RUTHFULLY YOURS

Funny what happens when a Republican wins the White House. The media mob suddenly develops an interest in transparency and fiscal responsibility. This week—in a story that has been developing over several months—all eyes are on the Environmental Protection Agency.

For eight years, President Obama’s two EPA administrators—Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy—received very little scrutiny from major news organizations. Reporters and opinion writers overlooked their misconduct at the EPA: excessive travel costs; blatant disregard of congressional oversight and lying to Congress; deleted texts and phony email accounts; colluding with activists who sought to use the agency to impose their costly, ideological agenda.

When the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the agency’s Clean Power Plan in 2016 because it exceeded administrative authority—the first time the court blocked a major EPA rule—no one called for McCarthy’s resignation or even criticized her role in writing the bad regulation. The editorial boards at the New York Times and Washington Post didn’t demand that McCarthy step down after she apologized for the disastrous Gold King Mine spill in Colorado, where 3 million gallons of toxic sludge befouled a river system spanning three states.

When McCarthy defended her agency’s role in the Flint water crisis, the Washington Post described her as some sort of hero: “She stood up to often-furious questioning at a congressional hearing that included Republican calls for her resignation, asserting that under the law her agency had done all it could to protect Flint’s residents.”

Time and again, sympathetic scribes in the mainstream media gave the EPA chiefs a pass.

But that drastically changed on December 7, 2016, when Donald Trump nominated Scott Pruitt to be his EPA administrator. Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general, was an outspoken critic of the agency and sued the EPA several times in his role as the Sooner State’s top lawyer. His appointment was a Southern-styled boot-kick to the far-left scientific establishment and the environmental lobby, signaling an end to their unchecked power grip at the EPA.

“Missile defense needs to be part of the United States’ strategy” against North Korean nuclear threats, conceded even a February 11 New York Times editorial in an incoherent anti-missile defense rant. Yet the Times still derided vital missile defense efforts like Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), a continuation of the leftist Gray Lady’s longstanding dangerous folly of opposition to protecting America’s homeland from nuclear attack.

The Times probably would have preferred that President Donald Trump had kept his initial Fiscal Year 2018 budget request with the missile defense spending levels of his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, growing North Korean nuclear threats prompted Trump and legislators to add $368 million to missile defense, reflecting a growing missile defense commitment noted on March 7 before Congress by undersecretary of defense John C. Rood. The Alaska- and California-based GMD is central to these missile defense efforts. As the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) notes, GMD “is currently the only U.S. missile defense system devoted to defending the U.S. homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks.”

Nonetheless, the Times simply repeated decades-old sophistries about missile defense’s futility, something that “will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary.” “After more than 30 years of research and more than $200 billion, the nation’s ballistic missile defense program remains riddled with flaws, even as the threat from North Korean missiles escalates,” the Times wrote. The Times cited a 2016 Pentagon report that supposedly “faulted” missile defenses (it actually describes GMD’s “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland”).

Mark Zuckberberg is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next month about the harvesting of data on 50 million users during campaign season, but one member of the panel said the Facebook CEO and related documents should be under subpoena.

Facebook announced mid-month that it hired a forensic analysis firm to delve into Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm that worked on President Trump’s campaign, after reports that the company held onto user data that had been improperly harvested.

Paul Grewal, VP and deputy general counsel for Facebook, said in a statement posted Friday on the company’s website that Cambridge Analytica had been suspended from Facebook and they were “moving aggressively to determine the accuracy” of claims that the political data firm didn’t delete user info “contrary to the certifications we were given.”

In a detailed interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who conceived the joining of political research and psychological targeting that started Cambridge Analytica (Steve Bannon was on the firm’s board), said Facebook lawyers didn’t reach out to him until August 2016 to demand that “illicitly obtained” data be deleted. “Literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” says Wylie. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

The UK and EU have launched investigations into Cambridge Analytica.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) invited Zuckerberg to testify at an April 10 on data privacy; Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have also been invited. Other committees have also requested a session with Zuckerberg.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN today that “there ought to be subpoenas for him in case he changes his mind, for documents that Facebook has and for Cambridge Analytica and Aleksandr Kogan who are key, also, to knowing how this information on 50 million people was harvested and then abused, illegally juiced to mine and manipulate other data.”

