Federal Authorities Raided Trump Fundraiser’s Office in Money Laundering Probe

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Robert Faturechi and Justin Elliott

Federal authorities raided the office of Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy last summer, seeking records related to his dealings with foreign officials and Trump administration associates, according to a sealed search warrant obtained by ProPublica.

Agents were authorized to use the megadonor’s hands and face to unlock any phones that required fingerprint or facial scans.

The Washington Post reported in August that the Justice Department was investigating Broidy. The sealed warrant offers new details of federal authorities’ investigation of allegations that Broidy had attempted to cash in on his Trump White House connections in dealings with foreign officials. It also shows that the government took a more aggressive approach with the Trump ally than was previously known, entering his office and removing records — just as it did with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

Broidy served as a major Trump campaign fundraiser and was the national deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee until he resigned in April 2018, when it was revealed he had agreed to secretly pay off a former Playboy model in exchange for her silence about their affair.

The search warrant cites three potential crimes that authorities are investigating: conspiracy, money laundering and violations of the law barring covert lobbying on behalf of foreign officials. To obtain a search warrant, authorities have to convince a judge that there’s a probable cause they will find evidence of those specific crimes.

The search warrant also for the first time links Broidy to a globe-trotting Miami Beach party promoter.

The warrant, filed in July 2018, targeted Broidy’s office in Los Angeles. The scope of what authorities were seeking was broad. They planned to seize any evidence related to a list of dozens of people, countries and corporate entities, according to the warrant. Among the names on the list are Rick Gates, the former Trump campaign official who has pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe; Colfax Law Office, the firm founded by Robin Rosenzweig, Broidy’s wife; and several foreign countries.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment for this story.

Broidy’s attorney as well as a spokesman did not answer a list of detailed questions sent by ProPublica.

Broidy, an investor based in Los Angeles, pleaded guilty in 2009 to charges connected to his role in a major New York state public corruption and bribery case. But after backing Trump for president, he saw his star rise again. After the inauguration, he played a central role in filling administration vacancies, according to reports by ProPublica and others.

However, he once again quickly became mired in controversy, amid allegations of influence peddling and his dealings with the former Playboy model.

The search warrant shows that federal authorities are interested in Broidy’s alleged work for the Malaysian financier Jho Low, who is at the center of a sprawling international scandal known as 1MDB. In November, the Justice Department unveiled a bribery and money laundering case against Low.

In a separate filing in November, the Justice Department alleged that Broidy was paid by Low to lobby Trump administration officials to ease off on U.S. investigations into Low. Broidy is not identified by name in the filings, but he is widely reported to be the person referred to as “Individual No. 1.” Broidy has not been charged with a crime, and it’s unclear what the status of the investigation is.

Pras Michel, a member of the hip-hop group The Fugees and an associate of Low’s, funnelled the money to pay Broidy into the United States, the Justice Department alleged. Asked about the Broidy search warrant, a lawyer for Michel, Barry Pollack, said: “There has been news of this Broidy investigation for many months. Mr. Michel has not been charged with any wrongdoing whatsoever related to Mr. Broidy or anyone else.”

Federal authorities were also seeking records in Broidy’s office related to the United Arab Emirates, UAE adviser George Nader, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and any travel to the Middle East.

The New York Times reported last year that Broidy worked with Nader to steer the White House toward decisions benefiting the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Documents reviewed by the Times showed that Nader tempted Broidy with the prospect of more than $1 billion in contracts for Broidy’s private security company. Hacked communications showed Nader praised Broidy for “how well you handle Chairman” — a reference to Trump.

Nader became a cooperating witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election, according to multiple news reports.

Broidy’s attorney has in the past responded to the allegations with a statement saying Broidy “has never agreed to work for, been retained by nor been compensated by any foreign government for any interaction with the United States Government, ever. Any implication to the contrary is a lie.”

According to the warrant, federal authorities also sought to seize any records related to China and Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman and dissident who fled to New York, where he publicly accused the Chinese government of corruption.

The Times reported that Broidy explored plans to use his influence with the White House to force Guo out of the United States, apparently as part of an effort to curry favor with the Chinese and other foreign officials, and ultimately earn a payoff.

The search warrant for Broidy’s office also lists a name and corporation not previously linked to Broidy: “Joel Rouseau” and “Intelligent Resources.” There is a company by that name incorporated in Miami Beach by a Joel Rousseau, who is a friend of Michel’s. The search warrant does not describe Rousseau or Intelligent Resources’ role in the case.

Rousseau’s Instagram account shows him bouncing from Rio to Paris to Ibiza, frequently surrounded by models. “If you want to be successful, you need the beautiful people,” he told Crain’s New York in 2007, which described him as a specialist “in bringing agency models to clubs.” In another series of pictures, he is at an oil site in Haiti with workers he describes as his drilling crew. Rousseau made a foray into politics in 2012 when he donated tens of thousands of dollars to several Democratic Party groups.

Filings in a court case over unpaid taxes describe Rousseau as an “entrepreneur” with income swinging from under $1,000 for 2009 to over $2 million in 2013. He paid a long-standing bill for back taxes and penalties of more than $700,000 in late 2017, the filings show.

The address for Intelligent Resources is a house on Miami Beach’s exclusive Hibiscus Island. The person answering the door at the house last week told a reporter he had rented the house on Airbnb. Rousseau didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Another Non-Victimized View of Appalachia

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Last week I mentioned how fresh and valuable I thought the new documentary Moundsville was, for presenting the hard-luck story of a West Virginia town that had lost its big factories and was trying to find a way ahead.

