Media Mentions

On Friday, front-line workers from Amazon, Instacart, Shipt, Target, and Whole Foods have organized to walk out of their jobs together over demands that their companies provide better pay, benefits, and protections...Despite being classified as essential workers in a crisis, they say, their companies treat them as disposable...That workers are now looking outside their own company isn’t surprising, some experts say. “The problem isn’t unique to Instacart, or Target, or Whole Foods. The problem is across essential work,” says Benjamin Sachs, a labor law expert at Harvard Law School...In other countries, there’s ample precedent for industrywide organizing among workers with similar jobs, like a delivery workers union, but not in the United States. “In fact, under existing law, it’s almost impossible to form unions and bargain at the level of the sector,” says Sachs. As a leader on Clean Slate for Worker Power, a project at Harvard Law School, he recently called for a change in labor law that would allow people who do similar types of work to band together and demand industrywide changes, either as a union or an official collective of workers. “You don’t fix cross-sectoral health and safety problems with just a group of workers at Whole Foods,” he says. Friday’s strike, Sachs says, highlights the pressing need for that kind of change. So far, companies like Amazon have successfully fought off efforts to form unions within their workforce. Withholding labor is only one part of a strike’s goals. The other part is rallying consumer action. “Even a small strike with a lot of attention can hugely influence consumers—and these are all entirely consumer-dependent companies,” says Sachs.

More than a dozen United Nations independent rights experts are slamming the world agency on its response to the cholera epidemic in Haiti that has left more than 10,000 dead and over 800,000 infected after being introduced by U.N. peacekeepers shortly after Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. The group, which includes outgoing U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, says the U.N.’s response and failure to compensate victims has fallen short. They are calling on U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to urgently step up efforts to fulfill a U.N. pledge to help victims...Human rights advocates who have been fighting on behalf of cholera victims said the experts’ statement was conveyed in a formal communication process ordinarily used to question governments about human rights violations. It demonstrates escalating concern within the U.N.’s own human rights system that the organization is failing to uphold its obligations to cholera victims, they said. “We believe it is unprecedented for such a broad coalition of U.N. mandate-holders to send a communication that raises ‘past failures and ongoing violations’ by the U.N. itself,” said Sandra C. Wisner, a staff attorney with the Boston-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. The experts’ letter to Guterres and the Haitian government was prompted by a formal complaint filed by IJDH and its Haiti affiliate, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School in January.

As elderly and vulnerable citizens continue to die from COVID-19 in closed-off long-term care centers around the country, many of their relatives have begged elected leaders to release the locations of these outbreaks. Their pleas have carried weight with governors in Georgia, New York, Oklahoma and Florida, among others, who mandated an accounting of where the virus had spread. Not in Texas. Despite more than 300 deaths in such facilities, Gov. Greg Abbott has not moved to make public where patients and caretakers have fallen ill or died. The state’s expansive medical privacy law has made Texas among the most opaque for releasing information about the spread of the coronavirus, even as deaths in these facilities surged nationwide. More than 10,300 elderly people in 23 states have died in long-term care centers, according to the most recent available government data analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a national health policy think tank...Pat Souter, a lawyer who represents health care institutions and oversees health care studies at Baylor University’s law school, said Texas entities were correctly following state law by not releasing detailed information. Other states providing such details “may not have the same level of protections,” he said, “or determined that such release was permissible under an exception to their laws.” Federal privacy law only creates minimum standards, agreed I. Glenn Cohen, who directs Harvard University’s Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics. But he said best practices encourage transparency during public health emergencies.

A prisoner in the Middleton House of Correction become Massachusetts' first county jail inmate to die of COVID-related causes, heightening concerns among advocates that not enough is being done to reduce incarcerated populations, test inmates or prevent the spread in the state penal system. Essex County Sheriff Kevin Coppinger said Thursday that the 41-year-old prisoner died Wednesday, was one of 60 in his facilities to have tested positive for the virus. The prisoner — whose name was not released — had other health issues and had been incarcerated in the jail since Feb. 18, county officials said...Mostly, advocates hope to see the governor and state Parole Board do more to release prisoners. In early April the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled that inmates who are awaiting trial and not charged with certain violent, serious offenses can seek release with a presumption that they we will be let go unless they are considered to be an “unreasonable danger” or a flight risk. The court also urged the state Department of Correction and the Parole Board to expedite parole hearings and increase the release of prisoners already approved for parole and those nearing the end of their sentences. Since then, there have been 654 prisoners released pursuant to the ruling, according to the ACLU data tracker. Only 15 of those were released from the state prison system. Katy Naples-Mitchell, a legal fellow at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, says she’s watching the number of cases rise with concern. “We are watching a pretty rapidly moving disaster,’’ she said. “It’s impossible to contain a virus like this inside.”

