Facebook hit the one-billion user mark last week, a little more than two years after it reached 500 million users. To mark the occasion, we've rounded up some of the best reads on Facebook and privacy.
Facebook Raises Fears With Ad Tracking, The Financial Times, September 2012
Facebook has been working with a company called Datalogix to track how often people who see ads for a given product on Facebook end up buying it in real-world stores. Datalogix does this by matching up the email addresses tied to users' Facebook accounts with troves of email addresses and other data it has purchased, much of which comes from customer loyalty cards and other programs. The company has data on 70 million American households from more than 1,000 retailers, including drug stores and grocers.
Facebook Sells More Access to Members, The Wall Street Journal, October 2012
In addition to its work with Datalogix, Facebook has started letting advertisers target users based on their email addresses, their phone numbers and the other websites they've been visiting. Gokul Rajaram, who oversees Facebook's ad products, said the changes were made "in a way that respects user privacy."
Facebook Confirms It Is Scanning Your Private Message for Links, The Next Web, October 2012
Last week, a Polish startup called KILLSWITCH.me posted a video to the website Hacker News that seemed to show that including link to a website — say, Mashable — in a private message to another Facebook user would include the "Like" counter on Mashable's website. Facebook confirmed to The Next Web that it was doing this, though it said it was not revealing any of users' private information.
Should Employers Be Allowed to Ask for Your Facebook Login?, The Atlantic, February 2011
When Robert Collins applied for a job with the Maryland Department of Corrections, the organization required him to give them his Facebook password. The Department of Corrections backed down after the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter calling the practice "a frightening and illegal invasion of privacy," but it hasn't stopped elsewhere. California became the latest state to ban it last month.
Why Facebook Is After Your Kids, The New York Times Magazine, October 2011
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which bars websites from gathering data about children under 13, means that 12-year-olds can't legally use Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wants to change that. "That will be a fight we take on at some point," he said. He may not be successful. The Federal Trade Commission pushed new rules last month to make it harder for companies to track children online.
Germans Reopen Investigation on Facebook Privacy, The New York Times, August 2012
In August, the German data protection commissioner in Hamburg — yes, the Germans have a data protection commissioner — reopened an investigation into Facebook's huge database of human faces culled from users' photos. (Johannes Caspar, the commissioner, had suspended the inquiry in June but reopened it when Facebook failed to cooperate.) The database is a component of facial-recognition technology that allows Facebook to automatically detect users' friends' faces in the photos they upload to Facebook. The company has since agreed to get rid of it for users who live in the European Union.
The Face of Facebook, The New Yorker, September 2010
Jose Antonio Vargas's profile of Zuckerberg details some of his views on privacy, which the Facebook founder calls a "third-rail issue" online. "A lot of people who are worried about privacy and those kinds of issues will take any minor misstep we take and turn it into as big a deal as possible," he said.
Zuckerberg: Facebook 'Made a Bunch of Mistakes' on Privacy, Mashable, November 2011
Facebook is now required to respect users' privacy and undergo regular privacy audits for two decades, thanks to a settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and the social network last November. It also requires that Facebook pay $16,000 a day for each violation of the agreement. In a blog post the day the settlement was announced, Zuckerberg apologized for making "a bunch of mistakes" on privacy issues, including its now-defunct Beacon advertising platform and a number of changes made in 2009.
Facebook to Target Ads Based on App Usage, The Wall Street Journal, July 2012
Facebook is also taking steps to track users on mobile devices, likely the next frontier for online privacy. "The social network is tracking the apps that people use through its popular Facebook Connect feature," the Journal reports, "which lets users log in to millions of websites and apps as varied as Amazon.com, LinkedIn and Yelp with their Facebook identity." Facebook uses that data to help target ads. When the Journal's story ran in July, the company was also considering tracking what people do on the apps. (We reached out to Facebook to see what the decided, but they did not respond to requests for comment.)
In just two weeks, volunteers for our Free the Files project have liberated information on $294 million in ad buys made in swing states since Aug. 2.
The spending data comes from nearly 4,600 political ad contracts collected in a Federal Communications Commission database. The buys were made by candidates, super PACs, social welfare nonprofits and other groups at TV stations in 33 major markets.
Though not comprehensive and based on ad purchases that are sometimes revised, the data provides a previously unattainable snapshot of political spending in the final weeks of the campaign. Of the contracts reviewed so far, $64.3 million reflects buys by the Obama campaign, which spent more than any other group and about four times the amount spent by the Romney campaign.
The next largest bloc of spending was by two groups founded by GOP strategist Karl Rove, super PAC American Crossroads and its nonprofit cousin Crossroads GPS. These groups, which are backing Mitt Romney in the presidential race, made $23.9 million in ad buys.
While the presidential campaigns were the top ad buyers, Free the Files also captures television ads aimed at House, Senate and local races. A substantial chunk of the $75.8 million in ad buys logged so far in Ohio’s Cleveland-Akron-Canton market is flowing into the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown and Republican Josh Mandel.
VOLUNTEER UPDATE
Freeing files — while highly gratifying, of course — is not without complications. Though the FCC requires television stations to maintain orderly files, the documents are often difficult to read — as Free the Files volunteers can attest.
Nevertheless, 387 people have managed to “free” 27 percent of the television ads from 33 top markets (as published by the FCC since August), verifying details about the buyer, the amount spent and the agency placing the advertisement. Before August, the political ad data was only available by visiting television stations in person and asking for their paper political files.
Several news organizations and journalism schools are also joining the Free the Files effort, adding to the ranks of volunteers. Since teaming up with the Huffington Post in Denver, Detroit, Miami and Washington, D.C., volunteers have freed an additional 1,174 files. PBS NewsHour and Time’s Swampland are also helping recruit people. Also contributing to the effort are journalism students at Temple University in Pennsylvania, Arizona State University, Ohio's Youngstown State University and the University of North Carolina.
Oct. 15: This story has been updated with comments from the Edison Electric Institute.
Since August, a dark money group called Defend My Dividend has spent nearly $90,000 running ads on South Florida TV stations warning seniors about a looming increase in the tax rate on dividends.
"You worked hard, saved for retirement, and dividends are a big part of it," says one of the ads, which Defend My Dividend has posted on YouTube. "But if President Obama and Congress don't act this year, tax rates on dividends will spike, almost tripling in some cases." Time is running out, the ad intones, as phone numbers for Obama and Congress appear on the screen.
The spot directs viewers to a website that gives few hints about the group behind the ads, which is described as a "national grassroots advocacy campaign."
But there are indications the group is more Astroturf than grassroots: The website is maintained by the Edison Electric Institute, a trade association for big dividend-paying electric companies.
According to television ad contracts obtained as part of ProPublica's Free the Files project, the contact person listed for some of the Florida ad buys was Stephanie Voyda, the institute's director. On many contracts, the Alliance for Savings & Investment, a group that represents dividend-paying companies, is listed as a co-buyer with Defend My Dividend.
Voyda did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica. Neither did Jim McCrery, a lobbyist and former Louisiana representative who serves as the manager of the alliance.
Tax analysts say electric utilities and other companies are concerned that the tax change could damage their stock prices. Dividends have been taxed at 15 percent since 2003, but the tax will rise unless Congress acts before the end of the year to extend cuts made under President George W. Bush. The Alliance for Savings & Investment successfully lobbied against a hike in dividend taxes in 2010.
The Defend My Dividend ads have run in Miami and West Palm Beach, two markets known for their large population of retirees. Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank, said the strategy made sense.
"Florida has the highest proportion of retirees, who rely on dividends," he said.
Ryan Rudominer, the Edison Electric Institute's executive director for communications, confirmed that Defend My Dividend, which he said had been formed in 2008, was targeting seniors in Florida.
"Paid ads have been running on national cable television, in print publications, and in select regional markets," he said in an email. "South Florida has a strong concentration of senior citizens and retirees that rely on dividend income and would be negatively impacted by the looming dividend tax hike."
Asked about Defend My Dividend's claim to be a grassroots campaign, Rudominer said the group had "generated hundreds of thousands of emails and phone calls from concerned citizens to their elected officials urging them to stop a dividend tax hike."
It's unclear how much the typical retiree would be affected if the Bush tax cuts are not extended. In that case, dividends would be taxed as ordinary income, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center and a former tax analyst for the Congressional Budget Office.
In February, Obama proposed taxing dividends as regular income only for those who make at least $250,000 a year. Along with the 3.8 percent surtax on high earners in the health care law, dividends could be taxed as high as 43.4 percent for that subset of people — the source of the ad's assertion that the dividend tax could triple.
"My guess is that the tax changes would disproportionately hit high-income individuals rather than older individuals," Williams said.
Seniors who hold dividend-paying stocks in IRAs or 401(k)s wouldn't be affected at all, he added, because dividends accrued in such accounts are already taxed as regular income when money is withdrawn.
Defend My Dividend's ads are clearly aimed at seniors, however. They feature older couples prominently and warn that a tax hike will have the effect of "squeezing seniors and families."
Edison Electric Institute, which is incorporated as a 501(c)(6) trade group and does not have to disclose its donors, has driven home similar messages about the potential tax change in other venues as well.
Its chairman, Lewis Hay III, who is also the executive chairman of NextEra Energy, a Florida power company, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in July with the headline "The Tax Cliff Endangers Seniors." Hay, McCrery and Sandy Callahan, the chief financial officer of TECO Energy, another Florida-based power company, have written similar op-eds promoting Defend My Dividend for severalFloridanewspapers in recent weeks. Hay did not respond to requests for an interview.
The financial aid award letters that colleges send to prospective students can be confusing: Many mix grants, scholarships and loans all under the heading of "Award," "Financial Assistance," or "Offered Financial Aid." Some schools also suggest loans in amounts that families can't afford.
Take Parent Plus loans, a federal program that allows families to take out as much as they need, after other aid is applied, to pay for their children's college costs. As we recently reported with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Plus loans are remarkably easy to get. With minimal underwriting and no assessment of whether parents can actually afford the loans, families can end up overburdened by debt.
Colleges often exacerbate things when their letters lay out, or "package in," large Plus loans to cover unmet need when student aid falls short. Just like the government, many colleges recommend loans without regard to family income or ability to repay.
The practice can leave students feeling misled. As we reported, Agostinha Depina, a 19-year-old college student, said that one of her award letters — from her top choice, St. John's University in New York — "made it seem like they gave me a lot of money."
After consulting a counselor, she realized that "it was more loans in the financial-aid package than scholarship money." St. John's did not return our request for comment.
"Financial aid award letters need to be more transparent around laying out aid that doesn't need to be paid back and loans that do," Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said in an email.
The department has laid out what it says is a better option. Earlier this year it created a model award letter [PDF], which separates "gift" aid — grants and scholarships from the school or the government — from "loan options." Parent Plus loans are included in a separate category — "Other options" — with no suggested dollar amount.
The award letters many students are actually getting from schools look very different from the Education Department's preferred — but not required — layout. Here's one package from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, a public school.
Notice that the student in this case — whose name we have redacted for privacy — was suggested a $16,800 Plus loan in the financial aid award letter, bringing the student's total estimated financial assistance to $33,200.
Conveniently, the figure matches the stated cost of attendance for that year. Not so conveniently for this student, it was beyond what her family could afford. (MassArt has yet not returned our request for comment.)
The language on award letters can also leave the wrong impression. The MassArt letter starts by saying the student will be "eligible to receive the following assistance" — even though getting the Parent Plus loan requires a credit check and applicants are sometimes denied.
Another award letter from Pace University, a private university in New York City, also packages in the Parent Plus loan to bring the total "offer of financial assistance" to just a few dollars short of the full cost of attendance. The student in this case also qualified for a federal Pell grant — need-based aid that typically corresponds to a household income of $50,000 or less. Pace still suggested a nearly $19,000 Parent Plus loan for just one year.
Robina Schepp, Pace's vice president for enrollment and placement, said the school offers financial aid counseling and information sessions for parents and students.
Long Island University, another private university in New York, also packages in the Plus loan to match the estimated costs down to the dollar. An LIU spokesman did not comment.
Some colleges do consider parental income when they suggest Parent Plus loans. Ringling College of Art and Design uses an algorithm to determine the recommended loan amount. The school's letter notes that the listed amount is "an estimate of what you may wish to consider borrowing, and is partly based on your income." Parents, it says, "may apply for more or less."
