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SELLING GIRLS | SEX TRAFFICKERS ARE TARGETING AMERICAN CHILDREN
SELLING-GIRLS5 CHAPTERS
Author:
KHOU and WXIA
Published:
3:11 PM CST December 4, 2017

Previous
CHAPTER 1
SEX TRAFFICKING 101
CHAPTER 2
MOTIVATION
CHAPTER 3
SURVIVORS
CHAPTER 4
RECRUITED
CHAPTER 5
BUYERS
Next
SELLING-GIRLS
SEX TRAFFICKING 101
Sex trafficking is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the U.S. And traffickers are preying on young girls across the nation — our daughters, sisters and friends — right in our backyards.
CHAPTER 1 OF 5



Hear this sex trafficker's warning to parents from jail

Americans care a lot about money.

We talk about jobs and taxes and pay checks, but here’s what we don’t talk about: right here, in the United States, there is a thriving underground economy based on selling children for sex.

If sex sells, then business is good. It was almost a billion dollars, according to an Urban Institute 2014 study. But these dirty profits come at a huge cost.

Girls in America—our daughters, sisters and friends—are being lured and sold into the billion-dollar sex trafficking industry.
This is how sex traffickers do business. It’s all about supply and demand.

First, they need someone to sell. Traffickers target young people in their own homes, by combing through social media profiles, looking to spark a conversation. The trafficker targets pre-teens and teens by finding something to bond over and earn their trust.

It could be the promise of a modeling career. The trafficker might buy them drugs or alcohol or provide protection from an already dangerous situation at home.

Traffickers gain psychological control and use violent threats to force victims to stay. Once the child is isolated from family and friends, the trafficker puts them up for sale. This is where the demand comes in.

Traffickers use internet sites to connect with buyers or “johns.” But calling them johns is too polite. They are abusers. They are purchasing kids for sex.

So who are these buyers?

Court records show they’ve been teachers, pastors, cops and judges. They could be the guy next door.

The trafficker gets the money. The buyer gets the sex. The child victim gets exploited and sold.

So how is this different from prostitution, pornography or other sexual acts? These victims are minors. Legally, they cannot consent.

This isn’t the movies. It’s not like “Pretty Woman” or “Taken.” Richard Gere is not the buyer. Liam Neeson isn’t there to save the day.

This is sexual exploitation.

This is trafficking.

This is modern day slavery.

It’s selling girls.

SELLING-GIRLS
MOTIVATION
CHAPTER 2 OF 5

Carol* looked toward the darkness before her, then back down at her hands.

She cleared her throat.

She’d just been reminded that she was only 14 years old the first time she was sexually trafficked. Carol says met a guy on Facebook who called himself “Motivation.” He friended her, sold her on a life of no parents, no rules and being able to do whatever she wanted.

Joshua "Motivation" Jones is serving 12 years in prison for his second arrest for sex trafficking.
Court documents say Joshua “Motivation” Jones took nude pictures of her to post on the internet. He told her after every sex date, she should bring the proceeds back to him. That she didn’t have to wear a condom with clients, but she had to wear one with him. That did she have any other friends who would like to work?

When she told him she had a friend, but she was only 14, court documents say he replied: age doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Then, since the internet on his phone wasn’t working to post those nude photos of her, he forced her on the streets to sell her body for sex.

Carol’s first buyer was an undercover cop.

She was arrested for prostitution, despite federal law, which defines her as a victim.

According to the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000, all children under the age of 18 who are commercially sexually exploited are victims of sex trafficking. Unlike adults, there does not have to be “force, fraud, or coercion” under the law. The very age of the child makes them a victim.

Police arrested Jones and he pled guilty to compelling Carol into prostitution.

His sentence for the crime? Eight years probation.

He called it a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Her dream was to make music; then she was sold and forced to have sex

Carol was disappointed, but not surprised.

“It made me feel like what happened wasn’t really that serious and that it doesn’t really matter,” Carol said of Jones’ sentence. “It happens all the time, like who cares if it’s just another girl? Who cares if it’s you this time?”

When Carol got out of juvenile detention, another sex trafficker recruited her.

Therein lies the revolving door of sex trafficking — victims often get lured back into the sex trade because they never received specialized care. Pimps do the crime because they often do very little time.

Court records show “Motivation” continued trafficking young girls. It was only after a second arrest that he received hard time -- 12 years in prison.

“Sit your daughter down and let her know,” Jones said through a telephone in a Texas penitentiary. “There’s people out there really ready to manipulate her.”

*Carol’s name was changed to keep traffickers from finding her.

SELLING-GIRLS
SURVIVORS
CHAPTER 3 OF 5

Megan* grew up in church and got straight As in school.

She calls herself the “pretty typical girl next door” and she had big hopes and dreams.

Megan met a man online who promised to help her reach her music dreams. She was later sold on Backpage.com.
One of those was to one day become a music star.

She went to an online dating site and met a guy. She said that guy had a business partner who she was told was a music producer.

“My dream was to play guitar and sing and make music,” she said. “So when he asked if I wanted to go and make music, I didn’t hesitate and was like, ‘Yeah, sure.”

But there was never a music studio. She never saw any instruments or any recording equipment.

“It was all a lie,” she said.

Megan was sold on Backpage.com, a popular website where people post ads for sex.

“The next thing I know, I’m selling my body for money,” she said. “And $30,000 later, I haven’t kept any of the money. They’ve taken everything.”

TIMELINE: The history of Backpage.com

But traffickers don’t merely hide on the internet.

RaeAnn worked at a fast food restaurant to help her family make ends meet. A group of young adults, led by a girl RaeAnn’s age, often ordered at the drive-thru and flashed money around.

Monica, RaeAnn’s mother, said her daughter was asked how much she made.

“She was like, ‘$7.50,’” Monica said. “They’re like, ‘Uh, you work so hard.’ They would talk to the managers and be like, ‘Y’all need to give her a raise.’”

The girl in the group later befriended Monica’s daughter on Facebook. Little did RaeAnn know, she was actually a recruiter luring new girls to be trafficked.

They promised her a lot more money than she was making serving burgers. And RaeAnn’s family was in a difficult spot, so the extra cash sounded good. Plus, she was told she would be going to Wisconsin to sell purses.

“That was the story,” Monica said.

RaeAnn was lured into sex trafficking on the promise of making more money selling purses.
But it wasn’t purses being sold. It was RaeAnn.

She was advertised on Backpage.com with the term “new in town,” one of many secret codes used to suggest an underage female.

“I kept trying to call her, trying to call her, and it kept going to voicemail,” Monica said. “I felt out of control. I had no control of the situation. Helpless. I felt mad.”

RaeAnn spent eight days in hotel rooms before relatives recovered her. Monica called it a living hell for her daughter.

“With some of the things she’s had to do,” Monica said, “some of the things she’s seen, she will never be able to undo them.”

*Megan’s name was changed to protect her safety.

SELLING-GIRLS
RECRUITED
CHAPTER 4 OF 5

How a suburban dad started paying for sex with girls

The daughter of Michael* and Lynn* vanished for more than three weeks.

“You don’t sleep,” Michael said. “You don’t eat. You’re out driving around. You don’t know what you’re gonna do if you find her.”

While her desperate parents searched, traffickers lured their 13-year-old daughter away with free alcohol and drugs.

They found their daughter at a motel just blocks from home only to discover she had been forced to have sex for money.

“It was probably the most devastating moment, honestly, that I ever experienced,” Lynn said. “She broke down sobbing and said, ‘You won’t want me anymore. I’m so dirty. I’m so dirty, mama. You won’t want me anymore.”

But she wasn’t the only girl recovered at the same motel -- located across the road from the local high school.

Amber Cammack investigates missing teens cases for the non-profit Operation Found Safe.

“There have been dozens of girls linked to this motel: 14, 16, 12 years old,” she said. “And she’s not the only 12-year-old that we found there.

“We’re close enough (to the high school) for these kids, when they go on their lunch break, they can come over here and party or get whatever they want.”

Traffickers often use “free” drugs and alcohol to lure kids but only to tell them later that they have a debt to pay. The way they pay off that debt is by turning a trick, or being forced to have sex.

Lynn and Michael’s child was only 13 years old when she was trafficked out of the motel across from the high school she would have attended.

“It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” Michael said. “She’s been through some things that people just aren’t supposed to go through.”

They said their daughter still suffers from PTSD and acute sexual trauma.

“My child thinks that I will not love her,” Lynn said. “She doesn’t want me to hug her because she’s dirty. There’s no way that I can hug her or talk her out of it. She’s got to get professional help.”

