Samantha Seda’s client,a 16-year-old foster child from Far Rockaway, New York, had no criminal history when he was arrested in September, accused of having pulled out a gun and fired one shot in the air. Even though he had no priors and no relatives who could post bail, a judge set the amount at $100,000, and as he sat in jail for over a month, the boy lost his spot at the foster home where he had been living.

Seda, a Legal Aid attorney representing adolescents charged as adults in Queens, thought the allegations against her client were dubious and was looking for a way to get him out on bail. That’s when she decided to look into the officers named in the complaint against him. What she discovered stunned her.

The arresting officer, she learned, had been sued several times, and in the 1990s, he had been part of a group of officers working a narcotics operation that was accused of planting drugs on people and stealing drugs from suspects. Some of the officers went to trial and were convicted on felony charges, but most settled, costing the city some $1.2 million in damages to their victims. The officer she was researching was acquitted in court, but he had been named in connection with at least nine separate misconduct cases and had settled at least two, she told The Intercept.

Intrigued, Seda looked into the second officer, a sergeant who claimed he had watched her client pull out a gun and shoot it. He was also named in a pending lawsuit, in which a driver alleged the officer had stopped him, assaulted him, and arrested him with no legal justification.

“I thought, wow, that’s outrageous. Two cops in one case that are dirty,” Seda said. When she looked into the third officer, another sergeant who said he had found a gun on the street after her client ran, she was almost expecting to find something.

And in fact, that officer had also been sued, for assaulting a young black man moments after he walked out of his sister’s house. That lawsuit alleged the officer had thrown the boy to the ground and “roughed him up” before arresting him and taking him to the police precinct, also without legal justification. The boy was never charged with anything — but his family sued the city, demanding $100,000 in damages.

The accusations against the officers didn’t automatically imply their guilt in those cases, Seda said, but they certainly raised red flags.

Seda took her findings to a judge and argued that they undermined the credibility of the officers in question — and he promptly dropped her client’s bail and released him until trial. But only months earlier, the case might have played out quite differently.

Tracking Police Misconduct

In the past, when Seda wanted to learn more about an officer connected to one of her cases, she would scour legal databases and news archives in search of any relevant information. If she somehow knew an officer’s history would matter to the case, she might file a public records request for complaints filed against him or try to subpoena public agencies for that information — a cumbersome process for a public defender handling dozens of cases, and one with no guarantee of success. “It would have been very hard and it would have taken months,” she said. “It may have never happened.”

Most police misconduct goes unreported, particularly in less extreme cases and in more disenfranchised communities, but complaints filed with police departments and civilian review boards, as well as lawsuits, can point to significant histories of abuse tied to specific officers and precincts. In most cases, however, a citizen who becomes the victim of police abuse has next to no way of knowing if that officer is a repeat offender or has a history of targeting certain people, say, or sexual harassment.

As is the case with most police departments across the country, the NYPD does not disclose internal disciplinary records to the public. Even though cities spend millions in public funds to settle lawsuits filed against officers, the public has little access to what the settlements reveal about problematic officers and precincts. Meanwhile, the officers themselves rarely face consequences and often return to the streets quickly, their histories shielded in anonymity.

But that situation is beginning to change — as a growing number of police accountability groups are starting to bypass the departments by aggregating and distributing misconduct history databases on their own.

Earlier this year, Seda was trained in using the Cop Accountability Project, a database created by New York’s Legal Aid Society that pools civil rights lawsuits, criminal court decisions, and a variety of other public and private sources like attorney notes and social media content to compile misconduct profiles on nearly 9,000 New York City officers. The database assembles a wealth of information that could otherwise take months to gather, as well as some that wouldn’t be available anywhere else, and it has proved to be a game-changer for the attorneys using it.

In the past, individuals could file public records requests with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is normally the first recipient of citizen complaints regarding police use of force, abuse of authority, and other misconduct. But since October 2014, when the New York board’s executive director was fired and accused of releasing records protected by law, the CCRB has denied all public records requests on the grounds that they violate New York’s strict privacy protections for law enforcement officers. A spokesperson for the board declined to comment on the change in policy or the former chief’s departure but wrote in an email to The Intercept that the CCRB “believes that transparency and accountability builds trust between police and the community it serves.”

The CCRB also recently launched its own Data Transparency Initiative, an interactive online data tool that includes information on more than 190,000 allegations of police misconduct, involving more than 63,000 victims and some 36,000 NYPD officers. But unlike the Legal Aid database, that data paints only a macro picture of the issue and cannot be connected to individual officers or incidents. Legal Aid’s Cop Accountability Project began as an informal, handwritten list of officers Legal Aid lawyers knew had a history of misconduct. Over the years, as lawyers amassed information to help build stronger cases for their clients, the list grew into a spreadsheet, then eventually into a cloud-based relational database that recently became available to Legal Aid attorneys through a mobile app.

“We are essentially trying to find a way to collect data to document events that government doesn’t want documented in a public way,” Cynthia Conti-Cook, one of the curators of the database, told The Intercept.

