The New York Times - 06.08.2019

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Justice Department, has not certified, or even tested, the bulletproof backpacks and has no plans to do so, said Mollie Timmons, a department spokeswoman. Still, Mr. Sheikh said, Guard Dog’s backpack is designed to meet the agency’s Level IIIA per- formance standard for body armor, which would make it resist- ant to bullets fired from shotguns and handguns. The backpacks are tested at a facility in Oregon, he said. But Mr. Sheikh acknowledged that the backpacks were less ef- fective at blocking gunfire from powerful semiautomatic weapons, like the ones used at Sandy Hook. And gun-control advocates say there is no evidence that armored backpacks, however care- fully tested, would keep children safe during a shooting. “We’re asking children to stand up to gunmen because lawmakers are too afraid to stand up to the gun lobby,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Ac- tion for Gun Sense in America, a grass-roots gun-control organiza- tion. “There isn’t a parent in this country that isn’t terrified. These companies are capitalizing on that.” Mr. Siboni, who runs ArmorMe, said it was unfair to accuse his company of exploiting national fears about gun violence to turn a profit. “Whatever you do, you’re capitalizing on something,” he said. “We are just responding to a need.” In several recent Twitter posts, Senator Kamala Harris of Califor- nia, a Democratic presidential candidate, has held up bulletproof backpacks as a symbol of the broader problem of gun violence in the United States. “Parents shouldn’t have to buy a bulletproof backpack for their child just to keep them safe in school,” she tweeted in July. “This shouldn’t be normal.” But for Celeste Green, a senior at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, the backpacks seem like a necessary precaution. The day before the shooting in El Paso, Ms. Green, 22, learned that a teenager in her hometown, Columbia, S.C., had threatened to “shoot up” a local school. When she saw the news, she thought of her younger sister, who is starting high school in the fall. Ms. Green sent her mother a few videos and hyperlinks with information about bulletproof backpacks. “Immediately, she was like: ‘Where should I start? Where should I look?’ ” Ms. Green said. “There was no question.”

model that costs less than $100. “It could be the difference be- tween life and death,” said Yasir Sheikh, who runs Guard Dog. In the past, companies have been criticized for falsely claiming that their armored backpacks were certified by the National In- stitute of Justice, which oversees the body armor used by law enforcement. The agency, part of the

looking backpack,” Mr. Siboni said. “And it has panels that protect you against bullets. It will in- crease your survival chances.” Another company, Guard Dog Security, has been selling bulletproof backpacks since shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting. The products are available at Office Max, Office Depot and Kmart, and the company recently released a

Before his freshman year at the University of Connecticut, J.T. Lewis received an unusual gift from his mother: a bulletproof backpack. Mr. Lewis, who will be a sopho- more at the university, comes from a family shattered by gun violence: His younger brother, Jes- se, was killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. When his mother, Scarlett, gave him the dark-gray backpack, he said, she did not have to say a word. “We just had a mutual under- standing,” said Mr. Lewis, 19, who is running for a seat in the Con- necticut State Senate. Now he wears the armored backpack on campus because it makes him feel safer, even if it means he sweats a little more under the bulky load. “I don’t know if it’s going to have any effect,” Mr. Lewis said. “But it might if I get shot from behind.” As mass shootings become a tragic fact of life in the United States — at schools, stores, mov- ies theaters and houses of worship — it’s not just the families of vic- tims who are investing in protective gear. In a dystopian development, a growing number of companies are offering bulletproof backpacks in back-to-school sales, marketing them to parents who are desper- ate to protect their children from gunmen. “It’s incredibly depressing,” said Igor Volsky, the director of Guns Down America, a gun-control advocacy group. “The market is trying to solve for a problem that our politicians have refused to solve.” Demand for bulletproof backpacks surged after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. With back-to- school season approaching, the shootings this weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, have brought renewed attention to the products. In the past, some stores have re- portedly sold out of the backpacks, which typically cost $100 to $200. Months before the Parkland shooting, a private Christian school in Miami sold protective panels that could be inserted into backpacks, charging $120 for the bulletproof shields. This year, ArmorMe, a personal-defense company run by a former Israeli commando, Gabi Si- boni, started selling a bulletproof backpack that can unfold into a larger covering. “The backpack is designed first of all to be a very stylish and nice-

Bulletproof Backpack Is in Demand

By DAVID YAFFE-BELLANY

ARMORME

J.T. Lewis, above with President Trump at a round table on gun violence last year, said his mother bought him a bulletproof backpack when he first went away to college. Bags made by ArmorMe, top, unfold into a larger covering.

EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

MASS SHOOTINGS: POLICY | MEDIA

In linking this weekend’s mass shootings to “gruesome and grisly video games” and inadequate treatment of mental illness, Presi- dent Trump echoed talking points that emerged from conservative media strongholds even before his Monday address from the White House. In his remarks, Mr. Trump con- demned “racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” though he did not propose any new gun control measures, in keeping with several right-wing personalities who de- clined to endorse weapons bans in the hours after the massacres in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, left 31 dead and scores wounded. Mr. Trump’s public statements often mirror comments made by pundits on Fox News, and there were striking connections be- tween his remarks on video games and mental illness and what the cable network’s com- mentators said on Monday. Pete Hegseth, a guest host on the morning Fox News program “Fox & Friends,” said on Monday’s broadcast that video games “de- sensitize folks to the violence.” Mr. Hegseth’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt agreed, adding: “There’s so many different fac- tors, you don’t know. I mean, may- be a child’s born with something — mental illness.” “It does come back to that a lot,” chimed in the third host, Steve Doocy. A day earlier on Fox News, Rep- resentative Kevin McCarthy, Re- publican of California and the House minority leader, had made the same argument about the supposed role that video games played in mass shootings. A “Fox & Friends” guest on Sunday, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, took a similar line. One reliably pro-Trump outlet, The New York Post, took a different tack, urging Mr. Trump to take action with an editorial bill- boarded on the tabloid’s front page with the headline “BAN WEAPONS OF WAR.” It was not the first time The Post had spoken out in favor of

gun regulation. In the wake of the shooting at a school in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018, in a front- page editorial, the tabloid argued for an assault-weapons ban. The headline for that edition was “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE ACT.” In a statement on Monday, a spokeswoman for the newspaper said: “The New York Post has a long history of advocating for gun control, and today’s editorial speaks for itself.” Rupert Murdoch, the influential media tycoon who controls The Post — as well as Fox News — has made his views in favor of stricter gun control legislation known at least since 2012, when he weighed in from his personal Twitter ac- count on the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. On “Fox & Friends” on Monday, however, Mr. Hegseth, whom Mr. Trump has considered for a post in his administration, took issue with The Post’s call to ban the sale of assault weapons in the United States. He suggested that shop- pers at the El Paso Walmart where the shooting took place would have been better off if the store had not been a gun-free zone. “This is Texas,” Mr. Hegseth said. “We would expect someone to immediately be shooting back. Well, not in a place where you’re told you can’t have a personal fire- arm. So it’s not as simple as say-

ing, ‘Ban weapons of war.’ ” Rick Santorum, a former senator and Republican presidential candidate, made a similar point about the perceived downsides of stricter gun control during an ap- pearance on CNN on Sunday. “They go to soft targets,” said Mr. Santorum, who is a regular CNN analyst. “So the whole point is, when you restrict guns to law- abiding people, you make more soft targets.” Another conservative CNN pundit, David Urban, an adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, in- sisted that addressing mental illness was more crucial to stopping mass shootings than any gun control measure. “These people are twisted,” he told the CNN anchor Jim Sciutto. “They’ll find ways around that.” After noting that high-powered weapons “have been available” for decades, Mr. Urban added, “What has changed in American culture that makes people do what they’re doing today?” The first law enforcement offi- cer arrived at the scene of the El Paso massacre six minutes after the shooting started. In Dayton, where nine people were killed and more than two dozen were in- jured, the police shot and killed the assailant within one minute of the first gunshots. Some conservative commenta- tors focused on legislation per-