When Attorney General William Barr this week directed U.S. prosecutors to safeguard civil liberties amid state-level pandemic orders, he signaled Justice Department support for lockdown protesters by highlighting religious and economic rights. In a two-page memo, the nation’s top cop gave the clearest indication yet of the kind of battles federal prosecutors are likely to focus on. In doing so, Barr suggested the Department of Justice (DOJ) might back church groups and those seeking a swifter economic reopening while staying on the sidelines of fights over new limits on abortion and voting access... “One example of what Barr is concerned about is how churches have been singled out for different treatment,” (Gary) Bauer wrote in response to the Barr memo. “Why is it okay for people to gather at Walmart but not at church?” Legal experts say Barr might continue to press that question in court. “Religious liberty is a place where the DOJ in the Trump administration has been bringing more and more affirmative litigation on behalf of church groups and other religious voices,” said Glenn Cohen, a professor at Harvard Law School. “I will be curious to see if this becomes more than a signal and if the 93 U.S. attorneys begin bringing more litigation.”

In the span of two months, the coronavirus crisis has demanded sweeping changes from the U.S. construction industry, and experts say many of them will remain in place even after the outbreak recedes. As contractors prepare to return to work on sites that have been shut down by shelter-in-place initiatives, they will face an industry that has been drastically changed by the both public health and economic effects of the pandemic...Since World War II, the percentage of the U.S. construction industry involved in union memberships has steadily declined, from about 87% of the workforce in 1947 to 12.8% in 2018. Nevertheless, since the pandemic began, trade unions have taken on renewed influence in many areas of the country by advocating for members’ best interests in keeping sites operational and safe...During the crisis, unions have provided a voice for workers who are struggling to decide whether they should stay home or go to work, said Mark Erlich, a fellow at Harvard University’s Labor and Worklife Program. Unions also help laborers find new work after a layoff. “Clearly, being a union member has been enormously beneficial in the past few weeks,” he said. The appeal of unions will be stronger than ever going forward, Erlich said, a trend that “will likely come into conflict with cost-cutting measures that construction employers will inevitably be considering once they reckon with the financial losses from the crisis.”

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed how Americans get our food. We’re no longer going to restaurants; we’re limiting our trips to the grocery store. Many of us are, for the first time, ordering groceries online. That’s causing huge spikes in demand on e-commerce sites like Amazon, which has moved quickly to expand its grocery delivery services and transform Whole Foods Markets into fulfillment centers for online orders. But if Amazon consolidating control over yet another sector of the economy during a crisis makes you uncomfortable, Jeff Bezos would like to offer a reframe: Actually, buying your groceries online is better for the planet...There are also bigger picture considerations about how the rise in online shopping we’re witnessing due to coronavirus will impact our food system in the long term. Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says that while getting groceries delivered seems like the “right direction to go” from a public health standpoint right now, she worries this trend will make it even harder for smaller retailers and family farms to compete. Broad Leib notes that in nearly every state where low-income families can purchase groceries online with food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Amazon and Walmart are the only approved retailers. “A lot more people are already or will be on SNAP in the coming months,” Broad Leib said, noting that 37 million Americans were participating in the program in January, the most recent available data. “We’re putting a huge thumb on the scale for big retailers.”