Although it keeps growing every day, the database is by nature incomplete, Conti-Cook notes, and lacks access to any internal documentation the NYPD may have on its officers. In fact, Legal Aid is currently fighting the city in court to open up officer misconduct files to public records requests. The group has also been fighting a New York law known as “50-a,” which protects officers from exactly the kind of scrutiny and accountability the public is demanding by guaranteeing the confidentiality of all law enforcement personnel records, essentially blocking any judicial review of officers’ histories and possible patterns of misconduct.

In a statement released last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined some proposed amendments to 50-a. The NYPD did not respond to a list of questions from The Intercept but referred us instead to a recent official statement by Commissioner James O’Neill expressing support for de Blasio’s proposed reforms. “I believe in transparency. I also believe that making information about disciplinary proceedings public will help us build trust with the community,” O’Neill said.

But police accountability advocates were quick to point out that the proposed changes were just a way to kick the can down the road; they were “not substantive” and fell short of a “genuine commitment to full transparency.” “If the administration is serious about police accountability,” the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote in response to the mayor’s statement, it will “just start releasing records.”

Until that happens, the Legal Aid database remains the most comprehensive accountability tool available to lawyers.

“What the Legal Aid Society is doing will not replace legislative reform, no matter how large its database grows,” Conti-Cook wrote. “Defender-driven data, while filling a gap in access to records, is not the ultimate solution.”

Yet for all its limitations, the database has already achieved a lot. Lawyers in Legal Aid’s network have successfully used it to “change the narrative in the courtroom about what happened during a specific encounter between a client and an officer,” Conti-Cook explained in an academic paper presenting the project. “Expanding the definition of police accountability data from official disciplinary complaints to other sources that similarly document misconduct events has changed who controls the definition of misconduct, and therefore who controls the narrative of what is happening between police and the communities they serve.”

And those victories haven’t stopped in the courtroom. In response to the Legal Aid database, the NYPD itself has expanded the definition of misconduct it uses to manage risk internally to include allegations raised in lawsuits in addition to the department’s internal affairs bureau and the city’s civilian review board. These investigations remain inaccessible to the public, but they are now informed by a broader set of sources.

Perhaps most importantly, beyond tracing individual officers’ histories of misconduct and singling out the so-called bad apples, the Cop Accountability Project has also highlighted broader trends in New York’s police-community relations.

The database revealed, for example, that between June 2015 and May 2016, a single Brooklyn precinct — the 75th Precinct in East New York — was sued in federal court at least 47 times, more than double the amount of any other precinct. The second most sued precinct was the 73rd, in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In total, over that time frame, NYPD officers were sued in federal court 966 times. The NYPD is sued about 4,000 times a year, mostly in state courts — a dramatic increase in litigation that in 2014 alone cost the city $216 million in settlements. The increase in lawsuits marks an opposite trend from that noted by New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which reported that from 2006 to 2015, the number of complaints steadily declined, from 7,663 in 2006 to 4,461 in 2015 — possibly suggesting that a growing number of citizens, frustrated with the redress process available to them, might be resorting to suing the police.

The Legal Aid database also showed that the 10 precincts with the highest numbers of lawsuits were concentrated in Brooklyn. Citywide, 82 percent of plaintiffs filing lawsuits were black, while only 2 percent were white. Thirty-three percent of the lawsuits were filed over encounters that took place on the street, and 47 percent alleged excessive use of force, with 64 percent of those cases requiring hospitalization.

The analysis also gave a breakdown of the charges officers made against the plaintiffs, which were overwhelmingly for “resisting arrest” and “disorderly conduct,” two of the vague charges regularly used in questionable police stops.

Legal Aid made those findings public as part of a push for greater police transparency, but the bulk of the database is currently available only to lawyers within the group’s network. As word of the database’s existence spread, other attorneys began reaching out to Legal Aid for access to its data, sometimes contributing more information from their own records. In one case, a judge even suggested that an attorney seek access to the database, prompting the officer’s attorney to also demand to see the file Legal Aid had on him.

Conti-Cook said the entire database has not been made public because it is built, in part, on confidential sources and information that’s protected by attorney-client privileges. But the goal, ultimately, is to distill the majority of the data that is in the public record and open up access to all New Yorkers.

“We’re dreaming of a website,” she told The Intercept.

A Killer Cop With a Past

On October 20, 2014, a group of Chicago police officers shot and killed a black teenager named Laquan McDonald. Police said that the officers fired in self-defense, the boy had a knife, and he was killed by a single shot to the chest. For over a month, the official narrative was the only narrative.

It was not until a whistleblower tipped off journalist Jamie Kalven that the story was false and there was “horrific” video to prove it that the real narrative began to emerge. Kalven obtained a copy of the autopsy report, which showed that McDonald had been shot 16 times, including several times in the back, and that police officer Jason Van Dyke had unloaded his weapon “execution style” while McDonald lay on the ground. A month later, the city settled with McDonald’s family for $5 million before they even moved to sue.

It took several more months of protest and public pressure before details of the official cover-up were revealed, and more than a year for the city to release dashcam video of the shooting. Finally, Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder. Officials then sought to paint him as a lone “bad officer” whose actions shouldn’t reflect on the department.

