Corrupt Guatemalans’ GOP Lifeline

U.S. Republicans are weakening a U.N. anti-corruption investigation into President Jimmy Morales. What are they getting in exchange?

Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales at a press conference with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in Guatemala City on Feb. 28, 2018. (Johan Ordoñez/AFP/Getty Images)

BY COLUM LYNCH

| FEBRUARY 5, 2019, 8:00 AM

In February 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump took a break from the National Prayer Breakfast to thank Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales for supporting the White House’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—the first world leader to show such support. And Morales’s reward has proved far greater than the handshake and photo-op he took home from his trip to Washington.

Over the past two years, the Trump administration’s political appointees have worked to undermine a highly regarded U.N. anti-corruption commission in Guatemala, one that has uncovered alleged illegal campaign contributions to Morales, as well as allegations of corruption by his brother and son.

When Morales announced plans in early January to terminate the U.N. commission’s mandate, giving its investigators 24 hours to shut their office, the U.S. response was limited to a mild statement of concern about corruption in Guatemala from the U.S. Embassy. It didn’t even mention the U.N. commission.

For more than a decade, U.S. presidents and lawmakers from both parties agreed that the U.N. International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala—known by its Spanish acronym, CICIG—offered the best hope of confronting a destructive legacy of corruption in the Central American country. The State Department’s regional experts believe the commission has stemmed the flow of immigrants and drugs to the United States.

“The administration says it wants to reduce the flow of immigrants over the border,” said Stephen Pomper, the director of the International Crisis Group’s U.S. program. “Here was a humane program that promoted the rule of law, that helped Guatemalans, that could have reduced those flows. So what happened?”

One thing that happened was that Guatemala’s conservative president, himself an evangelical Christian, has succeeded in shattering the political consensus, forging alliances with a coalition of U.S. conservatives. That coalition includes Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, former U.N. envoy Nikki Haley, Sen. Marco Rubio, evangelical Christians, and conservative think tanks and pundits who share antipathy toward the United Nations and a preference for friendly sovereign states to be able to act as they please.

“We have seen a breakdown of the bipartisan consensus on the issue of anti-corruption and democratic governance,” said Eric Olson of the Seattle International Foundation, which funds anti-poverty programs throughout Central America. “If you can prove you’re going to be loyal on something—in this case moving the embassy to Jerusalem or not backing China’s claims on Taiwan—[the United States] may go light on corruption.”

The U.S. retreat on the Guatemala commission is just the latest manifestation of its enmity toward international institutions that promote justice around the globe. (Last year, the United States threatened to halt cooperation with the International Criminal Court.) Pulling the rug out from under the commission could undercut Guatemala’s police and courts.

“Behind all of this is a slow but clear dismantling of what was a top priority for the U.S. and could result in more drug trafficking, weaker institutions, and a return to the old ways,” Olson said.

The U.N. commission was established in 2006 to help Guatemala’s public prosecutor and national police investigate complex corruption and organized crime cases, which contributed to a massive spike in murders in Guatemala. The reforms it has spurred have radically remade the Guatemalan justice system and led to a precipitous decline in homicides, according to Renard Sexton, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University who conducted a study of violent deaths for the International Crisis Group. “It was quite obvious that CICIG had reduced the homicide rate in Guatemala,” Sexton said.

The commission enjoyed broad support from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who appropriated $44.5 million for it over the past decade. Influential Republicans such as former Sen. Bob Corker, then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former Rep. Ed Royce, then-chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were among its most stalwart supporters.

The commission is led by a Colombian prosecutor, Iván Velásquez, whose crime-fighting reputation has made him one of the most popular public figures in Guatemala. One 2017 poll found that 71 percent of Guatemalans had trust in the U.N. commission, better than their view of other public institutions. “Iván Velásquez is like the Robert Mueller of Guatemala,” said Stephen McFarland, the former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala.“Iván Velásquez is like the Robert Mueller of Guatemala,” said Stephen McFarland, the former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala. 


The commission has trained Guatemalan law enforcement in the use of modern investigative techniques, including the use of wiretaps, and pursued cases to the highest levels of government. In 2015, Guatemalan prosecutors, working closely with the commission, implicated then-President Otto Pérez Molina and his vice president, Roxana Baldetti, in a bribery conspiracy. Pérez Molina was forced to resignin September of that year. In October 2018, Baldetti was sentenced to 15 years in prison on corruption charges.

Pérez Molina’s fall opened the path to the presidency for Morales, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform with the slogan “Ni corrupto ni ladrón”—neither corrupt nor a thief. But he has grown increasingly hostile toward Velásquez after the commission began investigating charges of illegal campaign financing during the 2015 presidential election, as well as fraud by his older brother, Samuel Morales, and one of his sons, José Manuel Morales. The fraud case involved the illicit billing in 2013 of $12,000 in meals to a federal agency by the mother of José Manuel’s then-girlfriend. Guatemala’s ambassador to the United States, Manuel Alfredo Espina Pinto, did not respond to a request for comment.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has vowed to continue supporting CICIG, even if the commissioner is operating outside the country. Even before the current crisis, the U.N. had concluded that Velásquez’s relationship with Morales had deteriorated so much that it was searching for his successor.

Late last August, Morales moved to shut down the commission by the end of its mandate in 2019. Speaking from the national palace and flanked by dozens of Guatemalan army officers, Morales denounced the commission as a threat to national security. Meanwhile, the Guatemalan military dispatched U.S.-supplied jeeps to CICIG’s headquarters.

