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9 questions about biohacking you were too embarrassed to ask.

Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”

Maybe you, like me, have a colleague who’s had a chip implanted in their hand.

These are all types of biohacking, a broad term for a lifestyle that’s growing increasingly popular, and not just in Silicon Valley, where it really took off.

Biohacking — also known as DIY biology — is an extremely broad and amorphous term that can cover a huge range of activities, from performing science experiments on yeast or other organisms to tracking your own sleep and diet to changing your own biology by pumping a younger person’s blood into your veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging. (Yes, that is a real thing, and it’s called a young blood transfusion. More on that later.)

The type of biohackers currently gaining the most notoriety are the ones who experiment — outside of traditional lab spaces and institutions — on their own bodies with the hope of boosting their physical and cognitive performance. They form one branch of transhumanism, a movement that holds that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.

Some biohackers have science PhDs; others are complete amateurs. And their ways of trying to “hack” biology are as diverse as they are. It can be tricky to understand the different types of hacks, what differentiates them from traditional medicine, and how safe — or legal — they are.

As biohacking starts to appear more often in headlines — and, recently, in a fascinating Netflix series called Unnatural Selection — it’s worth getting clear on some of the fundamentals. Here are nine questions that can help you make sense of biohacking.

1) First of all, what exactly is biohacking? What are some common examples of it?

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a different definition of biohacking. Since it can encompass a dizzying range of pursuits, I’m mostly going to look at biohacking defined as the attempt to manipulate your brain and body in order to optimize performance, outside the realm of traditional medicine. But later on, I’ll also give an overview of some other types of biohacking (including some that can lead to pretty unbelievable art).

Dave Asprey, a biohacker who created the supplement company Bulletproof, told me that for him, biohacking is “the art and science of changing the environment around you and inside you so that you have full control over your own biology.” He’s very game to experiment on his body: He has stem cells injected into his joints, takes dozens of supplements daily, bathes in infrared light, and much more. It’s all part of his quest to live until at least age 180.

One word Asprey likes to use a lot is “control,” and that kind of language is typical of many biohackers, who often talk about “optimizing” and “upgrading” their minds and bodies.

Some of their techniques for achieving that are things people have been doing for centuries, like Vipassana meditation and intermittent fasting. Both of those are part of Dorsey’s routine, which he detailed in a podcast interview. He tries to do two hours of meditation a day and eats only one meal (dinner) on weekdays; on weekends, he doesn’t eat at all. (Critics worry that his dietary habits sound a bit like an eating disorder, or that they might unintentionally influence others to develop a disorder.) He also kicks off each morning with an ice bath before walking the 5 miles to Twitter HQ.

Supplements are another popular tool in the biohacker’s arsenal. There’s a whole host of pills people take, from anti-aging supplements to nootropics or “smart drugs.”

Since biohackers are often interested in quantifying every aspect of themselves, they may buy wearable devices to, say, track their sleep patterns. (For that purpose, Dorsey swears by the Oura Ring.) The more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you — or so the thinking goes.

Then there are some of the more radical practices: cryotherapy (purposely making yourself cold), neurofeedback (training yourself to regulate your brain waves), near-infrared saunas (they supposedly help you escape stress from electromagnetic transmissions), and virtual float tanks (which are meant to induce a meditative state through sensory deprivation), among others. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these treatments.

A subset of biohackers called grinders go so far as to implant devices like computer chips in their bodies. The implants allow them to do everything from opening doors without a fob to monitoring their glucose levels subcutaneously.

For some grinders, like Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president as head of the Transhumanist Party, having an implant is fun and convenient: “I’ve grown to relish and rely on the technology,” he recently wrote in the New York Times. “The electric lock on the front door of my house has a chip scanner, and it’s nice to go surfing and jogging without having to carry keys around.”

Istvan also noted that “for some people without functioning arms, chips in their feet are the simplest way to open doors or operate some household items modified with chip readers.” Other grinders are deeply curious about blurring the line between human and machine, and they get a thrill out of seeing all the ways we can augment our flesh-and-blood bodies using tech. Implants, for them, are a starter experiment.

2) Why are people doing this? What drives someone to biohack themselves?

On a really basic level, biohacking comes down to something we can all relate to: the desire to feel better — and to see just how far we can push the human body. That desire comes in a range of flavors, though. Some people just want to not be sick anymore. Others want to become as smart and strong as they possibly can. An even more ambitious crowd wants to be as smart and strong as possible for as long as possible — in other words, they want to radically extend their life span.

These goals have a way of escalating. Once you’ve determined (or think you’ve determined) that there are concrete “hacks” you can use by yourself right now to go from sick to healthy, or healthy to enhanced, you start to think: Well, why stop there? Why not shoot for peak performance? Why not try to live forever? What starts as a simple wish to be free from pain can snowball into self-improvement on steroids.

That was the case for Asprey. Now in his 40s, he got into biohacking because he was unwell. Before hitting age 30, he was diagnosed with high risk of stroke and heart attack, suffered from cognitive dysfunction, and weighed 300 pounds. “I just wanted to control my own biology because I was tired of being in pain and having mood swings,” he told me.

Now that he feels healthier, he wants to slow the normal aging process and optimize every part of his biology. “I don’t want to be just healthy; that’s average. I want to perform; that’s daring to be above average. Instead of ‘How do I achieve health?’ it’s ‘How do I kick more ass?’”

Zayner, the biohacker who once injected himself with CRISPR DNA, has also had health problems for years, and some of his biohacking pursuits have been explicit attempts to cure himself. But he’s also motivated in large part by frustration. Like some other biohackers with an anti-establishment streak, he’s irritated by federal officials’ purported sluggishness in greenlighting all sorts of medical treatments. In the US, it can take 10 years for a new drug to be developed and approved; for people with serious health conditions, that wait time can feel cruelly long. Zayner claims that’s part of why he wants to democratize science and empower people to experiment on themselves.

(However, he admits that some of his stunts have been purposely provocative and that “I do ridiculous stuff also. I’m sure my motives are not 100 percent pure all the time.”)

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The biohacking community also offers just that: community. It gives people a chance to explore unconventional ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, and to refashion the feeling of being outside the norm into a cool identity. Biohackers congregate in dedicated online networks, in Slack and WhatsApp groups — WeFast, for example, is for intermittent fasters. In person, they run experiments and take classes at “hacklabs,” improvised laboratories that are open to the public, and attend any one of the dozens of biohacking conferences put on each year.

3) How different is biohacking from traditional medicine? What makes something “count” as a biohacking pursuit?

Certain kinds of biohacking go far beyond traditional medicine, while other kinds bleed into it.

Plenty of age-old techniques — meditation, fasting — can be considered a basic type of biohacking. So can going to a spin class or taking antidepressants.

What differentiates biohacking is arguably not that it’s a different genre of activity but that the activities are undertaken with a particular mindset. The underlying philosophy is that we don’t need to accept our bodies’ shortcomings — we can engineer our way past them using a range of high- and low-tech solutions. And we don’t necessarily need to wait for a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial, traditional medicine’s gold standard. We can start to transform our lives right now.

As millionaire Serge Faguet, who plans to live forever, put it: “People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset, so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying,’ but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness [of biohacking] once results start to happen.”

Rob Carlson, an expert on synthetic biology who’s been advocating for biohacking since the early 2000s, told me that to his mind, “all of modern medicine is hacking,” but that people often call certain folks “hackers” as a way of delegitimizing them. “It’s a way of categorizing the other — like, ‘Those biohackers over there do that weird thing.’ This is actually a bigger societal question: Who’s qualified to do anything? And why do you not permit some people to explore new things and talk about that in public spheres?”

If it’s taken to extremes, the “Who’s qualified to do anything?” mindset can delegitimize scientific expertise in a way that can endanger public health. Luckily, biohackers don’t generally seem interested in dethroning expertise to that dangerous degree; many just don’t think they should be locked out of scientific discovery because they lack conventional credentials like a PhD.

4) So how much of this is backed by scientific research?

Some biohacks are backed by strong scientific evidence and are likely to be beneficial. Often, these are the ones that are tried and true, debugged over centuries of experimentation. For example, clinical trials have shown that mindfulness meditation can help reduce anxiety and chronic pain.

But other hacks, based on weak or incomplete evidence, could be either ineffective or actually harmful.

After Dorsey endorsed a particular near-infrared sauna sold by SaunaSpace, which claims its product boosts cellular regeneration and fights aging by detoxing your body, the company experienced a surge in demand. But according to the New York Times, “though a study of middle-aged and older Finnish men indicates that their health benefited from saunas, there have been no major studies conducted of” this type of sauna, which directs incandescent light at your body. So is buying this expensive product likely to improve your health? We can’t say that yet.

Similarly, the intermittent fasting that Dorsey endorses may yield health benefits for some, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Although there’s a lot of research on the long-term health outcomes of fasting in animals — and much of it is promising — the research literature on humans is much thinner. Fasting has gone mainstream, but because it’s done so ahead of the science, it falls into the “proceed with caution” category. Critics have noted that for those who’ve struggled with eating disorders, it could be dangerous.

