Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 90

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's up, this ICT was something I know you're gonna want to hear. In my new podcast, ICT's Daily Game, I'll be dropping some daily wisdom and personal insight that I believe is essential to achieving success in business, love, life, hustling, whatever. I'll be coming to you every single weekday with a fresh new quote that speaks directly to me and I hope to you as well. In five minutes or less, I'll break down why these words matter and reveal personal stories and experiences that show them in action in my life. My goal is to inspire all of you out there to achieve success and happiness, whatever that means to you. So start every week day morning with me and get inspired. Listen to I.C.'s Daily Game every week day on the I Heart

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This is King's Line. The prosecution of Young Thug and YSL. The arrest of young thug sent shockwaves through the hip-hop world in the city of Atlanta. I'm Christina Lee. And I'm George Cheedy. As the historic and controversial jury trial of one of music's most iconic Artists begins we're examining the case from all sides all of this before a single juror has been selected

Listen to King slime on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, everybody Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know This is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ [♪ OUTRO MUSIC [♪ by Austin Coker of Syracuse University and by Jake Weiner of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Hi, guys.

Morning. How you doing, James? Good. I'm very excited to talk more boarded stuff. I like covering this, even though it's sometimes terrible. So what I wanted to start off with is, I think our listeners will be familiar with CBP1, the most cursed cell phone app of all time. And both of you have written a lot and very, uh, insightful about CBP1. So I thought we could kind of do a little

bit of a breakdown of, uh, A, the issues with it and B, like, with the issues with it as an app, and then the, the fact that we're using an app, being a problem inherently. Uh, so perhaps we could start with, I know Jake, you mentioned you wanted to talk a little bit about the design of the app. So in the process of sort of commissioning it and making it, should we start there? Yeah, and I think this story is pretty interesting and unique

because CBP1 was built in-house by a small team at the Office of Field Operations and CBP, yeah, which is unique. Like there's one other app that they built and I don't really know of other mobile apps that have been rolled out with anything close to the size of CBP one that have been designed by a government agency. Yeah, that's kind of an odd choice.

Conceptually, it's not something I'm critical of. I think if we're going to have a government that's providing services, it's good for them to do things in-house. It means you're not relying on third parties who are able to use information from the app and benefit off of it. But it does mean you need the institutional competency to be able to design an app. Yeah, missing. And so to just provide a quick history, basically, a CBP1 app was built off of the framework

of an older app called CBP Rome. That app was used just for people boating on the Great Lakes, because technically if you go like boating on Michigan, you will leave the United States if you chase a fish over the boundary to Canada. And CBP felt that it was very important that people who did that reported leaving and coming back into the United States. Yeah, we're questionable. the people who did that reported leaving and coming back into the United States. Yeah, we're questionable, but they built an app to let people do that.

And the framework for that app used a GPS ping to verify when you're back in the US. Okay, so this is a small app, you know, I don't think they encountered too many problems with it because you have maybe a couple hundred visitors a day Um, and on that framework they built out CBP1 to do a couple of things it's used for Folks like customs folks, so if you're importing goods into the country you can do some of that reporting through CBP1 And also use it to apply for the, and obtain the I-94 travel form, which is the form that like most folks coming to the United States are going to need. And then critically

for our uses is that if you're applying for asylum, you can use it to schedule an appointment. Yeah, that's been the bulk of my reporting on it. Is that the bulk of its use? I think so, yeah. Okay. And so that's a, I'm still blown away with the fact they designed it in-house. It's crazy. Did you ever find a job posting so the people who designed it or did they just like get some people who were good at IT

to kind of take a swing at it? So as far as I know from, you know, I've talked to one of the people involved in the creation, I think Austin has as well. My understanding is that it was like an in-house team that already existed. But Austin, you may be able to clarify that. Yeah, that's my understanding too.

I think they have a technology team within the agency that is using technology in various ways. I don't think we have a full understanding of the scope of their responsibilities and the work that they've done. I think to Jake a full, full understanding of the scope of their responsibilities and the work that they've done. I think to Jake's point, it is quite interesting that they produce something for the public. It's not unusual, of course, for large agencies to have teams in-house that deal with all

of the general technological challenges that every agency in 2023 faces, you know, databases, you know, keeping government cell phones, working and secure and all of that, all of that kind of thing. But a lot of the things that are public facing from federal agencies tend to be contracted out to a private vendor in some way. So this is, it's quite unique.

And, but I don't think we have a full scope of what they are, aren not producing in-house. Yeah, that's interesting because they heavily rely on outside contractors for so much of that. There's a whole industry that starts here in San Diego and goes over to Tucson and probably further into New Mexico of people providing surveillance technology to border patrol. It goes over to the West Bank, too. Well, lots of it can be seen. Having talked about the sort of unique approach to design, it's probably a good idea to then talk about the implementation of SAP, and it's kind of

lacklustres and understanding, and it's just fucking sucks, it's terrible. So, like, in what many ways has it been unfit for the purpose of it supposed to do? So I think as first we can talk about it's technological inadequacies and then more broadly about why this isn't a problem you can really solve with an app on a telephone that needs broadband and Wi-Fi. Yeah, so I'll start by saying that I think a lot of what's happening with the problem the CBP1 app is institutional blindness. So the people who design the app, I genuinely think want it to work well.

And I think they're simply not asking the questions that you need to be asking when you design app like this, which is who's really gonna be using it? What are their needs? What technology, what wireless services, what phones are they using? Basically, if you're someone on the Southern border with very little money and probably an outdated phone,

are you going to be able to use this app? Not a great camera. And so I think the first place to start with that is simply the fact that the app requires a strong Wi-Fi or cell signal to use, which is not always present. And I think Austin has some good insight into the problems with insufficient Wi-Fi. Yeah, definitely. You know, I think some of what's interesting here is the way, not only that the app relies on Wi-Fi,

but then the kind of real world social consequences here, for help people then try to cope with these problems. I want to take one step back just really quickly and discuss the world that CBP was dropped into because there's some important context here. So, as I know you've already covered James, you know, over the past three years, the dominant border control policy was Title 42, a COVID era policy that was purportedly motivated by concerns about public health.

This is where Title 42 comes from. Title 42 of the US code pertains to issues of questions of public health. It's not an immigration policy. It was a public health policy, although detailed reporting has, I think, pretty well established that it was more of a political, a moment of political opportunism

rather than a legitimate public health concern. But regardless, that policy allowed customs and border protection to effectively turn back anyone who arrived at the border, whether they attempted to cross unlawfully or not, and the primary human rights concern here was people who were seeking asylum, which is their right to do. One of the aspects of Title 42 was that there was a rare exemption clause built in that allowed people who were particularly vulnerable, a particular humanitarian concern, to attempt to effectively apply for this kind of exemption.

And until January of this year, that process was run by nonprofit organizations. CBP had this sort of informal outsourced system where NGOs on the Mexican side of the border would effectively conduct massive amounts of intake and prioritization and triaging of these cases and then submit names to CBP to allow people to come to ports of entry. CBP one effectively replaced that system in January which meant that instead of migrants going through the NGOs, they would have to download this app, fill out the information and send it in. This is really important to mention

because the groundwork was actually laid by a tremendous amount of effectively unpaid labor on the backs of NGOs on the southern side of the border. And it is fair and accurate to say that this was an extremely imperfect system and that there were absolutely significant issues with this. But one of the interesting things is that the role that NGOs played meant that people coming and seeking asylum would then in some ways be potentially connected with a broader network of NGOs, support services,

advocacy, and so forth. So the introduction of CBP1 purportedly bypassed the work of NGOs in screening people for the exemption process. However, NGOs still ended up performing all this kind of invisible labor because they're the ones who effectively were working with migrants to make Wi-Fi available. And it's not just Wi-Fi, it's actually charging your phone. When I visited shelters and camps on the southern side of the border

at the end of 2022, a big part of the having camps and shelters was actually providing electricity. You know, when I was there and I know other have reported on this, James, I'm sure you've seen this too, you know, people would be huddled around the outlets because they needed to charge their phone. If their phone didn't work, if their phone wasn't charged, they didn't have access to CBP one. This was already a challenge because the primary form of communication with CBP was phone

calls. They would, individuals would get phone calls. In fact, I interviewed a Russian family on the Mexican side of the border in Matamoros in November. And the family now, they, and many of the other migrants I spoke with, and this was also true for many migrants, by the way. The families, typically the wife and children, if they were a family unit,

would say I either in a hotel or a shelter or someplace that was more safe, and then the men would effectively have the nights on the street where they could actually get cell phone coverage and things like that. So CBP1 introduced all of these kind of technological demands. It's not that they weren't there before, but I think it's a different matter when you go from interacting with the network of NGOs to saying, now you're actually interacting with the US government, and this is the only way that you're going to be able to enter the country. I think those demands were quite high and they've

clearly had some tremendously negative impacts from migrants trying to come through that way. Yeah, definitely. I know have one here, but we bought so many of these like solar powered charging brick things and distributed those, but I have so many photos of people's hands reaching through the wall. And people trying to charge their phone on the other side of the wall, you know, and it's been a big demand for a while, but it's certainly when CBP would attend people and people in places where they didn't have power and then expecting them to also communicate using their telephones that became a particularly sort of ridiculous issue, very upsetting to see it, like, done like that. So, yeah, this app really isn't a solution

for the problem we're facing, which is, as you said, like a three-year backlog on people who have legitimate asylum claims being able to make those asylum claims. And I guess, can we talk about who it favors in implementing this system as a catch-all, right? Not an option, but the option. Who does that favor and who does it not? Yeah, before we get there, I think it might be helpful to just run through like what it is like to use CBP on. Oh,, this took a bit. So you have to go through it. Because it is a yeah. And that's I and when you're thinking about that,

think that every step is a potential failure point, right? Every step you could have a glitch. And anytime you have a glitch happen, it's going to kick you out of the app and you have to restart. Yeah. So if you're on a Southern border, you need to apply for asylum, you need to apply for asylum,

you've been walking for months, from Venezuela, Guatemala, etc. You got your phone. First thing you have to do is log into the app through login.gov. That's the single sign on service that many government agencies use. It works fairly well, so you register yourself a profile. Then you're going to navigate over. Hopefully you speak one of the languages that my own CPP one is available in. As of now,

I believe that's English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, although they may have added a new language language recently. You find the right place in the app, not always super clear, to submit your asylum application and try and schedule an appointment. And then you're going to have to fill out a ton of information. You're giving CVP, your name, addresses, people you know in the US, you know, big form to fill out, including often information on how vulnerable you are. So are you pregnant? Are you disabled? Have you been threatened in Mexico?

Information that they want to use to prioritize you, hopefully. And then you're going to need to take a facial photograph. That's going to go into CVP and Department of Homeland Security's databases. It will be run against facial recognition searches that they populate with like this massive facial recognition system, the Traveler Verification Service. That can flag people who are on CBP's target list, TSA's target list. You could be wrongfully flagged by that because facial recognition is not a perfect technology. You're also going to take a facial live-ness scan.