Eventually, it emerged that Van Dyke had been accused of misconduct at least 17 times before he killed McDonald, including several allegations of brutality. Yet none of those complaints — one of which cost the city a $500,000 civil settlement — had resulted in any disciplinary action. Between 2012 and 2015, the city of Chicago paid $210 million in police misconduct settlements— with just 124 of the city’s roughly 12,000 police officers accounting for $34 million in payouts. The Chicago Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Public disclosure of Van Dyke’s long complaint history was made possible by litigation brought by Kalven against the city of Chicagoback in 2007. It took seven years of litigation for an Illinois Supreme Court judge to rule that documents bearing on allegations of police abuse, including citizen complaints, were public information and therefore subject to public records requests. Kalven’s group, the Invisible Institute, whose mission is to hold public institutions accountable, quickly moved to obtain records from Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority as well as the department’s internal affairs division — which came to some 56,000 misconduct complaints against 8,500 police officers since 2011.

But the Invisible Institute didn’t stop there. Driven by a commitment to the notion that information about public institutions should be open, free, and accessible to all, the group processed all the complaints and then published them on a user-friendly, interactive website.

“We positioned ourselves as advocates for data, transparency, and accountability,” Rajiv Sinclair, who works on the database, told The Intercept. “We share all the data with everyone.”

As is the case with New York’s Legal Aid database, the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project allows people to search for the complaint records of individual officers, but it also tells broader stories about police trends in the city. For instance, the data shows that young black men on the South and West sides of Chicago consistently file more complaints than any other group in the city — but it also shows that their complaints have a much lower “sustain rate,” Sinclair said, meaning they are much less likely to be investigated and followed up on.

That’s partly because Chicago police will not investigate a complaint until the citizen filing it signs a sworn legal affidavit — a stressful prospect for many whose interactions with law enforcement are defined by mistrust. As a result, nearly 60 percent of complaints are thrown out. A quarter of complaints were dropped because citizens filing them couldn’t identify the officers. A new data initiative launched last week, OpenOversight, is hoping to fill that gap by providing a database of officers’ photos and badge numbers.

“There’s a lot of intimidation in that process,” Sinclair noted, referring to the affidavit requirement. “Many of those cases are going to be an officer’s word versus a citizen’s word. And if you’re a black teenager, you know how undervalued your word is, you know that if you say one thing and the officer says another thing, they’re just going to say that you’re lying.”

Whose Data Is Public Data?

The Invisible Institute plans to expand the scope of its project to add new data sources like use of force records, tactical response reports, and a wider set of misconduct complaints, but it also hopes to combine those with more contextual data around individual officers. The ambition is to be able to follow problem officers through their careers, to see how patterns change as they move between units and commanders, and to explore the intricate networks of relationships that model the Chicago Police Department’s behavior.

But the primary goal remains easily accessible accountability. The group recently developed a Twitter bot that extracts officers’ names from news stories posted on Twitter and automatically responds to followers with those officers’ profiles and complaint histories. They also run workshops based on the database with high school students in the city’s most heavily policed neighborhoods — the same kids “who gets stopped by police every day,” Sinclair said.

“Those users are the most important to us, and they have been underserved by the predominant trends in civic data transparency and police data transparency,” he added.

In fact, as open data initiatives have multiplied in recent years, some government agencies have gestured toward transparency by releasing data sets for scholars and analysts to report on broad social trends. But most of that data, like the data released by New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, is “de-identified,” meaning it can’t be traced back to specific officers. And ultimately, for the people whose encounters with police build up those data sets, the big picture matters less than the name and history of the officer who abused them.

“A lot of data is very disconnected from the people who we think are the most important users, and those are citizens who have had encounters with police and their lawyers,” Sinclair said. “One of the most important uses for our data set is for lawyers and citizens to be able to look up an officer. … Data can support your case, make it more clear that what happened to you is true.”

A similar initiative, which focuses on officers’ patterns of traffic stops rather than complaint histories, is North Carolina’s Open Data Policing NC. The project is made possible by North Carolina’s uniquely detailed reporting requirements for traffic stops, which require officers to file detailed reports on all stops, including reasons for the stop, details on whether a search was conducted, as well as the race, age, and gender of the driver.

That data was always public, but like much public information, it was not readily accessible, essentially voiding its public utility.

“There’s nothing that I’m publishing that you couldn’t have always gotten,” Ian Mance, an attorney with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and curator of the database, told The Intercept. “But if you requested the database from the state, it would be such a large file it would literally melt down your laptop if you tried to open it.”

Until the website launched — covering 25 million traffic stops made since 2002 by the state’s 300 largest enforcement agencies — police were required to compile the data, but then “it kind of just disappeared,” Mance said. Departments never looked at it and didn’t have systems set up to analyze the data from officers’ stop patterns, he said, adding that he’s been trying, with some success, to convince police departments of the site’s benefits, pitching it as an “auditing tool” they can use for internal reviews.

While the database doesn’t publish individual officers’ names, it lists their ID numbers — making it possible for a citizen who was pulled over to identify his stop by department, date, or other circumstantial data, and then, through a hyperlink on the officer’s ID, to populate a page with his “career enforcement data,” including any patterns suggesting bias.

“So if you are a driver who suspects you’re being stopped for an illegal, race-based reason, you can test your hypothesis by going on the site,” Mance explained.

