How can we ban facial recognition when it’s already everywhere?

Apple iPhones offer Face ID, which allows you to unlock your phone and some apps by using a facial scan. | AFP via Getty Images

A growing number of gadgets are scanning your face.

Facial recognition is having a reckoning. Recent protests against racism and police brutality have shined a light on the surveillance tools available to law enforcement, and major tech companies are temporarily backing away from facial recognition and urging federal officials to step in and regulate.

Late last month, we learned of the first-known false arrest caused by a faulty facial recognition system, involving a Black man in Michigan identified by software that Detroit’s police chief later admitted had a 96 percent misidentification rate. And a policy group from the Association for Computing Machinery, a computing society with nearly 100,000 members, has called for the suspension of corporate and government use of the technology, citing concerns that its built-in biases could seriously endanger people.

There’s also pressure from Congress. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Pressley and Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey have proposed new legislation that would prohibit federal government use of facial recognition and encourage state and local governments to do the same. It’s one of the most sweeping proposals to limit the controversial biometric technology in the United States yet and has been hailed by racial justice and privacy advocates.

All of this follows a move by several major technology companies, including IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft, to pause or limit law enforcement’s access to their own facial recognition programs.

But amid the focus on government use of facial recognition, many companies are still integrating the technology into a wide range of consumer products. In June, Apple announced that it would be incorporating facial recognition into its HomeKit accessories and that its Face ID technology would be expanded to support logging into sites on Safari. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, some firms have raced to put forward more contactless biometric tech, such as facial recognition-enabled access control.

“When we think about all of these seemingly innocuous ways that our images are being captured, we have to remember we do not have the laws to protect us,” Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center, told Recode. “And so those images could be used against you.”

The convenience that many find in consumer devices equipped with facial recognition features stands in stark contrast to the growing pressure to regulate and even ban the technology’s use by the government. That’s a sign that officials looking to effectively regulate the tech will have to take into account its range of uses, from facial recognition that unlocks a smartphone to the dystopian-sounding databases operated by law enforcement.

After all, when earlier this year Recode asked Sen. Jeff Merkley what inspired his push to regulate the technology, he pointed out how quickly the Photos app on his iPhone could identify members of his family. He was struck by how easily law enforcement could be able to track people with the technology, but also how powerful it had already become on his own device.

“You can hit that person, and every picture that you’ve taken with that person in it will show up,” Merkley said at the time. “I’m just going, ‘Wow.’”

Facial recognition is becoming more widespread in consumer devices

One of the most popular uses of facial recognition is verification, which is often used for logging into electronic devices. Rather than typing in a passcode, a front-facing camera on the phone snaps a picture of the user and then deploys facial recognition algorithms to confirm their identity. It’s a convenient (though not completely fool-proof) feature made popular when Apple launched Face ID with the iPhone X in 2017. Many other phone companies, including Samsung, LG, and Motorola, now provide facial recognition-based phone unlocking, and the technology is increasingly being used for easier log-ins on gaming consoles, laptops, and apps of all kinds.

But some consumer-focused applications of facial recognition go beyond verification, meaning they’re not just trying to identify their own users but also other people. One early example of this is Facebook’s facial recognition-based photo tagging, which scans through photos users post to the platform in order to suggest certain friends they can tag. Similar technology is also at work in apps like Google Photos and Apple Photos, both of which can automatically identify and tag subjects in a photo.

Apple is actually using the tagging feature in its Photos app to power the new facial recognition feature in HomeKit-enabled security cameras and smart doorbells. Faces that show up in the camera feed can be cross-referenced with the database from the Photos app, so that you’re notified when, for instance, a specific friend is knocking on your door. Google’s Nest cameras and other facial recognition-enabled security systems offer similar features. Face-based identification is also popping up in some smart TVs that can recognize which member of a household is watching and suggest tailored content.

Facial recognition is being used for identification and verification in a growing number of devices, but there will likely be possibilities for the technology that go beyond those two consumer applications. The company HireVue scans faces with artificial intelligence to evaluate job applicants. Some cars, like the Subaru Forester, use biometrics and cameras to track whether drivers are staying focused on the road, and several companies are exploring software that can sense emotion in a face, a feature that could be used to monitor drivers. But that can introduce new bias problems, too.

“In the context of self-driving cars, they want to see if the driver is tired. And the idea is if the driver is tired then the car will take over,” said Nkonde, who also runs the nonprofit AI for the People. “The problem is, we don’t [all] emote in the same way. “

The blurry line between facial recognition for home security and private surveillance for police

Facial recognition systems have three primary ingredients: a source image, a database, and an algorithm that’s trained to match faces across different images. These algorithms can vary widely in their accuracy and, as researchers like MIT’s Joy Buolamwini have documented, have been shown disproportionately inaccurate based on categories like gender and race. Still, facial recognition systems can differ in the size of their databases — that is, how many people a system can identify — as well as by the number of cameras or images they have access to.

