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A curated weekday guide to major news and developments over the weekend. Here’s today’s news:

U.S. PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION AND NEW CONGRESS 

President-elect Trump’s Defense Secretary pick Pete Hegseth was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” over a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups by a fellow service member. Tara Copp, Michelle R. Smith and Jason Dearen report for AP News.

Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement but he maintained their encounter was consensual, his lawyer said on Saturday, on the heels of the Trump transition team’s receipt of a detailed memo claiming that Hegseth raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer during a 2017 conference. Trump has told advisers he is standing by Hegseth despite the allegations, sources say. Michael Kranish, Josh Dawsey, and Jonathan O’Connell report for the Washington Post; Maggie Haberman reports for the New York Times.

A woman told the House Ethics Committee panel she saw former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) have sex with a minor, her attorney said Friday. Separately, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) yesterday reiterated that he thinks the Committee’s report should remain sealed, saying Gaetz is now a “private citizen.” Casey Gannon and Kaanita Iyer report for CNN; Avery Lotz reports for Axios.

Trump yesterday said he selected Federal Communications Commission commissioner Brendan Carr to chair the agency. Carr previously authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump also announced he has chosen his campaign’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt as his White House press secretary. Rebecca Falconer reports for Axios; Vivian Ho reports for the Washington Post.

Speaker Johnson did not rule out the use of recess appointments to confirm Trump’s Cabinet nominees in an interview yesterday, saying he is “sympathetic” to opposition to the procedure’s use but will have to see “how it plays out.” Avery Lotz reports for Axios.  

Trump’s transition team is bypassing traditional FBI background checks for at least some of his Cabinet picks, relying on private companies to conduct the vetting process, sources say.  Evan Perez, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Kristen Holmes report for CNN.

Trump allies are reportedly exploring whether several U.S. military officers involved in the Afghanistan withdrawal could be court-martialed. Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee, Vaughn Hillyard, and Mosheh Gains report for NBC News.

Two top Senate Democrats urged the Pentagon and Justice Department on Friday to investigate Elon Musk’s reported contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sam Cabral reports for BBC News.

OTHER U.S. DOMESTIC DEVELOPMENTS 

T-Mobile was one of the telecom networks compromised in a major Chinese spying operation. A company spokesperson said there is “no evidence of impacts to customer information.” Sarah Krouse and Dustin Volz report for the Wall Street Journal.

Officials in Columbus, Ohio, condemned the actions of a small group of people who marched in the city carrying Nazi flags and shouting racial slurs on Saturday. Michael Corkery reports for the New York Times.

The FBI is investigating a wave of offensive text messages received by Hispanic and LGBTQ people in recent days mirroring an earlier barrage of racist texts sent to Black people,  the agency said Friday. Kate Selig reports for the New York Times.

The Biden administration is seeking to formalize federal arrangements for curbing excessive police force and racial discrimination ahead of Trump’s takeover in January. David Nakamura and Mark Berman report for the Washington Post.

Rights groups are urging Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to authorize condolence payments to families of civilians killed or injured by U.S. military operations overseas, according to a letter seen by the Washington Post. Meg Kelly and Missy Ryan report. 

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR

Israeli airstrikes killed about 70 people in northern Gaza early yesterday, the Hamas-run health ministry said. An earlier Saturday strike on a school in Gaza City refugee camp killed 10 people, medics said. Rebecca Tan, Jennifer Hassan, Miriam Berger, and Hazem Balousha report for the Washington Post; Nidal al-Mughrabi reports for Reuters.

Israel will issue draft notices to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Friday. Loveday Morris and Alon Rom report for the Washington Post.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aide allegedly leaked classified information to foreign press in a bid to influence public opinion on hostage negotiations, according to a court release published yesterday. Mike Schwartz and Catherine Nicholls report for CNN.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — U.S. RESPONSE 

Families of American victims of the Oct. 7 attacks sued Iran yesterday, alleging it supported “the single deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust” by bankrolling Hamas. Adam Goldman and Ronen Bergman report for the New York Times.

ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR — INTERNATIONAL RESPONSE 

Pope Francis said Israel’s attacks in Gaza “should be investigated to determine if they meet the legal definition of genocide,” Italian media reports. Anthony Faiola reports for the Washington Post.

Israel’s conduct in Gaza is “consistent with the characteristics of genocide,” a new U.N. Special Committee report released Thursday said. COGAT, the Israeli agency that approves Gaza aid shipments denied that Israel “use[s] hunger as a weapon of war.” Lauren Kent and Lauren Izso report for CNN.

ISRAEL-HEZBOLLAH WAR

Two waves of Israeli airstrikes hit central Beirut yesterday, killing Hezbollah’s top spokesman and head of media relations. Isabel Kershner, Euan Ward, and Hwaida Saad report for the New York Times. 

Amos Hochstein, the White House envoy overseeing the efforts to secure an Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire agreement is set to visit Beirut on Tuesday, Lebanese sources say. Maya Gebeily reports for Reuters. 

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR 

In a major policy reversal, President Biden authorized Ukraine to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to strike inside Russia, officials said. Senior Russian lawmakers yesterday warned that Washington’s decision to authorize the strikes “could lead to World War Three.” Adam Entous, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes report for the New York Times; Reuters reports.

Russia on Saturday launched a “massive” overnight attack targeting Ukrainian power infrastructure, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. The attack killed at least 10 people, caused “significant damage” to Ukraine’s energy plants, and prompted Poland to scramble its fighter jets as a precaution. Paul Adams and Kathryn Armstrong report for BBC News. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday spoke with Putin for the first time in nearly two years, telling him that Russia’s deployment of North Korean troops is a “grave escalation”. Ukraine’s Zelenskyy said Scholz’s actions undermine efforts to isolate the Russian leader. Damien McGuiness reports for BBC News; Pjotr Sauer and Kate Connolly report for the Guardian.

Russia has created a new, deadly weapon to attack Ukraine, “a small number of highly destructive thermobaric drones surrounded by huge swarms of cheap foam decoys,” an AP News investigation shows. Emma Burrows, Hanna Arhirova, and Lori Hinnant report. 

HOUTHI DEVELOPMENTS

Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked a “vital target” in Israel’s city of Eilat, the group’s spokesperson said on Saturday. Ahmed Tolba and Enas Alashray report for Reuters.

