The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

BY MADDY BUTCHER

I

n late 2020, Coloradans voted by a single percentage point for the reintroduction of gray wolves in the state — but only west of the Continental Divide. The area, also known as the West- ern Slope, covers about a third of the state and is home to about 10 percent of its population, myself included. The ballot initiative was approved largely by Coloradans who live in Denver and elsewhere on the Front Range, east of the divide. In ranch country, it was widely regarded as a policy bomb dropped by idealistic city dwellers on an area where plenty of people, connected to the livestock economy, are struggling to get by. Muddying the waters, a federal judge has, in effect, hit pause on the wolf rollout; a Feb. 10 ruling restored endan- gered species protections to gray wolves across most of the Lower 48 states. The decision means Colorado will have to seek approval from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service before reintroducing gray wolves. The ruling overturned a Trump administration policy that ended the wolves’ protected status and left their manage- ment up to the states. The Biden administration had defended the policy, but envi- ronmental groups prevailed. They’re vowing to seek federal blessing for Colo- rado’s wolf reintroduction plan; the state’s Parks and Wildlife biologists are moving ahead with preparations. So, this ready-made culture war debate will keep bouncing along, with “Coexist” bumper stickers attached. But let’s stop and consider what it means to readjust an ecosystem and a landscape so that humans are not top dogs but team players. This past year, Colorado Parks and Wildlife established a stakeholder advisory group, with 20 Coloradans including county commissioners, ranchers, wolf ad- vocates, biologists and outdoor outfitters. One member, licensed outfitter Adam Gall, recently told me that, ideally, when the reintroduction program begins, “They’ll put wolves on the ground, and I hope wolves will do what they’re sup- posed to do, which is to eat deer and elk, and stay out of trouble.” But gray wolves are already challeng- ing this notion in Colorado. Several weeks ago, on a Jackson County property, a pack that had traveled south from Wyoming killed a calf, then a cow, then another cow. At a nearby ranch, they killed a family dog. Gray wolves, considered extinct in the West a century ago, were reintroduced in Wyoming in the mid-1990s at Yellow- stone National Park. Since then, they have spread across the state and into Idaho and Montana. (The recent court ruling doesn’t apply to these states because wolves there were federally delist- ed independent of the Trump administration policy.) For the record, depredation of livestock by wolves is rare, and the cost is minimal compared with many other cate- gories of loss, such as disease or death from a difficult calving. But statistics are cold comfort to Colorado ranchers who — even now, before the planned prolifera- tion of wolves — stay up at night anxious- ly casting spotlights into the dark to defend their herds. The Great Wide Open is more than an idea. It’s a complicated reality that in- cludes issues such as recreational use and the presence of livestock. Livestock is profoundly knitted (until now, mostly lovingly) into our history on this conti- nent. Livestock is cowboys and cowgirls, but it’s also us humans raising prey animals in environments that require vigi- lance, stewardship and resourcefulness. If we are shifting to an all-inclusive ecological mind-set, in which apex preda- tors have renewed sway, it would be nice if those moving the culture in that direction appreciated the practical realities of wild- ness and coexistence. Wolves are beautiful and captivating. So are bears and mountain lions — until they shred your pet, keep you up at night and cost you money you can’t afford to lose. I lost one of my dogs, Belle, to a mountain lion. We were hiking, and she caught a scent and took off. The cat she’d smelled made quick work of her. When I found her — a dirt-and-snow-colored dog, lying stone-cold in dirt and snow — those big brown eyes were still open. It was also a mountain lion that left claw marks on each side of my donkey’s haunches, having tried and failed to take him down. Coexistence has kept me up at night. Matt Barnes is a member of the Colora- do stakeholder advisory group on wolf reintroduction. As a range scientist, he has worked with ranchers to improve outcomes when they deal with large car- nivores such as wolves and grizzlies. The work is quiet, collaborative and often effective. When I asked him about the divisiveness around the reintroduction news, he said wolves spur us to “consider our humanity and our place on this landscape in a way that other animals don’t.” If we are team players, he said, “then we should make room for other species, at least where we can.” That won’t happen in downtown Denver — or in D.C., for that matter — but what if it did?

Maddy Butcher is the author of “Horse Head: Brain Science & Other Insights” and director of the Best Horse Practices Summit.

