Online extremist organizing can seem opaque to the point of being occult. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

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Often, the processes of online extremist organizing can seem opaque to the point of being occult. One day the term “alt-right” enters the zeitgeist, and the next, editors at prominent conservative media outlets are being outed [[link removed]] as moonlighting for explicitly white nationalist publications. A new investigation [[link removed]] in Splinter demystifies the methods the “alt-right” uses to get its members and messages into the mainstream. It turns out it’s mostly horrible private email chains, including a chain dating back to 2015 called “Morning Hate.” The emails have the combination of banal affect and shocking content that’s so common in white nationalist media. One of the most enduring aspects of white nationalism is that white nationalists love a secret code, and Morning Hate is no exception — participants agreed to call Adolf Hitler “our good friend” and President Donald Trump “our good friend’s son.” In the meantime, though, leading Morning Hate members like John Elliot were using the chain and their roles at prominent conservative institutions like the Charlemagne Institute (which has fired Elliot since the investigation was published) to groom younger people into white nationalism and amplify their messages at the outlets where they worked.

‘Black Mirror’: Bandaidsnatch

The International Committee of the Red Cross is now in the choose-your-own-adventure business. A Twitter thread [[link removed]] that went up last week dramatizes the negotiations that ICRC and other frontline aid organizations make to deliver humanitarian support in conflict zones. To get aid into the besieged city of Urdiol in the game, you need to make quick judgments that will have life and death consequences.

The choices in the game reflect not only the logistical challenges of delivering food during wartime — coordinating with multiple levels of military hierarchy and dealing with soldiers on the ground who want the food for themselves, for instance — but also the problem of managing risk for aid deliverers themselves. What level of assurance that your route into the city won’t be shelled is acceptable to you?

Many of the challenges are reputational. You can bribe guards for quick passage into the city, but the news that you paid will spread and many will interpret it as you favoring the guards’ side. In the long run, is that tradeoff worthwhile?

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Labor power in defense industries

As tensions in Kashmir remain high, workers in Indian munitions factories returned to work [[link removed]] last week after a six-day strike. Workers at the Ordnance Factory Board, India’s government weapons manufacturing organization that keeps the Indian military supplied with armor, artillery, shells and bullets, had been at loggerheads with the government over proposals to give the organization a more corporate structure. Their union agreed to call off the strike, which began Aug. 20, after the government pledged to review corporatization plans.

This is a moment of high leverage for Indian weapons manufacturers. Orders from the Indian army are up [[link removed]] since the height of confrontation with Pakistan early this year, and with the Modi government’s recent moves in Kashmir, tensions are unlikely to abate anytime soon. Strike supporters pointed out that during the Kargil War between India and Pakistan in 1999, Indian munitions production roughly tripled.

In an example of the organization’s degeneration, ex-staffers noted that they had been specifically recruited to hide the arms deal from funders. To make matters worse, in an internal e-mail thread labeled “scandale,” WWF country director Jean Bernard Yarissem admitted that the army had embezzled WWF money during the deal.

Labor power is not a frame through which American media coverage typically views defense issues, but it is an important one. In times of increased uncertainty, defense workers have opportunities to pursue gains both for themselves and for their broader political goals.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE The bureaucracy of algorithms

The last edition of Deep Dive dealt with the biases that keep bureaucrats from reaching their Platonic ideal form as data-driven, relentlessly rational decision-makers. This week, we’ll look at efforts to beat bias by putting decisions in the hands of the most data-driven government employees of all: algorithms.

In an article [[link removed]] last year for the journal Information Polity, Rik Peeters and Marc Schuilenburg examined the growing role of algorithmic decision-making in security bureaucracies. Predictive policing systems, which take in a broad range of data in hopes of telling police the time and location where crime is likely to occur and even the likely identities of the perpetrators, are already in use in many jurisdictions. Amsterdam, for example, hosts the Crime Anticipation System, which, despite its name, is not a marketing campaign for crime. Instead, it divides the city into 15,625 square-meter blocks and uses data on past crimes, known suspects and other factors to offer police bi-weekly predictions of crime each of the blocks.

In the US, algorithms also extend to the justice system, where predictive justice is on the rise. Many US courts use algorithms to rate defendants’ likelihood of recidivism in order to set bail, sentence convicted criminals and make parole decisions for prisoners. The most common programs are run by private companies, which mean the algorithms are proprietary and hidden from the people being rated. Courts have already ruled that knowing the algorithms’ outputs are enough due process to pass constitutional muster.

These programs are often marketed as revolutionary steps forward in security provision, but Peeters and Schuilenburg argue that we should instead see security algorithms primarily as forms of bureaucracy. Like human bureaucrats, a security algorithm’s job is to classify things — or, in many cases, people — into standardized categories based on predetermined data inputs. Does this person have a long criminal record? If yes, the risk of them offending again is high. Rinse and repeat.

Where the humans and the algorithms diverge is that the goal of the algorithms is to supplant human judgement and replace it with a pure classification exercise. Policing and criminal justice have always been areas where individual professional judgment has been hugely important — there’s a reason judges are called judges. Peeters and Schuilenburg argue that predictive technologies, which were originally intended as risk assessment tools to inform individual professional judgment, mesh so well with the bureaucratic logic of state security systems that they are a threat to swamp some forms of professional judgment altogether.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

James Reinl spoke [[link removed]] to a Yazidi refugee in Germany about the state of religious freedom in Iraq. Though the Yazidi heartland city of Sinjar is no longer under ISIS control, militias that now patrol the streets still persecute the religious minority and many refugees feel it is unsafe to return. According to State Department officials, the situation in Sinjar is indicative of a global problem. The US estimates that over a quarter of the world’s population faces religious persecution.

Margaret Croy raised the alarm [[link removed]] about America’s slippage toward a return to nuclear weapons testing. With the Trump administration pulling out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty and threatening not to renew New START, the US-Russia bilateral nuclear arms control relationship could soon be over. Without it, Croy argued, testing advocates will be able to make the case that the diplomatic costs of testing are low.

Paige Sutherland broke down [[link removed]] the fight over health insurance reform in Chile. Chile has a dual public-private insurance scheme, in which wealthy Chileans pay premiums to access better quality care through a private insurer while poorer Chileans subsist on an underfunded public system. Women are suing the private system, Isapres, because it systematically insures men at much lower premiums than anyone else. The government is considering a reform scheme to address the gender discrimination issue, but the bifurcated public-private system will continue for the foreseeable future.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Sometimes the best security measure [[link removed]] is giving your town a name [[link removed]] that’s hard to pronounce.

Hurricane Dorian’s approach brought the return of a 2017 notice from the Pasco County, Florida sheriff's office succinctly describing [[link removed]] the perfectly proportional deterrent hurricanes have against Florida gun owners: “BULLETS COME BACK, DON’T SHOOT.” The accompanying graphic is also quite funny [[link removed]].

DARPA wanted to test [[link removed]] some underground robots in some new tunnels, which is a normal level of creepy for DARPA. But they way they went about getting [[link removed]] the tunnels was much more unsettling than usual.

Official Brexit update [[link removed]].

A Twitter thread [[link removed]] that includes two of the most 2019 questions imaginable: “Why didn’t anyone google ‘Marxism’” and “Why didn’t anyone Google ‘irony’.”

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between PRI’s The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRI/PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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