The Washington Post National Weekly - January 21, 2018

SUNDAY, JANUARY 21, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Triumph of the robo-callers How Washington tried — and failed — to defend your phones. PAGE 12

Politics Drug policy office’s rising star 4

Nation How cars are monitoring drivers 8

5 Myths Iran 23

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THE FIX

If not Trump in 2020, who?

E UGENE S COTT

the Senate. When asked whether they would be inclined to vote for Gillibrand, 49 percent of Americans said no while only 13 percent ore than half of Americans are unsaid yes. interested in keeping President Gillibrand’s name has been thrown around Trump around for a second term, as a possible 2020 candidate and has attracted according to a new poll. But to be quite a bit of attention recently for public fair, considering his historically low approval stances on sexual misconduct. She ratings, this is not that surprising. helped lead the call for former senator But what is surprising is who AmeriAl Franken (D-Minn.) to resign followcans want as the next president — and ing allegations of sexual misconduct and who they don’t. even said former president Bill Clinton A recent Quinnipiac poll says that should have resigned, which sent shock more Americans would vote for former waves through Democratic circles. vice president Joe Biden than Trump. It Gillibrand has also spoken out in certainly wouldn’t be a landslide win: support of single-payer health care, a 48 percent of respondents said they’d policy Sanders pushed during the 2016 pick Biden, while 44 percent said they’d campaign. elect the president for a second term.

The survey did not poll Americans Biden has not ruled out running in on other hypothetical 2020 candidates, 2020, after opting not to enter the race including Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) or in 2016, citing the death of his son Beau Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). But Biden and a need to focus on family. what is clear is that more than half of But, if elected, Biden would be 78 years MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST Americans seem uninterested in allowold when entering the White House.

The former vice president ranks at A recent poll showed more Americans would vote for former ing Trump to remain in the White House for another term.

No. 2 behind Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) vice president Joe Biden in 2020 than for Trump.

In a question in which no opponent on our list of top 2020 contenders. is named, 62 percent of respondents said that It has become a common argument on the While Biden is No. 2 on the list, it’s not as they would not be inclined to vote for Trump; left when lamenting Trump that had Sanders firmly as before, after a recent spate of sexual 34 percent said they would. been the Democratic nominee over Hillary harassment allegations against politicians — “President Donald Trump can’t seem to imClinton, he would have attracted enough supand the reevaluation of past allegations — prove his approval rating, perhaps because of port to beat Trump. The argument is that libput Biden’s handling of the Clarence Thomas the troubling fact that half of the voters we erals who did not back Clinton would have confirmation hearings back in the spotlight. spoke to think he is mentally unstable,” said voted for Sanders, along with some of the And speaking of the #MeToo movement, Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipwhite working-class voters and men who ultithe buzz around Oprah Winfrey after her iac University Poll. “The president is a dividmately chose Trump. campaign-style speech during the Golden er, not a uniter, say an overwhelming number However, this most recent poll suggests Globes, confirmed that she would beat the of voters, an assessment made even more disthat would not be the case today. The poll president. According to the poll, she would turbing by his perceived lack of respect for also revealed potential support for get 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 39 perpeople of color.” n Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the lawmaker from cent.

New York who holds Clinton’s former seat in But 66 percent of respondents said electing © The Washington Post BY

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a celebrity as president is a bad idea.

One particular lawmaker who is considered a front-runner by many liberals would not appear to have the support needed to beat Trump: Sanders. When asked whether they’d be inclined to vote for Sanders over Trump, 55 percent of those surveyed said no.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please email weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 15

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY SOCIAL MEDIA BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

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ON THE COVER Washington tried to stop unwanted phone calls, but robo-callers wrecked the Do Not Call list. Illustration by KYLE BEAN for The Washington Post.

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Park Service advisory board exodus BY

J ULIET E ILPERIN

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ore than three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service have quit out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.

The resignation of 10 out of 12 National Park System Advisory Board members leaves the federal government without a functioning body to designate national historic or natural landmarks. It also underscores the extent to which federal advisory bodies have become marginalized under the Trump administration. In May 2017, Zinke suspended all outside committees while his staff reviewed their composition and work.

In a letter to the secretary last week, departing board chairman Tony Knowles, a former Alaska governor, wrote that he and eight other members “have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law.” All of the signatories, who serve as unpaid volunteers, had terms set to expire in May. “We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda,” Knowles said. “I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success.”

In an email earlier this month inquiring about the status of the more than 200 boards that had come under review, Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said, “Boards have restarted.” She did not provide any further details and did not respond to an inquiry Tuesday.

Some advisory bodies apparently are operating. But others are still frozen because the department has yet to approve their updated charters, as is legally required under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Other panels,

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

Nearly all members of the panel are resigning, citing frustration with the Interior secretary such as the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission, have been reinstated but are awaiting department approval for their agendas.

Two of the Bureau of Land Management’s 38 resource advisory councils (RACs) — Rocky Mountain and Southwest Colorado — had to postpone meetings last week because their charters were out of date.

“It’s concerning that our advisory council has been unable to meet for over a year,” said Scott Braden, a member of the Rocky Mountain RAC who is a wilderness and public lands advocate at Conservation Colorado. “Secretary Zinke has said that local input is important for BLM to consider, and yet these councils, which provide just such input, have been sidelined.”

In at least two instances, Zinke has disbanded existing advisory bodies — the Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council and the Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science. He replaced the first one with the Hunting and

Shooting Sports Conservation Council, which just started soliciting nominations Jan. 9. It will place a heavier emphasis on sport shooting while promoting hunters’ and fishermen’s access to public lands.

The National Park System Advisory Board, which was established in 1935, has typically included social and natural science academics as well as former elected officials from both parties. In recent years, it has advised Interior on how to address climate change, among other issues, and how to encourage younger visitors to frequent the parks.

The board is required to meet twice a year but has not convened since Trump took office last January, Knowles said Tuesday. Members, most of whom have worked together for seven years, were surprised to not be consulted on Interior’s recent decisions to increase visitor fees and reverse a ban on plastic water bottles in the park system. The decision to reverse climate change directives and other policies drove the decision to resign, he said.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke deplanes Air Force One in Salt Lake City in December.

“We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored.”

Tony Knowles, departing chairman of the National Park System Advisory Board

“We were frozen out,” said Knowles, who emphasized that the group recognized Zinke would select new members this year but wanted “the momentum to continue” from what the board accomplished in 2016 during the park system’s centennial year.

Gretchen Long, a board member from Wilson, Wyo., said in an email that the nine board members resigned given the administration’s seeming attitude that the group’s work “could be so summarily dismissed. . . . And we worry greatly that the new initiatives incorporated in the [National Park System] are now being rescinded.”

The two remaining board members are Harvard University public finance professor Linda Bilmes and University of Maryland marine science professor Rita Colwell, whose terms end in May. Since the Interior secretary cannot establish new historical and natural landmarks without the board’s approval, none has been declared since Jan. 11, 2016, when then-Secretary Sally Jewell designated 24 such landmarks.

The board members’ action comes as one of Zinke’s top deputies, Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas, plans to move into the Washington offices that the National Park Service has occupied for half a century.

NPS will be relocated elsewhere in the building, according to individuals briefed on the plans.

Zinke has identified repairing the park system’s aging infrastructure as one of his top priorities, though he hasn’t nominated a National Park Service director.

Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Commitee, questioned why Zinke hasn’t nominated a director and urged him to solicit more outside opinion on how he manages national parks. “I call on Secretary Zinke to personally reach out to each member of the National Park Service Advisory Board and tell them their counsel is valued and that this administration respects local voices,” she said in a statement Tuesday. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Cars collect reams of data on owners Experts say millions of U.S. drivers are already being monitored “Ultimately, there’s no car privacy statute that car companies have to abide by.”

Ryan Calo, associate professor of law at the University of Washington

P ETER H OLLEY Detroit BY

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aniel Dunn was about to sign a lease for a Honda Fit last year when a detail buried in the lengthy agreement caught his eye.

Honda wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the contract stated, according to Dunn — a stipulation that struck the 69year-old Temecula, Calif., retiree as a bit odd. But Dunn was eager to drive away in his new car and, despite initial hesitation, he signed the document, a decision with which he has since made peace.

“I don’t care if they know where I go,” said Dunn, who makes regular trips to the grocery store and a local yoga studio in his vehicle.

“They’re probably thinking, ‘What a boring life this guy’s got.’ ” Dunn may consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but. By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn, everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he likes to eat and how much he weighs.

Though drivers may not realize it, tens of millions of American cars are being monitored like Dunn’s, experts say, and the number increases with nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold.

The result is that carmakers have turned on a powerful spigot of precious personal data, often without owners’ knowledge, transforming the automobile from a machine that helps us travel to a sophisticated computer on wheels that offers even more access to our personal habits and behaviors than smartphones do.

