The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High still feel like it was yesterday when a gunman took the lives of 17 students on February 14th 2018 in Parkland, Florida. The school held a moment of silence and a half-day to commemorate one-year since the deadly attack, reported by ABC News today. For many, they simply …

According to a new announcement made by the company today, the internet giant Google plans to spend more than $13 billion across the United States. The funds will be used to build data centers and offices throughout the country. The story was reported in the BBC today. Google claims that the investments will create some …

The Trump administration has announced they will be boosting their troop presence in Eastern Europe as reported by the Financial Times. The American ambassador to Warsaw said that more American troops would be deployed in Poland to counter Russian influence. Russia has been assertive in the region and the move comes after much Polish lobbying …

Iranians celebrated the 40th anniversary of the fall of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the formation of their Islamic Republic today. The revolution brought to power Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shi’ite cleric who fundamentally transformed the state into a theocracy and de facto leader of Shi’ite Islam. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched in …

The above photo, from USA Today, allegedly features the Democratic governor of Virginia Ralph Northam. The Washington Post published the image, which was in his 1984 medical school yearbook last week. Northam admitted to appearing in the photo, saying in a statement: 

I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now. This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service. But I want to be clear, I understand how this decision shakes Virginians’ faith in that commitment.

According to USA Today, Northam admitted to making “other mistakes” in his 20s. That’s why he was so certain that he used shoe polish to create the blackface in his Michael Jackson costume in the above photo.  

Calls for his resignation came in as the news broke. The politician’s 12-year career has been built up until now, on his clean-cut image and soft spoken demeanor. President Trump tweeted his criticism: 

Democrat Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia just stated, ‘I believe that I am not either of the people in that photo. This was 24 hours after apologizing for appearing in the picture and after making the most horrible statement on ‘super’ late term abortion. Unforgivable!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has also called on Northam to resign: “Northam must resign, and those who try to help him stumble past this deserve scrutiny,” she wrote in a tweet. 

But Northam has refused to step down. He said that, upon closer inspection, the photo was not of him. Until that moment, Northam had a reasonable case for refusing to resign. He could have said that he made a mistake, and that he learned from it. He could have denounced racism and worked hard to right racial wrongs in his state. Instead, he’s thrown his own integrity into question. As Slate pointed out, there have been three versions of his story after he recanted his confession. In the first denial, he said that he knew immediately that he wasn’t in the photo. That obviously doesn’t jibe with his initial confession. Then he said he knew he couldn’t have done it––of course, another contradiction to his explanation that he absolutely knew he could do it. Finally, he said he could tell just by looking. Instead of simply taking responsibility for a mistake, he became a coward and tried to lie. Or, alternatively, instead of denying that he was in the photo from the start, he caved to political pressure and took the fall for something he didn’t do. Either option does not look good for him. 

Slate’s point was a powerful one. In his attempts to walk back his confession, Northam rendered himself a liar. Either he lied during the initial confession, or he lied during one of his recantations. 

As a side note, CNN, in what was hopefully a mistake, called Northam a Republican. Conservatives are accusing CNN of assuming Northam was Republican because of accusations of racism.

Before Donald Trump was elected president, Jared Kushner was an investor, a real-estate developer, and a newspaper publisher with no political experience. His FBI background check was complicated and raised red flags for the White House security specialists who were investigating him for top secret security clearance. He was not granted clearance at first, but a Trump official overruled them.

Carl Kline, a former Pentagon employee appointed director of the personnel security office in the Executive Office of the President, approved at least thirty people for top secret security clearance who had been originally denied it. 

Now, there have been “grave breaches in national security at the highest levels of the Trump administration” and Democrats are investigating. Two House Democrats––Reps. Don Beyer (Va.) and Ted Lieu (Calif.)––have also called for Kushner’s security clearance to be revoked:”We urge you to immediately revoke the security clearance of Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, and to comply with past and future oversight requests from Congress related to security clearances, information security, and other matters of national security” This is not the first time the two have done so––they called for revocation of Kushner’s clearance in 2017. 

