On April 27, Musk took a cheap shot at Gadde, mocking past decisions made by her team. Gadde, who is female and hails from India, soon faced a barrage of harassing messages, including racist and sexist insults. Musk was all but proving that point that many had made surrounding his bid to buy the company: under his ownership, Twitter may become a much more hostile place, especially for women and LGBTQ people.

Whether it’s a top executive at Twitter, a BBC reporter in Iran, or a Muslim feminist activist in India, or a journalist at The Washington Post in the U.S., women and sexual minorities — especially those with a public profile — face various kinds of online abuse, from violent threats and hate speech on social media to doxxing attacks that expose their personal information. Since the start of the pandemic, online abuse and harassment has become more severe for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.

Many advocates say tech companies should do more to tackle online abuse, but with people like Musk in charge, it’s hard to see this happening any time soon.

For the foreseeable future, it will be up to those who are targeted to take individual actions to protect themselves. Last week, I spoke with a few key voices dealing with online harassment and gathered their insights.

Speak out, but don’t feed the trolls

Zeba Warsi, a journalist from India, has extensive experience with online abuse. 

“In the beginning I used to reply to every single troll who would lash out with abusive language or be disrespectful. I used to respond to them and then I started realizing when I would respond to people — especially to accounts which were just like bots, with close to no followers, who were thriving on hate — I was in fact giving them more traction by engaging with them. So then I eventually stopped responding.”

Though it doesn’t mean she’s not speaking out. “Address the issue on your own platform, post about it, tweet it, but don’t engage with them. Don't give them the platform, they don't deserve it,” Warsi told me.

The latest major attack she endured was in January, when she appeared in a fake auction app in India, called Bulli Bai, that included profiles and photographs of more than 100 Muslim women, offering them up “for sale.” Like Warsi, most of the women featured in the app are Muslim and do public-facing work — among its targets were politicians, other journalists, and the Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai.

She said disengaging with the trolls has helped her mental wellbeing. Warsi is now pursuing a journalism degree at Columbia University.

“I decided to take a break from my career in India and get this distance from all that hate. And despite all that distance, it still haunts me. You wake up to it, on the 1st of January, the beginning of new year and you get so many messages from your friends and colleagues that your picture is being plastered on this disgusting, degrading, humiliating, fake auction.”

“It gets to you,” she said. I had a very distressing phone call with my father back home in India. He was really upset and he was really scared for my safety, even though I'm not physically in India, because that's the kind of fear that it creates.”

Separate the personal from the professional

Warsi also recommends keeping personal and professional lives separated online as much as possible. 

“I have this sort of division between what is public for me and what is private. I think it helps me to have more control over my social media. So my Twitter is public where I put out my work and my Instagram is private, which is only for my friends and family. So I keep my account private so random Twitter or Instagram trolls are not going to find me there,” Warsi said. 

Keep a record

Gwen Taylor, a program manager at Glitch, a U.K.-based nonprofit working to eliminate online abuse, suggests documenting the abuse.

“Documenting online abuse is a really important step, not only to empower yourself to understand the patterns that are happening, but also to empower you to report it if you decide to do so, and it’s validating, in a way, that it is difficult and it is traumatic,” they said.

Be an ‘active bystander’

Warsi and Taylor both said when it comes to online abuse, having support and community is essential. But being a part of that supporting network also requires knowledge of how to do it.

Taylor says reaching out to people is extremely useful, as online abuse can be so isolating, but it requires thoughtfulness: “Whether you know them or not, just don't take action without their consent. Online abuse can feel very disempowering. You might think you're doing the right thing by reporting it, or by replying to it, but actually that might not be what the person wants. So reaching out, checking in with the person. Maybe giving them options of like, 'I was thinking of doing this. Is that okay? Is there something else you want?'”

Having a network that can report abuse on your behalf can be very powerful and much more effective than doing it alone, says Taylor.

They pointed to a group of women parliamentarians across countries in Africa who had formed a WhatsApp group to organize this kind of support. “Whenever one of them receives online abuse they go into chat and they're like, 'Can you help?' It's really powerful, having this network that empowered people that can go in and be like 'Yes, I'm going to come and report that for you and help,'” Taylor told me.

Amplify their voice, not their victimhood

The other advice Taylor gave on how to empower people being harassed and abused online is to amplify the person, not the abuse.

“Not amplifying the post that's getting the abuse, but in general, just amplifying their messages, their work. If it's an artist, retweeting. If it's somebody writing, saying that you like their writing or encouraging other people to read it,” they told me. “Because often what happens in incidents of online abuse is that the conversation ends up getting totally focused around the abuse. And actually, we want to take away from that. We don't want to give the person being abusive that power.”

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At Coda, we’ve covered stories of law enforcement and other state agencies using surveillance technology that leaves people and their data vulnerable. Here are some examples of seemingly innocuous monitoring tools and techniques that can nevertheless put people’s privacy at risk, along with one example of how nature can fight back — and win.

1. Bluetooth headphones: Plenty of people use these  — we see them everywhere. But convenient as they are, they also have a tendency to expose our data. A few months ago, I spoke with Bjorn Martin Hegnes, an IT researcher at Norof University in Oslo, Norway. He built a kit for detecting Bluetooth signals and took a long bicycle ride around Oslo. Over the course of 12 days, he tapped into roughly 1.7 million Bluetooth signals and collected corresponding metadata from 129 headsets belonging to people in close proximity to him as he rode along. 

With this data in hand, he was able to identify the locations of headset owners, their everyday routes and sometimes even their names, since people often name their devices after themselves. He concluded that devices using static, non-changing MAC addresses — a type of device address that never changes — were easily detectable. 

“I showed in my project that when you have enough data points, you can find where the person goes to school, where he lives. You can get a lot of information from a person that has a static MAC address on their device,” he told me.

2. Smart coffee mugs and other household ‘things’: Everyday objects and electronic devices that are connected to the internet, part of the so-called “Internet of Things,” have become increasingly popular. But how smart are they really? Devices like smart fridges or connected coffee mugs don’t have the same security mechanisms as our computers or phones do, leaving users vulnerable to security breaches like hacking. While it’s hard to imagine what harms could come from a fridge hack, this kind of maneuver can lead to scarier outcomes than you might think.

“Someone who finds a vulnerability in your refrigerator and then uses it to get onto your network, they're not trying to spoil your food by changing the temperature in your refrigerator,” said security expert Window Snyder, who spoke on “How to fix the Internet,” a podcast hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They're using your refrigerator as a launch point to see if there are any other interesting devices on your network.” At that point, devices that do contain sensitive data about you are suddenly more vulnerable to compromise. 

3. Exercise apps: Strava, a popular GPS-powered app that maps your workout, also has a social network feature where people can follow each other, upload and share their exercises and leave “kudos” after a successful run. In 2017, when Strava released so-called “heat maps” that showed the activities of every single user who had ever uploaded their GPS points, military analysts were quick to express concern. The published map included workout routes of US military personnel, making it easy to identify military bases abroad. 

“Strava’s default settings mean your data is automatically broadcast to other users. Fail to hide yourself on FlyBys (which allows users to see other athletes’ full names, times and pictures) … or forget to activate Privacy Zones (which block out areas where workouts frequently begin and end) and you’re essentially slapping a big ‘come find me’ sticker on yourself, 24/7,” Katie O'Malley wrote for Elle in 2020, in a confessional essay on becoming a “Strava stalker” during Covid lockdown. 

4. Fake pill bottles: In 2013, New York City police tried to crack down on pharmacy robberies of prescription painkillers by attaching tracking devices to several pill bottles. They filled the bottles with placebo pills, labeled them with the names of popular opioids like OxyContin and then stocked them on pharmacy shelves. The idea was that if a person tried to steal a bottle, police would be able to track and identify the thief in short order. In at least a few cases, the scheme actually worked.

5. Australian magpies: We end with a story of nature outsmarting GPS trackers. Earlier this year, behavioral ecologist Dominique Potvin and her team of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia attached tiny tracking devices to the several Australian magpies (a common local bird), to monitor their flight patterns and other behavior. But the birds refused to comply. They started pecking at each others’ tracking devices, and ultimately succeeded at removing all of them. The researchers debated whether the magpies were trying to help one another break free of the restrictive technology, or if they were simply interested in the shiny objects. Ultimately, Potvin’s team decided the magpies were too smart to be tracked by GPS. They will not be using it on the birds again.

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TikTok restricted its services in Russia in early March, citing Russia’s "anti-fake news" law, but many users are circumventing the restrictions all the same. And plenty of the platform’s one billion monthly users worldwide continue to comment and report on the war, while others are using the tool to spread related disinformation through commentary, dance challenges, and lip-syncing trends.

Here are some of the widespread trends that social media researchers have uncovered on TikTok:

1. In early March, U.S.-based media watchdog Media Matters published a report by researcher Abbie Richards identifying 180 TikTok users who had posted nearly-identical videos showing a person kneeling while holding an English-language sign that condemns “Russophobia” and invokes “info wars.” Captions typically include the hashtags #RussianLivesMatter or #RLM.

Richards notes that the video captions also include strikingly similar typographical errors, indicating that they are part of a highly coordinated effort. Some gave themselves away: In what could only have been an error, some of the video captions included Russian-language instructions, such as “You can publish, description: Russian Lives Matter #RLM.”

2. Media Matters also spotted Russian influencers on TikTok making hand gestures to form the letter “Z” while doing a viral TikTok dance. Z has become a symbol of support for Russia’s military. In a more bizarre trend, young women posed for selfies by making the Z letter with their hands, proclaiming that this is how “real women” take selfies.

3. A report by VICE showed how Russian TikTok influencers have been recruited by an anonymous Telegram channel to post videos with pro-Kremlin messaging about the invasion, in exchange for payment. Operators of the Telegram channel instructed the TikTokers, some of whom have over a million followers, to justify the attack on Ukraine by defending their own people against the government in Kyiv. This aligns with Putin’s false narrative that the Ukrainian government has systematically targeted Russian-speaking people in the ongoing conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian government in the eastern Donbas region (Putin has even referred to this as a genocide).  TikTok influencer Yarra_M observed how people in dozens of these videos appear to be using the exact same script as one another, with some simply reading it from their phones.

4. Marieke Kuypers, a Dutch user who describes herself as an “unofficial TikTok fact-checker,” recently noticed TikTok users amplifying Putin’s rhetoric of justifying Ukraine’s invasion by pointing to NATO’s role in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and its airstrikes in Kosovo in 1999. These actual events came in response to violence by Serbian forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, following years of conflict over Kosovo’s attempts to secede from Serbia. But in the videos, TikTokers act out a dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, where Ukraine refuses to stop bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 (although this never actually happened) and then in 2022 the roles are reversed, with Ukraine pleading to stop the shelling and Russia refusing to do so.

5. In the days leading up to the invasion, when Russia recognized the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk (both located in the Donbas region) as independent republics, more than 1,000 Russian TikTokers started posting videos that used a mirror effect. Videos featured people fist-bumping their own reflections, pretending to be “two brothers,” Donbas and Russia, and lip-syncing to a Russian song, “Brother for Brother.” The hashtags read: “We don’t leave our own behind,” and “We’re together,” in line with the Kremlin’s misleading message that people in the Donbas need to be saved from the “Nazi” Ukrainian government and that Russia will come to their rescue. 

The videos were first spotted by reporters for the popular independent Russian news site TJournal, which is now blocked in Russia, among other media outlets featuring opinions that dissent from the Kremlin narrative. Soon other TikTokers started using the same trend and filter to mock influencers who had “sold” their videos for government propaganda.

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Maria Sonevytsky’s work has something to say about that. She has been studying Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s historical music for years. A professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, she is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, she spoke to me about how Ukraine’s musical inheritance can provide context and insight into Ukrainian history and national identity.

Tell me about your work in Ukrainian music and how it helps shed light on the current situation.

I decided that I wanted to divide my research between Crimea and western Ukraine.

And what I started observing was that many people had very complex feelings about whether they wanted Ukraine to go in the direction of the European Union or Russia. Everyone I spent time with was not in favor of going toward Russia, but they were also critical of the European Union. They didn't have simple ideas that Europe was some sort of utopia. I saw this expressed constantly through music.

My project started because Ruslana, a Ukrainian pop star, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004. It was a really big deal for some people. They believed, “Uh-huh! Finally, we can show that Ukraine is part of Europe.” For others, it was very embarrassing. They said, “Eurovision is kitsch, and this is not how we want our Ukraine to be defined.” 

It became a very fascinating glimpse into just how complex it is to think about how people want to position themselves. So music became a lens through which I could view how culture was, in some ways, imagining a future for Ukraine.

Why is this important? 

I think that's so important, especially when we're talking about traditional music. I'm usually writing about some sort of hybrid music that uses a combination of traditional gestures with popular music forms. But even when we're talking about just traditional music, these are all also forward-facing. They're expressing a wish for the future — even if just a wish for the survival of a past. 

