Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I commented last week that I cannot really cover the war in this column, since it’s bigger than the scope of the column. And that is still true. But one small and general aspect of war – namely, international law, including who writes it, who enforces it, why it works, and why it doesn’t when it doesn’t – that I can cover.
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The US-Iran conflict and the consequences of international law-breaking

David Mednicoff, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Editor’s note: Iran’s missile attack on a U.S. base in Iraq in retaliation for the Trump administration’s killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani has dramatically escalated global tensions.

Dozens of questions have swirled around the events. Beyond the politics, international law and Middle Eastern scholar David Mednicoff from the University of Massachusetts Amherst addresses five key points about the legal status of those attacks and the larger conflict.

1. What role does international law play in this conflict?

The U.S. and other prominent countries established the contemporary system of international law after World War II with three broad goals.

First, and foremost, law should minimize global war.

Second, the only accepted justifications in international law for countries to wage war are obvious self-defense and collective security authorized by the United Nations.

Third, the international legal system expects national governments to pursue their own strategic interests, consistent with the first two goals of global peace and cooperation.

International law has fostered predictable procedures for the conduct of political and economic affairs among countries.

2. But who enforces international law?

International law is founded on the idea that nations have authority to run their countries and shouldn’t be coerced by a global government. This means that enforcement largely depends on governments accepting the importance of compliance.

Such acceptance happens in general because countries, like people, have diverse incentives to obey law. There is benefit to being known as reliable in one’s obligations. International law is made most often through treaties that countries negotiate and sign. They follow these treaties because they see them as helpful. Countries get used to and internalize some international law.

Finally, international organizations have large bureaucracies to exert pressure and resolve disputes around international law. The relatively new International Criminal Court can detain, charge and punish leaders who commit certain severe crimes.

Given its power, the U.S. has been willing to flout some international law. But such violations are noticed and have effects.

Major breaches of international law contribute to erratic and destructive behavior among nations as the norms of good behavior are degraded. The increasing influence of anti-democratic political systems across the globe is partially a result of the U.S., the world’s most powerful democracy, retreating openly from its ideals.

Still, the challenge of upholding international law is compelling with a country like Iran, which works against U.S. priorities in the Middle East and has threatened Americans.

3. Did the US attack that killed Soleimani violate international law?

It likely did. For the U.S. to kill another government’s official without a major attack or clear threat of attack to its basic autonomy is an illegal act of war.

Doing so on Iraqi territory without apparent Iraqi consent is an additional problem. U.S. activity within Iraq depends on following specific treaties between the two countries, which would not give Washington free rein to attack foreign government officials on Iraqi soil.

U.S. officials have implied that killing Soleimani was self-defense, as he helped plan, or may have been planning, deadly acts against American citizens in the Middle East.

Yet the use of force in international law has to take account of issues of necessity, immediacy and proportionality. So far, the world has seen little evidence that killing a member of the Iranian government was necessary for basic American self-defense.

Indeed, Iran’s compliance and behavior under the 2015 nuclear treaty and evidence of limited cooperation between the U.S. and Soleimani to combat the Taliban and ISIS suggest that he and his government did not threaten the U.S. fundamentally.

4. Is the Iranian strike on US military bases in Iraq legal under international law?

International law does allow for defensive reprisals – which would probably cover Iran’s Jan. 8 missile attacks on U.S. bases based in Iraq, which killed nobody but did damage property.

It’s most logical to interpret Trump’s deliberate killing of an Iranian official as an act of war. The principle of self-defense allows reprisals, so long as they are proportional to the original attack and directed against military targets.

In light of the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal, which Iran appeared to be respecting, and its act of war in killing Soleimani, the missile attacks seem a measured – even minimalist – justified response.

5. Why should Americans care if international law was broken?

I suspect a typical response in the U.S. to this is “So what.” Americans, including the president, may ignore when the U.S. acts against international law. Yet, law-breaking reduces other countries’ trust in the U.S. and increases the risk other countries will violate the rules in ways that harm Americans at home and abroad.

