Matthew Petti

For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community,” including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

“The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

The senator says he will keep working to ensure “that Congress is fully informed of all these programs.” He and Rand Paul (R–Ky.) have been trying to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would ban buying data from third-party brokers. Although the bill passed the House of Representatives last month, the Biden administration opposes it.

Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

“Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book. Another firm called Near Intelligence used RTB data to help anti-abortion groups track women who visited Planned Parenthood clinics.

Earlier this year, WIRED revealed that Near Intelligence had used RTB data to build a dossier on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s associates, tracing mobile phone owners from his private island to addresses in the continental United States and other countries.

The new U.S. intelligence policy is “sort of a recognition that this data is actually sensitive, which is a bit of a change,” Tau notes. “Early on, government lawyers were saying basically it’s anonymized, so no privacy problem here.”

For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection insisted in a 2018 privacy assessment that the agency “receives only anonymized data from commercial sources…with no associated PII,” or personally identifiable information. But the border cops have used that supposedly anonymous data to track and arrest specific people.

Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

“A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

[…]

Via https://reason.com/2024/05/15/heres-how-the-cia-plans-to-use-your-ad-tracking-data/

By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 14.05.2024

A senior US Air Force official has sent defense contractors a strongly worded letter over delays to the Vulcan Centaur heavy-lift launch vehicle program – initiated to replace the workhorse Atlas V, which uses Russian-made RD-180 engines. The delay signals the US’s inability even to copy Russian-made equipment, a leading space researcher says.

US Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli has sent the heads of Boeing and Lockheed Martin’s United Launch Alliance space divisions an “unusually blunt” appeal highlighting Pentagon concerns over the years-long delays to the Vulcan rocket project.

“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs. Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” Calvelli complained.

“As the owners of ULA, and given the manufacturing prowess of Boeing and Lockheed Martin corporations, I recommend that you work together over the next 90 days to complete an independent review of ULA’s ability to scale its launch cadence to meet” contract requirements, the official urged.

Calvelli expressed concerns about the ULA’s poor flight record to date, pointing out that to meet its contract obligations, it would have to launch 25 missions for the Pentagon by the end of 2027. The alliance, separately bound to launch 38 rockets for Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation, launched only three missions through 2023.

“Launch is critical to our ability to transform our space architecture. We are counting on Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the ULA team to be successful in getting critical capabilities into space for our warfighters,” the assistant secretary wrote.

The United Launch Alliance kicked off the Vulcan’s development a decade ago amid a push by Washington to phase out the purchase of Russian-made RD-180 engines used on the Vulcan’s predecessor, the Atlas V, to put satellites into orbit. The Vulcan has a stated launch capacity of 27.2 tons, and an estimated expected cost of $100-$200 million per launch, compared to 8.2-18.85 tons and $1090 million per launch for the Atlas V, depending on variant.

Initially projected to start flying in 2019, the Vulcan program has faced half a decade of delays, owing partly to major issues with the rocket’s BE-4 engines, developed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company. The first Vulcan rocket successfully launched in January of this year, but quickly ran into new problems, including delays to the development of the Air Force’s Soviet-inspired Dream Chaser spaceplane.

The program will require a second flight before it can be certified by the Pentagon for use for national security and intelligence collection-related missions, with ULA expecting the program’s second launch to take place sometime later this year.

Calvelli did not elaborate on the nature of his concerns with the Vulcan program, instead shifting the discussion to national security and the US’s strategic competition with Beijing.

“The United States continues to face an unprecedented strategic competitor in China, and our space environment continues to become more contested, congested and competitive. We have seen exponential growth of in-space activity, including counterspace threats, and our adversaries would seek to deny us the advantage we get from space during a potential conflict,” he wrote.

ULA assures that it’s on track to ramping up its rocket production capabilities, with CEO Tony Bruno telling media that the Vulcan “is much less expensive” than the Atlas V with its Russian-made RD-180s, and that future plans to reuse the new, American-made engines will result in “economies of scale” that will make it “cheaper over time.”