The setup of the story might seem familiar, from countless “lost hopes in the Heartland” reports over the past few years. But its tone was quite distinct—and, as I argued in that piece, familiar to Deb and me from our reporting in similar towns in recent years. That is: The residents were clear-eyed about where the town now stood, and what its prospects were. But they spent little time on “who did this to us?!?!” rage—which is worth noting mainly because reports of resentment, rage, and lashing-out have been such a staple of recent political reporting from economically struggling areas. The difference in the Moundsville movie was the sense of humor, and of reality—and of agency, of people not carrying themselves as objects of trends starting somewhere else, though objectively big trends had displaced them, but instead as individuals with their own choices to make.

This is a setup for an endorsement of the op-ed this weekend by the novelist Robert Gipe, which the NYT presented with the headline “Appalachia Is More Diverse Than You Think.” I read it as saying not that West Virginians and other Appalachians were “worse off” or “better off” or “angrier” or more or less “racist” than you thought. But rather that they were complex human beings, not markers on the simplified grid of pro-Trump/anti-Trump national politics.

For instance:

Many of my pro-Trump neighbors are frustrated and angry, but they are not naïve. They bear a hard-earned sophistication regarding the reliability of political promises ….

What pains me and many of my neighbors in the mountains the most are divisive political posturing and partisan wrangling divorced from the realities of our economic struggles … We in Appalachia join our fellow Americans in asking: Who will encourage our best selves? Who will enable our joy? Who will release the energy hiding in our hearts?

The whole essay is worth reading, and I mention it for that reason and because it so strongly resembles what we have heard in many other places. In one form or another, people have been asking “Who will encourage our best selves?” Thanks to Robert Gipe for highlighting the universality of this question, beyond all “red state”/“blue state” simplifications.

This man thinks he knows what happened to missing flight MH370

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Blaine Gibson’s interest in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 started as a casual curiosity. Within a year it had developed into a full-blown obsession, which has taken him to ten countries searching for debris from the missing airliner since 2015.

Remarkably, Gibson has been successful where a multi-national search effort costing hundreds of millions of dollars has not: He’s actually found parts of the plane. Gibson has been involved in recovering at least 17 of the 32 pieces of debris said to be “highly likely” to come from MH370 by the Malaysian government.

The flight was carrying 239 passengers and crew when it disappeared on March 8, 2014 after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. A short time into the flight Boeing 777 made an unscheduled turn and stopped communicating with air traffic control.

It’s presumed to have crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean more than seven hours later. The most expensive search in aviation history was carried out but found nothing. The Malaysian transport minister says his government would be prepared to look at specific proposals to restart the search of the plane.

Gibson’s strategy has been to study oceanographic patterns to try and figure out where debris might have traveled across the Indian Ocean, then go beach-combing.

“All these crazy theories that the plane is in the jungle of Cambodia, the Gulf of Thailand, the Bay of Bengal, Kazakhstan or the deep southern Indian Ocean intact underwater after a controlled ditching — those are all disproven by the debris alone,” said Gibson.

Gibson found his first piece of MH370 in February 2016 on a sandbank off the coast of Mozambique. The publicity surrounding his find led other people to get in touch saying they’d found debris too, and Gibson developed a network in countries around the Indian Ocean.

“People asked me: ‘were you happy when you found a piece of Malaysia 370?’,” said Gibson.
“Happy would be if I’d gone out to that sandbank and found 239 people grilling seafood sipping on coconuts saying, ‘hey what took you so long?'”

VICE News followed Gibson as he visited the Malaysian Ministry of Transport, where most of the recovered pieces of debris thought to be from MH370 are stored.

This segment originally aired March 8, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Bezos and DoD Dream of AI, but Invoke Terminator Nightmare

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Amazon, headed by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, has received its fair share of negative attention recently, and it’s no surprise: the company is a master at racking up tax subsidies and maximizing loopholes. It paid $0 in corporate income taxes for 2018, while reportedly maintaining abominable working conditions for many of its 613,000 employees in the United States.

But it may be Amazon’s activities in Washington that warrant more scrutiny, as Open the Government notes in our new report, Government, Inc.: Amazon, Government Security & Secrecy. Much of the more recent media drama has been over Amazon’s planned headquarters (thanks to the close to $780 million in state and local subsidies that it’s been guaranteed) just outside the Pentagon in Crystal City, Virginia. But really, Amazon has been deeply entrenched as a dominant Beltway contractor in Washington for years, providing, among other government services, artificial intelligence to the Department of Homeland Security for their customs and border protection detention centers. The FBI has recently agreed to pilot Amazon’s facial recognition technology.

But for Bezos, his work here has just begun. He is now seeking to expand Amazon’s reach even further by providing cloud services and artificial intelligence to the military. And he’s leaps ahead of the competition for what may be the largest single source government IT contract in history—the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program with the Department of Defense.

Amazon’s advantage in this regard is that Amazon Web Services (AWS) already provides cloud computing services across the federal government. Analysts predict the company’s total U.S. government business for 2019 could rise to as much as $4.6 billion. Even when AWS is not the direct provider, it’s often partnered with other contractors. In 2013, half of the 10 vendors that were part of a $10 billion Interior Department contract partnered with Amazon.

The most significant contract for AWS, however, was with the CIA in 2013—a massive $600 million deal to provide secure cloud services to the entire intelligence community. The contract not only means substantial revenue for AWS, but an advantage in competing for future government cloud contracts, particularly within the national security state.

