Month: August 2014

Google, Crime Fighter

The company reported a sex offender to the police:

A Houston man was arrested after Google detected that he was trying to email sexually explicit photos of a young girl to his friend. After its data-crawling algorithms detected the images, Google tipped off the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which then alerted police. The man, John Henry Skillern, is now being held for $200,000 bail on charges of possessing child pornography.

Rich McCormick explains how Google’s algorithm works:

Google makes use of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology to scan emails, and calculate a mathematical hash for an image of child sexual abuse that allows it to recognize photos automatically even if they have been altered. The tech is now also used by both Twitter and Facebook, after Microsoft donated it to the NCMEC in 2009. Videos, too, have become the focus of such digital fingerprinting programs. Google has its own Video ID software for detecting footage of child sexual abuse, and British company Friend MTS donated its Expose F1 detection program to the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) earlier this year.

While the technology has helped to halt the activities of people such as John Henry Skillern, the automated image detection systems used by Google and others have some flaws. For one, new pictures won’t be caught by software such as PhotoDNA: only images already recorded in the user’s database can be spotted. They also raise some privacy questions.

Lauren Williams looks at the legality of Google’s actions:

Courts largely support service providers monitoring content for child pornography as long as they don’t conspire with police to do so, Orin Kerr, a computer crime law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told ThinkProgress. “The big issue is the Fourth Amendment. Google needs to make sure that they are not acting as agents of the police,” he said.

Shafer fears where Google’s kiddie-porn offensive will lead:

Like cannibals, murderers, pedophiles and rapists, child pornographers — and customers of child pornography — constitute the worst of the human worst. They are the exemplars of the retrograde. Our natural impulse will always be to use whatever means, legal or technological, to expose and punish such unrepentant deviants.

Today, I’m fine with Web companies using scanning technology to uncover those who trade in child pornography. But the powers conjured up out of universal abhorrence have a way of spinning out of control, leading us to commit immoral acts in our pursuit of morality. It wasn’t that long ago that marrying across racial lines was a crime. Or that homosexual acts were punished by law. Or that pot smokers were jailed for decades. Or property covenants prevented Jews from buying properties.

Map Of The Day

Alison Abbott explains the genesis of the above video, which depicts 2,600 years of cultural change:

Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase, to find 120,000 individuals who were notable enough in their life-times that the dates and locations of their births and deaths were recorded. The list includes people ranging from Solon, the Greek lawmaker and poet, who was born in 637 bc in Athens, and died in 557 bc in Cyprus, to Jett Travolta – son of the actor John Travolta – who was born in 1992 in Los Angeles, California, and died in 2009 in the Bahamas.

The team used those data to create a movie that starts in 600 BC and ends in 2012. Each person’s birth place appears on a map of the world as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. The result is a way to visualize cultural history – as a city becomes more important, more notable people die there.

Mark Byrnes cautions:

Of course, devoting such a study to only ‘notable individuals’ of Europe and North America leaves out all sorts of people; most people, in fact.

The visualization of North American migration, for example, suggests the continent was uninhabited until Colonial times. The reason for the omission of so many kinds of people is quite simple: “[t]he poor are simply not as well recorded,” one of the researchers, Maximillian Schich, an asso­ciate pro­fessor in arts and tech­nology at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Dallas, tells National Geographic.

What we see in these videos is an example of how powerful data visualizations can be. But when it comes to charting thousands of years of world history, they’re still only as good as the records researchers can access.

Eliza Berman adds:

The video and accompanying article, which appear in Nature, an international science journal, have generated some criticism on Twitter, since Nature fails to qualify the phrase “visual history of human culture” with the words “Western” or “European.” Still others question how much the places where a man—and these are mostly men—was born and died can really tell us about cultural history.

These critiques are valid, and perhaps they’ll be addressed as Schich’s team releases further research. But if we take the video for what it is and nothing more—a mesmerizing view of the migrations of people whose contributions Western culture values—it’s a compelling look at the interplay between culture and geography.

