The internet has given us many ways to make ourselves seen and heard, and to make our ideas, our bodies, ourselves, visible to many. But this visibility offers users an ironic bargain: giving both new platforms to expose injustices, and also enabling new kinds of abuse, public shaming, and coordinated attacks like doxing and trolling.As we reckon with the unfolding of the #metoo movement, some have suggested that long-standing issues of sexual abuse and harassment at work are coming to light now, in part because access to the megaphone of social media has been a spark to arouse the public conscience to the side of women struggling to speak about their experiences. Others have pointed out the importance of another type of visibility, calling for the collection of more and better data about the otherwise invisible experiences of the U.S.’s increasingly fragmented and isolated workforce. In particular, attention is being turned to women working in pink-collar and other low-wage industries, where abuse is hard to see and even harder to measure.In a sense, bigger and better data seems like one solution to the #metoo movement’s focus on individual and celebrity-driven narratives rather than larger systemic problems. Pointing to the lack of data on sexual harassment in the freelancing sector, Nathan Heller of the New Yorker writes, “We can’t fix what we don’t see, and we can’t protect what we do not see whole.” Without these types of visibility, he and others have argued, addressing these systemic issues may be impossible.But simply adding more data has its limitations, particularly for workers who rely on digital platforms to find work. Platforms already collect and leverage large amounts of data about workers in ways that have complicated consequences for their daily experiences of work. Importantly, this data doesn’t always tell the whole story.For the past year, we’ve been interviewing nannies, babysitters, elder care workers, and housecleaners across the U.S. who use platforms like Handy, TaskRabbit, and the in-home care provider platform Care.com to do care and cleaning work, in an effort to better understand how platforms are shaping domestic work. Along the way, we have found that, in many cases, the aggregation of individual data leads not to more accountability and justice, but rather forces workers to make trade-offs between visibility and vulnerability.Dora is a young black woman who has been regularly finding house-cleaning gigs on home services app Handy, in between finishing her degree in New York City. While most of her clients have been pleasant, others were far less so. “I had this one creepy guy client that kind of just watched me the whole time I was cleaning to the point I was just, ‘I think I’m just gonna leave.'”But making the decision that is best for one’s own safety can have consequences down the line; Dora (whose name has been changed for anonymity) described receiving bad ratings on numerous occasions in retaliation from clients who made her feel uncomfortable. She added: “And I think that’s what really upsets me, because I realize how sensitive I am because of this app. It’s almost a lot of pressure to keep up a [good] review cause that’s how you would get more gigs. And that determines your pay.” (A Handy Pro’s rate is based on payment tiers determined, in part, by average rating.)Other workers we spoke to described having their accounts suspended or deactivated after clients reported them for acting in their own best interests. Care workers, for example, sometimes receive bad ratings for turning down a job offer; like jilted men on dating sites, prospective clients sometimes lash out after hearing a “no.”Domestic workers are excluded from legal protection from workplace discrimination and assault through most federal workplace legislation, and only four states offer protection from sexual harassment through Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights (New York, Hawaii, California, Massachusetts). However, while these bills protect nannies and other employees of households, they don’t protect workers like Dora, who work through platforms for many different clients.Even as they provide a form of mediation between customers and workers, these gig platforms can also amplify abuse, often behind the scenes of the data generated by platforms. This insight echoes trends in other contexts where data-intensive technologies are used, in effect, to manage vulnerable populations. As Virginia Eubanks details, states have combined data sets collected in a number of different contexts to disqualify poor people for the public benefits they need. Sarah Brayne likewise writes about how police departments use data, sometimes acquired from private companies like Pizza Hut, to create wide nets of surveillance that can track individuals across institutions.These data technologies have consequences for those hoping to seek help and speak up. Imagine making the difficult calculation to report abuse in these domestic work situations. In the wake of increasingly aggressive ICE tactics, deportations, and anti-immigrant rhetoric, a 2017 survey reported a sudden drop in immigrant women seeking out social and legal service providers for victims of domestic abuse. Presumably they’ve made the impossible choice to avoid scrutiny over their personal safety. As workers use digital platforms to find work that has been traditionally less visible, there is a potential to make vulnerable people more visible and trackable by powerful institutions.Domestic workers are often considered “invisible” workers because they largely work in an unregulated “gray” economy, face many labor market challenges, and work behind closed doors in people’s private homes. However, many of these workers’ lives are made hyper-visible through the websites and apps they use to look for work. These services promise to shine a light into this otherwise informal economy, bringing trusted strangers into clients’ homes to care for their children and elderly, clean their bathrooms, and hang their TVs.In digital marketplaces, trust is often established through visibility–creating lines of sight between strangers on either side of a transaction, so that they might get to know one another by viewing ratings and reviews from past clients, response rates to messages, profile pictures, and biographical sales pitches. Platform companies offer these features–in addition to background checks–to assuage the nervous doubts of clients who want to see, what appear to be, important things about the short-term contractors they may hire to perform intimate tasks for themselves and their loved ones. Workers may also benefit from this kind of visibility, but they often don’t have much choice about the spotlight cast on them.Domestic workers cultivate their profiles on platforms like Care.com or TaskRabbit in much the same way upwardly mobile professionals are expected to cultivate their resumes or LinkedIn profiles (though on gig platforms, their last names are shortened to a first initial). Domestic work platforms create systems that reward workers for investing in their profiles, making them more visible to clients and placing them higher on recommended lists.For instance, a worker with a compelling and detailed profile, a fast message-response rate, and five-star ratings may receive a notification that she’s in the top percentile of sitters in her area. Keeping up with these metrics can also earn her a “CarePro” badge that is visible to clients on her profile. Those who choose not to disclose their age, location, or to post photos of themselves are deprioritized. This information is readily viewable by anyone using Google search–not just those with accounts on the platforms.Related: How Demographics, Automation, And Inequality Will Shape The Next DecadeMore often than not, however, this visibility mostly works in one direction. Workers are rendered transparent for the benefit of potential clients, while clients’ lives aren’t held up to similar scrutiny. While domestic workers face some of the highest rates of assault and abuse, many popular platforms, including Care.com, the largest marketplace for care workers, don’t allow workers to post reviews of clients; instead, workers can only privately notify platform companies should they see a message, job posting, or profile containing “inappropriate” content, or if they have any “inappropriate interactions.”And while theoretically, clients who get flagged for inappropriate content/interactions while on the site can lose their accounts, the process is opaque. Workers, for example, can’t see when other workers flag a client’s account or posting. Based on our research, this review process doesn’t consistently result in problematic clients losing access to the site. Care.com outlines a single termination policy for its members, both care workers and clients, reserving the right to “terminate a member’s Care.com membership for any reason or no reason, with or without notice,” providing a partial list of reasons for account termination, ranging from “[s]uspicion of fraudulent activity” to abuse or harassment.In other parts of the service economy, the ability to vet clients has been one of the primary appeals of digital marketplaces for people working independently and with few protections. For sex workers–a rarely acknowledged type of gig worker–this ability can be crucial for safety. When Rentboy.com, one of the largest websites for gay male escorts, was raided and shut down by the Department of Homeland Security in 2015 (the agency labeled it an “internet brothel”), many escorts who had relied on the site argued that the shutdown was a huge setback for their ability to protect themselves. Similar concerns are now being raised over Craigslist’s recent removal of its Personal Ads section in response to the Senate’s passing of the SESTA legislation.Gig platforms are often critiqued for their supposedly novel ability to connect strangers with each other. But working for strangers is hardly a new phenomenon, as domestic workers, day laborers, sex workers, freelancers, and other independent workers have long experienced. What matters are the power dynamics embedded in these platforms.In many cases, the power dynamics are unequal. In domestic work, this can have consequences for hiring, where establishing trust is more complicated than in other kinds of gig work. Work involving the care of loved ones can be emotionally fraught, and clients’ anxieties are further stoked by news coverage of identity-stealing housecleaners and child-neglecting babysitters. One bad review, regardless of whether it is deserved, can, in many cases, make a care worker de facto unhireable on a platform, which ends up having the same effect as having one’s account terminated.Despite questions about client accountability, and even as they continue to take increasingly large pay cuts, many workers stay on platforms like TaskRabbit or Handy largely because of the layers of protection they provide, however meager they may be. Workers we’ve spoken to expressed uneasiness with taking these transactions off-platform, not only because platform companies often penalize them for it, but also because the platforms provide at least some possibility of accountability in case things go wrong. When the alternative is Craigslist or word of mouth, domestic workers make uneasy trade-offs with regards to safety.Comparing Notes On FacebookSome care workers have found support through Facebook groups–some with thousands of members–where they share advice, celebrate each other’s victories, and offer mutual aid in distressing and traumatic situations.As researchers, we’ve spent months observing these groups, and have found that they offer a smaller public space where workers can more safely navigate the intimate politics of their unique work contexts. For example, Maia, a young woman who came to the U.S. to work as an au pair for an American family, told us that she has kept in touch through Facebook with many of the other women she met in her training program in Mexico, and was able to compare notes and seek out advice during her live-in employment. But these groups also extend into larger networks beyond the public spaces that domestic workers have traditionally congregated, like public parks or connections through training programs.Members post about a “dad boss” who makes them uncomfortable with sexual innuendo or inappropriate advances, or collectively think through the consequences of telling a charge’s parents about another parent or a coach that made them feel unsafe or threatened. They often encourage each other to seek out legal action. Threads can extend to hundreds of responses that may point the questioner in the direction of relevant state laws, workers’ bills of rights, lawyers that offer payment plans, or offers to help them find alternative employment. In these ways, they function as a community of workers who may never meet one another in person, but who nevertheless forge a culture of work across time and space. Just as in more traditional workplace settings, these interventions aren’t uniformly supportive or without contention, as disagreements over whether or not to file police reports, to quit jobs, or to address harassment at all will often be contested among group members.Related: The Network Uber Drivers BuiltWhile these groups are valuable, they have limitations. Care workers are keenly aware of the illusion of privacy that even closed Facebook groups provide. While they’ve created their own codes of ethics for protecting the privacy of the families they work for (such as using code names, blurring faces in photos, and obscuring details), their own privacy is tenuous in part because of Facebook’s real name policy, and because employers and nanny agencies occasionally infiltrate these groups to spy or dig up dirt on individual workers. As a work-around, an administrator of the group will often post on behalf of a member that wishes to remain anonymous.These groups also don’t appear to include some populations of domestic workers. They are mostly English speaking and populated with digitally savvy workers who are already active on social media. (In its survey of nannies, caregivers, and housecleaners across the country, The National Domestic Workers Alliance found that 66% of respondents were foreign-born, 47% of which are undocumented.) Moreover, these groups often work more like digital whisper networks, focused on immediate and ad hoc harm reduction or emotional support rather than more organized efforts to effect change for the industry. Still, these social media groups are a testament to the fact that gig workers are not as isolated or powerless as they may seem.In a labor market where contingent and “gig” work arrangements are on the rise, domestic workers provide a prescient example of the trade-offs of an increasingly independent workforce. As Ai Jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (and Meryl Streep’s date to the Golden Globes) points out, domestic workers are the original gig economy workers and have long been working out some of the solutions that will allow other vulnerable workers to survive difficult conditions. The online groups that provide support for many independent domestic workers–and as our colleague at the Data & Society Research Institute Alex Rosenblat has illustrated, for many Uber and Lyft drivers as well—may herald something we’ll only see more of, especially as higher-wage professionals also start seeing their job security weaken, become independent contractors, and need ways to cope with the conditions of atomized work.Some of the most important open questions around sexual harassment come back to data, and our lack of it in the context of gig work. But having more statistics on sexual harassment in the gig economy, while important, invariably tells us what we already know to be true–that it is rampant, and its frequency is directly correlated to a lack of accountability for its prevention and redressing its harms for workers. While new data sets can shed light on collective phenomena, they still direct our gaze toward the bad behavior of individuals and obscure the ways new technologies of work have transformed the very contexts of abuse and harassment.These are perennial issues that have always faced domestic workers, but now, more than ever, we need a better understanding of the changing dynamics of how abuse is enabled. This means turning our eye toward the platform companies themselves, how their platforms are architected, what they decide to track or not to track, and how their technologies change the dynamics of user behavior and social interactions, sometimes for the worse.Julia Ticona (@JuliaTicona1) is a sociologist who researches technologies of work, emotions, and inequality, and is a postdoctoral scholar at Data & Society; she will be joining the faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. Alexandra Mateescu (@cariatidaa) is a researcher at Data & Society who works on labor and tech issues, and has spent the last year conducting ethnographic research, in collaboration with Julia Ticona, on domestic workers and labor platforms.