Face ID is an example of a facial recognition technology used for identity verification. The system checks that a user’s face matches up with the face that’s trying to open the device. For Face ID, the details of an individual user’s face have been previously registered on the device. As such, the Apple algorithm is simply answering the question of whether or not the person is the phone’s user. It is not designed to identify a large number of people. Only one user’s biometric information is involved, and importantly, Apple does not send that biometric data to the cloud; it remains on the user’s device.

When more than one person is involved, facial recognition-based identity verification is more complicated. Take Facebook’s facial recognition-based photo tagging, for instance. It scans through a user’s photos to identify their friends, so it’s not just identifying the user, which is Face ID’s only job. It’s trying to spot any of the user’s friends that have opted in to the facial recognition-based tagging feature. Facebook says it doesn’t share peoples’ facial templates with anyone, but it took years for the company to give users control over the feature. Facebook failed to get users’ permission before implementing the photo-tagging feature back in 2010; this year, the company agreed to pay $550 billion to settle a lawsuit over violating users’ privacy. Facebook did not start asking users to opt in until 2019.

The question of consent becomes downright problematic in the context of security camera footage. Google Nest Cams, Apple HomeKit cameras, and other devices can let users create albums of familiar faces so they can get a notification when the camera’s facial recognition technology spots one of those people. According to Apple, the new HomeKit facial recognition feature lets users turn on notifications for when people tagged in their Photos app appear on camera. It also lets them set alerts for people who frequently come to their doorway, like a dog-walker, but not in their photo library app. Apple says the identification all happens locally on the devices.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Google Nest Cameras provide a video feed through a smartphone app and, for a small monthly fee, offer facial recognition features.

The new Apple feature is similar to the familiar face detection feature that can be used with Google’s Nest doorbell and security cameras. But use of the feature, which is turned off by default, is somewhat murky. Google warns users that, depending on the laws where they live, they may need to get the consent of those they add notifications for, and some may not be able to use it at all. For instance, Google does not make the feature available in Illinois, where the state’s strict Biometric Information Privacy Act requires explicit permission for the collection of biometric data. (This law was at the center of the recent $550 billion Facebook settlement.) Google says its users’ face libraries are “stored in the cloud, where it is encrypted in transit and at rest, and faces aren’t shared beyond their structure.”

So Google- and Apple-powered security cameras are explicitly geared to consumers, and the databases used by their facial recognition algorithms are more or less limited.

The line between consumer tech like this and the potential for powerful police surveillance tools, however, becomes blurred with the security systems made by Ring. Ring, which is owned by Amazon, partners with police departments, and while Ring says its products do not currently use facial recognition technology, multiple reports indicate that the company sought to build facial recognition-based neighborhood watchlists. Ring has also distributed surveys to beta testers to see how they would feel about facial recognition features. The scope of these partnerships is worrisome enough that on Thursday Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, head of the House Oversight Committee, asked for more information about Ring’s potential facial recognition integrations, among other questions about the product’s long-standing problem with racism.

So it seems that as facial recognition systems become more ambitious — as their databases become larger and their algorithms are tasked with more difficult jobs — they become more problematic. Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Recode that facial recognition needs to be evaluated on a “sliding scale of harm.”

When the technology is used in your phone, it spends most of its time in your pocket, not scanning through public spaces. “A Ring camera, on the other hand, isn’t deployed just for the purpose of looking at your face,” Guariglia said. “If facial recognition was enabled, that’d be looking at the faces of every pedestrian who walked by and could be identifying them.”

So it’s hardly a surprise that officials are most aggressively pushing to limit the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. Police departments and similar agencies not only have access to a tremendous amount of camera footage but also incredibly large face databases. In fact, the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology found in 2016 that more than half of Americans are in a facial recognition database, which can include mug shots or simply profile pictures taken at the DMV.

And recently, the scope of face databases available to police has grown even larger. The controversial startup Clearview AI claims to have mined the web for billions of photos posted online and on social media to create a massive facial recognition database, which it has made available to law enforcement agencies. According to Jake Laperruque, senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, this represents a frightening future for facial recognition technology.

“Its effects, when it’s in government’s hands, can be really severe,” Laperruque said. “It can be really severe if it doesn’t work, and you have false IDs that suddenly become a lead that become the basis of a whole case and could cause someone to get stopped or arrested.”

He added, “And it can be really severe if it does work well and if it’s being used to catalog lists of people who are at protests or a political rally.”

Regulating facial recognition will be piecemeal

The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act recently introduced on Capitol Hill is sweeping. It would prohibit federal use of not only facial recognition but also other types of biometric technologies, such as voice recognition and gait recognition, until Congress passes another law regulating the technology. The bill follows other proposals to limit government use of the technology, including one that would require a court-issued warrant to use facial recognition and another that would limit biometrics in federally assisted housing. Some local governments, like San Francisco, have also limited their own acquisition of the technology.

So what about facial recognition when it’s used on people’s personal devices or by private companies? Congress has discussed the use of commercial facial recognition and artificial intelligence more broadly. A bill called the Consumer Facial Recognition Privacy Act would require the explicit consent of companies collecting peoples’ biometric information, and the Algorithmic Transparency Act would require large companies to check their artificial intelligence, including facial recognition systems, for bias.