Automakers say they collect customer data only with explicit

ISTOCK

permission, though that permission is often buried in lengthy service agreements. They argue that data is used to improve performance and enhance vehicle safety. The information that is gathered, they add, will soon be able to reduce traffic accidents and fatalities, saving tens of thousands of lives.

There are 78 million cars on the road with an embedded cyber connection, a feature that makes monitoring customers easier, according to ABI Research. By 2021, according to the technology research firm Gartner, 98 percent of new cars sold in the United States and in Europe will be connected.

Connecting cars to computers is nothing new. Vehicles have relied on computerized systems since the 1960s, mostly in the form of diagnostic systems that remind drivers to check their engines and “event data recorders,” which capture accident data and are considered the “black boxes” of automobiles.

What’s changed in recent years is not only the volume and precision of that data but how it’s being extracted and connected to the Internet, according to Lauren Smith, who studies big data and cars as the policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum.

Though the automotive industry still collects less personal information than the financial, health-care or education industries, experts say, it doesn’t take much to jeopardize customers’

privacy. For example, regular visits to an HIV clinic can offer information about someone’s health. But unlike information gathered by a hospital or a clinic, health data collected by a nonhealth provider isn’t covered by the federal privacy rule known as HIPAA, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In a 2014 letter to the Federal Trade Commission, automakers pledged to abide by a set of privacy policies that included not sharing information with third parties without owners’ consent.

They’ve tucked their warnings about data collection into a few lines of text in owner’s manuals or enticing lease and purchase agreements, and on their websites.

General Motors, which became one of the first automakers to start collecting customer data in real time with its OnStar system in 1996, said in an email that the company’s system “does not collect or use any personally identifiable customer data without a customer’s consent.”

“Before a customer even gives consent, we describe what kind of data is to be collected and how it will be used (mobile app, proactive alerts, etc.),” Dan Pierce, a GM spokesman, said. “If a customer declines, we do not collect any data from the vehicle.”

On a page outlining its customers’ privacy rights, Toyota notes that vehicle data is collected to

improve safety, manage maintenance and analyze vehicle trends.

The site also notes that, with permission, customer data may be shared with “companies affiliated with Toyota.”

Though the pledge restricts automakers from selling data to an outside company without customers’ consent, experts have noted that the voluntary self-regulatory standard doesn’t stop them from using that data for their own benefit.

The law has been unable to keep up with rapid advancements in auto technology, according to Ryan Calo, an associate professor of law at the University of Washington who teaches courses on robotics law and policy.

“Ultimately, there’s no car privacy statute that car companies have to abide by,” he said. “Not only are automakers collecting a lot of data, they don’t have a particular regime that is regulating how they do it.”

Though the possibility of abuse exists, Calo and other experts say automakers have so far been “responsive” to concerns about data collection and privacy. While privacy scandals periodically erupt in Silicon Valley, automakers have sought to differentiate their business models by ensuring privacy, according to James Hodgson, a senior analyst at ABI Research.

“They want to sell cars and maintain a competitive advantage over the Googles and Apples of the world,” he said.

And yet, Calo said, by collecting massive amounts of data, car companies could be setting themselves up for the 21st century’s ultimate Faustian bargain. The more data a company collects, the more incentive the company has to monetize that data.

“Any company that has tons of data about consumers and can control the interaction with them is going to have the capability and incentive to try to use that information to the company’s advantage — and possibly to the detriment of consumers,” Calo said.

“It’s almost unavoidable,” he added. n ©The Washington Post

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No rest for U.S. air blitz in Afghanistan M AX B EARAK Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan BY

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inter usually means a lull in the fighting here. Taliban fighters blend back into their villages, where it’s warm, and U.S. forces hunker down.

But for the first time in 16 years, the cold has not slowed the war in the air. U.S. and Afghan forces conducted 455 airstrikes in December, an average of 15 a day, compared with just 65 the year before. All told, 2,000 airstrikes were carried out between August and December of last year, nearly as many as in all of 2015 and 2016 combined.

The huge spike in airstrikes is the product of new rules of engagement, adopted as part of a strategy that President Trump announced in August. U.S. forces can now strike Taliban targets at will, whereas under the Obama administration they were restricted to defending Afghan forces under imminent attack. As more than a half-dozen U.S. military officers put it, “The gloves are off.”

The blitz is set to intensify as U.S. military operations draw down in Iraq and Syria and assets such as jets, field advisers and surveillance drones are redeployed in Afghanistan. U.S. bases here are abuzz with activity. Numerous military officers used a phrase often repeated during this war: “We’re at a turning point.”

But whether the new strategy is a decisive step toward forcing the Taliban to the negotiating table or just another curve along a seemingly endless road of war depends on whom you ask.

High above Afghanistan’s spectacular snow-swept mountains, from the vantage point of a KC-135 Stratotanker on a recent refueling mission, what was clear was the quickening pace of the air campaign. Over the course of six hours circling above the two most active areas of fighting — Helmand and Nangahar provinces, which are hundreds of miles from each other — F-16 fighter jets swooped in again and again, taking on tens of

STAFF SGT. SEAN MARTIN/U.S. AIR FORCES CENTRAL COMMAND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

The usual winter lull in fighting has given way to a major spike in attacks on Taliban targets thousands of pounds of fuel in midair.

“Where last year we’d do a 12hour flight over Afghanistan and offload maybe 20,000 pounds of fuel, now we do four hours and might offload 50,000 pounds,” said Ronny, a senior airman who controlled the “boom,” a device lowered from the back of the KC135 that can refuel almost any military aircraft. (The Washington Post is complying with a request from the military that, for security reasons, personnel in active combat engagements who are not commanders not be identified by their full names.)

A year ago, the U.S. Air Force was preoccupied with bombing the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa, and the KC-135s were flown out of an air base in Qatar, concentrated mostly on that effort. That meant combat pilots in Afghanistan might often be able to stay in the air for just an hour at a time before running out of fuel.

Under the new strategy, KC-135s are based in-country at Kandahar Airfield, enabling combat pilots to stay out much longer.

That luxury of time is new. And many of the recent airstrikes have taken full advantage of the new rules of engagement. Dozens of them have targeted labs where the Taliban turns poppy into narcotics, which it uses to finance its operations. Hundreds of Taliban fighters have been killed.

“We’ve started to hear of Taliban commanders saying they can’t sustain this level of casualties,” a senior intelligence officer said during a briefing this month in Kabul. “Not that there’s any shortage of fighters, but it is creating friction within their ranks.”

The new strategy presupposes that U.S. and Afghan forces can pound the Taliban so hard that it has no choice but to relinquish its war against the Afghan government and instead join it in some sort of power-sharing agreement.

The intelligence officer said that the Taliban could even be given control of entire provinces in such an agreement. Yet even though that would be a major walk-down from the George W. Bush era, when many Americans thought the Taliban could be vanquished,

An F-16 Fighting Falcon, seen from a KC-135 Stratotanker that is refueling it, flies over Afghanistan in November.

many analysts doubt the new goal is attainable.

“The U.S. is misreading Taliban psychology,” said Borhan Osman, senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group.

“Their whole fight is about saying, ‘We were a legitimate government and you toppled us and installed a puppet government.’ This new U.S. strategy will only make them more willing to fight.”

U.S. military leaders acknowledge that the Taliban controls or contests nearly half of Afghanistan’s districts. But they also generally praise the scrapping of what Trump called President Barack Obama’s “arbitrary deadlines” for troop withdrawal and the return to a “conditions-based approach.”

The shift, they say, sends a signal to the Taliban and its regional backers that the United States is “here to stay.” They also argue that it boosts the resolve of the Afghan government and aligned forces by showing that the United States has recommitted to keeping them in power.

In the coming years, the U.S. military hopes to double the size of Afghanistan’s special operations commando force and to triple the size of the Afghan air force. It has already committed to sending roughly 3,000 more American troops. Human rights groups have long expressed concern that more airstrikes could result in an increase in civilian casualties. Military officials are quick to point out that, per their own numbers, civilian casualties decreased in 2017 from the previous year, despite the huge increase in airstrikes.

“I’m not skeptical in the sense that they say its going great and I say it’s not,” said Barnett Rubin, a senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation who has studied and written about Afghanistan for decades and advised the U.S. government and NATO. “It’s more that it doesn’t matter what happens on the battlefield. The Taliban cannot be eliminated. We can say we’ll wait them out, but we can’t. We have the option of leaving, and they don’t. Eventually . . . we’ll take that option.” n ©The Washington Post

COVER STORY

WASHINGTON VS.

ROBO CALLERS THE GOVERNMENT TRIED TO STOP UNWANTED PHONE CALLS. WHAT WENT WRONG?

