22 December 20
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Laura Poitras | I Am Guilty of Violating the Espionage Act
Laura Poitras, The New York Times
Poitras writes: "The Justice Department is setting a dangerous precedent that threatens reporters - and the truth."
am guilty of violating the Espionage Act, Title 18, U.S. Code Sections 793 and 798. If charged and convicted, I could spend the rest of my life in prison.
This is not a hypothetical. Right now, the United States government is prosecuting a publisher under the Espionage Act. The case could set a precedent that would put me and countless other journalists in danger.
I confess that I — alongside journalists at The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news organizations — reported on and published highly classified documents from the National Security Agency provided by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, revealing the government’s global mass surveillance programs. This reporting was widely recognized as a public service.
The Espionage Act defines the unauthorized possession or publication of “national defense” or classified information as a felony. The law was originally enacted during World War I to prosecute “spies and saboteurs.” It does not allow for a public interest defense, which means a jury is barred from taking into account the difference between a whistle-blower exposing government crimes to the press, and a spy selling state secrets to a foreign government.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Espionage Act was rarely used in the context of journalism. The most notable exception is the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 was charged with violating the Espionage Act for providing news organizations, including The Times, with the Pentagon Papers. The charges against Mr. Ellsberg were dropped when the illegal methods of the government’s evidence gathering — breaking into his psychiatrist’s office and warrantless wiretapping — were exposed.
All this changed after Sept. 11, when the Espionage Act became a tool of the government to selectively prosecute sources and whistle-blowers, and to intimidate journalists and news organizations seeking to publish reports that the government wanted to suppress. During Barack Obama’s presidency alone, the Justice Department prosecuted eight journalism-related Espionage Act cases against sources, more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined.
One of the most alarming abuses of the Espionage Act under President Obama was the case of Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst who in 2010 was indicted under the law for disclosing classified information to the Fox News journalist James Rosen. In the Justice Department’s search warrant, Mr. Rosen is described as a possible “co-conspirator.” Mr. Rosen was ultimately not charged, but tragically Mr. Kim pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act and served 10 months in prison. (I co-produced a film about the case.)
Despite this escalation of prosecuting whistle-blowers and sources, the government had never crossed the line to charging journalists or publishers for receiving or releasing classified information — until last year.
That was when the Justice Department indicted Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of WikiLeaks, with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act, on top of one earlier count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
The charges against Mr. Assange date back a decade, to when WikiLeaks, in collaboration with The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel and others, published the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and subsequently partnered with The Guardian to publish State Department cables. The indictment describes many activities conducted by news organizations every day, including obtaining and publishing true information of public interest, communication between a publisher and a source, and using encryption tools.
I made a film about Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks called “Risk.” I filmed Mr. Assange for many years, and as the film shows, we had serious disagreements. There are many reasons to be critical of Mr. Assange, and I have not shied away from them. But we should be clear about what he is being prosecuted for and the stakes for press freedom.
WikiLeaks’ publications exposed war crimes, revealed previously undisclosed civilian deaths in American-occupied Iraq, detailed government corruption in Tunisia on the eve of the Arab Spring, and generated countless other reports that dominated the front pages of newspapers around the world throughout 2010 and 2011.
WikiLeaks was responsible for the most unvarnished reporting on American occupations and foreign policy since the start of the “war on terror,” and helped to shift the public consciousness.
None of the architects of the “war on terror,” including the C.I.A.’s torture programs, have been brought to justice. In contrast, Mr. Assange is facing a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
He is detained at Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London, recently under lockdown because of a coronavirus outbreak, and fighting extradition to the United States. A British judge is expected to rule on his extradition on Jan. 4. On Wednesday, 15 members of Britain’s Parliament issued a letter to the secretary of state to meet with Mr. Assange ahead of the extradition decision, citing concerns of press freedom.
I have experienced the chilling effect of the Espionage Act. When I was in contact with Mr. Snowden, then an anonymous whistle-blower, I spoke to one of the best First Amendment lawyers in the country. His response was unnerving. He read the Espionage Act out loud and said it had never been used against a journalist, but there is always a first time. He added that I would be a good candidate because I am a documentary filmmaker without the backing of a news organization.
It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange’s indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges. It paves the way for the United States government to indict other international journalists and publishers. And it normalizes other countries’ prosecution of journalists from the United States as spies.
To reverse this dangerous precedent, the Justice Department should immediately drop these charges and the president should pardon Mr. Assange.
Since Sept. 11, this country has witnessed an escalating criminalization of whistle-blowing and journalism. If Mr. Assange’s case is allowed to go forward, he will be the first, but not the last. If President-elect Joe Biden wants to restore the “soul of America,” he should begin with unequivocally safeguarding press freedoms under the First Amendment, and push Congress to overturn the Espionage Act.
Attorney General Bill Barr at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center in July 28. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Undercutting Trump, Barr Says There's No Basis for Seizing Voting Machines, Using Special Counsels for Election Fraud, Hunter Biden
Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post
Zapotosky writes: "Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday that he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud - again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election."
At a news conference to announce charges in a decades-old terrorism case, Barr — who has just two days left in office — was peppered with questions about whether he would consider steps proposed by allies of the president to advance Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud.
Barr said that while he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. He asserted he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government,” and he would not name a special counsel to explore the allegations of Trump and his allies.
“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said.
Similarly, Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, who revealed earlier this month he was under investigation for possible tax crimes. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors, and he hoped that would continue in the next administration.
“To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.
The comments are likely to further erode what is already a significantly damaged relationship between Barr and Trump, though they also could help insulate Barr’s successor, Deputy Attorney General Jeff A. Rosen, from any White House pressure.
Earlier this month, Barr broke with President Trump on his unfounded allegations of voter fraud, telling the Associated Press he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Tension already had been simmering between the two men for months because Barr did not on the eve of the election release results from Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which Trump thought might be a political windfall. And after Barr’s comments, the president’s frustration was compounded when Hunter Biden revealed he was under federal investigation for possible tax crimes, and Barr had apparently kept that probe a relative secret, too.
Trump told Fox News recently that Barr “should have stepped up” and publicized the case — which would have violated Justice Department policy.
“All he had to do is say an investigation’s going on,” Trump said, adding later, “When you affect an election, Bill Barr, frankly, did the wrong thing.
After a meeting with Trump last week, Barr handed in his resignation, saying he intended to leave this Wednesday.
Since then, Trump has intensified his effort to overturn the results of the election. On Sunday, he said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm Biden’s victory.
And at a frenetic Oval Office meeting days earlier, he seemed to entertain other steps that some advisers warned are baseless and exceed the bounds of his power.
