Watching the footage, nearly six months later, is a kind of compulsive ghost-hunting. In the antiseptic stare of the surveillance camera, even the most ordinary interactions are deformed, made weird only by what we know now. It is unnerving because it ends in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. It is unnerving because even with his every movement laid out, the grotesquely composed protagonist of this film gives away nothing.
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10 Minutes. 12 Gunfire Bursts. 30 Videos. Mapping the Las Vegas Massacre.
The shots began at 10:05. Twelve bursts of gunfire later, the police broke down Stephen Paddock’s door at the Mandalay Bay. The Times mapped 30 videos to draw perhaps the most complete picture to date of what happened.
By MALACHY BROWNE, DREW JORDAN, NICOLE FINEMAN and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date October 21, 2017.
The faces of hotel guests and staff are blurred to preserve their privacy, reducing them to smudges that crisscross the screen at random. Mr. Paddock is the only person who appears throughout, the Waldo whose distinctive frame and faintly lopsided gait our eyes quickly learn to seek out in every frame. The clips begin when he appears and end after he leaves. The other people are little more than a backdrop.
Except that some of them may become his victims. And some are already his unwitting accomplices.
Over and over in the clips, Mr. Paddock is seen leaving the Mandalay Bay for his home in Mesquite, returning with a dark minivan loaded with suitcases. Over and over, valets take his keys; over and over, bellhops stack his luggage on gold carts, helping him transport at least 21 bags over the course of seven days. As they take the service elevator upstairs, Mr. Paddock chats with them. He cracks a joke. He tips.
They have no idea that the suitcases they are so conscientiously carrying are full of guns and ammunition.
Mandalay Bay employees are virtually the only people with whom Mr. Paddock interacts in the surveillance footage. He checks in at the V.I.P. desk, eats alone at the resort’s sushi restaurant, makes snack runs to the gift shop and gambles at the high-stakes video poker machines. Casino hosts greet him as a regular. Security cameras capture him with arms aloft, celebrating a $1,000 win.
But his movements are otherwise sedate, deliberate, unobtrusive, so much so that when he raises a hand to scratch his face in the elevator at one point, the extra movement registers as significant, even sinister.
Toward the end of the footage, two guests carrying shiny plastic inner tubes get off the elevator, padding out in flip-flops. Mr. Paddock pauses to let them off, then gets on.
It is the afternoon of Sept. 30. They seem to be on their way to the pool. He is on his way upstairs, where his guns await.
President Trump took the first steps toward imposing tariffs on $60 billion in Chinese goods and limiting China’s ability to invest in the U.S. technology industry Thursday, saying the moves were a response to Beijing’s history of forcing U.S. companies to surrender their trade secrets to do business in China.
The president directed U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer to announce within 15 days a proposed list of products to be hit with tariff increases. After a public comment period, the final list, designed to target Chinese products that benefited from improper access to U.S. technology, will be made public.
“We’re doing things for this country that should have been done for many, many years,” the president said before signing a memorandum setting in motion the trade actions.
The president blamed China for the loss of 60,000 factories and 6 million jobs, a number that most economists say blends the impact on U.S. employment of both Chinese competition and automation.
Trump said that unfair Chinese trade practices are responsible for the yawning U.S. trade deficit with China, which has reached a record $375 billion on his watch.
“Anyway you look at it, it’s the largest of any country in the history of our world,” the president said. “It’s out of control.”
The White House expects the new taxes, which could reach up to 1,300 specific imports, will have a “minimal impact” upon consumers.
“There is no way to impose $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports without it having a negative impact on American consumers. Make no mistake, these tariffs may be aimed at China, but the bill will be charged to American consumers who will pay more at the checkout for the items they shop for every day,” said Hun Quach, vice president for international trade at the retail Industry Leaders Association.
Trump and his aides provided varying estimates of the value of the Chinese goods at issue. The president referred in his Roosevelt Room remarks to “about $60 billion” while a senior White House aide who briefed reporters two hours before the president spoke put the figure at “about $50 billion.”
The official can not be identified under the ground rules for such White House briefings.
Trump also ordered Lighthizer to complain to the World Trade Organization about China’s discriminatory licensing practices for foreign companies, an effort U.S. officials hope will draw support from U.S. allies in Europe and Japan.
On Capitol Hill Thursday, Lighthizer said that several U.S. allies would be spared unrelated tariffs on imported steel and aluminum — at least temporarily — while they negotiate possible permanent exemptions.
Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee that the European Union, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Korea will not be hit by the tariffs, which take effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday. Trump already had exempted Canada and Mexico from the import levies for the duration of talks aimed at renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The president described the actions against China as part of a broader reappraisal of U.S. global relationships, featuring a willingness to use tariff threats to force concessions from U.S. trading partners.
“We will end up negotiating these things rather than fighting over them,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, in an apparent reference to fears of a trade war.
The president also alluded to political calculations, saying that voter concerns over economic losses from bad trade deals was “maybe one of the main reasons” he won the White House.
“The era of economic surrender is over,” added Vice President Michael Pence.
But the trade moves drew fire from the conservative National Taxpayers Union’s Bryan Riley, who called the proposed China tariffs “self-destructive and reckless.”
Under the measures targeting Beijing announced Thursday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will draw up new investment restrictions to address concerns about Chinese investors, including state-sponsored investment funds, acquiring American companies to gain access to their technology.
“The end objective of this is to get China to modify its unfair trading practices,” said Everett Eissenstat, deputy assistant to the president for international economic affairs.
Since taking office 14 months ago, the president’s remarks on China have swung between effusive praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping and tough talk about its trade practices. In recent months, Trump has adopted an increasingly bellicose tone, with the White House billing Thursday’s action as “targeting China’s economic aggression” and the president’s trade agenda released in February labeling the country a “hostile” economic power.
“China is engaged in practices which harm this country,” said Peter Navarro, director of the White House office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
Trump’s trade moves potentially mark a sharp break with decades of growing U.S. economic engagement with China, which began in the late 1970s as the country emerged from Maoist autarky.
Years of commercial delegations and diplomatic dialogue saw trade between the two countries mushroom to $635 billion from $116 billion in 2000. Yet at the same time, U.S. companies complained about strict restraints on their operations in the Chinese market. Government regulations typically limited them to a minority stake alongside a local partner.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations sought to persuade the Chinese to embrace more fully a market-oriented policy. Through 2013, when a high-level Communist Party conclave proclaimed a “decisive role” for the market and officials promised to pare back the state’s role in the economy, U.S. officials believed China was headed in the right direction.
“That process has failed,” said Navarro.
Trump administration officials now say that China’s economic policies are distorting global markets for key products such as steel. and threaten to have the same effect on more advanced industries like semiconductors and artificial intelligence.
Washington’s long-standing belief that increased economic ties between the world’s two largest economies would benefit the Chinese and American peoples have been scrapped by the Trump team. “China benefits far more from the U.S.-China relationship than the U.S. does,” Navarro said.
China has repeatedly urged the United States to refrain from taking action that might provoke a trade war, arguing that both countries would be hurt.
Premier Li Keqiang this week urged Washington to “act rationally instead of being led by emotions,” while the China Daily newspaper urged the administration to “come to its senses” and stop pushing for a trade war.
Chinese media has repeatedly hinted at retaliation against U.S. soybean imports or orders of Boeing aircraft.
Li also took a conciliatory step this week, promising that China would open its economy further to foreign companies and investors and not force them to surrender their technology.
But Li conditioned any such opening on the U.S.removing its restrictions on high-tech exports to China, which Washington refuses on national security grounds.
“We all know that in trade it is unrealistic and unreasonable to pursue absolute equivalence,” Hua Chunying, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, said Thursday. “…If the U.S. on one hand wants China to buy what it wants to sell, while on the other hand refuses to sell to China what China wants, and makes accusations against China about trade imbalances: Is this fair?”
Simon Denyer in Beijing contributed to this report.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appealed to State Department employees on Thursday to maintain their integrity and to be kind in a “mean-spirited town” as he bid farewell to the staff he led for barely a year.
Tillerson urged a few hundred employees gathered in the main lobby of the Harry S. Truman Building to show respect for each other and to undertake one act of kindness a day. He drew sustained applause when he added: “This can be a very mean-spirited town. But you don’t have to choose to participate in that. Each of us get to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we will treat others.”
Tillerson, 66, was fired by President Trump on March 13. He officially learned of his dismissal through a Trump tweet saying that CIA Director Mike Pompeo would be his replacement.
Tillerson had rebuffed suggestions he would resign amid a series of White House leaks over the previous months, apparently calculated to shame him into leaving, and lately had insisted he would be at the State Department through the end of the year, if not longer.
