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Despite assisting investigators in the wake of a historic attack on democracy, online platforms need to do more to keep their user data private even if it means going bust. The subsequent security failure by conservative social-networking site Parler is a lesson for other social platforms, even the good ones.

Events in the US have unfolded over the past two weeks like a boxing match between democracy in one corner and a grumpy skinhead in the other.

First, the latter the chin of democracy with a heavy blow. Rioters who entered the Capitol Hill Building, the country's Congress, committed a direct offence at one the most sacred political sites of American democracy that momentarily paralysed the nation.

But then democracy recovered. It rose to its knees and used what it's bestat, the power of the people. Within hours of the incident thousands of concerned citizens, open-source journalist and hobby online investigators gathered onlineacross social media networks - including your humble correspondent - andanalysed video-frame by video-frame every image of footage fromthe scene.

Leading perpetrators (see example of one Tweet above), were quickly located. This is becausethese individualsleft sufficient portions of online breadcrumbs - essentially traces openly accessible for those who know where to look - all over the web. Investigators used data fromonline posts, public authority records and other open-source intelligence sources.

This left their profile accessible and data that made tracing possible. Here at E&T, we covered variousfacial and images recognition tools and code that endow investigators and citizen journalists with great powers. They directly helped in the information gatheringfor the Capitol Hill incident and helped to inform federal and state investigators.

But we also need a few critical words on how these intrusive open-sourcetechniques impede privacy and thereforecan be viewed critically in the eyes of advocates.

Inthe example of the riotsit confirmed both. Itallowedinvestigators for instance to find the man who brought to Capitol Hill police-type temporary restraints, as Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton wrote. If the trespassers had the chance, thesecouldhave been used to take members of Congress hostage. So there was a real need and opportunity to do good.

I chatted to people online and collected the set of essential tools used in what might have been the biggest ever collaborative online investigation. Most effective were online tools likeMicrosofts facial image comparisonanalyser. It allows to compare faces in uploaded images with others found across the web. It provides you with a score indicating how closely subjects' faces align.

Open source face verification online tool by Microsoft Azure that assisted in the manhunt for individuals involved in the Capitol Hill storming

Image credit: Microsoft, E&T

Other tools such as Yandex image search,PimEyes, TinEye, Berify, Pixsy, Face-rec.org, FindFace or Image Raider, all enabled users to gather intelligence to locate equipment, identitiesor even where the culprits shopped for their neo-Nazi clothes. All this eventuallyhelped to build a public case against the intruders.

Then democracy struck another blow at the sullen guy in the corner. Amazon decided to suspend its webhosting service to social media platform Parler. Parler is popular among right-wing extremist groups, and members involved in the Capitol Hill incident used it to coordinate their actions and share footage.

Amazon gave Parler a short-lived ultimatum. When it went dark, geolocation datafrom videos turned up. Every time a Parler user took a video, metadataincludingthe location, time and the Parler IDwererecorded.

This information leaked when the Parler data was initially scraped by @donk_enby on Twitter. This process is kind of like hitting next page then save over and over.The hacker shared links to the data she scraped, but not the data itself.

The links point to millions of public posts, images, and videos.The hacker also shared video metadata which included GPS locations and other information that cameras save in videos, like the phone model, but not data generated by the website, like usernames, other sources have told me.

That allowed developer Kyle McDonald and others, like me, to take the geolocation data from videos and plot it on a map. McDonald says it shows that Parler users were everywhere, not restricted to specific places the way that some popular narratives suggest. We can see the progression of videos taken around and even inside the Capitol Hill building.

Timeline graphic for video uploads by Parler users and their geo-location on January 6

Image credit: Google Earth, Parler data, E&T

The data is evidence for a clear movement from the White House to the Capitol on January 6, including many videos that were shot inside the Capitol.

Image credit: Google Earth; Parler

GPS locations can be accurate down to a few metres, McDonaldexplains. We can see dots and relevant Parler IDs taken videos inside the building (see image above). Although this helps to expose the people behind the Parler IDs, there is a darker side to these leaks that we should worry about.

[Such leaked metadata] have a history of being abused by police and other people interested in spying like stalkers, McDonald says.

"Parler was incredibly irresponsible in not scrubbing this metadata. They scrubbed metadata from images, which indicates that they were aware of this problem but too incompetent to fix it for videos". It's not the first GPS leak. It may not be the last. Other developers and privacy advocated told me that they are worried.

