CANADA HAS NO SECOND AMENDMENT

Mandatory minimum penalty for firing gun at house unconstitutional: Supreme Court

NO NEED WITH SCOC

Fri, January 27, 2023 



OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a mandatory minimum sentence of four years for firing a gun at a house is unconstitutional on the basis it could amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

In a companion judgment Friday, the top court said two other minimum sentences, both involving armed robbery offences, do not represent excessive punishment and are therefore constitutional.

The Supreme Court also affirmed and developed the framework for weighing challenges to the constitutionality of a mandatory minimum sentence under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms provision against cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

The first decision came in the case of Jesse Dallas Hills, who pleaded guilty to four charges stemming from a May 2014 incident in Lethbridge, Alta., in which he swung a baseball bat and shot at a car with a rifle, smashed the window of a vehicle and fired rounds into a family home.

Hills had consumed large amounts of prescription medication and alcohol and said he did not remember the events.

He argued the minimum four-year sentence in effect at the time for recklessly discharging a firearm into a house or other building violated the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

A judge agreed and Hills was sentenced to a term of 3 1/2 years, but the Alberta Court of Appeal overturned the finding of unconstitutionality and the sentence was increased to four years.

In allowing Hills's appeal, the Supreme Court said the mandatory minimum sentence was grossly disproportionate, given that a young person might fire a paintball gun at a house as part of a game.

"The mandatory minimum cannot be justified by deterrence and denunciation alone, and the punishment shows a complete disregard for sentencing norms," Justice Sheilah Martin wrote on behalf of a majority of the court.

"The mandatory prison term would have significant deleterious effects on a youthful offender and it would shock the conscience of Canadians to learn that an offender can receive four years of imprisonment for firing a paintball gun at a home."

In any event, the Liberal government repealed this particular mandatory minimum sentence, along with several others, after the appeal was heard.

In the companion judgment involving two other Alberta cases, the Supreme Court said mandatory minimum penalties for a pair of armed robbery offences did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

The first offence, robbery committed with a restricted or prohibited firearm, carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison.

The second, robbery with an ordinary firearm, carried a mandatory minimum sentence of four years at the time the appeal was heard, but this minimum sentence has since been repealed.

A majority of the Supreme Court said Parliament is entitled to enact mandatory minimum sentences that signal that a disregard for the life and safety of others in handling firearms is simply not acceptable.

There is also a need for general deterrence when a person endangers the safety of others in wielding a firearm, the court added.

The framework applicable to challenges of mandatory minimums under the Charter prohibition against cruel treatment requires a two-stage inquiry, the top court said.

First, a court must determine a fit and proportionate sentence for the offence in respect of the objectives and principles of sentencing in the Criminal Code.

The court must then ask whether the provision in question requires it to impose a sentence that is grossly disproportionate when compared to the fit and proportionate sentence, the Supreme Court said.

This exercise entails looking at the scope and reach of the offence, the effects of the penalty on the offender, and the penalty and its objectives.

Martin indicated the two-part assessment can focus on either the actual offender before the court or another individual in a "reasonably foreseeable" case — for instance, a young person firing a BB rifle or a paintball gun at a house.

"A reasonable hypothetical scenario needs to be constructed with care," she cautioned.

But Martin said the desire expressed by certain members of the Alberta Court of Appeal to excise the use of reasonably foreseeable scenarios from the court's framework is "completely contrary to both precedent and principle."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2023.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press

RENT IS INFLATION
Halifax sees highest year-over-year rent increase for a Canadian city, says CMHC

PROPERTY IS THEFT

Fri, January 27, 2023 



HALIFAX — With the average rent up 9.3 per cent, Halifax has had the highest year-over-year spike in the country for residential rental costs, says Canada's national housing agency.

The executive director of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia said the data is not surprising and that the impact of soaring rent is evident in the record number of Haligonians experiencing chronic homelessness.

As of Jan. 25, the association had identified 796 people in Halifax who had been without housing for more than six months, Michael Kabalen said in an interview Friday.

“That’s the highest we’ve ever seen,” Kabalen said, noting that prior to the pandemic, the association was reporting that about 250 people in Halifax were chronically homeless.

Released Thursday, the annual report of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation said the average rent for a two-bedroom residence in Halifax jumped 9.3 per cent between 2021 and 2022, hitting $1,449 per month. That rise is well above the national average increase of 5.6 per cent, which brought the average rent for a two-bedroom unit in Canada to $1,258 monthly.

Vacancy rates in Halifax were at one per cent as of October 2022, below the Canadian average of 1.9 per cent — the lowest national vacancy rate since 2001.

Kelvin Dnoro, a market analyst with the housing agency, said the "situation is dire" for low-income renters, who must compete for the limited housing options as just three per cent of total rental units in Halifax are considered affordable to the lowest 20 per cent income earners.

Kabalen agreed: “The constant conversation at our tables is that we can't find suitable housing for the clients.”

His group has partnered with the federal government to tackle homelessness by funding community-based housing support groups and using its growing portfolio of residential units to increase the housing supply. It is renting out about 160 units of varying affordability in the province, Kabalen said, adding that two new apartment builds in Dartmouth, N.S., are underway.

Dnoro said the biggest takeaway from the housing agency's annual report is that more rental housing is needed at all price points. In order to incentivize new residential builds in the current economic climate, he said, units will have to be rented at a higher cost to compensate for the effect of inflation on building expenses.

“We need much more new housing supply," he said, adding the focus of new builds shouldn’t be on a unit's price when it hits the market. "Because if there’s lots of supply on the market, they will have to bring down their prices in order to compete."

Like Halifax, neighbouring New Brunswick’s two biggest cities also saw an average rent rate increase above the national average. In Moncton, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment rose 6.4 per cent year-over-year, and in Saint John it rose 7.6 per cent.

In Newfoundland and Labrador, the average two-bedroom rent rose 4.2 per cent between 2021 and 2022, below the national average.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2023.

---

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

Lyndsay Armstrong, The Canadian Press

S. Dakota tribes seek disaster declaration in storm recovery


Fri, January 27, 2023



PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota’s congressional delegation wrote letters to President Joe Biden in support of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations’ requests for a major disaster declaration following winter storms that left six people dead.