In his speech, Tillerson did not mention Trump by name but invoked the values of respect, integrity, honesty and accountability, all core attributes he cited at meet-and-greet gatherings with embassy employees around the world.
Outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson waves as he walks out of the doors of the State Department on March 22, 2018. (Susan Walsh/AP)
“Never lose sight of your most valuable asset, the most valuable asset you possess: your personal integrity,” Tillerson said. “Only you can relinquish it or allow it to be compromised. Once you’ve done so, it is very, very hard to regain it.”
“I hope you will continue to treat each other with respect,” he continued. “Regardless of the job title, the station in life or your role, everyone is important to the State Department. We’re all just human beings trying to do our part.”
Tillerson officially remains secretary of state until March 31, but he has turned over the day-to-day running of the agency to his deputy, John Sullivan. In a speech, Sullivan said Tillerson was returning to his ranch in Texas later in the day.
“His work for our country, leading the department, his voice for peace, for humanitarian assistance has been an inspiration for me,” Sullivan said. “And I was honored — have been honored to work for him, to have been selected by him to serve as deputy secretary of state.”
All secretaries of state make their ritual arrival and farewell speeches in the lobby of the building where Tillerson spoke the day he first entered it on Feb. 2, 2017, and again on Thursday.
Many speak from the stairway to a mezzanine so they can be viewed by all in the jam-packed room. But Tillerson addressed the crowd from the lobby floor, standing in front of a wall plaque dedicated to State Department employees who have been killed in the line of duty. It was a poignant nod to Tillerson’s concern for the safety of his staff. He often spoke of waking up in the morning wondering whether everyone was safe.
The crowd of assembled of employees Thursday was noticeably sparser than usual. A large number of senior officials have resigned or taken early retirement, in part because they did not want to serve the Trump administration but also because they considered Tillerson remote and instrumental in their being sidelined in U.S. foreign policy.
Among those in the crowd was Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary who was fired when he contradicted the White House version of Tillerson’s dismissal. Goldstein told reporters that his boss had not spoken to the president that morning and had no idea why he was being replaced.
Although some had mixed views of Tillerson’s brief tenure — and some were highly critical — many thought he had been treated shabbily by the White House.
Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert who served under six secretaries of state, tweeted that Tillerson, who had the shortest tenure of any top diplomat in modern U.S. history, “never had a chance and was treated in a cruel/humiliating manner.”
But criticism still followed Tillerson as he walked out the door.
John Kirby, a former State Department spokesman who now works as an analyst on CNN, tweeted, “Tillerson deserves credit for being a gentleman a man of integrity. But we should not forget the degree to which he failed to: advance a cohesive foreign policy . . . promote respect the expertise of career diplomats . . . and fight for the resources the State Dept sorely needs.”
Tillerson’s 14 months at the helm of State Department were marked by several disagreements with the president he served. Tillerson urged Trump not to withdraw the United States from international commitments made by the previous administration, such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal, which Trump is contemplating leaving.
Trump in turn repeatedly undercut Tillerson, often contradicting his top diplomat’s measured statements with a breezy tweet. Their relationship never seemed to recover after Tillerson reportedly was overheard referring to Trump as a “moron,” a remark Tillerson never denied, calling it beneath his dignity. Trump later offered to compare IQ test results.
In leaving an administration where federal employees are sometimes denigrated as being part of a “deep state” intent on derailing Trump’s agenda, Tillerson expressed appreciation for the contributions made by State Department employees. He thanked employees “from the mailroom to the seventh floor and all points in between.” The seventh floor is where Tillerson and his senior aides have offices.
“The country faces many challenges,” he said, “in some instances perplexing foreign affairs relationships, and in other instances serious national security threats. In these times, your continued diligence and devotion to the State Department’s mission has never been more necessary.”
“H.R. McMaster has served his country with distinction for more than 30 years. He has won many battles and his bravery and toughness are legendary,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “General McMaster’s leadership of the National Security Council staff has helped my administration accomplish great things to bolster America’s national security.”
General McMaster had struggled for months to impose order not only on a fractious national security team but on a president who resisted the sort of discipline customary in the military. Although General McMaster has been a maverick voice at times during a long military career, the Washington foreign policy establishment had hoped he would keep the president from making rash decisions.