There are already practical consequences developing from Trump’s violation of international laws about using force against another country. Illegal acts of war can enrage an opponent, solidifying its determination. Iranians of all stripes have come together to object to Soleimani’s killing. The last time Iranian streets saw this level of unified popular outrage against the U.S., it helped consolidate the 1979 Islamic revolution. Iran’s fury over a plausible narrative that the U.S. attacked its leaders illegally may yet help bring on devastating, full-scale war.

In addition, when one country violates international law, other nations often get upset. The system of international law requires mutual collaboration and trust.

If, as a result, other nations are reluctant to cooperate with U.S. efforts – say on immigration, trade or international crime – that hurts American interests. Trump’s Jan. 8 speech seeking to deescalate the conflict may have come in part because killing Soleimani illegally made U.S. allies reluctant to back Trump in further confrontations.

Some in the U.S. act as if only naked might matters in foreign policy. Yet, the peril of American policy in Iran and Iraq illustrates something different. Law, and the legitimacy it conveys, also count.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

David Mednicoff, Chair, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, and Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, it leaps out that international law is only as good as the people and nations who care about it. If you don’t care about your country’s reputation, you won’t care about international law (and if you are dull enough not to see that the very survival of your country could depend on its international reputation, you may very well not care.) It’s not my purpose here to discuss why international reputation is important – but perhaps someone should – and soon.

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Everyone seems to be taking a day off, for various reasons – more or less holiday-related, though not all directly. I think I need one too, and I am certain that the furies need one. They have been pretty overworked for the last – well – more than three years. Closing in on four years, actually.

So, not to belabor the point, I am just going to share a reprint of reprints – a short look at articles The Conversation has come to write because of questions sent to them from children – children as young as six. Relax and enjoy the ride.
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We asked kids to send us their burning questions – here are 5 of our favorites from 2019

Maggie Villiger, The Conversation

Out of the mouths of babes… comes a never-ending stream of questions.

So this year, The Conversation US jumped on a great idea dreamed up by our colleagues in Australia and launched a series of articles meant to answer questions kids ask, but that everyone probably wonders about. The Conversation’s editors collect children’s questions and then look for scholars who can provide clear answers based on their own research and expertise.

Below are a few of our favorite “Curious Kids” articles from the past year. And whatever your age, if you have a question you’d like an expert to answer in 2020, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. Curiosity has no age limit!

Why is money green?

This one could only have come from an American kid. Marek, age 12, asked the question; history Ph.D. student Jonah Estess gave an answer.

It turns out that green ink is hard for counterfeiters to get right on their phony bills. And in the quirks-of-history department:

“Also, there was lots of green ink for the government to use when it started printing the money we have now. The green color also does not fade or decompose easily.”

Why do old people hate new music?

Maybe Holly, age 14, got sick of adults yelling “turn that racket down” and decided to ask this question. Psychology researcher Frank McAndrew had some ideas for her.

As they age, brains get worse at telling apart chords, rhythms and melodies. Another factor: Grownups might gravitate to the music they listened to back when they were young and their emotions were more intense. Or it might come down to what’s called the “mere exposure effect” – just hearing something more tends to make you like it more.

“When you’re in your early teens, you probably spend a fair amount of time listening to music or watching music videos… For many people over 30, job and family obligations increase, so there’s less time to spend discovering new music.”

If you barely ever hear the latest bangers, you might not like them either.

What can you learn from an animal’s scat?

Verity Mathis from the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History confirmed that Cora, age 9, was onto something with this question. Poop is a window into animals’ hidden lives.

“Scat can tell us a lot about an animal’s diet, habits and movement, so scientists like to study it both in nature and in the lab. Outdoors, scat can identify what animals are present in an area. Then researchers take it to a lab, dry it out and dissect it for clues about the animal’s diet.”

Researchers can even extract DNA from scat, a hands-off way to learn more about what’s going on with a particular population.

Why do feet stink by the end of the day?