Like the Chicago and New York initiatives, the North Carolina project quickly revealed broader patterns of enforcement, including racial disparities in traffic stops. And the data has already informed some policy changes. In Greensboro, for instance, city officials changed their protocols to end stops for low-level traffic violations, and in Durham, the city council passed a policy mandating that officers get written consent for searches not justified by probable cause.

As with Chicago and New York, the data has also been used in court. “We’ve had cases where there were terrible claims of racial profiling and officers weren’t able to offer a coherent explanation of why a certain person came to their attention and why they stopped them,” Mance said. “Their career enforcement data became immediately relevant to answering questions of whether they targeted this person for illegal, race-based reasons.”

“Open data is the future, there’s no putting the cat back in the bag,” he added. “This is something police departments, whether they like it or not, are going to have to contend with, because we’re reaching a point where the public expects to have access to this kind of information.”

Yet many data projects are ultimately contingent on agencies’ cooperation — either willingly and because local legislation declares the data a public record, or after long-fought legal battles like Kalven’s.

As demands for accountability increase, so does pushback. As police departments across the country started to enroll in body camera programs, local legislatures also began to discuss bills to keep that footage secret. In Georgia, legislators moved to shield bodycam footage from public records requests and extended the restriction to officers’ misconduct records that were previously available. In New York, the Civilian Complaint Review Board’s reversal of its policy of disclosing records upon request came just months after the killing of Eric Garner sparked widespread protests in the city and demands for more accountability.

North Carolina, despite having one of the most transparent traffic stop reporting requirements in the country, is no exception. Last month, for instance, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department faced an onslaught of criticism for its refusal to release video of the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott. Scott’s killing came just days before a revision to North Carolina’s public records law — allowing police to withhold video like that of Scott’s killing from the public — was set to kick in.

“I think these efforts are very shortsighted and people see them for what they are,” Mance said, “which is an attempt by people in power to keep the public from having a better understanding about the way that they are being policed.”

A National Clearinghouse for Police Complaints

So far, efforts to use open data to track officer misconduct and hold police departments accountable are few and limited. But with 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, each ruled by different sets of local regulations, there is no uniformity in how police misconduct is tracked, if at all, and in a majority of places, the public has no access to records of complaints filed against police.

That might be about to change, as a civil rights group is preparing to launch a nationwide website that will allow users to file official reports of officer misconduct and abuse, while also making those reports immediately public. For years, Flex Your Rights, the group behind the Open Police Complaintsinitiative, ran “constitutional literacy” workshops, educating the public on their rights during police encounters. But they soon realized that wasn’t enough.

“The events of the last few years have shined an important light on the fact that people are going to have bad police encounters regardless of whether they ‘flex’ their rights perfectly or not,” Steve Silverman, the group’s founder and director, told The Intercept.

Instead, the new website, which is set to go live early next year, will aim to bring some uniformity and accountability to the police complaint process, by compiling research on different departments’ requirements and allowing users to either file complaints directly online — for those departments that choose to participate in the initiative — or upload the complaints they file on their own and share those reports publicly.

The idea is to simplify the complaint process for citizens and minimize the need for people to file grievances in person at a police station, “where they’re bound to have another bad encounter,” Silverman said. The site will populate a report by asking users dozens of questions and will offer varying degrees of transparency, allowing users to publicly disclose anything from bare, anonymous details of the incident to full narrative accounts including names of officers and victims. It will also give police departments an opportunity to respond and update each report with the findings of their investigations.

“We’re trying to use open data in order to encourage better responsiveness but also to track how well and how poorly departments are responding to complaints, as one of the big reasons why police complaints processes suck is because they’re very unresponsive,” Silverman said. “Of course there are going to be some police departments and individual officers who chafe at the idea that their name might be attached to a public complaint. But if that’s the case, they should go ahead and properly and swiftly investigate the complaint and they’ll have an opportunity to post their findings.”

The group said it would protect the site from misuse and false reports — and potential libel suits — by requiring that all police complaints be officially filed before they can be shared publicly, and by flagging “frequent flier” users and filling the site with disclaimer notices reminding readers that the reports are allegations. It will also offer tools to connect citizens filing complaints with attorneys in their areas, as well as to other relevant resources.

“We hope that by providing this kind of information in a public way, we’ll urge departments to take action,” Silverman said.

But even if departments refuse to engage with the site — and Silverman and Morgan Lesko, the project’s main developer, expect it will take a few years to compile a significant volume of complaints and get departments to take notice — the reports will be accessible and easily searchable by anyone.

“In the worst case scenario — that we don’t get appropriate feedback from police departments — we still have these collected online,” said Lesko. “And it’s all published in one place; it’s not just lost on Facebook somewhere, scattered around in rant form. It’s a public record.”

The post Open Data Projects Are Fueling the Fight Against Police Misconduct appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, back when he was only one of more than a dozen GOP candidates, I discovered Citizen Kane was one of Donald Trump’s favorite movies via a video filmed by Errol Morris.

Trump acquits himself pretty well on Kane and its lessons — although I would not characterize Kane’s fall as “modest” — and his commentary about the film is probably the first actually interesting thing I have ever heard him say. But I watched all the way to the end and he shoots himself in the foot in the most Trumpian & misogynistic way — it’s actually perfect.