Yet the president and the general, who had never met before Mr. Trump interviewed General McMaster for the post, had little chemistry from the start, and often clashed behind the scenes.
General McMaster’s serious, somber style and preference for order made him an uncomfortable fit with a president whose style is looser, and who has little patience for the detail and nuance of complex national security issues. They had differed on policy, with General McMaster cautioning against ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran without a strategy for what would come next, and tangling with Mr. Trump over the strategy for American forces in Afghanistan.
Their tensions seeped into public view in February, when General McMaster said at a security conference in Munich that the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was beyond dispute. The statement drew a swift rebuke from the president, who vented his anger on Twitter.
“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” Mr. Trump wrote, using his campaign nickname for Hillary Clinton. “Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”
Mr. Trump selected General McMaster last February after pushing out Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, for not being forthright about a conversation with Russia’s ambassador at the time. (Mr. Flynn has since pleaded guilty of making a false statement to the F.B.I. and is cooperating with Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.)
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General McMaster carried out a slow-rolling purge of hard-liners at the National Security Council who had been installed by Mr. Flynn and were allied ideologically with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, earning the ire of conservatives who complained that his moves represented the foreign policy establishment reasserting itself over a president who had promised a different approach.
General McMaster’s position at the White House had been seen as precarious for months, and he had become the target of a concerted campaign by hard-line activists outside the administration who accused him of undermining the president’s agenda and pushed for his ouster, even creating a social media effort branded with a #FireMcMaster hashtag.
Last summer, Mr. Trump balked at a plan General McMaster presented to bolster the presence of United States forces in Afghanistan, although the president ultimately embraced a strategy that would require thousands more American troops.
General McMaster had been among the most hard-line administration officials in his approach to North Korea, publicly raising the specter of a “preventive war” against the North. He was among those who expressed concerns about Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision this month to meet Kim Jong-un, according to a senior official.
Crews work on downed power lines following a nor’easter. CBS News
Major power outages are possible, especially given the hit the power grid took during the earlier March nor’easter.
On Monday, New York’s Westchester County Board of Legislators held a special meeting on the massive power outages caused by the previous storms, grilling representatives of Con Ed and NYSEG, CBS New York reports.
Many customers in Westchester are still frustrated with the delayed response to power outages after those storms downed trees and power lines.
“There were three cables on the street, a pole with the transformer, a tree came down,” said Mamaroneck resident Karen Fontecchio.
In New Jersey, cleanup from March’s previous storms was still ongoing.
By Tuesday evening, Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency. He said the biggest shortfall during the last storm was the performance by utility companies, which the board of public utilities was investigating.
“We’re also, preemptively in this storm to get work, to nudge them and all others ahead of this,” Murphy said. “That encourages them bringing in other men and women from our sister utilities, which they are apparently doing.”
PSEG says it has mobilized nearly 600 mutual aid and contract employees ahead of the storm. JCPL representative Ron Morano says wind is once again a major concern. In preparation for Wednesday, the company is bringing in extra workers from Ohio and setting up two more staging areas in Ocean and Essex County.
In addition, the utility company will have a daily call with local officials to get feedback and response.
Electrician Mike Lettera of Big Electric in Paramus says generator installations were at an all-time high.
WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve said it would raise short-term interest rates a quarter-percentage point and signaled it could lift them at a slightly more aggressive pace in coming years to keep the strengthening economy on an even keel.
Fed officials said they would increase their benchmark federal-funds rate to a range between 1.5% and 1.75% and penciled in a total of three rate increases for this year.
Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired senior FBI official Andrew McCabe for what Sessions called a “lack of candor,” McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about contacts with Russian operatives, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, but McCabe’s previously-unreported decision to actually put the attorney general in the crosshairs of an FBI probe was an exceptional move.
One source told ABC News that Sessions was not aware of the investigation when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday less than 48 hours before McCabe, a former FBI deputy director, was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension, but an attorney representing Sessions declined to confirm that.
Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were informed of the probe during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News was told.
By then, Sessions had recused himself from the FBI’s probe of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election, giving Rosenstein oversight of the growing effort.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesUS Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on November 14, 2017, in Washington, DC.
Within weeks, Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to take over the investigation and related inquiries, including the Sessions matter.
Two months ago, Sessions was interviewed by Mueller’s team, and the federal inquiry related to his candor during his confirmation process has since been shuttered, according to a lawyer representing Sessions.
