It Could Happen Here Weekly 104

Thanks for having me. For those of you who don't know, Sim has been making videos recently about the genocide and Gaza from a queer Jewish anti Zionist perspective, and this is one that I think a lot of people need to be exposed to and to listen to. I mentioned this to you before the recording, but a Jewish friend of mine told me how much she connected with your voice and how much she's learned from you, and how your videos have been helping her approach really awkward and

difficult conversations with her peers. So I appreciate you very much.

created Read for Palestine challenge on YouTube. And just creating this Read for Palestine challenge was enough to get me put on the Canary Mission website.

from my more conservative family. My more liberal family would take the line of like, it's just very complicated, both sides hate each other, who can say who's right? And it was only by reading Palestinian voices that I really developed an anti Zionist perspective.

But you know, I do think that everyone having those conversations, putting your beliefs out there, whether it's one on one in face to face conversations or whether it is doing it online, where like certainly your friends and family are going to see the things that you're posting and the things that you care about, it has a great impact. And like I've definitely noticed friends of mine over time who maybe a few intense bombing campaigns ago, were very checked out on this issue are now very.

think that's important to remember. You made some points in some videos that you made that I would love for you to not like regurgitate, but maybe just like cover for people that haven't watched your videos or are just unaware. In general, I think a really important point you made was how suffering is not monopolized or exclusive or any worse or better than other people suffering if regardless of what identity they are. Can you get into that a little bit?

Rwandan genocide for a more recent example. And uh it is I reject the framework that you can't make comparisons between genocides. I think that keeps us ignorant. I think that keeps us from being in solidarity with one another and understanding the mechanisms of power and control and wealth accumulation that underlie all these genocides. And I do believe what is happening in Palestine right now is a genocide being committed by the Israeli state.

You mentioned something really important that I think I appreciated about how maintaining the dehumanization of the Palestinians is vital to maintain the white supremacist, imperialistic thing that is Israel. Can you get into that a little bit?

publishing as well as journalism. Another an author friend of mine, Hanin Ricott, has had the hardest time. She's been on sub with her book and she's been told by multiple editors to change the main character from a Palestinian character to just a generic Arabic character because being Palestinian is seen as inherently too controversial to publish.

about the difference between colorism and racism. Can you talk about that for a little bit.

African Jews immigrating to Israel. Well, when it comes to the Western media, our view of the conflict is not as nuanced as recognizing those differences. And so I was explaining that colorism is, you know, discrimination based on the color of your skin. Racism is a racial construct us about social economic and legal discrimination. And while colorism is often used to determine racism, that's not always one hundred

percent the case. And in the case of Israel, when you're talking about the Western media looking at Israel, they report on Israelis as people, as people who are to be mourned, as people are whose deaths are important, as people whose lives are valuable, And they report on people in Gaza Palestinians as you know, human shields is the most sympathetic way we hear them talked about. Their deaths are not deemed important, They are not humanized within the media.

If they're killed, they're either combatants or they were a human shield. They were someone being used by combatants, and their deaths are you know, maybe the lip services paid to those debts being regrettable, but they're seen as necessary and not not unconscionable in the way that deaths in Israel are reported on.

versus the occupied the oppressed. So I think semantics are so important for us to keep in mind even when we're talking about it with our peers, to make sure that we talk about it in the correct way, because I like, unconsciously becomes ingrained in us, even if we don't realize it when we keep talking about certain things the way the media wants us to talk about them as a conflict or as a clash or whatever it is.

because they are Palestinians within occupied Palestine. So like, for example, it just came to my attention that there are some in the I'm a book talker. My book talk channel, it's in books Instagram is mostly what I do is just you know, share about books for folks to read and share about the books I'm working on, and some of my fellow book talkers have been recommending people read books by both Palestinian and Jewish authors so they can

show both sides. A Paladinian author, Hanna Mushback, just wrote a great letter to sort of call in our community and explain this is this is very antisemitic to conflate Judaism with Israel, the policies of Israel. You know, yesterday we saw five hundred Jewish activists get arrested in the Capitol building here in d C. In protests and demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So there are many many

anti Zionist Jews. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing, but conflating them gives Israel more power and gives it a stronger moral foothold to say, oh, we're representing all Jews, not just this this state. So that's something also to be really careful about, is to not pit this as a Muslim versus Jewish fight, because it's not. It's about Israel, the state versus Palestinian people.

even get into because we can't understand it. I think the Zionist narrative wants us to believe it's about religion so people can ignore what's actually going on and be too scared to speak out. It's like time and time again something that I want to remind people that it's not Muslim versus Jewish, which is what it gets framed by most of the time. But speaking of Zionism and how it's not equated to the Jewish religion at all. If anything, Zionism is anti Semitic in and of itself.

to go to Israel for the rapture to happen. It is the most like comic book idea I've ever heard, and everyone just goes along with it. Yeah, that brings me to another thing he brought up in your videos

about a homeland. I think what you discussed is really important because because of this narrative that a lot of Zionists teach to Jewish people about how they're constantly being persecuted, I think people are led to believe that Israel is their safe haven, Like if all of us fails, I have Israel to go back to that as my home, even like American Jews that have no connection to Israel. Really, why, in your opinion, do the Jewish people not necessarily need a homeland?

is run. And so, you know, a lot of people misinterpreted that videos is you know, which I kind of try to argue with me saying, but there's other theocratic ethno states. But I'm saying, yeah, if you're a leftist, you should think that's bad everywhere, because a theocratic ethno

state is an inherently fascist construct. It's inherently saying one religion and or one ethnicity, in the case of the way Israel interprets Judaism, these people are more valuable and are more citizens here and have more rights here than everybody else, and that is just incompatible with leftist values, I think. And so I the point of that video

is nobody should have a theocratic ethno state. And this is a line that I've heard even some leftist Jews saying well, oh, we you know this is a complicated issue because Jews need a homeland. Well, I'm sorry, our world is just two heterogenous too diverse. You know, migrations have been going on for tens of thousands of years all over the place. There's no one plot of land on Earth anymore that you can carve out and say, Okay, just this one type of people are going to get

to live here and be citizens here and have rights here. Now, I'm an anarchist personally, so I when I say no theocratic ethno states, I'm also like in a bigger picture way saying like no states would be the ideal for me. But certainly theocratic ethno states are even worse within that

framework compared to like liberal democracies or something. So yeah, that was a video that was like intended to be an in group conversation, and then it got a million views and got because my following has like really exploded over the last week. So I wasn't expecting it to

go so far. And so for people who idealize ethno states, like Japan or Sweden, they were really having a hard time with me, with me saying that and thinking it was really anti Semitic for me to say, oh, I don't think Jews should have theocratic ethno state, but no, I think nobody should have a theocratic ethno state.

I mean, Amy Schumer posted this crazy video proving in her words, that it's not an apartheid state actually and how people have all the rights in the world when in reality it's shameful.

is not a term that I hear often anymore. But like the progressive except Palestine, I think that idea has been really damaging because it makes it seem like you can still be so liberal and progressive and still not really recognize that Palestinians are being genocided for almost a century.

There's also non jew it just queer you know, all sorts of queer liberation queer activists out there, which is like a whole other network that I'm tapped in into, and many of them are staying silent on this genocide. And it's like we are all fighting the same evils, the same type of oppression. And if you want people to stand with you when your rights are being taken away, you got to stand with everybody else.

your voice is just in general, especially now. And Yeah, I just really thank you for what you've been doing, because it's kind of scary too. I'm sure to suddenly have a big platform and have all these people analyzing everything you're saying and trying to find little holes in your arguments. But I appreciate that you're not backing down.

book about centering racial justice within climate organizing. And the final scene of the book actually takes place at a Free Palestine protest, and so that's definitely a presence throughout the book. And based on experiences I've had organizing with the incredible Students for Justice in Palestine and Palestini youth movement organizers that we have here in Houston.

corporate retailers. And it's available in hardcover and ebook and audiobook. And you can find me online at sim Kern on TikTok and if you search simcr it's at sim Bookstagram's badly on Instagram, but if you just search sim Kernel, I'll pop up on Instagram.

other option available to me. That sure fits my culture. Yeah, So we're not here to talk about things that I like to do in my free time, as much as I would love that, but we are here to talk about things that I have been seeing in my worktime. When I was traveling to Kurdistan a couple of weeks. Kurdistan, for people who are not familiar, is a big area, the area where Kurdish people live, and it spans several countries.

The areas I went, we're in a rock and in Syria or in that it's not really in I guess Syrian regime territory. But if you look on the.

around Surakania and Tel Abiyad. We've talked about that before on the Podka, so if you want to know more about that, you can go back and listen to it. It's the area along the border, one of the areas

on the border between Turkey and Syria. And as people will know, Syria is a country that has had a long and terrible civil war, which they've heard about in lots of episodes, right, and we're not talking about that today so much as we're talking about the Turkish state's use of drones to bomb what people generally in this country will know as for a Java, right, So just to give them statistics off the top, this is the fourth year in a row of aggression at this time

of year, right, So there have been two land attacks I think Operation Olive Branch and Operation with someone called peace Spring, and then two years the last two years there have been drone strikes at this time of year. This time of year, it seems very hard not to conclude that these are attempts to destroy civilian infrastructure and make it very hard for people in the cold months of the year. So right now around two million people in north East Syria are going to be without power

and without water. And I experienced some of that when I was there, and the places I stayed will run off generators, so you'd have like intermittent power. You'd have power from it, and then they'd put some petru in the generator and the power will go down, or the generator would have a little tantrum and the power would go down. But generally I had a lot better access to power that some people had a lot better access

to water. So as I was traveling around, I noticed some people didn't have access to like running water, right, they can't turn on the tap and get water. Obviously that's a massive problem. It's something I think. Look, as people are listening to this, Israel is also bombing the shit out of Gaza, the whole of the Gaza Strip, and the US recently intervened to ensure that people there had access to water, and they have done very little in the case of protecting people in North and East Syria.