The declaration would assist the tribes’ recovery from destruction that tribal leaders say could have been prevented if there had been more resources to assist people stranded by the December storms. The requests outline that the weather's severity blocked access to medical and heating supplies.

Both the Oglala Sioux and Rosebud Sioux tribes are asking for the declaration to address emergency costs and damages.

“The emergency operations conducted by the tribe reduced the storms’ impact and accelerated the recovery of tribal communities," U.S. Sens. John Thune and Mike Rounds, and U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson, wrote in a letter to Biden on Thursday. "Despite these efforts, a number of tribal members remained trapped in their homes and were unable to access necessary supplies.”

Amancai Biraben, The Associated Press

Saddle Lake Cree Nation Confirms Existence Of Unreported Mass Grave

Fri, January 27, 2023 

(ANNews) – A new report from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation-based Acimowin Opaspiw Society non-profit says it’s found evidence of “undocumented mass graves” at the former site of Blue Quills Indian Residential School.

The report, which was released Jan. 24, found that the majority of the student deaths occurred as a result of tuberculosis contracted from unpasteurized raw cow milk the students were given to drink.

One of the mass graves was accidentally uncovered in 2004. It took until 2022 to confirm it was an unmarked grave through ground penetrating radar, the report notes, adding that there are suspected to be two others.

The Blue Quills school moved three times over the duration of its existence. From 1890 to 1898 it was located in Lac La Biche, from 1898 to 1932 it was on Saddle Lake Cree nation, and then from 1932 to 1970 it operated out of St. Paul County.

AOS executive director Leah Redcrow’s family has a long history with the school, as outlined in the report’s preface. Three generations of her family were imprisoned at the school at each of its locations, starting with her great grandfather Edward Redcrow in Lac La Biche.

Her grandparents, Stanley and Ruby Redcrow were married at the Saddle Lake location in 1928, and then her parents, Alex and Sheila Redcrow wed in St. Paul in 1974, after her grandfather had taken over administration of the school.

She said prior to the summer of 2021, when members started inquiring about unmarked graves, she had no idea there was a residential school on reserve, which included the Sacred Heart Cemetery.

“Once I found out there was an actual residential school there, we got more disclosures from our community members about them finding body parts of children while excavating, because it’s used as a graveyard still,” Redcrow told the Alberta Native News.

The residential school on reserve was essentially a Catholic colony, with its own church, sawmill and rectory, in addition to the cemetery, she explained.

She said they are mass graves, rather than unmarked graves, because there are multiple people buried in one grave.

“There’s a bunch of clandestine graves of children,” said Redcrow. “We don’t know the exact amount yet because we’re still sifting through all the burial records.”

The grave that’s been uncovered is located about 200 metres north of the school grounds, she added.

Even when the school moved to St. Paul, the dead children would be transferred back to the reserve, without their parents’ knowledge.

The Archdiocese of St. Paul provided AOS with its documents from the residential school, which is how they were able to determine the cause of death, Redcrow said.

She said these children entered the school with a clean bill of health, according to to the records, and then would contract TB within a month.

“We discovered that the cause of that would be drinking unpasteurized raw milk from cattle. It’s quite dangerous to drink unpasteurized milk, because none of the bacteria is killed in the milk. The cattle were also not being tested for tuberculosis or any other diseases, and the children were required to drink three glasses of milk a day with their meal,” Redcrow explained.

She said AOS and the Archdiocese have collaborated closely to get an accurate picture of what occurred at Blue Quills.

“Without them, we would just be like everybody else and we would be totally lost. We wouldn’t have known who died. We wouldn’t have had a clue who any of these children’s bodies are that we’re finding in our cemetery,” Redcrow said, referring to the Archdiocese’s documentation as the “most vital piece of the investigation.”

She said collaborating with Church officials is an example of what reconciliation looks like in practice.

“The people who are there today are not responsible. It’s the people who are alive at that time period who are responsible, and they’re dead,” Redcrow said.

Jeremy Appel, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Alberta Native News

B.C. First Nations face complex, stressful choice: should school sites be excavated?


Fri, January 27, 2023




WILLIAMS LAKE, B.C. — The chief of the Williams Lake First Nation says he would support excavating possible unmarked graves at the site of the former St. Joseph's Mission residential school if that's what elders and the community decide is best.

But the decision is complex, involving dozens of other First Nations whose children also attended the institution, numerous landowners, potential DNA tests, multiple levels of government, the coroner and the RCMP.

All that is in addition to the anxiety Chief Willie Sellars said he has about ensuring there isn't more trauma for survivors if bodies are found.

"I really start stressing out when I start thinking about excavation," Sellars said in an interview.

"And we're going to get there, I would imagine, but it's not going to happen overnight."

The First Nation announced this week that 66 more "reflections," indicating possible graves, were found with radar and other methods during the second phase of its work around the site of the former Catholic-run school, 500 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

The nation announced in its first phase of searching last year that 93 potential graves were detected.

Chief Joe Alphonse, chair of the Tsilhqot’in National Government, which represents six Tsilhqot’in communities whose children attended St. Joseph’s Mission, said the nation would be open to having conversations about exhumation, but it could also issue a cease-and-desist order if it isn't properly involved.

Alphonse said their government wants more than just updates from the Williams Lake First Nation and should be "part of the planning and every aspect of doing any work" on the site.

Whitney Spearing, lead investigator on the project, said Wednesday during the announcement that there won't be confirmation that the "reflections" are human remains without excavation.

"It must be emphasized that no geophysical investigation can provide certainty into the presence of human remains," she said.

The nation has identified 48 First Nations whose children attended the institution while it was in operation between 1886 and 1981.

Sellars said they have started reaching out to have conversations about what's next.

"We're more than willing to sit down and discuss with any nation that is impacted and talk about next steps, and talk about inclusion, and talk about working together on these things," he said.

"But we haven't reached out and had that dialogue with all 48 of the communities that are impacted. We're getting there though."

Sellars said there is debate across the country about whether to leave remains in the ground or "bring them home."