Spurred by a recent re-watch of Citizen Kane, Anthony Audi digs deeper into Trump’s misunderstanding of the film and finds that the course of Trump’s life has followed that of Charles Foster Kane.

He understands instinctively that by controlling the press, he can shape opinions on a mass scale — bending the truth as he sees fit. Over time, and through his marketing savvy, he develops a powerful media empire. Because that’s not enough, he then turns his sights to politics, running for New York governor as a stepping-stone to the White House. At campaign rallies, Kane gleefully brags about his poll numbers, and vows to lock up his opponent Jim Gettys, whom he condemns as an establishment tool. “Here’s one promise I’ll make,” he finally thunders. “My first official act as governor of the state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of “Boss” Jim W. Gettys!”

Kane never gets to fulfill that pledge. Instead, he loses the election-his campaign derailed by a last minute sex scandal. His editors know what to do, and the following day their headlines scream: “FRAUD AT POLLS!”

The piece is entitled Donald Trump Modeled His Life on Cinematic Loser Charles Foster Kane. Consciously or not, Trump does seem to be following Kane’s playbook here, right down to the fascism.

Specifically, Citizen Kane was a vision of what fascism might resemble in America. Both men knew better than to expect Hitler or Mussolini on our shores. They knew that our demagogue would be glossier, more entertaining-more American; and the man they conjured, inspired by real-life plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst, happened to look an awful lot like Donald Trump.

Read the whole thing…this is right up there with the best explainers of why Trump is the way he is. And part 2 is coming soon, an interview with Morris about Trump’s love of Kane.

Tags: 2016 electionAnthony AudiCitizen KaneDonald TrumpErrol MorrismoviesOrson Wellespoliticsvideo

From XKCD, a typically fine illustration of climate change since the last ice age ~20,000 years ago.

When people say “the climate has changed before”, these are the kinds of changes they’re talking about.

And then in the alt text on the image:

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car’s temperature has changed before.

The chart is a perfect use of scale to illustrate a point about what the data actually shows. Tufte would be proud.

Update: Tufte is proud. (via @pixelcult)

Tags: global warminginfovizRandall Munroescience

Federal Election Commission member Ann Ravel on Tuesday proposeda ban on political contributions by domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations.

Ravel’s proposal cites The Interceptseries last weekreporting that American Pacific International Capital, a California corporation owned by two Chinese nationals, donated $1.3 million to Right to Rise USA, the main Super PAC supporting Jeb Bush’s presidential run.

Ravel wrote that as a result of Citizens United and subsequent Supreme Court decisions, “our campaign finance system is vulnerable to influence from foreign nationals and foreign corporations through Domestic subsidiaries and affiliates in ways unimaginable a decade ago.”

The 2010Citizens United decision struck down the prohibition on corporations spending their own money on “independent expenditures,” thereby opening the possibility that foreign money could flow into elections that way.

Ravel, noting The Intercept ’s ‘s stories, wrote that this was no longer “a hypothetical concern.”

APIC board member Wilson Chen told The Intercept that APIC made the contributions following advice from its own lawyer and a 2015 memo prepared by Charlie Spies, treasurer and general counsel of Right to Rise USA and arguably the most important Republican campaign finance lawyer.

The Spies memo explains that, while foreigners are strictly prohibited from making political contributions, the FEC “has repeatedly made clear that even if a corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of a foreign corporation … as long as the subsidiary is both organized under the laws of a U.S. state and has its principal place of business within the U.S., the subsidiary is not a foreign national.” In the case of APIC, the fact that it is incorporated in California makes it American for legal purposes.

Spies’s reasoning largely rests on what is known as “AO 2006-15” — an FEC advisory opinion from 2006. That opinion stated that two U.S. corporations that were 100 percent owned by a Canadian corporation called TransCanada could make political contributions as long as the subsidiaries did not use money generated outside the U.S. or allow foreign nationals to play any role in the decision making process.

Whether APIC, in the end, APIC in the end followed those guidelines is an open question. The Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog organization focused on money in politics, has filed a complaintasking the FEC to open an investigation into APIC’s donations. “Current FEC rules allowing foreign-owned U.S. subsidiaries to spend in our elections, as long as citizens control the contributions, are clearly inadequate to prevent foreign influence,” Larry Noble, the Campaign Legal Center’s general counsel, wrote in a statement accompanying the complaint. “Yet the evidence shows that even those lax rules were violated here.”

Wilson Chen told The Intercept that he “proposed to make a donation to the Republican Party and then let the board of directors approve it before sending the donation.” APIC’s board includes Chen himself and Neil Bush, both U.S. citizens, but also APIC owners Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen, who are not.

In Ravel’s proposal, she writes that “given significant developments in law and practice” since the FEC’s advisory opinion was issued ten years ago, the FEC should “formally rescind Advisory Opinion 2006-15 (TransCanada) and the parts of other advisory opinions that purported to permit Domestic subsidiaries of foreign corporations to make contributions or donations, either directly or through separate segregated funds, in connection with federal, state, and local elections.”

