Category Archives: Government Oppression

Hilde Marchant, star reporter for the Daily Express, heard the story from a sailor. At first she didnt believe it. Two nights earlier, the sailor explained, he had been standing on the deck of a ship loaded with British nationals headed to England, and watched as a confetti of parachutes drifted into Rotterdam harbour. Dangling from each silhouetted disc, the sailor insisted, were German soldiers dressed, not in Nazi uniforms, but skirts and blouses. Each carried a submachine gun. When the disguised paratroopers landed, another witness claimed, men and women working as cleaners and servants emerged from basements and back doors wearing German uniforms. These traitorous individuals, the witness said, had come to Holland claiming to be refugees from Nazi oppression, sleeper agents posing as asylum seekers.

On 13 May 1940, three days after the invasion of the Netherlands began, the Daily Express published Marchants story under the headline Germans dropped women parachutists as decoys. Peppered throughout Marchants story was the term fifth columnist one that, a short time before, would have been unrecognisable to most readers. Marchant was one of the first people to adopt the phrase, coined during the 1936 Spanish civil war as shorthand for traitors poised to support an enemy invasion from within. British newspapers had begun to refer to fifth columnists after the German invasion of Norway in early April 1940, when reports circulated that spies had been installed in the country to aid the German invasion. By the time Marchants story ran, there wasnt a reader in Britain unaware of the term, or the notion that a similar network of duplicitous immigrants might lurk in their own towns and villages.

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The storys claims of treachery were, it would later transpire, exaggerated. But the image of the double-crossing immigrant proved indelible, and not only among the readers of newspapers. The British envoy to the Dutch government, Sir Nevile Bland, had also witnessed the landings of the German paratroopers just before he escaped via ship. When Bland reached London the day after the Express story ran, he drafted an eyewitness report. The account, titled Fifth Column Menace, was vivid and fearful. No matter how superficially charming and devoted they appear, Bland wrote, every German or Austrian in Britain is a real and grave menace. When the signal is given to invade Britain, Bland continued, there will be satellites of the monster all over the country who will at once embark on widespread sabotage and attacks on civilians. Britain, Bland concluded, cannot afford to take this risk. ALL Germans and Austrians, at least, ought to be interned at once.

Blands feverish report was widely distributed in Whitehall. A copy reached King George VI, who summoned the home secretary, Sir John Anderson, for a meeting at Buckingham Palace. You must take immediate action against political fifth columnists and other enemies of the state, he told Anderson. Men and women. When the reports claims were broadcast by the BBC, they had an immediate and transformative effect on the British publics attitude towards refugees, and Jews in particular, which until now had been broadly characterised by fragile tolerance.

Before May 1940, not a single person interviewed by the polling group Mass Observation suspected refugees to Britain of espionage, or suggested that they should be interned. Up until then, only 569 individuals had been interned, either through MI5s initial roundups or as the result of mandatory tribunals where senior judges had tested the loyalties of tens of thousands of asylum seekers. Some critics had always maintained that the home secretarys policy had been too feeble. In April 1940, after the German occupation of Norway made an invasion of Britain seem possible, Col Henry Burton, Conservative member for Sudbury, asked members of the House of Commons if it would not be far better to intern all the lot and then pick out the good ones. This view had spread through the Conservative back benches and now, with the news from the Netherlands, the newspapers carried the clarion call for mass internment.

Act! Act! Act! Do It Now! blared a Daily Mail article by G Ward Price, on 24 May. All refugees should be drafted without delay to a remote part of the country and kept under strict supervision. You fail to realise, Price wrote, that every German is an agent. A widespread ignorance of the true numbers of foreigners to whom Britain had offered asylum hastened the change in public attitudes. A poll asked British citizens to estimate the number of refugees who had come to Britain from Nazi Germany in the previous six years. Respondents put the number at anywhere between 2 and 4 million. The true figure was just 73,500.

Hysteria had overcome logic. Most refugees spoke thickly accented English, were unaccustomed to British social norms and would make ineffectual spies. Fifth columnists, if they existed, were far likelier to come from the ranks of British fascists. (On 23 May police arrested Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and about 35 of his followers, individuals who would have likely supported Hitlers invasion of Britain from within.) As the Labour politician Herbert Delaunay Hughes wrote, pseudonymously, at the time: It is lamentable how quickly people seem to have forgotten who exactly the refugees are and how it is that they came to this country. Most British citizens acknowledged the injustice inherent in mass internment, but felt that it was nevertheless an appropriate, justifiable measure. You cant say which is good and which bad, said one respondent to a May poll in which half of those interviewed favoured the internment of all enemy aliens. Some of them is very nice people, but its safest to pull them all in.

In the early hours of 5 July 1940, the British police came for Peter Fleischmann, a young German Jewish refugee. He had narrowly avoided the Gestapos moonlit roundups in Berlin two years earlier. At that time a kindly police officer had knocked on the gates of the orphanage that was Fleischmanns home, and warned that the Nazis were coming for him. When he was three, Fleischmanns parents had drowned in an accident while driving by the Wannsee lake. The couple had been writers for an anti-fascist newspaper. Fleischmann later learned the cars steering had been tampered with their deaths apparently an act of political sabotage.

Now it seemed the Gestapo wanted to wipe him out, too. Fleischmann fled to the south of the city and hid in the basement of his familys former housekeeper. When the first Kindertransport was arranged to bring children out of Germany, Fleischmann a few weeks shy of his 17th birthday just qualified for rescue. On 1 December 1938, alongside a brood of the citys Jewish orphans, he embarked the train at the Anhalter Bahnhof railway station, watched by orphanage staff and a few Gestapo officers, who had come to observe the children, with their unpatriotic dark hair and brown eyes, making their pioneering journey.

In Britain, Fleischmann, who dreamed of becoming a professional artist, was taken in by the owners of a Manchester business that specialised in colouring old photographs of young soldiers who had died in the first world war. They provided him with employment and a room in their home in Prestwich. The hours were long, and the conditions a basement filled with rats and shadows insalubrious. But the work might, he reasoned, provide the experience he needed to return to art school.

In Whitehall, however, ongoing discussions soon derailed Fleischmanns humble plans. Starting in November 1939, the government had established nationwide tribunals to test the loyalties of foreign passport-holders living in Britain. More than 50,000 individuals, including Fleischmann, had been classified, as a result, as refugees from Nazi oppression. After the invasion of Holland, however, the state began to debate whether these displaced men and women, many of whom had lost their livelihoods, homes and possessions, should be imprisoned anyway, without trial.