BY SIMON VAN ZUYLEN - WOOD On the morning of Oct. 1, 2015, a middleaged telemarketer arrived at the Washingtonheadquarters of the Federal Trade Commission. His name was Aaron Michael Jones, or possibly Michael Aaron Jones, and in any case, he went by Mike. According to court documents, Mike was a father and widower. He lived well, paying $25,000 a month for a Spanish Colonial Revival in a gated community near Laguna Beach, Calif. He also employed a personal chef, drove a couple of Mercedes, and maintained a gambling account at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Jones sustained his lifestyle by spamming people with robo-calls. He worked with a revolving cast of co-workers under the auspices of about a dozen corporations. At the core of his enterprise was a computer program capable of blasting out irritating, prerecorded phone messages to just about anyone in the country. Jones allegedly paid for exclusive access to the program, which he then rented out to other robo-callers. He and his associates also used it to peddle their own off-brand products, including auto warranties, home security systems and search-engine optimization tools. Anyone curious or lonely enough to listen to one of Jones’s robo-calls, then press “1,” would be directed to a call center, which often meant one or two of Jones’s underlings sitting in a room in Irvine, Calif.

ILLUSTRATION BY KYLE BEAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

n

In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robo-calls were being placed every month.

The FTC was investigating Jones’s empire and had called him to Washington to testify under oath. The companies affiliated with Jones may have been dubious — two weeks earlier, Google had filed suit against one called Local Lighthouse for trademark infringement and false advertisement — but the feds were more concerned with the robo-calls themselves. Virtually all robo-calls, whatever they’re selling, are illegal. And Jones had made a staggering number of them. According to the FTC, he was facilitating roughly a billion a year, more than any individual it had ever identified.

At 9:50 a.m., Jones and his attorney arrived at a fifth-floor FTC conference room, where two of the commission’s lawyers, James Evans and Ian Barlow, would confront him. But a curious thing happened as they began asking questions: Jones didn’t deny much of anything. When Evans tried to pin down the volume of calls he was capable of placing, he answered, “I did a lot,” then punched out an estimate on his phone’s calculator. Jones eventually grew restless and tried to move the interview along: “Obviously, the underlying issue is the calls are illegal. We know that already.”

Afterward, he returned to California and resumed robo-calling. In January 2017, the FTC sued him. Five months later, a federal judge banned him from telemarketing and hit him with a $2.7 million penalty. He didn’t bother contesting the judgment. (Jones emailed me that he’d “love to discuss” the matter, then stopped responding to messages.)

Jones, it appears, didn’t really care about getting caught. The same goes for the rest of the robo-calling industry. The financial rewards of bothering people on the telephone are clearly greater than the risks. “We continue to bring cases and shut down as many folks as we can,” says Janice Kopec, the FTC’s point person on robocalls. “What we recognized, though, was we shut down an operation and another one springs up behind it almost instantaneously.” Hence our modern scourge. In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robocalls were being placed every month. Two years later, that number has leapt to 2.5 billion. At best, these calls annoy. At worst, they defraud. By far, they constitute the top consumer complaint received by the FTC. In theory, there is a fix: the National Do Not Call Registry, created in 2003. Today, 230 million numbers are on it. The point, obviously, is to not be called. And yet the FTC receives 19,000 complaints every day from list members who have, in fact, been called. There is a battle being waged over the inviolability of our telephone numbers — over the right to not be bothered. On one side there is Mike Jones and his robot army. On the other side, there is the federal government and its list. It is clear who’s winning. But why?

The educated criminal skims the cream from every new invention, if he can make use of it.” So said a Chicago police inspector in 1888, describing an early telephone scam. A wealthy trader had installed a telephone line between his home and office, one of the first in the city. One weekday, according to a 19th-century newspaper called the Electrical Review, a smartly dressed man identifying himself as Thomas Jefferson Odell knocked on the trader’s door and asked his butler for use of the house phone. The butler obliged. Odell called the trader at his office. “The cook, the chambermaid, and your wife are lying here bound and gagged,” he told him, asking for $20,000 in ransom. The trader delivered the cash to one of Odell’s accomplices, then rushed home to find his wife in fine shape and none the wiser.

Over the next half-century, telephone scams became problematic enough that MGM produced a short film to warn of their dangers. It ran 19 minutes and featured a gang of swindlers who compiled telephone numbers of financially distressed people, then got them to invest what they had left in a bogus horse-racing scheme. The movie was called “Sucker List.”

A few decades later, nuisance calls evolved to include legitimate sales pitches. In the 1960s, door-to-door salesmen were suffering. The rise

of two-income families meant fewer women were home during the day to buy their products. In 1967, a public-relations consultant named Murray Roman saw a business opportunity, creating a telephone sales operation that could reach customers well into the evening. In his first major campaign, he hired 15,000 women to place a collective million calls a day from their homes on behalf of the Ford Motor Co. The idea wasn’t to sell cars — at least not yet — but to gauge consumer interest. This was called lead generation, and it professionalized the sucker list. Roman’s success rate was low, but his call volume was high enough to make up for it. Of 20 million people reached, 187,000 turned out to be decent leads. Of those, 40,000 bought cars. Ford, according to a 1976 article in the Harvard Business Review, made $24 million on the gambit. Telemarketing was born.

Murray Roman died in 1984, just before people would have started blaming him for ruining their lives. Two years later, a Virginia telecom analyst named Douglas Samuelson invented something called predictive dialing. The technology allowed department stores and politicians and scammers to dial widely and quickly, while weeding out phone lines that were busy or unresponsive. The industry grew exponentially; aggravated customers began to wail to their government representatives. In 1991, Congress passed a law that curtailed some telemarketing activities and created the first Do Not Call registries. Unfortunately, the registries weren’t maintained by the government but by companies doing the telemarketing, and the only way to get on them was to call the companies themselves. Nothing changed.

By 2003, the national telemarketing crisis had grown acute enough to warrant bipartisanship. A nationwide Do Not Call Registry would be established and the FTC would administer it. The House bill to create it passed 412 to 8. Only Ron Paul, Jeff Flake and a handful of other shrink-thestate types dissented. George W. Bush marked the occasion with a Rose Garden announcement.

“When Americans are sitting down for dinner, or a parent is reading to his or her child,” he said, in dad-voice, “the last thing they need is a call from a stranger with a sales pitch.” Telemarketing groups would have to pay to download lists of numbers on the registry, organized by area code.

If they were later found to have called any of those numbers, intentionally or not, they could be fined up to $11,000 per call.

All but telemarketers were elated. In three months, 50 million people signed up. Syndicated columnist Dave Barry called it the most popular government program since the Elvis stamp. The industry, meanwhile, filed several lawsuits against the FTC, arguing its new toy violated their First Amendment rights. “It will be like an asteroid hitting the Earth,” predicted Tim Searcy, then the chief executive of the American Teleservices Association. “Two million people will lose their jobs.” Barry, capturing the national mood, responded by printing the ATA’s phone number in a column and suggesting his readers flood it with calls. The lawsuits failed, the Do Not Call list became a permanent fixture, and telemarketing never recovered.

“It changed the industry dramatically,” says Stuart Discount, CEO of the Professional Association for Customer Engagement, which is just the new name of the beleaguered American Teleservices Association. “A lot of the outbound calling became continues on next page

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from previous page

calling your own customers, trying to increase their value. Cold-calling or trying to sell something really took a hit.” Set aside that it was now verboten to dial a wide swath of the country. Would someone on a Do Not Call list really be receptive to an unsolicited sales pitch? The registry, says the FTC’s Kopec, was “the nail in the coffin for outbound telemarketing.”

It was an era of good feelings and uninterrupted square meals. And it ended almost as soon as it began.

KYLE BEAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Ami Dziekan, 41, has worked for the Federal

Trade Commission since she graduated from Georgetown Law in 2004. She began her career as a staff attorney before being named program manager of the Do Not Call Registry in 2010.

Kopec and her boss Lois Greisman oversee the FTC’s big-picture robo-call strategy, while Dziekan manages the list’s day-to-day operation. (The registry’s customer service people — the human beings fielding calls from dissatisfied list members — are employed by a contractor with offices in Indianapolis and Albuquerque.)

“I have a reputation of having an office full of plants and pictures of family,” Dziekan says, glancing around happily. By federal government standards, her L’Enfant Plaza office building is an inviting one: “If I open my door, I get to look out of a window, which is nice.” Dziekan, a redheaded mother of two, lives on Capitol Hill and is active in her church. Her outlook on life is admirably sunny, given that her job entails dealing with two kinds of people: consumers who don’t want to be called, but are; and telemarketers who want to call, but can’t.

In simpler times, this wasn’t a major problem.

By downloading the list of numbers on the Do Not Call Registry, and then declining to call them, telemarketers largely policed themselves out of existence. By the late 2000s, though, a new threat had emerged: robo-calls. Instead of live telemarketers, working for recognizable companies, a new breed of humanoid irritants came calling with all manner of crappy sales pitches and outright scams. Robo-calling itself was not new; a robo-call is just another word for a prerecorded phone message. Public schools have been using them forever to announce snow days and twohour delays. But now, the technology — far more efficient than traditional telemarketing, in that a live human is needed only once a customer decides to engage — was being marshaled for profit and fraud.

