Blindness can be seeing too much of things, just as much as seeing too little.

My grandmother, who was the counterweight to my mother’s perennial absence, asked if I wanted to begin staying at the hospital that day or start my stay the following day.

To fix my eyes, in the summer of 1972 I was sent to England. I was seven then. My father had to be at the Munich Olympic games with the Iranian contingent and my mother was an absence that I never questioned. One day my grandmother and my older brother took me to the hospital where I was to remain that summer. What I recall of the place were the nurses, who seemed like nuns to me; they were always serious and laughter was not in their vocabulary. I dreaded the place from the moment I set foot in it.

“How long will I be here?”

“Oh, just a few days.”

“Then I’ll start today,” I said. It was a boy’s stab at courage and wishing to get the nightmare of loneliness in the hospital of a foreign country out of the way as quickly as possible.

But days turned into weeks at that hospital. And there were times when in the deficiency of my child’s logic I asked myself if I should have bought that extra day for myself away from this dreaded place.

Yet the dread came in waves. Sometimes it wasn’t there at all and I didn’t mind so much being at the hospital. The reason was an Arab boy whose bed lay next to mine, though not in an actual room but a wide, corridor-like area of the hospital. I wish I recalled his name. Since I do not, I will call him Khalid.

How Khalid and I came together is something I’ve thought about for decades. That first day the administration of the hospital gave us a tour of the floor I was to stay at. As we were passing the corridor where Khalid lay in bed, alone, with a longing and a fear that I was fast coming to identify as my own in that place of sickness, our eyes met. I didn’t know then that we could not speak each other’s languages. But the language of fear is universal and something snapped in me as we moved on from Khalid and the corridor into an overly large room where there must have been twelve or more beds. On each bed lay a British boy, staring dead-eyed at us. My skin color was far closer to theirs than it was to Khalid’s; nevertheless, something in the avalanche of that paleness of theirs seemed threatening to me.

And I also had a question which I never asked. Why was I being offered the possibility of a bed in this room while Khalid had to sleep in the corridor? It seemed unfair. What was even more odd was that I, a mere kid, was being allowed to choose where I’d stay: with the British boys or with Khalid.

My grandmother said, “Do you want to stay in this room or stay with that boy back there?”

I swallowed hard and said, “I’ll stay with that boy.”

There was a pause. That long sickroom seemed to grow in size, and if I am not mistaken the nurse who accompanied us looked at me strangely. As if I had failed some kind of a test.

Khalid became my brother. It took all of an afternoon for that to happen. To this day I don’t know what his sickness was and why he was there. We were often in trouble, doing the things none of those British boys would dream of doing. The apparent unfairness of the corridor, as opposed to a ‘real’ room, was the ticket that allowed us to roam the hospital at will. We haunted its stairways, smiled and laughed when the nurses scolded us, with words we did not understand, for not staying in our beds. Our language was the language of brotherhood. I spoke no Arabic and he obviously spoke no Persian, and English was not yet ours to share. We spoke with gestures. With hand signs and the hungry eyes of boys who grow in each other’s estimation with every new mischief they accomplish together. Sometimes we would stick our heads in the room of those British kids and each of us, I’m certain, knew what the other was thinking: “Thank God we are not the prisoners of that room!”

My grandmother would visit every few days. One day she came with my mother’s brother, Uncle Ali, who was a surgeon in Switzerland.

“The staff tell me you and this Arab boy misbehave. They say they might be forced to change your bed to another place.”

There was a television. Where exactly that TV was located I’m not sure now, but its presence is inscribed in the inmost recesses of my memory. A small, fat thing which that afternoon everybody was staring at and listening to intently, even as they were telling me that Khalid and I might be separated.

Something had happened at the Munich Olympics. Something serious. People had been killed. People were about to be killed, and I would be lying today if I said that I knew back then what or who or where Palestine was and what or who the Israelis were. Khalid and I, in trouble with the adults, looked at each other confusedly and I wanted to somehow convey to him that my father was actually there, right there in that TV at that moment, in Munich. And that I was not worried about my father because he was strong and I wished he would soon come here so Khalid could know just how strong he was.

Some days later they operated on my eyes and this time real blindness came. Maybe it was my child’s sense of the expansion of time that imagines the days of post-surgery blindness as weeks and months. In truth, it was probably only a few days. Days of utter darkness with bandages over both my eyes and nearly no movement.

Khalid wanted me back. He wanted us to roam those hallways like before and get in trouble together. When my grandmother and brother and uncle came to visit, their talks always inevitably turned to Munich. In the stillness and desolation of blindness I imagined what if my father came back from that apparently ill-fated city and my blindness would not let me see him again, ever.

Khalid was bored without me. He would come and poke at me and say things I didn’t understand. I wasn’t in the mood. I was not hurting, but I could not see. And the not seeing made me sulky. Khalid was still Khalid, but I had somehow been reduced. I told him to lay off me in the best non-language we had between the two of us. But he would not listen. He wanted his friend back.

One day I complained about him to either my grandmother or uncle, I don’t recall which one. And soon, that very day in fact, Khalid’s corner of the corridor turned quiet. I sat in the shadow of my blindness and my betrayal of him and wondered where he had been taken. Was it my complaint that had sent him away? Or was it that he had been sent to whatever surgery he was in line for? The long stretch of dark days of not seeing, with Khalid no longer there, turned my world into a torment that only those who have committed betrayal know something about. I had betrayed our brotherhood by telling on him. Khalid was no longer there and I would have to search a lifetime to find him and beg his forgiveness. I would look for Khalid when years and years later someone first recited to me the love poems of Ibn Zaydun in the original Arabic, and I would look for him in the eyes of lost comrades on the battlefields of Mesopotamia. And perhaps, just perhaps, I felt him nearest when on a spring evening in the Sadr City quarter of Baghdad a gentle old man whom I had been talking to, casually and with no sense of bitterness or resentment, said these words to me in my own language, “It’s just that the blood of you Persians runs a little cold, Mr. Abdoh. Doesn’t it!”

Often I’ve wondered why I have never remembered Khalid’s name. You would think one would at the very least remember the name of someone they’ve thought about for so many years. Someone who was really nothing to them, but also everything. Nowadays I know why: I don’t remember Khalid’s name because I never called him by his name. Nor did he ever call me by mine. In our special brotherhood of that summer of ’72 in London, the absence of words – in Arabic, in Persian, in distant English – did not require our names. So we never used them. We used instead a language much more intimate, that of touch and laughter and exquisite youthful mayhem. I don’t recall ever seeing two Khalids with my pre-surgery, problematic eyes during our hospital stay. I only recall seeing one Khalid, whom I betrayed, and whose name I will never remember.

The post On brotherhood and blindness appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s never entirely clear who is behind the campaigns, or if they’re actively being coordinated. But the abuse tends to flare up during moments of political scandal in India. The country’s deepening ethnic and religious divisions under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are plain to see in the digital realm. Trolling of minorities by supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is commonplace. India has used diplomatic channels to brand diaspora groups as terrorists, and has used digital channels to harass and disrupt potential opponents. Singh and other prominent Sikhs in the U.K. have received messages from X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — telling them that Indian authorities have demanded their accounts be blocked.

“I think most people have got fairly thick-skinned about these threats,” said Dabinderjit Singh, a prominent British Sikh activist and advisor to the Sikh Federation U.K., a lobby group. But then the killings began, and the threats got harder to ignore. In Pakistan, two prominent Sikh separatists were gunned down, one in January, the second in May. A third, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was killed in June in Vancouver, Canada, in what the Canadian government alleges was a state-sponsored assassination. A fourth plot was allegedly foiled by the FBI in the U.S. “Perhaps the situation is somewhat different now that those threats appear to be potentially real,” Dabinderjit Singh said. 

Adding to the sense of fear is the mysterious death of Avtar Singh Khanda, a Sikh activist based in the U.K.. Khanda, who had spoken publicly about receiving threats from the Indian authorities, died after a short illness in June. His family and colleagues are convinced he was poisoned and are demanding that the British authorities investigate his death.

British Sikhs are just the latest group to raise the alarm over the import of repression into the U.K. Uyghur exiles from China and democracy advocates who have fled Hong Kong have been aggressively targeted by people they believe work for the Chinese government. Iranian exile groups and media have been hit with cyberattacks and physical threats. Opponents of the Saudi and Emirati governments have been surveilled and harassed online. The multitude of cases show how authoritarian regimes are more willing than ever to reach across borders to target opponents living in western Europe and North America — and how much easier that has become in the digital era. 

Democratic governments have struggled to deal with these abuses, but perhaps none more so than the U.K., which is diplomatically diminished post-Brexit, gripped by constant crises, and increasingly authoritarian in its own politics. While the Canadian and U.S. governments have been vocal in their criticism of India’s transnational abuses, and worked to reassure the Sikh communities in their respective countries that they will be protected, the U.K. government has been deafeningly quiet. 

“Do one or two people have to be killed in the U.K. before our government says something?” Dabinderjit Singh said.

Transnational repression on British soil appears to be rising just as the U.K. navigates a world in which its exit from the European Union has left its economic and diplomatic powers seriously diminished. The government, now stacked with Brexit hardliners, is desperately seeking new commercial and political partners to help it deliver on the promised benefits of severing ties with the world’s largest trading bloc. 

All this has led to some uncomfortable compromises. It’s difficult to stand up to superpowers (see China) or petrostates (see Saudi Arabia) when you know you may need to rely on them for investment and trade. 

The U.K.’s particular vulnerability overlaps with an uptick in transnational repression globally, partly because technology has made attacks much easier to procure and to get away with. Lives lived increasingly online leave many openings for attack. Emails, social media accounts or cloud services can be hacked. Online profiles can be cloned or impersonated. Repression can now be performed remotely and systematically in a way that wasn’t possible back when intimidating exiles meant you had to physically infiltrate their spaces. It is also a lot harder to hold perpetrators to account. Online harassment campaigns can be dismissed as the actions of the crowd, and can be hard to definitively track back to a government actor. Perpetrators of digital surveillance too can be notoriously difficult to pinpoint.

These less visible components of transnational repression work in concert with more overt actions, often using international legal mechanisms, such as arrest warrants and Interpol red notices, to put pressure on people, limiting their ability to travel or access finances. To give themselves cover, authoritarian countries have often co-opted the West’s obsession with national security, echoing the excuses made by the U.S. and U.K. to justify their own adventurism. 

“The availability of the rhetoric around extremism and terrorism, which arose as part of the War on Terror, gives countries a common language to talk about people who are dangerous or undesirable,” Yana Gorokhovskaia, a research director at NGO Freedom House, said. “It’s a way of catching someone in a web that everyone understands as bad.”

Uyghur communities in the U.K. have long complained about abuse from abroad. They say their online accounts have been hacked, they’ve received threatening messages over WhatsApp and WeChat, and their family homes back in Xinjiang have been raided by police. As revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s massive “reeducation” camps and forced labor facilities in Xinjiang have emerged, these threats have increased. 

China’s reach into the U.K. became even more intrusive in 2021, after the CCP’s crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997. The U.K. government — which in 2015 declared a “golden era” of Sino-British relations — failed to prevent the Chinese government from unwinding the “one country, two systems” principle that gave Hong Kong its democratic freedoms. But it did offer an escape route for Hong Kongers, more than 160,000 of whom immigrated to the U.K. on special visas. Among them were many prominent democracy campaigners and activists. 

Former Hong Kong politicians and activists now living in the U.K. told me that they have had their emails and social media accounts hacked and that they have been doxxed and, they believe, followed by Chinese agents. U.K.-based activists, including the prominent labor campaigner Christopher Mung and the former protest leader Finn Lau have been put on a wanted list under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, with bounties of HK$1 million ($128,000) offered for information that leads to their arrest. 

In April, NGO Safeguard Defenders alleged that the Chinese government was running unsanctioned “police stations” in British cities. Those allegations were picked up by the influential right-wing media as violations of British sovereignty, which seemingly prompted the government to start talking in more robust terms about Chinese interference in the U.K. 

But the response — under a U.K. government scheme called the Defending Democracy Task Force — is mostly focused on tackling the obvious national security challenges presented by transnational repression.

What it doesn’t address is core human rights issues, like protecting people’s rights to free speech, free association and freedom from harassment, said Andrew Chubb, a senior lecturer in Chinese politics and international relations at Lancaster University who researches transnational repression. Security agencies don’t have a mandate to deal with human rights violations on British soil, unless they present a risk to the state — meaning that victims aren’t necessarily treated as victims, but as “potential threat vectors,” Chubb said. People facing human rights issues need to take their cases individually to court.

Framing the response in terms of sovereignty and national security means that victims of transnational repression — and whether or not their rights are protected — are subject to the U.K.’s diplomatic interests. 

“India is important to the U.K.’s future strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And Saudi Arabia is important in the Middle East and as a buyer of weapons,” Chubb said. “There's a very strong interest to overlook human rights issues where they concern these countries, which have not been deemed to pose national security threats.”

Simply put, this means that if you’re being targeted by a country that hasn’t yet crossed the boundary from trading partner to geopolitical rival, you’re largely on your own.

The concerns of the Sikh community in the U.K. wouldn’t have reached a wider audience were it not for a brazen attack in Canada. On June 18, two hooded men shot dead Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh nationalist, in a Vancouver parking lot. Nijjar had supported the establishment of a Sikh homeland called Khalistan — an idea that the Modi government aggressively opposes — and he was known to be on an Indian government wanted list. In October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused India of masterminding Nijjar’s death. The Indian government responded forcefully, expelling Canadian diplomats and denying its involvement. But a month later, the U.S. announced that it had foiled a plot to assassinate another supporter of Khalistan independence: Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen. The murder-for-hire scheme had been directed, U.S. Federal prosecutors say, by an Indian government official.

A week before Nijjar’s murder, Avtar Singh Khanda went into the hospital in Birmingham, U.K.. feeling unwell. Khanda, like Nijjar, was a vocal supporter of Khalistan independence, and his name was reported to have been included in a dossier of supposedly high-risk individuals that was handed to then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron by Modi in 2015.

Two days after Khanda was admitted to hospital, he was diagnosed with leukemia, complicated by blood clots. He died two days later. The coroner didn’t record the death as suspicious, but Khanda’s family and community couldn’t help but suspect foul play — acute myeloid leukemia, the form of blood cancer he was diagnosed with, can be caused by poisoning. For Khanda’s supporters, it was hard not to think of Russians like Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated with a lethal dose of polonium in 2006, or Sergei and Yulia Skripal, who were dosed with a nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018. 

“If it was a Russian that lived in Surrey or London, then the first thing people would think about was poison,” said Michael Polak, a barrister and human rights activist who is representing Khanda’s family. 

Polak says local police didn’t investigate the circumstances around Khanda’s death, despite his family’s pleas — something some Sikh activists say shows how little attention British authorities have paid to India’s adoption of the authoritarian playbook. 

Dabinderjit Singh, the activist, said the U.K. has been too quick to entertain the Indian government’s narrative that Khalistan separatists are terrorists and extremists. After the dossier that Modi reportedly gave to Cameron, a study was commissioned into Sikh extremism for the U.K. government-funded Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. It found that there was “no threat to the British state or to the wider British public from Sikh activism.” But the idea of Sikh extremism nevertheless began to appear in government studies and news stories. In 2018, British police raided the homes of five Sikh activists in London and the West Midlands, a county to the west of London centered around the U.K.’s second city, Birmingham. West Midlands Police said at the time, in a tweet, that the raids were part of a counter-terrorism operation, “into allegations of extremist activity in India and fraud offenses.” No one was prosecuted on terrorism charges as a result of the raids.

While Indian media and the Indian government openly amped up the supposed threat of Khalistan separatism in the diaspora, there were covert efforts to discredit the movement. In November 2021, the Centre for Information Resilience, a London-based research organization, uncovered a network of fake accounts, “the RealSikh Network,” on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (now X), which pushed out messages portraying supporters of Khalistan as extremists. The aim of the network, the center said, was to “stoke cultural tensions within India and international communities.”

These tensions are rising in the U.K. Jasveer Singh said he has tracked what he believes are other attempts to drive wedges between Sikhs and Muslims in the Indian diaspora in the U.K. — social media disinformation that plays on lurid conspiracies about Muslim men grooming Sikh girls, and vice versa.

There are also signs that Modi’s Hindu nationalism is spreading to other countries with alarming consequences. Rising support for Hindu nationalism and the online demonization of minorities has already led to violence in Australia. In September 2022, Muslims and Hindus clashed in the U.K. city of Leicester. Analysts and academics have suggested the deterioration of relations between the two communities was partly due to the growing influence of right-wing Hindutva ideologies within the diaspora. Supporters of Hindu nationalism have routinely demonized Muslims in India, and tried to portray them as not really being Indian. 

The South Asian Muslim community in Leicester is largely of Indian origin. After the clashes in the city, the Indian High Commission in London issued a statement condemning “the violence against Indian Community in Leicester and vandalization of premises and symbols of Hindu religion,” making no mention of the violence against Muslims.

With an election coming in India, these kinds of tensions are only going to grow, Jasveer Singh said. “It's only a matter of time before we see serious incidents in the U.K., unfortunately.”

Singh said he feels that the Sikh community is a “political football,” being sacrificed to allow the U.K. to pursue its geopolitical aims. “We’re well aware this is tied up in trade,” he said. “It is kind of frustrating and suspicious that the U.K. government is keeping such a distance from saying anything, especially after we've seen massive floodgates opened by Trudeau and Biden. It’s like, now or never. So I guess it’s never.”

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This poses problems for governments as they grapple with the prospect of integrating AI into the way they operate. It’s likely that AI will soon touch many parts of our lives, but it doesn’t need to be an AI controlled by the likes of OpenAI and Google.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a London-based think tank, recently began advocating for the U.K. to create its own sovereign AI model — an initiative that some British media outlets have dubbed “ChatGB.” The idea is to create a British-flavored tech backbone that underpins large swaths of public services, free from the control of major U.S.-based platforms. Being “entirely dependent on external providers,” says the Institute, would be a “risk to our national security and economic competitiveness.”

Sovereign AIs stand in stark contrast to the most prominent tools of the moment. The large language models that underpin tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are built using data scraped from across the internet, and their inner workings are controlled by private enterprises.

In a 100-page “technical report” accompanying the release of GPT-4, its latest large language model, OpenAI declined to share information about how its model was trained or what information it was trained on, citing safety risks and “the competitive landscape” (read: “we don’t want competitors to see how we built our tech”). The decision was widely criticized. Indeed, the company could put its code out there and cleanse data sets to avoid posing any risk to individuals’ data privacy or safety. This kind of transparency would allow experts to audit the model and identify any risks it might pose.

Developing a sovereign AI would allow countries to know how their model was trained and what data it was trained on, according to Benedict Macon-Cooney, the chief policy strategist at the Tony Blair Institute.

“It allows you to — to some extent — instill your values in the model,” said Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist at HuggingFace, an open source AI platform and research group. “Each model does encode values.” Indeed, while 96% of the planet lives outside the United States, most big tech products are developed by a tiny, relatively elite group of people in the U.S. who tend to build technology encoded with libertarian, Silicon Valley-style ideals.

That’s been true for social media historically, and it is also coming through with AI: A 2022 academic paper by researchers from HuggingFace showed that the ghost in the AI machine has an American accent — meaning that most of the training data, and most of the people coding the model itself, are American. “The cultural stereotypes that are encoded are very, very American,” said Luccioni. But with a sovereign AI model, Luccioni says, “you can choose sources that come from your country, and you can choose the dialects that come from your country.”

That’s vital given the preponderance of English-language models and the paucity of AI models in other languages. While there are more than 7,000 languages spoken and written worldwide, the vast majority of the internet, upon which these models are trained, is written in English. “English is the dominant language, because of British imperialism and because of American trade,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who recently published a paper on the issue. “These models are trained on a predominant model of English language data and carry over these assumptions and values that are encoded into the English language, specifically the American English language.”