U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS 

Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday, discussing AI technologies in nuclear weapon use determinations and the need for “certainty” in United States-China relations. Matt Viser reports for the Washington Post.

GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS 

Iran’s foreign minister on Saturday strongly denied a reported meeting between Tehran’s U.N. ambassador and Elon Musk, saying the story was “fabricated” by American media. Parisa Hafezi reports for Reuters.

Myanmar’s military has consistently targeted civilians as a form of collective punishment since seizing power, a local rights group said in a report released Friday. AP News reports.

Around 1,500 people died in protests that ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina earlier this year, the country’s interim leader said yesterday. Ruma Paul reports for Reuters.

Argentina has ordered the arrest of 61 Brazilian citizens who are wanted in their home country for participating in the 2023 storming of Brasília government buildings, a judicial source told Reuters on Saturday.

The post Early Edition: November 18, 2024 appeared first on Just Security.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A proposed law that would redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty between the British Crown and Māori chiefs has triggered political turmoil and prompted tens of thousands of people to show up in protest at the country’s Parliament on Tuesday.

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The bill is never expected to become law. But it has become a flashpoint on race relations and a critical moment in the fraught 180-year-old conversation about how New Zealand should honor its promises to Indigenous people when the country was colonized—and what those promises are.

A huge crowd gathered in the capital, Wellington, on Tuesday morning for the final stretch of a weeklong protest that has spanned the length of the country—a march through the city streets to Parliament. It follows a Māori tradition of hīkoi, or walking, to bring attention to breaches of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi—and is likely to be the largest treaty rights demonstration in the history of modern New Zealand.

Why is a 180-year-old treaty being debated?

Considered New Zealand’s founding document, the treaty was signed between representatives of the British Crown and 500 Māori chiefs during colonization. It laid out principles guiding the relationship between the Crown and Māori, in two versions—one in English and the other in Māori.

It promised Māori the rights and privileges of British citizens, but the English and Māori versions differed on what power the chiefs were ceding over their affairs, lands and autonomy.

Over decades, the Crown breached both versions. By the mid-20th century, Māori language and culture had dwindled—Indigenous people were often barred from practicing it—tribal land was confiscated and Māori were disadvantaged in many metrics.

How were treaty rights revived?

Prompted by a surging Māori protest movement, for the past 50 years the courts of New Zealand, lawmakers and the Waitangi Tribunal—a permanent body set up to adjudicate treaty matters—have navigated the differences in the treaty’s versions and tried to redress breaches by constructing the meaning of the treaty’s principles in their decisions.

Those principles are intended to be flexible but are commonly described as partnership with the Crown, protection of Māori interests and participation in decision-making.

Read More: Meet New Zealand’s Gen Z Māori Guardian in Parliament

While Māori remain disenfranchised in many ways, the weaving of treaty recognition through law and attempts at redress have changed the fabric of society since then. Māori language has experienced a renaissance, and everyday words are now commonplace—even among non-Māori. Policies have been enacted to target disparities Māori commonly face.

Billions of dollars in settlements have been negotiated between the Crown and tribes for breaches of the treaty, particularly the widespread expropriation of Māori land and natural resources.

Why is there fresh debate?

Some New Zealanders, however, are unhappy with redress. They have found a champion in lawmaker David Seymour, the leader of a minor libertarian political party which won less than 9% of the vote in last year’s election—but scored outsized influence for its agenda as part of a governing agreement.

Seymour’s proposed law would set specific definitions of the treaty’s principles, and would apply them to all New Zealanders, not only to Māori. He says piecemeal construction of the treaty’s meaning has left a vacuum and has given Māori special treatment.

His bill is widely opposed—by left- and right-wing former prime ministers, 40 of the country’s most senior lawyers, and thousands of Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders who are walking the length of the country in protest.

Seymour’s bill is not expected to pass its final reading. It cleared a first vote on Thursday due to a political deal, but most of those who endorsed it are not expected to do so again.

Detractors say the bill threatens constitutional upheaval and would remove rights promised in the treaty that are now enshrined in law. Critics have also lambasted Seymour—who is Māori—for provoking backlash against Indigenous people.

Why are protesters marching?

Peaceful walking protests are a Māori tradition and have occurred before at crucial times during the national conversation about treaty rights.

Police in the country of 5 million estimated that more than 40,000 people thronged Parliament’s grounds on Tuesday after a march through the central city that shut down streets and drew thousands more onlookers, many holding signs in support of the protesters.

As those outside Parliament waved flags, sang Māori songs and listened to speeches, crowds who could not squeeze onto the grounds spilled onto the surrounding streets, which remained closed to traffic.

Many are marching to oppose Seymour’s bill. But others are protesting a range of policies from the center-right government on Māori affairs—including an order, prompted by Seymour, that public agencies should no longer target policies to specifically redress Māori inequities.

(NewsNation) — President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday morning he plans to use “military assets” to remove migrants accused of entering the U.S. illegally.

In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump shared a post by Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton which read, “Reports are the incoming @RealDonaldTrump administration prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

Trump commented, “True!”

It’s unclear what military assets Trump intends to use, but he’s mentioned invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expedite migrant removal in the past. Critics argue the law is out of date and cite its most recent use during World War II to hold Japanese Americans in internment camps without due process.

The Alien Enemies Act refers to foreign nationals of a country at war with the U.S., and America has not formally declared war on another nation since 1942. However, some believe the language is broad enough it could be used in peacetime to circumvent the rights of immigrants.

Those rights include the right to request asylum and the right to due process and equal protection. Legal understanding of those rights and Constitutional language protecting them developed after the act was put into place, so there is the possibility that a court challenge could block such efforts.

National Guard troops have been used to support border defense for years, though those troops are typically used for logistics, including communication and transport, to free up Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents for frontline work.

Immigration was a top issue in the 2024 presidential campaign, and Trump has promised to stabilize the southern border after more migrants crossed during the Biden administration than any other in history.

Though there are still few details to the plan, some Republican lawmakers along the border have already weighed in with support for the plan.

“There should be a mass deportation for all of these convicted criminal aliens, for all of them. We should absolutely go down and hunt down and round up illegal aliens that are gang members that are gang members, that are hurting our communities and deport them immediately,” said Republican Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales.

There are an estimated 11 million people who entered the U.S. illegally in the country and Trump’s deportation plan is estimated to affect around 20 million families.

