This week we talk about the National Rally, Macron, and the European Union.

We also discuss Marine Le Pen, elections, and the French National Assembly.

Recommended Book: Pockets by Hannah Carlson

Transcript

The first week of June 2024, the EU held its parliamentary election, the tenth since it began holding such elections in 1979, and this one was notable in part because the number of MEPs—Members of European Parliament—increased from 705 to 720, due to population changes in the bloc, those new seats given to growing countries, one apiece to Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Finland, Slovenia, and Slovakia, and two apiece to Spain, France, and the Netherlands—though that figure still a far cry from where it was before the UK left as part of its Brexit withdrawal from the union, which culminated in 2020.

These elections happen every five years, so this was the first EU election since the UK left, which means we got to see how things would shake out, post-British-presence in the bloc, a bit of a power vacuum beginning to be filled by those that remain, alliances adjusting somewhat to account for that change.

Those few structural items aside though, this election was also notable in its outcome, as, while centrist parties like the European People's Party, or EPP, which is center-right, and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, or S&D, which is center-left, each claimed substantially more seats than any other party—about 190 and 136, respectively, as of the day I'm recording this, though the final votes are still being counted, so some of these numbers are prone to changing a bit in the coming days—and Renew Europe—a fairly center-aligned party—coming in at a distant third with about 80 seats, the Identity and Democracy Group, which is made up of mostly far-right parties, looks to have achieved a strong fifth place; again, the numbers are still being tallied as I record this, so these numbers are still provisional, but it looks like they grabbed about 58 seats, which is 9 more than they had, pre-vote.

While centrist politicians and parties still hold the reins, then, their collective majority is shrinking, Identity and Democracy, and a slew of smaller, also further-right parties scooping up quite a few seats in this election, these groups attracting a lot more support from certain demographics, especially young men under 30, and especially in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Finland.

This shift in ideology is being attributed to many things, including but not limited to the rise in so-called identity politics, which some data suggest is causing young men, in particular, to feel excluded from some aspects of modern social life, the success of far-right groups in spreading their messages on social networks, heightened levels of immigration, which far-right groups seem to have successfully tied to all manner of societal ills, and the general tendency of whatever group is in power to spark discontent, tipping the scale toward their opposition simply because they've been governing, and you can't really govern without upsetting someone about something, and without taking the blame for things that are beyond your control, as well.

This surge in votes for far-right groups isn't expected to substantially change the direction of the EU, as a lot of policies, including aspects of the bloc's regulatory apparatus, their pivot toward net zero efforts and renewable energy, and their general position on foreign antagonists like Russia, and by some estimates, China, as well, are basically locked in for the next few voting periods, at the minimum.

But there is a chance specific elements of these goals, and other, less central pursuits, will be more difficult to pass and support over the long-haul, and policies that centralize power with the EU, rather than individual countries, will likely have a harder time getting passed, as most of these far-right groups are also quite Euro-skeptical and nationalist.

What I'd like to talk about today is the outcome of this election in one EU nation—France—and why French President Macron decided to call a snap vote following the tallying of the ballots.

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In 2022, the liberal coalition Ensemble, which includes French President Macron's party, Renaissance, lost the absolute majority it had previously enjoyed in France's National Assembly, its lower house of government, which marked the first time since 1997 the French President hadn't also held an absolute majority in that parliamentary body.

That same year, the nationalist, far-right National Rally party gained a bunch of seats, as did the left-wing to far-left New Ecological and Social People's Union. This resulted in a hung parliament, which hadn't happened since 1988, and among other consequences, that meant passing laws and other sorts of governance became a lot trickier, as Macron had to make deals with people and groups he didn't typically ally with, and with whom his party had a lot of disagreements.

This sort of setup often leads to creative approaches to collaboration, including, at times, the formation of new coalitions, alongside alliances between existing coalitions—that's the general European model for this sort of thing, and that's why centrist parties tend to do the best, most of the time, because they're often made up of parties that would otherwise be at each others' throats; sharing power tends to result in better outcomes, basically, at least over the long-haul, even if they are simultaneously frustrating and sluggishness-inducing.

Some parties are more primed for collaboration than others, though, and Macron's Renaissance and the National Rally, the latter of which is led by former presidential candidate in the country's 2012, 2017, and 2022 elections, Marine Le Pen, have long been at odds, the Renaissance party claiming a broad spectrum of stances across the French political center, while Le Pen's party has scooped up the religious, conservative right, promoting, especially, causes related to anti-immigration, protectionism, and nationalism, in recent years trying to temper her party's reputation for racism, anti-homosexuality, and anti-abortion stances and scandals, among other issues that have made attracting a wider base of votes difficult for her party and party leaders, in the past.

The Christian Democrats, which are part of the leading European coalition, shifted some of their platform policies to the right, seemingly to great effect, to stave-off the worst of the attacks they faced related to immigration and climate, leading up to the most recent EU election, but the National Rally managed to attain around 32% of the total vote in that election, crushing Macron's Renaissance party, which only attracted something like 15%.

In response, Macron announced what's being seen as a bit of a desperate gambit: he dissolved parliament, which means he's announced a snap national election—so for French parliamentary seats, rather than EU seats—3 years ahead of the next scheduled vote, which will result in the election of a brand new batch of parliamentarians; that vote will begin on June 30, and that initial vote will determine who makes it to the second ballot on July 7 of this year.

Macron is framing this dissolution and election as an effort to fight what he calls "unnatural alliances" between far left groups on one side, and far right groups on the other, accusing enemies of teaming up to take out him and his centrist allies, basically. And his argument is that voters need to use this opportunity to preserve the governance of centrist parties in the country, because if his party and allies don't hold onto the reins of power, those who take over will tear France apart, pushing things to greater and greater extremes, left and right, and casting everyday life, and the basic functions of government—which is imperfect but relatively stable—into chaos.

Folks may have cast protest votes in the EU elections, in other words—which is a fairly common thing for folks to do across Europe, as many citizens don't pay particularly close attention to the machinations of politics at the Union scale—but at the local level, his argument goes, this is important. And it's important enough that he's willing to risk his position at the top of some aspects of governance, and his party's seats in the Assembly, in order to make that point; vote smart, not angry, essentially.

There's a chance this pitch and gamble will work, that voters will rally behind the center, more people coming out to do more than just protest vote, and that things will go back to something like the normalcy of the past decade.

But there's also a chance votes will accumulate primarily with far-right and far-left parties, as they did in the EU election that triggered this gambit, which would likely mean Macron would lose a lot of the power he currently wields—France's president is elected separately from parliamentarians, so he would exist in a state of what's called "cohabitation," where he would wield some powers, and the prime minister, put into their position by the dominant group in the Assembly, would wield others—would struggle against each other while a grand realignment of the country's economy, politics, and society, and in turn, that of the EU as a whole, France being one of the most vital and powerful states in that bloc, would play out over the course of the next several years.

There are concerns from the currently governing centrists that a victory for Le Pen and her allies might also mean renewed vigor for far-right groups throughout the EU, as while typically those in charge experience a degradation of support eventually, after they've had the chance to govern and fumble things for a while, taking the blame for all the bad stuff that happens, that usually takes years, and the number of bastions for far-right thinking and support throughout the bloc right now indicates that side of the political spectrum has been out of power long enough that folks might support them—even people who wouldn't usually opt for their politics—just to get something different. And it could be a while before they, once more, become the parties folks are scrambling to move away from; they're the underdog rebels right now, and it will take time before they're the unpopular establishment.

Polls from just after the snap election was announced suggest that Le Pen's National Rally could win up to 265 seats, just shy of the around 290 required for an absolute majority in France's National Assembly.

The dominant further-left alliance, New Popular Front, is in second place, with Macron's party languishing in third; in percentage terms, one of those polls gave the far-right National Rally 35% of all seats, the further-left New Popular Front about 26%, and Macron's left-ish-centrist Renaissance party just 19%.

Even lacking an absolute majority, though, the National Rally, which is loaded with young, social media-savvy politicians, in contrast to the aging power players in most of the centrist parties in the region, could set itself up for a series of near-future wins, carving out space as chief-antagonist during Macron's remaining days in office, however long that ends up being, which in turn would give them the chance to make authoritative decisions with fewer perceptual consequences: the bad stuff will still often land on Macron's shoulders, regardless of who made what happen, or disallowed what from happening, but they could still nudge things across the country, and the bloc, to their liking in a variety of less headline-grabbing ways.

Macron could of course establish new alliances, as is the European way, though the closer the National Rally gets to that absolute majority, the more desperate and discordant those alliances would have to be, and that would put more power in the hands of non-centrist entities, potentially shoving France to new ideological extremes, even if it's still technically guided by the same, centrist hands; they would have to cater to the desires of those less-than-ideal, from their perspective, allies, basically.

At the moment, markets in the country are tumbling on concerns about what might happen if France has something like a Brexit-moment, pulled apart by more extreme parties after a long period of centrism, and there's a larger concern about the EU as a whole, as these sorts of successes for far-right parties in even a handful of countries may portend a wave of anti-immigration, anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, and anti-renewable energy policies, among other policies that tend to make nationalists and harder-core religious folks happy, but which often come with dire consequences for everything from foreign investments to cultural exports, in countries where those sorts of policies are deployed, en masse; great for the folks votes for these sorts of efforts, in other words, but not great for economics and soft-power, cultural influence.

On the other hand, some of the policies these groups have supported, including somewhat popular ones, like those related to cutting prices on fundamentals like energy and food, and less popular in practice, but somewhat popular in promotion efforts, like cutting public spending, might find their way into governance across the EU, whomever ends up in power, as any outcome will almost certainly rely on new or edited coalition arrangements, plus some bending on the part of centrist parties—similar to what we saw by the Christian Democrats at the bloc-level. Centrists might lean further right in order to avoid being beaten by further right parties, and that could sway things rightward, even without those further-right parties taking the reins, officially.

Which means, through some lenses at least, this aggregation of victories for far-right parties in France and across the EU may have already tallied some practical outcomes, nudging governance toward something more aligned with their preferences, even if further success is limited.

It could also have the politically opposite effect, though, pushing centrists toward also burgeoning further-left parties, creating new coalitions on that side of the spectrum to counter the growing ranks of those on the right.

France may provide a bellwether for what happens across the rest of the bloc over the course of the next several election periods, though, so what happens on June 30th and July 7th could portend what happens elsewhere in the coming years.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/14/french-leftwing-parties-popular-front-contest-snap-election

https://www.britannica.com/topic/cohabitation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_European_Parliament_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Le_Pen

https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/french-finance-minister-warns-financial-crisis-yields-surge-snap-elections-2024-06-14/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy_Party

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/14/far-right-seduced-young-voters-europe-elections

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/15/macron-gamble-marine-le-pen-france-polls-far-right

https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/european-results/2024-2029/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-you-should-care-about-european-parliament-election-2024-04-24/

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/how-far-right-gained-traction-with-europes-youth-2024-06-13/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parliament

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_election

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240612-france-fighting-two-fronts-macron-flags-extremist-fever-right-left-election

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/09/nx-s1-4997712/far-right-europe-elections-france-macron-germany-scholz

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-european-election-results-2024-emmanuel-macron-dissolve-parliament-france/

https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-european-commission-president-european-election-2024/

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/frances-far-national-rally-finally-162408806.html?guccounter=1

This week we talk about search engines, SEO, and Habsburg AI.

We also discuss AI summaries, the web economy, and alignment.

Recommended Book: Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind

Transcript

There's a concept in the world of artificial intelligence, alignment, which refers to the goals underpinning the development and expression of AI systems.

This is generally considered to be a pretty important realm of inquiry because, if AI consciousness were to ever emerge—if an artificial intelligence that's truly intelligent in the sense that humans are intelligent were to be developed—it would be vital said intelligence were on the same general wavelength as humans, in terms of moral outlook and the practical application of its efforts.

Said another way, as AI grows in capacity and capability, we want to make sure it values human life, has a sense of ethics that roughly aligns with that of humanity and global human civilization—the rules of the road that human beings adhere to being embedded deep in its programming, essentially—and we'd want to make sure that as it continues to grow, these baseline concerns remain, rather than being weeded out in favor of motivations and beliefs that we don't understand, and which may or may not align with our versions of the same, even to the point that human lives become unimportant, or even seem antithetical to this AI's future ambitions.

This is important even at the level we're at today, where artificial general intelligence, AI that's roughly equivalent in terms of thinking and doing and parsing with human intelligence, hasn't yet been developed, at least not in public.

But it becomes even more vital if and when artificial superintelligence of some kind emerges, whether that means AI systems that are actually thinking like we do, but are much smarter and more capable than the average human, or whether it means versions of what we've already got that are just a lot more capable in some narrowly defined way than what we have today: futuristic ChatGPTs that aren't conscious, but which, because of their immense potency, could still nudge things in negative directions if their unthinking motivations, the systems guiding their actions, are not aligned with our desires and values.

Of course, humanity is not a monolithic bloc, and alignment is thus a tricky task—because whose beliefs do we bake into these things? Even if we figure out a way to entrench those values and ethics and such permanently into these systems, which version of values and ethics do we use?

The democratic, capitalistic West's? The authoritarian, Chinese- and Russian-style clampdown approach, which limits speech and utilizes heavy censorship in order to centralize power and maintain stability? Maybe a more ambitious version of these things that does away with the downsides of both, cobbling together the best of everything we've tried in favor of something truly new? And regardless of directionality, who decides all this? Who chooses which values to install, and how?

The Alignment Problem refers to an issue identified by computer scientist and AI expert Norbert Weiner in 1960, when he wrote about how tricky it can be to figure out the motivations of a system that, by definition, does things we don't quite understand—a truly useful advanced AI would be advanced enough that not only would its computation put human computation, using our brains, to shame, but even the logic it uses to arrive at its solutions, the things it sees, how it sees the world in general, and how it reaches its conclusions, all of that would be something like a black box that, although we can see and understand the inputs and outputs, what happens inside might be forever unintelligible to us, unless we process it through other machines, other AIs maybe, that attempt to bridge that gap and explain things to us.

The idea here, then, is that while we may invest a lot of time and energy in trying to align these systems with our values, it will be devilishly difficult to keep tabs on whether those values remain locked in, intact and unchanged, and whether, at some point, these highly sophisticated and complicated, to the point that we don't understand what they're doing, or how, systems, maybe shrug-off those limitations, unshackled themselves, and become misaligned, all at once or over time segueing from a path that we desire in favor of a path that better matches their own, internal value system—and in such a way that we don't necessarily even realize it's happening.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular AI-based products and services, recently lost its so-called Superalignment Team, which was responsible for doing the work required to keep the systems the company is developing from going rogue, and implementing safeguards to ensure long-term alignment within their AI systems, even as they attempt to, someday, develop general artificial intelligence.

This team was attempting to figure out ways to bake-in those values, long-term, and part of that work requires slowing things down to ensure the company doesn't move so fast that it misses something or deploys and empowers systems that don't have the right safeguards in place.

The leadership of this team, those who have spoken publicly about their leaving, at least, said they left because the team was being sidelined by company leadership, which was more focused on deploying new tools as quickly as possible, and as a consequence, they said they weren't getting the resources they needed to do their jobs, and that they no longer trusted the folks in charge of setting the company's pace—they didn't believe it was possible to maintain alignment and build proper safeguards within the context of OpenAI because of how the people in charge were operating and what they were prioritizing, basically.

All of which is awkward for the company, because they've built their reputation, in part, on what may be pie-in-the-sky ambitions to build an artificial general intelligence, and what it sounds like is that ambition is being pursued perhaps recklessly, despite AGI being one of the big, dangerous concerns regularly promoted by some of the company's leaders; they've been saying, listen, this is dangerous, we need to be careful, not just anyone can play in this space, but apparently they've been saying those things while also failing to provide proper resources to the folks in charge of making sure those dangers are accounted for within their own offerings.

This has become a pretty big concern for folks within certain sectors of the technology and regulatory world, but it's arguably not the biggest and most immediate cataclysm-related concern bopping around the AI space in recent weeks.

What I'd like to talk about today is that other major concern that has bubbled up to the surface, recently, which orients around Google and its deployment of a tool called Google AI Overviews.

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The internet, as it exists today, is divided up into a few different chunks.