“The Special Counsel’s office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress,” attorney Chuck Cooper told ABC News on Wednesday.
According to the sources, McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after a top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, and then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., wrote a letter in March 2017 to the FBI urging agents to investigate “all contacts” Sessions may have had with Russians, and “whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred.”
It’s unclear how actively federal authorities pursued the matter in the months before Sessions’ interview with Mueller’s investigators. It’s also unclear whether the special counsel may still be pursuing other matters related to Sessions and statements he has made to Congress – or others – since his confirmation.
During his confirmation in January 2017, Sessions told the Senate committee that he had not been in contact with anyone connected to the Russian government about the 2016 election. He also said he was “not aware” of anyone else affiliated with the Trump campaign communicating with the Russian government ahead of the election.
Two months later, after a Washington Post report disputed what Sessions told Congress, the attorney general acknowledged he had met the Russian ambassador twice during the presidential campaign, but insisted none of those interactions were “to discuss issues of the campaign.”
Sessions “made no attempt to correct his misleading testimony until The Washington Post revealed that, in fact, he had at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador,” Leahy and Franken said in a statement at the time. “We know he would not tolerate dishonesty if he were in our shoes.”
Sessions called any suggestions that he misled lawmakers “false.”
Nevertheless, charges subsequently brought by Mueller raised more questions over Sessions’ testimony to Congress.
In November, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos admitted to federal authorities that during the campaign he was in frequent contact with Russian operatives about setting up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Papadopoulos pitched the idea to Sessions and Trump at a meeting of the then-candidate’s foreign policy team in March 2016.
Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesActing FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Capitol Hill, June 7, 2017.
Sessions later told lawmakers he “always told the truth,” insisting he didn’t recall the March 2016 meeting when first testifying to Congress. He later remembered the meeting after reading news reports about it, he said.
“We are concerned by Attorney General Sessions’ lack of candor to the Committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury,” Leahy and Franken said in their March 2017 letter to then-FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump two months later.
It is a federal crime for anyone to knowingly provide false information to Congress – or to a federal law enforcement agency. No charges have been announced against McCabe, and there’s no indication that the FBI has recommended he be charged.
McCabe was fired Friday after the Justice Department‘s inspector general concluded that McCabe misled investigators looking into how Justice Department and FBI officials handled matters associated with the 2016 presidential election.
In October 2016, hoping to push back on a series of news reports questioning whether he might be trying to protect Hillary Clinton, McCabe authorized two FBI officials to speak with a reporter about his efforts to boost the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation. When he was questioned later about that decision, McCabe “lacked candor – including under oath – on multiple occasions,” Sessions said in a statement announcing McCabe’s firing.
“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability,” Sessions said. “As the [FBI’s ethics office] stated, ‘all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.'”
McCabe vehemently denies misleading investigators, saying in his own statement that he is “being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.”
For more than a year, Trump and other Republicans have questioned whether McCabe harbored a political bias when making law enforcement decisions as deputy director. McCabe’s critics point to his ties to Democrats, particularly his wife’s failed Democratic run for state senate in Virginia nearly three years ago.
But in an interview with ABC News, McCabe insisted politics was “absolutely not” a factor in any of the decisions he made, noting he has considered himself a Republican all his life.
A representative for McCabe declined to comment for this article.
Franken, one of the two senators who pushed the FBI to investigate Sessions, resigned from Congress in December amid several claims of sexual misconduct.
–ABC News’ Trish Turner and Matt Mosk contributed to this report
A storm dubbed #DeleteFacebook is brewing in techie communities, on Twitter and — irony alert — on Facebook. The idea is this time is different from all the other times the social network has violated our trust. The co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Acton, who became a billionaire when Facebook purchased his app in 2014, tweeted Tuesday, “It is time. #deletefacebook.”
Is this the beginning of a movement? Here’s the difficult truth: Holding Facebook accountable for data abuses through a mass walkout would be very hard because it is woven into so many lives. But Facebook members are not without recourse to help bring change. We should follow the money.
I agree enough is enough. In the last week, we learned Facebook allowed our likes, our religions, our network of friends — data that millions of us didn’t intend to share — to be weaponized in political campaigns. A political marketing firm that worked for the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, is in trouble for what it did with the data. But what’s really scary is that it didn’t have to hack into anything to get it. Facebook was designed to collect all that info and handed it over without policing how it was being used. Now Facebook’s having an overdue existential crisis about being a spy machine.