But the ubiquitous nature of facial recognition means that regulating the technology will inevitably require piecemeal legislation and attention to detail so that specific use cases don’t get overlooked. San Francisco, for example, had to amend its facial recognition ordinance after it accidentally made police-department-owned iPhones illegal. When Boston passed its recent facial recognition ordinance, it created an exclusion for facial recognition used for logging into personal devices like laptops and phones.

“The mechanisms to regulators are so different,” said Brian Hofer, who helped craft San Francisco’s facial recognition ban, adding that he’s now looking at creating local laws modeled after Illinois’ Biometric Privacy Act that focus more on consumers. “The laws are so different it would be probably impossible to write a clean, clearly understood bill regulating both consumer and government.”

A single law regulating facial recognition technology might not be enough. Researchers from the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that focuses on equitable artificial intelligence, have called for a more comprehensive approach. They argue that the technology should be regulated and controlled by a federal office. In a May proposal, the researchers outlined how the Food and Drug Administration could serve as a model for a new agency that would be able to adapt to a wide range of government, corporate, and private uses of the technology. This could provide a regulatory framework to protect consumers from what they buy, including devices that come with facial recognition.

Meanwhile, the growing ubiquity of facial recognition technology stands to normalize a form of surveillance. As Rochester Institute of Technology professor Evan Selinger argues, “As people adapt to routinely using any facial scanning system and it fades to the background as yet another unremarkable aspect of contemporary digitally mediated life, their desires and beliefs can become reengineered.”

And so, even if there is a ban on law enforcement using facial recognition and it’s effective to a degree, the technology is still becoming a part of everyday life. We’ll eventually have to deal with its consequences.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

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The Senate goes home for July Fourth recess as states wait on coronavirus stimulus

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell leaves after a closed-door briefing at the US Capitol on July 2, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Economists see the uncertainty as devastating for state budgets.

It’s now been more than six weeks since the House passed the HEROES Act, its latest take on additional stimulus as workers, businesses, and states continue to grapple with the economic fallout of the coronavirus. The Senate, however, wants to wait two more before considering a bill of its own.

Both chambers of Congress have officially left for a two-week July Fourth recess and Senate Republicans have said floor consideration of stimulus legislation won’t happen until they’re back. “A month from now we should be in the final stages of getting that bill together,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) told reporters earlier this week. (The House is focused on committee work in the interim.)

Democrats have argued that this delay could have serious consequences, as states stare down budget cuts and households across the country deal with layoffs and upcoming rent and mortgage payments. Republicans, meanwhile, have noted that some of the previous stimulus funding is still being distributed and emphasize that they’re waiting to see how the economy performs as some states reopen.

The updates, so far, have been mixed: This past week, a monthly report showed an influx of 4.8 million jobs in June, a seemingly promising boost, but data collected more recently also revealed that more than 1 million new unemployment claims were filed last week. Additionally, the current unemployment rate remains one of the highest the country has seen in years, at 11.1 percent. Another complicating factor: Some recent gains are a result of states reopening businesses, a move that some have had to reverse as coronavirus cases have spiked.

Economists tell Vox they’re particularly concerned about the limbo states are left in as a result of the Senate’s stimulus timing. While many have rainy-day funds, the delays of additional support make it tough for states to plan how well they will (or won’t) be able to provide public schooling, support for higher ed and Medicaid payments as they keep fielding sharp dips in revenue. For many states, their fiscal year budgets began on July 1, which has now come and gone.

“States are making decisions every day about what services they can provide and where they are going to need to lay people off, and, if they don’t know for sure that more funding is in the pipeline, they are going to err on the side of caution,” says Harvard Kennedy School economics professor Karen Dynan, a former chief economist for the Treasury Department. “That can’t be good, particularly when we are seeing cases surge in some places and all the more need for good health care and aggressive public health policy.”

Democrats’ legislation would have allocated more than $900 billion to states and localities to help cover some of the revenue shortfalls they’ve experienced, in addition to the $150 billion that’s already been set aside to help address coronavirus-related costs in the CARES Act. In the past, however, Republicans have chafed at providing more federal aid to states, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissing such efforts as a “bailout” that could be used to address “preexisting” problems. He’s since noted that more funding is likely needed but shied away from the amounts Democrats have proposed.

It’s unclear whether Democrats and Republicans will be able to reach an agreement on the boost in state funds and next steps on other important programs, including pandemic unemployment insurance, which is due to expire at the end of July. For now, it’s a question the Senate won’t be addressing for a few weeks.

State funding and pandemic UI are immediate areas where more action is needed

Additional state funding and an agreement on pandemic unemployment are among the areas where there’s an urgent need for more action.

As Vox’s Emily Stewart has reported, state and city budgets have faced immense strain throughout the pandemic as they’ve seen massive declines in both sales and income tax revenues, as well as growing costs associated with addressing the coronavirus. Before the coronavirus outbreak, “Arizona expected a $1 billion surplus and is now staring down a $1.1 billion deficit,” she writes.

