13 June 21
If you are reading this, then you did not depart, and from this morning’s readership numbers most people did not. We are glad you are still here.
We need you to GET SERIOUS about RSN. When you donate, you take an ownership stake. You should do that, and you should have that.
It is day 8 of the June fundraiser. We should be done. We are not.
Why?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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13 June 21
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RSN: Bernard Sanders | No
Bernard Sanders, Reader Supported News
Sanders writes: "Democrats must use our majority in a different way - one that helps all Americans, not just the 1% and large, profitable corporations."
s we attempt to transform this country and address the long term crises facing working families in terms of decent paying jobs, health care, tax reform, education, child care, climate change, racial justice and immigration reform, do I believe that we will have 10 Republican votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and do what has to be done?
No. No, I do not.
Do I personally believe that Republicans are serious about doing anything significant that would impact their wealthy campaign contributors and help the working families of this country?
No. No, I do not.
Do I believe that we should take Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell at his word when he said that he would do everything possible to undermine President Biden's agenda?
Yes, I do.
It should be clear to everyone that, at this point, if Republicans do not want to cooperate in passing legislation to address the long-neglected needs of working class Americans, then we have to move forward without them. We did that with the all-important American Rescue Plan. We're going to have to do it again. While the Democratic margins are slim in both the House and the Senate, we do have majorities in both bodies. Let's use them.
If Republicans do not want to cooperate, then we have to move forward without them to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems and railroads.
If Republicans do not want to cooperate, then we have to move forward without them to tackle the existential threat of climate change and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels.
If Republicans do not want to cooperate, then we have to move forward without them to build the millions of units of affordable housing that we desperately need.
If Republicans do not want to cooperate, then we have to move forward without them to lower the cost of prescription drugs and make health care a human right, not a privilege.
If we are going to pass a bold and progressive agenda through the Senate we must do it with 51 votes, instead of 60, by using the budget reconciliation process. And as Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that is exactly what I intend to do.
At a time when half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck and real, inflation-accounted-for wages have not gone up for workers in 48 years, the task at hand is not to please talk show pundits or to create a phony "bipartisanship" which accomplishes nothing. The time is NOW to address the needs of the American people, millions of whom are working two or three jobs just to put food on the table and a roof over their head.
The time has come for the United States Senate to stop representing wealthy, powerful and billionaire campaign contributors, and to start representing the working families of this country.
Now, Republicans will moan and groan if Democrats go forward without their support, but they appear to have very short memories.
Let us not forget that Republicans passed a $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest people of this country without a single Democratic vote.
They also tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and take away health care from tens of millions of people in this country without a single Democratic vote as well.
So Democrats must use our majority in a different way — one that helps all Americans, not just the 1% and large, profitable corporations.
And the truth is, my colleagues need to hear from you that you agree. So I am asking:
In this moment, we have got to be bold in terms of jobs, health care, nutrition, education, racial justice, immigration, criminal justice reform, housing, climate change and many other important issues.
Will it be easy?
Of course it won’t be easy.
But we must mobilize people of all backgrounds and from all communities in order to get it done. Because in the history of our country, that is the only way change has ever happened.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
A hand typing on a computer keyboard. (photo: Westend61/Imago Images)
The US National-Security State Has an Invisible Army
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Marcetic writes: "Tens of thousands of Americans work for US military and intelligence agencies, operating domestically under false identities with fake documents and James Bond-style spy gizmos."
Tens of thousands of Americans work for US military and intelligence agencies, operating domestically under false identities with fake documents and James Bond–style spy gizmos. Why? To allow the national-security state to pursue its forever wars smoothly, forever.
hen it comes to the national-security state, the era of big government never ended. As the Edward Snowden revelations and copious other disclosures have shown us over the years, the vast secret state that hums quietly beneath Washington has only grown over the past few decades. But though we get the occasional glimpse of the machine, we’re largely in the dark when it comes to its size and how exactly it operates.
One of those glimpses was recently provided to the public by William Arkin, former US intelligence analyst and veteran journalist who has reported for papers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and served for decades as an analyst for NBC until 2019, when he quit over the network’s increasing militarism under Trump. In a May piece for Newsweek, Arkin exposed the highly classified “signature reduction” program, and the “secret undercover army” of tens of thousands that operates under it, sometimes under the US public’s very noses. Jacobin spoke to him about what he found.
BM: When did you first learn about the signature reduction program? And how did this story come together?
WA: I first discovered the program, signature reduction — generally a term that’s used to apply to technology used to suppress the radar signature of objects, as regards to people — probably a decade or so ago. It appeared quite often in job announcements for the defense industry and it appears quite often in people’s resumes, but it was never explicitly stated what it actually means.
It’s not mentioned in unclassified budget docs, it’s not mentioned in any unclassified regulations, and when I started to do inquiries with the government, they essentially said, “It’s a term that people use, but it’s not an official program.” I knew that was not exactly telling the truth, so that just made me more curious.
As I started to collect more and more resumes and job announcements that describe how many organizations were engaged in signature reduction efforts, and how many companies were involved in providing services to the United States government to achieve signature reduction, I started to contact both individuals and those organizations to see if people would talk to me. I had a lot of lack of success.