Rescinding the advisory opinion would not eliminate the loophole that makes foreign owned U.S. corporations legally American. And since FEC enforcement is so notably lax these days, due to a persistent 3-3 deadlock, it’s not entirely clear how dramatic an effect it would have.

The proposal is set to be on the FEC’s agenda for its meeting on Tuesday, Aug. August 16.

Top photo: FEC Commissioner Ann Ravel.

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The post FEC Commissioner, Citing The Intercept, Calls for Ban on Foreign Money in Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

In recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.

Clinton celebrates her role in killing #Libya's head of state which led to ISIS takeover https://t.co/E2oAtKJ4ei pic.twitter.com/6ESnLhsQtV

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 1, 2016

Does "Board after party" image illustrate HRC's poor WikiLeaks poll results–entitled, uncool and unaware of it? pic.twitter.com/ht01ZlP8Z0

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 30, 2016

US poll: Who will you vote to become President?

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 29, 2016

Bernie Sanders Delegates drop this Wikileaks Banner as Hillary Clinton speaks #DNCinPHL #DNCLeak #FeelTheBern pic.twitter.com/oVGkQIc4Qu

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 29, 2016

Poll of polls: Trump now favored to win election after Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton #DNCLeak https://t.co/DOooNoC7hO #DNCinPHL

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 29, 2016

Audience at DNC turns on Bernie Sanders after he says "we must elect Hillary Clinton" following #DNCLeak https://t.co/yJszgko2XK #DNCinPHL

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 25, 2016

Hillary Clinton's showy rewarding of corruption by DWS is an ill wind for the corruption-overton-window of a future presidency.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 24, 2016

Hillary Clinton has stolen our innovative WikiLeaks twitter logo design. Compare: @WikiLeaks vs @HillaryClinton pic.twitter.com/mifka4mXf4

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 12, 2015

This has puzzled some of the group’s supporters, and led to speculation that the site’s Australian founder, Julian Assange, had timed the release of emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to drive a wedge between supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The publication of emails that revealed an anti-Sanders agenda inside the Democratic party was certainly welcomed by the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

The Wikileaks e-mail release today was so bad to Sanders that it will make it impossible for him to support her, unless he is a fraud!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2016

@realDonaldTrump That is https://t.co/kpFxYDoNyX — everyone can see for themselves. pic.twitter.com/JBEoTSZocO

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 23, 2016

But it should come as no surprise to anyone who looks back at the founding principles of WikiLeaks that Assange — who has clearly stated his distaste for the idea of the former secretary of state becoming president — would make aggressive use of leaked documents to try to undermine her.

As Raffi Khatchadourian explained in a New Yorker profile of the WikiLeaks founder in 2010, “Assange, despite his claims to scientific journalism, emphasized to me that his mission is to expose injustice, not to provide an even-handed record of events.” To Assange, Khatchadourian wrote, “Leaks were an instrument of information warfare.”

In other words, Assange’s project has been from the start more like opposition research than dispassionate reporting. His goal is to find dirt in the servers of powerful individuals or organizations he sees as corrupt or dangerous, and bring them down by exposing it. As he memorably told Der Spiegel in 2010, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

His recent focus on “crushing” Clinton but not Trump has led some to ask Assange if he is worried about helping to elect someone who might be even more hostile to him — let alone to the causes of justice and peace that have motivated Wikileaks’ previous disclosures. Asked recently by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” if he does prefer Trump over Clinton, Assange replied, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?”

Speaking to Bill Maher on Friday night from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been effectively confined for more than four years, Assange joked about hacking Trump’s tax returns, but added, “from the perspective of WikiLeaks trying to protect its sources, you have really two very bad presidential candidates.”

In an address to the American Green Party convention on Saturday, Assange reiterated that both major party candidates for the presidency were “horrific,” but argued that “it certainly doesn’t make as much difference as people say,” which of them gets elected. What is important, he said, is to build political pressure “to discipline and hold to account and check the abuses of power during the next four years.”

Standing ovation for Julian Assange of @wikileaks at the #GNCinHOU pic.twitter.com/duXmSrAFF3

— Green Party of MN (@MnGreens) August 6, 2016

To better understand Assange’s recent intervention in the U.S. election, it helps to look more closely at a sort of manifesto he wrote as he was creating WikiLeaks. The same month that WikiLeaks.org went live, in December of 2006, Assange posted an essay on his blog, “Conspiracy as Governance,” in which he explained his theory that authoritarian regimes — and western political parties — maintain power by conspiring to keep the public in the dark, through “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” In order for the people to regain control of the political system, Assange argued, it is necessary to find ways of “throttling the conspiracy,” like disrupting the ability of the conspirators to communicate secretly.

With that in mind, Assange wrote, “let us consider two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings, the US Democratic and Republican parties.” He continued, “Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems which manage their subscribers, donors, budgets, polling, call centres and direct mail campaigns? They would immediately fall into an organisational stupor and lose to the other.”

A decade later, by releasing thousands of unredacted emails and voice-mail messages hacked from the Democratic Party — in a database that makes it easy to search for the social security numbers of donors, as well as their passport and credit card details — Assange was finally able to put his theory into practice, by attempting to throttle one of the “conspiratorial power groupings” that selects candidates to run the U.S. government.

