[End-to-end encryption ought to be table stakes for communication wherever possible.]

The FBI has long waged an anti-encryption campaign, seeking to mandate the creation of backdoors into end-to-end encrypted communications like WhatsApp, Signal, and Apple’s iMessages. In their fantasy, these backdoors would be accessible only to law enforcement, and could otherwise never be exploited. To gin up support, they amplified the specter of child exploitation and spouted nonsense terms like “lawful access”, all in the hopes of convincing people that a “safe backdoor” wasn’t a complete and utter contradiction in terms.

But make no mistake about it, there are no safe backdoors.

Consider this analogy. You are the parent of a seven-year-old mischief-maker. You tell the child, “I’m leaving the house for an hour. There is a bag of candy hidden somewhere, but don’t look for it because it’s so well hidden you cannot ever find it.”

Of course, the child is going to do exactly what you expect and search for the candy. The same principle applies to creating a backdoor for the government in encryption. When bad actors are told there’s a government-mandated backdoor, they’re going to search for it if they know it exists. Even if it’s just to prove they could find the impossible only for bragging rights. Eventually, someone will find it. And once that door is open, it’s almost impossible to close it.

We’re now learning that China has penetrated America’s telecommunications systems deeply, in a breathtaking hack whose scope is still being revealed. It appears this was accomplished using backdoors mandated back in 1994 for use by law enforcement. This should not be surprising. When it comes to backdoors being exploited maliciously, it’s a matter of “when”, not “if”.

As a result of this hack, government officials are making an abrupt about-face. Americans are now being urged to use encrypted communications whenever possible. That is a good idea.

Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-officials-urge-americans-use-encrypted-apps-cyberattack-rcna182694

by Amy Yurkanin

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Register for our Nov. 21 virtual discussion, where our reporters take you inside ProPublica’s reproductive health coverage.

Georgia officials have dismissed all members of a state committee charged with investigating deaths of pregnant women. The move came in response to ProPublica having obtained internal reports detailing two deaths.

ProPublica reported in September on the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, which the state maternal mortality review committee had determined were preventable. They were the first reported cases of women who died without access to care restricted by a state abortion ban, and they unleashed a torrent of outrage over the fatal consequences of such laws. The women’s stories became a central discussion in the presidential campaign and ballot initiatives involving abortion access in 10 states.

“Confidential information provided to the Maternal Mortality Review Committee was inappropriately shared with outside individuals,” Dr. Kathleen Toomey, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, wrote in a letter dated Nov. 8 and addressed to members of the committee. “Even though this disclosure was investigated, the investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information.

“Therefore, effective immediately the current MMRC is disbanded, and all member seats will be filled through a new application process.”

A health department spokesperson declined to comment on the decision to dismiss the committee, saying that the letter, which the department provided to ProPublica, “speaks for itself.” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s office also declined to comment, referring questions to the health department.

Under Georgia law, the work of the maternal mortality review committee is confidential, and members must sign confidentiality agreements. Those members see only summaries of medical records stripped of personal details, and their findings on individual cases are not supposed to be shared with the public — not even with hospitals or with family members of women who died.

The health department’s letter states that there could be new steps to keep the board’s deliberations from public view. The letter said officials might change “other procedures for on-boarding committee members better ensuring confidentiality, committee oversight and MMRC organizational structure.”

Maternal mortality review committees exist in every state. They are tasked with examining deaths of women during a pregnancy or up to a year after and determining whether they could have been prevented.

Georgia’s had 32 standing members from a variety of backgrounds, including OB-GYNs, cardiologists, mental health care providers, a medical examiner, health policy experts and community advocates. They are volunteer positions that pay a small honorarium.

Their job is to collect data and make recommendations aimed at combatting systemic issues that could help reduce deaths and publish them in reports. The Georgia committee’s most recent report found that of 113 pregnancy-related deaths from 2018 through 2020, 101 had at least some chance of being prevented. Its recommendations have led to changes in hospital care to improve the response to emergencies during labor and delivery and to new programs to increase access to psychiatric treatment.

The health department’s letter states that the “change to the current committee will not result in a delay in the MMRC’s responsibilities.” But at least one other state has experienced a lag as a result of reshaping its committee. Idaho let its maternal mortality review committee legislation expire in July 2023, effectively disbanding the committee after lobbyist groups attacked members for recommending that the state expand Medicaid for postpartum women. Earlier this year, Idaho’s Legislature reestablished the committee, but new members weren’t announced until Nov. 15. There is now more than a yearlong delay in the review process.

Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia’s decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee’s work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women’s deaths if it could be politically sensitive.

“They did what they were supposed to do. This is why we need them,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the groups challenging Georgia’s abortion ban in court. “To have this abrupt disbandment, my concern is what we are going to lose in the process, in terms of time and data?”

One objective of any maternal mortality review committee is to look at the circumstances of a death holistically to identify root causes that may be able to help other women in the future.

In the case of Candi Miller, the most prominent detail in a state medical examiner’s report of her death was that she had a lethal combination of painkillers in her system, including fentanyl. It attributed the cause of death to drug intoxication.

But the Georgia committee looked at the facts of the death with a different objective: to consider the broader context. A summary of Miller’s case prepared for the committee, drawn from hospital records and the medical examiner’s report, included that Miller had multiple health conditions that can be exacerbated by pregnancy, that she had ordered abortion pills from overseas and that she had unexpelled fetal tissue, which showed the abortion had not fully completed. It also stated that her family had told the coroner she didn’t visit a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.”

The committee found her death was “preventable” and blamed the state’s abortion ban.

“The fact that she felt that she had to make these decisions, that she didn’t have adequate choices here in Georgia, we felt that definitely influenced her case,” one committee member told ProPublica in September. “She’s absolutely responding to this legislation.”

For Miller’s family, the committee’s findings were painful but wanted. “It seems like that is essential information that you would share with the family,” said Miller’s sister, Turiya Tomlin-Randall, who was not aware of the committee’s work until ProPublica contacted her.

She also said it’s upsetting to hear that the committee’s members were dismissed partly as a result of her sister’s case being disclosed to the public. “I don’t understand how this is even possible,” she said.

The committee also investigated the case of Amber Thurman, who died just one month after Georgia’s six-week abortion law went into effect. The medical examiner’s report stated that Thurman died of “sepsis” and “retained products of conception” and that she had received a dilation and curettage, or D&C, and a hysterectomy after an at-home abortion.

When the committee members received a summary of her hospital stay, they saw a timeline with additional factors: The hospital had delayed providing a D&C — a routine procedure to clear fetal tissue from the uterus — for 20 hours, which Thurman needed for rare complications she’d developed after taking abortion medication. The state had recently attached criminal penalties to performing a D&C, with few exceptions. The summary showed doctors discussed providing the D&C twice, but by the time they performed the procedure it was too late. Committee members found that there was a “good chance” Thurman’s death could have been prevented if she had received the D&C sooner.

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care did not answer questions from ProPublica for its September story. The hospital also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Thurman’s family also told ProPublica they had wanted the information about her death disclosed.

Some experts say that keeping the reports of maternal mortality review committees confidential is important for a committee to serve its purpose. They are set up not to assign blame but instead to create a space for clinicians to investigate broad causes of maternal health failures. But others say the lack of transparency can serve to obscure the biggest disruption to maternal health care in half a century.

“We know that the reports that have come out of that committee are anonymized and synthesized in order to provide a 50,000-foot view,” said Kwajelyn Jackson, executive director of Feminist Women’s Health Center in Atlanta, which provides abortion care. “But my worry is that in an effort to protect the state, there will be less information that will be available to people who could shift their actions, shift their protocols, shift their strategies, shift their behaviors in order to make a difference in maternal health outcomes.”

Two states did make shifts to their committees — Idaho, after members made a recommendation to expand Medicaid that Republicans opposed, and Texas, after a member publicly criticized the state.

In 2022, Texas committee member Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate, spoke out against the state’s decision to delay the release of its report during an election year. The following year, the Legislature passed a law that created a second community advocate position on the committee, redefined the position and had Wilson reapply. She was not reappointed. The state instead filled one of the slots with a prominent anti-abortion activist.

Wilson said Georgia’s decision to dismiss its committee could cause greater harm.

“What message is being said to the families who lost their loved ones?” she said. “There’s going to be even less accountability for this to not happen again.”

Ziva Branstetter, Kavitha Surana, Cassandra Jaramillo and Anna Barry-Jester contributed reporting. Doris Burke contributed research.

superlinguo:

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

dduane:

How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set “Web” as Default

Here’s something useful.

