Posts

What Is The Sound of a Dead Bird Xitting?

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This post contains observed and speculative material following the reported loss of content circa 2011-2014 at the former bird app.

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Observed:

August 9, 2023 – D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the D.C. district court’s earlier finding holding Twitter in contempt and assessing a $350,000 fine for failure to fully comply by the district court’s subpoena deadline.

August 16, 2023 6:41 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Xitter’s sketchy behaviors in its response to a DOJ subpoena approved on January 17, 2023. Xitter has been held in contempt and assessed a $350,000 fine for failure to comply with the subpoena.

August 16, 2023 1:59 p.m. ET – Marcy posted about the importance of attribution related to January 6 tweets which could have gotten former VP Mike Pence killed. Twitter data could reveal the account login information and device used for the purposes of threatening Pence.

August 17, 2023 6:23 a.m. ET – Marcy posted about Elon Musk’s meetings with with Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy while Xitter’s internal and external legal team tap danced about the subpoena it had failed to comply with fully and on a timely basis. This dancing may have been an effort to protect Musk and his political network including certain members of Congress.

August 17, 2023 3:26 p.m. ET – Brazilian Xitter user Danilo Takagi posted,

Acabei de confirmar aqui. O Twitter/X removeu todas as mídias e imagens postadas de 2014 pra trás. Eles não tem dinheiro nem pra armazenamento mais. Artistas e criadores de conteúdo, vocês realmente ainda querem continuar usando esta rede?

[Translation from Portuguese: I just confirmed here. Twitter/X has removed all media and images posted from 2014 onwards. They don’t even have money for storage anymore. Artists and content creators, do you really want to continue using this network?]

August 19, 2023 11:31 a.m. ET – Xitter user Tom Coates confirms Danilo Takagi’s earlier observation:

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats – so far – almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service. For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. https://twitter.com/search?q=From%3Atomcoates%20until%3A2014-01-01&src=typed_query&f=media

Xitter Birdwatch contributors added context:

Images before/around 2014 are still saved on Twitter/X’s servers, however, the t.co links appear to be broken at the moment.

The famous Ellen DeGeneres selfie from the 2014 Oscars is currently missing from her tweet. https://twitter.com/EllenDeGeneres/status/440322224407314432
But the original file is still available on their servers.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BhxWutnCEAAtEQ6?format=jpg&name=large
thttps://twitter.com/Accountabilabud/status/1693026133191819518?s=20

Each of the links above in the Birdwatch context field have not been available consistently; they have been converted by Xitter’s t.co link shortener when the tweet is shared but the shortened links may not work properly.

The erasure appears to be related in part to a “failure” of the t.co link shortener which eliminates accessibility to content, but this doesn’t explain why graphic media circa 2011-2014 is no longer available.

What the actual fuck is going on at Xitter?

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Here are several prominent theories about the loss of media on Xitter:

Musk is cutting costs, some say, by refusing to host media content.

It’s possible, but why 2011-2014 and not ALL of the former Twitter’s media content? Is this explanation consistent with the “failure” of the t.co shortener and loss of graphics in that date range?

Musk is trying to damage social networks within Xitter for his personal political agenda, others say.

Again, why that specific range and not from the former Twitter’s inception?

Musk is erasing cultural history, engaging in ethnocide or cultural genocide, noted by minority groups.

True. Erasing key parts of the Black Lives Matter movement’s inception and the social response to deaths which preceded it is one example targeted by this date range.

Also the erasure of Arab Spring-related content may be ethnocide.

You’re going to see folks making these points across social media, but there’s at least one more possible factor driving Musk’s erasure.

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Speculative:

What if Musk is eliminating access to evidence?

How do we know for sure whether Xitter the former dead bird platform is simply running into the operations problems expected since Musk canned 75-80% of staff, or whether he’s actively obstructing investigations which rely on former Twitter content by screwing with data accessibility?

How do we know Musk isn’t doing the bidding of his fossil fuel financiers from Qatar and KSA by suppressing access to content critical of leadership in those countries? Perhaps even hiding what it was spies for KSA employed by Twitter had been doing, or hiding possible foreign interference in democracy here and abroad?

Ponder this bit of dead bird xit for a while.

Three Things: No, No, and Hell to the NO, NYT

[NB: Check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

They can’t stop the bullshit. It’s in The New York Times’ DNA. Why should we trust their newsroom when the editorial page is full of crap created from distorted news?

I hope the better op-ed writers have backup plans because at some point they have to ask themselves why they want to be associated with idiots for neighbors…

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Two words probably tell you most of the problem without elaboration: Maureen Dowd.


Look, when a white person uses the word “woke” as a pejorative adjective you should walk away because they are fucking racist.

It’s that simple.

Which means you should walk away from BOTH MoDo and the person she allowed to vent their racist spleen, James Carville. The latter who once was a respected Democratic political consultant when Clintonian third-way ideology and its emergent neoliberalism walked the earth, needs to retire his big fat trap because the 1990s have been over for more than two decades. He clearly has no grasp of racism’s toll on Black Americans including the constant erasure of their oppression, even though Black women in particular are the most reliable Democratic voters. (Not to mention the average Millennial and Gen Z Democrat would have a difficult time recognizing the old coot.)