The next day, on Sept. 1, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo posted a rare tweet about Guatemala. The missive, however, made no mention of the Guatemalan show of force or of the government’s effort to hamstring the commission. Instead, Pompeo underscored the importance of the U.S. relationship with Guatemala. “We greatly appreciate Guatemala’s efforts in counternarcotics and security,” he wrote.

Since Trump’s election, Morales, a former television comic with roots in Guatemala’s evangelical Christian community, has steered his country ever closer to the White House. He quickly seconded the U.S. decision to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as that country’s only legitimate president and fended off appeals from Beijing to recognize its sovereignty over Taiwan. Most visibly, he was the first world leader to copy Trump’s embassy move to Jerusalem.

As Morales has sought to hamstring the commission that is investigating him, he has gotten political cover from Capitol Hill, political appointees in the State Department, and the White House.

Last March, Haley, then-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, traveled to Guatemala City as part of a Central American friendship tour to glad-hand countries that stood with the United States in a U.N. vote denouncing the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Haley said the visit was aimed at promoting the fight against corruption, human trafficking, and the drug trade. She publicly underlined U.S. support for the U.N. commission and advised Morales in a face-to-face meeting that it was “in his best interest” to cooperate.

But privately, in a meeting that included Velásquez and Guatemala’s then-attorney general, Haley dressed down the U.S. ambassador, Luis Arreaga, for publicly supporting the U.N. commission, according to three diplomatic sources briefed on the exchange. Haley was particularly irked that Arreaga had appeared at a press conference with Velásquez the month before. In photos from the event, each held a bumper sticker reading “I love CICIG” in Spanish.

“Haley requested that no more press conferences be held on high-impact cases, since that violated the principle of innocence,” said Edgar Gutiérrez, a Guatemalan political analyst who played a central role in negotiating the terms of the U.N. commission with the United Nations. Haley’s appeal, he said, ran counter to Guatemala’s criminal procedure code, which requires public disclosure of judicial and prosecutorial actions. “It is considered a guarantee for the accused, compared to the secret judicial processes of the era of authoritarian governments,” he said.

Haley delivered a similar message in public to the commission. “I told them they should be like the FBI,” she said. “They don’t need to be in the paper every day.” The U.S. Mission to the United Nations referred questions on the matter to a Haley aide, who did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

After the trip, Haley and Kevin Moley, the U.S. assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, began advocating a cutoff of U.S. financial assistance to the U.N. commission, according a diplomatic source briefed on the discussion.


But they faced intense pushback from career diplomats in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, which had steadily lost influence over Guatemala policy to Moley’s bureau, and the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which provides most of the funds for the U.N. commission. Those bureaus had long championed CICIG, which they hoped could serve as a model for justice throughout the region.

Haley’s team at the U.N. mission ultimately realized it couldn’t kill off the commission. Instead, Haley’s office developed a package of reforms, which involved the gradual disbursement of U.S. funds to CICIG once it met a series of benchmarks.

According to the plan, which was outlined in an April 10, 2018, State Department email, the United States would disburse $2 million to the U.N. commission if it agreed to meet its demands. Another $2 million check would be issued once the U.N. established an inspector general’s office to monitor CICIG’s work. The U.N. would receive an additional $1 million after the United States appointed a deputy U.N. commissioner, who would ultimately replace Velásquez. The United States would cut the final $1 million check once it was satisfied that the U.N. had met all of its terms.

Haley never succeeded in imposing these conditions. But the effort helped delay the commission’s funding for several months.

CICIG was “corrupt” and had “overreached its mandate,” Leslie Hyland, a career civil servant who wrote the April 10 email, told colleagues, according to another diplomatic source.

Hyland, who played point on Guatemala for the international organization bureau, reported to Mari Stull, a former wine blogger and food lobbyist and controversial political appointeewho has since stepped down. Stull also disparaged the commission. During internal discussions, she argued that Guatemala was a sovereign nation and had the right to deal with the commission as it sought fit, according to current and former State Department officials. “Her position was that [Morales] has every right to deal with these guys as he pleases,” one U.S. official said.

“I don’t think she set out to empower a bunch of corrupt Guatemalan officials and disenfranchise an important process for justice, but at the end of the day, that’s exactly how it ended up,” a third diplomatic source said.

A State Department spokesperson declined to answer a list of questions posed by FP, referring instead to speeches by Trump at the U.N. General Assembly in 2017 and Pompeo in Brussels in December 2018 that underscored the importance of state sovereignty. “International organizations/institutions must respect member state sovereignty and serve the needs of member states,” the spokesperson said.

The Guatemalan effort to dismantle CICIG coincided with an influence campaign that targeted influential lobbying firms with ties to Pence and Rubio.

In February 2017, Guatemalan business leaders and politicians gathered in a condominium in Guatemala City and outlined a plan to force out Velásquez, the U.N. commissioner, and Todd Robinson, then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and an outspoken supporter of the commission, according to an investigative report in the Guatemalan newspaper, Nómada, by the reporter Jody García.

“The main idea was to take control of the justice system in Guatemala,” García told Foreign Policy. Key steps to achieve that goal, she added, were the elimination of the anti-corruption commission and the contribution of money to U.S. lobbyists with connections in Washington.

In April 2017, Marvin Mérida, an aide to the Guatemalan president, signed an $80,000-a-month lobbying contract with an Indiana-based lobbying firm, Barnes & Thornburg. The firm’s managing partner, Robert Grand, has long been a top fundraiser for Pence, a former Indiana governor.
Pence’s office and Grand did not respond to requests for comment.