"If you start talking about bringing kids home that are buried, then there's a topic of discussion around DNA and confirming where those kids came from," he said.

"And again, you just look at how complicated it gets. I really look forward to having those conversations with those communities, and having those conversations with the families that are impacted, moving forward into the future."

The discoveries at the Williams Lake site is one of several similar searches across the country since ground-penetrating radar located what are believed to be the remains of children at the site of the former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Sellars said the work that's been done at the St. Joseph's site is just "scratching the surface."

About 34 of the 782 hectares have so far been subjected to geophysical analysis.

More than six private landowners own parts of the properties, Sellars said.

He said the First Nation has a great relationship with the owners of the property searched in the first two phases and discussions have started on what Phase 3 could look like.

Sellars said a decision on exhuming possible remains will proceed carefully, so that it doesn't create more trauma.

"We're getting to a point right now where elders and survivors are starting to feel more comfortable about telling their story, because they're being empowered by the amount of support that we're seeing in our sacred fires, at our ceremonies, at our events," he said.

Alphonse said any protocols around exhuming would also have to take into consideration the beliefs of all First Nations involved.

"We're all First Nations, but we have our own spiritual beliefs and our own customs and protocols, and all of those things have to be honoured and respected," he said in an interview.

"The whole purpose of looking for these people is that they've been forgotten and now that's being addressed. But this is not just a Williams Lake First Nations issue."

Alphonse said Federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Marc Miller was "very disrespectful" when he tweeted support for the Williams Lake First Nation after the potential remains were announced without mentioning other First Nations.

"The other nations that had students go to that residential school, now they're being forgotten in this whole process. So, they're adding more trauma to the situation," he said.

Williams Lake First Nation is holding a sacred fire until Saturday, as a way of honouring those who attended the school. Sellars said multiple First Nations were represented at a drum circle as part of the ceremonies.

"It was very uplifting to just be there and be present and that's really what the focus is on right now," he said.

The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which documented the experiences of those affected by Canada's residential school system, found at least 4,100 children died while attending the institutions.

The Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program has a hotline to help residential school survivors and their relatives suffering with trauma invoked by the recall of past abuse. The number is 1-866-925-4419.

— By Ashley Joannou in Vancouver

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 27, 2023

The Canadian Press

Retired teacher finds mammoth shoulder blade bone while walking dogs west of Edmonton

Thu, January 26, 2023 

Stacy Long found this bone west of Edmonton during a dog walk. Experts believe it is at least 10,000 years old. (Jamie McCannel/CBC - image credit)

Stacy Long was walking her two Great Danes west of Edmonton last spring when she found what appeared to be a large bone.

Long hoped the metre-long object was a bone, but because her dogs, Bart and Boss, didn't seem at all interested, she thought it might just be piece of petrified wood.

Though the dogs weren't intrigued, the quaternary paleontology team at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton was.

Long submitted photos of the object to multiple museums and Royal Alberta Museum staff recently told her they suspected she had found a partial mammoth shoulder blade bone. The museum estimates the animal it came from was alive about 10-14,000 years ago.

The museum is not publicizing the exact location of the discovery because it wants to prevent people from searching the area. Paleontologists plan to visit the site in the spring.

"I was definitely shocked," Long told CBC News on Thursday.

Submitted by Tracy Long

This isn't Long's first discovery.

The retired teacher previously found part of a hadrosaur's tibia bone, which the Royal Tyrell Museum identified for her.

She has also found what the Royal Alberta Museum believes to be a partial skull of an ancient bison.

Paleontologist Katherine Bramble said Long's mammoth discovery is special because the museum doesn't have many specimens. The museum has one other mammoth shoulder blade, but it belonged to a juvenile, not an adult.

"They're not as common to find as other things, like dinosaurs," she said.

She said most mammoth specimens are found in sand and gravel pits, so she and her colleagues were very excited that a member of the public found one in a different context.

Long has donated the bone to the museum, where it will be added to its research and reference collection.

The museum's experts don't yet know which type of mammoth the bone came from. Two species, the Columbian and wooly mammoths, are known to have lived in Canada. Columbian mammoths were the bigger of the two.

Submitted by Stacy Long

The museum has been using illustrations of the woolly mammoth in its official logos since 1990.

Bramble said the museum will compare Long's bone to other mammoth bones that have been found.

Staff could also use radiocarbon dating to determine its age.

Long said she donated the specimen to the museum because she wants to share it with others.

"I'm excited for little kids to be able to go there and see it and learn from it," she said.

Royal Alberta Museum

She said she appreciated how welcoming museum staff were. They gave her a tour and educated her about what she had found.

Since the museum shared her story on social media yesterday, Long said a lot of former students have been contacting her to find out more about it.

"A few of them are teachers now themselves so they've been asking lots of questions," she said.

The Truth about Ukraine and the Jews


Bernard-Henri Lévy
Thu, January 26, 2023

A rabbi walks past a monument commemorating the victims of Babyn Yar, one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Holocaust, in Kyiv on Sept. 29, 2022. 

Credit - Oleksii Chumachenko—SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

There’s a kind of background noise.

A nasty little music orchestrated by Putinist propaganda and its band of useful idiots.

It’s the idea, broadly, that Ukraine at war and martyred is also one of Europe’s most incorrigibly antisemitic countries.

So, once and for all: What’s the story with Ukraine and anti-Semitism?

The truth is, of course, that Ukraine in the ’30s and ’40s of the 20th century was a bloodland for Jews.

Soviet Ukraine, or Ukraine Sovietized, or, more precisely, Ukraine buffeted between Sovietism and Hitlerism, was one of the theaters of the Shoah by bullets, with, counting just the ravines of Babi Yar, 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children forced to dig the pits where their warm corpses would be piled, still shivering, not quite dead.

And when I say “Soviet” or “Sovietized” it’s not to minimize the part played in the massacre by compatriots, in the countryside or the cities—but it is to recall that there have been, and there are, two Ukraines.