Just a few months ago, Clearview AI faced outrage for scraping photos off social media sites like Facebook to create a near-universal facial recognition system that has been embraced by law enforcement agencies. Now, the company is again in the spotlight, this time after its CEO, Hoan Ton-That, said it's in discussions with federal and state agencies to help with contact tracing of people infected with the coronavirus. Ton-That said federal authorities and three states have communicated with him about using his company's technology as part of their coronavirus mitigation efforts...It's not yet clear whether a contact tracing system can slow the spread of the coronavirus, but even if it can, critics wonder whether one that incorporates technology like Clearview AI's might forever compromise a user's privacy. "In many places across the world, technology has been mixed with what I would call implements of social control that are coercive or quasi-coercive," said Glenn Cohen, faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard University. "There are big risks about privacy, about the relationship we have to the state, about access to the things we need to have good lives, like employment. And these are all things that I think need to be sorted out in real time rather than say: 'Oh, there's this shiny new toy over here. Let's go ahead and use it, because what harm can it do?'"

Contact tracing and drug trials could be two key milestones on the path forward to safely reopening America’s economy. But Americans have differing views on each: they’re hesitant to share their personal information for contact tracing efforts, but the same is not true when it comes to drug trials, studies suggest...Contact tracing is a way to help identify a person’s whereabouts who tests positive for a contagious disease and then track down people who may have crossed paths with them. In South Korea, health officials are able to pinpoint exactly where a person who has tested positive has been using security camera footage, credit-card records, GPS data from cellphones and car navigation systems...The technology, which is strictly opt-in, works by harnessing short-range Bluetooth signals, known as Bluetooth beacons. Using the Apple-Google technology, contact-tracing apps would gather a record of other phones with which they came into close proximity. Apple and Google spokesmen said separately that none of the information gathered from phone users will be monetized and will only be used for contact tracing. Both companies can disable the broadcast system on a regional basis when it is no longer needed. The tech giants’ proposal “is the version of digital contact tracing that is the most privacy respecting,” said Glenn Cohen, a professor of health law policy and bioethics at Harvard University. “It remains to be seen, though, what these architectural decisions will mean as to efficacy.”

An article by Noah Feldman: President Donald Trump’s decision not to renew the federal stay-at-home advisory is the perfect symbol of his approach to the Covid-19 pandemic: Once again, Trump is operating by signal and sign and suggestion, not concrete directives or orders. It’s not so much that the president is not leading at all. It’s that his leadership operates as a kind of shadow play, not as a practical reality. The federal advisory was never anything more than a nonbinding suggestion to the states. Declining to renew it is also nothing but a nonbinding hint that perhaps some states should be able to reopen. Neither has any formal consequences. Both amount to atmospherics. It’s important to remember that the president of the United States does have the power to lead by action, not suggestion. True, existing federal law most probably didn’t authorize Trump to order a nationwide lockdown. But consider what Trump could have done via regulation. He could have directed every agency in the executive branch to devise and issue Covid-19 regulations binding the industries that those agencies regulate. That would have enabled him to shut down large parts of the economy in order to achieve safety and health results. Trump could have invoked the emergency powers of the Defense Production Act more quickly and more completely to focus resources on protective equipment and tests. Trump has used the DPA to target a few individual firms (some of which were already producing the necessary equipment). But the Act gives him the power to marshal entire sectors of the economy, to nationalize the distribution of key resources, and to designate single a federal agency to coordinate all of this activity. So far, he hasn’t used those powers.

A podcast by Noah Feldman: Marta Figlerowicz, an associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale, discusses classic works of literature about pandemics from Boccaccio's The Decameron to Camus' The Plague. Plus, she psychoanalyzes Noah's love of detective novels.

An article by David Benger '20, Todd Carney '21, and Marina Lorenzini: The coronavirus has hit Iran hard. As the country grapples with the highest mortality rate from COVID-19 across the Middle East, the Trump administration has faced widespread calls to ease U.S. sanctions on Iran. The strict bilateral sanctions, which the Trump administration has reimposed since the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, have left the Iranian economy in a deepening recession, with foreign companies and governments remaining hesitant to engage in financial and trade exchanges with Iran. Though the Department of the Treasury purports to allow exceptions to sanctions restrictions for humanitarian aid, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals, the pandemic has highlighted the cracks in this system. In the meantime, however, other nations have stepped up to fill the void, providing some of the much needed aid to the struggling Iranian people. The international community’s will to deliver medical supplies despite potential penalties from the U.S. government demonstrates a challenge to the U.S. “maximum pressure” campaign. Several U..S. allies have deepened those cracks by developing their own mechanisms that deliver humanitarian aid and/or trade with Iran, some with the direct cooperation of the U.S. Treasury Department, others less so.