The contract, which stirred controversy in Guatemala when it was disclosed, was canceled shortly after. But a group of four Guatemalan lawmakers stepped up in May 2017 and signed another $80,000-a-month, yearlong contract with Barnes & Thornburg. In September 2018, an association of Guatemalan businessmen signed a six-month, $80,000-a-month contract with Barnes & Thornburg, ostensibly to improve relations with the U.S. government. The head of the business group is a critic of CICIG.

Another Guatemala-based organization—the Association for the Rule of Law in Central America—also signed an $80,000-a-month contract with a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig. That lobby shop previously employed Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and contributes political donations to Rubio, a key Morales ally on Capitol Hill. The Guatemalan organization’s director is David Landau, a San Francisco-based publisher who blogs for the Guatemala-based conservative website Impunity Observer. He is also a longtime critic of the U.N. commission, the Obama administration, and Democrats in general.

Landau did not respond to a request for comment.

That lobbying contract makes no reference to the U.N. commission. The government filing states that the goal of the contract is to “encourage the U.S. government’s support of any activities to bolster the rule of law” throughout Central America.

But the crusade against the U.N. commission received perhaps its greatest boost from an unlikely quarter.

Bill Browder, the billionaire hedge fund investor who championed sanctions against Russia, has embraced the cause of a Russian family prosecuted in Guatemala with the assistance of the U.N. commission.

Igor Bitkov, a Russian businessman, fled Russia in 2008 with his wife and daughter and eventually settled in Guatemala. But they purchased false identity documents and were caught up in a wide-ranging investigation into a criminal ring inside the government’s migration agency that was selling fake travel and citizenship documents.

Igor’s wife, Irina, reached out to Browder for help, persuading him that her family was the victim of a revenge campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his banking cronies. Browder alleged that Guatemalan prosecutors and the head of the U.N. commission conspired with Russian authorities to persecute and prosecute the Russian family—a claim that the U.N. denies.

But Browder’s lobbying efforts have won over many top Republicans. Last year, Browder presented lawmakers with a PowerPoint presentation documenting what he viewed as Russia’s persecution of the Bitkovs.

According to the presentation, Igor Bitkov took out more than $150 million in loans from several banks to fund the expansion of a timber company he owned in Kaliningrad, Russia. In 2005, a senior executive at a state-controlled bank tried to force Bitkov to sell a controlling interest in the company at a steep discount, according to the account. Bitkov refused. Two years later, the Bitkovs’ then-16-year-old daughter, Anastasia, was kidnapped in St. Petersburg and beaten and raped. The family claims it paid $200,000 for her release.

Three Russian banks demanded that Bitkov immediately repay the loan in April 2008. When Bitkov failed to make the payment, the banks appointed a state bankruptcy administrator to sell off Bitkov’s factory equipment for a fraction of its value, Browder claimed. Threatened with arrest, the Bitkovs fled the country, eventually landing in Guatemala, which has no extradition treaty with Russia. They entered the country legally but later bought falsified documents, changed their names, and started a new life as teachers in the tourist town of Antigua.

“This is a clear case of abuse,” Browder told FP. “A number of CICIG supporters, including human rights organizations, are blinded to the idea [that the commission abused the Bitkovs]. They are unwilling to say this is a problem that needs to be fixed.”

“This is a clear case of abuse,” Browder told FP. “A number of CICIG supporters, including human rights organizations, are blinded to the idea [that the commission abused the Bitkovs]. They are unwilling to say this is a problem that needs to be fixed.”

In April 2018, well after Browder had agreed to take on the Bitkovs’ cause, the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, co-chaired by Sen. Roger Wicker and Rep. Chris Smith, organized a congressional hearing that provided a forum to denounce CICIG. The hearing, titled “The Long Arm of Injustice: Did a U.N. Commission Founded to Fight Corruption Help the Kremlin Destroy a Russian Family?” highlighted the harsh treatment that the Bitkovs suffered, including an initial 19-year prison sentence for Igor and the transfer of their then-3-year-old son to a state orphanage. They have since been released and are seeking political asylum in Canada.

The following month, Senate Republicans led by Mike Lee and Rubio suspended the U.S. government’s $6 million in annual funding to the commission for several months. That effort was closely coordinated with Haley’s office and political appointees in the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which were also advocating the freeze.

The funds were ultimately restored after an agreement to implement reforms, including the creation of a new post of deputy commissioner, and a requirement that the State Department conduct a review of the commission’s work. Guatemalan officials caught wind of the plan to restore funding and emailed a protest to Washington, calling the decision “outrageous.”

U.N. officials dismissed allegations of Russian influence, saying Russia “never had any links to the commission’s work” and never contributed a penny to its budget. The commission, they note, has cooperated with the State Department and U.S. immigration authorities. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement played a key role in the investigation into migration crimes that ultimately resulted in the prosecution of the Bitkovs.

“This Commission is shocked and concerned about biased, contradictory and troubling information regarding legal proceedings affecting the Bitkov family, which do not conform to reality,” Loreto Ferrer, a spokeswoman for the commission, wrote to Congress in April. “We are surprised that unfounded allegations of interference by a foreign country in the conduct of criminal proceedings in Guatemala are circulating at the highest level of the U.S. Congress with no evidence.”

Gutiérrez, the Guatemalan political analyst, dismissed the assertion of a Russian conspiracy, saying it “seems crazy.” When he first began discussions with the U.N. aimed at creating the commission, he ran into fierce opposition from the then-Russian ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, in the U.N. Security Council.