But nationally, there are fewer than 600 beds dedicated to specialized long-term care of child sex trafficking victims. And 27 states do not have any beds for long-term recovery.

*Michael and Lynn’s requested their names be changed given the sensitive nature of this subject.

SELLING-GIRLS
BUYERS
CHAPTER 5 OF 5

This is the story of two people: one paid for sex, one was sold for it.

We’ll call the buyer Jason.

Jason claims he purchased girls for sex without ever thinking about their age.

Jason says he paid for sex 25 times and it eventually cost him his family.
“All of this operates in the shadows,” he said. “All this operates in secrecy. I’m sure there are guys that say, ‘I don’t go to underage because I know.’ You don’t know.”

The average age of trafficking victims is just 15 years old, according to Shared Hope International research study. The non-profit group works in the prevention of sex trafficking and the restoration of those who have been victimized through sex trafficking.

Jason said he purchased sex more than 25 times and never got caught.

“When I was in the midst of it, I never thought of sex trafficking,” he said. “I was paying to escape for 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour to escape.”

The Shared Hope International analysis also took a close look a who is purchasing girls for sex. They found the buyers are most often men around 40 years old.

“Typical American guy. Baseball, apple pie and mom. That’s me,” Jason agreed.

Teens are being sold for sex, but you can help stop it

Jason says he had a great marriage for the first five to seven years. But after the birth of his second child, his wife seemed to lose interest in him. He still wanted that physical affection. But he said he was no longer getting it, so paying girls he found on Backpage.com became a way for him to fulfill that desire.

He got the sex he wanted, but lost his family.

“One of the worst days of my life, to have to tell them what I’d become,” he said. “I had it all and I chose to throw it away.”

Jason says he got divorced and lost custody of his children.

According to Shared Hope International, nearly a quarter of buyers hold a position of authority or trust, such as an attorney or law enforcement. Approximately one in five buyers have a job working with children.

Jason now says he regrets buying girls like Gaby. For two years, Gaby’s body was sold for sex. But now, she's becoming a voice for the thousands of women and girls who are lured and trapped into the world of trafficking.

Gaby hopes to expose what’s happening in bedrooms all around us.

Gaby was sold for sex for two years. Now she’s speaking out to share what’s happening behind closed doors.
“You wait for a knock on the door,” she said. “Then you have to hug them in a specific way where you would put your hands up the middle of their back and then go back down and around their hip because you had to check for guns, knives.”

She said she was kept on duty for eight hours a day, staying drunk and high to take away the pain. Buyers would pay up to $750 for an hour with her.

Gaby believes the man who trafficked her—and several other girls—was a college professor.

“He would open his laptop and make me read reviews on me,” she said. “He wants to make sure that his clientele isn’t disappointed.”

Gaby’s buyers revealed personal details about their lives. They were women’s husbands and daughters’ fathers.

The husbands and fathers who purchased Gaby and thousands of girls others like her are the reason so many girls are exploited, manipulated and assaulted.

If you see something or someone suspicious, call the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST. Tips are anonymous.

© 2017 TEGNA MEDIA

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Poverty

HuffPost

AdChoices
IMPACT
06/04/2015 07:58 am ET Updated Sep 08, 2015
This Startup Gives Poor People A Year’s Income, No Strings Attached
By Nico Pitney

(Photo: GiveDirectly)
A person whom Teresa had never met showed up at her home one day with a remarkable offer. Teresa and her family would receive what amounted to a year’s income, in cash. Nothing was owed in return. She did not have to repay the money, and her family could spend it however they wished.

Teresa was at a loss. “We did not believe someone would give us that kind of money without having worked for it.” But then the money came.

This scenario has played out thousands of times. The organization behind the money, GiveDirectly, is not broadly known. They have spent very little to market their work; their Facebook page has just over 7,000 likes.

Yet, dollar-for-dollar, analysts say GiveDirectly is among the most effective organizations in the world trying to eliminate extreme poverty. Some of its strongest champions are two of Facebook’s co-founders. And in the spirit of Silicon Valley, GiveDirectly’s work is data-driven and transparent in ways that are virtually unheard of in the aid world. For donors who want their giving based on evidence-backed results, few organizations compare.

Teresa, her husband Odhiambo, and their family. (Photo: GiveDirectly)
*  *  *

How it works. GiveDirectly transfers about $1,000 to very poor families over the course a year. It makes no rules or even suggestions about how to use the cash.

Since launching in 2011, the group has distributed about $15 million to communities in Kenya and Uganda. These are not the poorest countries in the region. Rather, they are at the center of Africa’s revolution in mobile banking, which is crucial to GiveDirectly’s strategy. A person in sub-Saharan Africa is 60 times more likely to have a mobile financial account than a European.

Once GiveDirectly has selected a village based on publicly-available poverty data, it uses an ingeniously simple method to identify who will receive money: it enrolls households who live in homes built with thatched roofs and mud floors (as opposed to corrugated metal roofs or concrete floors). The use of organic materials is a reliable indicator of severe poverty — easy for members of the community to understand, and for GiveDirectly’s staff to audit, the group states.

The money is then delivered electronically. Recipients typically receive an SMS alert and then collect cash from a nearby mobile money agent. (If they are among a dwindling minority in Africa that doesn’t have a mobile phone or SIM card, GiveDirectly helps them buy one using a portion of the cash transfer.)

Distributing the money electronically slashes costs and eliminates several prime opportunities for corruption (i.e., fewer middlemen to siphon off funds or ask for bribes). It is at the core of GiveDirectly’s plans to scale its work to millions of poor people worldwide.

Does giving cash help? Cash transfer programs have an extensive research record, including dozens of peer-reviewed studies spanning at least 13 countries in four continents. The UK’s development agency calls cash transfers “one of the more thoroughly researched forms of development intervention”; a gold-standard charity evaluation group GiveWell (not affiliated with GiveDirectly) says transfers “have the strongest track record we’ve seen” for a non-health poverty program.

Longer-term research into anti-poverty interventions is rare, but it exists for cash transfers. A 2013 study in Uganda found that people who received cash enjoyed a 49 percent earnings boost after two years, and a 41 percent increase after four years, compared to people who hadn’t gotten a transfer. Another study in Sri Lanka found rates of return averaging 80 percent after five years. In Uganda, not only were the cash recipients better off, but their number of hours worked and labor productivity actually increased.

Do many people just end up wasting their money on alcohol or smokes? Last year, the World Bank reviewed 19 studies of cash transfer programs and said the answer is no. “Almost without exception, studies find either no significant impact or a significant negative impact of transfers on expenditures on alcohol and tobacco,” the report stated. “This result is consistent across the world.”

Cash transfers aren’t a silver bullet. One program gave $200 to at-risk Liberian men who were either homeless or who made their income from dealing drugs or stealing. The lead researcher, Chris Blattman, summarized the findings in an op-ed in The New York Times:

“Almost no men wasted [the money]. In the months after they got the cash, most dressed, ate and lived better. Unlike the Ugandans, however, whose new businesses kept growing, the Liberian men were back where they started a year later. Two hundred dollars was not enough to turn them into businessmen. But it brought them a better life for a while, which is the fundamental goal of any welfare program. We also tested a counseling program to reduce crime and violence. It worked a little on its own, but had the largest impact when combined with cash.”

Young men in Liberia. (Photo: Glenna Gordon/Innovations for Poverty Action)
There are at least a few health-focused poverty programs that have an even stronger record of cost-effective results, analysts say, including distributing bed nets to halt the spread of malaria and deworming.

Also, money alone cannot always overcome a lack of basic social services. Cash recipients spend more on education and health, but if there are no quality schools or healthcare in their area, then try as they might, they do not necessarily end up healthier or better educated.

But the positive impacts of cash transfers have been consistent and wide-ranging, from improved nutrition, healthier newborns and greater school participation to decreased HIV infection rates and psychological distress. As a result, according to a 2011 review by the UK’s development agency, global aid has undergone a “quiet revolution,” with developing countries launching transfer programs believed to reach between 750 million and one billion people.

An evidence-based approach to development. GiveDirectly is the first nonprofit to focus exclusively on cash transfers. It was founded by four graduate students at MIT and Harvard. Partly they were spurred by technological advances like mobile banking, which make distributing cash cheaper and more secure than ever. But in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they were also at the heart of a growing movement to put aid interventions to the test of actual science.

