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Daily thread - United States 2021 transition of power - January 15
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Similar article from NPR
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Yikes. Hope he gets some time in jail, but I also get some psychiatric help and some meds.
Federal authorities said Friday that there is "no direct evidence of kill and capture teams" among the Capitol rioters, walking back claims outlined in court documents that attackers sought to apprehend and "assassinate elected officials."
The article you linked includes this section now too, I assume it probably wasn't there originally:
‘We got to hold this door’: How battered D.C. police made a stand against the Capitol mob. With every article I read, I am increasingly concerned for the safety of the nation, our peacekeepers, and our institutions. It's taking a tremendous amount of self-discipline to avoid the negative thoughts that spring up: wishing violence, vindication, and retribution on those intent to destroy the sanctity of the US. I think it's a natural defense when the extreme corners of this movement are calling for civil war and want to instate an awful, oppressive, fundamentalist view. I am working diligently to channel negative energy to a constructive place, but it feels insurmountable in some moments when the hateful, de-humanizing, and violent rhetoric lobbed by these extremists is directed at oneself.
'Kill him with his own gun': DC cops injured in Capitol riot share their stories
Far-right groups move online conversations from social media to chat apps — and out of view of law enforcement
I have Signal installed, but I rarely use it. I admire it technically. But I increasingly have mixed feelings about it, much like I've always had about Tor, despite there being some good uses for Tor. Shades of gray.
Unlike Tor, law enforcement can probably track the metadata. Maybe that's a reasonable compromise?
I'm a long-time Signal user and I'm completely fine with this.
Unlike Parler or Voat or Gab or any of those other right-wing shitholes, there's no real "sharing" or "promotion" aspect of Signal. It's just a messaging app. Current extremists can use it to hide their communications from law enforcement, but there's no "radicalization pipeline" as we've seen with sites like YouTube where watching video game reviews recommends you videos about GamerGate which recommends videos about how feminism is destroying western civilization and before you know it you're watching Alex Jones talking about how George Soros is a gay frog.
Most likely, our 500 year old, technologically illiterate lawmakers are going to use this as yet another attempt in the long, long history of trying to mandate "law enforcement only" backdoors in encryption.
I agree that it's probably not a good way of doing outreach and recruitment, which changes the epidemiology of how the memes spread.
I mean, can't really stop people from messaging each other in the end. Although it seems like a common assumption that once taken off a deplatform, those far right groups can reconvene elsewhere mostly intact, that's not really something that can be assumed.
There's been studies done, for instance, that shows a tremendous amount of attrition on communities as they move between platforms, and many members just stop attending. So yeah, some crazy folk will move to encrypted messaging, but it's going to be a fraction, and there's not much that can be done about it.
Signal still requires a phone number at sign up, and I suspect most people will use a real number, though some may go out of their way to get a burner. I wonder if law enforcement agencies could infiltrate these groups and scrape messages with a bot, or whether infiltration would treated be like wiretapping. Signal has a desktop version, so it seems feasible. Last time I checked (about 18 months ago),
desktop messages are not encrypted at restedit: the key is stored plainly on the machine, and while the database (I think) is encrypted, it could very easily be decrypted. I couldn't find anything definitive last time I looked a few weeks ago.I don't think it would be that hard to get informants, since it's not like they need to learn Arabic or something. The culture doesn't seem that hard to imitate.
But I'm thinking about how people sometimes complain about law enforcement infiltrating leftist groups and how it shows how the police and national security state are terrible. Shades of gray there too?
Yes, I'm not claiming equivalence. But I think there need to be nonpartisan rules about what kinds of surveillance techniques law enforcement is allowed to use? And, when thinking about what these rules might be, we should think about how they might be applied to organizations that we are sympathetic to and not just our enemies.
I guess Qanon might be declared a terrorist organization or something, and then there are different rules for them? It's not really an organization though, which makes things harder.
American right wingers (looking directly at Matt Gaetz) have been complaining about their voices being "censored" on social media for at least the last 18 months. It's totally unfounded, and arguably the opposite is true --- social media boosts conservative voices. And, these are private companies, so I find the complaint about free speech ironic in the context of free-market capitalism, which republics pride themselves on supporting. Private companies owe these groups nothing.
Where I struggle is with conservatives that back Trump's rebukes of Section 230. The contradiction is that removing legal liability protections means that, for the most part, moderation will become substantially heavier. Thus, culling most hate speech that masquerades as free speech online. It will be then that conservative voices are truly being removed from the conversation.
I do remember stuff like that, which is why I think it's a bit ironic (if not contradictory) to be hoping the FBI tracks these people down and they get locked up. (Or at least I'm hoping that happens.) It seems like there are some contrasting sentiments that need to be resolved somehow? I don't have any answers; I'm just pointing that out.
(To be clear, it's the spying part where I see some tensions. Of course assassinations are bad. Spying seems like a way to avoid getting blindsided. Do we want the police to know about events in advance, or not?)
Someday we should have that discussion about how alternative structures are supposed to work.
