Chile : Request for an Arrangement Under the Flexible Credit Line-Press Release; Staff Report; and Staff Supplement

Chile : Request for an Arrangement Under the Flexible Credit Line-Press Release; Staff Report; and Staff Supplement
Published May 29, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

St. Vincent and the Grenadines : Request for Disbursement Under the Rapid Credit Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for St. Vincent and the Grenadines

St. Vincent and the Grenadines : Request for Disbursement Under the Rapid Credit Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for St. Vincent and the Grenadines
Published May 29, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

ACLU: President Trump has No Idea How Online Speech Works

President Trump has No Idea How Online Speech Works

Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at bullying social media companies and online platforms into changing how they moderate content online. The order came the day after President Trump tweeted that Republicans feel that social media platforms silence conservative voices. And, notably, just days after Twitter’s decision to place a fact-checking label on one of Trump’s tweets for the first time, calling out his blatantly false tweets about mail-in ballots and directing users to trusted journalistic sources countering the President’s lies.  

There is one part of the executive order we agree with. Its opening section identifies how online speech has become a central feature in public dialogue, and raises concerns about the monopoly power of a handful of private companies to control such an important forum for debate. We agree that Twitter and Facebook should be careful about their own content decisions, because they affect all of us. But that’s where our agreement ends. The remedy President Trump proposes in the rest of the Executive Order is far worse than the problem it identifies. In the name of free speech, it threatens official retaliation for speech that displeases the government. 

Let’s start with the Constitution, which prohibits retaliation for protected speech. Trump is telling Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, “If you speak out in ways that displease me,” for example, calling out his lies, condemning his views, or adding context to his distortions, “I will make things much harder for you.” The First Amendment forbids such blatant, thin-skinned efforts to stifle expression — whether they are effected through formal or informal means. In the short term, such threats chill free expression, and are impermissible for that reason.   

At the same time, the extent of the order’s long-term effects remain unclear. The President has no more authority to amend an act of Congress or a provision of the Constitution than he does to silence those, including Twitter, who condemn his views and his policies. He can’t constitutionally do any of these things on his own, yet the order appears to attempt to do all three.

It directs the Commerce Department to ask the FCC to make a rule adopting the President’s interpretation of an important shield from liability for online platforms known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). The FCC has no obligation to take up the request, and, even if it did, no authority to interpret CDA 230 in the ways the order suggest because they are contrary to the law’s clear language. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t try.

Other provisions, including a threat to withhold government contracts and advertising from online platforms whose speech decisions about what to post, not post, or comment on, level a direct threat of retaliation for protected private speech. And given the government’s substantial resources, that threat cannot be considered idle. It also cannot be considered constitutional. 

That brings us to one of the biggest problems with the executive order. It blames CDA 230 for online censorship, which entirely misconstrues the function and purpose of that statute. This fundamental misapprehension appears to be shared by many members of Congress, as well. In fact, Section 230 is critical to protecting free speech online, and threats to undermine it will undermine free expression.

By generally immunizing platforms from liability for the speech of their users, CDA 230 allows platforms to publish all sorts of content without having to calculate the legal risk presented if it were their own content, creating space for free communications and debate. That includes — as Donald Trump appears to have forgotten — his own tweets, even when they include lies.

It also includes the videos, photos, and tutorials each of us is relying on to stay connected today. If it weren’t for CDA 230, no website owner would permit public posts knowing that the site could be investigated, shut down, sued, or charged with a felony over one user’s illegal tweet or post — including that of the President. Without this protection, even the smallest blog would have to hire an army of lawyers to assess in real-time all content created and uploaded by users. It’s unaffordable, and unrealistic. Instead, sites would avoid legal liability by simply refusing to host user-generated content at all, effectively shutting down the platforms we have come to depend on for public discourse.

In fact, this is exactly what has happened in the past when Congress has amended CDA 230. SESTA/FOSTA, which the ACLU strongly opposed, was purportedly aimed only at creating platform liability for illegal sex trafficking. We warned at the time that, rather than face liability, platforms would engage in excessive censorship that would harm the LGTBTQ and sex worker communities in particular. As we predicted, after SESTA/FOSTA’s passage, entire web sites that provided forums for sex workers to connect, share information to protect themselves, and build community disappeared. Google and other remote storage sites began to scan for sex-related content and remove it from their systems, censoring legal content only to avoid liability risk. Speech and safety both suffered.

The changes the President seems to want, which would strip online platforms of CDA Section 230’s protections if they fact-check his statements on their platforms, or are deemed “biased” from the standpoint of a particular administration, could have the paradoxical effect of silencing even the President himself online. Without CDA 230 protections, those platforms would not expose themselves to the legal risk of hosting the President’s content — or anyone else’s.

Changes proposed by certain members of Congress, like Senator Lindsey Graham, would harm our online speech rights in different ways. For instance, the changes to CDA 230 proposed by Sen. Graham’s EARN IT Act, which the ACLU also strongly opposes, would not only harm our online speech rights, but also undermine our privacy online, again in ways that will disproportionately harm the LGBTQ and sex worker communities. Any changes to narrow CDA 230’s protections must be far more carefully considered.

CDA 230 protects people’s ability to create, communicate, and build community online. The ACLU will remain vigilant in ensuring that the Internet remains a place for self-expression and creation for all. We also urge vigilance on the part of members of Congress to protect free expression online as they examine CDA 230. And we will be monitoring closely to see how federal agencies choose to enforce President Trump’s executive order, if at all.

Published May 30, 2020 at 03:48AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2ZVQsgh

ACLU: President Trump has No Idea How Online Speech Works

President Trump has No Idea How Online Speech Works

Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at bullying social media companies and online platforms into changing how they moderate content online. The order came the day after President Trump tweeted that Republicans feel that social media platforms silence conservative voices. And, notably, just days after Twitter’s decision to place a fact-checking label on one of Trump’s tweets for the first time, calling out his blatantly false tweets about mail-in ballots and directing users to trusted journalistic sources countering the President’s lies.  

There is one part of the executive order we agree with. Its opening section identifies how online speech has become a central feature in public dialogue, and raises concerns about the monopoly power of a handful of private companies to control such an important forum for debate. We agree that Twitter and Facebook should be careful about their own content decisions, because they affect all of us. But that’s where our agreement ends. The remedy President Trump proposes in the rest of the Executive Order is far worse than the problem it identifies. In the name of free speech, it threatens official retaliation for speech that displeases the government. 

Let’s start with the Constitution, which prohibits retaliation for protected speech. Trump is telling Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, “If you speak out in ways that displease me,” for example, calling out his lies, condemning his views, or adding context to his distortions, “I will make things much harder for you.” The First Amendment forbids such blatant, thin-skinned efforts to stifle expression — whether they are effected through formal or informal means. In the short term, such threats chill free expression, and are impermissible for that reason.   

At the same time, the extent of the order’s long-term effects remain unclear. The President has no more authority to amend an act of Congress or a provision of the Constitution than he does to silence those, including Twitter, who condemn his views and his policies. He can’t constitutionally do any of these things on his own, yet the order appears to attempt to do all three.

It directs the Commerce Department to ask the FCC to make a rule adopting the President’s interpretation of an important shield from liability for online platforms known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). The FCC has no obligation to take up the request, and, even if it did, no authority to interpret CDA 230 in the ways the order suggest because they are contrary to the law’s clear language. However, that doesn’t mean it won’t try.

Other provisions, including a threat to withhold government contracts and advertising from online platforms whose speech decisions about what to post, not post, or comment on, level a direct threat of retaliation for protected private speech. And given the government’s substantial resources, that threat cannot be considered idle. It also cannot be considered constitutional. 

That brings us to one of the biggest problems with the executive order. It blames CDA 230 for online censorship, which entirely misconstrues the function and purpose of that statute. This fundamental misapprehension appears to be shared by many members of Congress, as well. In fact, Section 230 is critical to protecting free speech online, and threats to undermine it will undermine free expression.