Assange’s attack on the DNC certainly revealed hypocrisy within the party, and led to the resignations of four senior officials, but his decision to not redact personal information from those documents — or from a second cache of emails hacked from a Turkish political party — also led to criticism from some longtime supporters, including Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower.

Democratizing information has never been more vital, and @Wikileaks has helped. But their hostility to even modest curation is a mistake.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 28, 2016

My colleague Glenn Greenwald also told Slate last week that he was troubled by the fact that WikiLeaks had abandoned its previous policy of redaction. “There were tons of redactions when they were releasing Pentagon documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,” he noted. “And they even wrote a letter to the State Department before they released the cables requesting the State Department’s help in figuring out which information ought to be withheld.”

Although Assange has spoken of the dumping of “pristine,” unedited documents as a philosophical principle — and his biographer Andrew O’Hagan reported that the collapse of his working relationship with the editors of the New York Times and the Guardian was partly fueled by disagreements about redaction — it seems possible that the intense pressure on the organization has also made it nearly impossible to carry out careful editing of every document it obtains. Assange continues to be confined to Ecuador’s embassy in London — which has been described as illegal, “arbitrary detention” by a United Nations panel — and Sarah Harrison, his investigations editor, has chosen to live in exile in Berlin since helping Snowden get from Hong Kong to Russia, heeding legal advice that she could face prosecution if she tried to return to Britain.

Whatever the reason, it is difficult to see a public-interest argument for making public some of what was contained in the DNC files. One of the voice-mail recordings, for instance, was a conversation between a staffer and his young child during a visit to a zoo, which appears to have been left by accident, following a pocket-dial. The staffer’s phone number was made available, much to the delight of some Trump supporters.

The Wikileaks voicemail leaks are very damning now we have names and phone numbers and voices

— Made In America (@dileximan) July 30, 2016

As the Turkish scholar Zeynep Tufekci explained in the Huffington Post, a trove of Turkish-language emails WikiLeaks released last month, inaccurately presented as private messages from members of Turkey’s ruling party, the AKP, also included little of public interest but did reveal the private information of ordinary citizens.

RELEASE: 294,548 emails from Turkey's ruling political party, Erdo?an's AKP #AKPemails https://t.co/1Yof7YZpH7 pic.twitter.com/GGzGS8oUrY

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 19, 2016

To make matters worse, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed also shared a link to another cache of hacked Turkish documents that included home addresses or phone numbers for every female voter in 79 of Turkey’s 81 provinces.

You know the safety, privacy and misrepresentation of millions of people in other countries MATTERS too? Maybe not to Wikileaks, but to us?

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) August 1, 2016

Unfortunately, for believers in the WikiLeaks project, Assange has responded to criticism of his redaction-free document dumps by attacking even longtime supporters who have spoken out. The @wikiLeaks Twitter account the site’s founder uses to annotate documents and rebut critics replied angrily to Snowden’s message about the desirability of some sort of selective editing, accusing the NSA whistleblower whom Assange helped get asylum in Russia of angling for a pardon from Clinton.

@Snowden Opportunism won't earn you a pardon from Clinton & curation is not censorship of ruling party cash flows https://t.co/4FeygfPynk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 28, 2016

WikiLeaks also suggested, wrongly, that Tufekci is an “apologist” for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a leader she has, in fact, frequently criticized for his opposition to internet freedom.

I am … printing this one and putting in my wallet next time I'm in Turkey. "Hi, I'm an Erdogan apologist." ???? pic.twitter.com/mduPcb9qlV

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) July 25, 2016

Of course, Assange is hardly alone in being quick to denounce his critics on Twitter, but the way in which he uses the @wikileaks account these days matters to the overall functioning of the organization because it is the only obvious way for outsiders to provide feedback on the annotation or analysis of the documents. Despite the site’s name, WikiLeaks never developed into a Wikipedia-like website that welcomes, or facilitates crowd-sourced annotation and vetting of the documents it obtains. If you spot an error on Wikipedia, you can fix it, but WikiLeaks does not allow for that kind of collaborative fact-checking.

That the site was originally intended to function more like a crowd-sourced, wiki platform was suggested by the Wikipedia-like annotation that accompanied the very first document uploaded by WikiLeaks in 2006. (Although it was described as a “leak,” that document — an order from an Islamist rebel leader in Somalia that the site’s editors could not verify as authentic — was not provided by a whistleblower, but stolen from Chinese hackers by a WikiLeaks activist who intercepted traffic flowing through a Tor network server he owned.)

Since the crowd-sourced aspect of WikiLeaks proved difficult to implement, and the site no longer relies mainly on collaborations with news organizations to vet and make sense of the vast troves of documents it obtains, Assange has, over time, taken on the role of the organization’s main analyst. Before the advent of Twitter, analysis and annotation written by Assange and his volunteers filled a section of the WikiLeaks website. Lately, though, most of the interpretation of the documents has been done only in short bursts on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, where the site’s founder draws attention to items he thinks are important, and tries to provide some context and analysis.

The micro-blogging format has obvious limits, however, when it comes to making complex annotations. The generally hostile tone of the WikiLeaks Twitter feed in response to even well-intentioned efforts to fact-check the group’s work has also severely hampered the project’s ability to use crowd-sourcing to properly annotate and vet the documents it posts. (I know this from first-hand experience, having been denounced by @wikileaks last month for pointing to a factual error in one of the group’s tweets about a DNC email.)