Esther Duflo is a key leader of this movement. The Financial Times called her “one of the world’s star economists — tenured at MIT at 29, MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ fellow, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark medal, the so-called ‘mini-Nobel.’” One of her mantras is that aid programs can and should be rigorously tested, because when they are, the results are often surprising and do not line up with people’s preconceptions. (Exhibit A: the realization that when poor people receive cash, they don’t rush out to spend it on alcohol.) In 2003, Duflo and colleague Abhijit Banerjee founded MIT’s Poverty Action Lab, which worked on many of the studies documenting the power of cash transfers.

After years of experimentation, Duflo and Banerjee published a celebrated book, “Poor Economics,” which combats the idea that poor people live simple financial lives. They found the poor are in some ways even more sophisticated with their finances than wealthier people, partly because it is so important that they get things right. The extreme poor personally manage loans to family and neighbors; they evaluate credit offers without the support of financial institutions; they manage their day-to-day cash flow in the context of very inconsistent income patterns. All of this helps explain why giving cash to the poor, rather than allocating capital on their behalf, has proven particularly effective.

Government-run cash programs typically require poor people to take some action before receiving money, such as getting a vaccine. The amounts transferred are usually small and handed out over longer periods of time; they’re essentially an income supplement. GiveDirectly takes a different approach. Bolstered by recent research, it distributes a large, one-time sum of cash over a shorter period of time. The goal is to transfer wealth that is more likely to be invested in long-term benefits. Also, GiveDirectly’s transfers are made unconditionally, with no strings attached. The group found that adding conditions (and verifying they were met) provided few benefits, despite substantial costs.

So how do people spend their $1,000? “We have seen it all,” GiveDirectly co-founder Paul Niehaus told The Huffington Post. “If there’s anything we’ve learned from doing this, it’s that everybody has very unique needs.” Often some of the money goes to food, better housing, healthcare or education. “Sometimes things don’t work out — the money goes to a failed investment, a business that doesn’t succeed.” And then there’s everything else. “We had one guy who bought musical instruments and started a band and released an album,” Niehaus said. “Anything you can imagine in this incredible richness and diversity of human life.”

Despite the work of Duflo and others, accountability is not yet a standard of the charity world. Few aid organizations attempt to verify whether their programs are actually effective. Even more rare are nonprofits that submit their own programs to randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the same rigorous types of studies that pharmaceutical companies use to test drugs. These trials are expensive, difficult and time-consuming.

GiveDirectly’s leaders not only encouraged such a study of their work, but went further. In 2013, they took the extraordinary step (in the charity world) of announcing an RCT publicly before the data were in, thus binding themselves to the findings whether positive or negative. If GiveDirectly’s approach didn’t work, if the results turned out terribly, there was nowhere to hide.

Trying to disrupt the aid world. GiveDirectly has proven especially popular in Silicon Valley, where sympathy is high for people trying to upend an industry using technology and data. Google’s philanthropic arm was an early GiveDirectly supporter; Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes sits on its board of directors, and another Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, has donated over $12 million through his foundation.

“In a private sector company, cost is everything and customer satisfaction is everything,” said Michael Faye, another GiveDirectly co-founder. “I don’t think we see that in our sector.” And so he’s trying to change it.

In the traditional model, charities show they are conscious of costs by highlighting how much of their revenue is spent on “services.” But there are few standards or requirements (from the IRS or otherwise) about how charities should classify their spending. Nonprofits can claim all sorts of “service” costs that are indirectly related at best, including salaries, office space, or grants to other NGOs. There is no requirement that they itemize these costs, and most don’t.

GiveDirectly wants to establish a new standard: When a donor gives one dollar, how much ends up in the hands of a poor person? Their answer, which has been independently reviewed, is that about 90 cents of  each dollar donated is transferred directly to recipients. This is in the realm of a few other best-in-class poverty interventions.

To force a focus on customer service, GiveDirectly surveys cash recipients about their experiences. Clients are asked a series of questions — were they able to pick up their payments quickly and easily? Were they asked for a bribe? — and their answers are posted publicly on the web, in real time, along with links to raw data tables.

GiveDirectly’s website is a monument to the organization’s data-driven approach. Instead of heart-wrenching photos of children in need, you’ll find numbers — lots of numbers — that identify whether GiveDirectly’s services are hitting its key performance goals. “This means that we could make a mistake and you would see it at the same time that we would,” Niehaus said. “We think that’s a powerful standard to set.”

The group’s website does feature personal stories from individual cash recipients, but GiveDirectly says the people they interview are chosen at random. Niehaus described it as a fundamentally different approach to promoting a charity, one based on giving donors an accurate view of the lives of the poor. “This is a real opportunity to disintermediate the way Americans learn about poverty overseas and give them a much more honest and unfiltered view of what that life is like, and what people were able to do with their money.”

These are often not the glossy tales of hope (or of tear-jerking destitution) that are found in many nonprofit ads. In one interview on GiveDirectly’s website, a cash recipient named Kevin shared his initial concern that the program was run by satanists. “We have heard over the radio that in [other places] devil worshipers work in those areas and take money there but later they demand that you offer a sacrifice in the form of your child, your wife, or you personally.” In another interview, a recipient named Selyne detailed her thoroughly un-exceptional shopping list: a wooden door, some furniture, a chicken.

Teresa, the cash recipient who couldn’t believe the transfer was real, is another individual chosen at random to be interviewed. She offered a critique of GiveDirectly’s staff (“The first time they came, they never gave many details”), and marveled that her family had moved to the village just prior to the launch of GiveDirectly’s program. “We were so lucky to have arrived the same year that the funds came,” she said. “We could have just watched from a distance as iron roofs littered the village. It was all God’s blessings.”

“We’re not just picking a few stories that make us sound good,” said Niehaus. “We’re really giving you a representative view of what happens when you give people cash transfers.” Faye added, “We’re going to combine emotion with truth in our marketing efforts.”

“I consulted many people who had constructed houses the size that I was interested in. I even inquired about the total,...

Posted by GiveDirectly on Wednesday, February 25, 2015
GiveDirectly also wants to provide donors with more hard data. “In the same way you would track a package that’s sent through FedEx, you’ll be able to track your donation from when it goes to Kenya, when we identify the person, when we back-check the person, when the money hits their bank, all of it,” said Faye. “Until we enforce metrics and discipline around efficiency, transparency, fraud, our sector is not going to change.”

Digitization of the aid supply chain provides more data to donors but also ensures more reliable services for cash recipients. It is very difficult for aid groups to closely account for the work of their field staff, who are distributed across large remote rural territories. In GiveDirectly’s case, all field work is digitally time-stamped and geolocated. When a staffer says they were at a particular home at a particular time, it can be verified. Directors can watch a live data stream as field workers go door-to-door in a village enrolling new cash recipients.

Last year, GiveDirectly faced its worst case of fraud to date: roughly 2 percent of one month’s round of payments was stolen. A GiveDirectly director in Uganda had colluded with the local money agent to convince recipients that part of their cash was being withheld to cover higher costs of SIM cards. Some recipients were suspicious and called GiveDirectly’s local helpline, but the call center staffer was in on the scam. The incident came to light publicly when Niehaus wrote about it on GiveDirectly’s blog. “It was a tremendous opportunity to set that precedent,” Niehaus said, “that we’re going to be transparent about things that go well and also about things that don’t.”

“We want to go to great lengths to talk about our failures, to talk about the incidents of fraud that GiveDirectly experiences,” Faye added. “This is inherent to the sector and for too long we’ve avoided talking about it, which means that people simply pretend that it doesn’t exist. Until we can have an honest conversation and say, ‘Yes we had high costs,’ or ‘Yes we had fraud,’ we’re not even going to start down the path of fixing it.”

This is music to the ears of Elie Hassenfeld, a hedge fund analyst turned charity evaluator who helped create GiveWell, which does meticulous work to identify the most effective and cost-efficient groups working on extreme poverty. GiveWell typically names only three or four top charities each year; GiveDirectly has made the list for three years running.

“We look for organizations where if something goes wrong, they would know about it, and they would highlight it, and they would learn from it,” Hassenfeld told HuffPost. “If you’re hearing some bad news, that’s a good thing. If you’re only hearing good news, that’s a bad thing. You should hold organizations accountable to that standard rather than a totally unreasonable one of perfection.”

The results come in. GiveDirectly had announced the first rigorous trial of its own program before the data were in, results be damned. Now the study was published and the conclusions were striking.