A big exception, of course, is China. Models developed by Chinese companies are sovereign almost by default because they are built using data that is drawn primarily from the internet in China, where the information ecosystem is heavily influenced by the state and the Communist party. Nevertheless, China’s economy is big enough that it is able to sustain independent development of robust tools. “I think the goal isn't necessarily that everything be made in China or innovated in China, but it's to avoid reliance on foreign countries,” said Graham Webster, a research scholar and the editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center.

There are lots of ways to develop such models, according to Macon-Cooney, of the Blair Institute, some of which could become highly specific to government interests. “You can actually build large language models around specific ideas,” he explained. “One practical example where a government might want to do that is building a policy Al.” The model would be fed previously published policy papers going back decades, many of which are often scrapped only to be brought back by a successive government, thus building up the model’s understanding of policy that could then be used to reduce the workload on public servants. Similar models could be developed for education or health, says Macon-Cooney. “You just need to find a use case for your actual specific outcome, which the government needs to do,” he said. “Then begin to build up that capability, feed in the right learnings, and build that expertise up in-house.”

The European Union is a prime example of a supranational organization that could benefit from its vast data reserves to make its own sovereign AI, says Luccioni. “They have a lot of underexploited data,” she said, pointing to the multilingual corpus of the European Parliament’s hearings, for instance. The same is true of India, where the controversial Aadhaar digital identification system could put the vast volumes of data it collects to use to develop an AI model. India’s ministers have already hinted they are doing just that and have confirmed in interviews that AI will soon be layered into the Aadhaar system. In a multilingual country like India, that comes with its own problems. “We're seeing a large push towards Hindi becoming a national language, at the expense of the regional and linguistic diversity of the country,” said Bhatia.

Developing your own AI costs a lot of money — which Macon-Cooney says governments might struggle with. “If you look at the economics side of this, I think there is a deep question of whether a government can actually begin to spend, let alone actually begin to get that expertise, in house,” he said. The U.K. announced, in its March 2023 budget, a plan to spend $1.1 billion on a new exascale supercomputer that would be put to work developing AI. A month later, it topped that up with an additional $124 million to fund an AI taskforce that will be supported by the Alan Turing Institute, a government-affiliated research center that gets its name from one of the first innovators of AI.

One solution to the money problem is to collaborate. “Sovereign initiatives can’t really work because any one nation or one organization is, unless they're very, very rich, going to have trouble getting the talent to compute and the data necessary for training language models,”  Luccioni said. “It really makes a lot of sense for people to pool resources.” 

But working together can nullify the reason sovereign AIs are so attractive in the first place.

Luccioni believes that the European Union will struggle to develop a sovereign AI because of the number of stakeholders involved who would have to coalesce around a single position to develop the model in the first place. “What happens if there’s 13% Basque in the data and 21% Finnish?” she asked. “It’s going to come with a lot of red tape that companies don’t have, and so it’s going to be hard to be as agile as OpenAI.” Finland for its part has developed a sovereign AI project, called Aurora, that is meant to streamline processes for providing a range of services for citizens. But progress has been slow, mostly due to the project’s scale.

There’s also the challenge of securing the underlying hardware. While the U.K. has announced $1 billion in funding for the development of its exascale computer, it pales in comparison with what OpenAI has. “They have 27 times the size just to run ChatGPT than the whole of the British state has itself,” Macon-Cooney said. “So one private lab is many, many magnitudes bigger than the government.” That could force governments looking to develop sovereign models into the arms of the same old tech companies under the guise of supplying cloud computing to train the models — which comes with its own problems.

And even if you can bring down the computing power — and the associated costs — needed to run a sovereign AI model, you still need the expertise. Governments may struggle to attract talent in an industry dominated by private sector companies that can likely pay more and offer more opportunities to innovate.

“The U.K. will be blown out of the water unless it begins to think quite deliberately about how it builds this up,” said Macon-Cooney.

Luccioni sees some signs of promise for countries looking to develop their own AIs, with talented developers wanting to work differently. “I know a lot of my friends who are working at big research companies and big tech companies are getting really frustrated by the closed nature of them,” she said. “A lot of them are talking about going back to academia — or even government.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

The post Should countries build their own AIs? appeared first on Coda Story.

“It was a philosophical question but, according to textbook science, grass isn’t really green, it’s just the light reflected from it has a certain wavelength,” Vickers says. “I thought there’d be a consensus on it.”

Instead, Vickers’ question prompted fierce semantic debate. Some colleagues argued that grass has objective properties — color being one of them. Others contended that only light exists in a physical form: what a human perceives as green is merely certain molecules reflecting electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 520 and 570 nanometers.

The open-ended, theoretical question rendered the survey data nearly worthless. Rather than general agreement, all that emerged was lively scientific and philosophical discussion across academic inboxes. But the high response rate gave Vickers encouragement: his idea for an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus could really work. All he needed was to ask a more straightforward line of inquiry.

It was while writing his book on the relationship between science and truth, Identifying Future-Proof Science, that Vickers became convinced that there should be a more accessible way to establish general academic agreement on disputed topics. “The traditional theory, even for non-experts, is to decide what to believe based on the science itself,” he explains. “But the more I wrote, the more I thought, ‘That’s not how the real world works.’ You’d never say to someone worried about getting vaccinated, ‘Here, read this textbook on the science of vaccines’ — it’s summarizing decades of research; you’re asking someone who might not have the background knowledge to read, judge and understand it.”

Help for the time-stressed non-academic, says Vickers, will come in the form of a large-scale poll of global experts responding to popular scientific issues via a set of four options, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” at the extremes, and “weakly agree” to “weakly disagree” in the center. Results will be published in academic journals, with the eventual aim of a physical institute housing vast teams of researchers, data scientists and IT experts working towards the goal of greater societal consensus on subjects like climate change and pandemics.

Vickers’ hope is to also aid academia itself: there is a lack of hard data quantifying how many experts agree on the biggest topics of the day. “It’s actually difficult to find how many global scientists believe that Covid-19 is caused by a virus,” he says. “And the best attempt to quantify the scientific community’s opinion on whether climate change is driven by human activity has 2,780 respondents: a tiny fraction of the world’s scientists you could ask, and nearly all were from Western countries.”

Driving the initiative is the fight against misinformation. Expertise has long been weaponized as means of power and deception, particularly among marginalized and minority communities, says Nicole Grove, editor-in-chief at the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. In some cases, it’s created a sense of mistrust, undermining the credibility of some institutions. “It wasn’t that long ago that doctors were recommending ‘healthy’ brands of cigarettes to their patients, where seemingly scientific research was used by tobacco companies as verifiable evidence that we now know was completely manufactured.”  

Experts say that there has perhaps never been more dispute than there is today on what makes a fact, a fact. “The internet is an amazing access point for knowledge, but it’s also changed the way people are able to produce what appears to be evidence to support any point of view,” adds Grove. “One can always find someone with credentials who will take on any position at any time. My sense is misinformation is more about bombardment than a lack of information.”

Social media has also created echo chambers that fan the flames of conspiracies, even in the face of incontrovertible proof. “Research suggests that people are attracted to conspiracy theories when their psychological needs are frustrated,” says Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent. “They can turn people away from mainstream politics and science in favor of more extreme political views and anti-science attitudes. And these theories seem to arise even when the scientific consensus is clear.”

Vickers acknowledges that his proposed consensus-finding institute won’t appeal to sections of the population that think the whole system is corrupt. But he believes his idea could benefit broader society, particularly on health issues. He cites a June 2022 study showing that Covid-19 vaccine uptake was significantly boosted in the Czech Republic once a skeptical public were shown that 90% of 9,650 doctors trusted in its safety. “The high consensus helped correct a misconception that only half of physicians were confident in the vaccine,” he says. “It ultimately led to higher vaccinations, meaning fewer deaths. It may sound dramatic, but the cost in a lack of consensus can be that stark.”

Beyond health crises though, there are questions over whether experts should be burdened with an altruistic role in educating the public on what they consider to be a scientific fact. “Scientists shouldn’t be loaded up with societal duties no one else has,” says James Ladyman, professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol. “The rise in misinformation is a matter for regulation and government — it has nothing to do with science.”

There are also concerns that a frictionless polling model could supersede the complex, nuanced pursuit of acquiring and discussing knowledge. “Science is a highly structured social organization in which consensus is achieved semi-formally through conferences, meetings and journal publications,” adds Ladyman. “It’s not a flat structure where people vote and everyone has equal say. When a scientific institution wants to take a position on a topic, it typically sets up a subcommittee that writes a report with details of their inquiry — it doesn’t poll all its members.”

While a hard figure may not exist, there is a consensus among the scientific community that smoking cigarettes is a leading cause of cancer and that human activity is the main driver of climate change. Determining a general agreement among more debated topics, such as whether biological sex is the main determinant of gender, may pose more of a challenge. 

“A shared commitment to telling the truth about nature, and to getting that truth out there, still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among even the most expert of scientists,” says Gregory Radick, professor of history and philosophy at the University of Leeds. “And much is lost when scientific knowledge gets boiled down to an answer to a simple ‘yes or no’ question.”

It means that facts can be disputed by experts. Ladyman says that a mass-survey model risks creating more noise in a system already blasting information round-the-clock. “In principle, finding out the scientific consensus on a topic could be good. But it presupposes that the information can’t be found out already. I find it unlikely that a significant number who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change would change their mind if they saw there was a huge scientific consensus about it — they probably wouldn’t care.”

However, Vickers believes that his Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus needs to happen, especially if it can help people make better informed health decisions. “In the 20th century, it was too easy for the tobacco industry to make it look like there were two sides to the story — a global poll would have shown there were perhaps only 2% of rogue scientists that existed,” he says. “The goal isn’t to tell the public the facts — it’s to accurately measure the opinion of the scientific community and then provide people with data that could be useful to them.”

Vickers’ epistemic agency is still in the funding stages. His team is currently debating who qualifies as a scientist, from the obvious choice of an academic affiliated to a relevant science department or institute, to the borderline cases of a former nurse now giving health lectures at universities. 

Then, there’s dividing the scientists up: a meteorologist and, say, a pediatrician may receive an equal vote on a climate change question; the consensus among each scientific discipline, however, could be shown separately. Finally, there’s the issue of ensuring a high enough response rate for strong enough data — the plan is for a personalized email to be sent within institutions, just like in the original question to Durham scientists, to get as many survey queries answered.

Consensus for an institute determining scientific consensus is, ironically, difficult. The next step is a pilot program in April, involving 18,000 scientists from 31 institutions across 12 different countries. The planned opening question should, at least, elicit strong assent: “Has science proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is caused by a virus?” “It’s not a particularly interesting question as most people accept that it’s been established, but we want to set a baseline for what solid scientific consensus looks like,” says Vickers. 

In an age where a rabbit hole of misinformation is only ever a few clicks away, Vickers’ hope is his idea will reach well-meaning people left confused by the online maelstrom. “Had a mass survey of global scientists existed when the pandemic began — questions on how Covid is transmitted, mask efficacy, vaccine safety — I think it would have helped the public,” he says. “There’s a mess of information out there.”

The post A philosophy professor proposes an Institute for Ascertaining Scientific Consensus appeared first on Coda Story.

“Something that happened to me and was beyond my control has left me like a machine that’s been switched off – disabled – unable to do anything that a 21-year-old of my intelligence and interests might want or need to do,” she wrote.

That young correspondent, Maeve Boothby O’Neill, spoke Russian, listened to jazz and read constantly. She loved musical theater, especially the shows “Wicked,” “Billy Eliot” and “Into the Woods.” She was plotting out a series of 1920s mystery novels set in the villages of Dartmoor, an upland expanse of bogs and rivers and rocky hills in southwest England where Maeve and her mother had once lived.

Maeve died on October 3, 2021. She was 27. On the death certificate, her physician noted “myalgic encephalomyelitis” — an alternate name for the illness known as chronic fatigue syndrome — as the cause. It is rare for a death to be attributed to either ME or CFS. 

An inquest into the circumstances, including the actions (and inactions) of clinicians and administrators at the local arm of the National Health Service, or NHS, is expected to be held later this year. Maeve was diagnosed with the illness in 2012, after several years of poor health. She fought hard to access appropriate medical care and social service support from institutions and bureaucracies that did not seem to understand the disease.

“She did everything she could to survive,” wrote Sarah Boothby, Maeve’s mother, in a statement she prepared for the upcoming inquest. The NHS “did not respond to the severity of Maeve’s presentation, and failed in its duty of care,” wrote Boothby, adding that her death was “premature and wholly preventable.”

Maeve’s father and Boothby’s ex-husband, Sean O’Neill, a journalist at The Times, brought widespread attention to ME in a series of articles, including one last year about Maeve. His “creative, courageous” daughter, wrote O’Neill, “struggled not just with the debilitating, disabling effects of ME but also with the disbelief, apathy and stigma of the medical profession, the NHS and wider society.”

Myalgic encephalomyelitis is frequently triggered by an acute viral or other infectious illness, although it has also been associated with exposure to environmental toxins, including mold. Patients have been found to suffer from a range of immunological, metabolic, neurological and other dysfunctions. Core symptoms include profound exhaustion, a pattern of relapses after minimal exertion known as post-exertional malaise, brain fog, poor sleep and heart rate irregularities that lead to dizziness or nausea when in a standing position. Standard therapies have focused on symptomatic relief since the underlying causes remain unknown and there are no diagnostic medical tests.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 836,000 and 2.5 million people in the country have what it refers to as ME/CFS, and most remain undiagnosed. In the U.K., the estimates range from 125,000 to 250,000. Many patients are unable to work, climb stairs or even perform basic daily functions without assistance. 

As a journalist and public health academic, I have been investigating and writing about ME for several years. I have learned how it can devastate the lives of patients and their families, not least because mainstream medicine has framed it as largely psychosomatic — a modern version of what would once have been diagnosed as hysteria or conversion disorder. 

From the start of my project in 2015, I found it to be enormously intellectually and emotionally rewarding. But no one besides desperately ill patients took much notice. Editors at major news organizations couldn’t be bothered. Academic colleagues were polite but perplexed at my dedication to this obscure domain. At gatherings with friends, I could tell they’d had enough after the fifth or eighth time I’d mention the latest developments in the field. 

Viral epidemics always leave in their wake a small percentage of people experiencing chronic complications that have no identified cause. And the prolonged medical complaints being reported by millions of people around the world after acute coronavirus infection include some of the key symptoms that define ME. 

Patients, clinicians, scientists and journalists are debating and investigating the overlaps between the two conditions. While long Covid is a grab-bag term for an extremely diverse group of patients, some are receiving clinical diagnoses of ME or ME/CFS, as it is often called these days. 

And just as ME patients have long felt dismissed or misunderstood, long Covid patients have had similar experiences. As I reported last year for Coda, for example, doctors unable to continue working because of long Covid have been dismayed that their medical colleagues often tell them their cognitive impairment and repeated relapses are physical expressions of pandemic-related trauma. Conditions like ME and others that lack definitive medical tests — such as irritable bowel syndrome, Gulf War Illness, fibromyalgia and various forms of pain — are often lumped together into a category called “functional” disorders or “medically unexplained symptoms,” known as MUS.

The emergence of long Covid has focused widespread attention on a long-simmering debate that has previously been confined largely to academic and medical circles: Do these functional and medically unexplained ailments arise mainly from ongoing disease processes or from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and related psychiatric conditions?

All around the world, leading scientists and clinicians regard long Covid as a heterogeneous disease. They are seeking to elucidate its many pathophysiological pathways and find drug targets for therapy. In December 2022, the CDC reported that long Covid “played a part” in 3,544 deaths in the U.S. from the start of the pandemic through June 2022.

Another camp is applying the psychosomatic lens to long Covid. The experts in this group also hold impressive academic status, receive significant research funding and publish in respected journals. They witness the same phenomenon and see something completely different: A global tsunami of mass hysteria leading to paralysis, gait disorders, memory loss, inability to remain upright without feeling sick, repeated flu-like relapses and a list of other complaints.

Medicine has a long and sorry history of bias and discrimination on the basis of sex. Given that ME and other functional and medically unexplained disorders are known to be much more prevalent among women, it is not surprising that patients with these conditions routinely report receiving poor treatment and even abuse at the hands of the healthcare system. Physicians frequently prescribe psychotherapy and exercise programs based on their presumption that emotional or mental distress, negative or unhelpful thoughts and/or unhealthy behavior patterns are causing the persistent problems.

It goes without saying that stress, anxiety and related factors can have negative health impacts and exacerbate underlying ailments and that psychological support and lifestyle adaptations can help alleviate distress, including among people with chronic conditions. But when it comes to medically unexplained illnesses, mistakes in interpreting symptoms can visit trauma and despair upon patients and families. 

Last May, an Irish court ordered a hospital to pay a young man 6 million euros for having failed to diagnose a brain tumor, an error that delayed necessary surgery by months. Doctors had misdiagnosed his headaches, concentration problems and hand numbness as “psychological and functional” and referred him to “the mental health services and physiotherapy,” according to the Irish Independent.

Physicians can be quick to default to psychological explanations when they don’t understand what is causing a patient’s problems, noted Brian Hughes, a psychology professor at the University of Galway, in a blog post about the case. (Professor Hughes is a friend and colleague.) 

“It would be nice if the doctors concerned could perhaps try to be a little less hasty, and a bit more humble,” he wrote in the post. “The phrase ‘Medically Unexplained’ does not mean ‘Medically Unexplainable.’ Just because you don’t know what’s wrong with a patient doesn’t mean that nothing is wrong with them.”

Maeve Boothby O’Neill was born in 1994 in London. Her parents divorced when she was five, and from then on she lived with her mom in southwest England — first in Dartmoor, and then in Exeter, a major university town.

In pulling together the following account, I spoke multiple times with Maeve’s mother, Sarah Boothby, via social media as well as in her cozy flat on a quiet road a few blocks from Exeter’s High Street — the same flat where Maeve had struggled with her declining health and where she’d died the previous fall. While there, I reviewed three fat clip binders stuffed with copies of Maeve’s medical and social service records, voluminous correspondence, reams of handwritten notes and journal-type entries, applications for social benefits and related documents and writings.

The Royal Devon University Health NHS Trust, which oversees the hospital where Maeve sought care during the last months of her life, did not respond to an email seeking comment.

From an early age, Boothby told me, Maeve adored “storytelling” in all its forms and loved being surrounded by books. She wrote her first play — or rather, she dictated it — when she was seven. “She played happily in her imagination for days on end,” said Boothby.

Maeve expressed her opinions early. During a family vacation to southern Spain, Boothby recalled, Maeve, then four years old, declared: “What’s the point of Spain? It’s too hot!” At 10, she became a vegetarian out of both principle and gustatory preference.

In the summer of 2007, when Maeve was 12, both she and Boothby came down with what felt like a mild viral illness. Boothby recovered completely after four weeks. But according to Maeve’s diary from that time, she still felt exhausted weeks after the acute sickness.

(Boothby read the diary after Maeve’s death. It opened with this advisory: “The writing beyond this page is strictly private and is only to be viewed with the express permission of Maeve.” Boothby posted the following snippets and others from the diary on Twitter. )

“God I am TIRED,” Maeve wrote on August 7. On August 11: “Oooohh . . . tired . . .” August 12: “I am still vair [very] tired! Why?! Mum has said she wants me to stay in bed all day and rest :¿ (got a tiredness headache too. Ow ow ow ow).”  August 17: “in bed - still tired :(”

Besides the references to exhaustion that pepper the diary, Maeve also expressed delight about compelling personal matters — celebrating her birthday, getting a new dollhouse, visiting her dad in London.

