While digging around in history documents I noticed a very precise phrase comes from the Free Speech League of America, during 9 April 1917 “Espionage and Interference with Neutrality” Hearings of U.S. Congress:
Source: Espionage and Interference with Neutrality: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Sixty-fifth Congress, First Session on H.R. 291, April 9 and 12, 1917
There you see it, from the Free Speech League of America (radical socialists):
The first casualties of war are free speech and free press
Also, I noticed in the above passage an English general and statesman (Cromwell) quote.
This sent me right back to digging around some more, this time finding a huge list of famous quotes about speech in the records of U.S. District Court for New Jersey – 25 F. Supp. 127 (1938):
Eugene Lyons, whom we understand to be an experienced and originally sympathetic newspaper reporter, ends his most interesting book, Assignment in Utopia, in these words: “No plan for economic salvation must be accepted if it is diseased with disdain for life. Ultimately Russia will not be judged by how much bread it has given its people — by that standard other countries and other systems may be far more successful — but by how much freedom, self-respect, equality, truth and human kindness it has brought into the world.”
That’s a much more circumspect approach and hints at the irony behind the naming of Molotov cocktails (he had described airlifts as food aid and then dropped bombs, so his targets started producing a “drink” to go with them).
Make bread versus make speech…
What if it’s not a base freedom to make (and distribute in large quantities) either bread or speech that matters most but the integrity of both?
It seems like we should focus energy on the quality measures of those thing being spread, such as respect, equality, truth and compassion.
After all, is someone delivering unsafe food (Molotov’s “bread”) to be ingested really so much different than delivering unregulated poison into hands and to the mind (“diseased disdain for life”)?
Just a few days after the above appeal by the radical extremist Free Speech League of America in April 1917 for the right to criticize government, an Executive Order 2594 was published and a new Committee on Public Information (CPI) was formed under President Wilson.
The Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of Navy and a civilian (charged with executive direction) almost immediately started pushing out official propaganda based on KKK themes.
Few today seem to remember or speak of America in WWI amplifying KKK messaging from the White House itself, even the District Court for New Jersey left it out of their summaries, yet that is exactly what was happening.
Imagery of that time (given how Wilson had restarted the KKK in 1915 under “America First”) violently targeted Americans (especially Blacks) who believed in freedom:
Moreover, American tyranny (e.g. violence against those seeking freedom, such as the state sanctioned 1919 mass murder in Elaine, Arkansas to suppress speech) is sadly consistent with its earlier history.
…the persistent notion of Colonial America as a society where freedom of expression was cherished is an hallucination which ignores history. … The American people simply did not believe or understand that freedom of thought and expression means equal freedom for the other person, especially the one with hated ideas.
The Colonies had had a similar history of repression at the hands of the Royal Governors: “There are no free schools or printing and I hope we shall not have these 100 years hence, for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into this world and printing has divulged them. Libels against the best government have resulted. God keep us from both.”
And here’s the District Court for New Jersey final statement on the matter.
We close with the suggestion made by a distinguished British statesman in the course of the Debates on the Public Order Bill several times referred to. He said in speaking about Sir Oswald Moseley’s Fascists, “Why make martyrs out of clowns?” and we add wicked clowns at that.
Fascists beware. Clowns, as far as I can tell, are not a protected class.
It’s like seeing a story on airplane safety in hostile territory where former staff reveal they couldn’t agree politically on how to measure gravity in a way that appeased a government telling them that up is down. Or hearing that a crash in 2018 made safety staff aware of flying risks — as if nothing ever crashed before a year or two ago.
Really? You just figured out domestic terrorism is a huge problem? That says a lot, a LOT. A Civil War was fought after decades of terrorism and it continued again after the war ended, and there’s a long rich history of multi-faceted orgs conspiring and collaborating to undermine democracy. And that’s just in America, with its documented history of violent transfer of power.
Quick chart by me of where and when fascism took hold in Europe.
I’m not going to give away any insider secrets when I say this new article provides some shockingly awful admissions of guilt from tech companies that facilitated mass harms from hate groups and allowed the problem to get far worse (while claiming success in making it better).
