Link Roundup December 2020

[wepon]

Armed police raid home of Florida scientist fired over Covid-19 data

On Monday night, Jones appeared on CNN and denied that she was the author of the unauthorised message. She said she last had access to any computer system within the state was six months ago, adding: “I’m not a hacker, I’m not that tech savvy.” She told CNN she had come to the conclusion that the raid had been motivated by a desire to root out her source within the state bureaucracy, which is why police took away her phone. “On my phone is every communication I have ever had with someone who works with the state who has come to me in confidence and told me things that could get them fired,” she said.

“I started crying”: Inside Timnit Gebru’s last days at Google—and what happens next

I thought that they might make me miserable enough to leave, or something like that. I thought that they would be smarter than doing it in this exact way, because it’s a confluence of so many issues that they’re dealing with: research censorship, ethical AI, labor rights, DEI—all the things that they’ve come under fire for before. So I didn’t expect it to be in that way—like, cut off my corporate account completely. That’s so ruthless. That’s not what they do to people who’ve engaged in gross misconduct. They hand them $80 million, and they give them a nice little exit, or maybe they passive-aggressively don’t promote them, or whatever. They don’t do to the people who are actually creating a hostile workplace environment what they did to me.

Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

Google violated US labor laws by spying on workers who were organizing employee protests, then firing two of them, according to a complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) today.

Leaked Audio: Facebook Moderators Terrified to Return to Office During COVID Outbreak

At the beginning of August, Facebook announced that it would be allowing all its staff to remain working from home until at least the middle of summer 2021 “based on guidance from health and government experts.” But, at the same time, thousands of people who are tasked with making sure Facebook stays free of child abuse imagery, beheadings, and all the other horrors floating around the internet, were being told to return to the office.

Videos Appear To Show Cop Planting Marijuana During Arrests. The Staten Island DA Sees Nothing Wrong

In 2018, the New York Times published another video of another car stop in which Officer Erickson appears to plant drugs on a young Black man. And, in two different incidents the same year, NYPD internal investigators found that Officer Erickson had invoice discrepancies related to drug seizures, according to Staten Island DA records obtained by Gothamist/WNYC through the Freedom of Information Law.

Videos From Right-Wing Site That Preaches ‘The Left Ruins Everything’ Assigned In Ohio School

An Ohio public school has been giving students extra credit for watching videos from PragerU, a right-wing website that produces clips of talking heads such as Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro discussing conservative viewpoints, HuffPost has learned. The PragerU videos — with titles such as “Build the Wall,” “Why the Right Was Right” and “The Left Ruins Everything” — were assigned to a 10th-grade history class at Maumee High School, along with a series of questions about the videos’ “most important messages.”

US Ice officers 'used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders'

Lawyers and human rights advocates said there had been a significant acceleration of deportations in recent weeks, a trend they see as linked to the looming elections and the possibility that Ice could soon be under new management.

Leaked review of Met police body-worn video footage reveals officer errors

The Met has been plagued by a flurry of social media videos raising concerns about stop and search, use of force and racial profiling, prompting calls for footage from body-worn video cameras to be made public. But in an internal memo seen by the Guardian, a senior Metropolitan police chief says incidents captured by cameras worn on officers’ bodies, recorded examples of “poor communication, a lack of patience, [and] a lack of de-escalation before use of force is introduced”.

He fought wildfires while imprisoned. California reported him to Ice for deportation

But when his release date came on 6 August and his sister was waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire fence to take him home, California prison guards did not let them reunite. Instead, officers handed the 41-year-old over to a private security contractor who shackled his hands, waist and legs, put him in a van and drove off. For the first time in his life, Saelee was placed into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody and flown 2,000 miles to an Ice jail in Louisiana. He is now facing deportation to Laos, a country his family fled as refugees when he was two years old.

“I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation

The connection to the Honduran leader was made, Zhang said, because an administrator for the president’s Facebook page had been “happily running hundreds of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in a show of extreme chutzpah.” The data scientist said she reported the operation, which involved thousands of fake accounts, to Facebook’s threat intelligence and policy review teams, both of which took months to act. “Local policy teams confirmed that President JOH’s marketing team had openly admitted to organizing the activity on his behalf,” she wrote. “Yet despite the blatantly violating nature of this activity, it took me almost a year to take down his operation.”

‘He hurt me’: migrants who accused Ice gynecologist of abuse speak out

On 5 November, lawyers say, Oldaker’s name and the names of 16 other women who had spoken out against Amin were shared with the Department of Justice, which oversees Ice, and other agencies. Two days later, on 7 November, Oldaker’s commissary – the account detainees use to buy medicine, personal cleaning products, and make phone calls – was “zeroed out”, a telltale sign that a detainee is about to be deported. On 9 November, a Monday, Oldaker was woken up at 5am by Ice officers, who told her she was being deported. She was handcuffed and loaded into a van, and driven straight to Columbus airport, 150 miles west of Irwin county.

