position:cofounder

  • Big tech firms are racing to track climate refugees - MIT Technology Review
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613531/big-tech-firms-are-racing-to-track-climate-refugees

    To be an undocumented refugee, these days, is to exist in many places and to not exist at all. It is to have your movements, words, and actions tracked, archived, and multiplied. It is to live between fences, tents, and databases—one new entry per doctor’s visit, per bag of rice, per canister of water. It can mean having your biometric and biographical data scanned, stored, and cross-checked by people you do not know, and who speak a language you may not understand. It is to have your identity multiplied, classified, and reduced to lines of code. It is to live in spreadsheets.

    Today, around 1.1 billion people live without a recognized form of identification. In many cases, their papers—if they ever had papers at all—have been burned, lost, or otherwise destroyed. And the number is growing every day. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN’s refugee agency, estimates that in 2017, one person became displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict, economics, or climate change. “In short, the world had almost as many forcibly displaced people in 2017 as the population of Thailand,” the agency reports. “Across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced.”

    The next frontier, though, is not figuring out where people have been or where they will settle: it is figuring out who they will be when they get there. What will their “digital identity” look like? Who will hold the keys? A number of new and established tech companies are rushing to answer these critical questions. Technology accelerated the global identity crisis, and now technology claims to have the solution.

    But now that so much of our economic and political life takes place online, creating new forms of identity has taken on a severe urgency. Both the private and public sectors are racing to come up with a sustainable way of counting, identifying, and connecting not only the growing population of the global displaced, but also the wealthy population of the voluntarily mobile. Mastercard, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir, and Facebook have all entered the field, through private ventures as well as controversial partnerships with some of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies.

    In 2015, all the UN’s member states committed to providing “legal identity for all” by 2030 as part of its Sustainable Development Goals. As a result, virtually every major aid-granting agency is either incubating, researching, or piloting a digital identity program.

    Et hop, Palantir dans la boucle... humanitaire, tant qu’à faire.

    The UN’s World Food Programme recently announced a new $45 million, five-year collaboration with Palantir that will use the Palo Alto firm’s “range of digital analytical solutions” to streamline and track the dispersal of humanitarian aid. The move was immediately met with skepticism among privacy advocates: a group of more than 60 human rights activists sent an open letter to WFP executives, expressing deep concern over the partnership and urging WFP leaders to “reconsider the terms and scope of the agreement with Palantir.”

    They argued that not only would the partnership threaten to “seriously damage the reputation of the WFP,” but also that it could “seriously undermine the rights of 90 million people the WFP serves.” The controversy, researchers said, should be a “wake-up call” to the humanitarian community about the dangers of relying on digital data and entrusting their networks to third parties.

    In a statement responding to these concerns, the WFP wrote that a series of “checks and balances” would protect private, identifying data, and that Palantir would not be able to use it for commercial gain. In an e-mail to MIT Technology Review, a WFP representative wrote that the agency has its own solutions to managing refugee identities, and that “the WFP-Palantir partnership does not focus on areas that require personally identifiable information (PII) of beneficiaries, nor does it focus on digital identity. No PII data is ever shared with Palantir or with any other partner. Only anonymized/encrypted information is used to analyze allocation of assistance to ensure complete privacy and security for the people we serve.”

    Yet as researcher Faine Greenwood said in Slate, the WFP may be overestimating its ability to protect and anonymize sensitive data.

    Expérimenter la blockchain sur des populations fragilisées comme les Rohynga, quelle bonne idée.

    Both the promise and the risks of digital identity have already become evident in the work of a small army of blockchain and biometric startups. The immutable, decentralized nature of the blockchain has led a number of startups to pin their hopes on the emerging technology as a solution to the problem of storing and protecting sensitive information, including biometric data.

    Passbase, which bills itself as “the first self-sovereign identity platform backed by verified government documents, linked social media accounts, and biometric signatures,” has raised seed funding from Alphabet and Stanford, and currently accepts documents from over 150 countries. Vinny Lingham, cofounder of the blockchain identity verification company Civic, goes so far as to claim that his company can help save democracy. WFP.s Building Blocks program also uses blockchain inside a refugee camp in Jordan.

    Maybe blockchain will save democracy. Or maybe it will make future political crises even worse. The Rohingya Project distributed blockchain-based digital identity cards to Rohingya refugees in order to help them access financial, legal, and medical services. It is, on the face of things, an altruistic, forward-looking humanitarian initiative. But uploading highly sensitive, identifying biometric information to an immutable ledger and testing emerging technology on a vulnerable population means exposing that population to untold risks.

    Data breaches, like those that have repeatedly exposed personal information in India’s Aadhaar biometric identification program, have exposed at-risk populations to new dangers. And they are all too common: in March, a data breach at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency exposed the personal information of 2.3 million survivors of American wildfires and hurricanes, leaving them vulnerable to identity fraud. In April, Kaspersky Labs reported that over 60,000 user digital identities could be bought for $5 to $200 via a dark-net marketplace. No technology is invulnerable to error, and no database, no matter how secure, is 100% protected from a breach.

    As digital identification technologies flood into the market, it is difficult to imagine predicting or preventing the disruptions—good and bad—that they will cause. Blockchain and biometric technologies have touched off a critical reevaluation of the most existential questions: What determines identity, and how many identities can one person claim? What will it mean when official identification eventually—inevitably—is no longer the purview of the nation-state?

    “Everybody deserves to have formal identification that they can use to exert their rights,” says Brandie Nonnecke, director of UC Berkeley’s CITRIS Policy Lab, which works on technology development in the social interest.

    But the rush of public and private digital identity programs has already begun to complicate fundamental questions about identification, registration, citizenship, and belonging. Even the simplest questions about digital identity have yet to be determined, Nonnecke says: “Do you have one identity, or do you have multiple identities across institutions? Is that a safeguard, or does it create more risk?”

    #Identité_numérique #Vie_privée #Humanitaire #Techno-fix

  • YOU MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN FOURSQUARE, BUT IT DIDN’T FORGET YOU
    https://www.wired.com/story/you-may-have-forgotten-foursquare-it-didnt-forget-you

    IT’S THURSDAY AFTERNOON, and I’m on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in the Flatiron District, sitting across from Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. He pulls out his phone to show me an unreleased, nameless game that he and his skunkworks-style team Foursquare Labs have been working on. Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game’s virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There’s a Midtown Bar, a (...)

    #AccuWeather #Foursquare #Twitter #Uber #algorithme #smartphone #géolocalisation #BigData

  • US denies entry to BDS cofounder Omar Barghouti
    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/04/denies-entry-bds-founder-omar-barghouti-190411174724070.html

    Barghouti’s difficulties travelling in the past were due to the Israeli government restricting his ability to exit and enter Israel by not renewing his travel document, but this was the first time he has faced a ban by the US government.

    “This US entry ban against me, which is ideologically and politically motivated, is part of Israel’s escalating repression against Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights defenders in the BDS movement for freedom, justice and equality,” Barghouti said.

    “Israel’s far-right regime is not merely continuing its decades-old system of military occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing; it is increasingly outsourcing its outrageous, McCarthyite repression to the US and to xenophobic, far-right cohorts across the world,” he added.