…companies defined hate in limited ways. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all introduced hate speech policies that generally prohibit direct attacks on the basis of specific categories like race or sexual orientation. But what to do with a new conspiracy theory like QAnon that hinges on some imagined belief in a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democratic pedophiles? Or a group of self-proclaimed “Western chauvinists” like the Proud Boys cloaking themselves in the illusion that white pride doesn’t necessarily require racial animus? Or the #StoptheSteal groups, which were based on a lie, propagated by the former president of the United States, that the election had been stolen? These movements were shot through with hate and violence, but initially, they didn’t fit neatly into any of the companies’ definitions. And those companies, operating in a fraught political environment, were in turn slow to admit, at least publicly, that their definitions needed to change.
“Proud Boys cloaking themselves” is about as sensible a phrase as loud boys silencing themselves. Everyone knows “proud boys”, like other hate groups, very purposefully use signaling to identify themselves, right? (Hint: “men who refuse to apologize” with frequent use of prominent Proud Boy logos and the colors black and yellow)
Both the ADL and SPLC have databases easily referenced for the latest on signal decoding, not to mention the many posts I’ve written here…
Limited ways used to define hate (reduced monitoring) were meant to benefit who, exactly, and why was that the starting point anyway? Did any utility ever start with “defined pollutants in limited ways” for the benefit of people drinking water? Here’s a hint from Michigan and a very good way to look at the benefit from an appropriately wide definition of harms:
This case has nothing whatsoever to do with partisanship. It has to do with human decency, resurrecting the complete abandonment of the people of Flint and finally, finally holding people accountable for their alleged unspeakable atrocities…
It should not be seen as a political act to stop extremist groups (despite them falsely claiming to be political actors — in reality they aim to destroy politics).
Who really advocated starting with the most limited definition of hate, a definition ostensibly ignorant of basic science and history of harm prevention (ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc)?
In other words “movements were shot through with hate and violence” yet companies say they were stuck in a worry mode about “what to do” with rising hate and violence on their watch — as if shutting it down wasn’t an obvious answer. They saw advantages to themselves of not doing anything about harms done to others… as proof of what moral principles, exactly?
Should be obvious without a history degree why it’s a dangerous disconnect to say you observe imminent, immediate, potential for harms yet stand idly by asking yourself whether it would be bad to help the people you “serve” avoid being harmed. Is a bully harmed if they can’t bully? No.
The article indeed brings up an inversion of care, where shutting down hate groups risked tech workers facing threats of attack. It seems to suggest it made them want to give into the bully tactics and preserve their own safety at the cost of others being hurt; instead it should have confirmed that they were on the right path and in a better position to be shutting bullies down so that others wouldn’t suffer the same threats (service to others instead of just self).
Indeed, what good is it to say hate speech policies prohibit direct attacks if movements full of hate and violence haven’t “direct attacked” someone yet? You’re not really prohibiting, are you? It’s like saying you prohibit plane crashes but the plane hasn’t crashed yet so you can’t stop a plane from crashing. A report from Mozilla Foundation confirms this problem:
While we may never know if this disinformation campaign would have been successful if Facebook and other platforms had acted earlier, there were clearly measures the platforms could have taken sooner to limit the reach and growth of election disinformation. Platforms were generally reactive rather than proactive.
Seriously. That’s not prohibiting attacks, that barely rises to even detecting them.
Kind of like asking what if you hear a pilot in the air say “gravity is a lie, a Democratic conspiracy…” instead of hearing the pilot say “I hate the people in America so this plane is going to crash into a building and kill people”.
Is it really a big puzzle whether to intervene in both scenarios as early as possible?
I guess some people think you have to wait for the crash and then react by saying your policy was to prohibit the crash. Those people shouldn’t be in charge of other people’s safety. Nobody should sit comfortably if they say “hey, we could and should have stopped all that harm, but oops let’s react now!”
How does the old saying go…”never again, unless a definition is hard”? Sounds about right for these tech companies.