Our inbox suggests that kids are very interested in all things gross and smelly. Indiana University microbiologist Bill Sullivan took a stab at this question from Helen, age 6.

He points the finger (toe?) at a harmless type of bacteria that live all over people’s skin, happily eating up dead skin cells. The stinkiness problem arises inside your warm, moist shoes – conditions the bacteria love and take advantage of to chow down and multiply.

“Like anything else that eats, these bacteria make smelly waste. It is their waste that gives sweaty feet their funky odor: It contains stinky chemicals like those made by skunks and rotten eggs.”

Where does the sand on the beach come from?

Kids write in with big questions about how the Earth works, too. Sly, age 6, posed this one that many an adult relaxing at the shore might have wondered about.

University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery explained that there’s “more to beach sand than meets the eye.”

“It has stories to tell about the land, and an epic journey to the sea. That’s because mountains end their lives as sand on beaches.”

It’s a story of erosion. And the sizes, shapes and colors of the individual grains of sand you see can tell you about the kinds of rocks they originally came from.

What are you wondering?

Over the past year, we had a blast hunting down answers to about everything from stargazing with binoculars to why kids aren’t very patriotic these days to what makes pizza so infernally delicious. Thank you to all the kids who were curious enough to ask questions – and keep ‘em coming in the new year!

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

[ Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. ]

Maggie Villiger, Senior Science + Technology Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, the kids are all right. Anything you can do to help us keep it that way would be appreciated.

(Though, personally, I find that the older I get, the more I enjoy the work of 21st century classical composers, as well as some of the 20th century ones considered less “accessible.”  But then, it’s been a long time since I thought I had to like something in order to appreciate its worth.)

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Now that we have Articles of Impeachment, everyone will start speculating about the trial in the Senate, although it’s not now even 100% certain that there will be one at all. The Senate, of course, wants it fast so they can kill it fast. The House, of course, wants to be certain that this trial will be fair – and not a circus. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to look back at a previous trial, including a previous analogy of Senators as jurors.

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When a chief justice reminded senators in an impeachment trial that they were not jurors

Steven Lubet, Northwestern University

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell created a predictable stir when he told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would structure the impending impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in “total coordination with the White House counsel’s office.” He added, “There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”

This outright rejection of neutrality drew immediate protests from Democrats. Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., who may well be one of the House impeachment managers in the Senate trial, called for McConnell’s recusal, saying “No court in the country would allow a member of the jury to also serve as the accused’s defense attorney.”

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., likewise slammed “the foreman of the jury” for saying he would “work hand and glove with the defense attorney.”

Demings and Nadler made a valid point, but they used the wrong analogy. Senators at an impeachment trial are not the equivalent of a jury and they are not held to a juror’s standard of neutrality.

Harkin’s objection

The principle, that senators are not jurors in the traditional sense, was well established at the outset of the 1999 impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton.

Tasked with delivering an opening statement for the House managers – who present the House’s case to the Senate – Rep. Robert Barr, R-Ga., reminded the senators of Clinton’s tendency to “nitpick” over details or “parse a specific word or phrase of testimony.” To Barr, the conclusion was obvious: “We urge you, the distinguished jurors in this case, not to be fooled.”

That was the moment Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, had been waiting for.

“Mr. Chief Justice,” he said, addressing William Rehnquist, who was presiding over the trial, “I object to the use and the continued use of the word ‘jurors’ when referring to the Senate.”

Harkin had prepared well, basing his argument on the text of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and the rules of the Senate itself.

He explained that “the framers of the Constitution meant us, the Senate, to be something other than a jury.”

Instead, Harkin continued, “What we do here today does not just decide the fate of one man. … Future generations will look back on this trial not just to find out what happened, but to try to decide what principles governed our actions.”

Chief justice weighs in

The chief justice sustained the objection.

“The Senate is not simply a jury,” he ruled. “It is a court in this case.”

Rehnquist thus admonished the House managers “to refrain from referring to the Senators as jurors.” For the balance of the trial, they were called “triers of law and fact.”