It's related to facial recognition, but it is different. It's a different technology and it is untested. There's been no government agency that has evaluated facial liveness for bias. And that basically is trying to figure out are you a real person or are you like a picture of James that you're holding up. Yeah, because you're trying to get James an appointment and sell it to him later or something. Do the facial liveness scan that's been the sticking point where folks with darker skin and indigenous folks have not been able to get through it. We can talk about that a little later. You're also going to do a GPS pain.

So your phone pulling from both cell towers and GPS data is going to try and establish your location and send it to CBP. Back and create problems if you're pinging off a US cell tower. Suddenly, it's less reliable. It might look like you're in the US. And once you get through all these steps, then you're ableinging off a US cell tower, suddenly it's less reliable, might look like you're in the US. And once you get through all these steps, then you're able to submit your information and you're in a lottery or whether or not you get an appointment. Great. Yeah, let's, the photo thing, I think has been covered, maybe I've been covered extensively because this is what I do, but I think maybe some people are unaware of the complete inadequacy of those facial

livenous scans. And I know some nonprofits in Tijuana have light booths, which can help with that. But it's not, you know, it's again like that money could be doing something more useful, right? And then making like a like a Instagram booth for people who just want to use the exercise illegal right to claim asylum. So let's talk about that technology and how it's not working. Yeah, I think one really important factor here, and the reason I wanted to paint some of the context was, and partly selfish, because as a geographer, I'm always very eager to evangelize about the importance of understanding social geography, for thinking

about the questions of human rights and asylum and immigration. So the facial life test is a great example of that. So it's hard to see this unless you've been on the ground in some of these places. But again, just a historical thing that I think will be pretty non-controversial. Anti-black racism is something that's existed for a very long time. It's not just in the United States, it's around the world, obviously, not everywhere, but obviously through colonialism, through settler colonialism, and so forth, it's really shaped, not just anti-black racism, but anti-black racism itself has produced many of the geographies that we have from redlining segregation, educational acts,

all kinds of things. The way that the social world looks today is already shaped by these issues of racism. What that then means is questions like who has access to cell phone towers and fast Wi-Fi, and who can afford up-to-date smartphones that can meet all of the threshold of require, the technological requirements,

to use this app and use the software, is already distributed and fractured by questions of race and identity. What that means is, even if the facial liveness test worked perfectly, and there were no issues with the software, which is not true, but let's even just assume that, it is still true that access to that technology and software is already structured by race. One of the things I noticed having spent time along the border was just how much, even in some of the shelters and where black and African migrants had access to shelter, was

itself tended to be more pushed to the outside of this where you're less likely to get yourself on coverage, less likely to have electricity, much more likely that the roads, even where I visited, were not paved, and I was there when it was raining. In Ranoza one day, and you know, even getting some of the places where African migrants and African families were staying, and Black migrants, by the way, from Latin America.

It was just a mind everyone that there are Black Latinos living in Latin America, right? We're also pushed more to the outskirts. And as a result of that, those factors contributed to access. So it wasn't just issues with the software itself, which may be there. It's hard for me to evaluate. It's not because it's not like we've done our own evaluation of that. But it's also all of those contextual factors. And I just want to make a fine point on this.

We know that it's already. CBP should understand that already and understand the various social factors that impact access. So simply saying, for instance, if one wanted to take a defensive position and say, well, look, we ran the test. The software works as intended, there's no racial bias in the software. That doesn't get CBP out of the responsibility of saying, yes, but you absolutely had all the information and the reasonable person should have known that this access to this app had these kind of technological requirements. And then that access was not evenly distributed.

Yeah, I think it's really important. You said that actually because a lot of reporters, it does get reported on there are people doing great work, but like sometimes it gets missed because African migrants might not speak Spanish, Black African migrants. And a lot of reporters don't have the language skills to talk to people in, I worked with a fixer who spoke a Romo and Tigrayan and a lot of other like five or six other languages and that helped to get me an insight into the very difficult situation that lots of African people face and you know their isolation, their relative lack of resources even in what's a pretty resource-spar setting for

everyone. And I know Haitian people, I've spoken to a lot of Haitian people. Plus, then you add that like, if I think about last month, the language is which I was able with through friends through translation to speak to people with Vietnamese, command you is a dialect of Kurdish, French, Swahili, Spanish, evidently Dutch. Aside from Spanish, those are not covered, maybe if you're French, you can... I think it would be still hard to work in Asian-Creator, if you spoke sort of more mainland French. Those are not covered by the app, right? So you have to find a way to access that via translation. And then it's very, the information makes you incredibly vulnerable to whomever

if you're asking someone to share, right? It's imperfect. It's not a sufficient way to describe it, but it did extremely flawed system. So Jake's point, like I'm also like kind of open-minded about, you knowminded about using an app like this. I mean, Jake's right. I mean, if you're going to have a government in 2023, having some reasonably up-to-date ways to do things is not an unreasonable expectation.

But there's just so many blatantly obvious shortcomings that were not difficult to identify in preparing this app and understanding what people are likely to need. So to have those gaps and then also to roll out the app at a time when the same policy announcement that rolls out this app is also a policy announcement that says this is the only way to do it. Imagine if your new policy for particular health care thing was like, we have to go through this route, we know that 80% of people aren't going to be able to use this, but now this is the only treatment you have an option for. That would be, it's just strange. I think one thing to just think about creatively here is, I can imagine a phase rollout of this where

they did improve it over time, but they were adequate outlets for people who didn't fit into the categories that they had built into the app. And I think that would be a more complex and more nuanced and maybe a more interesting way to do it. I just don't think I don't think it was rolled out responsibly in that way. Yeah, I think we should be honest that beta testing and app on hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the world is incredibly responsible. Yeah, it's just cruel. It's not in any way appropriate. So I guess we've talked a lot about this app. Let's talk about, let's say you're fortunate enough to get an assignment appointment to go to enter the US. You would then, in most cases, enter something which is called CBP's

alternative to the detention system. ISIS. ISIS, sorry, yeah, you're right. Let's explain a little bit like why it's an alternative to detention. What why would one be detained? You've been in theory. Don't I think wrong? Well, in many people's perspective have done anything wrong, I guess. And then what does it ATD mean? And then we can get into some of the privacy issues and the way that it affects not just migrants, but also everyone. Yeah, one thing before we go there, I think would be great. Just closing the loop on the racial bias discussion. This is like an element of my advocacy that I talk about all the time in different out areas of like how facial recognition is used when it's using the criminal justice system

is that there absolutely is bias in most facial recognition systems. They work really well for white men and increase increasingly less well, basically as you run down the privileged spectrum. That's an element of how these systems are designed, right. It's they get fed a lot of images of white men and fewer images of other folks. That's fixable, right? Like you can provide a training database that is a whole, you know, a good spread of people. It seems and not necessarily have been done with the facial liveness for CBP1. In part, because the British company that designed it probably did not have access to a lot of images of the type of people who would be on the Southern border. We're talking about indigenous Mexican folks, bechial folks, just a very large number

of different ethnicities. But any bias like that is, as Austin said, sitting on top of a series of other biases, right, of structural biases. And so the result, we see with a lot of facial recognition systems, and this facial-alibance system and CD-G1 is no different, is that a little bit of, even a little bit of bias in how the facial recognition works

gets amplified. And it's amplified by social biases. It's amplified by the biases of people who run the system and people who interact with it every day. And then it's amplified by institutional blindness as well, failure to recognize a problem. We had facial recognition systems rolled out since, on some level, since like the early to mid-2000s. And we didn't even know that facial recognition, that bias was a problem in any facial recognition

system until 2018. So when you're thinking about, and you're hearing about like bias testing and the fact that it's been bias tested, those tests are never incredibly reliable because they're not done in the real world. They're not done in the real world. They're not done with the people actually using the technology. They're done in a controlled setting. And they're not. Sacred Skando, one of best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Na Sons Joaquin Garcia.

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Hey what's up y'all, this is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. I'm talking about your most amazing hair and several experiences of the Flaur Bra. I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life. Like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch

to my nose. I wanna know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high. There was a every time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up. more. Listen to bombing with Aircon drain, Wilfair was big money players network on the IHR radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm by people who have a nuanced understanding of how the technology impacts people. Yeah, I think it's very important to remember that, yeah, this layers of one layers of bias

and they stack to make it harder and harder for certain people coming to the United States to get, again, what's that right? And often to just be safe, right? Like some people, especially the less advantage you are sort of on a global scale, the likely the less safe you are waiting in Mexico to make an appointment for your asylum, right? Like if you can't get into a shelter or you're from a group where you don't have community to look out for you, you do just that bit more likely to be taken advantage of or have something bad happen to you or your family. So yeah, it'll stacks up, I guess, to make for a very unfortunate situation for people. Yeah, which means the consequence of having a glitch happen is way higher.

Yes, I've personally known people who have had terrible consequences from what should have been a very, very straightforward asylum application and very easy to process very rapidly. Yeah, it's a whole, it's a whole mess. And I know I'm trying to speak more to some of the folks who work with African migrants, because I think that often their stories just don't get told, especially at our southern border where like, obviously there's this like a lot of people like to report on the border but not leave New York or D.C. or wherever they have their studio and newspaper or what have you. And I think it's easy to miss that if you haven't like got said like like being around a lot and seeing all these things stack up on top of one another. Yeah, it's an important topic that we don't especially as like I know that it doesn't get reported

on because everyone likes to report on Ukraine and only Ukraine but like it's more wars in Africa or wars in you know, so people from Myanmar it's very hard for them to get to the southern border, actually, from hearing from thousands, maybe different cases where people can't leave Thailand, but again, the system, you know, when you have a whole other alphabet that you're trying to access the system in and it doesn't work for you,

then that makes it incredibly difficult for those people. And that ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a cliffhanger in the podcasting industry, because we will be back tomorrow with more on how ice tracks migrants, and how that track of migrants can impact other people, people who live with them, people in their communities. I hope you join us then. Thanks. Bye. Hey everyone, it's James and I am back with Dr. and Jake to discuss Ice's alternative detention program today. If you haven't listened to yesterday's episode on CBP1 and a little

bit of ATD then I suggest starting there, because there's a lot of context that you might be missing in today's episode. Let's talk about alternatives to detention a bit. Let's say, this is a once inside the US system, right? So it's a little different. It's people who've managed to get through the significant hurdles posed by CBP1.

What happened to them then? Yeah, so, you know, ICE has the option of detaining people at immigrant detention facilities. This includes people who are facing deportation. Most people who are facing deportation. Can you explain that the title eight thing because people might not be familiar, I've tried to explain that before, but I'd love you to explain that again just so people are clear. Regarding detention. Well, regarding filing a defensive asylum application and why people might be doing that.

The post title 42 paradigm for processing asylum. Yeah, sure. Okay. So Title 42, which we talked about earlier, has gone away, which me now, title eight is not like title 42. It's the part of the U.S. law, which is about immigration. Title eight never went away, but it is now the dominant, you know, section of code that is shaping border enforcement and immigration processing. When someone comes through CBP1 and they get the point then they go to their interview for the Venturi

then they come into the United States. They have not made an asylum application yet. So they still have to do that. And the US, the United States has two options at this point. There's two agencies that can make decisions, can receive asylum applications and make decisions. USCIS, which is historically the primary one, US citizenship and immigration services, they have what are called asylum officers whose job it is to adjudicate asylum applications, interview people, and so forth.