One that was yet to exist as a free and sovereign nation; which the Ukrainian-born Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko depicted, in his requiem to the dead of Babi Yar, as that of the “barroom regulars” thirsting for the “blood of pogroms,” stinking “of vodka and onion,” and, when the victims, “kicked to the floor,” begged for mercy, encouraging the assassins to “Beat the Yids, Save Russia!”—yes, Russia…

And then another Ukraine; the one that liberated herself from that Russia; the one that, since the onset of the U.S.S.R., then the Maidan Revolution, and then the invasion of Putin’s army, refuses the status of vassal, of the humble twinned servant, of the Cinderella of the tundra, that the invaders, drunk on their Lebensraum, wished to relegate her to; and the one that, having become this young free country, having irrevocably fallen in line with the democracies of Europe, is now turning the page on its past.

This Ukraine knows that she is one of the four countries to have counted, along with Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky and many others, the greatest number of Righteous Among the Nations.

This is the Ukraine of Uman, the city of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, where I filmed, for my upcoming film, Slava Ukraini, a rav, in a kind of echo of the Righteous, recounting how it was in his synagogue that the peasants of Cherkasy Oblast came to find refuge on the first days of the Russian attack.

Hasidic pilgrims sing and dance during the annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov in Uman, Ukraine, on Sept. 27, 2022

.Pete Kiehart—Redux

It’s the only country in the world where, on December 17, first day of Hanukkah, on the Maidan, that historic revolutionary square representing dignity and resistance, one could see the following: Hasidim raising a giant menorah; a whole people, starting with the mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, joining in on the lighting of this flame; and the flame shining brightly atop a city bombarded and deprived of electricity—“the Russians send us ballistic missiles,” joked a rabbi. “We’ll send back Kabbalistic missiles!”

It’s the country of the Azov regiment, one of whose commanders, Ilya Samoilenko, survivor of the hell of Azovstal and soldier of limitless audacity, is just back from Israel. He went to Masada to replenish his well of strength to return to combat; and the image of this brave soul treading the hot stones of that shrine to Jewish resistance while in cold Ukraine it snows, the idea of a Ukrainian zealot clambering over herbs and the rubble of the Judean fortress millenary twice over, carrying, in his head, the destruction of Mariupol, the bombs and the ruin that defiled the basements of the steel plant where he held out, he too, 40 days, are extraordinary. Is this visit not the most scathing retort against the idiots who promise, contra the winds of History, to return Ukraine to its demons?

And this Ukraine is also—we can never repeat it enough—the homeland of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Churchillian president elected in a landslide, who is, also, a Jewish hero: the story of this descendant of survivors of the Shoah who had, at the outset, neither tanks, nor apparatus, nor apparatchiks to take on the Giant, but just his country’s hard-won liberty. Doesn’t it seem straight out of a Biblical tale?

In the face of the return of Goliath the Philistine, isn’t this the rebirth of little David, master of truth and war chief, an artist who knows how to sing, and is also an incomparable strategist, who finds ways to use only the intelligence of his muscles and his guile to oppose the invasion?

Isn’t this the story of Abraham rising up alone, according to the Midrash, to battle the armies of the five kings who hold Lot hostage?

And isn’t this Judah Maccabee sealing the resounding victory of the weak over the strong, the humble over the proud, the few over the many, and, in the end, over the false brilliance of the desecrated temple, the victory of the tiny oil lamp whose light is not that of power, but of exception?

Rabbi David Goldich blesses the wine during sabbath prayer at the Great Choral Synagogue in Kyiv on Dec. 10, 2022.Anastasia Vlasova—The Washington Post/Getty Images

A cunning trick of reason.

An adventure of memory.

But the fact, whether we like or not, remains.

History is not always a curse.

It is not the eternal return of resentments and crimes.

If there was ever a place, in this crazy war in front of Russian neo-fascism, barbarism, and terrorism, where one can hear the echo of the Jewish soul, it’s in Ukraine.

Energy Harbor closing W. H. Sammis Power Plant, laying off 140 employees

USA TODAY Network Ohio
Wed, January 25, 2023 

FirstEnergy's W.H. Sammis Plant

Akron-based Energy Harbor, a former FirstEnergy subsidiary, is closing its W. H. Sammis Power Plant, with all 140 people working at the plant losing their jobs.

The facility, located in Stratton, in eastern Ohio along the Ohio River, is one of the state's few remaining coal-fired power plants.

According to a Jan. 13 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notice from plant director Christopher Cox to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services Office of Workforce Development, the mass layoff is expected to start no earlier than March 14.

Cox said in the letter that all employee terminations and the complete closure of the facility are expected to take place between March 14 and July 15, with the first terminations expected to begin sometime between March 14 and April 14. Cox said terminations will be on a rolling basis as the facility is phased down.

The notice came one week before the start of a complicated public corruption case in relation to House Bill 6, with co-defendants Larry Householder, the former Ohio House speaker, and Matt Borges, the former Ohio Republican Party chairman, pleading not guilty to federal racketeering charges.

House Bill 6:What you need to know about Ohio's corruption scandal, Larry Householder trial

Householder is accused of orchestrating a criminal pay-to-play scheme to win back control of the Ohio House of Representatives, pass a $1.3 billion bailout for two nuclear plants and defend that law against a ballot initiative to kill it.

Federal prosecutors must prove that Householder traded legislation − a $1 billion bailout for two nuclear plants on Ohioans' electric bills − for nearly $61 million in campaign cash. Householder says he did nothing wrong.

Borges is accused of playing a key role in that effort to overturn the law, called House Bill 6, and bribing a ballot initiative operative for insider information.

In 2018, FirstEnergy announced plans to close its two nuclear power plants − Davis-Besse in Ottawa County and Perry in Lake County. Meanwhile, company officials were working on solutions to keep the plants open at the state and federal level.

As part of that push, FirstEnergy and its allies used nonprofits known as dark money groups to funnel contributions to Householder to conceal the scope of their donations.

FirstEnergy later admitted it bribed Householder and Gov. Mike DeWine appointee Sam Randazzo, who led the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. The company agreed to a $230 million fine and to cooperate with a larger federal investigation. Randazzo has not been charged with any crime and Householder has pleaded not guilty.