If only city

folks knew

about living

with wolves

BY STEWART BAKER

T

he Internal Revenue Service’s use of facial recognition technology has unleashed a storm of congressional criticism from both Democrats and Republicans. This rare moment of bipartisanship would deserve recognition — if the critics were right. But they’re not. The background is familiar to anyone who pays federal taxes. The IRS and millions of taxpayers have been plagued by identity fraud for years. Impostors have claimed other people’s tax refunds before the real returns were even filed. They have collected billions in covid- relief benefits using stolen identities. To stem the bleeding, the IRS contracted with ID.me, a private identity verification firm. That firm uses, among other things, face recognition technology to match applicants’ video photos to the pictures on their driver’s license or passport. The plan sent Congress into a tizzy. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) complained that “many facial recognition technol- ogies are biased in ways that negatively impact vulnerable groups, including people of color, women, and seniors.” Fifteen Republican senators objected that the face recognition system threat- ened to make taxpayers “pay the toll of giving up their most personal informa- tion, biometric data.” Cowed by the accusations of bias and privacy, the IRS announced that it will “transition away” from face recognition. But both accusations are false, and the price you and I will pay for this panicky retreat is enormous. It’s true that the earliest face recognition algorithms had a small but real bias issue. In a 2012 study, facial recognition algorithms were successful at matching faces of White people almost 95 percent of the time, but the figure was just 89 or 90 percent for Black people and women. That didn’t last long. By 2018, the National Institute of Standards and Technology found “massive gains in accuracy” in the best algorithms, with error rates that were up to 50 times lower than those in a study conducted in 2013. The next year, two Department of Home- land Security agencies tested the technology in the field and reported similar improvements in error rates, with virtu- ally no race and gender differences. The senators’ privacy beef is even less persuasive. The IRS technology would essentially do what the lobby security guards I encounter every day are sup- posed to do — check my face against the picture on my ID. And having a group of senators call my face “biometric data” doesn’t make it any more private; I still expose it to everyone I pass on the street, and to the governments that issued my driver’s license and passport. Not to mention the dozens of photos I’ve post- ed on social media. Just how much is my privacy invaded if ID.me and the IRS get one more picture of me so I can safely access my tax returns and refunds? The senators didn’t say. In short, the privacy and equity benefits of dropping face recognition are tiny. But the harms are staggering. During the covid emergency, the government lost more than $100 billion to American, Russian, Chinese and Niger- ian scammers using stolen American identities. Every day, more victims of identity theft find themselves trapped in a nightmare of lost funds, bad credit and sometimes even criminal charges. We need better protection from such scams. Unfortunately, the substitute for face recognition being touted by its critics isn’t better. It’s worse. Wyden wants the IRS to switch to “verification by humans.” Talk about lose-lose. At this point, the technology is much better than humans: Even human “super-rec- ognizers” can’t beat the algorithms. Their best accuracy rates are around 95 percent, well behind today’s ma- chines, and ordinary mortals, with an error rate of about 81 percent, aren’t even close. They will almost certainly show more bias, too; humans are notorious for having trouble recognizing people outside their ethnic group. Meanwhile, taxpayers would get worse service that costs more. If you’ve flown home from overseas in the past few years, you’ve probably skipped the customs line served by a human officer and headed straight for a kiosk that uses facial recognition to match you to your passport. And I’ll wager money you never want to go back to the old system. But when it comes to protecting yourself from identity theft, that’s exactly what the bipartisan critics in Con- gress want the IRS to do to you. Instead of a quick, automated process, you will wait on the phone to be verified by a human being. That human being will be working for the same understaffed IRS that has not gotten around to opening and logging all the returns it received in the mail nearly two years ago. But that’s what’s in store for all of us if the bipartisan group of congressional critics gets its way. If it’s any consola- tion, we probably won’t be on hold for the whole two years. But it sure will feel that way.

The writer, a former assistant secretary for policy at the Department of Homeland Security, practices law in D.C.

