Thursday, August 26, 2021

YOU WON'T WORRY ABOUT BEING CAUGHT NAKED ANYMORE
Facebook Unveiled VR Work Meetings, Which, No Thanks

The problem is, work sucks.

Katie NotopoulosBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 19, 2021, 


Facebook / Via oculus.com
"Workrooms," Facebook's new VR office meeting.

Facebook on Thursday offered a first glimpse at the “metaverse” CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently been touting as "the successor to the mobile internet" and the future of his now–$354 billion company. He's described it as “an embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at,” which is evidently a fancy euphemism for attending a virtual work meeting via Facebook’s $299-plus Oculus virtual reality headset with a bunch of colleagues.

This is the bloody cutting edge, the vanguard of the fast-approaching next phase of our digital lives, a real-world manifestation of techno-optimism.

And it’s...work meetings.


Twitter: @disclosetv


This raises two grim possibilities. The first is the sad realization that science fiction icon Neal Stephenson’s metaverse — a collision of the physical and virtual in a shared online space — is a sad little office veal-penned in by floating whiteboards. The metaverse is the officeverse, and office work is boring. Meetings are boring. A large corpus of popular art is devoted to this concept.

The second is that like so many innovations touted as magnificent, world-changing shifts, this “embodied internet” that Zuckerberg is peddling is more of a sad-trombone “neat” than a Jobsian “BOOM.” We were promised flying cars and a VR whale jumping out of a basketball court. What we got is just another way to attend the work meetings we’re already sick of attending.

It’s “cool,” it looks pretty fun, I bet it’s nice to use. Is it life-changing? Mind-blowing? I don’t know. “A different kind of productivity experience” is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of “metaverse.”

Earlier this spring Facebook revealed a wearable wrist device and glasses that could decipher neuron impulses from your brain to your hand. This was some very cool sci-fi stuff! We want the full experience! I want Facebook to steal my DNA and do something actually fucked up and weird and bad! Clone my ass, Zuck! Send my roboclones to fight in a space war against the Boston Dynamics dog robots while I bathe in a pod of goo! I want THAT. I don’t want more work meetings. No one wants more meetings. Please, sometimes just a phone call works.





Twitter: @RMac18


Andrew Bosworth, AR/VR executive at Facebook and leader of the new “metaverse” team, told the Verge, “I think it might be the most intense VR application that exists, in terms of how much we’re trying to put every bell and whistle from the headset into the experience you’re using.” There’s just something sad about the most ambitious and “intense” VR experience being a slightly better way to discuss the Q2 TPS reports.

A common criticism of Facebook’s forays into new technologies is the company’s shoddy track record on privacy. If we can’t trust Facebook with social media profiles used mainly for wishing high school friends happy birthday, how can we trust it not to abuse the smart cameras we install in our homes, or the headsets we strap to our faces? If the idea of Facebook processing video of your conversations with your family makes you squeamish, the idea of it processing work meetings where confidential or proprietary information might be discussed should give you pause.

But it’s possible there’s something that should fill us with even more dread and antipathy: What if Facebook’s “embodied internet,” its most invasive technology to date, establishing itself as the virtual reality intermediary for our everyday interactions, is just, well, kind of boring?




Katie Notopoulos is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Notopoulos writes about tech and internet culture and is cohost of the Internet Explorer podcast.

#OnlyFans' Ban On Adult Content Cost Sex Workers Followers And Money. Now The Company Says It's Changed Its Mind.

"Every single dime that company has made has revolved around porn whether they want to admit it or not ... I think it’s hilarious now watching them try to pick up the pieces from a vase they threw at the wall."

Clarissa-Jan LimBuzzFeed News Reporter



After facing enormous backlash from creators, subscribers, and the public, OnlyFans is reversing its upcoming ban on the sexually explicit content that propelled the platform to international success.

"We have secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community and have suspended the planned October 1 policy change," the company said in a tweet Wednesday morning.

OnlyFans said creators will receive an official notice about the reversal in an email.

It's unclear if the suspension of the policy change is temporary. "The proposed October 1, 2021 changes are no longer required due to banking partners' assurances that OnlyFans can support all genres of creators," OnlyFans said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

A subscription platform where fans can follow and pay for content from independent creators, OnlyFans became massively successful due to adult content. It was one of the only online platforms where sex workers could create and control their content while making money off of it.

Last Thursday, the company announced that sexually explicit content will be banned beginning Oct. 1, saying it had to "comply with the requests of banking partners and payout providers."

"The change in policy, we had no choice — the short answer is banks," CEO and founder Tim Stokely told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

OnlyFans' abrupt U-turn in that decision — and the world of uncertainty that the company has thrown creators into — has angered sex workers who say they have already seen an exodus in followers and income after the company's announcement of the ban.

Addie, who performs under the name xaddiebabyx, told BuzzFeed News that since OnlyFans' announcement last week, she has "lost countless fans, which is money [she uses] to put food on [her] table."

"They were so quick to throw us to the curb when sex workers are the reason OnlyFans has the huge platform they have today," she said. "It made me laugh reading their post today, thinking we were all going to come back to them, even though they have only suspended the policy change."

Omi, an adult content creator who said she has lost more than 500 followers and $4,000 in income on the platform in the past week, told BuzzFeed News she was irked that OnlyFans tweeted about the reversal before informing creators. Hours after the company's tweet, Omi said she still hadn't heard directly from the platform.

She said she does not trust OnlyFans to support sex workers given how evasive the company has been about the initial ban — but that has put her in a difficult position.

"The dilemma is that I’ve built a thriving five-figure business and made over half a million on this site, so it gives me major anxiety not knowing what to do," Omi said. "They have no idea how hard we worked to build these fan bases just to lose them overnight."

OnlyFans' behavior in the past week has not come as a surprise for adult content creators like Skylar Shark, considering how the platform has treated them in the past.

"Every single dime that company has made has revolved around porn whether they want to admit it or not," Shark added. "I think it’s hilarious now watching them try to pick up the pieces from a vase they threw at the wall."

But Shark will continue to use OnlyFans and hope that they do the right thing by sex workers.

"Because as a sex worker it becomes very hard to fully trust any site you work for at the end of the day," they said.


MORE ON THIS
OnlyFans Says It Will Ban Sexually Explicit Content Paige Skinner · Aug. 19, 2021


OnlyFans Creators Are Trying Not To Panic Paige Skinner · Aug. 20, 2021


Clarissa-Jan Lim is a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News. She is based in New York.






The FBI Is Selling A Surveillance Plane It Used On Black Lives Matter Protests

The aircraft watched protests in Washington, DC, in June last year and also flew over Baltimore in 2015 after Freddie Gray’s death.


Peter Aldhous BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 24, 2021, at 1:08 p.m. ET


Courtesy Ian J McGarrigle
The FBI's Cessna Citation jet

An advanced FBI spy plane that was used to watch Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, DC, last year is now up for sale.

A listing for the Cessna Citation jet has appeared on a website run by the General Services Administration to sell surplus federal government property. The aircraft carries a Wescam MX-20 camera turret, which is designed for high-altitude, persistent surveillance. With infrared sensors, it can monitor targets day and night, and in recent years has been used for some of the FBI’s most important surveillance missions.

