Computer science has its "protective disciplines:" privacy, security, and abuse prevention to protect people, site reliability engineering to protect systems, and more. One thing all these disciplines have in common is that they're trying to prevent catastrophic events – data breaches, harassment floods, and so on – which can have profound effects on people's lives.

But as Tolstoy said, "every happy family is alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." While ordinary engineering thinks mostly about how systems should work, the protective disciplines think about what happens when they fail. And both the risks which people face, and the consequences associated with those risks – what together we call their "threat models" – vary tremendously from person to person.

One very important aspect of doing this is to understand groups of vulnerable populations: people who are at especially high risk for some kind of event, or who would be subject to especially severe consequences. Some of these populations are huge ("women," "children") and some are small ("journalists," "high-profile activists"), but each is very different, and understanding those needs is a critical task in CS today.

The Enigma 2017 conference (an annual conference on computer security) is wrapping up today, and one of its major themes has been studies on such groups – survivors of domestic violence, journalists, low-profile activists, and so on. Here WIRED tells about one of these reports, +Sunny Consolvo and team's (fascinating) work on understanding how people in, exiting, and after abusive relationships relate to computers, and what they need in each of these phases.

The news continues to develop almost faster than I can type analyses. But I've tried to round up the most critical updates from the past few hours, together with a discussion of what they mean.

The short version is this: we're seeing the formation of an "inner circle" of government, including Trump, Bannon, Miller, Kushner, Priebus, and possibly Flynn and Conway, who have been taking deliberate steps to hobble the ability of all other parts of government – the rest of the Executive branch, Congress, and most especially the courts – from controlling them. Somewhat unexpectedly, they went straight for an attempt to grab extraordinary physical powers over people (yesterday's Muslim ban), rather than trying to boil the frog slowly; in the context of other moves taken over the past week, this starts to look like a coherent strategy.

Power, including the power to execute every one of the things that Trump promised to do during the campaign, is the primary goal; money, in large, untraceable quantities, appears to be the secondary.

Some updates on the political situation. Everything is very preliminary right now, because it's (apparently deliberately) unclear.

Several Federal judges have issued stays against the "Muslim ban" order. However, there are confirmed reports from multiple sources that Customs & Border Patrol (CBP, part of the DHS) is willfully disregarding those stays, denying access to counsel, moving the people they're holding to undisclosed locations so that nobody can get habeas corpus, and deporting people. This is very certainly not a local commander's decision; it goes up to the Sec'y of HS at least, and directly to Trump at most.

But – and here's the kicker – it's incredibly unclear what the scope of this refusal is. There's no clear news coming out, and we're getting more useful reports from the Twitter feeds of top attorneys in the field (both from groups like the ACLU, who have done heroic work tonight, and from attorneys at top firms, who have been joining this pro bono) than we are from anywhere else.

If this is a refusal of unambiguous Federal court orders, then this is serious, serious beyond the scale of anything we've seen in our lifetimes: it's DHS saying that if Trump tells them to do one thing and the courts another, they will do what Trump says and best of luck to the courts trying to enforce that. Which is to say, they're establishing a precedent that DHS actions are not subject to any sort of court review, or to anything other than the personal fiat of Trump – including their right to detain people, deport them, or hold them incommunicado.

Alternatively, this might be something else, a decision by CBP counsel that certain court orders don't apply to certain cases; this is serious too, since they're trying to create "facts on the ground" faster than the courts can react, but it doesn't mean a wholesale rejection of the system of law. I simply don't have enough information yet, and hope to update as we know more.

Separately, there was another story today: Trump reorganized the National Security Counsel. The two most prominent changes are this: Steve Bannon now has a seat on it, and the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were both demoted: they only attend meetings of the Principals Committee which "[pertain] to their responsibilities and expertise."

(The other full members of the PC, incidentally, are the secretaries of State (Tillerson), Treasury (Szubin), Defense (Mattis), and Homeland Security (Kelly), the AG (Sessions), the President's Chief of Staff (Priebus), the National Security Advisor (Flynn), and the Homeland Security Advisor (Bossert). You can read the full order here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/28/presidential-memorandum-organization-national-security-council-and)

The demotion of the DNI and CJCS is surprising and I don't yet know what it means. There currently is no DNI – Coats' nomination is yet to be confirmed. It's hard to imagine what meetings wouldn't pertain to their "responsibilities and expertise," especially given that secretaries with much more specific responsibilities (like Treasury) weren't demoted. Bannon's promotion, however, is more significant: Trump is known for not attending many meetings, and delegating those, and Bannon is likely to be his principal representative in the NSC.

My gut read is that this is something which will prove very important in the long run. Trump's rift with the existing military and intelligence establishments is well-known, and he's made numerous statements, directly and through surrogates, about his interest in constructing alternative establishments reporting directly to him. Bannon would be a logical person to manage that subchain, as his "Chief Strategist" role doesn't come with a large org to manage already, or with Congressionally mandated restrictions. That would be the skeleton of a new internal security system, with the DHS and FBI (both very loyal to Trump) in the loop, together with a new private "security force" rolling up to Keith Schiller that takes over a lot of Secret Service roles, and a hypothetical new intelligence force, with Bannon being either de facto or de jure in charge of all the new organizations, and little to no legal supervision over them.