taining to high-powered weap- onry, but George P. Bush, a Repub- lican who serves as the Texas land commissioner, highlighted the role played by white nationalists in mass shootings in his public statements on Sunday and in an article published on The Atlantic’s website on Monday. In the article, headlined “White- Nationalist Terrorism Must Be Stopped,” Mr. Bush, the son of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, re- ferred to recent testimony by the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, to argue that “most of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. are a conse- quence of white-nationalist terrorism.” David French, a prominent “Never Trump” conservative who flirted with a presidential run in 2016, went further in an article on the website of the right-wing mag- azine National Review, blaming Mr. Trump and certain quarters of Fox News for giving comfort to white nationalists. “Think of the thrills, energy and inspiration they’ve experienced from the highest office in the land — and from parts of the most pop- ular cable network in the land — since Trump came down the esca- lator in 2015,” Mr. French wrote. Outside the United States, many global news organizations focused on American racism and Mr. Trump. In Australia, a headline for an opinion article in The Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday de- clared, “US in the midst of a white nationalist terrorism crisis.” A col- umn in the German publication Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung argued that Mr. Trump “has not withdrawn the poison from the political climate of which he is a ben- eficiary, but has contributed to it becoming more and more wide- spread.” People’s Daily, the main newspaper of China’s Communist Party, cited “controversial remarks allegedly inciting racial ha- tred” by Mr. Trump. Taiwan’s gov- ernment-owned Central News Agency reported that his White House tenure had helped “pro- mote the rationale of white nation- alism.”

Trump Echoes ‘Fox & Friends’ on Shootings

The New York Post stood apart from its corporate sibling, Fox News.

BRITTAINY NEWMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article is by Michael M. Gryn- baum, Marc Tracyand Tiffany Hsu.

intensified in Washington over a
wide variety of issues, including
how they handle the spread of dis-
information or police hate speech,
lawmakers are questioning
whether Section 230 should be
changed.
Last month, Senator Ted Cruz,
Republican of Texas, said in a
hearing about Google and censor-
ship that the law was “a subsidy, a
perk” for big tech that may need to
be reconsidered. In an April inter-
view, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Cal-
ifornia called Section 230 a “gift”
to tech companies “that could be
removed.”
“There is definitely more atten-
tion being paid to Section 230 than
at any time in its history,” said Jeff
Kosseff, a cybersecurity law pro-
fessor at the United States Naval
Academy and the author of a book
about the law, “The Twenty-Six
Words That Created the Internet.”
“There is an inclination to look
at Section 230 as one lever to influ-
ence the tech companies,” he said.
Here is an explanation of the
law’s history, why it has been so
consequential and whether it is re-
ally in jeopardy.

So why was the law created?

We can thank “The Wolf of Wall
Street.”
Stratton Oakmont, a brokerage
firm, sued Prodigy Services, an in-
ternet service provider, for defa-
mation in the 1990s. Stratton was
founded by Jordan Belfort, who
was convicted of securities fraud
and was portrayed by Leonardo
DiCaprio in the Martin Scorsese
film about financial excess. An
anonymous user wrote on Prod-
igy’s online message board that
the brokerage had engaged in
criminal and fraudulent acts.
The New York Supreme Court
ruled that Prodigy was “a pub-
lisher” and therefore liable be-
cause it had exercised editorial
control by moderating some posts
and establishing guidelines for
impermissible content. If Prodigy
had not done any moderation, it
might have been granted free
speech protections afforded to
some distributors of content, like
bookstores and newsstands.
The ruling caught the attention
of a pair of congressmen, Ron
Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon,
and Christopher Cox, a Republi-
can from California. They were
worried the decision would act as
a disincentive for websites to take
steps to block pornography and
other obscene content.
The Section 230 amendment
was folded into the Communica-
tions Decency Act, an attempt to
regulate indecent material on the
internet, without much opposition
or debate. A year after it was
passed, the Supreme Court de-
clared that the indecency provi-
sions were a violation of First
Amendment rights. But it left Sec-
tion 230 in place.
Since it became law, the courts
have repeatedly sided with inter-
net companies, invoking a broad
interpretation of immunity.
On Wednesday, the United
States Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit affirmed a lower
court’s ruling that Facebook was
not liable for violent attacks co-
ordinated and encouraged by
Facebook accounts linked to Ha-
mas, the militant Islamist group.
In the majority opinion, the court
said Section 230 “should be con-
strued broadly in favor of immuni-
ty.”

