When the Justice Department arrested the chairman of Temple University’s physics department this spring and accused him of sharing sensitive American-made technology with China, prosecutors had what seemed like a damning piece of evidence: schematics of sophisticated laboratory equipment sent by the professor, Xi Xiaoxing, to scientists in China.
The schematics, prosecutors said, revealed the design of a device known as a pocket heater. The equipment is used in semiconductor research, and Dr. Xi had signed an agreement promising to keep its design a secret.
But months later, long after federal agents had led Dr. Xi away in handcuffs, independent experts discovered something wrong with the evidence at the heart of the Justice Department’s case: The blueprints were not for a pocket heater.
.. “If he was Canadian-American or French-American, or he was from the U.K., would this have ever even got on the government’s radar? I don’t think so,” Mr. Zeidenberg said.
.. About a dozen F.B.I. agents, some with guns drawn, stormed Dr. Xi’s home in the Philadelphia suburbs in May, searching his house just after dawn, he said. His two daughters and his wife watched the agents take him away in handcuffs on fraud charges.
.. Temple University put him on administrative leave and took away his title as chairman of the physics department. He was given strict rules about who at the school he could talk to. He said that made it impossible for him to continue working on a long-running research project that was nearing completion.
De Blasio and Bratton Apologize for Arrest of James Blake, Ex-Tennis Pro
Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City’s police commissioner apologized on Thursday for the mistaken arrest of James Blake, a retired top-10 professional tennis player, who said he was slammed to the ground outside his hotel in Midtown Manhattan after being confused for a suspect in a credit card fraud investigation.
..“I was standing there doing nothing — not running, not resisting, in fact smiling,” Mr. Blake said. Then, he said, an officer “picked me up and body slammed me and put me on the ground and told me to turn over and shut my mouth, and put the cuffs on me.”
A man who sells newspapers near the entrance to Grand Central Terminal, said he watched the police rough up Mr. Blake.
“They were real aggressive, like he robbed a bank,” the man, Charlie Sanders, 55, said. “They were shoving him around.”
.. Mr. Sanders said he saw Mr. Blake, his hands cuffed behind his back, being handled aggressively by a half-dozen undercover officers. The officers shoved Mr. Blake face first into a large, mirrored building support beam near the Grand Hyatt, Mr. Sanders recalled.
.. Mr. Blake, who retired two years ago, said that the detective who pushed him to the ground never identified himself and did not answer his questions. He was detained for 15 minutes, Mr. Blake said, and the encounter left him with cuts and bruises.
.. But Mr. Bratton was unequivocal in denying that Mr. Blake was racially profiled. “I don’t believe at all that race was a factor,” he said.
.. The detectives were supposed to have filled out a voided arrest report about the incident with Mr. Blake, police officials said, but they did not. That left Mr. Bratton to learn of the arrest through news reports later in the day. “There’s department protocols that should have been followed, and apparently were not followed,” he said.
When Discrimination Is Baked Into Algorithms
As more companies and services use data to target individuals, those analytics could inadvertently amplify bias.
.. Software that makes decisions based on data like a person’s zip code can reflect, or even amplify, the results of historical or institutional discrimination.“[A]n algorithm is only as good as the data it works with,” Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst write in their article “Big Data’s Disparate Impact,” forthcoming in the California Law Review. “Even in situations where data miners are extremely careful, they can still affect discriminatory results with models that, quite unintentionally, pick out proxy variables for protected classes.”
.. But what about when big data is used to determine a person’s credit score, ability to get hired, or even the length of a prison sentence?
The Most Important Legacy of the Black Panthers
r the subjects of Nelson’s documentary, the answer to police brutality was one that we don’t hear from many contemporary #blacklivesmatter activists: meet force with force, fire with fire.
This credo meant a lot to beleaguered black communities in California, in the mid-sixties. They were full of African-Americans who had left the South to find better opportunities and the rule of law, only to discover that laws were malleable things that could be shaped to ignore or brutalize them. From 1962 to 1964, the years just before the Watts rebellion, there were sixty-five people killed by the L.A.P.D., including twenty-seven who had been shot in the back. Only one of those deaths was deemed murder.
.. the California governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, put forward by the California State Assembly with the explicit desire to prevent the Panthers from carrying loaded firearms in public. In protest, on May 2, 1967, twenty-six armed Panthers, led by the co-founder Bobby Seale, invaded the State Assembly chamber, with shotguns and pistols drawn.
.. the early-seventies decline of the Panthers was brought about by the outright war waged against them by the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO unit, which frequently raided Panther headquarters and, as in the case of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, assassinated group leaders.
.. Reparations for Housing-Wealth Usurpation doesn’t quite have the same ring as Reparations for Slavery, but it might make a more compelling case for future generations of black radicals seeking remunerative justice for the sins of the past.