Investigators found that, one year after the transfer program, cash recipients had increased their earnings by 34 percent and their assets by 52 percent compared to people who didn’t receive transfers (the new assets were most often livestock, household upgrades, and savings). Among cash recipients, the number of people who reported going to bed hungry dropped by 36 percent, and the number of days children went without food fell by 42 percent. Cash recipients had spent more on education, health, food, and social goods and activities (though after a year, health and education outcomes had not changed substantially). There was no increase in alcohol and tobacco spending.

The trial also measured the psychological effects of GiveDirectly’s cash transfers. Lead investigator Johannes Haushofer, a behavioral economist at Princeton, studies the intersection of poverty and psychological well-being. He has written of a “psychological poverty trap”: being poor causes stress, anger, and sadness, which are in turn linked to economic problems like lost productivity and reduced interest in long-term investments (like health and education), which in turn exacerbate poverty. It can be a vicious cycle.

Participants in the GiveDirectly trial were given a range of tests assessing well-being and happiness; researchers even took saliva samples to measure the stress hormone cortisol, the first time this has been done in poverty research at large scale. The resulting data showed “large and highly significant increases in psychological well-being among transfer recipients.” People who received cash said they were happier, had greater life satisfaction, and experienced less stress and less depression. Notably, it didn’t matter if someone started off with low or high psychological well-being — all experienced similar improvements after receiving cash. Researchers also found that cortisol (stress) levels were significantly lower in several circumstances, and stress decreased more when more money was given.

That cash recipients can spend their money on anything has made evaluating transfers trickier. Is it more important to see improvements in health or in education? “We have this conversation all the time,” said Faye. “It’s a very hard question to answer. You take two neighbors and one needs to send their kids to school and one needs surgery because they’ve had a long-standing illness.” A benefit of evaluating psychological well-being was producing a metric that could sidestep this debate: a single composite measure of the impact of cash transfers. Though people spent their money in highly personalized ways, they were all on average significantly more satisfied with their lives.

Next steps for cash. GiveDirectly still faces uphill struggles. Many in the United States remain skeptical of giving cash to poor people. “The debates we’re having when we talk with American donors are miles away” from where development experts are at, Niehaus said. The reluctance is not limited to donors. Last year, when a wealthy Chinese financier publicly offered to fund $300 cash payments to homeless New Yorkers, the New York City Rescue Mission refused. Its executive director said he feared the payments would be spent on drugs and alcohol.

Also, few established charities have adopted the accountability measures that GiveDirectly advocates. At least one has argued against them. Heifer International is a large U.S. nonprofit that provides cattle and other livestock to the poor, among other programs. In 2013, when NPR asked whether Heifer would submit its programs to a controlled study, the group’s vice president of Africa Programs said it was a terrible idea. “I mean, it sounds like an experiment, and we’re not about experiments,” Elizabeth Bintliff told NPR. “These are lives of real people and we have to do what we believe is correct. We can’t make experiments with peoples’ lives.” Searching “fraud” on Heifer’s website brings up zero results. The group’s homepage does tout a 2009 study which found that Heifer’s work benefited poor rural families. But the paper has never been published or publicly released, and one researcher who was shown portions of it said he was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Two weeks ago, however, Heifer’s president and CEO Pierre Ferrari announced, “Heifer International is currently engaged in a randomly controlled trial (RCT) project, and I look forward to sharing the results as they become available in the future.”

And despite some skepticism, GiveDirectly’s financial support is growing (from $5.5 million in 2013 to an expected $40-50 million this year), driven in large part by younger donors working in tech or finance, according to Niehaus. “These are people who are used to quantitative approaches and who really care about evidence. They want to go to a nonprofit website and read about, Here’s how we’re doing on fraud. We’re just really pumped to have a donor base that appreciates that and values the honesty.”

Some of the giants of the development world are embracing cash transfers. The United Nations’ World Food Program is among the largest humanitarian agencies, with annual funding of over $4 billion. As recently as 2009, only $10 million was spent on cash and voucher programs. That number has since soared and in 2014 was estimated to exceed $1.25 billion across 87 programs in 56 countries.

GiveDirectly is leveraging its data to help improve transfer programs carried out by others. It has again publicly pre-announced new RCTs of its work, including one ambitious study of how cash transfers impact communities at a macro-level. “We’re asking questions like, what happens to the structure of businesses after cash transfers? How does local government change what they do? How do schools reallocate their budget? What happens to the prices of goods?” Niehaus said. “These are the sorts of questions that finance ministers have.”

GiveDirectly also continues to run experiments to test its core model. It tried directing cash toward female heads of households and toward younger women, and using criteria other than owning a thatched roof. None substantially changed the results. A new RCT is testing what happens when cash recipients have more control over the timing of their transfers (some want a lump sum upfront to pay for an expensive item; others want the payments spread out so their in-laws stop asking for loans). Another trial will find out what happens when GiveDirectly provides information about possible ways to spend the money.

No one argues that all anti-poverty spending should be shifted to cash transfers. There are other critical forms of development aid that do things cash transfers can’t, like provide public goods (vaccines, health clinics and roads, for instance) or transfer knowledge and skills.

But supporters believe that cash transfers should now be the standard against which the usefulness of other programs are measured. As Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz put it when announcing a $5 million donation to GiveDirectly: “Instead of asking the question ‘should this project be funded or should we do nothing?’, we could be asking the question ‘should this project be funded or should we just give the beneficiaries the money?’ and now we have that opportunity.”

37 years old

Here is me. 37 yrs strong.

Embryo editing

NewsHealth
Human embryo editing breakthrough is a ‘major advance’ towards controversial treatments for babies

The treatment could help rid babies of genetic diseases. But the ethical and legal considerations need urgent work, experts have warned

Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin Wednesday 2 August 2017 17:00 BST

Click to follow
The Independent Online
istock-475618532.jpg
Picture: Getty/iStockphoto
A landmark study suggests that scientists could soon edit out genetic mutations to prevent babies being born with diseases. The technique could eventually let doctors remove inherited conditions from embryos before they go on to become a child.

That, in turn, opens the possibility for inherited diseases to be wiped out entirely, according to doctors. But experts have warned that urgent work is needed to answer the ethical and legal questions surrounding the work.

Though the scientists only edited out mutations that could cause diseases, it modified the nuclear DNA that sits right at the heart of the cell, which also influences personal characteristics such as intelligence, height, facial appearance and eye colour.

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The breakthrough means that “the possibility of germline genome editing has moved from future fantasy to the world of possibility, and the debate about its use, outside of fears about the safety of the technology, needs to run to catch up”, said Professor Peter Braude from King’s College London. Scientists warned that soon the public could demand such treatment – and that the world might not be ready.

“Families with genetic diseases have a strong drive to find cures,” said Yalda Jamshidi, reader in genomic medicine at St George’s, University of London. “Whilst we are just beginning to understand the complexity of genetic disease, gene-editing will likely become acceptable when its potential benefits, both to individuals and to the broader society, exceeds its risks.”

The new research, published in Nature, marks the first time the powerful Crispr-Cas9 tool has been used to fix mutations. The US study destroyed the embryos after just a few days and the work remains at an experimental stage.

In the study, scientists fertilised donor eggs with sperm that included a gene that causes a type of heart failure. As the eggs were fertilised, they also applied the gene-editing tool, which works like a pair of specific scissors and cuts away the defective parts of the gene.

When those problematic parts are cut away, the cells can repair themselves with the healthy versions and so get rid of the mutation that causes the disease. Some 42 out of 58 embryos were fixed so that they didn’t carry the mutation – stopping a disease that usually has a 50 per cent chance of being passed on.

If those embryos had been allowed to develop into children, then they would no longer have carried the disease. That would stop them from being vulnerable to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – and would save their children, too.

READ MORE
Gene editing technique named scientific breakthrough of the year
“Every generation on would carry this repair because we’ve removed the disease-causing gene variant from that family’s lineage,” said Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov, from Oregon Health and Science University, who led the study.

“By using this technique, it’s possible to reduce the burden of this inheritable disease on the family and eventually the human population.”

The heart problem is just one of more than 10,000 conditions that are caused by an error in the gene. The same tool could be used to cut out those faults for all of those, and eventually could be used to target cancer mutations.

The work could lead to treatments that would be given to patients, once it becomes more efficient and safe. Using such a treatment on humans is illegal in both the US and the UK – but some experts expect that law will soon be changed, and that the legal and ethical frameworks need to catch up with the technology.

There is some suggestion that the editing work could take place in the UK. Though using the research as treatment is illegal there as well as the US, the regulatory barriers are much higher in America and look unlikely to be changed.

