In a fast-trending headline from Minnesota, Alex Mingus points out hard truth about America:

‘They don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe.’ Good Samaritan criticizes police as he accepts award from St. Paul cops.

Mingus then gets right to the business end of the problem.

After Interim Police Chief Jeremy Ellison gave Mingus the award, Mingus took off his sweatshirt to reveal a T-shirt that read, “Smash White Supremacy.”

He said in an interview Monday that he wore it “because the police are one of the strongest arms of white supremacy in our world. They started as slave catchers and they haven’t changed much. All that the police do is protect rich white people’s property.”

Protect rich white people’s property? Mingus suggests it’s undeniable how slave catchers rebranded as police, thus making America into long-running white police state.

This seems right. It helps explain, for example, why a “Black lives matter” movement that emphasizes the importance of human life runs into opposition from angry whites who demand violent police protection for… just property.

General Sherman even warned about this exact thing as he demonstrably tried to end a Civil War in what the brilliant military thinker described then as the most humane way possible: his soldiers burning rich white racist people’s property to the ground in order to stop them from expanding and perpetuating a white police state that killed Black people.

“They set a thing on fire, glass was broken, property damage is unacceptable” is what slaveholders said in the Civil War. And it’s what today’s rich white people seem to bitterly complain as if proving Sherman’s moral warnings right.

Mingus is giving us insights into why rich whites from the 1800s and today would completely downplay a depressing fact that Black people needlessly are being killed by police who claim a mission to protect property.

To make a finer point, many white people in America (especially billionaires from South Africa born to German parents who grew up profiting directly from Apartheid) don’t seem to care for Black people’s lives at all unless those Black people can be treated as owned property (e.g. slavery is the foundation of tipping culture).

History obviously plays a key influence and even may be an accurate predictor in these matters.

If we don’t see governments taking active measures to move away from racism, showing up with evidence of anti-racism, then expect to see more racism.

For example, the state of Minnesota was undeniably founded on systemic oppression and exploitation. Despite that they’ve allegedly engaged in some hard work of reversing their legacy. The police chief’s award ceremony in St. Paul for the clearly anti-racist Alex Mingus is just one example.

However, Kansas City (Missouri, really, which was founded with the aim of expanding and perpetuating slavery) has an even worse history than St. Paul, Minnesota.

…slavery in western Missouri was often just as brutal as elsewhere in the South. […] Intimate relations… [caused] the worst forms of physical and psychological abuse. […] Owners continued to rely on slave patrols to monitor slaves’ movement but now sanctioned extreme violence as they worked to control an increasingly unruly slave population. [After] regular slave patrols became unreliable, many owners turned to Confederate guerrillas, who ruthlessly helped them maintain slavery.

And on that point, to date western Missouri has shown sparse if any signs of anti-racism or undoing their “ruthless” method for perpetuation of slavery (as opposed to say very obvious work in eastern Missouri)

Western Missouri police actually seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, the wrong side of history: stand accused of repeatedly and clearly perpetuating, enabling and ignoring slavery practices, if not simply failing to stop them.

Ten years ago a hostage crisis was exposed, which centered on a central Missouri group that captured a runaway woman to enslave her for many years.

Bagley allegedly forced the girl to sign a “sex slave contract” and branded her with an “S” tattoo for slave as well as a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for slave. Bagley allegedly told the girl that the sex-slave contract “never” ended, according to the indictment. Bagley then allegedly “beat, whipped, flogged, suffocated, choked, electrocuted, caned, skewered, drowned, mutilated and hung” the girl to enforce the contract… [in a] home indistinguishable from its neighbors save for the yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag flying from a pole in the yard. […] The woman’s nearly seven years in captivity ended in February 27, 2009, when she had a heart attack from the electric-shock torture and was hospitalized.

Seven years a hostage. How did Missouri police miss this gruesome slavery case, in the heart of a region created to expand and perpetuate slavery?

Fast forward to 2021 and a Kansas City police officer was accused of systematically exploiting and raping black women for decades.

Golubski, whose investigation led McIntyre to prison, faces allegations in a lawsuit that he used his police badge to exploit vulnerable Black women for sexual favors and coerced some of them into fabricating testimony to clear cases he investigated. In at least one instance, he is accused of repeatedly raping a woman whose children he’d promised to help get out of legal trouble.

You have to keep in mind that “coerced” testimony is a huge deal, because Kansas City police used it to systemically oppress Black people.