Read this article by Aja Romano at Vox on the history and use of “woke.” This exhortative word of caution and awareness has belonged to the Black community, and bled into progressive activists’ use because of the overlap between Black activists and progressives.

Like the word “liberal” and the framework of critical race theory (CRT), the right-wing has now seized “woke” to poison it and make it toxic, to discourage its wider exhortative use to beware racism’s threats and racists.

When it’s used by whites who are neither Black and/or progressive, who are not activists advocating for their intersectional human rights, it’s amplification of the same poisonous effect and the same underlying racism.

Oh look, it’s that tool Bret Stephens doing his duty once again for the right-wing, this time bolstering the promulgation of racism by the rest of NYT’s editorial page combined with bashing intersectional anti-racist progressivism.

Just walk away from these asses.

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Contrast and compare: here’s the opinion editorials at the Los Angeles Times on November 10 and today.

And the Washington Post from today.

While there are the spot annoying bad actors like Marc Thiessen at WaPo helping push the toxification of CRT, there’s a better mix of opinions not intent on poisoning left of center ideology compared to NYT which has persistently offered a home to crap like Maureen Dowd’s closeted racism and Bret Stephen’s more overt racism.

[Disclosure: I have subscriptions to WaPo and LAT — guess why.]

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And then the news page…perhaps it didn’t make it into an NYT article, but this tweet by Maggie Haberman which has now been deleted displays a weakness for amplification of right-wing crap without validating it first. Thank goodness this garbage didn’t make it into a news piece (that we know of so far).

I wish I’d taken a screen shot of the original tweet when I first saw it, before it was deleted. It’s only available now in the Internet Archive and without the link to the original crappy story she had retweeted with comment — an article at New York Daily News which made a false claim about Black Lives Matter activists without checking first to see if the sources they relied upon were in anyway associated with BLM.

Haberman made a claim in this reweet-with-quote without first verifying who Hawk Newsome is, assuming NYDN did their work.

Uh, no; it’s as if Haberman never heard the old journalists’ aphorism, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Worse, it’s as if Haberman would accept Trump’s word and stick with it long after he was disproven. Newsome is NOT affiliated with BLM and cannot speak for them; BLM had to issue a statement about this a year ago June when Trump used Newsome as a mouthpiece.

If you are white and a journalist, unless you have been very close to BLM and covering it regularly as part of your beat, DO NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS about the movement’s members; validate your sources’ relationship and authority for authenticity and accuracy.

Jesus Christ, it’s a well-known Russian active measure to use racism in this country as a wedge to increase political tension, with BLM in particular a target of their efforts.

Unless, of course, you enjoy being used by foreign influence ops as a useful idiot and don’t mind further trashing your credibility.

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Institutionalized systemic racism doesn’t always look as obvious and egregious as it does in the Rittenhouse trial. Sometimes it just looks like laziness by journalists and contributors who are privileged by their circumstances. And sometimes it looks like readers who can’t be arsed to recognize and call out that racism based in easy material which satisfies a majority white audience.

Three Things: Loads of Bricks, White Chicks, Made-up Schtick

[NB: I want to make sure you take note of the byline. Thanks. /~Rayne]

Especially after last night this one’s been really bugging me so I’ll lay it out here first.

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Why was riot gear more important than personal protective gear for the nation’s health care system back in March? This has bothered the hell out of me since I looked at the purchase orders and dates.

31-JAN-2020 — Trump declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Service Act

13-MAR-2020 — Trump issued two national emergency declarations under both the Stafford Act and the National Emergencies Act (NEA)

17-MAR-2020 — Federal purchase order from Veterans Affairs signed for POLICE PROTECTION EQUIPMENT FOR WASHINGTON D.C. VA POLICE IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19 OUTBREAK

18-MAR-2020 — Trump invoked emergency powers via Executive Order under the Defense Production Act

19-MAR-2020 — Trump named the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as the lead agency in the COVID-19 emergency response efforts (designation previously held by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS))

19-MAR-2020 — California issued Stay Home order

21-MAR-2020 — Illinois, New Jersey issued Stay Home orders

22-MAR-2020 — New York, Ohio issued Stay Home orders

23-MAR-2020 — CT, LA, MI, OR, WA issued Stay Home orders

23-MAR-2020 — Federal purchase order from Veterans Affairs signed for POLICE GEAR, DISPOSABLE CUFFS, GAS MASKS, BALLISTIC HELMETS, RIOT GLOVES

06-APR-2020 — FEMA seized orders of N95 masks
16-APR-2020 — FEMA seized orders of N95 masks
21-APR-2020 — FEMA seized orders of N95 masks

Why did the federal government seize private orders of N95 masks in April when it could have been ordering them instead of riot gear in March?

The government clearly had COVID-19 in mind because it’s spelled out in the order for POLICE PROTECTION EQUIPMENT entered Tuesday 17-MAR-2020 after the first national emergency declaration — the order uses PRESIDENTIAL ISSUED EMERGENCY DECLARATION, OR A MAJOR DISASTER DECLARATION as its emergency acquisition justification.

But why not order personal protective equipment for health care roles instead?

Why were they planning for riots in March, which is clear from the order for RIOT GLOVES on 23-MAR-2020?

