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http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/29/politics/turkish-embassy-indictments/index.html
A DC grand jury returned indictments against 15 Turkish security officials and four other individuals Tuesday on charges of attacking protesters during an incident outside the Turkish ambassador's residence on May 16, 2017. The violence took place during Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit to the US.
CNN previously reported that nine people were injured in the melee, though witness and Turkish authorities have offered conflicting accounts of who was involved and who was to blame. All defendants were also indicted with "bias crime enhancements" -- referring to hate crimes -- to the charges.
The Turkish embassy says the protesters were affiliated with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which is a designated terror group in Turkey, the US and Europe, and has been engaged in a 30-year conflict with the Turkish government. Turkey alleges the protesters "began aggressively provoking Turkish-American citizens who had peacefully assembled to greet the President." In June, DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said that "there's no indication at all that the protesters were a terrorist group."
Previously: Violence at Turkish Embassy in Washington
Erdogan Decries 'Unacceptable' US Arrest Warrants for Staff in Washington Brawl
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President Trump will sign an executive order to allow local police departments to receive or purchase military surplus equipment:
Police departments will now have access to military surplus equipment typically used in warfare, including grenade launchers, armored vehicles and bayonets, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday, describing it as "lifesaving gear."
The move rescinds limits on the Pentagon handouts that were put in place by President Barack Obama in 2015 amid a national debate over policing touched off by a spate of high-profile deaths of black men at the hands of the police, including the shooting death in 2014 of 18-year-old Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., by a white officer. Some local residents viewed police use of military equipment during the ensuing protests as an unnecessary show of force and intimidation.
In a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police in Nashville, Mr. Sessions said Mr. Obama had made it harder for the police to protect themselves and their neighborhoods. "Those restrictions went too far," Mr. Sessions said. "We will not put superficial concerns above public safety."
Mr. Sessions said that President Trump would sign an executive order on Monday fully restoring the military program, called 1033, and that the president was doing "all he can to restore law and order and support our police across the country." [...] The program was started in the 1990s as a way for the military to transfer surplus equipment to federal, state and local police agencies fighting the drug war. More than $5 billion in surplus gear has been funneled to law enforcement agencies.
Organized gangs get to play soldier.
Also at The Hill and USA Today.
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President Donald Trump has selected Andrei Iancu, the managing partner of a major Los Angeles law firm, to be the next head of the US Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO].
His most notable work in the tech sector is likely his representation of TiVo Corp. in its long-running patent battles with companies like EchoStar, Motorola, Microsoft, Verizon, and Cisco. TiVo ultimately succeeded in compelling those defendants to pay up for its pioneering DVR patents, and payments to TiVo ultimately totaled more than $1.6 billion, according to Iancu's biography page.
Iancu also had a hand in Immersion Corp's $82 million jury verdict against Sony Computer Entertainment in which a jury found that Immersion's patent claims on tactile feedback technology were valid and infringed.
[...] Iancu earned his JD, along with an MS in mechanical engineering and a BS in aerospace engineering, from UCLA. He worked as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft before attending law school.
Handling the business of a large and successful law firm like Irell & Manella means that Iancu is no slouch when it comes to management skills. And his varied set of clients could help him avoid the tug of war that often pops up between tech and pharma over how to manage the patent system.
If confirmed by the Senate, Iancu will replace Michelle Lee, the outgoing USPTO director who left shortly after Trump's inauguration. Lee, a former Google attorney, was a favorite of the tech sector.
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The "Daily Stormer", a neo-Nazi website that has been having trouble staying online since Charlottesville, has once again been shutdown.
According to The Verge:
The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer briefly returned to the web today, using a new URL and a string of new hosts to dodge the bans that took it off the internet last week. The site reappeared this morning at the address Punished-stormer.com, apparently using Dreamhost as both a host and DNS provider.
[note: url modified]
Shortly after the new site became public, Anonymous groups began a denial-of-service attack against it, targeting the Dreamhost DNS infrastructure that makes the site accessible to the rest of the web. The result was nearly two hours of intermittent downtime for the countless sites using Dreamhost's DNS infrastructure.
