. The one thing they can agree onwell, they can agree on lots of things, unfortunatelyis that they dont want any third party to gain any traction.

Kollibri:They work very hard at that at the state level. Also, the fact that the debates were taken over by the two parties. That made a huge difference too.

Ted:Thats something that went almost unnoticed. It used to befor those of us, like you and me, who are old enough to rememberpresidential debates were always sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Now, its called like the Commission on Presidential Electionsor something like thatand that thing is run by the two major parties.

Its not a coincidence that the last time there was a third party candidatelike say John Anderson in 1980 or Ross Perot in 1992it was under the auspices of the League of Women Voters. But ever since the two parties have run it, theyve managed to keep people like Ralph Nader off the debate stage, but I think that does a tremendous disservice to democracy. We need as many choices as possible.

It shouldnt just be a major third party candidate like Ralph Nader, but Id like to hear from the Socialist Workers. In other countries, the smaller parties are taken a lot more seriously by the media, and are given more of a voice, so quote-end-quote fringe or smaller constituencies have a voice in the system and thats part of the reasonin my view, its the main reasonwhy voter turnout in other countries is so much higher

Kollibri:So it comes back around to that Howard Zinn quote again, about how its not important whos sitting in office, but whos sitting in the streets, and sitting in the lunchrooms and all that.

Ted:Thats right. Theres this famous poster from the May 1968 uprising in Paris of a woman throwing a brick at the viewer and it says, Beauty is in the streets. What that means is that real politics is in the street, its protesting. We see that right now with Black Lives Matter.

Until the pandemic, protesting was something that people didespecially white peopledid on weekends as a getaway to Washington or to their state capitol, and you went and walked around and you chanted and you felt good about yourself and then you went home and got ready for the work week. Now, with one in four voters unemployed because of the pandemicsitting at home, nothing to do, no distractions, no sportsreally theres nothing to do but protest or stay at home. Suddenly were in an era of permanent protest and the power of that is just amazing. We have a long long way to go, but I thought we were never going to get rid of those stupid Confederate statues or those stupid Confederate flags. Suddenly, Oh, we dont need those anymore. And the difference is protest every single day on an ongoing basis. Thats all the difference in the world. Thats what the 60s were like. We havent seen that since the 60s, where protest is everywhere. Its not just a big splash in Washington on May Day and then we all go home. Its every single day and its in Dayton, Ohio, and its in Lansing, Michigan, and its everywhere.

Thats where politics lives: outside in the streets.

Full interview can be found here.

Go here to read the rest:
The Corruption of the Democratic Party: Talking to Ted Rall about his new book - CounterPunch

Text Size:A- A+

New Delhi: UC Browser was Indias second most popular mobile browser before the government banned Chinese applications on 29 June.

An estimated 100 million Indians, who had the the application downloaded on their phones, now stand to lose access to the internet.

UC Browser is a Chinese mobile browser run by UC Web, a company owned by tech giant Alibaba which acquired the firm in June 2014. The companys revenue, reported at $571 million dollars in 2017, will likely be impacted by the ban given that India is a key market for the company.

Pavel Naiya, a senior analyst with analyst firm Counterpoint Technology Market Research, said as many as 100 million smartphone users had UC browser installed on their mobile devices before the ban, according to the firms estimates.

The browser was more popular among users of budget phones, devices priced at Rs 10,000 or below, Naiya said.

Also read: Banning apps violates WTO rules, will affect employment of Indians: Chinese embassy

A 2015 IANS report stated UC Browser was Indias third most-used app after Facebook and WhatsApp. Indian users spend five million more monthly hours on UC Browser than on Chrome, the report published in Business Standard said.

A reason for UC Browsers success and widespread use was that it worked fast, and the browser made it easy to access content.

Marketwatch.com, citing the Wall Street Journal, said: Users say UC Browser works better in countries dominated by low-end smartphones and spotty mobile service.

On 29 June, when India banned 59 Chinese apps citing threats to national security and user privacy concerns, UC Browser was the most popular mobile browser after Google Chrome in India.

Data from Statcounter showed UC Browsers market share in India was 14.46 per cent while Chrome was at 75.56 percent market share between June 2019 and June 2020. Notable here is that even before the ban, Indian users were pulling away from UC Browser. A 2016 report from Medianama states that UC Browser at the time has a 58.4 per cent market share, the highest in India, with Opera coming in second at 16.5 per cent.

Also read: Google temporarily blocks access to banned Chinese apps in India

These numbers indicate how Google Chrome has managed to rapidly grow in India. The same 2016 Medianama report said Chrome had the biggest worldwide market share with 34.2 per cent.

Yet, in India, Chrome found no mention among the top few mobile browsers. Fast forward four years, the company has managed to corner three-fourths of Indian market for mobile browsers.

Now that UC Browser has been banned, low budget smart phone users can choose from multiple alternatives. There are many mobile browsers alternatives available, including Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Dolphin, Jio Browsers, etc, said Naiya.

Among the Indian companies, the replacements for UC Browser include Bharat Browser, Epic Privacy Browser and Indian Browser.

Also read:China says strongly concerned, verifying situation after India bans 59 Chinese apps

Prior to the June ban, which also cut out apps such as TikTok, SHAREit and Shein from the Indian market, UC Browser faced allegations for cyber attacks and fake news.

In 2018, DNA reported UC Bowser was among 42 apps flagged by intelligence agencies as potentials gateways for cyber attacks, spying and spreading fake news.

The year before, in 2017, it was removed from the Google Play Store. A company statement reported, a certain setting of UC Browser is not in line with Googles policy, according to a Financial Express report. It linked the apps removal to misleading campaigns it was running, as suggested by some media reports.

Two years prior to that, The Citizen Lab, a research lab based at University of Toronto, in 2015 found that UC Browser was leaking a significant amount of personal and personally-identifiable data of users. The research into UC Browser had been triggered by documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Also read: Shut up and put up What Chinese companies in India should do as Galwan crisis continues

ThePrint is now on Telegram. For the best reports & opinion on politics, governance and more, subscribe to ThePrint on Telegram.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Excerpt from:
Everyones talking about TikTok but 100 million Indian smartphone users are missing this app - ThePrint

Spy planes, helicopters, and drones surveilled hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country as they took to the streets to protest the police killing of George Floyd and racist police. Meanwhile, a series of surveillance startups are using the coronavirus pandemic to track people, analyze outbreaks, and otherwise attempt to legitimize their technology.

Tomorrow join Motherboard and Mijente at SURVEILLANCE PANDEMIC, a discussion between NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, author and Intercept senior correspondent Naomi Klein, Mijente campaign organizer Jacinta Gonzlez, and Motherboard staff writer Edward Ongweso Jr. discuss how technology is used against Black Lives Matters protesters, undocumented immigrants, and Black and brown communities more broadly.

The discussion is being hosted by Mijente, an organizing and action hub hoping to develop and spark social change within the Latinx and Chicanx community.

Mijente also leads the No Tech for ICE campaign, which is working to get tech companies to take a stand against ICE by committing to stop working with the federal agency as it continues deportations and raids during the pandemic.

Surveillance Pandemic: Mijente and Motherboard in Conversation with Naomi Klein and Edward Snowden, will be streaming on the VICE News YouTube and the Motherboard Facebook tomorrow at 6 p.m. EDT.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

See more here:
Motherboard and Mijente Present SURVEILLANCE PANDEMIC with Edward Snowden and Naomi Klein - VICE