Boeing responded to Calvelli’s letter by promising to get “on more of a wartime footing to stay ahead of the threat,” and agreed with the senior Air Force officer’s sense that “a quicker and more reliable launch cadence is critical to meeting that need.”
Rocket Science

The problems surrounding the Vulcan rocket and its engines signal major issues for US space rocket engineering, with the ULA delay demonstrating that American rocket scientists currently can’t even effectively copy Russian engines, much less create safe, reliable engines of their own, says Dr. Natan Eismont, a leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Scientists’ Space Research Institute, told Sputnik.

“There have been attempts to copy RD-180 engines from the moment they were sold to the Americans,” Eismont recalled. From the early 2000s onward, “launches were carried out using the Atlas III, and then a lot using the Atlas V, [which] provided for nearly half of all American launches. This is significant…There were attempts to copy the RD-180 from the start, and to this day they remain just that – attempts. The Americans haven’t been able to create an engine with characteristics close to matching the RD-180.”

Created in the 1990s, the RD-180 is a derivative of the legendary RD-170/171 series of rocket engines, developed in the 1980s by Energomash for the super-heavy Energiya launch vehicle, which was designed to shuttle up to 100 tons of useful cargo into Low Earth Orbit, to launch the Buran space shuttle, and deploy the next generation of space station components, and pieces of large, Moon and Mars-faring spacecraft of the future.

With the Soviet space program curtailed dramatically after the USSR’s collapse, budding cooperation with the US in the 1990s instead led to the development of the RD-180, and the export of over 120 of these engines to the US between 2000 and 2021.

The question of why the Americans have not been able to develop an engine with characteristics comparable to the RD-180, or even copy the Russian-made engine, stems from a problem which has plagued the US going back almost to the start of the space age, Eismont says.

“Efficiency is measured by specific thrust [the ratio of net thrust/total intake airflow, ed.], which for the RD-180 is 400 tons from the Earth’s surface, and 430 tons in a vacuum. These characteristics are generally achievable. But there’s also the specific impulse [a measure of how efficiently the engine generates thrust, ed.] and here, no rocket apart from ours has been able to achieve comparable parameters. Because to obtain characteristics comparable to those achieved by the RD-180, one must use a fairly high level of pressure in the combustion chamber – more than 200 atmospheres,” which can be dangerous if done improperly, the academic explained.

“At the same time, high-frequency oscillations arise,” Eismont added. “The secret lies in determining the moment during testing after which these fluctuations become possible, and immediately turning off the engine at that precise moment. How to do that – what parameters are necessary here, what parameters are acceptable, and how issues can be overcome – it appears that no one apart from our specialists knows this. Simply handing over the engine with all its documentation is not enough. Because there are subtleties in the manufacture of the engine which are difficult to convey using documentation.”

That’s not to say that American rocket scientists will not be able to ever overcome these difficulties, the observer emphasized. They can and will, but doing so “requires a lot of money and time,” and knowledge enough to pinpoint when testing enters the danger zone to prevent the destruction of “very expensive” test equipment.

Solving this issue will be “critical” for the Americans, Eismont believes.

“Here, [the ULA] can turn to [Space X CEO Elon] Musk, where, in general, the same tasks were set, and the company has its own rocket engine. For Musk too, everything didn’t work out straight away or to the end. Here, in general, we can say that Musk has not achieved the required level of reliability. SpaceX’s engine is in fact also an attempt to copy the RD-180… They are probably further along than say Boeing or others involved [in the Vulcan program, ed.]. But nevertheless, he had to come to terms with the fact that he could not manage without accidents. That is, the process turned out to be slower and more expensive than planned,” the academic explained.

Besides documentation, what US rocket scientists are really lacking is specialists, who can’t be replaced by imported engines, technical or even testing documentation.
“What you need are people involved in the project. Who will give the Americans these people? No one,” Eismont said.