In WWII, things like this were called "collateral damage", where innocent casualties were necessary in order to get at the Nazis themselves. But is this sort of action legitimate on the internet? Especially by non-governmental organizations?
Also reported at https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/08/dreamhost-ddos-attack/
Related story: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/21/16180614/charlottesville-daily-stormer-alt-right-internet-domain
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The US and North Korea are not the only ones ratcheting up tensions in the Orient. From Japan-Forward[1]:
The armies of India and China are locked in a standoff over the strategic Doklam plateau, an area inside the sovereign territory of Bhutan. Under the purview of the Indian-Bhutan Friendship Treaty, signed in New Delhi in February 2007, the tiny kingdom called in for Indian help after the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) moved in under orders from Beijing.
Asserting dubious claims and then engaging in bullying and revisionism to get its way—this is now becoming an oft-repeated Chinese pattern we have all seen before. Indeed, in the offensive launched in June 2017 in the Doklam plateau—which China now claims is a “traditional pasture for Tibetans” (ignoring completely the fact that China predicates the claim in Doklam upon its equally untenable claim over Tibet)—China attempted to build a road near the critical tri-junction border area among China, India, and Bhutan. This area is vital to India’s security.
In the specific case of Doklam, there is a fascinating twist to the tale. China did not foresee India’s tenacious military resistance and political fortitude in response to the PLA’s Doklam encroachment. Unlike the Scarborough Shoal, where Filipino forces quit without a fight, India appears very unlikely to withdraw its troops unilaterally from the Doklam border area, and is standing up to China.
China and India are the first and second largest world militaries, perhaps it would be wise to heed the sage advice.
[1]:Japan-Forward is the English-language publication of the Sankei Shimbun, a large Japanese newspaper with an open Nationalist slant.
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Daniel Kammen, a renewable energy expert appointed last year as a science envoy to the State Department, resigned Wednesday, citing President Trump's response to the violence in Charlottesville as the final straw that led to his departure.
Kind of makes you wonder, you know, what kind of President could provoke a science envoy to the State department to resign. But not far to look! As Kammen goes on:
In a resignation letter posted to Twitter, Kammen wrote that Trump's remarks about the racial violence in Virginia had attacked "core values of the United States" and that it would have "domestic and international ramifications."
Even American scientists have ethics, and will not serve violent racist regimes, like Nazi Germany. So there is that.
But the most interesting thing, is the encryption:
However, his most biting message may have come in the form of a hidden acrostic: The first letter of each paragraph spelled out I-M-P-E-A-C-H.
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Propublica: Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate
Most tech companies have policies against working with hate websites. Yet a ProPublica survey found that PayPal, Stripe, Newsmax and others help keep more than half of the most-visited extremist sites in business.
Because of its "extreme hostility toward Muslims," the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site's director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.
But either not their job, or they just didn't know:
Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it's not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn't necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.
ProPublica goes on to say:
The sites that we identified from the ADL and SPLC lists vehemently denied that they are hate sites.
"It is not hateful, racist or extremist to oppose jihad terror," said Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch. He added that the true extremism was displayed by groups that seek to censor the Internet and that by asking questions about the tech platforms on his site, we were "aiding and abetting a quintessentially fascist enterprise."
Business is business. IG Farben said much the same when it had exclusive contracts with the (then current) German government.
See also: After Backing Alt-Right in Charlottesville, A.C.L.U. Wrestles With Its Role
Fighting Neo-Nazis and the Future of Free Expression
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in on the recent controversy surrounding Charlottesville and the effective removal of certain sites from the internet for expressing vile views. This entire incident and our response has an enormous implication on the future of internet freedoms as we know them.
In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is "dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism." Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare's CEO: "Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power."
The Electronic Frontier Foundation agrees. Even for free speech advocates, this situation is deeply fraught with emotional, logistical, and legal twists and turns. All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with. Those on the left face calls to characterize the Black Lives Matter movement as a hate group. In the Civil Rights Era cases that formed the basis of today's protections of freedom of speech, the NAACP's voice was the one attacked.
Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn't.
It's notable that in GoDaddy and Google's eagerness to swiftly distance themselves from American neo-Nazis, no process was followed. Policies give guidance as to what we might expect, and an opportunity to see justice is done. We should think carefully before throwing them away.
It might seem unlikely now that Internet companies would turn against sites supporting racial justice or other controversial issues. But if there is a single reason why so many individuals and companies are acting together now to unite against neo-Nazis, it is because a future that seemed unlikely a few years ago—where white nationalists and Nazis have significant power and influence in our society—now seems possible. We would be making a mistake if we assumed that these sorts of censorship decisions would never turn against causes we love.
Part of the work for all of us now is to push back against such dangerous decisions with our own voices and actions. Another part of our work must be to seek to shore up the weakest parts of the Internet's infrastructure so it cannot be easily toppled if matters take a turn for the (even) worse. These actions are not in opposition; they are to the same ends.
We can—and we must—do both.
We're at a very fortunate point in history where most of society is still reasonably just, but people forget how rapidly change can come. Rosa Parks chose to not yield her seat in the United States just 62 years ago. Legally enforced racial segregation ended only 53 years ago. Living at a time with overt segregation feels like a time centuries past. However, many living today were still alive when it was the status quo. And things going in the opposite direction just as rapidly is entirely possible as well. Actions and policies should not be guided by the here and now, but by the justness of said policy. In other words policy should be decided based not on who it effects, but on the justness of the said policy. Is it more just to live in a world where people have the right to say things that others may find distasteful, or where people can be effectively removed from society by the [transitory] powers that be? We should answer these questions in a period of just times, not when we desperately need them resolved to restore justness.
As the EFF's statement reminds us, if certain groups are successful organizations such as Black Lives Matter may end up being characterized as a hate group. Radical left organizations such as Antifa have already been declared a domestic terrorism group by at least one state. And this is just on a government level. Nestle, Bayer, BMW, General Electric, Coca Cola (rebranded just for Nazi Germany as Fanta), Standard Oil (now Exxon/Chevron/BP ), IBM, Random House Publishing, and many more are some companies that cooperated and collaborated with the Nazis. To think that the supercompanies of today somehow would never possibly consider going down the wrong path is simply naive. And in a world where just a handful of companies now have a practical monopoly on information access - that's something that I think should give people pause before jumping to silence even the most vile of speech.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
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A basic right in the U.S.A. has been the Freedom of Speech, yet of late it has been under heavy threat. United States Foreign Service Officer (ret.) and author of Hooper's War Peter Van Buren at We Meant Well blogs about Five Bad Arguments to Restrict Speech.
"Open discussion, debate, and argument are the core of democracy. Bad ideas are defeated by good ideas. Fascism seeks to close off all ideas except its own."
The blog entry itself is rather long and contains numerous links to supporting material. Here is the list; below the fold includes an elaboration on the statement and a summary. Read the blog itself for more details and exposition.
- The First Amendment Only Applies to Government?
- What's Said May Provoke Violence in the Room (A Clear and Present Danger)
- What's Said May Provoke Violence Outside (Public Safety)
- Speech Can or Should Be Restricted Based on Content (Hate Speech)
- Free Speech Should Not Be Subject to the Heckler's Veto
[...] 1. The First Amendment Only Applies to Government?
The first fallacious argument used to shut down free speech is that the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in our Constitution only applies to government, and so universities or other entities are entitled to censor, restrict or shut down altogether speech willy-nilly.
Short Answer: Not really. Public funding invokes the First Amendment for schools, and free speech runs deeper than the Bill of Rights. It's as much a philosophical argument as a legal one, not a bad thing for a nation founded on a set of ideas (and ideals.)
[...] 2. What's Said May Provoke Violence in the Room (A Clear and Present Danger)
Some claim that certain conservative speakers, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, who purposefully use anti-LGBTQ slurs to provoke their audiences, should be banned or shut down. Their speech is the equivalent of yelling Fire! in a crowded movie theatre when there is no actual danger, provoking a deadly stampede for the exits.