But, eventually, I did get a couple of people to start talking, and then they passed me on to other people. People were very reluctant to describe how the techniques of clandestine operations are utilized out there in the world, but they were willing to talk to me in general about the techniques that were being used, many of which I was able to track back to actual spy cases in which spies had been captured and caught, where the details of those cases revealed the techniques and the tradecraft associated with signature reduction.
BM: You write that there are around sixty thousand people who are part of this “secret army,” operating both overseas and domestically. What exactly are they doing?
WA: There are three separate major groups that engage in signature reduction, which means either they are operating under false identities or they use other techniques to protect their identities when they are operating.
The first group is the special-operations world, and particularly the clandestine special operations associated with the so-called “black” operations. Well, what keeps them black? It’s all of these techniques of signature reduction, everything from false identities all the way through to civilian cover they’re using to operate in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. I think there are about thirty thousand or so people who are part of the Navy SEALS, Green Berets, etc., who operate under some level of signature reduction. Not all of them are completely clandestine. And, as I explain in the article, not all of them are even traveling with false identities, but when they get into a country they switch their identities.
The second group is the human intelligence operators at the Defense Department. That also includes people in “close-in surveillance” or “close-in reconnaissance.” For instance, if I want to be able to intercept your signal, I need to get close to you in order to do so, to pick out that signal from the whole variety of signals that are pinging the cell phone tower that you’re communicating with. A lot of that work is done by people who are undercover. This group has been growing since 9/11 and has become a fairly large activity throughout the military.
And the third group are the cyber operators, the people who work online, whether they’re collecting intelligence or monitoring everyone from Al Qaeda and ISIS to the Russians, or are engaged in what are called “influence operations” — propaganda, psychological operations. That’s the fastest-growing group, from utilizing false personas and the very techniques we accuse Russians of using during the 2016 elections, to operating under misdirection or non-attribution, where their identity or their origins as US government cyber operators is obscured. There are more than ten thousand people throughout the NSA and the military who utilize the techniques of signature reduction in this way.
BM: Do we have a sense of what some of these cyber operations look like in concrete terms?
WA: The most obvious example is against ISIS. There’s a lot of intelligence collection from those social media platforms — not just the ones we’re familiar with, but the social media platforms that ISIS utilizes — and there’s also false information that’s planted in those social media platforms, either to get people to reveal themselves and their locations or to collect intelligence.
Social media is really an essential part of modern-day operations. Cell phones and social media have become ubiquitous around the world, and in parts of the world where infrastructure isn’t really very good, cell phone and internet services are very important. Most individuals in Africa use their cell phones for banking and commerce. The cell phone is the fabric that ties people together. That world is the avenue by which most people are influenced by false information or through campaigns that communicate with them directly.
It’s important to say that the vast majority of these cyber operations are targeted toward terrorist organizations and adversaries of the United States, from Russia and China all the way down to transnational organized crime organizations. But there’s evidence, too, that the Department of Homeland Security and the US military are increasingly operating online and on social media inside the United States as well.
BM: Does this violate the longstanding bans on the military and US propaganda being deployed domestically?
WA: It’s certainly worthy of our guardedness. There is a law called the Smith-Mundt Act, which specifically restricts the US government from propagandizing the American public and came from the early part of the Cold War.
But, in the modern era, where these types of lines of communication have become so mixed and so varied, I would say that anything that goes out there into public information, that might be propaganda oriented at Russia or China or ISIS, has a greater potential to blow back on the US public and Western public opinion. There’s an increasing danger of American citizens being recipients of this propaganda, and propaganda information being inadvertently plugged back into mainstream media at the same time. That’s really the danger, that with the variety of news media that exists these days, people begin to think that some of the news sources they’re reading are actually independent and nongovernmental.
We see the obvious side of that, for instance, in news channels like Sputnik or RT, which are actually owned by the Russian government. Those sources that are in English are read by a lot of people, and they think it’s somehow independent. Similarly, the United States engages in those same kinds of operations. And given the way most people consume information, particularly because most people get their news from their phones, I think they don’t even recognize the difference between actual news media and sources of propaganda.
The availability of independent information is not lesser, but the variety of propaganda is increasing. And, especially as the mainstream media increasingly goes behind the paywall, people who are out there looking for news, let’s say anti-vaxxers, people skeptical of Covid, or people who are against the government in one way or another, will find online news sources that are less than reliable.
BM: It seems like few people, even in Congress, are familiar with the signature reduction program. What exactly is the level of awareness of it?
WA: One of the things that is really fascinating to me is that you have this multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars program (it’s about a billion dollars to administer) involving over a hundred contractors (and hardly any of those contracts are public) and dozens of government agencies, the purpose of which is to conduct clandestine efforts to either administer the clandestine world or to be the clandestine world, and hardly anybody knows anything about it. This is the first article to be written about it. It’s quite extraordinary.
I think it really does show you that despite the internet and the fantastic growth of news media, especially all of the new online sources — I’m talking about the Politicos, the Voxes, the Axioses — national security remains as much a black hole as it has always been. And, in that regard, the idea that the internet was going to create citizen journalism, and that journalism would create more transparency, and that transparency would lead to more democracy, has failed.