They're there largely is like internal security due to the various non state arm groups that are in the area and state armed groups I guess that are operating in the area that would make things dangerous for people living there. So these particular essays were anti narcotic essay. And again why I'm grounding this and what they do is because they're not the people who like send you to jail for the rest of your life for like having an ounce of weed. They're the people whose job is to

prevent the trading cap to gone. Will people know what people know what Captagon is?

non state arm groups get money to buy stuff. Right, So when we're talking about drug interdiction, it's not done in a vacuum. It's not done because I could they think that necessarily that drugs are bad or that you know, there's some kind of moral failure that comes from the use of these substances. It's because it allows funding for groups that are trying to kill people on the ground.

So like interdicting the drugs is part of an anti terrorism operation that allows people to live safely, which is what they deserve after ten plus years of war in that area. So twenty nine people is a lot of people, right, twenty nine anti narcotics, I say issues is a lot of the people who do that job. It's going to make it significantly harder for them to continue doing that job, which means it's going to make it significantly easier for

those arm groups to get funding. Right. It's also so while I was there, there was a massive funeral for these people. Right, every town, every settlement across where Java has lost somebody in that strike. Right, So in Kamishlo, in Kabani, in Alhasaka, like all these places had big funerals because you know, three or four or ten people came from that town and like that's I saw a little girl like going to her dad's funeral, right, like a little girl holding a picture of her dad. And

it's pretty fucked up. Like it's hard for that not to affect you, especially as like these people weren't fighting anyone, they weren't attacking anyone, right, they were just they were taking a training. They were taking an anti narcotics training at night, and sixty of them were gathering it's building. Twenty nine were killed, twenty eight injured. It's in the sort of furthest northeast part of North and Eastsyria, but around a town called Derek, which is on the board

of it al Malkay Derek. Yeah, Bobody, my pronunciation is asked al Malachaia might say on the map if if you're looking at Google Maps, so you're trying to work out what it is. Lots of these places. The reason they will have two names is cored edition and Arabic. Right, So like under the previous side regime, like Arabic was the sort of language that people were enforced to speak and use, and now under the self administration, people tend to use Kurdish, and they tend to use a Latin

script as opposed to an Arabic script. Right, So that's why you'll see two names very often you're looking on a map, But like twenty nine is only you know, there's nineteen other people, mostly civilians, right, who were killed. Then two million people are now living without power, without water, and without these basic services, which in turn will result in more death. Right, More people will die because they don't have access to those things which are life sustaining, right,

or people, young people, sick people. Both things are the very basics of sustaining human life, and so without the things are going to get a lot harder. I want to talk a little bit about like where these drone strikes happened, because largely aside from the one of their age, they weren't at like large groups of people or buildings. Instead,

they were like deliberately targeting infrastructure. So of the ones that I saw and the ones that I read about, and they targeted like an electricity substation in one case, they targeted a lot of water facilities, right, like like water pumping stations, et cetera that allow people to get water, a cooking gas plant, which it's pretty obvious what that does, right, It allows people to get bottles of gas to cook their food, and a lot of oil in destructures. So

I saw a few of those. Theyre called like donkeys, you know, the things that go up and down. Yeah my using the word, I don't.

the power to them had been knocked out. So obviously that's not only a major revenue source, but also like that is how people in the region get fuel, right, so it's going to be harder for them to get diesels,

going to be harder for them to drive around. People already don't drive around a lot because a lot of the drone strikes on people in the yepegay Yepija, so that the People's Defence Forces and Women's Defense Forces, lots of drone strikes have happened when those people are driving their cars, when they get in a car, so it can be quite hairy driving and a lot of people were driving too, like I drive around, but that's one of the areas of risk for people.

you know, watching everything. People in general are outless, which provides cover for some of these groups that may want to do like a kidnapping.

They have a good website. It's Jarva Information Center to org. They produce monthly report on both things. So that will give more information on those things. That would be a good time to pivot to adverts. But I've got all that is.

the Kurdistan Communities Council. So that would be the I guess the if you look at like Syria, Iran, Turkey and Iraq as different countries, all of which have some administry to give control over the nation of Kurdish people, right, Kurdish people live in all four countries, and they live

in other countries too. Of course, then the movements in each of those countries are subsidiary to the k CK and so some of those KKK folks who are up in Solimani so like that there will be drone strikes there and that's that's far inside Iraqi Kurdistan, right, You're you're a long way from the border there, and that's

that's what these drone strikes, I guess. The drone strikes allow Turkish intelligence in the Turkish military to target people much much further inside with very little consequent or risk

on their own. Right, these drones are largely not being targeted because certainly in an Ees, the Autonomous Administration in North Eastyria, they don't have the means to target them, right, the United States hasn't supplied them with the weapons that they would need to shoot down those drones, which I think brings me onto the role of the US in this and I guess more broadly the role of the

coalition in this case. Coalition is a coalition to defeat ISIS. Right, it's made up of dozens of countries, the UK, the US, Germany, lots of other Western I guess countries broadly, and countries in that part of the world too, like I think

Iraq is part of it. Certainly, like Iraqi, Kurdistan has done their own operations against ISIS sleeper cells, peshmurger and like everywhere you go, right, you go through Peshmerga checkpoints, like I was going through an area where they had arrested an ISIS member the day before, so like it's they'll be getting you out of the car, you know, going through your bags, looking through your stuff. Right, So

that's all part of the same operation. But the US has a base in a place called Alhassaka, which again you can look up on the map, right, it's a little west trying to light up my compass here, a little west of Kamishloh, which is a capital of the region, and the US pretty much US troops don't do a great amount of leaving that base. It's fair to say they'll come out in helicopters. They were going out like sort of supporting SDF patrols in the Ahuska region, but

they were supporting them from the air. Right. They generally aren't going out and about like with people on the ground, talking to people, unless it's a specific mission, which they do sometimes you can if people are interested in like the US presence. It's called Operation Inherent Resolve, And they have a Twitter account whether sometimes post themselves doing things.

But what they don't do is protect that. And so the US and the Autonomous Administration are allies in this fight against ISIS, right, but they are only allied in this fight against ISIS. The US is not supporting them in defending themselves from drone strikes or like ensuring that civilian population is protected from those attacks. So the US has the capacity city to shoot down these drones, and they prove that by shooting one down last week or

the week before. I'm a little bit jet legged, so a bit bugled on time, but I think it was last week the US shut down a Turkish drones.

every single person worrying what's going to happen tonight? Right Like, And I can speak to a tiny part of that experience. Right Nothing compared to what people are living there have gone through at all. But it's a concern every time it gets dark, you know, well it's tonight the night, especially for the rural folks who might be living in a rural area but near to a substation, or near to one of those nodding donkeys or other infrastructure which

has been targeted, or near a cooking gas plant. Right, those things I can imagine explode with quite some force. They can't leave, right, they can't just upen and not live near any infrastructure. Infrastructures will allows place to be survivable for civilians, So they just have to live with

this constant fear. And it's very odd to see that and then simultaneously see this, this sort of deification of drone strikes that are happening in Ukraine and like this, you know, people with dog dressed as Napoleon Twitter avatars, Yeah, cheering someone's kid dying.

like consuming social media and just the sheer. It's like people forget that this is like thousands of people's actual, like human lives that they're like yes, sneaming about, and it's it just it just becomes just they talk about it in the same way they talk about like a Marvel movie or like a star like it's it's it's yeah, or sports like.

their stuff. We got nazi's doing a whole bunch of politics as fandom as well. It just creates like it's it's it's like this team sports like fandom thing that is just pervate.

spent time in these places, you know, for a decent amount of my life, But fuck me, it's just like it destroyed you. Like seeing a mum mary her son cry for her little boy. It's fucking heartbreaking, and like I got to live that for one morning, and those people live that every single day and every time. And I don't, I know, it makes me want to shout at people when I see this.

to it. Hearing people talk about, you know, doing what they do in times of war because of patriotism, because of nationalism, because of belief in the founding principles of their country, seems a little bit less coarse than like doing it because you fell in with a bunch of memers who use little dog avatars and shit. But like, I don't know, it's not it's not like less logical than than being right or die because like you happen to be born under you know so and so the king.

the in the class, you know, Jesus Christ. It's so what I wanted to say is that like when yeah, like if you're in the military, you probably know this, right, like like this sort of blood makes a grass grows, shit, fine, whatever, Like that's how wars work. War is undesirable. It's horrible. You have to be horrible, you have to you have to dehumanize people to kill them. You don't have to

fucking do that if you're on Twitter dot com. But like people, you know, people with the silly dog advatars chiefly, but other people to have begun to see themselves as like participants in conflict in a way that they maybe didn't. Maybe they did and I just wasn't around in second one.

on conversation is itself like a form of activism. By just like just through like consuming or sharing content, you feel like you're actually participating in the thing itself.

actual person on the ground telling you what's happening. So I think there's a little bit of nuance because I also think the only reason that like just for Palestine for example, just is we don't have to go into it too much. But a huge reason why there's so much more support for the Palestinian movement is because of social media.

in Ukraine, right Like. The degree to which weapons keep flowing to that country is going to be heavily based on the degree to which sympathy for that cause remains among US taxpayers and taxpayers in other countries that are sending them those weapons. That's going to have an impact

on the presidential election. Maybe. I mean that is the other thing, right that, like everyone who is engaging with this stuff via social media, there's a tendency to get caught up in a bubble in terms of just thinking about how much this is on the mind of like American voters. Maybe it'll be different this election, but generally, like again, my feelings on this are kind of muddled, but like very very often, no matter how big a deal a story is, you know, online and stuff, American

voters rarely vote based on foreign policy concerns. Yeah, I want to say, I'm not saying that's what matters morally.

can make a meaningful difference with a few bucks. And I know I sound like an MPR advert now, but like the Rajarv Information Center has some good resources and like they they have, I'm not going to read them because it's very complicated. Like I said, it's bank transfer information. But if you feel helpless, you are not, Like you can do a lot with a little. You can raise money, you can help to organize donations, right that like this,

these things make a difference. If someone who doesn't have water now gets a palette of bottled water, that makes a difference. If someone gets a heater for their home, that makes a difference. If even if it's someone whose kid has died, right like making their life a little less painful in a physical sense, rightly helping them be warm at night, that does make a difference. And you can do that. And if you want to make a difference, I would really encourage you to do whatever it is.