Short Answer: The standards for shutting down speech are very restrictive, and well-codified. Milo comes nowhere close.
[...] 3. What's Said May Provoke Violence Outside (Public Safety)
The idea that a university or other venue cannot assure a speaker's safety, or that the speaker's presence may provoke violent protests, or that the institution just doesn't want to go to the trouble or expense of protecting a controversial speaker has become the go-to justification for canceling or restricting speech. Berkley cited this in canceling and then de-platforming (rescheduling her when most students would not be on campus) Ann Coulter, whose campus sponsors are now suing, and New York University cited the same justification for canceling an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Short Answer: Canceling a speaker to protect them or public safety is the absolute last resort, and some risk to safety is part of the cost to a free society for unfettered speech.
[...] 4. Speech Can or Should Be Restricted Based on Content (Hate Speech)
There are no laws against "hate speech." A speaker can call people names, and insult them by their race, sexual orientation or religious beliefs. What many people think and say is hateful. It is carefully thought out to inspire hate, to promote hate, to appeal to crude and base instincts. Indeed, that is their point. But there is no law or other prohibition against hate speech. Even restrictions on "hate speech" meant to prevent violence, often cited as the justification to restrict such speech, are by design extremely narrow.
Short Answer: You cannot restrict hate speech. Free speech means just that, with any limited restrictions content-neutral.
[...] 5. Free Speech Should Not Be Subject to the Heckler's Veto
Another argument used by some progressives is that the so-called Heckler's Veto is in itself protected speech. Someone may have a right to speak, but someone else has the same right to shout them down and prevent them from being heard.
Short answer: Free speech is not intended to mean whomever can literally "speak" the loudest gets to control what is said. The natural end of such thinking is mob rule, where Speaker A gets a bigger gang together to shout down the gang Speaker B controls.
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Over at StatNews is a story on a recent trend where low cost commercial DNA testing is resulting in a number of White Nationalists taking genetic tests, and sometimes they don't like the results that come back.
The article looks at research on how they respond to the sometimes unexpected results:
[...] In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years' worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.
[...] About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. "Pretty damn pure blood," said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn't find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.
Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual's knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. [...] Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don't matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy "that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry," Panofsky said.
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Following a number of CEOs pulling out of President Trump's American Manufacturing Council and Strategic and Policy Forum, President Trump tweeted that the initiatives have been ended:
Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both. Thank you all!
The CEOs of Merck, Intel, 3M, and other companies had already left:
3M Co. Chief Executive Officer Inge Thulin stepped down from the White House's manufacturing council, adding to the corporate exodus as the backlash grows to President Donald Trump's ambivalent response to racially-charged violence in Virginia over the weekend.
Thulin joined the White House panel in January "to advocate for policies that align with our values and encourage even stronger investment and job growth -- in order to make the United States stronger, healthier and more prosperous," the CEO said Wednesday in a statement tweeted by 3M. "After careful consideration, I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance these goals."
Update: The members of the Strategic and Policy Forum reportedly disbanded the group before President Trump's tweet:
The quick sequence began late Wednesday morning when Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group and one of Mr. Trump's closest confidants in the business community, organized a conference call for members of the president's Strategic and Policy Forum. On the call, the chief executives of some of the largest companies in the country debated how to proceed. After a discussion among a dozen prominent C.E.O.s, the decision was made to abandon the group altogether, said people with knowledge of the details of the call.
Also at Bloomberg:
Trump made the announcement on Twitter, less than an hour after one of the groups was said to be planning to inform the White House that it would break up. [...] Trump appeared to be making an effort to get ahead of the news as the councils began to disintegrate. The strategy forum, which is led by Blackstone Group LP's Stephen Schwarzman, planned to inform the White House Wednesday before making the announcement public, according to another person familiar with the matter, who wasn't authorized to discuss the news publicly.
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