Similarly, Drexel University — a private university in Philadelphia — packages in Parent Plus but "does take into account the ability of the family to contribute to the education cost for the suggested Plus loan amount," said Niki Gianakaris, a university spokeswoman. (Gianakaris said the school is also revamping its award letter to make clearer distinctions between grants, scholarships and loans.)
It's not clear whether these more conservative approaches to packaging in Parent Plus loans actually result in more conservative borrowing: At Drexel, the average Parent Plus loan was more than $24,000 in the 2010-2011 fiscal year. Meanwhile, the average parent loan at Ringling topped $26,000. That's much higher than the average Plus loan across all schools that year: $11,877.
As of late last month, more than 300 schools — representing about 10 percent of all undergrads — had adopted the Education Department's model letter.
Some members of Congress have tried to go further. Earlier this year, Sen. Al Franken sponsored legislation that would make it mandatory for all institutions of higher education to adopt a standardized financial aid award form. The bill is still in committee.
"Students and parents are not getting consistent, accessible and comparable information about college costs and their financial aid offers," Sen. Tom Harkin said in an emailed statement. Harkin is chairman of the Senate education committee and a co-sponsor of Franken's bill. "A concerted effort at all levels — campus, community, state and federal — is necessary to ensure that families have the information they need to make the decision that is best for them."
In a forthcoming law review article, Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School argues that the rise of super PACs and unfettered contributions and spending this election cycle are “effectively ending the post-Watergate era of campaign finance laws.”
To help understand what is shaping up as a watershed election cycle, I asked Briffault to explain the path that took the country from stringent post-Watergate contribution limits through Citizens United to today’s multi-billion-dollar free-for-all.
Briffault has written extensively about the history of campaign finance law. He has filed amicus briefs in cases on the side of defending regulation. His article on super PACs will be published in the Minnesota Law Review.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain how the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo casecreated the foundation of modern campaign finance law?
In the Buckley case the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment applies to campaign finance regulations, but it applies in different ways to different kinds of campaign finance activities. Contributions — that is, giving money to a group, a candidate, or a political party — are less protected. The court said that contributions raise the danger of corruption, that is, that candidates will feel indebted to their large donors, and also that contributions are less pure speech than expenditures.
The court said that an expenditure, which is money being spent on communications to the voters to persuade them how to vote, gets the highest level of protection. The court said that that kind of spending cannot be limited because it comes closer to pure speech and because it raises no danger of corruption.
A particularly difficult question involves what are called independent expenditures. Having reached the limit on the amount of money he is allowed to give a candidate, the donor might then just make an expenditure by taking out his own ads praising the candidate, or condemning the candidate's opponent. In Buckley, the court said that so long as such an expenditure is not formally coordinated with the candidate it will get the full constitutional protection of expenditures.
The first big loophole in the law that politicians exploited became known as “soft money.” The symbol of the soft money era was Democratic donors sleepingin the Lincoln Bedroom under President Clinton. How did that happen?
As a result of some rulings by the Federal Election Commission, the political parties were allowed to accept unlimited donations and corporate and union money so long as the political party used the money not for direct candidate support, but for background activity, like voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives and certain kinds of advertising that avoided express advocacy of the election or defeat of candidates. Because the money did not go for direct support of candidates — although it certainly helped candidates — it was considered “soft money” not subject to the restrictions on the “hard money” used for direct support of candidates.
The parties and their donors started to figure out soft money in the late 80s and it really took off in the 90s, peaking in 2000 and 2002.
So the famous McCain-Feingold law passed in 2002 and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003. Explain the system that law created.
McCain-Feingold stopped the parties from collecting and using soft money. Many experts thought the parties would be hit hard by the soft money ban, but in 2004 they actually replaced all the lost soft money by redoubling their efforts to collect more hard money from individual donors.
However, there was an immediate effort to get around the soft money ban through so-called 527 committees, which were named after a section of the tax code and were in effect a kind of political committee. The idea was that they would act independently of candidates, and engage in issue advocacy that helped candidates but did not expressly support them. The theory of the 527 was that they're not working with the candidates and they're not working with the parties, and they're also not engaged in express electioneering. So they claimed that they could take unlimited individual, corporate, and union contributions.
How big a role did corporate money play in funding these 527s?
There wasn't actually very much corporate money in the groups, but you did see large individual donations to organizations like MoveOn and the anti-John Kerry Swift Boat group. For the first time since Watergate, you began to see the first real appearance of million‑dollar donations.
This is the last time the Federal Election Commission actually took any action. It brought enforcement actions against a number of the prominent 527s and several years later obtained significant multi‑hundred thousand dollar penalties from them. The commission said that a number of the 527s had crossed the line into regulated electioneering and should have abided by the rules limiting contributions and disclosing spending.
The super PAC of today in many ways looks like these 527s from 2004 that were cited for breaking the rules. The difference is the super PACs seem to be acting within the rules. So how did we get from the 527 to the super PAC?
Part of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 limited donations to all political committees, which are defined as organizations that give money to candidates or spend money in support of candidates. That law is on the books from 1974 onward and the Supreme Court upheld it. No one had focused on the idea that there might be some committees that only engage in independent spending, and do not give contributions to candidates, too.
But in the late 2000s, even before Citizens United, some independent committees began to argue "All we're going to do is engage in independent spending. If that's all we're going to do, we should not be subject to any restrictions on our donations."
The Citizens United decision is popularly known for allowing corporate spending in elections. But what did it say about this issue of independent spending?
In the course of striking down the ban on corporate and union independent spending, the Court also said that independent spending does not cause corruption and can’t be limited. The solution to independent spending, the court said, is disclosure and the public reaction to candidates who do the bidding of independent spenders.
A D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case called SpeechNow was moving through the system around the same time as Citizens United and the decision came down a couple months after Citizens United in 2010. The circuit court specifically cited Citizens United and said, in effect, "If there's nothing corrupting about independent spending, then there's nothing corrupting about donations to groups that engage in independent spending, and therefore these donations cannot be limited."
That's how we get the Super PACs.
The argument gets made that, before Citizens United and before SpeechNow, Sheldon Adelson or George Soros could have individually bought $100 million worth of ads. There was nothing stopping them from doing that.
That's right. But in reality it didn’t happen. In theory, George Soros himself could have spent as much money as he wanted as long as it did not involve a committee. The ability to pool money into a super PAC turns out to be very significant.
On the issue of corporate and union expenditures, right now we’re seeing 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groupsthat don’t disclose their donors spending a lot of money, and there are reportsthat at least some of that money is coming from corporations. These types of groups were active in previous elections but not to the extent they are now. How were they previously constrained by the law?
The 70s-era law said that corporations couldn’t engage in independent spending in connection with an election. But "independent spending" was defined as express advocacy – that is, saying explicitly who to vote for. The McCain‑Feingold law redefined independent spending for corporations to include any broadcast message that mentions a candidate's name, within 30 days before primaries or 60 days before a general election. That greatly expanded the scope of the ban on corporate and union spending.
There was a 2007 Supreme Court case, Wisconsin Right to Life, that I think did most of the work that is attributed to Citizens United. It freed up groups funded by corporate or union money to do more in elections. Then Citizens United said that corporations and unions could also spend money on express advocacy. These groups can now contribute to 501(c) organizations that engage in electoral advocacy.
In your forthcoming article you argue, “More than a century after Congress enacted the first restrictions on contributions in federal elections, and thirty-eight years after the comprehensive post-Watergate contribution limits were adopted, we appear to be rapidly heading into an era in which those contribution limits have been rendered functionally meaningless.” How did you come to this conclusion?
It will be interesting to see what the total numbers are when this cycle ends. But if it turns out that as much a significant fraction — perhaps one quarter to one third — of the spending promoting a candidate is being spent by outside groups, and funded by a very, very small number of very, very wealthy people, the candidates are going to know who they are.
The purpose of the law was to reduce the dependency of candidates on large donations, and reduce the danger that office holders will feel dependent on that and reduce the effect of those donations on policy and appointments. If a significant fraction of the money that's helping candidates is coming from a very small number of extremely wealthy people, that puts us back to where we were before.
Here's our latest explainer video, on the storied history of money in politics. Lyrics follow.
Act I: Brown Paper Bags
“I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited [from public service]. I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“I don’t like all the influence of money in politics.” (Mitt Romney)
When people think of Watergate they think of a break-in
But they don’t mention the money that Nixon was taking
From wealthy donors to help him get reelected
Nixon paid them back in favors just like they expected
To battle corruption Congress passed a new law
Capping contributions to a candidate’s haul
The source of the donations had to be disclosed too
And the FEC was formed to enforce the new rules
Some who felt the law went against the Constitution sued
Saying limits on money limited free speech too
So the courts kept the cap on how much you can donate
But said spending was unlimited by an outside group or candidate
That meant no more spending limits to promote a cause
Or to point out a rival campaign’s flaws
So while candidates once snuck around with brown paper bags
From then on they raised money publicly or left it to PACs
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“I don’t like all the influence of money in politics.” (Mitt Romney)
Act II: Soft Money
“We should also curb the role of big money in elections by capping the cost of campaigns…” (Bill Clinton)
In the 80s and 90s, there was a new gimmick:
“Soft money” that’s disclosed but had no limits
It’s supposed to cover each party’s expenses
But guys like Clinton used it to help their election chances
There was just one problem, Clinton’s party was broke
So he asked for more money every time he spoke
And in return for the 100 million dollar cash-in
He let donors use the Lincoln Bedroom to crash in
Then the “scandal and reform” cycle happened again
And legislation was proposed by Feingold and McCain
It capped donations to parties, ending soft funds
And banned corporate/union issue ads right before elections
But with each new reform comes new loopholes
Tax exempt “527s” arose
Because they weren’t explicit about whom they supported
Many still raised money without limits to thwart them
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“I’ve earned every cent.” (Richard Nixon)
“Money is speech.” (Jeff Greenfield)
“The more speech the better.” (Antonin Scalia)
“The rules are what they are…” (Jay Carney)
Act III: Super PACs and Non-Profits
“I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests.” (Barack Obama)
But the most outside money was yet to be spent
Some argued spending limits broke the first amendment
“Corporations and unions are entitled to free speech”
They took it to court, the Supreme Court agreed.
Super PACs can raise as much money as they want
They can also use union and corporate funds
The only rule is they cannot coordinate
With a specific party or a specific candidate
But reform opponents weren’t quite done yet
They found new uses for 501(c)(4) non-profits
Which are a lot like Super PACs with more mystery
They haven’t had to disclose donors ever in history
Whether Republican or Democrat you might believe
That spending limits jeopardize our freedom of speech
But with each new cycle of deregulation
More money is being injected into our elections
In May 1985, a Guatemalan Army lieutenant named Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes deserted, flew to San Francisco and requested political asylum, asserting that leftist guerrillas in his war-torn homeland were gunning for him.
The 27-year-old officer described his combat exploits in his application for asylum. He said he had served as an instructor in the elite "Kaibil" commandos and as a "commanding officer" in Guatemala's bloody civil war.
"It is impossible for me and family to return as we have been sentenced to death due to my participation in the various combats in the conflictive area," he wrote in his asylum application.
Immigration officials rejected his request, but Sosa sought asylum in Canada and became a citizen there. He eventually returned to the United States and became a U.S. citizen as well.
Recently, Sosa's odyssey took an extraordinary turn. The self-proclaimed refugee stands accused of committing mass murder in uniform. Last month, Canada extradited him to Los Angeles to face trial on charges related to one of the worst war crimes in the recent history of the Americas. He had fled north after prosecutors charged him with lying on immigration forms to conceal his alleged role in the slaughter of more than 250 people in the village of Dos Erres in 1982.
Sosa, now a 54-year-old karate instructor, avoided detection for years because of oversights and lack of scrutiny by the Canadian and U.S. governments, according to court documents and interviews with Sosa, his relatives, officials and others. His trial will offer an up-close look at an accused leader of the commando unit implicated in the Dos Erres massacre: a landmark case for the Guatemalan and U.S. governments, which are connected by Guatemala's violent past and present.
During years that many refugees struggled in the shadows, Sosa lived comfortably in North America. He bought a home, operated karate schools and traveled around the world.
"Imagine how different things can be for one person and another," said Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, a survivor of Dos Erres.