Suddenly “Rachel from Cardholder Services,” the ubiquitous fake bank rep, was plotting to take your money. Around tax season, fake Internal Revenue Service agents came calling, too. They left menacing messages like, “This is a final notification call to inform you that there is an arrest warrant issued against your name and your identity.” From there, targets would be directed to call a number where an operator would be waiting to bilk them. In one scheme, victims were commanded to drive to their grocery stores and pay phantom back taxes in the form of iTunes gift cards. For their part, legitimate companies began outsourcing illegal robo-calls to third parties. (Last year, a

federal judge hit Dish Network with a $280 million penalty in part for doing that. Dish Network says it’s appealing.) And none of this includes the related problem of spam text messages.

In the quaint era of man-made telemarketing, it was mainly large corporations like Ford that could pay for the infrastructure and manpower to dial thousands of numbers at once. A couple of technological shifts changed that.

One was the advent of voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) dialing. This is the technology that makes Skype possible and is now used by a bulk of the country’s telephone landlines. VoIP “allows telemarketers to make lots and lots of calls for less money, from anywhere in the world,” says Will Maxson, an assistant director in the FTC’s consumer protection bureau. “It also allows you to set up shop, tear down, move. All you really need to make a lot of calls is a computer and an Internet connection.” Combine that with an automated dialing platform, plus some co-workers, and you’re Aaron Michael Jones.

Equally important was the rise of call “spoofing,” or faking a telephone number. Back in another quaint era, you may recall, Paris Hilton was accused of hacking into Lindsay Lohan’s voice mail by pretending to call it from Lohan’s phone.

All it took was a perfectly legal $10 “SpoofCard.”

(SpoofCard terminated Hilton’s account.) Robocallers were employing more sophisticated tools, but the principle was the same. It allowed them to entice targets by calling from numbers that bore their own area codes, and, simultaneously, throw law enforcement off their scent.

In 2009, the FTC responded by outlawing almost all robo-calls, exempting those from political organizations, schools and other entities not trying to sell you things. Now, it was not only illegal to call a number on the registry, it was illegal to solicit any customers using robo-calls. The ban had no perceptible effect. From 2010 to 2011, the number of annual Do Not Call complaints jumped from 1.6 million to 2.3 million, the largest increase since the list’s inception. The following year, the number rose again by nearly 70 percent. Last year, the FTC received a record 7.2 million complaints, and the calls were as disreputable as ever. The top violations reported were debt-reduction schemes, vacation and timeshare offers, warranties and protection plans, and impostors. (Most of these were robo-calls, though live holdouts remain.)

Meanwhile, a shift occurred in the way people thought about unwanted calls. The Do Not Call Registry had promised tranquility. Now, it couldn’t deliver. This made people angry twice: once at the robo-calls, then again at the impotent gatekeepers letting them through. “We know that there are people who put their faith in the Do Not Call Registry as blocking every single phone call that they do not want,” says Dziekan. “I try to be flattered that they think I can block every single call that they don’t want. Unfortunately, I can’t.”

Here’s a sad anecdote: In 2013, the FTC published a blog post on its website. It was called “10 years of National Do Not Call: Looking back and looking ahead.” The post featured a cute graphic and plucky copy. “To etiquette purists, the 10th anniversary dictates gifts of metal,” it read. “The

The FTC’s Janice Kopec, left, and Ami Dziekan.

FTC presents this iron-clad guarantee: You can count on us to continue to take action against companies that violate the Telemarketing Sales Rule.” Later that day, a commenter named Helen wrote, “Awesome!!!” But every year, a dozen or so new comments would appear, and as time went on, they grew darker. “I think you all have done an awful job,” wrote one commenter in 2016.

“The Spammers still call with NO fear of our Government.” Added another: “You no longer function at all.”

At the root of this public relations problem is a likely misapprehension about how the Do Not Call Registry works. When you add your number to the list, nothing actually happens. No legal muscle or technological wizardry suddenly prevents a solicitor from calling you. All the list does is provide you with vague recourse in the event you are called, by allowing you to complain that someone has called you. So, you can report the violation by calling a toll-free number or filling out a form on the Do Not Call website. Then, if the number you were called from shows up in enough complaints, the FTC will leap into action and prosecute the offending dialer.

Except, it almost certainly won’t. In the age of live telemarketing, the mere threat of prosecution or penalty was enough to deter companies with shareholders and reputations to protect. In the robo-calling epoch, dialers couldn’t care less. One, nobody knows who they are or where they’re calling from, because they all spoof their numbers.

Two, more of them are doing it every year, since it’s cheap and easy to blast out automated calls from anywhere in the world. All this makes it nearly impossible to identify robo-callers, let alone penalize them. At a hearing on robo-calls in October, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was getting so many of them, she’d disconnected her home phone. “The list,” she said, “doesn’t work.”

When I met with Kopec, the FTC’s de facto robo-czar, she drew a distinction between two eras of the Do Not Call Registry. “Prior to the beginning of the robo-call epidemic, we really approached the problem in two ways: law enforcement and consumer education,” she said. Now, she no longer has the resources to realistically tackle the problem. With an annual budget of $300 million — by contrast, the FBI’s is $9 billion — the FTC is a relatively puny federal agency. There are only 43 employees in the Division of Marketing Practices, which oversees unwanted calls. None of them, including Kopec, work full time on the issue. Ami Dziekan, who works in a different department, is the lone steward of the Do Not Call Registry.

Since the robo-call ban went into effect in 2009, the FTC has brought just 33 cases against robo-callers. In those cases, defendants have been ordered to pay nearly $300 million in relief to victims, and nearly $30 million in civil penalties to the government. But even then, the FTC can’t force perpetrators to pay the fine if they argue they’re broke. Which robo-callers often seem to be. So the FTC has only collected on a fraction of those sums: $18 million in relief and less than $1 million in penalties.

(Point of clarification: The FTC is the sheriff here. Its job is to prosecute shady business prac-

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COVER STORY tices, and robo-calls tend to be shady. But various other state and federal agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, also police nuisance calls. In theory, there are legal distinctions between which kinds of cases the FCC and FTC can bring, though neither agency could explain these to me clearly. As a practical matter, an FTC spokesmanfigures, it doesn’t matter: “There are enough violators in this space to keep us both busy.”)

The bottom line is that the problem has become too sprawling to litigate. The FTC is like a commercial fisherman trying to use his bare hands. “What the robo-call problem prodded us to do,” Kopec says, “was to recognize that there has to be a technical piece to this solution as well.”

Less reactive policing, more proactive call-blocking. Unfortunately, it couldn’t do that either.

“The FTC is largely a civil law enforcement agency. We have a whole lot of attorneys, and a whole lot of economists, and a few technologists,” Kopec explains. “We don’t have the expertise.”

For a while, neither did anyone else. In fall 2012, as the nation’s robo-call affliction grew

more severe, the FTC created a contest, offering a $50,000 prize for the most promising callblocking proposals. Eight hundred entries were submitted; A-list tech journalist Kara Swisher served as a judge. The following spring, two winners split the reward. The more auspicious of the two was called Nomorobo, devised by a Long Island programmer named Aaron Foss.

Foss, now 39, was working as a freelance software developer in Port Jefferson, on the island’s north shore. “I didn’t even know what robo-calls were,” he says. “Even back then, [the FTC] was like, ‘We’ve done everything we can.

Can anybody else do something?’ ” Foss started by piggybacking off technology called “simultaneous ring,” which allowed an inbound call to travel to multiple destinations at once. So when someone called your number, they were also calling Nomorobo. At the same time, he began compiling a blacklist of likely robo-call numbers.

By marrying simultaneous ring with the blacklists, Nomorobo picked up inbound calls before its subscribers did, then blocked the bad ones from going through.

The call-blocking field soon grew crowded.

Truecaller. RoboKiller. Hiya. The FTC hosted another $50,000 contest called “Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back.” Yet another was called “Zapping Rachel,” in honor of the “Cardholder Services” menace. Cute names both, but the fight had already become a technological arms race — App Store Autobots against boiler-room Decepticons, basically. And the bad guys were winning. The apps grew more sophisticated — Nomorobo now says it blocks 27 million calls a month — but consumers were receiving more robo-calls than ever. “The robo-call problem is getting worse,” Foss says, “even though there are all these technological answers to it.”

I tracked down several hypotheses as to why.

For one, it’s very hard to identify a robo-call from its phone number alone, which in turn makes it difficult to compile comprehensive blacklists. A decade ago, the future of email was clouded by a

massive spam problem. By cataloguing bad actors by text keywords and IP addresses, Google and others were able to all but eradicate the problem. Gmail now claims that less than 0.1 percent of the emails its users receive are spam.