And it doesn't have to be here, right, It's happened that there's like there's an ethnic cleansing happening in azabadiant there is an ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza, right, Like these are places where like you can show meaningful solidarity and support with a little bit of a donation or a fundraiser. It's happening at our fucking border, right, Like

someone died at our border since I last recording. Someone else got run over by some child in the truck or like you can make a difference in a meaningful way with actions, And it's really easy to get sucked into like just posting into the void and feeling helpless, but like very helpful things you can do.

is like it's not politics as fandom. It is metapolitics. It's where you actually put your politics into your into your actual everyday life and it influences the friends you have, the communities you have. So whether that's you know, a whole bunch of trans musicians doing a benefit show to to get donations to send over to Rajava or send over to to Gaza, or you know, there's a lot of other sorts of things that that is a way of actually having part of your politics be not just

like consumption have not. It's not just like Twitter accounts with flags and your avatar. It's actually like living your life in a way that matches the things that you believe.

So like you can participate in that, as Garrison said, right by doing the mutual aid by doing the benefit show, by doing the fundraiser, Like, you are making a world in which this shit will happen less when you do things to stop it happening or to ease the pain of it happening.

That's because people built networks didn't go away, and it was good in May in part because we built networks that help to make being gun housed in San Diego feel be survivable. Right, And like those networks are resilient and they're flexible, and they help us like mentally process all the horrible shit and also physically help people. So yeah, you have that within your means too, Right, you have a signal on your telephone, like you can organize things.

I don't have to feel helpless, but I feel dizzy due today, I suppose, but alcoholic that has feeled. So maybe that's a wonderful time to end.

wanted to update everyone. As Robert mentioned in the show, the weakening of the essay shrint and the fact that people are not able to be out and about because of these drone strikes, combined with the events in Israel and Palestine in the last couple of weeks, have resulted in a significant uptake in violence in the area. So I just wanted to update you on that. I've seen a decent amount of misinformation, which will be shocking to

many of you on Twitter dot com. So there have been a series of rocket and uav UOV and manned aerial vehicle right drones drone attacks on US bases across the north of Iraq and across Syria. So some of those happened Altant, which is further south. Some of them happened to Al Hussaka. Some of them also happened to oil pipelines. And I would be very wary of people posting pictures of big fires and claiming that there are

attacks at the US Bass. Every time I've seen that, it's actually been an attack on an oil pipeline, and either the person doesn't know that that's not a US base or they are wilfully being leading to try and get more clicks. People get paid on Twitter for engagement now, so I'm quite cynical about people's reasons for doing that. But there definitely have been attacks that they have not

resulted in much loss of life. One contractor I believe did lose their lives due to Carliac incident that happened when they were sheltering from a what turned out to be a false alarm of a drone attack, but no one has been directly killed by the drone munitions. There have been a number of people killed in increasing conflict in the area. Both one person was killed in Khamishlo

very very close to where I stayed. Actually, you can probably see it from my Houtolium in a car bomb, which is not a normal thing to happen in the middle of that city, a car bomb going off, So that's obviously caused for concern for some people in Derrazor. SDF and coalition forces have conducted a number of operations against ISIS sleeper cells who are still there, arrested, obtained a number of suspected ISIS members. They've also been fighting

against Iranian backed militias across the Euphrates. We've also seen fighting between the Peshmerga, so that those are the military forces of the Kurdist down regional government in that area of Iraq and the Iraqi Army around the Macmaal refugee camp, which is a refugee camp for Kurdish people who have fled from turky And of course we've seen a lot of threats, a lot of even fighting inside Iran, but it it's generally be an Iranian back to relations attacking

US spaces so far across that whole area. So I just wanted to update you on those things. Obviously we'll keep updating you on them, and also to just suggest once again that people verify the sources of information because I have seen, especially about this area where I think literacy is very low among the general US populations, and outrageous claims being made by people who either don't know

what they're talking about or are wilfully misleading people. So I wanted to counsel people to be concerned about that. We don't have exact I don't have exact numbers of the numbers of drone attacks. I'm looking at a Pentagon press conference that happened thirty nine minutes ago, and then they're not giving them out there. So I have asked them for comment on a couple of things. So didn't email me back, very sad ghosting me. Bit, Yeah, that's

the latest information on that. I wanted to make sure that we have the leader's update for you.

of our guests, a great Carl Casarta. We're talking about like security culture, and particularly the aspect of security culture that involves digital devices and how to communicate with your friends' affinity groups, whomever via your phone essentially or your computer. This is a thing where there's a huge amount of disinformation as to which apps are safe. What does it actually mean to say that an app is a cryptied

How far does encryption get you? What sort of like cultural things come alongside the actual, like physical reality of the security of the device in order to kind of make a comprehensive security profile. We're gonna be talking about all that today and hopefully giving you some good advice on what you can trust. Because I am the furthest thing in the world from a technical expert. We have

two actual experts with us today. Carolyn Senders and Cooper Quinton have both recently published a paper alongside several other authors Leila Wagner, Tim Bernard, Ami Meta, and Justin Hendricks called What is Secure? An Analysis of Popular Messaging Apps, and it's it's basically going over what is the actual level of security with a number of things like Telegram, you know, Telegram's private messaging system, Facebook Messenger, Apple Message,

or I Message. I guess it's called and obviously signal and kind of as a spoiler, signal is your best bet. But that also isn't where you should end, right, I think we want to also talk about kind of like why and to what extent that's the case. But anyway, I'm going to turn things over to Carolyn and Cooper now because I have talked enough about this. Hey, guys, welcome to the show.

summary a skim before you continue, that might help. But I kind of wanted to start by asking you, guys, what is it that makes signal a good option for people?

it's also actually quite minimal. So the paper which everyone should read, and we'll probably get into this later. Different apps like Telegram or of Facebook's Messenger app, for example, have have this thing we've been.

So if you're using an iOS or Android version, like there are buttons in places where you expect them to be. Signal is not perfectly designed, but it is quite usable. Yeah, So for me, that's kind of what I think makes it makes it really wonderful.

the sort of level of user base that Signal and and certainly not WhatsApp have, right, And and that's largely because they were pretty much unusable, like PGP, almost entirely unusable even by cryptography professionals, right, even by computer security professionals like ourselves. OTR chat total pain in the butt, right,

like just a real nightmare to use. So, like Signal, there are still some rough edges, and we talked about some of those in our paper, But overall, I think that the big, the big innovation they've had is just remembering that what people want to do on a chat app is not encrypt things. What people want to do on a chat app is they want to they want to chat right. And and the second that that that the security sort of gets in the way of that, people will stop using it and go find something that's

more usable. And it seems like that's been Signals sort of guiding star and it's and they've you know, doing the doing the most secure thing that you can well still being fun and usable to actually just chat on right, And I think that that has served them quite well.

a bunch of stuff. It's pretty safe, especially for a normal person's uses right out of the box, which is huge and kind of in the same line as that is the fact that because Signal doesn't store metadata, you're not relying upon them being like committed, you know, anti state actors or whatever like, because they don't have access to the thing that, for example, Facebook will hand over to the cops if the cops just like breathe in their direction.

time it connected to the Signal server. And the reason we know that is because Signal publishes transparency reports with the full text and full response of any subpoena that they get, so like, we can actually just see in the responses that all they've given over is these two pieces of information, because that's all they have, and they've done some pretty clever things to make that be.

or government, but rather just that they received one. And so that's also the really great thing about Signal is you are getting all this information that you're not getting from other companies or platforms.

this introducing the concept that y'all introduced me to. I guess I was aware of this, but not the terminology security folklore, and I wanted to chat a little bit about kind of the most recent example of this something a lot of folks have probably been wondering about since we started talking about Signal, which is that roughly a week before y'all and I sat down to talk about this, a kind of viral info meme started coming through that was like Signal has a zero day exploit, which is

basically a hole that a hacker found in an Apple program that is that can't expose you. You have to turn off link previews, right, which is that when you when someone sends you like a link to an article in Signal, you get a little preview, not not dissimilar to how I think to be fair, just based on my very limited knowledge, that is, when I think about, like, what are potential holes in Signal, I don't think it's unreasonable

to be concerned about that specific feature. But that warning was not what it kind of seemed to be basically or not as accurate as I think a lot of people took it as being.

types of people. One uh, you know, people like us that would bring this to signal immediately and get them to patch it to protect the you know, millions of high risk users that you signal, or to the type of people that would go sell this exploit to some horrible company that would use it, you know, sell it to Saudi Arabia or something and use it to kill activists.

and from like from Signal and from your IP address. Right, So when you put a link in the owner of that website, whoever has the logs for that website, can know that somebody at your IP address is using Signal and sending this link over signal.

make foundational elements like link previews optional? And you're just like starting like gesturing wildly, but like you know, it's like, well, you don't know what people want, And I mean, what's the harm in turning off some of some of these things, right? You know, like maybe maybe people don't want to receive gifts. I don't know, maybe they don't want to receive stickers. Why don't you like let them have that option. What's the harm that could happen?