BM: You make the point that, in a world where we are all surveilled more than ever, to be covert requires the creation of not just false identities but entire social networks that are false. It suggests that a lot more of our online worlds are faker than we might imagine. Is this the case, or am I overstating things?
WA: It probably is overstating things and I agree with it. Let’s break it down. We live in a society right now that’s probably in the infancy of social media — it hasn’t been around that long. We haven’t really figured out its influence on society or the rules of the road.
I’m against censorship of any type. I’m against Donald Trump being censored on Twitter, I’m against Alex Jones being censored from social media. Once we give media companies the authority and encouragement to censor communication, then we’re going down a very bad path. Because then, something that was probably already implicit becomes official, in the sense there’s a sanctioned view of things, and then there’s an unsanctioned view, and the unsanctioned view can’t even be published.
I’m against that, and the so-called “liberal” support for Facebook and other social media companies to restrict communication that they don’t like because it’s “false” is a practice that’s going to come back and bite us in the ass in the future. Whether it’s President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or a President Bernie Sanders in the future, it’s going to be interesting to see if the same enthusiasm for censorship exists.
But number two, there’s a claim that I heard from many people that I talked to when I was reporting this article, that, “Oh, you know, human intelligence operations are actually less and less physical and more and more online, because online is more efficient, more productive.” I heard a lot of people living in in the newfangled world say that this newfangled world was going to overtake the old-fashioned world. Here’s the problem with that: we recreate the same dynamics of the trivial being more important than the important.
It’s not like we’re going to get Vladimir Putin, or someone close to him, to be an agent of the CIA, as a source of information and covert action, through Twitter or Facebook or any social media platform. What we’re going to get is a lot of shit, a lot of people who don’t have access to important information, who aren’t really central in government and the military. Then we’re just in a world in which, in a way, ironically, the focus of intelligence becomes to be an influencer, for the CIA to be influencers, to have their own channel.
“Ironically, the focus of intelligence becomes to be an influencer, for the CIA to be influencers.”
Then I have to ask, well, influencing what? All of the work the NSA did on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, did any of that have any effect? Because as we’ve seen, though ISIS has maybe lost the physical caliphate in Iraq, it’s growing all over the world. There’s very little evidence to show the gigantic efforts on the part of the US government to increase influence has achieved any goal. We’ve spent billions of dollars on influence annually and everyone hates us.
BM: Do we have a sense of how much of the program is private companies doing the work? And how aware are they of its full scope?
WA: There are over one hundred defense contractors, most of which are small companies that administer signature reduction, everything from building the gizmos that are the James Bond devices of the modern era, to administering the organizations that are creating people’s identities, finances, etc. So there is a cottage industry that administers signature reduction, and it’s not just small companies but large companies like General Dynamics, BAE Systems, and Lockheed Martin that are also involved in this secret world.
My sense is that very few have a holistic understanding of the size and scope. One organization or one company might be involved in administering some small piece of this, but I found that no one can really make sense of the overall size and scope of signature reduction efforts and their impact.
One source that I talked to at a very high level, a retired officer who had worked in the world of special access programs, had a very good understanding of the size of the effort because he was overseeing that. But, overall, most people I talked to were pretty surprised when I told them of how many companies, how many organizations, how many people worked undercover or availed themselves of signature reduction techniques.
As far as I know, no one in Congress ever had a hearing on the signature reduction effort, or the increasing clandestine nature of military operations, and as far as I know, no one has really written about it ever before. We’re looking at a program that, as far as I can see, has not really gotten any oversight at all, from Congress or from the public-policy world.
BM: In terms of technology, there seemed to be a real contrast between, say, some of the masks that appeared less convincing, and the incredible sophistication of some of the other technologies, like the silicon hand sleeves with false fingerprints.
WA: I’m not sure that I would agree with you that one is more impressive than the other. Impeding facial recognition, especially facial recognition at a distance, doesn’t require Hollywood-level make up. The technology is as good as it needs to be in order to achieve the goals they’re trying to achieve.
In the modern era, biometrics has become more and more essential to travel especially. And not just biometrics. For foreigners who enter the United States, I believe they’re now asking for their social media handles.
As identity becomes a matter of record — which is to say that the government records your fingerprints, your signature, your social media identity — then knowing the ecosystem of all of that is essential to be able to thwart it. Many people I talked to were engaged in a lot of research associated with understanding how biometrics work, the purpose of which is to figure out a way to defeat it. If you have any knowledge of the Cold War, for instance, you know that the superpowers engaged in biological and chemical warfare research, always with the justification that they weren’t able to defeat the other guys’ biological weapons unless they themselves understood the technology.
That’s what’s going on in the world of signature reduction: if you don’t understand how the data works, how the information goes from an airport, to the border, back to the intelligence establishment, and so on, how are you going to get somebody into a country, or allow them to operate inside a country clandestinely, in a world in which facial recognition systems, license plate readers, street cameras, doorbell cameras, are taking images of everything of our day-to-day life?