Ramírez spent 14 years as an illegal immigrant living near Boston, working two full-time jobs to support four children. His mother and eight siblings died in the massacre, but the 3-year-old Ramírez was abducted by a commando and raised by the officer's family. U.S. authorities recently granted asylum to Ramírez because he is living proof of the mass killing. He has agreed to testify against Sosa.
Sosa, who is jailed in Southern California, insists that he is innocent. He denies eyewitness accounts that he oversaw the killings of men, women and children and threw a grenade into a well piled with victims. He alleges a leftist conspiracy to frame him.
"It's a game being played by the guerrillas," Sosa said during a brief telephone interview last month, when he was still jailed in Calgary, Canada. "It's all a conspiracy." He added: "I am fighting still for my innocence."
Sosa maintains that he was working on a civil affairs project in another village on the day of the massacre. His omissions on U.S. immigration forms were innocent lapses, he says, pointing out that he made no secret of his past when he sought asylum.
"Both governments knew of my Guatemala military membership and my action in war," Sosa wrote in a letter provided to ProPublica by his brother, Hugo. "The United States knew perfectly well that I was a Guatemalan army officer."
Documents and interviews suggest that U.S. officials overlooked or failed to detect records of Sosa's military service at least twice when they reviewed his case. The story also raises questions about why Canada gave him refuge. Although there is no sign immigration officials knew of his alleged crimes, the Canadian government knew of serious accusations against the Guatemalan military: A Canadian diplomat participated in a U.S. investigation that found the army had committed the Dos Erres massacre.
Thirty years later, the case has become a test of Guatemala's fight against lawlessness. Courts have convicted fivesoldiers in the past 14 months. They were the first guilty verdicts in one of the bloodiest massacres in the war, which ended in 1996 and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. Prosecutors have also charged former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in the Dos Erres case, alleging that he was the mastermind of the strategy behind the massacre.
Sosa is the highest-ranking soldier in the commando unit to face trial. Seven suspects, including the unit's two top officers, remain at large in a nation where the security forces, often intertwined with mafias, retain great power. Guatemalan investigators believe some fugitives have been sheltered by the military and others move back and forth across the porous border with Belize.
U.S. authorities have arrested three other fugitive commandos who migrated to the United States. Gilberto Jordán, a former sergeant living in Florida, pleaded guilty to similar charges as those filed against Sosa and is now serving a 10-year sentence in federal prison. Another former sergeant arrested on immigration charges has agreed to testify against Sosa in the federal trial set for Nov. 27 in Riverside, Calif.
Martial Arts Expert
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Born in Guatemala City in 1958, Sosa is the third of six children of a military family.
Their late father was an internationally known karate master who oversaw martial arts training for the Guatemalan military, Sosa's brother, Hugo, said in an interview. Hugo Sosa is a former Guatemalan army captain who now lives in Sacramento, Calif.
The short, sturdily built Jorge Sosa graduated from officer school as a sub-lieutenant in 1979. He held posts in various regions, underwent paratroop training and served as commander of 40 soldiers in an honor guard, according to army records and his account. He won a reputation for martial arts prowess. A former military comrade recalled seeing him take on visiting Taiwanese soldiers in karate matches.
"He was tremendously skilled," said the former soldier, who requested anonymity for his safety. He described Sosa as "gentlemanly and friendly."
Sosa underwent a grueling training program to join the Kaibil commandos, one of the toughest special forces outfits in Latin America. In July 1981, he became a self-defense instructor at the commando training school in the Petén region of Guatemala's northern panhandle, according to military records and his account.
"This group of instructors and sub-instructors get their orders directly from the Director of the Center for Military Studies," Sosa said in his letter provided to ProPublica. "Our mission was to provide counter-insurgency training to selected military personnel though a physical test. This course trained regular troops to become more combat effective against the guerrilla forces."
The 30-year war with leftist guerrilla movements reached its peak in the early 1980s. The rebels assassinated a U.S. ambassador and committed other acts of terrorism, but the United Nations later attributed 93 percent of the human rights violations to the military. The U.N. concluded that the systematic campaign against indigenous groups constituted genocide.
The killing escalated in 1982 when Ríos Montt, a general, came to power after a coup. The commando school closed, and 20 instructors became a rapid reaction force for roving missions in a nationwide offensive against the guerrillas.
Sosa was one of four lieutenants who led this special patrol, though he was the lowest in seniority, according to Guatemalan court files and military records. The commander was Lt. Roberto Aníbal Rivera Martínez, who is still at large, according to the court files and records.
In October 1982, a guerrilla ambush resulted in the deaths of about 20 soldiers and the loss of their rifles. Intelligence later indicated the rifles could be in the vicinity of Dos Erres, a farming hamlet of 60 families deep in the jungle near the Mexican border. Army brass sent in the special commando patrol to recover the rifles and teach the villagers a lesson.
Disguised as guerrillas, the 20-man unit assaulted Dos Erres early in the morning of Dec. 7, backed by a support force of 40 uniformed commandos. The troops did not find the rifles or evidence of guerrilla activity. The raid disintegrated into a frenzy of rape, torture and murder that wiped out almost the entire population of the village, according to Guatemalan and U.S. court files.
The investigation began 14 years later, but it produced unique evidence. Breaking a code of silence, two soldiers became protected witnesses in the 1990s and testified about the slaughter. And prosecutors connected the unit to the massacre with DNA tests and other evidence proving that two boys from Dos Erres were abducted by commandos and grew up in military households.
Abducted Boys
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Lt. Oscar Ramírez Ramos abducted a 3-year-old, now known as Oscar Ramírez Castañeda. The lieutenant died in a traffic accident nine months later, but his family raised Oscar as one of their own.
Sgt. Santos López Alonzo abducted a 5-year-old, Ramiro Osorio Cristales, who unlike Oscar was old enough to remember the attack and his previous life. Alonzo raised the boy in harsh and abusive conditions, according to Guatemalan court files and interviews with Osorio and investigators. When the youth was 22, Guatemalan prosecutors found him, made him a protected witness and got him refugee status in Canada.
The Guatemalan and U.S. investigations identified Sosa as a commander of the assault on Dos Erres. Sosa played a lead role in a hideous scene in the center of the hamlet, according to the former soldiers. Commandos brought blindfolded villagers one by one to the village well, where they were questioned, struck on the head with a sledgehammer and dumped over the side. Soldiers also threw babies and children into the well, which overflowed with corpses by the end of the day.
Sosa not only gave orders, he killed people, according to witnesses. Former commando César Ibañez identified Sosa as one of seven lieutenants and sergeants who executed prisoners at the well, according to a transcript of his testimony in 2000.
Sosa and the others "hit them on the head with a sledgehammer and then threw fragmentation grenades at them so they died," Ibañez testified. "The comment on the part of the officers was that no one had seen anything and that he who opened his mouth should remember that it would be closed forever."
Sosa went into a rage when a villager cursed him from the well, said Favio Pinzón, a former cook for the squad. The wounded man managed to remove his blindfold and found himself lying atop a pile of living and dead bodies, Pinzón told prosecutors in 1996.
"He said to the officer [Sosa] Orantes 'Kill me,'" Pinzón testified. "So the officer answered 'Your mother,' and the gentleman answered 'Your mother, son of the great whore,' so when the officer Orantes saw him he shot him with his rifle, but that was not enough and he threw a grenade into the well."
In the Florida case, the guilty plea of Jordán, one of the former sergeants implicated, included a similar account of a lieutenant firing and throwing a grenade into the well, according to a 2010 presentencing document in which the lieutenant is not named.
Sosa denies the allegations. He asserts that Pinzón and Ibañez were not part of his commando squad and that his squad did not take part in fighting.
"I was not in 'Las Dos Erres,'" he wrote (the bold and underlines are from his letter). "We worked training selected troops. ... We were not combative [sic] troops. "
On the day of the massacre, Sosa says he was working in a civil affairs program in Melchor de Mencos, a town about a hundred miles away. He says participated in the program from October 1982 through March 1983.
"I met with the town's Mayor, military commissioners, and teachers," he wrote. "I went to the Capital City and had interviews with some Guatemalan Ministers and I was able to secure help for the citizens of Melchor de Mencos: 16 mobile libraries for the schools, educational materials (such as blackboards, chalk, books, pens, pencils, crayons), and sporting goods. ... We also helped in the construction of the 'Salsipuedes' town school. I sponsored a basketball team named 'Jimbas.'"
It's unclear whether Sosa can produce witnesses or other evidence to support his version of events.
"I know there are witnesses, the question is finding them," his brother said in a telephone interview.
The Sosas argue that the massacre may have really been committed by rebels, but that defense has been discredited by the confessions of military men in Guatemalan and U.S. courts.
Guatemalan prosecutor Sara Romero, who has spent 16 years investigating the case, dismissed the alibi.
"It's a lie," she said in a telephone interview. "We have witnesses who saw him throw a grenade in the well. He was one of the chiefs of the patrol. He was there."
Sosa's trial will feature unprecedented testimony from a new witness: Alonzo, the ex-sergeant who raised the 5-year-old boy from Dos Erres. In 2010, federal agents in Texas arrested Alonzo on charges of illegal re-entry after deportation. He was sentenced to time served and agreed to testify for the prosecution. He is now being held as a material witness in Southern California.
Documents in the Canadian extradition file indicate that Alonzo will identify Sosa as a commanding officer and describe Sosa's involvement in the massacre. The boy Alonzo abducted, Osorio, is now 35. In a telephone interview from Canada, Osorio said he is glad the former sergeant will testify.
"Everyone has to pay for what they did," Osorio said. "The psychology of these soldiers is really ugly. I think these elite military men in Dos Erres were people trained to destroy, to kill everything in front of them. They were a machine."
Assassination Attempts
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Sosa remained in the Army for two and a half years after the massacre, according to military records.
In 1984, he took an assignment training cadets at the military academy in Guatemala City. In July of that year, he says he spent a week on vacation in Florida with other officers, entering with official military passports. He cites this visit as one reason that the U.S. government should have known about his army service.
A year later, however, his career came to an abrupt end. The reasons for his departure to California in early May 1985 are murky.
Sosa provided the Canadian courts and ProPublica with pages from his 1985 asylum application that say he did his combat missions on "orders from the high echelons of the military" and that he had been "sentenced to death."
"He had caused so many casualties for the guerrillas that they wanted to kill him," his brother Hugo said in the interview.
But Sosa and his relatives now make an assertion that is not in the pages of the U.S. asylum application: He had grown disenchanted with the war and was fleeing from the military as well.
"I escaped from Guatemala on May 10, 1985 because I was not happy ... with the Guatemala army in the way they were dealing with the war," Sosa wrote recently in a letter to Amnesty International, obtained by ProPublica. "And also for the constant threats and attacks from the Guerrilla forces toward my family and myself."
Sosa survived three assassination attempts, according to his brother. Fellow soldiers tried to kill the lieutenant and his father because of internal feuds, his brother said.
"He left because there were threats against the family," Hugo Sosa said. "The perpetrators were both the guerrilla forces and the army. Lamentably, there were envies in the armed forces. Many did not like us because of envy. We knew some of the attacks were done by G-2, which is military intelligence. ... He had many achievements, many medals. He had obtained good posts. This created envy."
In one attack in 1985, Hugo Sosa said, intelligence officers with automatic weapons ambushed Jorge Sosa and his father while they drove in the Guatemalan capital. The Sosas fended off the assailants by drawing their own guns, according to the brother's account.
Sosa's former military comrade said he had heard that intelligence officers wanted to kill Sosa. Rather than envy, however, he cited a different motive: He said military intelligence targeted Sosa because of a dispute having to do with his personal life.
Sosa's brother said he knew nothing about that allegation. Sosa's military service record says he was discharged as a deserter on May 20, 1985.
Welcomed by Canada
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Sosa arrived in California with his wife and a young daughter, according to his account and U.S. records. His parents and a sister also came to San Francisco. The new arrivals lived with Hugo Sosa, who had moved there earlier after marrying a U.S. citizen.
The Sosas were part of an exodus of Central Americans fleeing wars. Military men were a minority compared to refugees from persecution by the Guatemalan armed forces, which had the longtime backing of the U.S. government, though ex-soldiers won asylum as well.