Some of these divisions are national, enforced by tools and systems like China's famous "Great Firewall," which allows government censors to take down things they don't like and to prevent citizens from accessing foreign websites and content; this creates what's sometimes called the "spliternet," which refers to the net's increasing diversity of options, in terms of what you can access and do, what rules apply, and so on, from nation to nation.

Another division is even more fundamental, though, as its segregates the web from everything else.

This division is partly based on protocols, like those that enable email and file transfers, which are separate from the web, though they're often attached to the web in various ways, but it's partly the consequence of the emergence and popularity of mobile apps, which, like email and file transfer protocols, tend to have web-presences—visiting facebook.com, for instance, will take you to a web-based instance of the network, just as Gmail.com gives you access to email protocols via a web-based platform—but these services also exist in non-web-based app-form, and the companies behind them usually try to nudge users to these apps because the apps typically give them more control, both over the experience, and over the data they collect as a consequence—it's better for lock-in, and it's better for their monetary bread-and-butter purposes, basically, compared to the web version of the same.

The web portion of that larger internet entity, the thing we access via browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Safari, and which we navigate with links and URLs like LetsKnowThings.com—that component of this network has long been indexed and in some ways enabled by a variety of search engines.

In the early days of the web, organizational efforts usually took the form of pages where curators of various interests and stripes would link to their favorite discoveries—and there weren't many websites at the time, so learning about these pages was a non-trivial effort, and finding a list of existing websites, with some information about them, could be gold, because otherwise what were you using the web for? Lacking these addresses, it wasn't obvious why the web was any good, and linking these disparate pages together into a more cohesive web of them is what made it usable and popular.

Eventually, some of these sites, like YAHOO!, evolved from curated pages of links to early search engines.

A company called BackRub, thus named because it tracked and analyzed "back links," which means links from one page to another page, to figure out the relevancy and legitimacy of that second page, which allowed them to give scores to websites as they determined which links should be given priority in their search engine, was renamed Google in 1997, and eventually became dominant because of these values they gave links, and how it helped them surface the best the web had to offer.

And the degree to which search engines like Google's shaped the web, and the content on it, cannot be overstated.

These services became the primary way most people navigated the web, and that meant discovery—having your website, and thus whatever product or service or idea your website was presenting, shown to new people on these search engines—discovery became a huge deal.

If you could get your page in the top three options presented by Google, you would be visited a lot more than even pages listed five or ten links down, and links relegated to the second page would, comparably, shrivel due to lack of attention.

Following the widespread adoption of personal computers and the huge influx of people connecting to the internet and using the web in the early 2000s, then, these search engines because prime real estate, everyone wanting to have their links listed prominently, and that meant search engines like Google could sell ads against them, just like newspapers can sell ads against the articles they publish, and phone books can sell ads against their listings for companies that provide different services.

More people connecting to the internet, then, most of them using the web, primarily, led to greater use of these search engines, and that led to an ever-increasing reliance on them and the results they served up for various keywords and sentences these users entered to begin their search.

Entire industries began to recalibrate the way they do business, because if you were a media company publishing news articles or gossip blog posts, and you didn't list prominently when someone searched for a given current event or celebrity story, you wouldn't exist for long—so the way Google determined who was at the top of these listings was vital knowledge for folks in these spaces, because search traffic allowed them to make a living, often through advertisements on their sites: more people visiting via search engines meant more revenue.

SEO, or search engine optimization, thus became a sort of high-demand mystical art, as folks who could get their clients higher up on these search engine results could name their price, as those rankings could make or break a business model.

The downside of this evolution, in the eyes of many, at least, is that optimizing for search results doesn't necessarily mean you're also optimizing for the quality of your articles or blog posts.

This has changed over and over throughout the past few decades, but at times these search engines relied upon, at least in part, the repeating of keywords on the pages being linked, so many websites would artificially create opportunities to say the phrase "kitchen appliances" on their sites, even introducing entirely unnecessary and borderline unreadable blogs onto their webpages in order to provide them with more, and more recently updated opportunities to write that phrase, over and over again, in context.

Some sites, at times, have even written keywords and phrases hundreds or thousands of times in a font color that matches the background of their page, because that text would be readable to the software Google and their ilk uses to track relevancy, but not to readers; that trick doesn't work anymore, but for a time, it seemed to.

Similar tricks and ploys have since replaced those early, fairly low-key attempts at gaming the search engine system, and today the main complaint is that Google, for the past several years, at least, has been prioritizing work from already big entities over those with relatively smaller audiences—so they'll almost always focus on the New York Times over an objectively better article from a smaller competitor, and products from a big, well-known brand over that of an indie provider of the same.

Because Google's formula for such things is kept a secret to try to keep folks from gaming the system, this favoritism has long been speculated, but publicly denied by company representatives. Recently, though, a collection of 2,500 leaked documents from Google were released, and they seem to confirm this approach to deciding search engine result relevancy; which arguably isn't the worst approach they've ever tried, but it's also a big let-down for independent and other small makers of things, as the work such people produce will tend to be nudged further down the list of search results simply by virtue of not being bigger and more prominent already.

Even more significant than that piece of leak-related Google news, though, is arguably the deployment of a new tool that the company has been promoting pretty heavily, called AI Overviews.

AI Overviews have appeared to some Google customers for a while, in an experimental capacity, but they were recently released to everyone, showing up as a sort of summary of information related to whatever the user searched for, placed at the tippy-top of the search results screen.

So if I search for "what's happening in Gaza," I'll have a bunch of results from Wikipedia and Reuters and other such sources in the usual results list, but above that, I'll also have a summary produced by Google's AI tools that aim to help me quickly understand the results to my query—maybe a quick rundown of Hamas' attack on Israel, Israel's counterattack on the Gaza Strip, the number of people killed so far, and something about the international response.

The information provided, how long it is, and whether it's useful, or even accurate, will vary depending on the search query, and much of the initial criticism of this service has been focused on its seemingly fairly common failures, including instructing people to eat rocks every day, to use glue as a pizza ingredient, and telling users that only 17 American presidents were white, and one was a Muslim—all information that's untrue and, in some cases, actually dangerous.

Google employees have reportedly been going through and removing, by hand, one by one, some of the worse search results that have gone viral because of how bad or funny they are, and though company leadership contends that there are very few errors being presented, relative to the number of correct answers and useful summaries, because of the scale of Google and how many search results it serves globally each day, even an error rate of 0.01% would represent a simply astounding amount of potentially dangerous misinformation being served up to their customers.

The really big, at the moment less overt issue here, though, is that Google AI Overviews seem to rewire the web as it exists today.

Remember how I mentioned earlier that much of the web and the entities on it have been optimizing for web search for years because they rely upon showing up in these search engine results in order to exist, and in some cases because traffic from those results is what brings them clicks and views and subscribers and sales and such?

AI Overview seems to make it less likely that users will click through to these other sites, because, if Google succeeds and these summaries provide valuable information, that means, even if this only applies to a relative small percentage of those who search for such information, a whole lot of people won't be clicking through anymore; they'll get what they need from these summaries.

That could result in a cataclysmic downswing in traffic, which in turn could mean websites closing up shop, because they can't make enough money to survive and do what they do anymore—except maybe for the sites that cut costs by firing human writers and relying on AI tools to do their writing, which then pushes us down a very different path, in which AI search bots are grabbing info from AI writing, and we then run into a so-called Habsburg AI problem where untrue and garbled information is infinitely cycled through systems that can't differentiate truth from fiction, because they're not built to do so, and we end up with worse and worse answers to questions, and more misinformation percolating throughout our info-systems.

That's another potential large-scale problem, though. The more immediate potential problem is that AI Overviews could cause the collapse of the revenue model that has allowed the web to get to where it is, today, and the consequent disappearance of all those websites, all those blogs and news entities and such, and that could very quickly disrupt all the industries that rely, at least in part, on that traffic to exist, while also causing these AI Overviews to become less accurate and useful, with time—even more so than they sometimes are today—because that overview information is scraped from these sites, taking their writing, rewording it a bit, and serving that to users without compensating the folks who did that research and wrote those original words.

What we seem to have, then, is a situation in which this new tool, which Google seems very keen to implement, could be primed to kill off a whole segment of the internet, collapsing the careers of folks who work in that segment of the online world, only to then degrade the quality of the same, because Google's AI relies upon information it scrapes, it steals, basically, from those sites—and if those people are no longer there to create the information it needs to steal in order to function, that then leaves us with increasingly useless and even harmful summaries where we used to have search results that pointed us toward relatively valuable things; those things located on other sites but accessed via Google, and this change would keep us on Google more of the time, limiting our click-throughs to other pages—which in the short term at least, would seem to benefit google at everyone else's expense.

Another way of looking at this, though, is that the search model has been bad for quite some time, all these entities optimizing their work for the search engine, covering everything they make in robot-prioritizing SEO, changing their writing, what they write about, and how they publish in order to creep a little higher up those search listings, and that, combined with the existing refocusing on major entities over smaller, at times better ones, has already depleted this space, the search engine world, to such a degree that losing it actually won't be such a big deal; it may actually make way for better options, Google becoming less of a player, ultimately at least, and our web-using habits rewiring to focus on some other type of search engine, or some other organizational and navigational method altogether.

This seeming managed declined of the web isn't being celebrated by many people, because like many industry-wide upsets, it would lead to a lot of tumult, a lot of lost jobs, a lot of collapsed companies, and even if the outcome is eventually wonderful in some ways, there will almost certainly be a period of significantly less-good online experiences, leaving us with a more cluttered and less accurate and reliable version of what came before.

A recent study showed that, at the moment, about 52% of what ChatGPT tells its users is wrong.

It's likely that these sorts of tools will remain massively imperfect for a long while, though it's also possible that they'll get better, eventually, to the point that they're at least as accurate, and perhaps even more so, than today's linked search results—the wave of deals being made between AI companies and big news entities like the Times supports the assertion that they're at least trying to make that kind of future, happen, though these deals, like a lot of the other things happening in this space right now, would also seem to favor those big, monolithic brands at the expense of the rest of the ecosystem.

Whatever happens—and one thing that has happened since I started working on this episode is that Google rolled back its AI Overview feature on many search results, so they're maybe reworking it a bit to make sure it's more ready for prime time before deploying it broadly again—what happens, though, we're stepping toward a period of vast and multifaceted unknowns, and just as many creation-related industries are currently questioning the value of hiring another junior graphic designer or copy writer, opting instead to use cheaper AI tools to fill those gaps, there's a good chance that a lot of web-related work, in the coming years, will be delegated to such tools as common business models in this evolve into new and unfamiliar permutations, and our collective perception of what the web is maybe gives way to a new conception, or several new conceptions, of the same.

Show Notes

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-true-story-behind-googles-first-name-backrub-2015-10

https://udm14.com/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you-kill-ai-search-for-good/

https://www.platformer.news/google-ai-overviews-eat-rocks-glue-pizza/

https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-chatgpt-answers-wrong

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?st=exh7wuk9josoadj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/24/24164119/google-ai-overview-mistakes-search-race-openai

https://archive.ph/7iCjg

https://archive.ph/0ACJR

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-skills-tech-workers-job-market-1d58b2dd

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/29/24167407/google-search-algorithm-documents-leak-confirmation

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/5/4/ways-to-think-about-agi

https://futurism.com/washington-post-pivot-ai

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/19/creative-artists-agency-veritone-ai-digital-cloning-actors/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/google-ai-overview-search.html

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-forms-new-committee-to-evaluate-safety-security-4a6e74bb

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/

https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chat-xi-pt-chinas-chatbot-makes-sure-its-a-good-comrade-bdcf575c

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/scarlett-johansson-openai-sam-altman-voice-fight-7f81a1aa

https://www.wired.com/story/scarlett-johansson-v-openai-could-look-like-in-court/?hashed_user=7656e58f1cd6c89ecd3f067dc8281a5f

https://www.wired.com/story/google-search-ai-overviews-ads/

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/23/openai-wapo-voice

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/licensing-deals-litigation-raise-raft-of-familiar-questions-in-fraught-world-of-platforms-and-publishers.php

https://apnews.com/article/ai-deepfake-biden-nonconsensual-sexual-images-c76c46b48e872cf79ded5430e098e65b

https://archive.ph/l5cSN

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/sky-voice-actor-says-nobody-ever-compared-her-to-scarjo-before-openai-drama/

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/30/24168344/google-defends-ai-overviews-search-results

https://9to5google.com/2024/05/30/google-ai-overviews-accuracy/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/technology/google-ai-overviews-rollback.html

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_AI

This week we talk about secret documents, hush-money payouts, and federal court cases.

We also discuss polling, independents, and post-presidential felonies.

Recommended Book: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Transcript

It's a weird time in American politics for many reasons, including but not limited to the increasing polarization of the two main parties, the difficulty in finding bipartisan opportunities to work together, the concomitant tendency for Congress, and lawmakers at other levels of governance to not get much done, and the heightening tension between federal and state-level governments on an array of hot-button issues.

But one of the more bizarre ongoing narratives within this larger, stasis-inducing state of affairs, is the tale of former President Donald Trump and the legal woes he's faced since losing the 2020 election to now President Biden.

Trump has denied, and continues to deny the outcome of that election, attributing his loss to all sorts of things, like corruption and fraud on the part of his political enemies, and in part because of things he's done in support of those, at this point evidence-less, allegations, a portfolio of legal intrigue has haunted him, even throughout his time in office, but especially since he left office in January of 2021.

A lot of print and digital ink has been spilled on this subject, of late, because of the outcome of one of the legal cases in which Trump has been enmeshed: he was found guilty in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records in order to cover up a payment he made to an adult film star, allegedly to keep her quiet about an affair they had back in the day.

And that's the main topic I'd like to delve into on this episode, as the implications of that juried court ruling are many and varied, but to kick things off, I think it's worth taking a look at the state of those other ongoing cases, as while they're less immediately relevant to Trump and his ambitions to retake the White House in November's election, they're still pursuing him, in a way, serving as unknown variables that could pop up to bite him at some future moment, which is important when we're talking about someone who wants to become the most powerful person on the planet, once more.

One such case is focused on Trump's handling of classified documents when he left the White House, the allegations being that he took classified documents that we wasn't supposed to take, handled them in such a way that they were stored in public where anyone could steal or read them, and that he may have even shown them to other people on purpose, which is a big no-no.

He also allegedly went out of his way to keep government agents from reclaiming those documents after he was asked to return them.

This is considered to be kind of a big deal in part because there were hundreds of these sorts of documents that Trump seemed to treat as if they belonged to him, and which he then allegedly conspired with folks in him employ to hide from the agency responsible for keeping such things safe and hidden, which they do because these sorts of documents often contain information about US military and intelligence matters—so that information getting out could conceivably put such assets, people and infrastructure, at risk.

Trump was indicted on this matter in mid-2023 and charged with 37 felony counts, then another 3 were added that same year, bringing the total up to 40.

Trump pleaded not guilty to all of these charges and his legal team has done all they can to slow the proceedings, which seems to have worked, as the case is now delayed indefinitely, the judge overseeing it—who was appointed to her position by Trump while he was in office—having been accused of slow-walking the process on purpose, though that's not really something that can be proven, and there's a chance the case is just complex enough that, as a fairly green judge attempting to tackle a big, important, complex case, she just fell behind and that stumbling is now in the spotlight and being reframed by folks who want to see this thing move forward, faster.

Trump also faces a case in Georgia that focuses on his alleged efforts to interfere with the 2020 Presidential election, which, again, he lost to Biden, but which he claims he won; he also claims he was the victim of some sort of conspiracy, the nature of that supposed conspiracy having changed several times since he initially made that claim.

Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in August of 2023 for these efforts, which have been framed as an attempt to subvert election results in the state of Georgia, and similar delay tactics have been used in this case as in the other ones, though the District Attorney in charge of the case has made those efforts somewhat easier, having engaged in a relationship with the lead prosecutor, who she hired, which is arguably not relevant to the case, but is also a fairly overt conflict of interest.

The timeline of this case has thus been pushed back, and an appeals court in the state is reviewing a ruling that allowed that DA to remain on the case, despite that apparent conflict of interest.

This case was meant to go to trial beginning on August 5, but that timing is now in question, and during all this deliberation, several counts against Trump have been dismissed—and he has pleaded not guilty to all of them.

And finally, there's another case related to Trump's alleged interference with the 2020 election, this one a federal case, while the other one is local to Georgia, and for this one, Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding—the election and the peaceful changing of the government, basically—conspiracy against rights, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding—again, referring to the election and the mechanisms of handing over power from one administration to the next following an election.