Or the United States can file removal proceedings, deportation cases, effectively against these individuals, and put them into immigration court where an immigration judge can accept an asylum application and adjudicate the asylum application. The major difference here is that in the court room, in the immigration court system, that individual is going in front of a judge and has an ICE officer, an enforcement related kind of attorney effectively arguing against them in court. Technically, they're not supposed to be arguing against them per se, they're supposed to be finding the right outcome, but effectively, they're arguing against them, almost like they're trying to apply for asylum in an immigration court, in a criminal court setting almost,

not really, but almost. Right, so here's the two main differences. When those individuals, historically, when people have been put into the immigration court system, ICE does have the option of detaining them, or at least detaining them for an early part of that process until they meet some certain told. The Biden administration has decided, largely, at this point, not to go that route. That has not been true in the past. The Trump administration's detention numbers were up well over 60,000 people detained today at one point. Right now, it's about half that.

It's up from the beginning of the year, but it's about almost 30,000 people are in detention now. And people seem to be moving through, even when they are detained relatively quickly. This is where alternatives to detention come in. I, we should not think of alternatives to detention as alternatives to detention. In fact, ICE itself has said on their website and in Test Money for Congress, alternatives to detention is not an alternative to detention. It is an alternative to unsupervised release. So it's what it really really is is an electronic monitoring program that allows the agency to effectively keep track

of everyone that they want to keep track of. Now, the number of people in this alternative to detention program is an extremely small fraction of the number of asylum systems in court. It is nowhere near, you know, satirating the total number of people that they could be. One wonders whether they consider 5% monitoring some kind of massive success when, you know, when most people are actually not monitored.

But one major change has happened, which is in addition to the smartphone app that migrants use to even try to seek asylum, now migrants also have to download an app called SmartLink. That is, now this one is not built in-house, this is contracted out from an organization called BI that effectively mostly contracts with the criminal justice system, but they also contract with ICE. So they have to download an app on their phone and they have to check in regularly using a similar but different kind of facial technology. They can communicate with deportation officers. They can get alerts about their immigration court here, all the stuff. But the crucial part of that is under threat of detention or redetention, redetaining migrants have to check in on their smartphone.

So it means that that same phone that one, you know, struggled with on the periphery of Renosa, trying to just even get into the United States to pursue, what is their legal right to pursue, asylum. Now, they're glued to their smartphone worried that if they don't respond to, you know, a text message or an alert or a ping on their phone, they can be redetained and potentially deported in some way.

So that's currently how this is. So it's not for everyone. It's not as if everyone follows this exact same path, but it is true, and I think this is the big takeaway. It is true that asylum seekers today will start interacting with the US government, may start interacting with the US government on their smartphone as far as out as Mexico City. And then continue to have their primary contact and interaction with the US government on their smartphone all the way through the border and to Columbus, Ohio, New York City, Seattle, Washington. So the smartphone has become effectively this kind of what I am trying to think of and conceptualize

as a kind of mobile border. They never where migrants never really arrive and they never really leave. Yeah, which is kind of not to get too sort of, I guess, not conspiratorial to throw them away, but like since 2001, the border has come to you more and more and more, right? And you don't have to go to the border for the borders to surveil you. And we can see this in hundreds of ways. Can we backtrack a little bit?

Just because our listeners will be familiar with some of the human stories that surrounded the end of Title 42. Some of those people, to my understanding, entered the United States, I'm doing heavy air quotes between ports of entry under title 42, but then were detained. It is fairly obvious. They thought they were being detained. It looked very much like they were being detained. They weren't allowed to leave

CBP apparently would argue that they were not detained because the conditions were woefully inadequate by their own detention policies, which don't exactly provide for luxurious conditions to begin with. And so what would the situation be for those people? Because they haven't, they were trying, at least some people I spoke to, to make CBP one appointments from a place of detention, which I don't think one can do. Maybe one can if one's not on a list or something, but you still have to get that, right? And you can't leave South or North to access. You have to be in Mexico to schedule an appointment on CBP one.

Okay. Yeah. These guys were in between. As Jake knows better than I do, I mean, the issue with being along the border, and James, you know this, because I mean, you're there, which sell tower you're on if you're close to the border.

Oh yeah, tricky, isn't it? I got, I used T-Mobile, but that's a free buzz marketing. But they, I have free roaming on my phone, right? So, very useful in the work I do. But I remember in 2018, I was in Mexico a lot, and then I was obviously just riding my bike a lot in places along the border. And they were like, you've been in Mexico every day this month, you don't live in America. We're going to cancel your phone contract. I had been in Mexico like some days, but they had all this thing,

oh, you're picking Mexican cell tell, so you're on a bike ride in the East County San Diego, I wasn't in Mexico, but my phone thought I was. So yeah, and the same thing can happen in reverse, right? You're a phone can ping American cell tell us when you're in Mexico. So those people might appear to be in the US when they're not. But in that situation, they couldn't make a CBP one appointment. So I guess they're assumed to have, it's the same as if they'd crossed the fence somewhere else and been to 10, 10 miles inside the United States, right? What would their process be? Yeah. So I think if we're talking about right now, this is actually really important, is that the new rule called circumvention of lawful pathways that were at least title 42.

Supposed to happen like three years ago. And it's finally got passed. Basically, there were a number of court challenges in which red states tried to keep title 42 in place. The same states, mind you, who were very critical of COVID protections, were extremely worried about lifting the ban on people in the southern border coming in because of COVID concerns. Part of what that rulemaking did was it worked a fundamental change in the way that asylum seekers work. And so, like, just context, a claiming asylum is a human right is a right guaranteed by international law.

Is the right guaranteed by us law that you can show up and say, Hey, I am not safe in the country that I'm coming from and I need asylum in the States. And you have a right to do that. And for the US or whatever country you arrive in to process your claim and decide if it's valid or not. So one of the changes in this rulemaking was that they are applying what is called the government is applying a presumption of ineligibility to people seeking asylum, which means that if you did not show up in the proper manner to the United States, that means if you did not use the CBP1 app to claim asylum before you got to the border, and if you did not apply for asylum in every

country that you traveled through along the way, if you traveled from Guatemala and you did not apply for asylum in Mexico, before you got to the border, you are automatically deemed ineligible. And your asylum claim will be denied with no hearing, with no opportunity to say, hi, I'm here because my husband is a police officer somewhere in Guatemala, and he's trying to kill me, and I can't stay in the country, right? Yeah.

And so that is a like fundamental change in the way the law works. And that's the starting point of someone who has crossed illegally not used CBP1 and then has picked up. That's new in the law in 2023. Yeah. And so they would immediately be filing

like a defensive asylum application to prevent that removal. Yes. And basically, at that point, you're trying to argue for one of a tiny subset of exemptions. Yes. Which there is virtually no guidance on how to implement those exemptions. Like one thing you can claim is that you

crossed without a CBP1 appointment because you couldn't use that. The idea of trying to prove to someone at the Customs and Border Protection that you were technologically unable to use an app seems basically impossible. Given that the only proof that you have is that you didn't get the appointment, right? That you weren't able to submit it. That's not a strong record that a lawyer would like to argue on.

I will tell you, as a lawyer. And so the result is basically that people who have, certainly legitimate asylum claims are likely to be turned away because they didn't comply with the proper process. Yeah, even people we heard, I can't remember where it was now, where the customs or officials in Mexico have been threatening to detain people for longer than it, so they couldn't make it in time for their CBP one appointment, right? That they had already made, they'd gone through that adewist and bias process, made the appointment, and then people were being detained and they'd necessarily paid a bribe.

And then if those people had crossed legally and between ports of entry, they would be very hard for them to prove that that had happened at all, right? Like what a cause them to do that. So those people are in an even more difficult scenario. And if people then through any of these processes find themselves in a ATD alternative to detention, there are numerous ways it can be surveilled. I also mentioned that they're phone app, which I think is the perhaps the like most recent and most common one. Another one is ankle monitors, right? You can get a parole kind of style of ankle monitor.

And I know that Jake, you've written a little bit about some of the consequences of those. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah. So first of all, an overview of the ATV program is that there are different levels of monitoring. And all of them are, I think, should functionally be viewed as e-carceration, which is to say that you're not going to release from custody.

Just the location of your custody has been moved from a prison to somewhere out in the world where you're being surveilled and your movements are potentially tracked, but you are still in many ways as vulnerable as you would be if you're actually in a jail or a prison. And so ICE has the option to decide at their discretion which level of monitoring you get. The levels of monitoring, the highest level is an ankle bracelet or an ankle shackle. That is a GPS device that this battery power has potentially only a few hours of charge on it.

You might get a day of charge off of it and is constantly monitoring your location and sending that location back to both ICE and to the contracting staff of BI Industries, this prison technology company, who ICE has hired as case managers, basically people who are providing support for ICE on keeping track of the usually 8 to 10,000 people who are on ankle monitor system. If you don't get quite that high level, or if you get deescalated over time, you apply to ICE, you say, hey, I've been on my ankle bracelet for like three months.

I've not strayed outside the area. I'm supposed to go. I've always responded to check-ins. Then they might bump you down to the SmartLink app. Also provided by BI Industries is on an extremely lucrative contract. Their last contract was like $2.2 billion. And that SmartLink app is either going to be loaded on your smartphone. If you have a smartphone that can handle it, or you'll be given a smartphone by ICE

and told to use that smartphone to check in. You will be required to check in on a sort of regular schedule. I don't have a strong sense for how often that is. Could be daily, could be less. To check in, you're going to open the app up. It's going to ping your GPS location, send it to ICE, and then you're going to take a facial recognition photograph. That photograph will be compared to make sure that you're actually you. That photograph is also potentially capturing your surroundings, the people you live with, whoever's like in the frame. And then you can communicate with your case manager on the app. You can potentially find information on when your immigration court hearings are that type of thing.

It's the middle level of monitoring. The lowest level of monitoring is voice print based. So basically every once in a while, whatever your dedicated check-in time is. You're going to call into ice on your phone. You're going to say, hi, I Jake Wiener. I'm checking in and Ice will run a voice print analysis and make sure that you are the person you say you are and confirm your location At any point if that system screws up you are

Potentially in via you were then in violation of the terms of your release. And at any point, if you've, there's been an error and I saw if you can share off and take you right back to jail. Let's talk a little bit about that you've mentioned BI, right, you've both mentioned BI. This is not a government agency, this is a contractor, but potentially they have access to your photograph, details of your asylum case.

And we are very clear on like certainly with the ice issued phones, people seem to have concerned that what is being monitored and what isn't being monitored on the phone, right? Like is it only when they have their app open? Is everything on their phone now subject to like a review by ICE. And potentially also by this third party contractor, right? So how are those contractors vetting their personnel? How are they making sure that this very sensitive information is secure and private like it should be?