In the US, there are various regulations and restrictions on how embryos can be edited, including stipulations that such work can’t be carried out with taxpayers’ money. UK regulators are more relaxed and liberal about those restrictions, leading to suggestions that it could eventually become the home of such work in the west.

The UK has become the first country that allows mitochondrial replacement therapy, another treatment that opponents warn could allow for the creation of designer babies.

embryo-dna-do-not-reuse-pa.jpg
Individual cells days after injection (PA)
“UK researchers can apply for a licence to edit human embryos in research, but offering it as a treatment is currently illegal,” said a spokesperson for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA), which would regulate any such experiments.

“Introducing new, controversial techniques is not just about developing the science – gene editing would need to offer new options to couples at risk of having a child with a genetic disease, beyond current treatments like embryo testing.

“Our experience of introducing mitochondrial donation in the UK shows that high-quality public discussion about the ethics of new treatments, expert scientific advice and a robust regulatory system are crucial when considering new treatments of this kind.”

Doctors said that any change in the law would have to strictly keep such treatment to being used for medical reasons, and not for “designer babies” that have other characteristics edited out.

“It may be that some countries never permit germline genome editing because of moral and ethical concerns,” said Professor Joyce Harper from University College London. “If the law in the UK was changed to allow genome editing, it would be highly regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, as is PGD, to ensure it is only used for medical reasons.”

But that work has already received significant opposition.

Dr David King, director of the Human Genetics Alert, which opposes all tampering with the human genome, said: “If irresponsible scientists are not stopped, the world may soon be presented with a fait accompli of the first GM baby.

“We call on governments and international organisations to wake up and pass an immediate global ban on creating cloned or GM babies, before it is too late.”

Professor Robin Lovell-Badge from the Francis Crick Institute said the research only appears to work when the father is carrying the defective gene, and that it would not work for more sophisticated alterations. “The possibility of producing designer babies, which is unjustified in any case, is now even further away,” he said.

More about: Crisprgene editingReuse content

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The Everett Herald, Unfair and Bias

I  used to be an avid reader of the Herald. When I moved to everett 13 years ago, I subscribed to delivery and was a loyal reader for many years. I find that as time goes on, I am more and more in awe at the bias of the stories written. Ive noticed that not only are the stories innaccurate and bias, but poorly organized. One such story has hit me at a personal level and that is the coverage of the recent murder trial in Everett of George d. Hatt. I believe I sat near ms. Hefley and not once did she or anyone else bother to ask anyone from the victims family anything. The first article was riddled with errors of facts and hearsay from the trial and  seemed very much in favor of the defendant and I felt it was even disrespectful to the victim, whose name is barely mentioned well into the second paragraph. And again, why didnt the writer get deeper into the thoughts or emotions of the people involved? I was there throughout most of the trial, with Andrew Spencers mother, father, son, and many other family and friends and I can tell you first hand, that this was a very intense roller coaster ride for all of us. Why didnt the coverage include any statements from the family, friends, or anyone for that matter? The facts were arranged in such a way that I felt the writer was conveying sympathy towards the defendant and making the victim less of a victim and more of a deserving criminal. If you had talked to anyone you might have heard a different story altogether. And if you are going to reprint things that the defense says, why not print the entire story, instead of leaving out bits of important information that are pertinent to the eventual outcome the jury came to? To top it off, the 3rd and final article that came out on Friday morning was not even worthy enough to be put on the front page as had the first two articles. This trial was so important when the writer wanted to make the crime seem justified, but when justice was served, and not in the writers obviously bias manner, the story took the back seat to yet another article about the homeless problem. Here are some key facts Diane Hefley left out: Andrew Spencer lived in Granite Falls and was a father. George Hatt was squatting on the property he claims was robbed by Andrew Spencer. There has been nothing to date that proves Andrew ever robbed or vandalized George Hatts possessions. The Herald would know this if instead of opinions, the writers did a bit of research themselves before throwing together some courtroom banter and hitting spell check, print.  George Hatt has an even longer list of felonies than Andrew Spencer. George Hatt showed absolutely no remorse for killing Andrew. George Hatt did not just shoot Andrew, he tricked him into thinking their dispute was settled and then lured him back with lies, he shot him at close range, twice, then threw him in a shallow hole, said he would forever be known as kissing his own ass, then jumped on this back, not once, but several times, breaking ribs, etc, then proceeded to club the deceased with a 50lb barbell, all before throwing some dirt on top, pouring various chemicals, and staging a bonfire for 3 days before fleeing. The body was not recovered in one piece, and was only recognizable because the head had been protected from the brunt of the fire. Even if you could justify a self defense plea, or sympathize with him for being robbed, even if you could justify this murder in any way, there is still the fact that what was done to Andrew after he died was horrific enough that no one showed up the day they showed the pictures of his remains in court. And telling also, is that the one and only day anyone showed up in support of George, was the girlfriend who was also there the night he killed Andrew, yet she was never called to the stand as a witness because her testimony kept changing and she was deemed a hostile witness, She is,  by the way, facing charges in another case out of Tacoma from just a few months ago, involving prescription fraud. These two career criminals have been known to talk about other individuals that have been victims of theirs in the past, it is rumoured that George is quoted as saying he "stopped counting his victims after 22". Why then, is the Herald painting a picture of a person who was an unfortunate felon who was merely teaching a robber a lesson ? Its easy to say what you want about Andrew Spencer, because he isnt here to defend himself, but the courtroom was filled with people who knew him, including his parents. George Hatt made sure to slip into his testimoney that his dad is a retired fire captain in Ventura County, CA, yet no one flew up or drove up from California in support of his defense. And no one from the Herald bothered to give any real thought to how these three articles sounded to the victims family. Or anyone else who reads them and doesnt know the full story.
My father, before his untimely death when I was 15, used to tell me, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think you are stupid, then to open your mouth and prove it." And the old tried and true cliche rings out as well, the one that says if you dont have anything nice to say,  dont say anything at all. I suppose you could say I'm guilty of that one, as I really dont have anything nice to say with regards to these articles, however, I think I speak for all those of us who knew Andrew Spencer, when I say, he was a kind person with a big heart and a checkered past, who once went out and bought shoes for several people in winter time who had no warm shoes.  I didnt know him for very long, and in fact, I tried to dislike him based on the things I had heard about him, but he was such an honest and sincere person who expressed regret for his past mistakes.  One couldn't help but like him, with his warm smile and easy laugh.
I cant say George Hatt was even the least bit sorry or remorseful for anything he did to Andrew.  Im repulsed just thinking about the pictures of his mutilated body, and the horrifying scene George staged to look like a campfire, complete with lawn chairs set around a firepit, where underneath lay the broken pieces of a man he thought had robbed him, a man who he actually had used as one of many identities he stole over the course of his 2 years in Granite Falls, to sell vehicles and drugs and numerous other shady deals.  Ask anyone about him, and they'll have nothing good to say. He even sent letters from jail telling his girlfriend to arrange a false witness to help get him acquitted of the murder charges he faced.  He signed it "The Granite Falls Grim Reaper".  Of course, he tried to say in court that that was not his signature,  but even without an expert in handwriting, anyone could see that it was indeed the same penmanship.
Andrew Spencer may have once had "Bad Boy" Tattooed on his wrists, but even more true is the one george hatt has in large letters across his chest that reads "Hell Awaits".
Shame on you, Herald, and you, Diane.   I thought you would at the very least,  quote reactions or comments from the victims family, in lieu of Andrew   not being alive to speak in his own defense. 

His story ended the night a man took his life, and now you disregard who he was and what a loss we have suffered with your carelessly arranged words. While it may just be another day at the office for you, his children will be at school and hear the snickers of other kids whose parents read your articles and spoke with disdain about someone you nor they, ever knew.
Its your loss to never have known him, our loss because we loved him.

The articles written by Diana Hefley lack feeling, empathy,  and smear the facts, alot like George Hatt.

Sincerely,
AN EX READER.

E.S.

Dirty tricks

← America Is Guilty if We Don’t Prosecute ObamaWhy America’s Healthcare (Sickcare) System Is Broken and Unfixable →
What Exactly Are the Spy Agencies Actually DOING with their Bag of Dirty Tricks?
Posted on July 15, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog
Note: Update below …

SPECIFIC EXAMPLES OF WHAT THEY MAY BE DOING

Newly-released documents from Edward Snowden show that the British spy agency GCHQ has developed numerous offensive digital tools.

But what exactly are they doing with these dirty tricks?

We think it’s important to think through the specific possibilities, in order to gain an understanding of how pernicious these manipulations can be.