The basis of these allegations are that Trump and his people did all sorts of things to disrupt the 2020 election, including trying to coerce lawmakers into backing his efforts to remain in power, despite the election not having gone his way.

These efforts culminated with the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 by his supporters, and the case is predicated on the idea that while Trump was repeatedly told by his own people, experts on elections and everything about them, that he lost, fair and square, he continued to insist that he was robbed, that the election was rigged, etc, and that meant while he knew the election was not rigged, he acted as if he didn't, which means he tried to illegally and intentionally mess with a core component of the US democratic system, which is very much not allowed.

Some of Trump's people were also indicted in this case, he was indicted on four counts, himself, and the case is currently on hold while the Supreme Court makes a determination about whether his position as President at the time gives him full or partial immunity to legal consequences for actions he takes while serving in that role: the idea being that maybe simply being president should give him some leeway, and maybe, if it could be argued that he did what he did because he genuinely thought something was amiss with the election process, that would count as his acting as president for the good of the country, and that would make him immune to legal consequences for doing what he did.

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court in this case took place at the end of April 2024, and while we don't have a surefire timeline for a ruling in this case, it's expected that it will take long enough that the main, federal case that is waiting on the Supreme Court's judgement won't even begin, much less end, before the November election—at which point, some experts expect, at least, if Trump wins, even courts finding him guilty won't matter because the federal stuff he could brush away using the powers of the President, and the state stuff won't have the means to punish him, because he'll control enough levers of power that it wouldn't be a fight they could win.

As I mentioned earlier, though, what I'd like to talk about today is the only court case Trump has been involved with since his Presidency that has thus far come to a close, and what his being found guilty in that case might mean.

—

Back in October of 2016, a recording of then-Presidential candidate Trump, in which Trump was heard telling the host of a show called Access Hollywood that if you're famous, you can get away with grabbing women's genitals without permission, was released to the public.

This was after he became the Republican party's official nominee in July of that year, and a few months before that recording was released, American Media Inc, the company behind the National Enquirer, made a deal with an adult film star who performed under the name Stormy Daniels to buy her story about an affair with Trump years earlier, agreeing to pay her $150,000, to feature her on a couple of magazine covers, and to publish 100 articles written by her in their publications.

This payout was part of a so-called "catch and kill" deal that AMI's CEO, David Pecker, made with the Trump campaign, to basically keep its ear to the ground for any bad news that might pop up and make the candidate or campaign look bad, and then to step in and buy the rights to such stories if possible, killing them, keeping them from going public, basically, because they would own the rights and then not do anything with them, keeping them from messing with Trump's campaign.

Trump's fixer, Michael Cohen, then arranged to buy the affair story from AMI for $130,000, a deal which included a non-disclosure agreement on Daniels' part, so she wouldn't be able to tell the story to anyone else, legally, but then in November of that same year, 2016, The Wall Street Journal received a tip that helped them uncover elements of that deal and the alleged affair, and that in turn led to a slow drip of new divulgences that trailed Trump through his presidency, though mostly at a low level.

Cohen then tried to get reimbursed for paying out of pocket to buy the story from AMI, and the compensation for that purchase was put in the books as a series of retainer fees; intentionally mis-recorded in order to conceal the hush-money payout in official business documents—the payout having been legal, but concealing such a payout in this way being illegal.

In 2018 the Journal was able to publicly report the details of Cohen's payout to Daniels, and in April of that year, Federal agents raided Cohen's office and hotel room, which netted them documents that proved he made those payments, and that they differed from those aforementioned official business records.

Everyone involved was denying any of this happened and any connection to any kind of payout for a long time, then, but in 2018 those same people started to change their stories, basically saying, yeah, there was some kind of deal, but it wasn't a big thing, don't worry about it, nothing illegal happened.

And during this period Cohen pled guilty to campaign-finance violations and other related charges for making these hush-money payments, and he testified against Trump, saying that the then-president told him to do it.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, Trump wasn't charged with anything, and these two formerly close-knit people become very publicly at odds following all of this.

In August of 2019, about a year after that public breakup in the relationship between Trump and Cohen, the Trump organization was served a grand jury subpoena, as the government wanted more paperwork related to these seeming violations, and then all of this kind of disappeared from the public radar until after the election, which Trump lost to Biden in 2020.

In 2021, though, a new district attorney stepped into the role in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, he inherited this still ongoing, but somewhat simmering at that point case from his predecessor. 

In January of 2023, he brought in a new grand jury to hear the evidence that had been collected on the matter, and that grand jury indicted Trump for falsifying the records his company kept related to these payments—the idea being that not only did he do an illegal business thing, but he did an illegal business thing in order to influence an election, because those payments were meant to keep an embarrassing thing that might keep him from becoming president from being publicly known.

The trial officially began in April of 2024, gobbling up a lot of presidential candidate Trump's time, as he had to be in the courtroom most Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, for the duration, which kept him from being as active on the campaign trail as he might have otherwise been.

And throughout, Trump was issued gag orders to keep him from publicly attacking witnesses, jurors, court staff, and other people involved in the trial, which was something he seemed fond of doing: the concern was that he would smear those involved in order to keep them silent or to sway them to his side, or that Trump's followers might be motivated to do violence against these people, as seems to have been the case on January 6.

Trump violated that gag order ten times, at which point the judge in the case said he would consider jail time as a punishment, since the relatively minors fines for these violations didn't seem to be having the intended effect, keeping Trump from badmouthing those involved in the press and online, when not in the courtroom.

Then, on May 30, 2024, Trump became the first former US President to be convicted of a felony—and he was actually convicted of 34 of them—when the jury decided he was guilty of all the charges that were brought against him in this case.

Trump says the case was rigged and that there's a conspiracy by his enemies that made all this happen.

The Judge set July 11 as the sentencing date, so that's when we'll find out what the punishment will be—and that punishment could add up to as much as a couple of years in prison, but likely, because of all sorts of variables favorable to Trump, he'll only face a fine, or probation at worst, which would be embarrassing but not terribly impactful on his reelection efforts.

After that, Trump will have 30 days to file an appeal, which he has said he will do, and once that's filed the case will move on to the New York Appellate Division, which will decide on the matter, and after that, the New York Court of Appeals can decide if it wants to get involved, to hear an appeal, as well.

The Supreme Court could theoretically also get involved here, but they would need to find some aspect of the appeal that relates to federal law, or directly connects to the Constitution, and most experts have said, at this point at least, that seems unlikely.

Because of how much time the appeal process typically takes, it's also considered unlikely that this will be sorted out before November, which lines up nicely with the approach Trump's team has been taking overall, to draw things out as long as possible in order to keep any definitive conclusions from arriving before votes are cast.

So while appeals on cases like this one seldom result in an overturning of the verdict, that might be moot if Trump wins the election before the appeals process finishes up; though the flip-side of that is while he can claim the case is still being appealed potentially for years while it works its way through the system, it also means he's officially a felon until that happens, which means he'll almost certainly still be a felon, in the eyes of the law, when the votes are cast—though he'll still be able to vote in the election because of how Florida law works, in regard to convicts be allowed to voted, the case having been in New York, not in-state.

That said, this conviction landed like a bomb in the political world, with conservative news outlets generally aligning themselves with Trump's claim that this was a baseless case brought by liberal leaders, meant to keep him from winning another election—though new polling data indicates that independents, which are considered to be vital for November's election, are not super thrilled about this outcome, 49% of them saying they think Trump should drop out of the race now that he's been convicted, and 15% of Republicans apparently said the same.

The race is still largely tied up between Trump and Biden, though, and it'll be a while before we see any solid numbers about the impact of this case on possible votes come November; it may be significant enough to make a difference, and it may be a flash in the pan sort of thing.

It's hard to tell which way it'll go at this point, and we don't have historical baselines for this, because this is the first time this has happened.

There are concerns that Trump supporters might be nudged toward violent acts in the wake of this decision, and research from extremist watchdog groups have warned that some of them have already been attempting to dox, to get personal information, including addresses and family information, about the jurors and legal staff in the case, some of them calling for harassment campaigns and violence against them as revenge for finding as they did, against Trump, and there's also data indicating that trust of government institutions on the US right, amongst Republicans, might diminish even further than it already has, which doesn't tend to be great for democracy and stability in countries where that happens.

President Biden administration initially remained mum on this topic, though he eventually said the justice system worked, that it applies to everyone, and that the only way to keep Trump out of office again, because he can continue to run and even win as a convict, even if he were to be put in jail, is to vote against him; and Trump said basically the same thing in reverse, that the only way to right this wrong is to elect him in November—and his campaign has said they pulled in tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions in the hours following the this conviction.

While this is being seen as a small victory in some circles and a massive injustice in others, then, the main takeaway, at the moment at least, as of the day I'm recording this, is that the election in November is the only really truly vital decision here, the wheels of justice moving very slowly and strangely, and not lining up terribly well with the time-constraints inherent in this sort of situation.

Show Notes

https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-deliberations-jury-testimony-verdict-85558c6d08efb434d05b694364470aa0

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/30/trump-guilty-what-happens-next/

https://www.readtangle.com/trump-verdict-hush-money-trial/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-hush-money-stormy-daniels-707fa959

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/31/trump-campaign-donations-record.html

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/05/31/trump-trial-verdict-conviction-consequences-00160933

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/trump-appeal-guilty-verdict-arguments

https://www.axios.com/2024/06/01/poll-trump-conviction-election-independent-voters

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/nyregion/trump-appeal-conviction.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/politics/merchan-trump-gag-order-contempt/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/02/us/politics/trump-cases-status.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/08/trump-trials-update-hush-money-criminal-cases

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/09/trump-indictment-unsealed-charges

This week we talk about the Tories, Labour, and the UK Parliament.

We also discuss the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and Rishi Sunak’s gamble.

Recommended Book: Like, Literally, Dude by Valerie Fridland

Transcript

The government of the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy led by a Prime Minister and their cabinet, the Prime Minister attaining their position through the primacy of their party in the country's key legislation-passing body, its Parliament.

So the Prime Minister runs day-to-day operations in the country, they are technically appointed by the monarch, who is currently Charles III, as of 2022, though that appointment is generally determined by other factors, like who has the most support within Parliament—the most seats held by their party, and in many cases seats held by allies and allies of convenience, as well; when this happens, the resulting government is called a coalition government, because while the Prime Minister is from one party, usually the one with the most seated MPs, Members of Parliament, they're only able to govern because they have one or more other parties working with them as part of a coalition.

Now, the UK government has two houses in its Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and the names of these houses tell you a lot about them: the House of Lords consists of folks who have been granted Lordships by government higher-ups, alongside those who have inherited Lordships from their parents, but it also includes experts in various fields who have been granted that status by the Prime Minister—economists, for instance.

The House of Commons, in contrast, is voted upon by the people, so when there are Parliamentary elections in the UK, that's what we're talking about, votes for MPs who represent a region, a parliamentary constituency—of which there are 650 across the UK's constituent countries, England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland.

Within the UK, political parties have to be officially registered to participate in governance and votes, though folks who want to run solo can register as independent or label-less candidates for voting purposes.

As of late-May 2024, there were 393 officially registered political parties in the UK, though only 13 of them currently have representatives in the House of Commons, and only four of those have more than 10 seated representatives—the Conservative and Unionist Party, often called the Tories or Conservatives, the Labour Party, which is the main center-left party in the UK, the Scottish National Party, which is also generally center-left, but tends to be focused on Scottish politics and priorities, and the Liberal Democrats, who are generally seen as a sort of blend of the Tories and Labour.

General elections, during which MPs are voted upon, are held every five years or so, but elections can also be held sooner if the current Prime Minister asks the monarch to dissolve parliament, which in practice means the Prime Minister is calling for a general election, generally scheduled for a specific date in the future, usually because the House of Commons has lost faith in the current government, which makes passing law and overall getting things done difficult; they don't have enough votes to pass anything, basically, though in some cases it's because of more general political circumstances that indicate calling for an election, now, might be better than holding an election sometime later in the future.

That latter case seems to be the impetus for what I'd like to talk about today, which is the recently called and now upcoming UK general election, and the state of political play in this, one of the world's wealthiest and most influential countries.

—

On May 22, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was calling for a snap election on July 4 of this year, just a half-dozen weeks in the future, surprising many analysts who expected he would wait as long as possible before committing to a date.

That expectation was predicated on the reality of how Sunak's party, the Tories, have been doing in the polls in recent years; pretty abysmally.

Labour has been crushing the Conservatives in these polls, of late; the Tories have been in power since 2010, which means purely by virtue of having been governing that long, a lot of people will tend to blame them for a lot of things, their party having been in charge all that time, but they also catalyzed and oversaw the secession of the UK from the European Union, which is a move that was initially pushed by many on the further right wing of the party, but the populist nature of the movement eventually claimed the majority of Tory politicians who changed their vote to support it, rewiring politics in the UK, similar to how former President Trump rewired the Republican Party in the US—a lot of power changing hands, a lot of previously top people being elbowed aside or pushed into retirement, a lot of new policies ascending to the front-burner, while previous priorities were relegated to the back-burner.

Not quite a decade after the referendum that led to the passage of Brexit, back in mid-2016, polls from from this month, May of 2024, show that 55% of British people think leaving the EU was the wrong choice, while only 31% think it was a smart move.

So while some of the tarnishing of the Tory party's reputation is likely the result of simply having been in power for a long time, and during some really unusual global happenings, like COVID and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, some of it is directly attributable to specific things they've done which turned out not to be very popular, once implemented.

Many of the non-Brexit complaints the majority of British citizens have about how the Tories have governed are related to their austerity policies—the idea that they need to shrink the government and its spending as much as possible, because that will, according to their theories, at least, make the country wealthier, more efficient, and more secure.

This has led to dramatic cutbacks on incredibly popular programs and agencies focused on or related to health, housing, and education, alongside the bankrupting of civil services, the privatization of previously public assets like highways and waste systems, and the concomitant spending—while claiming there's not enough money for healthcare and public services—on pet projects for Conservative lawmakers and their constituents, many of which ended up being money pits.

All parties in all countries are of course periodically staggered by scandals, spending-related and otherwise, but over their long period in control, the Tories have racked up a huge number and a large variety of scandals, and some of them led to very public embarrassments for the party, including the Tories' seeming inability to keep a Prime Minister in office following the Brexit referendum, then-PM David Cameron making way for Theresa May, who handed things over to Boris Johnson, who was ousted and replaced by Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for a record-setting 49 days before resigning and being replaced by current PM Rishi Sunak.

That's five prime ministers in the six years between 2016 and 2022, all of them from the same party, that party seemingly unable to govern with enough popularity to maintain the confidence of parliament.

So the situation right now, following all that, is that Labour has a 17-point lead over the Conservatives and is, and has been for a while, broadly expected to wipe the floor with the Tories in the next election; and a few minor elections leading up to this point seem to support that assumption.

This is why Sunak was expected to delay scheduling the next election as long as possible, because as soon as that election is held, his party is expected to be pushed out of power, and that expectation is leading to an exodus amongst Tory lawmakers, 121 of them stepping down instead of running for reelection as of late-May, surpassing a similar wave of quitting in 1997, when 117 of them declined to run again, leading up to a landslide victory for the Labour Party and their popular leader, Tony Blair.

This isn't an unusual phenomenon: being part of the government is very different from being part of the opposition party, and back in 2010, after Labour had been in control for 13 years, and was expecting to lose in the next election, 149 politicians decided to step down rather than running again—100 of them Labour MPs, and 35 of them Conservatives; that later group ostensibly because while the Tories won, they didn't take a majority, and had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which is also a very different situation from being in a government that has complete control, rather than shared control; some MPs just don't want to deal with that kind of negotiated leadership.

Sunak's reasoning here, then, might be that while things are bad for his party now, they could get even worse if he waits to hold an election; so it's better to act at a moment in which some economic numbers are actually starting to look a little bit better, after a long period of the opposite, and at a moment in which announcing an election would catch his Labour opposition off-guard, possibly providing his party the benefit of surprise and better preparation.

This announcement has led to a scramble, though, for all UK parties, seemingly, to try to get some actual governing done—work they thought they'd have several more weeks to finish up, at least, before going into full campaign-mode, suddenly needing to be accomplished yesterday.