Right now, what we're seeing is not only a denial that Ukraine has a past, but a rejection on the part of the Russians that there could be a Ukrainian future. And these musicians are saying, “No, we have a past and we are projecting it also into the future.”

It's not a simple history. It's a very complicated history. Ukraine has had a very complicated relationship to its project of statehood, as do many other countries around the world, including Russia. But Ukrainian history exists and we can actually hear it if we listen to the history of Ukrainian music.

Your book discusses how music got dragged into Russia’s propaganda on Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis. Could you tell me more about that?

There's one chapter in the book about the Maidan revolution, the band called The Dakh Daughters, and their performance of a song, that they did not want to claim had politics, but they performed it during the revolution and sure enough, the Russian internet immediately started calling them neo-Nazis, neo-fascists.

This is about how Ukrainians are not allowed the possibility of existing as anything but nationalists, that Russian propaganda does not let them have any agency outside of nationalism. And the Dakh Daughters are a clear example of a group that actually wanted so much not to be pigeonholed as Ukrainian musicians. They wanted to be just musicians, they didn't want to have to serve the state. But they did want to show their support. They ended up performing this quite apolitical song and immediately were called neo-fascists. 

If you know the Russian playbook, this is a very old strategy, it goes back to the Russian Empire and it was prevalent in the Soviet Union as well.

What has surprised you the most in your study of how Ukrainian musicians think about Ukraine’s history?

I'm writing a book on the late-Soviet Ukrainian rock scene and specifically in Kyiv. And I'm writing about the first Ukrainian punk rock band to sing in Ukrainian, Vopli Vidopliassova. 

They are all Russian-speaking, and as one of the members told me, they all grew up in the "Russkiy Mir” [Russian world]. They started singing in Ukrainian, and they claimed that at the time, it really wasn't a political statement. They just thought it sounded cool. And they were making fun, in some ways, of the stereotypes of Ukrainians as these kind of hopeless hillbillies.

Most of the band members have now switched to speaking only in Ukrainian for different reasons. In one interview, [a band member] came to understand himself as a formerly colonized subject in a way that he did not understand himself to be in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he really just thought of himself as a punk rocker in Kyiv and wasn't really that concerned about Ukrainian identity. But in the 1990s, when he started learning about the history of Ukrainian poets who had been repressed and reading the books that had been censored, he started understanding that some of this internalized feeling of inferiority had been part of a colonial campaign.

This has been really poignant for me, to hear these people as they learn and understand the degree to which Ukraine has been targeted by deliberate campaigns that say they have no history of their own, that they have no culture of their own.

I've always asked myself, is it fair to think about Ukrainians as colonized people? There's no question they were in the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes, these were colonized peoples, but they were divided between empires. The Soviet Union is a much more complicated case. It wasn't exactly an empire. And of course, Ukrainians were central in leading it at times.

What songs have you been thinking about as you watch the war in Ukraine?

One of the songs I've been thinking about a lot lately is the song “1944” by Jamala, a singer with Crimean Tatar heritage and who has crossed the border with her children, but whose husband has remained behind to defend their home.

When she wrote and performed it in 2016, it was really a plea to understand the plight of Crimean Tatars after the forced occupation of Crimea. And now it's become a plea to understand the plight of the whole of Ukraine.

I've been thinking a lot about Taras Kompanichenko, who has been a key figure in the revival of 17th-to-19th century repertoires. He is now serving in the army and playing music to boost morale for Ukrainian soldiers.

And I'm thinking about very ordinary musicians, non-celebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war. I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they're surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.

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TAULT, a non-profit literary agency and translation house, works with dozens of prominent Ukrainian authors and translators to spread Ukrainian contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. When Russia invaded last month, TAULT launched a project to publish essays and dispatches translated from Ukrainian.

I asked Kate Tsurkan, a translator, editor and the associate director at TAULT, for her recommendations of first-person accounts written by Ukrainian writers to better understand the war. Here are the five books available as English translations that she recommended.

1. “Absolute Zero” by Artem Chekh. Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyn.

Kate Tsurkan: “He is a writer but he joined the army in 2015 and this book is based off of a post that he started writing on Facebook during the war, and he transformed it into a book afterwards.

There's a very funny episode where in his military barracks, they adopt a kitten who has cerebral palsy and they fight over who will cuddle with the cat until he starts pissing in all of their sleeping bags and causing havoc for them. But he also has horrible stories like one when a husband tells his wife the things that they see on the front lines and she dies from a heart attack. It's filled with very interesting standalone anecdotes that portray the banality and the grotesque horror of war and how it affects not only soldiers, but people who are trying to get updates from back home. Chekh actually went back. He enlisted. He is on the frontlines again right now, unfortunately.”

2. “Mondegreen” by Volodymyr Rafeenko. Translated by Mark Andryczyk.

“When we are talking about first-person perspectives or memoir, I think we have to expand our perception and understanding of that because a lot of writers use their personal experiences to explore the world through fiction, for example. Volodymyr Rafeenko is from Donetsk. He was an internally displaced person when the war started.

It's very autobiographical, or an autofiction, we could say, because this is a book about a man from Donetsk who gets displaced because of the war and ends up in Kyiv, much like Rafeenko himself. The text is very visceral. It's interwoven with not only his memories of Donetsk before the war, but of his ancestors who had to deal with Russian aggression. And it deals on a large level with language, because this is the first novel that Volodymyr Rafeenko wrote in Ukrainian. Prior to that, he wrote several novels in Russian. He starts to explore not only the isolation that one feels when you are forced to flee your home, but also the isolation one feels when you start to switch from one language to another. And along with that from one culture, one mentality, to another.” 

3. “Apricots of Donbas” by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina.

“I think poetry can also be very autobiographical, in a sense. Yakimchuk is from Luhansk, and she became very famous for this poetry collection. It was released by Lost Horse Press to great acclaim. Yakimchuk's poetry is very interesting because it deals with a very heavy topic about military combat, about death, war, violence, but she uses very feminine language, sometimes even rather childlike language, to offer this visceral look into war. She's absolutely one of the greatest poets, I think, in Ukraine today.”

4. “The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear” by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky.

“This is a poetry selection that Ilya Kaminsky, the famous poet, edited and the Khersonsky couple really explore the ideas of propaganda, of relations between Ukraine and Russia, of this historical roots of the conflict and how the trauma from decades, even centuries ago still influences relations between Ukraine and Russia today. This is also an example where the autobiographical makes its way into poetry.” 

5. “A New Orthography: Poems” by Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin.

“It's from several of Zhadan's recent collections, from several of his recent collections from Ukrainian. He's exploring not just soldiers' perspectives of the war, but that of grave diggers, priests. He has a really empathetic way of looking at the situation because he is from Luhansk himself.”

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The post How Ukrainian writers have experienced the war in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

Or is it a terrible break with that past, the result of Putin’s separation from reality during two years of pandemic isolation?

Analysts, politicians, security and military experts are arguing over it now.

“I wouldn't want to slip into that temptation to look back and say, ‘We've missed something that was obvious all the way along.’ It wasn't obvious,” said Ben Noble, Russian politics professor at University College London and co-author of ​​”Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?”

“And that's the reason why lots of people are shocked, not only internationally, but also domestically, including members of the political and the economic elite in Russia.”

Precious N Chatterje-Doody, a politics and International Studies professor at Open University, U.K. and author of “Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories” also believes locating a premeditated grand plan in Putin’s actions is wrong. 

“One of the constant features of Putin's state leadership has been that he likes to make things unclear and to have multiple options. And in hindsight, he looks like a master chess player that had this planned all along,” she said. “I don't think that's usually true. I think he's a pragmatist. So he gives himself multiple options. It keeps people guessing. And then he kind of responds to situations as they occur.”

It’s impossible to read Putin’s mind. But Chatterje-Doody, Noble and other political scientists, journalists and writers, who have closely studied the country’s politics, identify political forces in Russia that the Putin government has harnessed to build the authoritarian state we see today. Here’s the breakdown.

Why is Putin claiming there are powerful Nazis in Ukraine?

“It's often misunderstood in the West, especially that Russia never reckoned with its totalitarian past, with mass repressions in the thirties under Stalin, basically a genocide of its own people,” said Olga Khvostunova, a Russian journalist and a researcher at the Institute of Modern Russia, in New York City.

Instead, Putin began emphasizing that Russia is a descendant of the powerful Soviet Union, the regime that saved the world from Nazism and crafted his rhetoric around it, especially during periods when he suffered from political unpopularity, said Khvostunova.

Instead of offering a unifying vision of the future that could lead to better post-Soviet Russia, Putin recycled the past. “What he offered as a unifying platform for the Russians was the vision of the past, which is, by the way, a very significant part of the fascist ideology — the great past that we need to restore,” said Khvostunova.

Putin’s campaign focused on glorifying the Soviet regime’s victory of Nazism, but distorted or minimized the history of mass repressions and massacres.

“It's basically the idea that Soviet soldiers paid for world freedom from Nazis and with their own blood, and this is used as a kind of constant refrain. It's like a key feature of contemporary Russian national identity,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Deflecting contemporary events onto World War II tropes also has been a key part of Putin’s narrative around the Ukraine invasion. Like most effective political propaganda, it has resonated at times because it contains a grain of truth. In the 2014 pro-democracy protests in Kyiv that ousted a pro-Russian president and in the subsequent war in the eastern Donbas region, military units aligned with neo-Nazism, like the Azov Battalion, were a part of Ukraine’s National Guard. In the 2019 elections, Ukraine’s far-right couldn’t even gather enough votes to enter parliament, and a Jewish comedian was elected president in a landslide victory. 

“What better way to weave doubt about the prevailing narrative in the West than to pick genuinely true bits of information and make them seem more significant than they are,” said Chatterje-Doody.

Strengthening the state against foreign interference

Since 2012, Russia has a law that allows the government to label NGOs and individuals receiving funds from abroad as “foreign agents,” subjecting them to reporting their every purchase at stores.

Informing this legislation is a foreign interference narrative that holds outside powers responsible for destabilizing the country.

“By claiming that the domestic opposition are traitors, the authorities can turn around and say, ‘you’re members of the opposition, but you are acting as agents of the West. You are traitors. You're not members of the loyal opposition,’” Noble, the University College London professor, explained. 

But it is in the last couple of years that the law has been applied much more aggressively against journalists and independent Russian newsrooms like Meduza, TV Rain and Mediazona.

Noble said the underlying message to the Russian populace is a powerful one. “You are not a critical independent journalist pointing out real problems in the country. You are creating false narratives and you are being paid and supported by people in the West. And the goal, your goal and those of your paymasters, the puppeteers, is to undermine the country.”

Protecting ‘traditional values’

The government’s repressive turn crystallized in campaigns against the LGBTQ community, portraying them as liberals out to destroy “traditional family values.” In 2013, Putin criminalized “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” 

Putin’s “anti-wokeness” ramped up support among right-wing and conservative politicians and influencers internationally. Russia has become the important power behind the World Congress of Families — a network of right-wing Christians opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Putin has strong ties with far-right European politicians including Marine Le Pen, of the National Rally party in France, former Italian deputy prime minister and leader of Italian far-right League party Matteo Salvini, and Milos Zeman, the president of Czech Republic.

“It's quite a savvy, communicative strategy in a lot of ways because this anti-political correctness or anti-wokeness movement is actually gaining a lot of ground in the West, especially online,“ Chatterje-Doody said. “And when you look at how the Russian regime tries to use the online environment — sowing seeds of dissent by using particular small facts and weaving them into something bigger — this is a really big social debate it can get involved in.”  

Understanding the arc of Putin’s thinking provides some clarity on current events, according to Sam Greene, the director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London.

“It is about understanding how it is that Vladimir Putin came to be in a position where this war makes sense to him — it doesn't make sense to anybody else but it makes sense to him,” Greene said. “It also helps explain why it's so difficult for ordinary Russians, who don't like the war, to do anything about it.” 

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The eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine has often been drowned in disinformation and tainted political narratives. Belorusets set out to correct this. I spoke with her about the importance of telling unheard stories, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book shows what everyday life has been like for eastern Ukrainian factory workers, florists, manicurists, cosmetologists since 2014. Why did you decide that these fragmentary stories had to be told?

In this tragic situation in eastern Ukraine, violence emerges as an unnatural reality imposed from outside. Discussions usually center around big politics and trying to stop the aggressor. And that's normal. But my work allows me to look at the situation in more detail, to go deeper to the level where the interpersonal is more important than big politics.

I wanted to make this part of reality more visible and reaffirm its right to exist. A right that is very easily overlooked during radical military violence and in international discourse that acts not on behalf of a person, but a continent, country or region.

In one of the stories, “The Stars,” women sheltering in basements decide when it’s safe to go outside based on horoscopes. They don’t know if they are being shelled by Russian-backed militants or the Ukrainian troops and some of them even believe it’s Canada bombing to get the town’s coal. Was the story meant to illustrate the dizzying effect of a constant information war?

