House passes torture bill

AlterNet
and
 Lindsay Beyerstein
September 28, 2006

The House voted 254-168 against the rule of law yesterday and for Bush's right to interpret the Geneva Convention in whatever way seems convenient. The so-called compromise legislation, which actually became more draconian during the alleged "compromise" isn't just about torture, it also includes a ridiculously broad definition of enemy combatant, and slap in the face to international law, the loss of habeas corpus for detainees in US military prisons, and more!

Don't you feel safer already?

That's 34 Democrats out of 194 and 219 out of 226 Republicans voting for the bill.

The New York Times published a scathing editorial about the torture bill, entitled Rushing Off a Cliff:

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Google This: Algorithmic Oppression

Imagine you've forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla." But instead of finding images of adorable animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that's replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

“These platforms are encoded with racism," says UCLA professor and best-selling author of Algorithms of Oppression, Dr. Safiya Noble. “The logic is racist and sexist because it would allow for these kinds of false, misleading, kinds of results to come to the fore…There are unfortunately thousands of examples now of harm that comes from algorithmic discrimination."

On At Liberty this week, Dr. Noble joined us to discuss what she calls “algorithmic oppression," and what needs to be done to end this kind of bias and dismantle systemic racism in software, predictive analytics, search platforms, surveillance systems, and other technologies.

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