In 2022, Energy Harbor said it planned to shut down or sell the remaining three units at the Sammis plant, in June 2023, five years earlier than it said previously.

"Over the past two years, it has been made abundantly clear to us that our customers, communities, and capital markets partners recognize the value of partnering with Energy Harbor as we help transform clean energy supply," John Judge, Energy Harbor's president and CEO, said in a statement at the time.

In 2018, FirstEnergy Solutions, the name of the company at the time, said it would shut down the plant in 2022. It reversed the decision a year later just as state lawmakers passed House Bill 6, the legislation that bailed out Ohio's nuclear plants by adding a fee to the monthly electric bill that consumers pay.

Four other units at the plant closed in 2020.

The legislation didn't directly provide aid to the plant, but Energy Harbor said at the time that the bailout would improve its finances enough that it could keep the Sammis plant open.

The legislature later repealed the fee.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron-based Energy Harbor closing W. H. Sammis Power Plant

Norway finds 'substantial' mineral resources on its seabed


Fri, January 27, 2023 
By Nerijus Adomaitis

OSLO, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A Norwegian study has found a "substantial" amount metals and minerals ranging from copper to rare earth metals on the seabed of its extended continental shelf, authorities said on Friday in their first official estimates.

The Nordic country, a major oil and gas exporter, is considering whether to open its offshore areas to deep-sea mining, a process that requires parliament's approval and has sparked environmental concerns.

"Of the metals found on the seabed in the study area, magnesium, niobium, cobalt and rare earth minerals are found on the European Commission's list of critical minerals," the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD), which conducted the study, said in a statement.

The resources estimate, covering remote areas in the Norwegian Sea and Greenland Sea, showed there were 38 million tonnes of copper, almost twice the volume mined globally each year, and 45 million tonnes of zinc accumulated in polymetallic sulphides.

The sulphides, or "black smokers", are found along the mid-ocean ridge, where magma from the Earth's mantle reaches the sea floor, at depths of around 3,000 metres (9,842 feet).

About 24 million tonnes of magnesium and 3.1 million tonnes of cobalt are estimated to be in manganese crusts grown on bedrock over millions of years, as well as 1.7 million tonnes of cerium, a rare earth metal used in alloys.

The manganese crusts are also estimated to contain other rare earth metals, such as neodymium, yttrium and dysprosium.

"Costly, rare minerals such as neodymium and dysprosium are extremely important for magnets in wind turbines and the engines in electric vehicles", the NPD said.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

Environmental groups have called on Norway to postpone its seabed mineral exploration until more studies are conducted to understand the organisms living on the seabed and the impact of mining on them.

There is "a great lack of knowledge" of deep oceans, where new and undiscovered species are potentially to be found, Norway's Institute of Marine Research said in a consultation letter.

The NPD said its estimates showed resources "in place", and further studies were needed to establish how much of those could be recovered with acceptable environmental impact.

(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; editing by Jason Neely)

Inside the Clandestine Efforts to Smuggle Starlink Internet Into Iran


Karl Vick
Wed, January 25, 2023 


People gather during a protest for Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by morality police allegedly not complying with strict dress code in Tehran, Iran on Sept 22, 2022. Credit - Middle East Images/Iranwire/Redux

Somehow, the satellite dish arrived in its original packaging, a gray cardboard box clearly labeled “STARLINK,” handed over in broad daylight in the middle of Tehran. “As if Elon Musk himself is delivering to me,” Reza, the young Iranian who accepted the package, recalls with a laugh. He took the delivery not from Musk, who owns the satellite internet company, but from a visibly nervous and irate professional smuggler. The man wanted the $300 he’d been promised, and an explanation for the device he’d just risked his life sneaking into the Islamic Republic.

“They kept me like five hours at the border for that,” the smuggler said, gesturing at the box.

What the Iranian border guards had finally, and foolishly, allowed into the country may well be the means to sustain the rebellion there. Now in its fifth month, the slow-motion uprising depends first on the zeal of protesters—but at least as much on being able to show the world what is happening.

“The most important thing is to have the protests on the internet—it’s crucial,” says Reza, who asked not to be further identified.

Iran’s authoritarian government not only controls the internet in the country, but also uses that control as a weapon—slowing service to a crawl when protesters go into the streets, and shutting it down altogether when the decision is made to slaughter them. The last time spontaneous protests erupted across Iran—over a fuel-price hike in November 2019—the regime responded by cutting off all external web portals and opening fire: all told, more than 1,500 people were reported killed.

So when nationwide protests erupted in September—sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by the loathed “morality police”—human-rights activists outside the country were primed to act. Within days, elaborate efforts got under way to provide a nationwide but leaderless movement with an alternate internet. Operating largely underground and on private funds, the most ambitious of the various efforts spans continents, communicates on encrypted messaging platforms, and involves about a dozen activists, five of whom spoke to TIME.

Their secret campaign, they say, was made possible by two public announcements: on Sept. 23, after protests had erupted in more than 80 cities, the Biden Administration cleared the way for U.S. communications companies to operate in Iran while keeping other sanctions in place. Later the same day, Musk announced, “Starlink is now activated in Iran.” That was the good news. But his message continued: “It requires the use of terminals in-country, which I suspect the government will not support, but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work.”

In a way, the effort to get the terminals there was already under way. “We had started to think about it in January 2021, with a feasibility study,” says one organizer, who asked not to be named for security reasons. (The Iranian regime, which since September has arrested an estimated 18,000 protesters and killed more than 500 inside the country, also has a track record of abducting and killing critics overseas.) Karim Sadjadpour, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.–based Carnegie Endowment think tank, has functioned as the public face of the effort. Sadjadpour was among those who solicited Musk’s cooperation and tweeted his approval; he stays in touch with activists, financiers, and senior U.S. officials, as well as senior officials in the countries around Iran, a nominal theocracy that functions as a security and intelligence state—and now faces an existential challenge.

Led by young women, the overwhelmingly nonviolent movement that has swept Iran found a slogan in “Woman, life, freedom” and an anthem in “Because of,” a ballad that took its lyrics from tweets listing the ways life in Iran had become intolerable. Like word of the protests, the song spread across the country online. “For those living under dictatorships like the Islamic Republic,” Sadjadpour says, “unfettered internet access is like oxygen.”

