[Plura-list] Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret; Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South; Let's get rid of nursing homes
Cory Doctorow
doctorow at craphound.com
Fri Jun 26 15:49:26 EDT 2020
Today's links
* Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret: How cops are
circumventing the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and
Training.
* Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South: Princess and the Frog ahoy!
* Let's get rid of nursing homes: An end-of-life plan.
* Sympathy for the mask-shy: Abstinence-only covid prevention is a failure.
* "Violent protests" vs "violent police": How to report on protests.
* Microcontent guidelines for 2020: A successor to the 1998 classic.
* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019
* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading
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👨🏿🚀 Copyright keeps police use-of-force training a secret
The California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training is
required by law to "conspicuously" publish all law enforcement training
materials.
They're refusing.
Because copyright.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/california-agency-blocks-release-police-use-force-and-surveillance-training
Oh, some of it's there, but if you ask to see how CA cops are trained on
facial recognition, license-plate cameras or (get this) use-of-force,
you get a Word doc containing one sentence: "The course presenter has
claimed copyright for the expanded course outline."
My EFF colleagues Dave Maas and Naomi Gilens have sent a demand letter
insisting these materials be released. The docs come from Motorola
division Vigilant Solution, which has a history of binding police to
illegal/unethical nonpublication clauses.
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-letter-post-sb-978-june-25-2020
But those clauses were nullified by SB978, the California law EFF helped
get past, which makes it clear that irrespective of copyright claims,
police training docs must be made available to the public.
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. So far, POST has only released
(some) course OUTLINES. By law, they are required to release ALL course
materials.
And while that hasn't happened yet, EFF HAS gotten some course docs
through FOIA requests.
What they found was profoundly disturbing. Vigilant's training docs are
hopelessly out of date and counsel police to engage in illegal conduct.
We told POST about it and demanded that the course be withdrawn. Was it?
Who know? The docs are a secret.
This isn't over: "If California POST is going to set and uphold police
standards, then it cannot ignore the law. POST must make its training
materials available online immediately."
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👨🏿🚀 Splash Mountain to purge Song of the South
A couple weeks ago, @tiahsoka challenged us to think of a new theme for
Disney's Splash Mountain, something to replace the racist "Song of the
South" skin that was grafted onto the 1989 flume ride late in its
production.
https://twitter.com/tiahsoka/status/1270181896454934529
Many replied, but the best idea came from Disneyland castmember
Frederick Chambers, who proposed that the theme be replaced with The
Princess and the Frog, a recent New Orleans-set princess movie with
amazing music and Disney's first Black princess.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/compton-cowboys/#zipadeedoodah
Chambers did a full, detailed workup for how the retheme could go. It's
stone brilliant.
https://twitter.com/freddyfrombatuu/status/1270456546665697280
It worked! Disney has now officially announced that Walt Disney World
and Disneyland's Splash Mountain will be rethemed for Princess and the
Frog, under the direction of Imagineering's Charita Carter. (No word on
the date)
https://www.ocregister.com/2020/06/25/disneyland-and-disney-world-to-remake-splash-mountain-with-princess-and-the-frog-theme/
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👨🏿🚀 Let's get rid of nursing homes
Nursing homes were largely unheard of until the 1950s, when the
Hill-Burton Act freed up public money to pay for them; prior to that,
older people stayed home or with family, or lived in small "rest homes."
As Rose Eveleth writes for Wired, nursing homes - both for older people
and people with disabilities - were already visibly unsafe, even before
the pandemic turned them into charnel houses; long before, they've
routinely incubated epidemics.
https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-for-an-end-of-life-discussion-about-nursing-homes/
But despite their failings, the nursing home sector has grown and grown,
thanks to spectacular returns to investors, who fueled a stock bubble in
nursing home building, even as the homes were defunding care and
increasing capacity to goose profits.
What's the solution? Some activists favor the Disability Integration
Act, "which protects the right for both disabled and older Americans to
live in the community."
https://adapt.org/as-covid19-crisis-shines-deadly-light-on-nursing-facilities-adapt-calls-on-congress-and-other-governmental-officials-to-act/
Where that's not possible ADAPT calls for "smaller, home-like settings
that are more resident-centered."
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👨🏿🚀 Sympathy for the mask-shy
It seems that in every health emergency, America rejects harm reduction
in favor of abstinence: don't want to get AIDS? Don't have sex. Don't
want to OD? Don't take drugs.