What happened if Facebook goes bust tomorrow [and leaks data in a similar fashion]? one privacy advocate and developer from London told pointed out to me.

McDonald says by now providers should know that they "should always scrub GPS metadata, making any attempt to locate users futile. But users should also have legal protections against this kind of abuse, he adds.

With the Parler geolocation video data now in the open, people started to look in their own neighbourhoods, some possibly for right-wing extremists. Who would blame them?

Of course, it warrants pointing out that not everyone on Parler is a member of an aggressive far-right extremist terrorist group. White supremacy and groups affiliated to it were recorded, that much is true, but many Twitter commentators also said that it would be a mistake to throw all Parler users in one pot.

Nonetheless,it's positive to see that theclosing of Parler struck a direct blow against far-right British groups that are banned from Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.

"People are taking a look in their own neighbourhoods, and remembering that we have a lot of work to do if we want to build strong communities that are resilient against the kinds of conspiracies and extremism that led to the attack on the Capitol,McDonald adds. Recently, hehelped to build a browser app called Facework that uses AI and uses peoples' facial expressions.

Will the fight between Democracy and privacy go into another round? You bet it will. For now, the Capitol Hill incident has led to support of federal investigators, the finding of the perpetrators andnow toDonald Trumps second impeachment.

He might not ever take public office again. So, despite this roundbeingwon by democracy, those who bet on privacy might have lost their money.

Most recent reports confirmed informationthat appZellowas alsoinvolved in the orchestration of the Capitol Hill incident. Weshouldhope that the social media walkie-talkie app, critics say has largely ignored a growing far-right user base,picked up a lesson or twofrom the Parler fiasco.

Pressure on the British biomasslobby is increasing. An investigation now also published byThe Guardian,forwhich E&T worked witha team ofinternational journalists,went through apainstaking process of fact-checking by the paper's lawyers before publication, I amtold.

Our effortsand scrutiny paid off. The piece made waves. Environmental advocate Greta Thunberg tweetedthe report and proclaimed itto be an "essential read on how 'bioenergy' is accelerating the climate crisis in the time span we have at hand."

E&T covered the same findings in Decemberandreceived pressure from several companies and industry groups. But the findings are watertight: healthy roundwood - trees that could be used to capture carbon emissions -is stillcutand used to make biomass pelletsfor the benefit of the UK's 'renewable energy transformation'.

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US events are prompting a showdown between democracy and online privacy - E&T Magazine

The Constitution and civic participation in a democracy played an critical role in my career abroad as a public diplomacy foreign service officer for the State Department. For the years after the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain fell, helping the people of Central Europe and of the former Soviet Union construct or rebuild democracy was an important focus at our embassies there. These programs were broadly welcomed by our host countries. But after such dark events on Capitol Hill last week, would our many overseas partners embrace us with as much confidence today?

In the former Soviet Union, we provided satellite receivers and television programs to the broadcasters to end the information blackout and allow access for views from outside. People were hungry for information and a new order. One of our most popular programs in the former Soviet Union was a series on our Constitution. It was dubbed into Russian and eagerly consumed by thousands of people across the region.

In Kazakhstan, we were asked to assist with creating its new government, and we brought American scholars to work side by side with Kazakhstani academics. A group of Kazakhstani judges invited to the United States to meet with their counterparts and see our country at work returned to tell us that if they had not seen it, they could never have imagined the extent of freedom in our political practices and institutions.

Even in Western Europe, as leaders considered a new system for their union, American ideas were welcomed. Our guest speaker, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, held up the copy of our relatively short Constitution that contains the foundations of our federal democracy, contrasting it with the long treaty they were drafting.

Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that one of the characteristic differences he saw between Europe and the United States was civic engagement. When American citizens see a problem in their community, the first action is to consult with others around them instead of petition the government for a solution. That civic engagement was absent in society in Eastern Europe and Central Europe, where conformity was demanded, while freedom of thought was discouraged and often punished. A critical component with American efforts in the region was in civic education.

After some resistance from the education bureaucracy, the programs we set forth were welcomed by teachers and proved effective. Students were shown they could and should start change by taking on the responsibility of civic participation. In the Czech Republic, a group of students decided their community deserved running water. After the municipality said that it could not be done, the students wrote a petition after they did research to demonstrate it was feasible. The students had success for the running water and were invited to parliament to highlight how civic participation was needed to foster democracy in the Czech Republic.