Mr. Manafort’s indictment is a case study in international corruption. For years, the indictment says, he operated as an unregistered lobbyist for authoritarian governments, a popular racket in Washington. To avoid taxes, according to the indictment, he set up offshore bank accounts and laundered money through real estate and luxury goods — a common practice that enriches plutocrats while exacerbating housing crises in cities like New York and London by pumping billions of dollars of looted wealth into a tight real estate market.While Mr. Manafort crossed lines (he has confessed to making false statements and material omissions) and now faces legal consequences, his long career typifies the amorality, opulence and lack of accountability that successive American governments have enabled.Many establishment Democrats and Republicans in the self-proclaimed “resistance” to Mr. Trump say they are deeply concerned about the Russia scandal, but they have largely failed to consider its full implications.To “Never Trump” conservatives, the main takeaways are that the United States needs to step up its confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, and that the Obama administration was insufficiently tough on Mr. Putin. Many Democrats, meanwhile, argue that Russian interference means that Mr. Trump’s presidency is illegitimate and that Mrs. Clinton is not to blame for her loss.But Russian meddling in American politics is, in fact, the product of a long series of bipartisan policy failures. Democrats and Republicans alike supported trade policies that facilitated the rise of plundered fortunes in countries like Russia and China. For instance, in the 1990s, both the Bush and Clinton administrations encouraged the aggressive privatization of the Russian economy, which resulted in collapsing living standards, a new class of robber barons and a backlash against liberal democracy that Mr. Putin exploits to this day.Left-wing critics of American foreign policy correctly point out that Russia is a convenient punching bag for hawkish pundits and politicians. But the most powerful counterweights to these hawks aren’t exactly progressive champions either: American corporations have lobbied against recognizing Mr. Putin’s human rights abuses and have sought to exploit Russia’s natural resources. Energy companies like Exxon Mobil, whose former chief executive, Rex Tillerson, now serves as secretary of state, have partnered with Russia and have sought waivers from international sanctions to drill for oil in Russia. A new Cold War would be dangerous, but so would a warmer United States-Russia relationship that enriches oil company executives in both countries.As a rising generation of leftists increasingly asserts itself within the Democratic Party — and may, eventually, have the opportunity to shape foreign policy — it must articulate a new approach to Russia consistent with its core values. This approach should be driven neither by the interests of the national security state nor by the energy sector. Instead, it should aim to block Russia’s kleptocratic elite from safeguarding its assets in the United States, to clean up the influence of foreign lobbying on Washington and to shut down tax havens for billionaires everywhere. The investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties provides an opportunity to focus on these issues.“Inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism are inseparable,” Mr. Sanders said in a recent address. “Around the world we have witnessed the rise of demagogues who once in power use their positions to loot the state of its resources. These kleptocrats, like Putin in Russia, use divisiveness and abuse as a tool for enriching themselves and those loyal to them.” For Americans who broadly share Mr. Sanders’s views, this should be the real lesson of the Russia scandal.

“Maybe these posters aren’t 100 percent sure about their involvement in the white nationalist movement, and they want to make sure they’d be accepted,” he suggested.It is impossible to know whether that was indeed going through their minds, however, because the researchers did not interview the posters directly. That also means the researchers cannot be sure that the DNA tests even belonged to the users who posted them.Despite those limitations, Wendy D. Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was well-executed study. In her own work, she has found an inverse dynamic: white people who take genetic tests hoping to find something that makes them feel more “exotic.” But like the white nationalists, they were also inclined to use only the information that was convenient for them: If a bit of Native American ancestry seemed as if it would impress their friends, for example, then they would embrace it. If they worried they wouldn’t be taken seriously, or thought they might be criticized, then they wouldn’t.Obviously, this type of selective retention is more benign than selective retention intended to rationalize acts of violence, social exclusion and racist hierarchies. Nonetheless, it’s far from consequence-free, Dr. Roth said. She called it “a new form of white privilege.”“They can reveal and benefit from that feeling of being unique, exotic or distinctive without having to experience the disadvantage that members of those groups have traditionally experienced,” she said.Dr. Roth also warned that the growing embrace of ancestral testing may broadly encourage a racist or ethnocentric worldview.