In June 2020, a BuzzFeed News review of flight tracking data provided by the website Flightradar24 linked the plane to high-profile raids including the capture of gang members on drug and weapons charges in Northern California in 2018, drug trafficking busts in Puerto Rico in 2018 and 2019, and drug, firearms, and money laundering arrests in Alabama in 2019.

And though the FBI says it does not monitor activity protected by the First Amendment, BuzzFeed News also tracked the plane circling Washington, DC, in June 2020 during Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. We also found that the plane circled Baltimore in April and May 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray from injuries sustained in police custody.

This reporting was subsequently cited by three Democratic members of Congress in a letter to the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, asking it to investigate federal government surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests.


Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via ADS-B Exchange / Flightradar24 / Carto
Flights by the FBI's Cessna Citation jet last year from June 1 to 6

Since 2003, the Cessna Citation aircraft has been registered to the National Aircraft Leasing Corporation, identified as a front for the FBI by Matthew Aid, a former intelligence analyst, in his 2012 book Intel Wars. The address given in its registration with the Federal Aviation Administration is a UPS store in Greenville, Delaware.

Most of the FBI’s fleet of more than 120 surveillance aircraft, similarly registered to fictitious companies, are smaller propeller-driven planes that usually fly at altitudes of around 5,000 feet. The Cessna Citation jet is the only aircraft of its type registered to known FBI fronts, and it typically watched its targets from 15,000 feet or more, making it harder to spot from the ground.

The contact given for questions about the sale is Earl McEwen, an FBI special agent who testified in court about using an FBI plane to surveil the 2014 Bundy standoff, an armed encounter between federal agents and supporters of a Nevada rancher who refused to pay fees for grazing his cattle on federal land.

McEwen declined to answer any questions about the aircraft sale from BuzzFeed News.

The FBI did not respond to queries from BuzzFeed News, including whether there would be restrictions placed on who they would sell the surveillance aircraft to and whether the jet is being replaced. It is unclear why the agency is now selling the plane.



Via gsaauctions.gov
A screenshot of the GSA listing for the Cessna jet

Although the existence of its fleet of aircraft is well known, the FBI has revealed little information about individual planes and their activities. In 2016, the agency denied a Freedom of Information Act request from BuzzFeed News for flight and evidence logs from 27 of its planes, refusing even to confirm or deny whether the records existed. In September 2018, a federal judge ruled against our attempts to overturn that decision.

At the time of publication, no bids for the aircraft had yet been recorded on GSA Auctions, the website where the plane is listed for sale. The listing indicates that the plane is being sold with the Wescam MX-20, which could complicate the sale because it is deemed a sensitive technology covered by the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which requires approval from the State Department before it can be exported. It is unclear what other equipment remains on the aircraft, although a photograph of the interior suggests that controls for the camera have been removed from the cabin.

The plane could continue to be used for surveillance. But some prospective buyers may be more interested in converting it into a private jet, currently in hot demand as the COVID pandemic has driven wealthy people away from airlines. Jets of that age and model can retail for $1.2 million, according to Albert Heidinger, president of Raptor Aviation, a company in Port St. Lucie, Florida, that sells aircraft including ex-military planes. But he said it was hard to say what a buyer would offer the FBI for the plane given the high costs of refitting it for use as a private jet.

“This market is crazy, so no telling what it will actually bring,” Heidinger said.
Clearview AI Offered Free Facial Recognition Trials To Police All Around The World

As of February 2020, 88 law enforcement and government-affiliated agencies in 24 countries outside the United States have tried to use controversial facial recognition technology Clearview AI, according to a BuzzFeed News investigation.

LONG READ


Posted on August 25, 2021, at 10:33 a.m. ET

Law enforcement agencies and government organizations from 24 countries outside the United States used a controversial facial recognition technology called Clearview AI, according to internal company data reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

That data, which runs up until February 2020, shows that police departments, prosecutors’ offices, universities, and interior ministries from around the world ran nearly 14,000 searches with Clearview AI’s software. At many law enforcement agencies from Canada to Finland, officers used the software without their higher-ups’ knowledge or permission. After receiving questions from BuzzFeed News, some organizations admitted that the technology had been used without leadership oversight.

In March, a BuzzFeed News investigation based on Clearview AI’s own internal data showed how the New York–based startup distributed its facial recognition tool, by marketing free trials for its mobile app or desktop software, to thousands of officers and employees at more than 1,800 US taxpayer-funded entities. Clearview claims its software is more accurate than other facial recognition technologies because it is trained on a database of more than 3 billion images scraped from websites and social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Law enforcement officers using Clearview can take a photo of a suspect or person of interest, run it through the software, and receive possible matches for that individual within seconds. Clearview has claimed that its app is 100% accurate in documents provided to law enforcement officials, but BuzzFeed News has seen the software misidentify people, highlighting a larger concern with facial recognition technologies.

Based on new reporting and data reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Clearview AI took its controversial US marketing playbook around the world, offering free trials to employees at law enforcement agencies in countries including Australia, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.

To accompany this story, BuzzFeed News has created a searchable table of 88 international government-affiliated and taxpayer-funded agencies and organizations listed in Clearview’s data as having employees who used or tested the company’s facial recognition service before February 2020, according to Clearview’s data.
GO HERE


Some of those entities were in countries where the use of Clearview has since been deemed “unlawful.” Following an investigation, Canada’s data privacy commissioner ruled in February 2021 that Clearview had “violated federal and provincial privacy laws”; it recommended the company stop offering its services to Canadian clients, stop collecting images of Canadians, and delete all previously collected images and biometrics of people in the country.

In the European Union, authorities are assessing whether the use of Clearview violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a set of broad online privacy laws that requires companies processing personal data to obtain people’s informed consent. The Dutch Data Protection Authority told BuzzFeed News that it’s “unlikely” that police agencies’ use of Clearview was lawful, while France’s National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms said that it has received “several complaints” about Clearview that are “currently being investigated.” One regulator in Hamburg has already deemed the company’s practices illegal under the GDPR and asked it to delete information on a German citizen.

Despite Clearview being used in at least two dozen other countries, CEO Hoan Ton-That insists the company’s key market is the US.

“While there has been tremendous demand for our service from around the world, Clearview AI is primarily focused on providing our service to law enforcement and government agencies in the United States,” he said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “Other countries have expressed a dire need for our technology because they know it can help investigate crimes, such as, money laundering, financial fraud, romance scams, human trafficking, and crimes against children, which know no borders.”

In the same statement, Ton-That alleged there are “inaccuracies contained in BuzzFeed’s assertions.” He declined to explain what those might be and did not answer a detailed list of questions based on reporting for this story.

Clearview AI has created a powerful facial recognition tool and marketed it to police departments and government agencies. The company has never disclosed the entities that have used its facial recognition software, but a confidential source provided BuzzFeed News with data that appeared to be a list of agencies and companies whose employees have tested or actively used its technology.

Using that data, along with public records and interviews, we have created a searchable database of internationally based taxpayer-funded entities, including law enforcement agencies, prosecutor’s offices, universities, and interior ministries. We have included only those agencies for which the data shows that at least one associated individual ran at least one facial recognition scan as of February 2020.

The database has limitations. Clearview has neither verified nor disputed the underlying data, which The data begins in 2018 and ends in February 2020, so it does not account for any activity after that time or for any additional organizations that may have started using Clearview after February 2020.