And while we’re on the topic of biohacking nutrition: My colleague Julia Belluz has previously reported on the Bulletproof Diet promoted by Asprey, who she says “vilifies healthy foods and suggests part of the way to achieve a ‘pound a day’ weight loss is to buy his expensive, ‘science-based’ Bulletproof products.” She was not convinced by the citations for his claims:

What I found was a patchwork of cherry-picked research and bad studies or articles that aren’t relevant to humans. He selectively reported on studies that backed up his arguments, and ignored the science that contradicted them.

Many of the studies weren’t done in humans but in rats and mice. Early studies on animals, especially on something as complex as nutrition, should never be extrapolated to humans. Asprey glorifies coconut oil and demonizes olive oil, ignoring the wealth of randomized trials (the highest quality of evidence) that have demonstrated olive oil is beneficial for health. Some of the research he cites was done on very specific sub-populations, such as diabetics, or on very small groups of people. These findings wouldn’t be generalizable to the rest of us.

5) This all sounds like it can be taken to extremes. What are the most dangerous types of biohacking being tried?

Some of the highest-risk hacks are being undertaken by people who feel desperate. On some level, that’s very understandable. If you’re sick and in constant pain, or if you’re old and scared to die, and traditional medicine has nothing that works to quell your suffering, who can fault you for seeking a solution elsewhere?

Yet some of the solutions being tried these days are so dangerous, they’re just not worth the risk.

If you’ve watched HBO’s Silicon Valley, then you’re already familiar with young blood transfusions. As a refresher, that’s when an older person pays for a young person’s blood and has it pumped into their veins in the hope that it’ll fight aging.

This putative treatment sounds vampiric, yet it’s gained popularity in the Silicon Valley area, where people have actually paid $8,000 a pop to participate in trials. The billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has expressed keen interest.

As Chavie Lieber noted for Vox, although some limited studies suggest that these transfusions might fend off diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis, these claims haven’t been proven.

In February, the Food and Drug Administration released a statement warning consumers away from the transfusions: “Simply put, we’re concerned that some patients are being preyed upon by unscrupulous actors touting treatments of plasma from young donors as cures and remedies. Such treatments have no proven clinical benefits for the uses for which these clinics are advertising them and are potentially harmful.”

Another biohack that definitely falls in the “don’t try this at home” category: fecal transplants, or transferring stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of an unhealthy recipient. In 2016, sick of suffering from severe stomach pain, Zayner decided to give himself a fecal transplant in a hotel room. He had procured a friend’s poop and planned to inoculate himself using the microbes in it. Ever the public stuntman, he invited a journalist to document the procedure. Afterward, he claimed the experiment left him feeling better.

But fecal transplants are still experimental and not approved by the FDA. The FDA recently reported that two people had contracted serious infections from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria. One of the people died. And this was in the context of a clinical trial — presumably, a DIY attempt could be even riskier. The FDA is putting a stop to clinical trials on the transplants for now.

Zayner also popularized the notion that you can edit your own DNA with CRISPR. In 2017, he injected himself with CRISPR DNA at a biotech conference, live-streaming the experiment. He later said he regretted that stunt because it could lead others to copy him and “people are going to get hurt.” Yet when asked whether his company, the Odin, which he runs out of his garage in Oakland, California, was going to stop selling CRISPR kits to the general public, he said no.

Ellen Jorgensen, a molecular biologist who co-founded Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, two Brooklyn-based biology labs open to the public, finds antics like Zayner’s worrisome. A self-identified biohacker, she told me people shouldn’t buy Zayner’s kits, not just because they don’t work half the time (she’s a professional and even she couldn’t get it to work), but because CRISPR is such a new technology that scientists aren’t yet sure of all the risks involved in using it. By tinkering with your genome, you could unintentionally cause a mutation that increases your risk of developing cancer, she said. It’s a dangerous practice that should not be marketed as a DIY activity.

“At Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, we always get the most heartbreaking emails from parents of children afflicted with genetic diseases,” Jorgensen says. “They have watched these Josiah Zayner videos and they want to come into our class and cure their kids. We have to tell them, ‘This is a fantasy.’ … That is incredibly painful.”

She thinks such biohacking stunts give biohackers like her a bad name. “It’s bad for the DIY bio community,” she said, “because it makes people feel that as a general rule we’re irresponsible.”

6) Are all these biohacking pursuits legal?

Existing regulations weren’t built to make sense of something like biohacking, which in some cases stretches the very limits of what it means to be a human being. That means that a lot of biohacking pursuits exist in a legal gray zone: frowned upon by bodies like the FDA, but not yet outright illegal, or not enforced as such. As biohackers traverse uncharted territory, regulators are scrambling to catch up with them.

After the FDA released its statement in February urging people to stay away from young blood transfusions, the San Francisco-based startup Ambrosia, which was well known for offering the transfusions, said on its website that it had “ceased patient treatments.” The site now says, “We are currently in discussion with the FDA on the topic of young plasma.”

This wasn’t the FDA’s first foray into biohacking. In 2016, the agency objected to Zayner selling kits to brew glow-in-the-dark beer. And after he injected himself with CRISPR, the FDA released a notice saying the sale of DIY gene-editing kits for use on humans is illegal. Zayner disregarded the warning and continued to sell his wares.

In 2019, he was, for a time, under investigation by California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, accused of practicing medicine without a license.

The biohackers I spoke to said restrictive regulation would be a counterproductive response to biohacking because it’ll just drive the practice underground. They say it’s better to encourage a culture of transparency so that people can ask questions about how to do something safely, without fear of reprisal.

According to Jorgensen, most biohackers are safety-conscious, not the sorts of people interested in engineering a pandemic. They’ve even generated and adopted their own codes of ethics. She herself has had a working relationship with law enforcement since the early 2000s.

“At the beginning of the DIY bio movement, we did an awful lot of work with Homeland Security,” she said. “And as far back as 2009, the FBI was reaching out to the DIY community to try to build bridges.”

Carlson told me he’s noticed two general shifts over the past 20 years. “One was after 2001, after the anthrax attacks, when Washington, DC, lost their damn minds and just went into a reactive mode and tried to shut everything down,” he said. “As of 2004 or 2005, the FBI was arresting people for doing biology in their homes.”

Then in 2009, the National Security Council dramatically changed perspectives. It published the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats, which embraced “innovation and open access to the insights and materials needed to advance individual initiatives,” including in “private laboratories in basements and garages.”

Now, though, some agencies seem to think they ought to take action. But even if there were clear regulations governing all biohacking activities, there would be no straightforward way to stop people from pursuing them behind closed doors. “This technology is available and implementable anywhere, there’s no physical means to control access to it, so what would regulating that mean?” Carlson said.

7) One of the more ambitious types of biohacking is life extension, the attempt to live longer or even cheat death entirely. What are the physical limits of life extension?

Some biohackers believe that by leveraging technology, they’ll be able to live longer but stay younger. Gerontologist Aubrey de Grey claims people will be able to live to age 1,000. In fact, he says the first person who will live to 1,000 has already been born.

De Grey focuses on developing strategies for repairing seven types of cellular and molecular damage associated with aging — or, as he calls them, “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence.” His nonprofit, the Methuselah Foundation, has attracted huge investments, including more than $6 million from Thiel. Its aim is to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”

Wondering whether de Grey’s goals are realistic, I reached out to Genspace co-founder Oliver Medvedik, who earned his PhD at Harvard Medical School and now directs the Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering at Cooper Union. “Living to 1,000? It’s definitely within our realm of possibility if we as a society that doles out money [to fund research we deem worthy] decide we want to do it,” he told me.

He’s optimistic, he said, because the scientific community is finally converging on a consensus about what the root causes of aging are (damage to mitochondria and epigenetic changes are a couple of examples). And in the past five years, he’s seen an explosion of promising papers on possible ways to address those causes.

Researchers who want to fight aging generally adopt two different approaches. The first is the “small molecule” approach, which often focuses on dietary supplements. Medvedik calls that the “low-hanging fruit.” He spoke excitedly about the possibility of creating a supplement from a plant compound called fisetin, noting that a recent (small) Mayo Clinic trial suggests high concentrations of fisetin can clear out senescent cells in humans — cells that have stopped dividing and that contribute to aging.

The other approach is more dramatic: genetic engineering. Scientists taking this tack in mouse studies usually tinker with a genome in embryo, meaning that new mice are born with the fix already in place. Medvedik pointed out that’s not very useful for treating humans — we want to be able to treat people who have already been born and have begun to age.

But he sees promise here too. He cited a new study that used CRISPR to target Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests as accelerated aging, in a mouse model. “It wasn’t a total cure — they extended the life span of these mice by maybe 30 percent — but what I was very interested in is the fact that it was delivered into mice that had already been born.”

He’s also intrigued by potential non-pharmaceutical treatments for aging-related diseases like Alzheimer’s — for example, the use of light stimulation to influence brain waves — but those probably won’t help us out anytime soon, for a simple reason: “It’s not a drug. You can’t package and sell it,” he said. “Pharma can’t monetize it.”

Like many in the biohacking community, Medvedik sounded a note of frustration about how the medical system holds back anti-aging progress. “If you were to come up with a compound right now that literally cures aging, you couldn’t get it approved,” he said. “By the definition we’ve set up, aging isn’t a disease, and if you want to get it approved by the FDA you have to target a certain disease. That just seems very strange and antiquated and broken.”

8) Biohackers also include people who engage in DIY science without experimenting on themselves. What’s that form of biohacking like?