Lavrov insistently railed that the commission was a U.S. invention designed to create a justice model in former Soviet republics that would ultimately be used to attack Putin’s regime. “That’s why we took the issue to a vote in the General Assembly, where we won overwhelmingly,” Gutiérrez said.
But some supporters of the commission worry the allegations, coming on top of the Trump administration’s apparent hostility to the U.N. body’s work in Guatemala, may ultimately doom CICIG.

“The fact is that most people don’t know a great deal about Central America,” one congressional aide said. “The commission’s enemies have pursued a strategy that boils down to: ‘Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.’ And different stuff stuck.”

After deadly Syrian battle, evidence of Russian losses was obscured

A view of the grave of Russian private military contractor Sergei Gancherov in the settlement of Yelenovskoye, Russia December 13, 2018. Picture taken December 13, 2018. REUTERS/Maria Tsvetkova

FEBRUARY 5, 2019

YELENOVSKOYE, Russia (Reuters) - The last contact Grigoriy Gancherov and his wife had with their son, a Russian private military contractor fighting in Syria, was on Feb. 4 last year.

The father subsequently learned from a friend and fellow fighter of Sergei’s that the 25-year-old had died several days later in a major battle against U.S.-led forces in the Deir al-Zor region.

    It was not until mid-April that he received formal notification of his son’s death and the body was returned, accompanied by a death certificate stating he died on March 7 on the other side of Syria.

    Gancherov’s account is one of half a dozen instances Reuters has identified where the Kremlin-linked private military organization that recruited the fighters returned bodies more than seven weeks after the battle and with official documents bearing details that people who knew them say were incorrect.

    According to relatives and a battlefield witness, the fighters all died in the clash in Syria’s Deir al-Zor region, which took place overnight on Feb. 7.

    Such practices, an unusual pattern for Russian fighters killed in Syria, would have helped conceal heavy casualties until after President Vladimir Putin’s re-election in mid-March.

    Moscow’s message at the time was that the military campaign in Syria was a success with only modest human cost.

    That details are emerging nearly a year after the Deir al-Zor battle indicates that Moscow may struggle to control its message about casualties abroad at a time when it is expanding its military activities in the Middle East and Africa.

    NEW GRAVESTONE

About 100 Russian military contractors were killed in the Deir al-Zor battle, sources have said. The Russian foreign ministry has said that only a handful of Russian citizens were killed there and dismissed reports of heavy losses.

    Sergei Gancherov and his friend were standing near each other shortly before their position was hit, according to the account the friend gave to the father.

SPONSORED

    The friend, who was wounded, told the father he learned about Gancherov’s death on a medical evacuation plane on his way back to Russia.

    Reuters was unable to speak to the friend or verify his account.

    Grigoriy Gancherov plans to replace the wooden cross that bears the date recorded in his son’s official death certificate with a gravestone marked with the date of the Deir al-Zor battle.

    That was the first direct confrontation between the United States and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the only known battle in Syria in the early part of last year where Russian military contractors took part.

    Yet in each of the six instances identified by Reuters where fighters were returned to families after the election, the death certificates, issued by Russian officials in Syria, stated they died in late February or March.

    Several relatives of those fighters said the recruiters who informed them about their family member’s death told them not to disclose the circumstances.

    The Kremlin declined to comment on Gancherov’s death or that of the other fighters. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was wrong to suggest authorities postponed issuing death certificates of Russians killed in Syria because of the election.

    On whether death certificates issued by Russian officials contained incorrect information, Peskov said it wasn’t a question for the Kremlin. He added that he didn’t know whether there was a delay in returning the bodies.

    The defence ministry and the ministry of foreign affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
    As Reuters has reported, Russia secretly used private military contractors in Syria to carry out missions in support of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s ally, in coordination with the Russian military.

    The organisation that recruited the fighters, known as Wagner group, uses defence ministry transport infrastructure and hospitals. Russia denies using military contractors in Syria and says any Russian civilians there are volunteers.

    Peskov could not confirm whether the Wagner group operates in Syria or carries out missions on behalf of the Russian government.

A person Reuters understands to be close to the Wagner group commander did not respond to requests for comment.

HUGE AIR ASSAULT

On Feb. 7 last year, Russian fighters advanced towards an oil refinery in Deir al-Zor province held by Kurdish forces and the U.S.-led coalition, which responded with heavy air strikes.

    A military contractor who said he survived by taking cover identified among the many dead he saw two of the six fighters who were returned to families after the election with official documents bearing later dates of death.

    Colleagues told him the delay was because of the large number of deaths and because journalists were monitoring an airport in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, which was a key staging post for the private military firm.

    “It was difficult to deliver all of them at once because reporters were waiting for them in Rostov, meeting planes, as we were told,” said the fighter.

    He said he did not want to be identified because his recruiters did not allow him to disclose information related to his assignment in Syria.

    Reuters reporters spent several days after the February battle monitoring a military morgue and airport in Rostov. They did not see coffins arriving.

    According to the fighter, one of the dead colleagues he saw was Anton Vazhov from the southern Russian town of Novoshakhtinsk, whose official records say he died on March 21.

    He said he saw Vazhov in a body bag on Feb. 8 upon returning to the battlefield after the air strikes to collect the dead.

    “When we turned him over on his back and blew away the dust, we identified him,” the fighter said, adding that he drove Vazhov away from the battlefield in the back of a truck with more than 20 other bodies.

    FEAR OF REPRISALS

    In the region of Kirov, 800 km north-east of Moscow, lie the graves of three fighters whose bodies were returned to families in early April, according to people who knew them.

 

Slideshow (4 Images)

    The fighter who survived the battle said one of the three men, Alexander Lusnikov, was also among the dead he collected from the Deir al-Zor battlefield.