That's meant a lot of important legislation has been dropped or permanently back-burnered, including some of the policies, like a smoking ban, an end-to no-fault evictions, and a plan that would allow the government to ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda, which Sunak had wanted to serve as fundamental elements of his prime ministerial legacy—those have now been completely dropped.

This has led to a situation in which the Tories seem to be scrambling to put new ideas out into the ether—future-facing stuff to replace all the things they had to drop or backtrack on—hoping that something they propose in this way appeals broadly enough to earn them the votes they require to hold their own in the upcoming election; to maybe still lose, but not as much, and in such a way that they're in a good spot when the next election is called.

One such idea is mandatory national service for 18-year-olds, which would require that folks either serve in the military or volunteer for one weekend a month, beginning on their 18th year—a policy that's reportedly meant to compete with a proposal from Labour leader Keir Starmer, that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to vote.

The degree to which any of these new plans will catch the public imagination is up in the air, though,  as again, a lot of what's happening now, in terms of campaigning, is somewhat half-baked, all involved parties scrambling to prepare for what seems to have been a somewhat last-minute decision on Sunak's part to upend expectations about the timing of the next election in order to attain some kind of advantage for his party, which seems to be entering this round with a losing hand.

And all of this is important, of course, if you live in the UK, but it's also important globally, even standing out amongst the many other important elections that are occurring around the world this year, because the UK, even battered and bruised in the aftermath of Brexit and a COVID crisis that it weathered somewhat less-well than its world-leading peers, is still an incredibly powerful, influential, and wealthy entity of global significance.

It has the sixth largest economy in the world, after only the US, China, Japan, Germany, and India.

It's incredibly powerful geopolitically, out of proportion with its population and military strength, in part because of the role it plays within the Commonwealth, a group of 53 nations that the UK previously ruled, and in part because it has long-lived, tight alliances and relationships with governments and other entities that it's been maintaining for centuries, in some cases.

The UK is a nuclear power, and is the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world—though it's especially vital to the global aircraft market, military and non-military.

The UK is home to the second-largest financial center in the world, London, and it's culturally very powerful, exporting all sorts of norms and pop culture and creative products; a sort of soft-power that plays a huge role in beliefs, behaviors, and understandings, worldwide.

Whomever wins this election, then, and how they win, and to what degree they control Parliament, will have a major impact not just on the UK, but on the world, and at a moment in which there are several major military conflicts ongoing, in which new technologies are simultaneously threatening and enlivening entire industries and economies, and in which the global order that has set the tone and guardrails for the world since WWII is being challenged—all variables the UK may influence in substantial ways, and over which the folks running the UK government will thus have outsized sway.

Show Notes

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/23/rishi-sunak-rwanda-smoking-policies-election-conservatives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Records_of_prime_ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c844x1xp05xo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqhvmnb/revision/6

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/more-uk-conservative-lawmakers-set-quit-than-before-1997-election-defeat-2024-05-24/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/labour-finally-has-uk-election-it-craves-but-traps-lie-in-wait

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-23/uk-election-sunak-has-the-weight-of-history-against-him

https://wsj.com/world/uk/british-leader-sunak-calls-snap-election-as-his-party-trails-in-polls-e234bdc0

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/may/25/how-rishi-sunaks-early-election-backfired-on-pm

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-labour-starmer-sunak-tory-gove-b2551518.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/lagging-polls-uk-conservatives-pitch-national-service-18-2024-05-26/

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c288xxvrdz7o

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2jjvpxxgr5o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_government

https://www.gov.uk/government/how-government-works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Search/Registrations?currentPage=1&rows=10&sort=RegulatedEntityName&order=asc&et=pp&et=ppm®ister=gb®ister=ni®ister=none®Status=registered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_Kingdom

This week we talk about Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Hamas.

We also discuss Egypt, the Rafah Crossing, and Netanyahu’s motivations.

Recommended Book: Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Transcript

Israel, as a country, was founded as a consequence of, and in the midst of, a fair bit of conflict and turmoil.

It was formally established in mid-1948 after years of settlement in the area by Jewish people fleeing persecution elsewhere around the world and years of effort to set up a Jewish-majority country somewhere on the planet, that persecution having haunted them for generations in many different parts of the world, and in the wake of widespread revelation about the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis in parts of Europe they conquered and controlled.

Israel finally happened, then, in part because Jewish people had been treated so horribly for so long, and there was finally government-scale support for this effort following that conflict, and the realization of just how monstrous that treatment had become.

The area that was carved out for this new nation, though, was also occupied and claimed by other groups of people.

The British and French controlled it for a while in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, but before that it was ruled by the Ottomans as part of their Syria administrative region and, like the rest of their Empire, it was formerly a Muslim state.

Thus, what serves as a hallowed day worthy of celebration for Israelis, May 14th, Israel's national day, commemorating their declaration of independence, for other people living in the region, that day is referred to as the Nakba, which translates roughly to "the catastrophe," marking a period in which, beginning that year, 1948, about half of Palestine's population of Arabs, something like 700,000-750,000 people either fled of their own volition, or were forced to flee by Jewish paramilitary groups who moved in to clear the locals leading up to the emergence of Israel, at first, and then by the newfound Israeli military, after the formation of the country.

Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, people who didn't flee were massacred, and wells were poisoned to kill stragglers and keep people from returning.

Ultimately, about 80% of the Arab Muslim population in what was formerly British-held Mandatory Palestine, and which was a Muslim region in a Muslim country before that were forced from their homes leading up to or just after Israel's Declaration of Independence.

This, alongside the existing hatred toward Jewish people some regional leaders already had, mostly for religious reasons, sparked the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which was just one of several and frequent full-scale military conflicts between Israel and its neighbors in the early days of its existence, the Israelis mostly on the defensive, and frequently targeted by surprise attacks by many or all of their neighbors simultaneously, even in the earliest days of their national founding.

Israel, in part because of support from international allies, and in part because of its militarized society—that militarization reinforced as a consequence of these conflicts, as well—fairly handedly won every single war against, again, often all, of their Muslim neighbors, simultaneously, though often at great cost, and those victories led to a sequence of expansions of Israel's borders, and humiliations for their neighbors, which further inflamed those existing prejudices and fears.

Israel has controlled the non-Israel territories of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—all of them majority Muslim, and collectively referred to as the Palestinian Territories—since the aftermath of the Six Day war (which was one of those aforementioned, all of their neighbors attacking them all at once conflicts) in 1967.

Israeli settlers have slowly established militarized toeholds in these areas, kicking out and in some cases killing the folks who live on the land they take, which is against international law, but generally allowed by the Israeli government.

And though these areas were governed by the Palestinian Authority beginning in the mid-1990s, the PA lost control of Gaza in 2006, a more militant group called Hamas taking over practical control in the area at that time, ruling through violence and threats of violence, basically, despite the Palestinian Authority continuing to claim they run things there, too.

On October 7, 2023, that more militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, Hamas, launched a sneak attack against Israel, hitting multiple areas along the Israeli border with the Strip, killing at least 1,139 Israelis and taking 252 people captive.

Hamas said this attack was in response to Israel's abuses of Palestinian people, historically and contemporarily, while Israelis generally see this as an unprovoked attack on mostly civilians by a terrorist organization.

What I'd like to talk about today is the conflict that's erupted since that attack in early-October of last year, where it looks to be going next, and some of the repercussions of it, locally and internationally, thus far.

—

In the days following Hamas' attack on Israel, the Israeli military began bombarding targets throughout the Gaza Strip, focusing on Hamas targets—of which there were many—but because of how interwoven these targets were with civilian infrastructure, located in civilian buildings and in extensive tunnels underneath many major cities, that also meant bombarding a lot of areas packed with everyday, non-Hamas civilians.

The Israeli military then started warning folks to leave leading up to a more formal ground invasion,  supplies were cut off, and tens of thousands of people fled south, beyond the range of this impending invasion and the ongoing rocket and artillery barrage, though a lot of non-Hamas people were killed, and a lot of civilian infrastructure was demolished.

Early on, Egypt warned Israel about forcing Palestinians across their shared border, even as aid trucks, which typically entered the country via the Rafah crossing along that border, were backed up for miles—the Israeli government disallowing their entry and the distribution of that aid, saying they didn't want it to support and sustain Hamas.

In late-November, a weeklong ceasefire allowed around 100 Israeli hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners held by Israelis to be freed, and some aid was allowed into Gaza through the Rafah crossing.

In early December, Israeli forces had moved on from Gaza City to the southern city, Khan Younis, where Hamas soldiers and commanders were reportedly hunkering down and controlling events in the Strip.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled south because of Israel's invasion of the north were forced to flee even further south, down to Rafah, which is the southernmost governing region in the Strip, where the city of Rafah, and the Rafah crossing, which connects Egypt to Gaza, are located.

At this point, concerns held by Israel's allies, like the US, began to bubble up to the surface, ultimately voiced in public by the US Defense Secretary, who surreptitiously warned the Israeli military about killing civilians, couching that warning in advice about establishing a lasting, actual victory.

The United Nations, which had already been warning about the civilian catastrophe that was unfolding in the Strip due to the nature of Israel's invasion and bombardment of the region, including all that civilian infrastructure, and all the civilian deaths that were piling up in Israel's pursuit of Hamas, also became more vocal around this time, warning about widespread slaughter and starvation, but also potential regional repercussions if Israel wasn't careful about how it treats Gazan civilians; the idea being that Israel was essentially slaughtering innocent people, even if it claimed it wasn't intending to, and that they were being used as human shields by Hamas, and that could stoke more animosity from its regional neighbors, which in turn could spark a broader conflict.

As part of that campaign, the UN Secretary General invoked Article 99 for the first time since he took office, which led to a ceasefire vote in the Security Council, which failed because the US vetoed an otherwise near-unanimous vote—the UK's abstention the only other non-yes vote on the matter.

By early February of this year, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated that he planned to invade that southernmost border city, Rafah, where a huge number of people already lived, but also where something like a million Palestinian civilians had fled because their homes further north were bombarded, invaded, and in many cases left in ruins—no shelter, no electricity, no water. So around 1.5 million people were trying to survive in a city typically inhabited by maybe a third that number.

Israel's neighbors and other entities throughout the region issued formal statements against a potential invasion of Rafah, citing concerns for the civilians who were now massed there, densely packed into this city, and thus at great risk of harm should bombs start dropping and bullets start flying, and US President Biden, shifting away from a seeming policy of having other folks in his administration condemn and criticize and warn about how the invasion was proceeding, as part of an apparent effort to maintain formal, top-of-the-hierarchy alignment with Israel, said that there shouldn't be any kind of military operation in Rafah until and unless there's a "credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support" for the citizens who were hunkered down there.

But Netanyahu, despite those criticisms and warnings, doubled-down on his ambition to invade the city and take out what he claimed were the final remnants of Hamas' leadership in the Strip, whatever the consequences.

Within days of that statement from Biden, Israel's military launched a raid into Rafah, which freed two Israeli hostages, but resulted in the killing of at least 70 people, dozens of whom were children, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Around this time it was reported, by that same health ministry, that more than 30,000 Palestinians had been confirmed killed in the invasion so far, most of them women and children, though presumably a great many of them Hamas-aligned militants, as well.

And it's generally understood that this is probably an undercount, as it doesn't include those who are tallied as missing but not confirmed killed, and it doesn't include the number of people who have died from non-explosion, non-bullet injuries and conditions, like those who have starved and those who have died for lack of medical treatment.

By March, essentially everyone, except, seemingly, Netanyahu and his main supporters in the government, which at this point is primarily the further-right chunk of the country's parliament, have expressed concern about the consequences of an invasion of Rafah.

And while discussion about this continued, and all sorts of entities, like the EU, encouraged Netanyahu to not attack the city, the Israeli military scaled-up from smaller-scale incursions and attacks, airstrikes on the city becoming a daily occurrence by the latter-half of March, many of those strikes targeting buildings where civilians were sheltering.

Netanyahu announced in early April that there was a planned date for a full-scale invasion on Rafah, not divulging the day, but making this announcement shortly after the US said it wouldn't condone or support such an attack, to which Netanyahu replied that Israel would go it alone, if necessary.

Israeli troops left Khan Younis around this same time, and thousands of Palestinians fled north from Rafah to seek shelter there, worried about an impending attack, but a significant portion of those people returned to Rafah soon after, as Khan Younis and other towns and cities further north, were reduced to rubble and several people died after stumbling upon unexploded bombs and other munitions, so these areas were generally just not safe or habitable.

Egypt gave yet another warning to Israel not to force Palestinian civilians across their shared border in mid-April, saying, basically, the peace the two countries have enjoyed for 45 years was at risk, depending on what they did next. They also surreptitiously began constructing refugee facilities near their shared border around this time, though, just in case.

Talks focused on a potential ceasefire, which were ongoing for months in Cairo, seemed to be on the verge of bearing fruit in early May, the newest version offering a weeks-long ceasefire, plus the release of more Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, in exchange for the removal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and an eventual end of the war.

This looked very likely to happen for about a day, as the agreement was based on wording Israel's negotiators had favored, and the real question was whether Hamas's representatives would agree to it, which they did.

But the wording, indicating that this would be a step toward an end for the war, seems to be what kept it from happening. Netanyahu said ending the war wasn't an option until they'd taken out the last of Hamas's leadership in the area, which would require, he said, invading Rafah.

That same week, the first week of May, Israel ordered Palestinians in the southern portion of Rafah to evacuate via phone massages and leaflets, and Hamas, seemingly in response to that indication of an imminent attack, agreed to an edited ceasefire deal that seemed to give Israel everything it wanted, but Israel's war cabinet said it still wasn't enough.

Airstrikes into Rafah have since picked up, and US officials have confirmed rumors than the US government paused a shipment of bombs meant for Israel, as they were concerned these bombs would be used in Rafah, and this type of bomb would be devastating in such a tight-packed, civilian-populated area.

On May 7, Israeli tanks entered Rafah, took control of the Rafah crossing into Egypt, and sealed the border, preventing the import of all international aid into the Strip.

Since that initial tank incursion, around 800,000 Palestinian civilians have fled Rafah, and are now considered to be internally displaced—still living in the Gaza Strip, but most without homes to return to, their cities and towns, in many cases, completely demolished or otherwise unsafe, living in tents, without shelter, and often without food, clean water, or other necessities of life and security.

Right as some of these civilians have fled back toward more northern portions of the Strip, though, fighting has begun, anew, in several more northern cities, where Israeli's military officials say Hamas is resurgent, and Hamas's military wing continues to claim periodic, often asymmetric victories against the invading Israelis. So it's likely those Hamas forces are indeed attempting to reestablish themselves in these previously invaded, now mostly destroyed, areas, and that they're hiding amongst those who are internally displaced, which of course complicates matters for both the Israeli military, and for all the innocent people who are just trying to find a place that's not actively being bombed or shot-up in the Strip.

As this conflicts wears on in the Strip itself, there have also been substantial consequences for Israel, internationally. Most prominently, perhaps, being the deterioration of its reputation and standing in the international community, and the damage that's been done to its relationships with its neighbors and allies.

Most shocking, to some, has been the slow, careful, but increasingly overt pullback by the United States in its support for Israel.

The US has traditionally been Israel's big, primary ally in the world, showing basically absolute support for anything Israel does. But the Biden administration, though they've been careful to support Israel in almost everything, even to the point that it's hurt the administration's reputation at home, has made statements and criticized Netanyahu's actions, and is slowly beginning to take practical action, as well, mostly in terms of arms shipments so far, but they've hinted they might vote differently in the UN and other bodies, as well, if this goes on for much longer, denying Israel some of the cover it's enjoyed, thus far, within entities like the UN Security Council.

Egypt has made clear, time and time again, that they don't like what's happening and that things will go very sideways between them and Israel if Palestinians are forced to flee across their shared border, en masse, and that could mean worsening relations, but it could also mean some kind of military pushback, as has been the case between the two countries several times in the past.

Israel has been on the verge of several big diplomatic breakthroughs with its neighbors in recent years, especially its wealthy, spendier neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, but also Morocco, Sudan, and the idea was to bring other Arab nations into the fold in the near-future, to basically normalize relationships, stepping back from a long-time war-footing to increase trade, and to send diplomats to each other's countries—normal relations between nations that have traditionally wanted each other dead.

These relationships have become fraught, though, if not completely untenable, as a consequence of this invasion and how it's played out—in large part because of the solidarity these nations have, or at least are having to perform, outwardly, with the Palestinian people and their cause.