What they really seem to be revealing is an attitude of “please don’t hold me responsible for wanting to be liked by everyone, or for wanting an easier job” and then leaving the harms to grow.
You can’t make this stuff up.
And we know what happens when tech staff are so cozy and lazy that they refuse to stop harms, obsessing about keeping themselves liked and avoiding hard work of finding flaws early and working to fix them.
The problem grows dramatically, getting significantly harder. It’s the most basic history lesson of all in security.
FBI director says domestic terrorism ‘metastasizing’ throughout U.S. as cases soar
Perhaps most telling of all is that people comforted themselves with fallacies as a reason for inaction. If they did something, they reasoned falsely, it could turn into anything. Therefore they chose to do nothing for a long while, which facilitated atrocities, until they couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Inside YouTube, one former employee who has worked on policy issues for a number of tech giants said people were beginning to discuss doing just that. But questions about the slippery slope slowed them down. “You start doing it for this, then everybody’s going to ask you to do it for everything else. Where do you draw the line there? What is OK and what’s not?” the former employee said, recalling those discussions.
Slippery slope is a fallacy. You’re supposed to say “hey, that’s a fallacy, and illogical so we can quickly move on” as opposed to sitting on your hands. It would be like someone saying “here’s a strawman” and then YouTube staff disclose how their highly-paid long-term discussions stayed centered on how they must defeat a strawman and ignored an actual issue.
That is not how fallacies are to be handled. Dare I say, “where do you draw the line” is evidence the people meant to deal with an issue are completely off-base if they can’t handle a simple fallacy straight away and say “HERE, RIGHT HERE. THIS IS WHERE WE DRAW THE LINE” because slippery slope is a fallacy!
After all, if the slippery slope were a real thing instead of a fallacy we should turn off YouTube entirely right now, SHUT IT DOWN, because if you watch one video on fluffy kittens next thing you know you’re eyeballs deep into KKK training videos. See what I mean? The fallacy is not even worth another minute to consider, yet somehow “tech giant” policy person is stuck charging high rates to think about it for a long while.
If slippery slope were an actual logical concern, YouTube would have to cease to exist immediately. It couldn’t show any video ever.
And the following excerpt from the same article pretty much sums up how Facebook is full of intentional hot air — they’re asking for money as ad targeting geniuses yet somehow go completely blind (irresponsible) when the targeting topic includes hate and violence:
“Why are they so good at targeting you with content that’s consistent with your prior engagement, but somehow when it comes to harm, they become bumbling idiots?” asked Farid, who remains dubious of Big Tech’s efforts to control violent extremists. “You can’t have it both ways.” Facebook, for one, recently said it would stop recommending political and civic groups to its users, after reportedly finding that the vast majority of them included hate, misinformation or calls to violence leading up to the 2020 election.
Vast majority of Facebook “civic groups” included hate, misinformation or calls to violence. That was no accident. The Mozilla Foundation report, while pointing out deepfakes were a non-threat, frames willful inaction of Facebook staff like this:
Despite Facebook’s awareness of the fact that its group recommendations feature was a significant factor in growing extremist groups on its platform, it did little to address the problem.
In seeking resolution, our primary goal is to preserve our sense of self-value. …dissonance-primed subjects looked surprised, even incredulous [and] discounted what they could see right in front of them, in order to remain in conformity with the group…
Facebook staff may just be such white American elitists, that they’re in full self-value preservation mode and discount the hate they see right in front of them to remain in conformity with… hate groups.
So let me end on a rather chillingly accurate essay from a philosopher in 1963, Hannah Arendt, explaining why it is the banality of evil that makes it so dangerous to humanity.
[Evil] possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet–and this is its horror–it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.