    Lusnikov’s official records indicate he died on March 1, according to a relative who has viewed the death certificate.

    Another relative, Viktor Dumin, the brother of Lusnikov’s ex-wife, said the fighter told him about the circumstances of the death.

    “Once the president had been elected, it all came to light,” Dumin told Reuters at the cemetery where Lusnikov is buried.

    Neither of the two other military contractors - Alexei Kalabukhov and Konstantin Danilogorsky – had contacted their families since the battle, a childhood friend said. After learning about the battle, their wives tried to contact them but couldn’t reach them, the friend added.
Their graves say they died on Feb. 27 – the date the death certificates carry, according to a person familiar with the details.

The brother of another fighter from a town in the western part of Russia said he learned about his sibling’s death in Deir al-Zor in mid-February from an acquaintance in touch with the contractors in Syria, even though the death certificate said he died weeks later.

He asked not to mention their names saying he feared reprisals.

    SURGE IN REGISTERED DEATHS

    The belated return of bodies and incorrect documents described by friends and relatives last spring contrasts to the normal sequence observed by Reuters over a period of two years.

Typically, recruiters return a body to a family two or three weeks after a death, accompanied by a death certificate bearing a date of death that usually tallies with what relatives know from fellow fighters.

    The Russian consulate in Syria is responsible for registering the death of Russian civilians killed in the country. Each death certificate carries a serial number, starting from one at the beginning of the year.

 

    Russian officials at the consulate issued more than 60 death certificates in the first part of last year through April 8, according to documents seen by Reuters. At least 33 of those were between March 22 and April 8. The election was on March 18.

    The Russian consulate in Syria didn’t respond to requests for comment. Reuters was unable to establish whether all those certificates were for private military contractors.

Video: Gaza artist explores disability through cartoons

5 February 2019

Mohamed Dalo, 24, is a cartoon artist from Gaza City.

Dalo trained himself by researching online and imitating drawings he found on social networking websites.

Dalo was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe genetic muscular disorder.

“Some of my pieces deal with the issue of special needs and different kinds of disability,” Dalo told The Electronic Intifada.

Dalo has created 300 to 400 art pieces so far, and had three exhibitions.

Video by Ruwaida Amer and Sanad Ltefa.

The Surveillance Economy

by Mozilla- Feb 5, 2019

Feb 5, 2019

In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff argues that tech companies — like Google and Facebook — collect so much personal data for profit, that they’re changing the fundamentals of our economy and way of life. And now these companies are learning to shape our behavior to better serve their business goals. Shoshana joins Manoush Zomorodi to explain what this all means for us.

We then explore whether or not it’s time to end our relationship with corporate spies. OG advice columnist Dear Abby gives us some tips to start with. We chat with philosopher S. Matthew Liao. He asks if we have a moral duty to quit Facebook. Alice Marwickexplains why most people won’t leave the social network. And journalist Nithin Coca tells us what it was like for him to quit both Facebook and Google. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy, but he has no regrets.

Show Notes

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Read Professor S. Matthew Liao’s Op-Ed Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?in the New York Times.

Here is Nithin Coca’s story on fully quitting Google.

Mozilla is on your side. Firefox has never — and will never — sell your data. And, we make things that give you more control over your life online. If you love Facebook but hate their data collection practices, reduce what they can track about you. Try Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, which makes it harder for Facebook to track you on the web outside of Facebook.

Want more? Mozilla has teamed up with 826 Valencia to bring you perspectives written by students on IRL topics this season. Gisele C. from De Marillac Academy wrote this piece on the importance of diversity in tech.

And, check out this article from Common Sense Media, on the science behind kids’ tech obsessions.

Transcript

Manoush Z.: Do you know the advice column, Dear Abby? People have spilled their guts to this namesake newspaper advice columnist since 1956. Millions of people have enjoyed reading the sharing of secrets and confessions, and the no-nonsense advice Abby offers in return.

Jeanne Phillips: Hi everyone, this is Dear Abby. Actually I’m Jeanne Phillips, but I’m better known as Dear Abby.

Manoush Z.: Jeanne Phillips inherited the job from her mother, Pauline Phillips. We reached out to Jeanne, or Abby, because because we could use some relationship advice ourselves. It’s about our relationship with this friend we spend most of our time with: the Internet. Maybe this is a friend we can longer trust?

Speaker 3: Dear Abby. I think my friend the Internet is spying on me. I share everything with her. She knows what I like and don’t like. What I buy and where I shop. Where I’ve been and where I want to go. Who I might vote for and what issues I believe in. Everything. It turns out, my friend the Internet is taking my information and sharing it with other friends. They even pay her for it! It sucks because she is a huge part of my life. But it’s like she’s spying on me! What do I do? Signed, it’s Complicated.

Jeanne Phillips: To It’s Complicated, A close friend does not disclose the private chats that you’re having. You can’t trust a person like this. You can’t take back what’s out there. A person who mistreats you isn’t a friend. Somebody who uses you is not a friend. In the future, be careful what you reveal to this so-called friend, who doesn’t seem like much a friend to me at all.

Manoush Z.: Dear Abby’s tough love makes it obvious: on the internet, we let tech companies get away with more bad behavior than we’d ever let our real life friends get away with. The Big Tech companies especially – like Google, Facebook, Amazon and so on.And the relationships we all have with these companies have fueled an entire digital economy. An economy where companies watch everything we say and do, and then turn that knowledge into profit. This online data economy is so pervasive – and so lucrative – that author Shoshana Zuboff has coined a new word for it: Surveillance Capitalism.

