[Plura-list] Image Scrubber; Trump's bailout guy is making millions for his family; Fix the police

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Tue Jun 2 11:39:53 EDT 2020 

Today's links

* Image Scrubber: An in-browser image sanitizer that doesn't require you
to trust a random website.

* Trump's bailout guy is making millions for his family: Justin Muzinich
isn't a flamboyant villain like Mnuchin. He's a quiet villain.

* Fix the police: What evidence says about police reform.

* After Jim Crow, broken windows: Kelling and Zimbardo have a lot to
answer for.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🙌🏿 Image Scrubber

Posting images from protests to social media is a double-edged sword. On
the one hand, it can hold violent, powerful, corrupt people to account
for violence committed under color of law. On the other hand, it can
expose their victims (and the photographer) to retaliation.

Hence Image Scrubber, a free, in-browser tool for anonymizing pix. It's
a lightweight, powerful browser-based image editor (enabling you to
blur/mask identifying elements, including faces) that also deletes the
EXIF metadata your camera left behind.

https://everestpipkin.github.io/image-scrubber/

And because it runs entirely in your browser, you can download it to
your phone, put the device in airplane mode, and edit images without
connecting to the internet. If your phone is seized, the photos you've
edited will not be useful for targeting your subjects.

You can download the HTML files to your laptop and run them locally as
well. It's a "trust-no-one" model of image scrubbing that lets you
practice good opsec without taking it on faith that some random website
is deleting the images you send it.

Bravo, Everest Pipkin!

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🙌🏿 Trump's bailout guy is making millions for his family

If Trump and his cadre of mustache-twirling villains have a saving
grace, it's that they lack administrative competence. A con-artist
succeeds by running across the river on the backs of alligators, moving
so quick that none of them can take a leg.

A competent villain plays the long game, gets into the minutiae, buries
the con in the fine-print. Their superpower isn't their fast-thinking
gab, it's their ability to both endure and inflict boredom while they
make out like bandits.

But while trumpites like Steven Mnuchin are just gabby muggers, others,
like his protege Justin Muzinich, are champions in the dull, detail
oriented mass ripoffs.

Which is why Muzinich is in charge of trillions in bailout money, and
why that money has made him and his family of plutes incalculably richer.

https://www.propublica.org/article/this-treasury-official-is-running-the-bailout-its-been-great-for-his-family

Muzinich is a second-generation plute, the son of a junk-bond king whose
family firm, Muzinich & Co, has been a massive beneficiary of the
bailout, because, for the first time ever, at Muzinich's insistence, the
Fed has used its bailout money to buy up junk bonds.

What's more, Muzinich never divested himself of $60m+ worth of shares in
the family business. Instead, he parked them with Daddy, in a legal
fiction that maintains the pretence of divestiture but still allows
Muzinich to get the share back the day he leaves the Trump admin.

This isn't Muzinich's first rodeo: he was the point person on the Trump
tax bill, where it was his job to reject the commonsense advice of the
Treasury's tax expert and then perform surprise when their predictions
came true.

For example, when government experts warned Muzinich that creating
massive tax-loopholes for C corporations would induce large firms to
restructure as C corps, he pooh-poohed the prediction as absurd.

Today, the largest private equity funds in America - Ares, Blackstone
and KKR - have restructured as C corps, avoiding billions in taxes.

Despite all this, Muzinich is beloved of both establishment Democrats
and Republicans, because he talks like them. He is attuned to fine
details, capable of discussing nuance without drifting off in bored
reverie. He's not a clown.

But "seriousness" is not a substitute for virtue. Indeed, long after the
gator-dashing short con experts in the White House have had a leg gnawed
off, people like Muzinich will be luxuriating in their bunkers, bathing
in the money they stole.

Thank goodness for the forensic, explanatory skills of Propublica's
Justin Elliot, Lydia Depillis and Robert Faturechi - their service in
tracking down and laying out the long con is the first step on the long
road to banishing these sociopaths to society's outer reaches.

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🙌🏿 Fix the police

Data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe is the cofounder of the police reform
group Campaign Zero. In a spectacular thread from Oct 2019, he lays out
the evidence for which interventions improve policing, and which ones
are a waste of time/money.

https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655701271732224

What doesn't work? Better training, implicit bias workshops, bodycams.
These programs are uneven and the evidence doesn't support the idea that
they reduce police violence.

Thankfully, there is evidence to support a list of low-cost, practical
interventions that DO work.

30 years' worth of research supports the idea that use-of-force policies
reduce police violence.

http://useofforceproject.org/

Demilitarizing the police - stripping them of the weapons and armor that
they get as cheap surplus from the US military - works. Obama ended this
practice. Trump renewed it. Military contractors - who make bank from it
- lobby for it constantly.

Fix police union contracts. The contracts that police unions sign with
cities are bad jokes: "Purging misconduct records, reinstating fired
officers, dept funding."

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/police-union-privileges.html

Use data to do "predictive policing" - not predicting crime, but
predicting abusive cops.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/criminal-justice/ct-predicting-bad-police-behavior-20190801-xumudeezmjalbbpmqwyvh26tdi-story.html

Invest in orgs that support poor and marginalized people, and establish
police alternatives - for example, divert 911 calls related to mental
health to mental health professionals, not cops (likewise, divert calls
about homelessness to social workers, etc).