He suggested, for example, naming lawyer Sidney Powell — who has promoted the wild, false claim that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden — as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, though the idea appeared to be a non-starter, people familiar with the meeting have said.
Barr had previously seemed to throw cold water on Powell’s allegation of a grand conspiracy, telling the Associated Press, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that.”
Trump also suggested that homeland security officials should seize state voting machines and investigate alleged fraud, though acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and other homeland security officials have previously told the White House they have no authority to do so unless states ask for inspections or investigations.
Powell was present at the meeting, as was Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who has said publicly Trump could use the military to “basically rerun an election.” Flynn came to the Oval Office to discuss that idea, people familiar with the matter said, though Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously.” Trump later tweeted, “Martial law = Fake News.
Trump and his political allies had in recent weeks been pressuring the Justice Department, in particular, to appoint a special counsel to explore his unfounded claims of voter fraud. On Dec. 9, 27 House Republicans wrote to Trump urging him to direct Barr to make such a move, and Trump retweeted a post from Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) that contained an image of the letter and appealed to the Justice Department to act immediately. “The DOJ needs to listen to #WeThePeople and address their election concerns NOW,” Budd wrote.
Barr said at the news conference that he knew when he accepted the attorney general job, it would be a difficult one, but added: “I don’t regret coming in.” In addition to breaking with Trump on election fraud, Barr also seemed to put himself at odds with Trump in attributing recently uncovered cyberhacks of the U.S. government to Russia. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already done so, Trump later suggested on Twitter China might be the culprit.
“From the information I have, I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment,” Barr said. “It certainly appears to be the Russians.”
After he departs on Wednesday, leadership of the department will fall to Rosen, who declined to answer questions in a recent interview with Reuters about whether he would name special counsels to investigate voter fraud or Hunter Biden. Rosen did not appear at Monday’s news conference.
Nakia Wallace, an organizer with the activist organization Detroit Will Breathe, is placed in a chokehold by a Detroit police officer as riot police push into a crowd of protesters organized in response to the police shooting of Hakim Littleton on July 10, 2020. (photo: Adam J. Dewey)
Detroit Is Suing Black Lives Matter Protesters for "Civil Conspiracy"
Chris Gelardi, The Intercept
Excerpt: "The city's lawsuit came after protesters won a restraining order against Detroit cops for their violent response to the George Floyd protests."
t the end of August, activists in Detroit, like those in dozens of U.S. cities, sued their local government for its police department’s reaction to this year’s Black Lives Matter mobilization. Their complaint alleges that Detroit cops “repeatedly responded with violence” when they took to the streets and includes photos and descriptions of some of the gruesome resulting injuries: bruised and broken ribs, concussions, a collapsed lung, a fractured pelvis. In light of this brutality, the protesters asked a federal judge to bar the police from using “tools of excessive force,” like chemical weapons, sound cannons, and rubber bullets, against them.
Less than a month later, after the court issued temporary orders restricting the cops’ use of force, the city filed its official response. It includes a line-by-line denial of every brutality accusation — and a countersuit.
Detroit’s demonstrators are part of a “civil conspiracy,” the city’s countersuit alleges, “to disturb the peace, engage in disorderly conduct, incite riots, destroy public property,” and resist police orders, among other “illegal acts.” The countercomplaint asks the court to issue judgments declaring that the protesters engaged in this conspiracy and “defamed” the mayor and police, and to award the city damages.
The countersuit against Black Lives Matter protesters is a novel move in the post-George Floyd moment, and it has lit a fire under already boiling local tensions. The city has tried to portray it as a routine legal tactic, but many see the counterattack as an effort to suppress the right to protest and to shift the public narrative away from the police department’s violence. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., whose congressional district includes much of Detroit, has lambasted it as “an unthinkable assault on constitutional rights.”
The protesters are fighting back on two separate tracks: one in court, with the backing of national legal groups, and another in the city council, which has the power to cut off funding for the city’s litigation. One council member has already vocalized her opposition to the countersuit, and the activists are working to lobby others ahead of a vote early next year.
The situation highlights how officials across the country have weaponized the legal system to suppress the Black Lives Matter movement — like with the overuse of felony charges against protesters, something the Detroit activists have also experienced. When activists gathered in a suburb in October to march in defiance of racist policing, local cops in riot gear attacked them minutes after they took the street and eventually charged five with felonies. The prosecutor has not dropped the charges, despite pressure from community members, activists, and members of Congress.
“These attacks against us are a way of attempting to minimize our ability to go on the offensive and call for transparency and accountability,” said Tristan Taylor, a protest leader and plaintiff in the demonstrators’ original lawsuit. “This is just a way of saying to people, ‘This is not a place where you can raise your voice.’”
In Detroit, the reckoning over policing that swept the nation after the cop killing of George Floyd in May has been a struggle between two deeply entrenched sides. On one is the city’s protest movement and its umbrella collective, Detroit Will Breathe, the lead plaintiff in the original suit. On the other is the Detroit Police Department and its head, Chief James Craig.
Craig has been clear about his strategy in dealing with Detroit Will Breathe: “We don’t retreat,” he told host Tucker Carlson on Fox News, where he has appeared several times since this year’s movement began. While rarely offering specifics about the group’s wrongdoing, Craig has labeled Detroit Will Breathe a group of “criminals” and “misguided radicals” who “incite violence.” “I absolutely am not going to allow them to take over our city streets,” he told another Fox News host. He has also lobbed conspiratorial accusations at the Black Lives Matter movement at large, telling “Fox and Friends” that it is “coordinated,” “planned,” and “financed” by “a Marxist ideology” trying to “undermine our government as we know it.”
As Craig has bragged on Fox News, he has the support of Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, who has called Craig’s protest policing “beautiful” and “outstanding.” According to protesters, the city’s countersuit is an extension of Craig’s pugnacious response to their activism.
“It’s just another blatant attempt to silence and intimidate us,” said Lauren Rosen, an organizer with Detroit Will Breathe and a plaintiff. “Except now … they want to do it through the courts instead of in the streets.”
The city’s countersuit claims that Detroit Will Breathe activists made false statements about cops — evidence, the city says, of a “civil conspiracy” and that protesters “defamed” Detroit police (though the city clarified in a recent filing that it isn’t suing outright for defamation). But many of the assertions to which the city points seem to be political statements rather than factual inaccuracies. In one instance, the city claims that Nakia Wallace, a Detroit Will Breathe leader, “falsely characterized [Detroit police] officers” by posting on Twitter about the “murderous and brutal nature of the Detroit Police Department.” In another, it claims that a Detroit Will Breathe member “falsely” described the “‘mentality’” of Detroit police as one of “‘the wild, wild West.’”