  • Why #coinbase listing didn’t boost #xrp price
    https://hackernoon.com/why-coinbase-listing-didnt-boost-xrp-price-cc11569ebece?source=rss----3a

    There was a general feeling that when Coinbase announced it was listing XRP on its Coinbase Pro platform there would be a corresponding leap in the value of Ripple’s native token. There was some movement on the day of the announcement (25th February) with XRP shooting up by 10% in value, but that is about as exciting as it got.Furthermore, when Coinbase then announced on 28th February that it was adding XRP to Coinbase.com, as well as the exchanges’s Android and iOS apps, the response was flat.The analysts’ analysisWhile #crypto consumers might be somewhat surprised by this lack of activity, analysts were less so. According to crypto expert Charles Bovaird, writing at Forbes, several analysts were of the opinion that they had never expected anything else. Jeff Dorman, cofounder and head (...)

    #bitcoin

  • Who writes history? The fight to commemorate a massacre by the Texas #rangers

    In 1918, a state-sanctioned vigilante force killed 15 unarmed Mexicans in #Porvenir. When their descendants applied for a historical marker a century later, they learned that not everyone wants to remember one of Texas’ darkest days.

    The name of the town was Porvenir, or “future.” In the early morning hours of January 28, 1918, 15 unarmed Mexicans and Mexican Americans were awakened by a state-sanctioned vigilante force of Texas Rangers, U.S. Army cavalry and local ranchers. The men and boys ranged in age from 16 to 72. They were taken from their homes, led to a bluff over the Rio Grande and shot from 3 feet away by a firing squad. The remaining residents of the isolated farm and ranch community fled across the river to Mexico, where they buried the dead in a mass grave. Days later, the cavalry returned to burn the abandoned village to the ground.

    These, historians broadly agree, are the facts of what happened at Porvenir. But 100 years later, the meaning of those facts remains fiercely contested. In 2015, as the centennial of the massacre approached, a group of historians and Porvenir descendants applied for and was granted a Texas Historical Commission (THC) marker. After a three-year review process, the THC approved the final text in July. A rush order was sent to the foundry so that the marker would be ready in time for a Labor Day weekend dedication ceremony planned by descendants. Then, on August 3, Presidio County Historical Commission Chair Mona Blocker Garcia sent an email to the THC that upended everything. Though THC records show that the Presidio commission had been consulted throughout the marker approval process, Garcia claimed to be “shocked” that the text was approved. She further asserted, without basis, that “the militant Hispanics have turned this marker request into a political rally and want reparations from the federal government for a 100-year-old-plus tragic event.”

    Four days later, Presidio County Attorney Rod Ponton sent a follow-up letter. Without identifying specific errors in the marker text, he demanded that the dedication ceremony be canceled and the marker’s production halted until new language could be agreed upon. Ponton speculated, falsely, that the event was planned as a “major political rally” for Beto O’Rourke with the participation of La Raza Unida founding member José Ángel Gutiérrez, neither of whom was involved. Nonetheless, THC History Programs Director Charles Sadnick sent an email to agency staff the same day: “After getting some more context about where the marker sponsor may be coming from, we’re halting production on the marker.”

    The American Historical Association quickly condemned the THC’s decision, as did the office of state Senator José Rodríguez, a Democrat whose district includes both Presidio County and El Paso, where the ceremony was to be held. Historians across the country also spoke out against the decision. Sarah Zenaida Gould, director of the Museo del Westside in San Antonio and cofounder of Latinos in Heritage Conservation, responded in an email to the agency that encapsulates the views of many of the historians I interviewed: “Halting the marker process to address this statement as though it were a valid concern instead of a dog whistle is insulting to all people of color who have personally or through family history experienced state violence.”

    How did a last-gasp effort, characterized by factual errors and inflammatory language, manage to convince the state agency for historic preservation to reverse course on a marker three years in the making and sponsored by a young Latina historian with an Ivy League pedigree and Texas-Mexico border roots? An Observer investigation, involving dozens of interviews and hundreds of emails obtained through an open records request, reveals a county still struggling to move on from a racist and violent past, far-right amateur historians sowing disinformation and a state agency that acted against its own best judgment.

    The Porvenir massacre controversy is about more than just the fate of a single marker destined for a lonely part of West Texas. It’s about who gets to tell history, and the continuing relevance of the border’s contested, violent and racist past to events today.

    Several rooms in Benita Albarado’s home in Uvalde are almost overwhelmed by filing cabinets and stacks of clipboards, the ever-growing archive of her research into what happened at Porvenir. For most of her life, Benita, 74, knew nothing about the massacre. What she did know was that her father, Juan Flores, had terrible nightmares, and that in 1950 he checked himself in to a state mental hospital for symptoms that today would be recognized as PTSD. When she asked her mother what was wrong with him, she always received the same vague response: “You don’t understand what he’s been through.”

    In 1998, Benita and her husband, Buddy, began tracing their family trees. Benita was perplexed that she couldn’t find any documentation about her grandfather, Longino Flores. Then she came across the archival papers of Harry Warren, a schoolteacher, lawyer and son-in-law of Tiburcio Jáquez, one of the men who was murdered. Warren had made a list of the victims, and Longino’s name was among them. Warren also described how one of his students from Porvenir had come to his house the next morning to tell him what happened, and then traveled with him to the massacre site to identify the bodies, many of which were so mutilated as to be virtually unrecognizable. Benita immediately saw the possible connection. Her father, 12 at the time, matched Warren’s description of the student.

    Benita and Buddy drove from Uvalde to Odessa, where her father lived, with her photocopied papers. “Is that you?” she asked. He said yes. Then, for the first time in 80 years, he began to tell the story of how he was kidnapped with the men, but then sent home because of his age; he was told that the others were only going to be questioned. To Benita and Buddy’s amazement, he remembered the names of 12 of the men who had been murdered. They were the same as those in Harry Warren’s papers. He also remembered the names of the ranchers who had shown up at his door. Some of those, including the ancestors of prominent families still in Presidio County, had never been found in any document.

    Talking about the massacre proved healing for Flores. His nightmares stopped. In 2000, at age 96, he decided that he wanted to return to Porvenir. Buddy drove them down an old mine road in a four-wheel-drive truck. Flores pointed out where his old neighbors used to live, even though the buildings were gone. He guided Buddy to the bluff where the men were killed — a different location than the one commonly believed by local ranchers to be the massacre site. His memory proved to be uncanny: At the bluff, the family discovered a pre-1918 military bullet casing, still lying on the Chihuahuan desert ground.

    Benita and Buddy began advocating for a historical marker in 2000, soon after their trip to Porvenir. “A lot of people say that this was a lie,” Buddy told me. “But if you’ve got a historical marker, the state has to acknowledge what happened.” Their efforts were met by resistance from powerful ranching families, who held sway over the local historical commission. The Albarados had already given up when they met Monica Muñoz Martinez, a Yale graduate student from Uvalde, who interviewed them for her dissertation. In 2013, Martinez, by then an assistant professor at Brown University, co-founded Refusing to Forget, a group of historians aiming to create broader public awareness of border violence, including Porvenir and other extrajudicial killings of Mexicans by Texas Rangers during the same period. The most horrific of these was La Matanza, in which dozens of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered in the Rio Grande Valley in 1915.

    In 2006, the THC created the Undertold Markers program, which seemed tailor-made for Porvenir. According to its website, the program is designed to “address historical gaps, promote diversity of topics, and proactively document significant underrepresented subjects or untold stories.” Unlike the agency’s other marker programs, anyone can apply for an undertold marker, not just county historical commissions. Martinez’s application for a Porvenir massacre marker was accepted in 2015.