Former Trump Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security and Project 2025 co-author Ken Cuccinelli told “The Hill on NewsNation” that by the end of January, the U.S. military will enforce immigration through legal ports of entry on the southern border, reducing illegal crossings.

Cuccinelli argued that while complete control is unattainable, the goal is to make illegal entry impractical. He said the military presence would involve physical presence and reconnaissance assets, not tanks or planes.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs responded to Trump’s deportation plans saying that Arizona law enforcement will not be involved in the military-led border control.

“You don’t need state help to really to do any of it, but particularly the border security is truly a, properly, a federal responsibility,” Cuccinelli said.

T-Mobile confirmed being a victim of recent hacking campaigns linked to China-based threat actors targeting telecom companies.

T-Mobile confirms it was hacked as part of a long-running cyber espionage campaign targeting Telco companies.

Recently, the FBI and CISA announced they are continuing to investigate a large-scale cyber-espionage campaign by China-linked threat actors targeting U.S. telecoms, compromising networks to steal call records and access private communications, mainly of government and political figures.

The US agencies confirmed that Chinese threat actors had compromised the private communications of a “limited number” of government officials following the compromise of multiple U.S. broadband providers. The cyber spies stole information belonging to targeted individuals that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders.

“The US government’s continued investigation into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) targeting of commercial telecommunications infrastructure has revealed a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign.” reads the joint statement issued by CISA and FBI.

“Specifically, we have identified that PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies to enable the theft of customer call records data, the compromise of private communications of a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity, and the copying of certain information that was subject to U.S. law enforcement requests pursuant to court orders. We expect our understanding of these compromises to grow as the investigation continues.”

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that China-linked APT group Salt Typhoon (also known as FamousSparrow and GhostEmperor) breached U.S. broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, potentially accessing systems for lawful wiretapping and other data.

The security breach poses a major national security risk. The WSJ states that the compromise remained undisclosed due to possible impact on national security. Experts believe that threat actors are aimed at gathering intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal reports that T-Mobile’s network was breached in a Chinese cyber-espionage campaign targeting U.S. and international telecom firms. Hackers linked to Chinese intelligence aimed to spy on cellphone communications of high-value targets. It’s unclear if T-Mobile customers’ data, including calls or communication records, was compromised.

“T-Mobile is closely monitoring this industry-wide attack, and at this time, T-Mobile systems and data have not been impacted in any significant way, and we have no evidence of impacts to customer information,” a company spokeswoman told WSJ. “We will continue to monitor this closely, working with industry peers and the relevant authorities.”

The cyber campaign is attributed to the China-linked APT group Salt Typhoon, which is also known as FamousSparrow, UNC2286, and GhostEmperor. Salt Typhoon is a China-linked APT group active since at least 2019. The Chinese APT focuses on government entities and telecommunications companies in Southeast Asia.

“Hackers linked to the Chinese government have broken into a handful of U.S. internet-service providers in recent months in pursuit of sensitive information, according to people familiar with the matter.” Wall Street Journal reported.

“The hacking campaign, called Salt Typhoon by investigators, hasn’t previously been publicly disclosed and is the latest in a series of incursions that U.S. investigators have linked to China in recent years. The intrusion is a sign of the stealthy success Beijing’s massive digital army of cyberspies has had breaking into valuable computer networks in the U.S. and around the globe.”

China has long targeted global internet service providers and recent attacks are aligned with past operations linked to Beijing.

Intelligence and cybersecurity experts warn that Chinese nation-state actors have shifted from stealing secrets to infiltrate critical U.S. infrastructure, suggesting that they are now targeting the core of America’s digital networks.

The Salt Typhoon hacking campaign, linked to China, appears focused on intelligence gathering rather than crippling infrastructure, unlike the attacks carried out by another China-linked APT group called Volt Typhoon. Chris Krebs from SentinelOne suggested that the group behind Salt Typhoon may be affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, specifically the APT40 group, which specializes in intelligence collection. This group was publicly called out by the U.S. and its allies for hacking activities in July.

According to the WSJ, the group used sophisticated methods to infiltrate American telecom infrastructure through vulnerabilities including Cisco Systems routers, and investigators suspect the hackers relied on artificial intelligence or machine learning to further their espionage operations , people familiar with the matter said. The attackers penetrated at least some of that infrastructure over eight months or more.

The bad news is that this isn’t the first incident suffered by T-Mobile. In 2023, the carrier disclosed two data breaches, one in January and another in May.

In May 2023, T-Mobile threat actors had access to the personal information of hundreds of customers starting in late February 2023. The security breach impacted a limited number of customers, only 836 individuals. The carrier states that personal financial account information and call records were not affected by the security breach.

In January 2023, T-Mobile suffered the first data breach in 2023, threat actors stole the personal information of 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts.

The telecommunications company discovered the intrusion on January 5, 2023, the attackers obtained data through a single Application Programming Interface (“API”) without authorization.

The carrier suffered multiple data breaches in the last years, the last one in order of time took place in December 2021 when it disclosed a data breach that impacted a “very small number of customers” who were victims of SIM swap attacks.

Below is the list of previous incidents suffered by T-Mobile:

• In August 2021, a security breach impacted 54 million customers.
• In February 2021, hundreds of users were hit with SIM swapping attacks.
• In December 2020, T-Mobile disclosed a data breach that exposed customers’ network information (CPNI).
• In March 2020, threat actors gained access to T-Mobile customers and employee personal info.
• In 2019, T-Mobile disclosed data breach affecting prepaid wireless customers.
• In 2018, data breach exposed personal information of up to 2 million customers.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Chinese hackers)

The leadership of the Democratic Party deserves significant blame for the return of Donald Trump to the White House. While there were multiple factors at play, it must be acknowledged that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their enablers engaged in vast levels of political malpractice despite countless warnings from many key voices and constituencies. 

Multiple governments worldwide, regardless of ideology, have suffered at the polls this year, suggesting that Harris faced an uphill battle no matter what.  But that fight was made even more difficult by the simple reality that Biden and Harris spent a solid year alienating core constituencies of the Democratic Party, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and failing to assign clear blame for the individuals and interest groups responsible for the economic woes of the working class.

If we want a Democratic Party that can produce different outcomes, we will need to hold the current party accountable for its failures. That means matching our demands for change with the force and pressure of real accountability. The Democratic leadership must itself be targeted with campaigns that highlight the principles of electoral success while punishing those responsible for the party’s continued defeats. I’m building a campaign to do exactly that, and here’s how I think we can win.