Not all searches corresponded to an investigation, and some agencies told us that their employees had merely run test searches to see how well the technology worked. BuzzFeed News created search ranges based on data that showed how many times individuals at a given organization ran photos through Clearview.

We found inaccuracies in the data, including organizations with misspelled or incomplete names, and we moved to correct those issues when they could be confirmed. If we were not able to confirm the existence of an entity, we removed it.

BuzzFeed News gave every agency or organization in this database the opportunity to comment on whether it had used Clearview’s technology and whether the software had led to any arrests.

Of the 88 entities in this database:
36 said they had employees who used or tried Clearview AI.
Officials at 9 of those organizations said they were unaware that their employees had signed up for free trials until questions from BuzzFeed News or our reporting partners prompted them to look.
Officials at another 3 entities at first denied their employees had used Clearview but later determined that some of them had.
10 entities declined to answer questions as to whether their employees had used Clearview.
12 organizations denied any use of Clearview.
30 organizations did not respond to requests for comment.

Responses from the agencies, including whether they denied using Clearview’s technology or did not respond to requests for comment, are included in the table.

Just because an agency appears on the list does not mean BuzzFeed News was able to confirm that it actually used the tool or that its officials approved its employees’ use of Clearview.

By searching this database, you affirm that you understand its limitations.


According to a 2019 internal document first reported by BuzzFeed News, Clearview had planned to pursue “rapid international expansion” into at least 22 countries. But by February 2020, the company’s strategy appeared to have shifted. “Clearview is focused on doing business in the USA and Canada,” Ton-That told BuzzFeed News at that time.

Two weeks later, in an interview on PBS, he clarified that Clearview would never sell its technology to countries that “are very adverse to the US,” before naming China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Since that time, Clearview has become the subject of media scrutiny and multiple government investigations. In July, following earlier reporting from BuzzFeed News that showed that private companies and public organizations had run Clearview searches in Great Britain and Australia, privacy commissioners in those countries opened a joint inquiry into the company for its use of personal data. The investigation is ongoing, according to the UK's Information Commissioner’s Office, which told BuzzFeed News that “no further comment will be made until it is concluded.”

Canadian authorities also moved to regulate Clearview after the Toronto Star, in partnership with BuzzFeed News, reported on the widespread use of the company’s software in the country. In February 2020, federal and local Canadian privacy commissioners launched an investigation into Clearview, and concluded that it represented a “clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians.”

Earlier this year, those bodies officially declared Clearview’s practices in the country illegal and recommended that the company stop offering its technology to Canadian clients. Clearview disagreed with the findings of the investigation and did not demonstrate a willingness to follow the other recommendations, according to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Prior to that declaration, employees from at least 41 entities within the Canadian government — the most of any country outside the US — were listed in internal data as having used Clearview. Those agencies ranged from police departments in midsize cities like Timmins, a 41,000-person city where officers ran more than 120 searches, to major metropolitan law enforcement agencies like the Toronto Police Service, which is listed in the data as having run more than 3,400 searches as of February 2020.

Loations of entities that used Clearview AI.BuzzFeed News

A spokesperson for the Timmins Police Service acknowledged that the department had used Clearview but said no arrests were ever made on the basis of a search with the technology. The Toronto Police Service did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Clearview’s data show that usage was not limited to police departments. The public prosecutions office at the Saskatchewan Ministry of Justice ran more than 70 searches with the software. A spokesperson initially said that employees had not used Clearview but changed her response after a series of follow-up questions.

“The Crown has not used Clearview AI to support a prosecution.”

“After review, we have identified standalone instances where ministry staff did use a trial version of this software,” Margherita Vittorelli, a ministry spokesperson, said. “The Crown has not used Clearview AI to support a prosecution. Given the concerns around the use of this technology, ministry staff have been instructed not to use Clearview AI’s software at this time.”

Some Canadian law enforcement agencies suspended or discontinued their use of Clearview AI not long after the initial trial period or stopped using it in response to the government investigation. One detective with the Niagara Regional Police Service’s Technological Crimes Unit conducted more than 650 searches on a free trial of the software, according to the data.

“Once concerns surfaced with the Privacy Commissioner, the usage of the software was terminated,” department spokesperson Stephanie Sabourin told BuzzFeed News. She said the detective used the software in the course of an undisclosed investigation without the knowledge of senior officers or the police chief.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was among the very few international agencies that had contracted with Clearview and paid to use its software. The agency, which ran more than 450 searches, said in February 2020 that it used the software in 15 cases involving online child sexual exploitation, resulting in the rescue of two children.

In June, however, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada found that RCMP’s use of Clearview violated the country’s privacy laws. The office also found that Clearview had “violated Canada’s federal private sector privacy law by creating a databank of more than three billion images scraped from internet websites without users’ consent.” The RCMP disputed that conclusion.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a nonprofit group, said that Clearview had facilitated “unaccountable police experimentation” within Canada.

“Clearview AI’s business model, which scoops up photos of billions of ordinary people from across the internet and puts them in a perpetual police lineup, is a form of mass surveillance that is unlawful and unacceptable in our democratic, rights-respecting nation,” Brenda McPhail, director of the CCLA’s privacy, technology, and surveillance program, told BuzzFeed News.


Like a number of American law enforcement agencies, some international agencies told BuzzFeed News that they couldn’t discuss their use of Clearview. For instance, Brazil’s Public Ministry of Pernambuco, which is listed as having run more than 100 searches, said that it “does not provide information on matters of institutional security.”

But data reviewed by BuzzFeed News shows that individuals at nine Brazilian law enforcement agencies, including the country’s federal police, are listed as having used Clearview, cumulatively running more than 1,250 searches as of February 2020. All declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

The UK’s National Crime Agency, which ran more than 500 searches, according to the data, declined to comment on its investigative techniques; a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in early 2020 that the organization “deploys numerous specialist capabilities to track down online offenders who cause serious harm to members of the public.” Employees at the country’s Metropolitan Police Service ran more than 150 searches on Clearview, according to internal data. When asked about the department's use of the service, the police force declined to comment.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News also show that Clearview had a fledgling presence in Middle Eastern countries known for repressive governments and human rights concerns. In Saudi Arabia, individuals at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Advanced Studies (also known as Thakaa) ran at least 10 searches with Clearview. In the United Arab Emirates, people associated with Mubadala Investment Company, a sovereign wealth fund in the capital of Abu Dhabi, ran more than 100 searches, according to internal data.

Thakaa did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A Mubadala spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company does not use the software at any of its facilities.

Data revealed that individuals at four different Australian agencies tried or actively used Clearview, including the Australian Federal Police (more than 100 searches) and Victoria Police (more than 10 searches), where a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the technology was “deemed unsuitable” after an initial exploration.

“Between 2 December 2019 and 22 January 2020, members of the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) registered for a free trial of the Clearview AI facial recognition tool and conducted a limited pilot of the system in order to ascertain its suitability in combating child exploitation and abuse,” Katie Casling, an AFP spokesperson, said in a statement.

The Queensland Police Service and its homicide investigations unit ran more than 1,000 searches as of February 2020, based on data reviewed by BuzzFeed News. The department did not respond to requests for comment.

