Yesterday, @MassAGO Maura Healey and her team issued a groundbreaking report finding that the Bristol County Sheriff's Office violated the civil rights of immigration detainees.

Let's take look at some key findings (thread

First, some background.

The BCSO is administered by Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. @GlobeAbraham has reported on his close relationship with Trump's White House. He corresponds with Stephen Miller, the notorious architect of Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.
https://t.co/SqoPOT2v3M
Although the BCSO is a state facility, it has also contracted with ICE to hold people detained for federal civil immigration proceedings.
https://t.co/PbJoZVy8hL
ICE essentially pays a per diem rate for each detainee.

In 2019, the Mass. State Auditor found that BCSO improperly failed to remit more than $300,000 in ICE payments to the state.
https://t.co/jRTXmsdGz0
BCSO also has a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It allows BCSO personnel to be deputized to do some of ICE's work. ICE does not pay for their hours. It is essentially a donation of state employee time to federal immigration enforcement.
https://t.co/3dnbxrKXtS
In March 2020, immigration detainees at the BCSO, represented by @LCRBOSTON and others, filed a class action lawsuit.

The suit alleged "dangerous conditions" at BCSO that "will imminently result in the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19."
https://t.co/iBNZKOwCn5
Starting in April 2020, a federal judge conducted bail hearings and ordered the release of more than 40 civil detainees on strict conditions in order to "meaningfully reduc[e] crowding in the [BCSO] detention facility."
https://t.co/WASWwTsA6B
On April 16, Sheriff Hodgson, appearing on Fox News, characterized the release of these civil detainees as "ludicrous" and a "serious, serious problem."
https://t.co/0LPgNIyIEJ
On May 1, there was a violent incident in the BCSO's immigration detention facility. Three detainees were hospitalized.

@ACLU_Mass has filed a lawsuit for public records relating to the incident:
https://t.co/aapx8UHYpt
According to the lawsuit, immediately after the incident, BCSO made a series of detailed public assertions about what happened:
However, according to the lawsuit, after @ACLU_Mass requested to see the actual records of the incident (e.g., reports, video, correspondence with DHS), the BCSO suddenly reversed course and claimed that every single record of the incident should be withheld from the public.
In the meantime, according to the report, @MassAGO initiated an investigation on May 5.
The results of that investigation are two principal findings.

First, that the BCSO violated the detainees' rights by using "excessive and disproportionate" force.
Second, that the BCSO deployed chemical irritants (like pepper spray) "with deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of serious harm to the health of the detainees."

One detainee had to be revived with chest compressions. He was not taken to the hospital.
The report also contains many other deeply concerning details - more than I can list, but here are some examples.
And:
And:
And:
And:
And:
And:
The entire report is available here. It is deeply disturbing.
https://t.co/FLKVdh2Sm4
The Mass. AGO also filed a letter yesterday in @ACLU_Mass's public records lawsuit. The letter urges release of the underlying records of this incident.
In summary:
https://t.co/wrAiHUErNN

More from Government

The People's Twitter.
And it would definitely not selectively censor unfashionable opinions if it were run by a government bureaucracy.
Because public sector bodies only ever maximise The Common Good.
Could even call it The International Common Good Association, just to make sure


"I don't like the fact that Twitter is so subservient to the woke elites. Let's create a massive state regulator, so that the woke elites, which have a stranglehold on most institutions... oh no, wait..."

(I mean, he's not entirely wrong. His solution may be rubbish, but there is an issue here. Twitter really does have a substantial amount of market power.
Still: There are people who I just will not ever side with, even when they have a point. And that includes Communitarians.)

As far as I can see, there are no good solutions here.
5 years ago, I would have said "Lol, Twitter is just a private company, like any other. The Guardian wouldn't publish anything by me, but that's not "censorship". They're just not letting me use their platform."
However...

...Twitter really does benefit from substantial network effects. We are on Twitter, because everyone else is also on Twitter. You can set up a rival platform, but that would be like being the only person who has a telephone: not very useful, because there's no one you can call.
Typically excellent piece from @dsquareddigest The exponential insight is especially neat. Think of it a little like fishing...today you can’t export oysters to the EU (because you simply aren’t allowed to), tomorrow you don’t have a fish exporting business (to the EU).


The extremely small minority of people who known anything about this who think that Brexit will be good for the City make a number of arguments which I shall address in turn...

1. They need us more than we need them. This is a variant of the German carmakers argument. And we know how that went...Business will follow the profit opportunity and if that has moved then so will the business...

And what do we mean by us / we. We’re not talking about massed ranks of Euro investing / trading etc blue blooded British institutions.

Au contraire. We’re talking about the London based subs of US, Asian and indeed European capital markets players...As soon as they think the profit opportunity has moved then so will they...it’s a market innit...
This is a good piece on fissures within the GOP but I think it mischaracterizes the Trump presidency as “populist” & repeats a story about how conservatives & the GOP expelled the far-right in the mid-1960s that is actually far more complicated. /1

I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2

https://t.co/N97v85Bb79


The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3


This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.


This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5

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@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 reveals clearly that SARS-CoV-2 is reverting to its original pre-outbreak condition, i.e. adapted to transgenic hACE2 mice (either Baric's BALB/c ones or others used at WIV labs during chimeric bat coronavirus experiments aimed at developing a pan betacoronavirus vaccine)

@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 1. From Day 1, SARS-COV-2 was very well adapted to humans .....and transgenic hACE2 Mice


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 2. High Probability of serial passaging in Transgenic Mice expressing hACE2 in genesis of SARS-COV-2


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, ... found to date in mouse-adapted SARS-CoV2 and is also seen in ferret infections.
https://t.co/9Z4oJmkcKj


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad We adapted a clinical isolate of SARS-CoV-2 by serial passaging in the ... Thus, this mouse-adapted strain and associated challenge model should be ... (B) SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA loads in mouse lung homogenates at P0 to P6.
https://t.co/I90OOCJg7o
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
1/“What would need to be true for you to….X”

Why is this the most powerful question you can ask when attempting to reach an agreement with another human being or organization?

A thread, co-written by @deanmbrody:


2/ First, “X” could be lots of things. Examples: What would need to be true for you to

- “Feel it's in our best interest for me to be CMO"
- “Feel that we’re in a good place as a company”
- “Feel that we’re on the same page”
- “Feel that we both got what we wanted from this deal

3/ Normally, we aren’t that direct. Example from startup/VC land:

Founders leave VC meetings thinking that every VC will invest, but they rarely do.

Worse over, the founders don’t know what they need to do in order to be fundable.

4/ So why should you ask the magic Q?

To get clarity.

You want to know where you stand, and what it takes to get what you want in a way that also gets them what they want.

It also holds them (mentally) accountable once the thing they need becomes true.

5/ Staying in the context of soliciting investors, the question is “what would need to be true for you to want to invest (or partner with us on this journey, etc)?”

Multiple responses to this question are likely to deliver a positive result.