In 2014/2015 the Ukrainian media did not know what to do with this catastrophe. The inhabitants of these towns found themselves under attack. And, if before, every single killing of this kind without a trial would have been a crime requiring press and investigation, the new situation was different. People were dying in the streets from shelling, and the media said nothing about these victims, neither Ukrainian nor Russian. Moreover, Russian media began their toxic work of completely distorting the reality, creating numerous contradictory, inconsistent interpretations of events. 

The sharp devaluation of one's own life and these media mirages, media hallucinations, led to all kinds of rumors being spread among the residents of many small towns in Donbas. But most fundamentally, you wished to trust yourself more than any external sources of information. But how do you find your own credibility when there's fire under your feet? This is what my story is about.

Why are most of the protagonists in stories women? 

I didn’t want to bring everything to women’s bodies or women’s voices. But it turned out that the majority of people, whose experience stuck with me or seemed to me important, were women.

Many women were very honest with me exactly because they thought their experience wasn’t as important as that of men and hence so insignificant that talking about it wasn’t even dangerous. The conflict between self-negation and self-expression of those women — these elements seemed very valuable to me while writing.

Yet for me it’s very important to bring this not exclusively to women’s experiences but rather to the experiences that are most often seen among women, the experiences of living through those events as if from the second row of history.

What do people get wrong about how war affects people?

Sometimes, especially in the cities on the frontline, the collateral damage is coming from the Ukrainian side, not only from the Russian side. People live with the constant feeling of danger and incredible unfairness. 

Often people from Kyiv go to these places, like international journalists or people trying to help, and they ask these people what they think about politics. Sometimes they say, "We hate the Russians and the Ukrainians, leave us alone." And these very honest words are often used against them, that they are not patriotic enough, or they're not pro-Ukrainian enough. Maybe they don't understand what the political stakes are, but in my view, it's a very Soviet attitude towards people whose situation is so far from any kind of normalcy that you cannot force them to have some kind of “right” view. 

I think these people are heroes because they are trying to go on with their everyday peaceful life in a war zone. And maybe they can show us all how you can remain a person in a conflict, in the situation telling you, "You are not a human now, you can die every day just because you are crossing the street."

There’s a recurring character in your stories — Andrea. At times she gets very excited about the future but at other times she is very pessimistic about her own life as well as Ukraine’s future, and her presence is always fleeting. What is her role in your book?

The character of Andrea is all about love, about infatuation and connection between two women. She sounds negative and is complaining but complaining is the start of becoming a revolutionary. She is about the relations among different realities in Ukraine, about their capacity to simultaneously hate and love one another. Because in the contexts of such diversity, even mutual dislike can be productive, becoming the part of the exchange, which can be a stage to growth and development.

The post Exploring the everyday lives of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

From polling, data research or scientific analysis, here are some of the most important recent studies about disinformation.

1) Remember the fake news campaign that brought disinformation into the mainstream discussion? Yes, that one: Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. This research from 2018 by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a leading computer network analysis firm, for the United States Senate was, at the time, the most comprehensive analysis of Russian meddling. The researchers analyzed millions of posts and reactions online and determined how the notorious troll farm, the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, tailored different messages to galvanize individual Trump supporters and discourage non-supporters from casting votes at all. The focus had been on Facebook and Twitter; these researchers unraveled how the Internet Research Agency used YouTube in their campaign and also uncovered their sloppiness, like cases of them paying for political ads with Russian rubles.

2) How were scientists in different disciplines discussing fake news before disinformation went literally everywhere? In 2018, as fake news became a catch-all buzz term, a group of 16 political scientists, psychologists, computer scientists, media experts, historians, and journalists led by Harvard professors David Lazer and Matthew Baum teamed up to publish a paper about the science of fake news, looking at how it works on an individual and societal level.

3) In 2020 EU DisinfoLab published Indian Chronicles, an exhaustive research project uncovering a 15-year long international pro-India and anti-Pakistan disinformation campaign run by the New Delhi-based Srivastava Group, mainly targeting the UN and EU. Fake and “resurrected” think tanks and NGOs lobbied the European Parliament, spoke at sessions, and convinced parliamentarians to write pro-India and anti-Pakistan op-eds for over 750 of their fake media outlets across 119 countries. Reportedly, ANI, South Asia’s leading news agency, played a major role in spreading content from these websites, giving them credibility. Srivastava Group was also the organizer of controversial trips to Kashmir in 2019, when a couple dozen far-right European Parliamentarians visited the Indian-controlled disputed regions in Kashmir.

4) In 2020 QAnon, a conspiracy theory about how a global child trafficking ring is ruling the world, conquered every other outlandish conspiracy theory and went global. It infiltrated politics, public health, yoga groups, the hip-hop scene and disrupted the personal lives of thousands of people in the U.S. and abroad. Huge numbers of disinformation stories in the past year had something to do with QAnon, and this poll by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core published last May made clear just how far QAnon has traveled. In the U.S. alone, 30 million people believe at least some QAnon tenets, ranking QAnon next to major religions.

5) Last spring, amid Covid-19 vaccine rollouts, an international non-profit research organization, The Center for Countering Digital Hate, investigated Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for harmful, Covid-19 related disinformation. They uncovered the “Disinformation Dozen” —  the influencers who accounted for 65% of Covid-19 related misinformation online. The list includes notorious anti-vaccine campaigners like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alternative medicine practitioners like Christiane Northrup and the leading pseudoscientific influencer-physician Joseph Mercola. Mercola, who has been profiting from his misinformation, also made our list of top business owners profiting off bad science. “He will continue to express his professional opinions and defend his freedom of speech,” his representative told Coda when approached for a comment.

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The post These 5 disinformation studies changed the way we think about fake news appeared first on Coda Story.

Increasingly, many in Western countries are oblivious when this happens, compounding the isolation endured by people taken offline. Here are some internet blackouts you probably don’t know about:

1) In January, Kazakhstan made headlines because of its mass anti-government protests and the total internet blackout that followed. The Kazakh government has been in the habit of throttling the internet for a while though. For example, on May 9, 2019, the presidential election day, authorities cut off internet access coinciding with detentions of activists and journalists participating in the demonstrations at the time. In 2012, Kazakhstan's parliament amended a national security law allowing the government to shut down internet and mobile connections during riots or anti-terrorist operations.

2) In April 2019, London police shut down Wi-fi in London’s tube stations to halt the actions of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental activist group whose civil disobedience protests in the UK had caused disruptions on roads, bridges and railways and resulted in hundreds of protesters being detained. “In the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network, British Transport Police has taken the decision to restrict passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations,” a police spokesperson told The Verge in 2019.

3) One popular tool to combat exam cheating has become the shutting down of the internet. Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and India have been regularly cutting off the Internet during annual nationwide exams to prevent cheating and the leaking of test questions. Forcing large numbers of people into internet blackouts was not as productive as they wished, however, as questions still got leaked. Uzbekistan cut off internet and messaging services during several hours of exams as far back as early 2010s.

4) In 2020, India shut down the internet 109 times, according to a report by the digital rights organization Access Now. Indian authorities cut off internet access during protests, elections, and religious holidays, like for Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi celebrations in Madhya Pradesh state in 2019. Internet cut-offs during religious holidays are not exclusive to India. In 2018, authorities in Bali asked mobile operators to cut off the internet during Nyepi, a Hindu celebration of the New Year, characterized by observing different prohibitions. Gadgets are getting in the way of introspection, Hinduism Society head Gusti Ngurah Sudiana told the BBC.

5) Over 18 months, residents of a village called Aberhosan in Wales would mysteriously lose their internet connection every morning because of the Good Morning Britain morning TV show, or rather a couple who loved watching it. In September, 2020, after months of exhaustive investigations, a dedicated group of engineers discovered Alun and Elaine Rees accidentally cut off the internet in the whole village when they switched off their old TV to watch the show by hijacking the village-wide network. After the revelation, the accidental culprits decided to not use their old TV again.

The post Internet shutdowns gain popularity, and obscurity appeared first on Coda Story.

1) Want to play “Love me… Love me not?” but don’t have daisies to pull apart? For Android users, the Russian company Elsys might have a solution. Its “Love Detector” app allegedly has emotion recognition capability. Elsys provides what it calls VibraImage technology to predict a person’s emotions –and actions– based on vibrations in their head and neck. There’s not enough evidence to suggest the technology actually works but apparently it didn’t stop Russian authorities from using the emotion recognition during the 2014 Sochi Olympics to detect potential terrorists.

2) Your bed, but as a giant Fitbit, collecting your biometric data while you sleep, like temperature, heart rate, breathing, movements, or your sleep environment. Sleeping fitness companies like Ghostbed and Eight Sleep are making mattresses studded with sensors so smart that they can allegedly improve your sleep hygiene. If you prefer your mattress less sentient, devices like bedside radars made by the likes of Beddit can track your sleep movements. Recently Amazon also began planning to monitor slumber  –and collect your sleep data in the bargain.

3) Can you recognize your friend down the block by her walk? It’s no longer just your special power. Gait recognition technology, or GRT, monitors and analyzes the shape of a person’s body and their unique biomechanics. The technology can track and identify a person by analyzing step width, walking speed and rotation of the hip. The Chinese government  in 2018 started using the technology. According to the developer Watrix, it offers accuracy as high as 94%. Last year, Russia reportedly also started developing the system. Privacy International last year published a guide for protecting against gait recognition at protests.

4) About ten years ago Japanese mechanical engineers developed technology to recognize a person’s bottom by analyzing the way they sit. Scientists at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo inserted 360 sensors in a car seat and tested the technology with 98% accuracy.

5) Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan and Invoxia in France can track pets’ vitals, health and whereabouts with smart collars. “With the Smart Collar, the ability to collect at scale a large quantity of data over time, will open up incredible doors for research on correlations between vital signs and dog illnesses. This is how we discover new biomarkers, treatments and medicines,” said Invoxia CEO Amelie Caudron at the big Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

6) A Shanghai-based Wanhe goat farm has been developing facial recognition technology for thousands of their extremely rare, white goats. The facial recognition technology monitors goats’ weight, overall health, vaccination, and pregnancy, with the goal of significantly lowering the workload for staff currently burdened with checking on the goats several times a day. According to the Global Times, the technology is also aimed at improving the breeding of the special white goats, who only exist on this one farm.

7) In 2019, Chinese scientists developed a facial recognition app that identifies specific individual bears in Sichuan. Technologists trained the algorithm with tens of thousands of videos and photos of pandas so it can identify individuals by the shape of ears or circles around the eyes. “You no longer need to worry about making the pandas angry by calling them by the wrong name,” The Washington Post quoted the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.

8) Scientists are trying to use facial recognition to detect distressed farm animals subject to factory farming, like pigs and cows. Researchers say large-scale farms have too few employees to detect stress in the animals. Some scientists are working to detect complex emotions in farm animals —like happiness. But many animal rights activists argue this area of research is a PR stunt to counter criticism of factory farming.

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The Darvaza crater is believed to have been the consequence of a natural gas drilling operation accident, where the ground collapsed into a void under the Karakum desert. 

Despite having an isolated dictatorship hostile to outsiders ruling the country, Turkmenistan has a history of marketing the country’s bizarre spectacle to tourists, like a 246 foot tower in the capital Ashgabat dedicated to geopolitical neutrality. Or a gigantic, rotating golden statue of the country’s former dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov. And a newer, 16-foot statue of the current president’s favorite dog breed (The Alabay, a Turkmen variety of the Central Asian shepherd dog).

Putting tourism aside, last week President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov ordered the Gates of Hell to be extinguished. He had abruptly given the same command in 2010, without stating any clear reasons, but it was never completed.

Berdymukhamedov is known for puzzling initiatives like fumigating public spaces with smoke from an indigenous grass to protect against Covid. He has said that he wanted the pit extinguished because it’s a waste of profitable resources and it adversely affects the health of people living nearby and damages the environment.

But closing the Darvaza crater would have negligible mitigation for Turkmenistan's emissions problem. Rich in oil and gas resources, the country is one of the top emitters of methane, the largest component of natural gas and is significantly more detrimental to the environment than carbon dioxide. Methane leaks can be reduced with the help of regulations and infrastructure, and over a hundred countries made cut-down pledges at COP26, the climate conference last year in Glasgow. Turkmenistan’s had only made vague promises at COP26. 

In the past couple years, Turkmenistan has been on the radar of energy data analytics organizations like Kayrros or International Energy Agency, as methane footprint awareness evolved to become a top climate concern. But the contribution of the Gates of Hell to the problem does not rank among the chief causes of the country’s methane crisis.

“It's actually a tourist attraction. I don't think it can be considered the main cause of Turkmenistan's emissions. If you want to reduce methane emissions in Turkmenistan, it's probably not the place you want to start,” said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros. “I think there's a lot of scrutiny over emissions from Turkmenistan and this looks like an attempt by the government to be proactive about emissions.”

Darvaza crater, in fact, draws many adventurers' interest.