Clearview marketed its facial recognition system across Europe by offering free trials at police conferences, where it was often presented as a tool to help find predators and victims of child sex abuse.

In October 2019, law enforcement officers from 21 different nations and Interpol gathered at Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre in the Hague in the Netherlands to comb through millions of image and video files of victims intercepted in their home countries as part of a child abuse Victim Identification Taskforce. At the gathering, outside participants who were not Europol staff members presented Clearview AI as a tool that might help in their investigations.

After the two-week conference, which included specialists from Belgium, France, and Spain, some officers appear to have taken back home what they had learned and began using Clearview.


“The police authority did not know and had not approved the use.”



A Europol spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that it did not endorse the use of Clearview, but confirmed that “external participants presented the tool during an event hosted by Europol.” The spokesperson declined to identify the participants.

“Clearview AI was used during a short test period by a few employees within the Police Authority, including in connection with a course arranged by Europol. The police authority did not know and had not approved the use,” a spokesperson for the Swedish Police Authority told BuzzFeed News in a statement. In February 2021, the Swedish Data Protection Authority concluded an investigation into the police agency’s use of Clearview and fined it $290,000 for violating the Swedish Criminal Data Act.

Leadership at Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation only learned about employees’ use of Clearview after being contacted by BuzzFeed News for this story. After initially denying any usage of the facial recognition software, a spokesperson reversed course a few weeks later, confirming that officers had used the software to run nearly 120 searches.

“The unit tested a US service called Clearview AI for the identification of possible victims of sexual abuse to control the increased workload of the unit by means of artificial intelligence and automation,” Mikko Rauhamaa, a senior detective superintendent with Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, said in a statement.

Questions from BuzzFeed News prompted the NBI to inform Finland’s Data Protection Ombudsman of a possible data breach, triggering a further investigation. In a statement to the ombudsman, the NBI said its employees had learned of Clearview at a 2019 Europol event, where it was recommended for use in cases of child sexual exploitation. The NBI has since ceased using Clearview.

Data reviewed by BuzzFeed News shows that by early 2020, Clearview had made its way across Europe. Italy’s state police, Polizia di Stato, ran more than 130 searches, according to data, though the agency did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for France’s Ministry of the Interior told BuzzFeed News that they had no information on Clearview, despite internal data listing employees associated with the office as having run more than 400 searches.

“INTERPOL’s Crimes Against Children unit uses a range of technologies in its work to identify victims of online child sexual abuse,” a spokesperson for the international police force based in Lyon, France, told BuzzFeed News when asked about the agency’s more than 300 searches. “A small number of officers have used a 30-day free trial account to test the Clearview software. There is no formal relationship between INTERPOL and Clearview, and this software is not used by INTERPOL in its daily work."

Child sex abuse typically warrants the use of powerful tools in order to save the victims or track down the perpetrators. But Jake Wiener, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that many tools already exist in order to fight this type of crime, and, unlike Clearview, they don’t involve an unsanctioned mass collection of the photos that billions of people post to platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

“If police simply want to identify victims of child trafficking, there are robust databases and methods that already exist,” he said. “They don’t need Clearview AI to do this.”

Since early 2020, regulators in Canada, France, Sweden, Australia, the UK, and Finland have opened investigations into their government agencies’ use of Clearview. Some privacy experts believe Clearview violated the EU’s data privacy laws, known as the GDPR.

To be sure, the GDPR includes some exemptions for law enforcement. It explicitly notes that “covert investigations or video surveillance” can be carried out “for the purposes of the prevention, investigation, detection, or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, including the safeguarding against and the prevention of threats to public security…”

But in June 2020, the European Data Protection Board, the independent body that oversees the application of the GDPR, issued guidance that “the use of a service such as Clearview AI by law enforcement authorities in the European Union would, as it stands, likely not be consistent with the EU data protection regime.”

This January, the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Germany — a country where agencies had no known use of Clearview as of February 2020, according to data — went one step further; it deemed that Clearview itself was in violation of the GDPR and ordered the company to delete biometric information associated with an individual who had filed an earlier complaint.

In his response to questions from BuzzFeed News, Ton-That said Clearview has “voluntarily processed” requests from people within the European Union to have their personal information deleted from the company’s databases. He also noted that Clearview does not have contracts with any EU customers “and is not currently available in the EU.” He declined to specify when Clearview stopped being available in the EU.


CBS This Morning via YouTube / Via youtube.com
Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That

Christoph Schmon, the international policy director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BuzzFeed News that the GDPR adds a new level of complexity for European police officers who had used Clearview. Under the GDPR, police can’t use personal or biometric data unless doing so is “necessary to protect the vital interests” of a person. But if law enforcement agencies aren’t aware they have officers using Clearview, it's impossible to make such evaluations.

“If authorities have basically not known that their staff tried Clearview — that I find quite astonishing and quite unbelievable, to be honest,” he said. “It’s the job of law enforcement authorities to know the circumstances that they can produce citizen data and an even higher responsibility to be held accountable for any misuse of citizen data.”

"If authorities have basically not known that their staff tried Clearview — that I find quite astonishing."

Many experts and civil rights groups have argued that there should be a ban on governmental use of facial recognition. Regardless of whether a facial recognition software is accurate, groups like the Algorithmic Justice League argue that without regulation and proper oversight it can cause overpolicing or false arrests.

“Our general stance is that facial recognition tech is problematic, so governments should never use it,” Schmon said. Not only is there a high chance that police officers will misuse facial recognition, he said, but the technology tends to misidentify people of color at higher rates than it does white people.

Schmon also noted that facial recognition tools don’t provide facts. They provide a probability that a person matches an image. “Even if the probabilities were engineered correctly, it may still reflect biases,” he said. “They are not neutral.”

Clearview did not answer questions about its claims of accuracy. In a March statement to BuzzFeed News, Ton-That said, “As a person of mixed race, ensuring that Clearview AI is non-biased is of great importance to me.” He added, “Based on independent testing and the fact that there have been no reported wrongful arrests related to the use of Clearview AI, we are meeting that standard.”

Despite being investigated and, in some cases banned around the world, Clearview’s executives appear to have already begun laying the groundwork for further expansion. The company recently raised $30 million, according to the New York Times, and it has made a number of new hires. Last August, cofounders Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, along with other Clearview executives, appeared on registration papers for companies called Standard International Technologies in Panama and Singapore.

In a deposition for an ongoing lawsuit in the US this year, Clearview executive Thomas Mulcaire shed some light on the purpose of those companies. While the subsidiary companies do not yet have any clients, he said, the Panama entity was set up to “potentially transact with law enforcement agencies in Latin America and the Caribbean that would want to use Clearview software.”

Mulcaire also said the newly formed Singapore company could do business with Asian law enforcement agencies. In a statement, Ton-That stopped short of confirming those intentions but provided no other explanation for the move.