Winston Churchill, during his first cabinet meeting as prime minister, agreed to the internment of all male enemy aliens between the ages of 16 and 60 currently living in coastal counties in Britain. This protected area was where, in the event of Nazi invasion, a spy could cause most harm. Men were to be interned regardless of the refugee status bestowed on them several months earlier. The following day, on Sunday 12 May 1940, Scotland Yards fleet of motorcars roared out of police headquarters. Many of the officers dispatched to make the days arrests had been unaware of their task until they arrived at work that morning. By the end of this first mass roundup, around 2,000 refugees had been taken into custody and handed to the military authorities for internment.

Anderson, the home secretary, was opposed to mass internment, a position that he hoped to hold unless the war begins to go badly. Earlier in the year he wrote to his father of the danger posed to justice by national paranoia: In wartime people are easily worked up; a spy scare can be started at any time as a stunt. Now with German troops in France, the threat of enemy invasion looming, and newspapers stewing with reports of fifth columnists (even the Manchester Guardian had added its voice to the chorus calling for mass internment, stating: No half measures will do), he was forced to concede that there were various bodies and groups of persons in this country against whom action would need to be taken, including refugees. Throughout May, the protected area expanded from coastal counties inland, until no one in Britain was safe from the threat of immediate arrest and indefinite internment based on their nationality, ethnicity, religion or political beliefs.

Internment was in the best interest of the internee, Churchill argued, since public temper in this country would be such that such persons would be in great danger if left at liberty. This argument precisely echoed that made by the Nazi officials to justify the arrest of the partys political opponents. In a speech delivered in March 1933, shortly after the opening of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, Heinrich Himmler reasoned: I felt compelled [to make these arrests] because in many parts of the city there has been so much agitation that it has been impossible for me to guarantee the safety of those particular individuals who have provoked it. The Nazis used a euphemism for this category of arrest Schutzhaft, or protective custody a term that could now be applied to Britains own policy towards Jews. For those individuals who had survived and fled the Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald, now interned by their supposed liberators, it was a befuddling injustice. When Hitler learned of Churchills internment policy, he reportedly gloated: The enemies of Germany are now the enemies of Britain, too. Where are those much-vaunted democratic liberties of which the English boast?

Having allowed the popular press to whip up jingoism and hatred, instead of taking an enlightened lead, the government now used public opinion as justification for strict measures. Among Londoners some sort of neurosis had taken grip, the art historian Klaus Hinrichsen noted. Anyone who was German was considered a Nazi. On Sunday 4 June 1940, Churchill, who had been prime minister for less than a month, addressed the House of Commons to announce the governments new powers of arrest the powers to put down fifth column activities with a strong hand. Churchill acknowledged that the orders would affect a great many people who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. There was, he said, nothing to be done. I am very sorry for them, he added, but we cannot draw all the distinctions which we should like to do.

Status and class, those twin armaments of privilege, provided no protection. Nazism had pushed a wave of luminaries toward Britain. Now these Oxbridge dons, surgeons, dentists, lawyers and celebrated artists were taken into custody. The police arrested Emil Goldmann, a 67-year-old professor from the University of Vienna, in the grounds of Eton College, Britains most elite school. At Cambridge University, dozens of staff and students were detained in the Guildhall, including Friedrich Hohenzollern, also known as Prince Frederick of Prussia, a grandson of Queen Victoria (who, while interned, received food packages from Fortnum & Mason allegedly paid for by the royal family). That years Cambridge law finals nearly had to be cancelled because one of the interned professors had locked away the exam papers, and taken the key.

In the early hours of 5 July, a black mariah pulled up at the Prestwich home of Albert and Gertrude Ripkin, who had taken in Peter Fleischmann and given him work. Fleischmann awoke to the sound of knocking. Albert was not yet up, so Fleischmann opened the door. The officers instruction was curt and urgent. Get your clothes. Come with us. Neither soldier nor criminal, Fleischmann, one of 90 aliens and refugees arrested by Salford police that morning, was denied the civil rights that even convicts enjoy: no charge, no trial, no bail.

None of his story mattered: not the fact he had been orphaned and made homeless by the Nazi regime, nor the fact that he had been brought to England as a destitute child, nor that he had been carefully interviewed by one of the most senior judges in the land and deemed to pose no security risk to his adoptive country. In this new reality, subject to the British governments panicked measures, only Fleischmanns nationality the same nationality that the Nazis hoped to strip from all German and Austrian Jews mattered. Buffeted along a twisted road by the winds of history, Fleischmann was, once again, rootless, unwelcome, homeless.

Across the country, internees were sent to various transit camps to await dispatch to more permanent camps. Fleischmann, like most of those arrested in north-west England, was sent to Warth Mills, a massive, decaying, derelict cotton mill that cast a brutish silhouette on the Lancashire horizon. Its proprietors had been forced by recession to abandon the premises a few years earlier. The site had been abandoned in haste: the floor, a mixture of cobbles and wood, was viscid and slippery with old machine oil, the smell of which mixed with the acrid stench of the canal that ran alongside the building, and stuck in the throat. Transmission belts hung like nooses from rafters. Crankshafts, partly dismounted, dangled at Damoclean angles. Clumps of rotting, mouldy cotton decorated the floor. Spiders ruled the shadows. A series of cast-iron columns crowned with intricate Corinthian capitals, high up in the vaulted murk, supported a glass roof, the sole source of light inside the building, which was pocked with broken panes that let the drizzle in.

The building, three storeys tall at one section, had sat empty and dampening until the British army moved in on 5 June 1940. The first internees arrived seven days later. Theyd had ample time to take in their new homes thuggish frontage. From Bury station they had been marched the four miles or so along Manchester Road towards the mill. It was a walk of shame; hostile onlookers watched as they were paraded in front of the public as prisoners.

To be marched like a bloody prisoner of war, with people watching that really hurt, recalled Peter Katz, a pastor in his mid-50s, who had been one of the first arrivals. I felt degraded. By the time Fleischmann arrived, the place was packed. Inside, a phalanx of British soldiers under the command of a retired officer, Maj Alfred Braybrook, sat behind a row of tables, ready to check the mens belongings. The internees lined up behind ropes. Each man smelled the stench of disinfectant and listened to the sounds of captive men while he waited to be called forward. When Fleischmanns turn came, he approached, and a private grabbed his bag and tipped the contents on to a table. As the soldier sifted Fleischmanns belongings, a seated officer thumbed through his wallet. Fleischmann assumed the men were searching for any items that might be used as weapons, but it soon became clear that anything of value was in danger of confiscation. Just as the Nazis had systematically robbed many of these men of their valuables, so the British officers now took chocolate, cigarettes, writing paper and typewriters, distributing these items among themselves in full view of their prisoners.