Now compare that to a quote in the article from someone “surprised” to find out the KKK are nice people. If anything, history tells us exactly this point over and over and over again, yet somehow it was news to the big tech expert on hate groups. Again from the article:
In late 2019, Green traveled to Tennessee and Alabama to meet with people who believe in a range of conspiracy theories, from flat earthers to Sandy Hook deniers. “I went into the field with a strong hypothesis that I know which conspiracy theories are violent and which aren’t,” Green said. But the research surprised her, as some conspiracy theorists she believed to be innocuous, like flat earthers, were far more militant followers than the ones she considered violent, like people who believed in white genocide. “We spoke to flat earthers who could tell you which NASA scientists are propagating a world view and what they would do to them if they could,” Green said. Even more challenging: Of the 77 conspiracy theorists Green’s team interviewed, there wasn’t a single person who believed in only one conspiracy. That makes mapping out the scope of the threat much more complex than fixating on a single group.
For me this is like reading Green discovered water is wet. No, really, water turned out to be wet but Green didn’t know it until went to Tennessee and Alabama and put a finger in the water there. Spent a lot of money on travel. Discovered water is wet, also that white genocide is a deeply embedded systemic silent killer in America rather than an unpolished and loud one… and people with a cognitive vulnerability and easily manipulated are… wait for it… very vulnerable and easily manipulated. What a 2019 revelation!
Please excuse the frustration. Those who study history are condemned to watch people repeat it. In military history terms, here’s what we know is happening today in information warfare just like it has many times before:
For Russia, a core tenet of successful information operations is to be at war with the United States, without Americans even knowing it (and the Kremlin can and does persistently deny it).
Seemingly good folks, even those lacking urgency, can quickly do horrible things by failing to take a stand against wrongs. We know this, right? It is the seemingly “nice” people who can be the most dangerous because they normalize hate and allow it to be integrated into daily routines, systemically delivering evil as though it is anything but that (requiring a science of ethics to detect and prevent it).
From the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, who reinvigorated white supremacy in the 1920s… Genocide is women’s business.
Can physics detect up versus down? Yes. Can ethics detect right versus wrong? Yes. Science.
When those of us building AI systems continue to allow the blatant lie of white supremacy to be embedded in everything from how we collect data to how we define data sets and how we choose to use them, it signifies a disturbing tolerance…. Data sets so specifically built in and for white spaces represent the constructed reality, not the natural one.
Putting Woodrow Wilson in the White House (an historic white space, literally named to keep black Americans out of it) was a far worse step than any amateur hate group flailing loudly about their immediate and angry plans. In fact the latter is often used by the former as a reason for them to be put in power yet they can just normalize the hate and violence (e.g. Woodrow Wilson claimed to be defending the country while he in fact was idly allowing domestic terrorism and “wholesale murder” of Americans under the “America First” platform).
Wilson’s 1915 launch of America First to restart the KKK always has been a very clear hate signal, an extremist group, and yet even today we see it flourish on big tech as if something is blinding their counter-terrorism experts from a simple take-down.
Interesting tangent from history: the January 1917 telegram intercepted and decoded by British warning the Americans of a German plot to invade via Mexico…was actually over American communication lines. The Americans claimed to not care what messages were on their lines, so the British delicately had to intercept and expose impending enemy threats to America that were transiting on American lines yet ignored by Americans. History repeats, amiright?
Thus if big tech can say the know how to ban the KKK when they see it, why aren’t they banning America First? The two are literally the same ffffffing thing and it always been that way! How many times do historians have to say this for someone in a tech policy job to get it?
Hello Twitter can you see the tweets on Twitter about this… from years ago?
Is this thing on?
Here’s a new chart of violent white nationalist content (America First) continuing to spread on Twitter as a perfect very recent example.
Meltwater social media analytics for text mentions of “AFPAC” and “America First Political Action Conference” across the web from January 26 to February 26 found that discussion of the event primarily took place on Twitter and on forums like 4chan. This data does not differentiate between positive, neutral, and negative discussions. (Source: @jaredlholt/DFRLab via Meltwater Explore)
Big tech staff are very clearly exhibiting a failure to think (to put it in terms of Arendt’s clear 1963 warning).
Never mind all the self-congratulatory “we’re making progress” marketing. Flint Michigan didn’t get to say “hey, where’s our credit for other stuff we filtered out” when people reviewed fatalities from lead poisoning. Flint Michigan also doesn’t get to say “we were going to remove poison but then we got stuck on a slippery slope topic and decided to let the poison flow as we got paid the same to do nothing about harms.”