Just after 11 p.m. on August 25, the night before her birthday, she wrote:

“It is 53 minutes until I'm 13! OMG! We (me & dad) went shopping today…the plan tomorrow is to have a nice breakfast then a picnic with PINK CHAMP [champagne].” And at midnight: “I am officially 13 years old and have made it to TEENAGERDOM!” 12:01 p.m.: “Wow! I’m 13!”

Over the next few years, Maeve’s exhaustion increased, sometimes accompanied by punishing headaches. She began fainting while engaged in gym class, school sports, dancing and even walking. Her social life dropped off significantly and she reduced her school attendance to essential classes only, although she managed to keep up her grades.

Two general practitioners examined Maeve, found nothing wrong and dismissed her symptoms as “normal for a girl of her age,” said Boothby. A pediatrician referred Maeve to psychological services while telling her “the symptoms were all in her mind,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

“She was only 15 and doubted herself for years afterwards,” Boothby told me.

Spontaneous remission from ME is relatively rare, although the disease is known to fluctuate. Many patients remain more or less stable for years, and some improve slowly. Others, like Maeve, experience a gradual decline, for reasons that remain unclear. It is estimated that about a quarter of patients are home-bound or even bed-bound. 

In 2012, despite her reduced class attendance, Maeve graduated from high school in Bristol, where she and her mother were living for a year. She earned top grades in Russian, biology and English literature. She’d long imagined a career involving travel, foreign languages and international relations.

In a photo of Maeve on her 18th birthday, she glows with good humor. Her bright face is graced by a half-moon smile and framed by a tangled mane of brown hair. Her eyes are focused on some point to the left of the camera. She seems, like many her age, to be brimming with ideas and secrets and vital insights. Unlike her peers, she was too sick to attend university and explore her future.

That year, Maeve was finally referred for assessment to a clinic specializing in CFS/ME, as the illness was then often called, at a hospital in Bristol. Although the intake and diagnostic process dragged on for nine months, a specialist at last confirmed that she had the illness. In a subsequent email to the specialist, Maeve expressed relief at getting the news.

“It feels very empowering to finally have a diagnosis and some external recognition of my symptoms, to know that it’s not all in my head!” she wrote.

Shortly afterwards, Maeve and her mother returned to Exeter, where she contacted the local CFS/ME clinical service and reviewed their guidelines for treatment and care. These guidelines recommended a behavioral and psychological approach to recovery based on the hypothesis that patients like Maeve were extremely out of shape from remaining sedentary and harbored dysfunctional beliefs about having an organic disease that caused them to relapse when they did too much.

For decades, two related interventions were viewed as the standard-of-care for ME. A specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy was designed to alter patients’ faulty beliefs so they would do more. An approach to increasing activity called graded exercise therapy (GET) was designed to reverse their physical deconditioning so they would do more. A major British study called the PACE trial, with the first results published in 2011 in the Lancet, appeared to demonstrate that these treatments led to significant improvement and even recovery.

The information Maeve received in 2012 conformed to this approach. Leaflets advised her that “many people with CFS/ME have unhelpful thoughts,” which include “catastrophizing,” “eliminating the positive” and “all-or-nothing-thinking.” Instead of adopting these patterns, the leaflets advised, patients should ask themselves questions like: “What alternative views are there?” and “How would someone else view this situation?” and “Am I focusing on the negative?”

Maeve found this approach useless but did see a specialist in Mickel therapy, a cognitive approach popular in the U.K.. In a journal entry, Maeve wrote that, according to the therapist, “I should have more fun and be more childlike” and “my body’s ‘message’ is: my symptoms are here to tell me to stop containing my emotions and start expressing them honestly now.” 

She dropped the therapy after a couple of sessions. “It isn’t working for me,” she wrote. “If anything it’s making me worse, because I’m worrying about not having fun.”

As advised by the CFS/ME service, Maeve kept a meticulous activity diary in an effort to determine her “baseline” — the amount she could do without triggering the relapses that characterize post-exertional malaise. The goal was to increase the amount over time in order to nudge her body to improve. Maeve regularly struggled to stay within her limits.

In an email to the doctor who diagnosed her, she expressed concern that her legs ached after any physical activity. “Don’t worry about the aching of the legs,” the doctor replied. “That will not go until you enter a phase of sustained improvement — then it will, I promise you!”

“I’m looking forward to entering a period of sustained improvement so I can have my legs back!” Maeve responded in a follow-up email.

The doctor’s promise proved to be illusory. Maeve never entered a period of “sustained improvement.” Eventually, she realized her baseline was around 30 minutes of activity a day. If she exceeded it, she suffered a relapse — or a “crash,” as patients called it. And as she struggled to accept this restriction, she crashed again and again.

In the years since the Lancet and other journals published findings from the PACE trial, medical and public health experts — including me — have documented that the study includes egregious methodological and ethical missteps. Related research has also been shown to be poorly designed and fraught with bias. In 2015, I wrote a 15,000-word exposé of the PACE trial that garnered significant media and scientific attention, and I have continued to criticize research in the field. 

In 2017, the CDC rescinded its recommendations for CBT and GET as treatments for the condition. The CDC website now flatly declares: “ME/CFS is a biological illness, not a psychologic [sic] disorder...These patients have multiple pathophysiological changes that affect multiple systems.”

On October 31, 2021 — less than a month after Maeve’s death — the U.K.’s National institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE, issued new clinical guidelines for ME/CFS that reversed the agency’s own prior recommendations for the two treatments. In a review of studies, NICE assessed the quality of evidence in favor of GET and CBT, including from the PACE trial, as either “very low” or merely “low.”

The new guidelines highlighted the symptom of post-exertional malaise, which it called post-exertional symptom exacerbation, and warned of possible harms from graded exercise. The guidelines approved of psychotherapy for supportive care only — not as a curative treatment.

Maeve read everything she could discover about her illness and sought out whatever she thought might help. She found yoga and meditation helpful. She explored the possibility that she suffered from a deficiency of carnitine, an amino acid essential to energy metabolism. At various times, turmeric, B12, aspirin, the gastrointestinal drug famotidine and the gout drug colchicine seemed to provide some symptomatic relief.

She had to fill out exhaustive applications in order to obtain funds for basic expenses like buying a wheelchair and hiring care personnel. In her London Review of Books essay, she protested at the indignity of having to prove to a “mean and punitive government” that she was not malingering or faking it but was actually very sick and reliant upon benefits to survive.

“To access my right to this welfare payment,” she wrote, “I am required to prove my life has been devastated, presenting it as a collection of medico-historical facts about all the things I can’t do, which reminds me of all the things I might have wanted to do and makes my existence sound abject and pitiful.”

Records of correspondence with medical and social service agencies show multiple occasions of missed calls and misunderstandings about appointments. In a journal entry, Maeve expressed irritation at the inefficiencies and delays involved in dealing with the public institutions responsible for ensuring that everyone could access care and assistance. “It makes me angry that I’m supposed to get free treatment at the point of need, AND I FUCKING NEED IT NOW AND IT TAKES A MONTH FOR ANYONE TO LIFT A FINGER TO EVEN THINK ABOUT HELPING ME,” she wrote at one point.

At other times, her comments conveyed a sense of hope, however fragile. “I am still young and will get better,” she wrote in one application for benefits. “But no one can tell me how long it will take.”

Such hope notwithstanding, the scope of activities Maeve could perform gradually dwindled. “Over time, she became unable to cook, wash up, change her bedlinen, clean her room, apply for and renew her welfare benefit entitlements, make or attend appointments or go outdoors without assistance,” wrote Boothby in her inquest statement.

Maeve also experienced challenges with food intake. “Sometimes I have to wait for enough energy to eat — lifting a fork to my mouth requires energy I don’t have,” she wrote in one social service questionnaire.

ME or CFS has only rarely been cited as a cause of death. In England and Wales, the illness was cited as the underlying cause or as a “contributory factor” in only 88 deaths from 2001 to 2016, according to the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics. Malnutrition is among the most serious possible life-threatening complications. In very severe cases, patients can become unable to ingest sufficient nutrition because they have difficulty chewing and swallowing. 

At that point, tube-feeding — via a tube inserted down the throat or directly into the stomach through the abdomen — can be necessary to prevent death from malnutrition. William Weir, an infectious disease and ME specialist in London, has treated several patients who have been tube-fed for extended periods before improving enough to be able to eat on their own. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Weir told me, doctors who don’t understand ME often view malnutrition in severe patients as if it were a psychiatric issue like anorexia. “Patients with this illness are frequently regarded as having a psychological disorder that causes them to be deliberately and perversely inactive without any regard for the possibility that their inactivity actually has a physical basis,” he said.

By early 2021, Maeve’s condition had deteriorated to the point where she was unable to consume enough food, even with her mother preparing liquified meals. Boothby and Maeve’s GP at the time advocated for her to be hospitalized so she could have a feeding tube inserted. In mid-March, Maeve was admitted to the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. Noting that her tests appeared to be normal, the staff physician refused the tube-feeding request. 

“They kept treating her as if she was making it up,” said Boothby.

Maeve was discharged without a plan for providing her with sufficient nutrition at home, Boothby noted in a chronology of events of the last months of Maeve’s life that she prepared for the inquest. She was “unable to sit up, hold a cup to her lips, or chew,” wrote Boothby, and “all her symptoms were now highly exacerbated.”

Further deterioration in Maeve’s condition led to a second hospitalization in May. By then, Dr. Weir had examined her and found her to be extremely debilitated. In a phone call and a follow-up letter, he recalled, he urged the hospital physician overseeing Maeve’s care to insert a feeding tube.

The hospital did not follow Dr. Weir’s advice. The doctor, Boothby wrote, was “adamant she would not tube feed Maeve and told Maeve she would ‘feel much better if you gave your hair a wash.’” 

Again, Maeve was discharged without a plan for home care, according to Boothby. “She was completely immobilized except for being able to turn her head from side to side,” she wrote. “Her voice could not rise above a whisper. She was unable to reposition in bed or to lie on her side.”

During a third hospital admission that summer, a naso-gastric tube was finally inserted. But by that point Maeve’s body was unable to tolerate the hospital’s tube-feeding regimen. She responded with bouts of pain and constipation, which caused crashes and further exacerbated her condition. The tube was removed, and she was again discharged. 

On August 27, 2021, Maeve turned 27.

When tube-feeding fails, another possible option is total parenteral nutrition, in which the digestive system is bypassed and patients are infused through a vein. In a letter dated September 9, 2021, Dr. Weir warned the chief executive of the Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, that Maeve’s situation looked dire if this approach was not adopted.

“I have experience of similar cases leading to death and Maeve’s current clinical status shows all the initial hallmarks of this,” he wrote. “I am not exaggerating the issue when I say that this [total parenteral nutrition] may well save Maeve’s life.” 

Maeve ultimately refused to be readmitted because the hospital would not guarantee that she would receive total parenteral nutrition, according to Boothby’s written chronology. Maeve knew that without nutritional support she was going to die, Boothby told me, and she wanted to die at home — not in the hospital while being denied care. 

“She said, ‘At least we tried, mum,’” said Boothby.

Maeve continued to deteriorate throughout September and received morphine for pain. On October 1, according to Boothby’s written chronology, Maeve “said she was experiencing mild hallucinations.” On October 2, she exhibited “rapid shallow breathing, racing heart, eyes rolling.” 

At 1:45 a.m. on October 3, “Maeve was awake but incapable of utterance or focusing.” At 3 a.m., she was found dead. Doctors confirmed her death at 11 a.m., and her body was removed to a funeral home in the early afternoon. 

That evening, Maeve’s GP visited Boothby. “She said she had never had a patient so poorly treated by the NHS,” wrote Boothby. 

The inquest, which is not yet scheduled, will presumably shed light on the events that led to Maeve’s death and on the hospital’s actions in the matter. Philip Spinney, the senior coroner for Exeter and Greater Devon, declined to be interviewed but noted in an email that the process is at the “evidence gathering stage” and that the inquest itself could last at least two days. 

Given the prominence of Maeve’s case, the inquest and its findings could receive significant publicity. Boothby told me she would like the investigation to “expose as many facts as possible to public scrutiny.” 

Beyond that, she hopes it will demonstrate “how socially, morally and ethically unjust it is to deny a biomedical cause to ME” and will lead to recommendations for preventing more deaths like Maeve’s. “She died by the incomprehension and disbelief of an acute hospital,” said Boothby.

The post When the doctor doesn’t listen appeared first on Coda Story.

This store on Copnor Road is part of the Southern Co-op chain, which has become embroiled in a battle with privacy rights campaigners over its use of real-time facial recognition technology. In July, civil liberties group Big Brother Watch filed a complaint to the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office against Southern Co-op and Facewatch — the company providing the surveillance system.

Joshua Shadbolt, a duty manager at the Copnor Road supermarket, told me that high levels of theft have forced him and his colleagues to hide, for instance, all the cleaning products behind the till. Without the technology, he fears customers would be given free range to steal. Since Covid restrictions were lifted in the U.K. in early 2021 following a third national lockdown, shoplifting has been on the rise. This is likely to have been compounded by a cost-of-living crisis. Still, even if theft has not reached pre-pandemic levels, for Shadbolt, the biometric camera has been an effective and necessary tool in tackling crime.

For Big Brother Watch, the camera is a breach of data rights and individual privacy. Every time a customer walks into a shop or business that uses Facewatch’s system, a biometric profile is created. If staff have reasonable grounds to suspect a customer of committing a crime, whether it’s shoplifting or disorderly conduct, they can add the customer to a Facewatch list of “subjects of interest.” Facewatch’s policy notice says that the police also have the power to upload images and data to Facewatch’s system.

Anyone uploading the data, which includes a picture of the suspected person’s face, their name and a short summary of what happened, must confirm that they either witnessed the incident or have CCTV footage of it. But the policy does not indicate what the bar for “reasonably suspecting” someone is.

When a subject of interest is reported to the Facewatch system, it automatically shares that person’s data with any client within an eight-mile radius in London, a 15-mile radius in other cities and a 43-mile radius in very rural areas. This means that a person banned from one store in West London could walk into a store owned by an entirely separate company in East London and be refused entry. Every month, Facewatch also adds to their watchlist subjects of interest posted on police websites and on the website of Crimestoppers, a crime prevention charity.

The data of subjects of interest can be stored for up to two years, unless the police ask Facewatch to keep their data in the system, while everyone else’s data is held for three days.

Big Brother Watch’s complaint alleges that the Southern Co-op chain and Facewatch lack transparency about how they process people’s data and argues that they process more data than is necessary for generating and storing watchlist entries.

“It's really hard with private surveillance systems like this for citizens to really know what's going on, how their data is being processed, who goes on the watchlist and who doesn't,” said Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch under whose name the complaint was made. “I feel very, very confident that this is not only unlawful,” she added, “but a significant breach of people's privacy rights and data protection rights and that this precedent setting is actually really, really important.”

The former Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, in June 2021 raised concerns about the use of live facial recognition technology in public places, stating that “there is often a lack of awareness, choice or control for the individual in this process.”

The U.K. government has been slow to implement sufficient guidance on the use of live facial recognition technology, while the European Union has been better at dealing with the issue. One Dutch supermarket was forced to stop using facial recognition in 2019 due to pressure from the country’s data protection authority.

The EU is in the process of drafting new regulations on the use of artificial intelligence, including the use of facial recognition technology. But the AI Act has been criticized by consumer groups for failing to address the use of facial recognition technology by companies in public areas.

As customers filtered out of the Southern Co-op into an overcast afternoon in Portsmouth, they were largely unaware of, and did not care about, the presence of a biometric camera. Abbie Grove, a middle-aged woman clad all in black, told me: “I couldn’t give less of a shit, unless I was a shoplifter.”

A survey commissioned by the Information Commissioner in January 2019 found that only 38% of the public supported the use of live facial recognition technology by retailers. But when it came to policing, over 80% of respondents said that it was acceptable for law enforcement to use the technology.

Despite the survey showing that most people don’t support private businesses using facial recognition technology, much of the debate so far has focused on its use by law enforcement. In August 2020, the U.K. Court of Appeal found that South Wales Police’s use of facial recognition technology was a breach of privacy, data protection laws and equality rights. But since then South Wales Police have continued using it with some tweaks, and last year the Metropolitan Police, who cover most of London, ramped up its use of the technology.

One of the complaints made in the South Wales case was that the facial recognition systems pose the risk of subjecting people to racial bias. Studies have shown that the technology can be worse at identifying people of color than white men. In one recent case, a Black man in Georgia, U.S., was incorrectly matched with a suspect in a robbery and jailed for a week.

For Carlo, Big Brother Watch’s complaint is a landmark. “If it were lawful for private companies to create watchlists…of people that they don't want in their shops, without a criminal threshold,” she said, “especially in the moment of technological advance that we're living in, it would really open the floodgates.” While businesses argue that facial recognition technology is an essential aid to ensuring the safety of both customers and employees, there is mounting evidence in the U.S. that the tech is often used punitively and opaquely, and is frequently inaccurate.

As Carlo put it, the use of such technology by corporations is “privatized policing with the backing of extreme biometric surveillance.”

If Facewatch, whose systems are expanding into other stores, is absolved by the Information Commissioner of any wrongdoing, it will be a win for supporters of additional digitalization of security. For privacy rights campaigners, the commissioner’s decision is a first line of defense in a long battle to protect people’s right to privacy, to protect their right to be free of near constant surveillance.

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Bird flu, as it is more commonly known, is the latest in a series of disease outbreaks that have plagued the U.K. over the past two decades. Outbreaks, including foot-and-mouth disease in the early 2000s, swine flu in 2009 and Covid since 2020, have been made worse by a political system that, at its best, treats science with indifference and, at its worst, with disdain.

In the midst of the bird flu outbreak, an October 2022 parliamentary committee report revealed that the main facility for the country’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, a site in the town of Weybridge, on London’s outskirts, is being underfunded. This puts the U.K. at risk of entering another deadly outbreak unprepared. 

This neglect is also deepening a rift between the scientific community, whose job it is to advise, and politicians, whose job it is to decide what course of action to take during public health crises. This neglect was laid bare in the government’s Covid response. In early 2020, members of parliament appointed a committee of scientists to advise policymakers on how to tackle the virus, known as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. But nearly every aspect of this process happened in secret — the names of committee members were not made public and meetings happened behind closed doors.

In response to the near-total lack of autonomy and transparency in the official advisory group, in May 2020, experts set up an independent advisory group (known as the Independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies or Independent SAGE) that works on a volunteer basis to provide independent scientific advice to the government and the public on how to minimize deaths and support the country’s recovery. In a March 2022 review of its work to date, Independent SAGE wrote: “Scientific advisers should be critical friends to governments, speaking truth to power.”

Other experts too have called for scientific advisors to be given more autonomy as a mechanism for ensuring politicians do not just seek out whichever advice best aligns with their other political goals.

But so far, this doesn’t seem to be happening. After the country steered itself past the worst of the pandemic, a separate parliamentary report criticized the U.K.’s approach to the crisis, saying it was “too reactive as opposed to anticipatory.” Ministers have been trotted out to reassure the U.K. public and global partners that the government is doing everything it can to prepare for future pandemics. 

Yet many such assurances have proven hollow, as the government also has stepped back from several vital research efforts. One is the Pandemic Sciences Institute, which was designed to improve bio-defenses by providing the U.K. with the knowledge and strategies required to respond to the next major outbreak and avoid the failures that defined the Covid response. According to the Telegraph, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised the institute over $175 million but never delivered. Whether the U.K.’s new conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who came into power in October, will follow through on this and other bold commitments is yet to be seen.

Kate Bingham, who in 2020 steered the U.K.’s vaccine procurement and deployment as the chair of the Vaccine Taskforce, in late November told a parliamentary inquiry that the government was failing to prepare for a future pandemic by not supporting scientific research into variants and by allowing access to vaccines to wane. Baffled by this lack of leadership, Bingham said she is beginning to see it as “deliberate Government policy not to invest and not to support the sector.”

