AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE RACIST: “Software that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates their privacy,” and Technology Review is on it!

I’m a university librarian and I’ve seen the impacts of these systems up close. My own employer, the University of Colorado Denver, has a contract with Proctorio.

It’s become clear to me that algorithmic proctoring is a modern surveillance technology that reinforces white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. The use of these tools is an invasion of students’ privacy and, often, a civil rights violation.

If you’re a student taking an algorithmically proctored test, here’s how it works: When you begin, the software starts recording your computer’s camera, audio, and the websites you visit. It measures your body and watches you for the duration of the exam, tracking your movements to identify what it considers cheating behaviors. If you do anything that the software deems suspicious, it will alert your professor to view the recording and provide them a color-coded probability of your academic misconduct.

Depending on which company made the software, it will use some combination of machine learning, AI, and biometrics (including facial recognition, facial detection, or eye tracking) to do all of this. The problem is that facial recognition and detection have proven to be racist, sexist, and transphobic over, and over, and over again.

In general, technology has a pattern of reinforcing structural oppression like racism and sexism. Now these same biases are showing up in test proctoring software that disproportionately hurts marginalized students.

A Black woman at my university once told me that whenever she used Proctorio’s test proctoring software, it always prompted her to shine more light on her face. The software couldn’t validate her identity and she was denied access to tests so often that she had to go to her professor to make other arrangements. Her white peers never had this problem.

Similar kinds of discrimination can happen if a student is trans or non-binary. But if you’re a white cis man (like most of the developers who make facial recognition software), you’ll probably be fine.

It’s not only the software that’s racist and homophobic — it’s [Al Pacino voice] the whole damn system itself! [/Pacino  voice] “According to this professor, ‘Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist:’”

University of Rhode Island and Director of Graduate Studies Erik Loomis recently claimed “science, statistics and technology” are racist.

“Science, statistics, and technology are all inherently racist because they are developed by racists who live in a racist society, whether they identify as racists or not,” Loomis tweeted in reference to a New York Times article.

“This is why I have so much contempt for those, including many liberals, who ‘just want the data.’ The data is racist!” he continued.

“You’re out of order! You’re out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They’re out of order!”

ABANDON YOUR AUDIENCE AND YOUR AUDIENCE WILL ABANDON YOU: Fox News Ratings Crash: Trailing CNN and MSNBC For The First Time Since 2000.

MAYBE HE DIDN’T ACTUALLY WANT TO LOWER THE TEMPERATURE: Andrew Sullivan: Biden’s Culture War Aggression: He may have needlessly crippled his chances for lowering the temperature already. Excerpt:

Biden has also signaled (and by executive order, has already launched) a very sharp departure from liberalism in his approach to civil rights. The vast majority of Americans support laws that protect minorities from discrimination, so that every American can have equality of opportunity, without their own talents being held back by prejudice. But Biden’s speech and executive orders come from a very different place. They explicitly replace the idea of equality in favor of what anti-liberal critical theorists call “equity.” They junk equality of opportunity in favor of equality of outcomes. Most people won’t notice that this new concept has been introduced — equity, equality, it all sounds the same — but they’ll soon find out the difference. . . .

In less tortured English, equity means giving the the named identity groups a specific advantage in treatment by the federal government over other groups — in order to make up for historic injustice and “systemic” oppression. Without “equity”, the argument runs, there can be no real “equality of opportunity.” Equity therefore comes first. Until equity is reached, equality is postponed — perhaps for ever.

It means a government empowered to reward its supporters and punish its enemies, along race/ethnic/sex lines. That certainly won’t lower any temperatures anywhere.

Related: Biden brings back Critical Race Theory, which Trump called ‘divisive, anti-American propaganda.’

JUST NBC THE SELF-AWARENESS!

Shot: Pompous Ali Velshi Declares Trump Caused ‘The Death of Shame.’

—NewsBusters, yesterday.

Chaser: Ali Velshi Doesn’t Condone Rioting (Unless It Gets Him What He Wants).

—Jim Treacher, PJ Media, January 19th.

ENDORSED: Josh Hawley: It’s time to stand up against the muzzling of America.

Related: Liberal authoritarians like John Brennan are real threat to democracy.

Every time former CIA Director John Brennan appears on cable news to warn about some new “insidious threat to democracy,” I am reminded again that he deserves to be in federal prison.

In this corrupt media environment, however, the official who oversaw an illegal domestic-spying operation on the legislative branch of the US government, who tried to cover it up and blame innocent Senate staffers when discovered and who then brazenly lied about it to legislators and the American people — this man is held up as a paragon of civic virtue.

We still don’t even know what role Brennan played in spying on his political opponents during the 2016 campaign. We do know he went on TV for years after, alleging to have insider knowledge of an unprecedented seditious criminal conspiracy against the United States. Never once was he challenged by his hosts. And when an independent multimillion-dollar investigation couldn’t pull together a single indictment related to those claims, Brennan shrugged it off by saying that he may have “received bad information.”

Brennan was back on MSNBC last week, contending American intel agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

Even a former Communist such as Brennan surely understands there is nothing prohibiting Americans from being religious extremists, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists or even libertarians.

He’s a disgrace, and a tool.

HE’S NOT WRONG: The Moronic Firing of Will Wilkinson Illustrates Why Fear and Bad Faith Mob Demands Reign Supreme. “All of this is especially ironic given that the president of this colorless, sleepy think tank — last seen hiring the colorless, sleepy Matt Yglesias — himself has a history of earnestly and non-ironically advocating actual violence against people.”