“Clearview AI has set up two international entities that have not conducted any business,” he said. ●

CONTRIBUTED REPORTING: Ken Bensinger, Salvador Hernandez, Brianna Sacks, Pranav Dixit, Logan McDonald, John Paczkowski, Mat Honan, Jeremy Singer-Vine, Ben King, Emily Ashton, Hannah Ryan


MORE ON CLEARVIEW AI
How A Facial Recognition Tool Found Its Way Into Hundreds Of US Police Departments, Schools, And Taxpayer-Funded OrganizationsRyan Mac · April 6, 2021


Antonio Pequeño IV is a BuzzFeed News contributor

Contact Antonio Pequeño IV at antonio.pequeno@buzzfeed.com
Review: Sleek modern horror ‘Candyman’ has got quite a hook

By MARK KENNEDY

1 of 5

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a scene from "Candyman," directed by Nia DaCosta. (Parrish Lewis/Universal Pictures and MGM Pictures via AP)

There’s an urban legend that says if you repeat the name “Candyman” aloud five times in front of a mirror, you summon a hook-handed killer. After seeing Nia DaCosta’s film of the same name, you’ll never be tempted to do that. You might even not want anything sweet again. Heck, cancel Halloween.

Equal parts cerebral, political and gross-out, “Candyman” is a worthy addition to the library of top-notch social thrillers being built by Jordan Peele and it marks a stunning step forward for director DaCosta, who had just one indie under her belt, the well-received crime drama “Little Woods.”

“Candyman” — uh, oh, how many times has his name been typed by now? — is an unusual horror movie set in the luxury lofts and haughty art world of Chicago. It’s here that co-writers DaCosta, Peele and Win Rosenfeld can look at gentrification, police brutality, authenticity, myth and Black identity.


  
This image released by Universal Pictures shows Michael Hargrove as Sherman Fields in a scene from "Candyman," directed by Nia DaCosta. (Universal Pictures and MGM Pictures via AP)

It stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony, a visual artist struggling to live up to his billing as “the great Black hope of the Chicago arts scene of tomorrow.” He and his girlfriend, gallery owner Brianna (a wonderful Teyonah Parris) live a life of wealth and privilege, sipping Moscato in their gleaming duplex.

Prodded to create more gritty work, Anthony finds an odd kind of muse in the Candyman, who it is said roamed Chicago’s notoriously dangerous Cabrini-Green housing projects making poorly behaving children scared straight.

The myth goes that the Candyman was a Black artist who fell in love with a white woman he was hired to paint. Her prejudiced father hired hooligans to cut off his hand and smear his body with honey so he would be stung to death by bees. Then they burned him.

The tale is told to Anthony by a Cabrini-Green laundromat owner (Colman Domingo, superb) and yet in this telling the Boogeyman isn’t a vengeful demon meant to keep kids in line, but a victim. Candyman is actually an innocent scapegoat, a way to process a system of white oppression.

Peele has described this new riff as a “spiritual sequel” to the original 1992 “Candyman,” which was written and directed by Bernard Rose. In some nice touches, Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd, who were stars of the first film, have roles here, and Vanessa A. Williams appears in both films as the same character, Anne-Marie McCoy, Anthony’s mom.

The filmmakers use fabulous paper puppets to tell aspects of the past and have a recurring motif of bees and mirrors. “Candyman” gets progressively more filthy as it unspools, going from gleaming granite countertops in elegantly lit and airy kitchens to grimy, muddy abandoned and graffiti-scarred projects.


This image released by Universal Pictures shows Colman Domingo in a scene from "Candyman," directed by Nia DaCosta. 
(Parrish Lewis/Universal Pictures and MGM Pictures via AP)    
EASTER EGG; CANDYMAN IS A SHORT STORY BY CLIVE BARKER

There are more than a few stunning scenes, including the camera steadily pulling away from a well-appointed apartment at night while the woman in it grapples with the Candyman, and one in a girls’ bathroom that is terrifying for the fragments that it doesn’t show.

DaCosta can make a stroll down a well-lit, modern and clean hallway somehow creepy. This is confident, smart filmmaking. There’s a stunning scene in which the Candyman mirrors his prey’s movements and one in an elevator where blood droplets create their own horror-inside-horror.

Anthony’s newly unlocked passion to use the Candyman as fuel for his paintings — “I feel really connected to this. I’ve never been this clear before,” he says to his girlfriend — sends him spinning into madness and into his own past, unlocking secrets and fate.

There are parts of the plot that seem undeveloped or vestigial, like the girlfriend’s personal history handling artists on the edge — but “Candyman” — oh, no, that’s too many times, he’ll be here soon — is a jolt of macabre adrenaline. Hopefully, it’ll get a lot of buzz.

“Candyman,” a Universal Pictures release on Friday, is rated R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references. Running time: 91 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

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MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

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Online: https://www.universalpictures.com/movies/candyman

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
THE RETURN OF RUBBER DUCKY
Giant rubber ducky takes flight; where will it land next?
August 24, 2021

A giant rubber ducky floats in Belfast Harbor, Tuesday, Aug, 17, 2021, in Belfast, Maine. Harbor Master Katherine Given says it's a mystery who put it there, but that the 25-foot-tall duck doesn't pose a navigational hazard so there's no rush to shoo it away. 
(New England Cable News/Kenn Tompkins via AP)


BELFAST, Maine (AP) — A 25-foot inflatable duck named Joy disappeared over the weekend, as mysteriously as it arrived, after bringing days of delight to a seaside Maine community.

The rubber ducky was removed from the harbor sometime Saturday, likely because of concerns about Tropical Storm Henri, Belfast Harbor Master Katherine Given was quoted as saying in the Bangor Daily News.

Despite the weather concerns, Given said, people were upset to see the duck leave the harbor.

The duck’s arrival in the harbor two weekends ago was, and remains, a mystery. But Given said she received an anonymous letter from someone claiming to be responsible.

“JOY simply is fowl play. In this day in age of such bitter divisiveness in our country, we wanted to put forth a reminder of our commonalities instead of our differences,” the letter said. “Nothing embodies childhood more than being in a warm bath with your rubber ducky – the joy of not having a care in the world other than having to remember to wash behind our ears.”

Will the ducky return? That’s not known — but the letter alluded to the duck landing somewhere else after Belfast.
One last zinger: Dorothy Parker’s headstone unveiled in NYC
August 24, 2021

FILE - Author and poet Dorothy Parker is shown in an undated photo. Writer, humorist and civil rights supporter Dorothy Parker died in 1967 but it wasn't until 2020 that her ashes found a final resting place. The New York Post reports that a memorial ceremony, held on Monday, Aug. 23, 2021, at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York, unveiled a headstone at her family's plot where her ashes are buried. (AP Photo, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Dorothy Parker died in 1967, but it was not until last year that her ashes found a final resting place.

Now, at a memorial ceremony at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, her headstone has been unveiled at the family plot where ashes of the writer, humorist and civil rights supporter are buried, the New York Post reported.

Born in 1893 in New York, Parker wrote poems, short stories and theater and literary reviews for magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She was famous for one-liners such as, “The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue” and “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
















She died without leaving instructions on what to do with her remains but left her estate, along with the right to collect future royalties, to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom she had never met.

When King was assassinated, her estate transferred to the NAACP, which laid her ashes to rest in a garden outside their Baltimore headquarters in 1988. Before that, her remains had been held for years at a crematorium and in an attorney’s filing cabinet.

After much wrangling, the NAACP agreed with Parker’s relatives to relocate the ashes to New York as the organization moved its headquarters to Washington. The ashes were reburied in the cemetery, which is also the resting place of many city luminaries, last year.



A jazz band played at the ceremony Monday, which was originally scheduled to take place on Parker’s birthday on Sunday but was delayed by Tropical Storm Henri.