    Though the approval process for the Porvenir marker took longer than usual, by the summer of 2018 everything appeared to be falling into place. On June 1, Presidio County Historical Commission chair Garcia approved the final text. (Garcia told me that she thought she was approving a different text. Her confusion is difficult to understand, since the text was attached to the digital form she submitted approving it.) Martinez began coordinating with the THC and Arlinda Valencia, a descendant of one of the victims, to organize a dedication ceremony in El Paso.
    “They weren’t just simple farmers. I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.”

    In mid-June, Valencia invited other descendants to the event and posted it on Facebook. She began planning a program to include a priest’s benediction, a mariachi performance and brief remarks by Martinez, Senator Rodríguez and a representative from the THC. The event’s climax would be the unveiling of the plaque with the names of the 15 victims.

    Then the backlash began.

    “Why do you call it a massacre?” is the first thing Jim White III said over the phone when I told him I was researching the Porvenir massacre. White is the trustee of the Brite Ranch, the site of a cross-border raid by Mexicans on Christmas Day 1917, about a month before the Porvenir massacre. When I explained that the state-sanctioned extrajudicial execution of 15 men and boys met all the criteria I could think of for a massacre, he shot back, “It sounds like you already have your opinion.”

    For generations, ranching families like the Brites have dominated the social, economic and political life of Presidio County. In a visit to the Marfa & Presidio County Museum, I was told that there were almost no Hispanic surnames in any of the exhibits, though 84 percent of the county is Hispanic. The Brite family name, however, was everywhere.

    White and others in Presidio County subscribe to an alternative history of the Porvenir massacre, centering on the notion that the Porvenir residents were involved in the bloody Christmas Day raid.

    “They weren’t just simple farmers,” White told me, referring to the victims. “I seriously doubt that they were just killed for no reason.” Once he’d heard about the historical marker, he said, he’d talked to everyone he knew about it, including former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Mona Blocker Garcia.

    I visited Garcia at her Marfa home, an 1886 adobe that’s the same age as the venerable Marfa County Courthouse down the street. Garcia, 82, is Anglo, and married to a former oil executive whose ancestry, she explained, is Spanish and French Basque. A Houston native, she retired in the 1990s to Marfa, where she befriended the Brite family and became involved in local history. She told me that she had shared a draft text of the marker with the Brites, and they had agreed that it was factually inaccurate.

    Garcia cited a story a Brite descendant had told her about a young goat herder from Porvenir who purportedly witnessed the Christmas Day raid, told authorities about the perpetrators from his community and then disappeared without a trace into a witness protection program in Oklahoma. When I asked if there was any evidence that the boy actually existed, she acknowledged the story was “folklore.” Still, she said, “the story has lasted 100 years. Why would anybody make something like that up?”

    The actual history is quite clear. In the days after the massacre, the Texas Rangers commander, Captain J.M. Fox, initially reported that Porvenir residents had fired on the Rangers. Later, he claimed that residents had participated in the Christmas Day raid. Subsequent investigations by the Mexican consulate, the U.S. Army and state Representative J.T. Canales concluded that the murdered men were unarmed and innocent, targeted solely because of their ethnicity by a vigilante force organized at the Brite Ranch. As a result, in June 1918, five Rangers were dismissed, Fox was forced to resign and Company B of the Texas Rangers was disbanded.

    But justice remained elusive. In the coming years, Fox re-enlisted as captain of Company A, while three of the dismissed lawmen found new employment. One re-enlisted as a Ranger, a second became a U.S. customs inspector and the third was hired by the Brite Ranch. No one was ever prosecuted. As time passed, the historical records of the massacre, including Harry Warren’s papers, affidavits from widows and other relatives and witness testimony from the various investigations, were largely forgotten. In their place came texts like Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense, which played an outsize role in the creation of the heroic myth of the Texas Rangers. Relying entirely on interviews with the murderers themselves, Webb accepted at face value Fox’s discredited version of events. For more than 50 years, Webb’s account was considered the definitive one of the massacre — though, unsurprisingly, he didn’t use that word.

    An Observer review of hundreds of emails shows that the state commission was aware of potential controversy over the marker from the very beginning. In an email from 2015, Executive Director Mark Wolfe gave John Nau, the chair of the THC’s executive committee, a heads-up that while the marker was supported by historical scholarship, “the [Presidio County Historical Commission] opposes the marker.” The emails also demonstrate that the agency viewed the claims of historical inaccuracies in the marker text made by Mona Blocker Garcia and the county commission as minor issues of wording.

    On August 6, the day before the decision to halt the marker, Charles Sadnick, the history programs director, wrote Wolfe to say that the “bigger problem” was the ceremony, where he worried there might be disagreements among Presidio County residents, and which he described as “involving some politics which we don’t want a part of.”

    What were the politics that the commission was worried about, and where were these concerns coming from? Garcia’s last-minute letter may have been a factor, but it wasn’t the only one. For the entire summer, Glenn Justice, a right-wing amateur historian who lives in a rural gated community an hour outside San Angelo, had been the driving force behind a whisper campaign to discredit Martinez and scuttle the dedication ceremony.

    “There are radicals in the ‘brown power’ movement that only want the story told of Rangers and [the] Army and gringos killing innocent Mexicans,” Justice told me when we met in his garage, which doubles as the office for Rimrock Press, a publishing company whose catalog consists entirely of Justice’s own work. He was referring to Refusing to Forget and in particular Martinez, the marker’s sponsor.

    Justice has been researching the Porvenir massacre for more than 30 years, starting when he first visited the Big Bend as a graduate student. He claims to be, and probably is, the first person since schoolteacher Harry Warren to call Porvenir a “massacre” in print, in a master’s thesis published by the University of Texas at El Paso in 1991. Unlike White and Garcia, Justice doesn’t question the innocence of the Porvenir victims. But he believes that additional “context” is necessary to understand the reasons for the massacre, which he views as an aberration, rather than a representatively violent part of a long history of racism. “There have never been any problems between the races to speak of [in Presidio County],” he told me.

    In 2015, Justice teamed up with former Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Sul Ross State University archaeologist David Keller on a privately funded excavation at the massacre site. He is working on a new book about the bullets and bullet casings they found — which he believes implicate the U.S. Army cavalry in the shooting — and also partnered with Patterson to produce a documentary. But they’d run out of money, and the film was taken over by noted Austin filmmaker Andrew Shapter, who pitched the project to PBS and Netflix. In the transition, Justice was demoted to the role of one of 12 consulting historians. Meanwhile, Martinez was given a prominent role on camera.

    Justice was disgruntled when he learned that the dedication ceremony would take place in El Paso. He complained to organizer Arlinda Valencia and local historical commission members before contacting Ponton, the county attorney, and Amanda Shields, a descendant of massacre victim Manuel Moralez.

    “I didn’t want to take my father to a mob scene,” Shields told me over the phone, by way of explaining her opposition to the dedication ceremony. She believed the rumor that O’Rourke and Gutiérrez would be involved.

    In August, Shields called Valencia to demand details about the program for the ceremony. At the time, she expressed particular concern about a potential Q&A event with Martinez that would focus on parallels between border politics and violence in 1918 and today.