Taxpayers will

pay for the IRS

not using facial

recognition

I

f Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to gobble up another chunk of Ukraine at little or no cost to his own interests, he should have done it while Donald Trump was still president. With President Biden leading the response, Putin’s potential costs are rising — while his hoped-for benefits have evaporated. To be clear, Putin can send his tanks across the border whenever he wants, and nobody can stop him. His recognition of the “independence” of two separatist regions in Ukraine, which call themselves the Donetsk People’s Re- public and Luhansk People’s Republic, is an ominous development. But his threat to invade has not divided and weakened the Western alliance. Thanks largely to Biden, it has had the opposite effect. Even in this era of scorched-earth politics, Biden’s Republican critics are at pains to formulate specific complaints about his leadership on Ukraine. A few, such as Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa), have said he should have ordered a full-scale evacuation of American citizens. But others, including Sen. Bill Cassidy (La.), agree with Biden that such a step would be premature and unwise. Some Repub- licans have attacked Biden’s energy policies, arguing that the United States should be maximizing oil and gas production to curb Putin’s coer- cive power, which hardly seems on point. The most common GOP criticism is the most amorphous: Putin is supposedly emboldened because he sees Biden as weak. The precise opposite appears to be true. Putin might have hoped that amass- ing nearly 200,000 troops along the Ukrainian border and coastline would split the transatlantic alliance and per- haps extract a pledge that Ukraine, or what remains of it, will never join

NATO. Instead, this demand was met with a flat no. And all of NATO’s major players are on the same page. The Russian president, a former KGB agent, might have thought he could secretly fabricate a “justifica- tion” for invading by having his opera- tives stage “false flag” attacks against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine. The Biden administration countered with transparency, making public U.S. intelligence assessments of exactly how Putin was concocting such a pretext for war. The administration also shared intelligence that Rus- sian forces would target a specific hit list of pro-Western political leaders and influencers. Putin might have assumed he would be believed when he claimed his troops were simply conducting exer- cises and had begun to head home. Biden and his aides responded with more transparency, reporting that Pu- tin was actually adding to his potential invasion force, not subtracting from it. Contrast all of this with what possibly, or probably, would have happened had Trump still been in office. His “America First” foreign policy was in- fused with a heavy dose of the kind of neo-isolationism that is nightly given voice by Fox News host Tucker Carl- son, who argues that Putin is justified in insisting that Ukraine be firmly within Russia’s orbit and never join NATO. You will recall that Trump spoke admirably of Putin as “a tough cook- ie.” At a meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump famously took Putin’s word over that of the U.S. intelligence com- munity on the question of interfer- ence in our 2016 election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” You will also recall that Trump’s posture toward NATO was to hector

the allies for not spending enough on defense, leaving the United States to bear a disproportionate burden in funding Europe’s defense. This cri- tique is not without merit — Biden, too, wants rich and powerful alliance members such as Germany and Cana- da to spend more. But remember how haughtily Trump lorded it over the other NATO leaders at summit meet- ings — and imagine him now trying to hold the alliance together in the face of Putin’s threat to Ukraine. And recall how Trump tried to extort a bogus investigation of Biden from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — which led to Trump’s first impeachment. Contrast that with how Biden and his team have sought to bolster the inexperienced Zelensky through this crisis, including a face- to-face meeting between Zelensky and Vice President Harris on Satur- day in Munich. The result is that an invasion — and U.S. officials say they believe the Rus- sians will indeed invade — will be much costlier for Putin than he calcu- lated. Planned international sanc- tions, which include mothballing the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, might be secondary. The biggest impact could be the forging of a new sense of unity and purpose among NATO allies — and even, possibly, new interest among non-NATO nations such as Sweden and Finland in joining the alliance. Putin’s openness to French Presi- dent Emmanuel Macron’s proposal for a Biden-Putin summit might be a “tell.” No, Putin hasn’t blinked. Yes, the U.S. assessment that he has already given the order to invade might be accurate. But even as Russian forces strike, Putin will have to ask himself one question: Where’s Trump when I need him?

EUGENE ROBINSON

Putin must miss Trump now

SPUTNIK/REUTERS Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers a video address i n Moscow on Monday.