In 1994, Kansas City, Kansas, Police arrested Lamonte McIntyre for a double homicide he didn’t commit — sending him to prison for more than two decades before he was finally exonerated. […] As it turns out, the only evidence police had to charge McIntyre was his first name, and the coerced testimony of two eyewitnesses.

In other words if the white supremacist police force even catches wind of your name, you are at risk of being sent to prison for decades for crimes you didn’t commit.

Trust is non-existent in this environment, given that being identified by Kansas City police at all immediately brings life-threatening risks.

We need to get into the gruesome details for a minute to see just how widespread and common the abuse of Black women is; an unbroken connection to Missouri’s deep history of slavery practices.

During two days of sworn depositions, S.K. detailed rapes, beatings and being forced to crawl on her hands and knees while wearing a dog collar. Her allegations led to federal charges for retired KCKPD detective Roger Golubski. […] S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school. S.K. asked for breaks and needed tissues as she detailed a period of her life beginning when she was in middle school.

A white police officer was directly engaged in slavery of black girls, depicted as “rapes, beatings and…dog collar”.

The first point here is that a dog collar and beatings are relevant and important to other stories surfacing in Missouri news, coupled with police failure to investigate.

The second point is “across state lines” because that again brings us to… Missouri. While S.K. escaped and survived, testimony indicates other victims may have been killed and their remains hidden in the river on the Missouri side.

The third point, and I want to make this very, very clear is that police dismissed important reports of modern slavery in Missouri as untrustworthy.

At one point, S.K. said she told her aunt. At first, she was supportive. The aunt forced S.K. to go to the police department. S.K. said she was scared and refused to get out of the car. The aunt went inside without her. S.K. thought “that day in the car was going to be the last day that I would ever feel any pain from this man.” But again, S.K. was let down. When her aunt returned from inside the police department, she was angry. “She said that I lied,” S.K. testified. “That’s a good man of integrity. He wouldn’t jeopardize his job…”

Here’s a sobering thought. His job also wouldn’t be jeopardized if he had compromised the police force into collaboration. Police detective Golubski doesn’t seem to be an individual acting alone.

Testimony from victims describes many police officers involved with him, and how he described himself as region-wide “boss”.

The racism is so pervasive in Kansas City that schools in 2021 were literally fielding petitions to bring back slavery.

Nearly two weeks after a racist petition to bring back slavery circulated at her daughter’s school, Julie Stutterheim is still angry. She says it was yet another example of a racist incident at Park Hill South High School in the suburbs of Kansas City, Missouri.

Was the petition started by the Kansas City police department? Seems likely.

Speaking of starting trouble, do you know who won the war to end slavery? White people with white skin did.

General Grant was white obviously. So was Sherman. Celebrate them, right?

White racists falsely grouse they are worried that if they celebrate anti-slavery acts of white people (e.g. Grant destroying the KKK) then somehow that will make them hate white skin.

Holscher has been getting emails over the past couple of months from White parents complaining that they are worried about their kids being taught to hate their White skin.

Being taught to hate racists means you can still love white people, because those white people were and still are anti-racist.

It’s really that simple.

This is important context for the next chapter now unfolding in Kansas City. The police department refused again in 2022 to investigate reports of slavery.

And then a Black woman in Kansas City escaped… from a white man holding her as his slave.

Missouri [hostage detained with a dog collar] who escaped house of horrors told rescuers that sicko killed two of her friends

Remember the dog collar?

Killing two of her friends suggests this slaver also is a serial murderer, which was exactly the kind of warnings that Kansas City police tried to dismiss.

TONY CALDWELL: I am a little upset right now. The reason I’m upset is because we got four young ladies that have been murdered within the last week here off of 85th and Prospect. We got a serial killer again. And ain’t nobody saying nothing. CHANG: The Kansas City, Mo., Police Department called these reports, quote, “unfounded.” But a horrific discovery is now raising new questions.

Why did the police refuse to properly investigate reports of a serial killer? They set out to silence and push back the community, more specifically to undermine protection of Black women who were being victimized as a systemic level.

The Kansas City Police Department made a statement addressing the community testimonies and called them “completely unfounded rumors,” dismissing the concerns. Local news outlets followed suit, in essence, silencing any ongoing community voices which maintained concern of the missing Black women.

One would think given the high profile Golubski case that “unfounded” would be exactly the wrong word for police to hang their hat on.

The Kansas City Defender highlights how local newspapers breathlessly parroted the word “unfounded” into public relations, allowing police to ruthlessly chill concerns about a serial killer.

As the story unfolds now, Kansas City police look a lot like Golubski again — actively denying evidence about modern day slavery, that was in fact accurate and of an emergency nature.