By generally immunizing platforms from liability for the speech of their users, CDA 230 allows platforms to publish all sorts of content without having to calculate the legal risk presented if it were their own content, creating space for free communications and debate. That includes — as Donald Trump appears to have forgotten — his own tweets, even when they include lies.

It also includes the videos, photos, and tutorials each of us is relying on to stay connected today. If it weren’t for CDA 230, no website owner would permit public posts knowing that the site could be investigated, shut down, sued, or charged with a felony over one user’s illegal tweet or post — including that of the President. Without this protection, even the smallest blog would have to hire an army of lawyers to assess in real-time all content created and uploaded by users. It’s unaffordable, and unrealistic. Instead, sites would avoid legal liability by simply refusing to host user-generated content at all, effectively shutting down the platforms we have come to depend on for public discourse.

In fact, this is exactly what has happened in the past when Congress has amended CDA 230. SESTA/FOSTA, which the ACLU strongly opposed, was purportedly aimed only at creating platform liability for illegal sex trafficking. We warned at the time that, rather than face liability, platforms would engage in excessive censorship that would harm the LGTBTQ and sex worker communities in particular. As we predicted, after SESTA/FOSTA’s passage, entire web sites that provided forums for sex workers to connect, share information to protect themselves, and build community disappeared. Google and other remote storage sites began to scan for sex-related content and remove it from their systems, censoring legal content only to avoid liability risk. Speech and safety both suffered.

The changes the President seems to want, which would strip online platforms of CDA Section 230’s protections if they fact-check his statements on their platforms, or are deemed “biased” from the standpoint of a particular administration, could have the paradoxical effect of silencing even the President himself online. Without CDA 230 protections, those platforms would not expose themselves to the legal risk of hosting the President’s content — or anyone else’s.

Changes proposed by certain members of Congress, like Senator Lindsey Graham, would harm our online speech rights in different ways. For instance, the changes to CDA 230 proposed by Sen. Graham’s EARN IT Act, which the ACLU also strongly opposes, would not only harm our online speech rights, but also undermine our privacy online, again in ways that will disproportionately harm the LGBTQ and sex worker communities. Any changes to narrow CDA 230’s protections must be far more carefully considered.

CDA 230 protects people’s ability to create, communicate, and build community online. The ACLU will remain vigilant in ensuring that the Internet remains a place for self-expression and creation for all. We also urge vigilance on the part of members of Congress to protect free expression online as they examine CDA 230. And we will be monitoring closely to see how federal agencies choose to enforce President Trump’s executive order, if at all.

Published May 29, 2020 at 11:18PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2ZVQsgh

Bolivia : Request for Purchase Under the Rapid Financing Instrument-Press Release; Staff Report

Bolivia : Request for Purchase Under the Rapid Financing Instrument-Press Release; Staff Report
Published May 29, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

ACLU: Anthony Romero on Leading in a Time of Crisis

Anthony Romero on Leading in a Time of Crisis

Anthony Romero started his job as executive director of the ACLU just seven days before September 11, 2001, and he’s been with us ever since. The subsequent “war on terror” presented new and widespread threats to civil rights and civil liberties. Now, he faces a new challenge: leading the ACLU during the COVID-19 pandemic. He joined the podcast this week to discuss how the ACLU is navigating the current moment.

“In moments of crisis, in moments of fear, civil liberties are often imperiled,” Romero told our host, Emerson Sykes. The organization has had to “adjust to our understanding of what liberty and freedom meant at a time like this.”

While the ACLU’s values and goals have largely not changed during this pandemic, Romero discusses how our work continues to evolve and grow over time, and how our vigilance is more necessary than ever.

You can listen to this episode here:

Anthony Romero on Leading in Times of Crisis

Anthony Romero has been the Executive Director of the ACLU for nearly 20 years. He’s seen the organization through periods of massive growth and numer…

Listen to this episode

Published May 30, 2020 at 01:52AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3exWLL2

ACLU: Anthony Romero on Leading in a Time of Crisis

Anthony Romero on Leading in a Time of Crisis

Anthony Romero started his job as executive director of the ACLU just seven days before September 11, 2001, and he’s been with us ever since. The subsequent “war on terror” presented new and widespread threats to civil rights and civil liberties. Now, he faces a new challenge: leading the ACLU during the COVID-19 pandemic. He joined the podcast this week to discuss how the ACLU is navigating the current moment.

“In moments of crisis, in moments of fear, civil liberties are often imperiled,” Romero told our host, Emerson Sykes. The organization has had to “adjust to our understanding of what liberty and freedom meant at a time like this.”

While the ACLU’s values and goals have largely not changed during this pandemic, Romero discusses how our work continues to evolve and grow over time, and how our vigilance is more necessary than ever.

You can listen to this episode here:

Anthony Romero on Leading in Times of Crisis

Anthony Romero has been the Executive Director of the ACLU for nearly 20 years. He’s seen the organization through periods of massive growth and numer…

Listen to this episode

Published May 29, 2020 at 09:22PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3exWLL2

Peru : Request for Arrangement Under the Flexible Credit Line-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Peru

Peru : Request for Arrangement Under the Flexible Credit Line-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Peru
Published May 29, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

ACLU: Maine’s ISP Privacy Law Does Not Violate the First Amendment, Much as ISPs Would Like for It To

Maine’s ISP Privacy Law Does Not Violate the First Amendment, Much as ISPs Would Like for It To

Without many of us even realizing it, our use of the Internet reveals deeply private information about us, ranging from the contents of our communications to details about our finances, health, and exact location. This information — especially when aggregated — provides an intimate window into our personal lives and can reveal a great deal of personal, private information about us, like our health care needs and personal or political beliefs.
 
For each of us, there’s at least one entity that can see perfectly through that window: our “broadband information access service” provider, more commonly known as an Internet service provider or ISP. In order to even access the Internet, we must each rely on an ISP; our computers and phones have to connect to their networks before we can send and receive information online. As a result, they are uniquely positioned to collect, retain, and analyze troves of personal information about us.
 
Without regulation, they can use our personal information in any manner they please. As their track record shows, they often choose to use it in privacy-invasive ways, like creating extensive portfolios of their users’ online activity and injecting “super cookies” that allow third parties to track individual customers.
 
This perfect storm raises not only serious online privacy concerns, but free speech and information security concerns, too. Unwanted surveillance can chill us from speaking freely, deterring us from voicing unpopular or simply private opinions. Equally, access to personal information, should it end up in the wrong hands, could open us up to everything from personalized phishing emails to identity theft and bank account fraud.
 
In an effort to quell this storm and put some control back in consumers’ hands, Maine passed “An Act to Protect the Privacy of Online Customer Information.” That law requires ISPs to get approval from customers before selling or using their personal information — everything from social security numbers and billing information to details derived from Internet use, like browsing histories and app usage, precise geolocation, financial and health information, and even the contents of communications.
 
A group of ISPs are now challenging this privacy law, claiming that it infringes on their First Amendment rights by unconstitutionally restricting how they use or disclose customer personal information.
 
They’re right that this law regulates their speech: It governs the use and dissemination of information. But they’re wrong to call it unconstitutional.
 
As we explain in a friend-of-the-court brief we filed with the ACLU of Maine, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, Maine’s law regulates commercial speech, a category of speech that relates solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience. And the law satisfies the scrutiny that applies to regulations of commercial speech because it is narrowly drawn to advance the state’s interests in protecting consumer privacy, free expression, and security.
 