The confiscation of razor blades was justifiable, and a case could possibly be made for the seizure of gold sovereigns to preclude black-market trading. Other choices seemed indefensible: watches, books, medicine. One soldier took insulin from a diabetic. For some internees, this was a familiar experience. Many had passed through holding camps at Ascot and Kempton Park, also overseen by Braybrook. At Kempton Park, a young tailor, Kurt Treitel, lost his watch and all his money to larcenous soldiers.

The breach of privacy revealed not only what each internee had considered sufficiently important to bring with him during the harried moments of his arrest, but also the range of vocations represented among the captives. Doctors watched, bewildered, as the soldiers pocketed their stethoscopes. Academics argued that they should be allowed to keep their textbooks. Artists pleaded to keep their drawing paper. For many of the men, this ransacking crowned a brief period that had devastatingly transformed their view of Britain, and their place within it. [We] went around breathing injustice and feeling very sore about all kinds of things, wrote Hirsch Uri, who was arrested alongside a number of other young Orthodox Jews, most of whom had come to England via the Kindertransport. Since gloom only serves to increase ones loquacity, [we] soon became unbearable to ourselves.

Some men at Warth Mills had already experienced great drama in their escapes to England. Two days after the outbreak of war, Gotfried Huelsmann had successfully crossed the Germany-Netherlands border disguised as a greengrocer, driving a van filled with vegetables. To be interned by the country he considered an ally, after such acts of derring-do, was hurtful; to be robbed by those in whom these men had staked their trust, unthinkable. I remember very clearly and this was the dominating thought the feeling of insult, noted Claus Moser, who later became chair of the Royal Opera House. The whole operation was panicky and cruel.

In Warth Mills, 2,000 internees shared a single bath, and 18 water taps a limitation that quickly forced almost every man to give up on shaving, and encouraged some to rise as early as 4am to avoid the mass hustle for the facilities. Laundry could be washed in an empty room, but, without soap or drying facilities, clothes and blankets often emerged as dirty as before. There was no sewerage system, and the lavatories amounted to 60 buckets housed outside, beneath an oblong tent. As the day progressed, the stench became unbearable. The latrines became so choked that, towards the end of the day, men would simply relieve themselves in a quiet corner.

Conditions in the camp were considered, by the numerous German doctors among the inmates, to be a liability for the spread of disease. They wrote and co-signed a memorandum of complaint to Braybrook. Simon Isaac, a former professor at the University of Frankfurt who had overseen makeshift hospitals on the Russian Front, wrote that he had never seen a place less fit for the accommodation of human beings. To be imprisoned in a building not even fit for beasts, as another internee wrote, had a profound effect on the mens view of the country that had offered them sanctuary. Many [have] ceased to believe in the British spirit of humanity which before they had acclaimed, he continued.

The indignities of isolation from friends and relatives, meagre food rations, wet straw mattresses, lice and inadequate sanitary arrangements led many internees to draw parallels between the mill and the Nazi concentration camps from which they had fled. A former member of the German Foreign Office, held in the mill, claimed conditions were much worse than those of the notorious French prisoner of war reprisal camps he had seen in the first world war, where captured men were kept in cold, brutal conditions and subject to epidemics of typhoid and cholera. According to an official Ministry of Information report, two men, both of whom had previously been incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps, died by suicide.

After a week spent at Warth Mills, Fleischmann was transported to one of the more permanent camps, 10 of which were situated on the Isle of Man, where women and children were also interned. When he reached the island, Fleischmanns home was P Camp, or Hutchinson, where about 1,200 internees were billeted in requisitioned boarding houses that bordered a picturesque square, with views leading down to Douglas harbour. After the indignities of Warth Mills, Hutchinson had a bucolic quality, which, depending on an individuals temperament, at times felt like something akin to a holiday camp.

Rather than squander their time in detention, the men worked to turn the camp into a cultural centre. Professional actors staged productions of A Midsummer Nights Dream and Of Mice and Men. Feted musicians performed concerts on the lawn. Oxbridge academics delivered lectures on a vast range of subjects, while the many celebrated artists in the camp produced and exhibited works of art in various disciplines. The journalists and editors published a fortnightly camp newspaper, featuring news, articles, fiction and illustrations. Thanks to the efforts of campaigners such as the MP Eleanor Rathbone, and the Quaker Bertha Bracey, chair of the Central Department for Interned Refugees, the internees were provided with books to open an impromptu library (Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca proved to be the most borrowed titles), a table tennis table, and, in time, a shop where they could buy supplies, and even alcohol.

Their captors allowed the internees to establish a hierarchy of governance, a trick developed by the British army to facilitate the colonisation of indigenous groups. Still, Hutchinsons commandant, a former advertising executive named Hubert Daniel, was a benevolent overseer. At the urging of his wife, a frustrated artist, Daniel provided materials and studio space for the artists in the camp, and even hired a grand piano for an outdoor matinee performance by the interned musician Marjan Rawicz. The artists soon established a semi-exclusive artists cafe, housed in a laundry room extension, with food provided by an interned Austrian pastry chef. With its whitewashed walls and bubbling paint, water taps and washboards, the venue lacked the sophistication of the continental cafes the men were used to, but the room was sizable and, when some trellis tables, chairs and stools had been arranged inside, provided a relatively comfortable space for afternoon meetings, conversation and performances by, among others, the famed Kurt Schwitters, the most famous of Hutchinsons artist internees, who recited his dadaist poetry.

For Fleischmann, who had no ties to the outside world, Hutchinson provided the artistic education that had been cut short by the Nazis. Schwitters taught him life-drawing and how to mix paint from ground brick powder. The sculptors Paul Hamann and Georg Ehrlich showed him how to dig clay while out on an escorted walk in the local hills and smuggle it back into the camp. The sculptor Ernst Muller-Blensdorf showed Fleischmann how to carve blocks of firewood.

In later years, everything of which Fleischmann had dreamed since he was a young aspiring artist at the orphanage would come true. Under his adopted name, Peter Midgley, he would be accepted into the Royal College of Art. He would graduate with first-class honours, the top fine art student in his year, rewarded with the RCAs prestigious Rome scholarship. He would become a professional artist, securing commissions to create works for a number of British government departments, universities and the Royal Navy. Nothing bettered the training he received at Hutchinson, however. Everything thereafter, he later said, was just a recap.