This isn’t anything new, the academic recalled, pointing out that the US has had problems with its rocketry programs going back to the Apollo program and the days of the Saturn 5 rocket. “If you look at the technical characteristics of these American engines, they were strikingly worse than those that the USSR had at the time,” he said.

“It’s difficult to say why this was, but the Americans lagged behind here from the start. As for Soviet and Russian engines, they display an exceptional level of reliability. From the time that the Americans purchased these particular engines from us, they have not had any accidents. That is, the entire program was developed and carried out in accordance with the experience accumulated by that time by Energomash. Here, they really are ahead of everyone else.”

Ivan Moiseev, the head of the Russian Institute of Space Policy, echoed Eismont’s assessment regarding the RD-180, telling Sputnik that this is an “excellent” engine, with “not a single failure in over 100 launches.”

“The contract was concluded in 1996 and completed in 2021 – three years ago. Accordingly, the Americans still have some engines, they can still launch the Atlas V,” Moiseev said.

[…]

Via https://sputnikglobe.com/20240514/vulcan-programs-delay-shows-us-cant-even-copy-much-less-replace-russias-rocket-engine-know-how-1118431306.html

By Morgan Phillips, Congress Reporter On Capitol Hill For Dailymail.Com

• Roy is the lead sponsor of new legislation that will soon hit the House floor to prevent illegal immigrants from voting in federal elections
• DC City Council voted to allow illegal immigrants to vote last year  

But documents obtained by Judicial Watch detail a PowerPoint shown in a D.C. Board of Elections event entitled ‘Non-Citizen Voting Education Virtual Training.’

The D.C. City Council amended its code in 2023 to allow non-citizen voting. It went a step further than other jurisdictions by allowing not just non-citizens but those who are here illegally to participate in local elections.

The PowerPoint explains:

‘Non-US citizen residents of the District of Columbia can vote in local elections under the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022. Non-US citizen residents can vote in District elections for the offices of Mayor, Attorney General, Chairman or member(s) of the DC Council, member(s) of the State [sic] Board of Education, or Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner(s) Non-US citizen residents cannot vote for Federal Offices.’

‘To register to vote in the District of Columbia as a non-citizen, you must: Be at least 17 years old and 18 years old by the next General Election; Maintain residency in the District of Columbia for at least 30 days prior to the election in which you intend to vote; Not claim voting residence or the right to vote in any state, territory, or country; Not been found by a court to be legally incompetent to vote.’

‘You must provide proof of your address in the District of Columbia at an Early Vote Center prior to Election Day or at the polling place assigned to your address on Election Day.’

Federal law only allows citizens to vote in federal elections, but it prohibits requiring documentary proof of citizenship in elections. Arizona requires it for state elections.

The SAVE Act aims to force election officials to verify citizenship in elections. It’s not yet clear when it will come up for a vote.

Johnson, speaking alongside Trump world heavyweights Stephen Miller and Hogan Gidley and Roy last week, did not give a full accounting of how many non-citizens have voted in elections, but warned the number could be ‘dangerously high.’

‘We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that.’

Non-citizens who vote in federal and state elections are already breaking the law and putting themselves at risk of jail or deportation. A small handful of municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.

‘If a nefarious actor wants to intervene in our elections, all they have to do is check a box on a form and sign their name. That’s it. That’s all that’s required,’ Johnson said.

Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, called the bill the ‘most important vote that most members of Congress take in their entire careers.’

‘If this bill does not become law then Joe Biden and Democrats will have engineered, one of the greatest interferences in any democratic nation in the history of the world.’

The bill would aim to close any loopholes that allow people to register to vote without proof of US citizenship or photo ID, require all 50 states to remove any unlawful immigrants from their voter rolls, add penalties of up to five years in prison for election officials who register non-citizens to vote and require proof of citizenship for those who vote overseas.