Not everyone who’s interested in biohacking is interested in self-experimentation. Some come to it because they care about bringing science to the masses, alleviating the climate crisis, or making art that shakes us out of our comfort zones.

“My version of biohacking is unexpected people in unexpected places doing biotechnology,” Jorgensen told me. For her, the emphasis is on democratizing cutting-edge science while keeping it safe. The community labs she’s helped to build, Genspace and Biotech Without Borders, offer classes on using CRISPR technology to edit a genome — but participants work on the genome of yeast, never on their own bodies.

Some people in the community are altruistically motivated. They want to use biohacking to save the environment by figuring out a way to make a recyclable plastic or a biofuel. They might experiment on organisms in makeshift labs in their garages. Or they might take a Genspace class on how to make furniture out of fungi or paper out of kombucha.

Experimental artists have also taken an interest in biohacking. For them, biology is just another palette. The artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the University of Western Australia were actually the first people to create and serve up lab-grown meat. They took some starter cells from a frog and used them to grow small “steaks” of frog meat, which they fed to gallery-goers in France at a 2003 art installation called “Disembodied Cuisine.”

Boris Roessler/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

More recently, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has used old floral DNA to recreate the smell of flowers driven to extinction by humans, enabling us to catch a whiff of them once more.

And this summer, a London museum is displaying something rather less fragrant: cheese made from celebrities. Yes, you read that right: The cheese was created with bacteria harvested from the armpits, toes, bellybuttons, and nostrils of famous people. If you’re thoroughly grossed out by this, don’t worry: The food won’t actually be eaten — this “bioart” project is meant more as a thought experiment than as dinner.

9) At its most extreme, biohacking can fundamentally alter human nature. Should we be worried?

When you hear about people genetically engineering themselves or trying young blood transfusions in an effort to ward off death, it’s easy to feel a sense of vertigo about what we’re coming to as a species.

But the fact is we’ve been altering human nature since the very beginning. Inventing agriculture, for example, helped us transform ourselves from nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary civilizations. And whether we think of it this way or not, we’re all already doing some kind of biohacking every day.

The deeper I delve into biohacking, the more I think a lot of the discomfort with it boils down to simple neophobia — a fear of what’s new. (Not all of the discomfort, mind you: The more extreme hacks really are dangerous.)

As one of my colleagues put it to me, 40 years ago, “test tube babies” seemed unnatural, a freak-show curiosity; now in vitro fertilization has achieved mainstream acceptance. Will biohacking undergo the same progression? Or is it really altering human nature in a more fundamental way, a way that should concern us?

When I asked Carlson, he refused to buy the premise of the question.

“If you assert that hackers are changing what it means to be human, then we need to first have an agreement about what it means to be human,” he said. “And I’m not going to buy into the idea that there is one thing that is being human. Across the sweep of history, it’s odd to say humans are static — it’s not the case that humans in 1500 were the same as they are today.”

That’s true. Nowadays, we live longer. We’re taller. We’re more mobile. And we marry and have kids with people who come from different continents, different cultures — a profound departure from old customs that has nothing to do with genetic engineering but that’s nonetheless resulting in genetic change.

Still, biohackers are talking about making such significant changes that the risks they carry are significant too. What if biohackers’ “upgrades” don’t get distributed evenly across the human population? What if, for example, the cure for aging becomes available, but only to the rich? Will that lead to an even wider life expectancy gap, where rich people live longer and poor people die younger?

Medvedik dismissed that concern, arguing that a lot of interventions that could lengthen our lives, like supplements, wouldn’t be expensive to produce. “There’s no reason why that stuff can’t be dirt-cheap. But that depends on what we do as a society,” he said. Insulin doesn’t cost much to produce, but as a society we’ve allowed companies to jack up the price so high that many people with diabetes are now skipping lifesaving doses. That’s horrifying, but it’s not a function of the technology itself.

Here’s another risk associated with biohacking, one I think is even more serious: By making ourselves smarter and stronger and potentially even immortal (a difference of kind, not just of degree), we may create a society in which everyone feels pressure to alter their biology — even if they don’t want to. To refuse a hack would mean to be at a huge professional disadvantage, or to face moral condemnation for remaining suboptimal when optimization is possible. In a world of superhumans, it may become increasingly hard to stay “merely” human.

“The flip side of all this is the ‘perfect race’ or eugenics specter,” Jorgensen acknowledged. “This is a powerful set of technologies that can be used in different ways. We’d better think about it and use it wisely.”

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Listen to Reset

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change (or hack) our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselves, and others, at home? On the launch episode of this new podcast, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Zayner about how he’s thinking about human experimentation today. Plus: new efforts to come up with a code of conduct for biohackers, from legislation to self-regulation.

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Roger Stone, former adviser to President Trump, and his wife Nydia Stone arrive at court in Washington, DC, on November 15, 2019. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Stone’s trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from the Mueller investigation.

The verdict is in for Roger Stone’s trial — and a Washington, DC, jury found President Donald Trump’s longtime political adviser guilty on all counts Friday.

Stone was convicted of one count of obstructing an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress, and one count of witness tampering.

The verdict makes Stone the sixth former Trump adviser to be convicted of or plead guilty to charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The special counsel indicted Stone in January, before completing his work, and Stone’s trial was the highest-profile loose end remaining from the probe.

Prosecutors alleged that Stone tried to obstruct the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by lying to the committee about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks, and by encouraging another witness to lie for him.

The trial featured testimony from two other former top Trump campaign aides — Steve Bannon and Rick Gates. Both said that Stone repeatedly suggested he had inside information on WikiLeaks’s plans to release material that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.

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Gates gave testimony suggesting that Stone shared this information with Donald Trump himself. And Trump’s name came up frequently in the trial — prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky argued that Stone’s motivation for his lies and obstruction was that “the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.”

But what wasn’t really cleared up in the trial was whether Stone in fact had legitimate inside information about WikiLeaks and its posting of Democratic emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers. To an extent, that makes sense — the charges against Stone weren’t about anything he did in 2016, but rather the alleged cover-up he perpetrated the following year.

The government presented voluminous documentary evidence that the story Stone told Congress — that all his WikiLeaks information came from a single “intermediary,” radio host Randy Credico — was false. And they suggested Stone concocted this false story to hide his true WikiLeaks connection — conservative author Jerome Corsi. But what, exactly, Corsi learned, and how he learned it, remain murky.

Stone, however, has now been convicted, and will be sentenced at some point in the coming months by Judge Amy Berman Jackson. He will likely try to appeal his case — and hope President Trump pardons him — but, as of right now, it looks like the legendary dirty trickster may well serve prison time.

Who is Roger Stone?

Stone has had a reputation for political shenanigans since he was a 19-year-old volunteer carrying out dirty tricks to embarrass Richard Nixon’s 1972 Republican primary opponent — something that earned Stone a minor role in the Watergate hearings.

As a Republican campaign operative, he worked for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole; as a highly paid lobbyist, he worked alongside his friend Paul Manafort for a host of seedy clients. And he’s long been known as a colorful character who rejoices in the dark side of politics: scandals, smears, division, and negativity. Journalists have called him “the state of the art Washington sleazeball” and the “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze.”

Robert R. McElroy/Getty Images

Stone also, incredibly enough, spent nearly three decades trying to get Donald Trump for president before Trump actually went through with it. The two met in the mid-1980s, as Trump hired Stone and Manafort’s firm to do lobbying and PR for him. After Trump released his book The Art of the Deal in 1987, Stone urged him to consider running for president the following year, but Trump demurred. In 1999, Stone ran a presidential exploratory committee for Trump — but Trump again ended up not officially running.

The two had their ups and downs over the years (“Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told the New Yorker in 2008, arguing he “always tries taking credit for things he never did”). But by 2011, as Trump mused about challenging President Barack Obama, Stone was egging him on again, urging him to spread conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace.

So when Trump finally did launch his presidential campaign in June 2015, Stone was on board as an official campaign adviser. But he didn’t last long. After clashing with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, he left his official role in August 2015.

Yet Stone remained in contact with Trump himself to some extent and continued to try to support Trump’s candidacy from the outside. And some of those outside efforts landed him at the center of the Mueller investigation, leading to his arrest and indictment this January.

The timeline of Stone and WikiLeaks

It was all the way back in spring 2016 that Stone began saying he knew that WikiLeaks had information coming that would damage Clinton, according to both Bannon (testifying under subpoena) and Gates (testifying as part of a plea deal he struck with the government).

Back then, Gates was the deputy Trump campaign chair, serving under his longtime boss Paul Manafort. Gates testified that he and Manafort were initially skeptical that Stone really knew what he was talking about.

But then, on June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced that he had pending releases related to Clinton. Two days later, on June 14, the Democratic National Committee announced it had been hacked by the Russian government.

At the trial, the government revealed that Stone had called and spoken with Trump that same day (though it’s unclear what they discussed). Gates also testified that, the following day, Stone told him that more information was coming soon.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

A little over a month later, on July 22, WikiLeaks posted the hacked DNC emails online. Gates testified that Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort then instructed him to keep in touch with Stone and find out what else he knew about WikiLeaks’s plans — so Trump could be briefed on them. On July 25, Stone emailed his associate Jerome Corsi, telling him to “get to Assange” and “get the pending WL [WikiLeaks] emails.”