Thousands of Amazon workers demand time off to vote

While Amazon is the second largest employer in the country, with 1,372,000 U.S. workers including Whole Foods employees, it does not offer paid time off to participate in federal elections.

To Manage Wildfire, California Looks To What Tribes Have Known All Along

"I think it's really important that we don't think about traditional burning as: what information can we learn from native people and then exclude people and move on with non-natives managing the land," Middleton Manning says. "But that native people are at the forefront and leading."

Facebook Announces Crackdown on QAnon, Antifa, and Militias

It’s not immediately clear why Facebook would include antifa alongside action targeting QAnon and militia organizations. Since 1994, right-wing terrorism has been responsible for the murder of hundreds, while antifa has been responsible for zero deaths.

Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.” After the engineer’s post was removed, the related internal “tasks” he’d cited as examples of the alleged special treatment were made private and inaccessible to employees, according to a Workplace post from another employee.

Zuckerberg blames contractors for failing to remove Kenosha militia's 'call to arms'

“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services? [A]nti semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services,” one employee wrote to Zuckerberg, according to the report. “We need to get better at avoiding mistakes and being more proactive,” another wrote. “Feels like we’re caught in a cycle of responding to damage after it’s already been done rather than constructing mechanisms to nip these issues before they result in real harm.”

How to Make Tech Companies Actually Fight Climate Change

Over the past couple of years, climate change is just one of the issues that has animated increasingly vocal employee protests across the technology industry. More than a year ago, a group of Amazon employees tried something different: They began working together to present Amazon shareholders with a proposal for the company to commit to reducing its fossil fuel emissions. It was the first time that tech employees whose compensation included stock used that position to introduce a shareholder proposal. The group that formed over that action became Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

Google AI Tech Will Be Used for Virtual Border Wall, CBP Contract Shows

In August, Customs and Border Protection accepted a proposal to use Google Cloud technology to facilitate the use of artificial intelligence deployed by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT. Among other projects, INVNT is working on technologies for a new “virtual” wall along the southern border that combines surveillance towers and drones, blanketing an area with sensors to detect unauthorized entry into the country.

Google Promised Not To Use Its AI In Weapons, So Why Is It Investing In Startups Straight Out Of ‘Star Wars’?

Both Google and GV have minority stakes in companies supplying military surveillance tools. In 2016 GV acquired a stake in Palo Alto-based Orbital Insight and in 2017 Google took equity in Planet, headquartered in San Francisco. Together, in the last three years, the two firms have won at least $30.5 million in Defense Department contracts, alongside deals with space intelligence agencies, for projects that could be said to “directly facilitate injury.”

Where in The U.S. Are You Most Likely to Be Audited by the IRS?

In a baffling twist of logic, the intense IRS focus on Humphreys County is actually because so many of its taxpayers are poor. More than half of the county’s taxpayers claim the earned income tax credit, a program designed to help boost low-income workers out of poverty. As we reported last year, the IRS audits EITC recipients at higher rates than all but the richest Americans, a response to pressure from congressional Republicans to root out incorrect payments of the credit. The study estimates that Humphreys, with a median annual household income of just $26,000, is audited at a rate 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, which boasts a median income of $130,000, the highest in the country.

Programmers say Uber Eats is systematically underpaying their workers

Uber Eats workers may have overheard the internet buzz about a new browser plug-in, cheekily called "Uber Cheats." The reason for the pun, as the browser extension's author makes clear, is that he claims the food delivery platform underpays its employees. And he has the receipts to prove it.

Vegan Meat Company’s Anti-Union Speeches Are Being Scrubbed from the Internet

Someone claiming to represent the company now appears to be trying to scrub the internet of these recordings by filing takedown requests on copyright and privacy grounds with the sites on which they're hosted. Audio of the meeting has been deleted from YouTube, SoundCloud, and the podcast hosting platform LibSyn in recent days. A freelance journalist, Andrew Miller, who published the audio, had his personal website shut down by his web host HostGator on August 27. The takedown requests, several of which were viewed by Motherboard, claim that the speeches the company wrote are copyrighted. One video and four audio recordings—including two full-length podcast episodes that incorporate recordings of the meeting—have been flagged and removed from the internet.

Covid Gag Rules at U.S. Companies Are Putting Everyone at Risk

In the past few months, U.S. businesses have been on a silencing spree. Hundreds of U.S. employers across a wide range of industries have told workers not to share information about Covid-19 cases or even raise concerns about the virus, or have retaliated against workers for doing those things, according to workplace complaints filed with the NLRB and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Workers at Amazon.com, Cargill, McDonald’s, and Target say they were told to keep Covid cases quiet. The same sort of gagging has been alleged in OSHA complaints against Smithfield Foods, Urban Outfitters, and General Electric.