I think what most people don’t understand about surveillance is there’s more information than there are people who can process that information. We have a very distorted view from television and Hollywood. On television I can do a few keystrokes and I know the name of your dog. In real life, even though we have ubiquitous surveillance, most of that data, once it does its basic job — which is to tell you there’s no danger — is more or less lost. It’s not retrievable, it’s not put into a database. When someone enters my gate, the security camera takes a picture and sends me an email. But that’s my own personal system, and I don’t keep the material.
Right now, we live in a world in which there’s far more information than there are people to process it, look at it, or store it. But we are getting to a point where artificial intelligence and unlimited storage will make that information more usable and useful. We are getting there.
BM: What are some of the implications, legal, political, and otherwise, of the existence of this program?
WA: First of all, let’s remember what it’s for. It’s both a combination of the reaction to 9/11 and the requirement to go out there and operate in obscure parts of the world and fight terrorist organizations. And secondly, it grew because the world transformed in the last three decades from an analog to a digital world.
First, I think it shows you the scale and the resilience of the war on terror. I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon. Second, it shows you the transformation of the military from the World War II model with metals, if you will, to the modern-day model with information. While we still have battleships and bombers and tanks, they are becoming less and less relevant. This is a window into understanding the transformations of the future.
BM: Is this something the US public should be concerned about, particularly with the push for a domestic “war on terror” since January 6?
WA: The public should always be concerned about the secret operations of the American government, and to understand why they’re secret. Are they merely secret because we are protecting the sources and methods associated with essential operations, or are they secret because it’s a bureaucracy that doesn’t want to have oversight? In the case of signature reduction, without any information, how are we supposed to make that determination?
I’m somebody who’s been in this world, working both inside government and as a journalist and writer, and I’m not satisfied with the government answer, and nor should the American public. I consider myself their ambassador. If they don’t want to do anything about the government, that’s unfortunate, but I want to provide them with as much information to be able to make an informed decision.
The question that’s interesting in this world is that, as I said earlier, we are on the cusp of understanding the social media era. I don’t think we fully understand it. We don’t understand it in our personal lives — hell, I go to sleep with my goddamn smartphone, and I know there’s something very wrong with that, but I still do! So we haven’t adjusted yet to what it means to live in this modern social media era.
As we determine what the rules of the road are, as we determine the psychological and social and political impacts of the social media era, having our arms around what the government is secretly doing becomes ever more essential. I don’t want the government out there doing secret shit. Period.
'Trump's baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for U.S. election leaders and workers.' (photo: Patrick Fallon/ZUMA)
Trump-Inspired Death Threats Are Terrorizing Election Workers
Linda So, Reuters
So writes: "Late on the night of April 24, the wife of Georgia's top election official got a chilling text message: 'You and your family will be killed very slowly.'"
A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”
That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”
Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.
Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.
In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.
The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.
“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”
In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.
“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.
Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement that “vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”
Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for U.S. election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Some have faced protests at their homes or been followed in their cars. Many have received death threats.
Some, like Raffensperger, are senior officials who publicly refused to bow to Trump’s demands to alter the election outcome. In Georgia, people went into hiding in at least three cases, including the Raffenspergers. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson – a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December – is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.
But many others whose lives have been threatened were low- or mid-level workers, just doing their jobs. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric could reverberate into the 2022 midterm congressional elections and the 2024 presidential vote by making election workers targets of threatened or actual violence. Many election offices will lose critical employees with years or decades of experience, predicts David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“This is deeply troubling,” Becker said.
Carlos Nelson, elections supervisor for Ware County in southeastern Georgia, shares that fear. “These are people who work for little or no money, 12 to 14 hours a day on Election Day,” Nelson said. “If we lose good poll workers, that’s when we’re going to lose democracy.”
In Georgia, Trump faces an investigation into alleged election interference, the only known criminal inquiry into his attempts to overturn the 2020 vote.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not respond to Reuters’ questions about the ongoing harassment of election workers, including why Trump has not forcefully denounced the torrent of threats being made in his name.
‘DISTURBING AND SICKENING’
The intimidation in Georgia has gone well beyond Raffensperger and his family. Election workers - from local volunteers to senior administrators - continue enduring regular harassing phone calls and emails, according to interviews with election workers and the Reuters review of texts, emails and audio files provided by Georgia officials.
One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” The specific text of the threat has not been previously reported. The email, a state election official said, was forwarded to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declined to comment for this story.
In Georgia, threatening violence against a poll officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. Making death threats is a separate crime carrying up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Criminal law specialists say the widespread threats could increase the legal jeopardy for Trump in the Georgia investigation. That inquiry is led by the top prosecutor in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, is probing whether Trump illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election.
Among other matters, investigators are examining a Jan. 2 call in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Willis said in a Feb. 10 letter that her office would also investigate “any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”
That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering probe into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton County prosecutor.
Since launching her inquiry in February, Willis has added several high-profile attorneys to her team, including a leading racketeering expert, to assist on cases including the Trump probe, Reuters reported on March 6.
“I think there’s going to be a big-picture look at all of it,” said Rucker, a Democrat, who once prosecuted a high-profile racketeering case with Willis.
Fulton County District Attorney spokesman Jeff DiSantis did not respond to requests for comment on the office’s inquiries into election-related threats of violence.