Big Tech shouldn’t get a pass here on very well documented harms and obviously bad response. Let’s be honest, criminal charges shouldn’t be out of the question.
Source: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Photo of 1931 black pilots and founders of Robbins, Illinois airport.Recently as I was reading a note someone sent me about Melody Millicent Danquah, who was born in 1937, I thought something seemed off in the timeline. Danquah was described as the first female pilot in Africa, trained in 1963 by Ghana’s Air Force and a year later making solo flights in a de Havilland Canada DHC-1 Chipmunk.
It is a fine story on its own, not to mention the wider story of emancipation of black women from colonialism, but unfortunately it obscures the many women who flew in Africa long before her. I think it fair to say Ghana in 1963 was most certainly thinking about at the Ethiopian Air Force of 1935, and the role of women there.
First, let me lay out the situation globally for women who were pilots by the 1930s.
Bessie Coleman was the first American to have an International Pilot’s license. Racism in America actively prevented a black and Native American woman to learn how to fly, so she took night school to learn French, went to France and quickly became a pilot there.
…her brothers served in the military during World War I and came home with stories from their time in France. Her brother John teased her because French women were allowed to learn how to fly airplanes and Bessie could not… Coleman was accepted at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation in Le Crotoy, France. She received her international pilot’s license on June 15, 1921 from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
Just to reiterate, Coleman was the first American of any race or gender to achieve an International Pilot’s license.
Willa Beatrice Brown also is an American remembered for achieving many firsts: she was the first black woman with a mechanic’s license 1935, first black woman with a private pilot’s license 1938, and first black woman with a commercial pilot’s license 1939.
Source: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Willa Brown, pioneer woman pilot and president of the National Airmen’s Association of America (NAAA).
Brown trained hundreds of black American pilots, including some who went on to serve in the US military during WWII. She also was one of the eight black pilots that Ethiopia intended to get military support from to help fight against fascist invasion from Italy.
Second, Brown’s story reveals another thread — Ethiopia’s sense of equality at that time. It was a place with women flying planes years before Danquah was even born. And since that’s a giant clue about history of women pilots in Africa, let’s pull on the thread a little.
Italy invaded Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. Italian fascists (similar to the KKK in 1921 using planes to firebomb Tulsa, Oklahoma) launched a series of bombing runs to drop chemical weapons on Ethiopian civilians (even targeting clearly marked medical facilities).
It was in context of this air war, as well as 1921 the KKK using aircraft to bomb Tulsa, that we have to think of a black woman pilot like Janet Bragg being refused a role in US military because of racism.
She was invited by Emperor Selassie to Ethiopia (we know officially in 1955, although hard to find documentation of earlier visits).
Source: Jet magazine, 1993
The Chicago Challenger Air Pilot Association (CAPA), aiding in building an Ethiopian Air Force, was in fact founded by Bragg (see again the photo at the start of this post) where she maintained a very high-profile role including a public newsletter.
While doing postgraduate work at Loyola University and the University of Chicago, she worked as a registered nurse at several hospitals and saved enough money to buy her first of three planes. For $500 she purchased a plane, which she shared with other flying enthusiasts. This group, inspired by Bessie Coleman, formed the Challenger Air Pilots Association, which later evolved into the Coffey School of Aeronautics.
More to the point, we have evidence the President of CAPA — John Robinson — was physically in Ethiopia 1935 to advise Selassie when Italy invaded.
Was Bragg there too?
Did the CAPA women fly in Ethiopia to help build an Air Force that could fight fascism? They certainly were pilots considered instrumental in training male pilots and supporting Air Force development in both America and Ethiopia at this time, so it is not implausible.
This is a line of inquiry worth investigating further. And on that note, it would provide some evidence that America’s air force dramatic build-up the 1940s to fight against fascism would be rooted in the efforts of black women in the 1930s.