And yeah, this is kind of you introduce this when talking about sort of if you do try to engage somewhat with the technology, or if you wind up just kind of in the position I think most lay people are, where you know, maybe you have some friends who know more, or maybe you have some friends who think they know more, and you get all these conflicting things about like this

is safe, No, it's not. You can't trust signal. The FEDS could be running signal all this kind of stuff, and to be fair, the FEDS have run security based services before. It's not like I don't believe that's happening with signal, but it's not like I understand where paranoia like that can can enter into people's calculus, especially if you're not tech knowledgeable, and that can lead to this sort of state of security nihilism where you're just like,

you can't communicate it all online. There's no way to do it securely, and obviously there's no perfect right. You never have it, but you don't have one hundred percent with like talking in person to somebody right There are individuals in prison right now who you know, somebody they loved and trusted rat it on them. There's no one

hundred percents in this world. But that doesn't mean nihilism is the right response to like trying to figure out how to set up your communications standards with people right totally.

And so a lot of this was recognizing that there was certain practices we were picking up on, particularly with

folks we were working with. So like a lot of reproductive justice activists we were working with are new to security, they're new to technology, they don't have a background in tech, and generally, you know, the American South, American Deep South is super overlooked in terms of tech policy, in terms of just I think a general focus when people are talking about tech or tech literacy or tech activism, and that is like leaving really massive gaps and knowledge for people.

And so you know, when we were working on this, security folklore and security nihilism were both actually very almost like I won't say like a pendulum, but they were very connected. And so some of that was people hearing things like oh, I should put my phone in a microwave when I'm having a very sensitive conversation, right, And so that's where some of that security folklore is coming in.

It is something that is technically safe, but it's like not the thing you necessarily like totally need to do in that moment. And with security nihilism what it kind of came down to, And this is stuff we've seen

with other groups and other circumstances. A great example are are you know Palestinine activists and journalists Let's say, who are you know facing the threat of all different kinds of governmental censorship and surveillance of sort of saying like when there's this large threat sort of hanging on us,

and there's also physical surveillance. And this is true for a lot of journalists in other countries like India as well, for example, you know, like should everything go through signal or does it really matter?

It's actually like much more of a gradient. But you know, the focalore and the nihilism, I think come from a very similar place, which is we're asking people, like society is kind of asking or demanding that people be experts and something that's really hard. I am like a fairly technical person and even there are some things that I find hard to serve wrap my head around. And I've been working in privacy and security for like quite a while.

victories that sweep the enemy from the field. It's by friction, right, which wears down both the culture and the kind of readiness of the opponent until they simply bounce, which is a pretty durable and effective strategy. You can keep it up. It's this matter of like there's no like sweeping sudden like ninety minute three act win here. It's more a matter of the more difficult, the more expensive you make it, the more you hold on to and the more all

of us hold on to. Right. That's the other benefit is like, even if you're not even if you are the most law abiding person in the world like myself, having these security measures in place means that you're kind of contributing to the overall immune system of a kind of community of people who don't want the NSA listening to the ship.

to spy on anybody, right when you're encrypting that communication. Uh, then the NSA or whatever other global adversary has to go actually hack your phone, right, they have to. They have to target you specifically, they have to burn resources and you know, burn weapons, right, zero days to get access to your phone. And that's a lot more costly, it's a lot more noisy, it's a much higher.

you can use. But again, one of the things I think is amazing is that it is so easy to use, and it really is designed for and I'm using the term usability as a design term, meaning that it is they're thinking about a common user, including those with like lower digital literacy or those that are have never used any kind of any kind of security tool, and so they're hitting a specific threshold of usability for things to be understandable, and again, that's incredibly hard to do well,

and they are. They are doing it quite well. Like it's very I would argue it's very easy and sort of seamless for people to make a jump from WhatsApp or if you're on like Google or Android using like Google Messages, sorry Google, if.

as secure as they think. So yeah, I wanted to kind of chat with you about like why that is, and I specifically I wanted to talk One of the things that is frustrating about Telegram is they kind of have they have like a secret chat or private chat, like they have a couple of different options that don't necessarily mean what they sound like they mean to most people.

to a normal chat. So for low vision users or anyone with any kind of like disability, especially a vision related disability, it's almost impossible to It's like nearly impossible to recognize which chat you're using if you're looking at the chat logs.

that you are planning to use. Like you know, with Atlanta, people are getting charges because they had a lawyer's name written on their arm, right, and so the state saying, well, that's evidence that we're planning to commit a crime. You know, that doesn't mean that convictions will go through on that kind of thing, but it may be a reason why signal might not be an option, or say, you know, something comes out about it that makes it seem less secure.

What are other good or or acceptable options? And I know when we're talking about this, these are often options that require more input and work from the user in order to maximize their potential security. But I do think it's good to like let people kind of know what else is out there.

NSA is exactly the same, right, and and they've implemented it. Well, you know, there are a few more steps that, you know, few more precautions that you need to take with WhatsApp, like making sure that your chats aren't backed up being the main one. But WhatsApp is certainly good enough, right if you're if you're you know, chat networks aren't using signal, if you're in a country where you can't use signal, right, Like, WhatsApp has two billion users, I'm you know, it's it's

you can use WhatsApp almost anywhere in the world. It's and it's ubiquitous enough that it's not going to mark you as you know, somebody with something to hide, right, And like and I don't want to I don't want

to discount what's app. Right, getting two billion people to have end to end encrypted messaging by default overnight basically was a major cupe like that that was world changing, right, and like they they really do deserve applause for that obviously, you know, I think partly because of their scale, partly because they're owned by Meta, right, they haven't taken all of these same steps, like they do have more a metadata on their servers then Signal does, right, But if

that's your option, that is a fine option.

gotten taken care of everything. If you've got like a complicated eight digit password and no biometrics enabled, maybe depending on where you are and whatnot, that'll keep your phone locked long enough for those messages to get deleted, right, Like, it's all about kind of maximizing the chances that something like that helps.

turn off the biometric unlock on your phone. Certainly, especially in the US, there's the case law isn't settled, but there's a lot of state courts that have decided that police can force you to unlock your phone with your biometrics and that that's totally fine. So, you know, in the in the US context, it's a good idea. In any context, I think it's a good idea if you're at heightened risk to turn off.

not on your phone. You know, there are things like that you can do if you feel comfortable wiping your phone, that's something also you can do. You know, these are all again, these are these are these are different things, and I think this is one of the things our report. I don't remember how too much we get into a

bit something that at least we've been thinking about. Cooper and I run a little lab called Convocation, and one of the things we've been thinking about there is just also how do we install sort of like better, better, holistic practices where we understand that a phone is just one component of our safety, and so like secure messaging, encrypted messaging is one component of that safe safety.

many situations. But if you are, a full example, going to be transferring a bunch of Plan B pills in an area where that is prosecutable, that probably shouldn't go on your phone in that language.

broken or that person could hurt you. Learning how to trust people, you know, crossing the street, deciding to jaywalk right, all different things we do sort of every day actually can expect to harm. And so one thing I think for people listening to keep in mind is that's the

same when we have conversations. And I think a way to avoid nihilism is just to remember that that every day we are sort of going out there and actually being incredibly brave just by living our everyday lives, by deciding to be in community and have friendships and have relationships. And in my case, I love jaywalking, and no one around me does, and that's why that's my choice. And I have not yet gotten hit by a car j walking.

et cetera. But it's also just really it's really useful with any kind of security and and the onion, it's it's in vision, doesn't on you because like the largest outside chunk of it is don't be seen, don't be acquired, which means somebody actually getting you in their head sights, don't be a hit, which means being behind cover or something. And then the very internal part of it is like have some sort of armor in.

this stuff from my old job. There are a couple of concepts from military planning I think about in this context, and one of them that I also think is relevant to what we're talking about with friction is the concept of an ode loop, right, which is how do you win and combat against an opponent, And it's by disrupting this thing called the ode loop, and the odor loop is how an adversary carries out actions in a conflict like this, right. And the steps you have to go

for are observe, orient, decide, and act. And if you can disrupt any stage of that, you can stop them from taking actions, right, which stops them from being able

to harm you. And the good security is going to impact all three of those things, right, It's going to stop them from being able to see you sometimes if they can see you, stuff like you know, you were just talking, we were just talking earlier about link previews, right, and how that can kind of expose maybe who you're in communication with potentially well, that could allow the state to orient themselves to you and to your friends, right.