Yeah, I have no idea how they're vetting their staff. They are not exactly forthcoming. One aspect of the surveillance that I think is worth noting is that both ICE and BI don't just have your, whether you're on the smartphone or if you're on an ankle monitor, they don't just have your last GPS ping. They have your historical movements,

which means if you're on an ankle monitor, they have a record of every single place you went for the entirety of the time since you've been on an ankle monitor. And they also know where you are right now. Little more limited on a smartphone, but that's information that's highly sensitive. Your location, and especially your historical location information, until you all kinds of things, like what church this person goes to, Have they been to Planned Parenthood recently? Who do they associate with?

Like what houses are they visited? And for ICE, that information is very valuable because most migrants don't live alone. They live in community with other people. Some of those people may be undocumented. And so as a migrant, you are now worrying every time you check in, am I exposing someone who's undocumented to ICE surveillance? Am I exposing myself to just like tagging somewhere that ICE doesn't want me to be and maybe an officer who's going to show up for a check because of that.

It is creating a ton of insecurity and a system that is already very insecure and the like psychological harms of that are Manifest, you know, there's good studies like internationally that your risk of suicide and depression goes way up when you're on electronic monitoring that your access to jobs goes way down you You know, there's stigma with wearing an ankle brace. Also concerns that if you take a job, you won't be able to check in at your home

at the appropriate time. It looks like you're absconding, right? So this level of monitoring is messing with people's lives and really fundamental and deeply for all ways. Yeah, definitely. And these like, like you talked about, sort of how your phone can make you a snitch. Like mixed status families are very common, right? And it's hefty and migrant diasporas.

So like it could be someone in your family who have to different immigration status from you and to do what you need to do, you might be putting that person at risk. It's a very scary thing to have that tag on you at all times. And like you said, it's not just where you are, but where you've been. And if I'm right, they keep that data, right? That data isn't anonymized or sort of like destroyed. They can keep that data forever if they want to. Yes, it's inputted into their systems and that hangs around for, I think,

the retention period is 75 years. Okay, yeah, great. Depends a little bit. Yeah. This technology that goes into these, right, this facial recognition, I know they also have number plate license plate in America recognition. They have, I'm trying to think, which other technologies they have, their cell phone site simulation. A lot of that can also be transferred to local police agencies

right through some of these, like they're not tech transfer programs, I swear on word, but through these grants and programs that ice and a DHS more broadly has. Does that mean that local police agencies could also have access to some of this data? Yeah, so I think there's two different types of programs and it's worth breaking them apart. Yeah.

There are grant programs that are providing state and local police with the technology itself, right? That's like a money to buy a license plate reader and pop it out in your community. There is also the overlap between federal and special department of Homeland Security, ISIS databases, the systems that they house, all of this information in,

and state and local police, they have their own databases. Those databases are very often linked or accessible, which means that your local police department has a log of everyone they arrest very often. That log is sent to ICE and vice versa. So it's one of the main ways that this is done is through fusion centers, which is basically a federally funded state-run technology center embedded in state or local police departments where you have the Department of Homeland Security agents who have access to their set of databases and state and local police department officers who have access to their set of databases sitting right next to each other. and those people can then talk and be like, you know, I need you to run this search into your system, which is theoretically only for federal use, but suddenly is getting used for state law enforcement and vice versa. cities that want to be sanctuary cities that don't want their police departments reporting and handing people over to ICE when they arrest undocumented folks. City government is unable to

control their local police departments and the information that is sent to ICE. So even a sensible sanctuary cities where the city says we're not going to report this information. The way that these databases are tied together, especially license plate reader databases, as well as the rest databases, all sorts of stuff, means that the city government functionally cannot create a sanctuary city. Right. Which, just in, if we talk about my situation, I'm in San Diego, our mayor is terrible. And I want to turn all our street lights into spies, right? Like put little cameras on them so that they can watch what we're doing. And like this information feeds into,

we know exactly where the fusion center is actually, like I wrote about this in 2020, when the cops took someone's phone and used Graky to crack it open. So like the exposure for people who in the US, who are not citizens of the US, is very high with these things. And the last thing about these databases I wanted to talk about

was those aren't the only databases that I has access to, right? They can you explain how they've managed to acquire some data about other people and whether or not that is strictly speaking legal? Yeah, so we have a massive problem in America with data brokering, which is companies. The worst are Lexus Nexus and Thompson Royder's Westlock, but there are hundreds and hundreds of data brokers

who vacuum up all of the information that they can off the internet, off of utility records, off of publicly available information, and basically make massive databases that are tracking to the best that they can at every aspect of people's lives. Credit reporting agencies, the people who like give you your credit score are also data brokers. They're pulling in all this information so that they can assign you your credit, which is where your credit cards are, how much money you have. All this information is super valuable, right? And it's valuable to advertisers.

It's valuable, yeah, like for marketing, but it's also really valuable for law enforcement. Because you have everything from like addresses where people are spending money. Often you can pull from advertising like phone advertising data, people's GPS location. And a number of these services have sold access to ICE. Both like Thompson and Rich's Clear, Lexus, Nexus has several products that they sell to ICE as well as LocateX, which is now Babel Street, which is specifically a GPS location company. And ICE is basically managed to obtain

through contracts, information that they could not legally obtain through a warrant, right? Which is to say that if you a police officer and ICE officer want to get information on a single person, you know, you want their GPS location off their phone, you need to go to a court and say, hey, I'm looking for James Stout and I think that he committed a crime

or an immigration law. Here's my evidence, I need a warrant. You cannot get a warrant for mass monitoring. That's like a fundamental part of how the Fourth Amendment and the US Constitution works is that it has to be individualized or very close to individualized. But there is currently no law that says that ICE can't just go buy the information on an open market and completely evade the warrant requirement. So that's what's going on with Lexus Nexus, with Locate X, as well as some like social media surveillance companies. Right. Yeah. They're the same databases that I as a journalist use when I'm wondering if this Nazi is still living in this place or finding the sons of Confederate veterans

to check if they still work at the Citadel University. So I think a good way to finish this up will be to talk about once you're in, you've gone through this process, right? You've CVP1, you've ATD, and you enter into sort of the asylum hearing, or you have your various different asylum processes. Austin, can you give us a very broad overview of like the likelihood of success, and maybe a couple of, I know you're very good at monitoring the factors that determine the likelihood of success and an asylum application through track. This

is a great place to plug track if you want to. Can you talk about how likely folks are to be successful in that asylum application process? Yeah, so we monitor this federal data related to immigration and other areas through track, transactional records access clearing house at Syracuse University, where I'm at. I'm also a research fellow at American University, so we have a kind of a fun partnership right now, looking at different angles of connecting data

to research on Latin American Latino migrants. And so we keep really close track of what's happening with the immigration courts. We don't get data. You remember earlier I described this two tracks of seeking asylum. We don't currently get data on that first track where people go through asylum officers at USCIS.

We're interested in it, but they actually publish not comprehensive, but they publish decent amount of data. We would certainly like to get more, but it's the immigration course that we have focused very heavily on for the last decade, I would say. And so we get very detailed granular data from the immigration courts on the monthly basis that allows us to see exactly what's happening. I would say currently the success rate denial rate, however you want to put it, an immigration court for asylum seekers is about 52 or 53% get denied, about 47 to 48% are granted asylum, but that varies widely by immigration court

and by nationalities. So migrants from Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, tend to have much higher denial rates, 70, 80%, 90%, whereas nationals from let's say Ukraine, China, some other countries, Cuba, have very high success rates. Haiti actually is a good example of a country that has very low grant rates, very high denial

rates, even though much like Northern Mexico, where we actually send people that we deport very often, there are all kinds of travel warnings, the United States government does not want people going to Haiti because it's too dangerous, but we don't even have a problem deporting people back there who are seeking asylum, right? And so that's what we've seen in recent years. The denial rate was as high as 70% during the Trump administration. And so it's certainly much better under the Biden administration. I do want to say, though, that in addition to sort of policy-related issues that may drive this factor to your graphic concerns.

People are much more successful in New York City than say Houston or Atlanta, Georgia. But one of the really important factors here is in addition to all of that, there's a threshold question, which is a lot of people, including a lot of people who are recently arriving to the United States, if they can't get an attorney, it's very unlikely that they will even be able to file an asylum application in the first place. So that 48% grant rate is for people who file an asylum application. We're not seeing the people who aren't even able to file an asylum file in the silent application, we're not seeing the people who aren't even able to file an application in the first place.

One of the most concerning things, recent developments, is that the Biden administration, I think not for no reason at all. There's 2.2 million pending cases in the immigration course right now. The Biden administration is trying to push cases to be faster. This is something the Obama administration tried, Trump administration tried it, Biden administration tried it, and every single time the cases get accelerated,

including a large number of family cases, unfortunately, they simply don't have time to get an attorney and file a good silen application. So what we're seeing is in addition to like geography, nationality, does someone get an attorney, it's also speed. Just how fast the case is go through. And the reality is if you try to force an asylum case through the immigration courts or frankly even through USAS, in a matter of weeks, people are just not going to win. You can't speed things up and maintain a fair system. You just can't. It's also not great for people to wait, you know, five, six, seven,

eight years for a hearing or for a conclusion. So that's not ideal either, but, you know, trying to force cases through and, you know, two or three months is just doesn't work. Yeah, I've spoken to people. I spoke to a friend a couple of weeks ago who was saying that now he's seeing people in Newlier, he's been in the United States for a few years, gone through the process, but he's seeing people come in and they're the amount to pay for a lawyer if they want to get a private lawyer is going up and like if people only have a few months or don't have the right to work, there's just no way for them to obtain that much money. And then the people who are doing it sort of, I guess, sort of in for nonprofits are just overwhelmed by the amount of demand. So, yeah, those people

are in a really tough situation. Yeah, I think we should talk a little bit about the fundamental unfairness of this system. So, immigration judges are administrative law judges. They are not real judges approved by Congress. They are hired by administrative agency, which effectively means that there are much lower bars to who can be an administrative logge. You also as an immigrant do not have a right to an attorney sitting in front of an administrative logge. And one of the things that the data proves out is that in every aspect of the system having an attorney is the strongest indicator

of a good result. So that's like how likely people are to know about their appointments. It's actually extremely hard if you are someone who does not speak English and has limited money and limited access to the system. And frankly, it does not understand how the American Immigration Law System works, which is reasonable because virtually no one understands how it works. Law System Works, which is reasonable because virtually no one understands how it works. It's really difficult to know like when you have a court date, much less to show up and to understand what kind of information that you need to collect and present to a judge that will be convincing to this person, who again is not an article three judge that's been appointed by Congress, not the type of judges that you or I would have or cases heard by if we were arrested,

or if we just like filed a lawsuit. And so access to a judge is like the number one best indicator for whether your asylum claim is going to be successful or not or any kind of claim in the immigration system, frankly, and we do not provide that to people who don't have the money to hire a lawyer. Yeah, which is fundamentally unjust, right?