Are there times, in the dead of night, just after Donald Trump has appalled the world with some newly horrific act, when James Comey is gripped by the dreaded thought: It was me who put that man in power?The answer Comey gives is unexpectedly swift and direct. “Yes, actually. Mostly because people say that to me all the time. So I hear that quite a bit.” And what does he do with that thought? “It’s very painful. And I sometimes wonder, if I could go back in time, would I do something deeply unprincipled? I wouldn’t. All it does is make it painful, [because] I think Donald Trump is doing – and will do – great damage to my country. But that just adds to the pain.”In July of that year, Comey stepped forward to announce that a year-long investigation into Clinton’s use of email was over and that the candidate would face no charges. Republicans denounced him as a Democrat stooge. But then, in late October and less than two weeks before election day, Comey revealed that the FBI had reopened the email investigation and that Clinton was once again under suspicion. Republicans now rushed to praise Comey as a man of great integrity, the polls promptly narrowed and, on 8 November, Trump won the presidency.The report backed Comey on the decision not to prosecute Clinton, but it faults the way he broke from standard FBI procedures in making those July and October disclosures himself, rather than deferring to his bosses at the Department of Justice. The inspector general brands Comey’s failure to inform Justice that he was going to make a public statement in July 2016 “extraordinary and insubordinate”.Surely for a fastidious servant of the law like Comey – such a boy scout that he once felt compelled to tell a colleague that a gift of a necktie was, in fact, a “re-gift” of an unwanted present from his brother-in-law – that kind of condemnation hit hard?“Look, the term insubordination when I first saw it threw me. I’m like: ‘What?’ But in a way, he’s right. That if you define insubordination in that I intentionally deprived my superior of information that they would otherwise have wanted, yeah, that’s true. And I did it because I thought it was the thing that I had to do. Once I stepped back from it I realised, yeah, it’s actually a fair description.”It’s a typical Comey answer: emotionally self-aware; self-critical; striving to be fair and to see his opponent’s point of view; insistent on logic and, after all that, still convinced of his own ultimate moral rectitude. His certainty on that score is conveyed as much through his demeanour as his words. In the hotel room set aside for interviews, surrounded by multiple editions of his book waiting to be signed, he looks relaxed in loose jacket and no tie – “He’s dressing as a writer,” his German publicist suggests – and if guilt and angst are gnawing away, there is no outward sign of it.Instead he speaks as a man who wrestled hard with the decisions he had to make, and has wrestled with them in the months since, but has declared himself the winner. He is not tortured by regret. As he says of last week’s report: “I don’t feel chastened by it. Initial reaction was defensive, I think, a little bit. It’s painful to see yourself criticised like that but, in the end, I’m at peace with it.”What of the revelation that he himself had used a private Gmail account to do some of his FBI work, a disclosure that brought a three-word tweet – and viral rebuke – from Hillary Clinton: “But my emails”? Didn’t that make him a hypocrite?Not at all, he says. “I worried throughout the investigation that Hillary Clinton didn’t understand what her own investigation was about,” he says, risking condescension to explain that the issue was never what kind of email she was using – “I could [not] care less that she was using her own server or Gmail or AOL” or whatever – but rather “the mishandling of classified information”. For his own part, he says he used Gmail only when working at home on public texts, speeches and the like, which he would then send to his official FBI account. “There’s no accusation whatsoever that I used my Gmail account to discuss classified topics.”How did he react to the inspector general’s discovery that two FBI agents were texting each other about the campaign, one reassuring the other not to worry about a Trump victory because “We’ll stop it”?Comey says he was “stunned when I heard that stuff”. He had no idea the two agents involved were talking that way, or that they were in a relationship with each other. Had he known, he says he would have removed them immediately from their role in “any sensitive investigation”.He is puzzled, he adds, because the agent who wrote “We’ll stop it” also helped Comey draft the October disclosure statement that damaged Clinton so badly. “If he was in Hillary Clinton’s camp, why was he doing that? This is the thing that the Trump people have trouble explaining. If the FBI was a Clinton tool, why didn’t we disclose the Russia investigation?”It’s a good question. Given that Comey was, as last week’s report makes clear, happy to break FBI protocols in the Clinton case, why didn’t he break them to reveal before election day that the Bureau was looking into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign? Then at least he could rest easy, knowing he had hurt both Clinton and Trump equally.“It never even came into a conversation,” he says. “People tend to talk about it like there was an investigation of Hillary and there was an investigation of Donald.” But that wasn’t true, not then. “The candidate was not the subject” of the investigation, he explains. Nor even was the Trump campaign. All it was, at that stage, says Comey, was a preliminary investigation of four individuals. To reveal that a probe was under way would have damaged the investigation. Besides, “I don’t know what you could responsibly have told the American people that wouldn’t have been tremendously unfair to a candidate who was not being investigated.”I’m about to move on, but there’s something else that bothers me. In the book, Comey says he made his October statement in part because he feared that, if he didn’t, and Clinton won, there would be a cloud cast over the legitimacy of her presidency. Americans would feel they had not been in full possession of the facts when they voted for her.But wasn’t that hugely naive? Wouldn’t the Republicans and their conservative media outriders have branded President Hillary as illegitimate from day one whatever Comey had done, just as they had with her husband and Barack Obama?“Of course, the Republicans and Fox News – any Democrat as president they’re going to attack. But it’s an order of magnitude different if the basis of the attack on the FBI is that we concealed [the facts] from the American people and thereby engineered her election as president of the United States … Even without the Fox News voices, a reasonable American, I think, would be stunned” to learn that the FBI had reopened the email probe and not let on. Some of Comey’s detractors believe his motives were much less high-minded, that he kept inserting himself into the 2016 campaign not solely to maintain the integrity of the FBI, but for his own self-preservation. The inspector general hints at that when he writes that Comey based his decisions on “what he believed was in the FBI’s institutional interests and would enable him to continue to effectively lead the FBI as its director”. So: did ego play a part?“The honest answer is I don’t think so, in part because I knew how much this was going to suck for me. And I knew by choosing especially to speak that it was going to be bad for me personally. I think that’s a pretty good indication that it wasn’t about protecting myself. The knowledge that I was screwed, I think, is a pretty good indicator that wasn’t the case.”It’s now his predecessor as FBI director who is in the frame, as the world awaits Robert Mueller’s report into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Comey warns Trump’s opponents not to get their hopes up.For one thing, he says, we don’t know what Mueller will find. The truth might not be the “particular set of facts” people want it to be. (I ask if, based on what he knows, it is plausible that Russia actively meddled in the Brexit referendum. Intriguingly, he answers: “I think it’s plausible and consistent with their recent behaviour in the United States and a longstanding pattern. But I don’t know enough and if I knew, I couldn’t say it anyway. So I can’t talk about that.”) For another, it is “entirely possible” that even if the facts against Trump are damning, he won’t be impeached or removed because Republicans control both houses of Congress.He sets out instead his alternative hope, which he acknowledges some might find odd. “I almost hope that the American people are not relieved of their obligation to go to the polls in 2020 and decide what the values of the American president should be.” He worries that impeachment would short-circuit a necessary process, and would at the same time “risk driving a division into our country that would be long lasting … If it’s outsourced [to Congress], it’ll feed a narrative that there was a coup by the deep state and blah, blah, blah.” Better that Americans get rid of Trump themselves, at the ballot box.But will they? “I’m optimistic that, as the conversation continues in our country, which I’m trying to be part of for the next two and a half years, the sleeping giant will be awakened. I think of America as a bell curve. There’s wingnuts at either end and then the great lump in the middle is everybody else. And they’re busy and distracted and that giant, that lump, only awakens every so often in America. And I think the giant is stirring. I think the giant is stirred by images of children.”He has brought us to the infants and babies separated from their parents at the US border. For him, those images have recalled the internment of Japanese-Americans during the second world war, but also pictures of black children being bitten by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights struggles in the 1960s. “The giant awakened in our country in 1963 and 1964 and that changed our country. Martin Luther King wrote to that giant in Letter from Birmingham Jail, basically saying: ‘You busy, moderate people need to get in the game.’ And that happens every so often in American history. Again, I could be convincing myself of this, but I think the giant is awakening.“When you stare at children crying, being taken away from their mothers, it forces your eyes above statutes and numbers, to: ‘What kind of people are we, for God’s sakes?’ That’s a lifting of the national eyes that is powerful and potentially the kind of inflection point that I’m talking about. That’s the kind of thing that awakens the giant.”I ask about Trump’s threat to pardon himself and everyone else linked to the Russia scandal. Is the rule of law in danger in America? I expect him to equivocate, or to tell me I’m getting carried away. But his answer is clear.“Yes. Yes. Not in the long run, because we will recover. But if we’re not attuned to the damage that’s being done to it right now, the recovery will take longer.” He cites Trump’s demands that political opponents, including Comey, be locked up – uncharted territory for a US president.Still, Comey clings to the view that, in the end, America will right itself. There have been low points before, he says. “In the 1920s, one third of our congress were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Joe McCarthy reigned in America from 1950 to 1954.” But America recovered.Is Trump in that category, along with McCarthyism and the Klan? “I think he should be understood as channelling the forces of reaction to change in the United States.” Is he as great a menace? “We’ll only be able to judge in hindsight, I suppose, but certainly not if the giant awakens and we resist the temptation to become numb to the norm-destroying behaviours.”Comey promises to be active between now and the 2020 election, writing and speaking, perhaps even backing political candidates. He is no longer a registered Republican; he is now an independent. Would he run himself? That “is not something I’m ever going to do,” he declares. He says that he’d be a “crappy candidate”. He would hate asking people for money; he would baulk at saying contradictory things to different audiences; if an opponent made a good point in a debate, he would say so.You never know, I say: those very qualities might be appealing to voters. “The other thing is, I’m actually a bit of an introvert. I don’t get energy from public engagement. I don’t crave affirmation, crave attention. You’ve got to have a little bit of that in you.”Our time is nearly up. In our last minute together, I say that, if I were in his shoes, I would spend every waking hour scouring polling data and the like, searching for evidence that it wasn’t my fault that Hillary Clinton lost. I would need that.He wasn’t like that in the immediate aftermath of the election, he says. “I was just trying to block it out at the time. I think I felt a certain sense of numbness. Since then, I’ve actually delegated all that to my wife – she was a strong Hillary Clinton supporter – because she’s very keen to find evidence that it wasn’t me. She would very much like to find some definitive study that it wasn’t me.”And has she found it?“Not yet.” Topics James Comey Donald Trump US politics FBI Robert Mueller Hillary Clinton features

WILLEMSTAD, Curaçao—A court on the Dutch island of Curaçao has authorized the local subsidiary of U.S. oil giant ConocoPhillips to seize $636 million worth of assets held on the island by Petróleos de Venezuela SA.The move comes as Houston’s Conoco seeks to recover $2 billion in a decade-old dispute over the expropriation of its Venezuelan oil projects by the nation’s socialist government, which is struggling with an economic crunch that has caused widespread shortages of food and medicine....