And obviously stuff like locking down your device is not having unnecessarily info online can stop them bring being able to decide you know what you're doing, and how they should respond to that. And I think that's also good if you're thinking, if you're not just somebody who is concerned about your security like most people are, because it's

good to have some security. If you're actually dealing with the state or a corporation as an adversary in some way, it can be useful to think about your security culture in those terms.

your abusive partner, right. And you need to And this is why threat modeling is important, because you need to to really to really think about, you know, think through like you know, well, okay, wait, am I actually worried about protecting myself from the NSA or am I more worried about? Uh uh, you know the the racist police officer that drives down my street every day?

a state where that's illegal. It's like, well, like your your threat modeling is not great in that situation, right, Or like I do all that, but I carry in a legal handgun with me wherever I go. It's like, well, it may be more of a threat than your phone.

are very much like the NSA. They're very talented, they have a lot of money and tech at their disposal, and that might be different for some of the activists we're working with, let's say in like Louisiana or Texas, right, But the differences is like we're still talking about I would argue two brutal police forces that just have different means of disposal at their hands. So like the Louisiana Police are our groups you should totally be worried about.

They might not be able to hack your phone, but maybe eventually they could. But there are other there are obviously other things we're about with them. But you know, in the context of like with some of the folks who are working with in the South, like reproductive justice activists, some of the things are probably much more.

is miscarring or has sought an abortion. This is something Kate Bertash from the Digital Defense Fund, a friend of of you know ours, has talked about where like the people that are supposed to take care of you might be the ones that are actually your your biggest threat, right, the ones that have heard you say something or you've can fight it in for example, And that is kind of a horrifying thing to think about, but that is that is a thing you have to threat model, right

is can I trust this person?

Facebook Messenger that the paper gets into. But effectively, Meta is building this weird, sprawling infrastructure inside of Facebook Messenger and try to link Facebook and Instagram.

upsetting and triggering for folks.

But yeah, I would also say just just use Signal whenever you can.

Awful forums. There was a thread in one of the debate forums about this very right wing site, Free Republic, which is like one of the earliest reservoirs of what became trump Ism, and the tagline for the thread, just kind of watching these people was there is always more and it is always worse, And boy goddamn if that hasn't been a continually accurate statement about the whole of social media right now, isn't it time.

just the the barraers you. Information and disinformation has been very hard for people to sort of wade through, and I wonder I think one of the things I'd like us to focus on first and foremost is the impact of Israel's bombing campaign on journalists, specifically working in Gaza. I know, like friends of mine a journalists in Gaza. We featured on this podcast before the people of Parkour, Gazah and I know that many journalists have lost their

lives covering what's been happening. So can you explain a little bit about what's been happening and maybe bring us up to day on the amount of every loss is a tragedy, but like the amount of people who have lost their lives covering this.

the daily life of Gaza. Since the beginning of the war against Gaza on the seventh of October, you know how the war started targeting everything in Gaza, not even all the people, more than the people, you know, the buildings, the children, even the animals, the plants, you know, just bombing and bombing and bombing, air strikes the whole time.

At the beginning, we try to we have some our contacts with journalists and us we have our General Secretary member and so we try to get information from them. At the beginning, yeah, it was not easy, but it was okay to get some information about what's going on. But by the time. Now we reached to a place that when I call them, they always tell dozens of we don't know. We are disconnected. I'm homeless. Now, I

am not able to get any news. I can't tell you about my friend or my neighbor next to me, but I'm not able to tell you about further than this. I will just give some statistics. Up to now, we have eighteen killed journalists who have been either killed while track covering, others were killed in their homes, being through air strikes with their families and so on. We have also many many journalists who have dozens of them have

been injured. I'm really sorry, I was I wanted to have some you know, I curate statistics, but I can't give you until now. We are now trying trying to develop like a tool to get some statistics, but until now it's not working well. We have many journalists who lost their homes, homes because it was bomb bombed or

ye air strikes. Others they were this place. Yeah, and many of them moves from their homes either because their homes was a bomb or other because they were threatened to stay at their home safely, so they go to other like schools, hospitals and so on. The most tragic is the journalists who are losing their families. When you call a journalist to ask him about any thing, they told you Okay, I lost my son, I lost my wife, I lost all my family, I lost my mother. Now

they they are completely broken. You can't talk to them. They are you know, it's really very tragic situation.

on the ground at Gaza. I have made plans to go to Gaza, which probably won't work out now, but like it's hard foreign press, and of course there are many very capable journalists within Ghays that we don't need foreign press to go then necessarily. But can you explain a little bit of how when this war started it didn't just like affect these people in terms of killing

them killing their families, displacing them, destroying their homes. But also like every day this war goes on, it gets harder for us to see I think the impact of this war on civilians living in Gaza, right because of the damage to infrastructure.

of Palestinians. The very limited reach, very limited, and there are sometimes many times they are blocked or yeah, blocked or from posting and so on. So even also this is another problem that we are facing to reach out.

to in good conscious support that. And the fact that this has come at a time when I think generally, certainly for the US, reporting on things outside the US is an all time low, like it's atrocious, and so people lack the context to understand, not through any fault of their own right, but they've just been fed terrible,

you know, opinion pieces for the last few years. They like the context to understand why what's happening is happening and I think obviously Elon Muskersport, Twitter and and just it's assessable. It's terrible, it's full of false information. And as you say, often videos that I have friends who are photographers in Gaza, a friends who are just people in Gaza and videos that they post will be taken down. It's sometimes they're to say it's too graphic, it's too violent,

but like also that's their everyday life. Now that's been happening for two weeks. The graphic violence is sadly what's visited upon them every day.

the video just here that there is a child. It's loading child. Children. Thousands of children are losing their child's life or nothing, are losing their hands their legs. They are now handicapped. They don't know why. You know, we don't need to see the video, just know that this is going on. We don't want to make a tragedy. We don't want to to to people to cry with us. We cry. Yes, we want, okay, some solidarity, but it's not something to have the emotions and then then we

sleep and then we wake up. That's what or no, no, there is something going on. We don't need the sympath you know, we need some actions, we need steps, we need humanity now.

We need the people who elect their governments who support those massacs and to say no, we give you legitimate legitimacy to be human. Stop this inhumanity. We need the people to lobby on their governments that this should not be supported. This is this is the real action that we need. Lobbying, lobbying, lobbying by the people, by the power of people.

pat you down and take your clothes and go through your bags and stuch and like it just wasn't as big of a concern. I think more people in the fifteen years since then have become aware of the tragedy and the loss of life. And certainly now I've seen more people wake up to what's happening and protest or you know, get out and do things in a way

that they wouldn't have done ten years ago. And I think that's really it's good, Like hopefully that demand for people to be allowed to live with dignity and safety continues.

the response wasn't the same. And I think some of that comes from like and not particularly hard to see orientalism in the US and the US media. Also some of it comes from the complete absence of Palestinian voices in certainly in like English language press in America. And I wonder, like I know that there are certain organizations which have specifically worked to make it harder for Palestinian journalists,

like my friend Hausam Salem. He's an excellent photographer. You can find him on all the places where you find people on the internet. But we worked on stories together, and I know he's now had he's lost contract with major outlets because of this sort of campaign of accusing him of biased. I think it's hard not to be

biased when you see a little children die. But I wonder if you could talk about that, like how Palestinian voices are excluded or missing from what even now right the Atlantic since two weeks of bombing now and I was looking this morning and they've managed to find two Palestinian voices to share, like you know, it's maybe not,

and I'll have to check that after we've done. But I was flicking through these big sort of opinion piece type outlets and it's very clear that like even now, people haven't editors specifically or the greater press has not stopped excluding Palestinia voices. So maybe we could talk about like how that happens, what allows it to happen, and what people can do to help lift up those voices.

We're facing this globally, and we have many cases recorded undocumented in the PGS, and we can give you many examples about them. But I have to tell about something that we're a member of the International Federation of Journalists and we have also even our president of Brazilian Perlisinian Journalist Syndicate. He's a vice president of the International Federation of Journalist. He has been elected last year in the

last congress. We have sister unions. One of them one of the best friends of us are the National Writers Union, the American National Writers Union, which is a very big supporter to us. They even Harry got Better, the general secretary, even he visited us in Palestine a few months ago, and he's a very supporter of what's going on, of all our statements of our news at the beginning of

the world. They they produced like a statement about biasity and misleading news and so on, how to avoid them, supporting the Pristinians, supporting our life, our right to life, and so on. So we we highly appreciate this movement. Of course, it's not the only one. Many many syndicates, many unions all over the world sent us solidarity letters.

Some of them supported us even with some in kind contribution, with some funds in addition to solidarity, in addition to demonstrations and so on, which really gave us a lot of power of hope. So we can continue and we are not alone.

fundraiser for flag Vest, bullet professors, for journalists. What kind of support can people give, like in a concrete sense, beyond getting in the streets and protesting and writing letters and emails and phone calls. Is the stuff that they can do with their money if they have some money.

are under strikes, this will never help you. But if I want to talk about the daily life, about how it's going and the West Bank and Gaza, our journalists, we all work under the same conditions of aggressive events, covering aggressive events and so on. So we try as PJAS to contact all the media outlets in Palestine to offer or provide safety kits for all journalists who work in the field. But for example our freelancers, they work

on their on responsibility and a very denserse situation. We try to to to tell how dangerous that what they do when you go to cover with you don't have very full safety kits or it's it's very dangerous for them, but they are not able to to cover it and they want to they need to work, they need to do their job, so they do it in a very strange, very dangerous conditions. So one of the things that we can support Junius is yes, safety kets which are very important.

