A Little Less Conversation
Voice of America
It doesn’t often make domestic news, but the United States government owns a group of television and radio networks via the Agency for Global Media. Its most well-known property (to Americans, at least) is called Voice of America. Best known for its propaganda efforts during World War II, the government has expanded its footprint across most of the rest of the world. Anyhow, for some reason Trump wanted to install a corrupt toadie in charge of USAGM, and found Michael Pack:
Already, two judges have ruled that Pack acted illegally in office. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal whistleblowers' complaints, concluded that he probably did so in a separate instance.Pack has instigated investigations of journalists for purported anti-Trump bias; withheld visa extension for journalists who are foreign citizens, requiring their return to their home countries; and sought to erase regulations that insulate his newsrooms from political interference.
Nice! Pack was also sued last week by the D.C. Attorney General for establishing a non-profit media firm that existed solely to funnel money to his for-profit film venture. He did this prior to being appointed to run the USAGM, but it fits with the administration’s tendency to appoint people under civil or criminal investigation for financial fraud. So what else has Pack been up to during his tenure?
And now Pack is now being accused of trying to propagandize the Voice of America by a group of whistleblowers. They take exception to a planned appearance by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at VOA's Washington headquarters on Monday, just nine days before the Biden administration begins.
Mike Pompeo is going to give a speech that the US will broadcast all over the world, 9 days before he leaves office. Oh, it’s also an in-person speech, and indoors, because there’s nothing this administration loves more than a superspreader event.
Pack has moved aggressively to replace board members and senior leaders at all the entities the USAGM oversees with Trump loyalists, in violation of the law:
In October, a D.C. Superior Court judge ruled in another case brought by Racine that Pack had broken the law in firing board members over the Open Technology Fund, which is subsidized by USAGM. Pack had replaced the bipartisan board with one stocked with conservative activists and Trump administration officials.
Pack did the same with three other non-profit networks funded by USAGM and made himself board chairman over Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; Radio Free Asia; and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. He sought to force the networks to sign binding contracts ensuring that the boards could not be removed for two full years for any cause, and that board members could only be removed "for cause" subsequently, even though Biden aides have made clear he intends to replace Pack promptly.
ProPublica has reported on the ways the Trump administration has sought to keep political operatives in power after he leaves office, though I can’t say whether it’s because they truly want to destroy these agencies from the inside out or they simply like the status/access/job security. They’ll happily enrich themselves on the taxpayer dime, and they don’t appear to care if any of it is legal. There need to be consequences for people who violate the law from inside government, even at less-well known agencies like the USAGM.
Flint
Last summer I wrote about the Flint water crisis, and how Michigan’s very white leadership condemned the mostly black and brown citizens of a major city to drink poisoned water, and then covered up their complicity in the crimes.
Well, it turns out elections sometimes do have consequences and the Special Counsel the new governor appointed to investigate the Flint water crisis is going to bring criminal charges against Rick Snyder and his crew of goons:
Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, his health director and other ex-officials have been told they’re being charged after a new investigation of the Flint water scandal, which devastated the majority Black city with lead-contaminated water and was blamed for a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, The Associated Press has learned.
Hell yeah. A few people had been on trial previously for criminal charges related to the crisis, but in June 2019 a new Attorney General dismissed all of the cases. I wrote:
No reasonable explanation has been given by Nessel’s office as to why charges were suddenly dropped, or why many of the conspirators were allowed to take plea deals to minor charges that let them off without punishment.
Nessel did say that the “probe would start anew” and apparently it has? Perhaps my cynicism was misplaced? It is a bit of good news in an otherwise shitty new year, and a good first step to hold politicians accountable for their actions after they leave office.
Parler
After the president was banned from Twitter and his campaign removed from major tech platforms, many of his supporters emigrated to Parler, a “free speech” social network created by some dude from Nevada in 2018. Early adoption by a bunch of right wing bigots who got kicked off Twitter and Facebook helped it grow its extremist userbase, and in 2020 it caught the attention of the Trump campaign and other mainstream Republicans like Ted Cruz.
