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Package bound for Austin explodes at Texas FedEx facility, second package recovered by investigators

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SCHERTZ, Tex. — The latest in a wave of bombings rattling Central Texas brought a widening investigation to this city outside San Antonio on Tuesday, after an explosion at a FedEx facility signaled that whoever was responsible for the attacks had offered police potentially critical new clues while again shifting tactics.

The blast early Tuesday morning — the fifth since March 2 — came as investigators have struggled to explain the bombing campaign that began with a series of packages placed at people’s doorsteps in east Austin, escalated to a tripwire-enabled device left along a residential street and, on Tuesday, shifted to an explosive device shipped through a delivery company. The same person who shipped that explosive also sent another package that was intercepted before delivery and was turned over to the FBI, according to FedEx.

Police have described the unknown attacker as a “serial bomber” who has been showing increasing sophistication and skill. The two explosions on Sunday and Monday also suggested a worrisome — and unusual — willingness to change gears.

[ After fourth Austin explosion, police warn of sophisticated ‘serial bomber’ ]

The bomb in Shertz, Tex., exploded just after midnight while it traveled on an automated conveyor belt at a FedEx center about an hour south of Austin, the city that has been the focus of the blasts. One employee at the center said it caused ringing in her ears, but no one else was wounded, police said.

The package was en route to Austin, according to police, and officials said they think it was the work of the same person or people responsible for the four earlier explosions in the Texas capital. Michael Hansen, the Schertz police chief, said investigators are “confident that neither this facility nor any location in the Schertz area was the target.”

FedEx also said Tuesday that by using the delivery service, the person who shipped the packages left “extensive evidence,” which the company turned over to investigators.

“We have also confirmed that the individual responsible also shipped a second package that has now been secured and turned over to law enforcement,” FedEx said in a statement. “We are thankful that there were no serious injuries from this criminal activity. We have provided law enforcement responsible for this investigation extensive evidence related to these packages and the individual that shipped them collected from our advanced technology security systems.”

[ A century before Austin’s bombings, a deadly Wall Street explosion was never solved ]

Officials initially removed the second package suspecting that it, too, contained an explosive device, but authorities declined to say if they had found an undetonated bomb inside. Law enforcement officials were hopeful that the intact second package could offer a wealth of new clues.

William McManus, the San Antonio police chief, had said Tuesday morning that a second, unexploded device was found at the Schertz facility, but a spokesman for his department backtracked later Tuesday, saying that McManus “misspoke” when making those comments.

The discovery of any unexploded device linked to the case could prove crucial for investigators, because it could lead to the identity of a suspect or suspects; the materials used to assemble a bomb potentially can be traced back to a supplier — and, in many cases, the individual purchaser.

The suspect “is not stupid. He’s being diversified in his methods and attacks, and may have done this before somewhere,’’ said Malcolm Brady, a retired explosives investigator at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. But each new device — and delivery method — offers new potential leads, such as business records, video or other evidence.

“It’s a big jigsaw puzzle, and you put all the pieces of information together and go from there,” he said.

[ Austin bombings and the explosive echoes of the Unabomber ]

Investigators on Tuesday also searched a FedEx facility in Austin — where the package that detonated in Schertz likely would have been sent next — looking for other package bombs there, according to one person familiar with the investigation.

An Austin police spokeswoman said Tuesday afternoon that authorities were responding to a suspicious package at the FedEx facility there, though she said it was not immediately clear if it was connected to the explosion in Schertz.

Brian Manley, the interim Austin police chief, said his department had sent officers to Schertz to help investigate the “new development” there.

“The working theory right now … is that that was a package that was in the shipping center destined for Austin,” he told the Austin City Council on Tuesday morning. All four explosions in Austin have occurred outside the city’s core, which includes downtown, the Texas Capitol and the University of Texas.

McManus had said, during a morning news briefing, that officials believed a second package found at the Schertz facility was “also loaded with an explosive device that they are working on right now.” A spokesman later issued a statement saying: “There is no secondary device at the Schertz facility.”