The law focuses on ISPs: entities that are uniquely positioned to see everything we do, say, and even think online. Consumers have no choice but to use ISPs if they want to access the Internet. And the law does not ban their use of customer information entirely; it simply requires consent from customers first. Since we have no control over whether that information — which relates entirely to our use of a commercial service — is created and shared in the first place, surely we should at the very least have some say in what ISPs can do with it. It speaks volumes about the intent of the ISP companies — and the money they make off the collection and use of private customer information — that they would rather file an expansive lawsuit than simply ask their customers for permission to use their information.
 
As an organization deeply committed to the protection of both free speech and data privacy, we take these issues seriously. Maine’s law gives us the power to say yes or no to the collection and use of our private information. It puts the decision about when ISPs can use and disclose customers’ personal information back where it belongs: in the hands of Internet users. Despite the ISPs’ insistence to the contrary, Maine’s law does not violate their speech rights, and in fact does a great deal of good in protecting consumers’ privacy rights. Other states are already looking to follow in Maine’s legislative footsteps by requiring customers’ approval before allowing ISPs to share or sell their personal data — as they should. Perhaps that is what is scaring the ISP companies the most.
 

Published May 29, 2020 at 11:19PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2Xcjt5w

ACLU: Maine’s ISP Privacy Law Does Not Violate the First Amendment, Much as ISPs Would Like for It To

Maine’s ISP Privacy Law Does Not Violate the First Amendment, Much as ISPs Would Like for It To

Without many of us even realizing it, our use of the Internet reveals deeply private information about us, ranging from the contents of our communications to details about our finances, health, and exact location. This information — especially when aggregated — provides an intimate window into our personal lives and can reveal a great deal of personal, private information about us, like our health care needs and personal or political beliefs.
 
For each of us, there’s at least one entity that can see perfectly through that window: our “broadband information access service” provider, more commonly known as an Internet service provider or ISP. In order to even access the Internet, we must each rely on an ISP; our computers and phones have to connect to their networks before we can send and receive information online. As a result, they are uniquely positioned to collect, retain, and analyze troves of personal information about us.
 
Without regulation, they can use our personal information in any manner they please. As their track record shows, they often choose to use it in privacy-invasive ways, like creating extensive portfolios of their users’ online activity and injecting “super cookies” that allow third parties to track individual customers.
 
This perfect storm raises not only serious online privacy concerns, but free speech and information security concerns, too. Unwanted surveillance can chill us from speaking freely, deterring us from voicing unpopular or simply private opinions. Equally, access to personal information, should it end up in the wrong hands, could open us up to everything from personalized phishing emails to identity theft and bank account fraud.
 
In an effort to quell this storm and put some control back in consumers’ hands, Maine passed “An Act to Protect the Privacy of Online Customer Information.” That law requires ISPs to get approval from customers before selling or using their personal information — everything from social security numbers and billing information to details derived from Internet use, like browsing histories and app usage, precise geolocation, financial and health information, and even the contents of communications.
 
A group of ISPs are now challenging this privacy law, claiming that it infringes on their First Amendment rights by unconstitutionally restricting how they use or disclose customer personal information.
 
They’re right that this law regulates their speech: It governs the use and dissemination of information. But they’re wrong to call it unconstitutional.
 
As we explain in a friend-of-the-court brief we filed with the ACLU of Maine, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, Maine’s law regulates commercial speech, a category of speech that relates solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience. And the law satisfies the scrutiny that applies to regulations of commercial speech because it is narrowly drawn to advance the state’s interests in protecting consumer privacy, free expression, and security.
 
The law focuses on ISPs: entities that are uniquely positioned to see everything we do, say, and even think online. Consumers have no choice but to use ISPs if they want to access the Internet. And the law does not ban their use of customer information entirely; it simply requires consent from customers first. Since we have no control over whether that information — which relates entirely to our use of a commercial service — is created and shared in the first place, surely we should at the very least have some say in what ISPs can do with it. It speaks volumes about the intent of the ISP companies — and the money they make off the collection and use of private customer information — that they would rather file an expansive lawsuit than simply ask their customers for permission to use their information.
 
As an organization deeply committed to the protection of both free speech and data privacy, we take these issues seriously. Maine’s law gives us the power to say yes or no to the collection and use of our private information. It puts the decision about when ISPs can use and disclose customers’ personal information back where it belongs: in the hands of Internet users. Despite the ISPs’ insistence to the contrary, Maine’s law does not violate their speech rights, and in fact does a great deal of good in protecting consumers’ privacy rights. Other states are already looking to follow in Maine’s legislative footsteps by requiring customers’ approval before allowing ISPs to share or sell their personal data — as they should. Perhaps that is what is scaring the ISP companies the most.
 

Published May 29, 2020 at 06:49PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2Xcjt5w

ACLU: Recidivism Will Only Decrease if Successful Reentry is Embraced as an Antidote for Mass Incarceration

Recidivism Will Only Decrease if Successful Reentry is Embraced as an Antidote for Mass Incarceration

While there are many policies drafted and bills legislated, really the only components that comprise successful reentry to the community are skills, support, and shelter. Thinking about what I needed when I came home from prison looks much different now than it did 20 odd years ago. Back then, I thought serving my time in prison was my punishment; I didn’t know I was facing a life sentence after leaving prison. And for many people reentering society after leaving incarceration, that’s what reentry is — a life sentence.
 
When the corrections officer stopped by my bunk to tell me I was being paroled, my world stood still, and my head spun. All of a sudden life after prison was real, and my time inside was finally over. After 2,095 days, I was finally going home, and I had no idea how unprepared I was for freedom. I thought it was going to be as simple as the woman that taught the pre-release class said it would be. She said all I had to do was be honest about my past and be willing to work hard. So, as I sat in that hot, stuffy gym with 750 other men waiting to be released from prison, I thought I had it all worked it out. It all seemed so simple.
 
Walking out of prison I was handed a check for $50 and a bus voucher. The voucher allowed for travel to Dallas or Houston, and from there I had to purchase my own bus fare to Austin. I was expected to provide myself with clothing, food, travel, and shelter with that same $50. To say I was being set up to fail is being gracious. I was released on Thursday afternoon and didn’t have to report to my parole officer until the following Monday morning, so I spent the weekend with family I hadn’t seen in years and convinced myself that everything was going to work out fine.
 
When I reported to my parole officer that Monday, he informed me I was to spend the next 60 days on an electronic monitor. The monitor was supposed to be affixed to my ankle, but it was too small, so I was forced to wear it on my wrist. The conditions of my release mandated that while I was on parole I was to be gainfully employed. Who did my parole officer think was going to hire me with an electronic ankle monitor on my wrist? How did he think I was going to explain that to a prospective employer?
 
He didn’t seem to think about how the monitor would affect my life or even whether it would affect my ability to comply. He didn’t care that I was unemployable. He didn’t care how many times I was denied an interview after my application was reviewed and I had disclosed my conviction. When I sat in that prison gym before my release, I came up with a plan to apply at McDonald’s and work my way up from there. Aim low, I told myself. Don’t get your hopes up. Now, with a monitor on my wrist, I was worried that even this plan wouldn’t work out.
 
I had convinced myself if I aimed low enough, I was bound to hit my target and everything would work out fine. There was no sense in aiming high, those days were far behind me. Those halcyon days of youth had been stripped from me, right along with my dignity and self-worth. Aim low, I thought, so when I didn’t hit the mark I could remind myself it was because I was a convicted killer. Not formerly incarcerated, but a felon convicted of voluntary manslaughter, undeserving of anything other than failure.
 
What I needed was someone who had been to prison and was successfully navigating reentry to mentor me. I needed someone to tell me that applying for a job, for housing, or for a loan was different for folks with a felony conviction. Having someone tell me that being a father, a son, and even a brother was totally different after prison would have made an enormous difference in my life. My family needed to be informed about the limitations that were going to be placed on me and my ability to find employment, housing, or treatment. My church needed to see me as who I had become, not who I was. Creating pathways to successful reentry is just as incumbent upon the community as the individual, as transformation and redemption is expected, if not demanded, from formerly incarcerated individuals.
 