Parler was sort of permitted to exist, since it was a relatively small, hateful corner of the Internet. Then January 6th happened, and the platform was thrust into the spotlight and singled out as the website of choice for the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol.
All the attention was not good for Parler, it turned out, and the app was quickly banned from the Google Play store and threatened with removal by Apple, who axed it a day later. Then Amazon removed Parler from their webhosting service. Parler has sued Amazon, but their CEO admits the site may never come back online.
In addition to being run and populated by some pretty awful people, it turns out Parler was poorly coded, and before it was taken offline the site was hacked and had much of its data downloaded and made publicly available:
To recap, the scraping was pulled off by a hacker who goes by the handle donk_enby. She originally set out to archive content posted to Parler last Wednesday in hopes of preserving self-incriminating material before account holders came to their senses and deleted it. By Sunday, donk_enby said she had collected roughly 80 terabytes of posts, including more than 1 million videos, many of which contained the GPS metadata identifying the exact locations of where the videos were shot.
[…]
A key reason for her success: Parler’s site was a mess. Its public API used no authentication. When users deleted their posts, the site failed to remove the content and instead only added a delete flag to it. Oh, and each post carried a numerical ID that was incremented from the ID of the most recently published one.
You may recall Zoom had issues with hackers “bombing” meetings using scripts that could guess URL strings and, well, Parler was using sequential post numbers so you could simply keep adding 1 to a web address and find more posts, making it very easy for the donk_enbys of the world to compile an archive before the site was nuked from orbit.
Parler also did not obfuscate geolocation data from videos and photos, allowing both law enforcement and amateur sleuths to find posters who were at the Capitol riots:
Another amateur mistake was Parler’s failure to scrub geolocations from images and videos posted online. Sites like Twitter and Google routinely remove such metadata from content posted by their users. The video files hosted on Parler, by contrast, were “raw,” meaning they still contained this information.
Whoops! So Parler became an unwitting informant on all its users who tried to overthrow the government. Freedom!
It gets dumber - the free speech platform also made users fork over their Social Security Number and a photo of their driver’s license to enable certain functions on the platform. The libertarians were not amused:
The most onerous is Item 14. Parler can literally send you a bill for fees or potentially lost income, which it incurs if attributed to your posts.
I am enjoying the thought of Parler sending bills to its users for lost income attributed to their posts. Maybe that can become Parler’s new business model since all the rioters made posts and got the site taken down? Who knows.
It gets dumber still, because people are selling phones on eBay that have Parler installed for astronomical prices:
Oh, and people trying to find an app that no longer existed temporarily pushed a dormant porn chat app named Parlor to the top of the store rankings.
Also, someone made a map to find your local (now former) Parler users, if you’re interested.
Quibi
Remember Quibi? I have written about it a few times. I said:
Was Quibi a scam? It certainly was a flawed idea, and maybe a little unlucky. It’s rare I get to write about the rise and fall of a 10-figure media company over the course of a summer. I’m waiting to hear where I can watch the Liam Hemsworth show about hunting human beings in convenient 7 minute episodes.
Well. Good news. Streaming company Roku has acquired the rights to 75 of Quibi’s shows and will stream them For. Free. Tell me more, Variety Magazine:
The Quibi shows coming to the free, ad-supported Roku channel include “Reno 911,” a revival of Comedy Central’s cop spoof; dystopian thriller “Most Dangerous Game,” starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz…
Yessss. Anyhow, they paid “significantly” less than $100 million for the rights, which is a salty way to issue a press release, but go off, Roku. Quibi burned through a billion dollars building its mobile app and producing all this content. Not a great return on investment, but it’s something. The real winners are the viewers, who get to watch it all for free on an actual television.