Some states, including Michigan, have already proposed significant cuts to the budgets for the next fiscal year, including more than $450 million in reductions to schools and universities. According to Pew, state and local governments have temporarily laid off or furloughed 1.5 million workers as of June.

“Assuming that this is just a delay and that Congress eventually passes a bill, I think the most immediate impact is on state budgets,” says UC Berkeley public policy and economics professor Jesse Rothstein. “States have been kicking the can down the road, hoping that the federal government gets its act together. ... The longer that is delayed, the worse off we will all be.”

At this point, it’s uncertain if Senate Republicans will be on board with much state funding even after they return to the Capitol: Top leaders including McConnell have signaled more openness to the idea but have been reluctant about an expansive package. If states don’t get the support they need — fast — more layoffs and budget reductions could add to the current economic fallout.

“When you cut the budget, you have to cut positions for workers, and that further compounds the recession that we’re having right now,” says University of Kansas economics professor Donna Ginther. “This is the exact wrong time for state governments to fend for themselves.”

A July 31 deadline is also looming over the expanded unemployment insurance that was included in the CARES Act. Slated to sunset at the end of the month, this policy adds another $600 per week to the unemployment support that individuals receive.

Given the ongoing nature of the pandemic, and the layoffs that have persisted at many businesses, Democrats have argued that this support should continue. As Cecilia Rouse, a former economic adviser for the Obama administration, previously told Vox, ideal pandemic response policies would help put the economy on pause and tide workers over, while the country resolves the public health crisis.

Republicans, though, have argued that state reopenings will provide a key boost and worried that extending the increased UI will deter people from returning to work as businesses rehire. The Labor Department’s most recent unemployment report, which saw an additional 1.4 million people file last week, however, made clear that many people are still dealing with job losses.

If the expanded UI benefits end by August, this change could have a notable impact on consumer spending and households’ ability to cover living costs including food and rent. “Everything I’ve seen suggests that unemployment is going to come part of the way back, but not all the way,” says Ginther.

Lawmakers have a narrow window to approve stimulus in July and August

Now that it’s off for recess, the Senate won’t be back until Monday, July 20 — when lawmakers will have a narrow window to strike a deal on the next package, before they’re due to leave once again for their next recess on August 10.

The upcoming UI deadline is among the notable dates putting pressure on Congress to work something out — both to ensure individuals continue to have the support they need and so that states can have the time to update their approach to UI distribution if that’s required.

Complicating the issue, as usual, is the White House. “The shape of any kind of package is very much up in the air,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Thursday, while noting that the administration opposes the pandemic unemployment insurance.

Experts emphasize that more stimulus is sorely needed, especially as cases of the coronavirus are spiking again in several states including Arizona, Texas, and Florida.

“The health crisis — and thus the economic crisis — show no signs of slowing down, and now is not the time to scale back on support to those who need it most,” says Natasha Sarin, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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Missouri boy, 8, organizes Black Lives Matter march for kids

Eight-year-old Nolan Davis led a march for hundreds of children in his Kirkwood, Missouri community on last Saturday, June 27.

“I’m worried about Black people, like me, getting hurt. Some skin is like chocolate. Some is like vanilla. Some is mixed together like mine. But we’re all people,” Davis said through a megaphone according to CNN.

READ MORE: Educators march on Georgia’s state capitol to say, ‘Kids’ Lives Matter’

Davis, who is Black, is adopted along with his five-year-old sister, Caroline. Their parents, Kristin and Ryan Davis, have been participating in rallies in the St. Louis area since the May 25 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Nolan’s speech kicking off his children’s march in Kirkwood today! #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/1CYheQ44z6

— Ryan Davis (@rytdavis24) June 27, 2020

Nolan joined his parents at some of those rallies and had the idea to plan one just for children.

Kristin Davis told The Washington Post that she began seriously thinking about race after adopting Nolan eight years ago. Now, she said she co-chairs the racial equity committee at her children’s school, and takes cues from Black parents about how to raise her children.

She said that it is difficult to explain to her children the greater issues of systemic racism in America that contribute to police killings. However, her once her son had an understanding of some of what was going on, he “wanted to speak out more for the rights of people who look like him.”

The rally brought out over 700 people, including children and their parents. They marched from a local park to a neighboring shopping district with the support of the police in the community.

Today’s Black Lives Matter march in Kirkwood was amazing. We are very proud of Keysor kid Nolan Davis for using his voice and organizing the march. This is what community looks like! pic.twitter.com/R2T5lZVxAN

— Keysor Elem School (@keysorpride) June 27, 2020

Upon returning to the park, the children drew hopeful messages on the ground in chalk.

Talking to children about the Black Lives Matter movement can be challenging. A United Kingdom website published a 20-page guide called, “A Parent’s Guide to Black Lives Matter.” 