We quote verbatim (in black) the names and descriptions of some of these tools – some of which Glenn Greenwald didn’t highlight in his report.  We then provide descriptions in blue of potential misuses of such tools.

Then we discuss how likely such misuses really are.

TOOLS AND POTENTIAL MISUSES

Here are the actual dirty tricks in the British spy agencies toolkit, with hypothetical examples of potential misuses …

CHANGELING: Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity. Fake an email from a privacy advocate to make it look like he’s proposing terrorism.

SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE: Perfect spoofing of emails from Blackberry targets. Fake an email from an opponent of  bailouts to the giant banks to make it look like she’s planning to bomb a bank.

BURLESQUE: The capacity to send spoofed SMS messages. Fake a message from an an anti-war writer to make it look like he’s planning to sabotage a military base.

IMPERIAL BARGE : For connecting two target phone together in a call. Fake a telephone connection to make it look like a critic of the president’s policies spoke with a leader of Al Qaeda.

BADGER : Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign. Send out a fake, mass email pretending to be from a prominent whistleblower “admitting” that he’s mentally unstable, disgruntled, dishonest, vindictive and a Russian spy.

WARPATH: Mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign.  Send out a fake, mass message from a targeted group calling for the murder of all Christians and Jews.

SPACE ROCKET: A programme covering insertion of media into target networks. Insert a video of underage girls on a whistleblower website.

CLEAN SWEEP Masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries. Put up a bunch of fake wall posts calling for jihad on the Facebook page of a reporter giving first-hand reports of what’s really happening in a country that the U.S. has targeted for regime change.

HAVOK Real-time website cloning technique allowing on-the-fly alterations. Hack the website of a state politician who insists the government must respect the Constitution,  and post fake demands for a violent march on Washington, D.C.

SILVERLORD: Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal. Disrupt websites hosting videos espousing libertarian views.

SUNBLOCK: Ability to deny functionality to send/receive email or view material online. Block emails to reporters and the web functionality of a government insider who is about to go public on wrongdoing.

ANGRY PIRATE: A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer. Disable the accounts of a leading opponent of genetically modified foods.

PREDATORS FACE: Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers. Take down a website which is disclosing hard-hitting information on illegal government actions.

UNDERPASS: Change outcome of online polls. Change the results of an online poll from one showing that the American people overwhelmingly oppose a new war which is unnecessary for the defense of America’s national security to showing support for it.

GATEWAY: Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website. Make a website calling for more surveillance against the American people appear hugely popular.

BOMB BAY: The capacity to increase website hits, rankings. Make it look like a site praising praising Al Qaeda is popular among a targeted local population, when the locals actually despise violent Islamic fundamentalists.

SLIPSTREAM: Ability to inflate page views on websites. Make it appear that an article saying that the Constitution is “outdated” and “unrealistic in the post-9/11 world” is widely popular.

GESTATOR: Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube). Make a propaganda video – saying that Dear Leader will always help and protect us – go viral.

WHAT IS THE LIKELIHOOD OF MISUSE?

We don’t know which of the above hypothetically forms of misuse are actually occurring. However, as we wrote in February:

We’ve warned since 2009 (and see this) that the government could be launching cyber “false flag attacks” in order to justify a crackdown on the Internet and discredit web activists.

A new report from NBC News – based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden – appear to confirm our fears, documenting that Britain’s GCHQ spy agency has carried out cyber false flag attacks:

In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit’s mission included computer network attacks, disruption, “Active Covert Internet Operations,” and “Covert Technical Operations.” Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a “false flag” operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries.

Later that month, we noted:

A new report from NBC News shows that the British spy agency used “false flag attacks” and other dirty tricks:

British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”

***

The agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

Sound familiar? It should:

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI operated a program known as COINTELPRO, for Counter Intelligence Program. Its purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them.

NBC continues:

[The agency] also uses “false flag” operations, in which British agents carry out online actions that are designed to look like they were performed by one of Britain’s adversaries.

***

JTRIG used negative information to attack private companies, sour business relationships and ruin deals.

***

Changing photos on social media sites and emailing and texting colleagues and neighbors unsavory information.

And reporter Glenn Greenwald noted that Snowden documents showed:

Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.

***

These agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse …. Among the core self-identified purposes … are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

***

The discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.

The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes…. no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.

***

Then there is the use of psychology and other social sciences to not only understand, but shape and control, how online activism and discourse unfolds. Today’s newly published document touts the work of GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell”, devoted to “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption”….***

Under the title “Online Covert Action”, the document details a variety of means to engage in “influence and info ops” as well as “disruption and computer net attack”, while dissecting how human beings can be manipulated using “leaders”, “trust, “obedience” and “compliance”:

The U.S. government is also spending millions to figure out how to manipulate social media to promote propaganda and stifle dissenting opinions. And see this and this.

And any criticism of government policies is now considered “extremist” and potential terrorism. According to Department of Defense training manuals, all protest is now considered “low-level terrorism”. And see this, this and this.  Questioning war is considered extremism. The government also considers anyone who tries to protect himself from government oppression and to claim his Constitutional rights a “extremist”. This is not entirely new … the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” so he could continue spying on them in 1972. Indeed – for 5,000 years straight – mass surveillance of one’s own people has always been used to crush dissent.

The NSA is now also collecting and retaining the most intimate personal details of Americans, including nude and suggestive pictures and medical and financial records … even though they admittedly have no conceivable security value.

You may think you have “nothing to hide”, but you’re breaking the law numerous times every day … without even knowing it (update).

Indeed, top NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA is blackmailing and harassing opponents with information that it has gathered – potentially even high-level politicians – just like FBI head J. Edgar Hoover blackmailed presidents and Congressmen.

Moreover, if the NSA takes a dislike to someone, it can frame them. This has been CONFIRMED by top NSA whistleblowers.

And the following facts make it likely that British and U.S. spy agencies are misusing their powers:

The Pentagon falsely smeared USA Today reporters who were investigating the use of illegal Pentagon propaganda against the American people
The government and big banks joined forces to violently beat up peaceful protesters speaking out against bank corruption. Organizers of the protests say that their emails were blocked
The NSA engages in offensive attacks (“we hack everyone everywhere“). And private corporations – big banks – will likely get the power to declare cyber war. Similarly, the largest German newspaper alleges that the U.S. government helped Monsanto attack the computers of activists opposed to genetically modified food
The U.S. government at times uses national security powers to protect things other than the interests of the American people – such as globalism or global corporations (and may be putting foreign countries’ needs over our own) – and relies on countries which don’t even have a Constitution to justify unconstitutional acts. NSA’s recent actions are motivated by a power grab, not fighting terrorism
Top NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and Thomas Drake both say that the U.S. has become a police state. They say that the U.S. government has become like the Stasis or Soviets, Binney says that the NSA has become like “J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids” and that “the ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control“
Update: NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping, and who used to work in “black ops” – tells Washington’s Blog after reading this post:

My biggest fear has been that Black World programs that I specialized in would be turned against the American people. I do not confirm or deny want I see in your piece, but you are now starting to think like a Black World operations officer. I do not know of any case where such capabilities have definitively been used directly against U.S. Citizens, but I have not been privy to their targeting for over ten years now.

But I have to congratulate you on thinking out of the strict technology box and thinking “for what purpose.”

Postscript:  We don’t know whether or not the spy agencies are misusing their bag of tricks in the specific ways discussed above (in blue).  The whole point is that they have been caught lying time and again about what they’re doing, they’re running amok with no oversight, and the fact that they could be targeting government critics in exactly these ways shows how bad things have become.

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Washington's Blog

Rumors

So ive heard a few rumors and i want to keep track of them.

Was told that someone by the name of kerry miles (sp?) Is thought to be responsible for the murder of the mother and daughter hikers that were found mutilated and shot in thr head up on the hiking trails off mt loop /pilchuck area. He is a cousin of Myrna Mann, and the reasons this is believed is because 1) he carries on his person at all times a weapon that is thd same as the one used. 2) place where bodies were found is a favorite spot of his to hang out, 3)he has a dog that is known for chewing at bodies of animals that his owner has shot, after he has shot them, 4)he is a self proclaimed woman hater, states this often and openly and 5)  has threatened a female with shooting her and being able to get away with it because he has done it before.

Yes this is all just hearsay, but as an investigator of any case involving murder, i think it would be a good detective practice to follow up on all possible leads. Was. Told that law enforcement dismissed any notion towards him.
Also am told he has a violent hairpin trigger temperment and always always always carries his gun. Is known to be violent and hateful towards women.