When conservative politicians ignored their own government’s advice by refusing to wear masks in the House of Commons, it angered scientists, with some frustrated by what they saw as a pervasive culture of prioritizing ideological concerns over scientific advice. For Kit Yates, a member of the independent advisory group and senior lecturer in mathematical sciences at the University of Bath, it was evidence that the U.K. has not learned its lesson from the Covid pandemic.

Scientists have also felt that the government is too willing to throw them under the bus when things go wrong — prior to becoming prime minister, Sunak said that scientists should not have been given so much power in responding to Covid. Yates himself sees a link between this rhetoric and attacks that he personally received online and in the press, as political frustration with scientists trickles down into society.

Natalie Bennett, a Green Party member in the House of Lords, says that the political right are more resistant to science and that the current government is worse at dealing with science than any other for the last twenty years. But beyond ideology, neglect is also underpinned by a lack of understanding of science across the political system.

“When you look at so many of the issues, whether it's Covid, whether it's the climate emergency and nature crisis, whether it's issues of public health, there's so few people from either side of the house, who know how to ask the right questions,” Bennett said.

The consequences of neglecting science are not just limited to the Covid outbreak. Bennet told me over the phone that future disease outbreaks could be far worse than Covid.

In October 2022, as concerns about the bird flu outbreak were reaching a crisis point, the Public Accounts Committee in the U.K. Parliament released a report warning that the U.K. government was failing to prioritize the significant threat posed by animal diseases to the country’s health, trade, farming and rural communities. It raised concerns about the state of the U.K.’s main animal health facility at Weybridge, which it said “has been left to deteriorate to an alarming extent,” leaving the country unprepared for high category animal disease outbreaks or to deal with more than one outbreak at a time.

After a long period of underinvestment and mismanagement, there is now a redevelopment plan to improve the site, but this will take more than 12 years, and the committee is unsure the government will cough up the billions of dollars needed to properly carry it out. The government is underestimating the threat posed by diseases such as rabies, bovine tuberculosis and African swine flu, said the committee. 

While bird flu has decimated bird populations, causing devastating effects on the livelihoods of poultry farmers, a swine flu outbreak could do the same to pigs and the pork industry in the near future.

The Weybridge facility and the government department that runs it have been essential in ensuring the U.K. catches animal disease outbreaks early, according to Paul Wigley, a professor of avian infection and immunity at the University of Liverpool. Wigley’s concerns are not just limited to known diseases such foot-and-mouth disease but also to “novel” ones.

“There is always a chance that something will leap from somewhere that we have not seen before or become a new variant of something that we have not really seen before,” Wigley said.

Such diseases could pose a significant threat to human life. We have had Covid. It is now widely accepted that another pandemic is not a question of if but when. Like a turkey voting for Christmas, the government’s neglect of science puts the U.K. at risk of sleepwalking into that crisis.

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The broad-based, lucrative online campaign targeting Harry and Meghan with conspiracy theories and mass trolling is “by far the worst, worse than anything I’ve experienced doing this,” Bouzy told me.

According to a Bot Sentinel report released earlier this year, online campaigns targeting the royal couple have become a cottage industry for a handful of online influencers. Bouzy calls them “single purpose hate accounts.” Their platforms are devoted solely to posting about the couple and, according to the report, have become “a lucrative hate-for-profit enterprise” where “racism and YouTube ad revenue are the primary motivators.” 

The report describes the conspiracy theories they promote as “reminiscent of QAnon.” 

One popular theory holds that Meghan was never pregnant, her pregnancy bump faked. The followers of this theory call themselves “Meghan Truthers.” The most extreme proponents of the conspiracy maintain that her children Archie and Lilibet aren’t real at all. 

One of the most prominent anti-Meghan and Harry accounts promoting the “moonbump” theory was run by Sadie Quinlan, a Welsh pensioner who heavily promoted the false narrative that Meghan was never pregnant. Her account, called Yankee Wally, accumulated almost 19 million views and earned around $44,000 a year, according to Bot Sentinel’s findings. YouTube banned the account in March, citing violations of its policy against content designed to harass, bully or threaten. 

“I truly believe that Meghan Markle was NEVER pregnant. I believe she is barren,” Quinlan told Buzzfeed in March. “As a British taxpayer I am not happy paying for a FRAUDULENT pair of children.” 

According to Bot Sentinel, Quinlan inadvertently revealed she had been buying up fake Twitter accounts in bulk to promote her cause. She also posted videos on YouTube showing viewers how to make negative reviews about Meghan’s book rise to the top of Amazon’s book review list. 

Bouzy’s research identified Yankee Wally as one of at least 25 accounts devoted to posting round-the-clock anti-Meghan content on YouTube, with almost 500 million combined views and an estimated $3.5 million in YouTube earnings. 

A YouTube spokesperson responded to a Coda inquiry, but offered no comment for publication.

Bot Sentinel identified a core group of “predominantly Caucasian women” who have been able to successfully run a coordinated fake news campaign that gained massive influence, using YouTube to monetize their work and using Twitter to manipulate conversations on that platform, too.

In recent weeks, Bouzy has seen heightened levels of inauthentic activity designed to target the couple. In the comments section beneath the Netflix trailer on YouTube, thousands of almost identical sarcastic comments have been posted.

“I love the part where they say they are drawing a line under Megxit after an interview with Oprah, a podcast, a Netflix series and a book. Brings a tear to my left eye,” wrote one commenter. “I love the part where Harry talks about bravely escaping his castle and servants. This obvious discrimination is triggering a tear from my left eye,” wrote another. 

The structure, repeated thousands of times, begins with “I love the part” and ends with “it brings a tear to my left eye.” Many of the accounts are devoted solely to commenting on the trailer, with little or no other activity. 

This is a “copypasta” spamming technique where “accounts take a string of text and repeat it over and over again,” Bouzy said. And then organically, real people begin following suit. The resulting comments are a mixture of fake accounts and real people copying an inauthentic campaign. 

Attacks on Meghan and Harry have intensified since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, while people have been continuing to post videos explaining how to amplify negative content about the couple by using VPNs and swarming websites associated with Meghan. “It's quite astonishing,” said Bouzy. 

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Known in the British cycling community as a “punishment pass,” this type of threat is an occupational hazard for anyone pedaling on two wheels in the U.K. 

A video of this particular punishment pass ignited a fiery controversy online in early November. Some people were enraged the child had been threatened. But many others were just as angry at the 5-year-old and his father. 

The video garnered millions of views and soon became the top story on the Daily Mail website — one of the most-visited news sites in the world. It unleashed a wave of hatred, with thousands blaming the boy’s father for “horrific parenting” and risking his son’s life by letting him out on the road. 

“I faced insane levels of abuse,” the boy’s father Ashley Zhang-Borges, 36, told me. “Some of it was very direct threats of violence: ‘I’d run you over if I saw you’ or ‘hope they get you next time,’” he said. Others said they hoped his son would be killed.

Former Home Secretary Sajid Javid even weighed in on Twitter, also casting blame on the father. Although he later deleted the tweet, it was a signpost to how Britain’s cyclists are facing an onslaught of criticism amid the debate over who owns the roads in the U.K.

On one side, cyclists say they don’t feel safe on the roads, and there is not enough space for them when there should be. On the other, motorists see cyclists as a nuisance, people who hold up their travel time and don’t obey Britain’s Highway Code.

But the anti-cycling narrative is also frequently rooted in disdain for environmental policy. Cycling advocates are campaigning for safer streets for bikes amid a broader global movement to rethink the way cities are run as the world heats up. It’s causing fury among those who believe that the road should be for cars.

“A frenzy of high-minded moral purpose — allied to a lockdown culture of big government deciding how we should live our lives — has been the perfect excuse for town and city councils to impose a range of drastic 'cycle-friendly' measures with appalling consequences,” wrote politician-turned-broadcaster Nigel Farage in a 2020 Daily Mail op-ed during the lockdown. “Cyclists are the new kings of the highway, accountable to no one. Of course, the rest of us are told to shut up because cycling is the green alternative, better for the environment and healthy living.”

Right-wing media voices frequently paint cyclists as fanatical environmentalists. In another Daily Mail op-ed, Brendan O’Neill declared: “I’d rather take my chances with the carbon emissions from cars than with the moral emissions that emanate from these puffed-up, two-wheeled eco-warriors.”

On a 2017 BBC talk show debate about cycle lanes in Northern Ireland, Irish broadcaster George Hook even accused cyclists of being Nazis, saying they “used to wear brown shirts and sing the Hurst Wessel song.” 

The anti-cycling lobby in the U.K. also has some powerful backers. Two Facebook groups called "Unblock the Embankment" and "Londoners for Transport" were formed to advocate for the rerouting of London’s flagship cycle lanes running along the river Thames. Although often presented as a grassroots movement, the groups were really overseen by Crosby Textor, a lobbying firm owned by Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Alongside efforts to tear up London’s cycling lanes, the group has orchestrated a number of social media disinformation campaigns, doing everything from influencing Zimbabwe election debates to burnishing the reputation of Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

It is easy to imagine how these narratives trickle down and contribute to rising levels of online vitriol towards cyclists. People who post about cycling on social media say they regularly receive death threats. Anne Ramsey, a 55-year-old cyclist from Northern Ireland who posts under the handle “Cyclegranny,” told me she’d recently gotten a string of knife emojis in a private message. She used to post on Facebook about life on two wheels but was so inundated with abuse she had to leave the platform. “The level of aggression was extreme,” she said.

But cyclists too have popular online allies. Just outside leafy Regent’s Park, a notorious corner for collisions in London, drivers stuck in traffic are known to lurch out into the oncoming lane to overtake the line of cars. Cyclists coming out of the park can easily be hit — so one man has taken the matter into his own hands. Mike van Erp, 50, hides behind a hedge with his camera, waiting to pounce.

“Here we go,” he tells his YouTube audience of millions as he sees a car pull out of the traffic. Reciting the license plate number to his viewers, like a vigilante traffic cop, van Erp stands in front of the car trying to pass and tells them, “Go back!” Van Erp nicknamed the junction Gandalf’s Corner after the YouTuber was compared to the Lord of the Rings character shouting “you shall not pass.”

The videos are artistic in their own way — they somehow form a vignette of London in 2022. Doctors on their way to clinics, frustrated by the traffic, pull out illegally and immediately enter into a shouting match with van Erp. Drivers on the other side of the road yell words of encouragement or derision, and cyclists and motorbike riders whizzing past chime in.

“I do think there's some kind of U.K. position that cyclists are like eco-warriors. Yeah, actually, I'm a terrible environmentalist,” van Erp laughed.

“I still don’t really understand why people enjoy watching it,” van Erp told me. But enjoy it they do. Van Erp’s YouTube channel has racked up almost 50 million views, and his supporters are fiercely protective. When I reached out publicly to van Erp to ask him for an interview about “Britain’s cycling wars,” his followers immediately fell on me, assuming I was preparing to write another anti-cycling hit piece. “You are part of the car cancer,” one follower wrote (full disclosure: I cycle in London myself, but am also learning to drive), and my phone pinged with notifications for days. It was a litmus test for how fraught the debate has become.

It is minor in comparison to the abuse van Erp receives from the other side. “I can’t wait for you to get your head kicked in you little t***,” read one recent message. “Ten years and you still haven’t been curb stomped, I’m astonished. What a loser you are. I’m telling you now one day you’re gonna get hurt.”

According to a 2021 study by Oxford researchers, on average, those who swapped their car for a bike for just one journey a day could decrease their carbon emissions by 67%.

“People don’t want to make any sacrifices, but no one’s going to think about those sacrifices when we have a global catastrophe that’s been caused by heating up the planet,” said Frances Cherry, 38. Cherry campaigns for “play streets” and set one up on her local road. Once every month, the road is closed to cars, and kids can play freely on the street, riding their bikes around. It harkens back to 1950s London, when passing cars in residential neighborhoods were a rarity.

When the pandemic hit, it offered a glimpse of what the world’s cities could look like without cars. Metropolises that previously were hostile to cyclists, where only the most foolhardy would take to the road on two wheels, suddenly became cycling havens. 

During the lockdown in London, Cherry took her children on long bike rides through the suddenly quiet city, riding for miles across the capital as a way to get fresh air and exercise and pass the time. With her 5-year-old son, she cycled from Haggerston, in London’s East End, to St. James Park, a distance of almost five miles. “It felt almost unlimited. Like if it was safe he could go all that way. So I started questioning why people need a huge heavy machine to get any distance.” But soon enough, the cars returned.

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Northern Ireland

Today’s conflict isn’t waged with submachine guns. But the lack of accountability has allowed the wounds inflicted by the Troubles to fester.

Northern Ireland

The country’s failure to address its past has left room for permissible lies.

Northern Ireland

Families who lost loved ones during the conflict have pushed for answers for decades. Now, the British government may shatter any hope of justice.

Battling History

Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace

On January 3 in 1976, two Catholic brothers — John Michael and Brian Reavey — and two Protestant brothers — Reggie and Walter Chapman — were playing pool at a pub in a small town in South Armagh, Northern Ireland.

The men, all in their early 20s, had been friendly for years. They played soccer together. Amicable relationships between Catholics and Protestants had become increasingly rare, even in a small rural town.

The Reavey brothers went by fake names in the soccer league because they also played sports with the Gaelic Athletic Association, an Irish cultural group that prohibited its members from playing non-Gaelic sports until 1971. 

The Troubles had been raging for several years, and this area, south of Belfast and a short distance from the border with the Republic of Ireland, had been especially hard hit. About 400 people in South Armagh were killed over 30 years — a higher death toll than any other part of Northern Ireland aside from Belfast. 

It’s hard to imagine the violence that plagued South Armagh during the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s until peace was brokered by the Clinton administration in 1998. Northern Ireland is still segregated. Only 7% of children go to schools attended by both Catholics and Protestants. In Belfast, gates in towering walls topped with barbed wire close every evening. The deep wounds left on society by the Troubles still fester, represented by neatly kept memorials on roadsides. If you know where to look, each turn in a narrow country road, each old farmhouse at the top of a rolling hill tells the story of a dark moment in a traumatic history.

On that night in January 1976, the Reavey brothers were having a drink at the local pub when they bumped into the Chapman brothers. At one point, a bomb rolled into the bar, but it failed to go off. So once the police and the army had removed the threat, the men carried on with their game of pool. 

Within 48 hours, all four of them were murdered. 

The next day, on January 4, John Michael and Brian Reavey were at their farmhouse watching the comedy game show Celebrity Square with their 17-year-old brother, Anthony. A gunman barged through the front door and opened fire. John Michael was nearly cut in two by a spray of bullets from a machine gun. Brian was shot in the back trying to get upstairs to hide. The bullet came out through his heart. Anthony hid under the bed, but the gunman found him and filled his abdomen with 17 bullets. 

Somehow, Anthony managed to drag himself up the street to a nearby farmhouse. When the neighbor saw the boy, she called for the ambulance, the police and the priest. Anthony was making a miraculous recovery when he died suddenly 26 days later on January 30 in what the family maintains are suspicious circumstances.

The murder was meticulously planned. Gunmen drove from a farmhouse a mile away. Army checkpoints at both ends of the road ensured nobody saw them coming. After firing off the fatal rounds from a 9 mm Luger pistol, a .455 Webley revolver, a 9 mm Parabellum and a Sterling submachine gun, the gunmen sped away, switching cars, handing off the guns and burning the vehicle they drove to the attack. It took 12 minutes.

“I have done this journey at speed many, many times,” said Eugene Reavey, the older brother of John Michael, Brian and Anthony, as we drove the narrow country roads lined with tall brushes that the gunmen took to carry out the attack. In pursuit of justice for his brothers, Eugene has taken investigators on this route several times in recent years.

The gunmen “traveled these roads with impunity. They were never going to be stopped. Because it's all Protestant country here. So the police would have recognized all these people, and they just waved them on,” Eugene said, pointing across the fields to the road where an officer would have been standing, shining a light to give the gunmen the go-ahead.

Eugene Reavey, who was 28 in 1976, is now in his mid-70s.

He still gets angry when he talks about how a British soldier harassed his grieving mother at a checkpoint on her way home from the hospital. Or how the soldier dumped his brothers’ bloodied clothes on the road. 

Mr. and Mrs. Reavey never lived in that house again. Their son who discovered the carnage didn’t speak for a year after the attack. Eugene Reavey has known who killed his brothers for 41 years. A friend of his father’s overheard someone boasting about the murder in a local pub. 

Nobody has ever been held accountable. Eugene has dedicated his life to changing that. It has put him on the frontlines in a fight between survivors who want the truth and those who have something to lose from it coming out.

“I want the truth, if I can get it. Then I want justice, but there's no such thing,” said Eugene.

The small community was still reeling from the violence at the Reavey’s when tragedy struck again the next day. On January 5, 1976, Walter and Reggie Chapman were on their way home from work at the Kingsmill plant when their bus stopped suddenly on a secluded country road. Armed men forced the brothers and 10 others off the bus. The gunmen asked if there were any Catholics among them, and as one man went to step forward, the others pulled him back, thinking he was the target. The Catholic man was allowed to walk away. Eleven Protestants, including Walter and Reggie, were shot in their tracks, left to die on the pavement. Only one man survived. 

The South Armagh Republican Action Force, found to be a cover name for the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility for the fatal ambush. Many believed it was retaliation for the murders the day before of the Reavey brothers and members of another Catholic family — the O’Dowds — who lived about half an hour away.

The killings at Kingsmill put the Protestant community on edge. Neighborly tolerance turned to suspicion. The carnage of those 48 hours in the early days of 1976 stained South Armagh for decades.

Everybody in Northern Ireland has their own version of what happened during the Troubles. 

The Good Friday Agreement ended the bloodshed. But it did not offer a way to grapple with the history of violence. No one was appointed to look into the killings. The past festered. Later, there were attempts to create a framework to get at the truth of what happened and hold people accountable for their violence. All have failed.

The result is a system where the burden falls on families to push for answers.

Now, even this is under attack. In May, the British government introduced a piece of legislation that would effectively “draw a line under the Troubles,” as outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, granting qualified immunity to perpetrators of crimes committed during the conflict. For many, this would slam the door on any hope for justice.

Raymond McCord has come to blows with loyalist paramilitaries quite a few times. More than once it nearly cost him his life. 

He grew up in a notorious Protestant neighborhood in North Belfast that is intimidating to walk around to this day. Murals of men with balaclavas and machine guns tower over neatly kept houses. “UDA” is freshly spray-painted in red on a utility box, a reference to the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary. All the lamp posts are painted in the colors of the Union Jack — red, white and blue. 

But Raymond has never been one to fall into sectarian divides. When he was a kid, he played soccer on a Catholic team. As the Troubles picked up, Raymond was the last Protestant to stay on it, which counted Bobby Sands, the famous hunger striker, as a player. 

Raymond didn’t join the paramilitaries; he confronted them.

Once, the UDA severely beat him and left him to die with cement planks on his limbs. When he got out of the hospital, Raymond, hobbling on crutches with two broken legs, confronted the brigadier of the UDA at his house.

Raymond’s story, however extraordinary for his resistance, is also typical of the Troubles: a parent robbed of their child. His son, Raymond Jr. was found dead in a quarry beaten to death on November 9, 1997, just months before the Good Friday Agreement.

“People say as time goes by…” Raymond trails off. “It doesn’t get any better. It gets worse.” 

People were arrested for Raymond Jr.’s murder, but they were quickly released and nobody was ever charged. Raymond has blamed a loyalist paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force who was a police informant for his son’s death, and he accused police of protecting him.

