Fórum Pirátské strany

The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia. Will the US and the Organization of American States once again be able to overturn election results?

…

On October 20, Bolivians went to the polls to choose their president and congress. Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president in a country with the largest proportion of indigenous people in Latin America, was on the ballot for reelection. His main opponent, former president Carlos Mesa, is vastly preferred by the Trump administration. Since Morales was elected in 2005, the US government has been hostile, and Bolivia has not had ambassadorial relations with the United States since 2009. Morales is one of the last remaining members of a cohort of independent, left presidents who have been opposed, and in some cases removed with the help of, the United States.

When the official tally was done, Morales had 47.1 percent of the vote, with 36.5 percent for Mesa in second place. This meant that Morales had won the presidency without going to a runoff, because the rules allow for a first-round win for a candidate that gets at least 40 percent of the vote and a 10-point margin over the closest competitor.

The opposition cried foul. Long before the votes were counted, Mesa had already indicated he would not accept the decision of the electoral authorities if Morales were to win. What is more surprising, and disturbing, was the press statement from the OAS the day after the election. It expressed “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results after the closing of the polls.” But it did not present any evidence for its questioning of the election results.

…

For those who bothered to look at the data (the 34,000 tally sheets, signed by observers, are on the Web), it was clear that the increase in the share of Morales’s votes in later returns was simply a result of geography. In other words, Morales’s support is much stronger among rural and poorer populations, whose votes came in later. Such a geographically driven change in vote margins is not that uncommon in elections—as anyone who has watched election returns on television in the United States knows. And this change wasn’t even that big of a shift. The official data show a gradual change in the margin between the candidates as the mix of returns changed over time.

…

But in December 2017, the nation’s highest court ruled against term limits. Regardless of what anyone thinks of it, in Bolivia, as in the United States, the court’s decision is the law of the land. For many of those trying to overturn the results of the presidential election—including the Trump administration and its allies—the end justifies the means, and the rule of law is not a consideration.

…

This political intervention by the OAS has implications beyond Bolivia. It is understandable that many journalists see the OAS Electoral Observation Mission as neutral and take its statements as reliable—they usually are. But this is not the first time that OAS officials put their fingers on the scale of an election result under US pressure, and with horribly violent results.

In the 2000 national election in Haiti, the OAS at first decided that it was “a great success for the Haitian population, which turned out in large and orderly numbers to choose both their local and national government.” But the OAS later changed its position as Washington sought to destabilize and topple the government there.

…

The OAS also intervened in the Haitian election of 2010, doing something that perhaps no election monitors had ever done: They reversed the results of the first round without a recount or even a statistical analysis.

Looking forward in Bolivia, the government invited the OAS to audit the election results, and an OAS team arrived on Thursday for a 10-to-12-day visit. There are some voices within the OAS, such as the Mexican government, who have criticized what the OAS has done so far, and we can only hope that a few governments can keep this latest mission honest in the face of pressure from Washington and also the governments of Brazil and Argentina, who favor regime change in Bolivia.

Pushing Morales out will not be easy. After 13 years of some of the most successful economic policies in the hemisphere, he remains popular. During his presidency, income per person in Bolivia has grown at twice the rate of the Latin American average; poverty has been reduced by 42 percent; and extreme poverty has dropped by 60 percent.

…

Mark Weisbrot
November 8, 2019
The Nation

Opinion: Trolling Is Now Mainstream Political Discourse. Our new study on Islamophobia, xenophobia, and racism during the 2018 midterms confirms we're on a path to digital dystopia.

…

Kate Crawford, a leading scholar and author who regularly comments on the impact of technology, said “Distrust and trolling is happening at the highest levels of political debate, and the lowest .... The Overton window [the range of acceptable behavior] has been widened considerably by the 2016 US presidential campaign, and not in a good way ... presidential candidates speak of banning Muslims from entering the country [and] retweet neo-Nazis. Trolling is a mainstream form of political discourse.”

Mainstream trolling? Sure, I thought at the time.

Overall, there seemed to be a consensus that civility online was bound to get worse before it got better. Yet there was a sense of hope, that advancements in machine learning and natural language detection might eventually shield us from most of it, like a leveled-up Gandalf riding down the mountain on a white horse.

"To troll is human," one of the bolded takeaways in the Future of the Internet report said. Life went on.