Despite the cultural experience, depression was rife throughout the camp, as the men waited for news of their loved ones, worried about their businesses and obsessed over freedom. Lest this all sounds too rosy a situation, Klaus Hinrichsen, the art historian, who was secretary of the Hutchinson Camp University, later noted, let me assure you that all these frantic activities were entered into as a means of distraction from the ever-present anger at the injustice of being interned the constant worry about wives and children left without a provider and under almost nightly bombardment in London and other towns from the lack of communication and, of course suffering from the cramped living conditions and the lack of freedom of movement.

In the autumn of 1940, the British government released a white paper outlining several categories under which internees could apply for release. Those who were too young or too old, too infirm, or who already had permits to work in positions of national importance could apply to be freed. Artists, writers and musicians were not included until later revisions, and had to prove they had achieved distinction in their chosen field. (As Helen Roeder, secretary of the Artists Refugee Committee, put it to the director of the National Gallery: Do you think [the criteria could] be stretched to include the poor souls who have been too busy being hunted to achieve distinction in the arts?)

With hindsight, many internees recognised that they had been relatively comfortable and safe and, apart from the criminal abuse experienced at Warth Mills, their treatment was fair. For most, internment was a near-constant misery that, as the Oxford academic Paul Jacobsthal wrote, caused a trauma. At least 56 internees died in internment on the Isle of Man, many to suicide. And while Peter Midgleys life was transformed by the people he met during internment, the episode also triggered feelings of rejection and abandonment that haunted his dreams. Once or twice a year he would experience the same recurring nightmare: he was back in the camp; everyone around him was released until, finally, he was the last one there, permanently forsaken.

Every government must balance its humanitarian obligations with the need to uphold national security. To categorise refugees from Nazi oppression as enemy aliens, however, was to invite populist scorn and hatred upon those in most need of compassion in wartime, and represented a moral failing on a national scale. Few went as far as Tristan Busch, a former internee who described the British policy as a war crime in his memoir, but it is indisputable that the hasty measures heaped unhappiness and anguish upon thousands of people already enduring the ordeal of fleeing their previous lives. Only a single sentence spoken by John Anderson in the House of Commons on 22 August 1940, months before most of Hutchinsons internees were freed, provided something approaching an apology: Regrettable and deplorable things have happened, he said, as if the cruelties of internment had been the result of natural phenomena, and not a series of deliberate choices.

In May 2021, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued a formal apology to the more than 30,000 Italian Canadians declared enemy aliens during the second world war 600 of whom were sent to internment camps. There has been no equivalent attempt to repair the damage by the British authorities in failing to distinguish between refugees and enemy aliens a dehumanising term that, in 2021, the US government pledged never again to use. The battle between a nations responsibility to help those in need and to maintain national security persists in every age, every generation. The notion of the refugee who is not who he or she claims to be is an enduring story that can be easily used to justify institutional cruelty or overreach. While the context and detail shifts, the debate remains the same, as does the potential for history to repeat itself. Each successive generation must answer the same question: how far can we go in the rightful defence of our values without abandoning them along the way?

This is an edited extract from The Island of Extraordinary Captives by Simon Parkin, published by Sceptre on 3 February and available from guardianbookshop.com

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The rest is here:

'I remember the feeling of insult': when Britain imprisoned its wartime refugees - The Guardian

Hosting the Winter Olympics during a pandemic was always going to test the Chinese government, by putting its ever-growing ability to exercise political control and virus containment on a collision course with its enthusiasm for international prestige and status.

The 2022 Winter Games, which open on Friday, are being held at a time of particularly intense western criticism of China over human rights abuses, from the mass persecution of Uyghurs in far western Xinjiang labelled a genocide by the United States and other groups including Tibetans, to the crushing of Hong Kongs freedoms.

China denies human rights abuses, but activists have dubbed the gathering in Beijing the Genocide Games, and western powers from the US to the UK have announced a diplomatic boycott of the opening ceremony. The exiled campaign group World Uyghur Congress urged: No one should want another Olympics like this.

There is so little trust of the host nation that many countries have told their athletes to take burner phones, and cyber security experts warned a health app for Olympians could spy on them and steal health and other personal data.

Further censure has come from environmentalists who have warned for years about the negative impact of hosting the Games which need a lot of water for snow and ice in an area of intense water scarcity.

Yet Beijing weathered the controversy when it hosted the Summer Olympics, in 2008, said Susan Brownell of University of Missouri-St Louis, an expert on Chinese sports who was in China for those Games.

Then, high-profile protests dogged the global torch relay, violent suppression of protests in Tibet put Chinese oppression there on the news agenda, there was pressure on leaders to skip the opening ceremony and environmentalists warned about the intense pollution that shrouded Beijing.

But, once the competition began, the focus shifted to the athletes. Beijings calculation is, no doubt, that the same thing will happen this year. Right now, the political and investigative journalists have the front page, but once the Games start, it will be the sports journalists, Brownell said.

Covid has conveniently spared Beijing any worries about protests from the stands, which would have been the most likely arena for political activism in a country where public demonstrations by citizens are in effect banned.

Competitors and the few other foreigners given permission to come to Beijing, including coaches, support staff and journalists, will fly into a sealed-off Olympic world, a closed loop of venues and hotels in just three locations, connected by their own transport vehicles, travelling in their own lanes.

It is staffed by Chinese workers who are not allowed to return to their own homes without a long period of quarantine.

Authorities are so bent on total separation that they have warned Beijing residents against helping Olympians if a loop vehicle crashes.

For Victor Cha, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, these rules seem like a metaphor for how Chinas communist leadership wants the Games to play out overall in a closed system fully under their control.

Covid has really given them the excuse to completely lock down everything. They want to have complete control over the picture of the Olympics and that helps, he said.

There will be an official international protest, in the form of a diplomatic boycott by western governments including the US and the UK, but their absence is unlikely to be a major headache for officials in Beijing, or feature prominently in news coverage through the Games.

They shrug off the diplomatic boycotts. It feeds the domestic narrative that the west is trying to steal Chinas moment in sun, and they can say leaders are not coming anyway because of Covid.

The shutdown of international participation in the Games has put particular political pressure on the athletes, now the only people with a platform to make a statement.

It is impossible to separate sports from business and politics. More than a big sporting occasion, this is also a political event, said Mark Dreyer, author of Sporting Superpower: An Insiders View on Chinas Quest to Be the Best.

The human cost of Chinas political controls has been thrown into the spotlight in a very personal way for athletes by the treatment of one of the countrys best-known, most successful Olympians, tennis star Peng Shuai.

Last year, she vanished from public view after accusing a former senior Communist party official of coercing her into a sexual relationship, and her allegations were scrubbed from the internet.

After international outrage, she made a series of stage-managed public appearances inside China, including with Olympic officials, which have done little to assuage concern about whether she is acting with free will.