They could predict rioting but not mass deaths from contagion?

Something really smells here.

I’d hate to think the White House used its power to acquire riot gear in order to pull off last night’s double-header campaign stunt-voter suppression gig.

Because that’s what this POS was.

Still can’t wrap my head around the U.S. Park Police and National Guard using tear gas and flash bang grenades on peaceful protesters to clear a path to St. John’s Episcopal Church in D.C. last evening so Trump could have an unauthorized photo-op in front of the church.

I don’t ever want to hear that Christians support Trump because he protects their religious freedoms when he just crapped all over them, especially if it turns out the White House planned for this months ago instead of working constructively to stem COVID-19.

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The press has been traumatized by police assaults on them as they covered the protests over the last several days. In my opinion this is deliberate; it keeps the media from investigating what were the triggering events moving police toward violence against peaceful if angry protesters, launching property damage which further triggered police abuse. Protesters repeatedly caught on camera white people, some times in clusters, taking active roles in beginning property damage.

There are videos of black protesters trying to stop white people — too often dressed in black, acting in teams — who were the original actors causing property damage.


They ignore the pleas of black people to stop the damage.

There are several videos in which piles of bricks are pointed out by black protesters — bricks where no construction is apparent, left on sidewalks or in the middle of the street. One video shows white persons dressed in black removing barricades around the bricks. An academic noted on Twitter that any images of brick piles documented in Fayetteville, AR were there because brick walkways are constantly under repair. But at least a couple images show bricks piled on ashphalt street surface or concrete sidewalk, with no obvious construction or repair work in progress.

Yet another video circulating shows a black-clad white man handing out what is believed to be cash to black persons and pointing them to construction materials for the purposes of a temporary barricade. Wish the person recording the video had asked questions of their subjects.

There are some other disturbing signs about the content shared about white people allegedly involved in the property damage. This one may be a fake — there’s nothing in local news about this person.


There are claims in the thread about this person I can’t validate because I don’t use Facebook. Something about this is synthetic. Claims made attributing the source of support behind some of these vandals are clearly false and have been debunked.

The police have done themselves no favors, failing to arrest many of these vandals — in some cases simply watching them. Note how black protesters make this white vandal stop and drag them to police who are watching, doing nothing until forced to do so.

Police have also de-legitimized themselves by failing their duty to protect and serve, instead attacking citizens who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

Something isn’t right here, whatsoever. It looks systemic — rather like COINTELPRO and yet potentially manufactured at another remove — and the media needs to stop licking their wounds and get digging.

The press also needs to ask itself why this was not the face of this week’s civil rights protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder-by-cop.

~ 1 ~

Meanwhile, this man on the left:

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) with Confederate flag
continues to work on Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda:

deliberately ignoring this reality.

U.S. COVID-19 DEATH TOLL, JUNE 2, 2020 - 2:00 PM ET VIA WIKIPEDIA
Nearly a thousand more Americans have died since yesterday morning.

~ 0 ~

One last thing: if you have time for a reading assignment, I recommend Anne Applebaum’s essay in The Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit. I’m so pissed off at Trump for making me miss John McCain right now.

This is an open thread. Bring it.

The Dragnet Donald Trump Will Wield Is Not Just the Section 215 One

I’ve been eagerly anticipating the moment Rick Perlstein uses his historical work on Nixon to analyze Trump. Today, he doesn’t disappoint, calling Trump more paranoid than Nixon, warning of what Trump will do with the powerful surveillance machine laying ready for his use.

Revenge is a narcotic, and Trump of all people will be in need of a regular, ongoing fix. Ordering his people to abuse the surveillance state to harass and destroy his enemies will offer the quickest and most satisfying kick he can get. The tragedy, as James Madison could have told us, is that the good stuff is now lying around everywhere, just waiting for the next aspiring dictator to cop.

But along the way, Perlstein presents a bizarre picture of what happened to the Section 215 phone dragnet under Barack Obama.

That’s not to say that Obama hasn’t abused his powers: Just ask the journalists at the Associated Press whose phone records were subpoenaed by the Justice Department. But had he wanted to go further in spying on his enemies, there are few checks in place to stop him. In the very first ruling on the National Security Administration’s sweeping collection of “bulk metadata,” federal judge Richard Leon blasted the surveillance as downright Orwellian. “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this collection and retention of personal data,” he ruled. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”

But the judge’s outrage did nothing to stop the surveillance: In 2015, an appeals court remanded the case back to district court, and the NSA’s massive surveillance apparatus—soon to be under the command of President Trump—remains fully operational. The potential of the system, as former NSA official William Binney has described it, is nothing short of “turnkey totalitarianism.”

There are several things wrong with this.

First, neither Richard Leon nor any other judge has reviewed the NSA’s “sweeping collection of ‘bulk metadata.'” What Leon reviewed — in Larry Klayman’s lawsuit challenging the collection of phone metadata authorized by Section 215 revealed by Edward Snowden — was just a small fraction of NSA’s dragnet. In 2013, the collection of phone metadata authorized by Section 215 collected domestic and international phone records from domestic producers, but even there, Verizon had found a way to exclude collection of its cell records.