    “This is not a political issue,” Shields told me. “It’s a historical issue. With everything that was going on, we didn’t want the ugliness of politics involved in it.” By “everything,” she explained, she was referring primarily to the issue of family separation. Benita and Buddy Albarado told me that Shields’ views represent a small minority of descendants.

    Martinez said that the idea of ignoring the connections between past and present went against her reasons for fighting to get a marker in the first place. “I’m a historian,” she said. “It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today. And that cannot be relegated to the past.”

    After communicating with Justice and Shields, Ponton phoned THC Commissioner Gilbert “Pete” Peterson, who is a bank investment officer in Alpine. That call set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately derail the marker. Peterson immediately emailed Wolfe, the state commission’s executive director, to say that the marker was becoming “a major political issue.” Initially, though, Wolfe defended the agency’s handling of the marker. “Frankly,” Wolfe wrote in his reply, “this might just be one where the [Presidio County Historical Commission] isn’t going to be happy, and that’s why these stories have been untold for so long.” Peterson wrote back to say that he had been in touch with members of the THC executive committee, which consists of 15 members appointed by either former Governor Rick Perry or Governor Greg Abbott, and that an email about the controversy had been forwarded to THC chair John Nau. Two days later, Peterson added, “This whole thing is a burning football that will be thrown to the media.”

    At a meeting of the Presidio County Historical Commission on August 17, Peterson suggested that the executive board played a major role in the decision to pause production of the marker. “I stopped the marker after talking to Rod [Ponton],” Peterson said. “I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking with the chairman and vice-chairman [of the THC]. What we have said, fairly emphatically, is that there will not be a dedication in El Paso.” Through a spokesperson, Wolfe said that the executive committee is routinely consulted and the decision was ultimately his.

    The spokesperson said, “The big reason that the marker was delayed was to be certain about its accuracy. We want these markers to stand for generations and to be as accurate as possible.”

    With no marker to unveil, Valencia still organized a small commemoration. Many descendants, including Benita and Buddy Albarado, chose not to attend. Still, the event was described by Jeff Davis, a THC representative in attendance, as “a near perfect event” whose tone was “somber and respectful but hopeful.”

    Most of THC’s executive committee members are not historians. The chair, John Nau, is CEO of the nation’s largest Anheuser-Busch distributor and a major Republican party donor. His involvement in the Porvenir controversy was not limited to temporarily halting the marker. In August, he also instructed THC staff to ask the Presidio historical commission to submit applications for markers commemorating raids by Mexicans on white ranches during the Mexican Revolution, which Nau described as “a significant but largely forgotten incident in the state’s history.”

    Garcia confirmed that she had been approached by THC staff. She added that the THC had suggested two specific topics: the Christmas Day raid and a subsequent raid at the Neville Ranch.

    The idea of additional plaques to provide so-called context that could be interpreted as justifying the massacre — or at the very least setting up a false moral equivalence — appears to have mollified critics like White, Garcia and Justice. The work on a revised Porvenir massacre text proceeded quickly, with few points of contention, once it began in mid-September. The marker was sent to the foundry on September 18.
    “It’s hard to commemorate such a period of violence, in the midst of another ongoing humanitarian crisis, when this period of violence shaped the institutions of policing that we have today.”

    In the end, the Porvenir descendants will get their marker — but it may come at a cost. Martinez called the idea of multiple markers “deeply unsettling” and not appropriate for the Undertold Marker program. “Events like the Brite Ranch raid and the Neville raid have been documented by historians for over a century,” she said. “These are not undertold histories. My concern with having a series of markers is that, again, it casts suspicion on the victims of these historical events. It creates the logic that these raids caused this massacre, that it was retribution for these men and boys participating.”

    In early November, the THC unexpectedly announced a dedication ceremony for Friday, November 30. The date was one of just a few on which Martinez, who was still planning on organizing several public history events in conjunction with the unveiling, had told the agency months prior that she had a schedule conflict. In an email to Martinez, Sadnick said that it was the only date Nau could attend this year, and that it was impossible for agency officials to make “secure travel plans” once the legislative session began in January.

    A handful of descendants, including Shields and the Albarados, still plan to attend. “This is about families having closure,” Shields told me. “Now, this can finally be put to rest.”

    The Albarados are livid that the THC chose a date that, in their view, prioritized the convenience of state and county officials over the attendance of descendants — including their own daughters, who feared they wouldn’t be able to get off work. They also hope to organize a second, unofficial gathering at the marker site next year, with the participation of more descendants and the Refusing to Forget historians. “We want people to know the truth of what really happened [at Porvenir],” Buddy told me, “and to know who it was that got this historical marker put there.”

    Others, like Arlinda Valencia, planned to stay home. “Over 100 years ago, our ancestors were massacred, and the reason they were massacred was because of lies that people were stating as facts,” she told me in El Paso. “They called them ‘bandits,’ when all they were doing was working and trying to make a living. And now, it’s happening again.”

    #mémoire #histoire #Texas #USA #massacre #assassinat #méxicains #violence #migrations #commémoration #historicisation #frontières #violence_aux_frontières #violent_borders #Mexique

  • Exclusive: WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/09/26/exclusive-whatsapp-cofounder-brian-acton-gives-the-inside-story-on-deletefac

    By then, three years since the deal, Zuckerberg was growing impatient, Acton says, and he expressed his frustrations at an all-hands meeting for WhatsApp staffers. “The CFO projections, the ten-year outlook—they wanted and needed the WhatsApp revenues to continue to show the growth to Wall Street,” Acton recalls. Internally, Facebook had targeted a $10 billion revenue run rate within five years of monetization, but such numbers sounded too high to Acton—and reliant on advertising.

  • How my non-tech female cofounder built 45 CTOs for top-notch Startups!
    https://hackernoon.com/how-my-non-tech-female-cofounder-built-45-ctos-for-top-notch-startups-12

    Today, she has earned the Women Pride Award from her favourite Bollywood actor. She has been in the top 10 women entrepreneurs list in India. Her success is the result of her hard work and perseverance, tinkering her way to the top passing through a lot of background hurdles.Adding the co-founder tag on LinkedIn is easy, justifying it is so hard. You have to take some bold decisions as a CEO and you have no other choice.Aditi Chaurasia: Co-founder and CEO of EngineerBabu.She took some brilliant decisions to help us reach where we are today.1. You should choose your customers and not vice versa!The idea is that, people do understand their business domain and market, but technology may not be their forte. Eventually, Most of the people end up hiring the wrong person.Aditi made a decision (...)

  • Opportunity Flow
    https://hackernoon.com/opportunity-flow-44aecc738601?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    Increase The Number Of Moments That Can Change Your TrajectoryWhat is it?Opportunity flow is to you and me what deal flow is to a VC firm. It is the sum of things like conversations about research breakthroughs a grad student friend had, the inside access to a job opportunity, and an old coworker pitching you to join her startup as a cofounder. (Although I’ll mostly be discussing in the context of paid work, it could be used vocationally or in personal relationship.)Opportunity flow is the sum of moments that could alter the trajectory of your life. And like any sort of deal flow, depending on your investment hypothesis, you could consistently get opportunities to incrementally alter that trajectory or infrequently get the option to radically change. Most people land somewhere in (...)