“If you'd never seen this place before and were asked to draw a picture of a hole in the ground as a doorway to hell, this is exactly what it would look like,” said George Kourounis, a professional explorer and the only man known to ever go down in the pit. “I've described it as being in a coliseum of fire.”

If the reasons why the president of Turkmenistan wants to extinguish the fiery pit right now is open to speculation, so is how it became a burning hole in the ground in the first place. The most widely circulated theory is that in 1971 geologists ignited the hole, hoping to burn off seeping dangerous methane over a few days. 

But Kourounis says the Turkmen geologists that accompanied his expedition had a slightly different memory. 

“They tell me that the crater bubbled with mud and gas for years and that the mud actually overflowed the top of the crater and spilled into the surrounding desert and didn't catch fire until the 1980s.” 

Kourounis says nobody in the country knows what happened either. “I tried to get any kind of official reports, something on paper, but you know, it was the Soviet era, it was either classified or destroyed, or maybe no good records were taken. So I don't have any proof other than what we witnessed ourselves and the testimony from two geologists on the scene.”

Extinguishing the burning hole won’t be a straightforward task, according to Giuseppe Etiope, a geologist and researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy and the author of book called Natural Gas Seepage: The Earth’s Hydrocarbon Degassing.

Etiope said the accident seems to have exposed an accumulation of gas, or a gas pocket, below the surface, opening a Pandora’s Box. Closing it would require a comprehensive geological and geophysical study of not only the crater but the whole area.

“The Pandora’s Box is not only the shallower gas pocket, but is all the sequence of the pockets below that are probably connected,” he told me.

Long-term burning craters are not a new phenomenon tied to the petroleum industry. These “eternal fires” relegated as tourist attractions have had a special role in ancient cultures, driving mythological legends, religious traditions, and contributing to human civilization. Like the burning Baba Gurgur in Iraq, or eternal fires in Iran and Azerbaijan, like the Yanardag, worshiped by Zoroastrians.

Besides attempting to turn the Gates to Hell into a tourist attraction, Berdymukhamedov also gained attention for the site when, after months of rumors that he was dead, he appeared on a state-owned TV channel in a video, driving around the fire pit doing doughnuts.

Since November, the government has banned Turkmen from visiting the pit without special permission. And although the ban has not applied to foreign tourists, it appears Berdymukhamedov hasn’t welcomed them to visit the pit either.

It’s doubtful that the plan to close the Gates of Hell will succeed, according to Stefan Green, a microbiologist that accompanied Kourounis on his Darvaza expedition and gathered soil samples from the crater. 

The president “is certainly right that the crater is pretty bad for the environment. But it is better off burning than as an uncontrolled methane release. Methane is a terrible greenhouse gas, much worse than CO2. Better to burn it than to let it go into the atmosphere as methane,” he said. 

According to Green, the right solution would not be inexpensive: “You could put out the fire easily but that would create an explosion hazard. It needs careful engineering. My guess is that they decide it isn't worth the effort.”

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The post Closing Turkmenistan’s mysterious Gates of Hell appeared first on Coda Story.

But what if revisionist feature films become a tool of government propaganda? Here are five films whose treatment of history made headlines for being celluloid agitprop.  

1. In 2018, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russian state-controlled international news network RT wrote a screenplay for a film that her husband directed and the culture ministry funded. “The Crimean Bridge: Made with Love!” is a romantic comedy set on the 11-mile-long road that connects Russia to the Crimea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014. The film depicts how beautiful life is in Russian controlled Crimea, takes a shot at lying American journalists, reveres Russia's victory in WWII and glosses over the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944. Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov attended the premiere in Moscow, praising the film that people on forums and in reviews called propaganda or trash. "Leaving the theater," Anton Dolin, a film critic at the independent publication Meduza wrote. "Just like after seeing a 3D film, you automatically start looking for the box in which to drop your rose-tinted glasses."

2. “Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI” or “The Treachery of the September 30th Movement/Communist Party of Indonesia” is a 1984 Indonesian drama about a failed coup attempt in 1965 that saw six generals kidnapped and murdered, leading to the fall of the communism-leaning president Sukarno and installing the military general Suharto into power for 31 years. Suharto’s regime launched an anti-communist purge, killing up to a million alleged communists during his authoritarian regime. He made this film mandatory viewing for students. The debate over the film was revived in Indonesia in 2017 when President Joko Widodo suggested it should be remade for the millennial generation so that they understand the dangers of communism. 

3. The Chinese historical film “Cairo Declaration” made headlines in China ahead of its release in 2015. The film is about the consequential 1943 meeting in Egypt between the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek to discuss the war against Japan and that gave China great power status in the post-WWII world. But instead of Chiang Kai-shek the promotional posters of the film featured Mao Zedoung, who never attended the meeting. It sparked criticism from pro-government critics for disrespecting history and ridicule from Chinese internet users. People started making memes with different leaders like North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-Un or Barack Obama inserted on the movie’s posters. 

4. “Panfilov's 28 Men” is a 2016 Russian film based on a WWII legend of Panfilov's Twenty-Eight Guardsmen: Red Army soldiers from Russia and Central Asia who, outnumbered by the Nazis, heroically sacrificed their lives to defend Moscow in the freezing November of 1941. The soldiers are lionized in Russia and there’s even a memorial near Moscow to honor the heroes. But athough historians over the years found numerous inconsistencies in the story, Russian officials have co-opted the legend, painting themselves as direct descendants of the regime that saved the world from the Nazis. In 2018 Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky reportedly called doubters of the legend “filthy scum.”

5. American Sniper is a 2014 biopic loosely based on the story of reportedly the deadliest American sniper in the Iraq war, Chris Kyle. The film follows Kyle as he enlists in the Navy, after seeing news about the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania linked to Egyptian Islamis group, affiliated with al-Qaida. The film, was a huge success and was nominated for six Academy Awards but received widespread criticism as distorting the history of the Iraq war and serving as war on terror propaganda, while portraying Iraqis as violent and uncivilized.

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I talked to a high school teacher, an historian and an education expert to hear what they think about the struggle to teach January 6 in this volatile, fractious educational moment. 

The conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Anton Schulzki, president of the National Council for the Social Studies and teacher of American history at  General William J. Palmer High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado:

It's been a rather hyper politicized environment and as a result, there's been lots of legislation that's been passed in some of our states and also in some local communities that would rather restrict what teachers can talk about. With those restrictions in place some teachers are going to find it difficult to actually have these conversations. 

And I have to respect their decisions even though it may not be the best thing for students in the end. You're talking about people who live and work and teach in these communities, and they have to figure out they have to do what's best for themselves as well. Some people may see that as being a bit of a copout or being rather wishy washy but I have to respect the professionals in the classroom. They're the ones who know their students. They're the ones who know their community.

We can't deny the fact that something happened last January, right? All the facts are pointing to certain groups that were involved in the riot or insurrection. We're still learning the facts that are coming out as to what's actually behind all of this. And those facts are going to continue to play out. We can only look at things as they are right now. And I would urge teachers to listen to their students and also to be mindful of their community and to listen to the people in their community. That being said, I think the best thing that educators can do is to be honest and be truthful with their students.

I think the most important thing is that teachers have to really be able to listen to their own students and find out where the students are coming from. 

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, history professor at Ohio State University:

Part of the challenge for teachers, and I think this is really incumbent that they do this, is how do you talk honestly about something that has deep historical roots, in the moment — this is something that was led by a specific group of people in the United States. These aren't Democrats, these aren't radical leftist. These were loyalists to the former president of the United States. And just saying that for some is a sign of bias, but it's not. You literally are stating the facts. 

I think really, there are three angles that teachers should use. One historical context: How does this connect to the past and how can we draw the connections to the use of political violence to overturn elections, as well as the use of racism to justify these attempts to delegitimize elections. There's a long history of that: the civil war, reconstruction, and a hundred years of disenfranchisement. So you have to put that in the historical context. 

The second aspect is to talk about it in terms of good governance, talk about it in terms of government operation, the way this democracy works on a practical level, when we're talking about federal elections and state elections. So that students can understand that — when their parents, or friends or the internet say the vice president could have stopped this, he just chose not to, or that there was voter fraud — that's wrong. 

The third approach is by teaching critical analysis skills with regard to evidence. Evidence for the justifications for the attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power, this idea of voter fraud: What is the evidence? What are people saying? That's an important tool that children need to have because essentially this becomes a media literacy lesson and saying: "OK, this is what the courts say, and this is what you've read on the internet. How do these stack up together?” One of the lessons that can come out of this is, why do people believe this if there's no evidence for it. Teaching students the difference between speculation, conspiracy rumor and that which is actually provable. That's nonpartisan. It's not bringing politics.

Paula McAvoy, assistant professor of social studies education, North Carolina State University:

For many students, 2020 was their first experience of a presidential election, and what they saw was a deeply flawed democracy. It is really important for teachers to continue to discuss this event because young people need to understand that it should not be this way. 

When teaching about January  6, it is also important that teachers do not assume that students have much understanding about what happened. Teachers can use this moment to review the events leading up to and on January 6 and share what we know now — perhaps using some of the video compiled by the 2021 impeachment managers. 

The challenge with this approach is that to state the facts that Joe Biden won, there has been no evidence of widespread fraud, and that Donald Trump was impeached for "incitement of insurrection" will be heard by some students as teachers imposing a partisan opinion on the class. Consequently, some teachers will avoid bringing up the issue. Others might try to take a "neutral" view by saying, "Some people say there was fraud and others say there was not fraud. You can decide for yourself." But this misrepresents the facts by suggesting that nobody knows for sure. 

Rather than presenting January 6 as an event that is open to interpretation, teachers can treat it as a day of learning and remembrance.

Last, students also need to understand that the event is not over: There is an ongoing Congressional investigation; states are changing laws to make voting harder; and there are bills in Congress that attempt to create a more secure vote. Students ought to be learning about all of these issues, if we have any chance of improving the system we have. 

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1. Pakistan's centralized biometric ID scheme has been praised on a global stage. But as we highlighted in our series in November, it is excluding hundreds of thousands of people from essential services including state-subsidized medicines, food rations and even access to cell phones. Women, working-class people and ethnic, sexual and religious minorities are disproportionately affected. Alizeh Kohari, Coda Story’s inaugural Bruno fellow, tells the stories of people and their families who are already on the margins of society but are pushed even more to the side by the flawed digitized system that is increasingly being replicated across the world.

2. What would you do if the love of your life got wrapped up in the biggest conspiracy theory of the moment? Our short animated documentary, produced in partnership with Newsy, shows how QAnon is tearing families apart. Listen to three people from Colorado, Ohio and Utah as they take us through their love stories and explore how QAnon upended them.

3. In 2013, OrgCode, a consulting firm working on homelessness issues, designed an algorithm intended to help local social services to provide people experiencing homelessness with housing that would suit their needs. But as states across the U.S. started adopting similar systems, opaque algorithms became a tool for the local authorities to decide who gets housing and who does not. Coda reporter Caitlin Thompson traveled to San Francisco and investigated what life is like when a single number generated by an algorithm decides who is vulnerable enough to get home.

4. This summer, Erica Hellerstein went to Arizona to investigate how the U.S. government’s pivot to “smart” border surveillance to curb immigration is benefiting private companies with lucrative government contracts while putting migrants at even greater risk. The corridor of surveillance, equipped with monitoring towers, underground motion detectors and facial recognition cameras, is forcing migrants to take potentially lethal routes. 

5. In November, Isobel Cockerell reported on how surveillance is changing migration across the Atlantic Ocean. Cockerell went to Calais, a town at the narrowest point in the English Channel. As the closest French town to England, Calais is a stopping point for migrants seeking to reach the U.K. Governments on both sides of the Channel are spending millions on technology to stop dangerous migrant crossings that often result in death. But as Cockerell reports, it is not working.

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1. Coda Story’s senior reporter Erica Hellerstein points you to this episode by Radiolab from 2015 about aerial surveillance. “I recommend listening again, years after its release, to understand how our thinking about these kinds of technologies has evolved and stayed the same. Some questions are dated, but others really aren't at all.” The hosts track down a team who created a surveillance system helping their contractors, including the police, monitor specific places, people or even entire cities. But even if mass aerial surveillance could solve crimes or expose cartels, is it worth the privacy trade-off? 

2. Becky Lipscombe, Coda Story’s senior audio producer, recommends this episode from Love and Radio about a very specific kind of surveillance. “It's the story of someone watching – obsessively, voyeuristically – the couple across the street through their curtainless window, and her 'relationship' with these people she's never met. There's no hi-tech, but she does pick up a pair of binoculars!” I don’t own a pair of binoculars but by the end of the show my eyes were definitely covered with tears. 

3. If you’ve ever asked Alexa for dinner recommendations or called a provider’s customer service number, chances are your voice has been collected using voice recognition software that companies have been using for decades. For anyone interested in why our voices are collected, what happens to them and how it impacts us, this episode from our own Coda Currents podcast is an insightful listen. Caitlin Thompson chats with Joseph Turow, an author and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication about what he calls “seductive surveillance,” guised in convenience. He’s been writing about how the marketing industry tracks consumers for decades.