All of these activities were initiated by American efforts and welcomed by our partners as guidance for democracy. The shameful display on Capitol HIll last week, however, was not democracy in action. That simulated what many in the rest of the world have been trying to escape. But the reaction from most of the world, while full of shock, indicated hope that the United States would overcome such an aberration. The necessity of a beacon, no matter how broken it looks on occasion, remains strong.

Perceptions on American culture have often been a greater factor for the international view of the United States than many realize. Now more than ever, our place in the world could depend upon how our domestic policy and values are seen. It is time that we realize what we could lose at home and abroad. We must renew our efforts to educate our people about civic participation and in the principle that action anchored in the Constitution and rule of law can ensure the survival of our democracy.

Renee Earle is a retired United States foreign service official with a rank for minister counselor and is the publisher of the journal American Diplomacy.

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Can America remain model of democracy around the world? | TheHill - The Hill

On Dec. 17, 2010, the world was changed forever by the actions of one man. A Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself in petrol and set himself on fire outside the provincial headquarters of Sidi Bouzid in protest against local police officials who had seized his fruit cart.

Just 28 days later, Tunisias Jasmine Revolution had ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, driven by the righteous fury of a population who had witnessed enough, a reaction not just to the desperation and subjugation of a 26-year-old street vendor, but to the routine humiliation and oppression of many decades.

One question frequently asked during the early days of the Arab Spring was whether the Arab world was ready for democracy. After 10 years, it is clear that it was always the wrong question. The Arab public systematically dismantled decades of oppressive silence overnight. The question was always whether the rest of the world was ready to support them. The answer to that question should be clear from the decade of Middle Eastern blood spilled to almost total indifference from world powers.

For generations, Middle Eastern dictatorships had grown bloated and complacent, consoled by the false belief that their security apparatus could intimidate their populations into subservience in perpetuity.

But by 2010, those dictatorships no longer held a monopoly over information. Greater access to the internet in the Middle East brought social media, and with it access to the kind of platforms for ideas and debate that many of these same dictatorships had so effectively prohibited, repressed, and criminalized in previous decades.

Under those new conditions, the suicide of a young Tunisian man in the small city of Sidi Bouzid was no longer a local story reduced to a footnote dismissed in a state-controlled newspaper, it was a tragedy that triggered widespread outrage and a civilian uprising that would result in the downfall of a 23-year-dictatorship in the space of just 28 days.

Tunisians were not alone. Witnessing events in Tunisia, civil protests broke out across the Middle East in a series of uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring. The Middle East had previously lived for generations in a culture of fear and silence, where even mild public criticism of political authorities resulted in arbitrary arrest, torture, and even death. For the first time in the lifetimes of many, that silence had finally been broken, and it was now the tyrants who were trembling with fear.

After Ben Ali, Egypts Hosni Mubarak, Yemens Ali Abdullah Saleh, and eventually, Libyas Muammar al-Qaddafi fell. The uprisings spread as far as Bahrain and Syria, where the Assad regime had been in power for four decades.

However, the Arab Spring and the political movements it created were less united by collective democratic goals than they were by a rejection of decades of failed governments. The uprising in Syria, for example, began as small regional protests calling for political reforms, not the downfall of the dictatorship. It was only after the initial calls were met with overwhelming violence that those calls eventually changed.

But other than geographic proximity and a shared history of living under dictatorship, the Middle Eastern uprisings had very little in common, besides the chant that spread collectively across the region: The people want the downfall of the regime.

This sense of optimism, this palpable feeling that democratic freedoms could finally be in reach for people across the Middle East, was so dangerous to the hereditary dictatorships and monarchies that governed them that they spent the next nine years at war against their own populations, salting the earth to make sure the democratic movements that terrified them could never take root again.

Hundreds of protesters were killed by security forces in Bahrain and Libya in the first few weeks of the uprisings. Bahrains protests were crushed, Libyas death toll began to spiral out of control, prompting a U.N.-Security Council response, mandating a NATO no-fly zone, eventually leading to Qaddafis downfall and extrajudicial execution by Libyan rebels on the streets of Sirte on Oct. 20, 2011.

By December 2011, the Assad regime had murdered more than 5,000 civilians, many of them protestors gunned down on the streets of Syria, or arrested and tortured to death. By 2020, Syria has become the worst war of the 21st century, with the U.N. officially giving up on counting the death toll in 2014, with the last estimate put at more than 400,000 dead in April 2016, with the true figure expected to have risen substantially since then.