Gates also testified that he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Stone in late July, while Gates was in a car with Trump driving to LaGuardia Airport. Gates said that he could not hear exactly what was said on the call but that after the call ended, Trump told him that “more information would be coming.” About an hour after the call, Stone emailed Corsi again, to say a friend of theirs in London should see Assange.

A few days later, on August 2, Corsi emailed Stone about what he said were Assange’s plans, and vaguely mentioned “Podesta” — a reference to John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair. (Podesta’s emails had been hacked, but that was not public knowledge at this point.) The next day, Stone emailed Manafort saying he had an idea “to save Trump’s ass.”

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in mid-August, and replaced by Bannon. Stone then emailed Bannon on August 18, saying he knew a way to win the 2016 election, but that “it ain’t pretty.” Bannon testified that afterward, Stone continued to suggest privately that he had a “relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.” Bannon added that the Trump campaign didn’t really have an official access point to WikiLeaks — but that the closest thing to that would have been Roger Stone.

Still, despite all of Stone’s ominous predictions, no one at the trial testified that Stone ever offered specific knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans on timing or that he specified what information, exactly, they had in advance.

In any case, none of that was actually the focus of the charges against Stone.

The charges were about Stone’s alleged cover up

The government alleged that when the House Intelligence Committee asked him to testify in their Russia investigation in 2017, Stone concocted a false cover story to hide whatever actually happened.

Specifically, Stone omitted Jerome Corsi from the story, and claimed all of his information about WikiLeaks came from comedian and radio host Randy Credico. But, as prosecutors argued and Credico himself testified, that didn’t make sense with the timeline.

Credico did get in touch with WikiLeaks to do a radio interview with Assange, but that wasn’t until late August 2016 — months after Stone started claiming to know about WikiLeaks, and weeks after his emails with Corsi.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Stone was also charged with falsely telling Congress he had no emails or texts discussing WikiLeaks (he had a ton); with falsely saying he never asked for any requests to be communicated to Assange (he did); and with falsely saying he never discussed his conversations with his WikiLeaks intermediary with anyone in Trump’s campaign (Bannon and Gates said he did talk WikiLeaks with them).

The fuller story of what happened with Stone and WikiLeaks remains unclear — but Mueller’s own conclusions are already in his 448-page final report on the Russia investigation, hidden under black bars.

That’s because all material about Stone in the Mueller report was redacted, to avoid prejudicing this trial’s outcome. Now that it’s over, we’re finally getting closer to learning what the special counsel found — and whether he thought any Trump associates were involved in the dissemination of hacked emails.

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An ordinary day in New York City, as captured in The Hottest August. | Grasshopper Films

The Hottest August director Brett Story wanted to “look at climate change by looking away from it.”

One of the best documentaries of the year is also, on its surface, one of the simplest. To make The Hottest August, director Brett Story spent the month of August 2017 talking to New Yorkers about their hopes for the future as well as their anxieties. Story and her crew visited many well-traveled spots — Midtown Manhattan, people’s front stoops in brownstone Brooklyn — as well as some out-of-the-way places like Rockaway Beach, where residents worried about an eroding shoreline even before Hurricane Sandy devastated the area in 2012.

The movie was named for the expectation that the month would be the hottest August on record in the northern hemisphere — and while, in the end, it turned out to be slightly cooler than August 2016, the trendline has continued upward.

So what emerged from Story’s interviews was a portrait of ordinary people living in the shadow of looming climate change and the threats it poses to their ways of life. (The film’s official description is “A film about climate change, disguised as a portrait of collective anxiety.”) The Hottest August is a funny and fascinating film, but with an air of the uncanny hanging over everything.

As in her outstanding 2016 documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, Story’s interviews with her Hottest August subjects are shot with a stationary camera, often using their surroundings to help frame and provide subtle context for their answers; small interstitial moments give the film a sense of otherworldliness. Earth is our home, the place where we live, but with its cinematic vocabulary, The Hottest August presents a sense of strangeness, of being small beings living on a big planet whirling through an even bigger universe.

Story, who is Canadian and holds a PhD in human geography from the University of Toronto, met me in Brooklyn to discuss how she made the movie, how she imbued it with a feeling of sci-fi peculiarity, and how she navigates her own feelings of “futureless-ness.”

Alissa Wilkinson

The Hottest August is a documentary with a topic on its mind — how the looming possibility of devastating effects of climate change weighs on ordinary people right now. But it alludes to that topic rather than being direct. The meaning accumulates with your interviews, rather than being stated up front. How do you approach making a movie that will ultimately be allusive?

Brett Story

I feel like we’re living in a time when climate change news has accelerated and intensified. It’s not like we weren’t talking about environmental issues 15 years ago. But there’s something about now in which it feels so overwhelming and so intense. Now, there’s a kind of undeniability about planetary crisis.

I was thinking about how that was for me, personally, making it really hard to think in future terms — just, like, planning. I would think, “Oh, should I have a house one day?” Or, “Will I change careers?” And every time I had a thought that it felt slightly absurd. On a personal level, there’s a sense for me of a kind of futureless-ness.

We live in a socio-political time in which there are endless sources of bad news, and scary news, and Trump’s presidency, and violence at the border, and neo-Nazis marching around.

So I became quite preoccupied, trying to think about a way to connect these personal feelings of futureless-ness with an interest in how it was affecting how we live socially.

Grasshopper Films

But at the same time, I had to admit to myself that I don’t watch climate change films, and ask myself why. I don’t even read that much material about climate change, these long articles. It’s not that I’m uninterested, and it’s not because I don’t think it matters — totally the opposite. But I’m not sure what I have to learn from these pieces, because I’m already on board. I know. I know, and I think lots of us know, both that climate change is real and that it’s really bad and really scary.

So the film emerged out of an interest in subverting what constitutes a climate change film and thinking about what it is we have to learn at this moment that would be useful. For me, what I have to learn that might be useful is the causes of our paralysis, and the consequences of living in a future-less world. The social consequences of that. Is it connected? Is there a kind of nihilism that pervades? What are we doing with this dread and this anxiety? How’s it translating? How’s it being captured by political forces and ideas of who’s deserving and who’s undeserving of resources?

So the very origins of the project came out of a desire to look at climate change by looking away from it.

As soon as we started filming, I knew I was not going to utter the words “climate change.” I was going to ask people questions that would allow them to dictate what the conversation would be.

Some have said, and I agree, that people are going to look back at this time — at all of our cultural artifacts, all the books that get written, and the phones that get made — and be able to see climate change in all of them, even if they’re not obviously interested in that topic.

Alissa Wilkinson

New York is a particularly interesting place to investigate this because it has experienced some really recent, big weather events that caused measurable damage to the city that some people are still living with, like Hurricane Sandy in 2012. There are still people who don’t have their homes back.

Brett Story

I wanted to make a film where I was living. I wanted to have the confidence of knowing a place and knowing how to discover what I don’t know about it.

So it wasn’t even so much that it had to be New York. Any city holds lots of contradictions, but it needed to be a city that really exemplifies the contradictions. The economic contradictions — the absurd levels of wealth, absurd levels of poverty. The density of all these strangers living side by side.

And I really love making films in which I don’t follow characters but I have encounters with strangers. The Hottest August gave me a pretext to do a little bit more than what we’re all already doing with most of our day, which is encountering people and learning a little bit about life through those small encounters.

So it had to be a film that takes place in a dense place — a dense, full, vibrant, contradictory space. And yeah, I think it’s fitting that New York is a power capital of the world. It’s surrounded by water. That water is rising. It’s had its few climate catastrophes. But for me, it was also just about doing a deep study of a place where I could roam around with a sense of what I already know and what I have yet to find out about a place I call home.

I wanted the film to settle in a space [that tapped into] the deeply ordinary, and also allow it to feel strange for people. And the imagery needed to help us do that. As soon as we see images that we’ve seen before, we become really passive viewers. So the trick was finding images that we hadn’t seen before, but could also convey nothing more than ordinary life in different places. There’s a kind of delight in, you know, different blocks that look so radically different from each other, and yet they get called the same city.

Grasshopper Films

Alissa Wilkinson

There’s one scene, in the Brooklyn Navy Yards I think, that really did look kind of otherworldly, even if it’s just this one space.

Brett Story

It looks like a Soviet spaceship.

Alissa Wilkinson

Exactly. It’s a Tarkovsky.

Brett Story

The film is made up of genuinely spontaneous encounters. All we could do was pick locations. So all we could think about was, where do we go so that we’ll meet people once we’re there?

Alissa Wilkinson

Were you asking people where you should go next? Were you wandering around with a tripod?

Brett Story

Yeah, we were carrying a tripod. Some of the process of choosing just had to do with aesthetic inclinations. But I also wanted to offer some order to the disorder, to offer the audience a way through wide-ranging ideas. If I’m going to offer people a film that asks them to make associations between lots of different things and it doesn’t have a plot or any drama or a story, then I should at least give it some sort of aesthetic sensibility. It’s like basic architecture for the film.

I think of The Hottest August as a film that’s arranged through a series of detours. The conversations themselves are all sort of off-point, even when you start to realize that there are a set of questions that I’m asking everybody.

I’m genuinely approaching people and saying, “Hey we’re making a film about how people are doing this summer and what you’re thinking about.” Which is so loose! And then trusting my own skills as an interviewer, to hear what people are saying and to follow them there.