The North Korean nuclear missile threat has provided China with a golden opportunity to assert a leadership role in a matter of critical global security. What’s more, it comes at a time when the world worries that President Trump cannot be trusted to deal with the matter with wisdom and responsibility.So why does the Chinese government not take advantage and make the most of it? The answer has to be found in the nature of the political system in China, one that places the perpetuation of Communist party power above all else, including foreign policy.President Xi Jinping does intend to “make China great again” and is working to enhance its place in the world. But the leadership’s scope to persuade Kim Jong-un, through diplomatic channels, to contain his nuclear threats against the US is admittedly limited. Kim has largely ignored the Chinese and has declined to meet Xi or pay homage to this giant of a “fraternal” neighbour by visiting Beijing. He also purged powerful figures close to Chinese leaders. As a consequence, Beijing’s channels to Kim have been downgraded and reduced in effectiveness.This does not change the reality that Chinese co-operation and support remain essential for the North Korean economy, as more than 90% of its imports come through China.Beijing could cut this economic lifeline and force Kim to choose between his missile and nuclear programme on one side and keeping the lights on and food available on the other.But the Chinese government will not cut the lifeline and Kim knows it. This is why he feels confident to ignore Beijing as he pushes the peace, stability and security of the region to the brink by threatening Japan, the US and South Korea.China cannot cut the life-support system for North Korea because to do so would risk serious challenges emerging there that could potentially lead to the implosion of the Kim dictatorship. Why would a collapse of the regime be a matter of grave concern to China, since it has little love for Kim?It is not the risk of a flood of refugees to China, though many would be expected in such a scenario and they would be an unwelcome burden. However, were this to take place China would receive generous support from the US, Japan and others, and the flow of refugees, in any event, would only be temporary as they would return to a united Korea once the situation there stabilised.The risk of US forces being based in North Korea after an implosion of the Kim regime is also very small, if not negligible. The US forces are in South Korea to deter North Korea and the raison d’etre for their presence would disappear should North Korea cease to exist.Any new united Korean government would also almost certainly find itself engaged in difficult negotiations with the Americans over the disposal of the nuclear arsenal inherited from the Kim regime. With a united Korea not dependent on the US for security, and realising the need to maintain good relations with China, it would not allow the Americans to build military bases in the north.The real constraint on the Communist party’s action in Beijing is the potential impact not on Korea, but on China itself. Most Chinese believe the Kim regime has survived because of Chinese support. If the Chinese Communist party allowed the Kim regime to collapse, it would be seen as a result of the party turning off this vital life support.Such a move would then raise questions among Chinese dissidents about whether the party still had the political will and capacity to do whatever it takes to stay in power at home.As Xi made clear when he became China’s leader in 2012, he considered the biggest failure of the former Soviet Union was its leadership’s inability to deal forcefully with the “traitor” Mikhail Gorbachev. Xi made clear that the same mistake would not happen in China. In short, he would not allow any action that could signal to dissidents at home that the party no longer had the political will, determination and capacity to do whatever it took to maintain power.He will therefore not allow the Kim regime to be so destabilised that it risks implosion. Kim clearly understands this.The fact that China’s foreign policy is driven first and foremost by domestic considerations has significant implications for how it will contest, with the Americans, the leadership of east Asia. Much as Xi is asserting China’s right to be respected and admired, he is not – at least not yet – seeking to replace the US in the region.What Xi and his administration is doing, however, is attempting to reduce the stature of the US and make it look unreliable in the region. It wants to persuade its regional neighbours to look to China and not rely on the US. Helping Trump to resolve the North Korean problem does not advance this agenda.As China under the Communist party also sees Japan as a peer competitor and holds deep suspicion of its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, it is not keen to ease Japan’s pain brought about by Kim’s reckless missile tests. Beijing has no desire to work with Japan against North Korea.All this does not mean China is not concerned by Kim’s dangerous games; nor that Xi is not irritated by Kim’s refusal to show appropriate deference and appreciation of China’s support. Indeed, China has a policy of not wanting to see nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. But taking the risks implied to remove the North Korean problem is too high a price to pay.What China wants instead is to contain the North Korean problem, not to remove it. It wants talks and an acceptance of the reality of North Korea as a nuclear weapon state in return for Kim behaving himself.If the Trump administration and other leading players seriously seek to address the North Korean problem and want Chinese help, they need to bear in mind what the Chinese Communist party really wants and is prepared to do. Using conventional measures of national interest will not help – the ultimate driver behind Chinese policy is, as always, the interest of the Communist party.Steve Tsang is director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London Topics China Opinion North Korea Xi Jinping Asia Pacific Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Donald Trump Japan comment

20:21 | 10/13/17 | NR | CC Trump threatens to 'decertify' the Iran Nuclear agreement; Heroes emerge from the ashes of the California wildfires Continue Reading

The most destructive wildfire raging in southern California has expanded significantly, scorching an area larger than New York City.The Thomas Fire in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties has consumed 230,000 acres (930 sq km) in the past week.Fanned by strong winds, it has become the fifth largest wildfire in recorded state history after it grew by more than 50,000 acres in a day.Residents in coastal beach communities have been ordered to leave.On Sunday, firefighters reported that 15% of the blaze had been contained but were forced to downgrade that to 10% as it continued to spread."This is a menacing fire, certainly, but we have a lot of people working very diligently to bring it under control," Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. Thousands of firefighters are working round the clock to tackle the blaze, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.The containment operation is not only being hampered by dry winds. It is proving challenging for firefighters because of the location and mountainous terrain. An analyst with the California fire protection department, Tim Chavez, said the emergency services were struggling because "a hot interior" was in parts practically meeting the ocean, making access difficult. "It's just a very difficult place to fight fire," Mr Chavez said, adding: "It's very dangerous and has a historical record of multiple fatalities occurring over the years." Powerful pictures of the fires Flames seen from space The other fires hitting California are largely controlled, but 200,000 people have evacuated their homes and some 800 buildings have been destroyed since 4 December.Evacuation orders were issued overnight on Sunday for parts of Carpinteria close to Los Padres National Forest, about 100 miles (160km) northwest of Los Angeles.Forecasters said wind speeds were expected to increase throughout the day, before dying down again overnight.The local fire department tweeted pictures of a wall of flames advancing on homes on the outskirts of Carpinteria early on Sunday morning.A member of the emergency services in Carpinteria said he would continue working alongside his colleagues until the fire was under complete control. "What they did last night was amazing," firefighter Michael Gallagher said, adding: "They saved this entire community."We've been up, I'm at 29 hours straight, every other day... we are exhausted, but they're not coming off until this is done." The prisoners fighting wildfires Governor brands fires 'new normal' Businesses face ruin as blaze rages Meanwhile, actor Rob Lowe, who lives in Santa Barbara, a city of close to 100,000 people, tweeted that he was praying for his town as fires closed in."Firefighters making brave stands. Could go either way. Packing to evacuate now," Lowe added.California has spent the past seven days battling wildfires. Six large blazes, and other smaller ones, erupted on Monday night in southern California.The Thomas Fire - named according to where it started, near the Thomas Aquinas College - is by far the largest of the fires.They swept through tens of thousands of acres in a matter of hours, driven by extreme weather, including low humidity, high winds and parched ground.The authorities issued a purple alert - the highest level warning - amid what it called "extremely critical fire weather", while US President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency.On Saturday, California Governor Jerry Brown described the situation as "the new normal" and predicted vast fires, fuelled by climate change, "could happen every year or every few years".Several firefighters have been injured, but only one person has died - a 70-year-old woman who was found dead in her car on an evacuation route.There are also fears the blaze will seriously hit California's multi-million dollar agricultural industry.

The Takeaway: Maybe this is how the scene between Cohen and Hannity played out way back when?What Happened: Racism is alive and well, even in Starbucks, which prompted the internet into action and Starbucks into apology mode.What Really Happened: This story started last week, but it didn’t really break through into the mainstream for a few days, when people really started to realize what had happened. It all started in a Philadelphia Starbucks.News of the arrest—and the video, as well—started making the rounds online, prompting more and more responses on Twitter as the clamor started to build.Soon enough, faced with protests at the store where it happened, Starbucks made a public apology.It should be noted that the employee who called police is no longer working at the location, although it’s unclear whether or not she’s still working for Starbucks. (Some reports suggested she had left the company entirely.) The company’s executive chairman continued to apologize afterwards:The Takeaway: The entire story is sad, and a sign that the world is nowhere near the “post-racial society” that some proclaim, over-optimistically. (As if the last year hasn’t been filled with enough examples to argue against that.) On a far less important level, it also pushes back against a branding exercise for Starbucks itself……especially when the problem is far from limited to one store.What Happened: As if the Stormy Daniels story wasn’t enough of a Rorschach test, a new sketch took that and ran with it last week. What do you see?What Really Happened: We couldn’t let the week finish without checking in with the ongoing Stormy Daniels affair. (No pun intended, etc.) Last week, not content with potentially pushing the Michael Cohen investigations into action, it was all about the man who allegedly threatened Daniels and her child into silence surrounding Trump.Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.Some were impressed by the latest move......but others—really, a lot of others—found themselves distracted by the sketch itself, and who it might look like.The Takeaway: There was, at least, one man willing to try and save his reputation over this matter.OK, make that two. Kind of.

The Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar has called the Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson a “racist fool” after he made a racially loaded attack on her live on air.Carlson, a controversial conservative host and Donald Trump supporter, criticized Omar in a three-minute monologue full of anti-immigrant rhetoric and personal attacks on Omar and her family.In the segment, aired on Tuesday night, he described her as “living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country” and “a living fire alarm”. He also accused Omar of having “undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people”.Omar, who fled civil war in Somalia with her family in 1991 and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before arriving in the US as a child under a resettlement program and making history when she was elected to Congress last year, responded to Carlson on Twitter.She wrote: “Not gonna lie, it’s kinda fun watching a racist fool like this weeping about my presence in Congress. No lies will stamp out my love for this country or my resolve to make our union more perfect. They will just have to get used to calling me congresswoman!”Her tweet has been favorited more than 84,000 times.Carlson, who joined Fox in 2009, has a history of making misogynistic and racist comments. In unearthed radio recordings, he described Iraqi people as “semiliterate primitive monkeys” and claimed white men are responsible for “creating civilization”.Carlson’s Tuesday segment started with him describing Omar’s journey from Somalia – “one of the world’s poorest countries” – to America, “the world’s richest country with all the bounty that that implies”, and claiming she has “a lot to be grateful for”.He added: “But she isn’t grateful, not at all. After everything America has done for Omar and her family, she hates this country more than ever.”Rounding off the segment, he criticized the immigration system, in which he claimed “no country can import large numbers of people who hate it and expect to survive”, adding: “So be grateful for Ilhan Omar, as annoying as she is. She’s a living fire alarm. A warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately – or else.”Omar, who made history in January when she became the first Somali American and one of the first Muslim women sworn into Congress, has come under repeated attack since taking office – including from the president.In May, at the first ever congressional Iftar, she talked about the challenges she faced as a result of her identity in the Capitol.Omar is part of “the squad”, a group of high-profile progressive House Democrats that also includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Topics Ilhan Omar Fox News House of Representatives Democrats Fox news