But NSA collected phone records — indeed, many of the very same phone records, as they collected a great deal of international records — overseas as well. In addition, NSA collected a great deal of Internet metadata records, as well as financial and anything else records. Basically, anything the NSA can collect “overseas” (which is interpreted liberally) it does, and because of the way modern communications works, those records include a significant portion of the metadata of Americans’ everyday communications.

It is important for people to understand that the focus on Section 215 was an artificial creation, a limited hangout, an absolutely brilliant strategy (well done, Bob Litt, who has now moved off to retirement) to get activists to focus on one small part of the dragnet that had limitations anyway and NSA had already considered amending. It succeeded in pre-empting a discussion of just what the full dragnet entailed.

Assessments of whether Edward Snowden is a traitor or a saint always miss this, when they say they’d be happy if Snowden had just exposed the Section 215 program. Snowden didn’t want the focus to be on just that little corner of the dragnet. He wanted to expose the full dragnet, but Litt and others succeeded in pretending the Section 215 dragnet was the dragnet, and also pretending that Snowden’s other disclosures weren’t just as intrusive on Americans.

Anyway, another place where Perlstein is wrong is in suggesting there was just one Appeals Court decision. The far more important one is the authorized by Gerard Lynch in the Second Circuit, which ruled that Section 215 was not lawfully authorized. It was a far more modest decision, as it did not reach constitutional questions. But Lynch better understood that the principle involved more than phone records; what really scared him was the mixing of financial records with phone records, which is actually what the dragnet really is.

That ruling, on top of better understanding the import of dragnets, is important because it is one of the things that led to the passage of USA Freedom Act, a law that, contrary to Perlstein’s claim, did change the phone dragnet, both for good and ill.

The USA Freedom Act, by imposing limitations on how broadly dragnet orders (for communications but not for financial and other dragnets) can be targeted, adds a check at the beginning of the process. It means only people 2 degrees away from a terrorism suspect will be collected under this program (even while the NSA continues to collect in bulk under EO 12333). So the government will have in its possession far fewer phone records collected under Section 215 (but it will still suck in massive amounts of phone records via EO 12333, including massive amounts of Americans’ records).

All that said, Section 215 now draws from a larger collection of records. It now includes the Verizon cell records not included under the old Section 215 dragnet, as well as some universe of metadata records deemed to be fair game under a loose definition of “phone company.” At a minimum, it probably includes iMessage, WhatsApp, and Skype metadata, but I would bet the government is trying to get Signal and other messaging metadata (note, Signal metadata cannot be collected retroactively; it’s unclear whether it can be collected with standing daily prospective orders). This means the Section 215 collection will be more effective in finding all the people who are 2 degrees from a target (because it will include any communications that exist solely in Verizon cell or iMessage networks, as well as whatever other metadata they’re collecting). But it also means far more innocent people will be impacted.

To understand why that’s important, it’s important to understand what purpose all this metadata collection serves.

It was never the case that the collection of metadata, however intrusive, was the end goal of the process. Sure, identifying someone’s communications shows when you’ve been to an abortion clinic or when you’re conducting an affair.

But the dragnet (the one that includes limited Section 215 collection and EO 12333 collection limited only by technology, not law) actually serves two other primary purposes.

The first is to enable the creation of dossiers with the click of a few keys. Because the NSA is sitting on so much metadata — not just phone records, but Internet, financial, travel, location, and other data — it can put together a snapshot of your life as soon as they begin to correlate all the identifiers that make up your identity. One advantage of the new kind of collection under USAF, I suspect, is it will draw from the more certain correlations you give to your communications providers, rather than relying more heavily on algorithmic analysis of bulk data. Facebook knows with certainty what email address and phone number tie to your Facebook account, whereas the NSA’s algorithms only guess that with (this is an educated guess) ~95+% accuracy.

This creation of dossiers is the same kind of analysis Facebook does, but instead of selling you plane tickets the goal is government scrutiny of your life.

The Section 215 orders long included explicit permission to subject identifiers found via 2-degree collection to all the analytical tools of the NSA. That means, for any person — complicit or innocent — identified via Section 215, the NSA can start to glue together the pieces of dossier it already has in its possession. While not an exact analogue, you might think of collection under Section 215 as a nomination to be on the equivalent of J Edgar Hoover’s old subversives list. Only, poor J Edgar mostly kept his list on index cards. Now, the list of those the government wants to have a network analysis and dossier on is kept in massive server farms and compiled using supercomputers.

Note, the Section 215 collection is still limited to terrorism suspects — that was an important win in the USA Freedom fight — but the EO 12333 collection, with whatever limits on nominating US persons, is not. Plus, it will be trivial for Trump to expand the definition of terrorist; the groundwork is already being laid to do so with Black Lives Matter.

The other purpose of the dragnet is to identify which content the NSA will invest the time and energy into reading. Most content collected is not read in real time. But Americans’ communications with a terrorism suspect will probably be, because of the concern that those Americans might be plotting a domestic plot. The same is almost certainly true of, say, Chinese-Americans conversing with scientists in China, because of a concern they might be trading US secrets. Likewise it is almost certainly true of Iranian-Americans talking with government officials, because of a concern they might be dealing in nuclear dual use items. The choice to prioritize Americans makes sense from a national security perspective, but it also means certain kinds of people — Muslim immigrants, Chinese-Americans, Iranian-Americans — will be far more likely to have their communications read without a warrant than whitebread America, even if those whitebread Americans have ties to (say) NeoNazi groups.