A Starlink dish in Tehran, with the iconic Milad Tower in the background photographed in early November. Activists inside Iran looked for photo sites that could communicate that the dishes were in fact there.Courtesy

Here’s how Starlink works: Several thousand small satellites in low orbit around the globe beam broadband internet down to earth. The signal can be picked up only by a Starlink dish, which works only with a subscription that runs $110 a month. Musk created the pioneering service as a blend of commerce and altruism, making the net accessible in places either remote, under siege, or both. Though other companies have explored the model, Starlink is essentially the only game in town for that need—and, at a time when its founder is more likely to be associated with the fight over “free speech” on social media platforms, the company has played a significant role in preserving open information in some of the places it is most at risk. In Ukraine, Starlink effectively replaced the internet that was taken down during the Russian invasion, with the U.S. government and its allies contributing thousands of Starlink dishes. Musk’s privately owned SpaceX, which operates Starlink, contributed 3,667 of the dishes, and Musk waived the subscription fee.

The same largesse has not been extended in Iran.

“Each one is $700 … so 100 devices is almost $70,000,” notes an activist involved in organizing the largest smuggling effort, which has had to seek out monetary contributions from individuals. “And then with shipping and everything,” he says, referring to the process of smuggling them into the country, “it can easily come to $200,000.”

And 100 devices is not nearly enough to create an alternate internet. The idea is not to use the dishes the way the French Resistance, for example, used clandestine radio transmitters that were few and far between during World War II. Organizers estimate that a shadow web could be effective in Iran with about 5,000 Starlink dishes.

“The main goal is not really equipping all Iranians with satellites,” one organizer says, “but basically sending a few thousand devices and getting them to the right people, so an internet shutdown is not a problem.”

But how to send them? Direct shipping is hardly an option. Western package services do not serve Iran, and Iran’s national postal service is notorious for its intrusive inspections. (Western magazines sometimes arrive with images of female models defaced.) “The biggest challenge is the logistics,” says an activist who traveled to western Asia to arrange passage of the receivers.

Fortunately, the region has a rich culture of smuggling. Iran shares a land border with seven countries and has been a trading crossroads for millennia. Much of the world’s opium passes through Iran from Afghanistan to Turkey. Beer and liquor, strictly forbidden in the Islamic Republic, are nonetheless readily available, often by way of Armenia. So porous is the border between the adjoining ethnic Kurdish sections of Iran and Iraq that a motorist on the Iraqi side can choose between Iranian and Iraqi gasoline, sold in translucent jugs because one is noticeably darker.

All in all, a promising geography.

“So far, I’d say we have six separate channels that we are trying,” one organizer tells TIME. “We are not just relying on one channel. We try to diversify and see if we can get the job done.”

Some routes are more treacherous than others. It’s an open secret in Iran that regime insiders are heavily involved in smuggling. That includes elements of an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that has taken over whole swathes of the nation’s economy. “A lot of what I do is vetting,” said the activist tasked with finding partners in countries neighboring Iran. Another organizer said the search was particularly fraught in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates port city popular among “comrade smugglers.”

The IRGC also poses a danger inside Iran, where it has joined assaults on protests first left to riot police and paramilitaries. In the Kurdish region from which Amini hailed, mechanized divisions are deployed. “There are a lot of checkpoints at Kurdistan and Kermanshah, and they are specifically looking for guns and Starlink,” one organizer says. “But there are different routes. They can’t stop every car. So far we’ve been lucky that no one has been harmed in this operation.”

The dangers figure in whom the activists now ask to move the contraband. The professional smuggler who brought Reza the packaged dish was on a test run, organizers said, and not used again. The goal is to use only people who are committed to the mission, trustworthy, and willing to accept the risk.

“Having unauthorized communications devices could basically make you a spy,” says one activist, who, while imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, met a jailed journalist whose employer had issued him a satellite phone. What’s standard equipment for a foreign correspondent had brought a charge of espionage in Iran.

“It’s simply life and death,” says one activist. “You get caught, there’s no middle ground. Maybe they throw you from the 20th floor instead of the 40th floor, that’s the middle ground. Like, ‘moderate beheading.’”

A scene during a protest in Tehran for Mahsa Amini on Sept. 22, 2022.IranWire/Middle East Images/Redux

Once inside Iran, the dishes open a new front in a dangerous battlefield.

It was no surprise that after Amini’s death, the first software the regime took down were gaming platforms. “That was because they couldn’t monitor the chat forums and communications between players,” says one activist. “The chat rooms are superactive. They had worked together, they trusted each other … coming out to the streets, strategizing, coming up with new ideas. Gaming culture has a role to play, especially among younger people.”

In authoritarian countries, mobile phones double as listening devices. The spyware built into Iran’s cell infrastructure has been well documented by the Intercept. And though VPNs and encrypted messaging platforms like Signal may circumvent the system, protesters rightly regard their phones as loaded guns.

Reza says his most terrifying moment came at a demonstration he was leading in November. An undercover agent wrapped him in a bear hug and pulled him toward a waiting car.

“Unfortunately, I had my phone with me.” He thought of a friend who had recently been sentenced to five years in prison after authorities opened his phone and found messages “cursing the regime” on an encrypted chat with his father. Reza managed to avoid a similar fate by squirming away, but a month later was still mortified: “If they capture my phone, the information on it …”

Starlink brings its own risks. When the network arrived in Ukraine, where it’s heavily used by the military, experts worried that Russian forces would track the signal and direct bombs to the terminal locations, as they have done elsewhere with satellite phone signals. But even after improvements to the software, vulnerabilities likely remain. “Any novel new technology has the promise of moving faster than the regime trying to track it down,” notes John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab project. “At the same time, novel technologies come with risks. Some we know, some we speculate on, some we won’t know until the risks are translated to people getting arrested.” He, like others, declined to be more specific for fear of alerting Iranian authorities.

