This kind of government-encouraged or mandated joint venture is barely different from what China does. To be quite honest, for stuff like silicon manufacturing, it's probably a good idea.
Why would you absolve POTUS when it's clear his administration's policies created the environment that enables CBP officers to take this liberty?
Additionally, the CBP spokesperson[1] defended the action, and despite reporters asking questions, the administration has done nothing to walk back the action or apologize. All signs point to the administration being very okay with stuff like this happening.
[1]: This might not be widely known, but one of the first actions that happens on inauguration day is the replacement of US government agency spokespersons with new political appointees. One of the powers of the executive branch is the bully pulpit and smart administrations seek to use it from day one.
I've been watching this sort of thing for decades. Decisions like this by a CBP agent never get overturned by their management, and it never reaches the White House. If what the French researcher wrote was harmless then I would agree with you that this would be a case of policy from the WH causing overreactions below.
I don't think you're going to find any on-he-record first person testimony. It's going to be unnamed government officials, or front-line government employees who are talking to reporters and providing information without direct attribution
This is a very useful article if you want to understand the technical language used by the UK and US intelligence communities, which is often parroted by the media reporting on topics using sources that leak intelligence from those communities. This language has been standardized within their respective communities so that all parties involved (from the President to the lowliest analyst) should be on the same page with respect to the intelligence.
According to the article there are two measures:
- a probabilistic measurement and associated language, which speaks to the assessed likelihood of an event occurring
- a confidence measurement and associated language, which speaks to the assessed quality of the source(s) of the intelligence
I read a book that touched on this called "super forecasters". Apparently there was a push to reduce ambiguity in briefings. I can't remember if it was Obama or a different president (may have been as far back as Carter), but they were told something by an intelligence advisor and they asked for what is basically a confidence interval. The advisor went back and found out what they were conveying as a sure thing was basically like 50:50 chance. At some point they then decided to come up with a system to make this clearer.
> Laurie Smyla, a 73-year-old retiree from Sloatsburg, New York [...] Smyla has a degree in environmental science and even served as coordinator for the local recycling program in the late 1980s, as she explains when reached by phone. She was able to quickly identify the envelope as polyethylene, the most common type of plastic.
I gotta wonder, how many people did the reporters have to contact before finding the perfect subject to put a human angle on this part of the story. Kudos to them for doing the legwork
The phone contact list becoming the root of trust for defining personal trust relationships is rather unwelcome. Then software taking that data and wordlessly interpreting it as a binary trust/do-not-trust decision is also unwelcome.
If I am networking at a conference, I frequently exchange contact info by entering info into each others' contact app or sending each other a text. I'm sure I'm not the only one to do this.
It's one thing to tell two users that both parties are using Signal and in each other's contact list (contact discovery). It's another thing to encourage users to broadcast messages to all of them (via Stories, and the default share setting is all contacts)
In summary, while I'm neutral on the Stories feature, I think the implementation/rollout has been clumsy.
This might not be a problem that matters to the Google bean counters, but it would be a problem that a responsible, moral, and just company would solve.