Of course, none of this undermines Perlstein’s ultimate categorization, as voiced by Bill Binney, who created this system only to see the privacy protections he believed necessary get wiped away: the dragnet — both that authorized by USAF and that governed by EO 12333 — creates the structure for turnkey totalitarianism, especially as more and more data becomes available to NSA under EO 12333 collection rules.

But it is important to understand Obama’s history with this dragnet. Because while Obama did tweak the dragnet, two facts about it remain. First, while there are more protections built in on the domestic collection authorized by Section 215, that came with an expansion of the universe of people that will be affected by it, which must have the effect of “nominating” more people to be on this late day “Subversives” list.

Obama also, in PPD-28, “limited” bulk collection to a series of purposes. That sounds nice, but the purposes are so broad, they would permit bulk collection in any area of the world, and once you’ve collected in bulk, it is trivial to then call up that data under a more broad foreign intelligence purpose. In any case, Trump will almost certainly disavow PPD-28.

Which makes Perlstein’s larger point all the more sobering. J Edgar and Richard Nixon were out of control. But the dragnet Trump will inherit is far more powerful.

If Trump’s Protestors Didn’t Exist He Would Have to Invent Them

Since last Friday’s canceled Trump rally in Chicago, there has been quite a bit of discussion about protestors at Trump rallies — both the propriety of disrupting his events and some scolding about what a bad tactical move it was for protestors to shut down the Chicago event, as well as some sudden realization among the chattering classes that Trump really does espouse violence.

I’d like to take a different approach and look at how Trump uses protestors.

For months, Trump has made protestors an integral part of his schtick at rallies. A person of color, a woman in hijab, a woman with a walker shows up and either silently protests, perhaps holding or wearing an anti-Trump slogan, or does boo and call out. Purportedly in response to earlier disruptions, Trump instructs attendees before any disruption not to hurt the protestors, but instead to surround them, holding up Trump signs and chanting his name, until security comes to throw the protestor out. “Get him out of here!” Trump yells after his attendees have disinfected the herd. This is all part of the rhythm now of Trump’s rallies, a way to reinforce the mob mentality in a participatory way.  Supporters become more than mere voters: they get deputized into reinforcing the purity of the herd, like drone bees cleaning out a hive.

I’m agnostic about the efficacy of protestors thus treated — they serve a useful function for Trump, sure, but given that every rally he does is covered on TV, they also serve as witness to the violence and assumed nativism of the rallies (not that the chattering classes seemed to take all that much notice before last weekend). But any individual’s decision to protest is their own choice, and I fiercely admire the courage it takes to walk into one of those rallies and serve as witness.

Of course, the neat formula Trump has long relied on depends on having — or rather, maintaining the illusion of — a majority. The “Silent Majority” has really become something closer to the “Silent 30%” or even “Silent 25%,” but at Trump rallies it appears as if those no-longer silent angry people are a majority.

On Friday, Trump lost control of that illusion.

I agree with William Daley, among others, who suggests that Trump chose to create a confrontation by scheduling an event at UIC. But I also think protestors got a sufficient mass of organized protestors to the event to thwart the managed confrontation Trump was hoping for, because they deprived him of the illusion of a majority. So he canceled the event before even showing up, falsely citing Chicago Police Department warnings.

I’m agnostic here, too, about the efficacy of this protest. One thing that has been largely — though not entirely — ignored (which itself testifies to something about the efficacy of speech rights in this country) is that the protest was part of a larger effort, including the effort to oust Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in today’s election; there were even “Bye Anita” signs at the protest. That is, the protest of Trump’s speech was part of a larger effort to fight systematic abuse of minorities, and as such had an affirmative message as well, though I admit the message reinforced afterwards — by both the protestors and press — is that they shut him down. I believe Alvarez has been leading in the polls, so we’ll see this evening whether the larger movement against her police cover-ups has achieved its goals.

But in questions of efficacy, I think it worth remembering how the Black Lives Matter protest of the Netroots Nation debate between Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders last July (which seems to have been entirely forgotten as people feel sorry for Trump). O’Malley basically gave up his microphone willingly; Bernie was more perturbed. A lot of attendees in the audience (the equivalent of all the Trump supporters who were deprived of their opportunity to hear him speak on Friday) were really angry; but many of those same people also wrote pieces in the weeks later talking about how important a learning opportunity being discomforted in such a way was. And that protest was undoubtedly effective, as it made the criminal and social justice issues a key focus of the Democratic primary. That’s not to say Trump protestors are as likely as Netroots Nation attendees to reflect on the privilege that attends uninterrupted speeches by white men, but sometimes protests do lead observers to rethink their own role (as, for example, mosque protestors in AZ who were invited inside only to learn about Islam in an unmediated way).