    #future #careers #strategy #opportunity-flow-theory #opportunity-flow

  • An Overview of #hashgraph
    https://hackernoon.com/an-overview-of-hashgraph-b0900a1fd7bf?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3---4

    An Overview Of HashgraphSimple Overview of the Hashgraph ProtocolA distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a system where we share information and we don’t trust each other individually, but we trust the group as a whole. DLTs allow us to come up with a consensus on the order of transactions and timestamps.Introducing HashgraphHashgraph was developed by Swirlds. The cofounder and CTO of Swirlds is Leemon Baird, who obtained his bachelor’s degree at the U.S. Air Force Academy and obtained a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.Hashgraph is a DLT. However, hashgraph is not a #blockchain in the sense that it’s not built on a chain of blocks. Hashgraph would be best characterized as a DAG — Directed Acyclic Graph.Other DLT solutions might be secure, but they’re not particularly (...)

    #security #hashgraph-overview #distributed-ledgers

  • The only gay in the bro-village
    https://hackernoon.com/the-only-gay-in-the-bro-village-92c2f02b2716?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3-

    Probably not, but it sure feels like it sometimes.I was a PR guy with some #tech skills before I became a tech guy with some PR skills. Its been an interesting transition. The world of marketing has been comfortable with the gays for quite a while now and they like what we’ve done with the place. Tech? Hmm, not quite yet.Recently, I was doing a bit of soft recruiting for my startup at a JS meetup and was explaining to a couple of guys how my cofounder (who is a lady’s man, btw) and I are determined to get to know people before we take new team members on board, at what is basically the ground floor. We want to make sure the team we build is with us for the long run. I said, “it’s kind of like dating” when describing our recruitment process, which pretty much made the next, final five minutes (...)

    #life #lgbtq #self-improvement #humor

  • Behind the Scenes of a #database as a Service Provider
    https://hackernoon.com/behind-the-scenes-of-a-database-as-a-service-provider-1f5ee1776717?sourc

    Founder InterviewPlease welcome JawsDB Founder & Owner John Willman to Hacker Noon! JawsDB is a fast, reliable, no-bullshark database as a service, and was the very first developer marketplace partner of our weekly sponsor, Manifold.Manifold is the marketplace for independent developer services. You can learn more about their company in my interview with their cofounder Matt Creager and VP of Product Peter Cho. For Hacker Noon readers, Manifold is offering $10 off any service with code HACKERNOON2018Lets talk numbers. What is the scale and progress of JawsDB?It’s humbling, to be honest. Roughly 3 years ago, JawsDB had 5 customers at the end of its first month. I was ecstatic. Over the moon! Something I had put together as a labor of love and a project for learning new technologies (...)

    #database-as-a-service #weekly-sponsor #dbaas-provider #dbaas

  • “We’re in a diversity crisis”: cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives MIT Tech Review, by JAckie SNow
    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610192/were-in-a-diversity-crisis-black-in-ais-founder-on-whats-poisoning

    It’s really important to have the stand-alone conference [on Fairness and Transparency] because it needs to be worked on by people from many disciplines who talk to each other.

    Have a good idea, then put it in a box and let it sim with its pairs.
    And a bunch of white ass are gona debate on the colours of ethics.

    A boostrap issue.

  • They Have, Right Now, Another You
    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/they-have-right-now-another-you

    Stephen Crowley/The New York Times/Redux Peter Thiel speaking at the Republican National Convention, Cleveland, July 2016. Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and a cofounder of #PayPal, is a founder of #Palantir, a #Silicon\Valley firm funded by the #CIA, whose algorithms allow for rapid analysis of voluminous data that it makes available to intelligence agencies and numerous police forces as well as to corporations and financial institutions.

    Advertisements show up on our #Internet browser or #Facebook page or #Gmail and we tend to think they are there because some company is trying to sell us something it believes we want based on our browsing history or what weʼve said in an #e-mail or what we were searching for on #Google. We probably donʼt think they are there because we live in a particular neighborhood, or hang out with certain kinds of people, or that we have been scored a particular and obscure way by a pointillist rendering of our lives. And most likely, we donʼt imagine we are seeing those ads because an algorithm has determined that we are losers or easy marks or members of a particular ethnic or racial group.

    As OʼNeil points out, preferences and habits and zip codes and status updates are also used to create predatory ads, “ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.” People with poor credit may be offered payday loans; people with dead-end jobs may be offered expensive courses at for-profit colleges. The idea, OʼNeil writes, “is to locate the most #vulnerable people and then use their private #information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the ‘#pain_point.

    #algorithme #délétère #données #data

  • Pirate Bay cofounder invents an infernal device that will utterly bankrupt the music industry / Boing Boing
    http://boingboing.net/2015/12/22/pirate-bay-cofounder-invents-a.html

    The record industry insists that all unauthorized copies represent lost sales. So Peter “brokep” Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” storing them in /dev/null (which is to say, deleting them even as they’re created).

    #musique #copyright #pirate_bay

  • Immigration au #Qatar : la #kafala toujours en place malgré les promesses

    L’ONG Amnesty International publie ce jeudi un rapport pour rappeler au Qatar qu’il n’a pas tenu ses promesses en matière d’amélioration des droits des ouvriers, et notamment la réforme de la Kafala, ce système qui met tout employé à la merci de son employeur pour changer de travail, sortir du territoire…Une réforme annoncée il y a un an et qui n’a pas eu lieu.

    http://www.rfi.fr/moyen-orient/20150521-immigration-qatar-kafala-rapport-amnesty-travailleurs-migrants
    #migration #travail #exploitation

    • Will Migrant Domestic Workers in the Gulf Ever Be Safe From Abuse?

      Jahanara* had had enough. For a year, the Bangladeshi cook had been working 12 to 16 hours a day, eating only leftovers and sleeping on the kitchen floor of her employer’s Abu Dhabi home – all for half the salary she had been promised. She had to prepare four fresh meals a day for the eight-member family, who gave her little rest. She was tired, she had no phone and she was alone. So, in the summer of 2014, in the middle of the night after a long day’s work, she snuck out into the driveway, scaled the front gate and escaped.

      Jahanara ran along the road in the dark. She did not know where she was going. Eventually, a Pakistani taxi driver pulled over, and asked her if she had run away from her employer, and whether she needed help. She admitted she had no money, and no clue where she wanted to go. The driver gave her a ride, dropping her off in the neighboring emirate of Dubai, in the Deira neighborhood. There, he introduced her to Vijaya, an Indian woman in her late fifties who had been working in the Gulf for more than two decades.

      “It’s like I found family here in this strange land.”

      Vijaya gave the nervous young woman a meal of rice, dal and, as Jahanara still recalls, “a beautiful fish fry.” She arranged for Jahanara to rent half a room in her apartment and, within a week, had found her part-time housekeeping work in the homes of two expat families.

      Jahanara is a 31-year-old single woman from north Bangladesh, and Vijaya, 60, is a grandmother of eight from Mumbai, India. Jahanara speaks Bengali, while Vijaya speaks Telugu. Despite the differences in age and background, the two women have become close friends. They communicate in gestures and broken Urdu.

      “It’s like I found family here in this strange land,” Jahanara says.

      The younger woman now cleans four houses a day, and cooks dinner for a fifth, while the older woman works as a masseuse, giving traditional oil massages to mothers and babies.

      Jahanara’s experience in #Abu_Dhabi was not the first time she had been exploited as a domestic worker in the Gulf. She originally left Bangladesh six years ago, and has been home only once since then, when she ran away from abusive employers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and the police deported her. She had no choice – under the much-criticized kafala system for legally employing migrant workers, a domestic worker is attached to a particular household that sponsors their visa. Employers often keep the worker’s passport to prevent their leaving, although this is illegal in most Gulf countries today.