Then I take those conversational detours and try and choreograph them in the edit room so that they point to something.

If we’re shooting an interview in a sandcastle on Rockaway Beach, at a sandcastle-building contest, and an umbrella rolls away, we don’t know what that means. It might not mean anything. But it’s an opportunity to just delight in this strangeness and absurdity. The fact that someone walks by at the exact same moment and his bathing suit matches, can be part of the coincidences and delights that also remind us how strange we are, as human beings occupying this planet and making things on it and living our little lives on it. So a lot of the visual details are just purely about that, rather than pointing directly to themes or issues.

Alissa Wilkinson

New York is such a good city for a movie like this — everyone is very opinionated and willing to share their opinions with you.

Brett Story

That’s the thing: It’s a city in which, for whatever reasons, people are incredibly generous. I’ve felt that on a personal level; when I moved here for the first time for a brief stint, in 2008, I didn’t have a single friend. At a certain point I was like, “I don’t even need friends. I’m having such interesting conversations with all the people that I just meet in the course of my day.” I think people are really generous with themselves. Especially if they feel respected, and especially if you’re asking genuine questions and genuinely listening. People know when they’re being listened to.

Grasshopper Films

Alissa Wilkinson

Did you learn anything surprising through doing all of these interviews, talking to all of these people?

Brett Story

I think that I expected people to feel and talk about their anxieties and their worries a lot. Maybe not necessarily name environmental catastrophe as the cause of those anxieties, but still to point to those worries and anxieties. What I didn’t expect was that, yes, that happened, but people expressed so much more optimism than I expected.

Someone would say, “I’m getting kicked out of my house next week,” or, “I can’t get a job, I have to walk dogs,” or, “I’m worried about Social Security in the future,” but then they’d almost immediately also find a way to say everything was going to be fine. Like, “My luck’s going to turn. I’m going to make some better decisions moving forward. I’m going to get on top of this. I’m going to be my own personal entrepreneur. And then I won’t get evicted next week.”

I found this quite devastating. And I found it surprising and really interesting.

We have to live in this world. We have to get up every morning in it. There’s a luxury to letting ourselves be overwhelmed with the pessimism and the dread, but the mind has capacity to play all kinds of beautiful tricks.

That became really interesting to me, something that I wanted to bring out as a theme.

Alissa Wilkinson

Isn’t that part of the problem, too? We know this … thing … is coming. But it’s hard to convince a lot of people, and even ourselves, that we need to do anything about it. It’s like, “Well, it will happen and we’ll figure something out” — like, we’ll all move to the moon or whatever and it’ll be fine.

Brett Story

That’s true.

Alissa Wilkinson

I also wonder how much of this is part of Americans’ relentless optimism about the future. I wonder if you made this film in France, if you’d have a different film.

Brett Story

I think that’s true. I wonder what that’s about. Because I don’t think it’s just like, optimism is American. I think that versions of pessimism are also American, but I do feel like people have to be optimistic because … I have something to say about this. I feel like when we admit that life is pretty bad, there’s a way in which, in America — and I’ll include Canada in this too — the narrative of personal success versus personal failure is so dominant that as soon as you admit that things are shitty, you’re also kind of admitting that you’re a personal failure. Because that’s the narrative we’re sold.

And that’s devastating, too. I mean, I don’t want to feel like my life is shitty, because it’s all my fault, because I fucked up too much, or because I failed on too many fronts. That “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative — the one that says you can be anything you want, and then if you’re not, it’s all your fault — that makes optimism the better choice. Because otherwise what are you going to do with that humiliation and that shame?

That’s a big part of what I was interested in while making this film: thinking about the paralysis we feel, the powerlessness we feel, the reasons we can’t seem to do anything while our planet is collapsing.

We have an increasing loss of the sense of being in a society in which we can make social demands. So everything gets individualized. Change is only possible through individual action. And, I admit, I just don’t believe my personal action is going to have a huge effect — if I don’t use some straws tomorrow, I don’t think that’s going to cut carbon emissions. And I think that’s true of a lot of people.

So, does that make me the bad guy when it comes to climate change? No. I think when we lose a sense of belonging to a collective and having collective power over our circumstances, we can default to a kind of hopelessness or paralysis when it comes to things as big as environmental disruption.

Alissa Wilkinson

As well as magical thinking, that it’s just going to work out.

Brett Story

That it’s just going to work out, yeah. I mean, it has to work out, because there’s no other way. We can’t come up with another possible scenario.

Alissa Wilkinson

Plus, we get the idea that it’s always worked out in the past. Which is not true. Humankind is still here, but civilizations have disappeared.

Brett Story

Magical thinking is such a good phrase. It’s what I’m always interested in my films. What stories, what forms of magical thinking become so natural to us that we can’t think past them? I’m not saying that other people think crazy things — I include myself in this. What becomes received wisdom, so that we get trapped and can’t think outside of it?

And how could something like cinema — which can make us feel, and think, and hear slightly differently, or set us off kilter — how can that reacquaint us with our own forms of reality and dislodge some of that actual thinking?

Maybe that’s investing too much [power] in cinema. But that is what makes art complex and, for me, what makes it political. I think it’s more effective at [making us feel or think differently] than sending messages. Art can rejigger our relationship to the world such that we can start to examine why we even think stuff.

Alissa Wilkinson

I think this is why The Hottest August has the feeling of science fiction, in a way, even though it doesn’t present itself as a science fiction film. Sci-fi is always trying to dislodge us from the contexts in which we make our assumptions. It unsettles us, makes us feel a little strange so that we see the world differently.

Grasshopper Films

Brett Story

That was a really fun thing to play with creatively. That’s what we talked about while making it: This isn’t a science fiction movie and there’s no science fiction narrative, but can we introduce some sci-fi elements into it?

So, [the film’s editor] Nels [Bangerter] and I had a lot of fun with it. The first time he showed me the edit where we zoom in on the moon, and then the moon starts to spin around? I was like, “Nels, what are you doing? This is so weird!” And he’s like, “Just try it.” And now it’s my favorite part. Or that moment where the umbrella blows away — that is actually just totally ordinary. But it’s a moment where you can be like, “Oh, yeah, the world is a weird and wild place. And we’re on a planet, and there’s other planets, and there’s animals, and they’re looking at us, and they’re judging us.”

I think ordinary life is science fiction, if we can see it in those terms.

The Hottest August opens in select theaters on November 15 and will continue to screen in the weeks following; check the film’s website for details.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Rep. Max Rose (D-NY) for the 116th Congress stands outside the Longworth House Office building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Rose is introducing a new bill to ban corporate PACs along with Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA). | Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

More Democrats are ditching corporate PACs. A new bill would make that mandatory.

Two moderate House Democrats are introducing a bill aiming to root out corporate influence where it currently thrives: Washington, DC.

On Friday, Reps. Max Rose (NY) and Josh Harder (CA) will introduce the “Ban Corporate PACs Act,” which would ban for-profit corporations from being allowed to sponsor, operate, or fund PACs. Vox was given an exclusive first look at the legislation.

The bill’s co-authors see it as a necessary addition to the HR 1 — also known as the “For the People Act” — the vast anti-corruption bill that was House Democrats’ first priority after taking back the majority in 2018. HR 1 passed the House way back in early March, but it has gone nowhere as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vehemently opposes it.

“We always said HR 1 was just the beginning,” Rose told Vox in an interview. Rose called corporate PACs “legalized bribery” that “should not have a place in this town.”

His co-author, Harder, agreed. Nodding to the 2020 election, the members of Congress noted that while nearly all Democratic candidates running for president have taken a no-corporate PAC pledge, and multiple Democrats running for House and Senate have done the same thing — the idea should be mandatory.

The two members want this bill to be part of the House’s end-of-year agenda, but if it is passed in the House, it likely won’t go anywhere in the Republican controlled Senate. Still, anti-corruption reforms are incredibly popular with the American public across party lines.

“I think the impression a lot of folks have around the country is that Washington is a town controlled by corporate interests — there’s a lot of truth to that,” Harder told Vox.

Banning corporate PACs is becoming increasingly popular among Democrats

Rose and Harder’s bill calls for an outright ban of corporate PACs, which saw a resurgence after the US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

That decision made it clear the Supreme Court viewed money and outside spending in elections as free speech. And it paved the way for outside groups to spend unlimited sums of money on elections.

That’s ushered in a new political era in the United States, one where each election tops the amount of spending in the last. The 2016 election is the most expensive to date, costing over $6.5 billion (including Senate, House, and presidential campaigns). And the 2018 midterms were the most expensive midterms thus far, weighing in at over $5.7 billion for just Senate and House races.

Forswearing corporate PACs has become somewhat of a trend in the Democratic Party. At the beginning of the race, all Democratic candidates pledged they would not take corporate PAC money. A smaller group said they would not take Super PAC money, but some have been more open about their reliance on Super PACs, including newly minted presidential candidate Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts.

It’s not just at the presidential level; in 2018, close to 200 candidates for US House pledged to not take corporate PAC money. Watchdog outlet OpenSecrets noted most of those Democrats not only followed through on their promise of not accepting money from corporate PACs, but also that many times that decision didn’t disadvantage their fundraising because individual donors were so willing to give in the 2018 cycle.