The confusion and contradictory statements underscored the frantic pace of the investigation, which now includes more than 300 federal agents along with scores of local law enforcement officers in Texas.

President Trump said Tuesday that the federal government is working “hand in hand” with local authorities to “get to the bottom” of the bombings in Austin and find those responsible.

The package that detonated early Tuesday morning is believed to have been sent from a FedEx location in Sunset Valley, an enclave city within Austin, police said.

“The FBI believes that the package that detonated in Schertz may have originated from here,” said Sunset Valley Police Lt. Rich Andreucci.

The police department cordoned off the FedEx storefront — located three miles from the site where a bomb, rigged with a tripwire, detonated Sunday night — but neighboring stores in the shopping center were open.

“The more we’re sitting here, the more we realize it’s serious,” said Jessica Wilkinson, who was celebrating her 37th birthday by having lunch outside with her sister and mother. “It’s just all over the place.”

A mother of two children — ages 8 and 4 — Wilkinson said it’s been a scary time to live in Austin, “but it’s so random, it’s hard to change anything in my day-to-day life to avoid it.”

Her mother, Kellie Metzler, 59, said she thought about texting Wilkinson to say, “Don’t be scared, I sent a couple of packages for your birthday.” Metzler said she was infuriated by the seeming randomness of the bomber’s targets.

“Why pick on people you don’t even know?” Kellie Metzler said. “Not one of them did a thing to you. I just don’t get that.”

[ Police said the first blast was “isolated,” then shifted gears when two more followed ]

The first three bombs — one on March 2 and a pair that detonated March 12 — were in packages dropped off at people’s homes, authorities said. The fourth bomb was placed on the side of the road in a residential neighborhood and was rigged with a tripwire; when it detonated Sunday night, two men walking through the area were wounded.

The first three explosives all detonated in eastern Austin, affecting areas where black and Hispanic residents live, leading to suggestions that they might have been motivated by racial bias. The explosion Sunday night detonated in an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood and injured two white men in their 20s.

Police and experts have pointed to the change in tactics as suggesting the proficiency of whoever is responsible.

“That bomb was very different from the other three,” Manley told the City Council. “The first three appeared to be targeting a specific residence, resident address. And whether they were targeting the person at that address or not, we know they were placed on a specific doorstep at a specific home.”

The device Sunday night, by contrast, was seemingly intended to detonate at random, ratcheting up the fear in a city already unnerved by the package explosions. Police said Tuesday morning that they had received more than 1,200 calls about suspicious packages since March 12, the day two bombs detonated; one-third of the calls came in between Monday morning and Tuesday morning.

Berman, Barrett and Flynn reported from Washington. Matt Zapotosky, Brian Murphy, Julie Tate and Jenna Johnson in Washington contributed to this report, which has been updated.

Read more:

The unique terror of Austin’s deadly package bombs

Austin police search for bombing motive, say explosives made with ‘skill and sophistication’

‘Who did this and why?’: Austin remains tense after deadly bombings as police look for answers

The Health 202: Trump will propose executing drug dealers. But only in some already legal cases.

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THE PROGNOSIS

President Trump has admired Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte as a model for cracking down on drug crimes. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)

President Trump today will emphasize that the death penalty can be extended to drug dealers. But compared to his tough talk about executing a class of people he seems to view as street thugs, the president’s proposal aimed at curbing the opioid epidemic is a little less than it seems.

On a visit to New Hampshire, one of the states hardest-hit by opioid addiction and overdose, Trump will officially propose that his Justice Department pursue stiffer penalties — including capital punishment — for traffickers when appropriate under the law.

That last part is important as the administration had been considering making trafficking in even small doses of fentanyl — a deadly synthetic opioid — a capital offense. But instead, Trump is urging more aggressive prosecution of drug dealers, and only seeking the death penalty when it’s already available.