It's not clear, again, that this is where it's going, but it's definitely the configuration I would keep my eyes open for. It would promote Bannon from a Goebbels to a Himmler, which I suspect he would be just fine with.

So: Many signs out there, but nothing clear yet. These could range from incredibly serious to passing things, depending on how the next week or so plays out.

Update (00:51 PST): The DHS has put out an official statement, and I'll be damned if I can figure out what it means. It starts out by saying that they will continue to enforce all of Trump's orders, and that the orders remain in place, but it does offer a nod (later on) to complying with judicial orders.

Text here: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/29/department-homeland-security-response-recent-litigation

Update (02:06 PST): The Washington Post's story pulls together a range of official statements, which make it clear that this is deliberate and central policy, ordered personally by Trump. The exact meaning of the DHS statement remains unclear, but most people are reading it as an intent to continue to do whatever they want; it may involve a suggestion that if they don't want to grant a waiver to someone with a green card, they may do it by simply revoking the green card on the spot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/refugees-detained-at-us-airports-challenge-trumps-executive-order/2017/01/28/e69501a2-e562-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_airports-1046am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.560b5a336b45

Update (07:55 PST): Sources confirming that DHS lawyers had flagged the banning of legal permanent residents as illegal ahead of time, but were specifically overruled by Bannon. Note the implications both for the deliberacy of the act and for the extent of Bannon's power. Also, Priebus confirmed on "Meet the Press" that the omission of Jews from the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement was deliberate and is not regretted.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/steve-bannon-personally-overruled-dhs-decision-not-to-include-green-card-holders-in-travel-ban-cnn/

Update (12:59 PST): Priebus announced that the order will no longer be applied to those with green cards. The rest of the order stands (including those with visas other than permanent residency), and it remains unclear who has been deported so far, who is still being held, or what exactly CBP will be doing next. Increasing evidence signals that deployment of this policy really was complete chaos, even internally, with the head of CBP not even being pre-briefed.

https://nyti.ms/2jFy45B

Warning: This is not a piece about cute dogs!
Read the text here before clicking through.

The piece below is not a cheerful one. It started out as a comment on an earlier post, but it grew into a piece in its own right. I was trying to answer +Enclosed Grand Dad's question of why certain groups are particular targets of the Trump regime; that, in turn, grew into discussing what might be coming down the pipe next.

I come from a family for which thinking these things through, and knowing when to jump, has been a critical survival skill. The things in this post are the sorts of things people talk about quietly, while doing silent calculations about their options, but rarely talk about in public. This time, I thought I would share some of the innards with you.

Why the picture of the puppy? Because I stuck several pictures of cute animals, and links to even more, inside this article. They make this easier to deal with.

I'm going to go pet my dogs now.

Today, Donald Trump marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with an order against refugees, and a statement that pointedly didn't mention Jews. It talks about horror inflicted on "innocent people;" it makes no reference to how those people were chosen, or why.

And given the executive order of the day, that omission seems far clearer of a message. Among other things, it bans all refugees for the next 90 days (at which point it may be renewed); bans all Syrian refugees indefinitely; and most significantly, bars all nationals of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States, regardless of their visa status, for the next 90 days – the time required for the DHS to make a longer-term decision about this.

To clarify what this means, it means that anyone from one of those countries who is living in the US legally, even as a permanent resident, who was outside the country today cannot return for an as-yet indefinite period. (It may also apply to dual citizens, or to US citizens who were born in those countries; the text of the order is very unclear) I am personally aware of a few hundred people who are directly affected by this, at this stage: people who were out of town for one reason or another and are now separated from their homes and families. From some back-of-the-envelope guessing, I would say that there are at least 5,000 people who were affected today, possibly much more.

Rather impressively, even Dick Cheney described this as "[going] against everything we stand for and believe in."

On the radio today, they were talking about how Muslim communities are concerned about possible "civil rights issues" going forward, but they were rather limited in the concerns they raised. Korematsu is still the law of the land; never overturned, it held that the Japanese internment camps of the 1940's were legitimate exercises of executive power. Those won't happen tomorrow, because there's no extra PR vim in it, and it's still too soon; many people would remember and object. But two years from now, or three, when elections are starting to come up? Internment of nationals of various countries doesn't seem so far-fetched.

After all, Wednesday's orders around building a wall between us and Mexico included provisions to build and staff large detention centers next to them.

And both today's order and Wednesday's instruct the DHS to publish regular reports of crimes committed by immigrants, to remind us all of what we're being protected from. If you haven't read a report like this before, and your German is OK, look up back issues of "Der Jude Kriminell;" I added a scan of one below, although it's grainy.


Oh, the other picture? Those are eyeglasses. You can still see some of that pile at Auschwitz-Birkenau; they didn't keep all of it, they didn't have room. It's next to the giant pile of human hair, and the giant pile of baby shoes.

I just want you to remember what this day remembers.


When Search works correctly, it knows what you meant.

When Search works really correctly, it knows what you didn't realize you meant.

h/t +Kelly Ellis

From pictoline.com, which seriously needs to sell posters of these.

(ETA: As +Mikhail Kyraha spotted below, that tattoo on Marie Curie's arm -- PoRa -- spells "Пора" in Russian: "It's time!")