There’s little evidence that non-citizen voting is impacting election outcomes, and unlawful immigrants often steer clear of giving out personal information for fear or being caught by immigration authorities.

It is possible to vote illegally as an undocumented immigrant, though.

Most voting ballots require some kind of proof of identity to register to vote, such as a driver’s license. Not all of those proofs of ID require citizenship – the bill would specifically require ID requirements like passports or birth certificates.

A sampling from 2002 to 2022 of over 1 billion ballots found fewer than 100 cases of voter fraud.

Still, the bill is likely being pushed heavily by former President Donald Trump. Johnson and Trump gave a joint news conference on the issue last month.

[…]

Via https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13413623/elections-illegal-migrants-washington-dc-chip-roy.html

By Kim Kelly / In These Times

Working in the freezer at Southeastern Meats, a meatpacking facility based in Birmingham, Ala., ​“was the worst job I’ve ever had in my entire life,” Lakiera Walker tells In These Times. Her 12-hour shifts were spent inside a refrigerated building as cold as 30 or 40 degrees, and she had to beg or borrow warm clothes from her friends and family because the employer didn’t provide any.

She couldn’t even take solace in the idea that she was saving up money for her future, because the prison where she spent the rest of her waking hours was taking a 40% cut on top of various fees. As an incarcerated worker, Walker’s time was not her own — even when she was being forced to use it to make money for private employers and the state of Alabama.

Walker, 36, is one of 10 plaintiffs in Robert Earl Council aka Kinetik Justice v. Kay Ivey, a landmark class-action lawsuit challenging what they and their supporters describe as an unconstitutional forced labor scheme in Alabama’s state prisons. They allege the state’s disproportionately Black incarcerated population is being intentionally exploited for profit. The 126-page complaint was filed in the middle district court of Alabama on Dec. 12, 2023, by the 10 currently or formerly incarcerated workers, the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Mid-South Council, and the Woods Foundation. The suit describes how incarcerated Alabamians are forced to work for free in prison and paid extremely low wages to work for hundreds of private employers — including meatpacking plants and fast-food franchises like McDonald’s — as well as more than 100 city, county and state agencies. And it alleges that the state keeps the scheme going by systematically denying parole to those eligible to work outside jobs.

Prison labor is big business in the United States. According to a 2022 ACLU report, Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers, incarcerated workers save prisons more than $9 billion a year in operational costs and earn them more than $2 billion in sales of goods and services, while the prisoners make pennies per hour. They have no say over what types of work they perform or how they’re compensated for that labor, and a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 76% of the nation’s roughly 800,000 incarcerated workers are unable to refuse to work without punishment or retaliation.

None of this is unique to Alabama, but Alabama is one of only seven states that pays nothing to prisoners who work to keep its prisons running. The Yellowhammer State also has a particularly rotten reputation for how it treats its incarcerated population, with a notoriously overcrowded, dirty, dangerous and corrupt prison system. The prisoner mortality rate is five times higher than the national average.

For these reasons and more, the plaintiffs I spoke with told me that, once word spread that a class action was brewing, they jumped at the chance. There is a long list of defendants, including Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Attorney General Steve Marshall, three members of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm and Transportation Director John Cooper, as well as the cities of Montgomery and Troy, Jefferson County, and a number of private employers, including Gemstone Foods, Progressive Finishes and McDonald’s. The suit charges them with violating Alabama’s State Constitution — which, as of 2022, bans slavery and involuntary servitude—as well as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

In the case of the government officials, they’re also accused of conspiring to increase the size of the Alabama prison population — which is predominantly Black — through the discriminatory denial of parole so the state can continue profiting from forced labor. “[Prisoners] have been entrapped in a system of ​‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money, for the benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ​‘employ’ them,” the suit charges.