      Under kafala, quitting a bad boss means losing your passport and vital work visa, and potentially being arrested or deported. This is why, the second time, Jahanara escaped in the dead of night. Now, she works outside official channels.

      “You earn at least three times more if you’re ‘khalli walli,’” Vijaya says, using a colloquial Arabic term for undocumented or freelance migrant workers. The name loosely translates as “take it or leave it.”

      “You get to sleep in your own house, you get paid on time and if your employer misbehaves, you can find a new one,” she says.

      “The Gulf needs us, but like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”

      Ever year, driven by poverty, family pressure, conflict or natural disasters back home, millions of women, mainly from developing countries, get on flights to the Gulf with their fingers crossed that they won’t be abused when they get there.

      It’s a dangerous trade-off, but one that can work out for some. When Jahanara and Vijaya describe their lives, the two women repeatedly weigh the possibility of financial empowerment against inadequate wages, routine abuse and vulnerability.

      By working for 23 years in Dubai and Muscat in Oman, Vijaya has funded the education of her three children, the construction of a house for her son in a Mumbai slum and the weddings of two daughters. She is overworked and underpaid, but she says that’s “normal.” As she sees it, it’s all part of working on the margins of one of the world’s most successful economies.

      “The Gulf needs us,” Vijaya says. “But like a bad husband, it also exploits us.”

      The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that there are 11.5 million migrant domestic workers around the world – 73 percent of them are women. In 2016, there were 3.77 million domestic workers in Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

      In a single household in these states, it’s common to find several domestic workers employed to do everything from cleaning and cooking, to guarding the home and tutoring the children.

      Unlike other sectors, the demand for domestic workers has been resilient to economic downturns. Estimated to be one of the world’s largest employers of domestic workers, Saudi Arabia hosts around 2.42 million. The majority of these workers (733,000) entered the country between 2016 and 2017, during its fiscal deficit. In 2017, domestic workers comprised a full 22 percent of Kuwait’s working age population. Oman has seen a threefold explosion in its domestic work sector since 2008. Overall, the GCC’s migrant domestic work sector has been growing at an annual average of 8.7 percent for the past decade.

      That growth is partly fueled by the increasing numbers of women entering the workforce. The percentage of Saudi Arabia’s adult female population in the formal labor force has risen from 18 percent to 22 percent over the past decade. In Qatar, the figure has jumped from 49 percent to 58 percent. And as more women go to work, there’s a growing need for others to take over the child and elderly care in their households. Experts call this transfer of care work from unpaid family members to paid workers from other countries the “global care chain.”

      A 2017 report, which examined the effect of changing demographics in the Gulf, found that dramatically decreased fertility – thanks to improved female education and later marriages – and greater numbers of the dependent elderly have resulted in an “increased trend for labour participation of ‘traditional’ informal care givers (usually women).”

      The enduring use of migrant domestic workers in the region is also a result of local traditions. For example, while Saudi Arabia was still the only country in the world that banned women from driving, there was a consistent need for male personal drivers, many coming from abroad. The ban was lifted in June 2018, but the demand for drivers is still high because many women don’t yet have licenses.

      “Without domestic workers, societies could not function here,” says Mohammed Abu Baker, a lawyer in Abu Dhabi and a UAE national. “I was brought up by many Indian nannies, at a time when Indians were our primary migrants. Now, I have a Pakistani driver, an Indonesian cook, an Indian cleaner, a Filipino home nurse and a Sri Lankan nanny. None of them speak Arabic, and they can hardly speak to each other, but they run my household like a well-oiled machine.”

      There is also demand from expatriate families, with dual wage earners looking for professional cleaning services, part-time cooks and full-time childcare workers.

      “When I came from Seattle with my husband, we were determined not to hire servants,” says Laura, a 35-year-old teacher in an American primary school in Abu Dhabi. “But after we got pregnant, and I got my teaching job, we had to get full-time help.”

      “My American guilt about hiring house help disappeared in months!” she says, as her Sri Lankan cook Frida quietly passes around home-baked cookies. “It is impossible to imagine these conveniences back home, at this price.”

      Laura says she pays minimum wage, and funds Frida’s medical insurance – “all as per law.” But she also knows that conveniences for women like her often come at a cost paid by women like Frida. As part of her local church’s “good Samaritan group” – as social workers must call themselves to avoid government scrutiny – Laura has helped fundraise medical and legal expenses for at least 40 abused migrant workers over the past two years.

      Living isolated in a house with limited mobility and no community, many domestic workers, especially women, are vulnerable to abuse. Afraid to lose their right to work, employees can endure a lot before running away, including serious sexual assault. Legal provisions do exist – in many countries, workers can file a criminal complaint against their employers, or approach labor courts for help. But often they are unaware of, or unable to access, the existing labor protections and resources.

      “I never believed the horror stories before, but when you meet woman after woman with bruises or unpaid wages, you start understanding that the same system that makes my life easier is actually broken,” Laura says.

      In 2007, Jayatri* made one of the hardest decisions of her life. She left her two young children at home in Sri Lanka, while the country was at war, to be with another family in Saudi Arabia.

      It was near the end of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and 22-year-old Jayatri had been struggling to support her family since her husband’s death in the war two years earlier. The 26-year conflict claimed the lives of tens of thousands of fathers, husbands, sons and brothers, forcing many Tamil women to take on the role of sole breadwinner for their families. But there are few job opportunities for women in a culture that still largely believes their place is in the home. Women who are single or widowed already face stigma, which only gets worse if they also try to find paying work in Sri Lanka.

      S. Senthurajah, executive director of SOND, an organization that raises awareness about safe migration, says that as a result, an increasing number of women are migrating from Sri Lanka to the Gulf. More than 160,000 Sri Lankan women leave home annually to work in other countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Malaysia, according to the International Organization for Migration.

      Senthurajah says recruitment agencies specifically target vulnerable female heads of households: widows, single and divorced women and women whose husbands are disabled or otherwise unable to work to support the family. Women like Jayatri.

      When a local recruitment agency approached her and offered her a job as a domestic worker in the Gulf, it was an opportunity she felt she couldn’t turn down. She traveled from Vavuniya, a town in the island’s north – which was then under the control of Tamil Tiger rebels – to Colombo, to undergo a few weeks of housekeeping training.

      She left her young children, a boy and a girl, with her mother. When she eventually arrived in Saudi Arabia, her passport was taken by the local recruitment agency and she was driven to her new home where there were 15 children to look after. From the start, she was abused.

      “I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day,” she says, not wanting to divulge any more details about how she was treated.

      “I just wanted to go home.”

      Jayatri complained repeatedly to the recruitment agency, who insisted that she’d signed a contract for two years and that there was no way out. She was eventually transferred to another home, but the situation there was just as bad: She worked 18 hours a day and was abused, again.

      “It was like jail,” she says.

      “I spent five months in that house being tortured, hit and with no proper food and no salary. I worked from 5 a.m. to midnight every day.”

      In 2009, Jayatri arrived back in northern Sri Lanka with nothing to show for what she had endured in Saudi Arabia. She was never paid for either job. She now works as a housemaid in Vavuniya earning $60 per month. It’s not enough.

      “This is the only opportunity I have,” she says. “There’s no support. There are so many difficulties here.”

