The Supreme Court heard arguments in Maslenjak v. United States, a case about whether minor omissions or falsehoods in an immigration application can cost a naturalized American their citizenship, decades after the fact.
Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Robert Parker is arguing the case for the Trump administration and took the position that any falsehood or omission, no matter how trivial, was grounds for revoking citizenship. If that seems reasonable to you, consider that question 22 on the immigration form asks whether you’ve “ever committed, assisted in committing or attempted to commit a crime [you] were not arrested for.”
The Supremes were incredulous at Parker’s hardline position, and tested it by asking whether driving 60mph in a 55mph zone 20 years ago would be a good reason to expel a naturalized American citizen; they asked whether lying about your weight on a form, or forgetting to list a childhood nickname in the section on aliases, would qualify. Parker affirmed that they would.
Chief Justice Roberts excoriated Parker over this, saying he was “demeaning the priceless value of citizenship.”
Justice Breyer pointed out that the standard Parker advocates for would endanger the citizenship of “vast percentages of all naturalized citizens.”
The latest Wikileaks release of leaked CIA cyberweapons includes “Scribbles” – referred to by the CIA as the “Snowden Stopper” – a watermarking tool that embeds web-beacon style tracking beacons into secret documents that quietly notify a central server every time the document is opened.
The beacons are references to image files hosted on a server the CIA controls. Rendering this image requires that the user’s computer contact the CIA server to fetch a copy, giving the CIA insight into who is opening the document and when and where it is opened.
This is a pretty common technique, and one that is easily overcome by careful adversaries. It’s a standard feature in mass emails – if you’ve every looked at an analytics dashboard for something like Mailchimp, you’ll see entries estimating how many of the emails you sent out were read, how many were deleted, etc. That’s because mailing list software routinely embeds this sort of beacon in messages (most email programs let you turn off loading of remote contact, which foils this sort of tracking).
When I was working with the unpublished Snowden leaks, I only opened them on an airgapped machine that I had physically removed the network interfaces from (I glued the Ethernet port shut and ripped out the wifi card), which I purchased by walking to a store, taking it off a shelf, and walking it to the register, and which was only ever booted from an external drive containing the secure TAILS operating system. Good thing, too – more than once I fatfingered while scrolling through the docs and accidentally clicked a link in them, which could have revealed my activities to the NSA.
These are not extraordinary precautions for working with sensitive documents, and they would comprehensively defeat the CIA’s “Snowden Stopper.” But perfect operational security is hard. I think the CIA is betting that given enough time and enough documents, they would eventually catch even a very careful leaker due to a momentary slipup.
Sarah has been doing, and continues to do, very important work. Primarily, she is making it possible for Americans, who have always presumed a level of trust and competence in our government, to see and track the creeping normalization of the trump autocracy.
Adult children of authoritarians are useful in three ways: first, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states usually are. Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money, creating enough distance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track. Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with pictures of their happy families or glamorous lifestyle.
For nearly two years, Jared and Ivanka have been peddled by the press as a “moderating influence” on her vulgar, bigoted father. They have done nothing to merit this characterization.
When hate crimes rose in tandem with the Trump campaign, Ivanka and Jared were silent. When xenophobes like Michael Flynn – the former NSA head revealed to be a foreign agent – screeched tirades at the Republican National Convention, Ivanka and her siblings dutifully followed on stage. When Trump filled his cabinet with white supremacists like Steve Bannon, Nazis like Seb Gorka, and racists like Jeff Sessions, Ivanka and Jared did not distance themselves, but joined the team.
This is not a “moderating influence”; this is complicity.
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In my experience, someone who makes that argument is either ignorant (meaning they aren’t aware of current research as it evolves) or they’re just a bigot who doesn’t want to let a person be who they are. I don’t understand why another person’s gender identity is in any way threatening to anyone else, and I can’t help but feel like someone who freaks out when they encounter a transperson is just insecure about themselves.
I don’t think gender is a big deal, which is very easy for me to say because I’m a cis white hetro male, and I get the luxury of not having people threaten or attempt to minimize my basic existence. Because it’s not something I have to think about, I don’t have a good answer for you. I hope that someone who is not a cis white hetero male can answer you, because I would also like to know how I can be the best ally I can be.
Until then, though: I think it’s important to treat people with kindness and compassion, until they give you a reason not to. A person’s gender is, as far as I am concerned, not my business to judge or even care about.
Is this helpful at all? I feel like maybe it isn’t helpful.
The confusion is over this meme which is an outright fabrication:
@wilwheaton It became popular after being circulated on alt-ri– i mean Neo Nazi circles. I went and checked out the Bill Nye the Science Guy episode on genes where the left image is from, which you may find on Vimeo. Gender is not discussed once within the entire episode.
I know that the Deplorables lied about what Bill did on the show, and the Stupidsphere picked up the lie and ran with it like they always do.
The question I’m hoping someone who is more qualified than me will answer is: what’s the best way to be the best ally I can be? How can I use my privilege to help make life easier for my trans brothers and sisters?