In Alabama, that charge comes with ugly historical baggage. Convict leasing — a practice of forced penal labor prevalent in the post-Emancipation South (in which incarcerated men were ​“leased” to private employers) — was a massive state revenue driver. Thanks to the Black Codes, a racist program to criminalize petty offenses both real and imagined, Black people were locked up at a massively disproportionate rate to their white neighbors. Many were then sent to work on plantations to fill the labor gap left by Emancipation.

“The plantation owners, as best they could, wanted Blacks to return to the same place as they had been as slaves,” historian David Oshinsky writes in Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Other prisoners were ​“leased” out to work in coal mines, which was as good as a death sentence.

In the case of the government officials, they’re also accused of conspiring to increase the size of the Alabama prison population—which is predominantly Black—through the discriminatory denial of parole so the state can continue profiting from forced labor.

During the 1891 Coal Creek War in Tennessee, striking white miners freed more than 100 Black convict laborers who had been shipped in to act as strikebreakers. But such bright spots were few and far between. The more Black people who were imprisoned and forced to work, the more money they brought in for the state’s benefit. (Is this sounding familiar, dear reader? It should.) By 1898, convict leasing fees made up 73% of Alabama’s revenue.

Convict leasing was formally abolished in Alabama in 1928, but prison labor has remained a significant source of income for the state. Alabama has long been one of the poorest states in the country (in 2022, its poverty rate was 16.2%). It also collects less in property taxes per resident than any other state, with rates that are enshrined in the state constitution and thus extremely difficult to change. This arrangement encourages the state’s conservative leaders to look for money elsewhere.

According to the lawsuit, Alabama reaped a $450 million benefit from forced prison labor in 2023 alone. The state takes a 40% cut of the gross earnings of all incarcerated workers laboring for private employers. It also prof its from goods manufactured by incarcerated workers. The Alabama Correctional Industries website boasts a wide range of products ​“sold to governmental entities within the State,” including ​“executive chairs” and a judge’s bench, and even operates a showroom in Montgomery, Ala. A lovely white gazebo purchased for the governor’s mansion was made by incarcerated workers. Its current occupant, Kay Ivey, is named as a primary defendant.

The symbolism is not lost on the plaintiffs: ​“In those same chairs prepared by [prisoners’] hands, the ones who benefited sit on the leather and deny them freedom,” plaintiff Alimireo English tells In These Times.

Some of that windfall also lands on Alabama’s state and county agencies, which have saved a fortune in wage costs by extracting labor from incarcerated workers instead of paying hired personnel. Since 2018, more than 100 public employers have benefited from cut-rate labor provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC).

Lakiera Walker worked for Jefferson County doing roadwork for approximately two years and was paid a $2 daily wage to handle large trash removal (including a Jacuzzi). She found out that the non-incarcerated workers on her team were making $10 per hour for the same job. One day, the lawsuit alleges, Walker’s boss attempted to coerce her into unwanted sexual activity; when she refused, he wrote her up on a disciplinary offense for ​“refusing to work.” She was then sent to work unpaid in the prison’s kitchen, and when her family called the commissioner and the warden to demand something be done, no action was taken.

“It was basically just slipped under the rug,” Walker says.

Lakiera Walker worked for Jefferson County doing roadwork for approximately two years and was paid a $2 daily wage to handle large trash removal (including a Jacuzzi). She found out that the non-incarcerated workers on her team were making $10 per hour for the same job.

During Walker’s time working at Southeastern Meats, she technically started at $12 per hour, which she believes is the same as her non-incarcerated coworkers, but after the Alabama prison system got through with her check, she was only bringing home about $100 in her weekly paycheck, which works out to less than $2 per hour. ADOC deducts 40% of the check as a ​“fee” and then often adds other fees, such as a $5 ​“transportation fee” to take workers to and from work.

After Southeastern Meats, Walker was sent to Burger King, where she worked right up until her release date. Once Walker left state custody, she called to collect her final check, but found it had already been sent to ADOC. After that, according to her lawyer, no one knows what happened to it. ​“So I’m coming out of prison with $10 and not the check that I worked hard for,” Walker explains. ​“You don’t have to take 40% from me. I’m at home!”