Pro-Brexit placards are seen outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain, March 26, 2019. REUTERS/Alkis KonstantinidisLONDON (Reuters) - The chief of the 2016 “Vote Leave” Brexit campaign said on Wednesday that opponents of European Union membership should start rebuilding the network and that they would win by a bigger margin if there was another referendum. In the June 23, 2016 referendum, 17.4 million voters, or 51.9 percent, backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million, or 48.1 percent, backed staying. Ever since, opponents have pushed for another referendum. “Start rebuilding our network now,” Dominic Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave campaign, said in a blog. “Beating them again and by more will be easier than 2016.” Cummings said many Brexit opponents had treated the public with contempt and criticized some Brexit-supporting lawmakers in Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party for being “useful idiots” for the Remain campaign. Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by James DaveyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Last week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) brought thousands of neoliberal elites – as well as an army of feted journalists and scholars – to the popular Swiss ski resort of Davos. There, the emerging relationship between the Davos set and far-right populists was plain to see. And it is far rosier than either party would like to admit.In the absence of Donald Trump, the spotlight was on Jair Bolsonaro, the newly minted president of Brazil, who was also the keynote speaker at the WEF. Attendees were initially somewhat uneasy with the far-right president, who openly praised military dictatorship, and therefore mostly held their applause before his speech. But after he had touted “a new Brazil … that’s open to business”, the room warmed up rapidly.Francesco Starace, chief executive at the Italian electricity multinational Enel, probably spoke for most people in the room when he said: “If it is populist or not populist, we don’t care – it is a reform agenda that we think is good for the country” – and for WEF attendees, obviously.In addition, the Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, one of the most vocal supporters of the normalization of the populist radical right in Europe, was given a full panel to lay out his vision of a “new global architecture”. Of course, some critics of the far right were given airtime too. The historian Timothy Snyder, who has been issuing alarmist warnings about the threat of totalitarianism, was on two panels. But the overarching message being sent at Davos was: far-right populists are welcome here.In fact, the reception of the likes of Kurz – and especially Bolsonaro – at WEF is chillingly similar to the way that neoliberal elites have responded to Trump, who was initially received with hesitation, but was quickly normalized and is increasingly embraced. Just think about the praise that chief executives of the Business Roundtable heaped on Trump for his “aggressive” deregulation policies, for example.Meanwhile, elites are railing against the kind of “populism” that actually threatens their interests: so-called “leftwing populism”, which in most cases is just old-school social democracy. Take, for example, former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz. Schulz likes to present himself as being against both the far right and the left, but most of his critique is directed at Democrats, not Trump. In particular, his ire is focused at new Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose proposal for a maximum tax bracket of 70% he described as “not American”. His main political enemy is clearly on the left, not the right.What does this shift represent? Having tamed the rightwing populist challenger, they are now turning their attention to the possible leftwing populist backlash that politicians like Trump are creating. Brian Hooks, chairman of the Koch network, made clear that the objective of their new education initiative is to find “a better way” than the recent teacher strikes. Art Pope, one of the donors, was less diplomatic. He said his support for the Koch education initiative was motivated by his concern about the popularity of socialism among students. “It used to be you didn’t have to have a serious conversation about socialism in American politics. Now you do.”Concretely, the Koch network and its donors are not so much afraid of Bernie Sanders, but of his political offspring, like Ocasio-Cortez, who could construct the political alliance that could not only overthrow the current rightwing (populist) powers, but also the liberal elites within the opposition.Liberals should not be seduced by their money, or scared by their propaganda. To defend, or reinstate, liberal democracy, they have to not only fight rightwing populists, but also their neoliberal enablers. Social justice can only be achieved when the perverse privileges and wealth of the neoliberal elites are significantly limited. And the Davos class will be no ally in that fight. They have made it abundantly clear: they will take a rightwing populist over a leftwing one any day.• Cas Mudde is a Guardian columnist Topics Davos Opinion US politics Koch brothers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Donald Trump Jair Bolsonaro The far right comment

Apple has announced a multiyear deal with Oprah Winfrey to create original programming, a coup in the battle for A-list talent and projects in the booming digital entertainment market.“Together, Winfrey and Apple will create original programs that embrace her incomparable ability to connect with audiences around the world,” Apple said in a statement.Apple gave no details of the type of programming that Winfrey would create, the value of the deal, or when it might be released. Winfrey had no immediate comment. Winfrey, 64, an influential movie and TV producer who also publishes a magazine, is expected to appear on screen, a source familiar with the deal said. Apple has not said how it plans to distribute its programming, to which it has committed an initial $1bn. The partnership is the biggest original content deal struck by Apple so far as it aims to compete with Netflix Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Time Warner Inc’s HBO. Netflix, which has said it will spend up to $8bn on programming this year, in May struck a multiyear deal with Barack and Michelle Obama to produce films, documentaries and other content. Netflix, the world’s leading streaming entertainment provider, has also lured prolific television producers Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes away from broadcast television. Amazon said in November it had bought the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings and would produce a multi-season series that explores new storylines preceding author JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. This week, Amazon also announced a development deal with Oscar-winning actor Nicole Kidman’s production company for movies and television. For its part, Apple in November ordered two seasons of a dramatic series with Hollywood stars Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, looking at the lives of people working on a morning television show. Other projects Apple has announced include a remake of Steven Spielberg’s 1980s science fiction anthology series Amazing Stories, based on Isaac Asimov’s influential Foundation science fiction novels, and a drama from La La Land movie director Damian Chazelle. Under the deal with Winfrey, she will remain chief executive of cable channel OWN, which she launched in 2011 in partnership with Discovery Inc. Winfrey in December extended her contract with OWN through 2025, OWN and Apple said. Under her contract with OWN, Winfrey can appear on camera on other platforms on a limited basis. Winfrey rose to fame as the host of her own television talk show, using it to build a media empire that spans magazine publishing, movie and television production, cable TV and satellite radio. Born into poverty, she is one of the world’s wealthiest women and has been nominated for two Academy Awards. A rousing speech by Winfrey at the Golden Globes awards ceremony in January triggered an online campaign to persuade her to run for US president in 2020. She dismissed the notion, telling InStyle magazine in an interview, “It’s not something that interests me.” Topics Oprah Winfrey Digital television Apple news

A federal appeals court in New York City has denied Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott’s bid to keep a six-game suspension over alleged domestic violence on hold. Elliott was in court and the denial of the injunction makes him ineligible for Sunday’s game against the Atlanta Falcons. The second US circuit court of appeals ruled on Thursday that Elliott didn’t meet the standards to continue blocking the suspension but ordered a hearing as soon as it could be scheduled. He played the first eight games on three different legal reprieves. It wasn’t immediately clear how soon the court would rule on Elliott’s claim that he was treated unfairly by the NFL. Reports emerged on Wednesday that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is aiming to sue the NFL if they agree to a contract extension for the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell. Part of Jones’s unhappiness is said to be down to Goodell’s handling of Elliott’s suspension.Elliott led the league in rushing last season and was named an All Pro. He is second in rushing this season. Topics NFL Dallas Cowboys US sports news