Her treatment was highlighted by protesters at this months Australian Open, who wore T-shirts saying simply Where is Peng Shuai?. Organisers banned them, then backtracked on the ban.

Perhaps concerned by the swell of support for Peng, China has taken the unusual step of going beyond the International Olympic Committee bans on athletes taking political stands.

If they break Chinese laws, with behaviour or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, athletes will face certain punishment, Yang Shu, a member of the Beijing Organising Committee, told a news conference this month.This rhetoric may be intended mostly as deterrent, analysts say. An athletes arrest over a political protest would be shocking, and likely to become an enduring image of an event that Beijing wants remembered as a sporting and logistical triumph.

Rob Koehler of Global Athlete, an advocacy group for sportspeople, said they have reluctantly advised competitors to save protests or criticism of China for when they have finished competing and returned home. That is the hardest and most outrageous thing we have had to say, given how hard we pushed for them to have the right to basic freedom of expression, he said.

Even if China manages to side-step an inflammatory protest or an inflammatory response at the Games, the virus that might once have looked like a gift to a government bent on control has become more of a threat to a successful Olympics, with the highly contagious Omicron circulating widely.

If an outbreak knocks out high-profile athletes, or significantly diminishes the number of competitors, it could start to undermine the events.

Beijing announced on Saturday that, even before the Games had begun, the number of cases in the Olympic village had jumped from two to 19. Cases among athletes and team officials exceeded those among media and other stakeholders for the first time. There has already been disruption to qualifying competitions after athletes tested positive. At the US figure skating championships, Brownell said some athletes developed Covid between competitions, and despite taking extreme precautions.

They had been masking, observing social distancing; the pairs team had only private lessons in the rink with their coach and didnt know where they had got it. It created quite a panic at the championships themselves, Brownell said.

Ironically, Chinas success with controlling earlier variants of Covid has left it particularly vulnerable, public health experts say. Its domestic vaccines are ineffective against Omicron, and because there have still been only a few cases in a country of more than 1.4 billion people, there is almost no natural immunity.

A vulnerable population and an unevenly distributed healthcare system makes the potential of a Covid outbreak terrifying. The devastation that ripped through Wuhan in the earliest days of the pandemic could still be unleashed on the rest of China, and fear of this has almost certainly contributed to the intense testing and quarantine rules.

These factors have affected how the rest of the world, or at least audiences in markets such as the US, will experience the Games. The broadcaster NBC is keeping its commentators at home, covering Beijing from thousands of miles away.

Restrictions on media coverage of the last Games, the Summer Olympics in Japan held last year after a years delay, diminished the viewing experience for many of the millions of people who wanted to follow from home.

My personal feeling was that coverage of the Tokyo Games really lost something. It was pretty clear they didnt invest the same amount of money, the coverage was not as glossy and aesthetically pleasing, said Brownell.

Now, with commentators not actually being in Beijing, thats going to be even more marked. I think the pandemic restrictions could have an impact on how the TV and social media audiences see these Olympics.

There may also be less promotion. In a sign perhaps of how these Olympics are among the most controversial in recent decades, sponsors who pay eye-watering sums to be connected with the Games have not been flaunting those links in the west as they have done in the run-up to previous iterations of the competition.

For years China has forced heavy penalties on sports personalities, companies and managers who risked the slightest public criticism of its politics.

A 2019 tweet by Daryl Morey, then general manager of the Houston Rockets, supporting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong was estimated to have cost the National Basketball Association hundreds of millions of dollars after he was allowed to stay in his job.

But sponsors in the west are wary of being accused of pandering to China. Perhaps because they are caught between Beijing and Washington, there has been no pre-Games campaign to spur excitement in the US from the card payment giant Visa, Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The framing in China of the Beijing Winter Games, however, is drastically different from that outside the country focused on igniting national pride, and using the Games to boost participation in sport and expand the domestic winter sports industry.

Chinese citizens participation in sport has been on the rise since the 2008 Games, said Shushu Chen, a lecturer in sport policy and management at the University of Birmingham, who has been tracking the impact of the Summer Games in Beijing and London.

Chen noted that compared with London, residents in Beijing were ostensibly more positive about the inspirational effects of the Olympic Games, which can perhaps be explained by sociocultural contextual differences between the two cases.

Dreyer, who has lived in Beijing since 2007, observed that the wave of enthusiasm in China for winter sports began in 2015, when the country won the hosting rights. China will not top the medals table this year, but it will probably do better than it has ever done before. And it will have many more athletes competing in the Winter Games than previously.

Inside China, the Games are already being hailed as a triumph for Beijing and its ability to rally against the virus, and against western criticism. Internationally, these Games may be remembered very differently.

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Sport, politics and Covid collide at the Beijing Winter Olympics - The Guardian

The journalists, politicians, students, and other human rights activists,who were spied on by the Hungarian government are now mulling to take legal action against their government. According to a report by The Guardian, they were allegedly targeted by the Hungarian government in order to keep an eye on their work through Israeli spyware called Pegasus. This came nearly seven months after a consortium of news outlets called-- The Pegasus Project revealed the names of several top journalists, human rights activists, and opposition leaders of Hungary, who were allegedly targetted by the Israeli company NSO. The media report said they had tested devices of several people in a lab and found the devices possibly were infected with the Pegasus spyware.

Quoting the analysis found by Security Lab, The Guardian said the devices had been infected with Pegasus through a zero-click exploit. As per the Guardian, the zero-click exploit enables operators of the spyware to contaminate a phone by clicking on a dubious link. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) told the British English daily that it will launch legal action on behalf of six clients: Brigitta Csikasz, David Dercsenyi, Daniel Nemeth and Szabolcs Panyi, all journalists; Adrien Beauduin, a Belgian-Canadian PhD student and activist; and a sixth person who requested anonymity.

"It is improper that the procedures of the national security services, which are necessarily carried out in secret, has become a tool of oppression rather than a means of protecting citizens," The Guardian quoted Adam Remport, an official of HCLU as saying.

"What we would like is for our clients to have direct proof of their being surveilled and the disclosure of the data gathered on them. If we can get good rulings it would mean that a new avenue for redress would open for anyone who has been secretly surveilled," added Remport.

When the news agency AP asked the NSO group over the allegations, the spyware said it does not identify its customers for contractual and national security reasons. Further, in a statement, the group reiterated that they sell their products only to government agencies for use against "serious crime and terror.' It is worth mentioning that US President Joe Biden blacklisted the NSO Group and a lesser-known Israeli competitor last week after several reports red-flagged the use of spyware in several people including top defence officials.