4. From experimenting with surveillance technology to reading faces and ears in the cars behind windshields to monitoring gamblers at the table, this episode of In Machines We Trust from MIT Technology Review covers how police in different U.S. cities use surveillance technology and who makes the decisions about accuracy and effectiveness. You’ll also find out what Woody Harrelson has to do with tracking down a beer thief in a New York City drug store.

5. In July, a consortium of newsrooms and rights organizations uncovered howGovernments have used Pegasus, spyware from the Israeli NSO Group, to hack the devices of journalists and opposition activists around the world. Marta Biino, who has just completed a Coda reporting fellowship, recommends listening to The Guardian’s Today in Focus episode about the Pegasus project: “I was particularly struck by an academic calling Matthew Hedges to tell him how he found his phone number included in the NSO data leak and how he was detained and tortured in the UAE. The production is amazing and I still vividly remember Hedges' powerful story.”

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1. Jennifer Lincoln, known to her over 2 million TikTok followers as @drjenniferlincoln, is a Portland, Oregon-based obstetrician-gynecologist. Lincoln’s short, humorous videos, based on scientific research, covers a wide range of subjects about health, mythbusting about period pains, treating vaginal infections with pseudoscientific cures or misinformation about sexually transmitted infections and safety of Covid-19 vaccines. She also uses her platform to discuss pressing issues like widespread inaccessibility of hygienic menstrual products, birth control, abortion or how to become an OB GYN whose practice is inclusive of people with different gender identities.

2. Alease Daniel, or @aleasetheembryologist on TikTok, is a Raleigh-based embryologist, who has introduced her more than 124,000 TikTok followers to her IVF lab. IVF is a method of assisted reproduction with sperm and eggs combined outside of the body in a laboratory dish. Millions of TikTok viewers have seen her work in the lab, talking through the procedures like prepping dishes for IVF to retrieving the eggs or counting sperm. She also uses her videos to debunk reproductive misconceptions. Daniel has told Wral that she’s posting videos because fertility treatment can leave people feeling out of control and having knowledge about the process provides a little bit of peace of mind.

3. Tanaya Narendra, @dr_cuterus on Instagram, is a gynecologist, who uses her social media account to post videos and illustrations about reproductive health, safe sex, body positivity or safety of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, that prevent some strains of virus causing cervical cancer. Her posts in English and Hindi are short, funny and educational, like this video titled “Dude, where’s my vagina?” explaining the anatomy of the uterus using an anatomical model.

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4. Ali Rodriguez, also known as The Latina Doc or @alirodmd on TikTok, is using her dancing TikTok videos to answer questions and clear misconceptions about reproductive health in English and Spanish. In October, she told VerywellHealth that being a Latina, she understands the stigma and secrecy surrounding reproductive health and contraception and her patients from the Latinx community often are exposed to misinformation or lack of information about it. 

5. Natalie Crawford, or @nataliecrawfordmd on TikTok, is a Texas-based obstetrician-gynecologist and fertility specialist. Since 2019 she’s been sharing fertility-related information on ovulation, reproductive health and diets. She’s also been posting informative videos about endometriosis, a long-term condition where tissue that normally lines the inside uterus grows outside of it, usually causing severe pain and sometimes other issues such as infertility. Endometriosis can be debilitating and can take years to diagnose and treat accordingly. Crawford also runs Instagram and YouTube accounts to share information more extensively than she can do in few-second TikTok videos.

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1. In 2001, Saudi Arabia’s leading clerical body issued a fatwa banning not just Pokémon cartoons, but the entire franchise, including cards and video games in which players collect little creatures who then become stronger and develop powers. The decree said that Pokémon was unacceptable to Islam, as the special powers possessed by the characters were blasphemous and their transformation over time taught children about evolution. It also disapproved of the symbols used in the game, stating they promoted religions such as Shinto and Christianity, along with Freemasonry and Zionism. The edict was revived in 2016, owing to the popularity of the Pokémon Go mobile app. 

2. Despite U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s widely publicized pride in the much-loved British children’s show, “Peppa Pig” has its detractors. In 2018 China banned the cartoon and hashtags referencing it because of its popularity within the country’s Shehuiren (slacker) subculture, which has been described by the state-affiliated Global Times as “the antithesis of the young generation the Communist Party tries to cultivate.” One episode of the show was also removed from Australian TV  in 2012. Featuring friendly spiders, it was deemed dangerous to children, since many species in the country are highly poisonous.

3. Launched in 2013, “Steven Universe” was the first show created by a woman, Rebecca Sugar, for the kids’ TV channel Cartoon Network. The animated adventure series’ central themes included family, friendship and relationships — including LGBTQ ones. That was enough to get it banned in Kenya. In 2017, the country’s Film Classification Board prohibited the broadcast of six cartoons, including Steven Universe, saying that they “intended to introduce children to deviant behavior.”

4. Winnie the Pooh has been a children’s favorite for almost a century and rose to even greater popularity, thanks to a series of 1960s Disney cartoons. In 2013, Chinese social media users began to create memes that compared President Xi Jinping to the honey-loving bear. In the one above, Xi, filmed giving a speech from a luxury car during a military parade is likened to the chubby cartoon character. Not only did the Chinese government ban Pooh cartoons, in 2018 it blocked the website of the U.S. TV channel HBO after comedian John Oliver made fun of its heavy-handed censorship.

5. After running for just a few days in 2019, the animated movie “Abominable” was abruptly pulled from Vietnamese theaters. The film — part of a Chinese partnership with the Hollywood studio Dreamworks — is about a young girl helping a Yeti to get back home to Mount Everest, but one scene met with popular uproar and swift action from Vietnamese authorities. It featured a map that showed disputed South China Sea territories as belonging to China. The Philippines and Malaysia also banned the movie for the same reason.

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1.In October, the Istanbul-based Syrian journalist Majed Shamaa, used his TV show “Street Poll” to respond to a recent viral video of a Turkish man complaining that, while he couldn’t afford bananas, Syrian refugees were buying them by the kilogram. In a short sketch, Shamaa looked suspicious of his surroundings, bought a bag full of bananas, then ducked into an alleyway and furtively tucked into them. On October 30, police detained him for inciting hatred and insulting the Turkish people. He spent nine days in jail before being released.

2. In March, Idrak Mirzalizade, a Moscow-based Azerbaijani comedian, was a guest on the popular TV comedy show “Razgony.” During his slot, he made a joke about discrimination against non-Russians within the country and how difficult it is to rent an apartment if you have a foreign-sounding name. He went on to say that, after successfully renting one place, he found that the previous tenants, who were Russians, had left behind a mattress covered in excrement. After acres of pro-government media coverage stating that he had insulted the people of Russia, thousands of online threats and one physical attack, he was convicted of inciting hatred, jailed for 10 days and banned from Russia for life.

3. Also in Russia, comedian Denis Chuzhoi became the subject of a police investigation following a stand-up tour in October, in which he referenced an online rumor that President Vladimir Putin has lifts built into his shoes, in order to look taller. “For me that explains everything,” he said. “My wife wears shoes with high heels. In the evening, she’ll come home, throw her shoes off and say, 'Denis, we need to fuck up America and kill all the gays.’”

4. Over the border in Kazakhstan, 25-year-old activist Temirlan Ensebek found policemen searching his apartment in April. His laptop and mobile phones were confiscated. He was then taken in for questioning about “deliberately spreading false information.” The reason? For a few weeks, he had run a satirical Instagram page titled Qaznews24. One post, stating that the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Kazakhstan proposed "to assign Nursultan Nazarbayev the status of a god in the national constitution," mocked the personality cult surrounding the autocratic former president. 

5. In January, Indian comic Munawar Faruqui was detained by police in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, for a joke he didn’t even make. Faruqui, who is Muslim, was accused of insulting Hinduism during his shows by the son of a member of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Though there was no evidence to back up the accusation, Faruqui spent over a month in jail. After being freed, he has come under frequent attack from Hindu nationalists and has had to cancel a number of national performances, following threats of violence.

Masho Lomashvili contributed to research.

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Eco-anxiety is the term being used to describe a deep-seated fear of environmental meltdown now being experienced by a growing number of people. According to psychologists, it can have profound effects on mental health and is particularly prevalent among young people. 

In response, a growing number of mental health professionals are taking a “climate-aware” approach to the treatment of a range of conditions. Young people are also creating online communities to share their experiences and tips on how to deal with feelings of stress related to ecological issues.

As psychotherapist Caroline Hickman explained, the phenomenon “doesn't just stop with anxiety, it extends into depression, despair, frustration, guilt, grief, shame. It's a real combination of emotional responses.”

“It's not just what's happening to the planet,” added Hickman, who is a member of Climate Psychology Alliance and a lecturer at the University of Bath in the U.K. “What we also feel is frustration and abandonment and betrayal, because people in power are failing to act on science.”

Hickman has co-authored a global survey, led by the University of Bath, which will soon be published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet. Questioning 10,000 people aged between 16 and 25 in 10 countries, it found that more than half of respondents said that stress over climate change was affecting their daily lives. But some go even further than that. 

“One trend that's troubling is the tendency of what's been called doomism: the stance that it's too late, there's nothing we can do, that we're past the point of making a significant impact toward a healthier world,” said psychologist Leslie Davenport, who has written a book for young people titled “All the Feelings Under the Sun: How to Deal with Climate Change.”  

Far from being a mental illness, Davenport and Hickman believe that eco-anxiety is a rational and healthy response to what's going on in the world today, but that it should be channeled constructively and not spill over into nihilism. 

Fighting climate doomism is precisely what sustainability scientist Alaina Wood, 25, has been doing on TikTok for the past few months. She’s a member of EcoTok, a TikTok account, run by a team of environmental educators and activists, that provides climate education to over 100,000 followers.

Wood says that, while we all need to be aware of the threats to our world, the non-stop stream of terrifying headlines about the climate crisis can leave people feeling overwhelmed. She believes that shifting focus to possible solutions helps relieve eco-anxiety and gives a sense of agency to people who may have felt powerless to act. 

The biggest thing that helped me was finding a counselor,” she said, speaking of her own previously debilitating fears. “They recommended that I seek out resources and people who weren't just talking about the doom.” 

“It helped my eco-anxiety to know that I could fix things.” 

Along with a sense of pessimism, a lot of young people describe a profound sense of guilt over their individual actions, such as eating meat, or driving a car. 

Henry Ferland, a 19-year-old student and TikTok content creator stresses that individual guilt is largely misplaced — after all, corporations and governments that have failed to act are the ones to blame. However, he does believe that taking small steps with tangible effects is important both for the environment and for our mental health. 

And that’s exactly what helped him to tackle his own eco-anxiety.

Ferland, known on TikTok as Traashboyyy, tasked himself with picking up litter every day, then ended up setting himself a target of 50,000 pieces of garbage. "Doing little personal actions where you can see the good impact that you're having on the environment really helps me,” he said.

After meeting his goal a month ago, he bumped it up to 500,000 and asked his followers to join in, using the hashtag #trash500k on social media. 

“It's so much fun seeing people clean up in Germany and in Mexico and in Oregon,” he said. 

Like his teammates at EcoTok, Ferland believes that building communities and a wider awareness of eco-anxiety is extremely important. “You are not alone,” he said. “People who know that climate change is real have feelings of stress about it.”

Alaina Wood agrees wholeheartedly. “At the end of the day, it's really about finding somebody you trust, who you can talk to about it and who also understands what it is,” she said. “I was running into a lot of young people saying that their mental health professionals didn't know what eco-anxiety was.”

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One week later, Moroccan authorities confirmed that Aishan had been arrested after a terrorism alert was issued by Beijing through Interpol. He now faces possible extradition to Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim communities have been held in concentration camps in a crackdown described as “genocide” by the U.S. State Department in July.

“He's in frustration, he's really afraid. If he's deported to China, it's a death sentence for him,” said Abduweli Ayup, a prominent Uyghur activist. Ayup, who is based in Norway, where he runs an organization dedicated to assisting Uyghurs in exile in Turkey.

Ayup, who worked with Aishan at a Uyghur diaspora newspaper in Istanbul in 2016, told me that he speaks with his friend every week and that he is helping his family financially. 

“It’s devastating. He has three kids in Turkey,” Ayup said. 

Aishan’s case highlights how Interpol, the largest law enforcement organization in the world, with 194 member countries, can be used by authoritarian leaders and human rights violators to track down critics across international borders.

A red notice is an international electronic wanted persons notice issued and circulated by Interpol. The alert functions as a request to other countries to find and provisionally arrest criminal suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions. Countries submit a red notice request to Interpol’s General Secretariat, which, after review, decides whether or not to release it to the police databases of member countries. Member countries can also issue a different alert called a diffusion, which notifies law enforcement authorities that they seek the arrest of a specific person. Diffusions are not published by Interpol but are circulated through the organization’s channels by the country itself.