“On May 15th Google released a new "Web” filter that removes “AI Overview” and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set “Google Web” as your default search engine.“

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at this — NPR has always been a news source for comfortable liberals who want soft voices and current events delivered gently, without any trace of alarm. They’ve got tote bags to give away and coffee table books to sell! They’ve responded to the incoming wave of ignorance with a puff-piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that doesn’t use the word “unqualified” even once.

Trump has threatened to appoint RFK Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He doesn’t have any expertise in public health, medicine, or science, but he has a slogan, “Make America Healthy Again,” and that’s good enough.

Another word NPR doesn’t use is “conspiracy theorist.” They acknowledge that he has a few wacky ideas, but hey, he wants to stop the chronic disease epidemic in the USA, isn’t that a good thing?

Kennedy’s baseless claims have included that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain”; that school shootings are attributable to antidepressants; that chemicals in water can lead to children becoming transgender; and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV. He’s also long said that vaccines cause autism and fail to protect people from diseases.

NPR never questions whether Kennedy’s policies would actually work, or for that matter, what his policies are. We’ve got a real health problem — obesity, diabetes, narcotics, etc. — but they don’t address his solutions, if any. What he has done is tap into MAGA paranoia.

He knit together an unlikely coalition — some from the left and some MAGA supporters — eager to take on the establishment.

“Bobby Kennedy and Trump have bonded over tying the core of MAGA — which is a distrust of institutions and getting corruption out of institutions — to our health care industries,” says Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy and the Trump transition team, who spoke with NPR before Kennedy’s nomination.

What corruption? Be specific. The corruption I see is that there are an awful lot of quacks getting rich writing pop-sci diet books, and pharma MBAs leading their companies to immense profits at the cost of every day Americans’ health. You’re not going to fix that by hounding doctors and scientists and imposing bogus health treatments on the public.

By the way, Calley Means is a Harvard MBA with connections to the Heritage Foundation but no medical background who wrote pop-sci book about nutrition. I imagine that RFK Jr has the “wrote a book about dieting” demographic solidly locked up.

Means — himself a former lobbyist for the food and drug industry — has emerged as one of the leading voices in the MAHA orbit. He and his sister, Dr. Casey Means, catapulted into the political sphere after publishing a bestseller on metabolic health. Both have business ventures in the health and wellness industry.

But have no fear! Means and RFK Jr have a simple plan to fix everything.

Means says a key to their plan is eliminating conflicts of interest.

See above reference to Means’ own interests.

When the article does cite critics of RFK Jr, it’s always with qualifications and padding, and never goes into much depth.

“There are some things that RFK Jr. gets right,” says former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden. “We do have a chronic disease crisis in this country, but we need to avoid simplistic solutions and stick with the science.”

Great — we have a “chronic disease crisis,” but what’s the solution? It never says. Is it “drink raw milk” (Kennedy has endorsed that)? Is it “end all vaccinations” (he thinks they cause autism, and change children’s gender identity)? Is it “tear down cell phone towers” (he thinks 5G is used for mind control)? Is it “take anti-depressants off the market” (he claims they cause mass shootings)? Is it “replace COVID vaccines with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine” (he thinks those are effective)? Or maybe it would help to insert more racism in science policy.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

Reading NPR’s article, you might come away with the impression that Kennedy is a grounded, qualified person trying to fix a real problem in how we let pharmaceutical companies run rampant — which I think is a genuine issue that resonates with the public — but it completely neglects to point out that Kennedy is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who will make everything worse. But that’s NPR for you.

If you’d like a more accurate perspective on the consequences of Kennedy running the bioscientific and medical establishment, read Science magazine.

Public health researchers are alarmed, especially given Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines. “I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK,” University of Minnesota epidemiologist Michael Osterholm told CNN.

Numerous critics of Kennedy have weighed in with concerns. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine expert Paul Offit told CNN Kennedy is a “science denialist.” Even Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during Trump’s presidency, said at a meeting this week that if Kennedy discourages people from getting vaccines, “I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health,” economy, and security.

“We’re all in a state of panic,” this person added. “The damage that he can do is enormous. I don’t know anybody who isn’t worried about this.”

But then, Science isn’t in the business of spooning comforting pablum into the mouths of the well-off.