“The only thing the police wanted to do was cover Raymond's murder up,” he said. So Raymond Sr. took the case to the police ombudsman, the watchdog body in charge of investigating allegations of crimes committed by police in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

After a three and a half year investigation, the police ombudsman determined that Raymond was right: a UVF man who was a police informant was indeed a suspect in his son’s murder, but he was never charged.

“I want to see the people charged. I want to see the policemen charged that covered it up in Raymond’s murder too, who were paying these people that were killing,” Raymond told me.

So he sued the chief of staff of the UVF and the men who killed his son in civil court. Days after he launched his lawsuit, police informed him there was a credible threat on his life. He refused to withdraw it.

Raymond McCord may be one of the last people to be able to file a private lawsuit for a murder that occurred during the Troubles. For many victims and survivors seeking truth, justice or accountability, the U.K. is about to pull the rug from underneath them.

The divide feels particularly vast this year. In elections in May, Sinn Fein, the republican party that was the political wing of the IRA during the conflict, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in history. The prospect of a united Ireland seems closer than ever, something unionists are dead set against.

It is in this context that the U.K. government came up with a plan to close the book on the Troubles. Almost nobody in Northern Ireland — Catholic and Protestant — supports it. Instead of burying the conflict in the past, it’s bringing the anger to the surface.

In July 2021, the British government released the outline for the bill to deal with the legacy of the Troubles which included an amnesty for crimes committed during the conflict. The uproar was immediate and came from all sides. All five major political parties in Northern Ireland came out against it.

The opposition to this bill has become a rare unifying force for groups who still hold a grudge against each other. But there’s perhaps nobody who despises this legislation more than Raymond McCord.

He was already two decades into fighting to bring his son’s killers to court when he heard the news last summer about the U.K. government’s amnesty proposal. He rang a friend whose father was killed in 1992. The two headed to London to protest at Downing Street. Then he gathered nine other victims to form the Truth and Justice Movement. They started calling politicians.

Just a month after the U.K. announced its plans, the group sat down in the Belfast City Hall across the table with politicians from every major political party in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Raymond circulated a document pledging to reject the U.K.’s amnesty proposal. Every politician signed it. They did the same thing at Westminster. Every political party except the Tories promised to oppose the legislation.

A revised version of the bill was introduced, and it includes substantial changes from the original proposal. Instead of a blanket amnesty, there will be a qualified immunity. The door remains open to prosecution of anyone who does not cooperate with an investigation. The bill creates a commission which will have the power to compel witnesses. There’s also an oral history project that “will allow people to tell their stories and share their experiences.”

Under the new proposed legislation, inquests that have reached a certain point will carry on, and civil action filed before the introduction of the law, like Raymond McCord’s case against paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force, will be allowed to continue. But other families won’t be able to file new civil lawsuits.

The bill is trying to walk a thin line between aging veterans of the security forces living in fear that they will be the next target of a spurious investigation and the families of victims long denied justice. But to Raymond McCord, the changes don’t make much of a difference. He’s planning to file a legal challenge if the bill does become law.

Francie McGuigan was the first person to break out of Long Kesh, the notorious prison where suspected paramilitaries, the vast majority of whom were Catholic or republican, were held without trial as political prisoners during internment from August 1971 to December 1975. 

He escaped dressed as a priest with an unsuspecting soldier in the passenger's seat. Francie was driving someone else’s car that he didn’t know how to put in reverse, so he had to ask the soldier to back it up for him as they pulled out of the prison.

Francie grew up in a prominent republican family in Ardoyne, a Catholic working class neighborhood in North Belfast. Nearly every member of his immediate family was interned at one point or another. Francie himself was in the IRA.

In 1971, Francie was sent to prison where he and 13 other men were subjected to “interrogation in depth.” Later, it would be called torture. The 14 prisoners became known as the Hooded Men.

The men were forced to hold stress positions, a hood over their heads, their legs spread apart, fingertips touching the wall supporting their body weight until they collapsed. They were deprived of sleep, food and water. They were taken up in helicopters, told they were hundreds of feet in the air, then pushed out the door, only to learn they weren’t far off the ground.

“There's no way they let me out of here alive because they're not going to let me tell the world what they've done,” Francie thought at the time.

It was during one of the numerous interrogations that he realized the toll the experience was taking on him. The interrogator asked him to spell his name. He couldn’t spell McGuigan.

The torture lasted seven days. Eventually, the Hooded Men were transported to the jail with other interned prisoners where they wrote down their stories. Francie didn’t think it would make a difference.

“We had no faith or nothing in British justice. We didn't believe in it, and we didn't believe it existed. We've since proved that we were right,” Francie said.

The Irish government filed a case against the U.K. at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. There were signs the British would be condemned on an international stage for their treatment of the Hooded Men. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, issued a report accusing the U.K. of torture.

But optimism that there would be accountability was shattered when in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights did not rule that the Hooded Men had been tortured. Instead, the court called the interrogation tactics “inhuman and degrading treatment.”

The United Kingdom was able to wipe its hands of the accusation that officers tortured political prisoners on its own soil. 

When a RTÉ Investigates documentary in 2014 showed new evidence of torture that had not been presented before the European Court of Human Rights, Francie joined forces with the daughter of Seán McKenna, one of the other Hooded Men who was so severely affected that he lived out the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital before he died in 1975.

They went to court to ask a judge to decide if the police should have investigated allegations of torture by British security forces. After years of appeals all the way up through the highest levels of the U.K.’s legal system, they were vindicated.

On December 15, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the tactics used against the Hooded Men were “deplorable” and had they happened today, it likely would be considered torture. The court ordered an investigation into the allegations of torture, but crucially, one that was not conducted by Northern Ireland's police force. The judge in the case did not have faith the police force could be impartial.

When I met Francie in the spring of 2022, the Hooded Men were still in limbo. An investigation hasn’t been opened. The future of that investigation is now even more uncertain.

For days after the murder of his brothers, Eugene Reavey waited for the police to come talk to the family, but nobody did.

“I was expecting something. We got nothing,” he told me.

Decades went by, and the Reavey family tried their best to heal. Along the way, a picture started to form of a secretive murder squad in South Armagh operating in the 1970s. International investigators started to look into evidence that security forces in the army and police had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Glenanne Gang, they were responsible for more than 120 murders.

An investigation into the Glenanne Gang in the mid-2000s was never completed. Efforts to give victims’ families answers were stalled until, in 2019, a court in Belfast ruled there should be a full report on how the gang operated.

The road to accountability for crimes committed during the Troubles is long, complicated and often stymied by people who have something to lose from the truth coming out. 

For Francie McGuigan and Eugene Reavey, the only way to get closer to that truth has been through the courts, relying on judges to order transparency and accountability that otherwise rarely exists.

There’s a view that “litigation and courts are used as a solution to the problem. And the reality is they’re not. They’re far from a solution, but they are the only solution at the moment,” said Darragh Mackin, a human rights lawyer in Belfast who represents both the Hooded Men and the families of the Glenanne Gang victims.

After the court ruling, the task of investigating alleged collusion by the Glenanne Gang fell to career detective and anti-terrorism expert Jon Boutcher. His team has taken on some of the most politically contentious cases from the conflict, and it has become the gold standard for inquiries into Troubles-era crimes.

“Somebody told me you’re rewriting history,” Boutcher said. “Actually, nobody knows what happened in Northern Ireland because it’s kept behind this curtain of secrecy. I’m setting out what happened.”

For many, Jon Boutcher feels like their last chance to correct the record on what happened to their loved ones. But the future of Operation Kenova may be short-lived. Under the proposed federal legislation, criminal investigations related to the Troubles can only be carried out by a newly created reconciliation commission; its leadership will be appointed by the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland. The work of Operation Kenova would cease. It’s not clear yet whether the new investigative body would take on the Glenanne Gang case.

The door that people like Eugene Reavey fought so hard to open could be slammed shut.

The torture of the Hooded Men and the murder of the Reavey brothers get at one of the most contentious features of the bloody conflict: the role security forces played during the Troubles. Were the army and police keeping the peace, protecting society from terrorists? Or were they active participants? Was it just a few bad apples? Was there a system of impunity or are veterans now the target of a witch hunt?

Tensions have far from disappeared. People on different sides seem to be living in completely different realities, convinced to their core that they are in the right and the other side is evil.

The pervasive narrative throughout the Troubles and into the present is that republican paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of violence. You hear the same numbers repeated: 60% of killings were committed by republican paramilitaries, 30% by loyalists and 10% by state security forces. Over half of the people killed were civilians. More than 250 were children under the age of 18.

Brandon Lewis, who was the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland until his resignation in July, has doubled down on this, claiming that “the vast majority of those state-related killings were lawful.”

The breakdown has significant political weight. It has been used to undermine the argument that the British fought a dirty war in Northern Ireland and to bolster the narrative that investigations into state killings are rewriting history in favor of republican paramilitaries by creating the illusion that security officers in uniform were responsible for violent acts to the same degree as groups like the IRA.

Being a policeman or a soldier in Northern Ireland was a dangerous job. I spoke with veterans who were blown up in car bombs and lost limbs or were ambushed and shot, narrowly escaping with their lives. I met one man now in his 80s who drove a school bus and served part-time in the Ulster Defense Regiment, which was part of the British army. He had to be followed by a police car on his bus route because of threats on his life. One day, a bomb under his seat went off. He and the students all survived, but his son later committed suicide due to the trauma.

In all, 1,441 members of the British armed forces, including 197 serving UDR soldiers, were killed during Operation Banner, the deployment that lasted from 1969 to 2007. Another 319 members of the RUC were also killed. Many still live with the scars, either physical or psychological.

But there is a growing body of evidence that there was collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the police ombudsman, the watchdog body tasked with investigating police killings, has found that RUC officers protected members of loyalist paramilitaries and turned a blind eye as those groups armed themselves with weapons later used in sectarian killings.

In 2001, the RUC was dissolved and replaced with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Many of the former officers or soldiers I spoke to see the investigations into members of security forces as a witch hunt coming decades after they risked their lives to keep the peace.

“All the legacy structures are either being designed or are being subverted for the purpose of introducing a false narrative to demonize the police and the security structures and the work that they did,” said Chris Albiston, a former chief constable of the Ulster police.

Albiston is particularly enraged by allegations of widespread collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Together with his colleagues at the Northern Ireland Retired Police Association, a welfare and lobbying group for former officers, they are using the courts to curtail the power of the ombudsman to release reports concluding collusion occurred.

The police didn’t talk to any witnesses of Paul Whitter’s murder. On April 15, 1981, the 15-year-old boy was walking past a bakery when he was shot in the head by a plastic bullet fired out the window of a tank by the Ulster police in the city that most Protestants call Londonderry and Catholics call Derry. He died 10 days later.

I met his mother, Helen Whitters, exactly 41 years later, around the corner from where he was shot.

“I’ve never spoken to an RUC man. They have never spoken to me, ever, ever, ever,” she said of the government police.

Only once did an officer come to the Whitters’ house.

"They had a black bag with Paul’s clothes, bloodied clothes, and they handed them in and that was it. That was it. Nothing. To this day,” Mrs. Whitters told me.

Paul Whitter’s family is still waiting for answers. The records on his death were sealed until 2059. When the family tried to request them, they were sealed for an additional three decades. The British government released partial files on Paul Whitters’ murder in June, but the rest remain sealed until 2084 — over 100 years after Paul died. Everyone who knew the boy will be gone before the information his mother wants becomes public.

People who are opposed to investigations into crimes that happened during the Troubles sometimes accuse victims of trying to rewrite history. But for decades, the truth was unattainable for many families. Large parts of history were never written.

During the Troubles, there was a system in place to ensure killings by security forces were not investigated. Crimes committed by the army were not handled by the police. Instead the Royal Military Police did an internal review.

Investigations into atrocities committed by paramilitaries were dangerous and difficult. Violent groups were adept at picking up shells and covering their tracks. Authorities risked their lives to go through paramilitary-controlled neighborhoods to examine the scene.

Overall, the rate of investigations and prosecutions during the conflict was dismally low. Only four soldiers were convicted during the Troubles. Even now, only six have been charged.

Investigations that did occur were often heavily flawed. Take, for example, the Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday when British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry on January 30, 1972. Conducted in the immediate aftermath, the report found that soldiers were fired upon first. This was later proven to be false by a public inquiry released in 2010 that took 12 years to complete and cost £195 million, roughly $280 million.

Things only started to change in 2010 when Northern Ireland began to build a judicial system that was not governed by the British one. As Northern Ireland’s first director of public prosecutions that was truly independent from England, Barra McGrory has had a front seat to the decades-delayed effort to write those chapters into history books.

“​​Specifically these British army shootings were never really scrutinized. The odd one was. But by and large, they were never properly investigated. And then all of a sudden, there was a focus on them. And files started to come in,” McGrory said.

Still, the system was overly complex and under-resourced. At the current rate, it will take investigators 20 years to get through the cases in the queue.

For some, transparency would go a long way. As Paul Whitter’s mother told me, “a wee bit of honesty on their part would help, wouldn’t it.”

Eugene Reavey was on his way to the hospital to pick up the bodies of his brothers, John Michael and Brian, on January 5, 1976, the day after their murder at the family’s home.

“And I was coming up that hill. There was a fellow waving his arms frantically,” Eugene told me as we retraced his steps one morning this May.

“I put the window down and he says, ‘Come on up here, quick. There's been an awful slaughter.’”

Eugene got out of his car and started walking up the hill when he saw it. At first, he thought there had been an accident and a neighbor’s cows were lying on the street. “There was steam rising out of these bodies, you know,” he said. “It was raining.”

It’s as if Eugene can see the bloodied street in his mind’s eye as he described “the smell of death” to me. “It haunts me to this day. And such carnage.”

Almost immediately, the accusations started flying. None of the Reaveys were involved in any paramilitary. But police told people the IRA shot the Reavey brothers because they wouldn’t go along with a plot to kill security forces. Or that Eugene was responsible for the murders at Kingsmill.

“It was the next morning. ‘Eugene Reavey was in the IRA.’ Eugene Reavey was never in the IRA in his fucking life. Or had anything to do with them. And that’s the sort of shit and nonsense that they were coming out with. So we had to put up with that every time they stopped us at a checkpoint,” Eugene told me over breakfast, sipping the second cup of coffee that had gone cold as we talked.

Northern Ireland’s failure to address its contested history has left room for what some historians call permissible lies. In the absence of truth, people fill in their own narratives.

For Eugene, things got worse. For four days after his brothers’ death, police stopped him driving to work, pulled him out of his car and down into a field where they held him on his knees in the river at gunpoint.

“And the water was up to there,” he said, pointing to his chin. “And the big guy takes out a gun and puts it to my head and he says, ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ I say, ‘I don’t fucking know, you needn’t be asking me.’ ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ And that went on five times.”

The rumor that Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmill killings in which his murdered brothers’ friends, the Protestant brothers Walter and Reggie Chapman perished, persisted for decades.

Twenty-five years later, he was driving home from work when he heard on the radio that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Protestant political party, was going to reveal the killers at Kingsmill on the floor of the House of Commons. Eugene didn’t think much of it until he learned that Paisley had named him as the mastermind of the attack.

“I nearly died. And my wife, god help her, she was nuts.”

Eugene spent years trying to clear his name. It was later proved, after a lengthy legal battle and an investigation by the Historical Equires Team at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that Eugene Reavey had nothing to do with the murders at Kingsmill.

But the damage had been done.

“People I had known for years just turned their back, walked away. Neighbors wouldn't speak to me,” Eugene said.

“Because no matter where you went. See that man, that's the man that shot the people at Kingsmill. That went on for years and years and years.”

The area along the Shankill Road in North Belfast, just a few blocks from a peace wall gate that closes at 6pm, is unmistakably Protestant. You don’t have to look hard before you spot the red hand of Ulster, red poppies, the Union Jack.

On one corner, behind a black metal gate, there’s a memorial that has a very different tone from the others that dot the city. It’s not about tradition, history or the bravery of those who fought on one side or another. It’s just angry.

On the walls, there are photos of young children with the captions like “murdered by Sinn Fein/IRA for being Protestant,” or “Sinn Fein/IRA’s slaughter of the innocents.”

Violent images of carnage caused by bombings are intermixed with photos of IRA members who are now in government. I can’t pull my eyes away from one block of photos of terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and an IRA bombing in London: “IRA — Sinn Fein — ISIS no difference,” reads the caption.

The monument is graphic, inflammatory. But it’s only one symbol of the embers of the Troubles that are still burning today.

In Derry, there are indications of the same anger coming from the opposite side. In one mural, two men wearing balaclavas point machine guns. If you stand directly in front of the wall, one of the guns is pointed straight at you. “Unfinished revolution” is written across the top in block letters. Around the city, there are symbols of modern-day paramilitaries, like a sign for the fringe republican group Saoradh with the slogan “salute the men and women of violence.”

These memorials represent the margins. The vast majority in Northern Ireland support the Good Friday Agreement and do not want a return to violence. But these symbols contribute to an ever present uneasiness in the air, a fear that peace is tenuous.

Failing to grapple with the past has kept this anger alive.

“It's still raw. Every fifth person you stop on that road will know somebody who died, possibly a relative. And that still hurts people,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican political prisoner and former Sinn Fein director of publicity.

“We are, in a sense, captives of the dead.”

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“Everything had been encrypted,” said Sice. “All the children’s records, staff records, all the teaching and learning, all the data, all the finances, internet. Everything.” 

Lanesend Primary, which serves roughly 400 students, aged four to 11 years old, had experienced IT problems the day before. Staff couldn’t access their emails or remotely log into the school’s systems. Sice was aware of the issues, but attributed them to routine maintenance. 

“I really, really hadn’t thought that it would be a cyber attack,” she said.

Lanesend was not the main target. The Isle of Wight Education Federation (IWEF), a multi-academy trust of three secondary schools, serving a total of over 2,000 students, provides technical support and data storage for Lanesend and two other primary schools on the island. A week into the summer holiday, its systems and those of the six schools for which it is responsible were crippled by hackers. 

To regain access to them, a ransom of more than $1 million was demanded from IWEF. Payment was to be made in bitcoin, as has become common in similar attacks, but IWEF refused to comply. Now, it faces massive administrative disruption and thousands of dollars’ worth of bills to recover.

A worsening trend

In recent years, education has become one of the sectors most frequently subjected to ransomware attacks. According to one British independent authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the number launched against U.K. universities and schools increased by 148% between 2019 and 2020. 
In the U.S., however, the figures are even more stark. Attacks on schools from kindergarten through to 12th grade increased by 860% in 2019 — a record high. In July that year, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency after three school districts were taken offline, just weeks before students were set to return from summer vacation. The number of incidents involving educational institutions decreased slightly in 2020, but the targets have become much bigger, including large school districts with higher budgets. In total 1.36 million American students were potentially affected last year alone.

The problem has become so bad that the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center have warned schools about a growing number of attacks that have exploited increased cybersecurity weaknesses connected to remote learning during the pandemic. 

According to Doug Levin, founder of the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center, which helps schools improve cybersecurity and conducts an annual study of ransomware attacks in the U.S., hackers are also demanding more money.   

Levin first started tracking the phenomenon in 2015. “The extortion demands for schools at the time were $5,000, $10,000, $25,000,” he said. “It’s not unheard of for those ransomware demands to be $1 million or more now. That’s a dramatic change.” 

After a hack in March, the Harris Federation, which runs 50 primary and secondary schools in London, received a ransom request for $4 million. But that was nothing compared to the demand issued to Broward County Public Schools of Florida in March, which came in at a whopping $40 million. The district refused to pay. 

The ransom faced by IWEF was nowhere near that high, but it was still far beyond the organization’s means. “They asked for an amount that we couldn’t afford,” said executive headteacher Matthew Parr-Burman. “It was an easy decision, because it was like. ‘Well, this is a stupid amount.” 

So, why schools?