For many of the freshman Democrats, like Harder and Rose, who campaigned on a no corporate PAC pledge, the culture of Washington was a bit of a shock. As House Democrats were rolling out HR 1 this spring, some freshman told Vox they were being approached by more senior members and pressured to ditch their promise.

“Mostly from members who have been here a long time … a few of whom have been very dismissive and said, ‘You’re going to have to get rid of that,’” Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) told Vox this spring.

Harder, who beat Republican incumbent Jeff Denham in California’s 10th Congressional District, remembered going to what he thought was going to be a policy discussion shortly after arriving in DC as a new member of Congress.

“All it is is a whole row of lobbyists really eager to have conversations, and that’s basically been every day since,” Harder told Vox. “The peeks into it I’ve seen are really frustrating. It’s not just this is a corrupting influence, this is also a huge impediment to the things we want to get passed.”

And of course, Republicans have no such qualms about accepting corporate PAC money, which drives the arguments of some older Democrats who say their party needs to take it to stay competitive. Republicans in the Senate have also been an impediment to Democrats’ attempts at reform. McConnell has refused to take up HR 1 and similar bills, arguing it infringes on constitutionally protected free speech.

Rose, a freshman member of Congress representing Staten Island with a penchant for being blunt, sees it differently.

“Mitch McConnell has never met a corporate PAC, federal lobbyist, dark money outfit that he doesn’t immediately fall in love with,” Rose said. “He is not a supporter of the swamp, Mitch McConnell is the swamp.”

Anti-corruption bills are politically popular

If there’s one thing Democratic and Republican voters can agree on, it’s that Washington is corrupt and dysfunctional.

The belief there’s too much money in Washington goes across party lines. A 2015 New York Times/CBS poll found 84 percent of Americans thought money had too much influence in politics, and 66 percent believed wealthier Americans had more political influence.

Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp” and pledges not to run on outside money that wasn’t his own were hugely popular in 2016. Come 2018, House Democrats crushed Republicans in a wave election as they hammered a message about cleaning up a “culture of corruption” that had run rampant in the Trump White House.

And although McConnell and Republicans oppose Democrats’ HR 1, the sweeping bill was politically popular, including with Independent voters. A January poll by End Citizens United poll found 75 percent of 2018 voters in battleground House districts said cracking down on Washington corruption was their top priority, followed by 71 percent who wanted to protect Social Security and Medicare, and 70 percent who listed growing the economy and jobs.

Furthermore, 82 percent of all voters and 84 percent of independents said they support a bill of reforms.

Since HR 1 could not be passed, Rose and Harder are hoping this smaller provision will be politically harder for the Republican-controlled Senate to ignore.

“This bill is a response to a feeling out in the country about who has power in Washington and who should have power in Washington,” said Patrick Burgwinkle, communications director for End Citizens United.

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Taylor Swift meets fans at Tianhe Sports Center on November 11, 2019 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province of China. | Photo by Xia Wening/VCG via Getty Images

Taylor Swift says Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta won’t let her perform her old hits on TV.

Taylor Swift’s ongoing feud with music executives Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta has entered a new and extremely dramatic phase. On Thursday night, Swift published an emotional plea on her social media accounts, claiming that Braun and Borchetta were blocking her from performing her old hits at the upcoming American Music Awards and in a previously unannounced Netflix documentary — and now Swift’s fans are doxxing Borchetta and Braun in retaliation.

Swift’s public feud with Braun and Borchetta began this summer when Borchetta, the founder of Swift’s old record label Big Machine Records, sold the label, and with it, Swift’s old master recordings to Scott Braun. The sale gave Braun ownership over all the records Swift made prior to 2019’s Lover, and meant that any time someone wanted to license one of Swift’s old hits, they would have to go through Braun.

For Swift, the sale was unacceptable. Braun was Kanye West’s manager when Kanye released his infamous “Famous” video, which features a nude likeness of Swift in bed with Kanye. Swift has said that she considers Braun to bear personal responsibility for the whole affair, which was, she wrote this summer, “a revenge porn music video which strips my body naked.” Swift said she tried to purchase the rights to her master recordings herself, but neither Braun nor Borchetta were willing to make a deal she found acceptable.

So to get around them, Swift announced in August that she planned to re-record all of her old albums starting in November 2020, the point at which her old contract allows her to do so. The plan was that she would own the masters for all of her new recordings herself, and anyone who wanted to license them could go through her rather than Braun.

But now, Swift says that Braun and Borchetta are refusing to allow her to perform her old hits anywhere. “Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun have now said that I’m not allowed to perform my old songs on television because they claim that that would be re-recording my music before I’m allowed to next year,” she wrote. And that ban would block her from performing her old hits both at November’s American Music Award, where Swift will be honored as Artist of the Decade, and in a forthcoming Netflix documentary.

Per Swift, Borchetta will only drop this claim if Swift agrees both to cancel her plans to re-record her old albums and to stop talking publicly about him and Braun. “Basically, be a good little girl and shut up. Or you’ll be punished,” Swift summarizes. “This is WRONG.”

If Swift’s summary is correct, Braun and Borchetta are attempting to gain some leverage against her after she thoroughly trounced them in the court of public opinion this summer. But Swift has enormous leverage of her own, in the form of her army of dedicated Swifties, and she is willing to use it. “This is where I’m asking for your help,” she writes in her post. “Please let Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun know how you feel about this.”

The Big Machine Label Group refuted Swift’s claims in a statement issued Friday morning. “At no point did we say Taylor could not perform on the AMAs or block her Netflix special. In fact, we do not have the right to keep her from performing live anywhere,” reads the post. It goes on to argue that Swift “has admitted to contractually owing millions of dollars and multiple assets to our company” — the assets presumably being her old masters — and that “despite our persistent efforts to find a private and mutually satisfactory solution, Taylor made a unilateral decision last night to enlist her fanbase in a calculated manner that greatly affects the safety of our employees and their families.”

Big Machine is being a bit weaselly with its language about the ban (they don’t have to be unable to legally block Swift from performing live to make it difficult for her to perform live), but it isn’t wrong to note that the safety of its employees may be at risk. As Vox’s sister site The Verge has reported, some of Swift’s fans responded to her post by doxxing both Braun and Borchetta, publishing their private contact information, including phone numbers and physical addresses, to Twitter.

Swift hasn’t responded to the doxxings, and it’s not a move she explicitly directed her fans to make. But it’s relatively common during Twitter wars for figures with a lot of followers to point their fans in the direction of a hapless target, and then sit back and watch the fallout. That move was a favorite tactic of infamous online of all people Milo Yiannopoulos, of all people, before Twitter finally banned him. Weaponizing his followers worked for him because it allowed him to direct increasingly vicious and hateful harassment at his targets while keeping his own hands ostensibly clean. Swift knows how unpleasant that can be, because she experienced online attacks herself at Kim Kardashian’s hands two years ago.

The great Taylor Swift-Scooter Braun war is getting messier and messier, and it’s starting to look as though everyone involved is willing to play dirty.

from Vox – All https://ift.tt/2QnjQqX

Former US Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on November 15, 2019. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Even Fox News thought Trump’s tweets strayed dangerously close to witness intimidation.

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch delivered a powerful opening statement during her testimony before House impeachment investigators on Friday. She detailed her decades of service as a diplomat, and expressed concern that her sudden ouster due to a Trumpworld smear campaign this past spring could have a chilling effect on those who are sincerely committed to rooting out corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere.

“I remain disappointed that the department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” she said, alluding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The policy process is visibly unraveling … the State Department is being hollowed out.”

Shortly after Yovanovitch concluded her opening statement, President Donald Trump responded to it by attacking her, going so far as to blame her for decades of civil unrest in Somalia. (Yovanovitch began her posting in Mogadishu in 1986, when she was about 28 years old.)

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” Trump tweeted. “Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”

In a second tweet, Trump touted his own “very strong and powerful foreign policy” before taking a shot at former President Barack Obama. But the irony is that just hours earlier, at a rally in Louisiana, Trump mocked and ridiculed William Taylor — the State Department official who testified before impeachment investigators on Wednesday and is currently serving as the acting ambassador to Ukraine.

And with regard to Trump’s claim that Ukrainian President Zelensky “spoke unfavorably about [Yovanovitch] in my second phone call with him,” a call summary released by the White House indicates that Trump brought her up and criticized her as “bad news,” and that Zelensky mostly just went along with what he was saying.

“She’s going to go through some things,” Trump said during that call, in a comment that Yovanovitch said during her testimony that she regarded as a “threat.”

“I wondered what that meant. It concerned me,” she said.

Shortly after Trump posted his tweets, the Democrat leading the impeachment inquiry, Rep. Adam Schiff, asked Yovanovitch to respond to them.

“Well, I don’t think I have such powers — not in Mogadishu, Somalia, not in other places,” she began. “I actually think that where I served over the years, I and others have demonstrably made things better for the US as well as for the countries that I’ve served in.”

Schiff went on to characterize Trump’s tweets as a form of witness intimidation.

“I want to let you know, ambassador, that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,” he said.

Even Fox News’s Bret Baier thought Trump’s tweets were ill-advised. After Yovanovitch’s hearing adjourned for a break, Baier said that “this whole hearing turned on a dime when the president tweeted about her [in] real time and during the questioning Adam Schiff stopped the Democratic questioning to read the president’s tweet to her and get her response.”