U.S. law allows for the death penalty to be applied in four types of drug-related cases, according to the Death Penalty Information Center: murder committed during a drug-related drive-by shooting, murder committed with the use of a firearm during a drug-trafficking crime, murder related to drug trafficking and murder of a law-enforcement officer that relates to drugs.

The measures are part of a three-pronged approach to fighting opioid abuse and overdose the White House rolled out last night. It’s aimed at reducing the demand for opioids by slowing overprescribing, cutting off the supply of illicit drugs and helping those who are addicted, my colleague Katie Zezima reports.

“The opioid crisis is viewed by us at the White House as a nonpartisan problem searching for a bipartisan solution,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters.

For weeks, whenever the president mentioned opioid abuse, he has praised the leaders of countries where people are executed for drug crimes, or even shot in cold blood. Exhibit A: Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, whose brutal campaign to crack down on illicit drug has resulted in the deaths of more than 12,000 people without due process, as police and hired guns have slaughtered suspected users and distributors on the streets and in their homes.

Trump applauded Duterte last spring for doing an “unbelievable job” in combating the illegal drug trade, and after meeting with Duterte in November he said the two have a “great relationship.” Last month, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Trump often compares drug dealers to serial killers and advocates they get the death sentence, as in the Philippines and a handful of other countries mostly in Asia and the Middle East.

And a week ago, at a political rally in Pennsylvania, the president again suggested the United States should join the handful of other countries in allowing capital punishment for drug crimes.

“You kill 5,000 people with drugs because you’re smuggling them in, and you are making a lot of money and people are dying,” Trump said, prompting cheers from the gathered crowd. “And they don’t even put you in jail. That’s why we have a problem, folks. I don’t think we should play games.”

Trump’s “tough guy” stance stood in stark contrast to the more measured approach preferred by some of his top administrators, such as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. Azar has gone out of his way to stress better treatment as key to quashing the epidemic.

The United States is one of 32 countries with death penalty laws for drug offenses, but only seven nations actually conduct executions routinely, according to a March report from Harm Reduction International. They include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as China and Singapore, two countries Trump also referred to as examples of ways he thinks the United States should approach the issue.

(The Philippines doesn’t actually allow the death penalty for drug crimes, but executions are being carried out ad hoc under Duterte as noted above.)

Ashok Kumar, Singapore’s U.S. ambassador, argued in a recent letter to The Washington Post that his country is one of the few that have kept drug abuse under control through its “clearheaded approach,” which includes education, rehab programs — and stiff penalties.

But experts in drug law say there’s no evidence that capital punishment on its own reduces dealing or drug use — and it could even worsen the behavior. The most likely scenario is that lower-level operators, such as drug runners, would be caught and executed while organized criminal leaders remained free to carry on their activities, Georgetown Law professor Larry Gostin told me.

“In the case of trafficking, the economic rewards are so lucrative and the supply networks so sophisticated that, in my view, it would provide no deterrent to organized crime,” Gostin said.

Iran, for example, has one of the highest addiction rates in the world. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, 2.2 million people — nearly 3 percent of the population — are hooked on drugs. Yet Iran also carries out more executions per capita for drug offenses than any other country, with 242 people executed last year, according to HRI.

Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan also said he sees no scientific evidence that executing drug dealers deters dealing or drug use. “It’s not a smart policy, even if it has some emotional appeal,” Fagan told me.

But it’s well known that Trump acts — and speaks — from his gut, not necessarily because he believes there’s evidence to support his views. From his own blunt rhetoric, he has made clear he admires the same trait in other world leaders, even leaders such as Duterte who show a blatant disregard for human rights.

Duterte announced Wednesday that he’s withdrawing the Philippines from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, which is looking into his violent campaign to determine whether it justifies an official investigation into charges of crimes against humanity. Duterte said the decision to withdraw was because of “baseless, unprecedented and outrageous attacks” by U.N. officials and an attempt by the ICC prosecutor to seek jurisdiction “in violation of due process and presumption of innocence.”