      Jayatri’s traumatic time in Saudi Arabia is one of many stories of abuse that have come out of the country in recent years. While there are no reliable statistics on the number of migrant domestic workers who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, Human Rights Watch says that each year the Saudi Ministry of Social Affairs and the embassies of source countries shelter thousands of domestic workers with complaints against their employers or recruiters.

      Excessive workload and unpaid wages are the most common complaints. But employers largely act with impunity, Senthurajah says.

      “It’s like a human slave sale,” Ravindra De Silva, cofounder of AFRIEL, an organization that works with returnee migrant workers in northern Sri Lanka, tells News Deeply.

      “Recruitment agencies have agents in different regions of the country and through those agents, they collect women as a group and send them. The agents know which families [to] pick easily – widows and those with financial difficulties,” he says.

      In 2016, a man turned up at Meera’s* mud-brick home on the outskirts of Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, offering her a job in the Gulf.

      “They told me I could earn well if I went abroad and that they could help me to look after my family,” she says.

      Within a few months of arriving in Saudi Arabia, Meera, 42, couldn’t keep up with the long hours and strenuous housework. She cooked and cleaned for 12 family members and rarely got a break.

      Her employer then became abusive.

      “He started beating me and put acid in my eyes,” she says. He also sexually assaulted her.

      But she endured the attacks and mistreatment, holding on to the hope of making enough money to secure her family’s future. After eight months, she went back home. She was never paid.

      Now Meera makes ends meet by working as a day laborer. “The agency keeps coming back, telling me how poor we are and that I should go back [to Saudi Arabia] for my children,” she says.

      “I’ll never go back again. I got nothing from it, [except] now I can’t see properly because of the acid in my eyes.”

      While thousands of women travel to a foreign country for work and end up exploited and abused, there are also those who make the journey and find what they were looking for: opportunity and self-reliance. Every day, more than 1,500 Nepalis leave the country for employment abroad, primarily in Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, India and Malaysia. Of the estimated 2.5 million Nepalis working overseas, about 11 percent are female.

      Many women from South Asian countries who work in the Gulf send remittances home that are used to improve their family’s socio-economic status, covering the cost of education, health care, food and housing. In addition to financial remittances, the social remittances of female migrants in terms of skills, attitudes, ideas and knowledge can also have wide-ranging benefits, including contributing to economic development and gender equality back home.

      Kunan Gurung, project coordinator at Pourakhi Nepal, an organization focused on supporting female returnee migrants, says those who have “successful” migration journeys are often able to use their experiences abroad to challenge gender norms.

      “Our society is patriarchal and male-dominated, but the boundaries expand for women who return from the Gulf successfully because they have money and thus some power,” he says.

      “The women have left their village, taken a plane and have lived in the developed world. Such experiences leave them feeling empowered.”

      Gurung says many returning migrant workers invest their savings in their own businesses, from tailoring to chicken farms. But it can be difficult, because women often find that the skills they earned while working abroad can’t help them make money back home. To counter this, Pourakhi trains women in entrepreneurship to not only try to limit re-migration and keep families together but also to ensure women are equipped with tangible skills in the context of life in Nepal.

      But for the women in Nepal who, like Jayatri in Sri Lanka, return without having earned any money, deep-rooted stigma can block their chances to work and separate them from their families. Women who come home with nothing are looked at with suspicion and accused of being sexually active, Gurung says.

      “The reality is that women are not looked after in the Gulf, in most cases,” he says.

      In Kathmandu, Pourakhi runs an emergency shelter for returning female migrants. Every evening, staff wait at Kathmandu airport for flights landing from the Gulf. They approach returning migrants – women who stand out because of their conservative clothes and “the look on their faces” – and offer shelter, food and support.

      Of the 2,000 women they have housed over the last nine years, 42 have returned pregnant and 21 with children.

      “There are so many problems returnee migrants face. Most women don’t have contact with their families because their employer didn’t pay, or they have health issues or they’re pregnant,” says Krishna Gurung (no relation to Kunan), Pourakhi’s shelter manager.

      “They don’t reintegrate with their families. Their families don’t accept them.” Which could be the biggest tragedy of all. Because the chance to make life better for their families is what drives so many women to leave home in the first place.

      Realizing how crucial their workers are to the Gulf economies, major labor-sending countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines have been using both pressure and dialogue to improve conditions for their citizens.

      Over recent years, they have instituted a wide array of bans and restrictions, often linked to particularly horrifying cases of abuse. Nepal has banned women from working in the Gulf in 2016; the same year, India disallowed women under 30 from migrating to the Gulf. In 2013, Sri Lanka temporarily banned women from leaving the country for domestic work, citing abuse abroad and neglected families at home, and now requires a family background report before women can travel.

      The most high-profile diplomatic dispute over domestic workers unfolded between the Philippines and Kuwait this year. In January, the Philippines banned workers from going to Kuwait, and made the ban “permanent” in February after a 29-year-old Filipino maid, Joanna Demafelis, was found dead in a freezer in her employers’ abandoned apartment in Kuwait City.

      “Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country.”

      At the time, the Philippines’ firebrand president, Rodrigo Duterte, said he would “sell my soul to the devil” to get his citizens home from Kuwait to live comfortably back home. Thousands of Filipino citizens were repatriated through a voluntary return scheme in the first half of 2018, while Kuwait made overtures to Ethiopia to recruit more maids to replace the lost labor force. Duterte’s ban was eventually lifted in May, after Kuwait agreed to reform its migrant work sector, ending the seizure of passports and phones, and instituting a 24-hour hotline for abused workers.

      It’s well established that bans do not stop women from traveling to the Gulf to become domestic workers. Bandana Pattanaik, the international coordinator of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, has criticized bans as being “patriarchal, limiting to female agency and also ending up encouraging illegal human smuggling.”

      But others point out that the international pressure generated by travel bans has had some effect, as in the case with the Philippines and Kuwait. “Bans provide some political leverage for the sending country,” says Kathmandu-based researcher Upasana Khadka. “But bans do not work as permanent solutions.”
      ATTEMPTS AT REFORM

      Today, after decades of criticism and campaigning around labor rights violations, the Gulf is seeing a slow shift toward building better policies for domestic workers.

      “In the past five years, five of the six GCC countries have started to adopt laws for the protection of migrant domestic workers for the very first time,” says Rothna Begum, women’s rights researcher for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch.

      “The GCC countries have long cultivated the image of being luxurious economies meant for the good life,” Begum says. “This image is hard to maintain as labor exploitation comes to light. So, while they try to shut the reporting down, they have also been forced to address some of the issues raised by their critics.”

      Legal and institutional reforms have been announced in the domestic work sector in all GCC countries except Oman. These regulate and standardize contracts, mandate better living conditions, formalize recruitment, and plan rehabilitation and legal redress for abused workers.

      This gradual reform is due to international pressure and monitoring by human rights groups and international worker unions. After the 2014 crash in the oil economy, the sudden need for foreign investment exposed the GCC and the multinational companies doing business there to more global scrutiny.

      Countries in the Gulf are also hoping that the new national policies will attract more professional and skilled home workers. “Domestic work is a corrupt, messy sector. The host countries are trying to make it more professional,” says M. Bheem Reddy, vice president of the Hyderabad-based Migrant Rights Council, which engages with women workers from the southern districts of India.

      Many of the Gulf states are moving toward nationalization – creating more space for their own citizens in the private sector – this means they also want to regulate one of the fastest growing job sectors in the region. “This starts with dignity and proper pay for the existing migrant workers,” Reddy says.

      There have been attempts to develop a regional standard for domestic labor rights, with little success. In 2011, the ILO set standards on decent work and minimum protection through the landmark Domestic Workers Convention. All the GCC countries adopted the Convention, but none have ratified it, which means the rules are not binding.

      Instead, each Gulf country has taken its own steps to try to protect household workers who come from abroad.

      After reports of forced labor in the lead-up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar faced a formal inquiry by the ILO if it didn’t put in place migrant labor protections. Under that pressure, in 2017, the country passed a law on domestic work. The law stipulates free health care, a regular monthly salary, maximum 10-hour work days, and three weeks’ severance pay. Later, it set a temporary minimum wage for migrant workers, at $200 a month.

      The UAE’s new reforms are motivated by the Gulf crisis – which has seen Qatar blockaded by its neighbors – as well as a desire to be seen as one of the more progressive GCC countries. The UAE had a draft law on domestic work since 2012, but only passed it in 2017, after Kuwait published its own law. The royal decree gives household workers a regular weekly day off, daily rest of at least 12 hours, access to a mobile phone, 30 days paid annual leave and the right to retain personal documents like passports. Most importantly, it has moved domestic work from the purview of the interior ministry to the labor ministry – a long-standing demand from rights advocates.

      The UAE has also become the first Gulf country to allow inspectors access to a household after securing a warrant from the prosecutor. This process would be triggered by a worker’s distress call or complaint, but it’s unclear if regular state inspections will also occur. Before this law, says Begum, the biggest obstacle to enforcing labor protection in domestic work was the inability for authorities to monitor the workspace of a cleaner or cook, because it is a private home, unlike a hotel or a construction site.

      The UAE has not followed Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in stipulating a minimum wage for domestic workers. But it has issued licenses for 40 Tadbeer Service Centers, which will replace recruitment agencies by the end of the year. Employers in the UAE will have to submit their requests for workers through these centers, which are run by private licensed agents but supervised by the Ministry of Human Resources. Each of the centers has accommodation for workers and can also sponsor their visas, freeing them up to take on part-time jobs while also catering to growing demand from UAE nationals and expats for legal part-timers.

      “You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”

      B. L. Surendranath, general secretary of the Immigration Protection Center in Hyderabad, India, visited some of these centers in Dubai earlier this year, on the invitation of the UAE human resources ministry. “I was pleasantly surprised at the well-thought-out ideas at the model Tadbeer Center,” he says. “Half the conflicts [between employer and worker] are because of miscommunication, which the center will sort out through conflict resolution counselors.”

      Saudi Arabia passed a labor law in 2015, but it didn’t extend to domestic work. Now, as unemployment among its nationals touches a high of 12.8 percent, its efforts to create more jobs include regulating the migrant workforce. The Saudi government has launched an electronic platform called Musaned to directly hire migrant domestic workers, cutting out recruitment agencies altogether. Women migrant workers will soon live in dormitories and hostels run by labor supply agencies, not the homes of their employers. The labor ministry has also launched a multi-language hotline for domestic workers to lodge complaints.

      Dhaka-based migrant rights activist Shakirul Islam, from Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Programme, welcomes these changes, but remains circumspect. “Most women who return to Bangladesh from Saudi [Arabia] say that the revised laws have no impact on their lives,” he says. “My understanding is that the employers are not aware of the law on the one hand, and on the other, do not care about it.”

      Migrant rights activists, ILO officials, the governments of source countries and workers themselves are cautiously optimistic about the progressive direction of reforms in the Gulf. “But it is clear that none of the laws penalize employers of domestic workers for labor rights violations,” says Islam.

      Rights activists and reports from the ILO, U.N. and migrants’ rights forums have for decades repeated that full protection of domestic workers is impossible as long as GCC countries continue to have some form of the kafala sponsorship system.

      Saudi Arabia continues to require workers to secure an exit permit from their employers if they want to leave the country, while Qatar’s 2015 law to replace the kafala sponsorship system does not extend to domestic workers. Reddy of the Migrant Rights Council says the UAE’s attempt to tackle kafala by allowing Tadbeer Center agents to sponsor visas does not make agents accountable if they repeatedly send different workers to the same abusive employer.

      For now, it seems the women working on the margins of some of the richest economies in the world will remain vulnerable to abuse and exploitation from their employers. And as long as opportunities exist for them in the Gulf that they can’t find at home, thousands will come to fulfil the demand for domestic and care work, knowing they could be risking everything for little or no return.

      Jahanara says the only thing for women in her position to do is to take the chance and hope for the best.

      “You focus on the success stories you hear, and hope you’ll have that luck.”


      https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/articles/2018/08/31/will-migrant-domestic-workers-in-the-gulf-ever-be-safe-from-abuse-2

      #travail_domestique #migrations #pays_du_golfe

  • Code Club cofounder resigns after being ordered not to criticize Google
    http://pando.com/2014/08/27/code-club-cofounder-resigns-after-being-ordered-not-to-criticize-google

    One of the founding members of Code Club, a volunteer-led organization that teaches programming to kids in the UK, has resigned after being told by its board not to criticize Google or any of the group’s sponsors."

    "“This is institutional corruption,” he said. “This is the danger posed by the monopoly of companies like Google. And it is affecting every aspect of society, including education.”

    C’est fascinant comment le numérique réuni souvent sous la même bannière des gens qui s’opposent parfaitement.
    Ici quelqu’un qui défend l’éducation au code pour une émancipation numérique contre quelqu’un qui veut de la main d’oeuvre en quantité et des consommateurs pas trop critiques.

    #Google #code #éducation

  • You are more than a sexual fetish — but online dating sites might not think so - Salon.com
    http://www.salon.com/2014/03/15/you_are_more_than_a_sexual_fetish_%E2%80%94_but_online_dating_sites_might_not

    In his first post on the blog, titled “Rape Fantasies and Hygiene by State,” which showed a state‑by‑state breakdown of people who answered questions about their willingness to act out rape scenarios in bed at a partner’s request, OKCupid cofounder Chris Coyne boasted about the utility of OKCupid as a living social-science lab: “Old media could only get 3,050 people to answer a poll about Obama. And it was enough to call the election with confidence. OKCupid, on the other hand, can ask the world’s most personal questions and get hundreds of thousands of answers.”

    article plus intéressant que son titre ne laisse à penser

    #surveillance #data-mining #sondages

  • #GitHub puts founder on leave, kicks wife out of office after #harassment claim
    http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/github-puts-founder-on-leave-kicks-wife-out-of-office-after-harassment-

    GitHub has placed one of its three cofounders on leave and barred the cofounder’s wife from the office while it investigates allegations made by a former employee.

    Engineer Julie Ann Horvath announced this past weekend that she had left GitHub, describing a toxic office culture in an e-mail interview with TechCrunch. The wife of the cofounder played a prominent role in Horvath’s account.

    Julie Ann Horvath Describes Sexism And Intimidation Behind Her GitHub Exit
    http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-ex

    The exit of engineer Julie Ann Horvath from programming network GitHub has sparked yet another conversation concerning women in technology and startups. Her claims that she faced a sexist internal culture at GitHub came as a surprise to some, given her former defense of the startup and her internal work at the company to promote women in technology.

    #harcèlement #sexisme