“That was the description of the guy we were talking about and that was the location we said they were being taken from. That’s exactly what we were telling people. I’m just sorry that it took so long, but I’m grateful that she found a way out. I’m sorry people didn’t act on it sooner, and it’s absolutely tragic that the other young ladies didn’t make it. It’s horrible.

Golubski should be the back story to every single article on this new case. His outrageous abuse of Black women appears to be something of a norm in Missouri political circles, not an exception — state-sanctioned slave catchers obviously drag their heels on reports of Black women being abused by white men (including by the slave catchers themselves).

Is anyone really looking into whether the police were actually involved in this case and covering it up like Golubski would have done, not just turning a blind eye with “unfounded” comments?

The Kansas City Defender asked the police how “completely unfounded” was an exact phrasing chosen by police instead of something more like “no evidence” (opening the possibility of more evidence).

We base our investigations on police incident reports of criminal activity. We do still maintain that there is no indication that what you guys reported was accurate and there was no indication that there was anything that supported that claim. We share what information we can publicly, many times from the scene, of incidents of violent crimes when there is a report or an investigation underway, there had and has not been anything that corresponded to your reports on social media and the web which is why we refuted that report and said that the claims were unfounded.

This response reads to me like it was written by the disgraced detective Golubski himself, it’s so tone-deaf, patronizing and ruthless.

Kansas City police are basically insinuating that if Golubski doesn’t file a report on himself enslaving a Black girl then it can’t be investigated as a crime.

After all, anyone saying they have an absence of evidence does not mean they have some kind of evidence of absence. “Unfounded” was the wrong word given that reports were based in something… which turned out to be TRUE.

Kansas City police seem deeply implicated in the systemic disappearance, torture and death of Black women.

When you think about an epidemic of missing Black women in America it makes it all the more depressing. For police to sit back and do nothing, claiming an absence of evidence in the face of a national crisis, sounds like police sealing fate, pounding the nails into innocent victim coffins.

Data from the National Crime Information Center found that 19,545 Black women ages 18 and over went missing in 2020. Nearly 71,000 Black girls ages 17 and under went missing last year. “The numbers are spiking,” Natalie Wilson, a cofounder and the chief operating office of Black and Missing Foundation Inc. (BAMFI)… As with hate crimes and harassment, vulnerable communities may not come forward to report missing cases out of misunderstanding and fear. A common misconception is that people need to wait a specific amount of time before reporting a missing person. But this is not the case.

In conclusion, there seems to be a systemic problem in Missouri when you look at the quantitative and quantitative reporting of racist crimes against women there.

And while that problem is clearly related to deserved mistrust and confusion in police reporting procedures, a far more troubling question that nobody seems to be reporting in this new story about an escaped slave is whether modern-day white supremacist threats to national security (even serial killers) are in fact collaborating with police…

…something that Alex Mingus just warned us about in his police award ceremony.

America’s brutal history of state sanctioned violence against women of color is not just history.

As I started my career in computer security in the 1990s I felt like I was quite late to the party; had to catch up to the many experts who brought deep experience over decades of practice.

Instead I’ve realized over time that showing up late doesn’t mean that you aren’t also, at the same time, relatively… early.

It’s thus a bit surreal to have been in the field of misinformation (and disinformation) for so long because I keep hearing that it’s a *new* problem.

“It’s always a good time to invest in a good thing” as a U.S. Green Beret trained to blow up bridges in Ethiopia once told me.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts about data integrity when looking back, which maybe will help others who just now are looking forwards at misinformation.

Relatives and relativity

Relativity is fundamental to understanding integrity of information. Absolutism is not incompatible, however, with relativity. “We can be in different time zones yet still share the same concept of time” as my father once told me.

Indeed, what we believe often derives from our family. This is why racism (one of the most insidious forms of disinformation) tends to be something taught by parents. For example, naming a child Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (after treasonous pro-slavery leaders) or even the awful Robert Lee shows how American families still openly spread false beliefs (racism) and refuse to stop disinformation.

A recent study highlights that fear tends to correlate to susceptibility to misinformation, which helps show why racist groups troubled by their own “survival” are so naturally oriented towards the stuff.

…words related to existentially-based needs (i.e., discussing death and religion frequently) is useful to distinguish who will eventually share fake-news…

Back in 2008 I wrote another simple explanation that has stuck with me ever since.