Why is the law so consequential?

Section 230 has allowed the mod-
ern internet to flourish. Sites can
moderate content — set their own
rules for what is and what is not
allowed — without being liable for
everything posted by visitors.
Whenever there is discussion of
repealing or modifying the stat-
ute, its defenders, including many
technology companies, argue that
any alteration could cripple online
discussion.
The internet industry has a fi-
nancial incentive to keep Section
230 intact. The law has helped
build companies worth hundreds
of billions of dollars with a lucra-
tive business model of placing ads
next to largely free content from
visitors.

That applies to more than social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. Wikipedia and Red- dit depend on its visitors to sus- tain the sites, while Yelp and Ama- zon count on reviews for busi- nesses and products. More recently, Section 230 has also provided legal cover for the complicated decisions regarding content moderation. Facebook and Twitter have recently cited it to defend themselves in court when users have sued after being barred from the platforms. Many cases are quickly dis- missed because companies assert they have the right to make decisions on content moderation as they see fit under the law.

What’s wrong with the law? The criticisms of Section 230 vary. While both Republicans and Dem- ocrats are threatening to make changes, they disagree on why. Some Republicans have argued that tech companies should no longer enjoy the protections because they have censored conser- vatives and thereby violated the spirit of the law, which states that the internet should be “a forum for a true diversity of political dis- course.” Facebook, Twitter and Google, which runs YouTube, which are the main targets for bias claims, have said they are baseless. On the flip side, some Demo- crats have argued that small and large internet sites aren’t serious about taking down problematic content or tackling harassment because they are shielded by Sec- tion 230. Mr. Wyden, now a senator, said the law had been written to pro- vide “a sword and a shield” for internet companies. The shield is the liability protection for user content, but the sword was meant to allow companies to keep out “offensive materials.” However, he said firms had not done enough to keep “slime” off their sites. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wyden said he had recently told tech workers at a conference on content moderation that if “you don’t use the sword, there are going to be people coming for your shield.” There is also a concern that the law’s immunity is too sweeping. Websites trading in revenge pornography, hate speech or personal information to harass people online receive the same immunity as sites like Wikipedia. “It gives immunity to people who do not earn it and are not wor- thy of it,” said Danielle Keats Cit- ron, a law professor at Boston Uni- versity who has written exten- sively about the statute.

Is Section 230 in jeopardy? The first blow came last year with the signing of a law that creates an exception in Section 230 for websites that knowingly assist, facili- tate or support sex trafficking. Critics of the new law said it opened the door to create other exceptions and would ultimately render Section 230 meaningless. Ms. Citron, who is also vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to combating online abuse, said this was “a moment of re-examina- tion.” After years of pressing for changes, she said there was more political will to modify Section 230. Senator Josh Hawley, a Repub- lican from Missouri and a fre- quent critic of technology companies, introduced a bill in June that would eliminate the immunity under the law unless tech companies submitted to an external audit that their content moderation practices were politically neutral. While there is growing political will to do something about Section 230, finding a middle ground on potential changes is a challenge. “When I got here just a few months ago, everybody said 230 was totally off the table, but now there are folks coming forward saying this isn’t working the way it was supposed to work,” said Mr. Hawley, who took office in Janu- ary. “The world in 2019 is very different from the world of the 1990s, especially in this space, and we need to keep pace.”

A ‘Perk’ for Big Tech

Gets a Second Look

Ron Wyden, left, with Christopher Cox, introduced an amendment to the
Communications Decency Act, which protected companies from liability.

DOUGLAS GRAHAM/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY, VIA GETTY IMAGES

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

The New York Times - 06.08.2019

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