“This is finally her homecoming to her beloved New York City,” Kevin Fitzpatrick, president of the Dorothy Parker Society, told the newspaper.

Parker’s relatives attended the memorial, where those gathered read from Parker’s work and some poured gin, her beverage of choice, on the grave.

The headstone is carved with a poem of Parker’s written in 1925 that reads: “Leave for her a red young rose; Go your way, and save your pity; She is happy, for she knows that her dust is very pretty.”

Dorothy Parker Society | Official Dorothy Parker Site ...

https://dorothyparker.com

2021-08-03 · Dorothy Parker has come home to New York. On August 22–the 127th anniversary of her birth–the poet’s cremains were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx beside her parents and grandparents. In a small private ceremony witnessed by less than 12 people, the urn containing Mrs. Parker’s cremains ended a 53-year odyssey.

ISRAEL SUPPLIED SAUDI ARABIA
Report finds NSO Group’s spyware used on Bahraini activists

By ALAN SUDERMAN
August 24, 2021

FILE - This Oct. 30, 2019, file photo show the Oregon State Treasury office in Tigard, Ore. Oregon was Novalpina's first major investor. Stephen Peel and Stefan Kowski, two founding Novalpina Capital partners, showed up at Oregon treasury offices in the Portland suburb of Tigard in November 2017 to make a pitch to the Oregon Investment Council, which oversees the state's $90 billion pension fund. Novalpina Capital has been saddled with both an internal dispute among its founding partners and an explosive report showing NSO Group's spyware has been widely misused around the globe. 
(AP Photo/Andrew Selsky, File)


RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Nine activists from Bahrain had their iPhones hacked by advanced spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire firm, a cybersecurity watchdog reported on Tuesday.

Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said NSO Group’s Pegasus malware successfully hacked the phones between June 2020 and February 2021. Those reportedly hacked included members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and two political dissidents living in exile. At least one of the activists lived in London when the hacking occurred, Citizen Lab said.

Citizen Lab said it has “high confidence” that at least four of the activists were hacked by the Bahraini government, which has a history of using commercially available spyware.

One of the activists targeted is Moosa Mohammed, who said he was previously a victim of spyware, in 2012.


“When I fled torture and persecution in Bahrain, I thought I would find safety in London but have continued to face surveillance and physical attacks by Gulf regimes,” he said.

The government of Bahrain, a tiny island kingdom off the coast of Saudi Arabia that’s home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, has a long history of suppressing dissent. Bahrain’s National Communication Centre dismissed Citizen Lab’s findings as “misguided” and said in a statement the country is committed to safeguarding individual rights and freedoms.

NSO Group said in a statement that it had not yet seen the report, but questioned Citizen Lab’s methods and motives. “If NSO receives reliable information related to the misuse of the system, the company will vigorously investigate the claims and act accordingly,” the company said.

Citizen Lab found that in some instances the malware infected targeted iPhones without the users taking any action — what’s known as a zero-click vulnerability.

Bill Marczak of Citizen Lab said the exploits worked against a recent versions of the iPhone’s operating system, adding that there’s ”no indication that the bugs exploited have been fixed.”

Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, said such attacks are costly and often have a short shelf life. “They are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users,” he said in a statement, adding that Apple constantly adds new protections for its devices and data.

The new report is the latest unwelcome news for NSO Group. The firm was the focus of recent reports by a media consortium that found the company’s spyware tool Pegasus was used in several instances of successful or attempted phone hacks of business executives, human rights activists and others around the world.

Those investigations, based on leaked data obtained by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International, sparked widespread condemnation of the company.

Last month around 1,000 protesters in Hungary’s capital demanded answers to allegations that the country’s right-wing government used Pegasus to secretly monitor critical journalists, lawyers and business figures. India’s parliament also erupted in protests as opposition lawmakers accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of using NSO Groups’ product to spy on opponents and others.


France is also trying to get to the bottom of allegations that President Emmanuel Macron and members of his government may have been targeted in 2019 by an unidentified Moroccan security service using Pegasus. Morocco, a key French ally, denied those reports and is taking legal action to counter allegations implicating the North African kingdom in the spyware scandal.

Facebook is currently suing NSO Group in U.S. federal court for allegedly targeting some 1,400 users of its encrypted messaging service WhatsApp with highly sophisticated spyware. That includes users in Bahrain, Facebook said.

Human rights experts working with the United Nations recently called on countries to pause the sale and transfer of spyware and other surveillance technology until they set rules governing its use, with the aim of ensuring that it won’t impinge upon human rights.
THE ALL VOLUNTEER WORKING CLASS MILITARY
`Was it worth it?′ A fallen Marine and a war’s crushing end

By CLAIRE GALOFARO and RUSS BYNUM

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Gretchen Catherwood sits in her home in Springville, Tenn., on Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. Her son, 19-year-old Alec, was killed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban in 2010. She and her husband are creating a retreat space, Darkhorse Lodge, for veterans up the road from their home. (AP Photo/Karen Pulfer Focht)

SPRINGVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — She was folding a red sweater when she heard a car door slam, went to the window and realized that a moment she always imagined would kill her was about to be made real: three Marines and a Navy chaplain were walking toward her door, and that could only mean one thing.

She put her hand on the blue stars she’d stuck next to the front door, a symbol meant to protect her son, Marine Lance Cpl. Alec Catherwood, who had left three weeks before for the battlefields of Afghanistan.

And then, as she recalls it, she lost her mind. She ran wildly through the house. She opened the door and told the men they couldn’t come inside. She picked up a flower basket and hurled it at them. She screamed so loud and for so long the next day she could not speak.

“I just wanted them not to say anything,” said Gretchen Catherwood, “because if they said it, it would be true. And, of course, it was.”

Her 19-year-old son was dead, killed fighting the Taliban on Oct. 14, 2010.

As she watched the news over the last two weeks, it felt like that day happened 10 minutes ago. The American military pulled out of Afghanistan, and all they had fought so hard to build seemed to collapse in an instant. The Afghan military put down its weapons, the president fled and the Taliban took over. As thousands crushed into the Kabul airport desperate to escape, Gretchen Catherwood felt like she could feel in her hands the red sweater she’d been folding the moment she learned her son was dead.

Her phone buzzed with messages from the family she’s assembled since that horrible day: the officer who’d dodged the flowerpot; the parents of others killed in battle or by suicide since; her son’s fellow fighters in the storied 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, nicknamed the Darkhorse Battalion, that endured the highest rate of causalities in Afghanistan. Many of them call her “Ma.”

Outside of this circle, she’d seen someone declare “what a waste of life and potential” on Facebook. Friends told her how horrible they’d felt that her son had died in vain. As she exchanged messages with the others who’d paid the price of war, she worried its end was forcing them to question whether all they had seen and all they had suffered had mattered at all.

“There are three things I need you to know,” she said to some. “You did not fight for nothing. Alec did not lose his life for nothing. I will be here for you no matter what, until the day I die. Those are the things I need you to remember.”

In the woods behind her house, the Darkhorse Lodge is under construction. She and her husband are building a retreat for combat veterans, a place where they can gather and grapple together with the horrors of war. There are 25 rooms, each named after one of the men killed from her son’s battalion. The ones who made it home have become their surrogate sons, she said. And she knows of more than a half-dozen who have died from suicide.