My days of disrespecting the Niskanen Center are coming to a middle.

Plus: “The recent extraordinary removal of the social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate — not irrationally, even if cowardly — that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and — as is usually the case — it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.”

Also: “Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions — from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art.”

Related: Is It Time to Boycott Niskanen? Why Jerry Taylor Must Resign.

OPEN THREAD: It’s there, it’s there for you, it’s what you want.

SPACE FORCE: U.S. Space Force is ‘on solid ground’ despite speculation.

TO BE FAIR, IT COULD BE MUCH LONGER: A Short History Of How Anthony Fauci Has Kept Failing Up Since 1984.

SALENA ZITO: Why the US Hispanic conservative movement is surging — even without Trump.

I’D LIKE THAT BETTER IF I TRUSTED THEM MORE ON OTHER FRONTS: Smart watches can detect symptoms of COVID-19 before wearer knows they are infected. “One of the early signs of a COVID-19 infection is inflammation in infected areas of the body. And when inflammation begins, the body responds by slightly altering blood flow. That change in blood flow can be seen in slight changes to a person’s heartbeat, detectable via smart watches like the one from Apple. By noting a person’s heartbeat over long periods of time, a smart watch can determine a normal baseline for the person wearing the watch. And when a sudden prolonged change happens, such as sustained heart rate variability, the device can detect that, too. In the test at Mount Sinai, the volunteers were asked to wear the smart watch full-time and also to install a watch app that specifically looked for sustained changes in their heartbeat. The researchers found that the watches were able to identify two-thirds of those people who were infected an average of seven days before the volunteers noticed any symptoms.”

IF THIS HAPPENED IN CHINA, NO ONE BUT PRC STOOGES WOULD DEFEND IT: Pretrial Release Condition: Can’t Speak About “the [Capitol] Protest or the Matters Related to the United States Government.”

Eugene Volokh comments: “The restriction on all speech about the riot, or criticisms of the federal government (even if read as limited to criticisms related to the substance of the riot) strikes me as pretty clearly unconstitutional, even given the extra authority the government has as to pretrial release conditions. . . . The protest attendance restrictions also seem to be unconstitutional, unless there’s specific evidence that Beckley is likely to engage in trespass, vandalism, or violence at future protests. (Note that the Oregon no-protest restrictions were quickly dropped.)”

WHERE IS THE SPICE? Giant sand worm discovery proves truth is stranger than fiction.

ANN ALTHOUSE: Rand Paul versus George Stephanopoulos. A great confrontation, and I do not agree with the title on this video, that Rand Paul “melts down.” “Paul never accepted or rejected the word ‘stolen,’ and he made his point very clearly and with detail and he effectively scolded Stephanopoulos for taking sides.”

A reminder of what you used to be able to say, the day before the election: Will your ballot be safe? Computer experts sound warnings on America’s voting machines.

SHOCKER: HOT MIC: Biden Says ‘I Don’t Know What I’m Signing,’ Signs Executive Order Anyway.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: MRI study reveals slowed brain activity during light sleep.

ERECTION CENSORED: ABC’s This Week edits out Schumer’s unfortunate Trump gaffe on Senate floor.

Evergreen:

BY ITS FRUIT THE TREE IS KNOWN: Sen. Rand Paul says Biden’s push for raising minimum wage shows he hates Black teenagers.

GREAT MOMENTS IN TIMING:

Shot: Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101. His movies included “Fail Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own experience of being blacklisted:

Mr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted great moments in history.

It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been blacklisted.)

“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in “Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”

—The New York Times, yesterday.

Chaser: New York Times Reportedly Cancels Contract of Editor Who Tweeted Having ‘Chills’ on Biden Inauguration Day.

—Mediaite, Friday.

In accordance with the prophesy:

UPDATE: You may not be interested in cancel culture — but cancel culture is interested in you:

Or is this a case of the Gray Lady using cancel culture to provide cover while firing someone for other reasons?

MORE: NYT Rebukes Claims That Editor Was Fired Over ‘Single Tweet:’

The Times is now saying her tweet about Joe Biden was not the cause for her termination.

“There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter,” a Times representative said. “For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet.  Out of respect for the individuals involved we don’t plan to comment further.”

“Developing,” as they say.

(Updated and bumped.)

JOURNALISTS AGAINST FREE SPEECH: The New Censors. When I wrote in 2019 about journalists’ new antipathy to free speech, it seemed bad enough that they were targeting rivals in their own profession with advertising boycotts and smear campaigns that led to conservative journalists being fired and banished from social media. But since the Capitol riot, they’ve gone beyond “de-platforming” individual heretics. Now they want to eliminate the platforms, too.

A LOT OF US SHOULD BE DELIVERING MESSAGES TO POLITICIANS: Aaron Rodgers Had A Blunt Message For U.S. Politicians.

THEY BLAME PARLER BUT DID WORSE THEMSELVES: Andy Ngo: Twitter Did Nothing to Stop Antifa Planning, Promoting Riots in Portland, Seattle.

THAT’S A MARKETING FAIL: Despite its soul-stirring performance, Audi’s redesigned 591-hp RS7 makes a case for the less-expensive RS6 Avant wagon.

GOOD: SpaceX launches record-setting mission without a hitch.

AND BY “TERROR” THEY MEAN “UNAPPROVED POLITICAL OPPOSITION:” Glenn Greenwald: The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming: No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.