Let’s look, however, at what has happened in the days since Friday. On Saturday, Trump canceled and then uncanceled an event in Cincinnati, citing Secret Service concerns. Also on Saturday, protestor Thomas DiMassimo rushed Trump on stage (something I don’t defend, as it created real concerns about Trump’s safety; DiMassimo is lucky he wasn’t shot). Finally, in Kansas City, protestors achieved the result that Chicago protestors might have imagined: the sustained silencing of Trump, which he used to 1) claim Sanders supporters were the problem and 2) reinforce his love for the police.

Since then there have been reports of Trump finally doing what he chose not to do before (I argue, because protestors play a key function in his rallies): screening attendees of likely protestors, including profiling on race, which carries with it its own visual messaging that may even influence attendees. Yesterday, Trump retreated to his less visceral means of reinforcing the bully structure of his campaign, again referring to Rubio as “Lil Marco” and publicly humiliating Chris Christie.

Here’s the underlying point, though. Amid all the discussions of both the law and norms surrounding interrupting speech, few have accounted for the way that well-managed spectacle is a key (arguably the key) to Trump’s attraction. That spectacle relies partly on Trump’s mock frankness — his ability and willingness to say anything he wants, including repeated promises he will address presumed grievances of his supporters. But it relies, at least as much, on his ability to mobilize a mob in a certain way, including to create the illusion for that mob that they are part of a coherent pure majority. That mob gives them the illusion of power they believe they have been illegitimately stripped of. It’s an illusion, of course, but Trump is a master at managing that spectacle to prevent cracks from forming in that illusion.

And this is why the response to Trump has largely been so ineffectual. Polls in FL showed that voters were more likely to support Trump given Friday’s shutdown (so on that level, at least, the protest may have backfired). But DC pundits scolding Trump has largely the same effect, reinforcing the sense of grievance. So if the DC press want to do something about Trump’s frightening power, they might do more reflection about how they have been a willing partner in it.

The way to weaken Trump is not to continue to magnify his spectacle, as the press has done non-stop for a year. This is tough for cable news to manage, because they are in the business of spectacle.

One way to weaken him is to reveal how Trump has exacerbated the grievances motivating his supporters, never addressed them. As a reminder, one of the only times Trump has really backed down over the course of this campaign was when Bernie attacked him for wanting to lower wages, because that’s a truth that, reinforced, might sow doubt.

The other way to is to disrupt Trump’s manufactured spectacle of strength, because his supporters are only going to support him so long as they believe his bluster about always winning (which relies, in part, on the bullying he performs at his rallies). I’m not sure whether disruption of rallies does that or not. Magnifying the degree to which Trump is a fearful man would. Reporting on his many failures would. Certain kinds of reminders of his past weaknesses might (though some would reinforce the sense of grievance).

Side note, one spectacle that did not get shown by the press were the protests in Detroit in advance of the GOP debate there. So as people complain about protestors not simply standing powerfully outside, know that the press has chosen in the past to ignore that spectacle.

I suspect Marco Rubio’s advisors had it right, even though they delivered it through the absolutely wrong messenger. Trump’s reliance on guest workers (he likes to conflate skilled H1B workers, which have been a central part of GOP debates, with unskilled H2B workers he employed at Mar Lago) and his use of Chinese manufacturers for his campaign swag are both real vulnerabilities. And if someone wants to suggest Trump is operating out of some sense of inferiority because he has a small flaccid penis and small hands to match, that may well undercut the spectacle of virility that Trump has affirmatively cultivated.

I think Megyn Kelly (because she’s a woman who has succeeded in making Trump look dumb, once Fox stopped letting Trump dictate her role in coverage), and — before Trump equated protestors with Bernie Sanders (maybe still, though I don’t know) — Bernie, are two of the few people who have the ability to undercut Trump’s power on mobilizing grievances. Probably some centrist union leaders have the same ability, as well as a select few faith leaders. There are vanishingly few people who have the power position to call attention to the degree to which Trump has contributed to his followers’ grievances, rather than done anything to alleviate them, but that evidence is out there.

I’m not sure what happens from here. Demographically, there should be no way Trump wins the general election; as I noted, the Silent Majority, to the extent it existed in Nixon’s era, is a minority now. Assuming it will be a Trump – Clinton race, I don’t know that we know, because Clinton will have a harder time addressing those grievances, and because the high negatives of both candidates will make turnout really unpredictable (though I also suspect Hillary will be an acceptable crossover vote for many Republican Neocons).

But there is one other unpredictable player here: the cops. For some time, both Ted Cruz and Trump have been feeding the perceived feeling of grievances of cops that they have been unfairly targeted by activists complaining about police violence. As noted, Trump hails the cops even as he dehumanizes protestors. Both Cruz and Trump have been buttering up the cops that may one day have the ability to turn the violence that has been simmering for some time in one direction or another (with the consequent spectacle). Though there were a few reports of heavy-handedness from Chicago cops, in general they did a good job of managing the tensions on Friday. I really, really worry that Cleveland’s cops (who are getting some new war toys in advance of the GOP convention) won’t exercise the same restraint.

Trump’s power rests on spectacle. He will not be defeated, primarily, with a rational argument or some tut-tutting about norms about violence (that, in fact, the US neither culturally nor internationally really abide by in any case), in part because there are few credible messengers of the rational argument about how Trump has contributed to grievances. If his spectacle starts to crack, however, the investment in Trump as a savior will dissolve. It won’t go away — it’ll get invested somewhere else, potentially even someone more violent (though that person is unlikely to have the soapbox Trump has). But his power depends on illusion.