“I am fearful of what this might do to them psychologically. They’re so strong and so brave and so courageous. But they also have really, really big hearts. And I feel that they might internalize a lot and blame themselves,” she said. “And oh God, I hope they don’t blame themselves.”

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The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment deployed in the fall of 2010 from Camp Pendleton, California, sending 1,000 U.S. Marines on what would become one of the bloodiest tours for American service members in Afghanistan.

The Darkhorse Battalion spent six months battling Taliban fighters in the Sangin district of Helmand province. An area of green fields and mud compounds, Sangin remained almost entirely in the Taliban’s control nearly a decade into the U.S.-led war. Fields of lush poppies used in narcotics gave the militants valued income they were determined to hold.

When the Marines arrived, white Taliban flags flew from most buildings. Loudspeakers installed to broadcast prayers were used to taunt U.S. forces. Schools had closed.

The Marines came under fire as soon as a helicopter dropped them outside their patrol base.

“When the bird landed, we were already getting shot at,” recalled former Sgt. George Barba of Menifee, California. “We run, we get inside and I remember our gunnery sergeant telling us: `Welcome to Sangin. You just got your combat action ribbon.’”

Snipers lurked in the trees. Fighters armed with rifles hid behind mud walls. Homemade bombs turned roads and canals into deathtraps.

Sangin was Alec Catherwood’s first combat deployment. He had enlisted in the Marines while still in high school, went to boot camp shortly after graduation, then was assigned to a 13-man squad led by former Sgt. Sean Johnson.

Johnson was impressed by Catherwood’s professionalism — physically fit, mentally tough and always on time.

“He was only 19, so that was extra special,” Johnson said. “Some are still just trying to figure out how to tie their boots and not get yelled at.”

Catherwood also made them laugh. He carried around a small, stuffed animal he used as a prop for jokes.

Barba recalled Catherwood’s first helicopter ride during training, and how he was “smiling ear-to-ear and he’s swinging his feet like he’s a little kid on a highchair.”

Former Cpl. William Sutton of Yorkville, Illinois, swore Catherwood would crack jokes even during a firefight.

“Alec, he was a shining light in that darkness,” said Sutton, who was shot multiple times fighting in Afghanistan. “And then they took it from us.”

On Oct. 14, 2010, after a late night standing watch outside their patrol base, Catherwood’s squad headed out to assist fellow Marines under attack, who were running low on ammunition.

They crossed open fields, using irrigation canals for cover. After sending half his squad safely ahead, Johnson tapped Catherwood on the helmet and said: “Let’s go.”

After running just three steps, he said, gunfire from ambushing Taliban fighters sounded behind them. Johnson looked down and saw a bullet hole in his pants where he had been shot in the leg. Then came a deafening explosion — one of the Marines had stepped on a hidden bomb. Johnson blacked out momentarily, waking up in the water.

Another explosion followed. Looking to his left, Johnson saw Catherwood floating facedown. It was obvious, he said, that the young Marine was dead.

Explosions during the ambush killed another Marine, Lance Cpl. Joseph Lopez of Rosamond, California, and badly wounded another.

Back in the United States, Staff Sergeant Steve Bancroft began an excruciating two-hour drive toward Catherwood’s parents’ house in northern Illinois. He’d served seven months in Iraq before he became a casualty assistance officer, tasked with notifying families of a death on the battlefield.

“I’d never wish that on anybody, I can’t express that enough: I do not wish looking a mom and dad in the face and telling them their only son is gone,” said Bancroft, who is now retired.

He was stoic when he had to be, as he escorted families to Dover, Delaware, to watch coffins be rolled out of a plane. But when he was alone, he cried. And he still weeps when he thinks about the moment he arrived at the home of Gretchen and Kirk Catherwood.

They laugh now about the hurled flowerpot. He still regularly talks to them and other sets of parents he notified. Though he never met Alec, he feels like he knows him.

“Their son was such a hero, it’s hard to explain, but he sacrificed more than 99% of the people in this world would ever think of doing,” he said.

“Was it worth it? We lost so many people. It’s hard to think about how many we’ve lost.” he said.

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Gretchen Catherwood keeps the cross her son was wearing on a chain around her bedpost with his dog tags.

Alongside it hangs a glass bead, blown with the ashes of another young Marine: Cpl. Paul Wedgewood, who made it home.

The Darkhorse Battalion returned to California in April 2011. After months of intense fighting, they’d largely seized Sangin from the Taliban’s grip. Leaders of the provincial government could move about safely. Children, including girls, returned to school.

It came at a heavy price. In addition to the 25 who perished, more than 200 returned home wounded, many with lost limbs, others with scars harder to see.

Wedgewood had trouble sleeping when he finished his four-year enlistment and left the Marine Corps in 2013. As he slept less, he drank more.

A tattoo on his upper arm showed a sheet of scroll paper bearing the names of four Marines who died in Sangin. Wedgewood considered reenlisting, but told his mother: “If I stay, I think it’ll kill me.”

Instead, Wedgewood enrolled in college back home in Colorado, but soon lost interest. A welding program at a community college proved a better fit.

Wedgewood had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He was taking medication, participating in therapy.

“He was very engaged in working on his mental health,” said the Marine’s mother, Helen Wedgewood. “He was not a neglected veteran.”

Still, he struggled. On the Fourth of July, Wedgewood would take his dog camping in the woods to avoid fireworks. He quit a job he liked after a backfiring machine caused him to dive to the floor.

Five years after Sangin, things appeared to be looking up. Wedgewood was preparing for a new job that would take him back to Afghanistan as a private security contractor. He seemed to be in a good place.

After a night of drinking with his roommates, Wedgewood didn’t show up for work on Aug. 23, 2016. A roommate later found him dead in his bedroom. He had shot himself. He was 25 years old.

He left a short note.

“He basically said that he loved us, but he was tired,” Helen Wedgewood said.

She considers her son and others who took their own lives to be casualties of war every bit as much as those killed in action.

When the Taliban swept back into control of Afghanistan just before the fifth anniversary of her son’s death, she felt relief that a war that left more than 2,400 Americans dead and more than 20,700 wounded had finally come to an end. But there was also sadness that gains made by the Afghan people — especially women and children — may be temporary.

“As a mom, this kind of stabs you, because would he still be around, would any of these young men still be around if this whole war hadn’t happened?” she said. “But I try to gently correct people when they say this was a waste or this was all for nothing. Because that’s not true. We don’t know what impacts it’s had on the safety of our country, on the safety of the Afghan people.”

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Some who served with the Darkhorse Battalion are having a hard time seeing it any way other than that their efforts, their blood and the lives of their fallen friends were all for nothing.

“I’m starting to feel like how the Vietnam vets felt. There was no purpose to it whatsoever,” said Sutton, 32, who now works in the veterans services office of a county outside Chicago, helping military vets get care.

“We were able to hold our head up high and say we went to the last Taliban stronghold and we gave them hell,” Sutton said, “only for it all to be taken away. In the blink of an eye.”

Barba, 34, works as a private security guard near Los Angeles. He and his wife are expecting their first child. He said he’s had trouble sorting his feelings about the bleak news from Afghanistan. His wife recently woke to Barba screaming in his sleep. “I think your nightmares are back,” she told him.