By contrast, a spoofed phone number — which can be hastily abandoned or belong to a legitimate entity — tells us little about the content of the call itself. This is why we know roughly how many robo-calls are being made but not how many human beings are behind them. “Maybe 1,000 scammers could be generating most of the problems,” says Alex Quilici, the CEO of YouMail.

Or more. Or less. Nobody knows.

Two, there’s a square-peg-round-hole problem plaguing the call-blocking start-ups. Different call-blocking technology works for different kinds of telephones — Nomorobo focuses on landlines, others on smartphones — and all of them use different blacklists. Which means robocalls will find a way to slip through. Meanwhile, the population most vulnerable to telephone scams — the elderly — are also the most likely to have old-school copper-line phones. According to the FCC, there are 54 million of these in the country, and they can hardly block spam calls at all. The only technology available for them are hopeless little analog boxes that require users to enter unwanted numbers by hand.

Three, good luck firewalling a tool as central to modern life as a telephone. “It’s really hard to get a consumer not to answer calls,” says Quilici. “If you’re a plumber, it could be a customer. You need to answer.” Email spam filters have made it harder for intruders to impinge on our digital lives, but people like to keep their phone lines open. And this openness means we’re vulnerable not just to receiving phony calls, but to being manipulated once we answer. “The easiest way to compromise an entity is social engineering. Sort of appealing to people’s emotions,” says David Dewey, director of research at Pindrop, a cybersecurity firm.

“We’ve seen instances of fraudsters that will call in to our customers, and they’ll pretend to be super angry. Or super polite and friendly — ‘You sound like you’re having a bad day today; I’ll ask you real simple, what’s your Social Security number on file?’ ” Finally, there’s the problem of the telecom giants that do nothing. As the FTC pushed its boulder and the start-ups chipped away at it, major telephone carriers stood and watched, claiming they didn’t have the authority to address the problem. For good reason, Washington has been loath to tell phone companies to censor calls.

Still, if carriers weren’t going to block the illegal calls plaguing their own customers, the problem seemed likely to persist.

In 2014, Foss protested by lugging 25 boxes of printouts, representing the millions of calls Nomorobo had blocked, to the headquarters of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates phone companies. A year later, the FCC woke up and voted to allow carriers to offer their customers external call-blocking apps like Nomorobo on their landlines. Next, in 2016, the FCC convened a group called the Robocall Strike Force, a sort of industry Knights of the Round Table in which telecom executives periodically

Since the robo-call ban went into effect in 2009, the FTC has brought just 33 cases against robo-callers.

KLMNO WEEKLY

sat in a room and brainstormed. Finally, in November 2017, the FCC gave carriers the power to block certain illegal robo-calls directly. Now, on the horizon — perhaps — is a moonshot called Caller ID authentication, which would function like the blue Twitter check mark that verifies a user’s identity. Developed by a consortium of telecom providers, it’s being tested by AT&T, Comcast and others. It may or may not see the light of day in 2018.

All this activity appears to be having a positive effect. We know this because the hobbled telemarketing lobby is angry again. “Our contact rates have plummeted about 20 percent” recently, says PACE’s Stuart Discount. His theory (though he doesn’t have data to prove this): Newly zealous carriers are accidentally blocking legitimate calls from companies innocently trying to reach their customers.

Still, the last of the human, legal telemarketers have more to fear from robo-callers than from the robo-call police. Says poor Discount: “They created the atmosphere of these billions of calls made each year that interrupt legitimate contact between companies and customers, because people won’t answer the phone.” In other words, we’ve lost trust in our own telephones. “It’s very difficult and obviously we recognize the problem,” he continues. “Look, we’re all consumers, too. I don’t want to get these calls.”

A few months ago, I told a friend in Boston I was

writing about the robo-call epidemic. He was pleased to inform me that an app had slowed the deluge of spam calls he was used to receiving on his iPhone. But it wasn’t perfect; the version he was using couldn’t block robo-texts.

I decided to spam him. There is a software platform called Twilio that allows companies, or anyone, really, to send out phone calls and text messages from a random number. This is a legal and legitimate business practice, so long as it is not being done with the intent to defraud or harm a recipient. Indeed, there are good, privacy-related reasons for spoofing a call; imagine that a women’s shelter is trying to contact a domestic abuse victim at home without her abuser knowing. In any event, for the price of $1, I bought one of Twilio’s countless 202 (D.C.) area code numbers. Then, over the course of an afternoon, I followed a tutorial on how to program and send out a text message from that number. Programming a phone call would have been more difficult, but an adept coder could have done either in a few minutes.

I embedded my bogus 202 number, then his real number, then the body of my text, into Twilio’s open-source software. I sent him this: “This is a message from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Our records indicate your phone number is registered on the federal Do Not Call registry. This is a routine list-maintenance message. To confirm, write YES. To remove your name, write REMOVE.” Giddy with mischief, I held out for like a minute, then asked him if he had received a text from a 202 number. He had. “Looked legit to me,” he said. n © The Washington Post

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SOCIAL MEDIA

A tough job, made even stranger BY

S TEPHANIE M ERRY

“M

atilda” star Mara Wilson learned early on that looking herself up online was a mistake. She wasn’t yet a teenager the first time she searched for her name and found sites that falsely promised nude photos of her, not to mention people discussing her body in sickening detail. Later, she found images of her feet floating around cyberspace, alongside those of other young actors.

“I actually came to laugh it off,” Wilson, now 30, said over the phone recently. “And it’s really sad, when you’re 14 or 15, that you’re laughing off that you’re on a foot fetish website.”

Wilson made the journey from child star to stable adult with relative ease, but that path is littered with cautionary tales. Kids in Hollywood have always faced dangers, and they historically came from within the industry. Just think of Judy Garland’s tales of being groped and harassed by a power player like Louis B. Mayer.

But the challenges for similar kids today are shifting and broadening with the rise of the Internet and the popularity of social media.

Suddenly child stars are being bombarded both with praise and criticism from the media, blogs and anonymous strangers.

There’s no real consensus on how to talk about child actors.

When it comes to a president’s young son or daughter the expectations are clearer: The best rule of thumb is to say nothing at all — or risk the consequences. When the Daily Caller posted a story poking fun at Barron Trump’s wardrobe choices, the publication faced the wrath of Chelsea Clinton, whose tweet urging people to leave the 11-year-old alone was liked more than 72,000 times. And SNL’s Katie Rich was suspended after she posted a widely criticized joke about the first son on social media.

But child stars don’t have those kinds of culturally accepted protections, so they’re often treated like adults. The problem with that line of thinking is coming into

CHARLEY GALLAY/GETTY IMAGES FOR TNT

Being a child actor has always been a struggle.

But social media makes it so much worse. focus with the kids from Netflix’s hit series “Stranger Things.” Thirteen-year-old Millie Bobby Brown’s wardrobe choices, for example, were endlessly and sometimes uncomfortably scrutinized during the press tour for the show’s second season. When a former NBCUniversal executive tweeted a red carpet photo of Brown in a leather dress with the caption, “Millie Bobby Brown just grew up in front of our eyes” — a comment for which he later apologized, and said was not intended to contribute to the “objectification . . . of a minor” — Wilson, among others, hit back, accusing him of sexualizing a young girl.

“A 13-year-old’s body is never your business unless you are that 13-year-old girl,” Wilson said in an interview. “I don’t understand why we don’t see it as off limits. It would be creepy if you were to talk about a 13-year-old girl down the street.”

It would, but there’s a doublestandard for youngsters in the public eye, and boys aren’t immune.

“Not to be weird but hit me up in 4 years” A post directed at actor Finn Wolfhard, above, by model Ali Michael in an Instagram story.

He was 14 at the time.

She later apologized.

Just look at the 27-year-old model who suggested, via Instagram, that then-14-year-old “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard “hit me up in four years.” Meanwhile, fans have publicly pined for a romantic relationship between the actor and Brown, posting doctored images of the pair together. And Wolfhard, whose popularity has grown even more since he starred in “It” over the summer, was attacked on Twitter by people who called him “rude” because he didn’t stop to greet fans and sign autographs when a crowd assembled outside of his hotel.

His “Stranger Things” co-star, Shannon Purser, came to his defense, as did “Game of Thrones” star Sophie Turner, who also came of age in the limelight. Those complaining, including grown adults, clearly believe that Wolfhard owed them something.

B

efore the Internet was as

big, it was easier to shield a child actor from everything.

Wilson’s parents and agent used to

go through her fan mail and pick out the particularly weird stuff so she wouldn’t have to read it, which worked — for the most part.

“But that doesn’t mean they can protect you from everything,” she said. “And that’s something that’s even more true with the advent of social media, which has democratized everything in a wonderful way, but also in a dangerous way.”

These days movie and television contracts might even stipulate social media activity as part of a publicity commitment, and studio teachers — the people who protect and advocate for children on sets — are worried about what that means. Sometimes, with the especially young, a parent or employee will do the posting. But not always.