That Iranian American entrepreneur personally purchased 100 Starlink dishes, picking them up at a SpaceX facility. “We reboxed them to kind of make it look like something else. And then it gets hidden in other cargo,” he says. The effort is separate from the smuggling campaign organized by the network of activists. “We have three different routes,” says the entrepreneur. “Even if there were nine [dishes], if they’re in the right hands, then a lot of information can get sent to the world from within the country.”

Public opinion is an important weapon in the uprising. But with foreign journalists barred by the Iranian government, and domestic reporters jailed, ordinary people must tell the story. “Citizen journalism is a big thing,” says Saman Arbabi, who posts cell-phone videos from the protests to his 700,000 Instagram followers. Even with the shaky internet, Arbabi, an Iranian American who lives in New York, says he receives hundreds of videos from inside Iran on a slow day. A day when a protester is hanged, as four have been so far, will bring thousands.

“They understand that they are the people who are communicating with the outside world, and they’re very important,” he says of the senders. “It’s very significant, to get reaction from governments and also powerful and influential people in the West.”

“If Iran gets free internet, uncensored internet,” Arbabi says, “then the regime is in big trouble.”

At Amnesty International, Matt Mahmoudi documented the surge in deaths during the internet blackout, and helped develop an online tool to verify footage that surfaces on social media. He described a free internet as “a channel of counter-power, as it were, where protesters and organizers can speak to each other, but also speak to the world about what’s happening in Iran.”

The 100 Starlink dishes that the unnamed Iranian-American entrepreneur bought, seen in Hawthorne, Calif.Courtesy

Since Russia’s invasion nearly a year ago, Ukraine has restored much of its internet with 22,000 Starlink dishes, with 10,000 more on the way, the Kyiv government says. Reza says Iranians are hoping for the same. “There’s a rumor that like in Ukraine, it would be free, you don’t have to pay to activate it,” he says. But when he powered up his dish, he learned “it wasn’t true.” (His subscription is paid overseas, by the activist network.)

Asked by TIME if the company would lift the fees in Iran or donate dishes, a SpaceX spokesman declined comment. The spokesman also demurred on the question of whether the company is working with the U.S. government to bring Starlink to Iran.

The same question, put to the National Security Council, produced four pages of statements about the Biden Administration’s support for an uncensored internet for the Iranian protesters. “But,” said a statement attributable to a senior State Department official, “we’re not going to get into the details of what tools or partners we may or may not be working with to advance that goal.”

This dismays the activists—who state flatly that the U.S. government has offered only rhetorical support—and advocates for American leadership in free communication. In the wake of the Arab Spring, which promised to replace despots with democracies, the U.S. partnered with Silicon Valley to set up the Open Technology Fund, which funds practical methods to promote access to the internet, and battle censorship in the name of human rights.

“A free Iran, both in terms of national security and many other ways, is in line with the free world,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, who runs a West Coast technology nonprofit that develops tools resistant to internet shutdowns. “It’s very obvious: Putin and China? Or the West? The Iranian people are very clear about who they want to be allied with. They’re chanting in the streets.”

Every previous technology banned by the Islamic Republic—from satellite television to the iPhone—has eventually become readily available inside its borders. This leads some activists to believe the fastest way to get Starlink dishes into Iran is by making them available in bordering countries. “Starlink terminals and other devices that circumvent governmental repression and censorship will invariably find their way into Iran because of the enormous demand,” Sadjadpour says.

Reza says that when a dish arrived without a tripod, he went to a local vendor who installs satellite TV, long illegal in Iran. The guy sold him a stand, and Reza set up the Starlink dish on the roof of his apartment building. It looks different enough from other satellite dishes that he worried it could be identified from the sky. So he asked his mother for one of her chadors—the billowing black cloaks favored by devoutly religious women, of which his mother is one.

She chooses hijab, her son explained, but opposes a regime that thinks it can make the choice for her or anyone else. She gave one to Reza, who draped the fabric over the Starlink receiving dish to conceal it. It still worked fine.

“I’m not a professional. I’m not, like, an FBI agent, CIA agent. I don’t know how to behave or respond in these situations. For sure I’m worried and I’m scared,” Reza says. “But when I see someone taking someone’s rights, I cannot be silent. I don’t see any value in this life without standing with people, standing up against the cruelty of this regime.”

Gaggle Drops LGBTQ Keywords from Student Surveillance Tool Following Bias Concerns


Mark Keierleber
Fri, January 27, 2023 


Digital monitoring company Gaggle says it will no longer flag students who use words like “gay” and “lesbian” in school assignments and chat messages, a significant policy shift that follows accusations its software facilitated discrimination of LGBTQ teens in a quest to keep them safe.

A spokesperson for the company, which describes itself as supporting student safety and well-being, cited a societal shift toward greater acceptance of LGBTQ youth — rather than criticism of its product — as the impetus for the change as part of a “continuous evaluation and updating process.”

The company, which uses artificial intelligence and human content moderators to sift through billions of student communications each year, has long defended its use of LGBTQ-specific keywords to identify students who might hurt themselves or others. In arguing the targeted monitoring is necessary to save lives, executives have pointed to the prevalence of bullying against LGBTQ youth and data indicating they’re significantly more likely to consider suicide than their straight and cisgender classmates.

But in practice, Gaggle’s critics argued, the keywords put LGBTQ students at a heightened risk of scrutiny by school officials and, on some occasions, the police. Nearly a third of LGBTQ students said they or someone they know experienced nonconsensual disclosure of their sexual orientation or gender identity — often called outing — as a result of digital activity monitoring, according to a national survey released in August by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. The survey encompassed the impacts of multiple monitoring companies who contract with school districts, such as GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark.

Gaggle’s decision to remove several LGBTQ-specific keywords, including “queer” and “bisexual,” from its dictionary of words that trigger alerts was first reported in a recent VICE News documentary. It follows extensive reporting by The 74 into the company’s business practices and sometimes negative effects on students who are caught in its surveillance dragnet.

Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops.