Fund the DoJ and direct it to investigate police departments:
"Departments that receive federal intervention have 25-30% fewer police
shootings than those that do not."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kznagw/jeff-sessions-is-walking-away-from-the-best-way-to-reduce-police-shootings

This stuff works. Adopting just some of these proposals in Oakland
reduced the number of people shot by cops from 8/year to 0/year.

To learn more about Campaign Zero's research, watch this video of them
presenting all of it to Portland City Council.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1niaq51Z2Uw

While some of the specifics of this were surprising to me, the overall
message is just commonsense. Tell cops they're not allowed to use
violence. Don't outfit them like an army.. Punish and fire cops who
break the rules.

Don't use cops as social workers, mental health counsellors or addiction
therapists.

When you put it that way, it's clear that the only reason we're living
through an epidemic of lethal police violence is that we chose not to do
something about it.

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🙌🏿 After Jim Crow, broken windows

US policing has been racist from the start. The first US police forces
were vigilante "Slave Patrols" charged with returning liberated Africans
to the monsters who'd enslaved them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/29/mind-control-skepticism/#qualified-immunity

So any discussion of the anti-Black violence of US policing must begin
with this fact.

https://theconversation.com/the-racist-roots-of-american-policing-from-slave-patrols-to-traffic-stops-112816

But it shouldn't end there.

Over the years, the character and intensity of US police racism has
changed, and there are identifiable, proximate causes for those changes.
Undoing those changes will not eliminate racism from policing, but it
will dampen the danger it poses.

In 2017, Matt Taibbi wrote a furious book about the NYPD's daylight
murder of Eric Garner, called "I Can't Breathe."

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/15/eric-garner-rip.html

In it, Taibbi examines the role that "broken windows" policing and
data-driven police quotas played.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/where-did-policing-go-wrong

"Broken Windows" came from a 1982 article in The Atlantic by the
academic corrections official George Kelling, who claimed that people
"feel safer" when the streets are swept of panhandling, litter,
graffiti, etc.

The Broken Windows theory was endorsed and spread by the famed Stanford
psych researcher Philip "Obedience Experiment" Zimbardo, who wrote, "If
a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired, all of the rest of
the windows will soon be broken."

The promise of an easy answer to crime was incredibly tempting for
mayors and police chiefs, who imposed quotes on rank-and-file officers,
demanding that they stop, search and ticket a minimum number of people
for low-level offenses every day.

But there's a problem with that. If you stop-and-frisk wealthy,
influential, connected people, they will sue you for human rights
violations, go to the newspapers, and make your life hell.

To meet quotas, cops had to find people who weren't entitled to complain
when their rights were violated.

Black people.

This is the origin of the modern, data-driven epidemic of overpolicing.
In 2004, the city of Baltimore saw 100,000 petty crime arrests that met
and exceeded Mayor Martin O'Malley's targets. By 2014, Chicago PD had
stopped 250,000 people in a single year.

The culture of "goal setting" and "deliverables" existed in
irreconcilable tension with the inability of the police to visit
stop-and-frisk and constant traffic stops on the white majority.
Something had to give. That something was Black lives.

America became the great incarcerator, as Clinton's Crime  Bill gave
rise to long sentences for the people busted by cops looking to hit
their targets.

As Taibbi writes today, "We have two systems of enforcement in America,
a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one
for everyone else."

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/where-did-policing-go-wrong

This is why NYC had to pay $33,000,000 in restitution for *one hundred
thousand* strip-searches performed on people facing misdemeanor charges.
These searches don't merely reflect sadism - they're also a way of
creating new charges, like "resisting arrest." It's a twofer.

It's why cops - correctly - came to understand that the people they were
policing hated them and saw them as an occupying army.

Lucky for them, that was around the time military contractors
successfully lobbied for a program of low-cost "surplus" sales of
military equipment to local law.

That's when we started to see cops dressing up like infantry on patrol
in Mosul. "Dress for the job you want."

Broken windows was a fraud, and "community policing" (the euphemism for
stop-and-frisk) never worked. But it lumbers on as a zombie "fact" whose
research was long discredited, claiming Black lives in its wake.

https://www.propublica.org/article/in-new-york-crime-falls-along-with-police-stops

"In upscale white America drug use is effectively decriminalized, and
Terry stops, strip searches, and 'quality of life' arrests are unknowns.
The country isn’t going to heal as long as everyone else gets a knee in
the neck."

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🙌🏿 This day in history

#15yrsago Newspaper breaking a strike by publishing online
https://web.archive.org/web/20050604000013/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050602.wdelivery0602/BNStory/Front/

#15yrsago Deep Throat's FBI-defeating security measures
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060102124_pf.html

#10yrsago Fordlandia: novelistic history of Henry Ford's doomed
midwestern town in the Amazon jungle
https://boingboing.net/2010/06/02/fordlandia-novelisti.html

#10yrsago Russia's troll factory
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

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🙌🏿 Colophon

Today's top sources: Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Kottke (https://kottke.org).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 514 words (22079
total).

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances: Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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