…they actually become more convinced they are in the right when evidence starts to challenge them…

Studying political science really helps tease apart the complexity of such an information integrity problem, as it demystifies power relationships that influence fear. Labels like “terrorist” get measured as relative as well as absolute terms, because beliefs originate in many varied perspectives.

“Havens of terror” for one group might be thought of as safe-houses (where freedom fighters gather to help end racism) for another group. I’ve written about this here before, using encrypted communications of an anti-apartheid movement as an example.

I’m reminded of such complexity every time I sip a glass of Knut Hansen.

They asked London. London said immediately, ‘Sink it.’ And they did what they were told. It would be like asking me to blow up the 8:45 train to London. I’d be absolutely certain there’d be friends, maybe even relatives of mine on that train, but if there’s any chance that Hitler’s going to get an atomic bomb, what else can you do?

Complexity and expertise

Rarely, if ever, do topics get boiled down into things that are easy, routine and have minimal judgment (ERM). Even the simple aspirin, as an ERM exercise in taking a pill, comes with complex warnings and dangers.

Thus people must turn to experts who can identify, store data, evaluate and adapt or analyze (ISEA) to make recommendations. Who is an expert? Why should we trust one person skilled with ISEA over another?

One of the best examples of this problem is Google. The founders took an old Beowulf cluster concept of inexpensive distributed computing (lots of power for little money), dumped every web page onto this cluster, then mixed in an ancient academic peer review (an open market of expertise) as a way to provide value.

In theory all the ideas on the web were meant to be filtered for integrity, such that “relevant” or “best” results would come from a simple word query (search).

This is obviously not how things turned out at all.

Google’s engine was immediately rife with horribly toxic misinformation. Human expertise was injected as a correction. With relativity in mind (see the first point above) a bunch of privileged white guys in fact made matters even worse.

My first encounter with racism in search was in 2009 when I was talking to a friend who causally mentioned one day, “You should see what happens when you Google ‘black girls.'” I did and was stunned.

Google capitalized on complexity with false representations of expertise. Powerful elites generated huge profits despite obvious failures in integrity because, when you really look into it… that’s the history of Stanford.

Did you know? I mean seriously, did you have any idea how horrible a human Stanford was?

Decisions and decisions

We all know how ERM feels far better than an ISEA when trying to figure out what to do.

Think of it as “should I take an aspirin, yes or no” versus “given this long list of symptoms and collection of samples from my body what are my best options for feeling better”.

Has anyone ever gotten frustrated with you when you lay out the details and they cut you off and say “get to the point” or “just tell me what to do”?

In real everyday terms people prefer moving ahead on known paths because they are under all kinds of pressure and distractions. Those who go about making decisions tend to be in a completely different mindset than those who are doing deep study and investigation of integrity and truth.

Engineering teams run into this problem all the time as those closest to a problem may struggle to articulate it in a simple way that decision makers can jump on. “It depends” might work for lawyers who can leave decisions to unpredictable juries, but for most people they want things boiled down to simpler and simpler options.

Yes and no questions require less effort than wading through a long list of warmer and colder ones, yet binary is a very low-integrity way to represent the world let alone handle risk.

The Shuttle disaster was a case (perhaps most famously explained by Tufte as a visualization failure) where engineers knew temperatures caused different/unknown safety for launch. They couldn’t express that in a binary enough way (DO NOT LAUNCH) to prevent disaster. NASA struggled to make ISEA into a decision that was ERM: temperatures below X will destroy everything.

Bending and breaking

There are many ERM in life and we benefit from using them all the time. Routines bring joy to life (a quick snack of good food that we recognize and like) by reducing burden. Being reliably rested, clean and fed means we are ready to expand and explore so many other areas of life.

However, routines are subject to challenge and change. Unexpected details come and turn our simple routines back into complex problems, forcing a shift from rigid to flexible thought.

A serious problem with this was discussed extensively by philosophers in the 1700s. Perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft put it best when she wrote that women would be as successful and intelligent as men if allowed a similar education. She argued successfully what ought to be was different than what is.

Her words sound true today because we have so much evidence to prove her right. However, for centuries past (let alone 1900s if we’re talking about America) men used a strain of philosophy now known as “positivism” to argue their lack of any observation (sensory experience) of women being equal to men was proof of what will be.

Confirmation bias is often how we talk about this sort of inflexibility today. People unwilling or unable to shift from ERM towards the hard work of ISEA — or be open to someone else using ISEA to deliver a new trusted ERM — opens the door to dangerous social engineering even among experts.

Trust and digital ethics

In the final paragraph of the section above I mentioned trust. It all comes down to this because data integrity is a matter of having systems that can establish and deliver trust through relationships, across boundaries and gaps.