The countercomplaint also accuses Detroit Will Breathe of peddling a “false narrative to rile the public” about the fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Hakim Littleton in July, noting that body and dashcam footage released the day of the killing “shows the man fire a gun at an officer before police shot him.” Missing from the city’s account is the key reason people are still protesting the incident: Video suggests that police landed most of their shots on Littleton, including one apparently to the head, after tackling him to the ground and kicking his gun away.
The city’s lawsuit also nitpicks Detroit Will Breathe members’ characterization of the police violence they’ve endured. In particular, in the countercomplaint and an earlier filing, the city takes issue with Wallace’s accusation that a cop placed her in a “chokehold” during a protest on the day of Littleton’s killing. Despite a photo showing a helmeted officer with her flexed arm wrapped tightly around Wallace’s throat, the city claims that, while arresting Wallace, the officer “lost her hold, which caused her arms to momentarily touch Wallace’s neck.” The amount of time the officer’s arm was around Wallace’s neck “was far too brief” to fit the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of a chokehold, the city asserts, and Detroit Will Breathe’s “improper use of this incendiary term demonstrates their desire to falsely alarm the public and the Court.”
“She took me down with very clear intentions — I couldn’t breathe,” Wallace told The Intercept. The chokehold denial is just one of many “ridiculous arguments you would not expect somebody who works for city government to make.”
An organization called the National Police Association has filed the only friend-of-the-court brief in support of the city’s arguments. Despite its official-sounding name, the National Police Association is a small “Blue Lives Matter” ideological group with no apparent law enforcement connections. (Association President Ed Hutchison told The Intercept he was unaware that “law enforcement backgrounds are required to operate” a nonprofit.) According to the association’s website, it aims to “fight back against cop-haters,” implement “‘Broken Windows’ policing policy for all state and local agencies,” and authorize “local law enforcement officers to perform federal immigration law enforcement functions.” The Bopp Law Firm, a Terre Haute, Indiana-based practice “dedicated to the advancement of conservative Republican principles,” assisted with the brief.
“I think [the countersuit] is much more political than legal,” said Julie Hurwitz, an attorney representing Detroit Will Breathe on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild. “The city is seeking to do whatever it can to discredit the extremely effective organizing that’s been going on in the city of Detroit.”
In response to a list of questions about the countersuit, the city of Detroit’s principal attorney, Corporation Counsel Lawrence Garcia, told The Intercept, “We prefer not to comment on active litigation.”
In asserting a “civil conspiracy,” the city’s countersuit also alleges that “the protests in Detroit have repeatedly turned violent, endangering the lives of police and the public” — and because of this, Detroit Will Breathe’s demonstrations shouldn’t be considered First Amendment-protected activities.
The city claims that, during four protests, activists injured Detroit police officers by throwing objects at them and resisting arrest; an earlier court filing claims that the injuries include “cracked vertebrae, lacerations, and concussions.” But the documents provide no details on how each injury occurred, and whom among the protesters caused the injuries. The filings also repeatedly claim that protesters were “destroying and defacing public property,” but give only two examples: a police car window shattered on an unspecified date and a statue of a slave owner spray-painted in September. The countersuit’s most detailed accusations of Detroit Will Breathe’s “unlawful” behavior center on activists repeatedly ignoring police orders to disperse.
Detroit Will Breathe’s complaint, by contrast, includes extensive details on the violent actions of Detroit police officers. One protester named in the suit claims that she was shot in the chest with a rubber bullet, which pierced her skin and tissue, after being tear-gassed and beaten with a riot shield without provocation; she experienced panic attacks for months after. Another protester claims that she suffered a head injury after being pushed to the pavement and trampled; she experienced migraines for weeks. Another had her pelvis fractured when a cop hit her with a baton; a doctor advised her not to walk for several months. Another suffered a broken rib and collapsed lung when an officer beat him over the back. Two got concussions when an officer hit them over the head with their baton. Others describe being tackled, beaten, pepper-sprayed, and tear-gassed on multiple occasions.
Rosen, the Detroit Will Breathe organizer, suffered ear damage after police blasted her with a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, also known as a sound cannon. “I experienced vertigo, dizziness, nausea, tinnitus,” she told The Intercept. For days she had difficulty sleeping and eating, “and because of not being able to really eat and the stress, I lost a significant amount of weight.”
Based on the disparity between the city’s open-ended allegations of unlawfulness and the protesters’ detailed complaints of police brutality, Detroit Will Breathe filed a motion to dismiss the city’s countersuit at the end of October. That motion is still being litigated.
“The law is very well settled that when you’re going to bring a claim, you need to be able to back it up, and you need to be able to back it up on its face,” said Amanda Ghannam, another lawyer representing Detroit Will Breathe on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild. “They’re just going with these really broad brush strokes trying to paint the entire movement as lawless and violent.”
A fight over the countersuit is currently brewing in the Detroit City Council’s internal operations committee, which oversees and issues recommendations on city funding decisions.
In order to continue work on the Detroit Will Breathe lawsuit, Garcia, the city’s attorney, has asked the council and the committee to approve an extension and expansion of a contract with the private law firm, Clark Hill, assisting his office with the litigation. The proposal would add the Detroit Will Breathe case, an additional year, and an added $200,000 to a preexisting five-case, $150,000 contract, according to a memo from the city council’s legislative policy division obtained by The Intercept.
During a November 18 internal operations committee meeting, nearly 20 people, many organized by Detroit Will Breathe, called in to denounce the city’s countersuit and oppose the contract.
“This is an attack on racial justice movements, and it’s a really egregious thing to spend public money on,” said one of the callers. Garcia responded to the concerns by portraying the counterclaim as a routine move. “The city files these types of countersuits when it’s legally advisable to do so,” he said.
Council Member Raquel Castañeda-López then asked Garcia whether the city had ever countersued activists protesting against police brutality, prompting him to admit that he believed this was a first. But he maintained that the protest movement is also an unprecedented situation. “I’m not aware of another occasion where there’s been a concerted effort to block city streets and assault police officers,” he said. To this, Castañeda-López called his bluff, pointing out that Detroit is famously known for its history of insurrections, riots, and civil rights demonstrations.
“The claims in the countersuit are ludicrous,” Castañeda-López told The Intercept. “If we as a city begin countersuing residents for protesting, it’s setting the first stone on the path of making it even more legally permissible to violate people’s First Amendment rights.”