Dissents Of The Day

A reader writes:

With regard to your post “The Last And First Temptation Of Israel,” let’s dispense with all pleasantries and call these racist warmongers what they are.  There is no excuse for this sort of language and belief and even under the worst of circumstances, you cannot justify it away.

With that said, a few things.  One, Feiglin is one of eight deputy speakers.  So, let’s be ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-CONFLICT-GAZAclear that his power in Israel slightly less than you claimed. Second, while nothing can justify these comments, the fact remains that the government that controls Gaza outwardly supports the genocide of Jews and ethnic cleansing of Israel.  They were elected by the Palestinian people which, regardless of Israelis’ actions, means Palestinians voted for a party committed to genocide against the Jews.

Against this backdrop, I find it highly offensive that you are so narrowly focussed on the sins of Israel to the complete and utter exclusion of culpability of Hamas. Can you honestly say, given the sophisticated tunnels that were found, that there is no justification in Israel’s actions?  I know you’ll shoot back “but the settlements” and I will counter with “they should be dismantled, but, let’s protect lives while we wait for politicians to wise up.”

The idea that this blog has focused on Israeli sins “to the complete and utter exclusion of culpability of Hamas” seems to me a deluded function of how polarized this debate has become. I’ve repeatedly and vehemently used clear language to denounce Hamas’ tactics as war crimes and their ideology as poisonous. Yes, I’ve become deeply concerned about Israel’s lurch toward eliminationist rhetoric – but my focus on that is partly because the story is ignored by much of the US media, and also because Americans are financing Israel – and not Hamas – and Israel portrays itself as a Western society. Another reader notes:

I think you make too much of “deputy speaker” – here’s another person who currently holds that title:

Ahmad Tibi is an Arab-Israeli politician and leader of the Arab Movement for Change (Ta’al), an Arab party in Israel. He serves as a member of the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) since 1999, and currently serves as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. Tibi was acknowledged as a figure in the Israeli-Palestinian arena after serving as a political advisor to the late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat (1993-1999).

Another pulls no punches:

Andrew, your blog post was a total hack job and you should be embarrassed. I had a funny feeling during your postings about the latest Gaza conflict that you may have some cringe-worthy lapses in basic facts about both the Palestinian street and the Israel street. To exploit nutty extremists and malign Israelis in a rush job for your blog proves my theory that you really don’t know anything about Israel – and sadly, you probably don’t care because you’ve made up your mind.

The Times of Israel pulled the blog post from this asshole immediately, and nobody gives a shit about the deputy speaker or pays no attention to him. It’s like writing about David Duke and the late Fred Phelps to expose the real truth about Americans. If you actually knew about life in Israel you wouldn’t exploit these jerks or worse, take them seriously and somehow connect the dots to Israel character.

If you knew ANYTHING about life in Israel you would certainly understand that a majority of the population is secular, liberal and progressive (not at all like you portray in this blog post); including a very high profile and large LGBT community. You would also know that these very large moral issues, like what to do about about Hamas and civilian causalities, the occupation, etc, is front and center in the media, in coffee shop conversations and in the workplace. Most of the conversations include a firm rebuke of the nuts you’ve decided to highlight in your blog post.

You’re an idiot if you think this is Israel. You’re a bigger idiot if you’re exploiting this just to be provocative. You know you should go there and spend some time. See what it’s like to be living in a free and progressive society surrounded by utter lunacy and religious and sexual intolerance. It’s not fun.

On the other hand, another notes:

Speaking of voices in Israel advocating various forms of genocide: one you may have missed came earlier in the year in the Jerusalem Post calling the Armenian Genocide “permissible“:

Every nation has the right to employ whatever means it has to fight for its survival, and should not have to do so at the expense of its moral standing in the eyes of other nations. This is a belief both Israel and Turkey share.