Rehnquist and Harkin got it right. Article III of the Constitution provides that “Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury,” and for good reasons.

In an ordinary trial, the jury’s role is generally limited to fact-finding, while the judge determines the scope and application of the law. In an impeachment trial, however, the Senate itself has the “sole power” to decide every issue.

Recognizing the Senate’s all-encompassing responsibility, and his own limited role, Chief Justice Rehnquist referred to himself throughout the proceeding only as “the Chair.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court has put it, impeachment presents a “political question,” in which all of the “authority is reposed in the Senate and nowhere else.”

Oath or affirmation required

McConnell, the Senate’s leader, has more leeway and far more power than any juror or even a jury foreperson.

The Constitution’s only procedural limitation is the requirement in Article I that the senators be placed under “oath or affirmation.”

Although the Constitution does not specify any particular wording (unlike the presidential oath, which is included word for word), the Senate adopted rules for impeachment trials in 1986 requiring each senator to affirm or swear to do “impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”

“Impartial justice” does not demand the enforced naiveté of jury service, which would be impossible in an impeachment trial. For example, the senators all have prior knowledge of at least some of the facts, and several of them are currently vying to run against Trump in 2020, while others are backing his reelection campaign.

But the Senate’s oath of impartiality clearly calls for at least some commitment to objectivity. Thus, the problem with McConnell’s announcement was not that he failed to behave like a juror.

Rather, he has declared an intention to disregard the Senate’s prescribed oath, which was fixed long ago by the very body that elected him its leader.

When Tom Harkin disclaimed a juror’s role at the Clinton trial, his purpose was not to affect the outcome of the case, but rather to underscore the full scope of the Senate’s decision-making responsibility. In contrast, Mitch McConnell appears to have boldly renounced open-mindedness itself on the impeachment court, whether as juror, judge or “trier of law and fact.”

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Steven Lubet, Williams Memorial Professor of Law, Northwestern University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, certainly Roberts is not Rehnquist, and that’s far from the only difference between then and now – or between now and when the Constitution was framed.  The framers were wise enough to foresee the possibility of a corrupt President.  They did not, however – how could they? – foresee the possibility of a corrupt President and a corrupt Senate at the same time.  If they had done so, they might have had some qualms at entrusting the Senate to be, not less than, but more than a simple jury.

When intelligent and knowledgeable people discuss things on the internet, the contents of those discussions reach the people responsible for acting in those areas, and things happen.  Perhaps we, especially with the help of the Furies, can help to create discussion of this subject all over the internet.  And then, things may happen.

The Furies and I will be back.

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I’m pretty sure that no one who is a regular here is a big Twitter user. I know all I ever see from Twitter is isolated tweets embedded by other people, and over have of those are sweet ones about cats and/or dogs, with occasional other animals. But there are progressive people who do use Twitter to communicate (passively or actively), and if you do happen to be one, or if you know one – or even if you just want to know what the latest thing is in disinformation detection, then you will be interested in this.
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You can join the effort to expose Twitter bots

Pik-Mai Hui, Indiana University and Christopher Torres-Lugo, Indiana University

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, more than 10,000 automated Twitter accounts got caught conducting a coordinated campaign of tweets to discourage people from voting. These automated accounts may seem authentic to some, but a tool called Botometer was able to identify them while they pretentiously argued and agreed, for example, that “democratic men who vote drown out the voice of women.” We are part of the team that developed this tool that detects the bot accounts on social media.

Our next effort, called BotSlayer, is aimed at helping journalists and the general public spot these automated social media campaigns while they are happening.

It’s the latest step in our research laboratory’s work over the past few years. At Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, we are uncovering and analyzing how false and misleading information spreads online.

One focus of our work has been to devise ways to identify inauthentic accounts being run with the help of software, rather than by individual humans. We also develop maps of how online misinformation spreads among people and how it competes with reliable information sources across social media sites.

However, we have also noticed that journalists, political campaigns, small businesses and even the public at large may have a better sense than we do of what online discussions are most likely to attract the attention of those who control automated propaganda systems.

