Your Rights Are Under Attack
So many awful things are being done in our name.
Cartoon by New Yorker’s Paul Noth. · Scroll down for the Digimentors Tech Tip from Robert S. Anthony. Want to advertise to our ~15K subscribers on LinkedIn and Substack (with a 40% open rate)? Here’s our sponsorship kit. Email me: sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
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FREE SPEECH AND DUE PROCESS RIGHTS ARE BEING TRAMPLED ON BY DONALD TRUMP. This is not some theoretical discussion on the margins—our fundamental rights are in peril. All of this is being done in our name, whether we like or not. ICE agents are, right this minute, abducting and detaining people all over America without cause. They are doing this in your name. Are you okay with it? I know I’m not.
For many, it’s been easy to “other” these problems away as something happening to an amorphous “them”—for decades, really. That entire thought process needs to end now. If you are in the U.S., citizen or not, you have the right to free speech and the right to due process—you can say whatever you want, and, if you’re arrested for it, you get a lawyer and court date, full stop.
Or, that’s how it used to work. ICE’s abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student at Tufts University, was captured on video. You’d be forgiven for thinking this was shot on the streets of Russia or somewhere else far away. It was in Boston.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s public response to the Ozturk case—and the explicit message he sends to everyone else—is chilling.
For the Americans among you, this is being done in my name, in your name, in our name. Say these phrases out loud and take stock of how it makes you feel:
“The Secretary of State is using un-proven AI systems to determine which students should lose their visas, in my name.”
“Green Card holder Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and sent to a detention camp in Louisiana without any evidence presented, in my name.”
“Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was abducted by plainclothes ICE agents because she wrote an op-ed in the school newspaper, in my name.”
“21-year-old student, Yunseo Cheung, her high school’s valedictorian, had her student visa revoked for attending a sit-in, in my name.”
“The Secretary of Homeland Security shot a TikTok promo for deportations on-location in a prison in El Salvador while wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, in my name.”
“Nearly 300 people have been ‘disappeared’ and deported to countries that are not their home by ICE for ‘having a tattoo,’ in my name.”
I could do a thousand of these little thought experiments on everything, from scientific research to foreign aid, but I shouldn’t have to. Immigrants are being treated liked animals ICE custody, in your name. That should be enough.
The ACLU obtained the criteria ICE is using to determine if someone should be abducted and sent to prison in El Salvador. I’m not sure one could even call these “criteria” and be grammatically correct.
We’re only a few weeks into a four-year (or longer…?) presidency, and the Trump Administration is more than just defiant; it is promoting these things as achievements. This passage from The Times is as harrowing as it gets:
Yet far from trying to downplay the aggressive tactics, the White House and immigration officials have celebrated them by trying to turn images of enforcement into deportation memes.
On Thursday, the White House posted a cartoon image of a handcuffed woman crying, an apparent mockery of a detainee who ICE officials said was a fentanyl trafficker arrested in Philadelphia. Last month, the administration put out what it called an “A.S.M.R. video” — a popular online video form that uses subtle sounds to stimulate pleasure — of people being shackled for a deportation flight.
You don’t need to read the myriad daily reporting on the countless assaults on your fundamental rights. Just go have a look at the official White House X/Twitter feed to see other things being done in your name. You’ve no doubt heard Trump officials and hangers on try to paint over all of this under the guise of something Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton did, but don’t believe it. The President is targeting universities and law firms very directly and very deliberately—this fight will define a generation, and the next 12 months may determine the fate of the United States as we know it.
Conservatives had it out for universities long before MAGA came around. Of course, most of these conservatives went to the very universities they decry, but that’s never mattered. The reason Rubio and ICE are targeting universities is very straightforward—people in America on education-based visas give the government a lot of data. They are easy to track and easy to find. The President then completes the pincer attack by pulling federal funding to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Call it what it is—the rolling back of fundamental rights. If ever there was a time for universities to deploy the immense resources of their endowments to protect their students, and the institutions that incubate these fundamental rights, it’s now.
Usually, this is where law firms step in to challenge these sorts of things—but the President is going after lawyers too, and some (but, not all!) of the largest, most powerful law firms in the country are caving. If you’re inclined to call it a “hedge,” read the letter from the Paul Weiss law firm Chairman Brad Karp first. It’s not a hedge, it’s capitulation. The goals are simple, as laid out by Marcy Wheeler on their must-read Emptywheel site:
Yes, these EOs are designed to deprive Trump’s most vulnerable targets of good legal representation.
Yes, these EOs are designed to delegitimize efforts to hold corruption like Manafort’s (and by extension, that of anyone in Trump’s loyal orbit or willing to turn on his adversaries) accountable.
But they’re also designed to give affiliated firms patronage, business opportunities dependent on loyalty. That turns these law firms into little more than lobbying firms, little different than Ballard Partners, a Trump-connected lobbying firm that experiences a bonanza every time Trump gets in office (and not coincidentally, that employed Pam Bondi until her confirmation as the lawyer enforcing this patronage). Once law firms have become indistinguishable from lobbying firms — something that was trending anyway — then rule of law is only accessible to those with proper ties.