Join @BigBird, @Elmo and @AbbyCadabbySST from @SesameStreet for Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism, a CNN/Sesame Street Town Hall for kids and families, Saturday morning at 10 a.m. ET pic.twitter.com/izMHtf4QHq

— CNN (@CNN) June 5, 2020

READ MORE: Alicia Keys to host ‘Kids, Race and Unity: A Nick News Special‘

On Saturday, June 6, CNN and Sesame Street aired, Coming Together: Standing up to Racism. The beloved children’s characters explained the peaceful protests taking place around the country. In it, Elmo’s dad made his debut where he explained, “Not all streets are like Sesame Street.”

“Not all streets are like Sesame Street. … What we are seeing is people saying ‘enough is enough.’ They want to end racism.”@Elmo’s dad Louie explains why people are protesting across the US. https://t.co/icV04F4FNW #CNNSesameStreet pic.twitter.com/1efrMAzZ8V

— CNN (@CNN) June 6, 2020

The following week, the network and Sesame Street teamed up again to explain the coronavirus pandemic to kids with The ABCs of COVID 19: A CNN/Sesame Street Town Hall for Kids and Parents.

The post Missouri boy, 8, organizes Black Lives Matter march for kids appeared first on TheGrio.

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The radicalism of the American Revolution — and its lessons for today

Danielle Allen will change how you think about the Declaration of Independence. | Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen discusses the American founding, prison abolition, and the future of democracy.

My first conversation with Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen on The Ezra Klein Show in fall 2019 was one of my all-time favorites. I didn’t expect to have Allen on again so soon, but her work is unusually relevant to our current moment.

Allen has written an entire book about the deeper argument of the Declaration of Independence and the way our superficial reading and folk history of the document obscures its radicalism. (It’ll make you look at July Fourth in a whole new way.) Her most recent book, Cuz, is a searing indictment of the American criminal justice system, driven by watching her cousin go through it and motivated by his murder.

Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, which Allen directs, has released the most comprehensive, operational road map for mobilizing and reopening the US economy amid the Covid-19 crisis. And to top it all off, a two-year bipartisan commission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which Allen co-chaired, recently released a report with more than 30 recommendations on how to reform American democracy — and they’re very, very good.

This is a wide-ranging conversation for a wide-ranging moment. Allen and I discuss what “all men are created equal” really means, why the myth of Thomas Jefferson’s sole authorship of the Declaration of Independence muddies its message, the role of police brutality in the American Revolution, democracy reforms such as ranked-choice voting, DC statehood, mandatory voting, how to deal with a Republican Party that opposes expanding democracy, the case for prison abolition, the various pandemic response paths before us, the failure of political leadership in this moment, and much more.

An edited excerpt from our conversation follows. The full conversation can be heard on The Ezra Klein Show.

Ezra Klein

What do we get wrong about the Declaration of Independence?

Danielle Allen

The first thing we get wrong is the notion that we should focus on Thomas Jefferson as the author. He put on his tombstone “author, the Declaration of Independence.” That was a real self-aggrandizing gesture. In fact, he was just the scribe. The intellectual work of the declaration was driven significantly by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

That’s an important thing to say out loud because Adams is someone who never owned slaves and Franklin was somebody who was an enslaver earlier in his life but repudiated enslavement and became a vocal advocate of abolition. Both Adams and Franklin were in a different place on enslavement than Jefferson was.

That matters. The Declaration of Independence fed straight into abolitionist movements and efforts. It was the basis of a text that was submitted in Massachusetts in January 1777 moving forward abolition, and abolition had been achieved already in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania by the early 1770s and 1780s.

When we focus on Jefferson, we get one part of America’s story — the story of the slaveholding South. We don’t get the part of the story which was about how abolitionism was developing already, even in the 18th century. That’s part of our story in history, too. We should see it and tell it.

Ezra Klein

That’s a corrective to something that I’ve bought into myself, which is that the central story of the Declaration of Independence is one of hypocrisy — at the same time these beautiful ideals were being written, they were being betrayed. What you seem to be saying is that this story is only partial — that feeding into the Declaration Independence was conscious abolitionist intent.

Danielle Allen

Yes, there was already conscious abolitionist intention by the 1770s. The person who is famous for having coined the “no taxation without representation” argument, James Otis, had already in 1760 written a powerful pamphlet against enslavement. So there was a strand of revolutionary thought that worked its way all the way through to seeing the need for the end of enslavement. Thomas Paine was another figure of whom that’s true.

That’s not to say that they were awfully egalitarian. John Adams was also explicit that while he thought that the sort of universal rights [in] the declaration applied to everybody — men, women, poor people, people of color — he also was convinced that nonetheless, power should be left in the hands of white men with property. He had this paradoxical view that the institution should secure well-being and rights for everybody, but that the responsibility for securing those rights should lie with white men with property.

So there is a sort of bifurcation between this notion that rights pertain to everybody and the question of who would actually have access to political power and be able to control political institutions.

Ezra Klein

What do you mean when you say the declaration is “best read as an ordinary memo”?

Danielle Allen

At the end of the day, human life and human organization depends on people being able to coordinate around a shared plan. And in order to coordinate around a shared plan, you have to make that plan memorable.