There can be no sustainable drop in rates of recidivism until we embrace successful reentry as an antidote for mass incarceration. Society must embrace the reality that 95 percent of the people currently in prison are coming home, and we have to find a better way to onboard them back into our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities.

Published May 29, 2020 at 02:00PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36FHrJq

Jordan : Request for Purchase Under the Rapid Financing Instrument-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director, and Advisor for Jordan

Jordan : Request for Purchase Under the Rapid Financing Instrument-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director, and Advisor for Jordan
Published May 29, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

ACLU: Recidivism Will Only Decrease if Successful Reentry is Embraced as an Antidote for Mass Incarceration

Recidivism Will Only Decrease if Successful Reentry is Embraced as an Antidote for Mass Incarceration

While there are many policies drafted and bills legislated, really the only components that comprise successful reentry to the community are skills, support, and shelter. Thinking about what I needed when I came home from prison looks much different now than it did 20 odd years ago. Back then, I thought serving my time in prison was my punishment; I didn’t know I was facing a life sentence after leaving prison. And for many people reentering society after leaving incarceration, that’s what reentry is — a life sentence.
 
When the corrections officer stopped by my bunk to tell me I was being paroled, my world stood still, and my head spun. All of a sudden life after prison was real, and my time inside was finally over. After 2,095 days, I was finally going home, and I had no idea how unprepared I was for freedom. I thought it was going to be as simple as the woman that taught the pre-release class said it would be. She said all I had to do was be honest about my past and be willing to work hard. So, as I sat in that hot, stuffy gym with 750 other men waiting to be released from prison, I thought I had it all worked it out. It all seemed so simple.
 
Walking out of prison I was handed a check for $50 and a bus voucher. The voucher allowed for travel to Dallas or Houston, and from there I had to purchase my own bus fare to Austin. I was expected to provide myself with clothing, food, travel, and shelter with that same $50. To say I was being set up to fail is being gracious. I was released on Thursday afternoon and didn’t have to report to my parole officer until the following Monday morning, so I spent the weekend with family I hadn’t seen in years and convinced myself that everything was going to work out fine.
 
When I reported to my parole officer that Monday, he informed me I was to spend the next 60 days on an electronic monitor. The monitor was supposed to be affixed to my ankle, but it was too small, so I was forced to wear it on my wrist. The conditions of my release mandated that while I was on parole I was to be gainfully employed. Who did my parole officer think was going to hire me with an electronic ankle monitor on my wrist? How did he think I was going to explain that to a prospective employer?
 
He didn’t seem to think about how the monitor would affect my life or even whether it would affect my ability to comply. He didn’t care that I was unemployable. He didn’t care how many times I was denied an interview after my application was reviewed and I had disclosed my conviction. When I sat in that prison gym before my release, I came up with a plan to apply at McDonald’s and work my way up from there. Aim low, I told myself. Don’t get your hopes up. Now, with a monitor on my wrist, I was worried that even this plan wouldn’t work out.
 
I had convinced myself if I aimed low enough, I was bound to hit my target and everything would work out fine. There was no sense in aiming high, those days were far behind me. Those halcyon days of youth had been stripped from me, right along with my dignity and self-worth. Aim low, I thought, so when I didn’t hit the mark I could remind myself it was because I was a convicted killer. Not formerly incarcerated, but a felon convicted of voluntary manslaughter, undeserving of anything other than failure.
 
What I needed was someone who had been to prison and was successfully navigating reentry to mentor me. I needed someone to tell me that applying for a job, for housing, or for a loan was different for folks with a felony conviction. Having someone tell me that being a father, a son, and even a brother was totally different after prison would have made an enormous difference in my life. My family needed to be informed about the limitations that were going to be placed on me and my ability to find employment, housing, or treatment. My church needed to see me as who I had become, not who I was. Creating pathways to successful reentry is just as incumbent upon the community as the individual, as transformation and redemption is expected, if not demanded, from formerly incarcerated individuals.
 
There can be no sustainable drop in rates of recidivism until we embrace successful reentry as an antidote for mass incarceration. Society must embrace the reality that 95 percent of the people currently in prison are coming home, and we have to find a better way to onboard them back into our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities.

Published May 29, 2020 at 06:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36FHrJq

So Much More Than Enough

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,564 words)

Lynn Shelton was the kind of artist no one asked for, but the only one you really wanted. The kind of person who was so good — so empathetic, so altruistic, so honorable — her work couldn’t help but be good in all the same ways. But in the face of what film became — a monstrous inequitable monopoly — she played too kind, too female, too independent, too old. When Shelton died suddenly on May 15 at only 54, from a blood disorder no one knew she had, artists more famous than her surfaced one after the other to remember her flawless reputation, critic after critic to fawn over her career. It was so familiar, all those people so quick to praise in private but almost never in public, until, you know, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. The reality was that Shelton had made eight films, directed countless television series, and still had to audition for jobs even when she knew the people giving them. The reality was that she had to work in TV to pay for the work she really wanted to do. The reality was that people in the industry knew her name, but no one outside of it did. “The main reason women make inroads in independent film is that no one has to say, ‘I pick you,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “I’m not pounding on anybody’s door. I’m just making my own way.” 

As existence increasingly became exhibitionism, Shelton made being a private success — being a good person making good work — more valuable than being a public one. Which is why I loved her more than any other artist around. Because it wasn’t just about loving her films, it was about loving her as a filmmaker, as a woman. Because, somehow, over two decades, she was always pure independence — fervent, uncompromising, relentless and humble, humble, humble — despite the constant pressure to be otherwise. To me, she was the only kind of artist to be.

* * *

If I met Lynn Shelton, I don’t remember it. I probably saw her and would have undoubtedly come across her name more than a decade ago, in the summer of 2009, when I interviewed actor Joshua Leonard about her third film, Humpday. It irritates me that I can’t remember. She was at the very least on the fringes of mumblecore, a no-budget indie film movement which really got going in 2005 with The Puffy Chair, Mark and Jay Duplass’ $15,000 parent-funded road trip movie. These films were hipster-style verité, with mix-and-match personnel and, according to Film Journal International, a “highly naturalistic feel, a fascination with male/female relationships and low-fi production values.” Originated by writer-director Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls), the movement also established the Duplasses, triple-threat bros with their fingers in every indie pie — from Jeff, Who Lives at Home to Amazon’s panegyrized series Transparent — and Joe Swanberg, the guy behind Netflix’s Easy. It was less of a vehicle for women. Even the It Girl.

In 2008, about a decade before she became GRETA GERWIG, I profiled Greta Gerwig for a now-defunct magazine called Geek Monthly. She and Swanberg had co-everything’ed the long-distance relationship drama Nights and Weekends. (As it happens, Shelton, who started out as an actor before it began to feel like “an exercise in narcissism,” appears briefly on screen though I don’t mention her in the interview.) I somehow addressed mumblecore’s gender divide while missing Shelton’s two features, We Go Way Back (2006) and My Effortless Brilliance (2008). “It can really feel like boys[’] town,” Gerwig confirmed at the time. She mentioned being broke, despite her omnipresence on the mumblecore scene: “There have been nights where I sit and stare at the wall and say, ‘What am I doing? What’s going to become of me?’” She was 24. 