In April, two investigators from Willis’ office met with Fulton County’s elections director, Richard Barron, who oversaw elections in a region that overwhelmingly backed Biden for president. Trump frequently targeted the county, claiming without evidence that election workers there destroyed hundreds of thousands of ballots.
During the hour-long meeting, which has not been previously reported, investigators sought information on threats against Barron and his staff, Barron said. Barron’s office had saved every harassing message – hundreds of them – and shared them with investigators.
Barron said his staff is made up almost entirely of Black election workers. “The racial slurs were disturbing and sickening,” he said of the threats.
‘YOU DESERVE TO HANG’
Among those targeted was Barron’s registration chief, Ralph Jones, 56, who oversaw the county’s mail-in ballot operation and has worked on Georgia elections for more than three decades, including senior roles.
Jones said callers left him death threats, including one shortly after the November election who called him a “n-----” who should be shot. Another threatened to kill him by dragging his body around with a truck. “It was unbelievable: your life being threatened just because you’re doing your job,” he said.
Jones, born and raised in Atlanta, said he had experienced racism – but nothing like this. He recalled how one night after the election, strangers showed up at his house. They identified themselves as new neighbors, he said. Jones knew no one had moved into the neighborhood and didn’t open the door. After that, he told his wife each morning to lock the door before he went to work. “My primary focus was to make sure that no harm came to my family and staff,” he said.
His boss, Barron, who is white, faced even more intimidation. At a Dec. 5 rally – ahead of a runoff election in Georgia that would determine control of the U.S. Senate – Trump showed a video clip of Barron and accused him and his staff of committing a “crime,” alleging they tampered with ballots. After the rally, Barron was bombarded with threats. “I underestimated how hard he was going to push that narrative and just keep pushing it,” Barron said of Trump.
Between Christmas and early January, Barron received nearly 150 hateful calls, many accusing him of treason or saying he should die, according to Barron and a Reuters review of some of the phone messages.
“You actually deserve to hang by your goddamn, soy boy, skinny-ass neck,” said a woman in one voicemail, using a slang term for an effeminate man. Another caller wanted him banished to China: “That’s where you belong, in communist China, because you’re a crook.”
Police were posted outside Barron’s house and office after he received a detailed threat in late December in which the caller said he would kill Barron by firing squad.
“It seemed like we were descending into this third-world mentality,” said Barron, 54, who has worked in elections for 22 years and volunteered as an election observer overseas. “I never expected that out of this country.”
Barron’s office is bracing for more abuse during an upcoming audit of the county’s 147,000 absentee ballots cast in November. A judge on May 21 ordered the review, granting a request by plaintiffs claiming fraud in Fulton County. The details of the review are still being litigated, but it may be supervised by Barron’s office. It won’t change the results, which were certified months ago. But it reflects the lasting impact of Trump’s election falsehoods.
Fulton County recently sought a dismissal of the case. Trump responded in a May 28 statement with more baseless allegations of a conspiracy to steal the election, saying county officials are fighting the review “because they know the vote was corrupt and the audit will show it.”
Trump’s disinformation campaign also shook election workers in Paulding County, outside Atlanta. Deidre Holden, the county elections director, was finishing preparations ahead of Georgia’s January Senate runoffs when an email caught her eye. The subject line read: “F_UCKING HEAR THIS PAULDING COUNTY OR D!E.”
The message, reviewed by Reuters, threatened to blow up all of the county’s polling sites. At least 10 other counties received the same email. “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play,” the message said in an apparent reference to the 2013 extremist attack on the Boston Marathon that killed three and injured hundreds.
“This sh_t is rigged,” the email said. “Until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS until 2024 like he should be, we will bring death and destruction to defend this country if needed and get our voices heard.”
Holden forwarded the message to local police and contacted the state elections director in Raffensperger’s office. Officials at the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were also alerted. “I’ve never had to deal with anything like this,” said Holden, who’s served as elections supervisor for 14 years. “It was frightening.”
As Georgia girds for elections in 2022 – including votes for governor and the secretary of state – election supervisors say they fear high numbers of the temporary workers who staff polling sites won’t return for future votes because they want to avoid harassment.
Vanessa Montgomery, 58, is among those who may not come back. In the Jan. 5 Georgia runoffs for two U.S. Senate seats, Montgomery was a polling manager in the city of Taylorsville. The stakes were huge: Both seats were won by Democrats, giving the party control of the Senate.
When polls closed that night, she set off to deliver ballots to an elections office in Bartow County, a predominantly white, Republican district in northwestern Georgia. Montgomery, who is Black, was traveling with her daughter, also a poll worker hired temporarily for the election.
On a dark, rural two-lane road, they noticed they were being followed by an SUV.
“I was trying to stay calm because I wanted to make sure we both were safe,” she recalled in an interview. “What were they trying to do, actually? Were they trying to hit us and take the information and destroy the ballots?”
Montgomery called 911 as her daughter sped towards town with the SUV nearly running them off the road, she said. They were followed for about 25 minutes. The dispatcher helped guide them to a parking lot, where officers met and escorted them to the election office. She declined to file a police report, and the incident was not investigated.