It’s already working. Law firms with literal armies of lawyers are cowering before the very thing they were built to fight, and it may cost us the rule of law as we know it.
Free Speech works two ways for the public, and we continue to disregard how these rights affect something like government transparency. The U.S. government is not perfect on this at all, but the public is capable of learning quite a bit about what the government does about a lot of things. Public rule-making gives any person or organization to provide details about how proposed regulations would affect them. Large swathes of public data on the housing market, medical research, milk production, and everything in-between are—or, were—available freely online from most agencies and grantees.
Concerned about waste, fraud, or abuse? Every federal agency has an Office of Inspector General assigned to cover it without favor or malice, and provide detailed reports about wrongdoing. We have a right to know these things. The U.S. federal budget is nearly $7 trillion—this is not something that can be algorithm-ed out of existence by a bunch of former Peter Thiel employees in a few weeks. Beyond how ridiculous it is on its face, we as a public are entitled to a much more thorough process. The first Inspector General was Baron von Steuben who served under George Washington before America was even a country, and IGs were enshrined into law nearly 50 years ago. Deliberative accountability and record-keeping matter to a functioning country, and Trump fired almost 20 IGs within days of taking office.
These mundane things that most people take little-to-no interest in are scooped up by enterprising journalists, researchers, the business community, and financial institutions and turned into almost endless amounts of knowledge. People at universities research, read, teach and practice free speech based on these things. Law firms protect this speech when its legality is questioned. This all goes together, it is crucial to defend it. All of it.
We’ve never needed universities, lawyers, and a free and open press like we do right at this moment—and we need them to be brave. This has to start now. We are all bound together—all Americans, whether we all realize it or not—in perhaps the greatest test of the American experiment has endured since the Civil War.
This past weekend’s massive, nationwide “Hands Off” protests were a great start—let’s hope a few folks in the halls of Congress decide that they can, in fact, start standing up to this regime.
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TECH TIP | Canon Fires Off Two New Compact Cameras for Creators
By Robert S. Anthony
Each week, veteran tech journalist Bob Anthony shares a tech tip you don’t want to miss. Follow him @newyorkbob.
Just when you thought smartphones had choked off the point-and-shoot digital camera market for good, the little devils are making a comeback. The latest salvo came from Canon last week as it raised the curtain on two new compact cameras: The EOS R50 V and the PowerShot V1.
While flagship smartphones from Apple, Google, Samsung and others offer excellent photo and video capabilities, their tiny sensors can’t match the resolution and low-light capabilities of the much larger sensors in digital cameras. Over the last year, compact digital cameras—even old ones—have suddenly become popular with younger users seeking something less narcissistic than a smartphone and more challenging, including the ability to bypass excessive image processing and exercise more personal creativity.
The “V” in the product names of Canon’s new cameras is significant as both offer video features aimed at “all creators, including cinema, livestreaming, vlogging, and VR,” according to a Canon press release.
While the Canon EOS R50 V shares most of its name with the EOS R50, which debuted in 2023, it doesn’t share its shape. The EOS R50 looks like a single-lens-reflex camera with a bump on top and a viewfinder on the back to go along with a small rear display screen which can fold out. The EOS R50 V, however, is a compact rectangle and lacks the viewfinder and pentaprism bump.
Like its older sibling, the EOS R50 V has a 24.2-megapixel, APS-C-size (23.6-by-15.8mm) sensor but adds video-friendly amenities like a second tripod socket for vertical shooting, separate buttons for livestreaming and movie shooting and support for some of the video-enhancing features found in Canon’s Cinema EOS series cameras.
The EOS R50 V can be packaged with Canon’s new RF-S14-30mm F4-6.3 IS STM PZ lens, which offers something unexpected in a kit lens: smooth, powered zooming. The lens also offers optical image stabilization (OIS) and Canon’s Movie Digital IS, both of which are useful for the EOS R50 V, which doesn’t have in-body image stabilization like more expensive units in Canon’s EOS R family.
The svelte Canon PowerShot V1 uses a smaller, 18.4-by-12.3mm, 22.3-megapixel sensor than the EOS R50 V, and has a fixed 8.2–25.6mm zoom lens (equal to a 16-50mm lens on a 35mm film camera or “full frame” digital camera). Like the interchangeable RF-S lens above, the unit’s lens supports both OIS and Movie Digital IS.
The PowerShot V1 includes a key feature for shooting long videos: an internal cooling fan to prevent the camera from overheating, which would trigger a shutdown. The camera supports cropped 4K video at 60 frames per second and has a three-microphone array with an included windscreen. The PowerShot V1 can be used as a high-quality webcam for livestreaming or video calls by connecting it to a PC with a USB-C cable.
The Canon EOS R50 V ($649.99 body only; $849.99 with RF-S14-30mm F4-6.3 IS STM PZ lens) and the Canon PowerShot V1 ($899.99) will be available in April.
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The horror of it all is unimaginable to me. I expected ickyness, but this sentence underscores that along with being awful beyond comprehension, it's also mind-numbingly icky. "Last month, the administration put out what it called an “A.S.M.R. video” — a popular online video form that uses subtle sounds to stimulate pleasure — of people being shackled for a deportation flight."