Yes, loosely speaking, "spying" covers a lot of different things and only some of them are legal. Isn't getting a search warrant to tap a phone sort of like spying? This is what Hoover was doing to MLK. (I forget whether it was legal, but he had some authorization.) But the FBI isn't like it was in Hoover's time, so I don't really have a problem with it, in principle, with proper scrutiny.
This is still looking at a relatively easy case, though. Here are some other things to consider:
For one, whether these groups have good opsec can change. They could get better at it. Technical improvements (like adopting Signal) will help them.
Also, do you think it's good if the police can legally watch over groups planning a large event where there might be crimes committed? That seems like a loophole for spying on all sorts of groups planning what they're going to do at a protest, because you never know who's going to show up or what they're going to do.
This all assumes something like the existing system though, and whether it can be fixed up.
I think the 'irretrievably' portion of your comment is unknowable, but nevertheless you can't abolish an armed power structure without overwhelming force or mutual co-operation -- which seems unlikely. And even if you could, such machinations would just further empower reactionaries. Reform is attainable -- there are plenty of democracies with much healthier police forces for America to emulate.
I'm guessing there probably are, but they're treated more like guidelines than actual rules. If the people making the judgment calls are sympathetic to a cause, they're probably less likely to file the paperwork to inflitrate, wiretap, etc. If they're less sympathetic or opposed, it's easy to drum up some justification for wiretapping or infiltrating a given group because even if they haven't done anything, they might. Then we get into a "who watches the watchers" kind of spiral...
Yes, we could certainly look into what already exists.
At a philosophical level, it seems like part of the tension is between rules and human judgement. Having too many rules and enforcing them too literally is consistent but often inefficient, stupid, and unjust. We can see many problems with vaccine rollout caused by having too many rules that are hard to follow. Accepting that sometimes human judgement will be wrong is better than slowing things down.
But the problem with relying on human judgement is that it gives people power that can be abused. There can be checks that power is being used appropriately, like getting a judge's approval, but it seems like there's often little alternative to trusting people somewhat. And then there are problems with recruitment and organizational culture.
Having strict, computer-enforced rules so no humans need to be trusted is the cryptocurrency fantasy and they keep rediscovering why the financial system is more complicated than that.
Pew Research poll: Biden Begins Presidency With Positive Ratings; Trump Departs With Lowest-Ever Job Mark
The questions they asked and breakdown of responses (PDF) and their methodology.
“No One Took Us Seriously”: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years - Allegations of racism against the Capitol Police are nothing new: Over 250 Black cops have sued the department since 2001.
It's a long, in-depth article that covers many of the related issues, events, and lawsuits, so I didn't want to quote the whole thing... but it's worth reading in its entirety, IMO.
Further support that the groups that attended the Jan. 6th riots are far beyond the lowly Trump supporter. "Identifying far-right symbols that appeared at the U.S. Capitol riot" from WaPo.
This is truly bizarre: https://twitter.com/jabinbotsford/status/1350186100564905985
I've never heard of Michael Lindell before (maybe I should've?) but he was present at the White House today, and someone managed to photograph his documents from afar, and then transcribe the visible portion of them. What's written in those notes, depending on your viewpoint, is either mildly disconcerting or downright weird:
https://twitter.com/wesbeal/status/1350197849368227846
And some other weird shit.
He's a strange guy that keeps getting involved in all sorts of things that he really shouldn't be. This was a big article from August going into detail about a totally unproven coronavirus "cure" he was trying to push to Trump at the time.
He's a huge financial contributor to the conservatives. It's a weird tale.
In a headline fit for 2020/2021: A pillow salesman apparently has some ideas about declaring martial law
There's some people freaking out over this, but Trump already had nutjobs Ellis and Powel in his ear earlier when they were "lawyers" in his pursuit to overturn the election in the courts. I doubt the pillow salesman is going to convince him of anything he wasn't already convinced of.
Disconcerting, but more of a "wtf" moment then one to get panicked over.
The Guy Who Flew a Confederate Flag in the Capitol Has Predictably Surrendered
So did the US Olympian spotted at the riots too:
Former Arizona Olympian Klete Keller, charged in U.S. Capitol riot, turns himself in to feds
Most of this Washington Post article repeats what we already know, but there is a bit that’s new:
How the rioters who stormed the Capitol came dangerously close to Pence
Bumble disables politics filter after Capitol rioters spotted in dating app
And a more recent update to the story as well:
Bumble reinstates political views filter after women reported Capitol rioters on the app to FBI
Which S&P 500 companies are changing their political donation policies?
The article is basically impossible to quote because of its layout, but has a good, up-to-date breakdown of all the PAC donation policies for companies in the S&P, and which have made changes to them as a result of the Capitol riots.
Biden elevates White House science post to Cabinet level
$500K in Bitcoin sent from France to US far-right groups
Link to the full Chainalysis report on the transactions:
Alt-Right Groups and Personalities Involved In Last Week’s Capitol Riot Received Over $500K In Bitcoin From French Donor One Month Prior
And listed in the report are the far-right friendly sites and organizations that also received money:
BitChute, Daily Stormer, VDARE, Ruqqus, Gab, Unz Review, and AmRen.