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump will nominate Kirstjen Nielsen, who as top aide to his White House chief of staff has sought to instill order in Trump’s team, to lead the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the White House said in a statement on Wednesday. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (R) walks with Kirstjen Nielsen, the chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S., before his departure with President Donald Trump to Yuma, Arizona, August 22, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri GripasIf confirmed by the Senate, Nielsen would take the reins at a sprawling department with more than 240,000 employees that is responsible for U.S. border and airport security, immigration policy, disaster response, refugee admissions and other matters. Nielsen, 45, is a cyber security expert with a considerable resume in homeland security that includes work at the department’s Transportation Security Administration and on former Republican President George W. Bush’s White House Homeland Security Council. Nielsen was retired Marine Corps General John Kelly’s chief of staff when he was secretary of homeland security during the opening months of Trump’s presidency. Kelly brought her to the White House as his deputy when Trump named him chief of staff in July to replace Reince Priebus after only six months on the job. The nomination requires Senate confirmation. Nielsen’s departure from the White House would mark the latest upheaval in Trump’s White House team. She was responsible for carrying out some of Kelly’s orders on who gets access to the president. As a result, she has irritated some White House officials who now have limited contact with Trump, according to sources familiar with the situation. Kelly has sought to bring more order to the chaotic West Wing since replacing Priebus. Trump has welcomed the changes to some extent, although he has privately confided to friends that the limitations on access to the Oval Office sometimes go too far. Putting Nielsen into the Homeland Security post will allow Trump and Kelly to keep a close eye on the department, but getting her out of the White House could permit some of Kelly’s strictness to be relaxed. The department has been led by an acting secretary, Elaine Duke, since Kelly took the White House post. Cyber security is one of the primary issues under the Homeland Security Department’s portfolio. Nielsen previously worked at a cyber think tank at George Washington University, blocks from the White House, and is considered well-versed in some of the more technical missions at the department, such as sharing cyber-threat information with the private sector. The department was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States exposed cracks in the country’s homeland security apparatus. The appointment comes at a busy time for the department, with one of its agencies, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, overseeing disaster relief in hurricane-hit Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida as well as wildfire-ravaged areas of California. The department also is responsible for U.S. border security. The department is a major player in implementing Trump’s aggressive stance toward deporting illegal immigrants, as well as vetting the lower number of refugees Trump has decided to allow into the United States and devising his travel ban on six Muslim-majority nations, North Korea and certain Venezuelans. ‘LOW-DRAMA PICK’ “It seems like a low-drama pick. It’s a little concerning that she seems to have little background in immigration security and policy, but those individual agencies are in good hands already, and there is a strong core of career managers,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors more limits on immigration. Nielsen is not known for hard-line views on immigration like those of White House adviser Stephen Miller. If confirmed, Nielsen would be the first homeland security secretary to have previously served as a rank-and-file member of the department. Some previous DHS secretaries have been criticized for not possessing enough technical fluency to address cyber threats facing the nation. She also served as a corporate attorney and a congressional staff member, the White House statement said. “Kirstjen’s a policy wonk at heart, especially when it comes to cyber,” Frank Cilluffo, a former senior homeland security official under Bush who worked with Nielsen at George Washington University. Nielsen would immediately be given the task of helping coordinate the federal response to potential cyber attacks that target elections. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election to try to help Trump win, in part by hacking and releasing emails embarrassing to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, and through online propaganda. Russia has denied meddling in the election and Trump has denied any collusion between his campaign and Moscow. Jeh Johnson, who served as former Democratic President Barack Obama’s last homeland secretary chief, designated election systems as critical infrastructure, widening the support the department can provide to states. But the department has clashed with several state officials over how best to cooperate to defend future elections. Politico first reported the appointment. Reporting by Steve Holland in Washington; Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati, Dustin Volz, Doina Chiacu and Eric Walsh; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by James Dalgleish and Peter CooneyOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Mr. Kelly raised none of the issues about conditions in Honduras, the person said. Mr. Kelly’s focus was on a smooth confirmation process for Mr. Trump’s pick to run the department, Kirstjen M. Nielsen, and avoiding any steps that would jeopardize the administration’s immigration policies.A Homeland Security spokesman denied that account.“It is perfectly normal for members of the White House team to weigh in on major decisions,” Tyler Q. Houlton, the spokesman, said on Thursday.And the White House official said that neither Ms. Nielsen’s name nor the subject of her confirmation hearing came up during Mr. Kelly’s call with Ms. Duke.Ms. Duke also recently resisted White House pressure to write a letter endorsing Ms. Nielsen, one of the people said. Ms. Nielsen worked for Mr. Kelly when he was Mr. Trump’s first Homeland Security secretary, and followed him to the White House when he was named chief of staff in July.The Washington Post first reported that the White House pressured Ms. Duke to end the protected status for tens of thousands of Honduran immigrants living in the United States.In their discussions on Monday, Ms. Duke, who was Mr. Trump’s choice in January to be deputy homeland security secretary, also told Mr. Kelly she would resign from the department once Ms. Nielsen was confirmed, two of the people familiar with the calls said. The Senate Homeland Security committee held a confirmation hearing for Ms. Nielsen on Wednesday but has delayed its vote on her nomination while senators seek more information from her, a Senate aide said.The immigration program, known as Temporary Protected Status, was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect foreigners, particularly Central Americans, fleeing war, natural disasters or catastrophes and was extended to Haitians after the 2010 earthquake. About 300,000 people are enrolled.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — At least 80 people were killed on Tuesday in Syrian government air and artillery strikes on besieged suburbs of the capital, Damascus, one of the last rebel-held strongholds. It was the bloodiest day so far in a weekslong escalation that prompted United Nations officials to issue an unusual call for an immediate cease-fire.The toll, compiled by rescue workers and rising into the night, came as at least six more people were killed in another rebel-held area, in the northern province of Idlib. There, in the past week alone, the government’s Russian-backed air war has damaged several hospitals and clinics and killed dozens of people, including many civilians.United Nations humanitarian officials declared the situation “extreme” even for the nearly seven-year war, and called on Tuesday for an immediate cease-fire for at least a month to allow aid deliveries.There was little hope, though, that a cease-fire would happen. Airstrikes appear to have intensified since Saturday, when insurgents shot down a Russian plane and killed the pilot. Russia, the main ally of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, says it is targeting rebel fighters, however residents have shown footage of babies being carried from hospitals and families being dug from rubble.As the violence crescendos the government has not authorized a single aid delivery to besieged areas, or an evacuation for urgent medical treatment, in two months, United Nations officials say. That is even worse than the usual tensions around aid; the Syrian government approved just 27 percent of requested deliveries last year.ImageA Syrian child was treated at a makeshift hospital in the rebel-held town of Arbin after an airstrike on Monday.CreditAbdulmonam Eassa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“It’s our moral duty to speak up,” Assistant Secretary General Panos Moumtzis, the United Nations’ regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, told reporters in Beirut, speaking with a degree of emotion not usually conveyed in the United Nations’ carefully worded statements.Mr. Moumtzis called the lack of aid delivery approvals “really outrageous,” and the rash of attacks on medical facilities “unacceptable.”“Humanitarian diplomacy is failing,” he said. “We are not able to reach the conscience or the ears of politicians, of decision makers, of people in power.”Mr. Moumtzis spoke as residents of Eastern Ghouta, the cluster of Damascus suburbs under bombardment, posted the names of the dead and photographs of the children who had died. They also posted videos of the shredded bodies of small children.Hassan Tabajo said 25 people were killed in his town alone. They included a cousin, the 10th relative Mr. Tabajo had lost in the war, who was killed when his apartment building was hit. The building also housed a center that trained women in English and tailoring; three students and a teacher died.Also Tuesday, rebel shelling killed three people in the government-held Old City of Damascus. The attack followed two others in the past week that killed at least 10 people, including several children.ImageSyrian rescue workers recovered people wounded in airstrikes on the rebel-held enclave of Kafr Batna near Damascus on Tuesday.CreditAmer Almohibany/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe war in Syria has displaced half the population and killed some 400,000 people, but now the carnage is growing in many places at once. The government is carrying out scorched-earth attacks in two of the last major rebel-held areas — near Damascus and in Idlib — and Turkey is striking a Kurdish area on the northern border.“There are multiple fronts where people are under extreme danger without a view to a solution,” Mr. Moumtzis said. “We haven’t seen this.”Russia is supposed to be monitoring a reduction in violence in both Idlib and the Damascus suburbs, where the heaviest attacks are taking place. Russia says it is trying to push Mr. Assad to negotiate with his opponents, including with some of the armed factions, although so far he has shown no inclination.The deal to ease violence in certain areas, brokered by Russia with Turkey and Iran — as well as the rout of the Islamic State from most of its territory last year — may have given people the false impression that the Syrian war was winding down, Mr. Moumtzis said.“There is a misperception that the de-escalation areas have resulted in peace and stability,” he said. “If anything, these have been serious escalation areas.”Yet Syria seems to have lost its hold on public attention, even though in the past year more than 8,000 people per day have been driven from their homes. In the north since mid-December, some 300,000 people have fled from their homes, some of them displaced for the second or third time.ImageRescue workers searched for survivors amid the rubble after airstrikes on the rebel-held town of Douma in the Eastern Ghouta suburbs.CreditHamza Al-Ajweh/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd more than 600 people are awaiting evacuation from the Damascus suburbs for urgent medical care, but no evacuations have been granted since 29 people were let out in November.Mr. Moumtzis said the United Nations would “ask the government of Syria to stop besiegement,” and he condemned the lack of cooperation from some rebel groups on aid deliveries. He also pointedly cited “the failure of countries who are of influence to Damascus and others to bring the influence needed to ensure respect for human beings.”Moaz al-Shami, an anti-government activist from the Idlib town of Saraqeb, said in an interview last week that he no longer knew why he risked his life to videotape attacks. “I don’t know what the point is,” he said.Mr. Moumtzis contrasted the situation to the 1990s war in Bosnia, where the shelling of civilians buying bread helped galvanize international response.“In Sarajevo we had the market massacre that woke up the conscience,” he said. But as larger death tolls in Syria receive less attention — airstrikes on marketplaces happen with some regularity — he said he wondered what level of violence it would take to shock the world into action.“We are running out of words, to be honest, to describe it,” Mr. Moumtzis said.