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Hungary: Victims of alleged Pegasus spyware attack to take legal action against Govt - Republic World

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: As Kashmiris on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and the world over are observing the Indian Republic Day as Black Day on Wednesday, Pakistan has reaffirmed its solidarity with the people of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).

In response to media queries, the Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Asim Iftikhar Ahmad said that today, when the Kashmiris in IIOJK and around the world mark January 26 as a black day against Indias oppression, the government and people of Pakistan reaffirm their unshakable resolve to continue to raise their voice and extend all possible support for the right of self-determination of the people of IIOJK.

The Spokesperson said that it is deplorable that in the past few days, the Indian occupation forces have further intensified the military siege already in place in the occupied territory for more than seven decades.

Coercing innocent Kashmiris to hoist Indian flags on the Republic Day is typical of Indias high-handedness to project a false sense of normalcy and a hopeless attempt at masking its systematic and widespread oppression, he said.

Asim Iftikhar said that the Indian governments decision to award so-called gallantry awards to the personnel of its occupation forces is yet another afront to the dignity of the countless victims of Indias state-terrorism characterized by gross human rights violations, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, suspension of fundamental freedoms, rapes, and the use of draconian laws such as Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Public Safety Act with complete impunity.

The Spokesperson said that on different occasions, Pakistan has presented to the UN and the international community evidence of crimes against humanity being perpetrated by the Indian occupation forces in IIOJK.

The Spokesperson reiterated that the international community must hold India to account for its oppression, and play its due role in enabling the Kashmiris to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination as pledged to them under the relevant UN Security Council resolutions, without any further delay.

Originally posted here:

Pakistan reaffirms its solidarity with people of Indian Occupied Kashmir - DND

Nationalists in Northern Ireland remember the 1972 Bloody Sunday asan assault by elite British soldiers on unarmed Catholics. The mass shooting, which ultimately led to 14 deaths, has often been instrumentalized to justify killings by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other groups held responsible for about two-thirds of the more than 3,500 deaths including more than 1,000 members of the British security forces in the three-decadeconflict.

The events of January 30, 1972, in Northern Ireland's second largest city, Londonderry, were a turning point, however: In an already politically charged atmosphere, British soldiers shot two dozen unarmed people at a protest. We know now that the commanders' aim was to show toughness and demonstrate the state's monopoly on the use of force. The result, however, was that the conflict between the Irish Catholic nationalists and the mostly Protestant unionists spiraled further. The IRA registered a large number of new members and continued to stoke the violence: 1972 became the bloodiest year in the entire conflict, with almost 500 deaths.

Bloody Sunday is the only event in British history that has been investigated by two judicial commissions.

DW's David Ehl

The first report, hastily written in April 1972, seemed tomostly serve the purpose of exonerating the soldiers. But the Saville Report,presented 38 years later, meticulously reconstructedthe course of events of the massacre and leaves no doubt about the interpretation: The paratroopers fired on civilians, none of whom posed a threat, and 14 British citizens were ultimately murdered in an operation commissioned bythe state.

In 2010, after the report was completed, Prime Minister David Cameron asked for forgiveness. For the bereaved families, who had fought for so long against the prejudiced portrayal of the first report, this was an importantvictory. But today, 50 years after the fateful day, it is more uncertain than ever whether even one of the shooters will ever be prosecuted.

The greatest threat for the further investigation of Bloody Sunday and all other atrocities of the Northern Ireland conflict comes from the British government: Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who admittedly has quite different concerns right now, wants to put the conflict in the past. In 2021, the government published key points for a statute of limitations to end all prosecutions. That would prohibit furtherinvestigations into state actors, and even ongoing proceedings would be abandoned. Northern Ireland's civil society erupted in outrage against this proposed blanket ban on Troubles-related prosecution.

Johnson's government has proposed ending prosecutions related to the Troubles

It is unclear whether these far-reaching plans will ever become law. But the proposal itself shows once again that Johnson is using the sledgehammer method in Northern Ireland.

The unionists have already been dealt a heavy blow, especially the right-wing Democratic Unionist Party, which leads the Northern Ireland regional government with its Irish nationalist coalition partner, Sinn Fein. The DUP had campaigned for Brexit in 2016, hoping that the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the EU would bring Northern Ireland more closely to London economically and politically. Johnson promised the same thing when he took office before dropping Northern Ireland like a hot potato to appease Brexit hard-liners on the mainland.

Today, thanks to an additional protocol in the withdrawal agreement, Northern Ireland is de facto still part of the European Union's single market, while trade with the rest of Britain is more difficult. For Northern Ireland, this has certainly paid off in the first Brexit year think of the numerous supply bottlenecks in the United Kingdom.

But it is a severe betrayal for the unionists. Their camp is politically divided, and it is conceivable that Sinn Fein will triumph in regional elections in May. In other words, the Irish nationalist camp now sees itself in a position of strength after decades of oppression and is now confidently calling for Northern Ireland to unite with the Republic of Ireland.

All this is causing new frustration in a society still largely split between nationalists and unionists. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, there has been relative peace in Northern Ireland, but the 50-year anniversary of Bloody Sunday is a reminder that there is still plenty of mutual mistrust.

It is primarily Brexit and the renewed discussion of Irish reunification, as well as reckless proposals such as Johnson's de facto amnesty plans, that have added fuel to the fire.

The overwhelming majority of people in Northern Ireland do not want new violence or instability. Peace will be put to the test. Northern Ireland will have to prove that ithas learned the lessons of history.

This commentary was translated from German.

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Opinion: Northern Ireland's peace faces new Brexit threats - DW (English)

On Wednesday, India commemorated its 72nd annual Republic Day, a national holiday similar to Americas Fourth of July that celebrates Indias values of democracy, equality and secularism.

Chicago City Council had the chance in 2021 to pass a resolution in support of these values and in solidarity with the citys Indian American community. Instead, the council shamefully failed.

Developments in India last month including violent Hindu extremists attacking Christianity on Christmas and explicitly calling for a genocide of the countrys over 200 million Muslims reveal that in its failure to stand up for democracy, the council has chosen to stand with Indias dictatorial Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his oppressive BJP government.

Prime Minister Modis government is so flagrantly oppressive towards its Christian community 30 million strong that it attacked St. Mother Teresas legacy, on Christmas Day no less, by blocking overseas funding for her organization Missionaries of Charity, one of the most recognizable Christian charities in the world. This attack on the Nobel Prize-winning St. Mother Teresa was accompanied by wide-ranging intimidation of the Christian community, including vigilantes vandalizing statues of Jesus Christ and gangs interfering with Christmas services.