Shelton was 43. Maybe that’s why I missed her, along with the rest of the world. Even the oldest mumblers, the Duplasses, were several years younger than her. Shelton had taken a while to get into film, the same way it took me a while to get into writing. She started acting in theatre, then studied photography before moving into experimental film, editing, and documentary. “I just did not have the confidence to do it,” she told The New York Times in 2009. “And then I had to find a backdoor way in.” Shelton was intimidated, just like I would be intimidated, but the pull landed her there anyway, as it did for me. She joked that her version of film school took two decades. It sounded familiar, that long way around. The way she finally gave herself permission also sounded familiar — through a female artist, Claire Denis, who was almost two decades older than her (I was more promiscuous about my idols). “I thought: ‘Oh, my God. She was 40 when she made her first film,” Shelton told the Times in 2012. “I thought it was too late for me, so in my head was, ‘Oh, I still have three more years.’” I’ve had this exact thought about writing: that it took me too long to get here, that I’m past the point of it being worth it. You may find that many artists — many women artists, who, if they weren’t actively discouraged from pursuing art, weren’t actively encouraged, either — have had this exact thought.

Shelton beat Denis by a year. Her first movie, We Go Way Back, is probably her most autobiographical, perhaps because she had just come from the world of documentary. It follows a 23-year-old woman (Amber Hubert) as she floats through life, acting in a theatre production she doesn’t really feel and doing men she doesn’t either, until she unearths a series of letters to her disconnected adult self from her confident 13-year-old self (Maggie Brown). This specter, her own past, helps her find her way back (so to speak). Shelton has said she herself had a similar trajectory, a trajectory familiar to so many women, where she started out with all this bravado and, slowly, bit by bit — as she became a woman, as her body changed, as society encroached — she lost it. It reminds me of all those typewriters I got as a child, all the writing I knew I would do, until I suddenly felt not good enough to write, not smart enough, not allowed enough. When Shelton got some semblance of her confidence back, she was already 39. And it showed. Though she was skirting the edge of mumblecore, her films just felt more baked than the others on every level, from screenplay to soundtrack: more considered, less flip (less male?). They weren’t sentimental romances; the relationships were more complicated, the dialogue funnier. Her films weren’t self-serious, they were mature. They were about people making messes and then cleaning them up.

It makes sense that in an industry that prefers men, Shelton’s third film, Humpday, about “two straight dudes, straight balling,” would be the one to get attention — it won the Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Independence at Sundance in 2009. As she herself says exasperatedly in the film, in which she plays a polyamorous boho den mother-type, “Boys. Fucking boys.” By that point, three years into the career she took so long to get to, Shelton had already settled on the formula that served her best, one that reflected the realism of life through the realism of her characters. She molded the movies to her muses, most of them men, from Mark Duplass (Humpday) to Josh Pais (Touchy Feely) to Jay Duplass (Outside, In). She limited the set to a small crew, cut down the takes, and shot with many of the same people (including musicians — do yourself a favor and listen to Tomo Nakayama’s “Horses” from Touchy Feely) in her drizzly home state of Washington, before sculpting it all in the editing suite. 

That she worked so organically, so modestly, from the place she grew up — not New York, not L.A., not some soundstage — was part of the whole thing. It wasn’t about careerism (repulsive), it was about her doing her best work. As for the money, if Shelton wasn’t funding her films through her own television work (she has said she only really felt professional after she directed Mad Men in 2010, while being named executive producer on Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere last year was a whole new level of arrival) it was through grants and fundraisers, with the crew paid through a profit-sharing system. When no one was getting money, at the very least they were getting warm meals. As Shelton told Anthem magazine two years ago: “I want to create this emotionally safe environment as much as possible for [the actors] to take the risk of opening up their hearts and their faces and their eyes.” 

This is the opposite of how art is made now, where everything is about money — huge studios, huge budgets, huge concepts, huge stars. Mid-budget films, which thrived in the indie boom times of the nineties, the most formative films for me and for the last Gen-Xers, the ones that started to sputter in the aughts when Shelton came around, have virtually vanished. What passes for mid-budget now has no less than $10 million behind it and a marquee name slumming it for cred. The few earnest indie directors left, like The Rider’s Chloé  Zhao, are snapped up for superhero content — even Shelton was in early talks around Black Widow. I can’t imagine a Marvel movie by Shelton and I’m not sure I want to, but I would still see it. I would see it because she made it.

Shelton’s plots were not high concept; they were barely plots at all. Which is just how I like it. I like my movies with nothing going on: just people living their lives. Maybe it’s my processing speed — even the simplest plot can be hard for me to follow — or maybe it’s being the kid of psychiatrists. Shelton always said she wasn’t the smartest person in the world, but she was fairly sure she had pretty high emotional intelligence. She was the daughter of a psychologist. Her interest was in tangled relationships, often with multiple family members involved, and the discomfort that emerges from within them. “I’ve always been that close observer of human behavior,” she told Slant last year. “I feel like the thing that makes humans human are their flaws.” 

The scene that touched me most in a marathon re-watch of Shelton’s eight films was in Touchy Feely — neither my favorite of her films nor the one featuring an actor I particularly like, which proves how skilled she was with performers. Ellen Page, playing Jenny, a sheltered, existentially morose twenty-something, sits on on a couch opposite her aunt’s oblivious boyfriend (played by handsome indie regular Scoot McNairy), staring at his lips, laughing tightly, nervously, her eyes bigger than the whole room. With no music, and just the two of them, side by side, quietly talking late at night in a dingy apartment, Jenny’s lust is so powerful it’s practically a third character and her words, as though overflowing from her loins, come out almost despite her: “Have you ever wanted to kiss someone so badly that it hurts your skin?” Yes. Right now. This isn’t cinema, it’s a conduit for intimacy. Which maybe says more about me than I want it to. But I have a feeling this approach — slow, humane, in no way prescriptive or showy —  is what led so many critics to dismiss Shelton. That scene, and Shelton’s movies as whole, remind me of a quote from Before Sunrise, a movie made by a man, but as collaborative in spirit: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between.”

My favorite Lynn Shelton movie is Laggies. I’ve probably seen it ten times. It’s the story that gets me. Which is the same reason Shelton made it, the only movie she did not have a hand in writing (Andrea Seigel is the screenwriter). It’s about a 28-year-old woman (Keira Knightley) having a quarter-life crisis, a woman who in the end describes herself as a snake carrying around her dead skin — old life, old relationship, old friends. Until she can shed all of this (will she?) she is in “this weird in-between place,” eventually befriending a teenager (Chloë Grace Moretz) and falling for the kid’s dad (Sam Rockwell), who is not unlike her. “You know, I never anticipated still having to find a place where I fit in by the time I was an adult, either,” he says. “I thought you automatically got one once you had a job and a family. But it’s just you, alone.” God, yeah. You don’t see much of this on screen, the female midlife crisis, though you do see a lot of the male version. And that sucks. Shelton refers to it as floating, but to me, when I have experienced it, it feels more menacing — like you have no tether, like you’re one of those astronauts who becomes detached from that shuttle cord and disappears into the black. Shelton questioned whether she was selling out by making a movie someone else wrote, a glossier movie than usual, starring real life celebrities. But she couldn’t resist the story in the end, a story that essentially defined her. “She doesn’t know what she wants to do but she knows what she doesn’t want to do, which is to fall in lockstep with this conventional timeline of what quote-unquote adults are supposed to do and that all of her friends around her are doing,” Shelton told The Georgia Straight in 2014. “I’ve tried to do things on my own terms and it took me 20 years to get to doing what I’m doing so I really relate to that prolonged journey of self-discovery.”

* * *

“I’m sorry,” one of my best friends said when I told him Lynn Shelton had died. I’ve never had someone I know respond that way when someone I don’t has died. “I wouldn’t normally say that,” he explained, “but I know how you feel about Lynn Shelton.” It’s true that I didn’t know her, but I knew her films, and the two were inextricable. Just like her and Marc Maron, her creative partner and her partner in life. Maron was Shelton’s last muse. She made Sword of Trust for him, a film in which he plays Mel, a pawn shop dealer, who is brought a sword by a couple that supposedly proves the south won the Civil War, which they collectively sell to a pair of loony right-wing conspiracy theorists. Shelton appears as Mel’s ex, a woman with whom he fell into drug addiction and whom it is clear he still loves but can’t trust. But it’s Maron you can’t take your eyes off, maybe because it’s him Shelton can’t take her eyes off.  As he said on his podcast, “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.” Everything was. When Shelton was walking around, it meant that, despite how bad it was, the world was still a place where a woman could be an artist, a woman could be a woman, on her own terms. What Denis did for Shelton, she continued to do for me. I don’t want to think of what her death means for film, but I know for me, as a woman, as an artist, it makes the world a whole lot harder to bear.