During Walker’s 15-year incarceration, she held a litany of unpaid jobs throughout the prison itself, too, including in the kitchen, housekeeping and healthcare. She even provided hospice care to dying patients. ​“The nurses really weren’t interested in taking care of sickly or terminally ill people, so they would get the inmates to do it,” Walker says. She says she was regularly required to work seven days a week, and she often had to work two shifts a day.

None of these prison jobs were paid, and quitting or refusing work was not a viable option. ​“You can’t say, ​‘Hey, I can’t go to work today,’” Walker explains. ​“You would go to segregation, which was solitary confinement. … People were so tired and just hopeless at that point, they would kind of welcome solitary confinement, just to have a break.”

Walker did finally make it home after all those years of forced labor, but many others are still trapped in the system. Another plaintiff, Lee Edward Moore Jr., a genial 51-year-old Black man, has been in ADOC custody since 1997. He is currently incarcerated at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., and was most recently denied parole in 2022. It was his fourth time being denied since 2009. He cannot for the life of him understand why.

His story spans decades and has seen him change prison ​“careers” many times. One of his first jobs at Holman was refitting the execution chamber; he remembers tearing out the old electric chair when the prison was switching over to lethal injections. As a highly skilled worker, he is constantly in demand, and the lawsuit describes how, over the years, he has been asked to do ​“plumbing, heating and air conditioning installation and maintenance, installation of phone lines, electrical work, and all manners of construction and yard work” projects for the prison. Like Lakiera Walker, Moore has been called down to the healthcare unit to help clean and provide care for fellow prisoners. For the past decade, Moore has also been asked to work on projects outside of the prison, during which he is typically left unsupervised; he’s even personally remodeled wardens’ own state-provided houses.

“They trust me; they know I’m not going to try to escape,” Moore explains.

His latest job has taken him back beyond the prison walls; now, Moore cuts the grass outside of death row.

Moore has not been paid a single cent for any of it, the lawsuit alleges, or received any type of tangible benefit. The biggest perk he’s ever received was a bunk in a smaller, less violent dorm reserved for certain low-risk workers. That, at least, was something; throughout our conversation, he’s clear about his desire to avoid the violence that notoriously permeates ADOC. A 2019 Department of Justice report stated that conditions in Alabama’s prisons were so egregious that they violated prisoners’ constitutional right to be protected against cruel and unusual punishment.

When I ask Moore if he ever refused to work, he explains he did feel he had the option, but generally prefers keeping busy — and staying safe. ​“I just do it because it’s so violent on the inside here,” he says. ​“I try to keep away from the trouble. I’m trying to go home, but I never have the opportunity.”

That element is the strangest part of his story. Moore’s reputation among the prison’s officials is squeaky-clean — as his lawyer interjected during our call, ​“Lee has the cleanest file I’ve ever seen, and he’s been in some of the toughest prisons in Alabama” — and Moore is clearly a low-risk, highly motivated individual. As the lawsuit reads, ​“There is no reasonable argument that he poses a threat to public safety as he has been working long hours daily since he was first incarcerated, without pay, for ADOC, both inside and outside prison walls without incident.” Moore has paying construction jobs waiting for him once he does go home, and a wife and family desperate to see him. His step-daughter is a parole officer, and several of Moore’s family members are in law enforcement.

The wardens at Holman continually recommended Moore for parole.

And yet, Moore’s custody level has not budged. He has not been allowed to participate in a work-release program, which would at least provide a paycheck. And his latest request for a sentence reduction was denied.

Now, Moore won’t get his next chance to come home until 2027. That’s why he joined the class action. ​“We’re being treated like slaves in here,” he says. ​“We just sit here. It’s hopeless. Trying to go for parole, there’s no hope.”