“Now that enabled Schiff to then characterize that tweet as intimidating the witness or tampering the witness, which is a crime — adding essentially an article of impeachment in real time as this hearing is going on,” Baier continued. “That changed this entire dynamic of this first part of this hearing, and Republicans now are going to have to take the rest of this hearing to probably clean that up.”

During another Fox News segment, former independent counsel Ken Staff said Trump’s tweet showed “extraordinarily poor judgment” and “was quite injurious.” But one of the Republicans partaking in the impeachment inquiry, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), defended the president, saying he “has been frustrated with this relentless attack on him by the Democrats that started even before he was president. I think the American people can relate to the frustration.”

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage

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Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch arrives to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, on November 15, 2019. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” she said.

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, is on Capitol Hill Friday to testify in the second day of public impeachment hearings. But she used her opening testimony in large part to offer a stinging indictment of leadership at the State Department under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump.

Yovanovitch was the US ambassador to Ukraine between August 2016 and May of this year. A widely respected career diplomat and the highest-ranked female ambassador at the State Department, Yovanovitch was the target of Rudy Giuliani-led attacks falsely accusing her of, among other things, working to thwart Trump’s Ukraine policy and being close to the previous Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko. That smear campaign, backed with no public evidence, ultimately led to her unceremonious dismissal months before her time was up.

“I still find it difficult to comprehend that foreign and private interests were able to undermine US interests in this way,” she said. “These events should concern everyone in this room,” she added, noting, “If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States.”

Her strongest comments, though, came when she turned her attention to the “degradation of the Foreign Service” during this administration, highlighted by the fact that Pompeo didn’t protect Yovanovitch from the attacks.

“As Foreign Service professionals are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded. This will soon cause real harm, if it hasn’t already,” Yovanovitch said. “The State Department is being hollowed out from within at a competitive and complex time on the world stage. This is not a time to undercut our diplomats.”

One of the country’s most respected ambassadors, then, just said that the State Department is flailing with Pompeo and Trump in charge. It’s about as damning a statement as one could imagine — and it came during one of the most dramatic periods of the Trump presidency.

You can read Yovanovitch’s full opening statement here.

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Digital rights group Fight for the Future conduced live facial recognition surveillance in Washington, DC, to track down members of Congress. | Fight for the Future

Almost 14,000 people’s faces were non-consensually scanned in Washington. Sound creepy? That’s the point.

Dressed in hazmat-like jumpsuits, wearing smartphones strapped to their heads, the activists who descended upon Congress on Thursday were a strange sight.

They were there to scan faces: members of Congress, journalists, and whoever else happened to cross their path in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, DC. They also headed to K Street in hopes of finding Amazon lobbyists to scan.

Using Rekognition, Amazon’s commercially available facial recognition software, the activists scanned nearly 14,000 faces, which they cross-checked with a database that enables the people to be identified. They livestreamed the whole process.

The activists were not trying to be creepy for creepiness’s sake. Their goal was to show lawmakers that facial recognition software — which can identify an individual by analyzing their facial features in images, videos, or real time — is an invasive form of surveillance. Over the past few years, the tech has become embedded in high-stakes contexts like law enforcement and immigration; the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Transportation Security Administration all use it.

The activists have one demand: the technology should be banned.

“This should probably be illegal but until Congress takes action to ban facial recognition surveillance, it’s terrifyingly easy for anyone — a government agent, a corporation, or just a creepy stalker — to conduct biometric monitoring and violate basic rights at a massive scale,” said Evan Greer, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, the nonprofit advocacy group that organized Thursday’s action.

The Rekognition system correctly identified one lawmaker, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier of California. It also incorrectly indicated that it had identified several journalists, lobbyists, and even a celebrity — the singer Roy Orbison, who died in 1988 — thereby highlighting one of the main problems with facial recognition: Sometimes, the tech gets it wrong.

If you’re in DC, you can go to ScanCongress.com to see if your face was scanned, too.

Although the activists’ suits were emblazoned with a notice — “Facial recognition in progress” — the group did not ask people if they consent to be scanned. The software on their smartphones just automatically scanned whoever they passed as they walked around.

That sounds unethical, right? The activists agree — and that’s their point: Currently, there’s no law preventing people from scanning your face without your consent anytime you step out in public, and there should be.

“Our message for Congress is simple: make what we did today illegal,” Fight for the Future, which has been advocating for digital rights since its founding in 2011, said after the action.

“Because we’re decent human beings, all this data we’re collecting will be deleted after 2 weeks,” the group promised. “But there’s no law about that. Right now, sensitive facial recognition data can be stored forever.”

The action was part of Fight for the Future’s BanFacialRecognition.com campaign, which has been endorsed by grassroots civil rights organizations like Greenpeace and the Council on American Islamic Relations.

”People should be able to go about their daily lives without worrying that government agencies are keeping tabs on their every movement,” said Carol Rose, executive director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a statement on Thursday’s action. “For too long, face surveillance technology has gone unregulated, posing a serious threat to our basic civil rights and civil liberties.”

The case for banning facial recognition tech

Facial recognition software has encountered a growing backlash over the past few months. Behemoth companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have become mired in controversy over it. San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville have all issued local bans.

Meanwhile, some of the Democratic presidential candidates have articulated how they’d handle the tech if they’re elected. In August, Sen. Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for a total ban on the use of facial recognition software for policing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, and former housing secretary Julián Castro have noted that they’d regulate the technology; they did not promise to ban it.

Some argue that outlawing facial recognition tech is throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Advocates say the software can help with worthy aims, like finding missing children and elderly adults or catching criminals and terrorists. Microsoft President Brad Smith has said it would be “cruel” to altogether stop selling the software to government agencies. This camp wants to see the tech regulated, not banned.

Yet there’s good reason to think regulation won’t be enough. The danger of this tech is not well understood by the general public, and the market for it is so lucrative that there are strong financial incentives to keep pushing it into more areas of our lives in the absence of a ban. AI is also developing so fast that regulators would likely have to play whack-a-mole as they struggle to keep up with evolving forms of facial recognition.

Then there’s the well-documented fact that human bias can creep into AI. Often, this manifests as a problem with the training data that goes into AIs: If designers mostly feed the systems examples of white male faces, and don’t think to diversify their data, the systems won’t learn to properly recognize women and people of color. And indeed, we’ve found that facial recognition systems often misidentify those groups, which could lead to them being disproportionately held for questioning when law enforcement agencies put the tech to use.

In 2015, Google’s image recognition system labeled African Americans as “gorillas.” Three years later, Rekognition wrongly matched 28 members of Congress to criminal mug shots. Another study found that three facial recognition systems — IBM, Microsoft, and China’s Megvii — were more likely to misidentify the gender of dark-skinned people (especially women) than of light-skinned people.

Even if all the technical issues were to be fixed and facial recognition tech completely de-biased, would that stop the software from harming our society when it’s deployed in the real world? Not necessarily, as a recent report from the AI Now Institute explains.

Say the tech gets just as good at identifying black people as it is at identifying white people. That may not actually be a positive change. Given that the black community is already overpoliced in the US, making black faces more legible to this tech and then giving the tech to police could just exacerbate discrimination. As Zoé Samudzi wrote at the Daily Beast, “It is not social progress to make black people equally visible to software that will inevitably be further weaponized against us.”

Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger, a law professor and a philosophy professor, respectively, argued last year that facial recognition tech is inherently damaging to our social fabric. “The mere existence of facial recognition systems, which are often invisible, harms civil liberties, because people will act differently if they suspect they’re being surveilled,” they wrote. The worry is that there’ll be a chilling effect on freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

The authors also note that our faces are something we can’t change (at least not without surgery), that they’re central to our identity, and that they’re all too easily captured from a distance (unlike fingerprints or iris scans). If we don’t ban facial recognition before it becomes more entrenched, they argue, “people won’t know what it’s like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited.”

Luke Stark, a digital media scholar who works for Microsoft Research Montreal, made another argument for a ban in a recent article titled “Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI.”

Comparing software to a radioactive element may seem over the top, but Stark insists the analogy is apt. Plutonium is the biologically toxic element used to make atomic bombs, and just as its toxicity comes from its chemical structure, the danger of facial recognition is ineradicably, structurally embedded within it, because it attaches numerical values to the human face. He explains:

Facial recognition technologies and other systems for visually classifying human bodies through data are inevitably and always means by which “race,” as a constructed category, is defined and made visible. Reducing humans into sets of legible, manipulable signs has been a hallmark of racializing scientific and administrative techniques going back several hundred years.

The mere fact of numerically classifying and schematizing human facial features is dangerous, he says, because it enables governments and companies to divide us into different races. It’s a short leap from having that capability to “finding numerical reasons for construing some groups as subordinate, and then reifying that subordination by wielding the ‘charisma of numbers’ to claim subordination is a ‘natural’ fact.”

In other words, racial categorization too often feeds racial discrimination. This is not a far-off hypothetical but a current reality: China is already using facial recognition to track Uighur Muslims based on their appearance, in a system the New York Times has dubbed “automated racism.” That system makes it easier for China to round up Uighurs and detain them in internment camps.

A ban is an extreme measure, yes. But a tool that enables a government to immediately identify us any time we cross the street is so inherently dangerous that treating it with extreme caution makes sense.