Three months after Sosa applied for asylum, the State Department's asylum office sent an advisory opinion to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service finding that he had not proved a well-founded fear of persecution, according to a State Department letter in August 1985. The INS informed him of its decision to reject his asylum request in a letter dated Sept. 19, 1985, records show. The INS began deportation proceedings, documents show.
Sosa remained in San Francisco for three years while he and his family sought political asylum at the Canadian consulate, documents show. Canada had a more generous asylum policy than the United States at the time.
Sosa's background invited scrutiny. He says he described his military service in his asylum request to Canada and that U.S. officials communicated with Canadian counterparts about his case. If so, that means he made it clear he was an officer and combat veteran in an elite unit of an army that was internationally notorious for massacres, torture and corruption.
In addition, the Canadian government had specific knowledge of the Dos Erres massacre. Tips about the incident had reached the U.S. embassy from Guatemalan government sources at a time when diplomats were under pressure to look into reports of military massacres across Guatemala, according to State Department cables declassified by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
As a result, three U.S. embassy officials traveled from the capital to northern Guatemala on Dec. 30, 1982, three weeks after the massacre, and conducted an inquiry. They were accompanied by the first secretary of the Canadian embassy, according to the cables.
The U.S. officials concluded that the Guatemalan army had wiped out the village, the cable says. The Canadian diplomat, meanwhile, "was unsure of what to conclude from what he had seen and specifically was reluctant to speculate as to who might have destroyed Dos R's", the cable says.
Despite the Canadian's hesitant response, the cable shows that Canadian diplomats knew about serious allegations against the Guatemalan military — and the U.S. view that Dos Erres was the work of soldiers. Assuming Sosa detailed his Army service in his asylum request, Canadian immigration officials could have seen that he served as an officer in northern Guatemala and other violent areas during years when the army was accused of wholesale abuses.
Sosa and his brother say Canada gave him political asylum. But Canadian justice and immigration officials, citing privacy restrictions, would not discuss the type of status he received and whether Sosa's military history was a consideration. Regardless, Sosa and his family moved to Canada as legal immigrants in 1988 and he became a citizen in 1992, according to documents and his account.
Francisco Rico Martínez, a longtime advocate of Central American refugees in Canada, said Canada has accepted other former Central American soldiers with questionable pasts.
"The acceptance rate was very high back then," Rico said. "There were a lot of deficiencies in the system that have been corrected. I am not surprised he entered."
The Sosas moved to Lethbridge in the province of Alberta. The father and son set up a karate school. But Sosa soon divorced his wife, with whom he had two children, and went to New York to teach karate.
"He came to the United States because he divorced," his brother said. "He came to improve himself. Business is stronger here than in Canada."
In the 1990s, Sosa met a Guatemalan-born woman in New York, a U.S. citizen who was the mother of one of his karate students, according to public records and her account. They began a relationship. Sosa settled in New York and the two were married. She now believes he manipulated her in order to obtain his immigration papers.
"He fooled me," said the woman, who asked to be identified by only her first name, Sonia, to protect her family's safety. "He is not honest. He married me to get residency. In his head, I imagine he wanted to achieve that. He is a very strange person."
Sosa made no secret of his military past, though he never mentioned the Dos Erres massacre, Sonia said. He told her he had left Guatemala fleeing the guerillas and the army, according to her account.
"I never understood why the military was persecuting him," she said.
Sonia believes that Sosa's wartime commando experience had a damaging psychological effect on him.
"Being a Kaibil is a very strong thing," she said. "You have to be very centered for it not to affect you. He had like a double personality."
Missed Clues in U.S.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Thanks to his marriage to Sonia, Sosa sought a green card.
U.S. prosecutors charge that he lied on his application for permanent residency and during an interview with a U.S. immigration officer on Nov. 30, 1998, according to the Canadian extradition file. When asked if he had done foreign military service, Sosa answered "none," according to the file.
Thirteen years earlier, however, he had described his military experience as the basis of his failed U.S. asylum request in California. In 1998, U.S. immigration officials already had an existing file number for him because of the earlier asylum bid, documents show.
Why didn't the officials in New York spot the contradiction with the previous California documents?
The answer involves a shift by the INS from paper files to digital recordkeeping in the early 1990s, according to two DHS officials. The INS officers who reviewed Sosa's case would have seen in his file that he had applied for political asylum in the past, the officials said. But to see details such as his past military service, they would have had to request the 1985 file from paper archives, where pre-1990 cases are kept, a DHS official said.
"When someone files for a green card, the individual goes through a thorough background check," the DHS officials said. "But they routinely don't go into that level of scrutiny as far as requesting a cold case file. They are relying on background checks, FBI fingerprints and so on."
Sosa's omission slipped by. He received his green card in 1998. He left his wife and moved to California, where he settled in Riverside County east of Los Angeles, according to his brother, ex-wife and public records.
In 2000, as a fledgling democracy took hold in Guatemala, prosecutors there charged Sosa and the rest of the commando squad for the Dos Erres massacre. The power of the army and a flurry of appeals by defense lawyers kept the case in limbo, impeding arrests for a decade. The Guatemalan media reported on the case and Sosa was aware of the charges, according to his brother.
Over the decade, Sosa did well. He worked as an office manager but focused increasingly on teaching karate, setting up four schools in Southern California, according to his brother. Sosa gave frequent martial arts seminars overseas, traveling at least once a year to countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Japan and Mexico, according to his family.
Sosa divorced Sonia in 2006 and remarried in California, according to his brother and public records. In 2007, he applied for U.S. citizenship in San Bernardino, Calif., court records show.
Federal prosecutors accuse him of committing three crimes during the application process and an interview with an immigration officer on March 18, 2008.
On his citizenship form, Sosa responded negatively to a question asking if he had committed a crime for which he had not been arrested, when in fact, an indictment alleges, "he had committed crimes including but not limited to murder at Dos Erres." Asked about past membership in organizations, he failed to mention the Guatemalan army, the indictment says. And it says he denied giving false information in the past, despite having concealed his military service on his green card application in 1998.
Sosa defends himself by asserting that officials should have known about his military service from their records. He cites his response to question No. 27 on the citizenship application that mentions his asylum request, which had described his combat experience.
"The first time I and my family entered into the United States was on May 10, 1985," Sosa wrote, according to a page from the citizenship form. "I submitted a political asylum application in San Francisco, California. It was at a later time that I submitted my case to the Canadian embassy."
Sosa's written answer further explained that U.S. officials rejected his asylum request and ordered his deportation, but canceled the order after learning that Canada accepted him as an immigrant in 1988. The answer to the question does not specifically cite his military service.
If U.S. officers had asked Sosa about his reasons for requesting political asylum in the United States and Canada, it seems logical that the questions might have elicited disclosure of his military past.
By 2008 the prosecution of the Dos Erres case had received news coverage in Guatemala and beyond. Sosa said in his letter that he also disclosed his army record when he testified on behalf of a fellow Guatemalan in a San Francisco immigration court in 1986 and 1987.
Immigrants routinely run into problems with the system because of inaccuracies or omissions on forms and in interviews. But in 2008 as in 1998, Sosa apparently did not raise enough interest to warrant retrieving the file on the rejected asylum request or even asking him about it. Moreover, officials point out, he had gone through a previous round of screening to obtain the green card.
The U.S. government granted citizenship to Sosa in September 2008.
The accused war criminal had avoided detection once again.
Three months later, though, an investigator at the Department of Homeland Security opened an inquiry into Sosa related to Dos Erres, according to U.S. court documents.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had recently ruled against Guatemala for its failure to pursue the massacre prosecution. The court, which is based in Costa Rica and is a regional arbiter for major human rights disputes, published the list of suspects. The war crimes unit of Homeland Security took an interest in the list and identified Sosa and three other fugitives who had come to the United States as immigrants.
After a lengthy investigation in Florida, Texas, California and elsewhere, in May 2010 federal agents searched Sosa's home in Moreno Valley east of Los Angeles. Sosa left for Mexico soon afterward. In January of last year, he traveled from Mexico to Canada. Police tracked him down in Lethbridge, where his parents still lived.
Because Canadian courts have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, Canada could have prosecuted Sosa for the massacre. Authorities also could have extradited him to Guatemala to stand trial.
Instead, Canada chose to extradite him to the United States to be tried for the immigration crimes, which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years. Canadian officials declined to comment on that decision.
Guatemalan prosecutor Romero said she was disappointed. She said a Guatemalan extradition request to Canada went unheeded.
"The U.S. is judging him for a minor offense that is immigration," she said. "It postpones our case."
U.S. federal officials say the extradition is part of a crackdown on human rights abusers who seek refuge here. They say it also bolsters the Guatemalan prosecutions. Some evidence used to convict the commandos in Guatemala last year came from U.S. investigations. If convicted, Sosa faces eventual loss of his citizenship and deportation to Guatemala.
"I think it's a very significant case," said Claude Arnold, the special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles and a former chief of the war crimes unit. "It's always good to get someone in a leadership role. ... Although it's an immigration case, we gather all the evidence as if we were prosecuting him for a war crime. Our goal is to help our international partners."
Politics and Punishment
The Sosas say the prosecution is politically motivated. They blame Guatemalan human rights activists looking to settle old scores.
"The famous human rights people, since they haven't succeeded in accusing the masterminds, they look for someone to pay," said Hugo Sosa. "They are people of the guerrillas. The U.S. government doesn't know what happened in the war. They base what they do on what the ex-guerrillas say, the ones who are now involved in human rights."
Sosa claims he is protected by an amnesty law in Guatemala for participants in the civil war and that the charges against him in his homeland have been annulled. He says his record his clean.
"I desperately need people to know that I have NOT committed a crime nor do I have a criminal mind," he said in his letter. "I have lived in North America for around 25 years and have absolutely no criminal record. I have been dedicated to helping immigrants that come to North America. In our Martial Arts traditional teachings, we teach respect and support for our neighbours; peace and love between all human beings; and to avoid any fights or confrontations without sense."
Guatemalan prosecutors point out that the amnesty law has a specific exception for crimes against humanity that has enabled the convictions in the Dos Erres case. Prosecutor Romero said the charges against Sosa have not been annulled. Sosa would be arrested and tried if he set foot in Guatemala, Romero said.
Osorio, the survivor abducted from Dos Erres as a boy, was startled last year when police informed him that Sosa had been caught in Canada and was a fellow Canadian citizen. If the charges against Sosa are true, he was a commander of the troops who stormed into Osorio's home and slaughtered his family.
Osorio has watched the case with disbelief. He finds it disturbing that Sosa might have manipulated the system in two countries and evaded capture for years.
"It is an injustice," Osorio said. "When I came to Canada as a refugee, I was asked if I had participated in any massacres. And I was a survivor of a massacre. This man had three nationalities. He came and went as he pleased. The state gives people like him the power to kill. They abuse power. That sense of arrogance stays with them. But then, when the hour comes for them to pay for what they did, they deny their crimes."
On Aug. 7, Mel Roseman, a retired school teacher in Los Angeles, received an email from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asking him to give a political donation of five dollars. Fifteen minutes later, he received another — almost identical — email, sent to the same address. But the second email asked him for $25.
It wasn’t the first time he had received near-duplicate messages. When he looked through his emails he found that pairs of messages from the DSCC had been arriving within an hour of each another since 2010. Digging further, he saw that there were other subtle differences. For instance, one version began with the salutation “Melvin J” and the other was addressed to both him and his wife, “Mel and Gladys Roseman.” In 2010, Mel had donated to the DSCC twice, on separate occasions, and had filled out the name field in the donation form with a different name each time. Somehow, the software at the DSCC failed to make the connection, and what’s more had decided that “Melvin J” was likely to be the more generous donor than “Mel and Gladys Roseman.”
Because Mr. Roseman volunteers for a non-profit internet service provider, he told us, “I receive more than one hundred messages a day, but I didn’t pay any attention to” the messages from the DSCC. At least, until he signed up for ProPublica’s Message Machine.
In this campaign season, ProPublica’s Message Machine project has collected more than 30,000 political emails, and identified more than 2,000 distinct mailings with more more than 4,000 variations. For each email blast, the Machine creates a computer model using an artificial intelligence technique called a Decision Tree. These computer models provide hints about the ways that political campaigns microtarget their constituents to optimize donations or some other political activity. Today, you can view the results of these models.
As of this writing, the Machine’s most confident about its models for the Obama for America campaign, though it creates a model for every email from every campaign. Each email in Message machine has an icon denoting the strength of its model.
