United States News, December 2019 Supplement
United States News.
In 1969 the U.S. began to choose men for military service by a lottery; an official drew a number for the day of the year (1 to 365 or 366 for a leap year) and that determined the order in which men would be called for induction. The lottery was a totally “arbitrary factor uncorrelated with personal traits,” and social scientists now use the cohort of drafted men to research “how a life-changing intervention carries implications for the individuals who experienced it, versus those who escaped by chance,” The Atlantic reported. One study found that “having a draft-selected birthdate increased mortality among draft-eligible men by about 4%, including a 13% increase in the rate of suicide and an 8% increase in the rate of motor-vehicle death.” Another study found “white men suffered a 15% earning penalty in the 1980s for being drafted, while black men experienced no such disparity” because of the existing labor-market bias against them. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/vietnam-draft-lotteries-were-scientific-experiment/602842/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20191219&silverid-ref=NTI0NDYyODAzNDgwS0
Motherboard reported that Dronesense, a company that sells “a platform to government, law enforcement, and private clients for flying drones, exposed a database of customer data, in some cases showing exactly where users programmed their drones to fly.” A researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “In additional to potential harms to privacy, insufficient security of law enforcement systems can also undermine the integrity of criminal investigations and even the justice process.” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdddp/data-shows-where-police-fly-drones-dronesense
Using U.S. Army Surgeon General annual and periodic statistical reports, the Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, 1861-1985, U.S. military health and personnel readiness reports, the Department of Defense Suicide Event Report, and journals, a research team tracked military suicides 1819-2017. Reporting in JAMA, they said the peak rate was in 1883, with 118.3 suicides per 100,000 active-duty Army service members, while the low was in 1944-1945 with only 5 per year. “During the Cold War (approximately 1945-1991) the rate generally stabilized in the low teens to mid-teens,” but the rate has increased “substantially since 2004” and from “2008 to the present the annual rate has remained within the range of 20.2 to 29.7 per 1000,000.”
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/articlepdf/2757484/smith_2019_oi_190660.pdf
The Intercept collected information on every individual sentenced to die by the federal government, the U.S. military and states with an “active” death penalty from July 1976 to the present. It contacted prison officials and asked for “a full roster of individuals sentenced to death row” and for “dates of birth, race, gender, sentencing dates, and current status.” They found that Florida and Texas had the data at hand, but “states’ record-keeping is abysmal, on balance.” (The records on death-row populations maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics are, by law, exempt from public release.) As of the fall of 2019, the researchers had a dataset of 7,335 individual entries from 29 states and the federal government. Among the findings: about 20% of the total were executed; 43% are no longer on death row but not executed; the number of death sentences fell from 300 in 1998 to 43 in 2018; over the four decades “the death penalty appears to be more racially biased than ever.” https://theintercept.com/series/the-condemned/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5bafedf00c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-5bafedf00c-134379393
A new study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found “empirical evidence” that most of the current facial-recognition algorithms “exhibit demographic differentials”—that is, “an algorithm’s ability to match two images of the same person varies from one demographic group to another.” The NIST researchers “used four collections of photographs containing 18.27 million images of 8.49 million people. All came from operational databases provided by the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.” The Washington Post commented, “The study could fundamentally shake on of American law enforcement’s fastest-growing tool for identifying criminal suspects and witnesses.” Federal records show that since 2011 the FBI alone “has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of state driver’s license records and other federal and local databases.” https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-evaluates-effects-race-age-sex-face-recognition-software; https://www.stripes.com/news/us/federal-study-finds-racial-bias-of-many-facial-recognition-systems-1.611851
On 5 December the Brennan Center for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP “filed a lawsuit on behalf of two U.S. based organizations that collaborate with filmmakers around the world, Doc Society and the International Documentary Association (IDA), challenging the State Department’s dragnet requirement that nearly all applicants for U.S. visas register on their application forms the social media identifiers they have used over the past five years on a list of twenty platforms, including those like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. This registration requirement, which took effect in May 2019 and affects about 15 million people a year, reflected a major expansion of the government’s probing into the social media activity of travellers and immigrants to the U.S. The lawsuit also challenges the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) subsequent retention and dissemination of those identifiers.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/doc-society-v-pompeo
A harrowing report from BuzzFeed is based on a whistleblower memo to the Department of Homeland Security in April 2018 that said immigrants held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails around the U.S. were “being given incorrect medication, suffering from delays in treating withdrawal symptoms,” harming themselves, and undergoing “preventable surgeries.” The whistleblower alleged that the ICE Health Service Corps “has systematically provided inadequate medical and mental health care and oversight to immigration detainees across the U.S.” ProPublica obtained a video showing “the Border Patrol held a sick teen in a concrete cell without proper medical attention and did not discover his body until his cellmate alerted guards.” Federal authorities “refused to release the video and other records of Carlos’ death to the public or Congress, citing the ongoing internal investigation,” but ProPublica used Texas open records laws to obtain “surveillance video, detainee logs and health records turned over to police by Border Patrol” from the Weslaco Police Department, which briefly investigated his death. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/ice-immigrant-surgeries-deaths-jails-whistleblower-secret; https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-the-cell-where-a-sick-16-year-old-boy-died-in-border-patrol-care
POLITICO reviewed publicly released records of 22 deaths of detainees in ICE custody between 2013 and 2018 “revealed malfunctioning software and troubling gaps in use of technology, such as failure to properly document patient care or scribbling documentation in the margins of forms.” A lawyer with the nongovernmental Southern Poverty Law Center said, “What we see globally throughout the system are failures to keep comprehensive medical records that are consistent with professional norms.” https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/01/medical-records-border-immigration-074507?