In a moment, Shoshana explains what Surveillance Capitalism is and how it is shaping, and modifying our online and offline behavior. And then, we’ll explore if we should cut ties with these companies… or if we even could cut those ties if we wanted to.

I’m Manoush Zomorodi. This is IRL: Online Life is Real Life. An original podcast from Mozilla.

Mozilla fights for a safe and open Internet that everyone can enjoy. You can support that mission, by trying out the Firefox browser. Firefox never sells your data. Download it at firefox dot com.

Manoush Z.: Shoshana Zuboff doesn’t think Google, Facebook, or the others are our friends. She believes the online world they’ve created doesn’t leave much room for pleasantries. I mean, it’s right there in the title of her book.

Shoshana Zuboff: My new book is called “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”.

Manoush Z.: Shoshana says these companies are not the democratizing and empowering tools they claim to be. And surveillance capitalism is spreading across our entire economy. A market economy where our private lives are what’s for sale.

Shoshana Zuboff: This is a new era of capitalism in which it is now private, human experience that lives outside the marketplace, that has been unilaterally claimed for the market, dragged into the market, renamed as “behavioral data”, and now traded and exchanged in a new kind of marketplace that is founded and operated by surveillance capitalism.

Manoush Z.: How did you come up with the term “surveillance capitalism”?

Shoshana Zuboff: Well, I think it comes down to this: you know, reading early documents, and listening to many early speeches, and reading some of the early patents, and at this point I’m talking largely about Google, right at the beginning here. Once they discovered that they could extract more behavioral data than they needed to improve, for example, their search products and services, this extra data, that was just at that point sort of stuffed into their data logs, sitting on their servers and not being used, and through a series of events they realized that they could use those data to predict who was most likely to click on which ad.

These extra data are what I call “behavioral surplus”, because it was more than they needed just to improve their products and services. Their desire to hunt and capture these behavioral surplus data was so intense, because it was going to finally be the road that cracked the code to how to monetize this young internet business. So their desire for these data was so intense that they began to explicitly formulate the idea that they were willing to hunt and capture that data while bypassing the user’s awareness.

Therefore, surveillance capitalism is essentially the only thing that you can call it, because it represents the social reality, as well as the economic imperative.

Manoush Z.: It is very, very poetic, and quite sinister actually, when you describe it. Can we make clear how Facebook fits into surveillance capitalism?

Shoshana Zuboff: Sheryl Sandberg, she’s a very brilliant and talented woman, and she was an extremely successful executive at Google, where she was involved in these very early phases of developing the logic of surveillance capitalism. In my book I describe Sheryl Sandberg as the “Typhoid Mary” of surveillance capitalism, because she’s really the one who began the process of dispersing … bringing the germs from one institution to another, where it gradually began to infect all internet businesses, all start-ups, all apps, all developers, and then as we now know, has moved out from Silicon Valley across the entire economy, really to found a new surveillance-based economic order.

Manoush Z.: Right. So it’s not just Facebook, all the companies … majority of the companies, are part of this surveillance capitalism. Why is it so irresistible, Shoshana?

Shoshana Zuboff: I think one reason that it’s irresistible, Manoush, is that in our globalized economy where prices have been driven down to the lowest common denominator, and people can shop online and easily find the lowest price, everyone in our very modern economy is chasing margins. We’ve had relatively low inflation, and so now this data surplus, this behavioral surplus, which we can sell into these new markets that trade explicitly in bets on the future of human behavior, I call these “behavioral futures markets”, now we see these same behavioral futures markets thriving in the retail sector, and the insurance sector, and the healthcare sector, in the entertainment sector, in the automotive sector.

Just recently the CEO of Ford Motor saying, “Hey, you know what? Our vehicles really are surveillance operations. We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in our vehicles, we can collect so much data about their behavior, and then we can monetize that data.” So maybe that should be Ford’s new business.

Manoush Z.: Can I just ask you, is there proof that surveillance capitalism does indeed work, that it increases the margins of these companies who are doing the ad targeting, or selling their wares based on the information they’re getting from the big tech companies?

Shoshana Zuboff: We see that Google has shot up in record time in market capitalization, Facebook has followed that same path. Amazon, a ruthless capitalist, but for many years not a surveillance capitalist, but now we see with its Alexa and this whole push toward ubiquitous sensing and recording and so forth, with it’s personalization effort, it has now swerved into the surveillance capitalist domain. And as these companies move into this domain, we see their bottom line, their revenues and their profit, are increasing.

And slowly, what the competitive pressures have forced these companies to realize, is that the most predictive data of all is the data that comes from my actually intervening in your behavior and shaping it toward those courses of action that are going to be most profitable for me because they’re most profitable for my business customers.

Manoush Z.: Right. So not just collecting behavior, but shaping behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff: So one example of this is Pokemon Go. It was peddled to us as all fun and games for the family, out having an adventure in the city or across the parks of your suburban town. But in fact Pokemon Go was, as I argue, was a kind of experiment in population scale behavior modification for the purposes of serving … the company behind Pokemon Go is called Niantic Labs … for serving Niantic Labs’ behavioral futures markets. Where it had restaurants and retailers and bars and pizza joints that paid to play. They said, “Yeah, we’ll have a Pokemon gym in our place, and you herd people to my bar, to my restaurant, to my establishment, and I’ll pay you per visit.”

Manoush Z.: Can I just ask you, what … Where does … Where do we … Let’s say someone’s like, “Pokemon Go, that’s annoying. But it’s really fun, and I get outside and I run around, and it’s a great time.” How do you recommend people sort of weigh the enjoyment or convenience that they get out of these services, versus the huge trade-offs that you have outlined?