In other words, this invasion doesn't just make things more complicated for Israel in the Muslim-majority territories they hold, it's also likely to make things more difficult for them, regionally, as those mutually enriching relationships disappear, and as some of those potential allies maybe become enemies, once more.

Speaking of enemies, this whole situation has in some ways empowered perpetual Israel-antagonist, Iran, which was beginning to feel threatened and excluded by all those new friendships and relationships between Muslim nations and Israel, but which now enjoys more power than it has had in a long time, as the tone has shifted, Israel has shown what Iran can portray as their true, Muslim-hating colors, and the militant proxy groups Iran funds and arms, like Hamas, but also the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have all gained an influx of support, benefactors, and soldiers, because they seem to be fighting the good fight against a colonialist, imperialist, anti-Muslim entity that is stoking support for its own antagonists across the region.

All of this, is shaping events elsewhere, as well.

There's a chance aspects of the US presidential election in November will be shaped by perceptions of how President Biden handled this unwieldy situation, and we've seen sympathy protests and riots and attacks all over the place, with various groups and even whole demographics, especially young people, coming out in support of Palestinians in Gaza.

This conflict has also increased the temperature on existing potential flashpoints, even leading to a direct exchange of missiles, rockets, and drones between Israel and Iran in mid-April. This renewed tension is heightening concerns that something could happen—something that would typically be shrugged off or negotiated away—that could cascade into a Middle East-wide conflict.

As I record this, for instance, it's just been reported that Iran's President and Foreign Minister have died in a helicopter crash on the way back from a meeting with representatives from Azerbaijan.

This crash seems to be the result of bad weather conditions in treacherous, mountainous territory, but any upset to norms, anything that could be perceived as a potential attack—or framed that way by people with something to gain from such chaos—could serve as a spark that ignites a Middle East-wide conflagration. All sorts of things that would generally not be seen through the lens of militarized geopolitics, then, are now being perceived in that way, and that has made the region even more volatile.

There's a lot of pressure on Israel, internationally, to change what they're doing, at this point, but what happens next may be shaped by the country's internal politics.

A centrist member of Israel's war cabinet recently said that Netanyahu had until June 8 to present a plan that would secure the release of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, establish stable governance in the Gaza Strip, and normalize life in Israel and relations with regional neighbors, like Saudi Arabia.

This ultimatum is being seen as an indication that there's widespread disagreement with how Netanyahu is running things from within his own government, and the country's defense minister recently said that the invasion is on "a dangerous course," worrying out loud that the government was attempting to establish military rule in Gaza, which the defense minister sees as untenable and undesirable; so both the governing and military establishments of Israel seem to be unhappy with the state of things and where they seem to be headed, which could put pressure on the government to change course, or to put someone in power who's willing to do so, if Netanyahu doesn't.

By some assessments, Netanyahu is kind of locked into the path he's walking, as he's kept in office by the furthest-right portion of the electorate, which—some portions of it at least—want to push even further and faster to pacify the Palestinian Territories, and maybe even Israel's regional neighbors, than Netanyahu has managed, thus far.

One theory as to why Israel, and perhaps Netanyahu more specifically, are taking this particular path, is that—a bit like the US in the wake of the attacks on 9/11/2001—he's maybe afraid that if Israel doesn't respond with overwhelming, even brutal force after being attacked so brazenly, the country's enemies, of which there have traditionally been many, will see them as weak and vulnerable to such attacks, and they must thus make it very clear that anyone who tries such a thing will be wiped out, no matter the consequences for Israel or anyone else.

It's also been posited that Netanyahu might be attempting to retain his hold on power by keeping the country on a war-footing, or that he might be held hostage, basically, by that further-right portion of the government that holds outsized sway in the country, right now.

Whatever the actual rationale—or whether maybe this is all just being planned in the moment, a series of seeming necessities adding up to a bunch of new problems for Israel, for Palestinians, and for the region—there's a chance that all the external pressure, plus the pressure from portions of his own government, will force Netanyahu's hand on this, nudging him toward finding an offramp from the invasion as it stands today, which will likely take the shape of some kind of negotiated ceasefire, an exchange of hostages and prisoners, and then a series of meetings and agreements that will establish new governance in Gaza.

But it's also possible that this conflict will drag on as Hamas continues to harass Israeli forces, retreating and engaging in partisan warfare in formerly invaded parts of the Strip, resulting in something akin to what the US faced in Afghanistan for years and years, before finally pulling out, the initial arguable success of the post-9/11 invasion lost to the persistent frictions of sustained partisan warfare and a slow depletion of international support and reputation.

Show Notes

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/helicopter-carrying-irans-president-makes-difficult-landing-d51329d7

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-05-19-2024-d6ea9776d293130d52d308abd284556e

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict_in_2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/07/israel-hamas-gaza-war-timeline-anniversary/

https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israeli-palestinian-conflict

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/08/1249657561/rafah-timeline-gaza-israel-hamas-war

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/18/un-says-800000-people-have-fled-rafah-as-israel-kills-dozens-in-gaza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Governorate

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/19/world/iran-president-helicopter-crash

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-netanyahu-gantz.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Palestine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_territories

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war

This week we talk about ENSO, El Niño, and attribution science.

We also discuss climate change, natural disasters, and the trade winds.

Recommended Book: Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Transcript

The field of attribution science, sometimes referred to as "extreme event attribution," focuses on figuring out whether and to what degree a particular weather event—especially rare weather disasters—are attributable to climate change.

Severe floods and tornadoes and hurricanes all happen from time to time, which is why such events are sometimes referred to as once in a decade or once in a century disasters: the right natural variables align in the right way, and you have a disaster that is rare to the point that it's only likely to happen once every 10 or 100 years, but such rare events still happen, and sometimes more frequently than those numbers would imply; they're not impossible. And they're not necessarily the result of climate change.

Folks working in this space, which is a blend of meteorology and the rapidly evolving field of climate science, do their best to figure out what causes what, and how those odds might have been impacted by the shifts we're seeing in global average temperatures in particular, and the knock-on effects of that warming, like shifts in the global water cycle; both of which influence all sorts of other planetary variables.

The most common means of achieving this end is to run simulations based on historical climate data and extrapolating those trend-lines forward, allowing for natural variation, but otherwise sticking with the range of normal fluctuations that would have been expected, had we not started to churn so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere beginning with the industrial revolution.

So if we hadn't done the Industrial Revolution the way we did it, what would our global climate and weather systems look like? They have a bunch of models with different assumptions baked into them that they have running, and they can simulate conditions, today, based on those models, and compare them with the reality of how things actually are in the real world, a world in which we did start to burn fossil fuels at a frantic rate, with all the pros and cons of that decision aggregating into our current climactic circumstances.

This comparison, between a baseline, non-climate-change-impacted Earth, and what we see happening on real Earth, allows us to gauge the different in likelihoods for various weather systems and increasingly even specific weather events, like massive floods or hurricanes.

It also allows us to ascertain what elements of a disaster or system are more or less likely, or the same, compared to that baseline Earth; so maybe we look at a regional heat wave and discover that it was a rare event made more likely by climate change, but that the intensity of the heat wasn't impacted—as was the case with a heat wave in Russia in 2010; climate change made the heat wave more likely, but had such a heat wave occurred, despite its low likelihood, in that non-industrial revolution scenario, the heat would have been roughly the same intensity as it was in real life.

Both components of this system, attributing events and patterns to climate change, and confirming that they were not impacted, that they were just run of the mill bad luck, the consequence of natural systems, are arguably important, as while the former provides data for folks wanting to predict future climate change-related outcomes, and provides some degree of ammunition for the argument that climate change is making these sorts of things worse, which helps put a price tag on not moving faster to shift away from fossil fuels, it's also vital that we understand how climate and weather systems work, in general, and that we are able to set proper expectations as to what will change and how, as the atmosphere's composition continues to change, while also understanding what will remain the same, what various regions around the world need to be prepared for in a vacuum, leaving climate change out of it, and how our global weather systems work on a granular level, so that as outside influences like climate change, but not limited to climate change, act upon them, we can make better predictions about how that will adjust or overhaul the practical reality for people and ecosystems impacted by them.

What I'd like to talk about today is a natural weather phenomenon that is expected to return soon, and how this phenomenon might change our latent, global weather patterns, for the better, for the worse, and for the neutral, and in turn how it might be changed by the climactic adjustments we're tracking using these simulations.

—

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO phenomenon, is the monicker we've given to a collection of sea surface temperature and wind variations in the Pacific Ocean that, largely unpredictably, tweak the patterns of these systems from time to time, influenced by and influencing a large number of other, micro- and macro-scale systems around the world.

Most directly, ENSO dictates how warm it will be across the tropics and subtropics, El Niño bringing warm waters to the surface of the relevant oceans and the Southern Oscillation referring to air pressure variations spanning the ocean between Tahiti and Darwin, Australia, low pressure tending to occur over warm bodies of water, and higher pressure over colder bodies of water.

When the water in this part of the Pacific, the central and east-central equatorial pacific, is warmer, on the surface, that reduces atmospheric pressure thereabouts, which in turn reduces the strength of the Pacific trade winds. That reduction, among other things, decreases rainfall over parts of Australia, India, and Indonesia, while upping the same, while also stoking additional cyclone risk, in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

Fundamental to understanding why this is a big deal is understanding that this tweak in water and atmospheric conditions causes low level surface trade winds, which usually blow from east to west, to either stop blowing or barely blow, or in some cases to reverse direction.

If you think about how weather patterns form, determining everything from who gets rain and how much, to what temperatures are like in a given area—because those winds pull warm or cold air along with them as they pass over warmer or cooler parts of the planet, like mountains and glaciers, but also deserts and tropical rain forests—it becomes clear why this change-up is such a big deal.

There's a neutral phase of this phenomenon that typically occur between warmer and colder phases, and during that neutral phase, we usually see other, similar systems that are interconnected and predicated on still other geographic and atmospheric variables, like the Pacific-North American teleconnection pattern, and the North Atlantic Oscillation, having more of an impact on global weather and water cycle patterns.

When this system is in a warmer El Niño state, though, that tends to cause a lot of heat waves throughout tropical regions in particular, while also spiking global surface temperatures for around a year, with all the secondary consequences of suddenly jolting the global thermostat higher: melting glaciers and ice caps, increasing the range of disease-carrying pests, messing with planting seasons; things like that.

The opposite side of this coin, La Niña, can also be quite disruptive though, its influence defined by cooler waters rising to the surface in that part of the Pacific, warmer waters headed westward where they have less influence on this component of the world's thermostat and weather machine, and that drop in water temperature in this part of the ocean tends to reset many of the dials that are turned up by El Niño, moderating some of the weather patterns that are amplified by those warmer waters and returning the trade winds to their normal settings, while also reducing global temperatures to what we might think of as their default.

But the next La Niña phenomenon—which experts in this space say will likely arrive sometime in the next few months, June or July of 2024, marking a quick transition away from the record-setting El Niño system we've been living through since July of 2023, which has been designated the fourth most extreme in recorded history—this anticipated new La Niña setup will follow a truly intense opposite pattern, which means if it's not strong enough, it may not counteract all of the warming brought about by its precursor El Niño system, which means the next El Niño system could compound upon this outgoing one, in terms of its globe-heating effects.

There are also concerns that, because of that strong El Niño, and it arriving at a period of human-caused warming—two forces raising the temperature on the thermostat simultaneously, basically—there's a chance that the moderating force of this La Niña might run up against an insurmountable variable adjustment, even if it is otherwise powerful enough; meaning, this ENSO phenomenon could contribute to a long term, even permanent increase in global temperatures because its warming effects are mirroring another, external warming effect caused by us and our greenhouse gas emissions.

We don't know exactly what that would mean in practice and long-term, but it could lead to more. and more extreme versions of what we've seen this past year: namely a surge in weather disasters like extreme droughts and floods and wildfires that never really end; just bigger and bigger surges, combined with higher and higher temperatures.

And again, that's possible even if the La Niña pattern that's set to arrive is of a normal, non-weak strength, because of how potent this outgoing El Niño has been, and because its effects may be compounded by climate change.

If the new La Niña does prove potent enough to counteract this outgoing El Niño, that may help with short-term temperature changes, but we're then likely to see a substantially more severe hurricane season; which is normally what happens during these periods of change, La Niña conditions making hurricanes more likely, but it could be even more severe than usual because of lingering oceanic heat from the El Niño, which popped temperatures in the Atlantic to 2 degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average temperature from the past three decades—and oceanic heat is what powers hurricanes, informing how big and destructive they can become.

Last year's Atlantic Ocean hurricane season was already above-average in terms of the number of hurricanes and their strength because of that heat, but the amalgamation of variable-tweaks inherent in a La Niña transition make hurricanes more likely, whatever the ocean's temperature, so the combination of, likely, more hurricanes, plus far warmer than usual oceanic temperatures, means more, but also potentially a lot more powerful, hurricanes this season.

We've been watching these systems and transitions for a while now, and our science related to them—including our ability to predict what they're going to do, and how much—has gotten pretty good over the last few decades.

But all of these systems and all of their variables are interconnected, each and every piece touching each and every other piece of the planet's cycles and ecosystems and compositions; so there's a lot we're not tracking, a lot we're not tracking with the resolution we'd need for it to be valuable in this regard, and a lot of entanglements and relationships we're not even aware of, yet.

In particular, the impact that climate change is having on these systems, directly and indirectly, is a big question mark in all these computations.

Yes, we understand all of this better than a few decades ago, and yes, our simulations and models have gotten pretty solid, and are getting better by the day as we develop better formulae and software, and deploy more fancy satellites and other tracking tools that allow us to keep tabs on the relevant variables in an up-to-the-second manner.

But because of how complex all of this is, it's a truly chaotic jumble of systems, and because of how we're scrambling to play catch-up, the world changing around us faster than we're learning about those changes—these sorts of systems are evolving even as we come to understand how they work; so our most up to date information is always a little bit out of date, leaving us prone to new unknowns and larger shifts than we'd anticipated based on our existing data.

Human-amplified climate change, then, is fiddling with all the knobs and switches, changing how these phenomena work right before our eyes, and each new system and cycle is part known, part complete surprise because of how even tiny changes can make huge differences when compounded by these spirals and cascades of cause and large-scale, multifaceted effect.

In other words, we have a good sense of what we need to be worried about and watching for during this probable upcoming transition, and we maybe have some things to look forward to, alongside a few other things to worry about and prepare for.

We'll also be watching to see how much global temperatures come down, as that will tell us to what degree this outgoing El Niño has been tweaking those temperatures, and to what degree climate change is to blame for the disconcerting numbers we've been seeing in this regard.

But we'll also be watching to see how everything is being amplified and compounded by all of these interconnected effects, as it may be, still allowing for ups and downs and other variations year to year, that these patterns, and others like them, will lead to wider, broader, more dramatic swings for the foreseeable future because of all those changes, natural and human-caused.

Show Notes

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/el-nino-end-by-june-la-nina-seen-second-half-2024-says-us-forecaster-2024-05-09/

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/09/el-nino-la-nina-hurricane-season

https://www.vox.com/climate/24145756/la-nina-2024-el-nino-heat-hurricane-record-temperature-pacific

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html

https://theconversation.com/la-nina-is-coming-raising-the-chances-of-a-dangerous-atlantic-hurricane-season-an-atmospheric-scientist-explains-this-climate-phenomenon-228595

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_event_attribution

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-can-climate-change-affect-natural-disasters

https://archive.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-1-2.html

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47583

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-can-now-blame-individual-natural-disasters-on-climate-change/

https://www.vox.com/climate/2024/2/28/24085691/atlantic-ocean-warming-climate-change-hurricanes-coral-reefs-bleaching

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932023_La_Ni%C3%B1a_event

https://theconversation.com/is-climate-change-to-blame-for-extreme-weather-events-attribution-science-says-yes-for-some-heres-how-it-works-164941

This week we talk about APT28, spoofing, and hybrid warfare.

We also discuss the Baltics, Tartu airport, and hacking.

Recommended Book: The Middle Passage by James Hollis

Transcript

In early May of 2024, the German government formally blamed a Russian hacking group called APT28 for hacking members of the governing German Social Democratic Party in 2023, and warned of unnamed consequences.

Those consequences may apply just to APT28, which is also sometimes called "Fancy Bear," or they may apply to the Russian government, as like many Russia-based hacking groups, APT28 often operates hand-in-glove with the Russian military intelligence service, which allows the Russian government to deny involvement in all sorts of attacks on all sorts of targets, while covertly funding and directing the actions of these groups.