Educational institutions can be a lucrative option for hackers — especially in parts of the U.S., where high property taxes contribute to big budgets, explained Levin. 

As for the $40 million demand received by Broward County Public Schools, the district’s annual revenue sits at $4 billion. While that figure is not actually enough to meet the needs of the sixth largest school district in the United States, it’s still enough to be very attractive to cyber-criminals. 

Schools are also a relatively soft target. Unlike major corporations, educational institutions rarely employ cybersecurity experts and their IT teams are often spread thin, tasked with both keeping their networks safe and more routine technical needs. 

Many schools use older versions of software, with unpatched vulnerabilities, and frequently fail to put in place basic security measures. The Isle of Wight Education Federation, for example, had not enabled two-step authentication.

“Everything has been run for the convenience of the teacher, which is obviously quite convenient for a hacker too,” Parr-Burman explained. 

That changed after the ransomware attack. Now, IWEF is one of many around the world directing significant resources towards the strengthening of its cybersecurity. 

“The fact of the matter is that, in the last five or so years, school districts have flipped from where technology is a nice thing to have to it being really integral to their operations, not just in the classroom but in the back office,” said Levin. 

He went on to explain that everything from locks on doors to telephone systems and school bus routing is now controlled and organized by computers. The growing reliance on technology seen during the pandemic could leave schools even more exposed.

According to Levin, distance learning could “increase the threat profile of school districts, because now you have people working on their personal networks and personal devices.” It is also likely that disruptions will be felt more widely in education systems with remote learning at their core. In September, a ransomware attack forced Howard University in Washington, D.C. to cancel all of its online classes. 

Like hospitals — another prime target for ransomware — schools cannot afford to be offline for long. This means that the educational sector is more likely to pay out than other industries. In a survey of IT decision makers at nearly 500 schools around the world, conducted by the British security software company Sophos, 35% of those targeted by ransomware paid off the hackers. 

But, for cybercriminals, ransoms are not the only potential source of revenue. In addition to demanding fees to decrypt data, they are stealing information and threatening to leak it online if they are not paid. 

“On the dark web, identity information for minors and young children is actually more valuable,” explained Levin. “That is because they have a fresh credit record that they can start to abuse and that no one is monitoring.”

So far, Parr-Burman doesn’t believe that any student or staff data was stolen from the Isle of Wight Education Federation, but it has happened to other schools. When Toledo Public Schools in Ohio was targeted by hackers in September 2020, the district refused to pay. Data was dumped on the dark web, including the addresses and social security numbers of current and former students. Months later, one parent was notified that someone had tried to open a credit card in the name of his elementary-school-aged son.

Wide-ranging disruption

As soon as Caroline Sice got the call informing her about the ransomware attack on Lanesend Primary, she snapped into problem-solving mode. She telephoned the school’s chair of trustees, business manager and leadership team to set up a meeting. She then sent an email to teachers, letting them know that she was on the case. 

For a moment, it felt like the matter was under control. But, as the scale of the problem became clearer, she started to lose hope.

“Over the weekend, it got heavier and heavier and heavier,” she said. “Suddenly, it begins to dawn on you that you’ve got nothing. Nothing. All the lesson plans. Oh my goodness, how are the teachers going to respond? This is years and years of their work, years of learning. The more you thought of it, the bigger and bigger it grew.”

The hackers also encrypted the backups of all of the data for Lanesend Primary and the five other schools, which meant the easiest way to resolve the problem was off the table. Staff would have to recreate all of the schools’ records from scratch. Then the Isle of Wight Education Federation informed Sice that it would no longer provide data storage or technical support to the primary schools including Lanesend after October 31. On top of recovering from the ransomware attack, Sice now has to find a new place to host all of her school’s information. 

Ultimately, Parr-Burman, Sice and the headteachers of the other affected schools made the decision to delay the start of classes by three days, to allow staff time to regroup and bring students back safely amid the pandemic. For the first six weeks of school, everything was done on paper. 

Kids are now back at their desks, but the upheaval caused by the attack is far from over. Some of the problems have been minor, like supplies not being delivered because schools could not pay bills after losing all of their financial information. Other things were unexpected. Hackers encrypted access to the digitized bells in one of the secondary school’s buildings, so for the first three weeks of classes, they rang at random intervals. Because the schools lost all their contact lists and access to email, the IWEF couldn’t inform parents or staff that the systems were down and the start of term would be delayed, so Parr-Burman put out a notice in the local paper. 

Some of the lost data was more important and more laborious to reassemble. The medical information of staff and students, financial records, payroll details, staff background checks — all of it was gone and none of it has been decrypted. 

On top of all the administrative challenges created by the ransomware attack, Caroline Sice is concerned teachers who lost lesson plans that they had devised will be forced to turn to a more rote curriculum.

“We’re a very creative school,” she said. “We learn from what interests the children. So every year is different. I’m worried that actually what they’ll now pull on is just whatever they can get rather than it being what was really made for the children.” 

Lanesend has about a dozen students with special needs, who have individual education, health and care plans, a government program to identify a child’s needs and ensure that they are met. It took three weeks, even with two people working on it, to recreate the learning plans for each of those students.

IWEF is facing high costs, as well. To prevent a future attack, the federation will now back up the secondary schools’ data, apart from the three primary schools, on a daily basis and store it separately so it can't be encrypted during another attack. This will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.  

Overall, Parr-Burman estimates the ransomware attack will cost IWEF up to $160,000, plus an additional $53,000 each year for increased security. 

Rebuilding databases, lesson plans and records will take hundreds of hours, on top of staff’s other responsibilities. The emotional toll is weighing on Sice and the team at Lanesend Primary. The school’s head of finance resigned recently, owing to stress. Sice says that she is trying to maintain a brave face for the children, but that she has trouble sleeping at night.   

“As head teacher, I’ve done some pretty tough things. This is the toughest. And it’s come on the back of Covid,” she said. “It’s challenging because it’s out of my control. It’s out of my expertise. And I’m relying on other people to try and get it back together. I would say it’s bent me towards breaking.” 

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One day in July, Darran Cowd stood high above the town of Ramsgate, watching a Royal National Lifeboat Institution vessel make land.

“Our lifeboat brought in a group of refugees that were stranded at sea,” he said, tearing up at the memory. “I was so proud of my friends, bringing those people to safety.”

Soon after, the British far-right activist Nigel Farage posted a picture of the same vessel on Twitter, with a very different sentiment. 

“Sadly the wonderful RNLI in Kent has become a taxi service for illegal immigration,” he wrote, sparking predictable howls of online outrage. A number of social media users attacked the RNLI — a registered charity, largely staffed by volunteers — pledging never to donate to it again. 

That one episode sums up the tensions roiling this once proudly cosmopolitan, seafaring part of the United Kingdom. The ideological battle between groups and individuals who feel an obligation to welcome people fleeing war, poverty and persecution, and others who believe that the U.K. is being overrun with undeserving economic migrants, also reflects a wider post-Brexit mood, as the country seeks to redefine its role in the world. 

On Tuesday September 7, it was reported that record 1,000 people tried to cross the English Channel. Two days later, news broke that Home Secretary Priti Patel had sanctioned the Border Force to intercept and “push back” vessels attempting to bring migrants across. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has argued that such tactics violate international law. Experts say they force people to use longer and more dangerous routes.

In response to questions about the legality of this approach, a Home Office spokesperson simply wrote: “We do not routinely comment on maritime operational activity."

In Folkestone, boats packed with people have been arriving from France every few days. The town has become a focal point for anti-migrant campaigners. But people like Darran Cowd believe that its long and robust history of offering safe harbor to the vulnerable still offers a solid foundation for the future.

Cowd is a curator at Folkestone Museum. There, a large painting hangs on the wall. Made during World War I, it shows local people standing at a dock, welcoming a crowd of Belgian refugees. A seemingly endless succession of silhouetted boats fades into the horizon. 

In 1914, up to 16,000 Belgians arrived in Folkestone in a single day, fleeing German invasion. The painter, an Italian named Fredo Franzoni, was a refugee himself, who fled Belgium with his family. He gave the picture, composed from memory, to the town in 1916.

Local resident Jonny Wicken, 43, has known the painting nearly all his life. The week the Taliban took over Kabul, he visited the museum and looked at it again.

“I wanted to go and see it to really think about how we were welcoming people,” he said, while walking along the harbor. “I looked at those people for the first time properly, I think. I looked at their faces and I really felt that they were stepping out of that picture.”

Wicken posted a photograph of the artwork to the 17,000-strong town resident page on Facebook. “Surely this is one of Folkestone’s proudest moments,” he wrote. “We’ve done it before and this painting shows us we can make #refugeeswelcome again.” The post attracted hundreds of likes, but also many negative comments. “Belgian culture did not want to destroy ours,” wrote one user. “Every soul deserves the chance to live and the people saying we shouldn't help are just as bad as the Taliban,” retorted another.

Folkestone is a fractured place, caught between its former identity as an outward-looking port community with strong links to Europe, its proud military history and its present-day reality. 

The town thrived in the years following World War II. Its typically English seafront featured funfair rides and arcades, and the wider area boasted a flourishing tourism industry. Regular passenger ferries between Folkestone and Boulogne also made it an important international hub.

As cheap air travel began to boom in the mid-20th century, making overseas vacations affordable for large numbers of British people, seaside towns across the U.K. edged into a long and steep decline. Folkestone was no exception.

The May 1994 opening of the Channel Tunnel, which links England to France by rail, was accompanied by promises of a renewed economy and a vibrant “Europeanization” of the area. Neither materialized. The mouth of the tunnel exists solely as an entry and exit point for cars boarding intercontinental trains, and many of the ferry services that operated from Folkestone moved to nearby Dover and Ramsgate. In 2000, the last ferry between Folkestone and Boulogne sailed and, for the first time in its history, the harbor was no longer a cross-channel port. 

Now, the only meaningful connection between Europe and Folkestone’s people are the migrant dinghies.

Wicken, who spent his teenage years taking cheap trips to France on weekends, believes that if the ferries still ran, some residents might be less hostile towards the new arrivals. “You’re eroding those links to places outside of where you are,” he said. He also recalled how the Folkestone of his youth had a more “European vibe,” a sense of openness, and links to other cultures. “We don’t have the same connection to the sea anymore.” 

Recording footage of migrants arriving on the Kent coast has become something of a sport for right-wing activists. The videos are often picked up and reposted by figures such as Farage, or accounts such as Leave.EU, a pro-Brexit organization funded by the businessman and political donor Arron Banks. They invariably attract thousands of views and incensed comments. In a recent thread, one Facebook user wrote: “We need to sit on the beach with a .22 rifle and shoot the boats down."

Before the dinghies began bringing people over, refugees from Calais attempted to arrive in Folkestone by stowing away in lorries and trains entering the Channel Tunnel. Many died trying to jump onto passing trains, or were crushed by trucks or electrocuted inside the tunnel. 

In July 2015, 22-year-old Husham Osman Alzubair, from Sudan, was found dead with severe head injuries on a freight train that had arrived in Folkestone from Calais. That same year, police had to break up clashes between rival protesters when the far-right Britain First and English Defence League stood against a collective known as Folkestone United, which was demanding an end to the tunnel deaths.

Over the past decade, affluent Londoners in search of sea air and comparatively cheap period housing have decamped to the Kent coast, transforming places like Margate from rundown resorts to artsy destinations, frequented by celebrities and fashionable young people. Signs of similar change are visible in Folkestone, too.

Sandgate is filling up with metropolitan incomers, attracted by the neighborhood’s bracing sea views and high-performing schools. The arts charity Creative Folkestone has peppered the town center with colorful installations for its 2021 Triennial, and transformed some of Folkestone’s historic streets into what it describes as an “urban village of designers, filmmakers, musicians, web developers and artists.” But a short walk away are the harbor and the eastern side of town — two of the most deprived neighborhoods in Kent. Folkestone’s unemployment rate is also above the national average. 

“People are feeling a bit pushed out of their town,” said Wicken. “Meanwhile, people are arriving on those beaches, and you can see the hate directed at them.”

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, Farage immediately connected the crisis to migrants arriving in places like Folkestone. “You can now see a wave of people fleeing Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with,” he said recently on GB News, a new British right-wing TV channel.

False claims that 48,000 asylum seekers were living in luxury hotels proliferated online at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The truth is that around 1,000 migrants are temporarily housed in hotels each night. All the same, Farage remains happy to jump on this narrative.

“The four-star hotels are booked, they’re running out of private accommodation. When we used the Napier barracks in Folkestone it was good enough for the British army, but deemed not to be good enough for those that have illegally come to this country. So the Afghan thing is going to play into this in a big way,” he said on the news show in August.

At the edge of town, in Sandgate, lies Napier Barracks. The military-owned site, once a staging post for troops on their way to fight in the trenches of Northern France during the First World War, was repurposed last year as a center to house up to 400 men while their asylum claims are processed. 

The compound has been fraught with controversy ever since. In January, a major outbreak at the camp led to almost 200 residents catching coronavirus. Far-right protesters have picketed it and 16 racist incidents have been reported to the Home Office since it opened. In June, a High Court judge ruled that conditions inside did not meet adequate health standards and that the home secretary had acted “irrationally” in housing people there. 

“People talk about Napier Barracks as if it's just this site up the road that we have to drive past,” said Cowd.

Anti-immigration YouTubers, however, have paid an uncomfortable amount of attention to the facility, filming outside the gates, flying drones over it and recording the residents. 

I arrived there as the sun was beginning to set. Ring-fenced with blue sacking, its grim barbed wire has recently been removed. Residents must sign in and out, are given three meals a day, issued £8 ($11) a week and not allowed to work. 

A group of young men were playing football on the grass outside. Yonas, 33, originally from Eritrea, spoke to me on condition that I refer to him using a pseudonym. When he arrived in Dover in June, he was transferred to a hotel in London. Then, a month ago, he was loaded onto a minibus. When he asked the bus driver where he and the other passengers were going, the driver said that he didn’t know. Yonas watched nervously on his phone as the GPS showed that they were headed towards Dover. 

“We thought, ‘Are we going back to France?” he said. 

Instead, they were taken to the barracks. 

 “This is a prison,” he added. “I don’t want to be in a prison. I’ve come here to change my life.”

On one of his first days in Folkestone, Yonas and a friend were walking around on the quiet, residential streets nearby. They crossed the road at a red traffic light. He told me that rather than slowing down, the driver sped up towards them. 

“He held up a finger to me,” Yonas said.

“People say, ‘Fuck you.’ They don’t like us,” another friend added. “I feel they think I am coming to make a problem for them.”

There have been some good moments, though. Yonas recalled how during the warm weather, he and some friends went to the beach to swim. “People were friendly,” he said.

Despite repeated calls for the closure of Napier Barracks, the Home Office recently advised Folkestone & Hythe District Council that it intended to keep the compound open until 2025. Councillor Jenny Hollingsbee said the local authority had no role in the decision. 

“This is very disappointing news and not what we had been hoping to hear,” she said in a statement. “I have made it clear to the Home Office that if the use is to continue, then it is our expectation that the government will make further investment to improve facilities for those staying at the barracks.”

Meanwhile, Cowd, the curator at Folkestone Museum, has been searching for a new centerpiece for Folkestone Museum’s collection: a lifejacket from one of the arriving dinghies. 

“You can tell a whole host of stories about the refugee experience with that one item,” he said. “I think that, right now, we’re too close to events to be able to display it, but one day, after we’ve had a bit of thinking time, we might be able to actually look back.”

The post Refugee crossings and anti-immigrant sentiment spark a historical reckoning in an English seaside town appeared first on Coda Story.

This week’s Letter from London illustrates the friction between rumor and reality on an extremely hyperlocal scale, so please bear with me. On the morning of Saturday, August 7, I woke at my usual time of around 6.30am and made myself a cup of coffee. After a 15-month-long pandemic, which has seen gyms and group sports largely locked down, I had begun retraining for ParkRun, a free, weekly series of timed events held across the world and organized by a U.K. charity. 

I was almost certainly going to leave my house around 7.30 a.m. for a run around the local Finsbury Park, which would end with another coffee overlooking a nearby nature reserve. That might sound like a healthy way to begin the weekend, but unfortunately, I was also scrolling through my Twitter feed. #FinsburyPark was trending — a rare phenomenon — and I decided to have a look. I now wish I hadn’t. 

The hashtag’s top tweets were a mixture of chaos, rumors and rebuttals. In a nutshell, something major had happened or not happened overnight. Getting to the bottom of it took some time, but a toxic mixture of facts and lies eventually emerged. At around 7.45 p.m. the previous evening, dozens of police were dispatched to an address around the corner, to investigate a tip-off that that as many as 70 venomous snakes had escaped a residential address. Officers shut down a road close to my home at around 8 p.m. and carried out a series of searches for just over an hour, before declaring the incident to be the result of a hoax call. 

One reason why the rumor went viral was because a Twitter account with over 100,000 followers named @CrimeLdn had posted footage, ostensibly from the scene, showing a large police presence, with the caption: “Estimated 70 poisonous snakes have escaped from a flat (according to the police) on the road between Manor House and Finsbury Park.” The footage can be viewed here. 

While @CrimeLdn, an account that usually shares reports of knife crime in the U.K., later confirmed that a member of the public had sent in false information, dozens of Twitter users were still sharing news of the allegedly escaped reptiles the following morning. @CrimeLdn’s correction also prompted criticism from other Twitter users about the importance of verification, using second sources, and the dangers of spreading fake news. 

By the time I had fixed myself a second coffee on Saturday morning to continue reading through the hashtag, I was half wondering whether running through my local park would be safe. I didn’t actually believe that 70 venomous snakes were on the loose in the area. On the other hand, I wasn’t entirely sure what to believe. I mean, venomous snakes have escaped residential buildings in other parts of the world. One actually made a break for freedom from a Cologne apartment in February. Coverage of the incident had also leaked to other parts of the internet. I saw the story published on several London news sites. Debunking of the hoax appeared throughout the day on national tabloid websites, including The Mirror and Metro. 

I did go for a run and, eventually, continued with the rest of my day, but the whole fiasco has reminded me of how the hollowing out of local news sources has left a void in our digital spaces. As much of Coda Story’s work demonstrates, a tsunami of fake news is an ongoing and persistent menace in countries around the world, including the U.S., Spain and Pakistan. Much of it is unleashed by political, religious, anti-science or business interests. Some of the most disturbing violence around the world has also been caused by the dissemination of fake news in hyperlocal situations. My experience seemed worthy of inquiry. 

I recently messaged @CrimeLdn to ask about the incident, in an attempt to find out how this kind of misinformation can spread across digital platforms and affect the lives of ordinary people. After several requests, an account administrator agreed to a short interview via Twitter Messages. I asked if moderators felt bad about posting the original material. “We got a little bit of criticism but at the same time I think people know it was a hoax call and it did make us feel a bit bad,” read the reply. 

I also asked the media team at Twitter. The response I received wasn’t particularly informative about this specific incident, but here’s an extract: “We use a combination of technology and human review to identify misleading information on the service. This includes Tweets that contain content that violates our synthetic and manipulated media policy, our civic integrity policy, and our Covid-19 medical misinformation policy. As a uniquely open, public service, the clarification of falsehoods happens in seconds on Twitter.” 

I felt like I needed to speak with an expert, so arranged an interview with Professor Shakuntala Banaji, professor of media culture and social change at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I wanted to find out why so many people would share false information, even after it had been fact checked, eventually leading to the deployment of police at taxpayers’ expense. 

“People have come to believe that passing on information of whatever kind, whether you have checked it out or not, is a civic duty,” she said. “So, a lot of people who unwittingly get caught up in these kinds of both hyperlocal and national chains of misinformation are not necessarily fools or violent people or inclined towards prejudice. They have thought of themselves in this context as being a good citizen. They have a belief in their own integrity and have a belief in the person from whom they found the information.”