The amount of data in the Message Machine represents a very small sample of the enormous databases assembled by the campaigns and parties. The model for each email represents our best attempt to understand how the campaigns’ decide which constituent receives which version. The models will get better when they are trained with more data, so if you receive emails from campaigns, forward them to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org.
For the more mathematically inclined, we’ve got a full explanation of our methodology.
Across all campaigns in the Machine, the most significant difference between emails in a single message blast is perhaps unsurprising: campaigns change the amount of money they ask for based on how much you’ve donated in the past. In Obama for America’s case, many emails contain a “quick donate” box that asks for more money when a particular constituent saves his credit card information. Because only previous donors see this box, we use it as a signal that the recipient has given money in the past.
While coverage earlier this election cycle noted the prevalence of the $3 donation request in Obama for America’s emails — Politico called it a “magic number” — this small request is just for starters. Some Obama supporters who had previously donated are often asked for $500.
Along these lines, Obama for America sent emails to supporters from the 2008 election who donated more than $2,000 that cycle, asking for them to match their 2008 support this election cycle. But supporters who donated any amount in 2008 have caught the campaign’s eye: like this message, asking 2008 supporters to “chip in” sent on July 29.
For its get-out-the-vote operations, Obama for America also targets supporters based on their physical location. Voters in swing states can receive slightly different messages than those who live in safer states. In many email blasts from Obama for America, the campaign urges voters from non-swing states to travel to competitive neighboring states.
Obama for America also considers a constituent’s age when writing email blasts. On May 29th, the campaign sent out an email with the subject “Good morning”, and in a variation sent to people aged 18 to 27 it said the campaign would “pick up the tab for you and a guest,” if the recipient entered a contest. The variation sent to slightly older people — with, presumably, more disposable income — did not include that phrase.
Despite many attempts to get them to help us understand their techniques, or even to respond to our work on the record, the campaigns remain tight-lipped about the methods they use to microtarget their supporters, and the amount of data they have on voters because, they tell us, they do not want to give up any advantage to their opponents. Adam Fletcher, a press officer for Obama for America, when contacted about our previous story on the campaign’s digital efforts, declined to participate “in stories about our technology/digital strategy for the simple fact that we don’t want the other side to get a heads-up.”
But there are hints at the ways campaigns craft and segment emails. In an undated article for the industry newsletter Winning Campaigns, Ken Strasma, Obama’s head of targeting in 2008, wrote about some of the techniques used in microtargeting. He outlined a list of computer algorithms traditionally used in private sector marketing, “there are a great many statistical techniques that can be used in microtargeting including regression analysis, segmentation techniques like CHAID and CART, and newer techniques,” and continued, “Phones, mail, door-knocking, even cable, radio and broadcast television can be targeted to the most appropriate target universes, saving the campaign money and delivering the campaign’s messages to the most receptive audiences.”
The Obama, and Romney campaigns did not respond to requests about exactly how much they spend on their email operations. An analysis of Obama for America’s emails indicate they send most messages from Blue State Digital’s servers. According to FEC filings, the campaign has paid Blue State Digital more than two and a half million dollars for that service, since 2011. A similar analysis of the Romney campaign messages show that they send their emails from servers run by Targeted Victory, a firm founded by Zac Moffat, who is now Romney’s digital director. This election season the campaign has paid Targeted Victory more than thirteen million dollars, which includes some ads bought by Targeted Victory on behalf of the campaign.
The DSCC did not respond to a request for comments about this story.
The Message Machine will continue to collect emails through the rest of the political season and beyond. Our code will get better at finding targeted emails as more data comes in. If you get campaign emails and would like to discover how the campaigns are targeting you, please forward your political emails to emails@messagemachine.propublica.org.
Rep. Bill Owens, D-N.Y., running for reelection in a tight race in northern New York, is under attack over a trip to Taiwan that broke House ethics rules.
In May, ProPublica first reported that the 2011 trip Owens took with his wife was organized by Park Strategies, the lobbying firm of former senator Al D’Amato that works for the government of Taiwan. House ethics rules bar members of Congress from taking most trips organized by lobbyists. Owens reimbursed the $22,000 cost of the trip after our story was published.
Now, Republican challenger Matt Doheny has taken aim at Owens over the issue. This ad has been running on Albany TV stations since Oct. 3 and in Watertown since Oct. 9, according to the Doheny campaign:
During a debate Tuesday hosted by NBC affiliate WPTZ, Owens was also asked what he learned from the Taiwan trip episode.
“That’s a thing that can happen in this complex world that we live in and we need to act responsible and take responsibility for it,” Owens said.
MODERATOR: Last Christmas, you and your wife took a trip to Taiwan. Four days, $20,000, trip arranged by lobbyists. After the details were made public on a website, you reimbursed for the expense of that trip. What did you learn from that episode?
OWENS: Well, we thought that we were abiding by the rules. There were some questions raised. In response to those questions we decided to take the step of repaying that money. And we believe that still we did everything in accordance with the rules to the best of our knowledge at the time. And we took the step that we thought was appropriate to correct it by paying that money back. That’s a thing that can happen in this complex world that we live in, and we need to act responsible and take responsibility for it.
This year’s race in the 21st district is a rematch from 2010; that year, a third candidate ran on the Conservative line and Owens barely beat his challenger Doheny.
An internal Doheny campaign poll released earlier this month showed him trailing Congressman Owens by five points among likely voters. A poll in early September showed Doheny trailing by 13 points.
The idea behind the Independent Foreclosure Review seems simple. During the peak of the foreclosure crisis, the banks broke laws and made errors that hurt homeowners. In response, the government mandated they compensate the victims.
But there is growing evidence some banks are playing a major role in identifying the victims of their own abuses, raising the question of whether the review is compromised by conflicts of interest.
Last week we reported that Bank of America, according to bank employees and internal memos and emails, is performing much of the work itself. Now, a ProPublica examination of contracts that outline what work the banks would do on the review shows that America's four largest banks all planned to participate heavily in evaluating whether homeowners were harmed. Three of the four banks would even help set how much compensation victimized homeowners would receive.
The four banks — Wells Fargo, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America — together account for about three quarters of the 4.4 million homeowners eligible for the program.
The review was designed to work like this: Each bank or mortgage servicer would hire an "independent consultant" to evaluate that bank's foreclosure cases, identify who was harmed and determine how much compensation each victim deserved. The maximum cash compensation a homeowner can receive through the review is $125,000. No money has been awarded yet.
However, the secrecy of the program makes it impossible to know for sure how it's actually being conducted. After being pushed by Congress and borrower advocates, bank regulators publicly posted the contracts between each bank and the consultant each hired last year to provide the "independent" review of foreclosure cases. It's these contracts that show that the banks planned to perform much of the work themselves.
Yet the main regulator for the biggest banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), said the contracts don't accurately describe how the reviews work now. "Much has changed," OCC spokesman Bryan Hubbard told ProPublica.
The OCC did confirm that some banks' mortgage servicing divisions are coming up with "self-identified findings of harm/no harm" and presenting them to the independent consultants. But the OCC would not specify which banks are doing this.
Moreover, said Hubbard, any such finding by the banks "does not influence the consultant."
Advocates disagree. "It's hard to imagine that it doesn't influence the outcome," said Alys Cohen of the National Consumer Law Center. "The consultant is supposed to act like an arbiter between the mortgage servicer and the homeowner — except the consultant is not only paid by the servicer, the servicer can put their finger on the scale. Meanwhile, the homeowner is totally in the dark once they send in their application."
What the Contracts Say
Like Bank of America, the other three big banks hired their "independent consultants" last year. Their contracts all describe a similar process for handling homeowner claims: After a homeowner submits a form detailing the bank's ostensible errors or abuses, the bank itself would perform a review of the case to determine if the homeowner was victimized by the bank's own practices. The bank would then pass on its findings to the consultant, which would make the final decision of how much compensation, if any, the homeowner would receive. The program launched in November of 2011, a couple of months after the contracts were signed.
Two companies — Promontory Financial Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) — won half of the contracts awarded so far: Promontory is handling the reviews for three banks, PwC for four.
Wells Fargo's contract with Promontory states that the bank would "process the complaint, prepare a recommended disposition, and provide the complaint, the recommendation, and supporting documentation to Promontory for independent review and decisioning [sic]."
Promontory, which is also serving as the consultant for Bank of America's foreclosure review, referred ProPublica back to the same comment it made in response to our previous story and declined to comment further. In response to Bank of America internal documents that indicated Promontory would be relying on Bank of America's analysis for its determinations, a Promontory spokeswoman called the bank's work merely "clerical" and said Promontory employees analyze the material assembled by Bank of America "independently with no involvement from the servicer."
Wells Fargo did not directly respond to ProPublica's questions about whether its employees were analyzing homeowners' files. Instead, spokeswoman Vickee Adams said the bank's role "is focused on providing relevant documents and information to the independent consultants, clarifying or confirming facts or findings and providing all details surrounding the events that occurred related to the foreclosure process."
Citibank's contract language with its consultant, PwC, is very similar to Wells Fargo's. "It is the responsibility of Citibank to prepare the case file and conduct the initial review of the complaint," it states. "Citibank will then forward the in-scope complaints, a report of Citibank's findings and its proposed resolution to PwC for independent review."
A PwC spokesperson declined to comment. Citi spokesman Mark Rodgers said only, "We are compliant with the process we agreed to with the regulators."
Neither Chase nor Deloitte responded directly to ProPublica's questions about the bank's role in the reviews. "We continue to work closely with the Independent Consultant, the regulators and the consortium [of banks involved in the program] on the final steps in the Independent Foreclosure Review process," was the entire response from Chase spokeswoman Amy Bonitatibus.
"We are conducting an independent review of the files and it is that review alone that will drive our recommendations," said Deloitte spokesman Jonathan Gandal. "Beyond that, we are not at liberty to discuss matters pertaining to our services."
Smaller Banks
The contracts of many smaller banks are different. The contracts of four banks — Ally Financial/GMAC, MetLife Bank, U.S. Bank, and Sovereign Bank — have clauses that say the banks would gather documents for the consultant's review, but there is no mention of their employees actually analyzing the files and forwarding recommendations to the independent consultants. One bank, OneWest, had no language at all in its contract about bank employees gathering documents or reviewing files. OneWest declined to comment.
The contract between GMAC Mortgage, the fifth largest servicer, and PwC states that GMAC is "responsible for assembling the documents necessary for the review" and should see which files require "immediate action." (The parent company for GMAC Mortgage, which declared bankruptcy earlier this year, is Ally Financial.)
GMAC spokeswoman Susan Fitzpatrick said the servicer only reviewed complaints when the homeowner had not yet been foreclosed on. The purpose of those reviews, she said, was to postpone the foreclosure sale before it occurred if it appeared that any errors had taken place. Regulators have said homeowners who submit complaints while still in foreclosure will "receive expedited attention."
GMAC is not reviewing the files of homeowners who have already lost their homes, said Fitzpatrick, and the servicer "will not propose borrower resolutions," she said. PwC alone makes the final assessment, she said.
PwC declined to comment.
Regulators Differ
The OCC is the primary regulator for most of the 14 banks conducting the foreclosure reviews, but the Federal Reserve oversees four of them. The Fed says that none of its banks are performing regular analyses of the borrower complaints.
But some of the banks overseen by the Fed do have language in their contracts saying the banks themselves would be reviewing the homeowners' complaints. SunTrust, for instance, has language in its contract very similar to what's in Bank of America's. The Fed is also overseeing the review for a subsidiary of Chase, EMC Mortgage Corporation, which has the same language in its contract that Chase does for its main servicing divisions.
Federal Reserve spokeswoman Barbara Hagenbaugh said that regardless of the contracts, none of the servicers it is overseeing are forwarding analyses of the homeowner files to the consultant. "For a brief period of time early in the process, we understand one servicer forwarded a preliminary analysis of files to its consultant," she said. "The consultant has assured us these files were not relied on for its assessments and those analyses are no longer forwarded.
"Federal Reserve examiners are monitoring the consultants and servicers closely to ensure the process remains independent."
By contrast, the OCC described a general procedure followed by the banks it oversees that includes the bank analyzing the homeowners' files and forwarding that analysis to the consultant.