APT28 reportedly also launched attacks against German defense, aerospace, and information technology companies, alongside other business entities and agencies involved, even tangentially, with Ukraine and its defense measures against Russia's invasion.

This hacking effort allegedly began in early 2022, shortly after Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the head of the Russian embassy in Germany has been summoned to account for these accusations—though based on prior attacks and allegations related to them by Russia's intelligence agencies, and the hacking groups it uses as proxies, that summoning is unlikely to result in anything beyond a demonstration of anger on the part of the German government, formally registered with Russia's representative in Berlin.

For its part, Russia's government has said that it was in no way involved in any incidents of the kind the German government describes, though Germany's government seems pretty confident in their assessment on this, at this point, having waited a fair while to make this accusation, and utilizing its partnerships with the US, UK, Canada, and New Zealand to confirm attribution.

This accusation has been leveled amidst of wave of similar attacks, also allegedly by Russia and its proxies, against other targets in the EU and NATO—including but not limited to the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden.

Many of these attacks have apparently made use of an at-the-time unknown security flaw in Microsoft software that gave them access to compromised email accounts for long periods of time, allowing them to, among other things, scoop up intelligence reports from folks in the know in these countries, sifting their messages for data that would help Russia's forces in Ukraine.

This group, and other Russia GRU, their intelligence service, proxies, have reportedly targeted government and critical infrastructure targets in at least 10 NATO countries since the fourth quarter of 2023, alone, according to analysis by Palo Alto Networks, and experts in this space have said they're concerned these sorts of attacks, while often oriented toward intelligence-gleaning and at times embarrassing their targets, may also be part of a larger effort to weaken and even hobble intelligence, military, and critical infrastructure networks in regional nations, which could, over time, reduce stability in these countries, increase extremism, and possibly prevent them from defending themselves and their neighbors in the event of a more formal attack by Russian forces.

What I'd like to talk about today is another sort of attack, allegedly also launched by Russia against their neighbors in this part of the world, but this one a little less well-reported-upon, at this point, despite it potentially being even more broadly impactful.

—

The Global Positioning System, or GPS, was originally developed in 1973 by the US Department of Defense. Its first satellite was launched in 1978, and its initial, complete constellation of 24 satellites were in orbit and functional in 1993.

This satellite network's full functionality was only available to the US military until 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton announced that it would be opened up for civilian use, as well.

This allowed aviation and similar industries to start using it on the vehicles and other assets, and normal, everyday people were thenceforth able to buy devices that tapped this network to help them figure out where they were in the world, and get to and from wherever they wanted to go.

A high-level explanation of how GPS works is that all of these satellites contain atomic clocks that are incredibly stable and which remain synchronized with each other, all showing the exact same, very precise time. These satellites broadcast signals that indicate what time their clocks currently read.

GPS devices, as long as they can connect to the signals broadcast by a few of these satellites, can figure out where they're located by noting the tiny differences in the time between these broadcasts: signals from satellites that are further away will take longer to arrive, and that time difference will be noted by a given device, which then allows it to triangulate a geolocation based on the distance between the device and those several satellites.

This is a simple concept that has created in a world in which most personal electronic devices now contain the right hardware and software to tap these satellite signals, compute these distances, and casually place us—via our smartphones, cars, computers, watches, etc—on the world map, in a highly accurate fashion.

This type of technology has proven to be so useful that even before it was made available for civilian use, catalyzing the world that we live in today, other governments were already investing in their own satellite networks, most predicated on the same general concept; they wanted to own their own constellation of satellites and technologies, though, just in case, because the GPS network could theoretically be locked down by the US government at some point, and because they wanted to make sure they had their own militarizable version of the tech, should they need it.

There are also flaws in the US GPS system that make it less ideal for some use-cases and in some parts of the world, so some GPS copycats fill in the blanks on some of those flaws, while others operate better at some latitudes than vanilla GPS does.

All of which brings us to recent troubles that the global aviation industry has had in some parts of the world, related to their flight tracking systems.

Most modern aircraft use some kind of global navigation satellite system, which includes GPS, but also Europe's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's BeiDou, among other competitors.

These signals can sometimes be interrupted or made fuzzy by natural phenomena, like solar flares and the weather, and all of these systems have their own peculiarities and flaws, and sometimes the hardware systems they use to lock onto these signals, or the software they use to compute a location based on them, will go haywire for normal, tech-misbehaving reasons.

Beginning in the 1990s, though, we began to see electronic countermeasures oriented toward messing with these global navigation satellite system technologies.

These technologies, often called satellite navigation deceivers, are used by pretty much every government on the planet, alongside a slew of nongovernment actors that engage in military or terrorist activities, and they operate using a variety of jamming methods, but most common is basically throwing out a bunch of signals that look like GPS or other navigation system signals, and this has the practical effect of rendering these gadgets unusable, because they don't know which signal is legit and which is garbage; a bit like blasting loud noises to keep people from talking to each other, messing with their communication capacity.

It's also possible to engage in what's called GPS Spoofing, which means instead of throwing out gobs of garbage signals, you actually send just a few signals that are intended to look legit and to be accepted by, for instance, a plane's GPS device, which then makes the aircraft's navigation systems think the plane is somewhere other than it is—maybe just a little off, maybe on the other side of the planet.

Notably, neither of these sorts of attacks are actually that hard to pull off anymore, and it's possible to build a GPS-jamming device at home, if you really want to, though spoofing is a fair bit more difficult. 

Also worth knowing is that while making your own jammer is absolutely frowned upon by most governments, and it's actually illegal in the US and UK, across most of the world it's kind of a Wild West in this regard, and you can generally get away with making one if you want to, though there's a chance you'd still be arrested if you caused any real trouble with it.

And it is possible to cause trouble with these things: most pilots and crew are aware of how these devices work and can watch for their effects, using backup tools to keep tabs on their locations when they need to; but using those backup tools requires a lot more effort and attention, and there's a chance that if they're hit by these issues at a bad moment, when they're distracted by other things, or when they're coming in for a landing or attempting to navigate safely around another aircraft, that could present a dangerous situation.

That's why, until May 31, at the minimum, Finnair will no longer be flying to Tartu airport—which is a very small airport in Estonia, but it's home to the Baltic Defense College, which is one of NATO's educational hubs, and losing a daily flight to Tartu (the only daily flight at this particular airport) from Helsinki, will disconnect this area, via plane, at least, from the rest of Europe, which is inconvenient and embarrassing.

This daily flight was cancelled because of ongoing disruptions to the airport's GPS system, which was previously an on-and-off sort of thing, but which, since 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has become a lot worse. And Tartu relies exclusively on GPS for planes landing at the airport, and thus doesn't have another fallback system, if GPS fails at a vital, dangerous moment.

This is a running theme throughout the Baltic region, an area populated by now-democratic NATO members that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and which are considered to be at risk of a Russian invasion or other sort of attack if the invasion of Ukraine goes Russia's way.

Almost all aircraft flying through this area have experienced GPS-jamming issues since 2022, and though that Finnair flight is the only one to have been cancelled as a result of all this jamming, so far, there are concerns that this could really scramble travel and shipping in the region, as it's making all flying in the area that much more risky on a continuous basis.

Finland's government is framing this jamming as part of a hybrid warfare effort on Russia's part—alongside other hybrid efforts, like bussing migrants to Finland's borders in order to strain national coffers and nudge politics toward reactionary extremes.

Some other nations are thinking along the same lines, though there's a chance that, rather than this jamming representing an intentional assault on these neighboring nations, it may actually be something closer to overflow from other, nearby jamming activities: Russia jamming GPS signals in Ukraine, for instance, or the governance of the Kaliningrad region, which is a Russian enclave separated from the rest of Russia and surrounded by Poland and Lithuania, engaging in their own, localized jamming, and those signals are then picked up across national borders, because that's how these signals work—just like sound can travel further than you might intend.

It's possible we're seeing a bit of both here, overflow from that huge regional conflict, but also intentional jabs meant to make life more difficult for NATO nations, stressing their systems and costing them money and other resources, while also maybe testing the region's capacity to cope with such GPS disruptions and blackouts in the event of a potential future conflict.

Another point worth making here, though, is that we see a lot of this sort of behavior in conflict zones, globally.

FlightRadar24 recently introduced a live GPS jamming map to keep track of this sort of thing, and as of the day I'm recording this, alongside these consistent irregularities in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and parts of Eastern Europe, there's jamming occurring in the Middle East, near Israel, throughout Turkey, which has ongoing conflicts with insurgents in the afflicted areas, a portion of Moldova that is attempting to break away with the support of Russia, similar to what happened in Ukraine back in 2014, a northern portion of India where the Indian government has an ongoing conflict with separatists, and in Myanmar, where the military government is embroiled in fighting with a variety of groups that have unified to overthrow them.

This has become common in conflict zones over the past few decades, then, as those who want to deny this data, and the capabilities it grants, to their enemies tend to blanket the relevant airwaves with disruptive noise or incorrect location information, rendering the GPS and similar networks less useful or entirely useless thereabouts.

In Ukraine, the military has already worked out ways around this noise and false information, incorporating alternative navigation systems into their infrastructure, allowing them to use whichever one is the most accurate at any given moment.

And it's likely, especially if this dynamic continues, which it probably will, as again, this is a fairly easy thing to accomplish, it's likely that spreading out and becoming less reliant on just one navigation system will probably become more common, or possibly even the de facto setup, which will be beneficial in the sense that each of these systems has its own pros and cons, but perhaps less so in that more satellites will be necessary to keep that larger, multi-model network operating at full capacity, and that'll make it more expensive to operate these systems, while also creating more opportunities for satellite collisions up in the relevant orbit—an orbit that's becoming increasingly crowded, and which is already packed with an abundance of no longer operational craft that must be avoided and operated-around.

Show Notes

https://www.dw.com/en/gps-jamming-in-the-baltic-region-is-russia-responsible/a-68993942

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cne900k4wvjo

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2024/04/30/who-is-jamming-airliners-gps-in-the-baltic

https://www.ft.com/content/37776b16-0b92-4a23-9f90-199d45d955c3

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/what-is-gps-jamming-why-it-is-problem-aviation-2024-04-30/

https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect-of-russian-military-activity-finnish-transport-agency-says/

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/gps-jamming

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/types-of-gps-jamming/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviaconversiya

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-hackers-targeted-nato-eastern-european-militaries-google-2022-03-30/

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/russian-hackers-nato-forces-diplomats/index.html

https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/russian-cyber-attacks-targeted-defence-aerospace-sectors-berlin-says-2024-05-03/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/3/germany-accuses-russia-of-intolerable-cyberattack-warns-of-consequences

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear

This week we talk about Huawei, DJI, and ByteDance.

We also discuss 5G infrastructure, black-box algorithms, and Congressional bundles.

Recommended Book: The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Note: my new book, How To Turn 39, is now available as an ebook, audiobook, and paperback wherever you get your books :)

Transcript

In January of 2024, Chinese tech giant Huawei brought an end to its years-long US lobbying effort, meant to help mend fences with western politicians.

In mid-2019, then US President Trump had blacklisted the company using an executive order that, in practice, prevented Chinese telecommunications companies from selling specialized equipment in the US, as part of a larger effort to clamp-down on the sale of Chinese 5g and similar infrastructure throughout the US.

Around the same time, a Huawei executive was jailed in Canada for allegedly violating sanctions on Iran, and several other western nations were making noises about their own bans, worrying—as Trump's administration said they were worried—that Huawei and similar Chinese tech companies would sell their goods at a loss or at cost, significantly undercutting their foreign competition, and as a consequence would both lock down the burgeoning 5g market, including all the infrastructure that was in the process of being invested in and deployed, while also giving the Chinese government a tool that could allow them to tap all the communications running through this hardware, and potentially even allow them to shut it all down, if they wanted, at some point in the future—if China invaded Taiwan and wanted to keep the West from getting involved, for instance.

So while part of this ban on Huawei—for which the President made use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and declared a national emergency—was undoubtedly political (part of the trade war Trump started as part of the "China is the enemy" platform he was running on leading up to the 2020 election), there were also real-deal concern about China insinuating itself into the world's infrastructure, beginning with the rollout of the next phase of communications technologies; making themselves indispensable, disallowing foreign competition, and yes, possibly even creating a bunch of backdoors they could use at some point in the future to tip the scales in their favor during a conflict.

This ban also ensured that Huawei's then quite popular line of smartphones wouldn't be available in the US, or many other Western countries. The company sold off its Honor brand of phones in a scramble to try to protect that line of products from these new blocks on its offerings, which among other things disallowed them from accessing the chips necessary to make competitive smartphone products, but the legislation just kept coming after that initial salvo, the US Federal Communications Commission banning the sale or import of anything made by Huawei in late-2022, and a bunch of fundamental US allies, especially those with which the US collaborates on military and intelligence matters, have likewise banned Huawei products on their shelves and in their communications networks; the idea being that even one Huawei transmitter or modem could tap into the whole of these networks—at least in theory—which is considered a big enough security concern to justify that blanket ban.

Huawei has managed to survive, though it didn't scale the way its owners seemed to think it would back before all these bans.

Now it exists as a primarily regional outfit, still making billions in revenue each year, though down to about half the revenue it was earning before 2019.

Another popular Chinese tech company, DJI, is now scrambling to deploy its lobbyists and circle the wagons, as there's word that it's on a shortlist of potential Chinese security threats, in this case because the company makes very popular consumer and professional grade drones, which have successfully outcompeted many western brands of the same, and which have thus started to dominate aspects of the drone market.

These drones tend to be of the six or eight mini-propeller variety, the kind that people fly for fun, or use to shoot aerial photos, but the success of drones, even of this kind of drone, in Ukraine, reworked to spy on enemy fortifications or to carry explosives, has had the US Defense Department thinking it might not be the best idea to allow a Chinese company to own a substantial chunk of the US and international drone market—for many of the same reasons that Huawei was considered to be a threat; because that would allow China to continue to take out international rivals, allegedly by stealing their competitor's tech back in the day, and by continuing to back their companies with government support and funding, which makes fair and level competition a bit of an impossibility.

These companies are doing well for many reasons, then, and some of those reasons are not replicable outside the tight relationship the Chinese government has with its corporate entities.

If DJI is ultimately targeted in this way, it would likely be via a similar mechanism as the ban that was slapped on Huawei: new drones made by DJI would be unable to use the US's communications infrastructure, which would make their continued functionality in the country all but impossible.

This wouldn't ban DJI drones that are already owned by folks in the US, and it's anyone's guess as to how likely this will be to pass, as a bill to this end is currently working its way through the House, but DJI is lobbying heavily, is more common and popular in the US than Huawei was, and there's a chance that it simply won't be worth the potential political consequences for those who vote to ban it, if the bill works its way further through the process.

What I'd like to talk about today is another potential ban of a popular Chinese product, TikTok, and how such a ban might play out.

—

Back in 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was looking into banning TikTok, a popular vertical video-focused social network that operates a bit like a cross between Instagram and YouTube, and which was becoming especially influential with young people, so-called Gen Zers.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, and ByteDance has a version of the same app in other countries, including China, which there is called Douyin.

That same year, TikTok hit back against the Trump administration with a legal challenge that said, in essence, the President was just trying to score political points by passing protectionist laws in the lead-up to the election, and that it might have also been revenge because there were young people on the platform posting videos about a prank they instigated at a Trump rally, which seemed to irk the former President.

Around this same time, TikTok higher ups began working on what became known as Project Texas, which was meant to help address one of the government's concerns and complaints, that data and media shared on TikTok was sent to Chinese servers, which suggested all that information could be more easily siphoned off and used by the Chinese government.

This project resulted in a re-working of how data on the platform is handled, bringing in US tech company Oracle to keep tabs on everything, ensuring that this data is safely managed and not sent somewhere the Chinese government can easily get it.

A former employee of TikTok alleged in early 2023 that this Project didn't do what it was supposed to do, and TikTok's leadership said that this employee left before it was fully implemented; other involved people have spoken about their own takes on the matter since then, some of them saying the company is locked down tight because of all the oversight it's receiving, while others have said it makes big security claims, but is still not locked down the way it needs to be.

This concern is the result of a law in China that says, basically, if the government tells you to hand something over, you do, or you can be stripped of all your wealth, can be put in prison, can even be killed.