We also, there's not a guarantee that you'll have a quality translator. Yes, yeah. You'll be able to show up to court and at all understand what is happening in your legal case, which is a huge barrier to be able to get a good result, to be able to communicate who you are and why you are will not be safe if you are deported from the country. Right. Yeah, we heard that in May where they were like, they were basically asking if anyone

could come and help try and like, migrant advocacy groups, you know, to someone to speak come and to someone to speak Turkish, just, you know, to someone to be called Manji, to someone to be Turkish, to just, you know, to someone to be Vietnamese, because they come down and help this person with their initial interview with each, it's just not a, not a just story from reasonable way to do these things, but that's where it's at right now, I guess. I think most people probably aren't aware of much of that, so it's good to explain how fundamentally unjust it is. So where, if people want to learn more about this, if people want to follow along, I know you both do some writing online, where can they find you and where can they find more of your writing about this?

Yeah, so you can find my writing on the electronic privacy information center or ethics website that is epic.org. You can find me and my 150 followers on Twitter at real Jake Weiner, that's WIENER. And hopefully in the near future, you'll be able to find some scholarship for me as well. Oh, cool, yeah. Using the Donald Trump Twitter format. Great.

How about you, Austin? Where could people find you? You have many more followers on Twitter.com. Yeah, so it's Austin Cooper. Last name is KocHER. The peculiarity of that name is in my favor, because it's pretty easy to search. But actually, this is a great timing.

I just had an article published this week, detailed one on CBP1. It's called Glitches and the digitization of asylum. It's an academic article, but it is open access, so there's no paywall there. Glitches and the digitization of asylum, it's also on my Twitter page. I'm on Twitter at ACCoker, so ACKOCAR. And I also write pretty regularly on SubSack. And that's like a weird thing to say. I'm slightly embarrassed to mention it, except that I'm not, because this academic article emerged actually out of stuff that I was initially exploring on SubSack.

So I really loved that format for writing because it's given me a chance to work out concepts and ideas before they even go into pure-of-you print. So if people want to get ahead of the curve, I want them thinking, go check that out too. Nice. And don't forget to visit track trac.sym.edu to get all kinds of data on immigration courts, alternatives to detention, detention statistics, and so forth. Yeah, I like to track this telegram channel as well, right? It's like the only time I can go on telegram and not see dead people, so I appreciate it for that. That's right.

We put stuff out on telegram and WhatsApp too. So if you don't want to have to be on Twitter, if you don't want to have to get an email on something like that, you just want to get a little, if you like some of those other messaging platforms, we have announcement threads on there. You can't interact. You just, you just get the little notification, but we try to, we try to diversify as much as possible, especially with the, uh, month's complication of Twitter. Yeah, yeah, that's really a good move. Thank you very much for your time, Beth. You really appreciate it. It was very insightful. Thank you, James. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness

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warn you Nancy. Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's up y'all? This is Eric Andreik, but I made a podcast called Bomming about absolutely tanking on stage. I'm talking about your most amazing and as a role experience as a performer.

I tell gnarly stories and I talk to friends about the worst moments of bombing in all sorts of ways. Bombing on stage, bombing in public, bombing in life, like the time I stole a girl's phone during a set and she dumped on stage and threw a big A-maker punch to my nose. I wanted to know what's the worst way they ever bombed or performed way too drunk or high, and was there ever a time where they thought they were going to crush and they stunk it up

Subscribe to my podcast bombing with Eric Andre to hear more crazy stories from me and my friends I'll have guests like Sam Jay to will say Sloan Michelle buto. Max DeMarco. DJ Doug Pound Saturday night lives Sarah Sherman and more Listen to bombing with Eric Andre on Will Ferris big money players network on the IAR Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts Hello, welcome to the podcast it could happen here. It's me James and Shereen today. Hi Shereen. Hi James. Hi Yeah, it's this lovely time to have you It's me, James, and Shereen today. Hi, Shereen. Hi, James. Hi. Shereen. Yeah, it's this lovely tie to Happy. Thanks for introducing yourself. I was a little confused by who I was talking to.

I have done podcasts for a long time, and I never actually know how to introduce myself. But I'm really happy to be doing this episode with you, because you're very good episode partner. Oh, thank you, Shereen. I am also happy to be in this episode with you. I think you're an excellent episode, Pana. What do we talk about today?

I just want to say that because I said it. No, I like them. It's good. It's good. We help people learn things. Well, today, you're going to learn some more things about Palestine. It's been a minute since we had an update. And I mean, surprise, surprise, things aren't good. So we're going to talk about some recent stuff that's been a minute since we had an update and I mean surprise surprise things aren't good

So we're gonna talk about some recent stuff that's been happening There's we mentioned some stuff that we've mentioned before in other episodes like the Neckbaugh or Just the ethnic cleansing that happened in 1948 Also some politics stuff. So if you are interested in getting more detail and you have a listen to those, I would recommend listening to those just for more context if you desire. But yeah. Yeah, I think you're diving in probably the deep end if you start here, but we're going to dive in at the deep end. So early this month, Omar Cotton, 27, a father of two children who worked as an electrician for the local municipality was killed when about 400 Israeli settlers marched down, torn Messiah's main road, setting cars, homes, crops and trees ablaze as they

went. It's not clear if you've shot by IDF troops or settlers, of both stormed village carrying weapons. Under international law is really settlement to illegal. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build a thousand new housing units in the settlement of Eli in response to the deadly shooting of four Israelis by two Palestinian government on Tuesday, the 20th of June. The suspected assailants were later killed. One of them was quote unquote neutralized by civilian, the other by the IDF, but it appears the plan is to punish the whole

nation again. Our answer to terror is to strike it hard and to build our country, Netanyahu, said, his right-wing government is dominated by settler leaders and supporters, and his statements came just days after the government gave far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich sweeping powers to exploit the construction of illegal settlements by passing measures that had been in place for almost 27 years. The violence in Tumasaya, am I saying that right? I just looked it up. Yeah, Tumasaya is a town in the West Bank

for context, people that don't know. So yeah, it's in the Ramallah and Elbira governing the West Bank. Yeah, I'm gonna get a little bit bit more into it why this is all happening. We just wanted to paint the picture for you first of all of the big events that have happened, I guess. So this violence against the people of this town and the shooting of Forest Raleigh's followed an incursion

by the IDF and Israeli border forces into the Janine refugee camp. It was an operational escape. I've not seen seen for decades. So it is eutugas, stung grenades, and an attack helicopter. Seven Palestinians were killed nearly 100 were wounded. And I feel like this is not the first time if you've been following any Palestinian news that you've heard of Jeanine, the refugee camp, or that is being attacked.

It might sound familiar. I'll get into it more later, but Shereen Abu-Akli was actually killed while reporting there. So I want to get into just why exactly Israel keeps raiding the Janine refugee camp in particular. And I want to talk about the camp's history, why it's getting targeted, and why the latest raid was different than the ones before it.

Janine is slowly becoming a symbol of Palestinian resistance. It was originally established in 1953 to house Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed during the Nekaba of 1948, which forced some 750,000 people from their homes in order to make way for the establishment of Israel. And again, we've talked about this in other episodes. You wanna revisit those, but essentially it was just

a very horrific example of ethnic cleansing and massacres in genocide and displacement. So the camp has seen much unrest over the decades, and it was nearly destroyed in 2002 when Israeli soldiers ambushed it during the Second Antifa. According to a human rights watch investigation, at least 52 Palestinians, including women and children, were killed during this period of time in 2002,

during the Second Antifaba. There were also at least 23 Israeli soldiers killed and several others injured that were reported. And since then, Janine has recently seen intensifying attacks by Israeli forces, especially since 2021, and it has slowly, along with Gaza, become a major symbol of Palestinian resistance. At this point, Palestinians are really fed up with the inaction of the Palestinian Authority, the PA, which is the government entity meant to oversee and quote-unquote protect the Palestinians

within its governance. The Palestinian Authority was formed in 1994 following the Gaza-Jericho agreement between the PLO and the government of Israel, and it was only intended to be a five-year interim body. Further negotiations were then meant to take place between the two parties regarding its final status. According to the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority was designated to have exclusive control over both security-related and civilian issues in the Palestinian-urban areas, which are referred

to as Area A, and only Palestinian control over Palestinian rural areas, which is called Area B. The remainder of the territories, including Israeli settlement, the Jordan Valley region, and bypass roads between Palestinian communities, were to remain under Israeli control, aka area C. East Jerusalem was excluded from the Accords. Negotiations with several Israeli governments had resulted in the authority gaining further control in some areas, but that control was then lost in some areas when Israel retook several strategic positions during the Second Infa Faba. At this point, the Palestinian Authority is an authoritarian regime that has not held elections in over 15 years, and it doesn't really stand in the way of the Israeli government

and the crimes they commit. So what concerns Israel is that in Janine and elsewhere, young Palestinians are increasingly taking up arms because they see no other way out of the pressure of occupation and they're very disillusioned with the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian authority. Yeah, I think that's a really important way to like, when we talk about like, especially Palestinian people, taking up arms, right? Or especially these new groups,

which have come in the last like couple of years, right? There's a lion's down group. I think they're more from like, Nubblers, Jeanine Brigades is another one. It's in the context of like government failure or state failure. I guess when we look at like the formation of states, right, when there's the it's called social contracts area, right? The idea that when we go and consent, which we don't do, we don't have a chance to consent to being in a state, right? Like very obviously, if you're from

Palestine, you're aware of this. Like we're supposed to give up some of our freedom and get some security, but the Palestinian authority has repeatedly failed to protect people in engineering, right? And in lots of other places too. And so like this response, like this response of taking up aunt is in the context of state failure, right? Like people are trying to protect their own communities when there's been a complete failure by the people who are supposed to protect them, the people who are, and that's both the PA and then like the broader, like the international community is kind of a pointless phrase. It doesn't really mean anything, but international law is also a pointless phrase. It doesn't really mean anything, which I'm getting too far afield here, but like the amount of times people in my replies on Twitter will be like, this is against international law.

And like, are you going to go and fuck me and force it then? Like, is it good? Yeah. Like, is it that matter? Is that that? Yeah. It doesn't matter. Like, we know it's bad.

Like, that's not what's up for debate. The what's up for debate is what the fuck are you gonna do about it, how you gonna stop it? And these people have decided that the way they're gonna stop it is by taking our palms. Evidently Israel sees them as terrorists. Evidently there are some groups inside Palestine who have killed civilians and don't shit, which is not very nice.

And also the IDF killed civilians all the time, right? And one of them is funded and armed by your taxes. And so like, yeah, it's an understandable response. And the response of the IDF is to sort of paint the whole of Janine as harboring quite a quite terrorist, right? Which is, and then to do these attacks, which often cause civilian casualties, which is not that distinct from suggesting that Israel is a terrorist state, right? And then attacking Israel, which like the one of these things is more broadly condemned, is terrorism and one is not a spruly condemned, is terrorism.

And then they're not to to my eye that morally different, I guess. Yeah. Does that make sense? I agree. And I also think, no, it makes a lot of sense. I think remembering the imbalance that it starts at is so important because Palestine has no army. It's not backed by any rich ass nation. It's not trained by anything. And it's an extremely unbalanced, co-enquete battle.