Clean Up the Party Now

Democrats are in disarray, with many different voices and communities picking through the wreckage of 2024 to decide what can be learned and what should be done next. This is the time to name our adversaries and assert our demands. If we want to build a Democratic Party that has any shot of winning elections and advancing the human condition, we must model the very posture of aggressive accountability that we want future Democratic presidential candidates to adopt.

There are plenty of potential targets for accountability. We can directly challenge the culture of the Democratic Party right now by turning the looming internal elections for a new Democratic National Committee chair into a public battle for our core values. Leaning into 2026, the elections for the House and Senate can be leveraged to call out Democratic incumbents who continue to serve as vehicles for corporate interests. Pro-Israel hawks like Rep. Ritchie Torres should be directly challenged in both the 2026 primaries and general election.  

Looking to 2028, leading Democratic contenders for the presidential race should be held accountable now for their failings. One such example is California Gov. Gavin Newsom.  When Uber launched its successful war against California state-mandated benefits for drivers, Newsom stayed neutral. He should be called out for this silence. Another important target is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also being talked up as a presidential contender. Shapiro’s record of support for Israeli apartheid and genocide is well documented, and a grassroots campaign to oppose him as president should begin now.  

Even Biden’s eventual groundbreaking ceremony for his future presidential library should be made into a target for principled criticisms and protests. Biden destroyed the Democrats’ prospects in 2024 by supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and arrogantly refusing to drop out of the presidential race until it was too late to hold a real primary. By making an example out of Biden himself, we can “punch up” into the highest levels of the party and build our power to hold the party accountable.

Name the Enemy: Corporate Elites

When it comes to the fundamental unfairness of the U.S. economy, Democrats often speak in soft surrogate terms: cutting taxes on the middle class, forgiving student loans, increasing funding for college, etc. But Democrats’ core silence on corporate greed has allowed Trump to step into the vacuum with a very different explanation of who is to blame. Trump’s false explanations often focus on racial resentments, culture conflict, or issues related to gender and sexuality. But blaming undocumented immigrants, DEI, “critical race theory,” or transgender equality will not address the fundamental unfairness of an economy in which workers are squeezed under the diktat of economic elites.  

The American working class has long been undermined by those who represent the interests of concentrated wealth. America’s corporate elites block unions, outsource U.S. jobs, cut benefits, and squeeze as much profit as they can out of America’s workers. But Democratic presidential candidates rarely run campaigns that bluntly name and shame these elites for the damage that they do to working-class lives.  The simple reason why is that many state- and national-level Democrats depend on these same financial elites for the cash that fuels politicians’  expensive campaigns.

As president, Biden brought into his administration a range of people and policies from the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, which resulted in policies and actions that have been pro-union, anti-inflation, and anti-monopoly. But unlike Sanders and Warren, Biden has done a very poor job of using his bully pulpit to bluntly name and blame the individuals and interest groups who are often most responsible for working-class woes. Biden had some of the right policies, but for reasons that likely included age-related fatigue and ideological predisposition, he got the politics wrong.

When Democrats create a “blame vacuum” for why working-class voters are suffering, other political opportunists are more than happy to step in. Thanks to the seduction of Trump, the white working class had already largely abandoned the Democratic Party. Now nonwhite working-class voters are starting to do the same. To reverse these trends, Democrats must start assigning blame accurately for the high prices, long workdays, and stagnant wages that harm so many workers in our country. 

Kick Out the Sellouts

Not only is the senior leadership of the Democratic Party unwilling to accurately name the enemy, but in many cases, the Democratic Party is actually run and advised by the same corporate elites who benefit from the exploitation of the American working class. The current chair of the DNC is Jaime Harrison, a former lobbyist for Walmart, Bank of America, Lockheed Martin, the coal industry, and many other corporate interests. 

Another toxic example of the pervasive corporate control of the Democratic Party is Tony West, the brother-in-law of Kamala Harris. In 2024, West took a leave of absence from his role as senior vice president and chief legal officer for Uber to advise Harris on her presidential campaign. During West’s time at Uber, the company waged an all-out war against working-class interests by using a California ballot proposition to successfully gut state-mandated benefits for overworked and underpaid Uber drivers. And before West came to Uber, he served as general counsel at PepsiCo, a company that has profited heavily from price inflation.

It has been widely reported that West advised Harris to embrace wealthy corporate elites instead of blaming them for America’s economic woes. This disastrous advice led Harris to cater to high-net-worth interests and muddle her message. This may have helped Harris attract the $1.6 billion in contributions that backed her campaign, but her lack of a clear message on the economy left her with millions fewer votes than Biden received in 2020. She failed to energize the Democratic Party base, including working-class voters, and she lost her campaign. 

Say Goodbye to Bill, Hillary, and Barack

Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all have a long history of undermining progressive and populist movements in the Democratic Party. All three should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead, they are still showered with deference and reverence by many.

Obama and the Clintons should be greeted by Democrats with the same deep skepticism that Trump supporters have shown George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In different ways, all three have aligned with the very corporate and financial elites who should be named as our political enemies. Bill Clinton brought us NAFTA, the job-destroying free-trade agreement that was opposed by labor unions. Hillary Clinton served on the board of Walmart and voted for Bush’s disastrous Iraq War. Obama avoided naming and shaming the Wall Street elites most responsible for the recession that brought him into power. And while in power, Obama bailed out financial institutions instead of focusing on working people. 

Once out of office, these three senior Democratic Party voices have continued to undermine the possibility of a successful Democratic Party that can mobilize its base and appeal to the working class. In 2020, Obama intervened behind the scenes to block Sanders’s campaign for president and put the aging, arrogant, and politically inept Biden in the Oval Office, an intervention that essentially set the stage for Trump’s return to power. Obama also wrote the script for bragging about America’s increased oil and gas production, a posture that both Biden and Harris would later adopt as they, too, alienated climate voters. And this year, the Clintons and Obama all gaslit the Democratic voters most concerned about Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Hillary Clinton heaped scorn upon Gaza activists, Bill Clinton personally justified Israel’s slaughter, and Obama tried to defend Biden by implying that Trump’s Muslim ban would be worse.