Shoshana Zuboff: The first thing is that we all need to better grasp what the trade-offs really are, because once you learn how to modify human behavior at scale, we’re talking about a kind of power now invested in these private companies. This is a really big deal, because it bodes for a future kind of society that I don’t think any of us would choose, because it’s a deeply anti-democratic kind of future that we’re on the road to here.

The second thing is that, it is entirely illegitimate and unjust for individuals to have to bare the brunt of this situation. What has been created under the regime of surveillance capitalism is a situation where our means of social participation have been conflated with the means through which surveillance capitalists collect their data and seek to modify our behavior, we are simply the source of raw material for a vibrant dynamic market process that serves others and does not serve us. This is a deep pathological injustice, a new source of inequality, that is now institutionalized in our societies, that we don’t really know anything about, and this is simply not okay.

Manoush Z.: Shoshana Zuboff’s book is “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. And look, if we lived in a world where the big tech companies actually told us what they do with all of our data, where they keep it, how they use it in their algorithms, maybe we wouldn’t have to be as worried as Shoshana says. Maybe if we had some transparency, there’d be more of a working relationship that we could have with these companies.

But they don’t tell us, and we don’t know, and so when Shoshana argues that big tech companies data mining practices turns people, us, into little more than data points to be manipulated and commodified, well, it rings pretty true, and it doesn’t sound so friendly.

Shoshana says that Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, is the Typhoid Mary of surveillance capitalism. Facebook is a master of this new economy.

In the past year, Facebook has drawn the most fire for this practice. The spread of propaganda and misinformation on the platform? The Cambridge Analytica scandal? And how that may have influenced an election? All thesE controversies, and the others, it’s all a result of how Surveillance Economy mines and sells our data.

If we followed Dear Abby’s advice to the letter… would we break up with Facebook for being an untrustworthy friend? The New York Times wrote that Facebook feels like, quote, and I love this quote, “a cheating romantic partner who was caught betraying us and apologized — only to be caught again weeks later.”

Last year, the hashtag #deletefacebook made the rounds, and some people did that very thing. They quit Facebook. And for a moment there, the blowback even cost the company money. $37 billion dollars of its market value.

So a lot of us in some circles are fed up with how Facebook is spying on us and adding us into the behavioral data market that Shoshana described. It won’t surprise you to learn that she is not on Facebook:

Shoshana: Of all the surveillance capitalists, Facebook is the most intimate. I have never had an account on Facebook. I don’t operate on Facebook. I caution all those who are close to me, friends and family, to do the same, but I also recognize that that’s not a viable solution for many people.

Manoush Z.: Unlike Shoshana, though, well over two billion people are still on the platform. The company still rakes in billions in earnings every quarter. Users don’t seem ready or willing to leave. So why not? Matthew Liao has been wrestling with that question.

Matthew Liao: I’m the Director of the Center for Bioethics at New York University.

Manoush Z.: Matthew is a philosopher, and in November he wrote an article asking if users should quit Facebook.

Matthew Liao: The title of my article is called “Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook?”.

Manoush Z.: Matthew joined Facebook in 2009, and he says it’s been useful for him both professionally and personally. He’s always felt pretty good about it.

Matthew Liao: That is, until recently. When I started to get worried about it, when I learned that … it was about the Cambridge Analytica and how Facebook might have been involved in being used to influence a political election, and that got me worried about my complicity, like whether I am contributing to that too, the demise of democracy.

Manoush Z.: What did you decide? Are you complicit with the demise of democracy?

Matthew Liao: I started to realize that the situation’s a lot more complex. As I learned about how Facebook was involved in being used to perpetrate genocide in Myanmar, or the hate crimes, and also the fake news that’s rampant on social media generally.

Manoush Z.: What you’ve just said would, I think, make anyone want to quit Facebook. Does this mean that you have quit Facebook?

Matthew Liao: So I haven’t yet quit Facebook. I was thinking, what would Facebook have to do for me to quit it? It seems that Facebook didn’t know that Cambridge Analytica was using the data to try to influence a political election, I think they were just a bit too loose with their regulations regarding data privacy, but they weren’t intentionally trying to influence the election.

Manoush Z.: So you’re arguing that it’s not Facebook’s fault that Facebook has been used for the kind of stuff that you just described?

Matthew Liao: Yeah. Yeah, so I think that’s right. It’s not their fault directly, but given that it’s sort of taking place on their platform I do think that they have a responsibility. At the same time, I am giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt, and partly the reason is that there are about 2 billion users on Facebook at the moment, and I think we just … we’ve never had a technology with that many users, so I can see from their perspective that try as they might they … it’s just very hard for them to be everywhere.

Manoush Z.: You sound “Oh, god. This one friend, They just need to get their act together or else I cannot hang out with them anymore.”

Matthew Liao: That’s exactly it, that’s exactly how I feel.

Manoush Z.: You can read Matthew’s full argument online, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes to this episode at irlpodcast.org.

Moral duty or not… surveillance economy or not… plenty of us are sticking with Facebook for now.

Alice Marwick: I think without a service to jump to, a lot of the current users are not going to give up the benefits that it provides.

Manoush Z.: Alice Marwick is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Alice Marwick: I talk to a lot of people who hate the way that Facebook targets advertising, and they feel that Facebook knows things about them that they don’t necessarily want Facebook to know. But at the same time, they … a lot of people feel that they’re addicted to Facebook, or that they need to check Facebook every day or they are going to miss out on what their friends and family are doing.