Later the same day, I went to a friend’s birthday party, and related the story to some guests who live in other parts of London. A couple said they had also experienced their own examples of hyperlocal fake news. There was also some light relief. I looked at Twitter again in the evening and one user had posted about Finsbury Park. The story had obviously moved on. He was paraphrasing actor Samuel L. Jackson’s soliloquy from “Snakes on a Plane.”

The post Letter From London: Snake news is fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

From the summer of 2020 on, London had hosted smaller protests against the state’s pandemic response. However, this time, a number of prominent and well-connected right-wing figures also hit the streets. Among them were TalkRadio presenter and newspaper columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer and conservative political commentator Calvin Robinson. In order to “ensure proper coverage” that “cannot be ignored” by the mainstream media, Richard Tice, leader of Reform U.K — the new name for the Brexit Party — hired a helicopter to film the event for a YouTube stream titled Freedom March Live.

Right-wing journalists like Hartley-Brewer have given anti-lockdown and Covid-19-skeptic views a regular platform during the pandemic. On her TalkRadio show, she has hosted medical figures who deny the efficacy of lockdowns or who have played down the severity of Covid-19. Toby Young, a British writer best known elsewhere for penning a memoir about his disastrous period of employment at Vanity Fair in New York, now writes for the Spectator and is the editor of a website called the Daily Sceptic. Despite their constant undermining of measures to tackle the spread of Covid-19, these well-known media personalities have tended to support the coronavirus protest movement from a distance — until now. 

One of the most outspoken opponents to Covid-19 restrictions is the former editor of the men’s magazine Loaded and one-time Brexit Party MEP Martin Daubney. Daubney appeared on Freedom March Live, giving on-the-ground reports, including a chat with the actor and anti-woke campaigner Laurence Fox, who stood in the London mayoral elections earlier this year on a staunchly anti-lockdown platform, winning less than 2% of the vote. Over the past year, Daubney has repeatedly defended anti-lockdown protests on social media. Since the majority of the U.K.’s pandemic restrictions were lifted in July, he and several of his peers have recently pivoted to railing against “vaccine passports” and remaining pandemic measures. 

While many have committed themselves to the coronavirus-skeptic cause, few of these well-connected Brexiteers and right-wing commentators have, like Daubney, made resisting Covid-19 restrictions their full-time job. “Nobody in the British media was talking about this,” he told me during a telephone call from his home in southeast London. “Or if they were, they were being very quickly denounced as crackpots or cranks.” A little more than a year ago, he sought to change that.

Media assault

In May 2020, Daubney and two former Brexit Party figures set up Unlocked, a new online media operation that now has nearly 70,000 followers on Facebook. His partners were Lesley Katon and Ben Habib. Katon is a former chief of staff for the Brexit Party, ex-creative director at a London-based PR firm and was once a BBC producer. Habib is the owner of the British fund management company First Property Group and, while representing the Brexit Party, was ranked in 2019 as the European Parliament member with the largest earnings in addition to their official salary. 

Despite the fact that British news organizations including the Mail, the Times of London, the Telegraph, the Express and the Spectator have regularly published articles critical of lockdown measures, the trio felt there was a need for an outlet that stood in defiant opposition to the U.K. government’s coronavirus restrictions. 

Daubney said that, among other things, he was moved to act by “horror stories” from the hospitality and entertainment sectors, which had largely been shuttered since March 2020, in compliance with pandemic regulations. “It really became apparent that the business community was being completely thrown under the bus,” he said. 

Unlocked has since offered a platform to prominent anti-lockdown voices and coronavirus-skeptics, ranging from rogue medical professionals to wealthy astroturfers, such as the Monaco-based aviation tycoon Simon Dolan, who has launched legal cases against the U.K. government’s approach and founded the activist group Keep Britain Free.

Unlocked began as a low-budget affair, publishing videos on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; mostly to-camera diatribes by Daubney and guest interviews, carried out on Zoom. One voice it championed from the start was that of Karol Sikora, an oncologist and vocal critic of the official response to Covid-19. 

In the past Sikora has described the U.K.’s National Health Service as the “last bastion of communism.” He is also a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, named for the town in Massachusetts that hosted an October 2020 meeting of scientists to discuss appropriate responses to the pandemic. The gathering was organized by the American Institute for Economic Research, a free-market libertarian think tank that has received funding from the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch. The document advocates an alternative approach to Covid-19, where only the elderly and most vulnerable follow protective measures, and only if they want to.

“We very quickly saw ourselves as a lobbying group,” Daubney explained of Unlocked. “We were politically motivated, but we were representing business and we were representing voices that weren't being heard in the mainstream. We were using our political contacts to directly leverage onto politicians to try and make them listen.”

Unlocked also interviewed Conservative Party MPs including Andrew Bridgen, John Redwood and Sir Desmond Swayne. The latter has been criticized for claiming in an interview with the Covid-19-skeptic group Save Our Rights U.K. that NHS leaders had been manipulated to exaggerate the scale of the coronavirus crisis. 

After finding a “big audience,” Daubney and his colleagues looked to turn Unlocked into a going concern. “We approached donors that were known to us — political donors — who began to get involved, and then we put it out to the market,” he said. 

According to Companies House, Unlocked was incorporated In October, 2020. The nature of its business was described as “web portals” and “activities of political organizations.” Habib was named chief executive. That same month, he announced a funding round, putting up £200,000 himself and seeking £4 million to pay for a studio to produce three programs per day, to be distributed via social media. 

Then, the organization moved into the premises of Habib’s First Property Group. “His entire office was empty because it was furloughed. We built a studio in there and spent a few thousand pounds on decent cameras and lighting,” Daubney said, quick to add that, at that point, they were still working “very much on a shoestring.”

Shortly after being incorporated, in November 2020, Unlocked published an interview with Mike Yeadon, formerly the head of scientific research and vice-president at the global pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Sitting in a large garage with a motorbike in the corner, he said that the Covid-19 pandemic was essentially over in the U.K. and that herd immunity had already been achieved. Yeadon also called for an end to mass testing and claimed that some 30% of people were immune before the crisis even started. 

“It became very self-evident that people such as Mike Yeadon weren't even getting a platform at all in the mainstream, or they were simply being annihilated by columnists like Owen Jones,” said Daubney, referring to the left-wing Guardian opinion writer. “There's a huge list of people who were very, very supportive of the lockdown, and anybody who seemed to challenge it, they had their professional and personal reputation eviscerated.”

Within 48 hours of being posted, the video was taken down by YouTube for violating its Covid-19 misinformation policy. Daubney said that Unlocked used this sanction as a “rallying point” and that a version posted to Facebook went on to attract more than a million views. “It's still the biggest thing we've ever done,” he said.

Prior to appearing on Unlocked, in September, Yeadon had co-authored a lengthy article on Toby Young’s earlier website, Lockdown Sceptics, saying that the pandemic was “essentially complete” and that there was “no biological principle that leads us to expect a second wave.” Later in December, he claimed on TalkRadio that herd immunity had been reached in London. A catastrophic second wave of cases soon followed.

“Our position and Mike's position was that this is a seasonal virus and there will be seasonal spikes. And that's precisely what's happened,” Daubney said when asked whether he thought Yeadon had been wrong.

In February, Yeadon left Twitter after historic Islamophobic tweets by him were uncovered. He has made far fewer media appearances in recent months. In March, Daubney told me that they were still in touch and that a follow-up interview was in the works. 

On the streets

Until June’s Freedom March, the relationship between influential pro-Brexit figures and street-level anti-lockdown protest groups remained ambiguous. The likes of Daubney and Hartley-Brewer defended public demonstrations without actually participating in them. Simon Dolan and his Keep Britain Free movement have, on the other hand, been in the thick of the action since the start. 

At one protest, held in London in August 2020, speakers included Mark Steele, who has argued that 5G causes Covid-19, as well as former nurse-turned-conspiracy theorist Kate Shemirani, who has recently called for “Nuremberg trials” against doctors. Also present was Piers Corbyn, figurehead of the coronavirus conspiracy theory group Stop New Normal and brother of the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Facebook event listing for the August 2020 protest named Keep Britain Free among the organizers. Daubney did not attend, though he did defend the demonstrators. “How many people calling today’s Trafalgar Square anti-lockdown protesters ‘covidiots’ said the same about the Black Lives Matter protests during the actual lockdown?” he wrote on Twitter.

One of the other organizers, Save Our Rights U.K., has spread a continuous stream of misinformation during the pandemic, including an interview with the conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has also given speeches at Covid-19-skeptic protests. Despite Keep Britain Free’s involvement in the demonstrations, Dolan claimed the group’s followers are autonomous, “rather than being centrally organized by me.” He also distanced himself from Mark Steele and Piers Corbyn. “I can’t really comment on their claims, as I have never spoken with them,” he said. 

One thing Dolan cannot deny is that he was executive producer of a 2019 film titled “Renegade: The Life Story of David Icke.” Both Icke and his son Gareth have spoken at protests co-organized by Save Our Rights U.K. “They are genuinely lovely, decent, honest people, who I admire very much,” Dolan told me. 

Dolan was banned from Twitter in October 2020 for violating the platform’s terms and conditions. In one post, he compared the former U.K. health minister Matt Hancock to Hitler. 

While Unlocked has hosted Dolan and a wide range of other coronavirus skeptics and anti-lockdown activists, Daubney is keen to disassociate both himself and the organization from extremism and outright denial of the coronavirus. 

“We're interested in evidence that's tangible and credible, rather than conspiracy theory,” he said. “Covid is obviously real. Covid obviously kills. Covid isn't a conspiracy theory. What I have kicked back against is what I believe is a disproportionate government response to the virus, which has been massively damaging on the business community, on the economy, on the physical well-being and the mental well-being of adults, and particularly children, of Britain.”

When pressed on Dolan’s history of sharing pandemic-related conspiracy theories on Twitter and his relationship to David Icke, Daubney became frustrated. “This isn't what I would classify as proper journalism,” he said. “You're just trying to sort of smear us here.” Not for the first time, he threatened to bring our interview to a premature end, adding, “I don't see what you're doing here that's going to be positive to me.”

The international network

Far from languishing unheard throughout the pandemic, as Daubney argues, the U.K.’s coronavirus-skeptic network appears to have directly influenced government policy. In September 2020, a group of researchers and medical professionals published an open letter to the government arguing against a new lockdown. 

The signatories included Karol Sikora, University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, and Harvard School of Medicine professor Martin Kulldorf — all of whom also put their names to the Great Barrington Declaration. Another University of Oxford professor, Carl Heneghan, who has appeared on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkRadio show numerous times, also lent his name to the document. 

According to reports by the Times of London and the Byline Times, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak organized a summit between Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Gupta and Heneghan, on the very day the open letter was published. After the meeting, Johnson decided against a circuit-breaker lockdown. This may have caused 1.3 million extra Covid infections, according to the Times of London. 

The U.K.’s Covid-19-skeptic and anti-lockdown movement forms part of a broader international web of libertarian and right-wing campaigners. In many countries, they have used the pandemic to spread anti-China rhetoric. Following an example set by the likes of Steve Bannon in the U.S., in January, Dolan and Francis Hoar — the barrister with whom Dolan launched his 2020 legal action against the British government — both signed an open letter to the FBI and other Western security agencies alleging that Covid-19 measures were the result of a global plot by China. 

When I asked Dolan about this, he said there was “no doubt” that the global response to the pandemic’s origins lay within the Communist Party of China. He implied that “pictures of people supposedly dropping dead in the streets of China” was part of a propaganda campaign by Beijing.

China has shifted during the pandemic towards a more aggressive defense of its response to Covid-19. But the global radical right’s efforts to blame Beijing for a vast conspiracy mean that ordinary people are caught in the middle of a dangerous information war — one in which Russia has also been a prominent player. 

In an article I contributed to in March, openDemocracy reported that Russian state media and proxy outlets had given consistent coverage to coronavirus-skeptic protests in Germany. As in Germany, RT and the Russian state-run video agency Ruptly also live-streamed demonstrations in London. One broadcast of an event held in August 2020 amassed nearly six million views on RT UK’s Facebook page. The channel has repeatedly amplified the likes of Daubney, Sikora and Heneghan. 

In addition to being cited by RT, Daubney has contributed to the Russia-backed media outlet Sputnik News. He has appeared numerous times on Sputnik International’s radio show and podcast Shooting From the Lip, which has been hosted by the U.K, talk radio presenter and former tabloid columnist Jon Gaunt since 2018. 

In one episode, Daubney said: “I would like to see more people deported,” adding that every foreign national who commits a crime should have to leave Britain. The title of the episode was “Corbyn Believes That Jamaicans Get a Free Pass to Murder and Rape in the U.K.,” based on a quote from Daubney, referring to the former Labour party leader. In another episode, Daubney described global warming as “the new religion.” Elsewhere, he has referred to identity politics as a “cancer of the modern world.” 

What happens next?

While plenty of other groups and channels of communication also exist, it is difficult not to view Daubney and Unlocked as important parts of the global radical right-wing coronavirus-skeptic ecosystem. 

After attending the Freedom March, Daubney went on Hartley-Brewer’s TalkRadio show to discuss how little coverage the demonstration was given by the “establishment” media and to denounce the focus on extreme elements in the crowd. Hartley-Brewer wholly concurred. Despite this apparent wish to distance himself from the political fringe, Daubney also retweeted a video posted by the conspiracy theory group Save Our Rights U.K. 

The footage featured police radioing in a description of the organization’s founder, Louise Creffield, as she arrived at the gathering by open-top bus. Above his retweet, Daubney wrote: “I was on the bus blowing kisses to the coppers. That seemed to help disperse them”.

The U.K. has since lifted the majority of its pandemic restrictions and some experts predict that the Covid-skeptic movement will soon disappear. But it could also morph into something even more dangerous. 

Attendees of the Freedom March were a mixed bag: ordinary people, alongside far-right supporters and an amorphous contingent of anti-establishment activists. In Hyde Park after the march, members of the audience sang along to a song by a Covid-19-skeptic band called Jam for Freedom, titled “We Are the 99%.” While the lyrics referenced a slogan made famous by the Occupy movement, between songs some people in the crowd shouted their support for Tommy Robinson, a veteran figure on the British far right and founder of the anti-Muslim hate group the English Defence League. 

In Germany, which has seen the world’s biggest protests against Covid-19 restrictions, a similarly diverse movement has been radicalized towards far-right conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, and developed a full-blooded obsession with former U.S. President Donald Trump. In late August 2020, a few hundred anti-lockdown protesters attempted to mount an assault on the Reichstag in Berlin. 

Could something similar happen in Britain? If Daubney’s own increasingly anti-government language is anything to go by, the answer is yes. On August 9, he announced his appointment to the role of deputy leader of Laurence Fox's Reclaim Party. Enraged about what he called “Covid passports” in reference to the U.K. National Health Service app, Daubney has stated that the country has “sleepwalked into a totalitarian state.” At one point in late March, he even appeared to use his Twitter account to threaten MPs for voting to maintain Covid-19 restrictions, writing, “Does anybody else feel like storming Parliament and making them listen?” 

This investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

The post Inside the UK’s anti-lockdown media machine appeared first on Coda Story.

“I really rely on those payments to be able to get things for my daughter,” she told me, during a telephone conversation. “We’ve got her school uniform to buy in the next couple of months. That is a large chunk of money and a bit of a worry.”

Bates is one of tens of thousands of Hackney residents — the borough is home to some 280,000 people and 10,000 businesses — who have been affected by a crippling ransomware attack on the council’s website. (In the interest of full disclosure, I live in Hackney and use the website regularly.) The breach took place in October 2020, disabling a number of vital local services, including systems that allow residents to access social security benefits, and pay rent and council tax.

Over the past few years, ransomware attacks on public and private institutions, including councils, utility companies and banks, have become an increasingly common form of online terrorism. In late 2020, dozens of U.S. hospitals and healthcare organizations were hit by malicious code distributed by cyber-criminals. Security analysts said the hacks were tied to a Russian gang known as UNC 1878 or Wizard Spider

Large corporations and financial institutions have the means to pay off ransomware gangs. For example, Brazil-based JBS SA, the world’s largest meat processing company, gave the equivalent of $11m to hackers who broke into its computer system in June. 

However, U.K. local authority budgets have been progressively slashed since the financial crisis of 2008, rendering most councils incapable of spending such large sums of money, even if they could get past the miles of red tape necessary to do so. Hackney has faced some of the most brutal cuts in the country: the council’s core funding from central government has been reduced by £140m ($195m) since 2010 – a reduction of 45%. 

On top of that, years of underinvestment in new technologies have left many of them more or less wide open to criminal assaults that endanger vulnerable people, who rely on the digital services they provide.

The damage done by the Hackney ransomware attack highlights both the importance of local authority services — which include public housing, garbage collection and the upkeep of roads — and the parlous financial situation of many U.K. councils. 

Put simply, councils are not lucrative targets. Hackney set aside £2m in last year’s budget for future cyber attacks, but the borough is also having to make almost £11m of savings this year after incurring additional costs during the pandemic. Affected areas will include education, children and families services and public health.

The council, which employs 4,500 people, refuses to pay off the attackers and has not disclosed their identity or the amount demanded. Describing the incident as a “significant threat to the organization,” Hackney Council’s head of digital and data, Matthew Cain, detailed the chaos it has caused. 

“Ten years-plus of significant investment in technology was removed overnight,” he told me. “From that point, the question was not which systems were available, but what data could we find and how could we rebuild that from the ground up? We have had the best part of 200 people working on it solidly since October, which represents more than our total investment in IT in a typical year.”

To make matters worse, Hackney’s ransomware attack was quickly followed by a data leak. In January, a criminal group published the personal details of council staff and residents on the dark web. While experts said that the stolen data was “limited” and “not visible through search engines,” nine months on, digital services continue to be affected, including changes to existing benefits and council tax claims and payments.

The audacity of ransomware gangs has pushed the issue into the international spotlight. During a June summit in Geneva, U.S. President Joe Biden urged President Vladimir Putin to crack down on hackers operating in Russia. Biden warned of consequences should such activities continue unchecked. 

But it isn’t just criminal gangs who are targeting government institutions. In July, U.S. and Britain announced that Russian spies accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election have spent most of the past two years attempting to breach the digital security of hundreds of organizations worldwide. The announcement did not identify any of the targets by name, but said they included government offices, political parties, law firms and media organizations in the U.S. and Europe.

In the U.K., a number of other government institutions have been hit. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency was hit in December 2020. Repair work to its systems is still ongoing. Since 2019, Hull City Council, in the north of England, has suffered at least 10 serious incidents and thousands of phishing attempts by criminals seeking to steal login details. Ireland’s public healthcare system is also rebuilding its digital infrastructure after a May attack. 

Meanwhile, council workers and residents are left counting the costs. In Hackney, this will doubtless mean less money for already strained local services, which could deepen financial instability for those most in need. “This is going to be an 18-month recovery,” said Cain. “We will do that rather than doing all sorts of other things.”

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It has also emerged that the Department of Health and Social Care building in London is fitted with cameras made by the Chinese tech giant Hikvision, which produces surveillance equipment under contracts worth $290 million with the authorities in China’s Xinjiang region, and has been linked to the mass oppression of Uyghur and other Muslim minorities. Reports from the region have shown Hikvision cameras installed in “re-education camps”, where as many as a million Uyghurs are imprisoned. 

While the company was blacklisted by the U.S. government in October 2019 to punish China for its treatment of the Uyghurs, the economic blacklist and federal ban on the products does not apply at city and state level. During the pandemic, U.S. cities, counties and schools reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on temperature-scanning cameras, while an estimated 338,543 networks of Hikvision cameras watch over U.S. citizens. 