Systems today are high technology and thus ethics shifts into study of digital ethics, but it’s still ethics even though more often we call it computer security (identity, authority, accountability).

When technology causes some “domain shift” (e.g. from ox and plow to diesel tractor) the ethical foundations (e.g. morality and adherence to rules) should not be discarded entirely as though trust has to be completely rebuilt every time a wheel is reinvented. Such destructive habits undermine integrity at a very significant level and the next thing you know a CEO is a serial liar and selling snake-oil to become the richest man on the planet.

This doesn’t have to be the case at all.

Misinformation such as racism using different media, whether it be from Elon Musk using his Twitter software or Henry Ford using his Ford International Weekly newspaper… isn’t as novel as people pretend (often in an attempt to escape past regulation and reason).

In fact changing the media doesn’t change the game at all. Old methods of misinformation (and disinformation) still work because new technology mostly speeds them up. Of course old counter-arguments remain valid as well, if we know what they are and how to achieve similar greater velocity.

Integrity of information brought decisive influence on the battle-fields of world-wars (e.g. Beersheba in 1917) all the way to more modern regional ones (Cuito Cuanavale, Angola in 1987). Take for example the lessons learned when a hot-headed sycophant Nazi General Rommel by 1942 had become an easily predictable disaster. He was fooled by disinformation campaigns, while his own attempts at propaganda became the laughing stock of the world.

I tend to weave in history like this because success in great battles of the past can and will inform success in our present and future ones, even if they don’t repeat exactly.

The best General in American history, who went on to be the best President in American history, put it something like this: if we were fighting Napolean I would trust men more who knew how to fight Napoleon. Instead Grant built trust from a constantly updating analysis of integrity threats to the country. His ability to always update and change for the better was what made him so amazing.

Who can forget for example Grant heaped criticism upon the traitorous General Bragg while at the same time praised a Confederate Longstreet as a man of great integrity.

“Longstreet was an entirely different man [from Bragg]. He was brave, honest, intelligent, a very capable soldier…just and kind to his subordinates, but jealous of his own rights.”

Grant was spot on. General Bragg arguably was the worst strategist in the Civil War if not the worst human being (a place in history hard to achieve given it was next to the atrocious General “butcher” Lee).

Brutal slaveholder, miserable to his own troops and hated by all is Bragg’s legacy. Then what could be the explanation of how or why such an obvious odious enemy of America had his name plastered boldly over a major U.S. Army base? Disinformation.

Ask any American why Civil War losers were able to write history in such an uncontested manner.

Their answer should be that in 1918 (the second rise of the KKK as led by President Woodrow Wilson, nudge nudge) a domestic terror group came up with Fort Bragg as information warfare.

Even more to the point, proving this wasn’t some small misunderstanding, Fort Bragg had its streets named for more and more sworn enemies of America: Alexander, Armistead, Donelson, Jackson, Mosby, Pelham and Reilly.

I’ve made light of this pervasive problem before, even creating a mock tourism guide.

Hint: America is all about losers writing and promoting history in a long game to perpetuate its racist origin story into a permanent power doctrine (e.g. white police state).

It is a country rife with unregulated disinformation nearly everywhere. American kids learn all about a myth of Washington instead of reality from Robert Carter. They learn a myth of Custer instead of reality from Silas Soule.

In that sense we should all be looking at past disinformation in order to see better forward. Many of the brilliant President Grant’s sentiments in the 1800s still seem critical for accurately predicting how to move Americans today from what is to what should be.

He was a clear-thinker far ahead of his time, much like Wollstonecraft, and had many insights in how to handle misinformation and disinformation — data integrity in the 2020s — through regulation. When we think of trust as an ancient problem of ethics it helps highlight solutions just as old.

As a final thought on finding and trusting experts, always beware a technical domain “expert” who over-emphasizes newness of misinformation, or who downplays it entirely in favor of flogging confidentiality software.

While fetishistic absolutist confidentiality promoted by libertarian slush funds such as the EFF can get a lot of attention (e.g. end-to-end encryption everywhere) it also can and does dangerously harm data integrity; that leads directly to loss of life. Safety must come before privacy in many cases. It seems people finally are starting to see how obsession with “crypto” and “cryptography” often fails the most basic digital ethics tests, yet it should have been obvious to anyone trying to establish meaningful trust in systems.

I hope this post has helped cover some key areas of digital misinformation, and shown how study of past information conflicts may help avert present and even future suffering.