No one's deploying an Apache helicopter when the idea of collision is right like. Exactly. And yeah, like Shrine Abu-Akli was a US citizen, other matters, but it shouldn't matter just in the idea of what the US can do or like the outrageous can have, but it doesn't do anything. Yeah, as a journalist who goes to dangerous places and is a US citizen now,

like it's fucking infuriating. And obviously, like, and it particularly thing that, now. It's fucking infuriating. Obviously, a daddy government is coming to save me. If you're laboring under that illusion, you're probably a little bit naive. But it is just incredibly frustrating to see the value of some quite American lives. It's always wrong to shoot journalists, of course, but it's just that the US basically condoning that. This isn't the first fucking Arab journalist that the US, who is a US citizen, who has been killed by an authoritarian regime

that the US has done a US citizen who has been killed by an authoritarian regime that the US has done fuck all about. Yeah. No, I think it's just a slap in the face for her family and just the entire community of like both Arabs and journalists and that crossover there. But I did want to mention just the terrorism acts on both sides are obviously terrible. I just think you have to remember where they started and the imbalance that is there, especially if the entity that is supposed to protect the Palestinians

isn't doing shit. And the only way Palestinians can fight back or defend themselves is with violence. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's just frustrating when people is with violence. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's just frustrating when people point out the violence on just the Palestinian side and we'll get into the news version of what that means and then biases of what that means in a little bit. But yeah, that's just explaining exactly why these groups have risen, yeah. There's, um, just to be an absolute fucking dweeb for a second. The introduction to Richard of the Earth that Jean Paul Starrs were wrote,

it's a French fan on book, is fantastic when talking about violence and violence in the decolonial process and like how it gets very nice at these colonial states, apartheid states like Israel, speak in the language of rights, and they encourage to colonize people to make their claims in the language of rights. But every time they encourage to colonise people to make their claims in the language of rights.

But every time they fucking do, they get met with violence. Right, like, and it is entirely understandable that when the state speaks you only in violence, you will reply using the same language that is spoken toolonial struggles have been, right, from Algeria to Vietnam to Palestine. And this isn't a particularly under theorized concept, it's there and found on the 1960s. That's always something I like to suggest people read. I think it's a very good kind of distillation of what's occurring. Yeah. No, I like that you mentioned that because it does seem like the path that this is like

a Palestinian problem that they have, that they are violent and that they hate the other side. And it is just another good example of the effects of colonialism and like that's the occupied people. And they're only choice of like retaliation. Anyway, I don't want to get into that too much, but I do want to emphasize why exactly that they were disillusioned the Palestinian youth, especially during this time because the idea of has been extremely violent and the PA still is really inactive and doesn't do anything. So that's kind of the

Reason why there. Yeah. Yeah, we have a little more entry neburetk, if you want to. Oh, yeah, I have a we have an episode about her I believe and I'm going to mention her a little bit here the Jen and refugee camp it houses armed fighters and but here, the Jen and refugee camp houses armed fighters and they're from several factions, but this means Israelis they consider it a hub for what they call terrorist activity rather than resistance. So the entire camp is then dubbed a terrorist site. The most of the people that the IDF has killed are not engaging in any sort of violent activity and in some cases, they are clearly marked as press,

wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet, like Elder Zeera journalist, Serena Buocque for one. She was shot dead by an Israeli sniper in May 2022. And in her case, the IDF said they were aiming at armed Palestinians who were shooting at them and responding with fire. And after, I don't know, a lot of inconclusive proof in the IDF sticking to that story, a ballistic analysis proved that that story wasn't true.

And there was no fire coming from the other side. But regardless, no one cares about that. And this happened all in Janine. So I think it's very clear why this camp has become a symbol of resistance, simply because the atrocities that have happened there are tremendous and they keep fighting back. And I think it's an example of how exactly a Palestinian symbol comes to be, like Gaza, like this, whatever it is. I wanted to include a coat from the Israeli military spokesman, Ran Kuchov. He told Army Radio, which I guess is not exactly a kind of neutral arbiter here,

that she was filming and working for a media outlet amidst arm Palestinians. They were armed with cameras if you will permit me to say so, which like, no, we should not, need to say so, which like, no, like we should not, we should not fucking permit someone, because like, you know, I'll go to a kind of dangerous spots with the camera. Like I've never fucking shot someone with a camera because it's a fucking camera, right? Like it doesn't, it doesn't, that's not what cameras do. They, they take videos. That is the most, like, I can't believe that's an actual quote. That someone said and got away with it. Yeah, what the fuck is wrong?

Like what in it's just incorrect operation of the human brain to use the fucking phrase arm with camera. Like what is wrong with you? I know, people got really mad briefly when Russians were shooting journalists in Ukraine in the start of the conflict. And I guess they were kind of, as we're asked off about this, but like, yeah, it's a fucking camera.

If your security is threatened by someone filming the shit that you do, it's because you shouldn't be doing it and you know, you shouldn't be doing it, right? Like, and again, like, I've experienced that, like people, people, you know, doing stuff that they don't want to be filming, they're getting mad that I'm filming it, but like, maybe if you're not prepared to defend what you're doing, you shouldn't be doing it. You don't, you know, you don't suggest that the camera is, the camera is, it's a neutral

object here. It's not the camera that shot a woman in the head. Yeah, I mean, the essence is infuriating. The fact that we're literally, it says, they were amidst armed Palestinians. And then you could stop there and people can just like click out and read and like move on their day thinking that they had fucking guns. And then next sentence is literally,

they're armed with cameras. Like are you, I don't know, that's just so infuriating to me that that's like a real thing that was said and accepted. It seems to be almost deliberately insulting. Yeah. It's definitely an attack on, I don't know if you're a journalist and you don't see that from tack on all of us and maybe examine your biases, I guess.

Yeah. And then the ballistics analysis that I mentioned earlier, where she was, it showed that where she was shot, there were several targeted shots, one of which hit her head because there were shots in the tree that was behind her. So she was clearly targeted. Yeah, because she was shot by a sniper out the back of one of their APCs, right?

They have a little, a little like murder hole. And she was shot from 200 meters away, which is not very far with a magnum fire site. And like, yeah, you don't just, it wouldn't look like that, I guess, like three little holes behind where her head was, suggested someone fired, like single shots targeted, not just like spraying, spraying bullets around. Yeah, I don't wanna talk about it too much because it is the something the topic of this episode,

but I do wanna just say that I think it's so ironic that the idea I'm supposed to be this advanced military body, this highly trained thing, and then at the same breath, they're defenses sometimes, they made a mistake, oops. You know what I mean? Like they made this grave mistakenly thought she was carrying a gun

or she was a rampied bullet guns. I just think that's a very silly, I don't know. Yeah, I'm being sure it's scary. I suppose. And you can, you can make mistakes, but if you make mistakes, you earn them, you could still be like, Oh, yeah, we, we, we 100% fucked up. And like we need to examine how we fucked up, you know, uh, that's just their defense so many times it gets really fucking old. But okay, before we continue and talk about the recent attack in Janine, let's take our first break and we'll be right back.

And we're back. Let's go back to talk about the latest raid on the Janine Refugee Camp. The Israeli army launched its latest raid on the Janine Refugee Camp in the early hours of Monday, June 19th. Five people, including a 15-year-old, were dead by the time it withdrew its forces in the afternoon. Others died the following day because of their injuries. Several journalists were shot at, and they were surrounded and one was injured. This raid, ironically, took place

near the location where Shireen Abouakley was killed. Several ambulances were also fired upon with live ammunition, and at first they were denied access to the injured, which is nothing new to the IDF. They do this consistently, with the block medical aid to reach the people that are injured.

The Israeli army said the raid was to arrest two suspects, one of whom was a former Palestinian prisoner, Asim Abou--Hajjah, who was the son of an imprisoned Hamas leader. I just want to quick reminder, a refresh. I know I say this in most of the episodes about Palestine, especially the ones I've done in the beginning of this year. But in 2022, Israeli forces killed more than 170 Palestinians, including at least 30

children, in occupied least 30 children in occupied East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. And this is described as the deadliest year for Palestinians and those living in those areas since 2006. Since the start of 2023, Israeli forces have killed at least 160 Palestinians, including 26 children. And it's June.

The death toll includes 36 Palestinians killed about the Israeli army during a four-day assault on the besieged Gaza Strip between May 9th and May 13th of this year. I just want to put that into context because if 2022 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the last 20 years, And we're essentially already there by six months into this new year. It's just, it's really disturbing and it's really heartbreaking that it's truly, there's no slowing down.

And this raid is a great example of them just like upping the ante. And what was different about this raid is really offenses into Janine are nothing new, but it appeared that the raiding soldiers were caught off guard this time. Shortly after the raid began, videos showed an Israeli military panther APC being hit with a roadside improvised explosive device. And there is a video of this, I haven't seen it because I just personally don't want to, but it's there if you choose to see it. Military helicopters then began shooting and launching rockets and flares while surveillance

aircraft hovered above. It was the first time in 20 years that Israel deployed helicopter gunships in the West Bank. By the end of the raid, reports suggested that at least five Israeli military vehicles had been damaged by explosive devices and bullets deployed by armed Palestinians. This was the first time the IDF was met with this understandable degree of resistance and defense engine and their response was overwhelming in return. Hi everyone, it's James and Chirin again and we're here today for a little update. It's the third of July as we're this, just because there's been a significantly larger IDF in curation into a genealogy camp.

And because we noticed it's coming out, at the end of the week, we wanted to make sure you had a little bit more update, two date information. So the best I can kind of piece it together, what happened is that some Israeli military vehicles were hit with an ID, This is a bomb, right? Roadside bomb, I'm probably exposed to device.

And Israel responded by going fully ham on a scale that we haven't really seen since the second inter fighter. So there's air attacks, drones, helicopters, armored vehicles. I saw them using like an anti tank missile against a house. So videos of armored bulldozers tearing up roads in the camp and Matt like, perhaps Shrine, you could kind of give a scale of what this has done, not just at roads, obviously, but to the people who live there. Yeah, like James was saying, they're continuing to attack with drones and rockets.

And the Janine refugee camp is very densely populated. It has about 20,000 people. And they are targeting infrastructure like homes and roads. And the mayor of Janine, Nidal Obaid, he said the attack was a real massacre and an attempt to wipe out all aspects of life inside the city and the camp. Those being targeted now are not just the resistance fighters, but civilians are being killed and wounded as well. And water and electricity services have also been cut off from the camp since the attack has started. And the Palestine Red Crescent said that at least 3,000 people

were evacuated from the camp. Yeah, and then as far as with like a time of recording, which is mainly afternoon, eight people have been killed, one more person was called a Romala. The two youngest victims were identified as Nurdine Hassan Yusuf-Mashud, who was 15 and 17-year-old Majidi Jonas Saoud Arawi. So both of them under 18, but the oldest person was 23. So these are all very young people, you're sadly dead now.