"[The] servicer generally performs its own review of how it administered the file, and will communicate its rationale and self-identified findings of harm/no harm to the independent consultant," the OCC's Hubbard wrote in an email to ProPublica. "The independent consultant may review the servicer's rationale/findings, but will conduct its own review and draw its own conclusions."
The Transportation Security Administration has been quietly removing its X-ray body scanners from major airports over the last few weeks and replacing them with machines that radiation experts believe are safer.
The TSA says it made the decision not because of safety concerns but to speed up checkpoints at busier airports. It means, though, that far fewer passengers will be exposed to radiation because the X-ray scanners are being moved to smaller airports.
The backscatters, as the X-ray scanners are known, were swapped out at Boston Logan International Airport in early October. Similar replacements have occurred at Los Angeles International Airport, Chicago O'Hare, Orlando and John F. Kennedy in New York, the TSA confirmed Thursday.
The X-ray scanners have faced a barrage of criticism since the TSA began rolling them out nationwide after the failed underwear bombing on Christmas Day 2009. One reason is that they emit a small dose of ionizing radiation, which at higher levels has been linked to cancer.
In addition, privacy advocates decried that the machines produce images, albeit heavily blurred, of passengers' naked bodies. Each image must be reviewed by a TSA officer, slowing security lines.
The replacement machines, known as millimeter-wave scanners, rely on low-energy radio waves similar to those used in cell phones. The machines detect potential threats automatically and quickly using a computer program. They display a generic cartoon image of a person's body, mitigating privacy concerns.
"They're not all being replaced," TSA spokesman David Castelveter said. "It's being done strategically. We are replacing some of the older equipment and taking them to smaller airports. That will be done over a period of time."
He said the TSA decided to move the X-ray machines to less-busy airports after conducting an analysis of processing time and staffing requirements at the airports where the scanners are installed.
The radiation risk and privacy concerns had no bearing on the decision, Castelveter said.
Asked about the changes, John Terrill, a spokesman for Rapiscan — which makes the X-ray scanners — wrote in an email, "No comment on this."
The TSA is not phasing out X-ray body scanners altogether. The backscatter machines are still used for screening at a few of America's largest 25 airports, but the TSA has not confirmed which ones. Last week, Gateway Airport in Mesa, Ariz., installed two of the machines.
Moreover, in late September, the TSA awarded three companies potential contracts worth up to $245 million for the next generation of body scanners — and one of the systems, made by American Science & Engineering, uses backscatter X-ray technology.
The United States remains one of the only countries in the world to X-ray passengers for airport screening. The European Union prohibited the backscatters last year "in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens' health and safety," according to a statement at the time. The last scanners were removed from Manchester Airport in the United Kingdom last month.
The X-ray scanner looks like two blue refrigerator-sized boxes. Unseen to the passenger, a thin beam scans left and right and up and down. The rays reflect back to the scanner, creating an image of the passenger's body and any objects hidden under his or her clothes.
The millimeter-wave scanner looks like a round glass booth. Two rotating antennas circle the passenger, emitting radio frequency waves. Instead of creating a picture of the passenger's body, a computer algorithm looks for anomalies and depicts them as yellow boxes on a cartoon image of the body.
According to many studies, including a new one conducted by the European Union, the radiation dose from the X-ray scanner is extremely small. It has been repeatedly measured to be less than the dose received from cosmic radiation during two minutes of the airplane flight.
Using those measurements, radiation experts have studied the cancer risk, with estimates ranging from six to 100 additional cancer cases among the 100 million people who fly every year. Many scientists say that is trivial, considering that those same 100 million people would develop 40 million cancers over the course of their lifetimes. And others, including the researchers who did the EU study, have said that so much is unknown about low levels of radiation that such estimates shouldn't be made.
Still, the potential risks have led some prominent scientists to argue that the TSA is unnecessarily endangering the public because it has an alternative — the millimeter-wave machine — which it also deems highly effective at finding explosives.
"Why would we want to put ourselves in this uncertain situation where potentially we're going to have some cancer cases?" David Brenner, director of Columbia University's Center for Radiological Research, told ProPublica last year. "It makes me think, really, why don't we use millimeter waves when we don't have so much uncertainty?"
Although there has been some doubt about the long-term safety of the type of radio frequency waves used in the millimeter-wave machines, scientists say that, in contrast to X-rays, such waves have no known mechanism to damage DNA and cause cancer.
The TSA has said that having both technologies encourages competition, leading to better detection capabilities at a lower cost.
But tests in Europe and Australia suggest the millimeter-wave machines have some drawbacks. They were found to have a high false-alarm rate, ranging from 23 percent to 54 percent when figures have been released. Even common things such as folds in clothing and sweat have triggered the alarm.
In contrast, Manchester Airport officials told ProPublica that the false-alarm rate for the backscatter was less than 5 percent.
No study comparing the two machines' effectiveness has been released. The TSA says its own results are classified.
Each week, the agency reports on various knives, powdered drugs and even an explosives detonator used for training that have been found by the body scanners.
But Department of Homeland Security investigators reported last year that they had "identified vulnerabilities" with both types of machines. And House transportation committee chairman John Mica, R-Fla., who has seen the results, has called the scanners "badly flawed."
by Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Emma Schwartz, Frontline
A western nonprofit that played a key role in freeing corporate spending on elections nationwide appears to have misled the IRS when it applied for the tax-exempt status that shields its donors from being publicly disclosed.
Documents obtained by ProPublica and Frontline show that Western Tradition Partnership, now known as American Tradition Partnership, said it would not attempt to sway elections when it asked the IRS to recognize it as a tax-exempt social welfare organization in late 2008.
Shortly before submitting the application, however, Western Tradition Partnership, which bills itself as a "grassroots lobbying" organization dedicated to fighting radical environmentalists, and a related political committee sent out fliers weighing in on candidates for Montana state office. The mailers blitzed districts in Montana days before the Republican primary.
Donny Ferguson, listed as the national director of media of American Tradition Partnership on the group's website, did not return a call or an email for comment.
Social welfare nonprofits — also called dark money groups because they are not required to identify their donors — have poured tens of millions of dollars into state and federal elections in recent years.
As spelled out in the tax code, the primary purpose of such groups is not supposed to be political. Yet a ProPublica story published in August showed that dozens of social welfare nonprofits, some formed in the run-up to the 2010 election, had underreported the extent of their political spending and activities to the IRS.
Western Tradition Partnership, though little-known outside Montana and Colorado, is not just any social welfare nonprofit.
Its lawsuit challenging Montana's ban on corporations buying independent political ads led to a ruling this June by the U.S. Supreme Court that effectively extended the court's 2010 Citizens United decision to all states.
For the last two years, Western Tradition Partnership has been locked in a dispute with Montana authorities over whether it should be subject to the state's rules for political committees.
After its mailings before the 2008 primary, the group and its political committee, the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, which uses the same federal employer identification number, sent out more fliers criticizing or praising candidates in the general election.
The group engaged in similar activities before state elections in 2010 in both Montana and Colorado. One of its fliers featured the face of Colorado state Sen. Gail Schwartz, a Democrat, grafted onto Donald Trump's body, with the tagline, "You're Fired!"
In October 2010, Montana's Commissioner on Political Practices issued a report finding that the group's purpose was "to directly influence candidate elections through surreptitious means." The commissioner determined that the group should have registered as a political committee and reported its donors and should be fined.
Western Tradition Partnership has sued the state over the ruling. The case is set for a hearing in March.
When it applied for IRS recognition in the latter half of 2008, Western Tradition Partnership explicitly said it would not be involved in elections.
"The organization will not directly or indirectly participate or intervene on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate for public office," the group wrote in its application, submitted under penalty of perjury.
Western Tradition Partnership also asked the IRS for expedited recognition, saying that without it, the group's principal donor, Jacob Jabs, would pull a planned grant of $300,000.
Identifying Jabs was a highly unusual step: Social welfare nonprofits almost never disclose their donors.
Jabs appears to be the head of American Furniture Warehouse in Colorado, the state's largest furniture retailer. He did not return calls made to his office.
Athena Dalton, who signed the request letter, and Scott Shires, a Republican operative from Colorado who signed Western Tradition Partnership's IRS application, also did not return calls for comment.
The IRS recognized the group on Oct. 2, 2008, three days after its request.
Despite the media attention prompted by the Supreme Court's ruling this summer, Western Tradition Partnership does not appear to have drawn scrutiny from the IRS for the statements in its application.
Though the group remains active, the IRS could locate no tax returns for it after 2008. Nonprofits that do not file tax returns for three consecutive years can lose their tax-exempt status.
* * *
On Oct. 30, in a special investigation in collaboration with Marketplace, FRONTLINE travels to the remote epicenter of the campaign finance debate for a tale of money, politics, and intrigue. How has the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision changed campaigns in America? Ask Montana, which has tried to challenge the ruling in court, is investigating alleged campaign abuses, and is playing host to a bitter race that could decide control of the U.S. Senate. FRONTLINE correspondent and Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal reports.
With the third and final presidential debate on Monday night set to focus on foreign policy, Iran will once again take center stage. The issue will be all the more charged since the New York Times reported this weekend — and the White House quickly denied — that the U.S. and Iran had all but agreed to new negotiations.
President Obama and Mitt Romney have needled each other plenty on Iran. But what are their actual policy positions, and how far apart are the two candidates? It might not be as much as you think.
If sanctions had been put in place when he first recommended them, Romney told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos last month, Iran's "economy would be on its knees, at this point." Romney would "put the leaders of Iran on notice" if elected, he added in October.
But he's had a hard time laying out exactly what he would do differently than Obama.
The White House has already championed tough sanctions on Iran, and both candidates have said they will do whatever it takes, including taking military action, to keep Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Here is our look beyond the candidates' rhetoric to see what really separates them.
Sanctions
Two months after he took office, Obama reached out to Iran with a video message announcing that the U.S. was "now committed to diplomacy" to resolve the two nations' differences. When diplomacy failed to halt Iran's nuclear program, Obama turned to sanctions. The administration pushed new sanctions through the United Nations in June 2010, and the U.S. and its European allies have passed several more rounds since then. The most recent U.S. sanctions, which passed in June, are aimed at Iran's oil exports.
The sanctions, along with Tehran's economic mismanagement, have crushed Iran's economy. The country's oil exports have fallen from 2.5 million barrels a day in 2011 to 1.5 million today, and its currency, the rial, has lost 80 percent of its value in the last 10 months.
Paul Ryan criticized the administration for watering down sanctions. "In Congress, I've been fighting for these sanctions since 2009," he said. "The administration was blocking us every step of the way."
Politifact reviewed Ryan's claim and rated it "Mostly False." The Obama administration has pushed for more flexibility in the sanctions Congress has proposed, but only to win the cooperation of other nations. Because decades of U.S. sanctions have already banned most trade with Iran, the new sanctions target other countries that trade with Iran — making international cooperation essential to enforcing them.
Finding a Red Line
The evidence that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon is actually mixed. A National Intelligence Estimate in 2007 reported that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Iran has insisted that their nuclear program is for civilian use only, and the CIA doesn't think Iran has restarted the weapons program. Under the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy for non-military purposes. But the trick is that a peaceful nuclear program and weapons program involve most of the same steps — until you actually need to build a warhead.
Obama has been clear: He will not allow Iran to build a nuclear weapon. He has said so publicly at least 20 times since 2008, as Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out at The Atlantic. But Obama has refused to set a hard "red line" — short of Iran actually completing a weapon — that he would not allow Iran to cross.
Romney, in contrast, has insisted he has a red line. But he's been unclear about where it is — or how different it is from Obama's position.
In the interview with Stephanopoulos last month, Romney said, "My red line is Iran may not have a nuclear weapon." When Stephanopoulos asked if that meant his red line was the same as Obama's, he said it was. The Romney campaign later added a line to its website, however, stating that, "Mitt Romney believes that it is unacceptable for Iran to possess nuclear weapons capability." (BuzzFeed has a rundown of several adjustments the campaign has made to the language in the Iran section of its website.)
The Romney campaign also tried to clarify the issue in an interview with the New York Times. While Obama has pledged to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, Eliot Cohen, a Romney adviser, said Romney "would not be content with an Iran one screwdriver's turn away from a nuclear weapon." He said Romney would keep Iran from obtaining nuclear "capability" — what the Times defined as "the combination of nuclear fuel, the technology to fashion it into a weapon and a delivery device ... that would enable it to build a weapon in a matter of weeks or months." Watch for a question on Romney's views in the debate tonight.
