Weekend Reads 6/22/19

An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That's Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border

Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September.

Michael E. Mann took climate change deniers to court. They apologized.

Though Mann said the Frontier Center was smart to retract and apologize, he also pointed out that the case was about untrue allegations of misconduct, not the group’s stance on climate change, making it an outlier.

“Making false and malicious allegations about a scientist is illegal,” Mann said by email. “The law is the appropriate recourse, and often an effective one, as this latest episode demonstrates.”

Hackers, farmers, and doctors unite! Support for Right to Repair laws slowly grows

On behalf of manufacturers, industry lobbyists have argued that right to repair legislation will make it easier for hackers to compromise electronic devices, but there is evidence that farmers have already turned to hackers to get around the access restrictions that manufacturers have put in place. Support for hacking devices to repair them came from an unexpected quarter in October, when the federal government published an updated interpretation of the DMCA that carved out an exception to the law expressly permitting equipment owners to hack their systems in order to repair them.

The Case for Reparations

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.