Note that Haaretz recently published an article showing that the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide presented the Jews in Palestine a brutally clear picture of how far “whatever means it has” extends:

A telegraph recently uncovered in the Turkish prime ministerial archive reinforces these accounts. Sent by the Turkish interior minister, Nazar Talaat, to the governor of Beirut, who also oversaw Zichron Yaakov, the telegraph read: “In the village of Zamrin (Zichron Yaakov,) in the Haifa district, the Kamikam (governor) told the people that if they do not hand over the spy Lishansky, their fate will be like the Armenians, as I am involved in the deaths of the Armenians.”

Another reader:

I have a few Israeli friends and have always been against the casual slaughter of Palestinians. My own support for the end of the war and criticism of the death of Gazan children has been vocal in situations both virtual and in physical conversation. I have discovered that there seems to be a violent pushback from many Israeli and Jewish people against my opinion (what a surprise!), usually revolving around the idea that A) I don’t understand B) You have no right to criticize us C) those in government don’t represent their opinion. Those are never fair reasons, because A) I do read enough to know B) I am human, the dead and injured are human and thus I have every right to have an opinion C) Then what are you doing about it.

I don’t mean to rant – but it would be helpful to readers to have a thread about this experience …. to share responses outside the media coverage. The mainstream coverage has been distorted and nothing has been said about how, one-to-one, others have been grappling with this. America has a unique position on this, as I live in New York (say what you will) and there is a huge number of Jews that have opinions about the conflict, nuanced or not, right or wrong. Compared to any other conflict, there seems to be a closer, perhaps more personal relationship with how we carry a discourse and there might be something valuable that a reader out there can share with the rest, beyond my own.

(Photo: Israeli residents, mostly from the southern Israeli city of Sderot, sit on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, on July 12, 2014, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

Obama’s Imperial Presidency? Ctd

Ross defends his “Caesarism!” charge from critics:

I will concede, certainly, that there are scenarios where congressional inaction obligates some presidential creativity, and that a House as dysfunctional as this one might create more such scenarios than usual. (Which is why, again, I haven’t written angry columns every time — and there have been many — this president has made dubiously-constitutional moves.) And I will concede, as well, that certain crisis-level situations might necessitate more extraordinary moves. (See Constitution, suicide pact, etc.) Posner invokes “the costly and ridiculous near-failure to raise the debt limit in past years,” which isn’t a terrible example: Had Congress actually failed to raise the debt limit, it would have been derelict in its duties, and the White House probably would have been justified in pushing the envelope significantly to deal with whatever economic fallout ensued.

But immigration reform is simply not that kind of issue. We’ve had millions of people here illegally for decades; we will probably have millions of people here illegally a decade hence even if Congress decides to pass major immigration legislation tomorrow; and there is no emergency situation requiring legalization as the obvious, there-is-no-alternative response.

For the record, I think Ross has the better of the arguments here. Yes, Obama is facing a nullification House – a body that will not even allow its own proposals to be signed into law by this president. They are by far the guiltiest party in our governmental dysfunction. But the remedy for that is voting them out, not supplanting them with the executive on a matter this controversial, this political and in this climate. Obama was right the first time: the Congress needs to do this. Ezra, meanwhile, reminds us how gridlock and this kind of executive temptation are not going to go away as long as we have a reactionary, nihilist rump in the House:

Conservative critics go too far when they pretend that Obama’s actions are unprecedented. President Jimmy Carter, for instance, unilaterally pardoned hundreds of thousands of draft dodgers — an action more extreme than anything Obama is said to be considering. At the same time, there do need to be limits on the president’s ability to win policy fights by selectively enforcing laws. …

Congressional dysfunction doesn’t justify any particular executive action. But it should worry both liberals and conservatives who fear the steady expansion of the president’s powers. Congress is going to be divided for a long time. Even as demographic changes make it easier for Democrats to win presidential elections, geography and redistricting make it nearly certain Republicans will hold the House well into the next decade. The result is that this kind of bitterly polarized, utterly ineffective, wildly unpopular Congress is likely to be the norm.