Kogan is a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge who gathered users’ data through an app that promised to predict the Facebook user’s personality. Facebook says about 270,000 people downloaded the app and Kogan “violated our platform policies” by passing the collected data over to Cambridge Analytica.

Journalists are still struggling to put him away.

Hillary famously shouted during the throes of the campaign, “Why am I not up by 50 points?” No doubt the media feels similar rage as it pores over Trump’s latest job approval numbers, which have actually gone up since February, according to CNN: “42% approve of Trump, highest in 11 months.” The CNN correspondent, grudgingly reporting these numbers, chalked Trump’s staying power up to the “economy.”

But in a reversal of the Clintonian adage, it is not the economy, stupid, around CNN these days. It is the sex scandal. Womanizing pundits and louche-living hosts profess shock at Trump’s behavior. They act like it is all so incomprehensible to them. Jeffrey Toobin likes to crank up his wind machine about Trump’s lack of integrity, but not so long ago Toobin’s squalid personal life was tabloid fodder. He was cheating on his wife with former CNN correspondent Jeff Greenfield’s daughter, impregnated her, then (unsuccessfully) put pressure on her to get an abortion, according to the New York Daily News in 2010.

“Jeff and Casey [Greenfield] saw each other off and on over the years,” says one source. “She was married to someone else for two years. After her divorce, she started seeing Jeff again. He said he was going to leave his wife for her. But, by then, Casey had begun to distrust him. She suspected he had several other mistresses.”

In 2008, when Greenfield became pregnant, and when she told Toobin the news, he offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” says a source. He also allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later via a sperm donor.

“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claims another source.

Greenfield underwent a risky DNA test while pregnant, but Toobin didn’t provide his sample and stopped talking to her, according to sources. On the day she gave birth, Greenfield e-mailed Toobin, inviting him to meet his son, Rory. A source says Toobin didn’t reply.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.

No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.

In the last two elections, Facebook has sold its user data to Democratic and, apparently more controversially, Republican campaign affiliates. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often been accused of censoring users’ expression according to their own political tastes. Civil libertarians have accused social-media and Internet giants of violating rights of privacy, by monitoring the shopping, travel, eating, and entertainment habits of their customers to the extent that they know where and when Americans travel or communicate with one another.

Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are the world’s five largest companies in terms of stock value. Together they have market capitalization of about 3 trillion dollars, about the net worth of the entire country of Switzerland.

Until the rise of high-tech companies in the 1980s, there were, for better or worse, certain understood rules that governed the behavior of large corporations. Services deemed essential for the public — power, sewage, water, railroad, radio, and television — were deemed public utilities and regulated by the state.

Anti-trust laws prohibited corporations from stifling competition: Price cutting and fixing, dumping, and vertically integrating to ensure monopolies were all illegal. The government broke up large “trusts.”

The public looked askance at the power of mega-corporations and their ability to sway public opinion through the monopolistic purchases of media and advertising and their ability to liquidate smaller rival companies. Product liability laws, if often punitively and unfairly, held corporations accountable even for the misuse of their products: Smokers sued the tobacco companies when they suffered from lung cancer and emphysema. Baby cribs that had hard edges were liable for infant injury.

Yet today’s Silicon Valley and related high-tech companies are largely exempt from such traditional regulations. Facebook and Google run veritable monopolies. Facebook alone controls an estimated 40 percent of the world’s social-media market. It has more than 2 billion monthly users. Google controls about 90 percent of the world’s search-engine market. Apple earns $230 billion in annual revenue and is nearing a market value of $900 billion. Microsoft controls about 85 percent of the word-processing personal and business markets. Amazon alone was responsible for about 45 percent of all online sales of any sort last year. It has huge contracts with the Pentagon and owns the Washington Post. When competitors to Big Tech arise, they are offered billions of dollars, cashed out, and absorbed. Facebook has bought more than 50 rival companies. It acquired former competitor WhatsApp, the world’s leader in messaging platforms, for a staggering $19 billion. Alphabet/Google has bought more than 200 companies, YouTube among them.