At Austin’s SXSW festival, Garry Kasparov, who many consider the greatest chess player of all time, made an appearance to speak on ethics in AI and warn of security threats.Kasparov reigned as world chess champion from 1985 through 2000, and in 1997 was challenged to play a six-game match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer. When he lost, he became a symbol of the rise of smart machines, which has lately led to some people questioning whether the advance of AI would ultimately mean game over for humanity.Kasparov has spent the last two decades advocating for better human-computer interactions. Writing prolifically and speaking around the world, he has emerged as a freedom fighter for democracy. A staunch critic of the Soviet Union, in 2008, he attempted to run as an opposition candidate to Vladimir Putin. With tensions rising in 2012, he was arrested and beaten while trying to attend the sentencing of the outspoken rock band, Pussy Riot. Soon after he left Russia and became a Croatian citizen.He currently lives in New York City, is active on Twitter, and chairs the Human Rights Foundation, which fights for the rights of political prisoners. He is also a spokesperson for Avast, the security software unicorn which last year had the largest IPO in the history of the London Stock Exchange.I spoke with Kasparov about data privacy, trust, and accountability. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.“At first, we think, ‘No machine can ever do that'”Fast Company: It’s been more than twenty years since you were defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer. Today, consumer AI is everywhere. Elon Musk says AI is the greatest known threat to our species. What are your thoughts on the coming AI apocalypse? Are we doomed or is AI going to save us all?Garry Kasparov: We make a mistake in misunderstanding the nature of computers by adding human qualities to them. Machines know the odds but always work within within the parameters that have been originally installed. There’s a fine line where machine intelligence begins and human creativity ends.The [Deep Blue] match taught me that human to machine relations always go through the same stages. At first we think, “No machine can ever do that. It’s impossible.” Then we believe it can do that but it’s weak. There’s a short window where we can compete and then machines are much better.I realized in 1997 that it was a matter of time before machines could actually conquer the game of chess and not because they can solve for it mathematically. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being better. As long as you operate within closed systems, machines will always prevail because they have a steady hand. Machines make fewer mistakes, with no psychological pressure. For instance, when we talk about self-driving cars, people say, “Oh but this self-driving car had an accident.” Yes, but something like 40,000 people are killed in this country each year in car accidents. It’s not about machines being perfect, because there’s no perfection in this universe. Machines perform better, that’s it.Since 1998, I’ve been talking about humans working with machines, how we can get the best out of them. How can we merge human intuition and human creativity with machines brute force and memory? How can we make the most effective cooperation between humans and machines? What is the human’s role in the future?We have to start realizing that we should not have such high expectations for computers to solve all the problems. We need to add elements that could compensate for machine deficiencies, because every computer could be put to solve a specific task but it will require certain human intervention to make them most effective.Transferring the knowledge from the closed system to open ended system will require human assistance. Machines will never recognize the moment when they enter diminishing returns. Machines can ask questions, but they don’t know what questions are relevant. So there is still plenty of room for humans to strategize and guide these machines. Machines are covering bigger and bigger territory but it will never be hundred percent. There will always be a little room for the last few decimal points for human intervention.Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and other doomsayers have talked about the end of the world yet I see not a shred of evidence that we are even close to that. It’s absolute nonsense to suggest that we should worry today about killer robots. It’s far less ominous.“Existing political systems are under huge pressure”FC: What about the ascent of DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations that are transacting among themselves with no human interaction?GK: We’ve moved so much of our lives into these digital realities. It’s like ethical electricity, DNA being transferred between parents and their children. You don’t expect it to be more ethical than what is created. We are reaching a point that there is responsibility on our side to make sure these creations will not be worse than our expectations.Humans still have the monopoly on evil. The problem today that we’re facing is not the Terminator. The problems today are bad humans, the evil that exists in this imperfect world, using technology invented in the free world to undermine the very foundation of the free world. That’s a real problem.FC: As a human rights activist, do you see the emergence of a global, decentralized cryptocurrency that is borderless and requires no human governance, like Bitcoin, as a means to escape rogue regimes? Will blockchain technology ring in the end of the era of nations?GK: Every new technology that has been brought into our civilization created this kind of political disruption. Existing political systems are under huge pressure because they’ve not been built to operate in this environment. If you look at the political structure of the of the world today, its foundation goes back to 1945. The creation of nations are as a result of World War II. The global stage is now populated by so many players that simply don’t feed the old framework. I think some things are inevitable because we are now facing a historical moment of shifting from the world order to something new. If you go back in history since the defeat of Napoleon, the framework couldn’t feed the expectations and political movements that have been created in the following years. Empowering people with this technology is very important.“The Facebooks and Googles … have so much power”FC: What keeps you up at night?GK: Enormous power is being allocated to big corporations that now collect data. That is one of my greatest concerns. While the big corporations, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, follow rigid regulations like GDPR in America or in Europe, they are far less scrupulous and respectful of privacy when it comes to China or Russia. As a human rights activist and someone who grew up in the Soviet Union, I feel really bad when Google, for instance, is rejecting cooperation with the Pentagon on moral grounds about Maven but also keeps working with the Chinese government on creating Dragonfly, the system that connects your social account with your mobile phone which could be really damaging for millions upon millions of people in China. There’s not much difference between Google data collection and KGB data collection. There are consequences for people in China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and other undemocratic countries. We need to hold the corporations responsible for dealing with this data. The Facebooks and Googles of the world have so much power now, we should look at the ways they are dealing with this information.I hope that people will be empowered to control their data and use it for their benefit, which is why the concept of blockchain will eventually conquer the world in whatever form, and however long, it takes. I could see how we’re at the end of one chapter and the beginning of new one.FC: What is your role at Avast?GK: My role is to inform the public about the threats and what needs to be done. I have my reputation as a human rights activist and also defending the individual consumer.I’m terrified by the fact that the general public is so slow in recognizing this. What can be done on the most primitive level is digital hygiene. We wash our hands, we brush our teeth. We should have the same good hygiene on our devices.You can’t protect yourself against all the digital viruses as in [real-life viruses], but at least 90% of the threats can be eliminated, if you follow elementary procedures like putting antivirus software on your network.Martine Paris is a San Francisco-based tech reporter who covers AI, consumer tech, gaming, crypto and blockchain for The FinTech Times, Modern Consensus, Pocket Gamer’s Blockchain Gamer, and Hacker Noon. Follow her on Twitter: @contentnow.