Related: With ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Laws & Abortion Bans, Student Surveillance Raises New Risks

The keyword shift comes at a particularly perilous moment, as Republican lawmakers in multiple states push bills targeting LGBTQ youth. Legislation has looked to curtail classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, ban books and classroom curricula featuring LGBTQ themes and prohibit transgender students from receiving gender-affirming health care, participating in school athletics and using restroom facilities that match their gender identities. Such a hostile political climate and pandemic-era disruptions, a recent youth survey by The Trevor Project revealed, has contributed to an uptick in LGBTQ youth who have seriously considered suicide.

The U.S. Education Department received 453 discrimination complaints involving students’ sexual orientation or gender identity last year, according to data provided to The 74 by its civil rights office. That’s a significant increase from previous years, including in 2021 when federal officials received 249 such complaints. The Trump administration took a less aggressive tack on civil rights enforcement and complaints dwindled. In 2018, the Education Department received just 57 complaints related to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

The increase in discrimination allegations involving sexual orientation or gender identity are part of a record spike in civil rights complaints overall, according to data obtained by The New York Times. The total number of complaints for 2021-22 grew to 19,000, a historic high and more than double the previous year.

Related: Anger & Fear: New Poll Shows School-Level Impact of Anti-LGBTQ Political Debate

In September, The 74 revealed that Gaggle had donated $25,000 to The Trevor Project, the nonprofit that released the recent youth survey and whose advocacy is focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth. The arrangement was framed on Gaggle’s website as a collaboration to “improve mental health outcomes for LGBTQ young people.”

The revelation was met with swift backlash on social media, with multiple Trevor Project supporters threatening to halt future donations. Within hours, the group announced it had returned the donation, acknowledging concerns about Gaggle “having a role in negatively impacting LGBTQ students.”

Related: Trevor Project to Refund Donation From Student Surveillance Company Accused of LGBTQ Bias Following 74 Investigation

The Trevor Project didn’t respond to requests for comment on Gaggle’s decision to pull certain LGBTQ-specific keywords from its systems.

In a statement to The 74, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said the company regularly modifies the keywords its software uses to trigger a human review of students’ digital communications. Certain LGBTQ-specific words, she said, are no longer relevant to the 24-year-old company’s efforts to protect students from abuse and were purged late last year.

“At points in time in the not-too-distant past, those words were weaponized by bullies to harass and target members of the LGBTQ+ community, so as part of an effective methodology to combat that discriminatory harassment and violence, those words were once effective tools to help identify dangerous situations,” Hetherington said. “Thankfully, over the past two decades, our society evolved and began a period of widespread acceptance, especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves. With that evolution and acceptance, it has become increasingly rare to see those words used in the negative, harassing context they once were; hence, our decision to take these off our word/phrases list.”

Hetherington said Gaggle will continue to monitor students’ use of the words “faggot,” “lesbo,” and others that are “commonly used as slurs.” A previous review by The 74 found that Gaggle regularly flagged students for harmless speech, like profanity in fictional articles submitted to a school’s literary magazine, and students’ private journals.

Related: Nearly Half of LGBTQ Youth Seriously Considered Suicide in the Last Year, Survey Finds. A Simple Strategy Could Save Lives

Anti-LGBTQ activists have used surveillance to target their opponents for generations, and privacy advocates warn that in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” laws and abortion bans, information gleaned from Gaggle and similar services could be weaponized against students.

Gaggle executives have minimized privacy concerns and claim the tool saved more than 1,400 lives last school year. That statistic hasn’t been independently verified and there’s a dearth of research to suggest digital monitoring is an effective school-safety tool. A recent survey found a majority of parents and teachers believe the benefits of student monitoring outweigh privacy concerns. The Vice News documentary included the perspective of a high school student who was flagged by Gaggle for writing a paper titled “Essay on the Reasons Why I Want to Kill Myself but Can’t/Didn’t.” Adults wouldn’t have known she was struggling without Gaggle, she said.

“I do think that it’s helpful in some ways,” the student said, “but I also kind of think that it’s — I wouldn’t say an invasion of privacy — but if obviously something gets flagged and a person who it wasn’t intended for reads through that, I think that’s kind of uncomfortable.”

Student surveillance critic Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit digital rights group Fight for the Future, said the tweaks to Gaggle’s keyword dictionary are unlikely to have a significant effect on LGBTQ teens and blasted the company’s stated justification for the move as being “out of touch” with the state of anti-LGBTQ harassment in schools. Meanwhile, Greer said that LGBTQ youth frequently refer to each other using “reclaimed slurs,” reappropriating words that are generally considered derogatory and remain in Gaggle’s dictionary.

“This is just like lipstick on a pig — no offense to pigs — but I don’t see how this actually in any meaningful way mitigates the potential for this software to nonconsensually out LGBTQ students to administrators,” Greer said. “I don’t see how it prevents the software from being used to invade the privacy of students in a wide range of other circumstances.”

Gaggle and its competitors — including GoGuardian, Bark and Securly — have faced similar scrutiny in Washington. In April, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey argued in a report that the tools could be misused to discipline students and warned they could be used disproportionately against students of color and LGBTQ youth.

Jeff Patterson

In a letter to the lawmakers, Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson said the company cannot test the potential for bias in its system because the software flags student communications anonymously and the company has “no context or background on students,” including their race or sexual orientation. They also said their monitoring services are not meant to be used as a disciplinary tool.

In the survey released last summer by the Center for Democracy and Technology, however, 78% of teachers reported that digital monitoring tools were used to discipline students. Black and Hispanic students reported being far more likely than white students to get into trouble because of online monitoring.

In October, the White House cautioned school districts against the “continuous surveillance” of students if monitoring tools are likely to trample students’ rights. It also directed the Education Department to issue guidance to districts on the safe use of artificial intelligence. The guidance is expected to be released early this year.

Evan Greer (Twitter/@evan_greer)

As an increasing number of districts implement Gaggle for bullying prevention efforts, surveillance critic Greer said the company has failed to consider how adults can cause harm.

“There is now a very visible far-right movement attacking LGBTQ kids, and particularly trans kids and teenagers,” Greer said. “If anything, queer kids are more in the crosshairs today than they were a year ago or two years ago — and that’s why this surveillance is so dangerous.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQ mental health support, contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.