Don't want to get coronavirus? Stay home.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dudes-who-wont-wear-masks/613375/
As Harvard epidemiologist Julia Marcus writes, abstinence-based
education is always less effective than harm-reduction: "trying to shame
people into wearing condoms didn’t work—and it won’t work for masks either."
Mask enforcement empowers cops to force us to mask up, but those powers
are disproportionately used against marginalized people, especially
Black people - and paradoxically, Black men who DO wear masks are more
likely to suffer racial profiling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/coronavirus-masks-racism-african-americans.html
Meanwhile, shaming may be effective at changing public behaviors, but it
also fuels bad conduct in secret. If people wear masks because of shame
- and not because they believe in the science - they'll ignore masks
whenever they can.
Marcus was interviewed this week on a must-listen episode of On The
Media, where she pointed out that other countries had success with
harm-reduction approaches that acknowledged human needs.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/abstinence-only-coronavirus-guidance-wont-save-us-on-the-media
For example, Dutch authorities advised people to pick sex partners for
the duration of lockdown and add merge their households with your own
"bubble." This presents risks - especially for people in large
households - but so does sneaking around.
"Public health works best when it recognizes and supports people’s needs
and desires without judgment. If Americans do this right, Huff might
even find that his wearing a mask is the very thing that makes those
checkout ladies smile."
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👨🏿🚀 "Violent protests" vs "violent police"
Media scholars say that the way the US press covered protests changed in
the summer of 1968, when Chicago cops turned the same violence on
reporters that had previously been meted out to demonstrators.
Finally, the press began to speak frankly and accurately about the
source of violence, that it came from enraged, armed cops who acted with
impunity to visit cruel violence upon protesters.
During the current uprising, press accounts have located violence with
demonstrators, using terms like "clash" that implied that protesters had
come out to do battle with the police.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/06/its-time-to-change-the-way-the-media-reports-on-protests-here-are-some-ideas/
National press lead with headlines like "A night of fire and fury
across America as protests intensify" (Washpo) and "Appeals for calm as
sprawling protests threaten to spiral out of control" (NYT).
As Kendra Pierre-Louis writes for Nieman Lab, this carries on the long
tradition of focusing on "annoyance" factors from protests, rather than
protest as a means "to publicize grievances from people who typically
exist outside of traditional power structures."
At the most absurd end of the spectrum are headlines like WUSA's "Pepper
spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march
honoring George Floyd" - as though pepper spray occurred without any
human intervention.
In @AskAKorean's excellent history of Korea's successful,
government-changing protests, they describe the process by which
"violent" protests became "peaceful" protests: what changed was that the
police stopped beating people up.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/03/white-nationalist-pogrom/#evidence
That change occurred when the less-favored groups who'd led the protests
in the face of unrestrained police violence (workers and students) were
joined on the lines by members of favored groups (wealthy
professionals), whom the police couldn't beat and kill with impunity.
What brought them out? Largely the same factors that changed the dynamic
in the US in 68: a shift in how the press apportioned responsibility for
violence at demonstrations, from the people airing grievances to the
armed public officials who hit, tortured and killed them.
That shift is starting today. It started with the headline on Matthew
Dessem's Slate story: "Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.html
Other publications took cues from Slate: Zoe Schiffer's Verge article
ran under the headline:
"The protest was peaceful — then the cops arrived"
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/2/21278285/peaceful-protest-oakland-george-floyd-police-violence-tear-gas
Pierre-Louis sets out a slate of recommendations for press coverage of
protests:
* Address selection bias: years of underreporting of Black Lives Matter
can make the protests seem sudden, but they're not - they represent an
evolution in a large, well-organized movement
* Mind how extreme protests capture disproportionate attention: the
armed maniacs who stormed state capitals demanding an end to lockdown
are fringe elements and unrepresentative of the national view
* Excise the passive voice: not "police-involved shooting" - rather,
"the police shot someone"
* Watch for framing: "Peaceful protest" suggests that most protests
aren't peaceful; "unarmed Black man" suggests that the default is "armed"
* Confront racism: protests over racial discrimination and violence are
legitimate; start your coverage with the grievance the protesters came
to air, not how long traffic was held up for
The best of the quotes in Pierre-Louis's piece come from U Minnesota
journalism prof Danielle Kilgo, who I just added to my follows on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/danikathleen
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👨🏿🚀 Microcontent guidelines for 2020
In 1998, Jakob Nielsen published "Microcontent Guidelines," a short
essay on "How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines"
("pearls of clarity...40-60 characters to explain your macrocontent").
https://web.archive.org/web/19990430035412/http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html
I absolutely took the essay to heart and I still refer to its precepts
when writing subject lines, headlines, etc.