That was the job of the Decoration of Independence. They had this set of colonies with extended lines of communication where it could take weeks for a message to travel from the north to the south end, and they needed somehow to be able to move together. So they had a moment of punctuation that memorialized for everybody what their purpose was: What were they trying to do together?

That’s the sense in which it’s a memo. Memo is short for the Latin word memorandum, which is the thing that must be remembered. That’s the sense in which it’s just like any other ordinary office memo that’s seeking to coordinate the actions of disparate people.

Ezra Klein

In your view, what does the memo say? What is the argument the declaration actually makes?

Danielle Allen

It’s pretty straightforward. It’s a group of people who look around and say, we don’t like this world. So it starts, “When in the course of human events.” It’s a diagnosis of a problematic state of affairs.

The problematic state of affairs is that the British government is not securing the rights of the colonists as they understood them. They understood their rights through a long history of thinking about the rights of Englishmen. Specifically, they thought the crown was violating those rights, and they sought an alternative. They had pursued petitions for change internally to the system for a long time, and after 10 years of efforts, they’d reached the point where they thought it was time to start something new.

So it’s a diagnosis and a prescription of a forward path based on independence. It’s also a justification of that self-governing action, that choice of their own, on the grounds that human beings are best off when they can govern themselves.

Ezra Klein

One of the arguments you make in the book is that the declaration is often read as an argument for freedom over equality, but, in your view, its fundamental point is that there is no freedom in the absence of equality. Can you talk about how one of those views came to predominate over the other and why you hold the one you do?

Danielle Allen

In the 18th century, when people thought about self-government, they often described it as a product of free and equal self-governing citizens. Free and equal always went together. In order to be free, you actually had to be able to play a role in your local institutions. You had to have equal standing as a decision-maker. So freedom and equality were mutually reinforcing.

That concept of self-government predates the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, and the remarkable transformations of the global economy achieved by industrialization and modern capitalism. As the economy transformed, as you saw the immiseration of populations in industrial centers, the question of equality came to have a different balance. There was a new question on the table: How does economic structure interact with freedom and with equality?

So with the 19th century and early 20th century, you began to have a sort of refashioning of the concept of equality primarily around economic concerns and conceptions and castes. That way, there seems to be a tension between a market economy defined as somehow rooted in a concept of freedom and equality based on equal distribution of economic resources. The Cold War brought that to a really high pitch, with the Soviet Union characterized as the political structure in favor of equality and the United States characterized as the political structure in favor of freedom.

But what that debate between those two physical systems did was obscure the fact that at their core, freedom and equality have to be linked to each other. You can’t actually have freedom for all unless most people have equal standing relationship to each other. That’s a political point in the first question. And then you fold in economic issues by asking the question: If we need to achieve equal political standing, then what kind of economic structure do we need to deliver that?

I think it is possible to have market structures that are compatible with egalitarian distributive outcomes. I think you need an egalitarian economy. You don’t need, strictly speaking, an equal distribution of material goods in order to support the kind of political equality that gives people equal standing and of shared ownership of political institutions.

Ezra Klein

Let’s hold on that idea of political equality versus economic equality. When people hear “we’re all created equal” or “we all are equal,” the mind naturally jumps to the places where we’re not. Some people are taller than others. Some people are born into a different station than others. The list goes on.

Your argument in the book is that equality here means something different — it’s a way of relating to one another, not a way of equalizing against each other. Can you talk about what that difference is?

Danielle Allen

We’re all not the same, but we are equal in some fundamental respects. The most important way in which we’re equal is that we are all creatures who proceed through our day trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday, and seeking to shape a life course that delivers to us a sense of well-being. So we’re all equal in being judges of our circumstances and seekers of a pathway to a more flourishing tomorrow than we had yesterday. That in itself — the fact that we can judge our circumstances and diagnose them and see solutions to a better future — makes us political creatures and makes us people who want to control our surroundings. That’s what we all share.

In order for that to be activated for all human beings, we need an opportunity to participate in political institutions that tap into that human capacity. As we participate in our shared institutions, will bring a variety of different kinds of resources to that process. We have different interests. We have different capacities. We have different experiences that build out different perspectives. So there’s this huge diversity of what we can all bring to the process of judging together about the shape of our future. But it is that judging that we all have the capacity for and that we all have a right to participate in.

Ezra Klein

Do you see any parallels between the protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the American Revolution?

Danielle Allen

The American Revolution was massively fueled by resentment of the arbitrary use of police power on the part of the British. The writs of assistance, for example, in Boston were rules that gave British customs officers the right to search people without any specific reason for searching them. It was stop-and-frisk in the 18th century, basically.

In other words, arbitrary use of police power was at the core of the American Revolution. Arbitrary use of police power and excessive penalty in our criminal justice system have been at the center of many people’s attention for quite a period of time now.

In the declaration, they say, all of our petitions have just been met by repeated injury. Such has been the experience for the last decade too, I think, for people who’ve been working on police reform and reimagining of our justice and public safety system. So I think there’s a lot of continuity. There’s a really strong sense of what rights should be protected and what it means not to have basic rights protected.