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Ecuador : Request for Purchase under the Rapid Financing Instrument and Cancellation of Arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Ecuador

Ecuador : Request for Purchase under the Rapid Financing Instrument and Cancellation of Arrangement under the Extended Fund Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Ecuador
Published May 28, 2020 at 07:00AM
Read more at imf.org

ACLU: We’re Taking Clearview AI to Court to End its Privacy-Destroying Face Surveillance Activities

We’re Taking Clearview AI to Court to End its Privacy-Destroying Face Surveillance Activities

For several years, a little-known start-up based in New York has been amassing a database of billions of our faceprints — unique biometric identifiers akin to a fingerprint or DNA profile — drawn from personal photos on our social media accounts and elsewhere online. The company has captured these faceprints in secret, without our knowledge, much less our consent, using everything from casual selfies to photos of birthday parties, college graduations, weddings, and so much more.
 
Unbeknownst to the public, this company has offered up this massive faceprint database to private companies, police, federal agencies, and wealthy individuals, allowing them to secretly track and target whomever they wished using face recognition technology.
                                                     
That company is Clearview AI, and it will end privacy as we know it if it isn’t stopped. We’re taking the company to court in Illinois today on behalf of organizations that represent survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable communities. As the groups make clear, Clearview’s face surveillance activities violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), and represent an unprecedented threat to our security and safety.
 
Face recognition technology offers a surveillance capability unlike any other technology in the past. It makes it dangerously easy to identify and track us at protests, AA meetings, counseling sessions, political rallies, religious gatherings, and more. For our clients — organizations that serve survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, undocumented immigrants, and people of color — this surveillance system is dangerous and even life-threatening. It empowers abusive ex-partners and serial harassers, exploitative companies, and ICE agents to track and target domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable communities.
 
By building a mass database of billions of faceprints without our knowledge or consent, Clearview has created the nightmare scenario that we’ve long feared, and has crossed the ethical bounds that many companies have refused to even attempt. Neither the United States government nor any American company is known to have ever compiled such a massive trove of biometrics.
 
Adding fuel to the fire, Clearview sells access to a smartphone app that allows its customers — and even those using the app on a trial basis — to upload a photo of an unknown person and instantaneously receive a set of matching photos.
 
Clearview’s actions clearly violate BIPA. The law requires companies that collect, capture, or obtain an Illinois resident’s biometric identifier — such as a fingerprint, faceprint, or iris scan — to first notify that individual and obtain their written consent. Clearview’s practices are exactly the threat to privacy that the legislature intended to address, and demonstrate why states across the country should adopt legal protections like the ones in Illinois.
 
In press statements, Clearview has tried to claim its actions are somehow protected by the First Amendment. Clearview is as free to look at online photos as anyone with an internet connection. But what it can’t do is capture our faceprints — uniquely identifying biometrics — from those photos without consent. That’s not speech; it’s conduct that the state of Illinois has a strong interest in regulating in order to protect its residents against abuse.
 
If allowed, Clearview will destroy our rights to anonymity and privacy — and the safety and security that both bring. People can change their names and addresses to shield their whereabouts and identities from individuals who seek to harm them, but they can’t change their faces.
 
That’s why we’re teaming up with lawyers at the ACLU of Illinois and the law firm of Edelson PC, a nationally recognized leader in consumer privacy litigation, to put a stop to Clearview’s egregious violations of privacy. We are asking an Illinois state court to order the company to delete faceprints gathered from Illinois residents without consent, and to stop capturing new faceprints unless it complies with the Illinois law.
 
There is a groundswell of opposition to face surveillance technology, and this litigation is the latest chapter in an intensifying fight to protect our privacy rights against the dangers of this menacing technology. Across the nation, the ACLU has been advocating for bans on police use of face recognition technology, leading to strong laws in places like Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley, California, and Springfield and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a statewide prohibition on use of the technology on police body cams in California.
 
We won’t let companies like Clearview trample on our right to privacy.

Published May 28, 2020 at 08:25PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3gvLs7N

ACLU: We’re Taking Clearview AI to Court to End its Privacy-Destroying Face Surveillance Activities

We’re Taking Clearview AI to Court to End its Privacy-Destroying Face Surveillance Activities

For several years, a little-known start-up based in New York has been amassing a database of billions of our faceprints — unique biometric identifiers akin to a fingerprint or DNA profile — drawn from personal photos on our social media accounts and elsewhere online. The company has captured these faceprints in secret, without our knowledge, much less our consent, using everything from casual selfies to photos of birthday parties, college graduations, weddings, and so much more.
 
Unbeknownst to the public, this company has offered up this massive faceprint database to private companies, police, federal agencies, and wealthy individuals, allowing them to secretly track and target whomever they wished using face recognition technology.
                                                     
That company is Clearview AI, and it will end privacy as we know it if it isn’t stopped. We’re taking the company to court in Illinois today on behalf of organizations that represent survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable communities. As the groups make clear, Clearview’s face surveillance activities violate the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), and represent an unprecedented threat to our security and safety.
 
Face recognition technology offers a surveillance capability unlike any other technology in the past. It makes it dangerously easy to identify and track us at protests, AA meetings, counseling sessions, political rallies, religious gatherings, and more. For our clients — organizations that serve survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, undocumented immigrants, and people of color — this surveillance system is dangerous and even life-threatening. It empowers abusive ex-partners and serial harassers, exploitative companies, and ICE agents to track and target domestic violence and sexual assault survivors, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable communities.
 
By building a mass database of billions of faceprints without our knowledge or consent, Clearview has created the nightmare scenario that we’ve long feared, and has crossed the ethical bounds that many companies have refused to even attempt. Neither the United States government nor any American company is known to have ever compiled such a massive trove of biometrics.
 
Adding fuel to the fire, Clearview sells access to a smartphone app that allows its customers — and even those using the app on a trial basis — to upload a photo of an unknown person and instantaneously receive a set of matching photos.
 
Clearview’s actions clearly violate BIPA. The law requires companies that collect, capture, or obtain an Illinois resident’s biometric identifier — such as a fingerprint, faceprint, or iris scan — to first notify that individual and obtain their written consent. Clearview’s practices are exactly the threat to privacy that the legislature intended to address, and demonstrate why states across the country should adopt legal protections like the ones in Illinois.
 
In press statements, Clearview has tried to claim its actions are somehow protected by the First Amendment. Clearview is as free to look at online photos as anyone with an internet connection. But what it can’t do is capture our faceprints — uniquely identifying biometrics — from those photos without consent. That’s not speech; it’s conduct that the state of Illinois has a strong interest in regulating in order to protect its residents against abuse.
 
If allowed, Clearview will destroy our rights to anonymity and privacy — and the safety and security that both bring. People can change their names and addresses to shield their whereabouts and identities from individuals who seek to harm them, but they can’t change their faces.
 
That’s why we’re teaming up with lawyers at the ACLU of Illinois and the law firm of Edelson PC, a nationally recognized leader in consumer privacy litigation, to put a stop to Clearview’s egregious violations of privacy. We are asking an Illinois state court to order the company to delete faceprints gathered from Illinois residents without consent, and to stop capturing new faceprints unless it complies with the Illinois law.
 