Cambridge Analytica, the Anglo-American data and behavioral science firm that worked for Ted Cruz and Donald Trump–and that sparked an investigation in the U.K. and inquiries by U.S. lawmakers–has announced two initiatives in the past year that highlight some of the newer techniques in targeted advertising and the complex relationships that surround them.Since last year’s presidential campaigns, the company has sought to expand further into targeted, or addressable, TV, an emerging type of data-driven ad technology that marketers and political campaigns can use to know not just what key audiences and voters like on TV and in other media, but also to determine what particular messages to show them and when.In an interview last month at the Advertising Week conference in New York, Duke Perrucci, Cambridge’s chief revenue officer, described the potential of new digital TVs and set-top boxes, and a future when targeted ads take up your whole screen. “Because you know the people in that home, and because you buy commercially available data, you know a lot about those people—there’s tons of data out there—now you can send those targeted ads specifically to those homes, the same way you would to a Facebook profile or to an Instagram account,” he said.While campaign dollars increasingly flow to internet ads–last year, spending on digital advertising eclipsed TV for the first time–television remains the ground zero of big ad campaigns, and the ad targeting and data capabilities in TV are starting to catch up to what’s used online. The idea is to allow candidates and brands to reach only those viewers who meet a desired demographic (e.g. potential buyer of motorcycle insurance). Rather than buying ads the old fashioned way during a certain program (a college football game, for instance) addressable TV allows advertisers to purchase an audience (like undecided Republicans).CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix [Photo: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit]Cambridge’s efforts in addressable TV began last year. In October 2016, during the final stretch of the presidential campaigns, the company announced a partnership with cross platform analytics company ComScore to merge Cambridge Analytica’s “behavioral psychology and data analytics platform” with ComScore TV data, yielding insight “into which programs, stations and dayparts deliver the highest densities of the targeted audiences that the company’s clients seek to influence,” according to a statement about the partnership.Typically, Cambridge’s political work has drawn significant support from the conservative mega-donor Robert Mercer, and much of its work in U.S. elections has been for candidates Mercer supports. Steve Bannon, Breitbart News CEO and former advisor to President Trump, sat on Cambridge’s board of directors until late last year. But the TV data effort, as well as a mobile data tie-up in Mexico, have links with another lesser-known American billionaire family, one whose large campaign contributions tend to support Democrats.Dish founder Charlie Ergen [Photo: Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images]Last October, as part of the partnership with ComScore, viewer data from 52,000 households, including some Dish households, was set to eventually flow to Cambridge Analytica. ComScore taps Dish data thanks to ComScore’s acquisition of analytics company Rentrak, in January 2016. Dish has had close ties with Rentrak since 2008, and, after it acquired 7% of the company in 2012, it agreed to provide Rentrak with exclusive use of its set top box data.“DISH is a major partner that helped us change the measurement landscape by allowing massive and passive television measurement across a national footprint,” comScore’s CEO, Serge Matta, said in a 2016 statement. A spokesperson for ComScore was unable to describe the outcome of the Cambridge Analytica partnership. Representatives for Cambridge Analytica and Dish declined to comment for this story.In September, Cambridge’s new brand-focused unit, CA Commercial, announced its own ad targeting TV product, SelecTV, that it said it would roll out in the U.S. and U.K., followed by additional countries and markets in coming months. Available in more than half of all 119.6 million U.S. TV homes, and in every U.S. market, addressable TV “has finally reached a scale that has become very attractive to performance marketers,” Alexander Nix, Cambridge’s CEO, said in a statement.Born out of a recent campaign to promote a new un-named cable TV show, the technology, Nix said, has led to a “huge tuning uplift” over traditional age and gender targeting, an effect that is “additionally amplified when homes are exposed to both desktop and mobile advertising.” It’s not known yet if or how Cambridge intends to use addressable TV data during upcoming political campaigns, for instance, during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.Dish is now America’s second-largest satellite TV operator and fourth-largest pay TV provider, and it’s also at the forefront of the ongoing battle to monetize set top box data to reach voters—one that, between digital and TV and a mix of the two—is expected to grow even hotter next year. In September, the company launched a new targeted TV ad program in partnership with Volvo, which can deliver targeted ads simultaneously on Dish and on the company’s Sling TV over-the-top service.Dish may have good reason to be casting about for innovative ways to bolster its TV business. While it earned $15 billion in revenue in 2016, its stock price has fallen more than 20% since July, and amid historic declines in TV viewership, it has seen a rapid drop-off in customers: during the third quarter, Dish lost another 129,000 pay TV subscribers, out of a nationwide base of around 13.7 million.On a recent phone call with analysts, Ergen pointed to existing advertising as part of the problem. Traditional TV, he said, is “suffering declines in part because it’s not as good a product. It’s more expensive. Rates have gone up as viewership goes down. And the commercial load–you’re talking about 30% of the viewing minutes are commercials. That’s an unhealthy viewer experience,” Ergen said. “There’s things as an industry we can do to change that. If the industry starts thinking of creative ways to compete, that market can stabilize.”[Photo: Flickr user Ambuj Saxena, Tim Mossholder/Pexels]Targeting TVsThe quest to target voters through TV is decades old and bipartisan. But practitioners say it was the Obama campaign in 2012 that signaled a breakthrough in using both social media and set-top box data in an effort to more precisely identify and persuade undecided voters. Rentrak, which is nonpartisan, collected the data and hired a third party to “anonymize” it so that the Obama team would only know that the information was coming from a set-top box of somebody on the persuadable list; personally identifying information would be stripped away.In the 2016 election, however, the Clinton campaign chose to build their own TV buying and targeting strategy, not to use a more advanced version of the Obama approach. “It’s frustrating when you build something that is available to both sides, and the side you personally support doesn’t use it,” Carol Davidsen, Obama’s TV ad guru, and now a comScore executive, told AdAge in February. (It’s not clear if Cambridge used the comScore system during its work for the Trump campaign.)US spending on addressable TV ads doubled in 2015 and is set to double again this year, but it’s still only a tiny piece of the ad pie: according to eMarketer, targeted TV ads will account for a mere $2.25 billion, or just under 3%, of all TV spending in 2018, and $3 billion in 2019. Among the efforts to grow those numbers is OpenAP, a system created by Viacom Inc., 21st Century Fox Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s Turner that aims to standardize the targeting categories ad buyers can increasingly reach through TV. Google and Facebook are also investing in targeted television ads.Addressable TV ad spending in the US is growing quickly, but will remain a small portion of total spending for the foreseeable future, according to eMarketer.“TV is still the strongest media you’ve got to get your message out, but it’s got a lot to learn from digital,” Perrucci, who has been leading Cambridge’s foray into the commercial sector, said at Advertising Week. “Why not take everything we know about the audience and use that to drive much more targeted TV?”But the combination of otherwise anonymous data on people’s TV viewing habits with social, demographic, psychographic, and other personal data is a growing privacy concern, argues Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Few voters even know their watching patterns are being watched, whether by Dish or another provider.“If you know [a voter] watch[es] Fox News at 5 p.m. every day and you also know from that addressable TV data—if someone has DirectTV, TiVo, whatever–how much of Fox News they watch, if they watch all of it or not. That kind of resolution is incredible,” he said. Most people don’t realize “that you can place and you can target like that to TV viewers.”Related: Bots Are Scraping Your Data For Cash Amid Murky Laws And Ethics Many cable operators use opt-out rather than opt-in consent, virtually guaranteeing that many citizens are unaware of how their data is used. In June 2016, communications advocacy group Public Knowledge filed complaints with the FCC and FTC over the technology, and singled out AT&T, Cablevision, and Comcast as the worst offenders.The group’s FCC complaint asserts that cable and satellite providers do not adequately obtain customer consent to use customer data, while the FTC complaint argues that the industry’s use of customer data without appropriate disclosures or opt-in consent amounts to an “unfair and deceptive” practice that’s in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act.[Photos: Tim Mossholder/Pexels, Flickr user Christian Frausto Bernal]A Cambridge-Ergen Connection In MexicoTV isn’t the only domain where the Ergen family’s business intersects with the Trump data contractor. This summer, Cambridge announced that it would send content to Mexican phone subscribers in advance of their 2018 presidential election through an app that gives users ad-sponsored airtime or mobile internet.In Mexico, Cambridge Analytica signed an agreement with Pig.gi, an app in use there and in Colombia, in advance of next year’s presidential elections. Pig.gi offers users free airtime and/or email service on mobile phones in exchange for receiving sponsored content. It will allow Cambridge to collect information on and deliver advertising to the phones of 850,000 Mexicans; several political parties have expressed interest in the tie-up.Among Pig.gi’s investors are Charlie Ergen’s son, Chris Ergen, who’s worked in international business development at Dish since 2014, as well as Variv Capital, which has a joint venture in Mexico with Dish, and Pig.gi’s founders, Colorado brothers Joel and Isaac Phillips, who are connected with Chris Ergen in several vaporous businesses.Pig.gi, which is currently available for Android in Mexico and Colombia, says its users have seen advertising content half a billion times. “We’re thrilled to be partnering with the app so that their partners can get the right message to the right people at the right time,” Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix says on the company’s website.Many Mexicans are “undecided and unmotivated,” Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge’s vice president of business development, told Bloomberg. “There’s a huge opportunity in this country to find the issues that are important for people and actually turn people out to vote.”Meanwhile, Kaiser, who recently updated her Facebook page to say that she is living in Mexico City, lists Chris Ergen as one of her friends on Facebook. (After an emailed inquiry, the page is no longer publicly visible.) In February 2015, Kaiser was a moderator at a Washington meeting on “Digital Diplomacy” organized by the Digital Future Forum, a company started by Chris’s co-investors in Pig.gi, Joel and Isaac Phillips.Cambridge is also staffing up across Mexico in advance of next year’s elections. As BuzzFeed reported, Arielle Dale Karro, head of operations in Mexico for Cambridge Analytica, posted a job listing in the Facebook group “Foreigners in Mexico City” on October 23, seeking staff for gubernatorial campaigns in seven of Mexico’s 31 states: Chiapas, Guanajuato, Morelos, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Veracruz. The company is also looking for someone to work in Mexico City. As of last week, however, Cambridge doesn’t appear in the National Registry of Suppliers of the National Electoral Institute (INE), which is a requirement for any firm that wants to be hired by a political party in Mexico.The TV and mobile app projects aren’t the only convergence of Cambridge Analytica with the Ergen family. In 2010 Cambridge’s Swiss partner Nicolas Giannakopoulos became a co-shareholder in a company with Charlie Ergen. Giannakopoulos, who describes himself as “a private consultant in security and investigation,” says the company was meant to distribute Dish content on the internet outside the U.S. Ergen joined Giannakopoulos’s firm, CH-Communication SA, six days after its founding on July 22, 2010, and resigned nearly a year later.That year, Giannakopoulos, a Swiss and Greek citizen was also working with SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. (SCL has a complex capital structure depicted here.) Until recently, one of his stable of Swiss companies shared an address and phone number with SCL’s Geneva office; the address disappeared from SCL’s website after the Sarawak Report questioned his links to SCL’s work in Malaysia. Asked about his activities for SCL in Switzerland by Sarawak Report, Nicolas Giannakopoulos claims to being “their partner for a long time.” But, he said, “the truth is that I have not done anything yet!”While Charlie Ergen hasn’t been affiliated with CH-Communication for six years, son Chase Ergen is connected with another Giannakopoulos firm, the Organized Crime Observatory. In a January 2015 announcement, OCO said that Chase Ergen was being appointed Special Envoy for Dominica and St Kitts-Nevis, where Ergen reportedly holds a passport. Neither Chase Ergen nor Giannakopoulos responded to emailed requests for comment.In recent weeks, Cambridge has been thrust further into the political spotlight amid ongoing investigations about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The company is now turning over to investigators documents related to its role in the 2016 campaigns, while the U.K. Information Commissioner is examining its role working for Leave.eu during a pro-Brexit campaign. Cambridge has issued contradictory statements about whether or not it used personality targeting ahead of the U.S. election and whether it worked for Leave.eu and in what capacity. And perhaps most intriguingly, it was reported last month that Cambridge’s CEO, Alexander Nix, contacted Julian Assange offering his help in releasing Hillary Clinton’s allegedly missing emails.Cambridge’s current work and partnerships are more complicated and less seductive than a narrative of evil Republican billionaires or Russian agents funding demagogic appeals on social media. They are a reminder that the quest for data and the power that comes with it is increasingly independent of partisanship or ideological belief.Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a writer and financial investigator in New York. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnMarlowe. The author wishes to thank journalist Wendy Siegelman for her research and insights. Alex Pasternack also contributed reporting.

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The presiding judge on Brazil’s Supreme Court overturned an injunction on Friday that had suspended an investigation into bank transactions involving Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of President Jair Bolsonaro, ruling that the inquiry could proceed.The investigation has proved one of the biggest challenges to Mr. Bolsonaro, a far-right politician who rose to power in Brazil on the back of his promise to eradicate entrenched political corruption and elitist privileges.The case involving Flávio Bolsonaro began unfolding in December, when federal financial investigators discovered that about 1.2 million reais, or about $327,000, had been moved in and out of a bank account belonging to an aide, Fabrício Queiroz, in 2017. At the time, Flávio Bolsonaro was a Rio de Janeiro State lawmaker and Mr. Queiroz was his driver.Some of the payments were to Michelle Bolsonaro, the wife of the current president. Jair Bolsonaro has said that those transactions were because Mr. Queiroz was repaying a loan to his wife.Rio de Janeiro prosecutors who were investigating the case have declined to comment, but critics say the transactions, typically made around payday, could reflect an illegal but common practice in Brazil: hiring “ghost” or no-show employees and then pocketing large portions of their salaries.It also emerged that the authorities were also investigating 48 cash deposits made on five days in a one-month period into Flávio Bolsonaro’s account.Flávio Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing and has said that the transactions were part of a payment for a property he had sold.Elected a federal senator in October, Flávio Bolsonaro initially said that he was not under investigation and that he would meet with prosecutors. But he suddenly changed tack in January and appealed to the Supreme Court to freeze the inquiry, claiming a right to legislative immunity.With the full court in recess, the judge on duty agreed to suspend the investigation, despite the fact that the transactions had occurred when Flávio Bolsonaro was still a state representative. Under Brazilian law, federal lawmakers and high-level politicians can be tried only in the Supreme Court — which usually means the cases drag on for years.The case, including Flávio Bolsonaro’s appeal, has prompted backlash even among allies.During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president, who had hoped to pitch his vision for a modern, law-abiding Brazil to investors and world leaders, ended up answering questions about his son.“If by chance he erred, and it were proven, I regret it as a father, but he’ll have to pay the price for those actions we can’t accept,” he told Bloomberg.Jair Bolsonaro, for years a marginal figure in Congress, rose to prominence in the midst of the so-called Car Wash investigation, which uncovered a huge bribery scandal involving politicians at the highest level and the state oil company.On the campaign trail, he vowed to upend the status quo and repeatedly criticized immunity as a shield for corrupt politicians, calling it “garbage” in a 2017 video that he recorded alongside Flávio.On Friday, Justice Marco Aurélio Mello said the protection from prosecution by lower courts did not apply to Flávio Bolsonaro because the transactions under investigation occurred before he had taken office as a federal lawmaker.In the past week, the scandal involving the president’s son has been eclipsed by a deadly dam collapse in southeastern Brazil. But the case is likely to receive more coverage now that investigators can resume the inquiry and as Brazil’s newly elected lawmakers are sworn in after the summer recess.Flávio Bolsonaro has remained relatively quiet after declaring on social media last week that he was the “victim of a slanderous campaign aimed at impacting the government of Jair Bolsonaro.”