Several of the callers during the committee meeting brought up the civil rights movement and painted the countersuit as a “segregationist” tactic, echoing an argument made by Detroit Will Breathe leaders.
“That’s what King went to jail for, right?” said Taylor. “Because [Birmingham] wouldn’t give him permits for doing civil rights demonstrations.”
Legal advocates agree with the analysis. Detroit’s “counterclaim is dangerous and it is chilling,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a brief. “The theory behind it could have been used to justify imposing ruinous liability on generations of civil rights protesters.”
The internal operations committee adjourned the November meeting, against Garcia’s objections, with a decision to revisit the contract proposal at a closed session in late January, an idea suggested by Council Member James Tate, before it’s reconsidered by the committee and sent to the full council. A spokesperson for Tate, a former second deputy chief at the Detroit Police Department, said that he will “reserve his opinion on the contract” until after the closed session and that he is “troubled by the allegations levied” by both sides of the lawsuit. The seven remaining members of the Detroit City Council did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiry about their position on the contract proposal and the city’s countersuit.
“They’re trying to send a message to the Black Lives Matter movement, to anybody standing up against state power and trying to hold them accountable,” said Wallace. But the movement has an “opportunity,” she said, “to bring forth meaningful change, and the responsibility to not allow ourselves to be co-opted or silenced or bullied off the streets.”
'Accountability at the Pentagon matters,' House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said on House floor. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The US Is on the Verge of the Biggest Anti-Money-Laundering Update in Years
Jen Kirby, Vox
Kirby writes: "If you're a corrupt foreign official or drug trafficker, there's a pretty easy way to protect your illicit cash: create an anonymous shell company."
You form a shell company — meaning a business that exists only on paper, with no employees, no products it makes or sells, no revenue, nothing except maybe a bank account and some assets — but you do it without disclosing your (the owner’s) real name, offering a convenient way to launder your money and evade law enforcement in the United States.
Except that might now be a lot harder to do in the US. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the $741 billion defense bill, will effectively ban anonymous shell companies.
If signed into law, when someone opens a shell corporation, they’ll be required to provide the owner’s name and some basic identifying information. This simple step will give law enforcement and national security officials a powerful tool to crack down on corruption.
The NDAA, including this provision, passed with overwhelming support in Congress. Trump is threatening to veto the defense package, but the bill should have enough support in the House and the Senate to override a presidential veto.
To help understand more about what this new provision does and why it’s so important, I called up Clark Gascoigne, a senior policy adviser at the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, a nongovernmental organization that advocates against corrupt financial practices by promoting transparency and anti-money laundering policies.
“This is the biggest anti-money-laundering update that we’ve had in 20 years,” he told me.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Jen Kirby
So can you explain — in really simple dummy terms — what this law actually does?
Clark Gascoigne
So in dummy terms, it will require that, when you form a company in the United States, you simply have to disclose the identity of the true human being who owns the company.
It asks for four readily available pieces of information: your name, address, date of birth, and an ID number, which could be a driver’s license or passport number. You disclose that to the Treasury Department.
And that’s it. That’s what it does. When you form the company, you disclose that, and then if you sell it or the company’s ownership changes, you have to update that with the Treasury Department. That’s it.
Jen Kirby
Okay, so, I’m thinking: If I wanted to start a business, of course I would have to give that information. But you’re telling me that’s not the case for all businesses?
Clark Gascoigne
So right now, in the United States — in fact, in every state in the country — you can set up an anonymous shell company. You can create a company without disclosing who the true owner is.
Some states ask for more information than other states, but no state actually asks for the person who ultimately owns the company. It could be a manager that needs to be listed. Some states require a registered agent of the company. There are some states that don’t even require a human being to be listed on the forms anywhere.
It’s a major problem for law enforcement and national security investigators as they’re pursuing criminal networks or national security threats. When they stumble across an anonymous shell company, they can’t figure out who is behind the company. They just hit this brick wall of corporate secrecy. And investigations often stall, and can, at times, be abandoned due to a lack of time and resources to be able to figure it out and continue to pursue the case.
So having this disclosure is going to be a critical reform that’ll allow investigators to actually follow the money trail.
Jen Kirby
I’m thinking, “Why would I want to form an anonymous company?” Maybe it’s because I want to do something that is not exactly aboveboard. Can you explain who, exactly, wants to open an anonymous shell company?
Clark Gascoigne
So I would state, first off, that there are many reasons to have a shell company if you want to hold assets. It’s the anonymity that this is going after. You can still incorporate shell companies after this, you just have to disclose who’s behind it to the government.
The reason that people oftentimes set these anonymous companies up is because they are looking at engaging in nefarious activity. There’s a pretty well-documented history of these anonymous companies being used to undermine various national security safeguards that we have, to hide bad actors and to launder proceeds for a wide variety of crimes.
Anywhere from North Korea setting up anonymous shell companies to evade sanctions on their nuclear proliferation financing to human traffickers who set up anonymous shell companies to own the illicit massage businesses they are operating through in order to stymie law enforcement from figuring out who the criminal kingpins are behind those shell companies.
Jen Kirby
Gotcha. And my understanding is the US has been a bit of an outlier here until now in allowing this practice. Is that right?
Clark Gascoigne
So there’s a number of studies and research that’s gone into this. There was a study a few years ago by some academics at the University of Texas, Brigham Young University, and [Australia’s] Griffith University, where they sent emails to corporate-formation companies in hundreds of different countries around the world, intentionally setting off red flags for terror financing, corruption, or drug-trafficking.
They actually found that the corporate formation agents in the United States were most likely to ignore the red flags and proceed with setting up the companies. There was one corporate-formation agent in Florida who responded saying, “This is clearly dirty money, it could possibly even be terror financing” — and then followed that by saying, “I wouldn’t even consider getting involved for less than $5,000 a month.” So totally willing to do it for a price.
There’s other studies, too. The World Bank and the United Nations took a look at 150 of the largest corruption cases over the past few decades and found that more than three-quarters of them utilize anonymous companies to launder their illicit funds, and US entities were the most common of those companies in those cases.
Jen Kirby
It seems the ease with which people could set up anonymous shell companies in the United States made some of the US’s foreign policy tools, particularly when it came to sanctions, somewhat ineffective. Is that a fair characterization?
Clark Gascoigne
I mean, without knowing who the beneficial owners of companies are, you can sanction any company you want, but a sanctioned individual can just set up another shell company anonymously. And that entity is not sanctioned, and they can just continue with business as usual. And this happens all the time. It’s like whack-a-mole.
Jen Kirby
Okay, so then this new law sounds pretty good, in that it’s very bad for people who want to launder money.