Related

Hillary Clinton Is Lying About the History Between Hamas and Israel

Ultimately, the former leaders of the Democratic Party are given far too much credit for their political successes. It is worth remembering that every Democrat who has been successfully elected president in the last 50 years came into office with the benefit of a massive disaster that undermined the Republican incumbent. Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 thanks to a recession. Obama defeated the successor to George W. Bush, John McCain, thanks to another recession. And Biden defeated Trump with the help of the 2020 global pandemic. Even Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Ford’s unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon.

Expel the Pro-Israel Lobby

As Israel accelerates its ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Democratic Party support for Israel’s military will continue to splinter and break apart the Democratic base. It will take time to more deeply investigate the question of why as many as 10 or 11 million of Biden’s 2020 voters didn’t show up to support Kamala Harris in 2024. But it is likely that some percentage of those voters were deeply anguished by Biden and Harris’s full-fledged support for U.S. military funding for Israel. Despite the misrepresentation of mainstream media, this anguish is not limited to Arab and Muslim voters, nor is it limited to voters in Michigan.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other pro-Israel campaign and advocacy organizations all care little about the prospects of the Democratic Party. They are single-issue organizations that are happy to reward or defeat any elected official who stands with or against them. By keeping a home for single-issue pro-Israel networks in the Democratic Party, the party hollows itself out by allowing those same networks to push out prominent progressive and populist legislators, along with the voters who back them. 

Related

How Does AIPAC Shape Washington? We Tracked Every Dollar.

One ugly result of this is the emergence of an extraordinarily hollow form of representational politics. While anti-worker Black voices like Harrison and West take on informal and formal leadership roles in the party, populist and progressive Black members of Congress like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman are targeted for defeat by the very pro-Israel networks who back Biden and Harris. Even the supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” J-Street contributed to Bowman’s defeat.

Embrace the Permanent Battle

Until Citizens United is overturned and public financing is embraced, the Democratic Party will face a perpetual tension between populist aspirations and the interests of corporate wealth. And even if major reforms were somehow implemented, they would pose such a threat to the interests of concentrated wealth that there would be a well-funded backlash. 

This means that advocates for a more effective Democratic Party should embrace a permanent battle for the soul of the party. The Democratic Party needs a permanent watchdog community that is armed with sweeping campaigns for reform in order to combat the party’s perpetual slouch toward the interests of concentrated wealth. If you agree, consider joining me by signing on to this platform.

Many networks both inside and outside the Democratic Party are well-poised to help lead calls for reform. Disgruntled Democrats, climate voters, progressives, opponents of Israel’s genocide, and even Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America members can all help push the Democratic Party away from its corporate moorings and pro-Israel litmus tests. 

Beyond 2024

Without strong and sustained public pressure, the Democratic Party is likely to remain trapped in its culture of defeat. We shouldn’t expect any real changes from the current stewards of a broken political party. If we want a Democratic Party that wins elections and advances the public interest, we will have to start fighting for it. That fight needs to begin now.

The post Take Out the Trash: A Proposal to Clean Up the Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known.

During his last term, the U.S. tech sector tiptoed skittishly around Trump; longtime right-winger Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his full-throated support of MAGA politics as other investors and executives largely winced and smiled politely. Back then, Silicon Valley still offered the public peaceful mission statements of improving the human condition, connecting people, and organizing information. Technology was supposed to help, never harm. No more: People like Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, and Marc Andreessen make up a new vanguard of powerful tech figures who have unapologetically merged right-wing politics with a determination to furnish a MAGA-dominated United States with a constant flow of newer, better arms and surveillance tools.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech.

These men (as they tend to be) hold much in common beyond their support of Republican candidates: They share the belief that China represents an existential threat to the United States (an increasingly bipartisan belief, to be sure) and must be dominated technologically and militarily at all costs. They are united in their aversion, if not open hostility, to arguments that the pace of invention must be balanced against any moral consideration beyond winning. And they all stand to profit greatly from this new tech-driven arms race.

Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden. Meta’s recent announcement that its Llama large language model can now be used by defense customers means that Apple is the last of the “Big Five” American tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — not engaged in military or intelligence contracting.

Elon Musk has drawn the lion’s share of media scrutiny (and Trump world credit) for throwing his fortune and digital influence behind the campaign. Over the years, the world’s richest man has become an enormously successful defense contractor via SpaceX, which has reaped billions selling access to rockets that the Pentagon hopes will someday rapidly ferry troops into battle. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has also become an indispensable American military tool, and the company is working on a constellation of bespoke spy satellites for U.S. intelligence agency use.

But Musk is just one part of a broader wave of militarists who will have Trump’s ear on policy matters.

After election day, Musk replied to a celebratory tweet from Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, a $14 billion startup that got its start selling migrant-detecting surveillance towers for the southern border and now manufactures a growing line of lethal drones and missiles. “Very important to open DoD/Intel to entrepreneurial companies like yours,” Musk wrote. Anduril’s rise is inseparable from Trumpism: Luckey founded the firm in 2017 after he was fired by Meta for contributing to a pro-Trump organization. He has been outspoken in his support for Trump as both candidate and president, fundraising for him in both 2020 and 2024.

Big Tech historically worked hard to be viewed by the public as inhabiting the center-left, if not being apolitical altogether. But even that is changing. While Luckey was fired for merely supporting Trump’s first campaign, his former boss (and former liberal) Mark Zuckerberg publicly characterized Trump surviving the June assassination attempt as “bad ass” and quickly congratulated the president-elect on a “decisive victory.” Zuckerberg added that he is “looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

To some extent, none of this is new: Silicon Valley’s origin is one of militarism. The American computer and software economy was nurtured from birth by the explosive growth and endless money of the Cold War arms race and its insatiable appetite for private sector R&D. And despite the popular trope of liberal Google executives, the tech industry has always harbored a strong anti-labor, pro-business instinct that dovetails neatly with conservative politics. It would also be a mistake to think that Silicon Valley was ever truly in lockstep with progressive values. A 2014 political ad by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a defunct effort by Facebook to court the Republican Party, warned that “it’s wrong to have millions of people living in America illegally” and urged lawmakers to “secure our borders so this never happens again.” The notion of the Democrat-friendly wing of Big Tech as dovish is equally wrong: Former Google chair and longtime liberal donor Eric Schmidt is a leading China hawk and defense tech investor. Similarly, the Democratic Party itself hasn’t meaningfully distanced itself from militarism in recent history. The current wave of startups designing smaller, cheaper military drones follows the Obama administration’s eager mass adoption of the technology, and firms like Anduril and Palantir have thrived under Joe Biden.