Medical kits also are very important. What what else we try we try to to do also we try to raise the awareness to make some materials for the journals about safety. Safety is very important for us. We try to to to teach them more about how to take care of them themselves, how to report and so on,

about their security and so on. Yeah, this is mainly what I can talk about for the needs or the in kind contribution, as I told you, in the current situation, for example, we try to support through some donations, through support to support the journalists with better charging. But it is because of the lack of electricity and power sources in Gaza, so just to give them connected currently and they are very useful for them and it helps. Now.

of it has gone relatively unreported. I mean it'll still say like the power and water being cut off, but that creates a lot of other dangerous situations, right, Like obviously some people rely on that power if they're infirm, if they have medical devices, that kind of thing. But also like where there are places to charge, that results in a very high concentration of people, right Like my friend was telling me that their parents were in a

hospital to charge their their devices. Right They wanted to call their child and say we're safe, we're alive, but their phone had run out of batteries, so they had to go to the hospital. Yeah, can you explain a little bit of some of the things that like that that has resulted in the loss of power for people.

We try to make some press zones and the hospitals in some places where it's for press for journalists to be there, So they can get some electricity power and so they can all to be together, try to exchange information and work together, so it will be better for them to work and safer between brackets always for them to work. To be honest, yes, I don't know. If you see the news now, it's we had the sun has set, so it's completely dark because you just can

have some lightned spots which are the hospitals. And you know that even the solar and the sorry, the fuel for school for hospitals is about to to to finish here and in two days I think maximum. But we will see. Maybe we'll have some trucks or they will get something inside Gaza for fuel and so on. But I'm not sure about this.

So I guess, just to be extremely clear on that, can you explain the situation for people in Gaza with respect to if they want them mobility and their ability to leave, because I think it's something that again has been like criminally overlooked in the United States, discourse.

More than five hundred have been killed. They were all children. Mothers are sitting just as a thinking that it would be a shelter for them. So yes, this is the situation Gaza. There is no safe place, no hospitals. If you are in a hospital, you will be bombed. If you're in school you'll be bombed. If you are in a mosque if you will be bombed. If you're in a church, you will be bombed. No safe place unfortunately.

just so on. So I think one thing people are really struggling with is like overload of information missed information, right, just some of the worst pieces I've ever seen in opinion pieces, things center on social media, which are like it seems that we've returned to like peak aslamophobic rhetoric of like September twelve, two thousand and one, and we've learned absolutely nothing from twenty years of killing and dying.

So I wonder where you would recommend if there are members of your syndicate or other places where people can find reliable and for reporting, which is you know, fact checked, which is not overloading them with you know, like if you go on Twitter to try and find your information at the minute, you're just going to get into an argument with someone who has the worst opinions in the world, and it's not good and it can dissuade you from taking action in the ways that you've mentioned which are

actually useful. So is there a place you'd suggest people look for information outlets or individuals they could follow.

to decide who's who's the right one. As you know, I am. I work in a syndicate which is like a union, which is for all journalists with all foods, all at outlets, so they are all our members.

We try now to report about journalists because this is our manda, this is our work to tell about what's going for our members, to try to get any protection

for them. Actually were in this very hard condition. But we tried, through our friends, through our relations, through our supporters, through our memberships and so on, to have some international support for them through information, through like a flow of information telling what's going on, how many journalists have been killed, how many journals are displaced, how many and so on, So we try to give them those that are not. As I already told you, it's really a hard job

that we are going we are doing now. It's getting more and more difficult. We are trying to cope, trying to develop new tools to cope with this hard, very hard situation. But we try our maximum to be honest, to get very real and true information, not to get any misleading information. There's a flow of misleading information. Even we hear about many journalists that they are killed, but when we try to make sure that we found that they are not journalists. We don't get them put them

in our lists. We try to investigate as much as we can, so to put our lists to be limited to journalists, to our members, to the people who work with us, with our within, our man dead and so on, so to be credible source of information.

it is. I believe it's just you know, that's the thing that I do. And I see people, you know, dressed like me. People. I know it's been very of your coverage of that has been very emotionally challenging for me, But it should be emotionally challenging. It's terrible, but I think people should definitely tune into it if they can. I wonder are they're like social media accounts that the PJS has that people can follow.

As I told you, because of the big number, we're trying to make sure who are the journalists, But a massive arrests campaign is taking place now. Also, journalists are facing a lot of threats about a lot of violations while covering many times that are prevented from coverage. They are threatened by weapons, They are threatened sometimes by the settlers,

armed settlers, even not the army, while covering many of them. Also, they are subject to incitement through social media pages like spreading their photo or there and so to make a kind of excitement how to kill them or to get rid of them and so on. So also the journalists are facing a very hard time now. Yeah, they are under the threat.

United States. But I've also you know, this is an unprecedented act of again war crimes, so delicated's it's very hard to see where this is going.

gives us that we have right to life. You know, this is a minimum right that we need people to tell us, Yes, you have a right to life.

look at sort of the early history of chocolate. So so okay, there's there's a lot of disagreement about exactly how old chocolate is. I've seen sources that say three thousand BC. I've seen sources that say seventeen hundred BC. The sevente hundred b C is the one that's pretty consistent. It seems like the Olmecs had something like chocolate. That's it. It's a sort of bitter drink that they sometimes put vanilla or red pepper in. Yeah, it was, it was.

seems to use it for ritual purposes. Yeah, I think at some point the I think it was the the Omes at some point we're doing these like they were making fermented alcohol out of so so normally with with chocolate, you're using like the cocoa beans, right, but there's like a flesh and the flute fruit around the beans, and they were making like a fermented thing out of that. And I don't know, I leave as an exercise to the reader with you count that as chocolate. But the

sort of conventional story goes okay. So like several thousand years after the Olmes, the Assex and the Mayans using it for ritual purposes, and the story basically is okay. So Herman Cortes drinks chocolate with stick king Maktazuma. Cortes goes, this is bitter as shit and sucks ass, but he brings it back to Europe anyways, and in Europe they mix it with sugar and also with honey, but mostly with sugar, and it becomes you know, it becomes very

very popular drinking Europe. And at some point, this is like the eighteen forty so like like takes some about like three hundred years to figure out how to make cocoa powder. But once you have cocoa powder, you can it's not it seems to be bitter like it in the in the way that it sort of is naturally.

And that thing is slavery. Yeah, yes, yeah, And you know this is slavery is a very sort of important part of the history of chocolate because slavery is what transforms the older ritual chocolate used by a bunch of different indigenous societies for several thousand years, into modern chocolate. And this is this is the point that I want to make because most most histories of chocolate tend you know, when they're trying to find the origin of modern chocolate,

they go, oh, it's chocolate bar. And I think they're wrong. I think they're very wrong. I think the distinct European innovation of chocolate is to add sugar to it. Yes, and this raises the very bleak question where does sugar come from? And the answer, of course is slavery. Sugar is one of the primary crops of slave economies in

both the colonies and the West Indies. It is one of the key elements of the so called triangle trade where you know, you may have probably you have learned this in school, but you know, for people, for people who've been out of school for a long time. So the triangle trade is Europe since manufacturer goes to Africa, it trades that fruit enslaved people and slave people are taken from Africa to the colonies and sometimes to America,

sometimes to the colonies in the West Indies. Uh. And then they take you know, the products of slavery from plantations back to Europe. And that's you know, rice, indigo, tobacco, cotton, molasses, rum, and critically sugar back to Europe. Actould wait did did they Did they teach you the triangle trade? Yeah?

this entire thing. And there's a very very famous this sort of classic study of sugar and slavery is Sydney W. Mitz's Sweetness and Power, which is a fundamental tax and a lot of sort of a lot of the sort of fields around the study of slavery, and one of his arguments is that the British industrial proletariat is fueled by slave sugar because the sugar is a stimulant that you know, they're putting it in tea, which another stimulant.

They're putting it in whatever they drink, and this is a thing that allows them to keep working for longer than they otherwise would have been able to.

You know, they do this with tobacco too. You haven't you have something that you're only supposed to use in fairly small amounts for ritual purposes, right, And the Europeans are like, okay, but what if we purified the shit out of it and they just ate it literally every day?

plus slavery. It is a fusion of cocoa, which is an indigenous ritual drink sees is a part of the wages of colonialism by the European empires, and sugar a slave crop that drove the colonial prontation economy. And you know, you might say me, you know you're being harsh here, right, even if we accept your argument about chocolate and the sixteen hundred, surely surely that's not sure now, wasn't wasn't.

slavery and sugar production five hundred years ago. And this is one of the sort of stunning things about you know, the miss of capitalism, right, which is that, okay, capitalism has had four hundred you know, I'm gonna give them a bit of credit and be like, Okay, I don't know, like I I'm gonna give capitalism a little bit of credit and give it only with being responsible for four hundred years of this and not five hundred years of this,

because you know, whatever complicated arguments about whether the capitalist transition is in the fifteen hundreds to sixteen hundreds. But you know, they have had four hundred years to solve the problem of slavery on Hispaniola. Has it done that?

the Dominican Republic. If you have had four hundred years to solve a problem and you have not solved it, you are never going to solve it.

at least a bit. We've arrived here at one of the real weaknesses of both sort of liberal and radical accounts of how the capitalist economy works, because both sets of accounts take as their starting point the fact that capitalism is based on free labor, that it's free people who enter into contracts to sell you that their labor, and that forced labor is this sort of like hauled over from older economic systems.

up beforehand. But there's a really good book on these sort of dueling forced labor systems driving the Tea economy in late eighteen hundred, so that there's there's one forced labor system in China and a different forced labor system in India that are both warring in each other to control the tea market.

as it exists. And you know, so there's always been a racial compoundent to this right and this is like trivially obvious, right, Like, there's a racial component of slavery, Like, holy shit, it's mostly about race. But I think, you know, we can we can expand this a little bit, and it gets you to a some sort of interesting things, which is that race is one of you know, so like obviously capitalism is supposed to be based on wage labor, but race is what mediates your access to wage labor

in the first place. So, you know, white, like if you're an American, right like, white Americans have basically always been able to get access to to wage labor, you know, and as shitty as wage labor is, it's it's not as bad as the other things you can get forced into, you know. But yeah, so if you're black, like, you know,

you get as successive forms of slavery. If you're indigenous, they tried to enslave you and then either sort of kept doing it or gave up and just killed did the genocide Asian people like who came to this continents and also sort of the West Indies largely get debt pion engine and entered service to you and you know, you can you can sort of work this out, so on and so forth, there's there's different like modes of stuff that are the normal sort of like what you

by default have access to if you are ex race, right, yeah, and obviously this, this sort of racial access to wage labor spread across the world. You know, your your access to wage labor is dependent on sort of your subject position as colonizer or colonize as well as you know, you're sort of global and also you're like local racial hierarchies, because oh boy, can that shit be really fucked up.