While Interpol can serve as an effective vehicle for fighting crime, rights groups, lawyers and politicians have repeatedly voiced concerns that the issuing of red notices has been repeatedly abused by repressive governments — including China, Russia and Belarus — to target dissidents, journalists or political opponents seeking refuge in other countries.

“Democratic countries become aiders and abettors to oppressive regimes because of how Interpol works,” said Yuriy Nemets, a Washington D.C.-based attorney working on Interpol and extradition cases. He also runs the website Red Notice Abuse, which investigates how governments use Interpol’s mechanisms to persecute their opponents. “We talk about human rights and then don't really do much to stop being duped into helping these violators of human rights.”

Aishan’s wife Buzainuer Wubuli told me that she worries about her husband. She says that she can only talk to him once or twice a week for a couple minutes. 

“The Moroccan police didn’t say anything, so my husband doesn’t know anything,” Wubuli said. “‘Is there any news?’ He asks me every time he calls me.” 

Aishan is just the latest example of how red notices can be abused by authoritarian states. Last month, Makary Malakhouski, a Belarusian activist was detained near Warsaw after a red notice request from Minsk. Malakhouski was released the following day with the help of Polish politicians, lawyers and media. In July, Yevgeny Khasoyev, a Russian human rights campaigner was also detained in Poland after the Kremlin issued a red notice request. He has since been released. 

According to Interpol’s constitution, the organization, headquartered in Lyon, France, is forbidden from “intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character." However, criminal justice experts say that the system is vulnerable to abuse, including countries fabricating or misrepresenting charges against political dissidents.

“It's very rare that there's information in the red notice request that screams out abuse,” said Bruno Min, who leads a campaign for reform at Interpol at the U.K.-based NGO Fair Trials. “They're usually described as being, for example, terrorist offenses or fraud offenses.”

Min believes the problem rests with Interpol’s universal membership, which grants every country equal opportunity to send out thousands of alerts annually, some of which can be vaguely worded or prone to political abuse. “If Interpol were able to, for example, figure out that this is a Uyghur man, living in exile in a country outside China, given what we know about the human rights situation in Xinjiang, you would hope that Interpol would take that into consideration when deciding whether that red notice should be allowed,” Min said. “That's one thing that the case highlights — really questioning how good those mechanisms are.”

Attorneys, human rights activists and politicians have long pushed for reforms at Interpol, which currently has a backlog of over 66,000 active red notices. In 2019, U.S. politicians introduced the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act in the House of Representatives, which would aim to counter politically motivated Interpol abuse in the U.S., while encouraging reforms within Interpol. The bill has yet to pass the House. 

Amid growing criticism, Interpol has introduced a number of reforms in recent years. In 2015, it announced a refugee policy that would allow the removal of a red notice if an individual is classified as a refugee under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In 2016, it reformed guidelines for reviewing red notice requests by its General Secretariat, before they are circulated among other member countries. 

Other problems persist, however. Even though red notices can be removed, the risk of extradition persists and those under red notices face a broad range of difficulties, including being denied visas, bank services, jobs and political asylum.

“Interpol is an incredibly effective tool for governments not just to track down people, but to make their lives very difficult, even if they understand that the individual will never get extradited,” said Nemets. “Imagine, if it's a political opponent who cannot go to the bank, cannot travel, get a job, cannot obtain legal immigration status. How much more hellish can you make somebody's life?”

While Aishan’s red notice was canceled on August 25, based on as-yet-undisclosed new information received by Interpol, he remains in jail and could still be sent back to China after Beijing sent an official extradition request to Moroccan authorities to keep Aishan detained on the charges of inciting terrorism. 

Morocco ratified an extradition treaty with China in 2017. 

“If a previously issued red notice is found not to be in compliance with the Constitution and rules, it is deleted from INTERPOL’s databases,” said the organization’s General Secretariat in a written statement to Coda Story. “All member countries are also informed about the non-compliance of a notice or diffusion, and are asked to update their national databases accordingly, in addition to being reminded that INTERPOL’s channels may not be used for any communication regarding the case.”

On September 22, Morocco’s highest court of appeal set a new extradition hearing for October 27, adding at least another month to Aishan's detainment. 

His wife Buzainuer hopes the court will make a decision soon. She worries that her husband, who lives with long-term respiratory problems, might be vulnerable to harsh conditions in detention. “And now winter is coming," she said. "Every time the season changes or the weather gets cold, my husband coughs a lot, sometimes he can't sleep because of coughing. I'm worried that he can’t stand it and will become seriously ill.”

The post Authoritarian regimes are using Interpol to hunt down their critics appeared first on Coda Story.

Bjorn Martin Hegnes, 35, who studies networks and IT systems at Norof University in Oslo, undertook a 300km cycle ride around the Norwegian capital over 12 days as part of his first year project. His kit included an omni-directional Wi-Fi antenna that could pick up Bluetooth signals from a distance of 100 yards away and a GPS device that could pinpoint locations.

Hegnes was able to collect around 1.7 million Bluetooth messages, over 9,000 Bluetooth transmitters and 129 headsets. 

He discovered that none of the headphones he analyzed during his cycles were implementing a security measure known as media access control (MAC) address randomization, which made it easy for him to pinpoint the exact locations of wearers.

We spoke to Hegnes about his research and how it highlights vulnerabilities in everyday devices.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda Story: What kind of devices did you observe and which were the most vulnerable to tracking?

Bjorn Martin Hegnes: Think about every accessory we are connecting to our smartphones, like smart watches and headphones. Headphones are the easiest to track because they're broadcasting the name of the device and many people use their first, last or full name on their headphones. These devices that people use in daily life without thinking are easy to track. There are also other things like electric toothbrushes and weight scales. I even found a coffee mug. I had data points on the person who had that mug. 

The reason why some digital devices can be tracked over time is because they don’t change their MAC address. What is that, exactly?

A MAC address is like a hard-coded number in a device that can identify you. It's like an IP address that never changes. I showed in my project that when you have enough data points, you can find where the person goes to school, where he lives. You can get a lot of information from a person that has a static MAC address on their devices. One person in my class had 21 data points on him. You could pinpoint where his apartment was, then you had different data points on his surroundings and his neighborhood, where he goes for coffee and groceries. 

Your report says that it appears to be easier to track the movements of an individual via a Bluetooth headset than it is via a smartphone. Why is that?

From what I understand, smartphones went from having static MAC addresses to random ones after the Edward Snowden leaks, which stated that the NSA had tracked people's smartphones with their MAC addresses. But a lot of headphones are still using a static address — even new ones. The project showed that it was harder to find phones to track. Headphones were much easier. 

How can this MAC address be captured?

If you have an Android phone, you can go to the App Store and download a free app called WiGLE. That's how I started. It will track everything for you

What surprised you most about your research?

That you can easily mass track a whole city on a really low budget. My device cost around two to three hundred bucks. I was really surprised. When I told people how little money I spent, they were shocked too. 

So to recap, why do you think the vulnerability of these devices is important?

The privacy concerns are that somebody can track you without your knowledge. You can have good security on your phone and turn off your location data on all of your apps. But a lot of people are not aware that using things like wireless headphones leaves them vulnerable. 

What can we do to protect our privacy?

One thing is to keep generic names on your devices, so they don’t include your name. If you have serious concerns about your privacy, stop using devices that don't support the randomization of MAC addresses. Go back to using wired headphones. 

The post Your Bluetooth headphones could be vulnerable to surveillance appeared first on Coda Story.

Over the past months, hundreds of Afghan soldiers have fled next door to Tajikistan. Over the weekend, dozens of military servicemen also escaped to Uzbekistan, desperate for medical assistance.

But, as thousands of Afghans attempt to flee, governments in the five Central Asian nations have not yet made definitive decisions about their approach to an impending refugee crisis. Kyrgyzstan declared on August 16 that it would issue 500 student visas for Afghans, but has not made public any further plans. Despite rumors on social media that Kazakhstan was preparing to receive displaced people, a spokesperson for President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stated, via Facebook on Monday, that no decision had been reached. Uzbekistan is similarly hesitant, while Turkmenistan has made no announcements since the Taliban takeover.

To make more sense of what the events in Afghanistan means for Central Asia, I spoke to Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a director of the Center for Governance and Market at the University of Pittsburgh, and the author of two books about the country.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity

Coda Story: What is your assessment of the speed with which the Taliban has managed to regain control of Afghanistan? 

Jennifer Murtazashvili: Afghanistan is a very decentralized society. The former government tried to centralize everything and many of the generals who were in charge of fighting around the country were not from the regions that they were protecting. They made decisions to surrender.  

You have soldiers who haven't gotten paid, who, due to corruption, had limited ammunition and support. When you're asking people who have been fighting for 40 years to engage in another huge offensive, you're asking them to fight for a state they don't believe in. It's one thing to fight against something you don't like. But if you don't have something to fight for, it's very difficult.

It has been going on for a very long time. We have seen districts fall throughout the country over the past 10 years. If we look at northern Afghanistan, for example, it was always the home of the opposition to the Taliban. 

What do the Taliban want from Central Asia countries? 

They want normalization. They want to be able to tax customs authorities. If trade stops, that's a big source of their revenue. So they want that trade to continue. They've been skimming off customs for a very long time. So, trade is very important to them. 

Getting narcotics out of the country is also vital. Most of the opiates produced in Afghanistan go out through Pakistan, but there's a good amount that goes through Central Asia and there's a pretty well organized scheme. They don't want those borders to close. 

What are the challenges that Central Asian countries face now — and what lies ahead?

I think the concern from Central Asia is about ISIS fighters, the remnants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan — a militant group active in the region — and other groups that might be associated with al-Qaida, who might not like the Taliban. 

Central Asian fighters have been going into northern Afghanistan and Pakistan for two decades now. If you remember, there were many Central Asians that went to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Well, imagine, now, that the opportunity to fight is right next door. I think this should be a concern. I don't want to exaggerate it, but it doesn't take a lot of people to cause a lot of trouble.

Recently, Uzbekistan’s foreign ministry made an announcement in which the country "firmly declares its commitment to maintaining traditionally friendly and good-neighborly relations with Afghanistan and the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of a neighboring country.” What does that tell us?

They have been talking for many years now. In fact, the Uzbek government has hosted Taliban delegations, so they're quite familiar with the Taliban leadership. Uzbeks have also been very active in Doha, engaging with the movement’s leadership. This was a very smart strategy, because they understood that, regardless of who would be in power in Kabul, they could do business with the Afghan government. And what is Uzbekistan interested in? It’s interested in infrastructure projects, railways, gas pipelines, things that connect Uzbekistan with lower transport costs. Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country. And so economically, the fastest way to a seaport is through Afghanistan and then into Pakistan.

What is the general attitude toward the Taliban among people in Central Asia?

I think there's a lot of fear. I've actually gotten some requests from the Uzbek media to speak, because there's a lot of uncertainty and people are scared about whether the Taliban are going to come take over their country. There's just uncertainty about who the Taliban is made up of and the scope that it has. That's the sense that I'm getting, just fear and uncertainty.  

What kind of role does the U.S. have in the region? If the Biden administration is able to come to some agreement with the Taliban, how significant would that be to Central Asian nations? 

The U.S. doesn't seem to have a strategy, quite frankly, and Biden has made it very clear that he's not that interested. The U.S. doesn't have very much of a strategy or a presence in Central Asia right now, either. I think the big players are China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, which is very interesting. Seeing how these local dynamics are taking place, I think politics in the region will become much more localized and not so much about great power rivalries.

The post What does the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan mean for Central Asia? appeared first on Coda Story.

ASPI’s research analyzed online behavior in the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan and Australia and found evidence of financially driven content farms, coordinated websites and social media accounts producing unoriginal, low quality articles and videos to drive traffic and revenue. 

One of the starkest examples highlighted in the report examines how a hired online campaign in Indonesia in November 2020 flooded Twitter with the hashtag #AdaApaDenganBBC (“What’s up with the BBC)”. The campaign involved hundreds of tweets aimed at discrediting a BBC article that suggested recent fires in Papua in eastern Indonesia had been deliberately lit to clear forests for palm oil plantations, benefiting a Korean company that had been buying local land. 

Researchers analyzed hundreds of tweets using the hashtag and found that a coordinated network of accounts, mainly created in 2020, regularly posted screenshots from Indonesian news articles that contained criticisms of the BBC’s palm oil deforestation story. Twitter has since suspended many of the accounts.

In another example of online manipulation, ASPI and the Taiwan-based civil society organization DoubleThink Lab analyzed a Chinese-language content farm and a news outlet targeting audiences in Australia and Taiwan. Research showed both online entities — Au123.com, a Chinese-language news outlet based in Australia and Qiqis.org, a content farm that targets Taiwanese audiences — regularly published articles that favored Chinese government policies and narratives. 