Separately, Yabloko, Russia’s last genuine opposition party that still has registered status, initiated a nationwide public peti- tion opposing an attack on Ukraine. Thousands signed within days. “This is not our war,” said Boris Vishnevsky, one of the party’s leaders and a member of the St. Petersburg legislature. “I still hope war can be avoided. And only we, Russian citizens, can stop it — not the West... not anyone from the outside.” For all the difficulties of measuring public opinion in an authoritarian state — where all television networks are con- trolled by the government and where many people are understandably hesitant to share their political views with poll- sters or other strangers — the available surveys point to the strong unpopularity of a military attack on Ukraine among Russian citizens at large. Most Russians neither favor sending troops to Ukraine nor buy into the Kremlin’s narrative of treating the West as an enemy. Whether domestic opposition to the war in Russia can have any practical effect is far from certain. What is certain is that by raising their voices against yet another Kremlin aggression, members of Russia’s cultural elite, acting in the best traditions of Russian and Soviet intelligentsia, are upholding the nation’s honor in the same way the seven demonstrators who pro- tested on Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia did in August

“A nation minus me is not an entire
nation. A nation minus ten, a hundred, a
thousand people is not an entire nation,”
recalled Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a poet
and one of the 1968 demonstrators. “So
[the authorities] could no longer say that
there was nationwide approval for the
invasion of Czechoslovakia.”
In more democratic times in Russia,
opposition to the Kremlin’s acts of aggres-
sion was not limited to those brave
enough to face imprisonment or worse
for confronting an authoritarian regime.
In January 1991, more than 100,000 peo-
ple stood on Manezhnaya Square in Mos-
cow, just outside the Kremlin walls, to

MOSCOW

O

n Sunday, police brutally dis- persed a group of demonstrators who came to Moscow’s Pushkin Square, the traditional site of dis- sident rallies since the Soviet era, to denounce Vladimir Putin’s presumptive attack on Ukraine. The protesters, who included veteran human rights leader and former member of parliament Lev Ponomarev, were detained as soon as they unfurled their banners; some were taken into police custody and charged with violating Moscow’s strict ban on public demonstrations imposed under the pretext of the pandemic. (Needless to say, the ban applies only to opposition rallies. When Putin addressed 80,000 people packed into a stadium to mark the anni- versary of the annexation of Crimea, the authorities had no objections.) The weekend protest was only the latest in the growing chorus of voices within Russia itself opposing Putin’s threats to Ukraine — a trend that has been underreported by international media, leaving many Westerners with the impression that everyone in Russia sup- ports the war. This is certainly not the case. In recent days, the country’s leading cultural figures — who traditionally hold significant moral clout here — have spo- ken out against an attack on Ukraine. “Russia does not need a war with Ukraine or with the West,” read a statement signed by, among others, rock musician Andrei Makarevich and actress Liya Akhedzhakova. “Nobody is threatening us, nobody is attacking us. The policy that pushes for war is immoral, irresponsible and criminal.” One of Russia’s greatest contemporary novelists, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, de- nounced the Kremlin’s war plans as “madness.” Acclaimed pianist Evgeny Kissin declared that those who provoke war will be remembered as “bloodthirsty criminals.” Renowned tennis player and former Grand Slam champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov said that “only someone psy- chologically deranged can threaten war.”

denounce the Soviet military attack on Lithuania. In the 1990s, mass rallies were held in Moscow and St. Petersburg in opposition to the brutal crackdown in Chechnya. When Communist lawmakers tried to impeach then-President Boris Yeltsin in May 1999, their liberal col- leagues shrugged off the effort as political theater — yet even some of those skeptics ended up voting for the article condemn- ing the war in Chechnya (falling short of a two-thirds majority by just 17 votes). Back then, Russia had a real parliament. In contrast, last week the rubber- stamp Duma passed a resolution on a formal diplomatic recognition of the two Kremlin-backed separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine without much debate by 351 votes to 16. (All the main “opposition” parties were in agreement. In fact, it was the Communists who helpfully introduced the motion for the Kremlin’s benefit.) If Putin really does attack Ukraine, he might be doing so at his own peril. Russian rulers do not have a good track record of “small victorious wars” launched for domestic political purposes — from the czarist regime’s disastrous campaigns in Crimea and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries to the invasion of Afghanistan in the waning years of the Soviet Union. The result is usually the opposite of what was intend- ed. “For Russia, such wars end not only unsuccessfully, but often in a political catastrophe,” warned Andrei Zubov, an eminent historian who was fired from Russia’s top diplomatic academy in 2014 over his opposition to the annexation of Crimea. “We know what public attitudes were after the defeat in the Russo- J apanese war of 1905 [leading to Russia’s first revolution]. We could have the same now. We could face a situation when people won’t accept this gamble by the regime.” For someone as obsessed with Russian history as Putin, it would be ironic if he were to stumble into one of its most oft-repeated mistakes.

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA

Many Russians oppose Putin’s war, too

The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

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