There is no way to neatly package the impact of the Arab uprisings into comforting lessons for the future. While the death toll and infrastructure damage in Libya has remained several orders of magnitude below the bloodshed in Syria, it is still no success story. While the Western-imposed no-fly-zone reduced civilian suffering and was never intended as state-building, the civil war, migrant slave markets, and deteriorating human-rights situation remains a shameful legacy for the international community that intervened, but failed to follow through.

Things are little better elsewhere. Revolutions were crushed, or fell under the weight of nationalist or Islamist counterrevolutions.

In many cases, especially Syria, the uprising was not crushed from within, but from without, only falling after the full-scale military intervention of Iran and Russia. Syrian revolutionary interests were also further destabilized, co-opted, and corrupted by Qatar and Turkey.

The dictatorships in Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain continue to receive legitimacy and support from the Gulf monarchies, just as the Gulf states continue to provide legitimacy and support to Libyas embattled warlord Khalifa Haftar in his goal to take control of the country from the barely functioning Turkish-backed, U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord.

The Gulf States are not the only culprit. The grotesque embrace of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisis junta by the United States government that began under former President Obama, even after killing 1,000 civilians during the Rabaa Square massacre, was perfectly encapsulated by outgoing President Donald Trump referring to Sisi as his favorite dictator at an international summit late last year. France, which has played a crucial role in legitimizing Libyas Haftar alongside its Gulf allies, has also embraced the Sisi regime, with French President Emmanuel Macron handing the dictator Frances highest award, the Lgion dhonneur, last week.

This cycle of conflict is far from over. The protests and ongoing economic difficulties in Lebanon and Iraq show that the public appetite for democratic change is still burning strongly, even after a decade of crushed regional protests, mass displacement, and Western indifference. Irans regional Shiite paramilitary organizations and their brutal techniques continue to escalate tensions, and non-state Sunni fundamentalist organizations are finding fertile ground throughout the chaos. The economic and sociopolitical factors that triggered the Arab Spring uprisings are significantly worse than they were in 2011, and thats before the region has fully realized the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Arab Spring may be over, but the civilian uprisings in the Middle East have barely begun. The Middle East now finds itself in the state of flux that Karl Marx described as permanent revolution, the aspirations of its people permanently churning but never fulfilled There is no way for dictatorships to turn the clock back to 2011, and there is no desire from their populations to accept a status quo that permanently disenfranchises them. The powder is drier than it has ever been; all that is missing now is the next spark.

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The Arab Spring Showed the People Want Democracy but the World Failed Them. - Foreign Policy

The year 2020 brought us mostly bad news regarding the state of global democracy, though there were some preliminary signs that things might yet turn around.

Over the past decade, we have been facing what democracy expert Larry Diamond calls a democratic recession, in which authoritarian governments have flourished and the rule of law has been undermineda situation that he worries might evolve into a full-scale depression on the scale of the 1930s. On a geopolitical level, two big authoritarian powers, China and Russia, have consolidated their rule and have been aggressively supporting antidemocratic initiatives around the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic has boosted Chinas standing in many ways: Though it was responsible for the original outbreak, its ruthless containment measures have apparently defeated the disease, and its economy is back to pre-pandemic levels. Chinas foreign policy has turned much more aggressive, with Beijing picking fights with neighbors like India and extending its dictatorship to Hong Kong, in violation of its 1997 pledges. It has put millions of its own Uighur citizens in camps, to very muted international protest.

Russia, for its part, has continued to destabilize democratic countries, from near ones like Ukraine and Georgia to distant ones in Europe and the U.S. through weaponized social media. Moscow has allegedly attacked opposition politicians like Alexei Navalnywho was, according to the German government, likely poisoned over the summerand lends strong support to Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko in suppressing mass calls for democracy.

The more insidious threats have come, however, from within established democracies, where democratically elected leaders have sought to erode constitutions and the rule of law. The Covid crisis has given them a perfect opportunity to expand executive authority, as when Hungarys Parliament voted to give Prime Minister Viktor Orban emergency powers. Similar power grabs or efforts to delay elections have occurred in the Philippines, Tanzania, El Salvador and Bolivia. Under the cover of Covid, Indias prime minister, Narendra Modi, has continued implementation of anti-Muslim policies initiated in 2019, like a new citizenship law disenfranchising them, and a reduction of Kashmirs status and autonomy.