Who Was Actually Doing “FBI’s” Aerial Surveillance of Black Lives Matter in Baltimore?

FBI's Critical Incident Response Group does surveillance but do not appear in unredacted parts of the documents.

BPD said they would call in FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, which does aerial surveillance, but CIRG does not appear in unredacted parts of the documents.

The ACLU just released a series of documents about the FBI’s aerial surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests after Baltimore cops killed Freddie Gray. As they note, the documents show two different parts of FBI, the Washington Field Office and Special Flight Operations Unit, conducting electronic surveillance of protestors, using night vision and other technology. At least two of the flights were claimed to be “consensual,” which ACLU’s Nate Wessler thinks might just reflect public monitoring. Both of those consensual flights appear to have been “collected from” a third party.

Because I’m interested in what happened to one set of video cards, I’m going to do a timeline based on the flight logs and the evidence log.

The timeline shows several things:

FBI did surveillance before Baltimore asked for it

The FBI conducted at least 5 surveillance flights, including several by the Washington Field Office, before a May 1 memo reflecting Baltimore Police Department (BPD) requesting help, prospectively, from Washington Field Office, though a BPD passenger had been on two Special Flights Operations Unit (SFOU) flights before then.

Of signifiant note, the memo said it would ask for help from FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group.

The potential for large scale violence and riots throughout the week presents a significant challenge for the Baltimore Police Department for airborne surveillance and observation. Baltimore will request the assistance of CIRG and WFO in the matter of airborne surveillance to assist the Baltimore Police Department.

CIRG is an elite group within FBI, and includes a Surveillance and Aviation Section, which would (presumably) have far more sophisticated aerial surveillance technology than your typical field office. Correction: It is that, but SAS also manages FBI’s airplanes generally.

CIRG’s Surveillance and Aviation Section (SAS) provides modern jets and other aircraft that respond to crisis situations domestically and around the world. SAS can deploy aviation assets worldwide, including assignments in combat theaters.

CIRG does not appear, unredacted, in any of the flight or evidence logs turned over to ACLU, but if they were involved with this surveillance it might explain some of the other odd details in these documents. As noted below, there are some other interesting redactions that might indicate CIRG involvement.

One more detail about the memo. It used looting to justify the request for help. But it also invoked online discussions among people alleged to be sovereign citizens. So they used a number of different claimed threats to justify the request for help.

FBI changed its case number after conducting the first flights

In many cases, the flight logs show changes made in the notes associated with each flight; in such cases, the log will show both the old set of notes and the new one. For the SFOU flights logged before that memo showing BPD asking for FBI help, someone updated the flight logs with the case number that FBI has left unredacted for this release (the original case number is redacted) after that memo got written. For example, this shows SFOU updating the log from their 4/30 flight on 5/2, replacing a redacted case number with case number “343A-BA-6337966” which is the case file that all these documents are associated with.

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 2.15.01 PM

This means SFOU originally conducted the earlier flights under a different FBI case number. This could either be another specific case, or a general number they use for standing investigations, as the FBI does both.

The Washington Field Office flights didn’t get logged until after that memo got written (they appear to all have been logged in one sitting on 5/4), so they always used the same case number.

You have to wonder how often the FBI delays doing flight logs until they have a case number to do the flight under–that likely violates protocols tying surveillance to a specific investigation.

ACLU didn’t get the flight logs for at least one flight

ACLU received flight logs for flights occurring between 4/29 and 5/3. But this document shows a flight occurring (or at least starting) on 4/28.

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 2.23.07 PM

This might just reflect an overnight flight the night of 4/28-29 (most of these flights occurred at night), except that there are two other evidence log files for flights on 4/29 that would correlate with the two flight logs from that date. I think it’s possible this is a BPD or a different federal agency’s flight — either Secret Service or Homeland Security, which the memo says BPD was working with — though the evidence appears to have come through FBI.

One flight reflects an FBI passenger

There are, in general, one flight a day for the days logged from each part of FBI, the SFOU and WF. The exception is 4/30, when what appears to be the Baltimore office flew an FBI passenger (whose identity was redacted under a 7E, law enforcement technique, FOIA exemption). Curiously, this flight wasn’t logged until well after the actual flight, on 5/21. Note, since this is a Baltimore flight, it’s unlikely it’s someone flying in from DC to see events.

Two consensual flights appear to have come from a third party

As ACLU itself noted, some (two) of these evidence logs claim the surveillance was consensual.  The two have something else in common. The entry for “collected from” (which elsewhere has unredacted descriptions where it is used, often “Aerial Surveillance Washington” or “…Baltimore”) is redacted, but it clearly shows the file is collected from a third party via an interim one.

Screen Shot 2015-10-30 at 2.31.14 PM

This would seem to suggest the entity that did the surveillance is being hidden. Note, it is being hidden with a 7E law enforcement technique.

Much of this evidence didn’t get logged until a delayed evidence turnover

As I said, the reason I decided to map out this timeline is because there was a delay in some of the SD cards arriving, presumably in Baltimore, to be logged. Even the description, written on 6/1, offered to justify the delay raises questions.