Jacob Wallis, who directs research on disinformation operations at ASPI, told me that online content farms are becoming an important part of the digital landscape in Asia Pacific countries where cheap digital labor is abundant. “Elections and periods of heightened political engagement are now a business model for operators at the base of the digital economy.”

Disinformation campaigns have become a lucrative sector for digital creators. According to ASPI, independent content writers can earn up to $2,000 a month. Research by the NGO Indonesia Corruption Watch in 2020 found that the Indonesian government has spent $6 million paying influencers to promote government policies on social media.

“There's a really dangerous nexus emerging between financially motivated scammers, content farms and state actors,” said Wallis. “State actors are beginning to understand that if they align with propaganda from the Chinese state, for example, that that will bring them an audience, which will drive revenue.”

The post ‘Influence for hire’ networks are manipulating online discussions throughout the Asia Pacific region appeared first on Coda Story.

China’s westernmost region has suffered a years-long crackdown on the basic human rights of its mostly Muslim population. Over 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim groups have been held in concentration camps that are described by Beijing as vocational training centers. The U.S., the EU and dozens of international law experts around the world have described China’s actions as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”.

Despite the long-standing ties with non-native Kazakhs who have settled in the country in large numbers over the past three decades, Kazakhstan’s authorities have adopted a series of harsh measures to quell the protests.

Kunbolat came to Kazakhstan in 2002. He lives in Almaty, with his wife and three children and has worked a number of jobs, including a stint as a taxi driver. His younger brother Baimurat, however, remains in Xinjiang. 

Kunbolat has not heard from Baimurat since 2018. Over a year later, he found out his brother had been arrested by police in Ghulja City for alleged hate-speech in a 2012 social media post. He learned, by text messages from family in China, that his brother is serving a 10-year prison sentence. 

In January 2020, Kunbolat decided to stage a one-man demonstration outside the Chinese Consulate in Almaty. “I had been silent for a year-and-a-half,” he said. “But when I heard he’d been convicted, all I could do was protest.”

In February, Kunbolat went back to the consulate with other Kazakhs from Xinjiang. Kunbolat, members of his family and other protesters, have been regularly fined, threatened and arrested by Kazakh police. At the time of our interview, he had been detained seven times during protests. “During my detentions, policemen would say, ‘Baibolat, your actions are dangerous for you, your family, your children’s future,’” he said.

Kazakhstan has become a nerve center of activism against the oppression of Muslims in Xinjiang. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Kazakhstan declared sovereignty in 1990, it launched a program to bring back ethnic Kazakhs living in neighboring countries. Kazakhs not native to the country are referred to as “qanda,” meaning “compatriots.” About a million have returned from Uzbekistan, Mongolia and China in the past 30 years. Many have left behind friends and relatives in China and a significant number of them have become targets of Beijing’s ethno-religious crackdown.

The human rights group Nargis Atajurt, founded by a Kazakh, born in Xinjiang, named Serikzhan Bilash, has documented and shared thousands of testimonies of those interned in Xinjiang camps and their relatives since 2017. 

Kazakhstan’s government has repeatedly refused to allow Nargis Atajurt, which is financed by supporter donations, to register as an NGO, cutting it off from foreign funding. Bilash fled Kazakhstan, via Turkey, and relocated to the U.S. after repeated harassment, intimidation and an arrest and a 2019 ban from political activism, handed down by the authorities. 

Speaking by telephone from his new home in Texas, Bilash told me the human rights group has been trying to highlight the plight of protestors like Kunbolat and those detained in Xinjiang, only to be harassed online and have their efforts blocked by the Kazakh government. Bilash believes that Kazakhstan’s strong economic ties with China are behind the official silence on the treatment of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang. 

Bilash said the authorities’ actions ignored the rights of non-native Kazakhs, in favor of economic concerns. “They think human rights or this injustice and unfairness is less important than Chinese yuan. They love Chinese yuan more than their people, more than their nation,” he said. “They don’t want to solve the problem from the root. They want people to shut their mouths and eyes and keep silent and don’t poke China.”

Kazakhstan's foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the treatment of Kazakhs in China.

China is one of the biggest partners and investors in Kazakhstan’s energy-driven economy. Kazakhstan is also an integral part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative and a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — a political, economic and security alliance between China, Russia and four Central Asian countries. The Chinese government organizes regular educational exchanges for Kazakh citizens. 

“This is how economic dominance turns into political influence,” said Temur Umarov, China and Central Asia expert at Carnegie Moscow. According to him, although Kazakhstan is trying to diversify its economy and is pursuing projects with other countries, its immediate future is tied to economic cooperation with China. Therefore, the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang poses serious problems for Sino-Kazakh relations. 

“What the government is doing is to try to find a way of resolving those kinds of situations that would not be unacceptable, either for China or for Kazakh society,” Umarov said. “For the government, it's a very sensitive topic and it's becoming more and more politicized.”

Niva Yau Tsz Yan is a researcher at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, who monitors China’s role in Central Asia. She believes that, in its pursuit of new economic strategies, Kazakhstan is trying to gain more bargaining power against China. “They're not China's puppet, at least not yet. There is a lot of resistance that they are very willing to do,” Yau explained.

However, she adds that “Kazakhstan will always have to deal with China in some capacity, Which is why in this Xinjiang problem, they are very reluctant to be so opposed to China.”

Since the protests began, participants have told numerous stories of Kazakh relatives being arrested in Xinjiang, simply for performing Muslim prayers or holding religious services.

Demonstrators outside the consulate believe that international pressure is essential to bring an end to the persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang. “We think only the West can save us,” said Aqiqat Qalliola. Speaking by a video call, he told me that his father died in prison in 2020 in Dorbiljin County, Xinjiang, after being detained for about two years. He added that he hasn't been able to talk to his mother and brother in Xinjiang since last August. He has heard that they have also been detained as well.

“If America and Europe don’t take any action, China won't even bother to take us seriously,” he said. 

In May, the official Twitter account of the U.S. embassy in Kazakhstan featured a post about the issue. “We condemn China's mass imprisonment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other ethnic minorities. The U.S. Mission stands with those who are seeking information about their family members in #Xinjiang. People should not be detained for assembling and expressing themselves peacefully.”

The statement had no effect on Kazakh police, who have continued to disperse, fine and arrest demonstrators. Kunbolat has been arrested four times since.

In May, on their 100th consecutive day outside the consulate, he decided to film the protesters. “I knew I would be arrested if I carried a sign or a photograph and if I chanted,” he says. “Spreading information is not against the law. I decided to act in a way that the Kazakhstan government couldn't detain me.” 

He was taken to jail anyway. 

Still, Kunbolat has vowed to continue protesting until his brother is freed. “We've got a proverb, ‘Homeland begins with family,’” he said. “If I can’t save my brother today, how will I save my homeland tomorrow? That’s why I don’t want to stop.”

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This upbeat tone is in stark contrast with recent reports from a number of Latin American countries who have voiced frustration over large-scale delays to Sputnik deliveries, revealing that Russia’s vaccine diplomacy might be failing to live up to promises.

Guatemala, a country of 18 million, became the latest country to renegotiate its Sputnik contract, cancelling half of its 16 million dose because of delays, the president announced on July 28. Negotiations with The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which markets the vaccine abroad, began at the end of June after deliveries were delayed and new daily cases were rising.

Sputnik has set out an ambitious delivery plan, promising 700 million doses worldwide this year. But supply side issues have halted vaccination drives in a number of countries. In July, India put off its rollout after the Russian producer failed to deliver equal quantities of Sputnik’s two doses. Earlier this month Ghana cancelled its contract of 3.4 million doses after a Dubai-based middleman couldn’t supply more than 20,000 doses. And Argentina, an early Sputnik V champion, hinted at stopping its contract of 30 million doses in a leaked email from a presidential Covid adviser in July, showing Argentine authorities pressuring RDIF to deliver second doses in accordance with their agreement.

“We always responded by doing everything possible to make Sputnik V the greatest success, but you are leaving us with very few options to continue fighting for you and for this project,” said the email.

While RDIF didn’t respond to Coda Story’s request for comment over worldwide shipment delays, Sputnik’s official Twitter page offers an explanation. “Given unprecedented worldwide demand all vaccine producers are experiencing some short-term supply issues. #SputnikV is in enormous demand as it has demonstrated outstanding efficacy and safety while not having any rare side effects that have been linked to other vaccines.”

Sputnik’s delivery problems are being seen as a significant chapter in vaccine diplomacy. “It's reasonable to start wondering whether or not Russia's aggressive vaccine diplomacy from the very beginning is now backfiring,” said Judy Twigg, professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in global health and Russian politics. “The goodwill that was generated by those promises and by the deliveries that have been made so far — at what point does that start to turn into resentment and ill will?”

Sputnik became the world’s first registered vaccine against Covid-19 in August 2020 and began mass vaccinations in December. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to sound ebullient about its efficacy. “As one of the European specialists said, it’s as reliable as a Kalashnikov rifle,” he said at a government meeting in May.

For critics like Olga Dobrovidova of AKSON, the Russian Association for Science Communication, the Sputnik V rollout bears all the hallmarks of a PR stunt. “Russia was able to exploit an opening in the market in late 2020 and early 2021,” she said. “But there were always concerns regarding Sputnik V production capacity and whether RDIF can in fact fulfil all its orders in time. I guess now we know that it can’t.”

Faced with missed deliveries, some governments are getting impatient and have struck deals with other manufacturers. Authorities in Argentina announced last Tuesday they had signed a deal for 20 million doses with Pfizer and agreed on a 20 million dose contract with Moderna earlier in July.

As Russia’s vaccine diplomacy weakens, the U.S. and the UK, countries previously criticized for hoarding surplus doses and failing to deliver on their commitments to Covax, the global vaccine initiative, have now ramped up donations worldwide. Last week the UK pledged to ship millions of vaccines to some of the world’s vulnerable countries, including Kenya, Jamaica and Cambodia. The U.S. plans to send 500 million Pfizer vaccines to over 90 lower income countries.

According to Twigg, Russia capitalized on being the first country to ship vaccines. “Now we're shifting into a very different period,” she said. “Western countries are filling in the vacuum that was there before.”

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Lashkarava, who worked for the local opposition TV channel TV Pirveli, had suffered a number of injuries, including a concussion. After undergoing surgery, he was discharged from hospital and was receiving treatment at home. An official cause of death has not been announced.

Sunday’s protests were led by civil rights organizations and activists demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili. Speakers accused the government and the Georgian Orthodox Church of sanctioning the violence. The church organized what was billed as a public prayer meeting on July 5, but priests and members of violent radical groups were seen threatening journalists.

At a government meeting on Monday, Gharibashvili said the administration condemned the July 5 violence and was investigating Lashkarava’s death. He repeated an earlier statement that the planned Pride March was a provocation and said that opposition groups were using the tragedy to further their political aims. 

“The investigation is working on several theories, including the theory of how those aggressive people appeared there and why they deliberately attacked journalists and camera operators,” he said. “This is a legitimate question that the investigation should answer.” 

Lashkarava's death has unleashed a disinformation campaign by far-right groups.

In a special YouTube episode of a political commentary show by Alt Info, an alt-right group that led the July 5 anti-LGBTQ protests, host Irakli Martinenko referred to the involvement of “liberals” in Lashkarava's death. “They probably sacrificed, murdered, one of their own and are now using it politically,” he told Alt Info’s nearly 17,000 subscribers. “Generally, the way the liberals fight differs from that of the conservatives. The main tool for the liberals is taking the position of victim.”

The disinformation angle has been picked up by other prominent figures in Georgia. On July 11, Levan Vasadze — an ultra-conservative public figure and businessman who has long campaigned against the LGBTQ community and has strong ties with pro-Kremlin actors such as the Russian far-right ideologue Aleksandr Dugin — made a video statement on the Georgian-language channel of the World Congress of Families, a U.S. and Russia-led coalition of right-wing Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and abortion and which has just under 65,000 Facebook followers. 

In the video, Vasadze cast suspicion on the timing and circumstances of Lashkarava’s death. He also called out the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia Kelly Dagnan for pressuring the Georgian government to let “this provocation take place,” referring to the Pride march. 

James Nixey, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, said the attempts to obfuscate the circumstances of Lashkarava’s death bore all the hallmarks of a disinformation strategy. “These are tried and tested tactics in Georgia from enemies foreign and domestic, and those domestic enemies are often funded by the foreign. There’s a merging of tactics there and we’ve seen it before.” 

LGBTQ rights have been in the firing line in a number of countries in Europe. Last week, Hungary passed a new law banning the dissemination of educational material viewed as promoting homosexuality in schools. In Poland, Andrzej Duda won a second presidential term last year on a platform of anti-gay rhetoric. In March, the nation’s government banned same-sex couples from adopting children and since the summer of 2019, more than 100 towns and areas have declared themselves "LGBT-free.”