There’s a strong sense of what it means to have invested public authorities with power. Why do we invest them with power? Mainly so they can secure our rights. So when the power is turned around and not used to secure our rights, then the social contract itself, the original compact, has been breached.

So I think everything we’re watching is fully recognizable and understandable in the original terms of the revolution and the declaration and Constitution.

Ezra Klein

Is there a tension in the way America views itself in terms of how we celebrate the moment of revolution and the ultimately violent uprisings that met the abuse of British power against Americans — and the fact that there is intense pressure to keep the protests today peaceful, and any deviation from that is seen as inherently illegitimate?

Danielle Allen

I think there’s a necessary tension that comes out of being a society born in revolution. At the end of the day, to be a successful society is to avoid revolution. So we have to celebrate as our origin something that every society also wishes to avoid.

In the Declaration of Independence, there’s this distinction drawn between altering the government and abolishing it and establishing a new one. That distinction in the declaration is used to justify a full-scale revolution, but it simultaneously points to the idea that the sustainability of constitutional democracy is going to have to focus instead on this concept of alteration.

So the question really is, can you achieve internal capacity in your institutions and social structures to make alteration a real possibility from one generation to the next?

We should all know from the get-go that we live in a world that has made an alteration one of its fundamental necessities in an ongoing way. And I think that’s the kind of proposition being tested now. It’s past due time for alteration in our administration of justice, in our approach to public safety. So let’s figure out what capacity for alteration we have.

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The QAnon supporters winning congressional primaries, explained

Trump supporters displaying QAnon posters appeared at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, on July 31, 2018. | Thomas O’Neill/NurPhoto via Getty Images

QAnon started on an obscure internet forum. Now its supporters are running for Congress.

“Where we go one, we go all” is a frequent slogan of adherents to QAnon, a fringe conspiracy theory that posits the existence of a pedophilic “deep state” working against President Donald Trump.

Now, it looks like at least a couple of them could be going to Washington.

On Tuesday, restaurateur Lauren Boebert defeated five-term incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton for the GOP nomination in Colorado’s Third District. Boebert is a conservative gun rights activist who touts her support for Trump, as well as her belief in “personal freedom, citizen rights, and upholding the Constitution of the United States,” on her campaign website.

She’s seemingly also on board with QAnon: In May, she told far-right personality and QAnon supporter Ann Vandersteel that the theory isn’t really her “thing,” but then later added, “I hope that [Q] is real, because it only means America is getting stronger and better and people are returning to conservative values.”

And in the traditionally Republican Colorado Third District — Tipton won by about 8 points in 2018 — Boebert is also the favorite to win in November.

If she does, odds are good she won’t be alone in her familiarity with QAnon when she gets to Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, almost won her primary outright in Georgia’s 14th District, which lacks an incumbent, and she’s on track to win again in the August runoff. Greene is even more open in her support for the conspiracy theory: In a 2017 video discussing it — one of several first uncovered by Politico — she told supporters that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”

Boebert and Greene are the two QAnon-supporting candidates most likely to make it to Congress this November, but they’re not the only ones who have a shot. According to Media Matters, there are at least eight other QAnon-friendly candidates for Congress who have already won their primaries, as well as one more (in addition to Greene) who’s headed for a runoff.

It’s a surprising number of people to have successfully running for office while embracing an objectively wild conspiracy theory. But maybe not that surprising — after all, one of the president’s sons posted a QAnon graphic on Instagram just last month.

Candidates don’t need to explicitly endorse conspiracy theories to elevate them

According to Travis View, a QAnon expert and co-host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous, part of it is just politics, albeit a particularly Faustian variety. The fanatical dedication to QAnon that characterizes many of the conspiracy’s acolytes turns out to be very effective when it comes to spreading a particular candidate’s message — or, at least, it is if they think a candidate is on their side.

Of Boebert, View says, “I feel like she’s being very crafty in that she seems aware of what she needs to say in order to give enough wink and acknowledgment to the QAnon community without out-and-out endorsing it.”

We can now add Lauren Boebert to the ever-growing list of QAnon supporters who are running for Congress. https://t.co/VJbFGkYKLx pic.twitter.com/m1bklAfikp

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 18, 2020

Boebert has continued to walk that fine line since her win on Tuesday. “I’m glad the [inspector general] and the [attorney general] are investigating deep state activities that undermine the President,” she said in a statement to Vox. “I don’t follow QAnon.”

But Graham Brookie, an expert on disinformation and the director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, says that whether candidates like Boebert officially lay claim to the conspiracy theory doesn’t matter too much.

“She may not identify as an adherent of QAnon conspiracy theories,” Brookie, a native of Colorado’s Third District, said in an interview with Vox, “but she has certainly amplified them provably, and the impact is the same on the audience.”

I was born & raised in #CO03.

This is my home.

I also happen to run a nonpartisan center dedicated to identifying & explaining disinformation.