“So they’re doing that sometimes without supervision,” said studio teacher Sharon Sacks. “I think that’s the next big thing that has to be monitored.”

Sacks has worked closely with Ariel Winter, along with the other child stars on “Modern Family,” for the past nine years, which means she has had a front-row seat to the struggles that come with growing up both in the public eye and online. Winter told the Hollywood Reporter that before she was a teenager, strangers were posting that she was “a fat slut” and “a whore.” For a while, she decided to change her appearance in the hopes it would shield her from criticism.

“I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to lose some weight, dye my hair, change how I dress. . . . Maybe I’m doing something wrong.’ But it didn’t help,” she said. “I actually got more hate by trying to change.”

It’s not just trolls on the Internet who are using grown-up language to discuss young stars. It happens in the media and other more well-established forums.

Brown routinely shows up on Tom + Lorenzo, the take-no-prisoners fashion site, where the writers skewer the likes of Gal Gadot, 32, and Jessica Chastain, 40. TMZ peppers Wolfhard with questions about kissing Brown for the camera. During a panel at San Diego Comic-Con, comedian Patton Oswalt introduced Wolfhard as the

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TECHNOLOGY “actor born with the greatest porn name ever.”

S

ome will argue that any child

actor — unlike the president’s son — signed up for this. And they have a point: If a kid wants to be famous, then he has to take the bad with the good. But that’s simplifying a situation that can often be murky.

Children in general don’t have much agency, but child stars are especially strapped with expectations — from parents and producers, from agents and fans.

“Children are not really seen as children in show business, they’ve always been seen as a commodity, a worker: ‘We pay you all this money, we expect you to behave like an adult,’” said Julie Stevens, a director and former child actor who has worked as a studio teacher since the 1990s. Meanwhile, some parents “just close their eyes and their ears because they don’t want to ruin an opportunity for their child. Or maybe their child’s the breadwinner for the family — who knows?”

Money makes the issue inherently more complicated. Should anyone feel bad for a kid who’s raking it in on a hit show? These days, certain states, including California and Louisiana, require 15 percent of a minor’s income be deposited into a trust that can’t be touched until the actor turns 18.

But parents have control of the remainder of that salary, which means it isn’t uncommon for a young star to reach adulthood and find that they don’t have the money they thought they did.

Stevens says she knows former child stars whose parents didn’t even bother to file income taxes on their salaries.

“So when they turned 18, the IRS came after them and took anything they had, which wasn’t much because their parents spent most of their money,” she said.

“They had to settle and hire lawyers. It was a horrible mess for a lot of them.”

And parents can often be the driving force behind their kids’ careers in the first place. Stevens once had to call social services on a mother who forced her daughter to work on a television show during the day, even though she was sick, before taking her to the Santa Monica promenade in the evening to busk for change. The last she heard, the girl was starring in a

major movie.

C

hild actors today have to navigate these potential issues while dealing with inevitable online chatter — but, of course, it’s not all critical. Some of it is the opposite. Wolfhard and Brown’s tweets often get near worshipful responses from fans. But that comes with its own risks.

“It’s hard for an adult to adjust to the business, but being a kid and getting all this adulation from adults, that’s very addicting,” Sacks said. “I think the best thing we can do is try to help them learn that this isn’t life.”

Long before Twitter and Facebook, Danny Tamberelli — one of the stars of “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” — remembers thinking how it was both flattering and strange when fans used to come to his shooting locations and give him gifts. The attention was nice, but he’s glad now, at 35, that his parents kept him grounded; they even forced him to get a summer job at a local bagel shop to “learn the value of a dollar.” These days he’s a musician, stand-up comic and he hosts a podcast with his “Pete & Pete” costar Michael Maronna.

He feels he has to be on Twitter, Instagram and other platforms for publicity reasons, but he’s glad those sites weren’t around when he was on a hit show. These days he still gets “weird, creepy videos, sometimes from fans.”

During a convention recently, he met some of the “Stranger Things” kids and was struck by their need to “create content” by shooting fun videos to feed their fan base.

“And there’s something about that that makes me feel sad,” he said, even though he assumes the children enjoy doing it. “I don’t think they should have to be worrying about that. At 12, 13, 14, they should be worrying about themselves and having fun.”

It’s just another way that the Internet is forcing child actors to grow up long before a normal kid would have to.

“I don’t think kids should have the responsibility of creating yourself and creating your brand,” he said. “It’s an extra way for kids who grow up in this business to go down a bad path and be disconnected from reality, because social media is whitewashing everybody’s true selves with their perfect Instagram lives.” n © The Washington Post

KLMNO WEEKLY

Google app draws privacy concerns BY

H AMZA S HABAN

A

Google app that matches people’s selfies to famous works of art and encourages users to share the side-by-sides on social media leaped to the top spot on the iTunes App Store charts this weekend, ahead of YouTube, Instagram and Facebook’s Messenger, but it has also drawn concerns from some that the privacy of the users may be at risk.

TWITTER

The latest version of the Google Arts & Culture app allows users to match their selfies against celebrated portraits pulled from more than 1,200 museums in more than 70 countries. The findyour-art-lookalike feature has been available since mid-December, but the app has rocketed to viral status as more users shared their matches on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram this month, in a mix of implausible, absurd and “spot-on” comparisons. People have also tested out the app using their dogs and pictures of celebrities and President Trump.

But not everyone was willing to snap away. Some people expressed skepticism over the privacy of the facial information users have been sending to Google.

The app works by using machine learning to recognize a person’s face in the selfie, including the position of the head. It then compares the face to a bank of selected artwork to find matches.

Google says that the selfies are not being used to train machine learning programs, build a data-

base of faces or for any other purpose. “Google is not using these selfies for anything other than art matches,” said Patrick Lenihan, a company spokesman.

The Arts & Culture app also says in one of its prompts that Google “will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches.”

The selfie matching feature is not available to users in Texas and Illinois, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. While there are no federal laws that specifically restrict the use of facial scanning, those two states forbid the use of facial recognition technology to identify people without their consent.

“The rise in the use of facial recognition by Google and other companies normalizes a privacyinvasive technology that lacks meaningful protections for users,” said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“Google may state now that photos from the app will not be used for any other purpose, but such statements mean little when Google can arbitrarily change this stance with little fear of any legal consequences.”

Google already uses facial recognition in its Photos service. A feature was added to Photos in October that lets users sort pictures of their pets, even differentiating among dog breeds. In December, Facebook began flagging users that appeared on the social network without being tagged.

Although that feature was designed to enhance users’ privacy and control, it also highlighted how well Facebook’s platform recognizes people’s faces without much input from users. And in September, Apple’s Face ID, introduced alongside its latest mobile phone, the iPhone X, sparked debate over the privacy and security of using a person’s face to unlock the device and enable applications, including mobile payments. n ©The Washington Post

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KLMNO WEEKLY

BOOKS

Busting the myths about millennials N ONFICTION

M KIDS THESE DAYS Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

By Malcolm Harris Little Brown. 261 pp. $25

l

REVIEWED BY

S TEPHANIE M EHTA

alcom Harris is the thinking person’s Berniecrat. His book, “Kids These Days,” offers a comprehensive, data- and research-driven look at the trends and anxieties that led so many young people to zealously support Sen. Bernie Sanders’s quixotic bid for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Millennials are better educated and more skilled than previous generations, yet they are saddled with more debt and fewer stable job prospects than their predecessors. To hear Harris, a millennial himself, tell it, they’re overworked, undersexed and stressed out. No wonder so many of them embraced an anti-establishment candidate who campaigned for free college education and railed against corporate greed.

Harris sets out to dispel much of the conventional wisdom about his peers — that they’re entitled, tech-addicted and in need of constant validation — using a novel approach. He analyzes millennials through the lens of “human capital,” an economic concept that refers to the investments that go into making a resource (in this case, people) more productive. By this measure, young adults born between 1980 and 2000, with their competitive schools, unpaid internships, organized sports and music lessons, indeed should be very valuable. But they find themselves thrown into a job market that, thanks to globalization, increased productivity and the “gig economy,” doesn’t reward them for their inputs. If you don’t count people in finance careers, collegeeducated young adults have seen their real wages drop 8.5 percent between 2000 and 2012, and unemployment rates for recent graduates have nearly doubled since 2007. Far from being entitled, millennials are disadvantaged. And the always-on devices they supposedly love so much? Technolog-

LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

Students cheer during a 2015 speech by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at George Mason University in Virginia.

ical advances are part of what’s killing their professional prospects.

It’s a stark and compelling picture, but in Harris’s book, it’s fairly bloodless. The few real-life examples of struggling millennials offered by the author are gleaned from the research papers, books and articles he cites to support his arguments. To disprove the myth that most undergrads are rich kids coasting through school while their parents write tuition checks — only about 19 percent of full-time students finish four-year programs on time, Harris reports — he writes about a student who was falling asleep in class. When queried by her professor, who assumed the young woman had been at a party the night before, the student revealed that she worked the graveyard shift at a local grocery store to make extra money. I yearned to know more about this student. Where did she grow up? Was anyone helping her pay for school? How does she feel about the job market she’s going to face after graduation? To find out, I might have to read “Paying the Price,” a book Harris draws from,

which was written by the professor who confronted the student.