The less Congress is able to do, the more that other power centers in the government will feel they need to do. The system will survive congressional inaction, but it will survive it in part by leaping into the antidemocratic dark.

The Troubling Triumph Of The Israeli Right

Tensions Remain High At Israeli Gaza Border

The Gaza conflict has fortified Israel’s right wing, Gregg Carlstrom admits:

Public opinion polls confirm the Israeli right’s gains during the current conflict. A survey conducted by the Knesset Channel last week found that the right-wing parties would win 56 seats in the next election, up from 43 last year. The center-left bloc would shrink from 59 seats to 48. Other surveys suggest that the right could win a majority by itself, without needing religious parties or centrists to form a coalition. But perhaps more striking is the public’s near-unanimous support for the Gaza war, from Israelis across the political spectrum. Roughly 90 percent of Jewish Israelis support the war, according to recent polls. Less than 4 percent believe the army has used “excessive firepower,” the Israel Democracy Institute found, though even Israeli officials admit that a majority of the 1,800 Palestinians killed so far are civilians.

Even scarier, Carlstrom adds, is that “this time, public dissent hasn’t just been silenced, it’s been all but smothered”:

A popular comedian was dumped from her job as the spokeswoman for a cruise line after she criticized the war. Local radio refused to air an advertisement from B’Tselem, a rights group, which simply intended to name the victims in Gaza. Scattered anti-war rallies have drawn small crowds, mostly in the low hundreds; the largest brought several thousand people to Tel Aviv on July 26. But most of the protests ended in violence at the hands of ultranationalists, who attacked them and set up roving checkpoints to hunt for “leftists” afterwards. Demonstrators have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and bludgeoned with chairs.

In Assaf Sharon’s incisive reading of Israel’s recent history, this strain of ultra-nationalism has been years in the making:

The conventional wisdom is that Israel has moved to the right. But as public opinions and analyses of voting trends clearly show, this is not the case. Although the right has grown, its rise has been relatively small. Israelis remain evenly divided on peace and security, and the left enjoys a clear majority on social and economic issues. The deeper shift is not in the level of public support for the two political camps, but in their make-up.

On the right, the liberal and democratic elements have been overtaken by chauvinist populists. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s party, Likud, whose members used to walk out on [Rabbi Meir] Kahane, is now populated by some of the most vocal inciters. The last remnants of its democrats were ousted in the last primary elections, and the remaining moderates pander to the pugnacious extremists that dominate the party. The prime minister himself has maintained utter silence in the face of growing racism and political violence. The left, on the other hand, has lost its political stamina and its moral courage. A depletion of ideas, debilitation of institutions, and putrefaction of leadership have left it politically inert. The social mechanisms that kept Kahane’s racism at bay have all but disintegrated.

When the philosopher and public intellectual Yishayahu Leibovitz called Kahane and his followers “Judeo-Nazis,” not everyone agreed, but everybody listened. More importantly, many understood the threat he identified and were willing to combat it. Breaking the moral siege demands active and resolute opposition to Jewish jingoism, not ignoring it and certainly not accommodating it.

(Photo: Police keep right-wing supporters of Israel separated from left-wing protesters during a rally held by the left-wing calling for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and for a ceasefire of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict on July 12, 2014 in Tel Aviv, Israel.At least one person was arrested and one person was injured. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

Three Red States Are Big Winners From Obamacare

A new Gallup survey illustrates the uneven impact of the law. HuffPo maps the data:

Uninsurance Rates

Margot Sanger-Katz contends that the “numbers demonstrate the big difference the Affordable Care Act could have for the country’s poorer states”:

I’ve written before about the “two Americas” in health care, with richer Democratic-leaning states expanding coverage to more of their populations and poorer Republican-leaning states sitting out the expansion.