…

Social networks function in the opposite direction: They take power away from central authorities and institutions, and push it to individuals at the edges. Rushkoff saw this power—at least as a tool for democratic gain—only harnessed once people took action, which we’ve witnessed since 2008. This idea predicates both the digital activism that helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency and the mechanism that turned the tables back around to elect our current president. The issues may have changed, but the means to campaign wins are largely one and the same: action.

…

The number of real people who are participating, including those who inspire and galvanize others to take political action, like vote, is on the decline. Instead, social platforms are increasingly populated by machines: bots, conversational AI, etc. Their agenda includes silencing real people who voice opposition and support for certain views. They also serve as threat intel—connecting our conversations, discovered through the monitoring of our expressed feelings and shared posts, with political issues.

…

In our latest study, we found more than half of some 100,000 tweets about two female Muslim congressional candidates in the 2018 midterms (both of whom would eventually win historic victories) involved outright hate speech. What's more, the bulk of the harassment and provocation came from a small cohort of troll-like accounts. These amplifiers didn’t simply retweet news stories and spam links. Content wasn't necessarily their primary weapon; connectivity was.

We found a remarkable pattern of these accounts persistently tagging House representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both Democrats, into threads and replies. This in turn helped funnel hate speech, amplify rumors, and pull others into heated discussion threads. While some of the instigator accounts were stereotypical bots, others represented an upgraded model of troll: They had traces of automation, quickly swarming on a specific post, for example, but were clearly used and supervised by real humans; they were cyborgs. Instead of mass amplifiers, these accounts functioned more like polarization vacuums. To me, this signals a wholesale shift in political distortion tactics.

This is a new twist to electoral politics and democratic participation in 2020 and in the coming decade. Over time, and especially across disparate Twitter communities, groups, and hashtags, these tactics will continue to surface anger and emotional vitriol. They will connect political candidates' identities to controversial issues, raising them in tandem, and then connecting them in the form of a narrative to real voters. This manufacturing of outrage legitimizes otherwise unsustainable rumors and ideas.

Through Rushkoff's interpretation, these hostile actors are exploiting fundamental design flaws in Twitter's social connectivity to galvanize feelings around heated issues—gender, ethnicity, and religion—and convert them into political action: voting.

…

Jonathan Albright
November 6, 2019
Wired

Sea rescue NGOs : a pull factor of irregular migration?

The argument that maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) operations act as a ‘pull factor’ of irregular seaborne migration has become commonplace during the Mediterranean ‘refugee crisis’. This claim has frequently been used to criticize humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) conducting SAR off the coast of Libya, which are considered to provide “an incentive for human smugglers to arrange departures” (Italian Senate 2017: 9). In this policy brief, we scrutinise this argument by examining monthly migratory flows from Libya to Italy between 2014 and October 2019. We find no relationship between the presence of NGOs at sea and the number of migrants leaving Libyan shores. Although more data and further research are needed, the results of our analysis call into question the claim that non-governmental SAR operations are a pull factor of irregular migration across the Mediterranean sea.

Eugenio Cusumano, Matteo Villa
Policy Briefs, 2019/22; Migration Policy Centre
European University Institute

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

Sale comes within months of DNS overseer pushing through controversial contract change

…

At the end of last week, the Internet Society (ISOC) announced that it has sold the rights to the .org registry for an undisclosed sum to a private equity company called Ethos Capital. The deal is set to complete in the first quarter of next year.

The decision shocked the internet industry, not least because the .org registry has always been operated on a non-profit basis and has actively marketed itself as such. The suffix “org” on an internet address – and there are over 10 million of them – has become synonymous with non-profit organizations.

…

Despite stating that Ethos Capital “understands the intricacies of the domain industry” its founder and CEO Erik Brooks has no experience within that industry. The firm’s website lists only Brooks and one Nora Abusitta-Ouri – who joined the outfit last month as its “chief purpose officer” – as employees.

But there is a common thread between those two and it is Fadi Chehade, a former CEO of ICANN, the organization that oversees the domain-name system and awards the contracts to run internet registries.

It was under Chehade that ICANN radically changed its approach to internet registries, including a massive expansion of the internet namespace and a move toward a free market approach to internet addresses. Chehade’s actions as CEO led directly to the Ethos Capital buyout of .org but he is not listed as a part of Ethos Capital and the company has so far failed to respond to our questions about his connection to the firm.

