THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY AND INTERNATIONAL REPORT APPEAR IN THE FOLLOWING PUBLICATIONS: CLARÍN, ARGENTINA n DER STANDARD, AUSTRIA n LA RAZÓN,
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WORLD TRENDSII THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2019
INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY
NANCY LEE Executive editor
TOM BR ADY Editor
ALAN MATTINGLY Managing editorThe New York Times International Weekly
620 Eighth Avenue, New York, NY 10018EDITORIAL INQUIRIES:
[email protected]
SALES AND ADVERTISING INQUIRIES:
[email protected]industry for months. The French
government allocated more than
$500 million in aid in the first six
months after the storm to the re-
covery of Saint-Martin and the
smaller, nearby French island
of Saint-Barthélemy, according
to Sylvie Feucher, France’s top
representative in the two territo-
ries. Hotels and restaurants have
reopened, and tourists have re-
turned. But Ms. Feucher predicted
it could take three more years for
the territory to recover.
She is convinced that some areas
are just too exposed to storms to be
safely inhabitable and is pushing
for more restrictions on land use.
The campaign has become a flash
point between France and a local
population bristling against over-
seas control. Residents of several
of the neighborhoods of greatest
concern suspect France is waging
a veiled campaign to drive poor,
black residents off their land so it
can be sold to developers.
France has set up a fund to buy
out property owners in the high-
est-risk zones, but Ms. Feucher
insists that nobody will be forced
to sell. Residents are unconvinced.
The view on both sides of the
island is that the Dutch half has
recovered more quickly. “We have
norms and rules and regulations
on the French side,” said Angèle
Dormoy of Saint-Martin’s Cham-
ber of Commerce. “Everything
is controlled and re-controlled,
three or four times.”
Saint-Martin’s residents are
French citizens, entitled to the
protections of France’s social net.
But that largess may have under-
mined private initiative. On the
Dutch side, much of the rebuilding
has been driven by private funds.
But some wonder whether in the
haste to rebuild, there was enough
thought given to future storms.
On the French side, Ms. Feuch-
er said she was trying to get res-
idents to take the long view: Re-
building right, even if it takes time,
could save lives in the next storm.
“Changing mentalities is always
difficult,” she said.
digital era, smartphone cameras,
social media and cloud storage
have allowed the images to mul-
tiply at an alarming rate. Both
recirculated and new images oc-
cupy all corners of the internet,
including Facebook Messenger,
Microsoft’s Bing search engine
and the storage service Dropbox.
There are online groups devot-
ed to sharing images of young-
er children and more extreme
forms of abuse. The groups use
encrypted technologies and the
dark web, the vast underbelly of
the internet, to teach pedophiles
how to carry out the crimes and
how to record and share images
of the abuse worldwide.
With so many reports of abuse,
law enforcement agencies across
America said they were often be-
sieged. Some have managed their
online workload by focusing on
imagery depicting the youngest
victims.
“We go home and think, ‘Good
grief, the fact that we have to pri-
oritize by age is just really dis-
turbing,’ ” said Detective Paula
Meares, who has investigated
child sex crimes for more than 10
years at the Los Angeles Police
Department.A Resource Gap
Tech companies are legally re-
quired to report images of child
abuse only when they discover
them; they are not required to
look for them.
It can take weeks or months
for them to respond to questions
from the authorities, if they re-
spond at all.
Even when tech companies
cooperate, encryption and ano-
nymization can create digital hid-
ing places for perpetrators. Face-
book announced in March plans
to encrypt Messenger, which last
year was responsible for nearly 12
million of the 18.4 million world-
wide reports of child sexual abuse
material, according to people fa-
miliar with the reports.
The law Congress passed in
2008 foresaw many of today’s
problems, but the government
has not fulfilled major aspects of
the legislation.
The Justice Department has
produced just two of six required
reports that are meant to com-
pile data about internet crimes
against children and set goals
to eliminate them, and there has
been a constant churn of short-term appointees leading the de-
partment’s efforts.
The federal government has
also not lived up to the law’s fund-
ing goals, crippling efforts to
stamp out the activity.
Congress has regularly allocat-
ed about half of the $60 million in
yearly funding for state and local
law enforcement efforts. This
year, the Department of Home-
land Security diverted nearly $6
million from its cybercrimes units
to immigration enforcement.
Further impairing the federal
response are shortcomings at the
National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children, which re-
views reports it receives and then
distributes them to federal, state
and local law enforcement agen-
cies and international partners.
The nonprofit center has relied
in large measure on 20-year-old
technology, has difficulty keep-
ing experienced engineers on
staff and, by its own reckoning,
regards stopping the online dis-
tribution of photos and videos
secondary to rescuing children.