Unsure of last name, or of spelling of kerry.
This information was shared with me on march 15 of 2017 by someone with many insights and information regarding several unsolved murders in the area of granite falls lake stevens.

Unsolved victims after GREEN RIvER Killer

Thursday, November 21, 1991 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
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The Victims: Forty Unsolved Murders Since 1984
This is a list of 40 unsolved killings in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties since 1984, the year officials say the Green River killer stopped murdering young women in the Seattle area. Nearly all the 40 victims were women, many whose deaths resemble the deaths of the serial killer's victims - prostitutes or young, street-wise teenagers.

KING COUNTY

1. Sarah Habakangas, 17, of Virginia, found strangled Nov. 5, 1991, off Interstate 90 east of North Bend. Had been living in Tacoma and near Sea-Tac strip since arriving in Seattle area six months ago. Arrested twice in Seattle for prostitution.

2. Anna Lee Chebetnoy, 14, of Puyallup, found Sept. 17, 1991, off Highway 410 east of Enumclaw. Last seen in Puyallup. Found near where a Sumner teenager's remains discovered in 1990.

3. Remains of woman found Sept. 11, 1991, 10 miles east of Enumclaw near Highway 410. Remains were of woman with African-American characteristics. Stood 4 feet 11 inches to 5 feet 2. Was 17 to 24-years-old. Had been dead at least two years.

4. Unidentified skeletal remains, believed to be of a woman, found along the Snoqualmie River near Fall City on Sept. 6, 1991.

5. Dawn Jennings, 37, of San Juan Island, found Aug. 4, 1991, near Highway 2, five miles east of Skykomish. Police looking into possibility she did not die from foul play.

6. Unidentified skeletal remains discovered July 6, 1991 off of I-90 near North Bend. Remains are of a white woman, 14 to 22 years old, 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighed over 170 pounds. Believed to have died in May or June.

7. Marta Reeves, 37, of Bothell. Found Sept. 20, 1990, eight miles east of Enumclaw off Highway 410. Believed to have disappeared from Seattle, where she had been arrested twice for prostitution.

8. Rhonda Hanke, 22, of Portland was found alongside I-90 five miles west of Snoqualmie Pass on Dec. 27, 1989. Shot in the head.

9. Kerry Anne Walker, 15, of Renton, found Dec. 22, 1989, north of Tukwila. The Renton High School freshman was last seen Dec. 20, 1988 when mother, leaving for work, peeked in room and saw her sleeping.

10. Unidentified woman, 30 to 50 years old, found Oct. 3, 1989 in 2300 block of Airport Way South in Seattle. Possibly Native American; stood 5 feet 1 to 5 feet 4, weighed 100 to 120 pounds. Died of shotgun wounds.

11. Kimberly DeLange, 15, of Sumner found Aug. 20, 1988, east of Enumclaw off Highway 410, where Chebetnoy was found this September. Last seen at Puyallup shopping center.

12. Ophelia McGnight, 17, of Seattle. Found Feb. 6, 1988 in Montlake Park. Died of gunshot wounds.

13. Dorthea J. Presleigh, 24, found Oct. 19, 1987 at Grandview Park in South King County. Disappeared from Sea-Tac strip day before dying of multiple gunshot wounds.

14. Debbie Gonzales, 14, of Auburn found Sept. 26, 1987, in woods off Auburn-Black Diamond Highway west of Black Diamond. No obvious cause of death.

15. Rose Marie Kurran, 16, of Lynnwood. Strangled; body left in plastic bag east of Sea-Tac Airport. Liked to hitchhike. Last seen on Pacific Highway South. Found Aug. 31, 1987. Police say she was victim of serial killer.

16. Shan M. Morehouse, 15, of Auburn found March 14, 1986 in woods off Seward Park in Seattle. Died from blow to head.

17. Rose Ann Black, 25, Seattle, Student at Seattle Vocational School. Found Aug. 20, 1984, in Lake Washington, near bathhouse at 800 Lake Washington Boulevard, with throat slashed.

18. Kathleen Arita, 38, Boeing computer operator from Renton, found May 9, 1984 near Star Lake off South 272nd Way. Last seen leaving home. Died of strangulation.

SNOHOMISH COUNTY

19. Unidentified, dismembered man. Right leg found Feb. 28, 1991 in Skykomish River near Startup; scalp attached to ear and brown curly hair found March 26, 1991, off High Bridge Road in Snoqualmie River ravine southwest of Monroe; left leg found Aug. 22, 1991 on sand bar of Snohomish River five miles south of city of Snohomish.

20. Tia Hicks, 20, of Seattle. Body found April 22, 1991, in cabin cruiser parked in Mountlake Terrace on 220th Street Southwest between Highway 99 and I-5. Apparent transient who used drugs. Disappeared from Seattle.

21. Sun Nyo Lee, 36, of Bothell. Skull found March 27, 1991, southwest of Monroe near Snoqualmie River off High Bridge Road. Detectives were investigating scalp found March 26 when they came across Lee's head, believed to have been cut off.

22. Michelle Koski, 17, of Seattle. Strangled; found Aug. 25, 1990 southwest of Monroe, near intersection of Highway 522 and Echo Lake Road.

23. Robyn Kenworthy, 20, of Seattle. Nude body found Oct. 22, 1988 beneath a pile of logs off logging road two miles north of Index.

24. Jennifer Burnetto, 32, of Tacoma, found stabbed to death June 29, 1988, eight miles northeast of Index.

25. Hazel Gelnett, 66, transient also known as Jennifer James. Found strangled May 8, 1988, in woods three miles east of Gold Bar.

26. Unidentified skeletal remains of woman in teens or early 20s found Jan. 1, 1988, in Canyon Park northwest of Bothell, 600 feet south of 228th Street Southwest.

27. Jay Cook, 20, of British Columbia found Nov. 26, 1987, beneath High Bridge near Monroe. Body of girlfriend found near Alger, Skagit County.

28. Dismembered white man found June 7, 1987, two miles east of Gold Bar.

29. Molly Purdin, 21, of Kennewick, found bludgeoned to death July 7, 1985 eight miles northeast of Index.

PIERCE COUNTY

30. Tracey Wooten, 26, of Tacoma, found Aug. 15, 1990, in Tacoma north of Commencement Bay. Alleged prostitute.

31. Samontra Baker, 24, of Tacoma, found Aug. 13, 1990, in vacant lot across from Tacoma condominium. Last seen in car with two strangers. Died of stab wounds.

32. Lisa Rivas, 19, formerly of Seattle living at Fife motel when she died. Body found Jan. 9, 1989, in woods near the Fort Lewis training ground off Highway 507. Trying to shake off life of prostitution and drug abuse when killed by blows to the head.

33. Tracy Whitney, 18, of Federal Way, found Aug. 28, 1988 near Sumner floating at confluence of the Stuck and Puyallup rivers.

34. Shannon L. Pease, 15, of Tacoma. Found April 4, 1988, in field in Lakewood. Believed to have disappeared April 3, 1988, from Ponders Corner in Tacoma area.

35. Unidentified woman found March 24, 1988, along Highway 16 in Tacoma. Fully dressed, 18 to 22 years old, between 5 feet 1 and 5 feet 4. Believed of mixed race, possibly African American with Asian or Native American ancestry.

36. Jennifer Bastian, 13, of Tacoma, found Aug. 28, 1986, in Point Defiance Park, where had been riding bicycle when she disappeared Aug. 4, 1986. Police believe think she was a victim of a serial killer who also murdered Michella Welch.

37. Stephanie Louie, 18, of Auburn, found Aug. 19, 1986, in woods near Eatonville. Last seen by a family member August 1983 at an Omak rodeo. Reported missing in 1984.

38. Denise L. Sallee, 17, of Pierce County. Found partly buried in Parkland on March 29, 1986. Disappeared from Tacoma shopping-mall bowling alley Jan. 24, 1986.

39. Michella Welch, 12, of Tacoma. Disappeared March 26, 1986, while playing with younger sisters at Tacoma's Puget Park. Body found the same evening.

40. Terry L. Main, 21, of Pierce County. Found in Tacoma on Feb. 22, 1986, the same day she disappeared about 5 a.m.

Copyright (c) 1991 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.
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Cell phone spying and Signal App

TECHNOLOGY
INNOVATION, THE INTERNET, GADGETS, AND MORE.
MARCH 7 2007 6:53 PM
How Do You Intercept a Text Message?
Turn your cell phone into a spy gadget.