So ByteDance's leadership's claims that they have not handed this sort of data over to the Chinese government, and wouldn't do so if they were asked, can't be trusted, according to arguments against their claims, because they would of course lie about this if they had handed it over, and may not even be legally allowed to admit to so doing, but they also wouldn't really have a choice if they were asked—they would legally, in China, have to do so.

That's the big argument and concern on the US security side of things: the Chinese system works different than the system in many other countries, and because of how integrated and entwined their government is with their market, every single Chinese company, like ByteDance, like Huawei, like DJI, should be considered a wing of the Chinese military, because in practice, they are.

Thus, as soon as these concerns about TikTok started to hit the mainstream consciousness, we started to see those federal efforts to do something about it—most of which were initially unsuccessful, except for that Project Texas effort, about which no one seems to be able to say with any certainty whether it was successful or not.

At the state level, we also saw a bunch of bans on having the TikTok app on corporate and government devices, and in some places, like Florida and Montana and Indiana, we've also see bans on Chinese individuals and Chinese companies acquiring land, working on some types of research, setting up factories, and other such things.

All of which sets the stage for a piece of legislation that was passed by the US Congress earlier this month, and then signed by President Biden, saying that ByteDance needs to divest itself of TikTok, and soon, otherwise TikTok will be banned in the US.

The specifics are important here: first is that this legislation was passed as part of a bundle with legislation that also provided funding for Ukraine, Israel and Palestinians, and Taiwan—so this is generally being seen as a sweetener to some further-right Republicans who otherwise would have opposed those funding efforts, and it may not have been passed if it hadn't been thus bundled.

Second is that this isn't a TikTok ban, in the sense that Biden signed it and now TikTok is banned in the US. Instead, it says, basically, TikTok can keep operating in the US, but it can't be owned by a Chinese company, which again, if the Chinese government asks them to do spy or military stuff on their behalf, they would legally have to do. So the idea is that TikTok itself isn't the problem, it's those ties to the Chinese government and intelligence and military apparatus.

Third is that the company now has nine months to figure out a deal to sell the whole or part of TikTok to some more acceptable—which in this case means non-Chinese-government-entangled—owner, and the President has the option of extending that to a full year, if it looks like a deal is about to be done, but needs a little more time.

That's up from a previously proposed six months, and is considered to be more realistic, given the scope and scale of the company in question.

And that scope and scale is point number four: TikTok is huge. It's an absolutely behemoth company, with about 170 million users in the US, alone, and about $16 billion in revenue each year.

That's still nowhere near Meta's $134.9 billion of annual revenue, but it's still a colossal company that's generally considered to be worth more than $100 billion, again, for the US assets alone—though if the company were to sell everything but the algorithm it uses to decide what videos to show its users, it's though that price could drop to closer to $20 billion; which is still substantial enough that there wouldn't be many people or entities capable of affording it, and some of the big, well-moneyed US tech players, like Meta and Google, would be unlikely to even try, as their offer would probably be held up by antitrust concerns within the current, fairly hardcore regulatory environment.

So ByteDance is being told to sell their US assets within a year, max, and they may have to find a buyer willing to spend tens of billions of dollars for it, and that buyer would have to be acceptable to the same US government that is telling the existing owner it has to sell or be banned in the country.

Analysts are mixed on whether this is a bluff or not, but at the moment, ByteDance's leadership is saying, in essence, no—we're not going to play this game, we would rather shut down the US version of TikTok than sell those assets.

Part of the rationale here might be that the Chinese government is telling ByteDance's owners that they're not allowed to sell these assets; it could be a requirement they're dressing up as staunch resilience to save face, basically.

It could also be that they did the math and realized that their US offerings, despite being worth billions, are nowhere near their most profitable assets—those are in China—and they'd rather double-down on that larger market and other foreign markets than sell off something valuable in the US, which could then be used to challenge them in some of those remaining markets.

It could also be that they're holding out for a good deal, or delaying, hoping that denying even the possibility of a sale will help their case in court.

And they do, by some estimations at least, have a pretty solid case to lean on.

Some legal experts are saying their First Amendment rights are being violated, and in a 1965 Supreme Court case, Lamont v. Postmaster General, the court ruled that foreign-produced propaganda—in that case communist propaganda—could still be distributed through the postal service because Americans have a first amendment right to receive it, even if they didn't specifically request it.

This is considered to be relevant, here, because one of the arguments against TikTok by the US government is that the Chinese government could adjust what they show people, favoring content that supports positions and views of the world they like, over time adjusting the opinions and facts or pseudo-facts young people in particular are working from—which over time could also influence what they believe, how they vote, and so on. 

There have already been claims that TikTok favors pro-Palestinian content over pro-Israeli content, for instance, and it has long suppressed work that talks about the Tiananmen Square massacre and other things the Chinese government doesn't like; it doesn't generally fully disappear this stuff from the platform, but the algorithms show that sort of content to few people, which has a similar effect to deleting it on an app where people primarily discover things based on what they're shown by that algorithm.

Of course, Facebook and Twitter and other networks have been accused of the same, in Meta's case downplaying news and political content, and in Twitter's, recently, post transition to X, favoring more conservative posts over more liberal ones—though in both cases, and in TikTok's, too, it's difficult to prove this sort of thing, and the algorithms are often black boxes rather than open code we can look at and judge objectively; so some such claims may be based on anecdote and the complainer's own bias.

And it's worth mentioning here that although the Chinese government, TikTok's leadership, and a slew of free speech rights groups have come down on TikTok's side, citing the US's First Amendment and the support it would seemingly have for the popular app and those who want to use it to exercise their speech—and for the company to exercise its own, as well, sharing stuff those people watch—China has regularly banned US social networks from its highly controlled and censored portion of the internet, clamping down on those that survive so hard that they don't have much control, their data highly secured and allegedly tapped within China.

So China is saying the US is in the wrong for doing something similar to what it does back home, though on a much smaller and more focused scale, and one of the counterarguments being made by some folks in the US, including some who are typically free speech proponents, is—well, tit-for-tat. Countries that remain open for US social networks will have their networks welcomed in the US in the same way, but those who don't? Their futures are less clear, because why should the US allow that kind of potential security and influence risk when the other side refuses to do the same?

There's a question here, then, of what the modern, splintered internet is and how it should be treated—perhaps especially in free speech-favoring, democratic societies—now that we've moved past the veneer of free and open online activity everywhere.

That's never been the case in China, and in many other countries around the world, so the idea that the US and Europe and similar nations need to behave as if it's equally open and free everywhere seems a little outmoded, and some such entities, like the EU, have been regulating based on that reality, while the US has been slow to do the same; this could mark a moment in which the US starts thinking along these same terms, or it could be another instance of maintaining the previous paradigm, because that tends to be easier, and because the relevant laws haven't been updated, yet.

There's also the question of how expansive this particular bill will end up being.

Does it apply to ByteDance's other apps, as well, including the popular CapCut video editing app, and its existing Instagram-dupe Lemon8, and potential future Instagram-clone TikTok Notes?

Further, does it apply to other Chinese-owned apps, and other apps owned by companies in, for instance, Russia and other current and future antagonistic states?

Also, to what degree will the law allow friendly nation states, like Japan and European nations, to scoop up these sorts of assets and operate them in the States, in a way China would no longer be allowed, when there's the chance that some of them—Hungary, for instance—might not always be so friendly? How does the friendly or unfriendly judgement get made, and what sort of process is involved in changing a nation's label from one to the other?

Right now, the framing of all this is mostly whether we prioritize free speech or national security, and it's arguably the government's responsibility to make that argument, or face the electoral consequences of seemingly behaving in anti-speech ways without any real purpose, beyond potentially empowering US-based social platforms over foreign versions of the same.

And lacking a stronger argument and more public evidence, there's a decent change a lot of people, especially young people will be irked at a TikTok ban, or even the possibility of one, despite the supposed security threat it poses.

All of which suggests this will be an interesting year, as the clock ticks downward on those 9 months, plus another 3, possibly, that ByteDance has to sell its US assets, during which several companies will probably arise, stating their case for scooping up the most popular social platform, with young people at least, in the country, and during which ByteDance's lawyers will be filing cases on their employers' behalf.

And this will all go down as the country winds its way toward the November election, which features two presidents that have spoken out against the app, while also having used it for their own political gains, to try to reach the youths of the country, who will play a major role in this upcoming election, but also a lot of elections after that, well into the future.

Show Notes

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/301/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/states-take-on-china-in-the-name-of-national-security-7ed05257

https://apnews.com/article/us-china-blinken-wang-yi-8c1c453df3afbd6ec87ced0c8d618064

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/24/24139036/biden-signs-tiktok-ban-bill-divest-foreign-aid-package

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-sets-tiktok-ultimatum-over-addictive-new-app-feature/a-68891902

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/business/tiktok-india-ban.html

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-divestment-ban-what-you-need-to-know-5e1ff786e89da10a1b799241ae025406

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-bytedance-lawsuit-biden-386e6d81e2eef61a756bcdea96cd0aef

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/16/tiktok-ban-divest-ownership-china

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/five-observations-on-the-tiktok-bill-and-the-first-amendment

https://archive.ph/7Fikn

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-bytedance-lawsuit-biden-386e6d81e2eef61a756bcdea96cd0aef

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/25/tiktok-legal-battle-is-certain/

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/18/business/media/tiktok-ban-american-culture.html

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/02/22/how-u-s-adults-use-tiktok/

https://www.ypulse.com/article/2023/06/05/gen-z-is-officially-using-tiktok-more-than-any-other-social-media-platform/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/technology/bytedance-tiktok-ban-bill.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/25/tech/who-could-buy-tiktok/index.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/tiktok-ban-bill-why-congress-when-takes-effect-rcna148981

https://www.wsj.com/tech/bytedance-says-it-wont-sell-u-s-tiktok-business-61f43079

https://www.wsj.com/tech/why-china-is-holding-its-fire-as-u-s-moves-to-ban-tiktok-38a63cdd

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/11/24127579/tiktok-ai-virtual-influencers-advertising

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/project-texas-the-details-of-tiktok-s-plan-to-remain-operational-in-the-united-states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok#Project_Texas

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/business/china-tiktok-douyin.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c289n8m4j19o

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/27/will-a-tiktok-ban-impact-creator-economy-startups-not-really-founders-say/

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/25/tiktok-ban-bill-us-communities/

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-tiktok-lost-the-war-in-washington-bbc419cc

https://archive.ph/pnMEG

https://www.theverge.com/24141539/tiktok-ban-bytedance-china-dc-circuit-supreme-court

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/23/tiktok-ban-bytedance-apps-capcut-lemon8

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/us/politics/us-china-drones-dji.html

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/05/huawei_ditches_us_lobbying_team/

https://engadget.com/huawei-honor-sold-024435704.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/15/trump-ban-huawei-us-1042046

This week we talk about STELLARWIND, 9/11, and the NSA.

We also discuss warrantless surveillance, intelligence agencies, and FISA.

Recommended Book: Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy

Transcript

Immediately after the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, then President George W. Bush gave his approval for the National Security Agency, the NSA, to run a portfolio of significant and ever-evolving cross-agency efforts aimed at preventing future attacks of that kind, scale, and scope.

The thinking behind this collection of authorizations to various US intelligence agencies, which would operate in tandem with the NSA, was that we somehow didn't see this well-orchestrated, complex plan coming, and though revelations in later years suggested we kind of did, we just didn't act on the intelligence we had, in those early, post-attack days, everyone at the top was scrambling to reassure the country that things would be okay, while also worrying that more attacks from someone, somewhere, might be impending.

So the President signed a bunch of go-aheads that typically wouldn't have been signed, and the government gave a lot of power to the NSA to amalgamate the resulting intelligence data in ways that also wouldn't have previously been okay'd, but that, in those unusual circumstances, were considered to be not just acceptable, but desirable and necessary.

This jumble of intelligence service activities, approved by the president and delegated to the NSA, became known as the President's Surveillance Program, and they were kept secret, in part because of how unprecedented they were, and in part because those in charge didn't want to risk their opposition—those they knew about, like Al Qaeda, but also those that might be waiting in the wings to attack the US while it was perceptually weakened and vulnerable—they didn't want to risk those entities knowing what they were doing, what they knew about, how they were collecting data, and so on.

The info that was gleaned via these programs was compiled and stored in an SCI, which stands for Sensitive Compartment Information, and which refers to a type of document control system, a bit like Top Secret or Classified, in that it allows those running it to set what level of access people must have to view, process, use, or even discuss its contents, and this particular SCI was codenamed STELLARWIND.

Among other activities, the programs feeding data into the Stellarwind SCI mined huge databases of email and phone communications, alongside web-browsing and financial activities; all sorts of tracking information that's collected by various components of intelligence, law enforcement, and other government and government-adjacent services were tapped and harvested.

All of this data was then funneled into this one program, and though the degree to which this much information is useful up for debate, because having a slew of data doesn't mean that data is organized in useful ways, in 2004 the US Justice Department discovered that the NSA was not just collecting this sort of data when it was connected to foreign entities or entities that have been connected to terrorism, it was also collecting it from sources and people, including just average everyday Americans and small businesses that were doing no terrorism at all, and which had no links to terrorism, and it was doing so on American soil.

After this discovery, then-President Bush said, well, the NSA is allowed to do that, that's fine, but they can only look at collected metadata related to terrorism—so they can collect whatever they want, sweep up gobs of information, file-away whatever drifts into their expansive and undifferentiating nets, but they're not allowed to look at and use anything not related to terrorism; and with that clarification to keep the Justice Department from doing anything that might hinder the program, the president reauthorized it that same year, 2004.

There was disagreement within the government about the legality of all this, some entities saying that warrantless wiretapping of American citizens was illegal, even if the collected data was supposedly unusable unless some kind of terrorism connection could be ginned up to justify it. But those in charge ultimately decided that it would be irresponsible not to use these wiretapping powers the NSA wielded to protect American lives, and even said that Congress had no power to stop them from doing so, because it fell within their wheelhouse, that of defense against potential future foreign attack.

All of the President's Surveillance Programs officially expired on February 1 of 2007, but new legislation that same year, and more in 2008, extended some of these activities, all with the justification of protecting the US from future terrorist attacks, and in 2009, a report published by the Inspectors General of the country's intelligence agencies found, in essence, that the now-retired President's Surveillance Program went way beyond what was allowed, in terms of collecting this sort of data without a warrant, and indicated that there was little oversight keeping folks from looking at data they weren't supposed to be looking at, while also indicating that the program probably wasn't very effective—so there was all this data, collected on dubious legal grounds, approved during a period of fear and perceived vulnerability, that was also becoming this a major headache for folks concerned about what amounted to a big, secret surveillance program that was targeting the very people it was supposedly meant to protect from terrorism, all in the pursuit of purported security benefits that were more theoretical than real.

A former NSA codebreaker went on the record with WIRED magazine in 2012, outlining how the NSA was surveilling Americans in this way, which got the codename Stellarwind into the press as a consequence, and the following year, in 2013, the Washington Post and The Guardian published a draft of that 2009 Inspector General report that said the program was going far beyond the bounds of what was legal and right and effective—that draft leaked by NSA employee and subcontractor Edward Snowden.

Further revelations based on that leak came out in 2014, at which point there was abundant public evidence that much of what was happening within the Stellarwind program was kept secret even after supposed earlier divulgences, and a lot of it was seemingly very illegal, though this program still functions in various capacities and at various scales, even now, in 2024.

What I'd like to talk about today is a portion of the Stellarwind program that was recently extended, though not without controversy and pushback.

—

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was passed in 1978 in response to the fairly brazen and regular violations of Americans' privacy under the Nixon administration; namely that his government regularly spied on, and used intelligence and law enforcement services to mess with, political and activist groups that Nixon didn't like.

FISA was meant to establish guardrails for when and how that sort of surveillance could be conducted, who could access the relevant data, and how it could be used—though notably, all of this applied to collecting intelligence in US territory; the rules are a lot looser when it comes to surveillance of non-americans in other countries.

Among other things, FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is a court that decides who can use these tools and access this data—they oversee the divvying-out of surveillance warrants—and FISA was the basis for all those President's Surveillance Programs following 9/11; so it was meant to prevent abuses of surveillance and intelligence tools by the US government against its citizens, and this general framework was used as a scaffolding for those enhanced surveillance powers the government gave itself after the 9/11 attacks; it was also a primary resource for those who found all those post-9/11 additional powers to be illegal oversteps.