The day after Christmas, a politician in Modis BJP party explicitly called for the conversion of Christians and other minorities to Hinduism, suggesting that Hindu temples set goals for numbers of individuals converted. These actions wholly contradict Indias founding values of a secular nation where all faiths are equal. While today Modis extremist policies target Mother Teresas organization, Modis political and ideological allies have shockingly erected statues and temples celebrating the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Modi and his allies vision reveres violence, not only in the individual assassination of Gandhi but also on a national scale, explicitly calling for genocide against religious minorities. From Dec. 17-19, 2021 in the Hindu pilgrimage town of Haridwar, Indias politicians from Modis party joined Hindu religious leaders for a purported religious convening where leaders explicitly called for a genocide against Indias Muslim community.

A violent extremist religious leader stated that If 100 of us are ready to kill two million of them, then we will win and make India a Hindu nation Be ready to kill and go to jail. At a Jan. 12 U.S. congressional briefing co-sponsored by a group of 17 human rights and interfaith organizations about the gathering in Hardiwar, Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, stated that the event was exactly aimed at inciting the genocide of Muslims and that As the leader of India [Prime Minister Modi] has an obligation to denounce this genocidal speech... Yet, Narendra Modi has not spoken against it.

Sunita Viswanath, executive director of U.S.-based Hindus for Human Rights, stated that The speeches made in Haridwar are an explicit call for genocide against Muslims by religious leaders who are close to the ruling party, the government. The Indian governments participation in such alarming events demonstrates just how dire the situation in India is.

The renowned South African Archbishop and activist, the late Desmond Tutu, said that If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. In voting down the 2020 resolution honoring Indias Republic Day, some council members cited a flawed argument propagated by pro-Modi supporters that the resolution was divisive. Pro-Modi supporters proudly gang up to target minority communities in India (as described above), but would be outraged and demand justice if their own minority faith faced this same oppression here in the U.S.

The City Council also broke ranks with a movement in over 10 other cities that passed resolutions in support of Indias democratic values, including in Seattle; San Francisco; Albany, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; St. Paul, Minnesota; and within Illinois, including Riverdale and Harvey).

Change in India is possible, as demonstrated by the recent repeal of controversial agricultural laws after global protests including in Chicago at Daley Plaza.

This year, elected officials in Chicago and Illinois must right their wrongs. They must act to uphold the values of Indias Republic Day democracy, equality and secularism. That action is necessary to send a clear message to Prime Minister Modi that Chicago and the U.S. will not stand by as Hindu extremists force the conversion of Christians and perpetrate an announced genocide against Muslims.

Pushkar Sharma and Cyrus Rab are members of the Chicago Coalition for Human Rights in India.

Sharma has worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and for the United Nations in Kosovo, the Gaza Strip, Colombia, Myanmar, and Iraq. Rab is a human rights and education activist based in Chicago.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com

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Now is the time for City Council to finally denounce religious discrimination in India - Chicago Sun-Times

A group working to promote democratic freedoms for Tibetans urged the NBC, the broadcaster of the Beijing Winter Olympics, to "go beyond the business" as they also have an ethical responsibility as a defender of freedom especially that of expression. The International Campaign for Tibet called on NBC to take in China's coercion in Tibet in their coverage of the games, reported Tibet Press.

"With just weeks to go before the 2022 Winter Olympics, we trust you plan to roll out the usual coverage. But these will be no ordinary Games. The severe oppression, including of freedom of expression, that the Chinese government inflicts on Tibetans and others under its rule demands equal attention," said the letter by the International Campaign for Tibet. In the letter, the democratic and freedom group added that by airing these Olympics, NBC is giving the Chinese authoritarian regime a podium to spread its propaganda. That's why, it is only they who can provide the victims of Chinese oppression the equal time more than to be side-lined for the sake of profit and their interest, reported Tibet Press.

The advocacy group called the Chinese government as one of the most brutal human rights abusers the world has seen in decades, reported Tibet Press. They also said that China has promised to improve the situation of human rights in the last Beijing Olympics 2008, but it has cracked down ruthlessly on Tibet, which is why Tibet is considered to be the second least free nation in the world after Syria as per freedom House.

In 2020, US government has chosen China's oppression of the Uyghurs as genocide. Including US, a lot of other government has called on diplomatic boycott of the Olympic in response to China not abiding by the international norms. After considering all these, the group called the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to have the ethical fibre to claim the Chinese government to follow to internationally maintained values of freedom and human rights to deserve the games, reported Tibet Press.

With regards to Beijing Winter Olympic next month, over 250 right groups have called out UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for accepting the official invitation for the opening of the ceremony. The appeal letter condemned Secretary General's decision as highly inappropriate and said that it grossly undermined the UN'S Commitment to human rights. The coalition includes global civil society groups representing Tibetan, Uyghur, Hong Konger, Chinese, Southern Mongolian, and Taiwanese communities, reported Tibet Press.

In the letter, it was mentioned that the Secretary-General's participation would challenge the United Nation's efforts to hold China responsible and go in contradiction of the core principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They also added that his acceptance of the invitation would give confidence to China's disregard for international human rights laws and will serve as an encouragement for the actions of the Chinese authorities.

The groups requested the UN chief to reconsider his choice to attend the Genocide Games since major nations have announced the diplomatic boycott in the last few months. China is now the subject of an Olympic boycott movement, said Tibet Press. (ANI)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Tibet advocacy group calls on Beijing games broadcaster NBC to 'go beyond business' - Devdiscourse

Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and former NPR science desk correspondent, spoke in the Jan. 25 BYU forum address. He emphasized the stories of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and how their tactics can be used to fight oppression without violence. (Melissa Collado)

National correspondent Shankar Vedantam told a BYU audience how non-violent protests can be successful in bringing awareness to injustice caused by the government. His Jan. 25 forum address focused on the tactics used by both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. during their peaceful protests.

They were great proponents of non-violence, Vedantamsaid.

Vedantam is a former NPR science desk correspondent and the 2009-2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He has won numerous journalism awards and is the host of the award-winning podcast The Hidden Brain.

Vedantam said Gandhis Salt March was meant to connect issues within the daily lives of Indians to a larger political law problem. This peaceful protest was made to put the government in a position where it had to make a tough decision.

During the civil rights movement, King kept his head up and loved his enemies despite the violence he faced, Vedantam said. King and others were fighting the oppression they were facing.

The goal was not just to win, not just to change the law but was to get the people who are part of the group that is oppressing us to change, Vedantam said. Systems of oppression harm not only the victims, but they also harm the oppressors.

He asked the audience to ponder if Gandhi and King were just outliers or lucky in the success of their individual conflicts. Do non-violent or violent actions work more often? Vedantam asked. Most people would predict that violent actions are far more likely to succeed.