According to the new Gallup poll, Arkansas and Kentucky have had the largest reductions in uninsured rates in the country. Arkansas reduced its rate by more than 10 percentage points, to 12.4 percent from 22.5 percent last year; the rate in Kentucky declined by 8.5 percentage points. (The margin of sampling error for the results varies by state size, but is around plus or minus two percentage points for those two.) West Virginia also made Gallup’s top-10 list. These three states had very high numbers of residents who lacked insurance and qualified for the new public programs; it is not a surprise that, with a commitment to these new programs, they saw significant coverage gains.

It’s one of the great tragedies of the last few years: that a black president offered many poor white states a healthcare law that would help them more than others – and most chose to reject it. I mean, it’s not as if Massachusetts needed it. Cohn draws attention to the tangible consequences of states opposing Obamacare:

[T]he numbers do suggest a pattern, one Gallup’s own researchers observe. The states that made the most headway covering the uninsured, according to Gallup, are states in which officials decided to build their own insurance marketplaces and to make all low-income people eligible for Medicaid, as the Affordable Care Act originally envisioned.

Obamacare Impact

Pivoting off the Gallup numbers, Greg Sargent asserts that Obamacare is becoming less central to this year’s campaigns:

All of these little data points help tell a larger story, which Politico told really well today: The fading of Obamacare as an issue in many states, including those with hard fought Senate races with massive expenditures such as those from the Koch group. To be sure, Dems very well could lose control of the Senate. But it is becoming increasingly accepted that even if that does happen, Obamacare might not be a major reason why — the makeup of the map and the economy could prove far more important in determining the outcome.

Busting Hamas’ Nihilism

An Indian news crew managed to capture this rare video footage of a rocket being fired from a densely populated residential area in Gaza yesterday morning, less than an hour before the ceasefire went into effect:

Michael Peck discusses why this is significant:

The film clip doesn’t show an Israeli retaliatory strike. But if there was one, it would have struck a built-up area, possibly injuring civilians. And there’s no way Hamas could not have been aware of that. By the way, the Indian film crew didn’t release the film until after they left Gaza, apparently in order to avoid retaliation by an image-conscious Hamas.

What can we conclude? From a military standpoint, a rocket that can fit under a small tent is going to be tough to eliminate with an air strike or artillery barrage. It takes troops on the ground. … It also illustrates exactly why guerrillas and irregular armies so often can prevail, or at least endure, against superior forces. Rockets and mortars are easy to assemble and fire. The launch crew can vacate before warplanes or artillery responds. When the counter-bombardment inevitably comes, civilians get hurt and the guerrillas gain support.

But Seth Lazar doesn’t buy Israel’s argument that Hamas’ use of human shields justifies bombing civilians:

[O]ne might think that Hamas’ joint responsibility provides some grounds for discounting the weight of those innocent civilians’ lives when tallying up the bad effects of the IDF’s actions. Suppose that Hamas were to literally treat innocent civilians as hostages by advertising an intention to kill a certain number of them should the IDF not withdraw. Then many would think it plausible that those deaths should not receive the same weight in the proportionality calculation as those directly inflicted by the IDF, in part because of the ‘intervening agency’ of Hamas. Perhaps human shields are analogous to hostages in this way.

We should resist this conclusion. Innocent people’s lives have weight in the proportionality calculation because of their moral status—their right to life. This status, and these protections, cannot be diminished by the impermissible actions of some third party.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch reports possible Israeli war crimes in Khuza’a:

On the morning of July 23, Israeli forces ordered a group of about 100 Palestinians in Khuza’a to leave a home in which they had gathered to take shelter, family members said. The first member to leave the house, Shahid al-Najjar, had his hands up but an Israeli soldier shot him in the jaw, seriously injuring him. Israeli soldiers detained the men and boys over age 15 in an area close to the Gaza perimeter fence. Based on statements from witnesses and news reports, some were taken to Israel for questioning. Israeli forces released others that day, in small separate groups. As one group walked unarmed to Khan Younis, Israeli soldiers fired on them, killing one and wounding two others.