By Christopher Beam
Text messaging.
A person text messaging
Retail giant Wal-Mart fired an employee Monday for eavesdropping on phone calls and intercepting text messages between the company's media-relations staff and a New York Times reporter. How do you intercept a text message?

Turn your own cell phone into a surveillance gadget. There are a few ways to do this. One method, phone cloning, lets you intercept incoming messages and send outgoing ones as if your phone were the original. If both phones are near the same broadcast tower, you can also listen in on calls. To clone a phone, you have to make a copy of its SIM card, which stores the phone's identifying information. This requires a SIM reader that can read the card's unique cryptographic key and transfer it to another phone. (Warning: This is super illegal, but there are still sites that show you how.) The problem with cloning is that it only lets you intercept messages sent to one phone number. Plus, you need physical access to the target phone to make it work—something Wal-Mart's technician probably didn't have.

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It's also possible to intercept unencrypted or poorly encrypted messages directly as they're broadcast over cellular channels. (If the network uses sophisticated encryption, you might be out of luck.) To steal messages with your phone, you would need to upload illegal  " firmware" onto your phone. This essentially turns your phone into a radio and allows it to pick up all the texts broadcast on a given channel—instead of limiting you to the ones addressed to you. You'd also need to know the network for the target phone—Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc.—and you'd have to make sure that both your phone and the target are within range of the same base station. This method isn't too expensive since you don't need much more than a computer, a phone, and some firmware that any serious techie could find online for free.

Wal-Mart isn't discussing details of the method its employee used, but a spokesperson did say he was able to intercept messages that included certain keywords. Companies like Global Security Solutions and Homeland Security Strategies develop interceptors for law-enforcement purposes. (Prices reportedly run as high as nearly $1 million.) These fancy devices essentially work the same way as the firmware method outlined above, but they have antennas for longer range and may run more smoothly.

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Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Patrick Traynor of Pennsylvania State University.

Christopher Beam is a writer living in Beijing.

FUTURE TENSE
THE CITIZEN’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE.
FEB. 9 2017 9:30 AM
How to Set Up Signal Private Messenger
And why you need it.

By Jennifer Golbeck
170207_FUT_signal
Signal will encrypt your messages for you.
Holly Allen for Slate

170207_FUT_signalScale
Encrypted texts and calls: not just for movie spies and paranoid hackers! The app Signal has seen a huge surge in popularity since the 2016 presidential election, when it became a go-to recommendation for people who might not want outsiders (like the government) reading their messages. It’s is a super-easy-to-use messaging application that works like any other texting program—but it has some extra benefits. All messages are encrypted, including when they go through Signal’s servers, so if anyone intercepts them in transit or at Signal, they can’t read them. The same goes for voice calls (also free), which you can make with the app.

Smart devices spying on you

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Trevor Timm column
The government just admitted it will use smart home devices for spying
Trevor Timm
Trevor Timm
Many consumers are wholly unaware that the smart devices making their home more custom and responsive are making data that can be hacked or collected

This product image provided by Amazon shows the Amazon Echo speaker. The biggest feature in Amazon’s Echo speaker is a voice-recognition system called Alexa that is designed to control Pandora, Amazon Music and Prime Music services as well as give information on news, weather and traffic. (Amazon via AP)

Amazon Echo sees when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. Photograph: Uncredited/AP
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Contact author @trevortimm
Tuesday 9 February 2016 15.29 EST Last modified on Tuesday 9 February 2016 15.39 EST

If you want evidence that US intelligence agencies aren’t losing surveillance abilities because of the rising use of encryption by tech companies, look no further than the testimony on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

As the Guardian reported, Clapper made clear that the internet of things – the many devices like thermostats, cameras and other appliances that are increasingly connected to the internet – are providing ample opportunity for intelligence agencies to spy on targets, and possibly the masses. And it’s a danger that many consumers who buy these products may be wholly unaware of.

US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you
“In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper told a Senate panel as part of his annual “assessment of threats” against the US.

Clapper is actually saying something very similar to a major study done at Harvard’s Berkman Center released last week. It concluded that the FBI’s recent claim that they are “going dark” – losing the ability to spy on suspects because of encryption – is largely overblown, mainly because federal agencies have so many more avenues for spying. This echoes comments by many surveillance experts, who have made clear that, rather than “going dark”, we are actually in the “golden age of surveillance”.

Privacy advocates have known about the potential for government to exploit the internet of things for years. Law enforcement agencies have taken notice too, increasingly serving court orders on companies for data they keep that citizens might not even know they are transmitting. Police have already been asking Google-owned company Dropcam for footage from cameras inside people’s homes meant to keep an eye on their kids. Fitbit data has already been used in court against defendants multiple times.

But the potential for these privacy violations has only recently started reaching millions of homes: Samsung sparked controversy last year after announcing a television that would listen to everything said in the room it’s in and in the fine print literally warned people not to talk about sensitive information in front of it.

While Samsung took a bunch of heat, a wide array of devices now act as all-seeing or all-listening devices, including other television models, Xbox Kinect, Amazon Echo and GM’s OnStar program that tracks car owners’ driving patterns. Even a new Barbie has the ability to spy on you – it listens to Barbie owners to respond but also sends what it hears back to the mothership at Mattel.

Then there are the rampant security issues with the internet of things that allow hackers – whether they are criminal, government or something in between – to access loads of data without any court order, like the creeps who were eavesdropping on baby monitors of new parents. Just a few weeks ago, a security researcher found that Google’s Nest thermostats were leaking users’ zipcodes over the internet. There’s even an entire search engine for the internet of things called Shodan that allows users to easily search for unsecured webcams that are broadcasting from inside people’s houses without their knowledge.

While people voluntarily use all these devices, the chances are close to zero that they fully understand that a lot of their data is being sent back to various companies to be stored on servers that can either be accessed by governments or hackers.

While Clapper’s comments are generating new publicity for this privacy worry, the government has known about the potential to exploit these devices for a long time. The then CIA director David Petraeus made clear that intelligence agencies would use theinternet of things to spy on people back in 2012, saying:

Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters – all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.

As Wired put it, Petraeus was expressing excitement the CIA would soon be able spy on you through your dishwasher.

Author and persistent Silicon Valley critic Evgeny Morozov summed up the entire problem with the internet of things and “smart” technology in a tweet last week:

While internet-connected devices are not going away – it’s a certainty they will only get more prevalent – it’s important that companies make them as secure as the end-to-end encryption the FBI director loves to complain about, and that we press the government to enact strict new rules to prevent our privacy from being invaded thanks to the weakest link among televisions or dolls or thermostats that line billions of homes around the world.

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474 Arrested, 28 Sexually Exploited Children Rescued During Statewide Human Trafficking Operation

474 Arrested, 28 Sexually Exploited Children Rescued During Statewide Human Trafficking Operation: LASD
POSTED 9:06 AM, FEBRUARY 1, 2017, BY TRACY BLOOM, UPDATED AT 05:52PM, FEBRUARY 1, 2017
la-county-sheriff
A Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department patrol car is seen in this file photo. (Credit: KTLA)
Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens of sexually exploited children and adult victims were rescued across California during a statewide operation to combat human trafficking, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced Tuesday.

More than 30 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and task forces, including the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force, participated in the third annual “Operation Reclaim and Rebuild” enforcement operation, according to a sheriff’s news release.

The statewide operation took place over the three-day period between last Thursday and Saturday.

In total, 474 arrests were made, including 142 males on solicitation charges, and 36 males on suspicion of pimping, according to figures provided by the Sheriff’s Department.

Additionally, 28 commercially and sexually exploited children and 27 adult victims were rescued.

“You are worthy of more. And we will work tirelessly with our partners … to provide you services and help you rebuild your life,” Sheriff Jim McDonnell said, addressing the victims during a news conference on Tuesday.

The minors who were recovered during the operation were being cared for by various children and family services agencies across the state, according to sheriff’s officials. The Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking and the Saving Innocence organization were coordinating efforts to help victims in L.A. County.

“Operation Reclaim and Rebuild focused on rescuing victims of sexual slavery and human trafficking, providing victims with much-needed services, identifying and arresting their captors, seeking successful prosecutions, and disrupting the demand for vulnerable victims by targeting their customers,” the release stated.

“Police agencies and other trafficking task forces throughout our state joined in the enforcement operation to send the clear message that California law enforcement shares a unified mandate: Human trafficking must not be tolerated in our state!”

Correction: An earlier version of this story had an incorrect surname for the L.A. County sheriff. The story has been updated.

FILED IN: LOCAL NEWS
TOPICS: CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT
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