But non-violent movements were more than twice as likely to succeed as violent movements, Vedantam said, noting that these types of peaceful protests allow one to see their enemies as human beings and try to understand them.

Vedantam concluded his address by emphasizing the core idea he has taken away from analyzing these movements by Gandhi and King:

The central importance of the beloved community is not love and not kindness, but courage, Vedantam said. With the absence of courage, it is impossible to build the beloved community.

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National correspondent speaks on the genius of non-violent protests in BYU forum - The Daily Universe - Universe.byu.edu

THIS month we celebrate the 13th anniversary of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

After more than 500 years, with Evo Morales, the first indigenous president and symbol of our emancipation, empowered, we were able to break the chains of oppression and recover our dignity and sovereignty.

Thus, on January 22 2009, during his first period in government a new constitution was approved, refounding the country as the Plurinational State of Bolivia and for the first time in our history, 36 native nations were fully recognised.

Gone was the colonial republic where the supremacist ruling class, mostly of European descent, treated our country as their private estate, plundering our riches while the true owners of this land, the native people, lived exploited, excluded, discriminated against and racially abused in their own country.

Until then, neoliberal governments shared the power, some only with 19 per cent of votes, like Jaime Paz Zamora of the MIR party (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), who crossed rivers of blood to become president in alliance with his own henchman, the 1971 army dictator Hugo Banzer.

For the first time in the history of Bolivia, a great cultural, political, social and economic transformation was achieved with Morales of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP).

He never hesitated to nationalise our natural resources which benefited the nation with more public investment, redistribution of wealth, bonuses, wage increases, more construction works and reduction of extreme poverty.

But in November 2019 we suffered a fascist coup supported by various far-right regimes in the region and others, including the US, Britain and EU.

In 11 months, Jeanine Anezs gang of mass murderers, arsonists and thieves brought pain and mourning and bankrupted the country.

Then the people united waving Wiphalas the multicoloured indigenous peoples flag stood firm in resistance and recovered democracy.

Confidence is back now with President Luis Arce and Vice-President David Choquehuanca in power.

There is economic stability, the health of the nation is being looked after, education restored and there are great plans to industrialise our lithium and many other industries to benefit Bolivians.

The opposition continues in its quest to destabilise the government and fails miserably.

But there is more to be done and that is to win justice for the victims of the massacres and to clear the remains of the coup regime structure that are still present the opposite would be to sleep with the enemy.

We need to keep united and vigilant and reaffirm our commitment to continue defending the historic process of change.

Let us not forget that the hegemonic empire and its lackeys continue in their attempt to destabilise our governments now Latin America is turning to the left.

And the latest discovery of arms and munitions from the US confirms their dark intentions against our democracies.

United we will overcome! Long live the process of change! Long live the Plurinational Estate of Bolivia!

Miriam Amancay Colque is a longstanding Aymara activist and Bartolina Sisa Resistance spokesperson in Britain (twitter.com/BartolinaLives).

Excerpt from:

Reaffirming our commitment to Bolivia's path of progress - Morning Star Online

The White House seeks public input on a bill of rights for an automated society.

We live our lives enmeshed in applications of artificial intelligence (AI): virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa listen to us, search bars finish our thoughts for us, and social media sites curate the information we consume. Decisionmakers may also use AI when determining who to hire, who receives loans and medical support, or even who to hold without bail.

Scholars, activists, government leaders, and members of the public worry that these technologies threaten constitutional rights, further discrimination, and could be used for oppression.

In October 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) responded to these worries by announcing plans for a digital bill of rights that would clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect. In an opinion piece first published in WIRED, Eric Lander, director of the OSTP, and Alondra Nelson, OSTP Deputy Director for Science and Society, noted that the creation of a new bill of rights for an automated age is only a first stepgovernment agencies must also decide how those rights are to be enforced.

The original Bill of Rights was meant to protect Americans against the possibility of government encroachment on individual liberties, but as NPR reported as early as 2013, these protections often cannot hold up against the powers of new technology, whether used by government or private industries. It is not clear what, if any, binding legal effect the digital bill of rights planned by the White House would have.

For people looking to understand how AI has affected the legal landscape, the OSTP hosted six different virtual panel discussions on AIs impact on consumer rights and protections, the criminal justice system, civil law, democratic values, social welfare, and the health care system. Each session featured representatives from industry, academia, members of the public, and other advocacy groups, who came together to discuss both the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence.

Panelists addressed concerns that AI tools may perpetuate the biases implicit in their creation, noting, however, that AI has the potential to be more equitable than the systems it may replace.

CEO of the AI-driven recruiting platform pymetrics Frida Polli explained that standardized tools and testing have been used in many of these contexts for decades, often leaving out marginalized groups. According to Polli, algorithmic tools could lead to more equitable hiring practices because they could provide a more individualized and nuanced view of a candidate than could be achieved through a screening exam.

Similarly, Sean Malinowsky, a former chief of detectives at the Los Angeles Police Department, argued that if people were worried about police bias and corruption, automated systems could be more equitable because they limit officer discretion.

Some panelists expressed concerns about focusing on a technology-oriented bill of rights to regulate data at all.

In one session, the director of the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Jumana Musa, argued that discussions of what kinds of technology can be used, and how, are not going to ever address the underlying issues of the criminal justice system and that racial justice could better be served by decriminalizing mental health issues, addiction, and poverty. She suggested that instead of asking what guardrails should be placed on technology, policymakers should consider whether technology is even a viable solution to the underlying problem.

In another session, Fabian Rogers, a community advocate in New York City, emphasized that policymakers should not get caught up in regulating the technology but instead should attempt to fix the underlying systems that technology is meant to support.

Other panelists worried that systemic change, although necessary, would take time, and they suggested that a digital bill of rights would be necessary to safeguard civil liberties during the transition period.

Panelists generally agreed that public input, at all stages of development, is critical to ensuring that technology is used fairly. Rogers suggested that governments create oversight boards made up of multiple community stakeholders who can make decisions about which technologies are implemented, and how they are used. One panelist emphasized that community members who chose to engage in these discussions should be compensated because otherwise only those who could afford to take off time from work and participate would have their voices heard.

The OSTP also solicitedinformation about AI-enabled biometricstechnologies that use facial recognition, physical movements, heart rate, and other physical indicators to identify people and infer information about them. The OSTP hosted two listening sessions on public and private uses of biometric technologies, and the office requestedinput from anyone who has ever been affected by these technologies.

Members of the public may email comments to the OSTP at ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov.

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Algorithmic Safeguards For the People and By the People - The Regulatory Review