But the upshot of this is that many of the descendants of enslaved Haitian people are still effectively enslaved today on sugar plantations than making republic. And so we're gonna we're gonna tell that story. But first we'd.

jobs for you, like come do this work. And so a bunch of people get in like these like army vans and then they get there and they get moorshed out of the van. A bunch of guys point guns at them and go, you're gonna work for free or we're gonna or like or we're gonna kill you. So this is really bad. And this is this is how a lot of like through the eighties and kind of early nineties, this is how a lot of sugar production

worked in the Jamaican Republic. And you know, it's it's very notable here that Dominican Republic produces a lot of sugar, and it produces a lot of sugar that specifically the US uses. Now this is like state run slavery right on, sort of like state run plantations. So then we had neoliberalism and so the state run plantations get privatized. However, come they still run on slave labor. So there's a very good Mother Jones report about this, and I'm gonna

I'm gonna read some of it here. Kakata is one of about one hundred, according to a local missionaries estimate, isolated camps scattered around Centralman Central Romana. As a giant sugar plantation, Sentrau Romana's one hundred and sixty thousand acres of sugar cane attract almost as big as New York City. Most of the workers and their families live in these battaias, rising in the morning to work the cane and the punishing heat, clearing weeds, slashing and spraying the stalks. Nearly

all are men of Haitian descent. Some were traffic back in the day of the journalists is doing this was the guy who basically uncovered a bunch of the original armies like the military slavery program in the nineties, and so he went back like a couple of years ago. So he s talked himself. Some of the people were traffic back touring the military slavery program, others were born and lived stateless, and others came from Haiti more recently,

paying smugglers to sneak them across the border. For years, the government has resisted providing legal status to people of Haitian heritage in the country, even though born there and estimated two hundred thousand people who for generations have been to mean by ray and class are stateless. For the men in the camps, CenTra Romana is the state. Their villages are patrolled by armed company police empowered to evict.

Centraro Romana owns the land or the Haitians work the railcars where they weigh and load the can and stocks, and the dwellings where they sleep. They are miles from

the nearest Dominican town not controlled by the company. So things going great here, yeah, and the conditions you know, Okay, so the sort of the capitalist reforms that neoliberalism has brought to this system are the number of child slaves has decreased dramatically, because that was a big thing when the first reporting, when everyone was like, holy shit, there's

a bunch of child slaves. This is a terrogress. Yeah, so we have less child slaves, right, and you know, so instead of the child slaves, right, it's now mostly adults. But the conditions here are still effectively slavery even after this or a child slavery stuff like is driven under. On a good day, these workers make three dollars a day and they are effectively and sometimes literally unable to leave. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this. One of the big ones is that most of the workers there

are most like basically all like you. You might find a worker somewhere who isn't stuck in this, but they're caught in these debt traps by Central Romana who and

these are like classic company, but they're not. They're worse than like, you know, the classic American company town, because at least an American company town, you can go to another town that is not controlled by the company, whereas these people like cannot And so they're caught in these debt traps by Central Romana, which is that the company that owns these plantations. And because they're so in debt, they're constantly forced to work for the company in order

to pay off their debt. But you know, they never actually make enough money to pay the debt off, and so they have to take on more debt to survive until you know, and largely what happens is these people work there in debt until they die. This is classic debt Pia nine, where a sort of debt transforms people into the effective property of the debt holder, who exacerbate the debt by denying them the ability to live without

taking on more debt. A very common way this happens is with medical debt, which is something you know, I think we're familiar with to some extent here, but is egregiously worse. And the other thing that I was realizing about this is that this is actually really eerily similar to the way that Cortez and the Conquistadores and slaved

indigenous people during the genocide. They would do the same thing of like, well, okay, now you're in debt to me, and because you can't pay the debt, you have five hundred percent interest per week, and so you know, that just accumulates, and now you work for me for the

rest of your lives. And this is you know, this is one of the one of the sort of ways in which this the long shadow of Spanish imperialism like looms over the Dominican Republic, even in what has really been about two hundred years of the age of the American Empire, you know, and as you know, obviously like as much of an effect as the Spanish Empire has had here, and oh god, it's not good. Today it is the American Empire that lines the pockets of the

slavers of the Dominican Republic. So such a Romana is owned by this family called the Fundjewel family, who are these Cuban expats who run this like enormous resort in shit where they live in Florida and are handed this is really fun. One hundred and fifty million dollars for the American state every year in the form of price

supports for sugar. So like you're an American, right, Like obviously your tax money very obviously goes to support slavery because we have prisons, and so your taxes are paying to enslaved people, but your taxes are also paying for slavery in other countries. It's incredible, really really great stuff

from the American political system here. And you know, and the way this has been maintained is through like two I think in the last twenty years, Mother Jones reported they've they've spent the sugar lobbyists spent two hundred and twenty million dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying, and it works really well. They've been able to influence the system

for a very very long time. The other funny thing about the Fundjol family is that they've created the perfect political trap, which is so one of one of the brothers is like a Trump guy and the other person is a Hillary supporter, and they're both like incredibly immeshed in both of the circles. So it's great. Things are

going very good. So after so the Mother Jones investigation was like in the last I think it was like last year the year before, and when the Mother Jones investigation about the fact that like all of this shit was still happening came out, there was a there was a giant uproar about it, and a couple of things happened. One is that so the village of the journalists had visited so Traya Romana, like, they didn't even bulldoze the villages.

They blew everyone's houses down with like sledgehammers and forcibly move them to like other villages and separated people's families. So that's that's great. And then so in late twenty twenty two, under under pressure from this reporting, the US

government like banned imports from that specific company. And Okay, it's unclear what is going to happen with it, if you know, if if they're gonna get unbanned eventually, uh, if it's gonna stick, if they're just gonna like I don't know, like transfer the assets to another company or something and use that instead. As so, as of right now, this specific set of plantations is not able to export sugar.

slavery in West Africa. They're also one of the only media people have ever seen talk about the fact that a lot of this stuff, it's not exactly the same, but a lot of the sort of slavery stuff also seems to be happening on plantations in Brazil, but there's effectively no coverage of it that's not in Portuguese. I don't know, so like, eventually, one day, I guess, like the fact that the other places other than West Africa have slavery will hit the anglophone media class or whatever.

But until then, I'm going to read this section. In West Africa, coco is a commodity crowd grown primarily for export. Coco is the Ivory Coast primary export. It makes up about half the country's agricultural export and volume. Most coco farmers earn less than one dollar a day and income below the extreme poverty line. As a result, they often resort to the use of child labor to keep their

prices competitive. In many cases, yeah, yeah, this is one of the things that happens when you're reading about child slavery stuff. Even people who like are trying to, you know, draw attention to how bad this is. You get stuff like that that's like Jesus Christ this. Yeah, so you know, they're making sub one dollar a day, they're using child labor. In many cases, this includes what the International Labor Organization

calls quote the worst form of child labor. These are defined as practices quote likely to harm the health, safety, or morals of children. Approximately two point one million children in Ivory Coast and Ghana work on cocoa farms, most of whom are likely exposed to the worst form of

child labor. Which is also really good that like we've we've capitalism has finally reached the you know, the apex of its control of the commanding heights of the world economy, which means that we're talking about we're trying to make tear lists of how bad child labor is.