The Israel Element
Much of Romney's criticism of Obama on Iran has been based on the administration's tone. His campaign basically says the administration isn't talking tough enough. Dan Senor, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, told NPR last week that it made the threat of military action less credible when the administration talked about the difficulties with attacking Iran. Those kinds of comments should be made "behind closed doors," he said. "By broadcasting it in public the way the administration has done," he said, "it has sent one message to Tehran — which is that we are absolutely not serious, that the credibility of the threat is not there — and it has sent the exact same message to our allies."
Romney has also tried to position himself as more closely aligned with Israel on Iran. During his trip to Israel in July, Romney said denying Iran nuclear capability should be America's "highest national security priority," and Senor, his adviser, suggested he would support an Israeli strike on Iran. "If Israel has to take action on its own, the governor would respect that decision," Senor said. Romney has also criticized Obama for remarks he made in 2009 suggesting there should be "daylight" between the U.S. and Israel.
Israel, it's worth noting, is divided on the merits of striking Iran. A number of Israel's top military and intelligence officials, including the former head of the Mossad (Israel's CIA), have urged caution.
A Negotiating Window
The biggest difference between Obama and Romney may be how able they are to hit the ground running in January. Gary Sick, a senior research scholar at Columbia's Middle East Institute, told us that while he expected Obama and Romney would take similar action, Obama would be better positioned to do so right after the election.
The Iranian election season will kick off in March after Nowruz, the Persian New Year, and may make it difficult to get anything done politically, said Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of a book on Obama's diplomacy with Iran. "Before all of that happens," Parsi said, "there is a window for the administration to double down on negotiation and try to get some sort of a deal."
Obama and Romney's willingness to draw a red line at Iran getting a nuclear weapon, Parsi added, was in itself a big break with previous presidents. "If we had that red line with North Korea, we would have gone to war with North Korea," he said. "We would probably still be at war with North Korea."
Tonight, while Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are preparing their foreign policy talking points for the final presidential debate of the 2012 election, we’ll be joining a group of Ohio volunteers focused on uncovering political spending at home. And you can, too.
The NewsOutlet — a consortium of college and professional news organizations — has organized volunteers at Youngstown State University to review and log political ad files ahead of tonight’s debate as part of ProPublica’s Free the Files project. Anyone can participate by logging into Free the Files and answering four simple questions about each ad file (and follow along with The NewsOutlet on Twitter at #FreeTheFiles) tonight from 6 to 8 p.m.
These political files were previously only available by visiting TV stations in person. But in August, the Federal Communications Commission began requiring stations in the top 50 markets to publish their files online.
Since then, nearly 675 volunteers have uncovered $407 million in ad buys in the files, including $90.7 million so far in Cleveland, Akron and Canton — the most of any other market in the Free the Files database. Indeed, a recent study by Wells Fargo Securities found that Cleveland ranked second in the nation for political spending.
As one volunteer, Lily Korte, told the Akron Beacon Journal, “Eventually you reach a point where something like $50,000 seems like a tiny amount of money because you just saw an ad buy that was half a million dollars. It’s just ridiculous. It’s thousands and thousands of these things.”
With just 15 days left until the election, here’s a look at the markets where we’ve made most progress so far (with many thanks to the volunteers who’ve helped get us here).
To help us make more progress in any of these markets, choose it from the drop-down below and then click “free a file.”
If you’re interested in obtaining files from your local television station or any of the other markets not covered by the FCC’s top 50, the Political Ad Sleuth project is collecting those files. The Sunlight Foundation will also be hosting a data happy hour this Thursday in Washington, D.C., and Boston for volunteers interested in meeting up.
If you're a registered voter and surf the web, one of the sites you visit has almost certainly placed a tiny piece of data on your computer flagging your political preferences. That piece of data, called a cookie, marks you as a Democrat or Republican, when you last voted, and what contributions you've made. It also can include factors like your estimated income, what you do for a living, and what you've bought at the local mall.
Across the country, companies are using cookies to tailor the political ads you see online. One of the firms is CampaignGrid, which boasted in a recent slideshow, "Internet Users are No Longer Anonymous." The slideshow includes an image of the famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Next to it, CampaignGrid lists what it can now know about an Internet user: "Lives in Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District, 19002 zip code, Registered primary voting Republican, High net worth household, Age 50-54, Teenagers in the home, Technology professional, Interested in politics, Shopping for a car, Planning a vacation in Puerto Rico."
The slideshow was online until last week, when the company removed it after we asked for comment. (Here is the full slideshow.) Rich Masterson, CampaignGrid's chairman, wrote in an email that the slideshow was posted in error: "It was an unapproved version of a sales deck that was posted by an intern who no longer works for the company."
CampaignGrid does indeed collect 18 different "attributes" for every voter, Masterson told ProPublica, including age, gender, political donations, and more. Campaigns use this data to tailor the online ads you see.
Online targeting has taken off this campaign season. ProPublica has identified seven companies that advertise the ability to help campaigns target specific voters online. Among them is Experian, the credit reporting company. Datalogix, a company that works with Facebook to track users' buying patterns, is also involved. (Here are marketing materials and comment from the seven companies). CampaignGrid and a few, similar firms have been profiled for their innovativeapproaches. Yet the scale of the targeting and the number of companies involved has received little notice.
Few of the companies involved in the targeting talk about it publicly. But CampaignGrid, which works with Republicans, and a similar, Democratic firm, Precision Network, told ProPublica they have political information on 150 million American Internet users, or roughly 80 percent of the nation's registered voters.
The information — stripped of your name or address — is connected to your computer via a cookie. Targeting firms say replacing your name with an ID number keeps the process anonymous and protects users' privacy.
But privacy experts say that assembling information about Internet users' political behavior can be problematic even if voters' names aren't attached.
"A lot of people would consider their political identity more private than lots of information," said William McGeveran, a data privacy expert at the University of Minnesota Law School. "We make more rules about medical privacy. We make more rules about financial privacy. So if you think private political beliefs are in that category, maybe you're concerned about having them treated like your favorite brand of toothpaste."
Google has stayed away from this kind of targeting. It classifies political beliefs as "sensitive personal information," in the same category as medical information and religious beliefs.
But other big players have embraced the "political cookie," as one company branded it.
As we reported in June, Yahoo and Microsoft sell access to your registration information for political targeting. That's one way CampaignGrid and other companies find you online. Political targeting firms say they also work with other websites, but would not name them.
While campaigns and the firms working with them can buy reams of data about voters, voters have been left mostly in the dark.
Many online ad companies mark targeted ads with a small blue triangle symbol, or the phrase "Ad Choices," and offer surfers a chance to opt out. But even if web users know what the triangle means, they get no information about how or why they were targeted.
"Consumers don't really understand what's going on and haven't given their permission," says Joseph Turow, a digital marketing and privacy expert at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.
There are few legal regulations governing how online targeting works, or what notification consumers must receive.
Online advertising experts point out that individual voting records are public information and have long been used to target voters through direct mail. And targeting companies say they are offering a valuable service. Instead of seeing random ads, users get to see ads from candidates they might actually want to support.
"We empower voters," Jeff Dittus, co-founder of Campaign Grid and now head of Audience Partners, wrote in an email. "We give voters information that is meaningful to them and helps them make choices."
Stuart Ingis, a lawyer for the Digital Advertising Alliance, an industry group, said that voter file targeting is a First Amendment issue, and that targeting should be protected as part of political speech.
"These technologies provide a method for politicians inexpensively to improve our democracy," he said. "I would say that the founding fathers firmly believed in the ability — I think our society very much values the ability — to efficiently reach a desired audience with a political message."
While targeting firms promise a wealth of individual detail, it's hard to know how much information most campaigns are actually using.
"The more third-party data providers you use, the smaller the universe of people who you can reach becomes," CampaignGrid's Masterson said. "Republican women 25-34 who drive SUVs and have American Express cards, and go to the theater once a month — that might be four people."
One place online voter targeting has been used successfully is in the state senate primary race of Morgan McGarvey, a Kentucky Democrat who faced off against three other Democratic candidates this May.
With four liberal candidates competing for a liberal district, McGarvey told ProPublica, he needed to convince the small number of voters who would turn out in the primary that they should vote for him.
His campaign worked with Precision Network to show online McGarvey ads to local voters under 35, and to female Democrats who had voted in at least three of the past five primary elections. (Two of his challengers were women.)
"When every dollar counts, when literally every vote counts, you have to be more targeted," he said.
"I do think it helped us win."
McGarvey is now running unopposed in the November election.
1. If you spot a small blue triangle icon on any online political ad, or the words "Ad Choices," take a screenshot of the ad.
2. Then click on the blue triangle or the words "Ad Choices" to find out which company showed you the ad. Take a screenshot of that, too.
3. Email the screenshots to us at targeting2012@propublica.org. Please include the full URL of the page where you saw the ad.
If the ad asks you to "learn more," visit a website, donate, or sign a petition, please send us a screenshot of that site or petition, as well. (The page where the ad sends you may also be targeted to what advertisers know about you.)
With campaign finances limits rendered nearly meaningless, election spending is on pace to set records. Where does each presidential candidate stand on how to regulate money in politics?
President Obama talks about changes but hasn’t instituted many. He favors legislation that would require disclosure of donors to dark money nonprofits. The president has also floated a Constitutional amendment to address Citizens United — an idea that’s currently politically impossible. Yet advocates point out Obama hasn’t even instituted campaign finance measures that he could do on his own using executive power.
Mitt Romney has mostly stayed mum. His campaign doesn’t have an official position paper on campaign finance and wouldn’t answer questions. When asked, Romney has said he favors removal of contribution limits to candidates, as a way to bring money from outside groups back into campaigns. He has also said he favors donor disclosure but hasn’t signaled support of specific legislation.
Here are the details:
President Obama
Obama supports the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would require disclosure of donors to politically active nonprofits, which are currently funded with anonymous money. In July, the bill failed to get 60 votes in the Senate after Republicans opposed it. An earlier version passed the House in 2010 when Democrats were in the majority.
In its statement on the disclosure bill, the administration criticized the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United as “bringing about an era where corporations and other wealthy interests can exert vastly disproportionate influence, including through anonymous donations.”
In August, during a Q&A session on the website Reddit, Obama said the country should eventually consider a Constitutional amendment.
“Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it),” the president wrote. “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”
He did not give specifics on what such an amendment would say.
Meanwhile, campaign finance regulation advocates in Washington have been disappointed by Obama’s first term.
“There are a lot tangible things that he could have done that he did not do,” says Lisa Gilbert, director of Congress Watch at Public Citizen.
Gilbert and other advocates pointed to an executive order drafted by the White House and floated in the media in 2011 that would have required government contractors to reveal political spending, which would shed light on otherwise unreported corporate contributions.
A year later, the Hill reported that the administration had “all but abandoned” the idea. It’s never been implemented.
Regulation advocates also complain that the administration has not offered nominations for the five of six FEC commissioners whose terms have expired. The agency, which has three slots for members of each party, is paralyzed by partisan deadlock on many issues.
The administration said in June in response to a petition that “the Obama Administration is committed to nominating highly qualified individuals to lead the FEC” — but nominations have not materialized.
Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher said he could not comment on whether Obama would take any actions without Congress — such as executive orders or FEC recess appointments — in a second term.
Pro-regulation groups are also unhappy with Obama’s reversal on super PACs, which the president’s campaign had criticized but later embraced.
Mitt Romney
Asked for details about Romney’s position on campaign finance, spokeswoman Andrea Saul responded with a link to a page on Romney’s website on “cutting the red tape” of regulation.
The page doesn’t mention campaign finance. Instead, it promises Romney will roll back regulations generally.
The campaign did not respond to questions about Romney’s stance on the DISCLOSE Act and other specifics.
During the Republican primary in February, Romney was endorsed by James Bopp, the arch-foe of campaign finance regulation. At the time, the Romney campaign told the Boston Globe that Romney believes Citizens United was correctly decided.
That followed comments Romney made to RealClearPolitics in December in the midst of a Republican primary dominated by single-candidate super PACs. He said he supported a system that would allow unlimited individual donations to candidates. The limit on individual donations directly to candidates is $2,500 per election, one of the few regulations left intact after Citizens United.