Anthony Diké's "How To Write Great Microcopy" is an interesting
successor to Nielsen's 22-year-old essay.
https://theproductperson.substack.com/p/-how-to-write-great-microcopy
"Microcopy" isn't exactly the same thing as "microcontent" - much of
Dike's work focuses on persuasive marketing copy. But he's got a lot to
say about other kinds of short text, including UI elements, error
messages, etc.
A selection of my favorites:
* (Almost) always use the active voice
It’s stronger and easier to understand than the passive voice.
Use it when you need to signal who or what caused an action.
* Use the passive voice (sometimes)
It has its place.
Use it when the action is more important than what caused (subject) the
action.
* Keep it scannable
Reading is work. Every word takes energy. Users like to save energy by
skimming.
* Avoid destructive feedback
It’s unhelpful and depressing.
He's also collected them all into a single Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/antdke/status/1263130017598406657
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👨🏿🚀 This day in history
#15yrsago What tomorrow's Grokster Supreme Court ruling will mean
https://web.archive.org/web/20050628001449/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/003742.php
#15yrsago Tit of justice reinstated by Supreme Torturer Gonzales
https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-06-24-doj-statue_x.htm
#10yrsago Adventurer's Club from Walt Disney World recreated in
painstaking detail with Half-Life engine
https://insidethemagic.net/2010/06/walt-disney-worlds-adventurers-club-virtually-recreated-for-fans-to-once-again-explore/
#10yrsago Texas GOP comes out against oral sex, the UN, and the Supreme
Court
https://web.archive.org/web/20100626003418/https://www.nydailynews.com/news/2010/06/22/2010-06-22_texas_gop_platform_criminalize_gay_marriage_and_ban_sodomy_outlaw_strip_clubs_an.html
#5yrsago Harry Reid tells BLM's Burning Man squad to suck it up
https://web.archive.org/web/20160703055058/https://www.rollcall.com/heard-on-the-hill/harry-reid-to-burning-man-rescue/
#5yrsago Supreme Court upholds marriage equality!
https://www.theguardian.com/law/live/2015/jun/26/supreme-court-rules-same-sex-marriage
#5yrsago How quickly can you turn a meme into an object and back into a
meme?
https://medium.com/@revdancatt/the-google-ai-neural-network-t-shirt-b3d4abd3efd6
#1yrago EU expert panel calls for a ban on AI-based risk-scoring and
limits on mass surveillance
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759447/eu-ai-ethical-policy-recommendations-ban-mass-scoring-surveillance
#1yrago Dieselgate 2.0: 42,000 Mercedes diesels recalled for "illegal
software"
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-says-it-discovered-new-illegal-software-on-daimler-diesels/
#1yrago Insulin: why the price of a 100-year-old drug has tripled in a
decade https://prospect.org/health/insulin-racket/
#1yrago Podcast number 300: "Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an
Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies"
https://ia803004.us.archive.org/11/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300_-_Adversarial_Interoperability.mp3
#1yrago How China ingests and adapts western culture
https://aeon.co/essays/how-china-remakes-its-cultural-imports-from-the-west
#1yrago Prosecutors and federal judges collaborate with corporations to
seal evidence of public safety risks, sentencing hundreds of thousands
of Americans to death
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/
#1yrago You treasure what you measure: how KPIs make software dystopias
https://www.datascience.columbia.edu/ethical-principles-okrs-and-kpis-what-youtube-and-facebook-could-learn-tukey#.XRMxf5DB5eg.twitter
#5yrsago 2.5 million data points show: America's ISPs suck, and AT&T;
sucks worst
https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/interconnection_and_measurement_update/
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources: Wil Wheaton (https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/), Naked
Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/), Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).
Currently writing:
* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 500 words (31799 total).
* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's
progress: 366 words (3618 total)
Currently reading: Goliath, Matt Stoller.
Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 07)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/22/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-07-2/
Upcoming appearances:
* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157
* 'What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can
make tech less big', Jul 1, Oxford Internet Institute
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6015930181073/WN_MnlH5x2XTRqiKKmhU0QPAg
Upcoming appearances:
* 'What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can
make tech less big', Jul 1, Oxford Internet Institute
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/6015930181073/WN_MnlH5x2XTRqiKKmhU0QPAg
* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157
Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
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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; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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