On tonight's show, host Arun Rath learned more about how community health centers in Massachusetts are aiding in stemming the spread of the coronavirus. It's hard to fathom in 2020, but there are still areas of Massachusetts with no internet connectivity or unreliable service. First, we heard how widespread the problem is, why it exists and what can be done to solve it. Then, we checked in with a school district in Berkshire County on how they are adapting during this pandemic. Internet connectivity is spotty in Berkshire County, which makes virtual learning more difficult. Finally, with non-essential businesses now closed until May 18, local stores across the state are hurting. We heard how two bookstores are managing and adapting in this time...Featuring Waide Warner, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

An article by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods: Neither of us has ever written anything that has been as misinterpreted as this piece in the Atlantic. People construed the essay to call for “an end to freedom of speech in America”; to endorse “China’s enlightened authoritarian approach to information” and “lament the US’ provincial fealty to the First Amendment”; as an attempt to surrender a “model of social organization predicated on individual liberty”; to argue that “the United States’ response to coronavirus would have been better had Big Tech and the U.S. government, like the Chinese communist regime, been able to control speech more effectively on the internet”; and to overlook that the “US & China are not equivalent” because “Americans are not at risk of being sent to a goulag [sic] if they breach YouTube’s terms of service [but in China] the risk is real.” And those were the nice comments. We did not say or imply any of these things. If you read the article, you will see that we do not remotely endorse China-style surveillance and censorship, or claim that the United States should adopt China’s practices. The piece was meant as a wake-up call about how coronavirus surveillance and speech-control efforts were part of a pattern rather than a break in one, and why, and what the stakes were. Let us try again.

An article by Samuel Rebo '21: As millions of Americans receive their coronavirus economic stimulus checks, they could be forgiven for assuming it was the president directly who paid them. After all, for the first time in history the federal government will disburse checks with the president’s name, “Donald J. Trump,” embossed on the memo line. Trump’s action—what many critics have called a politicization of money appropriated by a separate branch of government—is not the first time that the president has personalized the cash flow in and out of government agencies. Most notably, he is also the first president in history to donate his salary to government agencies—unlike previous presidents who chose to donate their salaries, all of whom gave the money to charity. Trump has donated his salary every quarter. In March 2020, he provided it to the Department of Health and Human Services to “combat coronavirus.” Trump’s quarterly donations to various departments pose unique constitutional and statutory questions. The Compensation Clause requires him to accept his salary, and the Appropriations Clause tasks Congress alone with funding the executive branch—both provisions that call into question Trump’s practice of helping “fund” the government with his own salary. These clauses are no technicalities. Rather, they ensure that the president and executive branch remain accountable to the American people.

Banks are finally starting to get it: Fossil fuels ain’t worth it. Just last week, Citigroup joined the wave of banks no longer investing in oil and gas projects in the Arctic. The only major bank in the U.S. that hasn’t committed to this is Bank of America. The economic crisis brought on by the spread of coronavirus has shown just what a risky investment fossil fuels are—and this new reality may just accelerate how soon these banks leave behind fossil fuels for good...However, it’s unlikely that the coronavirus had anything to do with these announcements as these commitments usually follow months of planning and preparation. “The timing is more coincidental than there’s a real causal connection there,” Hana Vizcarra, a staff attorney at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told Earther. “I don’t think the coronavirus has anything to do with these particular announcements, but I do think they may accelerate some of the work already going on in this area.” ...As permanent as the changes we’re experiencing feel, all this is pretty short term in the big picture of economics. And long-term trends are what banks care about, Vizcarra said. For oil and gas, the long term doesn’t look too great. Because, hello, climate change means no more fossil fuels. That future, however, feels a lot more tangible now that banks have actually seen what the death of oil might look like, particularly if they don’t start planning for it now. “Making that risk a reality and seeing that upfront—what that could really do, that demand shock, which causes a severe price drop—I think that will probably adjust some of their longer-term concerns,” Vizcarra said.