And in his keenness to knock down every unfair generalization about his generation, Harris peppers his book with straw-man arguments, some so absurd that they distract from the potency of his message. In an otherwise astute assessment of profiteering and greed at colleges and universities, the author wants us to be shocked, shocked that there are opportunists in these establishments. He writes, “Since almost all colleges are nonprofits, we assume people work in higher education for reasons other than financial gain, whether it be commitment to teaching the next generation, a passion for contribution to the sum of human knowledge and understanding, fear of social life outside the academy, or some combination of all three.” It’s as if he’s never heard of Division I college football or interacted with the support staff at a university bursar’s office. I stopped short when he mused, “If it is every parent’s task to raise at least one successful American by America’s own standards, then the system is rigged so

that most of them will fail.” It’s a throwaway line, but Harris seems to be positing that parenting is transactional, a notion that may advance the book’s narrative that millennials are investments but one that surely will rub any wellmeaning parent the wrong way.

All these quibbles — and I realize the critiques make me sound like a grumpy old Gen Xer — might be excused if Harris offered ideas for how millennials and future generations could band together to restore upward mobility.

Instead, he practically shrugs in the concluding chapter, “Books like this are supposed to end with a solution, right?” He then proceeds to offer the pros and cons of various traditional levers citizens use to affect change, such as participating in elections, making smart buying decisions, volunteering and protesting.

I get it: Harris doesn’t want to devalue his analysis by concluding with a tidy, too-pat blueprint.

But his reluctance to offer anything resembling a millennial call to arms feels like a cop-out. The author may not have all the answers, but here again, some outside voices might help. Surely there are smart activists and organizers who can lend insight and proactive suggestions for reversing millennials’ fates. Indeed, Harris suggests, somewhat naively, that mounting pressures may push his cohort to “become the first generation of successful revolutionaries.” In fact, there have been other triumphant rebellions in U.S. history, starting with the colonists who ousted the British.

The volunteers and protesters of the civil rights movement — including Sanders — were revolutionaries. Millennials may be different from previous generations, but it doesn’t mean they can’t learn a thing or two from the past. n Mehta, a deputy editor at Vanity Fair, wrote this for The Washington Post.

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

Horrific crime, twisty aftermath

The anatomy of a 50-year friendship

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

A

l

REVIEWED BY

D ENNIS D RABELLE

t the beginning of Christopher J. Yates’s fine second novel, “Grist Mill Road,” Patrick “Patch” McConnell looks back on the summer of 1982 and what he took for an “ideal childhood . . . growing up in the best place on earth, probably still [believing] in ghosts, UFOs, tarot cards and the purity of major league baseball.” His “best place” is a town in the mountains 90 miles north of New York City.

There, day after day, you would have found the 12-year-old Patch and his intimidating 14-year-old friend Matthew running wild without adult supervision.

Then came an event that changed three lives. It can be encapsulated in a tabloid headline — BOY SHOOTS OUT GIRL’S EYE — but there was much more to it than that.

For one thing, the shooting was no accident. The perpetrator, Matthew, first tied 13-year-old Hannah to a tree, then picked up a BB gun and pumped pellet after pellet into her. Patch was there, too, having his Lord Jim moment — standing by, watching the attack in horror, but making no attempt to stop it, not even a verbal protest. With blood all over herself and one eye a pulpy mess, Hannah was left for dead. Later Patch sneaked back, found her still alive, untied her and sought help. Matthew confessed to the crime, and the three went their separate ways. Ever since, Patch has been looking for a chance to redeem himself.

Lord Jim fled to the jungles of Southeast Asia, but Patch settled for Manhattan, where 26 years after the fact, the shooting takes on new meaning. By now Patch and Hannah are husband and wife — they met by chance in Grand Central Terminal some years back and eventually fell in love. (In case you’re wondering, she has a prosthetic eye that looks more real than the old glass ones.) Matthew reenters their lives first via the Internet, then in person; as before, he, Patch and Hannah make a

volatile mix.

Yates now turns to questions that hark back to the summer of ’82. For example, why wasn’t Patch charged as an accomplice? And how could Hannah possibly marry someone who let her down so badly, second thoughts or not? The answer, in each case, is that her perception of the attack is quite different from Patch’s. He lives in fear of the day when she stumbles upon “the monstrous secret that paces the perimeter of our marriage, like something that prowls in the shadows, a dangerous creature awaiting its moments, the right time to strike.” Eventually, Patch will set out to disarm that “monstrous secret” — with disastrous results. Another question — not fully answered until the book’s final pages — is how Matthew could have done something so heinous.

Shuffling and reshuffling one’s narrators has become almost a sport among suspense novelists, some of whom take it to excess.

This reader, for one, balked when Paula Hawkins in effect brought one of her characters in “The Girl on the Train” back from the dead, out of temporal sequence, to supply crucial information. Yates eschews such highhanded artifice, tacking back and forth in time, and from one narrator to another, with extraordinary skill. Some manipulators, you might say, are less manipulative than others.

Yates, who was born and raised in England and now lives in New York City, set his first novel, “Black Chalk,” mostly in his homeland.

This time around, he demonstrates impressive knowledge of and affection for his adopted country while telling an even more compelling tale. Not least among his new book’s strengths is the light it sheds on the phenomenon of an otherwise law-abiding male giving in to volcanic rage. n Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of Book World. This was written for The Washington Post.

C GRIST MILL ROAD A Novel

By Christopher J. Yates Picador. 352 pp. $26

HANK & JIM The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and James Stewart

By Scott Eyman Simon & Schuster. 367 pp. $29

l

REVIEWED BY

L OUIS B AYARD

an an agnostic liberal Democrat find lifelong friendship with a churchgoing conservative Republican? Suspend for now the cynicism of your Facebook feed and consider the example of Henry Fonda (Democrat) and James Stewart (Republican), who held it together for a good half-century without unfriending each other or wondering out loud how they would get through the holidays or coming to blows over immigration policy.

What was their secret?

Start with this now-inconceivable fact: They never spoke of politics. Or, for that matter, work.

Or war or women. They built kites and model airplanes and, when the mood struck, conceived elaborate practical jokes and, together, found the spirit of relaxation and fun that often eluded them as individuals. To borrow the title of Scott Eyman’s smart, generous chronicle, they became “Hank & Jim,” a pair of guys who asked nothing of each other but propinquity.

And, if they had been simply Hank and Jim, we wouldn’t plunk down a nickel for their story, however much we applauded their political high-wire act. But they did something even more unaccountable, which was to stumble into the same revelatory method of movie acting — a carefully calibrated, jealously guarded “non-style” that favored withholding over display.

Did the two men share theory and practice along the way, or were they each other’s accidental bystanders? That Eyman fails to answer the question may only mean that it’s unanswerable. We know that Fonda was far and away the pricklier of the two: a cold, coiled and reticent man given to deep silences. Stewart, by contrast, grew up in the cunningly concatenated small town of Indiana, Pa., where his father owned the hardware store. Without a great deal of angst, he

switched his career path from architecture to theater. Both men were loners, though, and both embodied “integrity mixed with a bloody-minded obstinance that wasn’t acting.” Crucially, too, both men had their hearts stomped on by the same woman: the willowy and incandescent Margaret Sullavan.

It was World War II duty, perhaps, that accentuated the two friends’ fundamental differences. Fonda opted for naval intelligence work in the South Pacific would shape his portrayal of Mister Roberts, a man of action in an idled world. Stewart, in his usual laconic fashion, went where the danger was, serving as lead pilot on 19 bombing missions.

Despite what you’ve been told, his first post-war movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is not a feelgood holiday classic but the unsparing portrait of a man coming apart at the seams. And over the ensuing 15 years — in genres ranging from western to thriller to comedy — Stewart found a way to show the darkness lapping just beneath his nice-guy mannerisms. Did he leave his old friend behind in the process?

Eyman makes an equally eloquent case for Fonda’s art: the “instinctive austerity,” the “pointillist technique” that weds “inner stillness” and “vocal urgency,” the way in which the actor’s own walk “works against the flow of life around him.”

That stiff outlier gait may have expressed more than he knew. A black friend of James Baldwin’s, after seeing “The Grapes of Wrath,” insisted that its star had “colored blood.” “White men don’t walk like that!” declared Baldwin’s friend as he imitated Fonda’s “stubborn, patient, widelegged hike away from the camera.” n Bayard is a novelist and reviewer. His most recent book is “Lucky Strikes.”

This was written for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

Being a mother during 38 minutes of nuclear fear ALLISON WALLIS is a disability studies graduate student at the University of Hawaii. She lives on the North Shore of Oahu with her family.