And then they estimate that Palestinian requests and estimates of 3,000 people have left the camp, which I think like paints a picture of like emptying or cleaning or whatever colonial sort of word you want to use to make it seem less brutal than it is, but like emptying the space of human beings so that it can be colonized or the other folks can move there right? Yeah. Yeah. In addition to some some places are saying eight have died. Some people some places are saying nine, but regardless, there are over 100 people that are injured. And so, I don't know the fact that the oldest person was only 23 years old should really paint the picture of like who exactly is being targeted and killed because there's no way their defense of targeting terrorists can play here, even though it probably does in the long run. But I just, I think it's really fucked up and unfair. The White House, meanwhile, said the United States, quote,

supports Israel's security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad, and other terrorist groups. And they also highlighted the need to protect non-combatants, which hasn't happened. And none of those people are actually being targeted or there's nothing to defend at this point. I really don't, I don't know. I just, I'm out of office. It's also weird that, I don't know,

like it just seems such a neat, yet corresponds. So maybe it's just me being a dweeb or whatever. At least one of the IEDs was claimed by Jeanine Brigade. I think the one earlier last week, to call out groups by name. And then not call out the group who are claiming responsibility for it. At least one of these attacks, it just seems so like okay press play on the tape. Yeah, they're also naming things that people are probably more familiar with like almost to like justify or like in tisphere. I've been like oh my god yeah, Hamas attack Hamas or whatever they

think will happen with that response. And the international response yeah, the international response has also been dog shit, surprise, surprise. Because it's always just talk, and nothing really happens. Turkey's foreign ministry voice is deep concern over the attack. They warned that it can trigger a new spiral of violence it already has. And they called the Israeli incursion a heinous crime, cut her stress that the need for international community to move urgently to protect the Palestinian people was very necessary and then Jordan condemned the escalation as a violation of international humanitarian law, which Israel has been breaking

for years, so nothing has happened. And then Egypt, on the other hand, it warned of serious repercussions and it called on other international people to intervene. And then the UN said that situation is very dangerous. Like all these things I think have already been said every time. That's why I just think it's so empty and. I don't know, I don't think it's just words and no actions. Like how are we how are we supposed to even take anything seriously, I guess, I don't know, I, that thing, if it's just words and no actions, like how are we, how are we supposed to even take anything seriously, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, it's the, it's the thoughts and prayers of the international. Like the UN is always deeply concerned, but it never does. Fuck all right. So yeah, I guess to wrap up, we should talk about what this means for like, Janina as a place or as a community.

Yeah, we mentioned this in our previous recording last week, but Israel's attacks on Janine are part of an effort to crush resistance with the young Palestinians that are increasingly taking up arms because they're the solution with the PA. And according to analysts, Israel's hard right government is likely to continue with heavy-handed approach toward Palestinians in the West Bank. Palestinian lawyer and analyst Diana Batou said, Israel wants to do whatever it can to crush Janine in any other form of resistance. Israel has made it clear that there are three options available for Palestinians. Option one is to leave.

Option two is to remain as residents, but not as citizens of any state. And option three is if you resist, we are going to crush you. This is what they are implementing. Yeah, yeah, I think this well said. Yeah. Hassan Ayub, who is a Palestinian political science professor at N Nizhah, National University, and Nablus, he agreed with the lawyer statement that he said, the end game is to make Palestinians give up any hope of achieving self-determination or being recognized as a people. Janine has a long history of resistance. It is a model for the masses that Israel wants to eliminate, but for Palestinians, the question is a matter of principle, and their end game is to end this occupation. And essentially Israel intends to crush what you refer to as quote the Ja'Nin phenomenon or any form

of Palestinian resistance. Yeah, the Israeli aggression raised fears of an escalation that continues to happen in areas such as the Gaza Strip because that's another symbolic place of resistance for Palestinians. And yeah, that's where we are now. That's pretty much it. I will, I resound some people I know, but people don't really don't like to be on their phones when this stuff is happening. So maybe we'll update you as some more information. Yeah, hopefully, I mean, updates like this are always kind of like unfortunate because I don't think we want to update

that more shitty things are happening, but especially with stuff like this, it doesn't seem like Israel's gonna back down anytime soon. So yeah, that's the update. Okay. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about some of the people who were killed. One of the people who was killed was I'm Jared, I'll just, he was 48. His son, age 22, was killed in a genuine massacre that occurred in January this year. I say, kind of give you a sense of like the risk that I guess one incurs unwittingly by existing in what is a fucking refugee camp. His son wasn't the only young person killed. Another

person who was killed was a sedule, Najad Nakhia. She was 15. And a few days later her classmates attended her funeral, all in their school uniforms. It's pretty sad. There are obviously images of it if you want to go look them up, but you can see lots of little schoolgirls burying their friend in a town which is covered in burned detritus. No one I don't know which you'll have to bury their kids it's a terrible kid shouldn't have to deal with this shit and but there are plenty of pictures of little school ghosts standing by her grave it's it's awful and yeah the other victims Antivirus, Ahmed Sarka, Ahmed Darrakma, Khaled Dawish, Kasim Faisal Abou-Siria. They were 15, 19, 21, 19, and 29 respectively. They after this occurred, the aforementioned attack on settlers in Eli took place.

Two gunmen shone to a gas station in a restaurant. One was killed on the scene scene and one was killed later. It was a response to the massive attack on Thomas Ia that occurred a few days before. And I want to highlight how the NYT covered this because I think it's important to like dissect how Palace 9 is covered by the US right because obviously the US is one of the biggest state supporters of Israel and specifically one of the people who continues to equip the IDF to do this stuff. So I'm quoting here directly, last week two Palestinians killed four Israelis and injured four others near the Eli settlement. Asciting a month-long violence between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank.

The next day some 400 settlers descended on several Palestinian villages, including Tulmousaia, a prosperous town near Romala, where reportedly they torch cars and homes. That I want to stop right there because it is not reportedly, right? We do not have to qualify this with like maybe or like we've just seen this on Twitter.com. Like you could probably see this shit on Google maps, right? Like they torch the town. There's massive damage done. Even the New York Times itself didn't qualify it as a reported incident in its own reporting. And this isn't, we don't hear the same thing

with the two Palestinian government, right? I'll just read the first opening sentence again last week, two Palestinian terrorists killed four Israelis. It's just stated as a fact, right? And these, just within those couple of sentences, you can see so much of the bias in the way this is reported. So much of the different perspectives through which state violence, I would encourage people not to use terrorism. I would encourage them to see things, especially in this context in terms of political violence, right? There is political

violence done by both sides. One of those sides is the state actor, the other side is a non-state actor, but qualifying one and making it distinct from the other, I think it's shoddy journalism, and I don't think it really helps us understand this situation. So what happened, 15 homes were burned, 60 vehicles were burned, and the writers sort of

quote unquote sort of saying this is reportedly not true. It's a thing that really happened. Another kind of phrasing that I've found really objectionable in this instance is clashes, right? Like often you'll see clashes in Janine and like that casts a lens of parity, or like it looks at these things for a lens of parity, which I don't think is real on the ground. Like it's not a clash when a helicopter is firing rockets, even if it is firing rockets at people with collationic offs, right? Like that's not it's not a clash. There's not really a parity

there, right? Like and it's it also kind not a clash. There's not really a parity there, right? Like, and it's, it also kind of downplays a violence of what's happening, right? It's an attack, it's an assault. I think the constant use of clashes, right? It's nearly always, you don't really see it used anywhere else. Or if you do, it's for much less severe violence, like clashes between an arrival football fans, not that that can't be very violent, it can't. But you don't really see this word used to characterize state violence on this scale anywhere else. And so I would really encourage people when they're reading especially coverage of this,

right, which is an issue that the US cannot get its head out of its ass about to look for this biased language. And if you're reading coverage or anything else, right, if you're reading coverage, something and you start to notice that, like, I would perhaps question where you're getting your coverage from. And I know you had some shit to say about your time sharing. I mean, yeah, I, I won really like what you said about referring to it as state violence versus terrorism because I think it's a huge point that I also want to adopt because I didn't even really transfer that over until just now when you said it. And I think it's a really important distinction. So thank you for that. But yeah, the New York Times, as well as many, if not most news organizations, they're incredibly biased when it comes to Palestine

Israel reporting, and the New York Times in particular has been absolute dog shit and their coverage of Palestine for quite a while now. There has been a persistent pattern of bias when it comes to Israel and Palestine. I'm going to go in chronological order and then James will jump back in with the recent article about the New York Times and this terrible thing that it has within it that I'm not going to give away right now. But let's go back in time to February 2011 when the New York Times published a piece on JVP activism in the Bay Area, JVP stands for Jewish Voices for Peace. And this article said, the activists say they are not working against Israel, but against the Israeli government policies, they believe are a discriminatory, which is, yes, correct. But in the

editor's note, the Times later wrote that one of the articles, two authors, was a pro-Palestinian advocate and that he should not have written the article and should not have been allowed to write it. So it initially seems like good reporting because it's true. You're protesting against these really government, but then to say that a Palestinian advocate can't write it is ridiculous. So fuck, New York Times.

And then in 2015, a study was done analyzing the New York Times publications during the period of September 10th and October 14th in 2015. At the time of the study in 2015, 2000 Palestinians had been injured while 83 Israelis were injured just for context of what the reporting was about. And the study analyzed 36 articles. In these articles, the New York Times talked about Palestinian quote-unquote violence, 36 times, and Israeli violence, two times. The word attack was used to describe Palestinian actions

110 times and Israeli actions 17 times. They used the word terrorist 42 times to refer to Palestinian violence and one time, one time to refer to Israeli violence. More than half of the New York Times headlines during that whole year depicted Palestinians as the instigators of violence, zero headlines depicted as Israelis as aggressors. None. And nothing has changed. I know that's from a period in 2015, but that's basically consistent, if not more so prevalent now. It just seems like the New York Times editorial board refuses to incorporate policy and perspective into its editorials, even though there have been

many calls to do so. And this leads it to fundamentally misread the reality on the ground in Palestine, and it clearly shows the newspapers bias when it comes to what it chooses to include about Palestine and from who. Of the 2,490 opinion pieces about Palestinians, the New York Times published between 1970 and 2019, only 46 were written by actual Palestinians, which is an average of less than 2%. With the lack of Palestinian and Arab columnists that are even employed by New York times, a kind of group think has inevitably emerged there. And this group think consistently places Israel, Israeli framings, and Israeli perspectives above those of Palestinians. A keyword search of the times editorials that discuss Palestinians is like this.