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Francis Fukuyama on the State of Democracy in 2020 and Beyond - The Wall Street Journal

An authoritarian inclination is in considerable part an inherited aspect of personality, according to behavioral economist and political psychologist Karen Stenner, author of The Authoritarian Dynamic, a groundbreaking exploration of the way a predisposition toward authoritarianism interacts with changing perceptions of societal threat. Its expressed as a desire for order through strong authority and shared values and norms that reinforce unity and conformity and minimizes differences, diversity, and discord.

Authoritarian voters, said Stenner in an interview, are highly sensitive to perceived threats to what she calls oneness and sameness.

That ends up being threats to authorities, institutions, and core values, she said. So the things that most upset them are loss of confidence in, and loss of shared respect for, leaders and institutions, and secondly, loss of a sense of shared values and norms. That impulse often manifests itself in a sense that we have lost the things that made us great, we have lost our way of life, the things that make us real Americans, the things that make us one and the same.

She estimates that about one-third of any population, across nations, has this inclination to some degree and that they are activated in times that are complex, chaotic, or stressful, periods that see challenges to authority, protests, dissent, and efforts to increase individual freedom.

The more tolerant a modern liberal democracy becomes, the more it emphasizes individual freedom and diversity, then the more complex political and social life becomes, the more chaotic and disorderly things feel, and the more distressing it is to authoritarians, Stenner explained.

Thats why societies that appear to be growing steadily more inclusive, tolerant, and pluralistic sometimes see sudden eruptions of intolerance or bigotry. The very complexity inherent to liberal democracy trips the authoritarian impulse that has until then lain dormant in the population, resulting in their increased demand for leaders and policies that shore up oneness and sameness, she said.

Trump clearly attracted those voters, said Matthew MacWilliams, author of On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History, his cogent new book exploring the tension between democratic ideals and authoritarian impulses in American history. MacWilliams, who previously ran a political consultancy, was finishing a late-career PhD thesis on authoritarianism in 2015 when Trump jumped into the presidential race.

Trump comes down the escalator and I start listening to him, and during the first few months of his campaign, everything he was doing is what the strongman would do to activate authoritarians, he said in an interview.

That is, singling out an other different from, and a supposed threat to, mainstream America and its values, often as part of a broader conspiracy, and portraying himself as the only one willing to confront that problem.

Trumps others were illegal immigrants and Muslims, whose entry to the country he promised to stop by building a border wall and enacting a Muslim ban.

Fascinated, MacWilliams put a poll in the field and came away with this conclusion: The best single predictor of support for Trump wasnt a voters race or income or education level, but whether he or she had strong authoritarian tendencies.

Now consider conspiratorialism, the belief in and promotion of groundless and often wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Trump is not the first national leader prone to conspiracy theories. But we have never had a president so invested in alternative realities. Further, if polls are accurate in saying that one-third to one-half of Trump supporters credit some aspect of the QAnon whirl of absurdity in a nutshell, that Trump is heroically battling deep state pedophiles who run a child-trafficking ring this is a particularly fertile period for fever-swamp foolishness.

Another barometer of that propensity for the preposterous: Despite any credible evidence of widespread fraud, upward of 60 percent of Republicans at least profess to believe the recent presidential election was somehow rigged.

Conspiracy theories have long been a tool of authoritarian demagogues. Stenner also sees extensive overlap between authoritarian and conspiratorialist mindsets among voters, saying the closed personalities and cognitive limitations that underlie authoritarianism also render one susceptible to conspiratorialism. MacWilliams says it makes intuitive sense that there would be considerable convergence, given that authoritarians tend to be driven by fears and thus are more prone to perceive possible threats on the political horizon.

These are two areas I plan to explore further. But readers, I need your help. Have you seen a friend or relative surrender to authoritarian impulses or slide into conspiratorialism? Why do you think it happened? Have you had any luck in changing their perspective or disabusing them of factually unfettered fantasies, and if so, how? Do you see a way for political leaders to reduce the anxieties that activate the authoritarian impulse while also protecting rights and opportunities for all members of our pluralistic society?

Please e-mail your stories and thoughts to me at scot.lehigh@globe.com.

Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeScotLehigh.

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Beware of authoritarianism and conspiratorialism, twin threats to our democracy - The Boston Globe