And last year, Duterte said this: “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. There are 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them … You destroy my country, I kill you. It’s a legitimate thing. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you.”

HealthCare.gov (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

AHH: Many Obamacare insurers turned a profit for the first time last year after three years of pretty heavy losses. Politico’s Paul Demko writes premium spikes led to the profitable year, citing analysis of financial filings of 29 regional Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Steven Udvarhelyi, CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, told Paul that 2017 “was the first year we got our head above water in the individual market since the ACA passed.”

“The healthier balance sheets are a welcome development for insurers after three years of major Obamacare losses, estimated at more than $15 billion by McKinsey,” Paul writes. “That led many national insurers, including UnitedHealth Group and Aetna, to flee the law’s marketplaces, in some cases leaving Blue Cross Blue Shield plans as the only option for customers.”

But one profitable year doesn’t totally rescue insurers from potential instability moving ahead. The Trump administration is expected to finalize a rule making it easier to buy cheaper plans that are exempt from parts of the health-care law, following Congress’s repeal of the law’s individual mandate. These big changes to the law are weighing on insurers as they decide what to do for 2019.

This file photo shows a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logo at the agency’s federal headquarters in Atlanta. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

OOF: The leading candidate to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is Robert Redfield, a longtime AIDS researcher who is well-respected for his work but once expressed a controversial position on HIV testing, our colleague Lena H. Sun reports.

Redfield was previously floated as a candidate for the top post at the CDC as well as at the National Institutes of Health under other GOP admnistrations, Lena writes. He would fill the role left vacant by Brenda Fitzgerald, who stepped down in January amid reports that she had investments in tobacco, drug and food stocks while heading the CDC.

Redfield is a former Army physician, and currently the director of clinical care and research at the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He oversees a major clinical program providing HIV care and treatment to more than 6,000 patients in the Baltimore-Washington region and a care program that is part of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. He has also served as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.

In the early 1990s, while he was an AIDS researcher in the Army, Redfield stirred controversy over an experimental AIDS vaccine that ultimately failed. “He had been known as a strong supporter of mandatory patient testing for HIV during the 1980s, at a time before effective treatments were available and intense stigma surrounded people infected with the virus,” Lena writes. Some felt the policies he advocated weren’t embracing sound public health approaches to the AIDS epidemic and were stigmatizing of those who were infected.

Trump speaks during an opioids event at the White House in October. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

OUCH: Watch out, opioid epidemic. Six months after Trump declared opioid abuse a public health emergency, his administration has a detailed plan for how it plans to counter the abuse and overdose crisis. We wrote extensively above about the penalties it’s proposing, but the plan officials released yesterday also calls for a slew of other policies to limit access to opioids and improve education. Here are some of the White House’s goals and strategies, per Katie:

  • Sharply reduce the number of painkillers that are prescribed nationwide, aiming to slash opioid prescriptions by one-third over three years.
  • Tighten the number of opioid prescriptions that can be reimbursed by Medicaid as a way to curb overprescribing.
  • Create a national prescription-drug monitoring system so suspicious prescriptions can be flagged. Right now, each state operates its own, and a few states have data-sharing agreements.

  • Test all federal inmates for opioid addiction and provide options for treatment when inmates complete their sentences and reenter society.

  • Put more naloxone, a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses, in the hands of more first responders. 

The Supreme Court is set to hear a major free-speech case on Tuesday related to information about abortion services. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

— Tomorrow, the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in a major case on free-speech rights for antiabortion “crisis” pregnancy centers, a hearing The Health 202 wrote about in November. The Post’s Robert Barnes reports from Gilroy, Calif., about clinics that are challenging a new state law requiring them to publicly post a notice informing clients about the availability of free or low-cost access to family-planning services, including abortion.

These centers say they’re being forced to deliver a message antithetical to their mission: encouraging women to carry out their pregnancies rather than end them. But California cites Supreme Court precedent upholding those abortion language requirements in contending it is requiring the clinic to deliver only a neutral and factual message, Bob reports. The message “doesn’t move in one direction or another on the political spectrum,” either in encouraging abortion or discouraging it, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra told Bob.