“There’s the trend of an illiberal streak we see running across Europe from Brexit to the rise of the far-right in France,” said Nixey. “You move from there into Eastern Europe and the intolerance shown by the Polish and Hungarian governments there. It’s all part and parcel of the same thing, but each one has its specificities.”

Lashkarava’s death caused wide discussion on Georgian Facebook as well, where many echoed the unproven theories of the Alt Info anchors.

“The United National Movement sectarians forced him on TV channels to yell that he had been beaten. Then they killed him with narcotics, so that they could get people’s support and cause unrest in Georgia in the name of the deceased,” said one user, referring to the main opposition party politicians and supporters.

While Alt-Info’s website and Facebook page were both suspended on Sunday for as yet unknown reasons, its Telegram group of over 2,600 subscribers has been filled with discussion about Lashkarava’s death.

“The guy died of an overdose and they are calling us murderers,” one of the Telegram group members commented.

The comments echoed speculation by allegedly far-right users on Facebook that Lashkarava had been under the influence of alcohol or drugs the day before his death. The theories point to July 10 street camera footage released by the Interior Ministry, which allegedly shows Lashkarava stumbling while walking.

On July 13, as dozens of mourners gathered at Lashkarava’s funeral to pay respects, a group of journalists disrupted a health briefing by Georgia’s deputy health minister, Tamar Gabunia. 

One journalist who interrupted the briefing held up a photo of Lashkarava and a sign that called for Gharibashvili’s resignation. “Irakli Gharibashvili must resign because he is the number 1 homophobe in our country and he is a violent prime minister,” he said.

Additional reporting by Burhan Wazir

Additional research by Sophiko Vasadze and Masho Lomashvili

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DLive, a relatively modest live streaming platform launched in 2017, with seven million users, has been embraced by other white supremacist and far-right figures, including the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, whose account was permanently disabled after the riot for "inciting violent and illegal activities." Gionet was also banned from the platform on January 8.

The gaming platform quickly distanced itself from the unprecedented events at the Capitol. “DLive does not condone illegal activities or violence,” read a posting on its official Twitter account, made hours after the insurrection. On January 8, the company said it had suspended, forced offline or limited 10 accounts and deleted 100 broadcasts and frozen the earnings of individuals streaming the riot.

Megan Squire, an extremism researcher and computer scientist at Elon University in North Carolina studied donations on DLive between April 2020 and January 2021. She found that extremists had earned up to $90,000 in less than a year by streaming their content to subscribers. 

I talked to her to find out more about the study and understand what we learn about monetizing extremism. 

This conversation was edited for length and clarity

Coda Story: Your research shows that far-right actors can earn large sums of money from streaming on DLive. How does studying this relatively small-scale social media platform improve our understanding of how these people work? 

Megan Squire: The study with DLive is more about the fact that these guys are figuring out how to make money in strange places that a lot of us have never heard of. In some cases, we are not paying attention to these tiny little platforms. 

I'm hoping that the study points out the new ways that money is being made, which people are just not aware of — lawmakers, law enforcement, even other researchers and journalists.  

That's why Nick Fuentes was on five nights a week, because he could guarantee to make a couple of thousand dollars every single night. So that's really something that was not on people's radar at all, they were not thinking about this as money. They were thinking about it as hate speech and propaganda.

Could you explain to the uninitiated how the donation network functions on DLive?

MS: There's a site currency called lemons that you spend when you want to donate to someone. You put money into the system and it changes it into lemons. And then, from there, you can use them to donate to your favorite streamer.

There seems to be a mix of large donors and micro donors on DLive. Why do you think they prefer to donate on the platform rather than send money directly to their favorite far-right streamers?

MS: It's really the live entertainment value of having the streamer interact with you or you interacting with the streamer in some way. At the beginning or end of a stream or randomly in the middle of a video stream, everyone would just donate one lemon. 

It's like clapping or applause. You're just showing your appreciation in general. And then, other times, they would give big amounts. They would give 50 lemons or 100 or 1000 — even 10,000. That's about $120. So these are big shows of appreciation.

Why do they donate to far-right extremists, even though transactions are public and not hidden?

MS: I don't think they entirely realized it was public. There's a difference between seeing the lemons coming in and realizing that that could be studied, observed or quantified.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there's nothing illegal about it. It's not like they were money laundering. They were just showing their appreciation for hateful speech, which in the United States is not illegal, so they really had no need to hide that under the law as it exists.

Also, most of them were operating under usernames. So I don't know their real identities, no one does. No one except the company that's cashing them out, and even cash-ins can be done fairly anonymously. 

Your research concludes that the far-right extremist streamer donation network on DLive is disparate and that groups of people follow certain influencers. What does that tell us?

MS: The thing that was the most interesting to me was the idea that there were these little fan clubs. They had these little groups and cliques that they identified with much more than the others. That bore out not just in the memes and what T-shirts they bought, they were really donating and keeping those streamers alive, so it created a sense of community. That was much stronger than I thought it would be. 

How much success has the far right had in adopting influencer culture?

MS: Oh, huge. If you think about it, they've always been good at the influencer culture, all the way back to despots and fascists throughout history. That's their big thing: strongman leadership and propaganda and all that stuff. They're really good at it. This is just the modern way of doing that. It's still a lot of the same tricks.

How hard is it to crack down on this use of technology by far-right figures? 

MS: If we think about influencers and brands, it's much harder to find legal culpability. You can't send a brand to prison. You can send a group and an individual and a leader. All those people can be charged with crimes, but it's much harder to indict a brand, indict a symbol, indict a meme. 

Nick Fuentes doesn't have members. “America First” is just a movement, it's a slogan, it's a flag, a logo. It's not a membership organization. So, being a propagandist, influencing people, but without calling themselves their leader, that's something that I think these guys figured out pretty quick.

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Experts worry that members of the public broadly underestimate the risks of in-car devices and services that, in the course of doing their jobs, also harvest vast amounts of personal data. Recently, privacy concerns have been raised about manufacturers including Ford and Tesla. 

In its annual Global Automotive Cybersecurity Report, the Israeli firm Upstream Security stated that 36% of cyber security incidents within the automobile industry in 2020 involved data and privacy breaches. A number of them resulted in the theft of personal information, including the telephone numbers and email addresses of car owners.

To understand what kind of data we leave behind every time we drive, where it goes and what that might mean for our privacy, I talked to cybersecurity expert Andrea Amico. Amico runs Privacy4Cars. His team consults with consumers and automotive businesses, and advises them how to manage the data that vehicles collect.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity

Coda Story: What kind of data are our cars gathering and how do they do it? 

Andrea Amico: There's anything ranging from your Twitter and Facebook handles and their activity to your calendar entries. You can see what music people were listening to, what files were recently downloaded on your phone, which photos you have taken recently. It depends on the car, but the newer the vehicle, the more information it captures. 

If you take your phone and sync it over Bluetooth — say you need to do a hands-free call, which is a legal requirement in a lot of locations; if you plug your phone into the USB port because you want to listen to your tunes, or because you want to use Apple CarPlay or AndroidAuto; if you connect to the vehicle's Wi-Fi or, simply, if you drive a car that has a GPS system — if you do any of those things, your personal data will be captured by the vehicle.

Why should we care that all this data is collected from us?

AA: I think people have a misunderstanding of two things. One is how much data is in there and how safeguarded that data is, which really breaks down into two things. Most people think:  "Once I unplug my phone, all my data is gone." That's not true. Unless you take some really specific steps, car by car, your data will be there forever. The other thing is that now, with certain vehicles, some of this data will actually go to a number of third parties. Right now we're tracking over 200 companies or entities that collect, use, share data collected from vehicles.

Can you give me examples of what kind of third parties — companies that are not the car manufacturer — can get hold of a vehicle owner’s data? How do they do it?

AA: The fact that we call it the manufacturer is a bit of a misnomer, because really auto manufacturers are assemblers of parts made by many third parties. You use the infotainment system, then the data goes to the manufacturer, but the company that made the infotainment system, they may also be getting a copy of certain types of data. The company that powers the maps, they are getting your geolocation. You want the weather alerts? Again, the weather company will get your geolocation. And, of course, if you know where people are, if you have detailed geo-stamps, it is not difficult to understand who these people are.  

What concerns you about where our data goes? Could you give me examples?

AA: The electronic data recorder, what people call the black box, is the only box in the car that collects personal information that actually has some good, real, clear protections under the law. Everything else does not. The average car today has about 100 computers. One has good legal protection, the other 99 do not, which poses questions about who can get access to it. And the answer is just about anybody.

If you look at a modern vehicle, some cars have more than 300 million lines of code and then collect terabytes of data from consumers every year. And now, with the advent of 5G, they will be able to collect even more and much faster. We are at the very beginning of this data revolution in cars. 

There’s a perception that the data vehicles collect is not personal because it doesn’t directly identify a person. What do you say to that? 

A lot of research has been done on how anonymous your geolocation is. And the answer is that it really isn't. Just recently, we came across a vehicle that had over 300 destinations stored in the navigation system. So, this is accessible to anybody who would have bought that car. They would have been able to rebuild a detailed diary of a person's life for the previous year or so. 

This stuff is personal. Would you hand your phone to a stranger? And if the answer is yes, then, by all means, don't worry about cars. But if the answer is no, I don't think people should treat cars any differently.

So what can car owners do to protect their privacy?

I don't think we should be trading off privacy for safety at any point. The burden really should not be on consumers, it should be on the industry, on how we can deliver these services in a way that does not dramatically affect the privacy of people. And I think it's about how transparent you can be about letting people know what data you're collecting, how you're planning to use it and how much granular control you can give to people to decide what they actually want to do.

The post How much does your car know about you — and who else can get their hands on your data? appeared first on Coda Story.

In May, a team of lawyers and researchers from the Criminal Justice & Police Accountability Project, a Bhopal-based initiative focusing on the criminalization of marginalized caste communities, published an essay on the website of The Transnational Institute, an international research organization linking scholars and policymakers. It outlined how the use of law enforcement technology, including biometrics and video surveillance, is accelerating caste-based discrimination in India’s second largest state, Madhya Pradesh. 

The team examined the police treatment of socially excluded groups in Madhya Pradesh. I spoke with Nikita Sonavane, a lawyer and the project’s co-founder to find out more. 

Coda: What drove you to study the links between law enforcement technology and caste prejudice in India? 

Nikita Sonavane: We are on the path to digitizing the policing system. So, as people who work with the communities that are constantly targeted by the police, we've seen that the surveillance methods — the way that certain communities have been policed historically — is something that will be bolstered by the advent of new technology. For us it was important to see what the possible ramifications of this sort of wide-scale digitization in India could be. 

Coda: Law enforcement agencies in India have long monitored certain caste groups because they are perceived to be “likely” to commit crimes. What is digital surveillance doing to worsen this kind of caste prejudice?

NS: The principle of criminal law is innocent until proven guilty. That principle is already overturned for a lot of these communities because their criminality is presumed. And now that criminality and inequality will be digitally encoded. To put it very simply, it will give rise to this parallel digital caste system.  

Coda: In your essay you write about India’s Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), which links every police station in the country online in real-time and allows for law enforcement to access a digital repository, which includes police crime reports and the biometric data of individuals such as photographs and fingerprints. What are your key concerns here?

The CCTNS has information not just about the person who has been considered to be a habitual offender — in terms of where they live, what kind of assets they own and other demographic details about them — but also has details about their friends and their family members. 

Coda: We’ve seen Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government launch technology-based platforms like CoWin during the pandemic, in order to boost vaccination drives. CoWin has received widespread criticism on grounds such as digital exclusion. Why is this government so keen on technology?

NS: It's twofold. For the government it's always a question of being able to exert a greater degree of control on its citizens, particularly since 2014, when the current government came to power.

With the CoWin portal, the vaccination program has been reduced to a sort of lottery system at best. Because we're living in a country where there is an extensive digital divide, the majority of the population of this country will not be able to access that portal and therefore will not be able to get vaccinated. 

Coda: You refute the government’s claim that systems such as the CCTNS will allow for “objective,” “smart” error-free, algorithm-based policing. Do you think such technology could be efficient in any scenario?

NS: Absolutely not. The idea that technology is going to make something that is inherently biased, oppressive and rooted in principles of casteist predictive policing is absolutely flawed. We have already seen that happen with CCTNS. Because in several states these sorts of systems have become the basis for surveilling certain communities, certain neighborhoods.

This is not an implementation question, this is a design question that cannot be fixed by technology or anything else. If anything, it will create this facade of efficiency and nothing more.

The post Police surveillance technology in India reinforces caste prejudice appeared first on Coda Story.

There’s no single narrative for why QAnon has made such deep inroads into American life, with recent polls showing that the conspiracy cult is now as popular as some major religions in the U.S. Emerging from the bowels of the internet, the ever-evolving theory claims that a cabal of pedophiles controls the U.S. government and that Trump is uniquely equipped to save the state from their clutches.

In collaboration with Newsy, Coda brings you stories of couples in Utah, Colorado and Ohio whose lives and homes have been torn apart by QAnon.

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