The Department of Defense’s JEDI contract will be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years, and will be awarded to a single company. From the start, the contract has come under fire from Amazon’s competitors, who argue that the competition is rigged in Amazon’s favor. JEDI arose from former defense secretary James Mattis’s interest in developing artificial intelligence for the military. His 2017 trip to Amazon and Google convinced him that a single, department-wide cloud infrastructure would be the best way to accomplish that goal. Google later chose not to compete for JEDI following its own controversy over its participation in the Defense Department’s Project Maven, and while Microsoft subsequently emerged as a contender, Amazon is still the clear favorite to win the contract.

The fight for JEDI has turned ugly, as old-guard government IT contractors pull out all the stops to protest the bidding process. One contender, Oracle, took its complaint about the JEDI process to Federal Claims Court, alleging that multiple DoD officials who worked on the contract were former Amazon employees. Earlier this month, Federal News Network reported that the Pentagon Inspector General’s office and the FBI Anti-Corruption squad are investigating possible conflicts of interest in the JEDI process.

We know that Amazon has drastically scaled up its lobbying efforts in Washington over the past few years, far outpacing its competitors. But the JEDI process has also highlighted how little we know about corporate influence on federal procurement. In 2017, Amazon fought for legislation that would allow the DoD to set up an online portal for acquisition of commercial products. Congress passed the so-called “Amazon amendment” as part of the final bill, and critics say the specifications are such that only large companies like Amazon and Walmart can realistically compete for the contracts. These lobbying efforts are public knowledge because companies are required to report on them. But no such requirements exist for lobbying federal agencies on contracts and procurement, leaving the extent of Amazon’s (and other companies’) influence over the JEDI contract process unknown.

Looking beyond the contentious bidding process, the technology that the Pentagon hopes to get out of the JEDI cloud program is even more troubling. While many of us are used to thinking of the “cloud” as simple data storage, DoD’s cloud strategy reveals that a primary purpose of the JEDI cloud infrastructure will be to enable advances in AI and machine learning. The military is already using AI on the battlefield, and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board website says that “the impact of AI and ML will be felt in every corner of the Department’s operations.”

The problem is that complex AI systems, in their current state, are virtually immune to human oversight. It’s a cautionary tale no different than the Terminator movies. In its recently released AI strategy, the Pentagon did commit to developing adequate testing and evaluation processes for AI systems. However, researchers and experts warn that testing to ensure that AI systems behave in a predictable way in all scenarios may not currently be feasible, and that even AI engineers often can’t discern how and why a complex system makes the decisions that it does. That means, crucially, that they have trouble figuring out why an AI system fails to produce a desired result. These issues also make it difficult to know when an AI system has been hacked.

So while DoD may intend to make its use of AI safe, predictable, and explainable, that may not even be technologically possible. But that hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from moving full steam ahead with developing and operationalizing AI systems, citing the need to stay ahead of rivals like Russia and China. And while Google employees made headlines by demanding that the company back away from Project Maven, the Pentagon considers the project to be a huge success.

Through Maven, the DoD used AI to assist in targeting for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria beginning in 2018. In late 2018, the military suddenly stopped releasing information about targeting of airstrikes in those two countries, despite a surge in strikes and civilian casualties. Maven is just a sample of what DoD hopes to do with AI, but it is cause for significant concern. When the military refuses to release even basic information, the public has no hope of knowing what role AI is playing and what damage it’s causing.

The tech companies, for their part, don’t seem terribly concerned about how their technology will be used. Despite facing employee protests regarding government use of AI services, Microsoft and Amazon declared their intent to continue working with the military and law enforcement. One Amazon Web Services vice president affirmed that the company has “not drawn any lines” in terms of the government’s use of its technology, despite the fact that the company “doesn’t know everything they’re actually utilizing the tool for.”

The layers of secrecy here are vast. First, overclassification and excessive secrecy are typical of the military and national security agencies. Second, the AI technology itself is difficult to understand and explain even for its creators, much less to oversight bodies or the public. Finally, private government contractors, who will be doing much of this work, do not have nearly the same transparency requirements as government agencies. Congress should work to rectify this problem by mandating greater transparency from the Pentagon both in our conflicts overseas as well as on their current and planned use of AI in those conflicts, and by ensuring better public access to information from private government contractors. Companies must, in turn, commit to disclosing more information about how they are ensuring their technology is safe and accessible to oversight bodies. They must get firm commitments from government agencies as to how their AI services will be used before signing contracts.

For more, read the full report from Open the Government: Government, Inc.: Amazon, Government Security & Secrecy.

Emily Manna is a policy analyst at Open the Government, a non-partisan coalition that advances policies that create a more transparent, accountable, and responsive government.

Did Dallas Police and Local Media Collude to Cover Up Terrorist Threats against Journalist Barrett Brown?

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Barrett Brown is an award-winning journalist and author who spent time in federal prison for work he did exposing various elements of the military-industrial complex, including publicizing the hacked emails of private intelligence company Stratfor. Since being released from prison, Brown has worked to establish the Pursuance Project, an initiative aimed at developing a new model of journalism based on crowdsourcing and diverse networks of collaboration using an internet-based platform.

In November 2018, Brown was the subject of a terrorist threat made against his publisher, Dallas-based D Magazine. However, unlike most such terrorist threats against journalists/media outlets elsewhere in the country, this threat was not handled in the normal manner. You might even say that Dallas PD, in collaboration with the Dallas Morning News, moved to cover it up. Was this a case of gross incompetence by the police? Hatred of a well-known local muckraking journalist seen as an enemy of Dallas police and corporate media? Or was it something else?

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Barrett Brown and CounterPunch Radio host, Eric Draitser. The full interview can be heard at patreon.com/ericdraitser ($1 subscription required).