There is a groundswell of opposition to face surveillance technology, and this litigation is the latest chapter in an intensifying fight to protect our privacy rights against the dangers of this menacing technology. Across the nation, the ACLU has been advocating for bans on police use of face recognition technology, leading to strong laws in places like Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley, California, and Springfield and Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as a statewide prohibition on use of the technology on police body cams in California.
 
We won’t let companies like Clearview trample on our right to privacy.

Published May 28, 2020 at 03:55PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3gvLs7N

ACLU: The FDA is Making Needless COVID-19 Risks a Condition of Abortion and Miscarriage Care. We’re Suing.

The FDA is Making Needless COVID-19 Risks a Condition of Abortion and Miscarriage Care. We’re Suing.

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe and upended normal life. In the four months since the first U.S. case was reported, more than 1.5 million people have been infected and 100,000 people have died in the United States. To mitigate risk, public health authorities tell us to get our groceries and prescriptions delivered, wave to grandma from the window, and generally avoid all unnecessary trips and close physical interactions outside the home.        
 
Consistent with these guidelines, federal agencies have taken every opportunity to encourage telemedicine use and give clinicians the flexibility to forgo unnecessary in-person encounters in accordance with their clinical judgment. They have waived various rules requiring in-person visits, even for controlled substances like opioids.
 
But there is one striking exception: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to subject mifepristone, a safe, effective prescription medication used to end an early pregnancy or treat a miscarriage, to a uniquely burdensome restriction that is jeopardizing the health and lives of patients and clinicians, with particularly dire implications for low-income communities and communities of color.
 
The FDA requires that the mifepristone pill be dispensed only in a hospital, clinic, or medical office: Patients who have already been evaluated by a clinician through telemedicine or at a prior in-person visit are not allowed to fill their prescription by mail. Instead, they must travel to one of these clinical settings to pick up the pill — even if they are receiving no in-person medical services at that time, and even if they will swallow the medication later at home (as the FDA permits).
 
For months, leading medical authorities have implored the FDA to suspend this restriction and give clinicians who provide abortion and miscarriage care the flexibility they need to protect their patients during this crisis. But the administration is intransigent.
 
That’s why today we filed a lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of medical experts and reproductive health, rights, and justice advocates, led by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), challenging the FDA rule that forces patients to take on unnecessary COVID-19 risks as a condition of receiving medication abortion and miscarriage care.
 
Of the more than 20,000 drugs regulated by the FDA, mifepristone is the only one that patients must obtain in a clinical setting, yet may self-administer unsupervised at home. It’s easy to see why no other drugs carry this restriction: There is no medical reason to dictate where a patient is standing when handed a pill they will put in their pocket to swallow later at home.
 
There is likewise no reason to impose this requirement on mifepristone, which has been FDA approved for 20 years and used by more than 4 million people. In the FDA’s words, mifepristone’s “efficacy and safety have become well established by both research and experience, and serious complications have proven to be extremely rare.” In fact, the FDA permits mifepristone to be sent to patients’ homes, in larger quantities and doses, when used for a purpose other than early pregnancy termination. 
 
Yet the FDA has maintained this unnecessary restriction throughout the pandemic — despite CDC guidance specifically encouraging patients to fill prescriptions by mail-order delivery wherever possible, and despite a national medical consensus that mifepristone prescribers need the same flexibility as other clinicians to forgo medically unnecessary in-person visits, consistent with their best clinical judgment, during this crisis.
 
As is virtually always the case when it comes to restrictions on abortion, the harm here is not borne equally. Low-income people and people of color, who comprise a majority of people seeking abortions, bear the brunt of the FDA’s restrictions. At the best of times, arranging transportation and child care in order to travel to a health care facility to pick up a pill is difficult or impossible for many patients. Some must travel hundreds of miles — or even take a flight — causing severe delays and blocking some patients from accessing abortion care at all.
 
Now, during a historic unemployment crisis with many schools and day cares shuttered, the FDA is forcing patients to take on life-threatening — and entirely unnecessary — risks in order to access essential health services. This is particularly dangerous for communities of color, who, due to longstanding inequities in access to and quality of health care and other manifestations of structural racism, are dying from COVID-19 at drastically higher rates.
 
Our coalition of plaintiffs represents tens of thousands of clinicians providing abortion and miscarriage care to patients across the nation, and the department chairs of obstetrics and gynecology at nearly 150 universities. It includes activists and organizers dedicated to removing barriers to high-quality pregnancy-related care that disproportionately harm marginalized communities. They have asked the FDA to do the right thing on mifepristone, but the agency has refused.
 
Pregnant people should not have to needlessly jeopardize their safety in order to access essential medication abortion and miscarriage care during the pandemic. We’re going to court to ensure that in this time of crisis, people do not have to subject themselves to unnecessary risk to access the reproductive health care they need.

Published May 27, 2020 at 11:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2zt1cId

ACLU: The FDA is Making Needless COVID-19 Risks a Condition of Abortion and Miscarriage Care. We’re Suing.

The FDA is Making Needless COVID-19 Risks a Condition of Abortion and Miscarriage Care. We’re Suing.

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept the globe and upended normal life. In the four months since the first U.S. case was reported, more than 1.5 million people have been infected and 100,000 people have died in the United States. To mitigate risk, public health authorities tell us to get our groceries and prescriptions delivered, wave to grandma from the window, and generally avoid all unnecessary trips and close physical interactions outside the home.        
 
Consistent with these guidelines, federal agencies have taken every opportunity to encourage telemedicine use and give clinicians the flexibility to forgo unnecessary in-person encounters in accordance with their clinical judgment. They have waived various rules requiring in-person visits, even for controlled substances like opioids.
 
But there is one striking exception: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to subject mifepristone, a safe, effective prescription medication used to end an early pregnancy or treat a miscarriage, to a uniquely burdensome restriction that is jeopardizing the health and lives of patients and clinicians, with particularly dire implications for low-income communities and communities of color.
 
The FDA requires that the mifepristone pill be dispensed only in a hospital, clinic, or medical office: Patients who have already been evaluated by a clinician through telemedicine or at a prior in-person visit are not allowed to fill their prescription by mail. Instead, they must travel to one of these clinical settings to pick up the pill — even if they are receiving no in-person medical services at that time, and even if they will swallow the medication later at home (as the FDA permits).
 
For months, leading medical authorities have implored the FDA to suspend this restriction and give clinicians who provide abortion and miscarriage care the flexibility they need to protect their patients during this crisis. But the administration is intransigent.
 
That’s why today we filed a lawsuit on behalf of a coalition of medical experts and reproductive health, rights, and justice advocates, led by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), challenging the FDA rule that forces patients to take on unnecessary COVID-19 risks as a condition of receiving medication abortion and miscarriage care.
 
Of the more than 20,000 drugs regulated by the FDA, mifepristone is the only one that patients must obtain in a clinical setting, yet may self-administer unsupervised at home. It’s easy to see why no other drugs carry this restriction: There is no medical reason to dictate where a patient is standing when handed a pill they will put in their pocket to swallow later at home.
 
There is likewise no reason to impose this requirement on mifepristone, which has been FDA approved for 20 years and used by more than 4 million people. In the FDA’s words, mifepristone’s “efficacy and safety have become well established by both research and experience, and serious complications have proven to be extremely rare.” In fact, the FDA permits mifepristone to be sent to patients’ homes, in larger quantities and doses, when used for a purpose other than early pregnancy termination. 
 
Yet the FDA has maintained this unnecessary restriction throughout the pandemic — despite CDC guidance specifically encouraging patients to fill prescriptions by mail-order delivery wherever possible, and despite a national medical consensus that mifepristone prescribers need the same flexibility as other clinicians to forgo medically unnecessary in-person visits, consistent with their best clinical judgment, during this crisis.
 