“We were trying to figure out the way to best get information to people about their health-care options and their rights,” Becerra said. “And this is a pretty straightforward way — neutral way — of getting that information to women.”

Abortion-rights advocates could ironically benefit in other ways, even if they lose this particular case. “If the court rules broadly against the government’s ability to have centers deliver its message, some abortion rights supporters wonder whether the same reasoning could work in their favor in other cases,” Robert writes. “They might challenge dozens of state laws that require doctors and others to deliver certain information to women about the alleged dangers that accompany abortion.”

Abortion rights supporters and opponents rally in the Texas state capitol. (AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa)

— On Friday, the National Academy of Sciences released the first in-depth report in more than 40 years about the state of science on abortion safety and quality in the United States. The work — conducted with support from six private foundations — found that abortions done in a clinic or with drugs appear to be safe in the vast majority of cases, The Post’s Ariana Eunjung Cha reports. Among the study’s interesting takeaways:

  • Legal abortions in the United States, whether by medication or the three major surgical methods, “are safe and effective.”
  • The quality of abortion care depends on where a woman lives.
  • Ninety-five percent of abortions are at clinics or other office-based settings.
  • Despite much speculation about abortion’s impact on future childbearing, the science shows that the procedure does not appear to increase the risk of secondary infertility, pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders, abnormal placentation, preterm birth or breast cancer.
  • Having an abortion does not appear to be linked to such mental-health consequences as depression, anxiety, and/or post-traumatic stress disorder.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

—Four former FDA commissioners say the “Right to Try” legislation the GOP-led House is teeing up for another vote would put vulnerable patients in danger, our colleague Laurie McGinley reports. Robert Califf and Margaret Hamburg, who led the FDA under the Obama administration, and Mark McClellan and Andrew von Eschenbach, who served under George W. Bush, sent a statement to lawmakers provided to The Post. “There is no evidence that either bill would meaningfully improve access for patients, but both would remove the FDA from the process and create a dangerous precedent that would erode protections for vulnerable patients,” they warned.

“Right to Try” would allow seriously ill patients to bypass the FDA in order to get access to experimental drugs. A Senate version of the bill passed over the summer. The House version failed to pass last week 259-140, seven votes short of the two-thirds threshold needed to pass a bill under suspension of the rules, a procedure typically reserved only for non-controversial legislation. Afterwards, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said lawmakers would try again to pass the legislation with only a majority vote.

–A few more good reads from The Post and beyond:

Coming Up

  • The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations holds a hearing on the DEA’s role in combating the opioid crisis on Tuesday.
  • The Senate Finance Committee holds a hearing on the nominations of “John J. Bartrum, of Indiana, to be an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services and Lynn A. Johnson, of Colorado, to be Assistant Secretary for Family Support, Department of Health and Human Services” on Tuesday.
  • The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health holds a hearing on “Implementation of MACRA’s Physician Payment Policies” on Wednesday.
  • The Atlantic holds an event on “The State of Care” on Wednesday.
  • Politico holds an event on “How to Improve Health Care in Nursing Homes and Bend the Cost Curve” on Wednesday.
  • The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health holds a hearing on the opioid crisis on Wednesday.
  • The Alliance for Health Policy, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the National Institute for Health Care Management hold a webinar on Thursday.

On Saturday Night Live, Anderson Cooper interviews members of a White House in turmoil: 

And on Weekend Update, SNL interviews Kate McKinnon as Education Secretary Betsy Devos: 

Watch the moment a family was reunited with a German shepherd that United Airlines mistakenly shipped to Japan:

Facebook’s New Controversy Shows How Easily Online Political Ads Can Manipulate You