***

Eric Draitser: You recently had an interesting, let’s call it, series of interactions with law enforcement and local government in Dallas. And it stems from a very grisly murder that took place a few months ago. But this isn’t just about a murder… this is really a story of corruption, of bad journalism, of hackery, of the complete abdication of professional ethics and responsibility.

So, tell us, where does our story start? What happened a few months ago in Dallas and how did things snowball from there?

Barrett Brown: So I’ve been covering local politics for D Magazine for the first time in my life after I got out of prison a few years ago. I was covering city council. And then Botham Jean, a local resident, was shot to death in his own apartment by Amber Guyger, a white police officer (Botham Jean was black).

There are very few large cities where the press was going to be less well-equipped to handle such a story than Dallas. Dallas is a very go along to get along city. There’s something called the Dallas Way. That’s an old sort of political philosophy that launders oligarchy and makes of it a virtue, makes of it a partnership, a cooperation between press, police, and local officials. This is especially true in the case of any interaction between the press and the Dallas police, you have regular deference.

And so, when Amber Guyger and the police union officials, including police union head Mike Mata, started putting out the first explanation of why Amber Guyger shot somebody to death in his apartment below hers, several journalists with the Dallas Morning News printed these claims as more or less fact. And they did the same thing a few days later when Amber Guyger’s story changed dramatically. It was really extraordinary, and I say that as somebody who has been a media critic, ne’er-do-well and malcontent for a long time. It was pretty wild.

So I wrote an article for D Magazine down here, analyzing the specifics and attacking the Dallas Morning News. And you know they were not fond of that. So, the editor of the Dallas Morning News, attacked me from his Twitter account for a minor error removed from the article, while ignoring all the things that remained. The things that were clearly the case about his own journalists and his own editors. And so bad blood had been accrued there between both me and the Dallas Morning News and me and the mayor’s office, which, of course, was responsible for the handling of the Amber Guyger-Bother Jean shooting…

Draitser: So basically, if I understand correctly, you wrote a piece which alleged that these journalists are basically just taking the cops’ word for it and the story keeps changing in rather implausible ways. And these journalists are just stenographers. Is that basically right?

Brown: It is. And it’s to an extent that is even more than you see in national journalism or regional journalism elsewhere. It’s to an extent that is pretty unusual. It’s perhaps best embodied by the occasion when there was the ambush against the police officers a few years ago and several were killed. One of those police officers, it turned out, had a great deal of of white nationalist symbology tattooed upon himself. And that never came up in the press.

And here we have a case in which it’s even more bothersome, in which the errors are so blatant. So, I got into a fight that obviously upset these journalists at Dallas Morning News. I’ve already had a bad relationship with some of them.

Flashforward to November. I’m informed by D Magazine editor Tim Rogers that there’s been a bomb threat delivered to D Magazine’s office, which is in a twenty-story building in downtown Dallas. The person who made the threat said that they were going to blow up the D Magazine offices if they continued to publish my articles. And so, after I told Rogers I had never heard of this person, he goes to the FBI and the cops and the first thing he tells me after he’s spoken with them is “Don’t make this public.”

I listened to him. I read his comments. I acknowledged his comments. And I made it public.

Because he was getting instructions from the police, from the FBI, and I’ve dealt with both in this city. I’ve reported on both for his magazine and I just know that that’s not how these things are done. When CNN had a very similar bomb threat, under almost identical circumstances – an internet threat to blow up CNN’s offices in New York a few weeks after this affair that I’m not done describing – occurred, the NYPD arrived immediately. The building was evacuated. It was news, national news for a couple hours until the all clear was given. In this case, that’s not what happened. This is the only city in the country in which journalists would be expected to help the police keep this under wraps.

Draitser: This is already insane to me. How is it possible? I work in a high-rise building in Manhattan. There are thousands of people who work in a twenty story building in the downtown area. It is already almost inconceivable that this would be kept under wraps.

Brown: It is. It was actually shocking even to me and I look for these things. I search for incidents of poor press conduct and things indicative of the Republic’s collapse.

I’ve dealt with this magazine and this editor since I was fifteen years old when I was interning at the alternative weeklies down here. It’s not quite the Village Voice. It’s not something that’s really out there to shake things up but it is a good magazine. And I’ve been happy to write for it. It is where I started my column that went to the Intercept later on and I got the National Magazine Award. It was a magazine that had given me a lot of breath that I wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere.

So I was a little bit taken aback to be given this instruction delivered from the police to my editor and then to me. And so of course I, you know, violated it and immediately announced without naming any names or publication that a threat had been made against a magazine that I work for over my work…

Draitser: So was the threat explicit that it was not only about you but about your coverage of the Guyger-Botham Jean story? Or was it more implied that this is what it was about? Or was it more a general kind of threat?

Brown: The threat was made on Facebook but I never saw it myself. All I have is the assistant police chief’s email, which we’ll get to later. His characterization – the characterization of the assistant chief of police – that it was a threat over me and that it was a threat that was conditional such that if they continued to publish my work, this person would blow up the building. And the same fellow also made a threat, a very similar threat against the downtown public library, which is a very large facility – not a bad one for a city of this size – if the Democrats and in this case the assistant chief of police quoted the fellow: something along the lines of “If the Democrats don’t stop with their conspiracies, I’m going to blow up your library.” And so… but there was no mention that I know of of specific coverage.