She said the scare triggered a panic attack, her first since serving as a U.S. Army officer decades ago in Bosnia, where she witnessed people killed by exploding landmines. Months later, Montgomery says she still suffers panic attacks from the incident and may stop working elections altogether.
Her manager, Joseph Kirk, the Bartow County elections supervisor, said Montgomery is one of his most reliable poll workers. Kirk now worries that the ugly reaction to Trump’s loss will make it harder to retain and hire the staff needed to run elections smoothly across America.
“I’m very concerned, after what we saw last year, we’re going to lose a lot of institutional knowledge nationwide,” he said.
THREATS OF MURDER
For Georgia’s top election officials, the intimidation has been especially personal and pointed.
In early May, Gabriel Sterling’s phone buzzed at 2:36 a.m. Five months had passed since the Georgia election office that he helps to lead had declared Biden the winner. The caller ranted that Sterling, the chief operating officer for Secretary of State Raffensperger, should go to prison for “rigging” the election against Trump.
“This stuff has continued,” said Sterling, 50, a Republican who drew national attention in December by denouncing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as false and dangerous. “It’s continued for all of us.”
Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs, says she has faced frequent death threats since November. Her personal and work cell phone numbers have been posted online by a Trump supporter who encourages people to harass her, she said. In April, she received a vulgar photo of a male body part.
“I don’t think any of us anticipated this level of nastiness,” said Fuchs, 31, who grew up in a conservative Christian family and has worked for years to help elect Republicans.
In an interview, she said the most alarming threats came in late November when Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people.” Death threats started pouring in, some calling for public hangings. Some of the threats were so detailed, the FBI began monitoring a list of people who were suspected of making them, said a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
In mid-December, a website titled “Enemies of the People” appeared online, posting the personal information of Raffensperger, Fuchs and Sterling, including home addresses. Crosshairs were superimposed over their photos. The FBI on Dec. 23 linked the website to Iran, citing “highly credible information indicating Iranian cyber actors” were responsible for the site. A spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the United Nations called the FBI’s claim “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Police parked an empty cruiser outside Sterling’s house to deter attackers, Sterling said. Fuchs said she stayed at friends’ houses as a precaution.
Sterling publicly rebuked Trump, pleading with the former president to stop attacking Georgia’s election process. “Someone’s going to get killed,” he said as he gripped the podium during an emotional Dec. 1 news conference.
A month later, five people died and more than a hundred police officers were injured when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, demanding that Congress overturn the election.
The threats against Raffensperger and his family began right after the election.
Tricia Raffensperger detailed one that came from a sender who created a phony email address using her husband’s name to make the text message appear like it came from him.
“I married a sickening whore. I wish you were dead,” it read. Another text called her a “bitch” and included vulgar sexual insults. Raffensperger’s family and staff viewed the messages as an effort to coerce him to resign.
At the time, Georgia’s two Republican U.S. senators had called on Raffensperger to step down, criticizing his management of the elections as an “embarrassment” as the vote count showed Trump narrowly trailing Biden in Georgia.
Raffensperger’s refusal to overturn the 2020 results has left him ostracized by fellow Republicans. As Raffensperger seeks re-election next year as secretary of state, Trump has endorsed his Republican challenger, U.S. Congressman Jody Hice, who has supported Trump’s baseless fraud claims.
Hice’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the threats against Georgia election officials and the reason he backs Trump’s false fraud allegations.
The threats worsened in late November, Tricia Raffensperger said, after unidentified people broke into the home of her daughter-in-law – the widow of the Raffenspergers’ dead son. The daughter-in-law returned home with her children to find the lights on, the garage door pulled up, and the door to the house open.
“Items in the house had been moved around, but nothing was taken,” said a report on the break-in from the Suwanee Police Department.
In response to the threats, the Georgia State Patrol assigned a security detail to the Raffenspergers. One officer was parked in their driveway. The other followed the secretary of state wherever he went.
Later that evening, as Brad Raffensperger left to get dinner for the family, he and his state police guard spotted three cars with out-of-state license plates in front of the family’s home in an Atlanta suburb. The officer guarding the house confronted the people and asked them to identify themselves, Tricia Raffensperger said.
The strangers said they were members of the Oath Keepers, the militia group. They gave the officer what the Raffenspergers considered a nonsensical reason for being there – to protect the area from Black Lives Matter protesters they had heard would be there. The officer told them to leave, Tricia Raffensperger said, which they did.
A Georgia State Patrol spokesperson said no formal report was generated on the incident and no arrests were made while providing security for the Raffenspergers.
The break-in and encounter with the far-right extremists prompted the Raffenspergers, their children and grandchildren to escape to a hotel in an undisclosed location, Tricia said. The family intended to stay away from home for more than a week, she said. They returned after four days, however, when a stranger at the hotel recognized her husband, making their effort to stay in hiding seem futile.
“He’s probably the only secretary of state that everybody knows,” Tricia Raffensperger said.