Between 1970 and 2019, the word peace appeared 1,000 in 112 times, but justice only appeared 86 times. Terror was mentioned 649 times, but occupation was only mentioned 219 times. 219 times. I want to also remind you, this is from starting from 1970. Israel's security, quote, was written 90 times, but Palestinian freedom was mentioned just three times. While keyboard searches alone do not tell the whole story, they do help us get a sense of the overall tenor of the Times coverage. And over the last five decades, Israel has been unquestioningly presented by Times editors as a

close ally, while the Palestinians have been consistently framed as a problem. So I want to talk about this. There was an excellent piece that came out in study hall. I believe it's based on some reporting in a Canadian outlet called Passage. Study hall is a freelance journalist, like group, like listserv, but they also do some editorial work. But it's talking about this, this Israeli nonprofit, or it's really funded nonprofits based in the US and also in Israel, called Honest. And what it is is a 501 C3. And essentially what they've done is, is what Shireen describes, right, where they've, they've found,

uh, not, uh, I believe mostly Palestinian reporters, perhaps, also, uh, non-Palestinian reporters who are reporting from this, uh, I guess it was from what I would describe as a, of the facts based approach to this, I guess, from what I would describe as a facts based approach to this, which is describing what's happening as an apartheid. And they've dived into these people's background, their previous tweets, their previous writing, their other work to describe them as biased and get their articles taken down. And they've done this to some very,

like this has happened to the times, right? And this is at a time like, Ado Shireen mentioned something that happened in 2011, but I know that in 2010, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the times had a child serving in the IDF, right? So like, you know, if I had a, you know, like if I was a journalist, I said, yeah, you know, if I had a, you know, if I was a journalist, I said, yeah, you know,

I actually have a son who's in the Al-Aqsa Martins brigade, like they're not going to, they're not going to commission my piece. But they've, for instance, a Hossam Salem, if you see how Hossam's work. I don't know, my brain doesn't work. He I worked with a sound before. He's a friend of mine. He's an incredibly gifted photo journalist. People should follow him on the places where they see photographs. He's blacklisted by the Times based on an honest reporting probe into his quote unquote bias, which his photos of Gaza are some of the most emotive photographs of Gaza, like I've ever seen, and I work with him on a piece that will one day become podcast about Parkour in the Gaza Strip. But I've said, yeah, how some is a fantastic photojournalist and absolutely like it is, it's actually ridiculous to

to have like having blacklisted by a major news organist who is to, which whether we like it or not, that is where a lot of Americans get their news. In one instance, this organization managed to get the Toronto start to scrub all uses of Palestine from their stories. Is there like a two-include shit? Like, yeah, like they were profiling a DJ who was Palestinian.

And then like, which I think it it's like incredibly illustrative, right? That like this is, organization presents itself as fighting anti-Israeli bias, which I'm sure that is a thing that exists. It fucking does not exist in the US media. Like, I'm not a Palestinian person, but a speaker's a person who has pitched articles about conflict in various parts of the world. And I can tell you that that is not a bias that I have come across having worked with almost

every big outlet that it is possible to work for in the US. It's not doing that. It's trying to erase Palestine and Palestinian people, not only their perspectives, but their whole existence, right? And this is something that I harp on a lot, but I think we should do more conflict reporting that's about people, unless it is about numbers and battles and such. Like, that's where I want to write about little girls who surf in Gaza and young men who

do parkour because like when Israel bombs Gaza, it doesn't just bomb people who are part of a harmas or whatever they want to say they're targeting, right? Like the Lions Dan or Jean-Imbriae's whatever, when they're bombing these places, they're also bombing children. They're also bombing places where little kids want to go and play football, there are bombing towns where little boys want to... I mean the bomb hospitals and schools. Yeah, and yeah, like the... This is where people just like you live. It's not like a...

There's a very clear desire to kind of erase Palestinian civilians, I guess, from my narrative, and it's really important that we, it's generalist, and as people don't allow that to happen, I guess. You can, we'll link to this in our sources at the end of the month, but I think it's an excellent piece. It's worth reading. Thank you for mentioning that.

Oh, of course. Before we continue with some really excellent new things, let's take our second break, and we'll be right back. Yes. We're back. And I want to talk a little bit more about like the, I guess, the Israeli political context behind the increased aggression towards Geneva and Palestine in general. So of the 165 Palestinian deaths, about 86 were in the

northwest bank, mostly in the areas of Geneva and Nablus, which cannot come into the areas where we're seeing new armed groups emerging. Despite this, Israel is readying to massively step up settlement in the West Bank. Earlier in June, Prime Minister Benjamin Nelden-Yahu ratified a policy allowing Pro-Setler Finance Minister, there's a legal smot-rich. To bypass the six-stage process for building settlements, effectively giving him the ability to make settlement decisions on his own. Every six years, Israeli politicians and settlers have become more and more open about their goals, annexing most, if not all, of the West Bank.

So, March of this year, Smotrich claimed that Palestinian people were an invention of the last century. It's probably worth thinking a moment to point out that all national identities are inherently constructed. Humanity did not come to earth with flags. Those are things that came to exist in the 19th and 20th century. It's like so is Israel, right? We can kind of put a date on that one. That's just so that's like literally projecting an invention of the last century is literally Israel, whatever. Yeah, the state of Israel. Yeah, I mean, nation's calling other nations constructed is kind of the pot calling the kel Black like a yeah, but so much in so much as if we're going

to do that, I think it's really throwing stones from the glass house. Yeah, exactly. It is like it doesn't really fucking matter either, right? Like it doesn't matter how long one group of people have said one flag, you still shouldn't fucking kill children, which applies to anyone involved in the killing of children. So my church said that there was no such thing as a Palestinian because there was no such thing as a Palestinian people in a speech in Paris, said a memorial for Jacques Coupfe, an activist Israel's right-wing Lecoude party. Do you know who are the Palestinians?

He said, I'm a Palestinian going on to describe his late grandfather, who he said was a 13th generation Jerusalemite as a true Palestinian, which somewhat look at these people are supposed to be contradictory, like it's not really worth fucking pointing this out, but like you can't simultaneously say there are no Palestinians, Palestine doesn't exist. Also, I'm a Palestinian. Again, not the point, I guess. He was a resident. He is a resident, one of the settlements himself. He's an advocate for theocratic law. The segregation of maternity warts, he doesn't want Arab and Israeli women

to give birth in the same group. So ridiculous. Yeah, his justification for it is like even worse, but I won't bother with that. He's also openly homophobic, and he supports conspiracy theory that Yitzhak Rabin was killed by Israel's security agencies. All around top guy. The coup Benjamin Netanyahu's party

likes to use names for a West Bank that you might find in the Bible, and has made accelerating illegal settlement there a priority. Since it took office, Netanyahu's coalition has approved 7,000 new housing units, many in the occupied West Bank. The government also amended a law to clear the way for settlers to return to four settlements and have been evacuated. Within a week of having power to make these decisions, Smotchrich approved 5,000 new units. This is a great time to draw attention to one of the most fucking infuriating paragraphs that has ever been written, which I found in New York Times article that suggested that. I can't believe this is real. James said it to me before this. And it is crazy.

I like to censure into that thing, I know, make a angry. Of course, not all West Bank settlers are also naturalists who believe that living in the land of the Bible is religious edict. Most settlers, in fact, including hundreds of thousands of ultra-orthodox Jews, move their seeking affordable housing. I am fucking like, I cannot reach it. I lost it. When I got to affordable housing, I checked out mentally, I catapulted myself into outer

space. I don't want to be here anymore. Oh, yeah. That is ridiculous. I have decided to curl up into a ball and no longer exist. Like, this is from the newspapers as well that like when so fucking ham on people in 2020, like taking milk from a target, you know, like, like when you like like seeking affordable dairy products, I guess could have been an alternative framing of that.

They didn't go for it. It just fucking unbelievable. Like the shit that free economics has done to people's brains is really next level. But more people listen to our podcasts and their podcasts because we're winning in the marketplace of ideas. So all in 750,000 people live in these settlements. But being a legal under-international law doesn't really mean anything unless that law is enforced.

And it really is. I hope we spoke about this before, right? Just like the US, which frequently violates domestic and international law on its own border, Israel is simply not held to account for its crimes. United Nations Special Rapporteur and Palestine, Francisco Bernace, told LG Zero, that international law has a quote-unquote problem of enforcement. There is a problem of double standards, because clearly, when it comes to Palestine, there is a cognitive dissonance, especially among Western countries,

and reticents in applying these coercive measures, and all the prohibitions of international law efforts, Abanesi said. Yeah, we already mentioned how just even the phrase international law, it's just make believe. Like, you always hear about Israel, even like committing crimes against humanity. None of that even seems to matter when it comes to Israel because there's never a repercussion. Yeah, it doesn't matter anywhere that there is no direct interest to capital to enforcing that law, right? It doesn't matter when young women in Myanmar get raped by soldiers,

it doesn't matter when villages get burned down there. It doesn't matter in Tigray, in Ethiopia and Eritrea, because there's no interest to finance capital of starving those, that problem. It's not just a Palestine thing. It's a thing all over the world. Laws are fundamentally backed up by violence, right? In America, if you get a parking ticket and you don't pay a parking ticket and you have to go to court, you don't go to court. Eventually, someone with a gun will come and kick down your door. All laws are based in violence. and like all laws are based in violence. And there ain't no one kicking down Israel's door, right? And no one will.

And so it doesn't matter. International law doesn't matter. It's not, it's nice that it's there. We can point to it and say, look, we've all agreed this is bad. But we all know it's bad. Like we don't really need a bunch of like old men as suits to tell us it's bad. We knew it was bad.

What we needed to fucking make it stop. And that's not happening. Yeah, I think it's bad, we knew it was bad. What we needed to fucking make it stop. And that's not happening. Yeah, I think it's also interesting to mention that internationally, even when you get better quote unquote reporting about Palestine, it still is not enough because it's usually about peace and both sides or a conflict or whatever. So I just think, I mean, that also goes back to news

and how it's reported. But this steppered insistence on blaming both sides is reflective of a deeply flawed quote unquote piece framework, and it has dominated the international understanding of the Israel Palestine quote unquote conflict for decades. The framework of peace centers on identity politics and ignores the structural violence that the state perpetuates against oppressed groups. It instead focuses on acts of spectacular violence committed by those groups in response to the oppression they face, and it also blames them for escalating conflict and then uses it to justify the repressive violence by the more powerful forces. to justify the repressive violence by the more powerful forces. To go back to New York Times briefly, many of the Times' editorials over the last 30 years since the advent of the Oslo Accords have been steeped in the peace framework.

They treat Israelis as Palestinians as having equal power when they clearly don't. They praise Israel for minor adjustments to its daily structural violence against Palestinians, but in the same breath they've scoled Palestinian leaders and society for acts of violence done in turn. And the word conflict is also problematic in and of itself, because Palestine isn't some conflict or problem for Israel to sort out. It's a cause for everyone to fight for. Since 1948, the Israeli state has prevented Palestinians from living in their homeland with freedom and dignity,

whether it's by banning refugees from returning to their homes or discriminating against Palestinian citizens inside Israel or keeping millions of Palestinians under military occupation. If there is a problem to be solved, that problem is the regime itself. But this fact of bias and shitty reporting and the fact that the truth is not out of there, that fact seems to have eluded the Times editorial board. Because rather than recognize the systemic violence, discrimination, and colonization perpetuated by Israel against Palestinians, the board blames, quote-unquote, both sides for a vastly

asymmetric situation. This both sides of them may give the appearance of balance, but it does not reflect the reality in which Israel holds almost total political, economic, and military power over the lives of every Palestinian in a system that growing numbers of scholars, human rights groups, and legal experts are defining as apartheid. But I do hope some of this was at least helpful and I mean, we'll probably be back to do the same kind of thing soon because Israel is relentless and stupid and I hate it. So until then, fuck the idea and have a nice day. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. What's up, this IST with something I know you're going to want to hear. Thanks. I'll be coming to you every single weekday with a fresh new quote that speaks directly to me and I hope to you as well. In five minutes or less, I'll break down

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