I would say though that the last article that I’ve done for D had been this piece on the Dallas Morning News and the media and the police and the police’s misconduct and why one should not take their word for anything. And the one previous to that had been one in which I had sat there with a police scanner off and on for a couple weeks and written down my observations of what the police… of how the Dallas police conduct themselves. And, you know, scored a few hits in there that I was fond of. But bottom line is that I’ve been very, very openly anti-police for a number of years here. After all, I was raided by SWAT team after sort of challenging the police based on my understanding which is now I think sort of the accepted view among everyone that they were retaliating against me and my mother illegally.

So there was already bad blood and that had been accelerated in recent times. And so when this happened, I published some information about it and the editor got mad at me. But there were no articles about this. There was nowhere where you could really go and see that a response team had been sent to the Dallas public library to search for bombs or that a threat, one of several threats over the last few months against media outlets and against journalists, had been carried out or had been made.

Remember the context of this: We’ve had shootings in newspapers in the last year in this country. We’ve had some guy threaten a journalist on Twitter down in Florida and when he was ignored he sent some would-be pipe bombs to a bunch of other figures. We’ve just had a bunch of this accelerated anti-press violence and threats of violence.

And so there is a protocol for when this happens. The protocol is that you immediately announce it. And that’s how it’s happened in every other situation. And it’s not how it happened here.

As time went on I got more and more concerned because when you do have this situation, when you do have this environment, you follow the protocol that has been established the country which is that you take it seriously. At the very least, you arrest the person. I know that because I was arrested by a SWAT team for making totally non-violent threats against an FBI agent as a journalist who was about to expose him. But in this case, rather than sending a SWAT team and beating someone down to the ground, bruising his ribs and charging him immediately, they did something entirely different. We’re not entirely sure what it was.

I eventually asked my city councilman, Philip Kingston, who is an unusually carefree politician, to check in with the Dallas police and ask them what was going on. Because the editor has stopped talking to me and he was upset that I’ve put the stuff out.

Draitser: So this is where the story really gets quite interesting because now you’ve involved not just representatives of the police or the police union or journalists. Now you have an elected official and the kinds of information that is exchanged between a law enforcement officer and an elected official is supposed to be at least quite different from how they interact with normal civilians. So I want to hear the details about this exchange between your local city councilman and the assistant police chief.

Brown: Right, so [assistant police chief] Lonzo Anderson. Philip Kingston inquired with Lonzo Anderson and got an email back. Kingston forwarded it to me. It’s a few paragraphs long and it very matter-of-factly notes that on November 13th somebody made what this benighted police pseudo-chief described as “a veil threat.” He means veiled, although that’s kind of a strange use of the term veiled even if you do it appropriately because the threats involved “blowing your fucking library up” which is not very, highly well-veiled. And then, of course, the threat to blow up the magazine in Lonzo’s words: “if they continue to publish Barrett Brown.”

And so he goes on to cite two actual charges, two specific charges that this suspect, who did it under his own name, was going to be charged with. And noted that he had been taken into custody on November 15th and was interviewed at the station and the investigation is ongoing. So, from that you get the sense that the cops are on it. They’ve brought somebody in, which is, you know, reasonable enough…so I’m thinking “Well I guess Tim Rogers is right. They really are on it, maybe I should have trusted him this time. They’re not going to allow a terroristic threats against the press and against public institutions pass in this day and age.

But it turns out I was wrong to have briefly trusted them because the guy was never arrested. And because [D Magazine Editor] Tim Rogers was meanwhile being told something entirely different from this investigator that had been assigned to the case. That investigator told him that no one had been brought in. It was all ongoing and they don’t have anything to tell him.

And so eventually, me and Tim Rogers get into this sort of public dispute about how this should be handled. I was obviously had an opinion about it and he had a different opinion. And at some point he says, “Look, you’re writing about this. You don’t know what’s going on. Trust me.”

And I said, “Well look, I’ve got a statement here from the assistant police chief my city councilman sent to me.” So and I posted it on his Twitter reel and he reads it and is like okay. So he writes an article explaining the situation. Explaining that they had told him all this, this and this and now suddenly he’s getting these statements delivered thirdhand that contradict what he’s been told.

And here’s where the story kicks in as of what happened today. Rogers recorded this conversation between him and the police officer, the investigator who called him after they ran that story. It does include the investigator being very abrasive, he’s obviously not used to dealing with someone saying “No, what you just said contradicts that other thing you just said and that doesn’t make sense.” He’s just not up to that kind of thing. Frankly, I think we’re fortunate that he wasn’t actually in charge of catching somebody with an actual bomb because this would have been a shorter story.

The cop berates Rogers for putting this information out. Tim reminds him that they didn’t put the information out. It was the Dallas police that put the information out through a city councilman through Barrett Brown – the named victim, the named subject who this person is clearly focused on. This is all very revealing of how police see the press and how Dallas operates.

But the important part is when the cop claims, I guess in a bid to win an exchange in this argument, that contrary to what Rogers had heard, the information that the assistant police chief had given the city councilman was “not true” in his words. He expands upon that and says that it’s not what happened. The information is truth be told not correct.

And so, Tim understandably says, “Well, are you saying that this assistant police chief gave false information to a city official about a matter of terrorist threats against the press? That seems very important.” And the police investigator goes, “Well, there you go again” and he throws out a bunch of incompatible metaphors and aphorisms and cliches that he’s picked up somewhere and strings them into a sentence. If you didn’t already have a distaste for cops in general, which I did actually, you would be hard pressed to make a contribution to the policeman’s ball this year after hearing this tape.

Draitser: Well, I’m certainly canceling my recurring donation. That’s for sure.

Brown: I’d advise that, yes.