Clark Gascoigne
This is the biggest anti-money-laundering update that we’ve had in 20 years. It’s a big deal, and it plugs what most people in the national security and law enforcement community view as the biggest loophole in our anti-money-laundering system.
Jen Kirby
Are there are flaws in it?
Clark Gascoigne
This is, of course, a compromise, right? If I could have waved a magic wand, this is not the bill I would have written.
But it is a compromise with integrity. Most importantly, the definition of who is a “beneficial owner” in the bill is very strong and will truly identify the ultimate owners of the companies. That’s a big deal.
Now, it doesn’t solve all of our money-laundering problems. One big exemption in this is that while it applies to corporations, limited liability companies, it does not apply to trusts or partnerships.
Partnerships are generally considered lower risk, but trusts are a major issue, particularly because the vast majority of trusts in the United States don’t actually register with their legal contracts.
So you will still be able to set up a trust that could potentially be abused for money laundering after this. That’s something that we’re going to have to take a look at. There are studies that the Government Accountability Office and Treasury Department are going to have to do on the risks posed by trusts. The bill mandates those studies, and hopefully we’ll be able to address that down the road.
There’s also some concerns around pooled investment vehicles, like hedge funds and private equity funds, that are operated or advised by a registered investment adviser. Law enforcement will be able to tie the fund to the investment adviser, and they’ll know the beneficial ownership information for the investment adviser, but they won’t know it for the fund itself.
There is a big concern around that because you’ve got trillions of dollars in money going into these private pooled investment funds that could potentially pose some risk for money laundering.
Jen Kirby
When it comes to those pooled investments, just to make sure I’m understanding this: So if I have dirty money, and I am putting it into this fund with a lot of other investments, it basically muddies the waters. You know who’s managing the fund, but you have no way to pull out each investment, correct?
Clark Gascoigne
Correct, yeah.
Jen Kirby
Gotcha. Okay, so is this law retroactive? If you already have an anonymous shell company, must you now register? Or does it all begin once the law goes into effect?
Clark Gascoigne
It applies both to new companies formed after this law, as well as to existing companies.
The Treasury Department will have one year to issue final rules spelling out exactly how this will be implemented, at which point new companies will immediately have to start reporting their ownership information. There will be a two-year grace period, though, for existing companies to come into compliance.
Jen Kirby
So why now? You say this is the biggest update to the US’s anti-money-laundering regime in 20 years, but what was the impetus in Congress to actually agree on this right now?
Clark Gascoigne
You know, the last update to our anti-money-laundering laws was included in the US Patriot Act back after 9/11. There was a clear reaction to the terror attacks on 9/11 that led to the updates in our anti-money-laundering laws at that time.
We don’t have anything similar to that right now. However, there has been a growing understanding of the strategic threats that anonymous shell companies posed to our national security, as well as to legitimate commerce, which has led to an increased level of support from various interest groups, in addition to prior opponents reversing their opposition and endorsing reforms.
A decade ago, opposition came from interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce, and secretaries of state particularly in Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming. Fast-forward a few years, and the secretary of state of Delaware endorsed the bill in 2018, and the US Chamber of Commerce just endorsed reform this summer.
I would say a big turning point in that started around 2016 when the Panama Papers were released. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a sort of pan-journalistic investigative collaborative effort for hundreds of news outlets around the world, published stories that dominated news headlines at the time, after they received a leak of millions of documents relating to individuals who’d been setting up anonymous shell companies to engage in all sorts of unscrupulous activity.
It also coincided with us, the FACT Coalition, reaching out to banking trade associations, because we thought, you know, banks have all these anti-money-laundering responsibilities, they need to know who’s opening accounts with them, wouldn’t it be better if the government collected this and then they could check a database? Wouldn’t that save them some money?
In August of 2016, the Clearing House Association, which has since merged and become the Bank Policy Institute, endorsed the bills, and that was the first major business trade group to endorse the bills. Pretty soon thereafter, the rest of the banking and credit union trade associations came on board. That was really a turning point, as it opened the door for additional business groups to also sign on and support.
So you just had a growing chorus of support among the business community, a reversal of opposition from the state secretaries of state, as well as a growing chorus of support in the national security community, which started, I’d say, after Russia invaded Crimea.
Folks in the national security community started taking a closer look at sanctions, asking, “How do you enforce sanctions? Can we actually enforce them if people are setting up these anonymous shell companies? Are Russia and China using corruption as a form of foreign policy to undermine our national security?”
There was a growing awareness that they were. That snowballed to the point where you’ve got hundreds of national security scholars from Republican and Democratic administrations alike calling for transparency. It was a mix of a few things. But those are the most notable.
Jen Kirby
What do you think will be the immediate impact of this legislation?
Clark Gascoigne
It’s going to take a couple years to implement, so it’s going to take a few years to start collecting information and making it available to investigators here at home.
But on immediate impact, there’s a recent op-ed in the Toronto Star where anti-corruption advocates in Canada are pushing the Canadian government to address their problem there with anonymous shell companies.
The biggest sticking point in Canada to collecting the information on the true owners of companies was the fact that the US didn’t do it, and they didn’t want to get too far out ahead of the United States. Now that we’ve moved forward, folks in Canada are saying their government had been waiting for us, and they’re now likely to follow suit.
I’ve also been in discussions with diplomats at the State Department for years who feel like they’ve had their hands tied behind their backs when they’re going overseas, talking to places like Singapore and Dubai about collecting this information and getting money laundering issues in their countries in check. Because those officials in Singapore and Dubai officials will just point the fingers back at us and say, “You guys are the worst at anonymous shell companies. How can you tell us that we need to figure out the situation when you don’t even do it yourself?”
Now that we’ve passed this bill, that we’re moving forward and implementing it, it allows our diplomats to go around the world and to truly push some of the seedier financial hubs around the world to clean up their act. That has just as big of an impact, if not probably a larger impact, than us collecting this information here in the United States.
People cross the street on May 19, 2020 in the Jamaica neighborhood in the Queens borough in New York City. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Finally, a Pro-Immigrant Epiphany
Andrew Tisch, New York Daily News
Tisch writes: "I hope and believe Americans' eyes are opening to the truly heroic contributions that immigrants make to every sector and part of our society."
ach day, they go to work in communities across America doing the thankless but essential jobs that someone has to do.
They’re harvesting crops, processing and packing meat; stocking shelves in warehouses and grocery stores; delivering food and supplies; building homes; caring for our kids and grandparents. They’re making our lives better and safer.