“To be honest, it’s a resource
and volume issue,” said John
Shehan, a vice president at the
center. “First priority is making
sure we’re assessing the risk of
the children. We’re getting this
information into the hands of law
enforcement.”Staying Hidden
The videos found on the comput-
er of an Ohio man were described
by investigators as among “the
most gruesome and violent imag-
es of child pornography.”
One showed a woman “insert-
ing an ice cube into the vagina” of
a young girl, the documents said,
before tying her ankles togeth-
er, taping her mouth shut and
suspending her upside down. As
the video continued, the girl was
beaten, slapped and burned with
a match or candle.
“The predominant sound is the
child screaming,” according to a
federal agent quoted in the docu-
ments.
The videos were stored in a hid-
den computer file and had also
been encrypted.The Ohio man, who helped run
a website on the dark web known
as the Love Zone, had over three
million photos and videos on his
computers.
The site, now shuttered, had
nearly 30,000 members and re-
quired them to share images of
abuse to maintain good standing.
Multiple police investigations
over the past few years have
broken up enormous dark web
forums, including one known as
Child’s Play that was reported to
have had over a million user ac-
counts.
Offenders can cover their tracks
by connecting to virtual private
networks, which mask their loca-
tions; deploying encryption tech-
niques, which can hide their mes-
sages and make their hard drives
impenetrable; and posting on the
dark web, which is inaccessible to
conventional browsers.
“Historically, you would never
have gone to a black market shop
and asked, ‘I want real hard-core
with 3-year-olds,’ ” said Yolanda
Lippert, a prosecutor in Cook
County, Illinois, who leads a team
investigating online child abuse.
“But now you can sit seemingly
secure on your device searching
for this stuff, trading for it.”
The offender in Ohio, a site ad-
ministrator named Jason Gmoser,
“went to great lengths to hide” his
conduct, according to the docu-
ments. Testimony in his criminal
case revealed that it would have
taken the authorities “trillions of
years” to crack the 41-character
password he had used to encrypt
the site. He eventually turned it
over to investigators, and was
sentenced to life in prison in 2016.‘Truly Terrible Things’
Tech companies have known
for years that their platforms
were being co-opted by preda-
tors, but many of them looked the
other way. And while many com-
panies have made recent prog-
ress in identifying the material,
they were slow to respond.
Hemanshu Nigam, a former
federal prosecutor in cybercrime
and child exploitation cases, said
it was clear more than two de-cades ago that new technologies
had created a boon for pedophiles.
The recent surge by tech com-
panies in filing reports of online
abuse “wouldn’t exist if they did
their job then,” Mr. Nigam said.
Hany Farid, who worked with
Microsoft to develop technology
in 2009 for detecting child sexual
abuse material, said tech compa-
nies had been reluctant for years
to dig too deeply.
“The companies knew the
house was full of roaches, and
they were scared to turn the
lights on,” he said. “And then
when they did turn the lights on,
it was worse than they thought.”
When Mark Zuckerberg,
Facebook’s chief executive, an-
nounced in March that Messen-
ger would move to encryption, he
acknowledged the risk it present-
ed for “truly terrible things like
child exploitation.”
“Encryption is a powerful tool
for privacy,” he said, “but that in-
cludes the privacy of people doing
bad things.”
The National Center for Miss-
ing and Exploited Children has
struggled with demands to con-
tain the spread of the imagery.
The technology it uses for re-
ceiving and reviewing reports of
the material was created in 1998,
nearly a decade before the first
iPhone was released.
But the problems are deep-
er than technology. The police
complain that the most urgent
reports are not prioritized, or are
sent to the wrong department
completely.
“We’re spending a tremen-
dous amount of time having to
go through those and reanalyze
them ourselves,” said Mike Ed-
wards, a Seattle police command-
er who oversees a cybercrimes
unit for the State of Washington.
The problem of child sexual
abuse imagery faces a particular
hurdle: It gets scant attention be-
cause few people want to confront
the enormity and horror of the
content, or they wrongly dismiss
it as primarily teenagers sending
inappropriate selfies. Some state
lawmakers, judges and members
of Congress refuse to discuss the
problem in detail, or avoid meet-
ings when it is on the agenda, law
enforcement officials and victims
say.
Steven J. Grocki, who leads a
group of policy experts and law-
yers at the child exploitation sec-
tion of the Justice Department,
said the reluctance to address
the issue was a societal problem.
“They turn away from it because
it’s too ugly of a mirror,” he said.
Yet the material is everywhere,
and ever more available. Such a
volume of work has forced the
authorities to make difficult
choices, including cutting back
on undercover operations like in-
filtrating chat rooms.
