SCOOP: Biden's COVID team appears to have entertained a test-and-trace app that would have let businesses deny service to patrons based on their health data.
It also would have divided users into three color-coded categories—just like China did last year.freebeacon.com/coronavirus/co…
The app was pioneered by the University of Illinois, which apparently tried to sell Biden on scaling up the school's contact tracing system. It records test results and Bluetooth data to determine who has been exposed to the virus—and "links building access" to that information.
The system resembles the one being used in China, where a mandatory app gives each user a "health status"—green, yellow, or red—that dictates access to public spaces. The University of Illinois app likewise divides users into three categories: yellow, orange, and red.
The proposal would amount to a more extreme version of so-called vaccine passports. Those passports collect less information and use a less granular classification scheme than the University of Illinois app, meaning they pose relatively fewer risks to civil liberties.
The proposal also threatens to exclude far more Americans from public life than measures like voter ID laws, which progressives have decried as the "new Jim Crow." Only 11% of Americans do not have a government-issued ID, whereas 19% don't own a smartphone.
The system could have enabled faster reopenings at lower risk, without centralizing surveillance in the hands of the federal government. But it would likely have encouraged a form of decentralized surveillance among businesses and local bureaucrats, which poses its own threats.
In order to be effective, the app requires widespread participation—meaning local institutions would have a strong incentive to mandate it, even if they weren't technically required to. That could be the beginning of a kind of social credit system.
The app collects less data, and has more built-in privacy protections, than some other systems. And with over a sixth of the population fully vaccinated, Biden seems to have left it on the chopping block.
But whether it stays there in future crises is an open question.
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EXCLUSIVE: The Trump administration has launched a civil rights probe into the Duke Law Journal based on our reporting—and it's warning that Duke Medical School could be next.
The school could lose ~1 billion in federal aid if it does not make major changes within six months.🧵
The Department of Education will investigate the Duke Law Journal’s 2024 decision to award extra points to applicants who mentioned race and gender in their personal statements.
Candidates could earn up to 10 points for discussing their "membership in an underrepresented group," according to the grading rubric for the essays, and an additional 3-5 points for holding "a leadership position in an affinity group."
NEW: After Prop. 209, UC San Diego transferred a race-based scholarship to a private nonprofit, the San Diego Foundation, so that it could continue the program.
Now both entities are being sued under the KKK Act, which bans conspiracies to interfere with civil rights.🧵
The Ku Klux Klan Act bans conspiracies of both public and private actors that deprive "any person … of the equal protection of the laws." It was passed in 1871 to counter the Klan’s lawless intimidation of black voters.
But it is being used today to challenge UCSD’s Black Alumni Scholarship Fund, which a lawsuit filed on Wednesday describes as a "conspiracy to interfere with civil rights."
EXCLUSIVE: Before she became the acting president of Columbia University, Claire Shipman argued that the school needed to get an "Arab on our board"—and suggested that a Jewish trustee should be removed over her pro-Israel advocacy.🧵
"We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board," Shipman, then the co-chair of Columbia’s board of trustees, wrote in a message on January 17, 2024. "Quickly I think. Somehow."
A week later, Shipman told a colleague that Shoshana Shendelman, one of the board’s most outspoken critics of campus anti-Semitism, had been "extraordinarily unhelpful," adding, "I just don’t think she should be on the board."
SCOOP: The Duke Law Journal sent a secret memo to minority applicants with tips on how to ace the journal's personal statement.
The memo told students they'd get up to 15 extra points for indicating their "membership in an "underrepresented group."🧵
The packet also included four examples of successful personal statements. Three of those essays referenced race in the first sentence. For example: "as an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges."
A fourth student waited until the last paragraph to disclose that she was "a Middle Eastern Jewish woman," an "intersectional identity" she said would "prove useful" in a "collaborative environment."
NEW: The Harvard Law Review axes 85% of pieces using a rubric that asks about "author diversity." It even axed a piece by an Asian scholar after editors complained that there were "not enough Black" authors.
We analyzed 500 new documents from HLR. What we found was shocking.🧵
The law review has insisted that it "does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication."
But it screens out the vast majority of submissions using the following rubric:
40% of editors since 2024 have cited protected characteristics when lobbying for or against articles—at one point killing a piece by an Asian-American scholar, Alex Zhang, after an editor complained that "we have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors."
NEW: The Harvard Law Review retaliated against a student for allegedly leaking documents to yours truly—and demanded he request their destruction in the midst of three federal probes.
Now the journal is being accused of illegally interfering with a government investigation.🧵
The Justice Department told Harvard on May 13 it was investigating reports of race discrimination at the journal. A week later, the law review instructed a student who was cooperating with the DOJ investigation, Daniel Wasserman, to round up the documents he’d allegedly shared.
The journal told Wasserman to "[r]equest that any parties with whom you have shared Confidential Materials … delete or return them to The Review."