Two older men whom Israeli forces briefly detained near the perimeter fence had been seriously wounded in earlier Israeli bombardments and died soon after being released, two witnesses said. The laws of war provide that wounded civilians and combatants should be given necessary medical care to the fullest extent practicable and with the least possible delay. In another incident on July 23, Israeli soldiers fired on a group of civilians who had been told to leave their home in Khuza’a, killing Mohammed al-Najjar, a witness said.

Hamas And The Teen Murders

That’s the current line from the Israeli government on the disputed authorization for the murder of three teens in the West Bank. Eli Lake follows up:

Israeli news reports say Qawasmeh acknowledged during interrogations that he received money and direction from Hamas leaders in Gaza to conduct the June 15 kidnapping. He was arrested trying to flee to Jordan using phony identification. Shaul Bartal, an expert on Hamas and a reservist major in the Israel Defense Force for military intelligence, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that the arrest of Qawasmeh was a smoking gun, but he also said it’s doubtful that Hamas leaders gave specific instructions to kidnap the three teenagers. “It seems Hamas leadership in Gaza gave an order, but the order was more general,” he said.

I remain confused about the term “kidnapping.” The teens were murdered almost as soon as they were captured. I also remain confused as to how – since we are now told the evidence came after the arrest of Qawasmeh – Netanyahu was able to know immediately that Hamas was institutionally responsible. It seems clear that the murders were not some random criminal act, and that Hamas sympathizers and renegades were involved, broadly authorized by Hamas. Beyond that? I doubt anyone intended it to be a casus belli. But Netanyahu made it one.

The NYT Caves Further To Sponsored Content

At first, they were never going to do it; then they were going to do it just a little, with very high standards; now, they’re lowering those standards so as to blur even further the difference between an advertisement and an article. And this is the crown jewel of American journalism: the New York Times. AdAge has the scoop:

The New York Times has shrunk the labels that distinguish articles bought by advertisers from articles generated in its newsroom and made the language in the labels less explicit … Recent Paid Posts from Chevron and Netflix have replaced the blue moat that enclosed [an earlier] native ad with a slimmer blue line running only along the top. “Paid For And Posted By” has been trimmed to to “Paid Post,” and in slightly smaller type. The company logos, also slightly smaller, appear in a white bar that’s not as tall as Dell’s dark blue bar. And because Chevron and Netflix didn’t write their Paid Posts, their logos don’t appear by the author’s name. Instead “T Brand Studio,” the unit within the Times that produces content on behalf of advertisers, appears off to the left.

Here’s why:

“Some form of labeling is necessary to make sure no one feels deceived, but beyond that I don’t think they need to have blinking lights,” said Scott Donaton, chief content officer at UM. “In general, if a client is going to create content, they don’t want the thing dressed up in way that pushes audiences away from it,” he added.

So to clearly label an advertisement an advertisement “pushes audiences away.” So the goal is to provide the smallest fig-leaf possible that gives the NYT plausible deniability of outright deception. And that’s entirely because of corporate pressure. Look at this page and see if you think most people would know it’s bought and paid for by an advertiser.

Now check out the Washington Times’ latest gambit with the Washington Redskins:

In 2000, then-editor Wes Pruden of the Washington Times blasted Dan Snyder’s efforts to control the flow of information about the Redskins as “chickenshit” tactics. Last week, the same newspaper agreed to give that same owner unprecedented control over that same flow of information about the same team. And all parties celebrated the deal. “The Washington Times and the Washington Redskins announced a unique partnership that will make the newspaper a content and marketing partner of the team,” said the joint press release.

And check out Condé Nast’s new venture as a marketer for Monsanto:

Screen Shot 2014-08-06 at 12.36.38 PM

Let me repeat: “Each episode will be stylishly arranged in a controlled environment, to create an authoritative and journalistic forum.” If you want your journalism stylishly arranged in a controlled environment to buttress the brand of a corporation, then you know to go read Condé Nast publications.