Anyway, there’s one other element here. The cop is confirming that in prior conversations one of the first things he did when he was speaking to Tim and four or five other staffers at D Magazine was to tell them: (a) not to tell anybody and (b) not to tell me anything else beyond what I have already been told. So, the only reason I knew about this in the first place is because Tim had asked me about this guy who had been making the threat before he went to the police. And so that’s revealing. Aside from everything else being aside from protocol, outside of the normal way of doing things, not letting the focus of a terrorist threat know anything about the case and obviously preferring that he not know that it happened. That’s what convinced me when I got this recording that there was something wrong here that I suspected all along. And so, there you have it. Now it’s out.

***

Draitser: Was there any indication that there was a formal arrest versus a “Oh, we took somebody into custody?” And if so, wouldn’t the obvious move for a journalist at that point be to find the records of the arrest? It seems like nothing was done. I mean it seems like it’s just all words here. It’s all words and opinions.

Brown: Right, so yeah the first thing that I looked at – and I think anyone would look at – is the actual phrasing of what the assistant police chief told Philip Kingston in this email. First of all he talks in the future tense about the charges so that, in fairness to Tim and to anybody else, you wouldn’t be able to look up any charges because they would be nonexistent yet. Having said that, there are ways of getting records of who has been arrested.

The assistant police chief uses terminology that makes it very ambiguous as to what’s going on. They say: “On November 15th, the DPD took the subject into custody for a DPD alias warrant. The subject was interviewed” – which means he had an existing warrant for something else entirely. Probably a minor warrant. “The subject was interviewed at headquarters. The investigation is ongoing. I will contact intelligence, updates” blah blah. So he doesn’t say he was arrested. He doesn’t say he wasn’t arrested. He just says interviewed at headquarters.

So I wasn’t satisfied; I posted it on Twitter. I did what I could to try to bring attention to it and finally I went to city council and confronted the mayor and the councilmen and explained in the three minutes I had allotted to me as a regular citizen what had gone on here and why I was unhappy about it and why I thought it was something they ought to look into.

So anyway, the mayor apologized right there. There’s a video of it. Then he once again he confirms, as if this was something that I was really hoping to hear, that the investigation is ongoing. And so, three months later, here we are.

Draitser: So one of the things that I find really kind of bizarre about all of this is the fact that they keep saying an investigation is ongoing. But this isn’t the OJ trial. This is a fairly straightforward case, it’s handled fairly routinely in pretty much every major city.

So I guess I have to ask the question, and pardon me if it’s too blunt or whatever, but are we looking at a Dallas police cover-up here?

Brown: Well, I mean in a way, literally yes in so much as this investigating officer told D Magazine to keep this quiet, to not tell the target, me, about it, etc. Also, D Magazine put up a short piece sort of commenting on it and, of course, castigating me for having broken the blue bond of silence or whatever it is that I guess we had formed between the press and police down here.

And then the next day, they deleted the article without explanation. And that was the only piece in the entire city about this. It was actually really the only coverage at all except for I think it was a blog post by some independent fellow who’s out there trying his best somewhere on his website. Beyond that, beyond my Twitter account, beyond the arguments that Tim Rogers got into with some people from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and EFF and all that who were telling him that like, hey, like this is serious. This is not how you should handle this. You shouldn’t be putting out a blog post attacking your journalist for this. You’ve done wrong here.

That was the only coverage. And Dallas Morning News knew about it. I made sure they knew about it because I had a feeling that they would be reluctant to cover it given that it does produce sympathy and raises one’s stature when one is having buildings blown up and even in people’s imaginations blown up.

And so as I suspected, they did not cover it. They went out of their way not to cover it. Even after I went to city hall and the press was there and a couple of them asked me, gave me their cards and said that they’d call me, nothing ever happened. So I gave up. I was frankly pretty upset back then and I feel like I’ve gone through enough bizarre commotions just in Dallas alone that I should have a pretty thick skin. I was rearrested illegally in 2017 after giving an interview to Vice and PBS. When the bureau of prisons claimed I was not supposed to do that without getting their permission, which is patently false, I was put in jail for four days and Democracy Now! did a thing on that and otherwise it was, you know, all quiet on the front.

And I would be shocked frankly given my time in this city and having grown up here if anything were to come of it tomorrow. There’s just no one who has anything to gain from talking about it. Obviously to the extent that Dallas Morning News does start talking about it, it brings up the question of why they ignored this situation back then. This is not something that happens when an outlet is threatened. You don’t play politics and place an embargo because you don’t like the journalist that was mentioned in the threat. That’s not how it happens anywhere else in this country.

So there you have it. I’m always on the lookout for examples of why we need press reform; why crowdsourced research and why some of these experimental protocols we’re developing such as the Pursuance Project, why they’re needed. Why things are worse in the press than people even realize until they’ve had a chance to both write for it and be covered by it extensively. And this is a great example. It’s an example that really astonishes me and I thought I’ve seen quite a bit in my day.

Draitser: Honestly, it seems like we have multiple cover-ups overlapping with each other here. Because, as far as I understand it, the Amber Guyger story itself was potentially a cover up where the police were essentially running interference for a suspected murderer. They were giving her access to her smartphone. They were letting her go home and talk to other people and so forth. And this was all whitewashed in the press with no actual interrogation of the facts. There was no investigation or anything and so the story continued to shift and the coverage just shifted with that.

And then here we have the second piece of this story where exactly the same thing is happening. So not only do we have collusion between the press and the police, but it seems that like they’re both actively working multiple cover-ups.