Many weren’t born here, many aren’t citizens here and some aren’t supposed to be here even though the U.S. is the only place they’ve really ever called home. But they are here, and we should all be thankful they are: They’ve put their lives on the line for America. Many died of COVID-19 doing jobs that allowed other Americans to live.
They are immigrants and they have always been essential to America. But in 2020, I hope and believe Americans’ eyes are opening to the truly heroic contributions that immigrants make to every sector and part of our society.
When COVID-19 hit in the spring, New Yorkers opened their windows each night to clap for the nurses, doctors and first responders who were risking their lives to save others. Many of the heroes we were cheering for are immigrants: one-quarter of all doctors and one-sixth of all nurses in the U.S. are foreign-born and so are 35% of all health care workers in New York.
It’s easy to see heroism in the lifesaving work of a doctor. We don’t see it as naturally in someone who delivers food to people’s homes. But perhaps we should. There are 70-year-old diabetics who are alive today because a delivery person saved them a trip to the grocery store that could have led to contracting a fatal case of COVID-19.
Many of these delivery workers are immigrants, as are so many of the essential workers on farms, in factories and throughout the food industry, who are taking on jobs many Americans don’t want to do.
And it seems the public is taking note of just how much immigrants do to tie together this rich mosaic that we call America.
In July, a Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans think immigration is “a good thing” for our country and that for the first time since 1965, a greater percentage of Americans now say they want to see immigration increase than those who want it to decrease. That, after years of anti-immigrant invective and policy coming from the current administration, is remarkable.
If immigration does in fact increase in America in the years ahead, we can expect our economy to grow faster, our government fiscal deficits to get smaller and the creation of new businesses — which are responsible for all net new job growth in America — to increase.
This isn’t conjecture. Some of the strongest periods of economic growth in U.S. history coincide with increased immigration; no surprise given that a growing population is one of the two essential ingredients (along with productivity) to grow any economy.
Almost half of America’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, while countless studies show that immigration tends to increase wages for most workers and that immigrants use fewer welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans.
Immigrants can even extend the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, because they are on average younger, and therefore pay the payroll taxes that sustain these programs longer, than native-born Americans.
I have spent a lot of time chronicling the stories of immigrants and the many benefits they bring to America. My American journey began with an immigration story. My great-grandfather, Shlomo Tichinsky, fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of his native Ukraine to arrive at Ellis Island in 1904. He had little money or education and he didn’t speak English. But he believed in the promise of America to be able to deliver a better life for him and for his family. There are so many immigrants today who deserve to dream that same dream.
I am appalled and heartbroken over how immigrants have, in recent years, been demonized as the source of so many of America’s problems when they are — based on clear and consistent historical evidence — a solution to so many of them.
With the coming inauguration of a new president and seating of a new Congress, it’s time to find solutions for a broken immigration system that was last reformed in 1965. We need a more fair, rational and humane system that provides security at the border and for the American people, while also securing the countless and varied contributions immigrants have delivered to this country for generations and will continue to deliver for generations to come.
Mourners at a vigil for Dr. Li Wenliang. (photo: Lam Yik Fei/NYT)
Leaked Documents Show How China's Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus
Raymond Zhong, Paul Mozur, Aaron Krolik and Jeff Kao, The New York Times and ProPublica
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus spread in China, the government stage-managed what appeared on the domestic internet to make the virus look less severe and the authorities more capable, according to thousands of leaked directives and other files."
n the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.
The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of COVID-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.
Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.
They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”
Special instructions were issued to manage anger over Dr. Li’s death.
The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.
At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.
Though China makes no secret of its belief in rigid internet controls, the documents convey just how much behind-the-scenes effort is involved in maintaining a tight grip. It takes an enormous bureaucracy, armies of people, specialized technology made by private contractors, the constant monitoring of digital news outlets and social media platforms — and, presumably, lots of money.
It is much more than simply flipping a switch to block certain unwelcome ideas, images or pieces of news.
China’s curbs on information about the outbreak started in early January, before the novel coronavirus had even been identified definitively, the documents show. When infections started spreading rapidly a few weeks later, the authorities clamped down on anything that cast China’s response in too “negative” a light.
The United States and other countries have for months accused China of trying to hide the extent of the outbreak in its early stages. It may never be clear whether a freer flow of information from China would have prevented the outbreak from morphing into a raging global health calamity. But the documents indicate that Chinese officials tried to steer the narrative not only to prevent panic and debunk damaging falsehoods domestically. They also wanted to make the virus look less severe — and the authorities more capable — as the rest of the world was watching.
The documents include more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 memos and other files from the offices of the country’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, in the eastern city of Hangzhou. They also include internal files and computer code from a Chinese company, Urun Big Data Services, that makes software used by local governments to monitor internet discussion and manage armies of online commenters.
The documents were shared with The Times and ProPublica by a hacker group that calls itself CCP Unmasked, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. The Times and ProPublica independently verified the authenticity of many of the documents, some of which had been obtained separately by China Digital Times, a website that tracks Chinese internet controls.
The CAC and Urun did not respond to requests for comment.
“China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state’s resources,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. “It’s not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale.”
“This is a huge thing,” he added. “No other country has that.”
Controlling a Narrative
China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, created the Cyberspace Administration of China in 2014 to centralize the management of internet censorship and propaganda as well as other aspects of digital policy. Today, the agency reports to the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee, a sign of its importance to the leadership.
The CAC’s coronavirus controls began in the first week of January. An agency directive ordered news websites to use only government-published material and not to draw any parallels with the deadly SARS outbreak in China and elsewhere that began in 2002, even as the World Health Organization was noting the similarities.
At the start of February, a high-level meeting led by Xi called for tighter management of digital media, and the CAC’s offices across the country swung into action. A directive in Zhejiang Province, whose capital is Hangzhou, said the agency should not only control the message within China, but also seek to “actively influence international opinion.”
Agency workers began receiving links to virus-related articles that they were to promote on local news aggregators and social media. Directives specified which links should be featured on news sites’ home screens, how many hours they should remain online and even which headlines should appear in boldface.
Online reports should play up the heroic efforts by local medical workers dispatched to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus was first reported, as well as the vital contributions of Communist Party members, the agency’s orders said.
Headlines should steer clear of the words “incurable” and “fatal,” one directive said, “to avoid causing societal panic.” When covering restrictions on movement and travel, the word “lockdown” should not be used, said another. Multiple directives emphasized that “negative” news about the virus was not to be promoted.
When a prison officer in Zhejiang who lied about his travels caused an outbreak among the inmates, the CAC asked local offices to monitor the case closely because it “could easily attract attention from overseas.”
Officials ordered the news media to downplay the crisis.