But Facebook isn’t like other products you boycott. Last year’s #DeleteUber movement, which attracted an estimated 200,000, helped drive a management change at the start-up because it hit Uber’s bottom line. We don’t buy products from Facebook — we are its product. We’ve given it our information for free. And in North America, we were each worth $26.76 to Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2017.
Facebook became America’s fifth most-valuable public company (worth about $490 billion as of Wednesday) by selling advertisers highly targeted access to us. It takes data about what we and our friends do and then combines that with data from other places to make all sorts of inferences about us.
It’s true that Facebook needs our eyeballs to sell ads to marketers, and is very attuned to how much time people spend looking at its apps. But you quitting — or even 200,000 people quitting — wouldn’t make much of a dent in its 2.2 billion sets of eyeballs. #DeleteFacebook doesn’t work as a phenomenon only among the elite — it would take tens of millions.
And while it’s easy to press the button to quit Facebook (here’s a link), it’s spectacularly difficult in practice. Facebook has a hold on us because of its network effect: Even if you don’t like Facebook, you might still need it to stay in touch with your mom, your second cousin or even your boss. They’d have to quit, also — and all their friends, too. Many people rely on Facebook to sign in to other websites, dating services and other apps.
There aren’t great alternatives, either. Several of the most popular other social apps in the United States — Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp — are also owned by Facebook. People peeved at Facebook’s data practices have tried making new services, but none took off.
Follow the money
There have been many calls to boycott Facebook for past indiscretions. If we want the result to be any different this time, we need to address the broader problem.
Aside from a dramatic change of heart from founder Mark Zuckerberg, getting Facebook to reform what data it collects and how it uses it requires destabilizing its business. And that boils down to this: Making Facebook an unreliable or expensive way for marketers to reach us.
“The only way the boycott will be effective is if it creates enough reputational damage that regulation becomes a reasonable option or if advertisers leave en masse,” says Brayden King, a professor at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management who studies how social movement activists influence corporate social responsibility and policymaking. Just the threat of either of those made Facebook’s stock price drop by 7 percent this week.
Comments made by Unilever chief marketing officer Keith Weed in February sound mighty relevant in the light of Cambridge Analytica: “It is acutely clear from the groundswell of consumer voices over recent months that people are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of digital on well-being, on democracy — and on truth itself,” Weed said. “This is not something that can be brushed aside or ignored. Consumers are also demanding platforms which make a positive contribution to society.”
(Unilever didn’t respond to questions about whether it followed up on Weed’s threat, or how it views the Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica flap.)
And the ad industry already has an action force: an anonymous group called Sleeping Giants, which has been effective at getting advertisers to step away from Breitbart News and other outlets the group accuses of racist or sexist content. A member of Sleeping Giants who asked to remain anonymous says it doesn’t currently have plans to target Facebook, but it is watching closely. “What is clear now is they are being irresponsible with information. Advertisers need to be aware of that and ask themselves what they want to support,” he said.
Option B is more of a hammer: If governments force Facebook to change the way it uses data, advertisers may become less enamored with Facebook just because it won’t be as effective.
Current U.S. privacy laws go deep on areas like children and health data. But there’s no general-purpose privacy law. Some members of the U.S. Congress have this week renewed calls for Facebook — even Zuckerberg himself — to testify on the Cambridge Analytica case. But turning that into laws is a long, slow process. Not even last year’s massive Equifax hack got lawmakers to act.
The world will soon get one kind of control from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which requires more transparency from companies about the data they collect and how they use it.
In the short term, Federal Trade Commission may also step in and fine Facebook. It happened to have an agreement in place with Facebook from 2011 that holds the social network accountable for incidents where its data gets shared without members’ explicit consent.
The regulation question is: What exactly should change? There will be many ideas floated in the months ahead. One intriguing argument is that policing data is more than just a Facebook problem, so we need an independent agency (beyond the FTC) to deal with it.
We’ve allowed an data-gathering industry to flourish with very few consequences and responsibilities. Now we’re learning just how badly that can end up.
And quitting Facebook alone won’t solve the bigger problem. The biggest consumer challenge of our era calls for a broader consumer movement. Tweeted another celebrity, Jim Carrey, “Who are you sharing your life with? #regulatefacebook.”
Just two days before tariffs on foreign-made steel and aluminum are scheduled to take effect, the Trump administration has yet to make public its plans for how the import levies will work in practice — creating confusion for its closest allies.