Instead of starting from the assumption that facial recognition is permissible — which is the de facto reality we’ve unwittingly gotten used to as tech companies marketed the software to us unencumbered by legislation — we’d do better to start from the assumption that it’s banned, then carve out rare exceptions for specific cases when it might be warranted.

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President Donald Trump leaves the Oval Office and walks toward Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on November 14, 2019 in Washington, DC. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Don’t fall for it.

President Donald Trump just released a readout of his congenial April phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

You should give it a read — but just know that it’s meant to distract you. That’s because this first phone call was never the problem.

Trump spoke with Zelensky on April 21 to applaud the Ukrainian leader on winning his nation’s presidential election. “I congratulate you on a job well done,” Trump said, according to the White House readout of the call, “and congratulations on a fantastic election.” (The readout states on the first page that it is not a verbatim transcript, but rather a reconstruction based on the notes of White House officials who listened in on the call.)

“Thank you so very much,” Zelensky responded, “and I appreciate the congratulations.”

The rest of the call reads in a similar fashion, though it contains no mention of many issues like corruption that the White House previously said they had discussed.

The White House released the readout right as Friday’s impeachment hearing was getting started. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, used part of his opening statement to stage a dramatic reading of the call summary. The reason, he noted, was to show that Trump held a normal call with the Ukrainian leader.

But the appropriateness of the April call was never in doubt. Many who testified in the impeachment inquiry have said that that conversation was just fine. Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the director for European affairs on the National Security Council, told investigators it was “positive.”

Rather, it’s the call on July 25 between Trump and Zelensky that is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

During that conversation, Zelensky mentioned buying “more Javelins [missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.” Trump immediately responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” Trump then went on to discuss his hope that Ukraine would open an investigation into Democratic candidate and former vice president Joe BIden and Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden — Joe’s son — sat.

Trump continues to say the July call was “perfect,” but it’s clear that it was anything but. That’s why the president and his allies are now promoting the unremarkable April call to distract from the July conversation and make it seem like Trump never did anything wrong.

Don’t fall for it. It’s the July call that matters, not the April one.

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People are more likely to evacuate if they can find safe passage for their pets, too.

Welcome to Laboratories of Democracy, a series for Vox’s The Highlight, where we examine local policies and their impacts.

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The policy: Pet evacuation plans for natural disasters

Where: Nationally

Since: 2006

The problem: It all started with Snowball. In the days after Hurricane Katrina inundated much of the Gulf Coast and burst through the New Orleans levies, the Associated Press reported that a boy had his small white dog Snowball taken from him by a police officer before he could get on a bus to be evacuated to Houston. “The boy cried out — ‘Snowball!’ Snowball!’ — then vomited in distress,” the AP reported.

The story was just one tragedy among thousands during and after Katrina, but it caused a large amount of anguish among pet owners across the country. Reports of thousands of abandoned pets and the many people who refused to leave their homes unless they could take their animals with them sparked a change in evacuation policy and a recognition of the strength of the human-animal bond. As for Snowball, there is some dispute as to whether the dog was ever found. Soon after the initial story was published, a federal government official told USA Today that Snowball had been reunited with its family.

In the massive Katrina evacuation, both out of New Orleans to avoid the floodwaters and then out of the state entirely, “a lot of people had top-down directives to not allow people to take dogs and cats with them, and bringing cats and dogs to sheltering spaces was not thought of. That caused a lot of distress and there was a huge outcry,” Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware who studies evacuation decision-making, said.

The impact of Katrina on animals and their companions was enormous. According to a survey by the Fritz Institute, nearly half of those who chose to stay behind during Katrina said they didn’t want to leave their pets. One Mississippi veterinary official told the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association that about a quarter of the deaths in one county hit hard by the storm came from people staying with their pets rather than evacuating.

While there’s no exact count of the number of pets left behind, estimates range from 200,000 to 600,000 from the over 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast region. Pets continue to be a priority during evacuations — during the recent fires in Northern California, many pets were left behind as people fled the oncoming flames, leading to a large grassroots effort to reunite people and their animals.

The effects on people who lost their pets but survived are dramatic as well. One study of African American single mothers who had been affected by Katrina found: “Pet loss significantly predicted postdisaster distress, above and beyond demographic variables, pre- and postdisaster perceived social support, predisaster distress, hurricane-related stressors, and human bereavement.”

That people refused to leave rather than abandon their pets or were traumatized by losing them should not be a surprise. While this would not be news to nearly any pet owner, many people view companion animals as essentially members of their families.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, David Grimm, the author of Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, said many people saw pets as family members. “People saw animals dying, they see members of people’s families that are dying,” he told Vox.

As anyone who’s ever worked at a general interest news site or a local news station could tell you, people all over the country are intensely interested in pets and deeply, deeply affected by stories of them in danger or separated from people, especially children. “You would see video footage of dogs wading through toxic waters, cats clinging to rooftops, it focused attention not just on the plight of people but the plight of pets,” Grimm told Vox.

The next year, the bitterly divided second Congress of the second Bush administration managed to pass the PETS Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush about a year after Katrina. The law was an amendment to the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, which is the legal framework for much of the government’s role is disaster relief and assistance to local agencies. The PETS Act instructs local government to include pets in their disaster planning. The rubber hits the road largely at the local level, when states mandate that counties and other smaller agencies come up with plans to accommodate pets during disasters.

“There’s language in this that makes sure that FEMA can provide mass care shelter and assistance to states,” DeYoung said. “What that means is that states can request extra support from FEMA because they’re setting up a co-located shelter where they can request funds to offset planning and accommodating.”

How it worked: More than a decade after Hurricane Katrina, several of the states most frequently impacted by disasters requiring evacuations have come up with strategies to help pets and their people.

In North Carolina, for instance, this has meant setting up shelters that allow people and pets to stay together during evacuations for hurricanes, including, according to the Virginian-Pilot, a shelter in Elizabeth City that was set up in a trailer full of “folded animal crates, food bowls, leashes, pooper scoopers and massive rolls of plastic sheeting” during Hurricane Florence last year.

The Virginian-Pilot reported that “emergency officials deployed dozens of the portable pet shelters” and were able to provide housing for “hundreds of animals.”

When Hurricane Matthew hammered the Southeast in 2016, it was well after the PETS Act was in force and national and local attention was firmly focused on the need to incorporate animals into disaster planning. More than 100 pet owners affected by the storm filled out a questionnaire designed by DeYoung and her co-author Ashley Farmer in March 2017: Just over 70 percent evacuated and nearly all of those who had left before or during the storm did so with at least one pet.

But that did not mean they necessarily knew where to go with them. Some reported having to drive farther to find a pet-friendly hotel or having to stay with non-pet-owning relatives. And just because pet-friendly shelters were in operation, that did not mean pet owners necessarily knew about them. While many people looked online for information about where they could bring their pets, the two researchers wrote that some people reported “social media” had informed them there were no shelters they could bring animals to.

But by putting it to locals, there can sometimes be confusion about how mandates from the state and federal government are carried out. The plans sometimes “do not dedicate extensive planning for sheltering and accommodations for pets in emergencies” and can be “unclear why or how the plans at the state level are being delegated to county planners,” DeYoung and two co-authors found in a 2016 paper published in the Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The PETS Act “doesn’t lay out the roadmap” for appropriate services for people and their pets, and states and local agencies are “still trying to figure out what it looks like,” Diane Robinson, the program manager for disaster services at the Humane Society, said, “which is still today a challenge for communities to have disaster plans in place that really meet the demand.” More than 30 states “have laws or emergency operation plans that provide for the evacuation, rescue, and recovery of animals in the event of a disaster,” according to the Michigan State University Animal Legal and Historical Center.

And some people still choose to leave some of their pets behind, DeYoung and Farmer found in their 2019 paper. “‘Outside cats,’ for instance, were left to fend for themselves as they were not used to being inside,” and of the people interviewed, “89 percent of respondents with dogs indicated that they took all pets with them, while 55 percent of respondents with cats took all pets with them.”

Robinson pointed to programs and policies in some of the states most frequently hit by disasters, including North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and California. “The federal government can only do so much; disaster is a local problem that needs a local solution.” When Harvey inundated the Houston area in 2017, one large shelter quickly changed its policies to allow pets inside, NPR reported.

One thing the PETS Act does not do is mandate that hotels and motels accept pets during a mandatory evacuation. According to the fact-checking and debunking website Snopes, false information about this supposed mandate starting popping up during 2017’s hurricane season as Harvey and Irene bore down on the Gulf Coast and East Coast respectively. The rumor was so prevalent that FEMA addressed it on its own webpage, telling pet owners, “Hotels and motels participating in FEMA’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance Program do not fall under the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act,” and that they should instead “call the hotel before you go and ask if pets are permitted.”

This common misconception pops up online frequently during disasters and has to be debunked just as often. “Hotels are not required to accept pets in a mandatory evacuation,” DeYoung said. “Some businesses out of good PR or having human compassion,” will, but that’s hardly a national-level policy.

“We want to see that the owners and their animals are able to be housed closely so that human-animal bond remains,” Robinson said. “It’s very healing for them and comforting for them to spend that time [together], to have that one piece of normalcy in their life where they’re providing care for that animal and not just sitting and waiting.”

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York.

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