Her voice trembled as she described her continuing fears for her grandchildren and other relatives. “I hesitate to say this because I’m afraid someone might use it against me,” she said, referring to the death of her son, Brenton. “But, you know, I have lost a child, and I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
A woman uses her phone. (photo: Getty Images)
Apple iPhones Can Soon Hold Your ID. Privacy Experts Are on Edge
Bobby Allyn, NPR
Allyn writes: "Buying a coffee and grabbing a train is already possible with an iPhone, but Apple wants to replace the physical wallet completely."
READ MORE
Authorities have made one arrest and are searching for another suspect in a mass shooting that wounded at least 14 people in Austin, Texas. (photo: ABC)
Police Arrest One Suspect, Hunting for Another After Austin Shooting Leaves 14 Injured
Associated Press
olice in Austin, Texas, say they have arrested one man and are searching for another in connection with a shooting early on Saturday that injured 14 people in the city’s downtown entertainment district.
The Austin police department said in a news release that the US Marshals Lone Star fugitive task force assisted in making the arrest, but it provided no other details other than to say it is continuing to follow up on leads for the suspect still at large.
Interim police chief Joseph Chacon said the shooting happened around 1.30am on a street packed with bars and barricaded off from vehicle traffic. He said investigators believe it began as a dispute between two parties.
Chacon said both suspects were male, but declined to disclose details such as whether both fired shots, saying the investigation was ongoing.
“Most of the victims were innocent bystanders, but we’re still sorting out all of the victims to see what their involvement is in this case,” Chacon said.
The mass shooting – one of at least three in the US overnight – sparked panic along 6th Street, a popular nightlife destination in the city that’s home to the University of Texas.
One witness, Matt Perlstein, told KXAN-TV that he was waiting with a friend to enter a bar when gunfire erupted.
“Everything was totally fine,” Perlstein said, then gunfire erupted. “We just heard like ... a bunch of gunshots going off. Everyone got on the ground. We couldn’t even comprehend what was going on at the time.”
Eleven victims were in stable condition, and two victims were in critical condition. No fatalities have been reported.
Chacon said at a briefing that there were initial reports of three shooting victims in the area around 6th street. That was soon upgraded when emergency services reached the scene.
“Our officers responded very quickly,” Chacon said. “They were able to immediately begin life-saving measures for many of these patients, including applications of tourniquets; applications of chest seals.”
Chacon also said some officers transported patients to hospitals in their police cruisers due to the nature of the scene, where it was hard to contain the crowd and get ambulances to those who were injured.
“Our aggravated assault and homicide unit detectives are out investigating, as well as members of our organized crime and gang units to see if this incident was gang-related. It’s not clear what sparked this off, but out of an abundance of caution we have notified the the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.”
Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, made a series of comments on Twitter.
“The uptick in gun violence locally is part of a disturbing rise in gun violence across the country as we exit the pandemic,” he said.
“APD and the City Council have initiated multiple violence prevention efforts in response – but this crisis requires a broader, coordinated response from all levels of government.
“One thing is clear – greater access to firearms does not equal greater public safety.”
The Austin attack was one of three mass shootings across the country overnight. In Chicago, a woman was killed and nine other people were wounded when two men opened fire on a group standing on a sidewalk in the Chatham neighborhood on the city’s South Side. The shooters got away and hadn’t been identified by mid-afternoon Saturday.
In the south Georgia city of Savannah, police said one man was killed and seven other people were wounded in a mass shooting Friday evening, police said. Two of the wounded are children – an 18-month-old and a 13-year-old.
Savannah’s police chief, Roy Minter Jr, said the shooting may be linked to an ongoing dispute between two groups, citing reports of gunshots being fired at the same apartment complex earlier in the week.
“It’s very disturbing what we’re seeing across the country and the level of gun violence that we’re seeing across the country,” he told reporters Saturday. “It’s disturbing and it’s senseless.”
The attacks come amid an easing of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions in much of the country, including Chicago, which lifted many of its remaining safeguards on Friday.
Sunday Song: Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen | The Partisan
Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen, YouTube
Excerpt: "They poured across the borders. We were cautioned to surrender. This I could not do."
September 1966: Joan Baez accompanies Martin Luther King Jr. and supporters as they escort Mississippi children to a newly integrated school. (photo: Bettmann/CORBIS)
They poured across the borders
We were cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
Into the hills I vanished
No one ever asks me
Who I am or where I'm going
But those of you who know
You cover up my footprints
I have changed my name so often
I have lost my wife and children
But I have many friends
And some of them are with me
An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in a garrett
And then the soldiers came
She died without a whisper
There were three of us this morning
And I'm the only one this ev'ning
Still I must go on
Frontiers are my prison
Oh the winds, the winds are blowing
Thru the graves the winds are blowing
Freedom soon will come!
Then we'll come from the shadow.
Deadly decade-long mega-droughts could be revived with climate change. (photo: Getty Images)
The West Is the Driest It's Been in 1,200 Years - Raising Questions About a Livable Future
Ben Kesslen, NBC News
Kesslen writes: "Trees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history, and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain."
Drought "is not a temporary condition we can expect to go away, but rather something we have to deal with," one expert said.
rees are dying. Riverbeds are empty. Lake Mead's water level dropped to its lowest point in history, and Utah's governor asked residents to pray for rain.
