These Disunited States, Con't

A new University of Virginia/Sabato's Crystal Ball deep dive into America's political views gives us some pretty sobering results and that tens of millions of American believe that it's time to go our separate ways as a culture, as a people, and as a nation.

The University of Virginia Center for Politics has partnered with Project Home Fire, a new initiative dedicated to finding common ground in American politics, on an innovative new data analytics and polling project to explore the social, political, and psychological divides between those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

Some of the key takeaways from today’s release are:

— Majorities of Trump and Biden voters express support for several elements of the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills being debated in Congress, but there are marked differences in their levels of support. (see Table 1 below)

— Majorities — often large majorities — of both Biden and Trump voters express some form of distrust for voters, elected officials, and media sources they associate with the other side. A strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and socialists, and a majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no real difference between Republicans and fascists. (see Table 2 below)

— Significant numbers of both Trump and Biden voters show a willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms if needed to serve their priorities. Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts,” and roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union. (see Table 3 below)

The Center for Politics and Project Home Fire will be releasing findings from this study in the coming weeks through a series of articles in Sabato’s Crystal Ball and other publications, as well as public symposiums that will each explore major, divisive subjects in American life. Those topics include: immigration, political violence, pandemic response, and other prominent national issues.

From July 22 to Aug. 4, 2021, Project Home Fire worked with InnovateMR, an industry-leading top 20 marketing research data collection firm, to capture online responses to more than 300 questions spanning social, political, and psychological topics from 1,001 Donald Trump presidential election voters and 1,011 Joe Biden voters (N=2,012), with a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points.

As part of this study, the Center for Politics and Project Home Fire will provide information not just about the divides between Biden and Trump voters, but also which kinds of voters in both camps are most open to finding common ground and which kinds of messages stand the best chance of spurring compromise.

“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed,” said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.

“In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both,” said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire.

I don't think this is going to get fixed anytime soon, it's just a matter of when and how badly this "cold civil war" turns into a shooting one.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The Feds turned to Google's geolocation technology to confirm people's phones were inside the US Capitol building, and the FBI is more than happy to use that in order to issue arrest warrants for January 6th charges.

COURT DOCUMENTS SUGGEST the FBI has been using controversial geofence search warrants at a scale not publicly seen before, collecting account information and location data on hundreds of devices inside the US Capitol during a deadly invasion by a right-wing mob on January 6.

While Google receives over 10,000 geofence warrants for location data in the US a year, those covering the Capitol breach appear to have been particularly productive, apparently enabling the FBI to build a large, searchable database in their hunt for the rioters.

Geofence warrants are intended to locate anyone in a given area using digital services. Google has been the target for many geofence warrants because its location technologies, which leverage GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth signals to pinpoint a phone within a few yards, are powerful and widely used.

Investigators can and do also serve warrants on phone companies. However, cell phone towers can only locate phones to within about three-quarters of a mile. While court documents suggest that the FBI collected cell tower records for “thousands of devices that were inside the Capitol” during the riot, Google’s data offers a much higher degree of accuracy.

The use of a geofence search warrant was first reported by The Washington Post, and others have previously noted specific instances of investigations that used Google geolocation data. But WIRED has found 45 federal criminal cases that cite Google geolocation data to place suspects inside the US Capitol on January 6, including at least six where the identity of the suspect appears to have been unknown to the FBI prior to the geofence warrant. One of these involved a serving Chicago police officer.

“I'm terribly concerned about the potential for misuse of that technology,“ says Ari Waldman, professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “Even if I think staging a coup against a democratic government is abhorrent, it doesn't mean that constitutional privacy protections shouldn't be in place.”

In fact, court documents refer to two geofence warrants relating to January 6, one of which a government filing seems to say was served even as the riot was raging. They were immediately sealed and are unlikely to be made public for years. However, a close reading of hundreds of court filings reveals that both the secretive geofence warrants and further Google-focused geolocation warrants delivered a wealth of information about dozens of suspects.

 

Don't get me wrong, the potential for abuse from geolocation data is massive, and the article goes on to make painfully clear.

 

For once, the technology was used to do the right thing.

 

But it will be used in other ways, much worse ones, that I can guarantee.

StupidiNews!

 Only one story, and it's pretty much everything:

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed Thursday night's votes on both the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion Biden plan, as Dems don't have the votes for either.