As is virtually always the case when it comes to restrictions on abortion, the harm here is not borne equally. Low-income people and people of color, who comprise a majority of people seeking abortions, bear the brunt of the FDA’s restrictions. At the best of times, arranging transportation and child care in order to travel to a health care facility to pick up a pill is difficult or impossible for many patients. Some must travel hundreds of miles — or even take a flight — causing severe delays and blocking some patients from accessing abortion care at all.
 
Now, during a historic unemployment crisis with many schools and day cares shuttered, the FDA is forcing patients to take on life-threatening — and entirely unnecessary — risks in order to access essential health services. This is particularly dangerous for communities of color, who, due to longstanding inequities in access to and quality of health care and other manifestations of structural racism, are dying from COVID-19 at drastically higher rates.
 
Our coalition of plaintiffs represents tens of thousands of clinicians providing abortion and miscarriage care to patients across the nation, and the department chairs of obstetrics and gynecology at nearly 150 universities. It includes activists and organizers dedicated to removing barriers to high-quality pregnancy-related care that disproportionately harm marginalized communities. They have asked the FDA to do the right thing on mifepristone, but the agency has refused.
 
Pregnant people should not have to needlessly jeopardize their safety in order to access essential medication abortion and miscarriage care during the pandemic. We’re going to court to ensure that in this time of crisis, people do not have to subject themselves to unnecessary risk to access the reproductive health care they need.

Published May 27, 2020 at 07:00PM
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ACLU: ICE Records Confirm that Immigration Enforcement Agencies are Using Invasive Cell Phone Surveillance Devices

ICE Records Confirm that Immigration Enforcement Agencies are Using Invasive Cell Phone Surveillance Devices

For years, immigration enforcement agencies have been using invasive cell phone surveillance technology known as Stingrays in near-total secrecy. To find out more, the ACLU and New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, and now we’ve forced the agencies to turn over documents revealing new details about the agencies’ practices. Today, we are publishing more than a thousand pages of record we’ve received from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about their purchase and use of Stingray technology. The documents reveal some significant gaps in public knowledge about the agency’s practices and raise significant privacy concerns.
 
Stingrays, also known as cell site simulators or IMSI catchers, track and locate cell phones. The devices mimic cell phone towers by sending out signals that trick cell phones in the area into transmitting their unique identifying information, ensnaring not only a target’s cell phone but also those of nearby bystanders. Using those transmissions, government agents can precisely locate phones, and can learn the identities of all phones in a particular area.
 
We initially submitted a FOIA request to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in 2017, after the Detroit News reported on a case where ICE used a cell site simulator to locate and arrest an individual on immigration-related charges. That request was met with two years of near silence from the agencies, so last December we filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order ICE and CBP to produce a range of records about their use, purchase, and oversight of the technology. ICE has since handed over more than a thousand pages of documents. CBP, on the other hand, maintains that it can’t find a single page dealing with cell site simulators, despite public evidence that the agency has spent millions on them. On Friday, we filed a motion asking the court to compel CBP to live up to its legal obligations regarding transparency under the FOIA.
 
There’s good reason to demand transparency from these agencies. Through the documents we received from ICE alone, here’s what we’ve learned:

• ICE upgraded their cell site simulator devices from the Harris Corporation’s Stingray II to a new model called Crossbow. Prior to release of these records, the existence of the Crossbow model was not publicly known. As of January 2020, ICE was still using Crossbows. Although records obtained through FOIA and other litigation in recent years has revealed some information about the costs and capabilities of the Stingray and other models of cell site simulators, we don’t know what the Crossbow can do, or whether it raises different concerns than other versions of the technology.
  
• In September 2017, ICE said it had used cell site simulators 223 times, including 95 times to “apprehend” people and 104 times to “gather evidence relevant to a case against any apprehended individual.” From Jan. 1, 2019 to Oct. 7, 2019, ICE deployed cell site simulators 134 times, which located at least 80 people and resulted in 22 arrests. Fifty-one pages of weekly reports chart ICE’s use of this technology over time. From the piecemeal reported totals we received in sets of documents dated from 2017 to 2019, we can surmise that ICE used cell site simulators at least 466 times. These figures supplement data previously reported by  Buzzfeed News showing that from Jan. 1, 2013 to Oct. 11, 2017, Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, used cell site simulators 1,885 times.
  
• For all of law enforcement officials’ talk about the need to maintain secrecy around law enforcement use of cell site simulators, a presentation by DHS’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center acknowledges that “hackers” and others can also obtain access to cellular communications data using Stingrays, and discusses a pilot program to deploy sensors to detect this technology in the National Capitol Region. The presentation reveals that in 2016, DHS “Detected likely IMSI catcher monitoring/tracking phones.” This document suggests that excessive government secrecy about cell site simulators may be self-defeating, by failing to alert American cell phone users about threats to the privacy and security of their communications.
  
• Although DHS and ICE acknowledge that cell site simulators can interfere with cell phone calls in the area, the documents reveal that “Neither ICE nor USSS (United States Secret Service) has funded independent interference testing.” The FBI has similarly stated that it “does not test or measure the interference levels” of its cell site simulators. This stands in contrast to federal police in Canada, whose tests revealed that cell site simulators could interfere with more than 50 percent of 911 calls, leading the agency to mandate limitations on use of the technology. Senator Ron Wyden has repeatedly raised this problem with federal law enforcement agencies, but unless something has changed since the dates of these documents, DHS and the FBI don’t seem to be taking it seriously.
  
• DHS requires all of its components that use cell site simulators, including ICE and CBP, to implement policies governing use of the technology. ICE’s policy governing the use of the technology is now public for the first time. According to the policy, ICE recognizes that it normally needs to get a search warrant before using a cell site simulator, except when there are “exigent circumstances.” But it is unclear if ICE regards this as the only exception to the warrant requirement, as both DHS’s policy and ICE training materials also say “exceptional circumstances” can justify bypassing the warrant requirement. The manner in which ICE has defined both “exigent” and “exceptional” circumstances in the training materials provides law enforcement officers with little guidance as to what these terms mean or when the agency considers them properly invoked. This is concerning because it raises the prospect that agents may be short-circuiting the need for judicial oversight when in circumstances where there is no true emergency.

There can’t be accountability without transparency. The release of these records — albeit with redactions — provides some helpful insights into what was previously an extremely secretive surveillance practice. For example, the documents provide multiple assertions that ICE and CBP are not using cell site simulators in civil immigration investigations.
 
That’s good news, but concerns remain. We know that despite claiming not to use Stingrays for civil immigration enforcement, ICE does use the technology in its ever-expanding category of “criminal” immigration investigations, including arrests for the crimes of illegal entry and reentry. And although the requirement to get a warrant is positive, we still don’t know what the agency believes qualifies as an “exigent” or “exceptional” circumstance that lets agents avoid the warrant requirement. Those are just a few of the outstanding questions.
 
We also continue to know virtually nothing about CBP’s use of this technology. CBP has stated that it searched for records three times in response to our FOIA request and has not identified a single responsive record. But the agency’s no-records response is impossible to square with publicly available information as well as the documents we received from ICE. A 2016 Congressional Report reveals that as of four years ago, CBP had spent $2.5 million to purchase 33 cell site simulator devices. And, in 2017 letters to Sens. Ron Wyden and Al Franken (redacted versions of which were provided to us for the first time in this case), DHS stated that CBP has used cell site simulators and was in the process of drafting a policy to govern their use.
 
We’re demanding the court order CBP to explain how it conducted its prior searches for records responsive to our FOIA request and to conduct a new search for responsive records.
 
The use of powerful, surreptitious surveillance equipment is concerning in any context. But when agencies such as ICE and CBP, with a long history of abusive practices, evade requests for information and then obfuscate provided information, we should all be concerned.

Published May 27, 2020 at 03:00PM
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