What has changed is which views the tech industry is now comfortable expressing out loud.

A year after Luckey’s ouster from the virtual reality subsidiary he founded, Google became embroiled in what grew into an industry-wide upheaval over military contracting. After it was reported that the company sought to win Project Maven, a lucrative drone-targeting contract, employees who had come to the internet titan to work on consumer products like Search, Maps, and Gmail found themselves disturbed by the thought of contributing to a system that could kill people. Waves of protests pushed Google to abandon the Pentagon with its tail between its legs. Even Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence and machine learning scientist, described the contract as a source of shame in internal emails obtained by the New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

It’s an exchange that reads deeply quaint today. The notion that the country’s talented engineers should build weapons is becoming fully mainstreamed. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey explained in an on-campus talk about his company’s contributions to the Ukrainian war effort with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

This “warrior class” mentality traces its genealogy to Peter Thiel, whose disciples, like Luckey, spread the gospel of a conservative-led arms race against China. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Luckey told Bloomberg TV in a 2023 interview. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019, Thiel, a lifelong techno-libertarian and Trump’s first major backer in tech, rejected the “ethical framing” of the question of whether to build weapons.” When it’s a choice between the U.S. and China, it is always the ethical decision to work with the U.S. government,” he said. Though Sinophobia is increasingly standard across party affiliations, it’s particularly frothing in the venture-backed warrior class. In 2019, Thiel claimed that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and two years later suggested that bitcoin is “a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”

Thiel often embodies the self-contradiction of Trumpist foreign policy, decrying the use of taxpayer money on “faraway wars” while boosting companies that design weapons for exactly that. Like Trump, Thiel is a vocal opponent of Bush- and Obama-era adventurism in the Middle East as a source of nothing but regional chaos — though Thiel has remained silent on Trump’s large expansion of the Obama administration’s drone program and his assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. In July, asked about the Israeli use of AI in the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Thiel responded, “I defer to Israel.”

Thiel’s gravitational pull is felt across the whole of tech’s realignment toward militarism. Vice President-elect JD Vance worked at Mithril, another of Thiel’s investment firms, and used $15 million from his former boss to fund the 2022 Senate win that secured his national political bona fides. Vance would later go on to invest in Anduril. Founders Fund, Thiel’s main venture capital firm, has seeded the tech sector with influential figures friendly to both Trumpism and the Pentagon. Before, an investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

An earlier adopter of MAGA, Thiel was also investing in and creating military- and intelligence-oriented companies before it was cool. He co-founded Palantir, which got its start helping facilitate spy agency and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now part of the S&P 500, the company helps target military strikes for Ukraine and in January sealed a “strategic partnership for battle tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to a press release.

Before, a tech investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

The ripple effect of Palantir’s success has helped popularize defense tech and solidify its union with the American right. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also an Anduril investor, is reportedly helping Trump staff his new administration. Former Palantir employee and Anduril executive chair Trae Stephens joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has suggested he would serve a second administration. As a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thiel ally Jacob Helberg has been instrumental in whipping up anti-China fervor on Capitol Hill, helping push legislation to ban TikTok, and arguing for military adoption of AI technologies like those sold by his employer, Palantir, which markets itself as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. Although Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a self-described Democrat who said he planned to vote against Trump, he has derided progressivism as a “thin pagan religion” of wokeness, suggested pro-Palestine college protesters leave for North Korea, and continually advocating for an American arms buildup.

“Trump has surrounded himself with ‘techno-optimists’ — people who believe technology is the answer to every problem,” Brianna Rosen, a strategy and policy fellow at the University of Oxford and alumnus of the Obama National Security Council, told The Intercept. “Key members of his inner circle — leading tech executives — describe themselves in this way. The risk of techno-optimism in the military domain is that it focuses on how technology saves lives, rather than the real risks associated with military AI, such as the accelerated pace of targeting.”

The worldview of this corner of the tech industry is loud, if not always consistent. Foreign entanglements are bad, but the United States must be on perpetual war-footing against China. China itself is dangerous in part because it’s rapidly weaponizing AI, a current that threatens global stability, so the United States should do the very same, even harder, absent regulatory meddling.

Stephens’s 2022 admonition that “the business of war is the business of deterrence” argues that “peaceful outcomes are only achievable if we maintain our technological advantage in weapons systems” — an argument that overlooks the fact that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological superiority failed to keep it out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a recent interview with Wired, Stephens both criticized the revolving door between the federal government and Anduril competitors like Boeing while also stating that “it’s important that people come out of private industry to work on civil service projects, and I hope at some point I’ll have the opportunity to go back in and serve the government and American people.”

William Fitzgerald, the founder of The Worker Agency, a communications and advocacy firm that has helped tech workers organize against military contracts, said this square is easily circled by right-wing tech hawks, whose pitch is centered on the glacial incompetence of the Department of Defense and blue-chip contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon. “Peter Thiel’s whole thing is to privatize the state,” Fitzgerald explained. Despite all of the rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements, a high-tech arms race is conducive to different kinds of wars, not fewer of them. “This alignment fits this narrative that we can do cheaper wars,” he said. “We won’t lose the men over there because we’ll have these drones.”

In this view, the opposition of Thiel and his ilk isn’t so much to forever wars, then, but rather whose hardware is being purchased forever.

The new conservative tech establishment seems in full agreement about the need for an era of techno-militarism. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the namesakes of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied and successful venture capital firms, poured millions into Trump’s reelection and have pushed hard to reorient the American tech sector toward fighting wars. In a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” published last October, Andreessen wrote of defense contracting as a moral imperative. “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength.” The firm knows full well what it’s evoking through a naked embrace of strength as society’s greatest virtue: Listed among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto.

The venture capitalists’ document offers a clear rebuttal of employees’ moral qualms that pushed Google to ditch Project Maven. The manifesto dismisses basic notions of “ethics,” “safety,” and “social responsibility” as a “demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism” pushed by “the enemy.” This is rhetoric that matches a brand Trump has worked to cultivate: aspirationally hypermasculine, unapologetically jingoistic, and horrified by an America whose potential to dominate the planet is imperiled by meddling foreigners and scolding woke co-workers.

“There’s a lot more volatility in the world, [and] there is more of a revolt against what some would deem ‘woke culture,’” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Compound. “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth because we saw in this past election a bunch of people get very political and make donations from their firms.”