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The questions surrounding the role of Facebook and other social media sites in the politics of our time have been coming at what feels like an accelerating pace. Reporting by the Observer, the Guardian and the New York Times in recent days has revealed that Cambridge Analytica — the social media monitoring firm that bragged it helped put Trump in the White House — had gained access before the election to the data of 50 million Facebook users through highly questionable means. Cambridge Analytica used to that data to create a tool of “psychological warfare” to manipulate American voters with targeted Facebook ads and social media campaigns. This news has painted the national discussion over social media’s impact on national politics in a stark new light. There was already a debate raging about how targeted digital ads and messages from campaigns, partisan propagandists and even Russian agents were sowing outrage and division in the U.S. electorate. Now it appears that Cambridge Analytica took it one step farther, using highly sensitive personal data taken from Facebook users without their knowledge to manipulate them into supporting Donald Trump. This scandal raises major questions about how this could have happened, how it can be stopped and whether the connection between data-driven ads and democracy is fundamentally toxic.

The bombshells are dropping so fast in this story about social media and the 2016 election, it is hard to keep up. Recall that just last week, Washington was aflutter over allegations from Brad Parscale, head of digital media strategy for President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run and the man who led the partnership with Cambridge Analytica, who tweeted on February 24 that his boss’ campaign had a massive advantage using Facebook advertising to reach voters. Parscale, who is now chief of Trump’s 2020 efforts, said his candidate’s Facebook ads were 100 or 200 times more cost-effective than those placed by the Clinton campaign for the presidency. Facebook quickly shared proprietary data illustrating that the two campaigns paid roughly the same aggregate sums to reach voters — and that the Trump campaign actually paid more on average than the Clinton campaign.

Now in light of the Cambridge Analytica headlines, it is clear that price of the advertising wasn’t the real story. The real story is about how personal data from social media is being used by companies to manipulate voters and distort democratic discourse. In this regard, it appears the Trump campaign had a decisive and ill-gotten advantage in the quest to exploit personal data to influence voters. And they used it to the hilt.

This is all very alarming. And as the days follow and the details are parsed about how this happened and who is to blame for malign social media advertising, we should not lose sight of a more basic question. As they stand, are the ways that social media sites use personal data to sell and publish political ads good for democracy in the first place?

On the internet, you don’t know much about the political ads you’re shown. You often don’t know who is creating them, since the disclaimers are so small, if they exist at all. You also don’t really know who else is seeing them. Sure, you can share a political ad — thus fulfilling the advertiser’s hopes — and then at least some other people you know will have witnessed the same ad. But you don’t really know if your neighbor has seen it, let alone someone else across the state or the country. In addition, digital advertising companies distribute ads based on how likely you are to interact with them. This most often means that they send you ads they think you are likeliest to engage with. They don’t determine what the nature of that engaging content might be — but they know (just as all advertisers do) that content works well if it makes you very emotional. An ad like that doesn’t make you contemplative or curious, it makes you elated, excited, sad or angry. It could make you so angry, in fact, that you’ll share it and make others angry — which in turn gives the ad free publicity, effectively making the advertiser’s purchase cheaper per viewer, since they pay for the initial outreach and not the shares. (This last bit is precisely what made Parscale proud.)

What this can lead to is communities and, eventually, a nation infuriated by things others don’t know about. The information that makes us angriest becomes the information least likely to be questioned. We wind up stewing over things that, by design, few others can correct, engage with or learn from. A Jeffersonian public square where lots of viewpoints go to mingle, debate and compromise, this is not.

The reason you don’t know about all of these things is the same reason that we as citizens should be worried: the whole system operates in the darkness of proprietary data and algorithmic processes at internet companies. Unless they tell us how they use the data they collect about us and design their targeting algorithms, we can only guess.

It’s important to distinguish what is new about this process. There are similarities here to the world of broadcast political ads — which itself is a cesspool. If a campaign produces a profoundly noxious ad, it might get some extra coverage in the news about how the ad was especially outrageous, meaning more people see it but at no additional cost. But producing and buying airtime for a TV ad is a lot more expensive and reaches a lot fewer people than if a political organization can make a toxic ad go viral on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and reach millions of people. Plus, when that organization does this on TV, it is transparent to everyone what it’s doing because the ad is on TV, and the organization is required by law to put its name on the ad and survive regulatory scrutiny. If a political organization does the same thing on a social media platform, it is, again, only visible to the people you targeted and those they share it with. And labels showing who bought the ad are often not all that they could be. (The companies say they are fixing this — and if they don’t, then regulation probably will compel it.)