“It really is weird,” Barba said. “I’ve seen my guys get mad. I’ve seen my guys get frustrated. But not like this. This is like somebody spit in their face.”

Johnson, 34, works as a commercial diver in Florida. He said the U.S. should have acknowledged years ago that the Afghan security forces Americans trained and equipped would never be able to defend the country on their own.

“My personal opinion, yeah, we probably should have pulled out years and years ago,” Johnson said. “If you’re not going to win the damn thing, what are you doing there?”

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A few months ago, Gretchen Catherwood was painting the cabins that will become the Darkhorse Lodge. It was dark, still without electricity and no cell service, so it was quiet. She felt suddenly like she could feel her son and his 24 fallen comrades. She could almost see their faces.

“It’s a place where I can feel like they’re together,” she said, “and that they are still caring for their brothers.”

The Catherwoods moved out of their home in Illinois. Every time she walked to the front door, Gretchen remembered those four men arriving with the news. She couldn’t bear it anymore.

The gold star pins she wore everyday on her chest kept breaking. She’d always disliked tattoos and hassled her son when he got one as a Marine. But then she found herself at a tattoo parlor. She had his name inked on her arm, and the shape of a gold star pin put permanently on her chest, just above her heart, so she’d never take it off again.

She could no longer care for her son, she said, but she could for those who made it home. She and her husband moved to the woods in Tennessee and got to work on the Darkhorse Lodge.

They fashioned their logo after the battalion’s mascot, a fierce-looking horse, facing left, its mane sharp like a serrated knife and its eyes squinted for battle. The artist who drew theirs softened its edges and turned it to the right, facing toward a future after war.

They raised a million dollars, mostly in small donations. One woman sends a check for $2 every month. Bancroft, the officer who notified her of her son’s death, donates every year. The obituary for one soldier who died by suicide asked for donations to the Darkhorse Lodge in his memory, and checks flooded the Catherwoods’ mailbox.

They hope to open next summer and offer free stays for any combat veteran from any war or branch of the military who might benefit from time in the woods, where the only conflict is among the dozens of hummingbirds fighting over the feeders on her front porch.

She is hopeful that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan means no one else will die on a battlefield there. But she also worries that it might rattle the vets who made it home, and who might already be struggling to make sense of what happened there and why.

“That’s a constant fear, it’s been my fear since they got back but now it’s even worse,” she said. “They experienced things that 99% of the country never will. I’ve never watched a friend die. I’ve never fought to the death. We are losing these people at a frightening, frightening rate to suicides, and we can’t afford to lose one more.”

She and her husband don’t believe that the chaotic end honors their son’s service, and are particularly troubled that some of the Afghan interpreters and others who helped the military for years might not make it out alive. But they also can’t imagine how it might have ended any other way, had the United States stayed in Afghanistan another year or five or 20.

Part of Alec Catherwood remains there, and for a while that bothered his mother.

When he was alive, she loved to touch his face. He had baby soft skin and when she put her hands on his cheeks, this big tough Marine felt like her little boy. The military did an honorable job making him look whole, she said. But when she touched his cheek as he laid in the casket, she touched a part that had been reconstructed - it wasn’t really him.

“That used to be much harder than it is now,” she said. “Now, it’s like, damn straight, he’s still there. He’s always going to have a presence there, flipping off the Taliban.”

Good things will grow where he is, she likes to think.

“He’s part of their dirt, their soil, he’s part of the Earth there, he is forever there.”

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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia.

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

EXPLAINER: Is Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano going to erupt again?

By AUDREY McAVOY

This Aug. 13, 2021 photograph provided by the U.S. Geological Survey shows the crater of Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island in Hawaii National Park, Hawaii. Geologists on Tuesday, Aug. 24 said they had detected a swarm of earthquakes at the volcano, though it is not erupting. (Drew Downs/U.S. Geological Survey via AP)


HONOLULU (AP) — The ground at the summit of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has been rumbling and swelling in recent days, prompting scientists to warn that the mountain could once again disgorge lava. But there’s no indication an eruption is imminent. The volcano, which is among the world’s most active, has behaved similarly in the past without any magma breaking the surface.

Here’s an overview of the latest developments at Kilauea:

WHAT ACTIVITY ARE SCIENTISTS SEEING?

Scientists at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory on Monday noticed a surge of earthquakes and the ground swelling at the southern part of the crater at Kilauea’s summit. There are indications magma is shifting about a half-mile to a mile (1 to 2 kilometers) below the surface.

It’s not uncommon for Kilauea to have earthquakes, which could indicate rocks are moving. It’s also not unusual for the ground to swell as the heat from the sun and saturation from rain can cause the ground to expand and contract.

However, earthquakes and ground swelling at the same time may indicate magma is on the move.

“We get a lot of earthquakes here and we get a lot of deformation here, but the combination of the two makes us much more aware,” said Jefferson Chang, a geophysicist at the observatory, which is part of the U.S. Geological Survey.

There have been hundreds of earthquakes since Monday, striking as often as 25 times an hour. The strongest measured magnitude 3, with most coming in between magnitude 1 and 2 At these levels, the quakes are generally too small for people to notice. Chang said there haven’t been any reports of people feeling them.

WHERE IS THE ACTIVITY HAPPENING?


It’s occurring at the summit of Kilauea volcano, an uninhabited area within Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island. This is about 200 miles southeast of Honolulu, which is on a different island called Oahu

The site is miles from the nearest town. The park has close off this part of the summit to the public since 2008.

Ben Hayes, the park’s interpretation and education program manager, said the park is preparing for a potential eruption, but he said there’s nothing to be alarmed about. “It’s a natural process at one of the world’s most active volcanoes,” he said.

HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?


Chang said scientists observed activity in the same part of the summit in 2015. That episode lasted three days, and the volcano didn’t erupt. Just like this time, the ground swelled. One difference is that there were more earthquakes then.

The last time Kilauea erupted at the southern part of its caldera or crater was in 1974.

WHAT’S THE CURRENT SITUATION?

The earthquake swarm stopped about 4:30 a.m. Monday. The ground swelling has also subsided. But the activity could return. Chang said sometimes there’s a lull in activity lasting a day or two.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO CHANGE THE ALERT LEVEL?


The observatory changed Kilauea’s volcano alert level to watch from advisory on Tuesday, meaning the mountain was showing heighted unrest with increased potential to erupt.

But scientists don’t know when that eruption may occur, if it does. If scientists believe a hazardous eruption is imminent, they will change the alert level to warning.

The observatory also changed the aviation color code to “orange,” alerting pilots that there’s potential for an eruption and they may need to avoid the area if one occurs.

HOW OFTEN HAS KILAUEA ERUPTED BEFORE?

Hawaiian chants and stories tell the stories of countless eruptions. In Hawaiian tradition, Kilauea is home to the volcano goddess Pele.

Kilauea has erupted 34 times since 1952. From 1983 to 2018, it erupted almost continuously, in some cases sending streams of lava that covered farms and homes. At the end of this decades-long eruption, Kilauea spewed lava from vents in a residential neighborhood on its eastern flank and destroyed more than 700 homes.

In December, Kilauea erupted at the crater, creating a lake with enough lava to fill 10 Hoover dams. That eruption ended in May.