News outlets were told not to play up reports on donations and purchases of medical supplies from abroad. The concern, according to agency directives, was that such reports could cause a backlash overseas and disrupt China’s procurement efforts, which were pulling in vast amounts of personal protective equipment as the virus spread abroad.
“Avoid giving the false impression that our fight against the epidemic relies on foreign donations,” one directive said.
CAC workers flagged some on-the-ground videos for purging, including several that appear to show bodies exposed in public places. Other clips that were flagged appear to show people yelling angrily inside a hospital, workers hauling a corpse out of an apartment and a quarantined child crying for her mother. The videos’ authenticity could not be confirmed.
The agency asked local branches to craft ideas for “fun at home” content to “ease the anxieties of web users.” In one Hangzhou district, workers described a “witty and humorous” guitar ditty they had promoted. It went, “I never thought it would be true to say: To support your country, just sleep all day.”
Then came a bigger test.
“Severe Crackdown”
The death of Li, the doctor in Wuhan, loosed a geyser of emotion that threatened to tear Chinese social media out from under the CAC’s control.
It did not help when the agency’s gag order leaked onto Weibo, a popular Twitter-like platform, fueling further anger. Thousands of people flooded Li’s Weibo account with comments.
The agency had little choice but to permit expressions of grief, though only to a point. If anyone was sensationalizing the story to generate online traffic, their account should be dealt with “severely,” one directive said.
The day after Li’s death, a directive included a sample of material that was deemed to be “taking advantage of this incident to stir up public opinion”: a video interview in which Li’s mother reminisces tearfully about her son.
The scrutiny did not let up in the days that followed. “Pay particular attention to posts with pictures of candles, people wearing masks, an entirely black image or other efforts to escalate or hype the incident,” read an agency directive to local offices.
Larger numbers of online memorials began to disappear. The police detained several people who formed groups to archive deleted posts.
In Hangzhou, propaganda workers on round-the-clock shifts wrote up reports describing how they were ensuring people saw nothing that contradicted the soothing message from the Communist Party: that it had the virus firmly under control.
Officials in one district reported that workers in their employ had posted online comments that were read more than 40,000 times, “effectively eliminating city residents’ panic.” Workers in another county boasted of their “severe crackdown” on what they called rumors: 16 people had been investigated by the police, 14 given warnings and two detained. One district said it had 1,500 “cybersoldiers” monitoring closed chat groups on WeChat, the popular social app.
Researchers have estimated that hundreds of thousands of people in China work part-time to post comments and share content that reinforces state ideology. Many of them are low-level employees at government departments and party organizations. Universities have recruited students and teachers for the task. Local governments have held training sessions for them.
Local officials turned to informants and trolls to control opinion.
Engineers of the Troll
Government departments in China have a variety of specialized software at their disposal to shape what the public sees online.
One maker of such software, Urun, has won at least two dozen contracts with local agencies and state-owned enterprises since 2016, government procurement records show. According to an analysis of computer code and documents from Urun, the company’s products can track online trends, coordinate censorship activity and manage fake social media accounts for posting comments.
One Urun software system gives government workers a slick, easy-to-use interface for quickly adding likes to posts. Managers can use the system to assign specific tasks to commenters. The software can also track how many tasks a commenter has completed and how much that person should be paid.
According to one document describing the software, commenters in the southern city of Guangzhou are paid $25 for an original post of longer than 400 characters. Flagging a negative comment for deletion earns them 40 cents. Reposts are worth one cent apiece.
Urun makes a smartphone app that streamlines their work. They receive tasks within the app, post the requisite comments from their personal social media accounts, then upload a screenshot, ostensibly to certify that the task was completed.
The company also makes video game-like software that helps train commenters, documents show. The software splits a group of users into two teams, one red and one blue, and pits them against each other to see which can produce more popular posts.
Other Urun code is designed to monitor Chinese social media for “harmful information.” Workers can use keywords to find posts that mention sensitive topics, such as “incidents involving leadership” or “national political affairs.” They can also manually tag posts for further review.
In Hangzhou, officials appear to have used Urun software to scan the Chinese internet for keywords like “virus” and “pneumonia” in conjunction with place names, according to company data.
A Great Sea of Placidity
By the end of February, the emotional wallop of Li’s death seemed to be fading. CAC workers around Hangzhou continued to scan the internet for anything that might perturb the great sea of placidity.
One city district noted that web users were worried about how their neighborhoods were handling the trash left by people who were returning from out of town and potentially carrying the virus. Another district observed concerns about whether schools were taking adequate safety measures as students returned.
On March 12, the agency’s Hangzhou office issued a memo to all branches about new national rules for internet platforms. Local offices should set up special teams for conducting daily inspections of local websites, the memo said. Those found to have violations should be “promptly supervised and rectified.”
The Hangzhou CAC had already been keeping a quarterly scorecard for evaluating how well local platforms were managing their content. Each site started the quarter with 100 points. Points were deducted for failing to adequately police posts or comments. Points might also be added for standout performances.
In the first quarter of 2020, two local websites lost 10 points each for “publishing illegal information related to the epidemic,” that quarter’s score report said. A government portal received an extra two points for “participating actively in opinion guidance” during the outbreak.
Over time, the CAC offices’ reports returned to monitoring topics unrelated to the virus: noisy construction projects keeping people awake at night, heavy rains causing flooding in a train station.
Then, in late May, the offices received startling news: Confidential public-opinion analysis reports had somehow been published online. The agency ordered offices to purge internal reports — particularly, it said, those analyzing sentiment surrounding the epidemic.
The offices wrote back in their usual dry bureaucratese, vowing to “prevent such data from leaking out on the internet and causing a serious adverse impact to society.”
There are signs of climate action hope for 2021. (photo: R_Tee/Getty Images)
Five Climate Change Lessons From 2020
Kristy Dahl, Union of Concerned Scientists
Dahl writes: "As we close out this year, these are the five climate lessons I'll be taking with me into 2021."
n early January of this year, fresh off the experience of writing a year-end blog post for 2019, I started a project that I thought would make writing this year's year-end post easier. I created a little 2020 calendar on which I planned to record the one big thing that happened in the climate change space each day. In my mind I called it "The Daily Big Deal," and I could envision myself sitting here, as I am, on December 17, reviewing the year's climate-related events and deftly knitting them together in the blog post equivalent of a beautiful scarf made of reclaimed yarn. Or an ugly sweater. Or whatever.