Epoch Times
While Twitter and Facebook take belated steps to deplatform the president and all of his conspiracy-spouting cronies, Google and YouTube don’t seem particularly bothered, and our old friends at the Epoch Times have ramped up the hoaxes and lies:
The YouTube channels have spread lies about voting technology companies, votes being flipped from Trump to Biden, disappearing USB drives, suspicious servers in Germany, and the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville. Since November, they’ve attracted more than 1.1 million subscribers and tens of millions of views.
Rather than, I don’t know, issuing a blanket ban on antidemocratic propaganda, YouTube has taken a far more hands-off approach, creating a system of “strikes” when channels post videos that users flag for disinformation:
“Over the last month, we’ve removed thousands of videos which spread misinformation claiming widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election, including several videos from the channels sent over by BuzzFeed,” [Farshad] Shadloo said. “Any channel posting new videos with these false claims in violation of our policies will now receive a strike, a penalty which temporarily restricts uploading or livestreaming. Channels that receive three strikes in the same 90-day period will be permanently removed from YouTube."
It’s worth remembering that Google has the technology to prevent this sort of dangerous content from flourishing on YouTube, and it simply doesn’t do it. The best they could muster after the Capitol riots was a short time out for Trump’s channel.
YouTube has made clear they’d rather chase user growth and poison the minds of Americans than take action against some of the platform’s worst offenders, who’ve spent years undermining democracy and fomenting hatred.
As for the Epoch Times, I’m still not sure what the end game is, given their stated mission of destroying the Chinese government. Their embrace of Trump is odd, even after he’s been run off the rest of the Internet, but I suppose we can’t expect rational behavior from a literal cult.
Blow That Whistle
The work-from-home phenomenon has triggered a fresh frustration for U.S. corporations: Americans are blowing the whistle on their employers like never before.
Perhaps the authors are being a bit glib but I’d suggest “reporting crimes to the authorities” should be more than a frustration for companies. What do I know. It turns out that work-from-home has emboldened people to speak out against the bad behavior they see in the workplace:
The isolation that comes with being separated from a communal workplace has made many employees question how dedicated they are to their employers, according to lawyers for whistle-blowers and academics. What’s more, people feel emboldened to speak out when managers and co-workers aren’t peering over their shoulders.
Um…good? Apparently working in human ant farms created the right amount of peer pressure to keep workers from snitching, which was surely an unanticipated bonus for companies. Now? People would rather get paid for calling out illegal behavior:
Intended or not, the SEC itself has played a big role in encouraging informants to come forward by showing how lucrative whistle-blowing can be. Since the pandemic hit the U.S., the agency has paid out some $330 million in awards, including an eye-popping $114 million to a single tipster in October.
I, uh, holy shit. Someone cashed out $114 million dollars as a whistleblower? I can only imagine the level of fraud you have to uncover to make 9 figures. Since 2010, the SEC has paid out a percentage of the money it collects:
Under the program, tipsters can receive financial awards if they voluntarily provide unique information that results in an enforcement action. Payouts can range from 10% to 30% of the money collected in cases where sanctions exceed $1 million. Awards are paid from a fund set up by Congress -- not money owed to harmed investors.
I rarely say it, but I’m pleasantly surprised at what Congress has done here, incentivizing workers to speak up. Now that everything is securities fraud, there’s never been a better time to be a whistleblower.
Short Cons
NBC News - ““I am a bit alarmed that Fred Turner, the 25-year-old founder of Curative Inc., with no medical background was rewarded the contract for testing lawmakers, staff and the media in the U.S. Capitol," one Republican Senate aide said. "I have been reliant on this service and captiously optimistic that it’s reliable.””
AP - “The new legislation quietly passed by Congress last month after a decade-long fight is the most sweeping banking reform of its kind since passage of the Patriot Act, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”
The Verge - “Before its closure, DarkMarket hosted close to 500,000 users and had facilitated over 320,000 transactions, according to Europol. The dark web marketplace traded everything from drugs and counterfeit money to stolen credit card details and malware.”
Tips, thoughts, or whistleblower payouts to scammerdarkly@gmail.com