The Little Cards That Tell Police 'Let's Forget This Ever Happened'

The cards are designed to be presented in a low-stakes police encounter, like a traffic stop, as a laminated wink-and-nudge between officers that says, “Hey, would you mind going a little easy on this one?” When a cop is handed a PBA card, they can call the number on it to verify the relationship between the cardholder and the issuer, then decide whether it means they should give the cardholder a break. According to Mike, the officer looked at the card, then let him go without asking for ID or the car’s registration. "By knowing somebody and having that connection, it worked,” Mike said.

Blue Bloods: America’s Brotherhood of Police Officers

“You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest,” South Carolinian William H. Trescott told the governor of South Carolina in 1865. The end of the Civil War meant that millions of Black people were transformed from items of property, from which labor could be forcibly and freely extracted, to independent humans with, at least nominally, the agency to do with their labor what they pleased, for their own benefit. “Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended,” writes historian Eric Foner, “the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.” In the absence of slavery as the means by which Black people could be made to stay in one place and work when and how White people needed them to work, the plantation class looked to the law to ensure that they would. Hence, the Reconstruction-era legislation known as the Black Codes was born. In Mississippi, being Black and not having written proof that you were employed was now illegal. In South Carolina, being Black and having a job other than servant or farmer was illegal unless you paid an annual tax of up to $100. Being in a traveling circus or an acting troupe? Illegal. In Virginia, asking for pay beyond the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” was illegal. In Florida, disrespecting or disobeying your employer was illegal. In some areas, fishing and hunting, or even owning guns, were now banned, as these activities could lessen Black dependence on White people for employment. And who would enforce these new laws? The police. In some cases, Foner writes, these newly deputized men wore their old Confederate uniforms as they patrolled Black homesteads, seizing weapons and arresting people for labor violations.

When You Have Diabetes, Even a Routine Police Encounter Can Turn Fatal

In fact, a landmark Supreme Court case on the use of force in policing involved Dethorne Graham, a Black man with diabetes. In 1984, Graham began having an insulin reaction, and asked a friend for a ride to a convenience store to get some juice to raise his blood sugar. When Graham walked into the store, he saw how long the line was and quickly walked back out again to go somewhere else. A nearby officer judged this behavior as suspicious, so he followed Graham and his friend and pulled them over. Without confirming that nothing was amiss at the store, the officer detained Graham at the curb. A scuffle ensued, in which an officer allegedly slammed Graham’s head on the roof of his friend’s car. By the time he was finally released, Graham had fainted and incurred shoulder and head injuries, multiple scratches, and a broken foot.

Au Pairs Come To The U.S. Seeking Cultural Exchange, But The State Department Often Fails To Protect Them

She signed up to become an au pair, one of the roughly 20,000 young people — overwhelmingly women ― from abroad who come to the U.S. each year as part of the State Department’s exchange visitor program. These au pairs are granted J-1 visas that temporarily allow them to live in the U.S. in return for providing child care for host families ― a program currently on pause for new arrivals due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The State Department authorizes private companies to contract with these young people and charge them thousands of dollars in fees to cover their placement and provide assistance while they are in the U.S. Those companies also charge host families around $10,000 a year to hire an au pair.

DeSantis pushes expansion of Stand Your Ground law as part of ‘anti-mob’ crackdown

The proposal would expand the list of “forcible felonies” under Florida’s self-defense law to justify the use of force against people who engage in criminal mischief that results in the “interruption or impairment” of a business, and looting, which the draft defines as a burglary within 500 feet of a “violent or disorderly assembly.” Other key elements of DeSantis’ proposal would enhance criminal penalties for people involved in “violent or disorderly assemblies,” make it a third-degree felony to block traffic during a protest, offer immunity to drivers who claim to have unintentionally killed or injured protesters who block traffic, and withhold state funds from local governments that cut law enforcement budgets.

March to Alamance polls ends with police using pepper-spray on protesters, children

At one point, the marchers held a moment of silence in the street in honor of George Floyd, the Black man killed while in police custody in Minneapolis earlier this summer. After the moment of silence concluded, law enforcement told people to clear the road. Then, deputies and police officers used pepper spray on the crowd and began arresting people. Several children in the crowd were affected by the pepper spray. Melanie Mitchell said her 5-year-old and 11-year-old daughters were pepper-sprayed just after the moment of silence.

How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher

“I just remember Drew saying, ’Oh my god, it’s not immunogenic,’” said Karikó. “We realised at that moment that this would be very important, and it could be used in vaccines and therapies. So we published a paper, filed a patent, established a company, and then found there was no interest. Nobody invited us anywhere to talk about it, nothing.” Unbeknown to them, however, some scientists were paying attention. Derrick Rossi, then a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, read Karikó and Weissman’s paper and was immediately intrigued. In 2010, Rossi co-founded a biotech company called Moderna, with a group of Harvard and MIT professors, with the specific aim of using modified mRNA to create vaccines and therapeutics. A decade on, Moderna is now one of the leaders in the Covid-19 vaccine race and valued at approximately $35 billion (£26b), after reporting that its mRNA based vaccine showed 94 per cent efficacy in a Phase III clinical trial.