But Kushner is far from Trump’s only problem. He received a stunning rebuke today from the Senate, which warned today against a “precipitous withdrawal” from Syria. The resolution, put forth by Mitch McConnell,  advises the administration to conduct a thorough assessment of the risks of withdrawal and to guarantee the permanent defeat of ISIS and al-Qaida. This follows the resignation of several key officials. The Senate is also attempting to block the Saudi government from interfering in Yemen. 

To recap, House Democrats are investigating how Kushner got security clearance when he should not have gotten it, Senate Republicans are pushing back on some of Trump’s most significant foreign policy maneuvers, and top officials have resigned in protest of those moves. 

It doesn’t end there, though. Trump recently embarrassed himself by criticizing an intelligence report he didn’t read. He then attacked the media for their reporting on his comments. In a series of tweets, he wrote: “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong! When I became President Iran was making trouble all over the Middle East, and beyond. Since ending the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal, they are MUCH different, but……..a source of potential danger and conflict. They are testing Rockets (last week) and more, and are coming very close to the edge. There economy is now crashing, which is the only thing holding them back. Be careful of Iran. Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”

It’s difficult to find an example of a president ever having experienced such turmoil in office. While Trump is certainly among the most politically divisive presidents of all time, partisanship does not account for these problems. These are problems of Trump’s own making. After promising that he would choose excellent people, he instead chose compromised people and now there’s been an information leak. After promising to solve worldwide political issues (by the way, Kushy, aren’t you supposed to on that?), he’s been criticized by experts in foreign affairs. After claiming to be the smartest man ever to be president (or whatever he claimed, it’s hard to keep track), he can’t even read intelligence reports. 

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I recently had an argument with a friend about Amazon’s Alexa. She got the device as a gift for her father, who turned out to be, according to my friend, “a bit paranoid” that the device would be “spying” on him. This frustrated my friend, who spent quite a lot of money on this gift. 

But I sympathized with the father. I told my friend about the Alexa that recorded a conversation and, without direction, sent that conversation to a contact. I also told my friend that you should be careful about what devices you let listen to you or watch you in your home because you don’t know who gets that data. My friend said I was being silly, and that “there’s nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide.” 

This argument drives me bananas because it’s predicated upon a very weak understanding––or perhaps definition––of liberty. In this case, freedom means liberty from the control of governments or companies, something we have to worry about more than ever.

Liberty is a tricky thing because it exists on two levels. First, and most obviously, there’s physical liberty. Most of us, most of the time, don’t have to worry about our physical liberty. Agents of the government aren’t going to arbitrarily knock down our doors and search our houses, with the notable and important exception of things like racially biased policing. That’s not the kind of liberty we should worry about with things like Alexa. The kind of liberty we need to worry about is much more subtle. 

For some background, before I continue, you may enjoy this video:

The liberty I’m referring to might be called “perceived liberty,” which we can define as the extent to which you perceive yourself to be free. Perceived liberty is difficult to keep tabs on because, like the lawnmower next door, threats to mental perceived liberty often just fade into the background. The simplest example of a threat to perceived liberty might be a surveillance camera on a bus. It’s designed to make people think they’re being watched, which in turn causes them to police their own behaviors. In other words, it limits their liberty. 

That’s all well and good when it comes to stopping criminals. Indeed, it’s probably a good thing to have a camera on a bus––whatever you do on a bus, in public, should be appropriate to film, right? So what’s the big deal? 

On such a small scale, it’s hard to see why such a threat to perceived liberty is significant. But take into account the myriad ways you’re being watched and listened to––think of Facebook, tracking your ever move, think of AI systems combing through your data to learn more about you, think of computer systems tracking your face as it travels through a city’s sea of surveillance cameras (something that the city of San Francisco just avoided), think of the Facetime bug allowing you to be eavesdropped on. Think of all the people who have access to that information: employees at Facebook or Amazon, local and federal government officials, and maybe hackers. 

It doesn’t even take all that, though. All it takes, really, is thinking through what happens when you know your phone is listening to you all the time. The moment you realize that is the moment you change your behavior to account for the possibility that you’re being listened to. The moment that happens is the moment you’ve surrendered some of your liberty. 

What’s worse, we’re training our children to be used to the idea of surveillance, inoculating them to the idea that liberty is limited to one’s physical body. 

More technology.