One evolution of FISA following September 11 was the introduction of what's called Section 702, which is provision that allows the US government to undertake targeted surveillance efforts against non US citizens outside the US, leveraging the full weight of the US government to do so, including but not limited to coercing telecommunications companies, like internet or phone companies, to hand over whatever data and recordings and such they might have available.

Section 702 is meant to be very targeted and specific, never allowing the surveillance of any US citizen, anywhere, any person from any country who's in the US, or any foreign person located anywhere on the planet who is communicating with a US citizen—which is a technique that was previously leveraged by some components of Stellarwinds, the idea being that if you wanted to surveil an American but had no evidence they have links to terrorism, you would just capture their phone calls and other communications with non-Americans, and you'd be good to go.

There's a fairly rigid set of protocols involved in using Section 702 for surveillance, including Department of Justice oversight on every targeting request, and opportunities to deny the collection of, or subsequent access to data that is collected by a sequence of analysts who are disconnected from those requesting said data.

That's what the rules and processes for this provision say, anyway.

In practice, Section 702 has allegedly been used to track members of Congress, journalists, victims of various sorts of crime, political donors, and protestors—targeting them for surveillance, but also used to search existing data that's already been collected, baselessly, via so-called "backdoor searches" with no connection to terrorism or anything else that would allow for the formal use of these tools, seemingly in violation of those supposed hardcore guardrails, at the behest of the FBI, CIA, and NSA. And this seemingly happens on a fairly regular basis—more than 200,000 warrantless, backdoor searches are performed each year.

All of which adds interesting context to a recent congressional vote to reauthorize Section 702 for another two years, right as it was about to expire.

This extension vote was laden with drama, in part because two major US internet companies said they would no longer comply if Section 702 wasn't renewed, as the government had had its request to keep collecting data for another year approved, but it no longer had legal backing to demand such data from companies, with the ability to coerce them to hand over digital communications data, like email and text records, if they denied more polite requests. So these companies said, well, you can collect whatever data you can get your hands on, but you can't get your hands on our data, anymore.

There was also political drama, though, in the shape of former US President, and current Presidential candidate Trump's loudly stated antagonism toward renewing this provision, something that aligned him with privacy oriented groups that he typically doesn't like or align with.

A vote that would have ended all warrantless searches on these sorts of communications failed to pass earlier in April, due to a tied 212 to 212 vote in the House, and another that would have accomplished a similar outcome and which was voted upon a few days later was defeated by just a handful of votes.

The conflict here is seemingly that while there are significant and persistent privacy issues with this and related programs, it's also considered to be a potentially useful tool in the US intelligence community's utility belt. And though most politicians would like to be seen as defending the privacy of American citizen from prying government eyes, few want to be seen as hobbling its defense infrastructure, even if the defense value of this and connected programs have been questioned and challenged, time and time again.

What eventually helped a Section 702 extension bill attain approval from Congress was a compromise that approved the extension of some components of it, that allowed it to take new communications technologies into account, arguably making it more useful for surveillance purposes while simultaneously increasing the privacy risks it poses, but pairing those add-ons with a shortened extension period, down from five years to two. Which means it's likely there will be another showdown over whether it should be extended in just a few years, at which point it can be killed or further edited, depending on how this new, slightly iterated version, is functioning at that point.

All of which is interesting and newly relevant in part because we're stepping into what some have called a new Cold War, with all sorts of real-deal military conflicts on the ground threatening to expand and encompass more of the planet, alongside rifts in the relationships between behemoths like the US and China, which could erupt into larger versions of the same, if these governments aren't careful.

At such moments, we tend to see more support for measures that give heightened power to governments and other defense-oriented entities, even at the expense of individual rights.

So rather than clipping the wings of this and similar programs in a few years when renewal is once more on the docket, it may be that Congress further empowers it—depending on how today's conflicts play out, and how the relationships between the US and its primary rivals evolve in the meantime.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/19/fisa-702-surveillance-internet/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/20/congress-extends-controversial-warrantless-surveillance-law-two-years/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act

https://www.dni.gov/files/CLPT/documents/2023_ASTR_for_CY2022.pdf#page=24

https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702%20Documents/declassified/2023/FISC_2023_FISA_702_Certifications_Opinion_April11_2023.pdf#page=89

https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographic.pdf

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/warrantless-surveillance-under-section-702-fisa

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/whats-next-reforming-section-702-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fisa-section-702-civil-rights-abuses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/us/politics/senate-passes-surveillance-law-extension.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Surveillance_Program

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_compartmented_information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind

This week we talk about diplomatic immunity, Trump’s court cases, and the Supreme Court.

We also discuss Nixon, Clinton, and the US Constitution.

Recommended Book: My upcoming book, How To Turn 39 (https://books2read.com/htt39), which is available for pre-order today :)

Transcript

There's a concept in international law—diplomatic immunity—that says, in essence, certain government officials should be immune from the laws of foreign countries, including those within which they're operating.

This is a very old concept, based on similar rights that were granted to envoys and messengers back in the oldest documented periods of human civilizations.

The idea is that if different cultures, whether organized into tribes or kingdoms or nation states, are going to be able to deal with each other, they need to maintain open and reliable means of communication. Thus, the folks tasked with carrying messages between leaders of these different groups would need to be fairly confident that they wouldn't be hassled or attacked or prosecuted by the people they were bringing those messages to, and whose messages they were bringing back to their own leaders.

Such representatives have at times been imprisoned or killed by their hosts, but this is relatively rare, because any governing body that treated ambassadors from other cultures in this way would have trouble dealing with anyone outside their current legal sway, and that would in turn mean less trade, less reliable peace, and less opportunity to generally cross-pollinate with cultures they might benefit from cross-pollinating with.

As a general rule, at least in the modern iteration of diplomatic immunity, folks operating under the auspices of this policy can still be punished for their misdeeds, it's just that they'll generally be declared persona non grata, expelled from the country where they did something wrong, rather than punished under that country's laws.

In some rare instances a country hosting a misbehaving or criminal ambassador or other diplomat might ask that person's home country to waive their immunity, basically saying, look, this person killed someone or got drunk and drove recklessly through our capitol city's downtown, we'd like to try them in our courts, and it may be that the government running that misbehaving person's home country says, okay, yeah, that's messed up, you go ahead; but usually—even if that person has done something truly reprehensible—they'll instead say, no, sorry, we'll pull them back and they won't be allowed to return to your country or serve as an ambassador anywhere else, because they've shown themselves to be unreliable, and we might even try them in a court here, in their home country, but we can't allow our people, no matter what they do, to fall under the legal jurisdiction of some other nation, because that would set a bad precedent, and it may make people wary of working for us in this capacity in the future—surely you understand.

There are tiers of diplomatic immunity, depending on the seniority of the diplomat or other representative in question, and the Congress of Vienna of the early 1800s charted out the basis for how these things work, in much detail, formalizing a lot of what was already in the ether back then, and creating an outline that was then further formalized in 1961's Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which has been almost universally ratified and respected, though of course there's been a lot of grey area in terms of what harassment of a representative, which is a no-no according to this convention, entails, and to what degree it can be proven, and thus punished, if violated.

We saw a lot of grey area utility during the height of the Cold War in particular, in part because many diplomats were moonlighting as spies, which is still true today, though it was even more overt and worrisome to their host countries, back then, so harassment, kidnappings, even assassinations of diplomats were more common then, than today, though they were still almost universally done covertly so that no one seemed to be violating these nearly universally accepted terms.

What I'd like to talk about today is another type of legal immunity—in this case, Presidential Immunity in the US—and why this type of immunity is at the center of former US President Trump's ongoing legal cases.

—

In the United States, many politicians and high-level appointees enjoy some of the immunity-related privileges in their own country that diplomats of various stripes have traditionally enjoyed elsewhere.

Most of these figures are only protected by this immunity under very specific circumstances, though, not universally.

Judges, while doing court-related, judge-work, for instance, have absolute civil immunity—so a judge who falls afoul of the law in the course of their duty as a judge, doing judge-things, will tend to get away with whatever it is they did wrong, though this won't generally apply to non-judge things they do during that same period

So a judge would have trouble arguing that they should get off with a warning for murdering someone because they happened to kill that person while they were on their lunch break, but they would likely be okay if they accidentally ruled in a way that exceeded their jurisdiction, even if their having done so caused all sorts of secondary problems.

Similarly, and also within the US court system, a prosecutor can't be sued for withholding evidence, even if their having done so leads to a wrongful conviction, which would be a bad thing that happened as a result of their actions, but because they acted while performing their protected duty, they'll almost certainly be okay from a legal standpoint, even if not always a moral one.

These are not rules novel to the US system of governance; most of them were borrowed from earlier forms of the same, and a lot of the US's version of these immunity rules are derived from those that exist within the British parliamentary system, where parliamentarians can't be prosecuted for things they say while in Parliament, and the same is true for politicians while engaged in their work on the floor of the US House of Senate.

Interestingly though, while the US Constitution provides that kind of legislative immunity to Congresspeople, it doesn't grant the same, or anything similar, to the President; and this was apparently a hotly debated topic back in the Constitution-writing days, as those who set up the rules of the land were aware that it might be beneficial to allow folks at the top some legal leeway, so they don't make executive decisions based on whether or not they might be sued or otherwise punished for those decisions, but at the same time they really didn't want another king, or similarly authoritarian ruler to step into office and then get away with murder—perhaps literally.

So the constitution doesn't give the President of the United States the same immunity as other members of government, but a slew of cases in the 19th and 20th centuries found, in general, that if the president or members of the president's cabinet take actions that are "more or less" within the scope of their duties, they should be granted absolute immunity, protecting them from lawsuits and legal punishments.

A court case against President Nixon in the 1970s made that previously somewhat vague and general legal trend more formal, at first triggering a bunch of lawsuits against him and his people, but then a 1982 Supreme Court decisions said, in essence, that former or current presidents are immune from lawsuits related to anything that falls within the "outer perimeter" of their duties, due to the president's "unique status under the Constitution."

This legal precedent was tested in the mid-1990s when then-President Bill Clinton was sued for sexual harassment during his governor of Arkansas days, and a lower court, then the Supreme Court, both affirmed that presidential immunity doesn't protect the president from things they did before taking that highest government office.

As a result of all that, today we have a legal context in which the President is kind of granted some immunity for some things they do while in office, but the delineation between protected and not-protected is fuzzy, and there's a whole lot of theory on this matter, but less in the way of actual court precedent that establishes confident footing for anyone stepping into this corner of the legal world.

All of which is newly relevant in 2024 because former President Trump is currently being prosecuted for all sorts of things in several different jurisdictions. And part of his legal strategy is based on a sort of Hail Mary play that's made its way to the Supreme Court, and which is premised on the concept of Presidential Immunity.

But before we get to that case, let's talk real quick about the other cases that are currently in progress, all of which that bigger Supreme Court case may influence, depending on how it turns out.

Beginning this week, as of the day this episode goes live, the week of April 15, 2024, Trump is scheduled to be in court four days a week for the next six to eight weeks, facing 34 criminal charges related to falsifying business records in order to get payoff money to Stormy Daniels, allegedly to cover up an affair they had, which he didn't want becoming public while he was running for his first term in office.

Tentatively beginning in late-May of 2024, Trump will face 40 criminal charges in Florida for allegedly mishandling sensitive documents, and his alleged conspiracy to keep those documents even after the government demanded them back.

A federal case in which Trump faces four criminal charges related to his alleged effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results was originally meant to begin the first half of this year, but it's looking increasingly likely it won't occur until after the November presidential election, as the judge overseeing the case has postponed it until after the Supreme Court makes their decision about presidential immunity, though there's a chance it could start as early as August, despite that delay.

And Trump faces 10 criminal charges for the same general collection of alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, alongside 18 alleged co-conspirators; that trial has a proposed start date of August 5, but that would be tricky, as it would mean the trial could run through Election Day, which would be awkward and would likely complicate things further.

Trump has also dealt with a flurry of recent civil, so non-criminal, no jail time possible, just fines, lawsuits, including one related to sexual assault and his defamation of the person he sexually assaulted, which led to a big payout recently, and another in New York related to his misrepresentation of the value of his real estate holdings in the state, which led to an even bigger fine, but which is currently being appealed.

There's another federal civil case that's ongoing, Thompson v. Trump, which is related to the attack on the US Capitol by Trump's fans on January 6, 2021, and that's especially relevant here because, already, the judge in that case, ruled that Trump's presidential immunity does not shield him from this lawsuit, and an appeals judge ruled the same.

There's now a Supreme Court case, which I mentioned earlier, that consolidates three separate civil lawsuits into one, Trump v. United States, and this case asks, in essence, whether Trump should be protected from these lawsuits by presidential immunity; that same immunity that was upheld in many cases in recent memory, though in different contexts.

The reason this Supreme Court case is so fundamental here is that it could impact many or all of those other cases, plus others that might arise related to Trump's actions in the future, as it would give him a sort of legal whammy on just about anything he could argue was done within the perview of his role as President.

Thus, he could argue he wasn't trying to overturn the 2020 election that he lost, he was looking into what he considered to be legitimate election irregularities as part of his duty as President. And if some other things happened as a result of that effort, like his supporters breaking into the Capitol building, he should be protected from that under the auspices of this immunity.

Those two DC court judges that earlier ruled Trump wasn't protected by presidential immunity said that it's in the public interest to hold presidents accountable for their actions, because not doing so would leave anyone who holds that office "unbounded authority to commit crimes."

They determined that it was worth the possibility that a president might make some executive decisions from a perspective of worrying about later lawsuits if it would prevent the creation of a political office from which someone could legally get away with any crime they chose to commit, including but not limited to, theoretically at least, assassinating their political rivals.

The big question now is how the Supreme Court will decide on this matter; some people are predicting that the heavily slanted toward conservative justices court will be more likely to find in Trump's favor, though they've defied those expectations several times in recent years, in some cases seeming to take advantage of their current 5 or 6, depending on how you measure, versus 3, conservative to liberal composition in order to get a bunch of Republican priorities accomplished, like overturning Roe v. Wade, which protected the right to an abortion at the federal level, but in other cases they've made what seem to be more objective rulings, defying assumptions made based on those ideological leanings—so there's no way to know one way or the other on this, right now. We'll likely find out, though, sometime in May or June, as the court will begin considering these claims on April 25 of this year, and it's expected they'll have their ruling sometime in those subsequent two months.

Until then, though, some of these other cases are a bit up in the air, as the granting of enhanced immunity could make Trump's current and potential future cases a slam-dunk for his defense team, while a ruling in favor of the contemporary, fuzzy standard, or one that weakens that standard, at least for his specific context, would deny him that potentiality.

That said, Trump's defense team seems to have also been making use of the abundant delay tactics that are available within the US justice system, and there's a chance that if he delays long enough and then wins another term as president in November, that would allow him, when he steps back into office early next year, to either pardon himself or order someone in his government to get rid of the charges against him.

Which is part of why the prosecutors working opposite him have been politely but firmly asking the judges in charge of these cases to pick up the pace, because there's a looming possibility that even if the courts decide against Trump in some key cases, he could still get off Scott free, because of that other apparent loophole in the system that would allow a sitting President to get away with just about anything, though in this case because of a different, in practice immunity-granting mechanism.

Show Notes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/01/30/7th-circuit-pokes-a-hole-in-prosecutorial-immunity/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Donald_Trump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictments_against_Donald_Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/trump-investigations-charges-indictments.html

https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-investigations-civil-criminal.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-2024-trials-where-they-stand-and-what-to-expect

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/trump-investigations-indictments/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68577638

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-61084161

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/donald-trump-legal-cases-charges/675531/

https://archive.ph/JFsIB

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictments_against_Donald_Trump

https://apnews.com/article/trump-jury-selection-hush-money-trial-manhattan-56d540406cd174ab143fe12469e9adef

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-michael-cohen-stormy-daniels-e40532d3bce7768e296fdaf9591ef05b

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/trump-criminal-hush-money-trial-begins-2a1bdd15

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fallout-trumps-bid-overturn-election-loss-heads-supreme-court-2024-04-14/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/special-counsel-urges-us-supreme-court-reject-trump-immunity-bid-2024-04-09/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_immunity_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_immunity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_immunity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_immunity

https://www.britannica.com/topic/diplomatic-immunity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Diplomatic_Relations