You know. So, so obviously a lot of the child slavery on cocoa farms are from sort of like larger I mean, I guess they are corporate, but from sort of like larger plantations, but also less You think that it's better on family farms, No family farms, I mean, I guess it is technically better than like being kidnapped and enslaved, is merely doing child labor on your families, like just being born into.

into slavery work. A lot of them are sold by their own families who do not have enough resources to take care of them and are like, okay, we'll basically sell these people so they can go do this job. And these families don't know that like their child is about to be enslaved, right, They're just like, okay, well they're going to go off and do work. But the other way that this happens is that kids from like

villages in other countries. But there's a lot of focus on Mali as one of the places this happens for them. But yeah, so there's a lot of these effects what are effectively raids into into Malli from the Ivory Coast to like steel children, and it's also happens to Bikina Fosso. You know, and this gets to the point where, you know, I'm gonna read a quote from one of these from this report again. In one village in Bikina Fosso, almost every mother in the village has had a child trafficked

onto cocaine farms. Traffickers will then sell children to cocaine farmers. So this is like the worst paranoid fantasies of every American right winger, except it's you know, this is just how chocolate is made.

we're gonna get into that. But yeah, there's no there's no actual systemic like there's no way that you can like you can't change this stuff with your individual consumption habits. And you know that's something that's just really fucking bleak about this because these conditions are, I mean, as bad

as you can possibly imagine. But the Food and Empowerment Project describes like children as young as five are forced to work up to fourteen hours a day, like chopping down cocoa pods and then chopping them open with machetes. And sometimes these people get Sometimes these kids are using

chainsaws to like clear wood, like clear down like forests. Yeah, and you know, okay, so this goes exactly how you expected to go, which is a bunch of these kids just have a bunch of fucking scars from where they've been slashed by machetes, because again, you are handing machetes to children, some of whom are as young as five. And then they have to carry one hundred pound bags of cocoa beans through the jungle. And this is the thing that's also happening in to make a public and

this happens a lot in a lot of places. Is that they just get you know, when when companies want to spray like they're farms with pesticides, right, they don't even bother even like clearing people out, which might you know, help like a tiny bit to make them not like

die from fucking poison. But no, like these fucking dipshits just like spray them with toxic chemicals as they just like spray them with pesticides, like a lot of whom are Christinogians, a lot of And this is happening in the Dominican the surcane fields in the Dominican Republic too, And a lot of those people just fucking died because

you know, they were stayed with these chemicals. There was a really terrible story of a of a guy who was trying to sue Central Romana and just fucking died from the like he wasn't able to get a pay off for the lawsuit because he died in twenty twenty before the lawsuit could like finish. So here's another great quote from the Food Empowerment Project. The farm owners using child labor usually provide the children with the cheapest food of ai, such as corn paste or the cassava and

bananas that grow in the surrounding forest. In some cases, the children sleep on wooden planks and small windless buildings

without access to clean water, sanitary bathrooms. And you know another key part of this, right is like, okay, so the conditions are obviously unbearably bad, but you know, a key part of this, like any system of slavery, is the physical violence against the enslaved people who are repeatedly and often beaten and abused and tortured in ways that are very reminiscent of sort of like older epochs of slavery if they try to escape. Now, this is the companies care about this to the extent that is bad.

Pr Yes, and the charcout companies repeated, like the chocolate companies. Okay, they they signed a thing in the year two thousand where they said we're going to eliminate child's the worst forms of child slavery by two thousand and five.

been alive, yes, correct, which is terrifying. Yes, yes. And and as we'll get into later, right, the number of child slaves is higher than it was when they started doing these child slave reduction efforts, so quote unquote production efforts, which are just sort of pr bullshit. So industry lobbying groups are also very, very powerful, and this is part of part of how this stuff persists. So the University of Chicago has a center called NORAK, which is like

a public research center. I don't know, I went to that fucking school. I don't trust any of these motherfuckers, and NEI or should you, because it turns out there was so okay. So they released this report on how bad child slavery is, right, but there was a leak of the original version of the report that was supposed to come out, and mean, the original version of the report has the number of child slaves at like two

point two million. Now, when the report actually comes out with no justification whatsoever and using a bunch of numbers for child slavery that are from before COVID nineteen, the Norak report was like, ah, there's only like one point six million child slaves. So six hundred thousand child slaves just sort of vanished in an editorial process after they got they came under fire from uh, the they came under fire from the chocolate lobby.

And you know, okay, so we tease this a little bit, and you might be thinking, well, I can eat fair trade chocolate, right, I can pay ten dollars for a chocolate bars as a fair trade on it, and it will and that will make sure that I'm only eating chocolate produced by free labor. Nope, the certifications for the

chocolate are fucking bullshit. You're still eating slave chocolate. The follow is an excerpt from a study conducted by the Corporate Accountability Lab on the failure of initiatives in the chocolate industry like certifications quote. In order to understand the gap between consumer perception and farmer impact better, we brought certified chocolate bars to villages where some are all of

the farm were certified. We held up the bar with the label and explained to the farmers what consumers expected out of the label, primarily that farmers were paired a fair price, earned a decent living, and certain practices like child labor and deforestation were not present. We also explained the difference in retail price between fair trade and uncertified chocolate. The overwhelming response from farmers to this information was shock

and outrage. One farmer pulled out his worn shirt in front of him and asked if it looked like he earned a decent living. A woman in one village said she can hardly afford to send to her children to school, so how could anyone think she earned a fair price. Our farmer consultations revealed virtually imperceptible differences between certified and uncertified farms in terms of living incomes, poverty, education, access

to healthcare, farmer bargaining power, or access to information. So, yeah, all the people who are telling you they're doing some fair trade shit, they're keeping your money and the places they are getting it from are as fucked as the as Hershey's yeah, so this is bad.

are also technical. I talked about this in my episode of Bachelor's episode a long time ago about this milk company that poisoned three hundred thousand babies, and that company was technically a co op, but like it was a co op in the sense that there was a small group of workers who were basically managers who owned shares, and then they just hired every source everything out to independent contractors, so it functioned like a normal company. Yeah,

this is a thing. A lot this the cocoa trade stuff is actually worse because most of these things that are called co ops aren't even co ops at all. They're just set up by cocoa growers as like fake co ops. And there they are like a very very small number of of of these coco farms that are actually workers cooperatives, but there's no way to tell which one is which unless you spend a bunch of time

like actually going and tracking the cooperatives down. So there's no sort of like ethically way out of this, right, you're just kind of you're, you know, like you can't you can't eat your way out of this problem. And of course everything across the board, all these conditions have gotten worse since the pandemic, So you know, it's it's not only is capitalism not making things better every like things are in fact getting worse. Now, all right, I

promised you the lawsuits. We're gonna talk a bit about the lawsuits. So there were actually two big lawsuits. There were eight people from Molly who were enslaved by coke plantations after being traffic from Mali sued nest Le, Cargill, Berry, Caliba, I don't know, some French shit mars Alam, Hershey's, and Models to try to get conversations from the companies by virtue of the fact that the companies sold products made

by their child slave labor. Yeah. Now there's also a separate lawsuit against slightly different companies, so a lot of the same company is slightly different that's using a different set of legal arguments. Both of the lawsuits have been thrown out, and I want to take a second to look at the reasoning here, both of which are sort

of just amazing. So I think the most famous one is the Supreme Courts eight to one decision that said, well, so, like, all this stuff happened, but it happened outside the US, so you can't sue companies for it. Here. She's an amazing piece of logic, which is just like, oh yeah, no, Actually, like corporations, like American corporations could just go everywhere else

and do crimes. And this is in the American legal system is specifically written in such a way that like if in a American corporation enslaves you in like the Ivory Coast, there's nothing you can do about it in the US. And then a judgment do you see throughout the other case because you know, their argument was, well, you can't prove that the companies knew you were being enslaved on those farms. There's no quote traceable connection between the people who enslaved you in the company, and so

there's nothing we can do. And the reason both these arguments work is the reason for the structure of the chocolate market, right the reason coco plantations in the Ivory

Coast and also Brazil can get away with this. You know, well, the reason that those plantations are in the Ivory Coast or Brazil or other places, the reason they're happening there and not in the US is because these are places where you can get away with that level of exploitation in corporate violence that you know in the US would be a lot more difficult. And this shields them from

legal liability. Furthermore, instead of just you know, jumping, instead of just running the cocoa plantations themselves, which these companies could easily do, right, this is a very very large trade. They could just sort of like they could invertially vertically and not even vertical integrate, they could just actually make chocolate, like they could just run the process, and they they

very specifically choose not to do it. And the reason they choose not to do it, this isn't one hundred billion dollar industry, right, But instead they what they choose to do is to just buy cocoa from the chocolate market where all these sort of nebulous producers sell, which allows the chocolate companies to go, oh, well, these people don't work for us. We just buy chocolate from the market. How are we supposed to know which these plantations use

slave labor? So it puts like a one degree of separation, Yeah, well it's actually two degrees. It's an additional degree of separation from the way something like Walmart works. Right where Walmart has a bunch of independent contractors. This isn't even contractors.

They're just buying finished products from things they're like they're completely unaffiliated with, and this gives them, like it gives them like two degrees of legal separation because it's not just that their contractors are doing something that they didn't know about. It's that they're just buying it right, and

this fucking sucks. And you know, since laws exist to protect the ruling class, judges and courts can just wave their hands and go, well, these companies definitely enslaved you, but we have no choice but to let them off completely scott free. So sorry about that. And I want to end today with something that has been running through my mind every since I fucking started researching this, which

is that the voorgeoisie must pay for their crimes. The state has failed, the court has failed, the NGOs have failed. And if anything is ever going to fucking happen that forces these companies to be in any way, there there's to be like a single iota of justice for the fact that all of these companies have been fucking gorging themselves on the profits of slave labor. At all, we are going to do it or no one is. So

congratulations you the American worker. It is unfortunately incumbent on you to deal with these fucking corporations that have been destroying the entire world. So yeah, happy spooky week everyone. Yes, this is very scary.

trapped on all sides. Here is what it feels like. I mean, this is this Halloween chocolate problem.

of chocolate companies. It will be doing exactly the same ship. So you have to you have to destroy the system of property by which these things are allowed to exist. And at that point maybe you can start on being able to eat food that isn't produced by slave labor.