In 2015, the state of Alabama reacted to reports of dangerous overcrowding within ADOC — prisons were at 195% capacity — by enacting measures intended to parole more people while hiring more parole and probation officers, plus an effort to reduce recidivism by investing in community-based substance use disorder and mental health treatment centers. The reforms initially were a success: They reduced the overcrowding and nearly equalized parole outcomes between Black and white prisoners.

“We’re being treated like slaves in here. We just sit here. It’s hopeless. Trying to go for parole, there’s no hope.”

But after far-right Gov. Kay Ivey came to power in 2017, progress stopped — and began rolling back. Ivey immediately took pains to curb parole grants. The lawsuit alleges that Ivey forced parole boards to disregard the ​“evidence-based objective standards” for parole decisions that had increased parole grants prior to 2018. The next year, the parole grant rate fell from 53% to 31%. It continued to plummet, and the gap between Black and white prisoners’ likelihood of being granted parole widened. Between 2020 and 2022, Black prisoners were denied parole at twice the rate of white ones.

By 2022, the parole rate was 11% overall and only 7% for Black prisoners — meaning that 93% of parole-requesting Black prisoners were denied.

That’s what happened to Alimireo English, a charismatic 48-year-old Black man who, according to a judge, should not be in prison right now. It’s a convoluted story, but he was taken into ADOC custody in October 2020 after his parole from a previous conviction was revoked over new misdemeanor charges. A jury acquitted him of those charges on Nov. 8, 2021, and a judge ordered his release.

With Robert Earl Council aka Kinetik Justice v. Kay Ivey, they have found a new spark of hope — and some new allies. The 10 plaintiffs have been joined by two heavyweight Southern labor unions, the USSW and the RWDSU Mid-South Council. It is uncommon to see major unions speaking out so explicitly about prison labor and the plight of incarcerated workers, but USSW and RWDSU have been unequivocal in their support.

“We’re proud to join this lawsuit because we are horrified and outraged by the system of forced labor in Alabama state prisons that has kept Black incarcerated people trapped in prison,” Eric Winston, a USSW member and a cook at the Brookdale Durham assisted living center in North Carolina, tells In These Times. ​“Across the South, we know that when racism exists anywhere, it hurts workers everywhere.”

[…]

Via https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/13/alabama-is-denying-prisoners-parole-to-lease-their-labor-to-meatpackers-mcdonalds/

Episode 20 Egypt’s Heretic Pharaoh

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

Amenhotep IV (1353-1336) would change his name to Ankenaten (meaning beneficial to Aten, the god of the solar disk). Believing there was only a single god, he created the first world’s montheistic culture in the world at a time when all other cultures were polytheistic.

His numerous Karnak temples to Aten, all open to the sun, were dismantled by subsequent regimes. We know about his regime, because the pharaohs he succeed Amenhotep IV reused the inscribed blocks of stone for other monument. These inscriptions reveal Nefertiti, his chief wife, was a commoner and often took the pharaoh’s place in making religious offerings, which was unprecedented.

Ankenaten moved Egypt’s religious capitol from Thebes to a spot in the desert he named Akhet Aten (meaning horizon of the Aten). According to to one of the boundary stones of Akhet Aten, Aten had revealed to the pharaoh the exact location of the new site, as well instructing him never to create a statue or physical image of the sun god.

Ankenaten’s new religion preached love instead of war. Despite panicky letters from diplomats requesting military support to preserve the respectful and subservient status of Egypt’s vassal states, he refused to lead military raids n neighboring countries.

According to Brier, he was really more of a religious mystic than a pharaoh and composed all the prayers (instead of his priests) used in the new temple. Artists had much more artistic freedom under Ankenaten, and the pharaoh himself is depicted with a peculiarly elongated face. Frescoes from this period depict Egyptian birds in their natural children, as well as the pharaoh playing with his children.

Film can be viewed free with a library card at Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/1492791/1492836