Media Mentions

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.

Reliable, reasonably priced, high-speed internet access has been an issue in the United States for quite some time, but the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ are even more evident during the pandemic. Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age joined KIRO Nights to discuss the digital divide. “Like many other fragile structures in American life, like our public health infrastructure, and our ability to vote securely, internet access is turning up to be a giant, difficult issue for America,” Crawford said. “It’s been in place as a huge issue for years and years, but the pandemic reveals that those who have it and have it inexpensively are able to educate their children at home…are able to visit doctors at a reasonable price without having to go directly to the hospital in person, are able to participate in life.” The coronavirus pandemic has proved the centrality of internet access to our daily lives, and Crawford said has shown we are failing as a country to make sure everyone has access. To understand the internet access situation today, Crawford went back to 2004.

Business lobbyists and executives are pushing the Trump administration and Congress to shield American companies from a wide range of potential lawsuits related to reopening the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, opening a new legal and political fight over how the nation deals with the fallout from Covid-19. Government officials are beginning the slow process of lifting restrictions on economic activity in states and local areas across the country. But lobbyists say retailers, manufacturers, eateries and other businesses will struggle to start back up if lawmakers do not place temporary limits on legal liability in areas including worker privacy, employment discrimination and product manufacturing...In theory, Congress could set uniform federal standards and take away the right to file lawsuits in state courts, said John Goldberg, a Harvard law professor who specializes in torts, or the law of civil wrongs and injuries. The Constitution gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce, and restarting a national economy wrecked by a national pandemic would probably qualify. “Saying we’re doing this to restart a national economy that has basically collapsed — it would be pretty hard to say that isn’t directly related to interstate commerce,” he said. But what Congress could do and what it is politically likely to do are two different things.

Financial crises follow a sequence. One of the steps is outrage. Then comes regulation — think Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley and the like. During the pandemic that is both a heath and a financial crisis, a lot of outrage is aimed at stock buybacks. Over the past three years, S+P 500 companies spent $2 trillion on buybacks. Pundits are quick to point out that U.S. airlines spent nearly all of their free cash flow on buybacks over the past decade. Many now argue that if these companies kept more cash on hand, they wouldn’t need bailouts now. This criticism joins longer-running arguments over whether buybacks encourage short-termism and limit investment in research and development. But there are good reasons to support buybacks. They allow capital to be deployed efficiently and stop managers from spending excess cash on vanity projects. And contrary to conventional wisdom, buybacks don’t benefit shareholders alone. Jesse Fried of Harvard Law School has testified to Congress that, for every $100 in repurchases, companies issue $80 of equity, meaning public investors net just $20. Employees are probably the biggest beneficiaries: Companies, particularly tech firms, use stock buybacks to repurchase stock options...To be sure, there are issues with buybacks. Mr. Fried has ably documented how executives can time them to their personal benefit, something akin to insider trading. Companies do buy back shares when they’re too expensive or otherwise spend money that should be saved. And in other cases, stock buybacks have encouraged a short-term focus.

Camille François is a leading investigator of disinformation campaigns and author of the well-known “ABC” or “Actor-Behavior-Content” disinformation framework, which has informed how many of the biggest tech companies tackle disinformation on their platforms. Here, she speaks with Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic and Evelyn Douek for that site’s series on disinformation, “Arbiters of Truth.”

He is 37 and less than 10 years out of law school. He had never tried a case, nor served as co-counsel at trial, when he was tapped last year for America’s federal bench. But he did go on Fox News to push the cause of Brett Kavanaugh when Trump’s supreme court pick was mired in sexual abuse claims two years ago. And now he is bound for the second highest court in the land. Conservative Justin Walker’s nomination to serve as circuit judge on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, announced by Donald Trump on 3 April, barely caused a ripple in a world transfixed by a deadly pandemic. But it was a wake-up call for Democrats: the fight for the White House and Senate in November will also be a fight for the rule of law. The Trump administration has brought a laser-like focus to nominating and winning Senate confirmation for 193 judges – two supreme court justices, 51 circuit court judges (a quarter of the total), 138 district court judges and two US court of international trade judges – at a pace unmatched since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. “I’ve never in my lifetime seen an election whose stakes were higher,” said Laurence Tribe, who was born in 1941 and is a constitutional law professor at Harvard University. “The transformation of the federal judiciary into a series of puppets for a very rightwing ideology will have lasting impact for decades.”