So there’s this kind of sense that there’s nothing better to use, they’re stuck using it, all their friends use it.

Manoush Z.: This is essentially the secret to Facebook’s success. If you love it, it can feel irreplaceable.

Alice Marwick: We know that when people go through big life transitions, like when they have a baby for example or when they retire, they often need a lot of social support during those time periods, and Facebook is often where people who don’t necessarily have a lot of other social support in their day-to-day life can go to get that.

Manoush Z.: So if you depend on it to stay connected, why would you let that go?

Alice Marwick: So when you have a technology where there’s this benefit to you right in front of you, and the harms are this … kind of negligible, I don’t really know what this is, that is a trade-off that most people aren’t gonna make. Only the most vocipherous privacy advocates, and not even all of them, are going to opt out of using a technology simply because it violates privacy.

Manoush Z.: Ok, so… Matthew isn’t ready to break up … Alice explains why a lot of people will never quit. Even Dear Abby admits she’s hooked!

Dear Abby: Oh my god, you really want to know what my relationship with Facebook is? I spend too much time on it. It’s the darndest thing. I start looking at the feed that I’m getting, and it’s on and on and on and all of a sudden an hour has gone by and I’m going, “What happened?”

Manoush Z.: If you really do worry about where all this is headed, and you want to minimize your part in this game, you can opt out. People have been known to quit Facebook and go on living happy lives. Freelance journalist Nithin Coca did so many years ago. He opted out of the surveillance economy – at least, as much as he could. He admits it was hard. At first.

Nithin Coca: I remember that there was several weeks where I would reflexively type in Facebook on my browser without even thinking about it, and then the page would show up, I’d be like, “Oh, yeah. I don’t have an account anymore.”

Manoush Z.: And then, well, things got better.

Nithin Coca: I remember I felt like I had more time to do other things online that I didn’t before, because Facebook did take up so much time. I felt like the communication that I was having with my close friends was like a lot better, and more meaningful and more in person than it was before. There was definitely some people that were not inviting me to events, and there were some … I felt like I had less idea what was going on socially in graduate school. I didn’t know who was seeing who, I didn’t have the same level of access to gossip as before, but actually that was … I found that I don’t really need that.

Manoush Z.: Nithin didn’t miss Facebook, then in 2016 he took things a step further. He tried to quit Google.

Nithin Coca: Quitting Google took me over a year because there’s just so many different Google services I was using, and I had to find alternatives for every single service and like move my information over from those different services to an alternative. It was far, far more challenging than Facebook ever was and required, I can’t imagine, how many hours of just testing and trying different tools, and just trying to find a … figure out ways to move information.

Manoush Z.: And Nithin’s pulled it off, mostly. He lives an online life without the biggest social media site, and without the biggest internet services company. He is proof that if you really wanna quit, it is possible.

Nithin Coca: I think the benefit is, now I control all my data, I know where all my information is. I’ve been able to learn a lot about how challenging it is for these other alternatives to compete with Google because they have such huge market share, and it kinda shows how the internet is no longer this open space for people to develop different tools and ideas, it’s really being monopolized by a few big giants.

Manoush Z.: Throughout this episode, I have called out the big tech companies, and Facebook in particular, for their data practices. Why? Well because they’re the biggest, but the surveillance economy as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, it spreads wider than that. For more on how our data trail is harvested, go back to the first episode of this season. The episode is called “Checking Out Online Shopping”, it’s a good one. That’s where you can hear about how brick and mortar stores, offline stores, are actually also playing the data game.

Change seems to be coming, if slowly. France just fined Google nearly $57 million US dollars for violating Europe’s sweeping privacy law, the GDPR. Chump change for Google, but it’s also a warning.

And the US Federal Trade Commission has been investigating if Facebook has broken privacy rules. So, on the regulatory front, it’s looking like companies may start to pay – literally – for their rampant collection and usage of our data.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is saying it’s time to stand up for privacy. And, of course, he’s saying that because it’s good for Apple’s core business. But it’s also true. It is time to stand up for privacy.

It might also be time for these companies to follow our lead… maybe reach out to Dear Abby for advice on how to they can do better.

Saving Face: Dear Abby, Last year, a bunch of my users – sorry, uh, “friends” – confronted me. They accused me of taking their personal information and sharing it with strangers for my own personal gain. I’ve admitted that I’ve made mistakes. I said I’m sorry many many many many times. How can I prove to them that I can be a good friend? Signed, Saving Face

Jeanne Phillips: To Saving Face. Treat them as you would want to be treated. Let your actions from now on speak for themselves. That’s how you’ll be judged.

Manoush Z.: Mozilla is with you. Instead of asking what we can do with technology, their asking what we should do with tech. Their Firefox browser is safe, includes private browsing and tracking protection. You can also install an extension called “Facebook Container”, it can limit some of the data Facebook collects about you, and even reduce micro targeting. Get it for free at mozilla.org/firefox/facebookcontainer, or just find the link in the show notes.

In our next episode, bold alternatives to big tech’s internet dominance. We’re checking out the decentralized web, which I promise you, is way more interesting than it sounds. We’re gonna find out if, as it’s proponents say, it really is the future of a more secure internet, one that gives you control over your data and your life.

For now, this is “IRL: Online Life is Real Life”, an original podcast from Mozilla. I’m Manoush Zomorodi.

I’m gonna … I hope you’re okay with this. I’m gonna label your behavior as “Leader of the Rebellion.”

Shoshana Zuboff: I’d be very proud. I’d be very proud to carry that banner, Manoush.