Hikvision cameras can also be found in public spaces around the UK. Around 65% of British councils currently use Hikvision technology, according to an investigation by internet research company Top10VPN, and they have purchased at least $1.3million worth of equipment over the past two years. The research company also found that the UK is the world’s fourth biggest foreign buyer of the Chinese company’s cameras, alongside those made by Dahua.

“I think there needs to be questions asked whether it is right for public funds to be allocated towards companies that have poor human rights records,” said Samuel Woodhams, a researcher at Top10VPN, who added that the cameras could also be retrofitted with additional features such as facial recognition and analytics tools. 

“I don't want to lose sight of the human rights implications of buying this technology or the implications of increasing surveillance in public spaces with zero regulations,” he added. 

Hikvision and the Department of Health and Social Care have been approached for comment. 

Last week, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to adopt measures that would lead to a ban on Hikvision, along with other Chinese surveillance giants, including Dahua and Huawei, after they were deemed a threat to national security. 

Hikvision strongly denies claims that its equipment could be hacked or used to relay data back to Beijing. When the US government added it to a sanctions list in October 2019, the company said it “respects human rights and takes our responsibility to protect people in the U.S. and the world seriously.”

The UK government is now under pressure to implement an urgent Whitehall security review, and the Department of Health has confirmed it’s conducting an internal investigation into how the video of the former Health Secretary was leaked. 

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The UK government is preparing to roll out its long-awaited coronavirus tracking app, called NHS Covid-19 and costing £35 million, on September 24.

The UK initially rejected a model of the app proposed by tech giants Apple and Google, which advocated for a model where tracking between people happened on the phones themselves. The tech giants said this approach would safeguard citizens’ privacy.

Under the government’s previous plan, the data from the health tracking apps would have been shuttled into a centralized system, potentially open to surveillance from police and intelligence agencies. 

“That would have been disastrous,” said Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, a UK organization advocating for digital rights. “But the government has sidestepped that they've done it a different way.”

On top of the privacy concerns, it was discovered that the UK-built app was incompatible with iPhones. In June, the UK abandoned the app it had tested on the Isle of Wight and partnered with tech giants Apple and Google to build a new app. 

The data culled from the tracking app, set for launch on September 24, will be stored locally on users’ phones and not shared with a central database. When arriving at restaurants, pubs, hair salons and cafes, people will be obliged to check in with the app so that they can be contacted later if a fellow patron turns out to be infected — and can do this by scanning the business’s QR codes, which the government have encouraged managers to display in their venues. 

“We need to use every tool at our disposal to control the spread of the virus – including cutting-edge technology,” the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement. “The launch of the app later this month across England and Wales is a defining moment and will aid our ability to contain the virus at a critical time.”

So far in the UK, manual sign-ins which have preceded the launch of the digital app have led to a more analogue form of data abuse – with bar staff reportedly using womens’ details to harass them via phone call and text. “Ultimately, if you've got a smartphone you’ll get a better privacy policy,” said Killock. “With the app, it’s unproblematic – I think people should be assured it works well.”

However, the app is just a small slice of the UK’s coronavirus contact tracing system. The wider system, called Test and Trace, which works via a website, is still a black hole when it comes to people’s data, according to Killock. 

According to a campaign spearheaded by the Open Rights Group, UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office, has not put serious pressure on the government when it comes to privacy concerns about the test and trace program. The Open Rights Group has drawn attention to the fact that there is no way of knowing if the public’s Test and Trace data is being handled safely. 

Last week, it emerged that the details of more than every coronavirus patient in Wales — 18,000 patients — were leaked online for 20 hours. In a statement, Public Health Wales said the names were published “in error.”

“Nobody can responsibly say that you should not engage with Test and Trace because it's a medical emergency,” said Killock, “but at the same time – can I advise that it's safe? I cannot.”

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Beard explained how the app, named NHS Covid-19, was initially met with enthusiasm by residents and that a reported 65% downloaded it. 

However, NHS Covid-19 — which used Bluetooth technology to collect data from phones — raised concerns among privacy advocates and experts, who said it did not allow users enough control over how their data was shared and stored. 

The app used a so-called centralized approach, that enabled the collection of information in a central database, to which law enforcement and intelligence agencies could potentially gain access. 

According to Gus Hosein, executive director at Privacy International, which has been monitoring coronavirus tracking apps, there is no information as to whether data was being stored centrally or what was being done with it.

“When the government embarked on their app, the app was necessary. The government was failing at containment, was failing at testing, and had no tracing initiatives. So the app was being asked to do the impossible: track our interactions that we don't remember, in the absence of a real contact tracing process; help us identify to others if we feel unwell, in the absence of a test; and require others to isolate in the absence of government leadership on quarantining. No app could do all of this,” said Hosein, via email.

After over a month on trial and $13.5m in costs, the UK government decided to withdraw the app. One of the reasons cited was the app’s poor performance with iPhones, owing to incompatibility with Apple’s iOS operating system. 

Now, the UK government has decided to develop a new app that could be more compatible with systems designed by Apple and Google. The new app is to run with a so-called decentralized approach, which is considered to be less invasive to privacy, allowing officials less access to user data. 

Coda Story has covered how Covid-19 apps have invoked privacy concerns in other European countries such as Italy and Germany, both of which have switched to decentralized apps after initially following a centralized model, similar to that used by NHS Covid-19. Our reporters have also looked into the implications of tracking apps in Pakistan and India.

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In our local newspaper, the County Press, Isle of Wight Councilor Andrew Garrett said that the app, which aims to track and trace Covid-19 cases, should be “ethical” and called for more information about “what is being tested, collected and stored.” 

The government has chosen to trial the app, NHS Covid-19, on an island since its results are more easily studied in a small population of 140,000 people. If successful, the app will be rolled out across the rest of the UK.

The latest figures on the Isle of Wight show 177 cases of Covid-19 and 47 deaths. While the numbers are small in comparison to other UK regions, our tourism industry has shut down and thousands of businesses have closed. Apart from an hour of daily exercise, I have only left my home just once every 10 days, to go shopping. Across the island, marinas are closed, seaside attractions shuttered and beaches are almost deserted.

A few days after the app became available in Apple and Google's app stores, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was upbeat about the trial. “People have been downloading it enthusiastically and I know that the plan is later in the month to make it more widely available as well,” he said during a daily news briefing.

Yet despite official assurances, concerns about how the app stores user data remain high. Earlier this month, it was reported that NHS Covid-19 had so far failed all of the tests required for inclusion in the National Health Service app library, including those on cyber security and performance.  Matthew Gould, CEO  of NHSX, the company behind the app, told members of the UK’s parliament that Britons will not be able to ask National Health Service administrators to delete their COVID-19 contact-tracking data from government servers.

I downloaded the app as soon as it became available and, one recent Friday, walked into town on my weekly shopping trip to see whether it had made any difference to my life. It was a sunny afternoon and there were significantly more cars and more pedestrians on the streets. Even though social distancing was being observed, I wondered whether the app had lulled everyone into a false sense of security.

NHS Covid-19 works via Bluetooth connection and records when two people using the app are within a certain distance of each other for longer than a specified amount of time. If one of those users later reports Covid-19 symptoms, all the others they have had significant contact with over recent days will be sent alerts and, if necessary, told to self-isolate. They will also receive a message directing them to a call center, to arrange for a swab test to be sent to their home.

On my walk, I found myself aware of my phone more than usual and when it pinged with a message, I nervously looked at the screen to see whether the app had been triggered. I bumped into a friend, Janette, and asked if she and her husband had downloaded the app. She is in her 50s, he is in his 70s, they both have it on their phones and say that they feel much safer. 

Janette said, “This is one of the few times that I’ve been out of the house in weeks. I’ve felt very nervous about being around people even though most are social distancing but at least now that I’ve got the app on my phone I’ll know if I’ve been close to anyone who has symptoms or has the virus and that makes me feel more confident.” 

A straw poll of friends has revealed that 100% of them have downloaded NHS Covid-19 and are unconcerned about privacy issues if it helps the track and trace process. Local businesses are using social media and LinkedIn to urge people to download the app. Across the island, 65% already have it.

On my shopping trip, I found myself giving other people a wider berth than usual around supermarket aisles. In the days since downloading the app, I feel safer knowing that I’ll be informed if I have been in contact with someone with Covid-19 symptoms. 

Privacy experts, however, say the app should offer more user control with regards to data. “People should have the option of deleting their data; they should have the option to refuse to be involved in clinical research especially when that could go on for a very long time with companies they don’t know about,” said Jim Killock, executive director of the UK’s Open Rights Group, an organization that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms. “If the app is to be useful at all, it needs as many people as possible to use it, so it does feel a little like the NHS has prioritized information over participation.”

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Ruth was born with hydrocephalus, a condition where a build-up of fluid exerts pressure on the brain. As a child, she was diagnosed with learning disabilities, epilepsy and autism. She is unable to speak, wash herself, feed herself, or go to the toilet alone, and her family say she requires constant care. 

In January, after nearly three decades of living at home with around-the-clock care, Ruth moved out aged 26. The government offered her a house of her own in the Glasgow suburb of Thornliebank, with a spare room for a live-in carer. Ruth loved horseriding and going out on day trips with her carers—she’d had a taste of independence, and was ready for more.

“We saw this as a move that would mean Ruth was set up for an independent life,” her brother David Cherry said. “Regardless of what happens to me or her mum or dad. And also so they could have a bit more of a life again and have some rest—they’ve given up a lot and worked very hard to be carers for my sister.” 

Ruth’s parents had one condition: they would only allow her to move if she wasn’t to be “subjected to technological overnight care.” These systems, known as “telecare,” had initially been installed in the properties of elderly people across Glasgow in a bid to reduce the need for overnight carers. Properties are fitted with a tablet, motion sensors, microphones and cameras from various private technology companies. Now they were being used for people with disabilities, too.

East Renfrewshire Council seemed to agree to their request, and Ruth moved in. 

Since 2006, when the Scottish Telecare Development Programme was first announced, several million pounds have been invested in the systems. In the UK, around 175,000 people have been provided with telecare systems by local authorities and housing associations.

For many, a home with sensors, cameras and microphones helps them regain some of their independence. But Ruth’s inability to communicate, complex needs and frequent distress means the tech system isn’t adequate. 

But during the summer, the council told Ruth she would have to go through a two-week trial period with the system after all, to assess her needs and decide whether the technology was suitable for her. “The way they put it, it wasn’t actually going to be put in: it was just part of the policy, it was absolutely necessary,” Cherry says. So the family reluctantly agreed to go ahead, hoping Ruth’s twenty-four hour care with a live-in carer would continue after the trial. 

But when the trial came to an end, the council came to a shock decision. They decided that the tech system was right for Ruth, and they would implement it in six days’ time. “That was difficult,” Cherry says. “There was no discussion, which my mum found very distressing. All along it was surprises and sudden changes.” 

Ruth is one of many people with disabilities whose lives and care have been changed by technology over the last twenty years. From the installation of unwanted tech-carer systems to the use of algorithms in welfare claims and the shift to online-only services, tech is having a bigger impact on the lives of vulnerable people than ever before. 

The disability tech market is booming; one report suggests that the industry will be worth $26bn by 2024. Many of the start-ups in this field are working exclusively with consumer tech, creating software to help deaf people make phone calls, for example, or improving on power-assisted wheelchairs.

Others are working with state departments—U.S. based company UiPath has recently been contracted by the Department of Work and Pensions, responsible for social security in the UK, to “reduce costs and increase efficiencies” by automating routine tasks. UiPath “robots” were employed to tackle a backlog of 30,000 pension claims. UiPath said it would have taken a human “several thousands of hours” to deal with the claims. The automated system performed the task in two weeks. 

The United Nations has described the UK government’s rollout of some of these cost-cutting measures as “evidence of grave and systematic violation of the rights of persons with disabilities.” Earlier this year, in his final report on the impact of austerity on human rights in Britain, Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, said UK ministers were in a state of denial about the impact of their policies. 

Impacts can be “really negative, really fast”

Ruth is now left alone for up to ten hours a night, and though her mother sometimes sleeps in the room intended for her overnight carer, she’s been told not to interact with the system in case she interferes with any of the sensors. 

“She couldn’t face leaving Ruth alone,’ David Cherry says. “But part of that was that the social work [department] said she wasn’t allowed to interact with the technology at all, or respond to her cries or check on her. She has to just let her cry.” 

The technology itself hasn’t been foolproof, either. On one occasion, the telecare system was shut off earlier than intended, leaving Ruth alone and uncared for forty-five minutes. Nothing happened, but her brother puts this more down to luck than anything else. 

Cases like Ruth’s are extreme. But there are other, more everyday examples of life being made difficult for those who don’t have access to a computer or have low digital literacy. 

Government cuts to public services have led to a shrinking of the workforce. As of March 2018, the public sector represented 16.5% of the total UK workforce, the smallest share since comparable records began in 1999. Online platforms have replaced social workers who once addressed local needs. 

“So many of these services are just online now,” said Jo Mitchell, a welfare benefits advisor at the Disability Law Service, a charity that provides free legal advice to people with disabilities. “Online housing benefits, council tax exemptions, changes to address... even to download a form you have to be able to have access to a PC.” 

Mitchell said a few of her clients are able to use local libraries, where there is limited support available. For many people, “it’s just impossible.” 

These everyday barriers may seem a million miles away from more extreme situations like Ruth Cherry’s. But Dr. Joanna Redden, co-director of Cardiff University’s Data Justice Lab, believes it’s important to “not differentiate between technological replacements of services and frontline workers.”

In other areas of Britain’s welfare state, algorithms are also replacing people. The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions now spends £8 million a year on building what have been dubbed “welfare robots”: automated systems that assess citizen’s benefits applications. Instead of a human, the government will task this new “intelligent automation garage”, built by the U.S. company UiPath, to judge whether citizens are telling the truth about their housing and childcare costs.

It isn’t yet clear what will happen if a citizen’s claim is rejected by the system. “The impact [of such systems] can be really negative, really fast, and leave people feeling completely powerless because of their lack of ability to find recourse,” Redden said. 

“Technology can be absolutely amazing for disabled people,” Andy Greene, an organizer with activist group Disabled People Against the Cuts, said. “If you look at social media, even—it connects a lot of disabled people who are marginalized and isolated from their communities.”

“But as usual, we only embrace things if it seems to turn a profit, and that seems to be the overriding principle when we decide whether or not technology will be used.”

Greene also points out that people with disabilities are excluded from the conversation around how such technology is used. 

If care is parsed through a profit-making lens, it’s “never going to be about us, or about making our lives easier,” Greene concluded. 

The Cherry family are still fighting for the telecare system to be removed and for the reinstatement of full-time overnight carers for Ruth. Nearly 100,000 people have signed a petition advocating that Ruth have a carer instead of the tech system. Ruth’s doctors, the fire service and her local Member of Parliament have all spoken out against the council’s decision.

East Renfrewshire Council, who did not respond to requests for comment, have told the family it is “no longer willing to discuss” the issue, and have referred the family’s lawyer to the Scottish social services ombudsman, which investigates complaints. They will now have to go through a lengthy complaints process before they get an answer. 

“If someone with complex needs like Ruth doesn't get looked after by humans at night - who does?” said Cherry. “Who does get looked after by actual people anymore?”

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But that is exactly what some British political analysts say it happening, as they watch Rees-Mogg’s influence rising at a time when some of his political policies and financial positions have aligned with some of the Kremlin’s own. The latest example occurred last week when Rees-Mogg took a public stance supporting Turning Point UK, a non-profit political group. Turning Point’s US arm has been linked to St Petersburg’s most notorious troll farm.

In the UK, Rees-Mogg’s rising appeal has provided an opportunity for the Kremlin to amplify the social tensions that have erupted over Brexit.

“Jacob Rees-Mogg is someone who has a public persona that is different to traditional technocratic politicians,” says Adam Hug, director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank in London. “Russia has an interest in disturbing the political landscape in the context of Brexit....and amplifying voices that seek to challenge the political mainstream. The primary motivation is stirring the pot.”

Rees-Mogg did not reply to requests to his office from Coda Story seeking comment. He has previously professed strong anti-Kremlin policies, including calling for stiffer economic sanctions against Moscow.

Last week, Rees-Mogg participated in the launch of Turning Point UK, the British branch of a US far-right youth pressure group with alleged ties to Russia.

Turning Point is known for its anti-Islam rhetoric and accused of boosting its numbers with racists. According to a December 2018 report commissioned by the U.S. Senate, Turning Point US’s social media activity was regularly co-opted and reposted by the Internet Research Agency (IRA) – otherwise known as the Mueller-indicted Troll Farm in St Petersburg.

Rees-Mogg didn’t seem concerned about the controversy, though. Last week, Mogg, alongside several other Tory MPs, posted a Turning Point UK launch video that condemned “the left wing hate mob.” “They want to silence your voice...but their time is up,” the video says, to a pounding beat. “People of all ages make up their own minds. The left has no monopoly on the ‘young’,” Rees-Mogg tweeted, linking to the video.

As his online influence has grown, so have revelations of other relationships between Rees-Mogg and entities with strong Russian connections.

This isn’t the first time Rees-Mogg’s online presence has aligned with that of the Russian bots.

The three hashtags #Moggmentum, #Ready4Mogg #Mogg4PM first gained traction during the 2017 U.K. general election in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Meme pages sprang up on social media, celebrating Rees-Mogg’s caustic wit and unflinchingly hard Brexit stance. In July 2017, when Mogg announced the birth of his sixth child via Instagram, the Internet went wild, in part because the politician named his son “Sixtus,” the Latin word for sixth. “Meet the living, walking meme of Conservative British Politics,” one Mashable headline ran. #Moggmentum took such hold that a young fan from Doncaster even got a Moggmentum tattoo.

Then, the bots came out in force.

The hashtags were picked up by Kremlin-linked social media accounts, and Russian bots began amplifying Rees-Mogg’s influence, according to an analysis carried out by Byline.com journalist J.J. Patrick using open source tools at the University of Michigan.

“Fresh network analysis shows a clear pattern of bot usage by Moggmentum,” Patrick wrote in February 2018. “With a network of accounts pushing Kremlin propaganda from George Soros memes to fake news around EU immigration, Rees-Mogg is now firmly embedded as a popular figure for Russia to champion.”

Throughout 2018, Rees-Mogg’s Twitter influence more than doubled, jumping from just under 100,000 followers to his current 233,000 followers. As Theresa May negotiated her Brexit deal in Brussels, Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group (ERG), a small faction of Conservative Brexiteers, became a powerful force in fighting for a hard Brexit. It was the ERG who then spearheaded a vote of no confidence in Theresa May in December 2018, after she delayed the vote on her controversial Brexit deal.

In the wake of the Sergei Skripal poisonings in March 2018, Political Scrapbook, The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday reported that Rees-Mogg’s investment firm, Somerset Capital Management, had holdings in Russian companies sanctioned by both the United States and the European Union.

While Rees-Mogg does not himself manage the investments, he remains a co-founder and partner of SCM, where he normally earns £14,500 every month for 30 hours’ work. It is unclear how much of Rees-Mogg’s own money is invested with the firm, or the vehicles that are vested in the Russian companies. According to SCM’s portfolio, published by Maitland Group in September 2018, the company’s investments in EU and US-sanctioned Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, were worth £42.6 million; positions in Yandex, the Russian search engine known for passing confidential data to the FSB were worth £12.3 million and Mail.ru, the social media giant and parent of VK – the Russian version of Facebook – were worth £7.1 million.

Somerset Capital Management declined to comment on their Russian investments.

The SCM report notes the spring and summer of 2018 “was characterised by elevated levels of geopolitical risk, which saw fears over mooted U.S. sanctions hit our Russian exposure.”

In an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Marr, Rees-Mogg said he was a supporter of tougher sanctions against Russia but he defended the investments of SCM, saying “We can’t run our investments on my political opinions.”

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