This was written for The Washington Post.

We knew there was a big swell coming in, so when the alarm blared on my phone at 8 a.m., my first sleepy thought was that we were flooding and needed to evacuate.

Then I read the notice on my phone.

“Emergency Alert BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” We’re not really disaster preppers on Oahu. Most of us grab our hurricane provisions in a mad rush to Costco and Walmart in the days before a storm hits.

And we have a long history of pulling together during crisis.

Aloha is a state of mind, but it’s also shown through actions. Our sense of community, known as ohana, is strong. So that was the excuse I’d given myself for not ensuring that we were prepared as a family to shelter in place during a nuclear strike. That and a big fat case of denial that the country I love has devolved to such a place.

I was home with my daughter, my service dog Pono, and Rosie the chinchilla, who belongs to my daughter, Abby. When I read the alarm, I jump out of bed and grab my glasses. I run to Abby’s room. “Get up honey. You have to get up right now. Right now.

Grab your pillow. Go to the bathroom. Turn on the tub and run it. Turn it off when it’s full.

Sit in the corner. Wait for me. Be brave. I’ll be right there.”

I run past Rosie in her huge cage and make a calculated decision that she won’t come into the bathroom with us. I shot Rosie a look of sympathy and went to search for the dog. I run to the back yard. It was such a stunningly typical, beautiful Hawaiian morning.

“Brandon?” I try my husband on his cellphone but the line is dead. I send a text to tell him we love him and that we’d shelter in

the bathroom. I pray he’s somewhere a missile wouldn’t go. I grab my medications, quickly fill a jug of water, and run to drop it off and check on Abby.

“Mom? What’s happening?”

She’s not crying, she’s pale, terrified, wide-eyed and wearing pajamas with cartoon characters on them. “Stay there baby. I’ll be right back.”

I scan the house for Pono in a panic and realize he’s outside.

The neighborhood is silent. Pono comes running when he hears the tone of my voice.

I grab pillows and quilts off the beds and run back to the bathroom. I settle in next to my daughter and the dog, and see a text from my husband: “On my way home.” I write back, “No. Find a place to stay.” He had been on a rural road with no shelter on the way to town. “Be there in two minutes.”

I pray whatever was about to hit us was going to take longer than two minutes.

I realize that I don’t know much about duck and cover because I’m only 36 years old and I grew up in a world without nuclear threats. I fake the confidence and teach my fourthgrader how to pull her knees up to her chest, lean her head down into them and cover her neck with her arms.

“Mom, why are we doing this?

Please? What’s going on?” I try to answer her judiciously. “Well, honey, you know that sometimes

JHUNE LIWANAG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A sign says “There is no threat” in Kaneohe, Hawaii, after an emergency alert warning of a missile strike was mistakenly sent out.

countries pick fights with each other and that’s what a war is?”

“Yeah . . . ” “Well, our president has been picking a fight with another country and they have missiles. Do you know what a missile is?” She nods. “So we just got a warning that the other country sent a missile to Hawaii. Until our military can blow it up we need to shelter somewhere safe just in case.” Another nod. Another group hug with the dog. “Where’s daddy?” Abby asks. “On his way, baby. He’ll be here any minute.”

For the first time, I wonder why the civil defense sirens didn’t go off. The state has been testing them for the past two months. The fear I felt the first time I heard the nuke test siren, it turns out, is only a modicum of the fear I feel now, cowering in a bathroom with my child.

I berate myself for not having a go-bag ready, for not having a box of emergency supplies stored in the bathroom, in the cars, in my husband’s office. I pray our failing to prepare won’t mean our deaths.

I let go of Abigail and tell her I need to check my phone. My browser is open to Twitter, so I refresh the page. I scroll past tweets about the missile alert in Hawaii. Warnings to seek shelter.

Inappropriate jokes made out of stress. I refresh the page and see that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (DHawaii) tweeted that it was a false alarm. I keep scrolling because I need more evidence. I

refresh again. Major news outlets and elected government figures are saying it’s a false alarm.

I hear my husband, Brandon, drive up, and I shakily stand. I tell Abby to stay where she is and run out to Brandon and we hug.

He doesn’t know it’s over yet and we’re both shaking. “I always thought if this happened I would be with my family,” he said later, as we were sitting outside decompressing.

We lead Abby out of the bathroom, but we’re still uneasy.

We live close to a firehouse and haven’t heard trucks go out on a single call. There has been no public response from our state or federal government. Twitter is our only source. “Is my friend still having her birthday party today?” Abigail asks.

Thirty minutes after the alert and still no all-clear. Thirty-five minutes. Finally, 38 minutes after the false alarm, we receive emergency text alerts stating the all-clear. It takes even longer for the state to send notices out over the radio and television.

Brandon and I have decided to make emergency kits and gobags, and I’ll be researching how to buy iodine in bulk. We’ll have a conversation with Abby, and have drills as a family.

Not right now though. Right now we’re sitting on the lanai, enjoying being together, while our kid runs in and out of the yard, helping her friend get ready for her birthday party. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Iran BY

T RITA P ARSI

For the past four decades, the United States and Iran have demon­ ized each other to no end. According to Tehran, America is “the Great Satan” whose imperialist designs have destabilized the Middle East and brought nothing but misery to the people of the region.

Washington, meanwhile, depicts Iran as the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” and a member of the “Axis of Evil” whose “evil hand” is be­ hind every conflict in the region. But somewhere along the way, America’s and Iran’s knowledge about each other was edged out by myths. “Don’t know thy enemy” became the mantra. Here are some common American myths about Iran.

MYTH NO. 1 The nuclear deal only delays an inevitable Iranian bomb.

This has been a common criticism of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson put it: “The JCPOA fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran; it only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.”

This misconception is based on the fact that some of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program expire after 10 to 15 years. However, the most important aspects of the deal — the intrusive inspections regime and the transparency and verification mechanisms — are permanent. There’s one catch, though: If Washington violates the deal or “terminates” it, as President Trump has vowed to do, the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program will be lost.

MYTH NO. 2 Killing the deal would help support Iranian protesters.

It’s true that the protests have been driven by economic grievances and that Iranians, especially the working poor, have been frustrated that sanctions relief hasn’t improved the economy. But jettisoning the deal and reimposing broad economic sanctions would only further punish the Iranian people.

Promoting Iran’s integration

in the global economy is a better way of empowering Iran’s working and middle classes.

Indeed, numerous polls show that Iranians overwhelmingly supported the nuclear deal precisely because they are desperate to break free from Iran’s isolation and reconnect with the outside world. Those in Iran who would like to see the nuclear deal collapse are the very hard-line elements the United States shouldn’t be helping.

MYTH NO. 3 Iran’s Green Movement was a failure.

The clerical government did indeed brutally suppress those protests, putting Green Movement leaders under house arrest. And the movement’s immediate demands were not met: Accusations of voter fraud were not properly addressed, political prisoners were not released. But the Greens got some vengeance in 2013 through the election of Hassan Rouhani.

Without the support of the Green voters, Rouhani could not have won the presidency. And in 2017, reformists swept almost all seats in city council elections in Iran’s largest cities.

MYTH NO. 4 Iran’s enmity with Israel is ideological and immutable.

Iranian leaders, too, often

ALI MOHAMMADI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

People in Tehran pass a banner depicting Iran’s religious leaders.

Despite officials’ rhetoric casting the United States as evil, Iranians tend to support the nuclear deal and hold positive views of Americans.

frame the clash as ideological, which enables them to pose as champions of the Palestinians and defenders of Islam against the West. In reality, though, the conflict is driven by geopolitical factors.

Historically, Iran and Israel enjoyed strong relations born out of common threats they faced: from the Soviet Union and from powerful Arab states, such as Egypt and Iraq. Although Iranian leaders turned against Israel rhetorically with the birth of Iran’s theocracy in 1979, the strategic reality did not change, and the two nations continued to collaborate behind the scenes. But tension escalated in 1991 because of two geopolitical shocks: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. The common threats that had brought Israel and Iran together evaporated. And in the struggle to define the new balance of power in the Middle East, Iran and Israel were no longer allies but rivals.

MYTH NO. 5 Iranians hate Americans.

While the Iranian

government’s hostility toward the United States (and vice versa) is unmistakable, the Iranian populace tends to hold positive views about American people, culture and values. It’s become almost cliche for American travelers to express surprise at the tremendous hospitality of Iranians toward Westerners in general and Americans in particular.

The admiration, curiosity and friendliness usually do not extend to the policies of the American government, however.

From U.S. support for Saudi Arabia to President Trump’s ban on travelers from some Muslim nations, American policies don’t tend to get high approval ratings from the Iranian people. But just as Iranians make a distinction between themselves and their government, they do the same when it comes to America and Americans. n Parsi is the author of “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy” and the president of the National Iranian American Council.

This was written for The Washington Post.