The purpose of this communication is to explain the late submission of Bureau aircraft[redacted] video to the Baltimore ELSUR unit. For background, Washington Field Office (WFO) and Special Flight Operations provided airborne support for the Baltimore Division during the week of April 27, 2015. Missions were flown from April 29 through May 2. The [redacted] SD cards were shipped to the Baltimore Division via FEDEX and arrived on May 5. The FEDEX package arrived at [redacted] approximately May 8. Due to operational missions on May 9 and May 10, the [redacted] SD cards were submitted to the ELSUR unit on May 11.

For example, where were the cards that they needed to be FedExed to (presumably) Baltimore, given that WFO was supposed to be involved in this? Why is FBI redacting the receiving office? Did these SD cards need to be reviewed for sources and methods? And what explains the uncertainty — we’re talking chain of evidence, after all — about when precisely they were received?

As the timeline notes, 4 of the evidence disks were not logged until after this justification got written. This includes the 3 instances where the file was collected via a third party, as well as a Washington Surveillance video attributed to 5/2 but actually taken on 5/1. Two of these are the “consensual” videos.


4/28: Aerial surveillance Serial 4 collected, collected from Washington, WF holding, logged 5/5

4/29: Aerial surveillance Serial 5 collected, collected from “Aerial Surveillance Video, Baltimore,” logged 5/6

4/29: Aerial surveillance Serial 9 collected, collected from indicates third party, holding office Baltimore, logged 6/2

4/29: 2.6 hour night SFOU flight with 3 crew members, 1 BPD passenger, originally logged at 7:52PM on 4/30, then updated with new case number on 5/2 at 2:01AM, Risk = 0

4/29: 4.5 hour WF flight (1.5 of which were at night), 2 crew members, no passengers, originally logged at 5/4 at 2:28 PM, then updated with virtually same information (without decimals) 5/4 at 2:35PM, Risk = 18

4/30: 4.9 hour SFOU night flight with 3 crew members, 1 BPD passenger, first logged at 4/30 at 7:46 PM, then updated with new case number at 5/02 at 2:02 AM, Risk = 0

4/30: Aerial surveillance Serial 2 collected, “collected from” redacted name [a category not always used elsewhere], Washington holding, logged 5/4

4/30: 3.4 hour WF night flight with 2 crew members, first logged at 5/4 at 1:38PM, then updated with virtually same information (without decimals) 5/4 at 1:38 PM, Risk = 20

4/30: 2 hour Baltimore night flight with 1 crew member, 1 FBI passenger (hidden, in part, for b7E), first logged 5/21 at 3:23PM, Risk = 18

5/1: Aerial surveillance Serial 11 collected (surveillance start 4/30, but end 5/1), collected from redacted but via third party, Baltimore holding, logged 6/2, surveillance listed as consensual

5/1: Memo, titled to include 4/27 date but reflecting events back to 4/25, stating, “Baltimore will request the assistance of CIRG and WFO in the matter of airborne surveillance to assist the Baltimore Police Department.”

5/1: 1.4 hour SFOU night flight, with 3 crew members, 1 BPD passenger, first logged 5/1 at 1:15 AM, updated without decimals 5/1 at 1:32 AM, then updated with new case number at 5/2 at 2:02 AM Risk =0

5/2: Aerial surveillance Serial 10 collected (though surveillance start and end listed as 5/1), collected from redacted, but via third party, Baltimore holding, logged 6/2, surveillance described as consensual

5/1: 5 hour WF flight (spanning night and day), with 2 crew members, first logged 5/4 at 1:58 PM then updated without decimals 5/4 at 2:00 PM Risk = 24

5/1: Aerial surveillance Serial 3 collected, collected from WF, holding Washington, logged 5/4

5/2: 3.9 hour SFOU night flight, with 3 crew members, 1 BPD passenger, first logged 5/2 at 2:03AM then updated 5/2 at , 2:04AM and 2:05AM, adding decimals, possibly changed flight ID? without Risk = 0

5/2: 4.3 hour WF flight — including training — spanning night and day, first logged 5/4 at 2:08 PM then logged 5/4 at 2:09 PM Risk = 20

5/2: Aerial surveillance Serial 8 collected, collected from Aerial Surveillance, Washington, logged 6/1

5/3: 4.2 hour SFOU flight, with 3 crew members, 1 BPD passenger, first logged 5/4 2:44 PM, then 2:45PM, then updated 5/4 4:42PM, Risk = 0

5/3: Aerial surveillance Serial 6 collected, no details on receipt from (but Baltimore, not WF, is holding office), logged 5/12

5/4: Serials 2, 3 logged

5/4?: SD cards shipped, unknown date

5/5: Serial 4 logged

5/5: SD cards shipped by FedEx arrive in Baltimore

5/6: Serial 5 logged

5/8, approximate: SD cards arrive at [location redacted]

5/9, 5/10: Operational missions disrupt logging

5/12: Serial 6 logged

6/1: Explanation for late turnover of one video, claiming missions were flown from 4/29 to 5/2

6/1: Serial 8 logged

6/2: Serial 9, 10, 11 logged