This criticism might seem like a narrow, technical objection — and it is certainly the case that journalists independently continue to help verify and interpret the most significant documents Assange publishes — but WikiLeaks’ lack of scrutiny of the documents it obtains, and its founder’s hostility to constructive criticism from outsiders, could be a significant problem if it is ever duped into publishing a forgery.

What if, as the cybersecurity consultant Matt Tait asked last month in relation to the DNC emails, a source — like, say, a hacker working for a Russian intelligence agency — provided WikiLeaks with a cache of documents that was tampered with in order to smear a political candidate?

In a post on the blog Lawfare, Tait explained that he had spent some time looking through the DNC files for any signs of a fake email planted among the genuine ones:

The metadata analysis I did on the leaked documents that day was almost by accident. I was actually looking for evidence of something much more frightening and which still keeps me up at night: What if the documents were mostly real, but had been surgically doctored? How effective would a carefully planted paragraph in an otherwise valid document be at derailing a campaign? How easily could Russia remove or sidestep an inconvenient DNC official with a single doctored paragraph showing “proof” of dishonest, unethical or illegal practices? And how little credibility would the sheepish official have in asserting that “all of the rest of the emails are true, but just not the one paragraph or email that makes me look bad?”

WikiLeaks is justly proud of its record to date of not being duped by forgers.

“The materials that we release are pristine,” Assange told Bill Maher on Friday. “We’re really good at this, we have a ten-year perfect record of having never got it wrong in relation to the integrity of what we’ve released.”

Still, given that WikiLeaks is now unwilling or unable to closely scrutinize all of the documents it obtains, it is not hard to imagine a scenario where something like this could occur — and that possibility itself serves to diminish the group’s credibility as a source of unvarnished truth.

Even so, for an organization so wounded by official persecution, it remains capable of inflicting remarkable damage. Although the DNC leaks have so far failed to derail Clinton’s campaign, Assange has hinted in recent interviews that he has more material on the candidate that he plans to release soon. While it is unclear why Assange would hold on to any secrets that might torpedo Clinton, if he has something like that, the fear of a WikiLeaks-powered October surprise must still haunt the dreams of her advisors.

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Donald Trump’s speech tonight accepting the Republican nomination for president will probably go down as one of the most frightening pieces of political rhetoric in U.S. history.

Even for people who believe the danger of genuine authoritarianism on the U.S. right is often exaggerated, it’s impossible not to hear in Trump’s speech echoes of the words and strategies of the world’s worst leaders.

Trump had just one message for Americans: Be afraid. You are under terrible threats from forces inside and outside your country, and he’s the only person who can save us.

The scariest part is how Trump subtly but clearly has begun melding together violence against U.S. police and terrorism: “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities,” he said, “threaten our very way of life.”

This is the favorite and most dangerous message of demagogues across all space and time. After all, if we know our external enemies are deeply evil, and our internal enemies are somehow their allies, we can feel justified in doing anything at all to our internal enemies. That’s just logic.

And if anything, Trump’s speech is actually more terrific, fabulous and huge than those of previous fanatics, since he promises he’s going to fix everything overnight. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon — and I mean very soon — come to an end,” Trump says. “Beginning on January 20th of 2017, safety will be restored.”

This use of fear to destroy democracy is so old that it’s described exactly in Plato’s Republic, written in Ancient Greece around 380 B.C.

Tyranny, says Socrates in The Republic, is actually “an outgrowth of democracy.” And would-be tyrants always in every instance claim to be shielding regular people from terrible danger: “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.”

Trump said that he is going to “protect” Americans or some aspect of American life 13 times tonight.

That makes sense, since as he portrayed the world, we desperately need protecting:

Nearly 180,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, ordered deported from our country, are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens. …

Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood. … Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. …

This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness. …

My plan will begin with safety at home – which means safe neighborhoods, secure borders, and protection from terrorism. …

I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. …

America was shocked to its core when our police officers in Dallas were brutally executed. … I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police: When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. …

We must also address the growing threats we face from outside America. …

Men, women and children viciously mowed down. Lives ruined. Families ripped apart. … Only weeks ago, in Orlando, Florida, 49 wonderful Americans were savagely murdered by an Islamic terrorist. …

We Will Make America Safe Again.

As The Republic explains, leaders like this inevitably end up “standing up in the chariot of State with the reins in his hand, no longer protector, but tyrant absolute.” This is how liberty “passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery.”

The good news is that if you turn off cable news — apparently the only source of Donald Trump’s knowledge about the world — and go outside, you’ll find that the U.S. is probably safer today than it’s ever been.

Despite the misleading statistics Trump used again tonight, the rate of murder and crime overall remains far, far lower than in the past. You also don’t need to worry about ISIS: even after the massacre of 49 people in Orlando, it’s likely more Americans will be killed by bee stings in 2016 than by terrorism.

Nonetheless, anyone who knows anything about the past must be genuinely worried that a major party could nominate someone like Trump. As the German philosopher Hegel famously said 200 years ago, “What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history.”

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