Social media deliberately exploits human psychology, not least with its parade of endless distractions. As well as making us stupid and inattentive, political democracy also is undermined via the mining of big data, as the ongoing revelations of Facebook’s privacy violations attest.

The European Renaissance formed much of what became the West’s vocabulary concerning individual freedom, humanism, political order and the idea of scientific inquiry freed from religious supervision or customary oversight. It gave rise, amongst other things, to speculation about the possibility of perfection. Neo-Platonists, like Pico della Mirandola, considered what man’s release from a determinist chain of being might mean. “What a great miracle is man,” Pico wrote in 1487, “the intermediary between creatures … familiar with the gods above him, as he is lord of the creatures beneath him.”

In this optimistic spirit, later humanists, like Thomas More, imagined utopia, “no place”, where “there’s never any excuse for idleness”. More’s society of perfect happiness was also one of complete surveillance where “everyone has his eye on you”. In a similar vein, Francis Bacon conceived a New Atlantis where Salomon’s house, or the scientific College of the Six Days Work, would find out “the true nature of all things (whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them)”.

The scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment only reinforced this quest. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein captured the dream of science which also came to address the growing irrelevance of God. By the late nineteenth century both Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy speculated on the meaning of God’s death. As Hardy wondered:

And who or what shall fill His place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise? …

In Silicon Valley, Big Tech offers the latest apocalyptic answer to Hardy’s question concerning “the goal of their enterprise”.

After an Ars Technica report that Facebook surreptitiously scrapes call and text message data from Android phones and has done so for years, the scandal-burdened company has responded that it only collects that information from users who have given permission.

Facebook’s public statement, posted on its press site, comes a couple of days after it took out full page newspaper ads to apologize for the misuse of data by third-party apps as it copes with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (follow the story as it develops here). In the ad, founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wrote “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The company’s response to the Ars Technica story, however, struck a different tone, with Facebook titling the post “Fact Check: Your Call and SMS History.” It said “You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” before going on to explain that call and text history logging is included with an opt-in feature on Messenger or Facebook Lite for Android that “people have to expressly agree to use” and that they can turn off at any time, which would also delete any call and text data shared with that app.

Ars Technica has already amended its original post with a response to Facebook’s statement, saying it contradicts several of its findings, including the experience of users who shared their data with the publication.

“In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used,” wrote Ars Technica IT and national security editor Sean Gallagher in the amendment to his post. “Facebook was installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.”

In its statement, Facebook said “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android .”

Mark Zuckerberg famously started Facebook out of a Harvard dorm room in 2004, but his social network now boasts more than two billion users world-wide. Facebook hasn’t matured as fast as it has grown, and its recent troubles show that it will need to exercise more control over content and privacy. Or politicians may do it instead.

Facebook is facing a public reckoning after two newspapers reported that data on 50 million users was improperly shared with a firm working for the Trump campaign. The outrage is overwrought, but perhaps inevitable given that Facebook has promoted itself as a guardian of consumer privacy.

In 2014 the company supported a Senate bill to limit the National Security Agency’s access to electronic data, arguing that it was more trustworthy than the government. Last year Facebook joined other tech companies to oppose Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s rescission of Obama-era privacy rules for broadband providers that didn’t apply to them.

The Internet Association argued that companies like Facebook and Google “have more limited visibility into online practices and consumer information” than broadband providers that are “in a position to develop highly detailed and comprehensive profiles of their customers—and to do so in a manner that may be completely invisible.” Facebook’s alleged data breach has exposed this conceit.

Facebook makes most of its $16 billion in annual profit from harvesting data on users. In 2007 the company decided to start selling personalized ads to fuel its growth. To boost user engagement and generate more ad revenue, Facebook encouraged third-party apps such as inane personality quizzes like “Which Disney Princess Are You?”