More recent decisions by ICANN also had a significant bearing on the decision to sell the .org registry. At the end of June this year, in a controversial decision made despite significant and vocal opposition, ICANN decided to lift price caps on .org domains for the next 10 years, paving the way for unlimited price increases on the 10 million .org domain names. That decision massively increased the value of the .org registry from millions to potentially billions of dollars.

…

But that logic has been repeatedly questioned by the internet community both at the time and since. Several high-profile non-profit organizations, including America's National Public Radio (NPR), C-SPAN, the National Geographic Society and the YMCA, wrote a joint letter to ICANN complaining that the organization had “articulated no compelling policy basis for this proposed change."

They rejected ICANN’s contract conformity argument, stating: “This strikes us as conformity for its own sake. ICANN should not disregard the public interest in favor of administrative convenience."

The joint letter was just one of 3,200 comments sent to ICANN on the issue, which was itself an indication of the extraordinary interest in the proposal since ICANN rarely receives more than 50 comments for any of its comment periods.

…

Adding to the frustration is the fact that ICANN gave no explanation for moving ahead with the decision to lift caps despite the public opposition. It also carried out no economic analysis of the change, despite being aware that it could be worth billions of dollars. Unusually for such a high-profile issue, the decision was also made by the organization’s staff rather than its board.

Under accountability measures, an ICANN board decision would have required the organization to look at it through a variety of lenses that would have raised serious question marks over the decision. In particular, the board would have to consider and discuss: the materials it has reviewed; any concerns raised by the community; any fiscal impacts or ramifications on the community or public; how the action served the public interest; and provide a rationale for the decision.

But the board did not make the decision, despite its high-profile nature and previous precedents, and as a result there was no explanation or rationale given. Adding to the sense that the entire process was flawed, no announcement was made about the decision to lift the price caps, and the new contract was simply uploaded to the webpage associated with the .org registry on the same day it entered into force.

Given the unexpected nature of the sale, the level of secrecy surrounding it – people still do not know who Ethos Capital is, how much it paid, or where its funds come from – and the huge sums of money at stake, the internet community is keen to find out the details of how the deal came about in the first place.

…

Former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade personally registered the domain name currently used by Ethos Capital in May and it was registered as a limited company in the US state of Delaware on May 14. That date is significant because it is one day after ICANN indicated it was planning to approve the lifting of price caps through its public comment summary.

As such it appears that the plan to purchase the .org registry was predicated on the price caps going ahead and that those behind the deal had intricate knowledge of ICANN’s internal processes.

Given the significant cultural hurdles that the sale of the .org registry would have to have overcome within ISOC and PIR, not just because it would cease to be a non-profit organization but also because ISOC is highly dependent on the registry’s revenue for its own financial well-being, it seems extraordinary that a deal of such magnitude could be agreed to and signed in just two months – as ISOC claims.

Some suspect that the deal has long been under informal discussion, with ISOC CEO Andrew Sullivan – who took over in September 2018 – working on it long before the contract negotiations. One potential indicator is the fact that ISOC restructured how it carries out one of its most significant duties – grant disbursements to internet society chapters across the globe – and set up a new Internet Society Foundation in February 2019.

…

Kieren McCarthy
November 20, 2019
The Register

Nonprofit Community Stands Together to Protect .ORG

…

EFF was stunned when ISOC announced the sale last week. We’ve spent the last six months voicing our concerns to Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about several terms in the 2019 .ORG Registry Agreement, urging ICANN to remove provisions that would make it easier for people in power to censor NGOs’ websites. Other organizations objected to ICANN’s removal of the price cap on .ORG domains, which allows the owners of .ORG to charge NGOs unlimited fees for continuing to keep their .ORG domains.

Throughout that six-month process, none of us knew that ISOC would soon be selling PIR to a private equity firm. Suddenly, those fears about the registry abusing the new powers ICANN was handing it became a little more palpable. Without the oversight of a trusted nonprofit organization like ISOC, a registry could abuse those rules to take advantage of the NGO sector.

…

The sale is especially troubling because PIR was never supposed to be a for-profit venture. ISOC created PIR expressly for the purpose of managing .ORG, with ISOC’s continued oversight. When ISOC made its proposal to the ICANN board in 2002 to transfer management of .ORG to PIR, part of the pitch was that ISOC would continue to ensure that the NGO sector had a say in policy decisions affecting the .ORG ecosystem.

…

Elliot Harmon
November 22, 2019
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Save .ORG

Help stop the sale of Public Interest Registry to a Private Equity Firm