“It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

Despite skewing young (by national security standards), many in this rightward, pro-military orbit are cultural and religious traditionalists infused with the libertarian preferences of the Zynternet, a wildly popular online content scene that’s melded apolitical internet bro culture and a general aversion to anything considered vaguely “woke.” A recent Vanity Fair profile of the El Segundo tech scene, a hotbed of the burgeoning “military Zyndustrial complex” commonly known as “the Gundo,” described the city as “California’s freedom-loving, Bible-thumping hub of hard tech.” It paints a vivid scene of young engineers who eschewed the progressive dystopia of San Francisco they read about on Twitter and instead flocked to build “nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China” beneath “an American flag the size of a dumpster” and “a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below.”

The American right’s hold over online culture in the form of podcasts, streamers, and other youth-friendly media has been central to both retaking Washington and bulldozing post-Maven sentiment, according to William Fitzgerald of Worker Agency. “I gotta hand it to the VCs, they’re really good at comms,” said Fitzgerald, who himself is former Google employee who helped leak critical information about the company’s involvement in Project Maven. “They’re really making sure that these Gundo bros are wrapping the American flag around them. It’s been fascinating to see them from 2019 to 2024 completely changing the culture among young tech workers.”

A wave of layoffs and firings of employees engaged in anti-military protests have been a boon for defense evangelists, Fitzgerald added. “The workers have been told to shut up, or they get fired.”

This rhetoric has been matched by a massive push by Andreessen Horowitz (already an Anduril investor) behind the fund’s “American Dynamism” portfolio, a collection of companies that leans heavily into new startups hoping to be the next Raytheon. These investments include ABL Space Systems, already contracting with the Air Force,; Epirus, which makes microwave directed-energy weapons; and Shield AI, which works on autonomous military drones. Following the election, David Ulevitch, who leads the fund’s American Dynamism team, retweeted a celebratory video montage interspersed with men firing flamethrowers, machine guns, jets, Hulk Hogan, and a fist-pumping post-assassination attempt Trump.

Even the appearance of more money and interest in defense tech could have a knock-on effect for startup founders hoping to chase what’s trendy. Dempsey said he expects investors and founder to “pattern-match to companies like Anduril and to a lesser extent SpaceX, believing that their outcomes will be the same.” The increased political and cultural friendliness toward weapons startups also coincides with high interest rates and growing interest in hardware companies, Dempsey explained, as software companies have lost their luster following years of growth driven by little more than cheap venture capital.

There’s every reason to believe a Trump-controlled Washington will give the tech industry, increasingly invested in militarized AI, what it wants. In July, the Washington Post reported the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute was working on a proposal to “Make America First in AI” by undoing regulatory burdens and encouraging military applications. Trump has already indicated he’ll reverse the Biden administration’s executive order on AI safety, which mandated safety testing and risk-based self-reporting by companies. Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer during the first Trump administration and managing director of Air Force contractor Scale AI, is reportedly advising Trump’s transition team on policy matters.

“‘Make America First in AI’ means the United States will move quickly, regardless of the costs, to maintain its competitive edge over China,” Brianna Rosen, the Oxford fellow, explained. “That translates into greater investment and fewer restrictions on military AI. Industry already leads AI development and deployment in the defense and intelligence sectors; that role has now been cemented.”

The mutual embrace of MAGA conservatism and weapons tech seems to already be paying off. After dumping $200 million into the Trump campaign’s terminal phase, Musk was quick to cash his chips in: On Thursday, the New York Times reported that he petitioned Trump SpaceX executives into positions at the Department of Defense before the election had even begun. Musk will also co-lead a nebulous new office dedicated to slashing federal spending. Rep. Matt Gaetz, brother-in-law to Luckey, now stands to be the country’s next attorney general. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Luckey shared that he is already advising the Trump transition team and endorses the current candidates for defense secretary. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”

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COP29

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The post Digest of Recent Articles on Just Security (Nov. 12-15) appeared first on Just Security.

Imagine having so much money that you can promise million-dollar bribes to people who’d sign a petition “supporting” the First and Second Amendments. Well, billionaire Elon Musk actually did, flexing his considerable wealth to influence the election.

Now imagine how strong a movement needs to be to defeat political forces with that level of power and funding.

In March, Musk, who owns Tesla and supported Donald Trump, poured nearly $700,000 into an under-the-radar election in Austin, Texas. The money funded ads targeting the city’s district attorney, José Garza. A former public defender, Garza has implemented a slate of reform-minded policies like investing in gun violence prevention, expunging the records of people arrested for crimes but not convicted of them, and increasing funding for substance abuse programs.

The Musk-funded ads were shameless in their fearmongering.

One featured a bloody teddy bear with the caption: “José Garza is filling Austin’s streets with pedophiles and killers. The next victim could be your loved one.”

Musk alone outspent the incumbent district attorney 3-to-1, but Garza handily won the primary, receiving 66 percent of the vote.

No Crumbling Movement

While it would be easy to depict Garza’s victory as a notable upset against powerful political forces, the win would be better thought of as the continued success of the criminal justice reform movement, a movement whose victories in recent years outnumber its losses.

Reports of the death of the criminal justice reform movement, in other words, are greatly exaggerated.

Garza’s win would be better thought of as the continued success of the criminal justice reform movement.

There have been setbacks. Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón suffered a recent high-profile loss.

Losses like Gascón, however, should not overshadow wins like that of Columbus, Ohio, District Attorney Shayla Favor, who opposes the death penalty and intends to eliminate cash bail. Or the reelection of Florida State Attorney Monique Worrell, who supports greater police accountability and is reclaiming her office after being removed by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Or the victory of Savannah, Georgia, District Attorney Shalena Cook Jones, who started a unit examining wrongful convictions and invested in alternatives to prison.

This is not the profile of a crumbling movement. These are elected prosecutors across the map winning races by implementing and then running on reform-minded policies.

Reform Works

The reason that deep pockets cannot defeat criminal justice reform is simple: The alternative just doesn’t work. People are beginning to realize we can’t incarcerate our way to safety.

Treating prison as the only solution to crime has given us the highest incarceration rate of any democracy on earth and a system in which three out of four prisoners are rearrested within five years of release.