TV stations also don’t have nearly as much detailed information about what makes their viewers react. But social media sites do. This gives political groups and campaigns incredible power — and is the secret sauce of the Internet advertising business, since it also proffers commercial advertisers the same ability. Here’s how it works.

First, the campaign collects as many email addresses from as many places as possible from potential supporters. Sometimes they take the voter file itself (the public list of all registered voters) and use data-mining techniques to match names and home addresses with email addresses. Next, the campaign uploads that massive list of email addresses into a social media service. Facebook, for example, can match the email addresses to individual users to create a “Custom Audience.” This is where Cambridge Analytica had a huge advantage, since they had the private Facebook data themselves and did not need to rely on guesswork to match email addresses and Facebook pages to actual voters. This audience can then be sliced and diced into different demographic groups, right down to people’s political and cultural preferences and biases. Here again, Cambridge Analytica may well have used their own private data stash to figure out ways to target specific voters with specific messages by studying their past behavior on Facebook. These filtered groups can then be tested to see which people respond well to which messages. From there, Facebook has another tool called “Lookalike Audiences” — as do other sites – that will find people that are similar to those designated in any given slice of the Custom Audience. Then the campaign buys ads that deliver the messages that Facebook data confirms people want to hear — turning up the outrage and sensation factor to get attention (ideally for free).

All of this does not add up to sites like Facebook and Twitter intentionally undermining Hillary Clinton. It is simply the nature of ad tech and social media: use personal data to divide up classes of the American population like barn animals, then feed us highly personalized messages designed to push our particular buttons so well that we share them and they go viral, thus keeping people on the site longer. Social media rewards provocation — again, without repercussion, since we usually only share content with our friends in a way that is largely invisible to the broader public. Morality and integrity count little in online advertising.

The real question here isn’t which campaign got the advantage. The real question is whether this micro-targeted free-for-all should be allowed in the political sphere at all in the way it is currently designed —with very little transparency about who is pulling these strings and how they are doing it.

When Russian trolls used social media to manipulate the voting public — apparently even more cost-effectively than the Trump campaign — it triggered a national scandal along with demands that the social media companies be held accountable for letting it happen. But when our own political parties do this to us, we often turn a blind eye. It’s politics as usual. Perhaps it is time to reconsider how and when we should set appropriate restrictions on the use of social media for political communications, especially as another set of national elections is just around the corner.

Beyond basic commitments to assure the privacy and security of their personal data, voters have a right to know who is trying to send them political messages and how they are doing it. They should know who bought the ads, how much they spent and what particular demographic audiences were targeted. They should be able to look at all the ads run by the people trying to reach them. This should notbe a database available somewhere on the Internet that normal users would never visit. It should be pushed forward as a part of the ad, so that it is easy to click and see the data right there. Beyond that, social media sites should take action against any political communicator that tries to break the rules. Facebook has responded to the Cambridge Analytica story to say that the technique used to extract data from 50 million users is no longer allowed. But no one is sure exactly what types of sensitive personal data are already out there or who possesses them — making it likely that efforts at voter exploitation will continue. For this reason, the companies should continue to develop better algorithmic detection systems to discover attempts to mislead prospective voters and act against them before or soon after they are disseminated.

But the American public must be wary, since the drive toward total transparency is unlikely to come from the politicians currently in power — or the tech companies themselves, even after they adopt some laudable measures. If there is anything we should learn from the Cambridge Analytica revelations, it is that unless things change, we can expect the spread of disinformation and the systemic manipulation of voters to happen all over again, not only in U.S. national elections but throughout the world. Because if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that these tools are effective.