Third, the CAPA aviators in Ethiopia were able to escape back to America to avoid capture by Italy. Yet we know today America really should have been backing these black pilots flying in Africa at this time and sending them back in with the British forces in 1940 (instead of waiting until Operation Torch 1942 and then not using them at all).
Indeed, American black pilots achieving record-breaking feats were far more likely to find themselves recruited to fight against fascism by Africa itself, than allowed to fight for America to free Africa.
Although Julian never succeeded in flying across the Atlantic, his efforts made him an international celebrity, and in 1931 Emperor Haile Selassie invited him to Ethiopia to take part in his coronation ceremonies. Julian impressed the Emperor with his skills as a parachutist, landing within a few feet of his throne during one ceremony, a feat that won him Ethiopian citizenship and a position in the nation’s airforce. […] During the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Julian flew to Ethiopia to aid in the defense of Selassie’s government. He was put in command of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force, which at the time consisted of 3 planes. Upon his return to the United States, he was temporarily detained at Ellis Island, over the question of his nationality — British or Ethiopian.
Of course that brings forward the rather awkward fact revealed by the British Foreign Office that some in the American government actively tried to undermine American blacks aiding Ethiopia and keep them home.
One distressed American official [November 1935] asked the State Department to investigate… and to discourage American blacks from going to Ethiopia.
When I studied Ethiopian history in British government archives, I read about women flying there in even the very first years of airplane availability (1920s). Perhaps with some time, and better availability of archives online, someone will focus on an important chapter of history that appears long overdue for greater exposure.
Please keep in mind (as an end note on where to learn more about these amazing women) I’ve written before about Wikipedia integrity issues, such as strange tone and lack of accuracy, and this history of black women in aviation is no exception.
You’ll find Wikipedia pages that claim impossibly that both Willa Brown and Janet Bragg were the “first” black woman to earn their commercial pilot’s license, and no reference at all to the racism they faced.
Here’s how the Smithsonian easily puts the Wikipedia integrity issues to rest. Brown was able to get a commercial license in 1939, whereas Bragg was denied a commercial license in the 1930s solely because she was black:
Bragg encountered discrimination against women at the Tuskegee black pilot training school when she passed the flight test for her commercial license and was denied the license. She received her commercial license in 1943 at the Pal-Waukee Airport near Chicago.
I don’t know what is worse, that Wikipedia omits the racism they faced, fails to recognize these two women existed during the same period and thus couldn’t both be the first, or gets a date wrong. It’s easy to fixate on the last point (easy to fix a date) yet the former issues are really more of an ongoing problem I find with Wikipedia.
A new paper in Nature says they have an algorithm that can read tightly folded letters without opening them physically.
The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes.
It makes the bold case that these tight folds from letters 300 years ago should be considered an historic link to modern cryptography.
Source: Nature, letterlocking examples from the Brienne Collection. From: Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography
Letterlocking was an everyday activity for centuries, across cultures, borders, and social classes, and plays an integral role in the history of secrecy systems as the missing link between physical communications security techniques from the ancient world and modern digital cryptography.
I have to say I disagree with this “missing link” comment. Cryptography doesn’t seem to come into it, as there is no decipher key to unlock them unless you stretch a definition to include unfolding.
A more obvious link from these letterlock examples to modern methods would be… the modern letterlock.
I suppose it’s important to say envelopes were an 1800s innovation in secrecy by providing an, ahem, envelope. Aerogrammes are ostensibly less safe than putting one in an envelope, even though an attacks on either one are basically the same — unlock, unfold, read.
That is why I say a “locking” fold of paper without an envelope doesn’t make a direct link to modern encryption. I mean encryption also existed in letters for many centuries (as I’ve written here before), separate from how the letters were folded.
For example, here is a German message intercepted in 1918 by British operator in Basra after liberating Iraq.
The bottom note says “2 letters missed thro machine gun jam”, which I suppose would be comparable to the “wormholes” in lockletter unfolding. But unlike lockletters, which can be read once unfolded, this text still lacks a key.
For another example here’s an old slide I made to show how the key in a 16th century “cardan grille system” (early steganography) was used during the American Revolution:
