Category Archives: ProPublica

Living in a Violent Neighborhood Is as Likely to Give You PTSD as Going to War

by daniel13stoko Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Chicago’s Cook County Hospital has one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation, treating about 2,000 patients a year for gunshots, stabbings and other violent injuries.

So when researchers started screening patients there for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2011, they assumed they would find cases.

Is PTSD Contagious?
Read Mac McClelland’s feature story on the epidemic in military families.

They just didn’t know how many: Fully 43 percent of the patients they examined–and more than half of gunshot-wound victims–had signs of PTSD.

“We knew these people were going to have PTSD symptoms,” said Kimberly Joseph, a trauma surgeon at the hospital. “We didn’t know it was going to be as extensive.”

What the work showed, Joseph said, is, “This is a much more urgent problem than you think.”

Joseph proposed spending about $200,000 a year to add staffers to screen all at-risk patients for PTSD and connect them with treatment. The taxpayer-subsidized hospital has an annual budget of roughly $450 million. But Joseph said hospital administrators turned her down and suggested she look for outside funding.

“Right now, we don’t have institutional support,” said Joseph, who is now applying for outside grants.

A hospital spokeswoman would not comment on why the hospital decided not to pay for regular screening. The hospital is part of a pilot program with other area hospitals to help “pediatrics patients identified with PTSD,” said the spokeswoman, Marisa Kollias.”The Cook County Health and Hospitals System is committed to treating all patients with high quality care.”

Right now, social workers try to identify patients with the most severe PTSD symptoms, said Carol Reese, the trauma center’s violence prevention coordinator and an Episcopal priest.

“I’m not going to tell you we have everything we need in place right now, because we don’t,” Reese said. “We have a chaplain and a social worker and a couple of social work interns trying to see 5,000 people. We’re not staffed to do it.”

A growing body of research shows that Americans with traumatic injuries develop PTSD at rates comparable to veterans of war. Just like veterans, civilians can suffer flashbacks, nightmares, paranoia, and social withdrawal. While the United States has been slow to provide adequate treatment to troops affected by post-traumatic stress, the military has made substantial progress in recent years. It now regularly screens for PTSD, works to fight the stigma associated with mental health treatment and educates military families about potential symptoms.

Few similar efforts exist for civilian trauma victims. Americans wounded in their own neighborhoods are not getting treatment for PTSD. They’re not even getting diagnosed.

Studies show that, overall, about 8 percent of Americans suffer from PTSD at some point in their lives. But the rates appear to be much higher in communities–such as poor, largely African-American pockets of Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia–where high rates of violent crime have persisted despite a national decline.

Researchers in Atlanta interviewed more than 8,000 inner-city residents and found that about two-thirds said they had been violently attacked and that half knew someone who had been murdered. At least 1 in 3 of those interviewed experienced symptoms consistent with PTSD at some point in their lives–and that’s a “conservative estimate,” said Dr. Kerry Ressler, the lead investigator on the project.

“The rates of PTSD we see are as high or higher than Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam veterans,” Ressler said. “We have a whole population who is traumatized.”

Post-traumatic stress can be a serious burden: It can take a toll on relationships and parenting, lead to family conflict and interfere with jobs. A national study of patients with traumatic injuries found that those who developed post-traumatic stress were less likely to have returned to work a year after their injuries.

It may also have a broader social cost. “Neglect of civilian PTSD as a public health concern may be compromising public safety,” Ressler and his co-authors concluded in a 2012 paper.

For most people, untreated PTSD will not lead to violence. But “there’s a subgroup of people who are at risk, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, of reacting in a violent way or an aggressive way, that they might not have if they had had their PTSD treated,” Ressler said.

Research on military veterans has found that the symptom of “chronic hyperarousal”–the distorted sense of always being under extreme threat–can lead to increased aggression and violent behavior.

“Very minor threats can be experienced, by what the signals in your body tell you, as, ‘You’re in acute danger,'” said Sandra Bloom, a psychiatrist and former president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Another issue, wrote researchers at Drexel University, is that people with symptoms of PTSD may be more likely to carry a weapon in order to “restore feelings of safety.”

Hospital trauma centers, which work on the front lines of neighborhood violence, could help address the lack of treatment. Indeed, the American College of Surgeons, which sets standards for the care of patients with traumatic injuries, is set to recommend that trauma centers”evaluate, support and treat” patients for post-traumatic stress.

But it’s not a requirement, and few hospitals appear to be doing it.

ProPublica surveyed a top-level trauma center in each of the 22 cities with the nation’s highest homicide rates. Just one, the Spirit of Charity Trauma Center in New Orleans, currently screens all seriously injured patients for PTSD. At another, Detroit Receiving Hospital, psychologists talk with injured crime victims about PTSD.

Other hospitals have a patchwork of resources or none at all. At two hospitals, in Birmingham, Alabama and St. Louis, Missouri, trauma center staff said they hope to institute routine PTSD screening by the end of the year.

Doctors in Baltimore, Newark, Memphis, and Jackson, Miss., said they wanted to do more to address PTSD, but they do not have the money.

They said adding even small amounts to hospital budgets is a hard sell in a tough economic climate. That’s especially true at often-cash-strapped public hospitals.

In order to add a staff member to screen and follow up on PTSD, “Do I lay someone else off in another area?” asked Carnell Cooper, a trauma surgeon at Maryland Shock Trauma in Baltimore.

Many public hospitals rely on state Medicaid programs to cover treatment of low-income patients. But several surgeons across the country said they did not know of any way they could bill Medicaid for screenings.

The federal government often provides guidance to state Medicaid programs on best practices for patient care and how to fund them. But a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the agency has given states no guidance on whether or how hospitals could be reimbursed for PTSD screenings.

Hospitals are often unwilling to foot the bill themselves.

Trauma surgeons and their staffs expressed frustration that they know PTSD is having a serious impact on their patients, but they can’t find a way to pay for the help they need.

“We don’t recognize that people have PTSD. We don’t recognize that they’re not doing their job as well, that they’re not doing as well in school, that they’re getting irritable at home with their families,” said John Porter, a trauma surgeon in Jackson, Miss., which has a per-capita homicide rate higher than Chicago’s.

“When you think about it, if someone gets shot, and I save their life, and they can’t go out and function, did I technically save their life? Probably not.”

When RAND Corp. researchers began interviewing violently injured young men in Los Angeles in the late 1990s, they faced some skepticism that the men, often connected to gangs, would be susceptible to PTSD.

“We had people tell us that we’d see a lot of people who were gang-bangers, and they wouldn’t develop PTSD, because they were already hardened to that kind of life,” said Grant Marshall, a behavioral scientist who studied patients at a Los Angeles trauma center. “We didn’t find that to be the case at all. People in gangs were just as likely as anyone else to develop PTSD.”

In fact, trauma appears to have a cumulative effect. Young men with violent injuries may be more likely to develop symptoms if they have been attacked before.

The Los Angeles study found that 27 percent of the men interviewed three months after they were injured had symptoms consistent with PTSD.

“Most people still think that all the people who get shot were doing something they didn’t need to be doing,” said Porter, the trauma surgeon from Jackson, Miss. “I’m not saying it’s the racist thing, but everybody thinks it’s a young black men’s disease: They get shot, they’re out selling drugs. We’re not going to spend more time on them.”

While post-traumatic stress often does not show up until several months after an injury, experts say many trauma centers are missing the chance to evaluate patients early for risk of PTSD and to use clinical follow-ups–when patients come back to have their physical wounds examined–to check if patients are developing symptoms.

Doctors say hospitals are unlikely to make significant progress until the American College of Surgeons makes systematic PTSD screening a requirement for all top-level trauma centers.

An ACS requirement would be “a much better hammer to show the administration,” said Michael Foreman, chief of trauma surgery at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Baylor, one of the few trauma centers to have a full-time psychologist on staff, surveyed 200 patients and found that roughly a quarter experienced post-traumatic stress. But Foreman said the center would not systematically screen all its patients until the ACS mandates it.

It’s not clear when that will happen. The organization’s recognition of PTSD screening as a recommended practice is a first step. Those new guidelines will be released in March 2014, according to Chris Cribari, who chairs the subcommittee that evaluates whether hospitals are meeting ACS standards. Cribari declined to say when PTSD screening might become a requirement. He said the timing will depend on what hurdles hospitals encounter–such as patient privacy–when some of them start screenings.

Cribari acknowledged that at some hospitals, “unless it’s a regulation, they’re not going to spend the money on it.”

At minimum, experts say, hospitals should provide all trauma patients with basic education about post-traumatic stress.

“The number one thing we do,” is simply “tell everybody in the trauma center about PTSD,” said John Nanney, a Department of Veterans Affairs researcher who developed a program for violently injured patients at the Spirit of Charity in New Orleans.

Without education about symptoms, patients who have flashbacks or constant nightmares may have “these catastrophic beliefs” about what is happening to them, Nanney said. “Just say, ‘This is something you might notice. If you do notice it, it doesn’t mean you’re going crazy. It doesn’t mean you’re weak. This is something that happens—don’t freak out.'”

The city of Philadelphia has begun to focus on trauma as a major public health issue. Philadelphia is working with local mental health providers to screen for PTSD more systematically–and to focus on post-traumatic stress as part of drug and alcohol treatment. The city has also paid to train local therapists in prolonged exposure, a proven treatment for PTSD– the same kind of training the US Department of Veterans Affairs has paid for its therapists to receive.

For violently injured Philadelphia residents, there’s also Drexel University’s Healing Hurt People, a program that’s become a national model for addressing trauma and PTSD.

Healing Hurt People reaches out to violently injured adults and children at two local hospitals and offers them intensive services. The program accepts a broad range of patients — from high-schoolers to siblings of young men who have been shot to former drug dealers. (One of Healing Hurt People’s clients talked about his post-traumatic stress in 2013 on This American Life.)

The program’s social workers screen all clients for PTSD symptoms and host discussions in which clients can share their experiences with one another. It’s a way of fighting stigma around mental-health symptoms. Instead of thinking that they’re going crazy, the conversations help them realize, “OK, this is normal,” as one client put it.

One of the program’s central goals is to discourage victims of crimes from retaliating against their attackers and to help them focus on staying safe and rebuilding their own lives.

The program’s therapists and social workers remind clients that the aftereffects of trauma may make them overreact and help them plan how to identify and avoid events that might trigger them. In one discussion last fall, a therapist sketched a cliff on a whiteboard, with a stick man on the top, close to the edge. The question: How do you recognize when you’re getting close to the cliff edge—and learn to walk away?

“Our thing is education,” social worker Tony Thompson said. The more clients “understand what’s going on in their body and their mind, the more prepared they are to deal with it.”

Intensive casework like this has shown good results, but it’s not cheap. Healing Hurt People is relatively small: Its programs served 129 new clients in 2013 and offered briefer education or assistance to a few hundred more. Its annual budget in 2013 was roughly $300,000, not including the cost of the office space that Drexel donates to the program.

Other researchers have been working to develop quicker, more modest interventions for PTSD, including some that use laptops and smartphones—programs that could easily be extended to more patients and still have some positive effect.

Whatever the approach, there “is untapped potential,” said Joseph, the surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. Healing Hurt People is a model for what she wants to create. “These are kids, for the most part. When a 17-year-old kid crashes their parents’ car, and they were drinking, we don’t say, ‘Oh, that kid’s hopeless, let’s just give up on them.'”

“We’ve certainly had decades of trying to apply political solutions and social solutions to our inner cities’ financial problems and violence problem, and they haven’t been successful,” said Ressler, the Atlanta researcher. “If we could do a better job of identification, intervention and treatment, I think there would be less violence, and people would have an easier time doing well in school, getting a job.”

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Living in a Violent Neighborhood Is as Likely to Give You PTSD as Going to War

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Report: Guards May Be Responsible for Half of All Prison Sexual Assaults

by CalebMcwhorter Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

A new Justice Department study shows that allegations of sex abuse in the nation’s prisons and jails are increasing–with correctional officers responsible for half of it–but prosecution is still extremely rare.

The report, released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, takes data collected by correctional administrators representing all of the nation’s federal and state prisons as well as many county jails. It shows that administrators logged more than 8,000 reports of abuse to their overseers each year between 2009 and 2011, up 11 percent from the department’s previous report, which covered 2007 and 2008.

It’s not clear whether the increase is the result of better reporting or represents an actual rise in the number of incidents.

Allen Beck, the Justice Department statistician who authored the reports, told ProPublica that abuse allegations might be increasing because of growing awareness of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act.

“It’s a matter of speculation, but certainly there’s been a considerable effort to inform staff about the dangers of sexual misconduct, so we could be seeing the impact of that,” said Beck.

The survey also shows a growing proportion of the allegations have been dismissed by prison officials as “unfounded” or “unsubstantiated.” Only about 10 percent are substantiated by an investigation.

But even in the rare cases where there is enough evidence to prove that sexual abuse occurred, and that a correctional officer is responsible for it, the perpetrator rarely faces prosecution. While most prison staff shown to be involved in sexual misconduct lost their jobs, fewer than half were referred for prosecution, and only 1 percent ultimately got convicted.

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Report: Guards May Be Responsible for Half of All Prison Sexual Assaults

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

by HermelindaWCAQ Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Obama released his plan to reform the NSA’s sweeping surveillance program. Obama offered much praise for the NSA, and he’s not ending the agency’s controversial bulk collection program, which scoops up information about Americans’ telephone calls. But he is making substantial changes to how the program currently runs, indicating that he may be more willing to risk the ire of the intelligence community for the sake of transparency reforms, than he’s been in the past. Many oversight questions, though, are still being left to the intelligence community, and the reforms Obama announced on Friday only address a sliver of the surveillance issues raised by the Snowden leaks. Most notably, the president did not address many of the internet-related revelations produced by the Snowden documents. But he tried to offer some real reform to civil libertarians (though hardly meeting the demands for widespread changes) while providing much support to the intelligence community, which will not likely cheer the reforms the president is implementing.

Bulk Phone Records Collection: Not Going Away, But More Hurdles for the NSA

The biggest change announced on Friday deals with the government’s practice of sweeping up Americans’ phone records in bulk—a practice that 60 percent of Americans oppose. Privacy advocates had hoped that Obama would take this opportunity to end the program. Instead, he announced that he’ll be making some big changes to how it operates. He ordered the attorney general and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to implement a system in which NSA analysts must get approval from the FISA court to search the records. There will also be a new limit on the number of people the NSA can investigate via these records (“two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organization instead of three.”) These are significant changes—ones that could ruffle feathers at the NSA, which has claimed that any changes to the program would undermine its ability to combat terrorism. However, the real test will be whether the judicial review process will be stringent enough to satisfy critics. In the past, the FISA court has been criticized as a “rubber stamp” court.

Bulk Phone Records Storage: Going Somewhere, No One Knows Where

Obama ordered the intelligence community and the attorney general to come up with a new way to store phone records collected under the program, without having the government hold on to this data. This certainly will create some hurdles for the NSA, but it doesn’t mean that the NSA is no longer permitted to collect telephone records. It’s just about how they’ll be stored. While the intelligence community has to come up with recommendations before March 28, it’s entirely unclear when this policy will be implemented, because no third-party outside of phone companies—which have indicated they don’t want this responsibility—really exists.

National Security Letters: Less Secret, Still No Judicial Oversight

Obama is making some modest changes to the process by which the government can use National Security Letters to compel businesses to secretly provide private records to federal investigators. Companies will now be able to disclose these requests—but at some yet-to-be determined point. The specifics are up to the attorney general. Privacy advocates will undoubtedly be disappointed by the fact that Obama is refusing to require judicial review before the government issues these secret orders.

The Top-Secret Spy Court: More Transparency, But Congress Should Figure It Out

Obama is asking the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to annually review which decisions made by the FISA court can be declassified. He is also asking Congress to put together a panel of advocates that will provide an independent voice in “significant cases before the court.” This is not quite as strong as having an in-house privacy advocate on every case, but it’s a serious change.

Everything else:

And…that’s pretty much it. Obama’s reforms don’t cover reports that the NSA has been working to undermine the internet’s encryption—such as by hacking into Google—and don’t entail a major overhaul of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which governs PRISM, the program that’s been accused of sweeping up internet communications. So it seems that any kind of online surveillance the government may be carrying out, will remain largely intact: “We’d hoped for, and the internet deserves, more,” says Alex Fowler, global privacy and policy leaderâ&#128;&#139; at Mozilla. “We’re concerned that the President didn’t address the most glaring reform needs.”

Obama maintains that there have been no alleged abuses of the telephone records collection program, which contradicts what the top-secret spy court has found. But his reforms indicate a greater willingness to reconsider aspects of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and they’ve somewhat exceeded expectations. He does say these reforms are only a start, which might be a small comfort to privacy advocates who are looking for much more.

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Obama’s NSA Reforms More Transparent Than Expected—But Expectations Were Really Low

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How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

by StormyV37lwvv Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

You know all those seemingly great sales during the holidays? It turns out, they are often a “carefully engineered illusion.” A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal defines what it calls “retail theater,” noting that often the discounts being offered to bargain-conscious consumers are carefully planned out by retailers from the start:

The common assumption is that retailers stock up on goods and then mark down the ones that don’t sell, taking a hit to their profits. But that isn’t typically how it plays out. Instead, big retailers work backward with their suppliers to set starting prices that, after all the markdowns, will yield the profit margins they want.

The red cardigan sweater with the ruffled neck on sale for more than 40% off at $39.99 was never meant to sell at its $68 starting price. It was designed with the discount built in.

Some retailers that sell online even set their discounts depending on user information, as the Journal reported last year:

The Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations. More than that, Staples appeared to consider the person’s distance from a rival brick-and-mortar store, either OfficeMax Inc. or Office Depot Inc. If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price.

Higher education may seem like a different world, but universities in many ways have been working from the same playbook.

Savvier college-bound consumers know that the so-called “sticker price” of tuition and fees at a given college or university isn’t what many–or even most–students pay.

Take American University, where 74 percent of full-time freshmen got a grant or scholarship–essentially, a discount off the list price–for the 2011-2012 school year. Or Drexel University, where that figure was 98 percent.

At nearly 200 schools, 100 percent of full-time freshmen got a scholarship, as DePaul University’s Jon Boeckenstedt points out.

A recent study of discounting at private non-profit colleges found that the average institutional grant has grown as a percentage of sticker price, hitting an all-time high of roughly 53 percent. But the report, released in May by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, also pointed out that while larger discounts are generally a good thing, students could still end up paying more depending on how much the sticker price is going up at the same time.

Like retailers, colleges and universities are increasingly getting more sophisticated about how they give out discounts, offering so-called “merit aid” to students they especially want to enroll.

Private universities have led the way in discounting, but as we’ve detailed, the practice has spread to public universities as well. Many state schools have moved toward the “high-tuition, high-aid” model by discounting for students with high test scores or for out-of-state students who will ultimately pay more than residents, even with a small discount.

Some colleges–mostly private colleges–will even price-match if students know to ask. (It’s not unlike your local Best Buy, really.)

The growing discount rates and the lack of transparency in the pricing of higher education have prompted some schools to try another approach. A few colleges and universities have opted for “tuition resets,” announcing they’re slashing sticker prices by as much as $10,000–while often reducing aid.

Call it the J.C. Penney strategy. The retailer tried to move away from high-low pricing and move to “everyday low prices,” only to find out the hard way that customers really, really love a discount.

Yet at least initially, some colleges such as Concordia University have gone the “tuition reset” route and have found that the lower rates (and the accompanying PR boost about the lower rates) got more student applications in the door, raising enrollments and ultimately, net tuition revenue. Whether that interest from consumers will keep up after the headlines fade remains to be seen.

It’s worth mentioning that one big difference between the pricing of higher education and other consumer goods is the ease of comparison shopping: When you’re shopping for a new TV set, it’s relatively easy to compare prices with a little research. It’s much harder to do that with colleges, especially when you have to narrow down your options to a manageable number and submit applications before knowing for sure how much each option will end up costing.

There are, of course, tools out there intended to make college costs more transparent. Colleges are required to post net price calculators to give prospective students–or, at least, those who put in the time to find the calculators online and enter in their personal information–a better sense of what a given school might cost them after discounts. But the calculators have their limitations: Some estimates are more accurate than others, depending on the complexity of the colleges’ calculators, which are not standardized. (In more recent news, lawmakers have introduced a law aimed at making the calculators more user-friendly.)

As it stands, it’s not always clear whether consumers actually win when colleges–or retailers–tinker with their pricing and discounts. What is clear is that when the system isn’t especially transparent, discounts can get people overexcited, whether they’re real savings or not.

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How College Pricing Is Like Holiday Retail Sales

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

by Obediah Ousley Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time” is how Mark Zuckerberg justified hijacking your privacy in 2010, after Facebook imperiously reset everyone’s default settings to “public.” “People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds.” Riiight. Little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc.) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency’s PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of internet users.


Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?


Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!


Timeline: How We Got From 9/11 to Massive NSA Spying on Americans


Meet the Data Brokers Who Help Corporations Sell Your Digital Life


Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

In light of what we know now, Zuckerberg’s high-hat act has a bit of a creepy feel, like that guy who told you he was a documentary photographer, but turned out to be a Peeping Tom. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: At the core of Facebook’s business model is the notion that our personal information is not, well, ours. And much like the NSA, no matter how often it’s told to stop using data in ways we didn’t authorize, it just won’t quit. Not long after Zuckerberg’s “evolving norm” dodge, Facebook had to promise the feds it would stop doing things like putting your picture in ads targeted at your “friends”; that promise lasted only until this past summer, when it suddenly “clarified” its right to do with your (and your kids’) photos whatever it sees fit. And just this week, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin told the Wall Street Journal that the company is experimenting with new ways to suck up your data, such as “how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.”

There will be a lot of talk in coming months about the government surveillance golem assembled in the shadows of the internet. Good. But what about the pervasive claim the private sector has staked to our digital lives, from where we (and our phones) spend the night to how often we text our spouse or swipe our Visa at the liquor store? It’s not a stretch to say that there’s a corporate spy operation equal to the NSA—indeed, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Yes, Silicon Valley libertarians, we know there is a difference: When we hand over information to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and PayPal, we click “I Agree.” We don’t clear our cookies. We recycle the opt-out notice. And let’s face it, that’s exactly what internet companies are trying to get us to do: hand over data without thinking of the transaction as a commercial one. It’s all so casual, cheery, intimate—like, like?

But beyond all the Friends and Hangouts and Favorites, there’s cold, hard cash, and, as they say on Sand Hill Road, when the product is free, you are the product. It’s your data that makes Facebook worth $100 billion and Google $300 billion. It’s your data that info-mining companies like Acxiom and Datalogix package, repackage, sift, and sell. And it’s your data that, as we’ve now learned, tech giants also pass along to the government. Let’s review: Companies have given the NSA access to the records of every phone call made in the United States. Companies have inserted NSA-designed “back doors” in security software, giving the government (and, potentially, hackers—or other governments) access to everything from bank records to medical data. And oh, yeah, companies also flat-out sell your data to the NSA and other agencies.

To be sure, no one should expect a bunch of engineers and their lawyers to turn into privacy warriors. What we could have done without was the industry’s pearl-clutching when the eavesdropping was finally revealed: the insistence (with eerily similar wording) that “we have never heard of PRISM”; the Captain Renault-like shock—shock!—to discover that data mining was going on here. Only after it became undeniably clear that they had known and had cooperated did they duly hurl indignation at the NSA and the FISA court that approved the data demands. Heartfelt? Maybe. But it also served a branding purpose: Wait! Don’t unfriend us! Kittens!

O hai, check out Mark Zuckerberg at this year’s TechCrunch conference: The NSA really “blew it,” he said, by insisting that its spying was mostly directed at foreigners. “Like, oh, wonderful, that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies. I thought that was really bad.” Shorter: What matters is how quickly Facebook can achieve total world domination.

Maybe the biggest upside to l’affaire Snowden is that Americans are starting to wise up. “Advertisers” rank barely behind “hackers or criminals” on the list of entities that internet users say they don’t want to be tracked by (followed by “people from your past”). A solid majority say it’s very important to control access to their email, downloads, and location data. Perhaps that’s why, outside the more sycophantic crevices of the tech press, the new iPhone’s biometric capability was not greeted with the unadulterated exultation of the pre-PRISM era.

The truth is, for too long we’ve been content to play with our gadgets and let the geekpreneurs figure out the rest. But that’s not their job; change-the-world blather notwithstanding, their job is to make money. That leaves the hard stuff—like how much privacy we’ll trade for either convenience or security—in someone else’s hands: ours. It’s our responsibility to take charge of our online behavior (posting Carlos Dangerrific selfies? So long as you want your boss, and your high school nemesis, to see ’em), and, more urgently, it’s our job to prod our elected representatives to take on the intelligence agencies and their private-sector pals.

The NSA was able to do what it did because, post-9/11, “with us or against us” absolutism cowed any critics of its expanding dragnet. Facebook does what it does because, unlike Europe—where both privacy and the ability to know what companies have on you are codified as fundamental rights—we haven’t been conditioned to see Orwellian overreach in every algorithm. That is now changing, and both the NSA and Mark Zuckerberg will have to accept it. The social norm is evolving.

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

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The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Destroying Your Right to Privacy

by Margherit Posted on September 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.

You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.

While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, don’t for a second imagine that it’s the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.

“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”

Hunt’s right. The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy. In one way, however, he was undoubtedly being coy. After all, the government is an active, eager, and early adopter of intrusive technologies that make citizens’ lives transparent on demand.

Increasingly, the relationship between Americans and their government has come to resemble a one-way mirror dividing an interrogation room. Its operatives and agents can see us whenever they want, while we can never quite be sure if there’s someone on the other side of the glass watching and recording what we say or what we do—and many within local, state, and federal government want to ensure that no one ever flicks on the light on their side of the glass.

So here’s a beginner’s guide to some of what’s happening on the other side of that mirror.

You Won’t Need a Warrant for That

Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.

The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” is that its representatives only get to invade people’s private space—their “persons, houses, papers, and effects”—after it convinces a judge that they’re up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don’t store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.

Consider email.

In a series of rulings from the 1970’s, the Supreme Court created “the third-party doctrine.” Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.

Back in 1986, Congress recognized that this was going to be a problem. In response, it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). That law was forward-looking for its day, protecting the privacy of electronic communications transmitted by computer. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well.

Nearly three decades ago, Congress couldn’t decide if email was more like a letter or a phone call (that is, permanent or transitory), so it split the baby and decreed that communications which remain on a third party’s server—think Google—for longer than 180 days are considered abandoned and lose any expectation of privacy. After six months are up, all the police have to do is issue an administrative subpoena—a legal request a judge never sees—demanding the emails it wants from the service provider, because under ECPA they’re considered junk.

This made some sense back when people downloaded important emails to their home or office computers and deleted the rest since storage was expensive. If, at the time, the police had wanted to look at someone’s email, a judge would have had to give them the okay to search the computer where the emails were stored.

Email doesn’t work like that anymore. People’s emails containing their most personal information now reside on company computers forever or, in geek speak, “in the cloud.” As a result, the ECPA has become a dangerous anachronism. For instance, Google’s email service, Gmail, is nearly a decade old. Under that law, without a judge’s stamp of approval or the user ever knowing, the government can now demand from Google access to years of a Gmail user’s correspondence, containing political rants, love letters, embarrassing personal details, sensitive financial and health records, and more.

And that shouldn’t be acceptable now that email has become an intimate repository of information detailing who we are, what we believe, who we associate with, who we make love to, where we work, and where we pray. That’s why commonsense legislative reforms to the ECPA, such as treating email like a piece of mail, are so necessary. Then the police would be held to the same standard electronically as in the paper-based world: prove to a judge that a suspect’s email probably contains evidence of a crime or hands off.

Law enforcement, of course, remains opposed to any such changes for a reason as understandable as it is undemocratic: it makes investigators’ jobs easier. There’s no good reason why a letter sitting in a desk and an email stored on Google’s servers don’t deserve the same privacy protections, and law enforcement knows it, which is why fear-mongering is regularly called upon to stall such an easy fix to antiquated privacy laws.

As Department of Justice Associate Deputy Attorney General James Baker put it in April 2011, “Congress should also recognize that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may substantially slow criminal and national security investigations.” In other words, ECPA reform would do exactly what the Fourth Amendment intended: prevent police from unnecessarily intruding into our lives.

Nowhere to Hide

“You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” the CIA’s Hunt explained to the audience at that tech conference. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”

You have to hand it to Hunt; his talk wasn’t your typical stale government presentation. At times, he sounded like Big Brother with a grin.

And it’s true: the smartphone in your pocket is a tracking device that also happens to allow you to make calls, read email, and tweet. Several times every minute, your mobile phone lets your cell-phone provider know where you are, producing a detail-rich history of where you have been for months, if not years, on end. GPS-enabled applications do the same. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell for sure how long the companies hang onto such location data because they won’t disclose that information.

We do know, however, that law enforcement regularly feasts on these meaty databases, easily obtaining a person’s location history and other subscriber information. All that’s needed to allow the police to know someone’s whereabouts over an extended period is an officer’s word to a judge that the records sought would aid an ongoing investigation. Judges overwhelmingly comply with such police requests, forcing companies to turn over their customers’ location data. The reason behind this is a familiar one: law enforcement argues that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy because location data is freely shared with service or app providers. Customers, the argument goes, have already waived their privacy rights by voluntarily choosing to use their mobile phone or app.

Police also use cell-phone signals and GPS-enabled devices to track people in real time. Not surprisingly, there is relatively little clarity about when police do this, thanks in part to purposeful obfuscation by the government. Since 2007, the Department of Justice has recommended that its US attorneys get a warrant for real-time location tracking using GPS and cell signals transmitted by suspects’ phones. But such “recommendations” aren’t considered binding, so many US Attorneys simply ignore them.

The Supreme Court has begun to weigh in but the issue is far from settled. In United States v. Jones, the justices ruled that, when officers attach a GPS tracking device to a car to monitor a suspect’s movements, the police are indeed conducting a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. The court, however, stopped there, deciding not to rule on whether the use of tracking devices was unreasonable without a judge’s say so.

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The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Destroying Your Right to Privacy

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Watch: This Video Explains Almost Everything You Want to Know About Fracking

by Lou Bovee Posted on September 13, 2013

Mother Jones

Still trying to figure out what the big deal with fracking is? Hydraulic fracturing—fracking for short—is the controversial process that has fueled the new energy boom in the US, making it possible to tap reserves that had previously been too difficult and expensive to extract. It works by pumping millions of gallons of pressurized water, with sand and a cocktail of chemicals, into rock formations to create tiny cracks and release trapped oil and gas. It’s been tied to earthquakes and has led to a number of lawsuits, including one that resulted in a settlement agreement that barred a seven-year-old from ever talking about it. At the same time, fracking has also created a glut of cheap energy and is helping to push coal, and coal-fired power plants, out of the market.

But for all the fighting about whether fracking is good or bad (and research has shown the more people know, the more polarized they become), many people don’t understand what fracking actually is. The Munich-based design team Kurzgesagt has put together a video that explains why fracking—which has been around since the 1940s—just caught on in the last ten years, and why people are worried. The video, which was posted earlier this month, has gone viral, and racked up over one million views in less than 10 days.

The video gets a lot right, but critics have also taken issue with a few of its claims. For example, the video states that fracking companies “say nothing about the precise composition of the chemical mixture but it is known that there are about 700 chemical agents which can be used in the process.” Energy in Depth, an industry group, has released a response noting that companies do disclose some information about chemicals used in fracking. What that group doesn’t mention, however, is that companies don’t have to disclose chemicals that are designated as “trade secrets,” which is a pretty serious exception.

Energy in Depth also quotes former EPA chief Lisa Jackson’s testimony (among others) that “in no case have we made a definitive determination that the fracturing process has caused chemicals to enter groundwater.” The key word here is “definitive”—there is a growing body of evidence that fracking can be linked to increased levels of methane, propane, and ethane in groundwater near fracking sites (likely due to faulty wells), and there are plenty of reasons to question whether pumping billions of gallons of toxic fluid into disposal wells is a good idea. (ProPublica has a couple of great, long pieces on injection wells.)

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Nearly 48,000 suing BP over toxic pollution from Texas refinery

by LeannqOsborn Posted on September 10, 2013

Nearly 48,000 suing BP over toxic pollution from Texas refinery

By

BP

The Texas City refinery.

Over the course of 40 days in 2010, BP allowed hundreds of thousands of pounds of chemicals to escape from its refinery in Texas City, Texas. Unfortunate neighbors inhaled a carcinogenic cocktail of benzene, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide.

Now, more than three years after the incident and a year after BP sold the refinery to another company, the first four of an estimated 48,000 claimants are having their day in court.

In a trial that began Monday, the neighbors are seeking up to $200,000 apiece in compensation — plus $10 billion in punitive damages, which they have pledged in court documents to donate to charity. From Bloomberg:

BP knowingly vented at least 500,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, including benzene, from a faulty refinery unit to a flare the company knew was incapable of destroying the toxins, Tony Buzbee, the residents’ lead attorney, said in a phone interview. He claims BP would have lost more than $20 million if it had shut the unit down during repairs.

“BP decided there was just too much money to be made at the time, so they decided to flare the emissions and take the consequences,” Buzbee said. He plans to ask jurors to send BP a message that “the wanton poisoning of an entire community is not an acceptable business practice,” he said.

London-based BP denies anyone was injured by emissions from the refinery, which was later sold.

It would be nice to think that this was an isolated incident. But we’re talking about BP, which was already fined $87 million by the feds for failing to fix safety problems that caused a 2005 blast at the same refinery that killed 15 workers. And then there are all those other accidents for which BP has been responsible — including the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which actually overlapped with the 40-day toxic release. From a 2010 ProPublica story:

In the weeks [after] the Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank in the Gulf, BP … insisted that the incident, the nation’s worst environmental disaster, was a disastrous but unusual misstep for a company that has done much in recent years to change its ways.

But a look at BP’s record in running the Texas City refinery adds to the mounting evidence that the company’s corporate culture favors production and profit margins over safety and the environment. The 40-day release echoes in several notable ways the runaway spill in the Gulf. BP officials initially underestimated the problem and took steps in the days leading up to the incident to reduce costs and keep the refinery online.

The $10 billion in punitive damages sought by the victims is a lot of money, but consider that BP brought in $18.8 billion in earnings in just the first six months of this year — and it would have brought in a lot more if it weren’t having to pay so much in compensation for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Everything You Wanted to Know about US Aid to Egypt

by hrzy86j5 Posted on August 27, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story, which first appeared on the ProPublica website, has been updated to reflect new developments. It was first published on Jan. 31, 2011.

Questions about the United States’ aid to Egypt have intensified in the wake of last month’s military coup. More than 1,000 Egyptians have been killed in the last week, most apparently supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. A few members of Congress have called for cutting off aid to Egypt, which the White House says is under review.

We’ve taken a step back and tried to answer some basic questions about the aid, including how much the US is giving Egypt, what’s changed in the years since the Arab Spring and what all the money buys.

How much does the US spend on Egypt?

Egypt receives more US aid than any country except for Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

The exact amount varies from year to year and there are many different funding streams, but US foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel. Most of that goes toward military aid. President Obama’s 2014 budget tentatively includes $1.55 billion in aid, about the same amount the US has sent in recent years.

Has any of the aid been cut off?

Actually, yes, but only economic aid, and only some of that. State Department has put a hold on some programs financed by the $250 million in annual economic aid to Egypt, including training programs in the US for Egyptian hospital administrators, teachers, and other government workers.

What about the military aid?

The administration delayed a scheduled delivery of four F-16 fighters to Egypt last month, and it is considering a similar delay for a shipment of Apache attack helicopters and repair kits for tanks. But the White House has not actually cut-off military aid, which has held steady at about $1.3 billion since 1987. (Economic aid, meanwhile, has fallen by more than two-thirds since 1998.)

American officials say that military aid doesn’t just promote peace between Egypt and Israel, it also gives the US benefits such as “expedited processing” for US Navy warships when they pass through the Suez Canal. A 2009 US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks makes essentially the same point:

President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as “untouchable compensation” for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.

According to the State Department, the military aid has included tanks, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft missile batteries, and surveillance aircraft in addition to the F-16 fighters and Apache attack helicopters. In the past, the Egyptian government has bought some of the weapons on credit.

How important is the aid to Egypt?

Pretty important. Saudi Arabia, which along with other Persian Gulf countries pledged $12 billion in aid to Egypt after the coup, promised this week to make up the difference in any aid cut by the US or other Western nations. But much of the aid can’t easily be replaced, in particular fancy US weapons and replacements parts for them.

Does the aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?

Not really. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the US to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the US ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was “admirable but not realistic.” And then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2009 that military aid “should be without conditions” at a Cairo press conference.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, led Congress in adding language to a spending bill in 2011 to make aid to Egypt conditional on the secretary of state certifying that Egypt is supporting human rights and being a good neighbor. The language requires that Egypt abide by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, support “the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections,” and put in place policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law.” It sounds pretty tough, but it’s not.

Has American aid to Egypt ever been cut off?

No. Congress threatened to block aid last year when Egypt began a crackdown on a number of American pro-democracy groups. A senior Obama administration official said that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had no way to certify the conditions set out in the spending bill were being met.

But Clinton waived the certification requirement (yes, the secretary of state can do that) and approved the aid, despite concerns about Egypt’s human rights record. The reason? “A delay or cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign,” the New York Times reported. Breaking the contracts could have left the Pentagon on the hook for $2 billion.

Doesn’t the US have to cut off foreign aid after a coup?

The Foreign Assistance Act mandates that the US cut aid to any country “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” But last month the White House decided that it was not legally required to decide whether Morsi, who was democratically elected last year, was the victim of a coup — which allowed the aid to keep flowing. “We will not say it was a coup, we will not say it was not a coup, we will just not say,” an anonymous senior official told the New York Times.

As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher points out, Obama and his predecessors have dealt this kind of thing before. The president cut some aid to Honduras after a coup in 2009 and to Mali and the Central African Republic after coups there in 2012, but not all of it. And those countries aren’t nearly as important to US foreign policy as Egypt. President Bill Clinton cut some aid to Pakistan after a coup there in 1999, but President George W. Bush reinstated all of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Obama’s refusal to call it a coup infuriated Morsi supporters. “What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, told the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”

What about economic aid and efforts to promote democracy?

The various economic aid efforts have had mixed results. The State Department has described the Commodity Import Program, which gave Egypt millions of dollars between 1986 and 2008 to import American goods, as “one of the largest and most popular USAID programs.” But an audit of the four-year, $57 million effort to create agricultural jobs and boost rural incomes in 2007 found that the program “has not increased the number of jobs as planned.” And an audit of a $151 million program to modernize Egypt’s real estate finance market in 2009 found that, while the market had improved since the program began, the growth was “not clearly measureable or attributable” to the aid efforts.

The US has also funded programs to promote democracy and good government in Egypt—again with few results. It has sent about $24 million a year between 1999 and 2009 to a variety of NGOs in the country. According to a 2009 inspector general’s audit, the efforts didn’t add much due to “a lack of support” from the Egyptian government, which “suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive.”

A recent audit of the European Union’s €1 billion—about $1.35 billion—aid program found that it had been “well-intentioned but ineffective” in promoting good governance and human rights. And a WikiLeaks cable revealed the Egyptian government had asked USAID in 2008 to stop financing NGOs that weren’t properly registered.

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Everything You Wanted to Know about US Aid to Egypt

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A royal(ty) scam: How oil and gas companies shortchange landowners

by CarriNDQ Posted on August 14, 2013

A royal(ty) scam: How oil and gas companies shortchange landowners

By Claire Thompson

Steven Jenkins

Discovering you live over an oil or gas deposit, in theory, presents you with a nice retirement plan. Lease the drilling rights to an energy company and you could be looking at thousands of dollars a month in royalties for as long as the fuel lasts. In fact, one of the arguments for expanded domestic drilling holds that those royalties will boost rural economies by putting extra cash in the pockets of local landowners, and funnel extra revenue to the federal government, as around 30 percent of drilling in the U.S. takes place on federal land.

It sounds like a sweet deal, so of course there must be a catch. Those royalties, it turns out, rarely end up being as high as expected, thanks to oil companies’ manipulation of the opaque formulas dictating how much drilling income the landowner ultimately sees. That’s according to an investigation by ProPublica:

In many cases, lawyers and auditors who specialize in production accounting tell ProPublica energy companies are using complex accounting and business arrangements to skim profits off the sale of resources and increase the expenses charged to landowners.

Deducting expenses is itself controversial and debated as unfair among landowners, but it is allowable under many leases, some of which were signed without landowners fully understanding their implications.

But some companies deduct expenses for transporting and processing natural gas, even when leases contain clauses explicitly prohibiting such deductions. In other cases, according to court files and documents obtained by ProPublica, they withhold money without explanation for other, unauthorized expenses, and without telling landowners that the money is being withheld.

Retired Pennsylvania dairy farmer Don Feusner, for example, saw his monthly gas-drilling royalty checks dwindle to a fraction of their original value — from $8,506 in December to $1,609 in April — even though wells on his property continued producing the same amount of natural gas. Chesapeake Energy was withholding almost 90 percent of his share of the drilling income for mysterious “gathering” expenses.

The government has been stiffed by energy companies, too, but the feds have their own auditing agency and army of lawyers; federal and state governments have successfully sued the likes of Chesapeake, Exxon, and Shell for billions of dollars of damages and back royalties. It’s much harder for individual citizens to fight back. They have to shell out their own cash to pay for legal services, and they’re often dealing with decades-old drilling leases inherited from relatives, making it even harder to parse the terms of the contract.

If a landowner does raise questions about how her royalties are calculated, tracing the source of the trouble is no simple task. After it’s extracted from the land, oil flows across the country through a network of pipelines in which different sections are owned by different companies, and the drilling rights themselves are split into shares and frequently traded. ProPublica writes:

The chain of custody and division of shares is so complex that even the country’s best forensic accountants struggle to make sense of energy companies’ books. …

“If you have a system that is not transparent from wellhead to burner tip and you hide behind confidentiality, then you have something to hide,” Jerry Simmons, executive director of the National Association of Royalty Owners (NARO), the premier organization representing private landowners in the U.S., told ProPublica in a 2009 interview. Simmons said recently that his views had not changed, but declined to be interviewed again. “The idea that regulatory agencies don’t know the volume of gas being produced in this country is absurd.”

In Pennsylvania, ProPublica found, landowners face an especially arduous road to justice. Little precedent exists for how such cases should be handled; many leases forbid landowners from auditing gas companies, and even if they don’t, the auditing process can cost tens of thousands of dollars. If it unearths discrepancies, then landowners can be required to submit to arbitration, also a costly process that can make it harder for them to join class-action lawsuits. And all of this has to be accomplished within the state’s four-year statute of limitations. As one Pennsylvania attorney representing landowners put it: “They basically are daring you to sue them.”

Chesapeake Energy racked up $12.3 billion in revenues in 2012. So why does it go to such lengths to lowball landowners, to whom a few thousand extra bucks a month make a much bigger difference than they do to Chesapeake? Does the company get off on being withholding? Well, probably — but its primary motivation, according to Owen Anderson, an expert in royalty disputes at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, is the same as every corporation’s:

“The duty of the corporation is to make money for shareholders,” Anderson said. “Every penny that a corporation can save on royalties is a penny of profit for shareholders, so why shouldn’t they try to save every penny that they can on payments to royalty owners?”

The duty of a corporation is to make money for shareholders. Period. How many of our current economic woes can be traced to that statement?

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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