So let me explain this: Lauren Boebert is an unabashed conspiracy theorist, who spreads QAnon & is unfit for elected office. https://t.co/CZX86BYSbR

— Graham Brookie (@GrahamBrookie) July 1, 2020

QAnon supporters — and believers of other conspiracies — are “primed to believe in code words and secrets,” as Vox’s Jane Coaston explained:

Conspiracy theories create order out of chaos, attempting to make sense of events that don’t make sense. And researchers have found that fact-based arguments against them only serve to reinforce them in the minds of believers. That’s what makes QAnon or Sandy Hook trutherism or any other conspiracy theory so difficult to combat: Because conspiracy theories aren’t based on facts, conspiracy theorists aren’t receptive to them either.

Not all QAnon-friendly candidates are like Boebert, though: Some exist much closer to the Greene end of the spectrum.

Specifically, View describes some QAnon supporters as “pragmatic” in their embrace of the conspiracy theory: “cynical grifters who see the QAnon community as a bunch of people who can be exploited for money or online audiences,” or even to win a Republican primary.

But in other cases, he says, “you see people who are genuinely radicalized by the QAnon story.” For example, View says, Jo Rae Perkins, who won the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon, appears to be a “true believer”; she even made explicit reference to Q in her victory speech this May.

Tacit support for QAnon makes sense for some candidates in today’s GOP

When it comes to the recent surge in QAnon-supporting candidates, most of their voters — and there are about 600,000 of them, according to a calculation by the Washington Post — aren’t voting for Q directly. In fact, just over three-quarters of Americans have never heard of QAnon. But while QAnon encompasses a lot of truly wild conspiracies, at its heart, View says, is “pervasive institutional distrust”: a belief that “the whole of mainstream media, the whole of the political system is entirely, irredeemably corrupt.”

And in the era of Donald Trump, that kind of populist messaging plays really, really well with the Republican primary electorate. (Not only with Republicans — as the Atlantic’s David A. Graham points out, voters of all stripes can be conspiracy-prone, and our current political environment isn’t helping. But the Satanic-pedophilia stuff is basically only a thing in on the extreme fringes of the GOP.)

Tipton, the Republican incumbent Boebert defeated, was endorsed by Trump — but Brookie argues that that endorsement was in name only.

“From an ideological standpoint, candidates like Boebert tend to play to the kind of basest parts of Trump’s base, which his rhetoric has consistently promoted, endorsed, amplified,” Brookie said. “So a victory of a candidate like Boebert can’t be seen as anything other than an extension of Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party.”

In other words, elements of the worldview underpinning QAnon don’t look all that different from what’s coming from the top of the ticket — which would explain the prevalence of QAnon signs at Trump rallies.

just some extremely normal people at an extremely normal political rally for an extremely normal president https://t.co/0Gxa9sa81B pic.twitter.com/9Z2pDX9zCg

— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) July 31, 2018

The result is a fairly widespread acceptance of — or at least an openness to — it and other conspiracy theories. For example, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll in late May found that “half of all Americans who name Fox News as their primary TV news source believe the conspiracy theory (that Bill Gates wants to use mass vaccination to implant microchips), and 44 percent of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well.”

"Half of all Americans who name Fox News as their primary TV news source believe the conspiracy theory (that Bill Gates wants to use mass vaccination to implant microchips), and 44 percent of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well."https://t.co/7edbgD0wZF pic.twitter.com/dPkfg9PQYy

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) May 22, 2020

As NBC’s Ben Collins points out, that’s not a theory that Fox ever boosted. But the channel has “spent the pandemic sowing constant distrust in disease experts, leaving a gaping hole for answers that’s been filled by opportunistic, algorithm-gaming grifters online.”

And it’s not too much of a jump from a conspiracy theory about Bill Gates and vaccines to QAnon. According to View, QAnon functions as “a meta-conspiracy theory that can connect with every other sort of conspiratorial narrative,” however out there it might be.

Republicans also haven’t been especially proactive in condemning QAnon when it crops up in candidates. After Boebert’s win, the National Republican Congressional Committee reiterated its support for her. When asked by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee if it intended to disavow Boebert, the NRCC said in a statement shared on Twitter by Huffington Post reporter Kevin Robillard that “we’ll get back to you when Cheri Bustos and the DCCC disavow dangerous conspiracy theorists like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.”

View says that failure to forcefully condemn the conspiracy theory means that QAnon is likely to stick around in the Republican Party: “Anything short of a clear, forceful repudiation,” he said, “they will take as acceptance.”

It’s unclear how Boebert’s hardline populism and flirtations with QAnon might hold up come November, though. It worked out well for her in the primary — she becomes one of just a small handful of candidates to successfully oust an incumbent of their own party this cycle — but Anand Sokhey, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, isn’t so sure the same will be true in the general election.

“I think it’s very competitive now,” Sokhey said. “It looks like it’s certainly possible for the Democratic candidate, Diane Mitsch Bush, to run strong in that district where we normally wouldn’t have thought it would have been possible.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

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