More than a million Uighurs and others belonging to Muslim minority groups are believed to be detained in China’s Xinjiang region. China calls them “transformation camps” built to prevent extremism from spreading. However, reports indicate they’re more like prisons. BBC News correspondent John Sudworth got exclusive access to one of the facilities.
The coronavirus has killed dozens of federal prisons and infected more than 6,000. Prisoners say they have been stuck in grim conditions that make social distancing impossible. To support their claims, some prisoners have used contraband cell phones that have been smuggled into prisons to post videos on Facebook and other social media sites.
VICE News contacted one of the prisoners, 34-year-old Aaron Campbell, held at a federal prison in Ohio, who said he was punished for making his video by being sent to solitary confinement. In a letter, Campbell said officials told him he would not face additional discipline if he issued a statement saying the video was fake. He refused. (The BOP did not respond to questions about his allegations.)
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IBM will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in a letter to Congress today. The company will also no longer develop or research the technology, IBM tells The Verge. Krishna addressed the letter to Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Reps. Karen Bass (D-CA), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY).
“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any [facial recognition] technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna said in the letter. “We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”
Posted in law enforcement
“The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that two-thirds of released prisoners are rearrested for at least one serious new crime, and more than half are re-incarcerated within three years of release.”
The announcement last summer that the number of Americans behind bars had increased for the 37th consecutive year in 2009 provoked a fresh round of grim editorializing and national soul-searching. With its prisons and jails now holding more than 2.4 million inmates — roughly one in every 100 adults — the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. As a proportion of its population, the United States incarcerates five times more people than Britain, nine times more than Germany, and 12 times more than Japan. “No other rich country is nearly as punitive as the Land of the Free,” The Economist has declared.
But a highly significant fact went largely unremarked amid the hubbub: The population of the nation’s state prisons, which house all but a relative handful of convicted felons, decreased by nearly 3,000. Although the drop was slight in percentage terms, it was the first since 1972. (State prisons held 1.4 million inmates at the end of 2009 and federal prisons more than 200,000, while the number held in local jails, mostly for minor crimes, averaged about 770,000 over the course of the year, and the majority had yet to face trial.) In California, which has the nation’s largest state prison system, with nearly 170,000 men and women behind bars, the prison population fell for the first time in 38 years. The national prison population — including those held in federal facilities — grew by less than one percent, the slowest rate in the last decade.
In a major blow to citizens’ privacy, the US Senate voted today to give law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and CIA the power to look into your browser history without a warrant. Thanks, Mitch McConnell.
Senators Ron Wyden from Oregan and Senator Steve Daines of Montana led the charge to insert privacy protections into the Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power for surveillance in order to maintain national security. However, the privacy protection amendment fell short by just one vote, as many senators who may have voted in favor of it didn’t show up.
WASHINGTON — Michael Fleming never got to say goodbye to his father. He didn’t know his dad was fading away on a ventilator, diagnosed with coronavirus at the federal prison where he was serving time for a drug charge.
His father, also named Michael, was held at FCI Terminal Island in Los Angeles and died April 19. At least half the population there has tested positive, the largest known hot spot in the federal prison system. But the first word the family received of the father’s illness was the day he died, from a prison chaplain asking if the body should be cremated and where the ashes should be sent.
“They just left us all in the dark,” Fleming said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We had to find out from the news what the actual cause of death was. It was kind of screwed up.”
A Colorado prison is now the site of the state’s largest confirmed COVID-19 outbreak as mass testing confirms that 238 inmates at Sterling Correctional Facility have the virus.
The number of positive cases at the facility spiked as more results from the 472 tests administered last week became available. Of those tested, half were positive. Sixteen tests were inconclusive, 216 were negative and two were still pending Tuesday afternoon, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman Annie Skinner said in an email.
Four of the sick inmates were in the hospital Tuesday afternoon, Skinner said.
Among the ongoing mysteries surrounding last week’s arrest of Harvard University nanoscientist Charles Lieber is the precise nature of the research program Lieber was conducting in his cooperation with Chinese researchers.
Lieber was arrested on 28 January on charges of making false statements to U.S. law enforcement officials and federal funding agencies about a collaboration he forged with researchers in China. He was released two days later on a $1 million bond. An affidavit outlining the charges against Lieber notes that in January 2013, he signed an agreement between Harvard and Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. According to the affidavit, “The stated purpose of the agreement, which had a five-year effective term, was to ‘carry out advanced research and development of nanowire-based lithium ion batteries with high performance for electric vehicles.’”
Officials at WUT have not responded to requests for comment on their agreement with Lieber. But it outlines just the kind of high-tech work that U.S. prosecutors involved in efforts to investigate Chinese attempts to acquire advanced technology from U.S.-based researchers say they are concerned about. They allege that the Chinese government has used such collaborations to improperly take advantage of the federally funded research enterprise, and gain an edge in economic and military advances.