We receive many requests from individuals and organizations who need help collecting and analyzing social media data. That is why, as a public service, we combined many of the capabilities and software tools our observatory has built into a free, unified software package, letting more people join our efforts to identify and combat manipulation and misinformation campaigns.

Combining different tools

Many of our tools allow users to retrospectively query and examine our collection of a 10% random sample of all Twitter traffic over a long period of time. A user can specify keywords, hashtags, user mentions, locations or user accounts they’re interested in. Our software then collects the matching tweets and looks more deeply at their content by extracting links, hashtags, images, movies, phrases and usernames those tweets contain.

Our trend analysis app looks at how closely that suspicious content trends together. Our network analysis app shows how ideas spread from user to user. Our map app checks the geographical pattern of suspicious activities around important topics.

Our Botometer app then detects how likely it is that elements of the online discussion are being coordinated by a group of automated accounts. Rather than reflecting an authentic discourse of real people, these accounts may in fact be controlled by a person or an organization. These accounts usually act together, with some of them tweeting propaganda or disinformation, and others agreeing and retweeting, forming an inauthentic discourse around them to attract attention and draw real people into the online discussion.

BotSlayer brings all the pieces together, letting a person using it do all those analyses with the entire flow of Twitter traffic.

BotSlayer’s system collects all matching tweets – not just a sample – and saves them in a database for any retrospective investigation. Its web interface, in one screen, shows users in real time the terms and keywords that are part of suspicious activity around their interests. Users can click on icons to search for related information on various websites and social media platforms to look for related malicious efforts elsewhere online.

For example, during the 2018 U.S. midterm election, many bot accounts that were reported on Twitter were also found to be related to Facebook bot accounts with similar profiles.

BotSlayer also provides links to our Hoaxy system, which shows how Twitter accounts interact over time, identifying which accounts are the most influential, and most likely to be spreading disinformation.

Proving useful already

On July 10, 2019, one of our BotSlayer systems, focusing on Twitter activity about U.S. politics, flagged suspicious activity for us to investigate. The system noticed the appearance of a large group of tweets, mostly from brand-new Twitter accounts whose names ended with a string of numbers – like @MariaTu34743110. Those are clues that their activity may be generated by a bot.

They were posting and retweeting links to a single YouTube video attacking a financier named Bill Browder, who has been at the center of a dispute between the United States and the Russian Federation. That shared focus is a clue that all the accounts were part of an interconnected system.

When we dug deeper, we identified more than 80 likely bots coordinating with each other to try to boost widespread attention to Browder’s alleged wrongdoing using the video on YouTube.

Plenty of other uses

Other coordinated campaigns have promoted financial scams, often seeking to sell questionable investments in cryptocurrencies. Scammers have impersonated internet celebrities like entrepreneur Elon Musk or software magnate John McAfee.

These accounts are a bit more sophisticated than political-attack bots, with one lead account typically announcing that users can multiply their riches by transferring some of their cryptocurrency into the scammer’s digital wallet. Then other accounts retweet that announcement, in an effort to make the scheme seem legitimate. At times they reply with doctored screenshots claiming to show that the scheme works.

So far, several news, political and civic organizations have tested BotSlayer. They have been able to identify large numbers of accounts that publish hyperpolitical content at a superhuman pace.

The feedback from testers has helped us make the system more robust, powerful and user-friendly.

As our research advances, we will continue to improve on the system, fixing software bugs and adding new features. In the end, we hope that BotSlayer will become a sort of do-it-yourself toolkit enabling journalists and citizens worldwide to expose and combat inauthentic campaigns in social media.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Pik-Mai Hui, Ph.D. Student in Informatics and Network Science, Indiana University and Christopher Torres-Lugo, Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, if there is any way you can help get this software widely distributed into the hands of those who can use it to best advantage, then please, do so.  Also, since it’s sort of an exercise in futility to detect disinformation if you cannot correct it – and be believed – you might see what you can do to encourage research in that area as well.

The Furies and I will be back.