Water is increasingly scarce in the Western U.S. — where 72 percent of the region is in "severe" drought, 26 percent is in exceptional drought, and populations are booming.
Insufficient monsoon rains last summer and low snowpacks over the winter left states like Arizona, Utah and Nevada without the typical amount of water they need, and forecasts for the rainy summer season don't show promise.
This year's aridity is happening against the backdrop of a 20-year-long drought. The past two decades have been the driest or the second driest in the last 1,200 years in the West, posing existential questions about how to secure a livable future in the region.
It's time to ask, "Is this a drought, or is it just the way the hydrology of the Colorado River is going to be?" said John Entsminger, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Greater Las Vegas is one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, home to more than 2.2 million people, and it gets just over 4 inches of rain in a good year.
Around 90 percent of the water comes from Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Colorado River formed by the Hoover Dam, which is currently 36 percent full.
The drought has been so persistent that the Southern Nevada Water Authority and many other groups in the region have spent the last 20 years preparing for a drier future.
"It isn't sneaking up on us," Entsminger said. "Since 2002, our population has increased close to 50 percent, about 750,000 people in the last 19 years or so, and over that same time our aggregated depletions from the Colorado River have gone down 23 percent."
The good news, he said, is that per capita water consumption is down by 40 percent. Indoor water is recycled in southern Nevada, where residents are paid to replace grass with drip-irrigated landscaping.
That is one of the region's many ways of confronting a 21st century Colorado River with significantly less water than it had a century ago.
Entsminger said the region needs to "drastically increase our conservation and rethink how we are using almost every gallon of water in order to accommodate that kind of future development."
That includes a new law that will declare more than 30 percent of the grass illegal in southern Nevada.
"The future of the Colorado River in the 21st century is almost certainly significantly less water than we had in the 20th century," he said, and it will require collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico. "The challenge before us is how seven states and two countries can all cooperate to figure out how to get by in the coming decades with significantly less water than we thought we had."
'Bull's-eye of global warming'
Grass bans won't save the West, especially a place that is in the middle of the desert and surging in population, like Phoenix.
Phoenix is the "bull's-eye of global warming, heating up and drying out," said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and author of a book about Arizona's largest city called "Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World's Least Sustainable City."
Before it was Phoenix, the Hohokam Indigenous people lived on the land for centuries. "They had a wonderful irrigation network system, and they subsisted in the desert with their canal network for more than a 1,000 years," Ross said, but severe drought forced them to abandon the site. Phoenix is built atop the ruins of the Hohokam people's city, and the canal system that brings water to Phoenix was built on the path first used by the Hohokam.
"The allegory is built into the city," Ross said. The test is whether history repeats itself.
Phoenix is a growth-obsessed city dominated by single-family-home real estate development. "You can't look at the long-term future of those developments without concluding that the challenges will only get greater by the year and with every new subdivision of low-density tract housing that's built," Ross said.
When he was writing his book on Phoenix 10 years ago, someone described Phoenix to Ross as a city of "people who are building homes for the people who are building homes." The metro area's population is almost 5 million, and it's expected to grow by around 2 million in the next 30 years.
Utah is in a similar situation. Its population grew by 18.4 percent over the past decade, making it the country's fastest-growing state, according to the latest census data.
The state government recently allocated $280 million for water projects, $100 million of which is for conservation. Farmers, who consume the most water in the state, are no longer flooding fields to irrigate them; instead, they're using more targeted and less wasteful irrigation methods. Utah is so dry that state officials might totally ban fireworks, fearing wildfires.
"I've already asked all Utahns to conserve water by avoiding long showers, fixing leaky faucets, and planting water-wise landscapes. But I fear those efforts alone won't be enough to protect us," Gov. Spencer Cox recently said in a statement.
To adapt, cities must acknowledge that drought "is not a temporary condition we can expect to go away, but rather something we have to deal with," said John Berggren, water policy adviser for Western Resource Advocates, based in Boulder, Colorado.
What does a sustainable Colorado River system look like? "We have a long way to go" to answer that question, Berggren said.
While it's easy to imagine that the drought spells apocalypse, experts say what prolonged drought really requires is the appropriate response and a willingness to adapt.
A report this spring from Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy argues that "the perception that Arizona is worst off among the western states is wrong."
Irrigated agriculture consumes 74 percent of the state's water supply. But as populations boom, more farmland is becoming neighborhoods, driving down water use.
"Farming in the Sun Corridor faces a genuine crisis, but that does not necessarily translate into urban shortages," the report said. "Of course, the fact that the Sun Corridor's dominant city is named after a bird that periodically immolates itself clearly invites scrutiny."
It's not that Phoenix won't have water in 20 years, but rather that to ensure that it does, industry might need to rethink why Arizona, which is mostly desert, is one of the top three market-vegetable-producing states.
Berggren said it's time to start strategizing, suggesting that states might need to pay farmers to plow their land without seeding it temporarily to destroy weeds and conserve moisture in the soil.
"If push comes to shove, they might need to go out and buy water rights from farmers, and those farms might go out of business," he said. That's not an idea to take lightly, and also not one to disregard. "We can have thriving communities, growing communities, diverse communities in the West. We just have to do it in a different way."
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