You can see where this is going, of course. The calendar has exactly 17 entries, almost all of them before mid-March, when the U.S. shut down amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 began its seemingly never-ending nosedive. The story of 2020 will forever be one of the COVID-19 pandemic: a story of the lives lost, the heroic commitments of medical professionals, essential workers, and vaccine researchers, the deep crises of unemployment and hunger, the months of isolation from friends and family, the loss of normalcy, the failure of our federal government to stanch the spread of this deadly virus.
Despite my abandoned efforts to chronicle it, though, climate change was also deeply woven into the story of 2020. As we close out this year, these are the five climate lessons I'll be taking with me into 2021.
1. Climate change is showing up in our daily lives whether we recognize it or not
Climate change was on full display this year as a parade of extreme events marched its way around the globe. In what was a record-breaking wildfire year across the western U.S., over 4.2 million acres of California's land burned—an area larger than the state of Connecticut and more than burned during the entire decade of the 1990s. As dire as California's fires were, consider this: The year began with wildfires in Australia that burned 10 times more land than that (about 46 million acres in all). Combined with a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season with multiple direct hits to Louisiana and Nicaragua, flooding in the U.S. Midwest, heat waves in the UK associated with more than 2,500 excess deaths, locust swarms in East Africa, devastating back-to-back typhoons in the Philippines, and countless other climate-related events, it's clear that climate change was staring us in the face—or more like screaming at us—all year long.
But climate change isn't just here in the form of these extreme events. It's here in the winter coats cast aside for a few days in the Northeast in January, when places like Pittsburgh hit 70°F. It's here in the strange, early blooms of confused spring flowers. And it's here in the lack of summertime fog in my notoriously/gloriously foggy neighborhood.
Indeed, one of the year's most chilling and powerful new studies concluded that from 2012 onward, the fingerprints of climate change can be detected from any single day in the global record. Whether it is glaringly obvious or not on any given day, climate change is already shaping our everyday lives in ways big and small.
2. When it comes to cascading risks, we need to be thinking much more broadly
Against the backdrop of the pandemic, this year's climate extremes exposed the many ways in which climate change intersects with civil unrest, water quality, financial insecurity, racial inequities in access to health care and secure housing, and countless other issues that might otherwise be perceived as being wholly unrelated.
Like pandemic preparedness, effective climate adaptation and planning will require us to think much more broadly about what climate change means than we have before.
For example, we have long recognized the interconnectedness of extreme weather and our energy systems—thousands if not millions of people lose power every year during snowstorms, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and the like. But when we look at what happened when Hurricane Laura hit Lake Charles, Louisiana, this summer, we can see that the cascading risks of climate-change-driven extreme weather extend far beyond the reach of our electricity system.
In the aftermath of Laura, hundreds of thousands of people were without power and water for days while a severe heat wave rode in on the storm's heels. Lake Charles' residents—about half of whom are Black and about 20 percent of whom live below the poverty line—had to somehow try to rebuild their homes and lives; keep themselves safe from the heat despite not being able to run their air conditioners or fans; and avoid contracting COVID-19 despite being unable to wash their hands. Add to that the financial insecurity many were experiencing after having been laid off during the pandemic shutdown, and we can see that the impacts of climate change reach deeply into so many different systems.
3. COVID-19 and climate change are racial injustices
The pandemic has touched all of our lives this year, but has taken a particularly devastating toll on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities. In just one example, as of June, nearly one in three Black Americans personally knew someone who had died from COVID-19 compared with roughly one in 10 white Americans.
The disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color are a crystal-clear manifestation of the deep racial inequities that have built up over centuries of systemic racism in the U.S. Millions of people around the world rose up this summer to protest another manifestation of those inequities: the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people by the police.
The disproportionate impacts of climate change are yet another injustice that racism inflicts on communities of color. My colleagues and I have written extensively about these issues recently, and, personally, I'm closing this year out with a deeper understanding of the fact that we cannot and will not be able to address challenges like climate change and COVID-19 without addressing the systemic racism that results in the disproportionate suffering of Black and brown people.
4. When it comes to emissions reductions, we need profound change, but not the kind of devastating change we experienced this year
This year we expect that carbon dioxide emissions—the primary contributor to human-caused climate change–will have dropped by about 7 percent globally and about 11 percent in the U.S., primarily as a result of the widespread economic and emotional pain caused by the pandemic. This is not the kind of transformative change, driven by deep and sustained policies, that we need to meet our climate goals—and it is likely to be short-lived.
Studies show that we'll need to accomplish decreases of roughly that same magnitude every year for the next 10 years to be on track to limit future warming to 1.5-2°C, and we'll have to do so in ways that encourage economic stability, improve the quality of life for people around the globe, reduce—rather than exacerbate—racial inequities, and ensure a just transition to safe, well-paying jobs for those whose livelihoods have been entwined with the production of fossil fuels.
It's a task that looks more and more daunting by the day, particularly because emissions are on track to increase by 2 percent per year globally between now and 2030 if we continue on a business-as-usual path.
But there are multiple technically feasible pathways to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, with steep near-term reductions in emissions. And economic recovery packages that invest in clean energy rather than continuing to prop up the loathsome fossil fuel industry (as they have thus far) could put us on a path toward accomplishing near- and long-term emissions reductions.
5. In the U.S. and around the world there is cause for hope
In a clear signal of the importance of climate change in U.S. voters' minds, climate change was a prominent topic in the presidential and vice-presidential debates. Indeed, pre-election surveys showed that, particularly for voters identifying as Democrats climate change was a high-priority issue despite the many immediate challenges the country faces.
The country then went on to elect a president and vice president who understand the science behind climate change and embrace the need for rapid, transformative climate action. President-elect Biden has affirmed his commitment to climate action in announcing an exciting slate of nominees and appointees who have long focused on issues of climate change and justice, including Deb Haaland, John Kerry, Gina McCarthy, and Mike Regan.
On the international front, China's pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 along with signals of similarly ambitions pledges from the EU, UK, Japan, and South Korea all serve as challenges for other countries—particularly developed countries like the U.S.—to commit to aggressive emissions reduction plans.
While we can't erase the past years and decades of climate inaction, all of these are signs that we may begin to right our path in earnest in 2021.
I think I can speak for many in the climate community when I say that the last four years have been grueling. Many of the drastic climate impacts we've long been warning about are coming to pass sooner than we had expected yet we've had to continue to fight for the issue of climate change to be named and recognized at all by our federal government. But there's been a heartening crescendo of calls over the last few years for intersectional solutions to climate change, and the incoming Biden Administration seems to be hearing those calls. There is a tremendous amount of work ahead of us as individuals, as a nation, and as a global society. But for the first time in years, I find myself hopeful that we'll start to see more meaningful progress on climate action in 2021.
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