All six victims of Florida bridge collapse accounted for, officials say

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Police confirmed that they are reviewing reports that construction workers told of hearing a loud cracking noise from the structure about 8 a.m. Thursday, almost six hours before the collapse.

“That’s all part of the investigation,” said Juan Perez, director of the Miami-Dade Police Department.

At 9 a.m. Thursday, FIU contractors working on the project held a two-hour meeting to discuss a crack in the span. However, the lead engineer concluded that “there were no safety concerns, and the crack did not compromise the structural integrity of the bridge,” according to an FIU statement early Saturday, which added that representatives of the school and the state transportation department also attended.

The bridge crashed onto the road at 1:47 p.m.

[Florida bridge engineer reported crack two days before collapse, state says ]

National Transportation Safety Board investigators identified pieces of the bridge structure Saturday to collect as evidence to “understand the collapse sequence and what caused it,” said NTSB spokesman Christopher O’Neil.Investigators also gathered documents on the span’s design, construction and inspections, he said.

The NTSB’s lead investigator in the collapse, Robert Accetta, has said crews were working at the north end of the span when it fell. They were applying force “designed to strengthen” one of 10 diagonal elements connecting the walkway and an overhead section. Those diagonal pieces, known as members, are “integral parts” of the structure, Accetta said.

“There were two cables that they were working on at that time,” Accetta said Friday evening. “They were internal to that diagonal member.”

He said it is unclear whether the collapse started in that area, and investigators have not determined whether the tightening of those cables “was related to the cracks that they discovered.”

“A crack in a bridge does not necessarily mean that it’s unsafe,” Accetta said.

NTSB Chairman Robert L. Sumwalt III said investigators also “want to look at how the contractors identified risk and mitigated those risks associated with the construction of this bridge.”

Late Friday, Florida officials revealed that a lead engineer for the private contractor had left a voice mail for a Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) official Tuesday, two days before the bridge fell, warning of “some cracking.”

The engineer, who works for FIGG Bridge Engineers, reported that he did not consider the cracking a safety issue. The state official was out of the office on assignment and did not hear the message until Friday, after the collapse, the department said.

On Wednesday, an FDOT consultant received a call from an employee of Bolton Perez Associates, the firm hired by the FIU team to oversee construction safety, alerting him to a meeting the following day concerning the bridge, FDOT said. The university said FIGG and the construction firm, Munilla Construction Management (MCM), called a Thursday meeting “to discuss a crack that appeared on the structure.”

During that meeting, a state consultant met with members of the project team but was not told of a safety problem, FDOT said. The state had done a preliminary safety review of the bridge’s design but did not oversee construction safety, a state transportation department official said Friday.

An FDOT spokesman referred safety questions to FIU on Friday, saying it was the university’s project.

At the Saturday briefing, FIU President Mark Rosenberg did not elaborate on FIU’s knowledge of the crack.

“We are cooperating fully with the authorities,” Rosenberg said.

Asked whether he believed that reporting the cracking to the state through a voice-mail message represented “due diligence,” Rosenberg declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said he was frustrated that state and university officials were “pointing fingers at the other guy.”

“Whose responsibility was it?” Nelson asked. “If there was a two-hour meeting that occurred from 9 to 11, and the bridge collapsed . . . just a few hours later, then somebody needs to be held accountable.”

Police identified four victims as Oswald Gonzalez, 57; Alberto Arias, 53; Navarro Brown; and Rolando Fraga Hernandez.

Brown died at a hospital, police said. Hernandez was in a gold Jeep Cherokee pulled from the rubble at 5:40 a.m. Saturday, and Gonzalez and Arias were in a white Chevrolet extricated at 7 a.m., police said. Police did not release the names of the final two victims Saturday night. Relatives have confirmed the death of Alexa Duran, 18, according to media accounts.

Perez said chaplains were with victims’ families, and workers held moments of silence as vehicles were brought out “so these victims can have some dignity.”

Martin Weil contributed to this report.