Brown: Yeah, well, there’s different kinds. There’s some cover-up within the police that probably has to do with mishandling the case or maybe the person who did this. Maybe he has well connected or wealthy family, which certainly would explain it. Maybe it’s one of those more baroque situations where the guy is suffering mental illness and for that reason as the FBI has done in the past, often times of Muslim youth, has been trying to get him to do something that would provide the DOJ with a great press release when they catch him doing the thing they told him to do. There are a number of possibilities and I don’t have a strong opinion on any one of them.

So there’s some kind of cover up there. There’s a dispute whereby this police officer thought it would make sense to claim that the original report of the guy being charged was false and thought it would work to, I guess, accuse his commanding officer, his superior of lying to the press or lying to the city council. He did not expect to be recorded. I guarantee that because that’s the kind of thing you can say on the phone to a guy, you know, and it’s hearsay but he had no reason to expect a recording would get to me. And frankly, I’m kind of surprised it did. It was only because of the foibles, the sort of the personal foibles of some of the people involved in this that I did get it.

Here we have an unusual sort of vivisection where we get to see more about the day-to-day just how these things do get covered up. We see how it doesn’t require a strong plan. It doesn’t require that you hide every element. All these elements have been out there. Not just out there but I’ve been pushing them down people’s throats.

So it’s one of those things just like the stuff I went to prison for. The HBGary hack where we suddenly got a great view from all these emails of how these intelligence contractors work and how the FBI deals with these private firms and how the DOJ acts like a concierge service for Bank of America and sends them to espionage firms that commits crimes with the DOJ’s blessing. You know it’s another great example. It’s a great opportunity that will not be taken here in Dallas and that, ultimately, I will describe in my book, which I’ve just completed now.

This whole fiasco is just one more argument as to why we need scaffolding around these institutions. Why we need to start building something that can address them from bottom to top because there’s very little that the press has done commendably in the last ten years on any of these issues. And even in the election, it didn’t take.

It didn’t cause them to stop and say, “Hey maybe we need to pay attention to what Palantir’s doing since they just got caught once again this time helping to manipulate the election with Cambridge Analytica. Maybe if next time we talk about Palantir, let’s remark about that. Let’s keep pointing that out from a few years ago.”

Let’s not adopt collective amnesia in a way that makes it easy for even dumb conspirators to get away with anything. And so that’s the story here as far as I am concerned.

Draitser: There’s also the absolute abdication of responsibility for journalists but especially those who are advocates for and defenders of journalists. You’re not Beyoncé, Barrett, but you’re not the lowest profile guy either. And you have a somewhat substantial Twitter following. You are notorious in many ways – certainly notorious in Dallas. And the fact that we don’t have even one journalistic ethics or any such organization whether Committee to Protect Journalists or any other groups of that kind defending you on this case. I think it’s also somewhat telling.

And so my question is: (a) have you reached out to any of those types of organizations (you know, CPJ and others)? And then (b) do you think that nobody has picked up on this story and is kind of, you know, speaking out on your behalf because you’re toxic? Is that what this is about? Because people are afraid that you’re toxic?

Brown: I don’t think so actually. The bizarre thing is that, you know, since going to prison and becoming a convict and then getting out and announcing I was going to start this very subversive group, I mean I run a non-profit now. I’m more mainstream than I ever was. I’ve got a board of directors with, you know, two ex-CIA agents who are, of course, dissidents. They’re reconstructed CIA agents. I’ve got professors at colleges. I’m addressing the Texas Library Association in Austin in April. And then a week later at the Tennessee Library Association in Chattanooga. So I don’t think it’s that I’m toxic. It’s not that.

It’s more that people look at institutions from the outside as I did before I first started interning at weekly newspapers. And you see print; you see a news organization; you see the CIA; or you see a company. And you have this sense of a solid thing that acts all at once. So people say, “Oh, this is what the CIA wants.” Or, “Oh, the New York Times always wants to do this.” However, we must constantly remind ourselves that these are collections of individuals and these are individuals that were not designed or evolved to oversee a press outlet or to oversee a kingdom or a nation-state. These are all haphazard things that we’ve constructed and accepted by inertia.

And so, we have jealousy and we have fear. We have minor, petty concerns for what our publisher thinks that we want them to do. We have people who are underpaid and they don’t have time to even develop sources in a way that they would had they more pragmatic or practical impetus to do so. They can get away with just, you know, putting in the bare minimum. I know because I’ve done it as a freelancer years ago. I’ve done the same thing.

We have a model of journalism that is fundamentally unchanged from what it was in seventeenth-century London where it was the editor and the writer. And it has never reexamined itself. It’s adopted hyperlinks and maybe LexisNexis and a few things like that, but it’s never stopped and said, “Hey, let us consciously reconstruct ourselves.” And knowing that the internet exists, let’s do crowdsourced journalism. Let’s bring in a structure here that doesn’t require the journalist to have to decide who is actually an expert and who isn’t. And that still hasn’t been done. There’s no impetus to do it from the inside for the most part and so it has to be done from the outside. And that’s just a reminder here.

In this case, I do not think there is any one reason for the cover-ups. Obviously, I’ve articulated that Dallas Morning News, there is no one at the Dallas Morning News who would benefit career-wise by writing stuff sympathetic to me at this point. And there are others who simply do not understand these issues.

One of the terrible things about journalism, and about the US press generally, is that editors and producers – and they would never articulate this out loud – do tend to think that if something important had happened and there’s evidence for it, then someone else would have covered it. And they all think that. And they know that even if they know their own weaknesses, they tend not to see the weaknesses in others in a strange way.

This is an environment that’s very haphazard – as I keep saying – a perfect ecosystem for misdeeds, for conspiracy, for disinformation. And that’s what we’ve gotten. And even the deterioration in the last few years has not been enough quite yet to overcome the day-to-day, mundane, mediocre careerism that permeates all of this.