Though it’s only been a decade since the criminal justice reform movement really picked up steam following the murder of teenager Michael Brown, our country has elected a record number of district attorneys who promise to shrink the size of the prison system and invest in measures that treat poverty, addiction, and trauma — the true root causes of most crimes.

Unlike rote incarceration, these reforms are achieving what should be the primary goals of the criminal justice system: improving safety and decreasing recidivism.

Research from the Vera Institute showed that, when compared to prison sentences, programs that divert defendants away from jail and into therapy or rehabilitation can, over a decade, cut reoffending rates in half and grow employment rates by nearly 50 percent. And New York University researchers found that defendants who were arrested, but not prosecuted, for low-level nonviolent offenses were 58 percent less likely to reoffend than defendants who were prosecuted.

Decades ago, virtually all elected prosecutors were “law-and-order” candidates, and anything else would have been unthinkable. But times are changing — and our approach to criminal justice must evolve too.

It’s naive to assume that the criminal justice reform movement will not hit speed bumps. Gascón, the high-profile LA district attorney who refused to charge minors as adults or pursue the death penalty, just lost his primary — by a lot.

The reasons for Gascón’s loss were not unique. He was unable to overcome the right’s tried-and-true strategy of playing on people’s fears about crime. Someone or something will always serve as the bogeyman that scares people into relying on prison as the only solution for crime.

Long Arc

Make no mistake, people have legitimate fears about their safety. And they are frustrated when the government seems unable to address visible signs of disorder like homelessness, substance abuse, or, in some places, retail theft.

It is no coincidence that the movement suffered losses in places where these issues were conspicuous; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Portland, Oregon, are prime examples.

We have centuries of evidence, however, showing that prison is not an effective tool for addressing these issues — or crime in general. A shift is underway, but the movement will need time and resources to expand people’s imagination of what is possible.

In the same way that one loss in a playoff series does not doom a team, Gascón’s loss or other losses that may follow does not mean that the movement is crumbling. In fact, it is forcing conservative candidates to acknowledge and adopt reforms.

Even Gascón’s law-and-order opponent, Nathan Hochman, a former prosecutor who won the primary, promised to increase access to rehabilitation and publicly stated that not all crimes deserve jail time.

We should expect to see Musk and others like him throw money at future races where criminal justice reform is on the ballot. That’s why we need to continue to support, fight for, and invest in criminal justice reform.

In the words of José Garza, the district attorney who bested Musk: “It’s going to take what it always takes, which is people organizing. It’s going to take consistency.”

The post Elon Musk Quietly Tried to Oust a Reform DA. Here’s Why He Failed. appeared first on The Intercept.

Watch the full interview here

The post Lichfield interviewed by DW on the implications of Trump’s election for the war in Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On July 20, Joseph Poliszuk and his colleagues celebrated the 10th anniversary of Armando.Info, a Venezuelan investigative news outlet he co-founded. The ICIJ partner had survived threats and censorship and was preparing to cover the Latin American country’s presidential election eight days later. Like other journalists there, Poliszuk and his team were worried repression could become more intense and hoped their jobs would not become even harder.

President Nicolás Maduro was reelected, but the results were disputed by Venezuela’s opposition party, which claimed to have proof their candidate won. This sparked protests against Maduro’s victory across the country which the government reacted to with the “harshest and most violent” repression tools, according to a report published by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council. The report said that a fact-finding mission had found rights violations including arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual and gender-based violence by law enforcement. Venezuela’s National Electoral Council said in a press release that the report was “illegal, contrary to the principles of the UN, violating the Terms of Reference agreed with this Constitutional Power and, above all, riddled with lies and contradictions.”

Journalists faced their own set of targeted threats, Poliszuk told ICIJ. “After the elections, the government canceled passports, not only of journalists, but of activists and political leaders as well,” he said. “It was a pressure and censorship tactic that sent the message ‘you are on the list, you better watch yourself.’”

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As a precaution, Poliszuk said his team helped two Armando.Info reporters based in Caracas, the capital city, temporarily leave the country. This made reporting harder. Armando.Info has operated a hybrid newsroom since early 2018, when a handful of its journalists had to flee the country after they were sued by a business executive they exposed as having ties to Maduro’s political party. Currently, half of the team works remotely from outside Venezuela.

“Some are referring to it as ‘journalism in exile’ and I think it has been romanticized a lot,” Poliszuk said. “Of course, it is great that technology has allowed us to come up with methodologies to continue this work from the outside — something that was not an option during past dictatorships in the 20th century. But it is not ideal. We lose timing, we lose reporting from the streets, we lose sources.”

The trade-off is security, he said. Poliszuck found a home in Mexico, an unlikely refuge as one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. “It appears that the modus operandi in Venezuela is to jail journalists, while here they are murdered,” Poliszuk said. “We all follow some basic security measures. I feel much safer here than even in Colombia. Not because Mexico is safer, but because the interests I touch are not here.”

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, at least 10 journalists have been arrested since the recent electoral campaigns began, and eight remain in prison “under false charges and in worrying conditions,” according to Reporters Without Borders, which advocates for freedom of information. Half of those were arrested during the post-election protests. State-orchestrated censorship and disinformation campaigns, which reportedly intensified around the elections, have compounded the challenges faced by reporters and citizens in Venezuela. Rolling blackouts, intermittent water supply and limited internet bandwidth already made reporting hard, Poliszuk said. The Committee to Protect Journalists found that since the election, reporters had self-censored, not appeared on camera and avoided attending or covering opposition rallies. Some radio news programs went off the air, the press freedom organization reported.

Armando.Info, a long-term ICIJ partner that has worked on investigations such as the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, also stopped publishing bylines for months after the election to protect their identities. Journalists’ identities became especially sensitive during the post-electoral unrest as the Government brought back a repression tactic first introduced in 2017 dubbed “Operación Tun Tun,” or “Operation Knock Knock,” as has been reported by Armando.Info and several international outlets.

The “operation,” as it was described in at least one social media post by an account run by the military, consists of identifying those who speak negatively about the government, knocking on their door and detaining them. Armando.Info has labeled the tactic “lynching 2.0 of opponents.”

The Venezuelan non-governmental organization Foro Penal published a report last week that counted 1,848 political detainees since election day on July 28. Twenty-four people have been murdered in the same period amid social unrest, according to Human Rights Watch.

“Many journalists have left, others are afraid, and for others, their outlets do not have the resources to pay them,” said Poliszuk. “The effort we make goes beyond the news-making process.”