On Episode 112 of Voices in AI, Byron speaks with fellow author and technologist David Weinberger about the nature of intelligence artificial, and otherwise...He’s a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and was co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and a Journalism Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. Dr. Weinberger has been a marketing VP and adviser to high tech companies, an adviser to presidential campaigns and a Franklin Fellow at the US State Department.

Gary Holland is a carnivore: He’s on a first-name basis with the meat manager at his local Market Basket, and gets special cuts put aside for him at the counter. So when he got word from his guy this week that the store’s supply was growing thin, Holland sprung into action...The novel coronavirus has brought the US meat industry to a seemingly unheard of moment in a first-world country: rationing in the grocery aisles as some two dozen meatpacking plants across the country have shuttered as infections raced through the workforce. Consumer prices have jumped, stores are limiting purchases, and farmers and ranchers are euthanizing livestock because slaughterhouses are closed...So how did we get here? “When we suddenly declared everyone working in food production as essential, it was a green light for those businesses to keep doing business as usual,” said Emily Broad Leib, head of the Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard University. Plants continued operating without issuing proper protective gear to their workers, she said, and once people started falling ill, it set off a chain reaction that we’re seeing now. “This is going to get worse before it gets better,” she said.

A lot of parents who are now stuck at home with their children are turning to social media to share what life is now like. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, some parents would share every moment of their kids actions on Instagram or YouTube. Some parents even create Instagram pages for their children from birth. When it comes to children’s privacy online, the law is spotty. Leah Plunkett works with the interdisciplinary Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet Society at Harvey University. She also is the author of the book, “Sharenthood”. “For parents that are worried about violating the law, I would say unless you’re doing something that would be criminal, you can share,” Plunkett said. “You are unlikely to violate a law with ‘sharenting’ but there’s a lot of room for us as parents as well as grandparents and coaches to do better than the law requires of us and make values-based choices around protecting privacy.” Plunkett says there are some things for parents to think about while being stuck at home. She notes it’s important to find ways to connect and vent but to make sure it’s not on social media. “If it’s online, even if they are three now, they’ll find it by the time they’re a teen,” She said. “Think about how they’ll feel with that kind of window into exactly how you were feeling when they whined for Disney plus for the 10th time.”

On the phone inside her San Francisco apartment, Lucía Abascal gently informed two brothers she had never met that they had been exposed to the coronavirus. Privacy rules, however, meant she could not tell them who had possibly infected them. She also told the siblings they’d have to stay inside for the next 14 days and monitor themselves for signs of a disease that has killed 59,000 Americans and counting...These days, she works in "contact tracing" — a public health strategy to contain the spread of disease by tracing backward from an infected person to others who may have been exposed so they too can be tested and quarantined...But amid all the sobering statistics of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, here is one more: There are nowhere near enough Lucía Abascals. Experts estimate the country needs as many as 300,000 contact tracers to chart and break the chains of the pandemic. Currently, there are fewer than 8,000...China, Singapore, and South Korea have been lauded for their use of phones, in conjunction with old-fashioned shoe leather, to track infected people’s movements and trace clusters of the disease. Germany and Australia are launching their own programs. Yet many are skeptical about how the US is going about it, or even whether the country would accept it... “My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”

An article by Cass Sunstein: Democrats have been rallying around former Vice President Joe Biden, but they are struggling with serious internal divisions. The more you examine what they’re actually saying, the more you see that it is hopelessly inadequate to say, as most people are doing, that some Democrats are in the center while others are on the left. If you hope to understand the tensions within American progressivism — and most Democrats do qualify as progressive to one degree or another — your best bet is to explore the work of three influential writers from a century ago, when the U.S. saw a flowering of left-wing thinking. The first was Walter Lippmann, who believed in scientists and experts, and who wanted to solve the nation’s problems by increasing their role in American government. The second was Max Eastman, who focused on economic inequality, class conflict and the rights of working people. The third was Randolph Bourne, who emphasized, and celebrated, separate social identities, and who wanted to ensure that no social group would be subordinated to another. The three offered radically different diagnoses of what ails our country — and radically different prescriptions. The deepest splits within the Democratic Party reflect not some center-to-left continuum, but their competing legacies.