And so we should not expect better than this is what I’m saying.

How Hate Groups’ Secret Sound System Works

On March 18, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

In the 1960s, reporters became attuned to the power they had over the public’s attention, and some tried to use it judiciously. While white supremacists, especially members of the Ku Klux Klan, offered privileged insider access to reporters who provided favorable coverage, the black press chose to ignore the Klan unless it was to highlight the group’s decreasing power. Jewish civil-rights organizations suggested that journalists practice “quarantine” and actively choose not to cover the American Nazi Party. The Klan and the Nazis wanted attention. In each of these situations, media outlets acted as gatekeepers that could strategically silence those seeking to use the press as a megaphone.

Social media have fundamentally changed who controls the volume on certain social issues. Facebook, Google, and other platform companies want to believe they have created a circumvention technology that connects people directly to one another without any gates, walls, or barriers. Yet this connectivity has also allowed some of the worst people in this world to find one another, get organized, and use these same platforms to harass and silence others. The platform companies do not know how to fix, or perhaps do not understand, what they have built. In the meantime, previously localized phenomena spread around the globe, so much so that the culture of American-style white supremacy turned up in a terrorist attack on Muslims in New Zealand.

As a sociologist at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, I study how technology is used by social movements, including groups on the far left and the far right. Since the uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere in 2011, we have witnessed thousands of protests and events inspired by and organized through social media. Progressive social movements routinely use networking technologies to grow their ranks and publicize their ideas. White supremacists have their own ways of deploying the same technology.

In the aftermath of outbursts of violence such as the one in New Zealand, traditional news outlets draw heavily on social-media postings for insights into the perpetrator’s motives and mine them for details that make stories sound more authoritative and vivid. Certain oddball phrases, internet memes, and obscure message boards garner mainstream attention for the first time. Inevitably, people Google them.

The extra attention that these ideas gain in the aftermath of a violent attack isn’t just an unfortunate side effect of news coverage. It’s the sound system by which extremist movements transmit their ideas to a broader public, and they are using it with more and more skill.

One variable remains consistent across all networked movements: The moderation policies of different platforms directly affect how groups amplify political ideologies online. White supremacists and other extremists tend to use anonymous message boards to plan manipulation campaigns. These places traffic in racist, sexist, and transphobic content and link to obscure podcasts and blogs. Moderation is rare and tends to occur only when too much attention is drawn to a certain post. In some forums, posts self-delete and leave few traces behind.

Far more useful in reaching a new audience are places such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, which remove objectionable content—but may not do so before it spreads virally.

Taking advantage of that dynamic, the murderer in New Zealand posted a full press kit on an anonymous message board prior to live-streaming his terrifying acts on Facebook. Many have labeled it a manifesto, but it reads more like a collection of copy-and-pasted white-supremacist conspiracy theories and memes. It would never have been notable on its own. This individual did not have the power or influence to boost these worn-out tropes. This manifesto could probably have existed in perpetuity on obscure document-hosting sites, and no one would have noticed. For platforms, this kind of content is simply white noise.

Explosive violence was the signal necessary to call attention to these posts. The New Zealand attacker used the live-streaming feature of Facebook to control the narrative, even to the point of saying “Subscribe to PewDiePie”—a meme referencing a popular right-wing YouTube influencer—during his broadcast. He succeeded in linking his deeds to PewDiePie’s fame. As of today, Google-search returns on “PewDiePie” include references to the Christchurch attack.

The New Zealand attacker also knew that others would be recording and archiving the video for further amplification. When choosing to publish on an anonymous forum first, he also ensured that that group of sympathetic trolls would re-upload content in the wake of takedowns by the major platforms. We’ve seen this tactic many times before. Sometimes it’s used in playful ways. When Scientology tried to get a leaked promotional video featuring Tom Cruise removed from the internet, users made a point of reposting it in a variety of places—making it impossible to stamp out. Other instances are darker: Some users attempted to keep videos on YouTube of a misogynistic murderer from Santa Barbara, California. The scale of these efforts can be startling. In the first 24 hours after the Christchurch attack, Facebook alone removed 1.5 million postings of the video. In a statement late Saturday, the company said it was still working around the clock to “remove violating content using a combination of technology and people.”

Weeks before Friday’s attack, the New Zealand shooter littered other social-media platforms with memes and articles about immigrants and Muslims to ensure that journalists would have plenty of material to scour. These sorts of cryptic trails are becoming an increasingly common tactic of media manipulators, who anticipate how journalists will cover them. The perpetrator of the New Zealand attack clearly hoped that a new white supremacist would hear a siren song by directly connecting with his words and deeds.

The sophistication of these manipulators presents a challenge for the media. In describing these dynamics, I’m not mentioning the New Zealand killer’s name. Other than PewDiePie, I’m not citing any of the personalities and tropes he tried to publicize. Withholding details runs counter to the usual rules of storytelling—show, don’t tell—but it also helps slow down the spread of white-supremacist keywords. Journalists and regular internet users need to be cognizant of their role in spreading these ideas, especially because the platform companies haven’t recognized theirs.

Just as journalists of the past learned to cover white supremacists differently from other groups, platform companies must address the role their technology plays as the megaphone for white supremacists. In designing, deploying, and scaling up their broadcast technologies, internet companies need to understand that white supremacists and other extremists will find and exploit the weak points. While Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others have resisted calls for accountability, there is no longer any doubt about how these platforms—and the media environment now growing up around them—are used to amplify hate.