According to State Department data, last year “just over 2,700 immigrant visa applications were rejected for medical reasons.” ProPublica and Univision reported that a 2017 review by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) found that its list of about 5,000 doctors who administer immigration medical exams “included scores of doctors with histories of professional misconduct; the agency promised to clean up the list. ProPublica decided to check the progress. The journalists “analyzed the disciplinary records of doctors in the top 5 states for green card applications” by using the USCIS website to find the doctors and then “looked up the medical board disciplinary record of each doctor.” It found “dozens of doctors who improperly prescribed controlled substances . .; some who violated patient privacy by revealing medical records to unauthorized people; some who failed to supervise assistants and technicians; and others who improperly diagnosed and documented medical conditions.” https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-audit-doctors-with-checkered-records-can-still-decide-fate-of-green-card-seekers?
The Government Accountability Office examined ICE enforcement from 2015 through 2018 and reported that arrests and deportations rose overall, including increases in the number of migrants who are elderly, transgender and disabled. However, “data on detained parents or legal guardians of U.S. citizen or permanent resident minors is not collected in a readily available format, so we couldn’t report it. We recommend that ICE collect and make this data readily available, as required by ICE policy.” One startling item in the report: “U.S. officials jailed approximately 2,100 pregnant women for immigration violations in 2018 . . bringing the increase since President Trump took office to 52%.” https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-20-36
Emails sent by ICE officials that were disclosed in court filings in a case of illegal re-entry show “how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to tack down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California,” The Intercept reported. “ICE used Thomson Reuters’s controversial CLEAR database, part of a growing industry of commercial data brokers that contract with government agencies, essentially circumventing barriers that might prevent the government from collecting certain types of information.” This use allowed ICE ‘s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center’s Data Analysis System to pull “data from other federal agencies, as well as commercial data brokers, to match the names of deported individuals to recent car registrations, utility bill, and mailing addresses, among other records.” https://theintercept.com/2019/12/22/ice-social-media-surveillance/
A Federal District Court judge ruled that former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is not entitled to the proceeds from the publication of his new memoir, saying that Snowden had signed agreements with the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. obliging him to submit his work to them before making it public and he failed to do so, Jurist reported. https://www.jurist.org/news/2019/12/federal-judge-rules-us-government-entitled-to-proceeds-from-edward-snowdens-memoir-and-speeches/
United States/California. The Los Angeles Times researched how many people die in California psychiatric facilities. The Times “submitted more than 100 public record requests to nearly 50 county and state agencies to obtain death certificates, coroner’s reports and hospital inspection records” for information on these deaths. It identified “nearly 100 preventable deaths over the last decade in California psychiatric facilities,” highlighting “breakdowns in care at these hospitals as well as the struggles of regulators to reduce the number of deaths.” Sadly, the data collected “revealed not only deaths but also hundreds of physical and sexual assaults against patients over the last decade.” www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-01/psychiatric-hospital-deaths-california
“Two former Bay Area Air Quality Management District employees who said they were retaliated against after objecting to the illegal destruction of pollution records will be paid $4 million to settle a whistle-blower lawsuit,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Air-district-whistleblowers-awarded-4-million-in-14913993.php
United States/Michigan. The Michigan attorney general sued Veolia, a utility company, for giving the city of Flint bad advice and “did not help it to prevent its lead crisis by pushing harder for safeguards against corrosion or a switch to a different water supply,” the Guardian reported. During the case, internal Veolia emails were made public, showing that Veolia executives “knew that families in Flint . . might be at risk of being poisoned by lead in their tap water months before the city publicly admitted the problem.” For background, see HRWG News 2016-01 and 02. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/10/water-company-city-officials-knew-flint-lead-risk-emails-michigan-tap-water
United States/Minnesota. “When the Minnesota State Services for the Blind transcribes school textbooks into braille, images in textbooks are turned into tactile diagrams, so that a vision impaired reader can feel the image.” The problem was preserving the 40,000 handmade illustrations. Engineering students at the University of St. Thomas developed a scanner to save the tactile images as a 3-D file and are working to develop a 3-D printer that can print a physical copy from the scans. https://www.fox9.com/news/st-thomas-students-develop-scanner-to-create-digital-archive-of-tactile-images-for-the-blind