“I think some of the bigger fish
who are out there are staying out
there,” Ms. Lippert said.Con tin ued from Page IThe Fight
To Rebuild
Following
The Storm
Sex Abuse Images Overrun the Internet
Con tin ued from Page IKHOLOOD EID FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Encryption, virtual private networks and other technology
have enabled online predators. A suspect being interviewed.WORLD TRENDSTUESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY IIIAbrupt Shifts
Unnerve U.S. Allies
This article is by David D.
Kirkpatrick, Ben Hubbard
and David M. Halbfinger.President Donald J. Trump’s
surprise acquiescence to a
Turkish incursion into northern
Syria this month has shaken
American allies, and not just
because it was
a betrayal of a
loyal partner.
What alarmed
them even more was his sheer
unpredictability.
His inconsistent and rapidly
shifting positions in the Middle
East have injected a new ele-
ment of chaos into a volatile re-
gion and have left allies guess-
ing where the United States
stands and for how long.
Previous American policy-
makers were clear about their
intentions, said Mowaffak al-
Rubaie, a former Iraqi national
security adviser. “This guy is
all emotional,” he said.
The uncertainties only com-
pound worries about the dura-
bility of the American commit-
ment to the Middle East.
American presidents have
been promising for almost 15
years to reduce the country’s
presence in the region, unnerv-
ing partners like Israel and the
Persian Gulf monarchs that
rely on American protection.
But few American leaders have
ever made and disclosed major
foreign policy decisions with
the speed and seeming improvi-
sation that Mr. Trump does.
Analysts say many allies are
now concerned that this unpre-
dictable commander in chief
could bolt without warning.
His decision to get out of the
way of the Turkish incursion
was apparently made on the
spur of the moment during a
phone call with the Turkish
president. It opened the door
to a fierce Turkish assault on
the American-backed militia
led by the Syrian Kurds, which
was key to the ground battle to
retake territory captured by the
Islamic State.
This was just the latest in a
series of flip-flops in American
policy in the region, including
two in Syria this year alone. In
December, Mr. Trump prom-
ised to withdraw all 2,000 or so
American forces there. But he
later changed his mind, with-
drawing about half.
He has warned that the Unit-
ed States was “locked and load-
ed” for military action against
Iran. But when Iran shot down
an American surveillance
drone this summer, Mr. Trump
reversed himself in the final
minutes to call off a planned
missile strike. Then last month,
he denounced Iran for orches-
trating an attack on Saudi oilfacilities but declined to take
military action.
Critics say that Mr. Trump’s
zigzagging policies have
emboldened regional foes,
unnerved American partners,
and invited Russia and various
regional players to seek to exert
their influence.
Michael Stephens, a scholar
at the Royal United Services
Institute in London, said, “The
region is in chaos because the
hegemonic power does not
seem to know what it wants to
do, and so nobody else does.”
Even in Britain, a close ally,
“nobody knows what to do any-
more,” Mr. Stephens said.
Mr. Trump insists he is acting
consistently and has said he
was fulfilling a campaign prom-
ise to get out of conflicts around
the Middle East.
To critics, his shifting posi-
tions show his fickleness.
Other countries are scurry-
ing to adapt to the new reality.
“Many nations around the
Middle East now are consid-
ering major changes in their
strategic defense plans because
they no longer see the United
States as a reliable ally,” said
Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, an
adviser to the Al Ahram Center
for Strategic Studies in Cairo.“It will be very difficult to con-
vince nations of the Middle East
that the United States is serious
about what it says.”
Since the American military
presence in the region reached
its apex with the invasion of
Iraq in 2003, all presidents have
tried to cut back.
President Barack Obama
sought to pull out of Afghani-
stan but instead sent a surge of
more troops to try to achieve
enough stability to ease a with-
drawal — a gambit that failed to
achieve that goal. He withdrew
American troops from Iraq in- But his critics say the pull-
out enabled the emergence of
the Islamic State, which seized
a large portion of Iraq and Syria
in 2014, drawing the United
States military back in.
Mr. Obama’s experience
might now serve as a caution-
ary tale to Mr. Trump, who risks
allowing a resurgence of the
Islamic State by pulling back in
Syria, argued Michele Dunne, a
scholar at the Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace.
But unlike Mr. Trump, Mr.
Obama “said from the begin-
ning that he wanted to pull the
U.S. troops out of Iraq.”
Steven Erlanger and David
Sanger contributed reporting.With Trump seen
as unpredictable,
uncertainty reigns.