“[W]hat we have right now is unlimited political contributions, but they’re not controlled by the campaigns,” Romney said. “They’re controlled by unaffiliated or uncoordinated entities, which, in my opinion, is the worst of both worlds. It means that large contributions have a big impact, and it means that the campaign can’t control them, so if we’re going to have big contributors, wouldn’t it be nice to have the campaigns responsible for what those contributors say?”
In an interview with the Portsmouth Herald editorial board last year, Romney also endorsed the idea of donor disclosure.
“I wish we could find a way to get money out of politics. I haven't found out a way to do that,” he told the New Hampshire newspaper. “I think the best way, by the way, is to let people make whatever contributions they want and have it instantly reported and know what conflicts exist so we know where the money is coming from.”
There is one area where Romney has floated tighter restrictions: money from teachers unions.
At an NBC forum in September on education, Romney criticized the unions’ donations to candidates who later negotiate contracts with teachers.
"I think we [have] got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns,” he said. “It's the wrong way for us to go. We've got to separate that."
Vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan has opposed the DISCLOSE Act, calling it “unconstitutional” in a 2010 statement.
Florida has the highest
percentage of home loans in foreclosure in the country. So why is more than
$300 million that could help homeowners sitting unused?
Florida was awarded those millions in February as part of
the $25
billion national settlement between five of country’s biggest banks and
forty-nine states and the District of Columbia. The settlement resolved
allegations of wrongful foreclosures and other mortgage servicing abuses, and
required banks to offer some homeowners the opportunity to modify their loans or
refinance, or, in some cases pay
homeowners directly for wrongful foreclosure.
The banks also had to pay $2.5 billion directly to state
governments. Florida’s sum was the largest, after California, in
part a measure of how deeply the mortgage crisis affected the sunshine state.
Yet Florida is one of just a few states where the Attorney General has not announced plans for a significant portion of the money. We’ve contacted every state to find out what they were doing with that money. Of the $2.5 billion going to states, just over a billion dollars has been pledged for housing-related programs, while a roughly equal amount has been diverted to plug budget holes or fund programs unrelated to the foreclosure crisis. $378 million is still to be determined, and almost all of that is Florida’s.
Florida’s funds are caught between the Attorney General, Republican
Pam Bondi, and the Republican state legislature. Bondi
has pledged
to make the money available to homeowners; earlier this year, she called
for suggestions from the public. Some state lawmakers, however, insist that
it needs to go through the regular appropriations process — where it
could potentially be siphoned off into
other programs. And that wouldn’t happen until March, when the legislative
session begins.
“We were very happy about the Attorney General’s commitment
early on that the money be used within the spirit of the settlement,” said Jaimie Ross, president of the Florida Housing Coalition, an
advocacy organization. “But is it just going to sit there until the legislature
starts so that we can wait to see how they want to use it? The silence is
deafening.”
A spokesman for
the Attorney General said, “it’s a matter of having a dialogue between the
two sides.” He could not give a timeline for when a decision might be reached. The
2013 budget request Bondi submitted to the legislature last week made
no mention of the settlement.
The mortgage
settlement states that Florida’s money can be spent “as directed” by the
Florida Attorney General for “purposes consistent with” the settlement, such as
programs aimed at homeowner protection or consumer fraud. But the legislature
should still “play a role,” according
to Katie Betta, a spokeswoman for incoming State Senate President Don Gaetz, a Republican.
The Democratic minority leader of the state senate, Nan
Rich, said, “It’s unconscionable to be sitting on
this money.” 11 percent
of Florida’s mortgaged homes are currently in foreclosure, and the state saw
92,000 completed foreclosures in the year ending August 2012, second only to
California.
Both Rich and Jaimie Ross of Florida Housing Coalition expressed concern that the legislature could divert the
money away from housing. One Democratic representative has
already suggested it be used to fund a pay raise for state employees.
It wouldn’t be the first state to see that happen. In May,
we
showed how almost one billion dollars that states received for the
settlement had gone to plug budget holes or fund programs unrelated to the
housing crisis. California, for example, received $410 million, but it all went
to the general fund. Ultimately, the Attorney General’s office ended up with
just $18.4 million earmarked
for housing counseling and overseeing the settlement.
Arizona’s state assembly diverted $50 million – more
than half the state’s total – to the general fund. Housing advocates
challenged the transfer in court, but a
judge ruled this month that it was legitimate. North Carolina legislators also
ended up rerouting $7.8 million that had been intended for housing counseling
to free up money in the state budget.
New Jersey put the $75 million it received towards various
social programs, including affordable housing. But the money funded
preexisting programs, rather than supplementing them or starting new
initiatives, as part of an effort to balance the budget.
A spokesman for the state treasury told us earlier this year
that the settlement did not require them to spend extra money. “If we put [the
money] into the budget and don’t have to cut something else, that’s a net
gain,” he said. (The treasury didn’t respond to our more recent requests for
comment.)
When we first mapped out where the settlement millions were
going, many states hadn’t yet outlined plans. We’ve updated our comprehensive
map to show developments
since then. Here’s a sampling of what’s happened:
•
Of Michigan’s $97.2 million, $10 million went to
public schools. The rest is earmarked for a
variety of housing-related programs, including $20 million for foreclosure
mediation and $10 million for demolition of blighted buildings in Detroit.
•
All of Pennsylvania's $66.5 million is going to
housing and consumer protection programs—90 percent to an emergency
mortgage assistance program, and the rest to initiatives in the Attorney
General’s office.
•
Most of Oregon’s money went to the general fund.
$3.78 million was dedicated to a new foreclosure mediation program, which, as
the Oregonian recently reported, has so far been a bust because banks have
refused to participate.
•
Washington State is offering the bulk of its
$54 million to non-profits for a range of counseling and legal aid
services, as well as to cities for demolition.
•
New Hampshire’s relatively small share —
$9.6 million — is being used in part to staff a new financial fraud unit
in the Attorney General’s office and to launch a statewide complaint database
to help coordinate investigations. Roughly two-thirds of the money will go to
grants to organizations offering legal aid and housing counseling.
•
With its $11 million, New Mexico is
funding a new foreclosure hotline and a pilot program for facilitating
settlements in court cases, among other homeowner-focused initiatives.
•
Wyoming dedicated its $2.6 million to a
non-profit housing counseling organization.
Attorneys general and lawmakers are still working out how
the money will be used in a few other states besides Florida:
•
Nevada’s Attorney General has already announced plans to spend $33.5 million from the settlement on foreclosure counseling. A spokeswoman said their office had formed an advisory committee to recommend to the governor and the legislature ways that the remaining $23.9 million could be used to help homeowners.
•
A spokeswoman for Alabama’s Attorney General
said their office was still reviewing programs to determine how to spend $19
million.
•
Louisiana still has $17.7 million still to be
allocated over the next few years to various programs, including settlement
oversight, a financial fraud unit, and litigation over faulty drywall. A
spokeswoman for the Attorney General said the office will work with the
legislature on the exact allocations.
•
Kansas is waiting for its legislature to go into
session in January to decide on how its $13.8 million will be split between
general appropriations and the Attorney General’s office.
•
Alaska’s $3.3 million is being discussed between
the Attorney General and the legislature. An assistant Attorney General said
they would announce a plan in December.
Some of the states that turned over their settlement money
to their legislature haven’t yet seen it spent. The biggest case is Texas, where
the legislature won’t meet until January to determine how to budget the $134
million it received. There’s no
requirement that any of that money be spent on housing.
Oct. 24: This post has been updated to include a comment from Sallie Mae.
The parallels between the mortgage market and the student loan industry have been frequently noted. Both involve big borrowing and have a history of lax underwriting by lenders. But the two are also strikingly similar in another way: When it comes to both mortgages and student debt, the servicers, or companies that handle loan payments, sometimes add roadblocks and give struggling borrowers the runaround.
That's the main takeaway from two recentreports by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the independent agency created by the financial reform law passed in 2010.
Servicers have misapplied payments, given borrowers bad advice, and reported incorrect information to credit bureaus, according to one of the reports. The findings were based on the agency's recent tracking of student loan complaints, focusing on the companies who handle private student loans.
Borrowers facing hardship and looking for flexibility through refinancing or a more manageable repayment plan "struggled to get an answer from their lender or servicer," wrote the agency's Student Loan Ombudsman, Rohit Chopra. When they tried to postpone payments, they were sometimes charged a recurring fee to do so.
And even when servicers encouraged borrowers to make "good faith" partial payments in amounts they could afford, the payments sometimes still resulted in delinquency or default, according to the report.
As we've noted in our reporting, private loans often don't have the same protections as federal loans: Death and disability discharges typically are not guaranteed or are decided on a case-by-case basis.
And when the loans are packaged and sold to investors, it's even harder to know who has the authority to make decisions about repayment options, discharges, or other issues that arise: "Borrowers report that sometimes servicers cannot even answer who owns a loan," noted an agency factsheet. Homeowners have faced similar trouble.
Sometimes, the parallels are exact. By law, members of the military are entitled to special protections, including lower interest rates on both mortgages and student loans. But thousands have been overcharged on their mortgages. And according to the government's second report, service members have also had the same problem with student loans. The report, which focused exclusively on the loan debt of military borrowers, blamed the overcharging on servicing errors and demands for unnecessary documentation.
The report also noted that loan servicers at times "guided" members of the military into putting loans into deferment or forbearance — even though interest accrues during those periods, and there may be better options available.
Of the more than 2,000 consumer complaints received by the CFPB from March and September of this year, the two most complained-about servicers were Sallie Mae, representing 46 percent of complaints, and American Education Services, or PHEAA, with 12 percent.
(The complaints, the report noted, were not "particularly disproportionate" to each companies' servicing volume. Sallie Mae has "modified $1.1 billion in private education loans with interest rate reductions or extended repayment since 2009," said spokeswoman Patricia Christel. A spokesman for American Education Services, Mike Reiber, said the servicer's customer service representatives "work daily with borrowers to explain repayment options and to help them avoid delinquency and default using all available means.")
Though the focus was on the servicing of private student loans, it's worth noting that many of the companies servicing loans in the private market are the same contractors handling federal loans.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, borrowers of federal student loans have also faced some of the same challenges as those with private loans. For instance: Since last fall, the Department of Education has been transferring some borrowers to new servicers it's contracted with to handle federal student loans — often resulting in confusion for borrowers, some of whom have even seen their repayment plans changed.
Currently, the Department has roughly a dozen servicers, with a new company added to the federal loan servicer team everyfewmonths. The expanding system of federal loan servicing can be confusing not only for borrowers who've been switched to new companies, but also for colleges who now have to deal with many more companies than they had to in the past.
The CFPB's report recommended that Congress assess whether more could be done to improve the quality of loan servicing and consider ways to encourage loan modifications and refinancing for struggling borrowers. Such efforts have been underway to help struggling homeowners, with mixedresults.
Have you worked in financial aid or student loans? Share your experience with reporter Marian Wang.
Today, we’re launching a series of discussions aimed at exploring patient safety from the perspective of health care professionals.
About five months ago, as part of our ongoing reporting on patient safety, we started a Facebook group for our readers who had suffered harm while undergoing medical care. The goals were to create connections, share stories and discuss what might be done about the ongoing problem of infections, injuries and mistakes. We’ve highlighted why patients rarely report errors (and obstacles when they do), legal options and financial consequences of suffering harm. And our members have shared their stories.
But much of the conversation so far has stemmed from the experiences of patients and family members. Now we aim to find out what providers think.
Do medical professionals really believe that one in four patients suffer some type of harm? Who or what do they think is responsible for the persistent problem? What’s the typical process at hospitals after a patient suffers harm? And what’s it like when providers are involved in an incident where a patient is harmed?
Over the next few days, we’ll be inviting a series of care providers to respond to these issues on Branch, a new platform for online conversation. We chose Branch because it encourages focused and intimate conversation; Branches are public – but only approved participants can contribute. And we hope that a range of providers – nurses, EMTs, techs, doctors – will contribute.
Below is our first discussion question. If you have a Twitter account, you just click Ask To Join; the first thing you should do after we approve you is post. If you do not have a Twitter account and would like to participate, please email blair.hickman@propublica.org. We will add you.
Check back here at noon every day between now and next Wednesday for the day’s new discussion question. And if you’re not available to Branch with us, but still have a story to share, fill out our questionnaire for providers. Your input will help inform our reporting.