NEWS
ANALYSISAmerican Titans Bend to China
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
and CHRIS BUCKLEY
BEIJING — Back in the Cold
War, the rigid Soviet system
proved no match for the lure of
American entertainment: rock
’n’ roll, Coca-Cola, Hollywood.
All became symbols of American
freedom and prosperity that no
amount of communist prohibitions
could stop.
Today, selling American cre-
ativity and talent increasingly
demands submission to the views
of the Communist Party as the
price of admission to a market of
1.4 billion.
A recent furor that began with
a tweet by a National Basketball
Association executive in support
of the Hong Kong protests has
underscored the consequences of
China’s willingness to use its vast
economic clout to police any polit-
ical values that threaten the par-
ty’s legitimacy or its policies.
For years, American companies
have yielded to Chinese demands
to tailor their words and prod-
ucts, as Hollywood studios now
regularly do, or to apologize. The
reward is continued access to Chi-
nese customers; the price may be
the erosion of American credibili-
ty as a beacon of free speech.
“When it comes to national sov-
ereignty, the Chinese government
is signaling loud and clear that it
would rather be feared than loved,”
said Jessica Chen Weiss, a profes-
sor of government at Cornell Uni-
versity in Ithaca, New York.
The Houston Rockets general
manager, Daryl Morey, immedi-
ately deleted the tweet that start-
ed the commotion, but it was too
late. The N.B.A.’s plans for China
were suddenly gutted. Broadcasts
were canceled, sponsorships sus-
pended. The league faced denun-
ciations from state news media
and fans, who tore up tickets for an
exhibition game between the LosAngeles Lakers and the Brooklyn
Nets in Shanghai.
Chinese authorities appeared,
belatedly, to grasp the conse-
quences of the furor and moved to
temper reports and commentary
about the N.B.A.
“Even with the N.B.A., if you
take to hurling abuses, or using
linguistic violence, like hatred and
invective, that will only make the
problems even more complicated,
and they may become more seri-
ous,” said Tong Zeng, a business-
man in Beijing who has been in-
volved in protests and campaigns
against Japan.
For an emerging superpower,
China can seem thin-skinned, and
its reactions petulant. Lady Gaga
faced a temporary ban on perfor-
mances and sales in China in 2017
after she met the Dalai Lama, theTibetan spiritual leader whom the
Communist Party denounces as
a separatist. Last year, Gap was
forced to apologize for selling a
T-shirt showing a map of China
that did not contain Taiwan or is-
lands in the South China Sea.
Jonathan McClory, the gener-
al manager for Asia for Portland
Communications and the editor
of an annual survey on soft pow-
er published with the University
of Southern California, said such
responses were “not a good look.”
“This reaction will have a neg-
ative impact on how people per-
ceive China, not just in the United
States, but around the world,” he
added.
The N.B.A. has a large and fer-
vent following in China, and it has
tried to capitalize on that. It islooking to China as a major market
and as a recruiting ground.
Mr. Morey’s comment appeared
to ignite a buildup of frustration
with the United States that has
mounted amid the trade war. The
protests in Hong Kong, which have
raged through the summer, have
compounded that. Although the
government massaged public opin-
ion, the outrage seemed genuine.
Xu Guyong, a 46-year-old civ-
il servant, attended the recent
game in Shanghai. He and his son,
13, wore Lakers jerseys. Yet he still
condemned Mr. Morey’s tweet.
“If people in China say we
should boycott N.B.A., I’m all
for it,” he said. “I would answer
the country’s calling and give up
watching.”
The league rushed to contain
the fire, offering an apology and
distancing itself from Mr. Mo-
rey’s view — only to face its own
backlash for seeming to pander to
Beijing. To some Americans, the
episode amounted to China un-
dermining one of America’s basic
rights: free speech.
Hollywood already self-censors,
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican
of Florida, said on Twitter. “Now
private citizens risk losing their
jobs if they offend China.”
But Mr. McClory noted that in
today’s world, commercial in-
terests trumped any intention to
promote a set of political values.
“The N.B.A. looks at China not as
a place to go out and fly the flag for
the U.S. or to trumpet the values
of democracy and free speech,” he
said. “They want to be there, to put
it bluntly, for profit motives.”
The N.B.A. is struggling to find
a way to make amends. When a
journalist recently tried to ask two
members of the Houston Rockets
if they still felt comfortable com-
menting on social and political is-
sues, a media officer for the Rock-
ets stepped in to curtail any reply.
“Excuse me,” said the officer,
“we are taking basketball ques-
tions only.”Claire Fu, Amber Wang and Lin
Qinqing contributed reporting.HECTOR RETAMAL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
The National Basketball Association is trying to repair its relationship with China.Ideals are no match
for access to a
market of 1.4 billion.