In recent days, top steel suppliers such as Brazil, South Korea and Japan have complained that the office of the U.S. trade representative has yet to establish a process for countries to apply for tariff exemptions, leaving it unclear whether any will be granted in time to forestall billions of dollars in border charges.
“We’re waiting for an indication of the procedure for us to make our proposal,” said Sérgio Amaral, Brazil’s ambassador to the United States. “There’s no indication by the USTR as to how this is going to work.”
The White House promised earlier this month that countries could ask for a waiver of the new import taxes of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. Only countries with a U.S. security relationship are eligible, and they must propose alternative ways of addressing administration concerns over rising import figures.
But with time running out, no official guidance on how to apply has been made public, leaving diplomats baffled. The delayed rollout raises the risk of disrupting trade between the United States and some of its closest allies.
“It’s very hard to predict what the final outcome would be,” said one South Korean official, who would discuss confidential discussions only if granted anonymity. “But we will know soon. The 23rd of March is right around the corner.”
Foreign officials this week went to Washington in the hope of gaining clarity about the administration’s plans. Cecilia Malmström, the European Union’s trade chief, arrived Tuesday for meetings with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and other administration officials, vowing in a tweet that she would “insist that the E.U. as a whole is excluded” from the tariffs.
The Commerce Department said Wednesday that Ross and Malmström would “launch immediately a process of discussion” on trade issues, including steel and aluminum, “with a view to identifying mutually acceptable outcomes as rapidly as possible.”
Peter Altmaier, the German minister for economic affairs and energy, met with Ross one day earlier in the hope of heading off a trade war between the United States and E.U. The E.U. has made public a 10-page itemized list of U.S. products that could be targeted for retaliatory measures if the steel and aluminum tariffs take effect March 23.
Japan’s economy minister and foreign affairs minister have met directly with U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer. But “the specific process for obtaining a country exemption from the tariffs established by President Trump’s proclamation on steel and aluminum has yet to be disclosed,” the Japanese embassy in Washington said Tuesday.
On Capitol Hill Wednesday, Lighthizer told the House Ways and Means Committee that the import taxes will not apply to countries that have begun talks with the United States, likely including South Korea, Argentina, Australia and the E.U. He said talks with Brazil, the No. 2 steel supplier to the United States, may begin soon.
“Countries will get out as we come to agreement. Some will be in position where the duties will not apply to them in course of negotiations,” Lighthizer said in his first public comments on the matter. “Our hope is end by the end of April we (will) have this part of the process resolved.”
The president’s March 8 decision to announce the measures, citing a threat to national security, took aides and allies by surprise. On a call with reporters to explain the move, a senior administration official provided conflicting statements about whether all countries or just those with U.S. security ties could seek waivers.
Lighthizer’s subsequent assignment to oversee the exemption process, which could involve dozens of countries, comes at a time when his office remains thinly staffed.
“They want to cut deals with everybody. But they’re not set up to do that in real time,” said William Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official.
Trump imposed the tariffs under a little-used provision in U.S. trade law that allows such measures in the case of threats to national security. That rationale has irked several of the countries targeted, such as Japan, South Korea and Germany, which are steel suppliers and longtime American allies.
In 2017, the United States imported 34.6 million metric tons of steel from 85 countries.
Trump exempted from the tariffs Canada, the U.S. market’s leading source of steel, and Mexico, ranked fourth, at least while talks aimed at renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement make progress. The president also said that if he allows some countries to escape the tariffs, he may raise the import levies on others.
Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he doubts that many other countries will evade Trump’s new taxes. “If you exclude Europe, why not Japan? Then pretty quickly the economic significance of the tariffs get whittled down to something more symbolic,” he said.
Brazil offers a good illustration of the complexity involved in clamping down on market distortions that most analysts blame on China’s excessive production of industrial metals.
The Latin American giant buys about $1 billion worth of metallurgical coal from U.S. mines and uses it to produce semifinished steel, which is then sold to U.S. customers for use in making finished steel products.
“We provide inputs that make U.S. steel more competitive,” Amaral said.
Administration officials have said that exempting too many countries from the tariffs might permit Chinese steel to enter the United States via those countries. But shipping steel from China to Brazil costs more than twice as much as sending it to East Coast ports in the United States, making such transshipment impractical.
Brazil, a U.S. defense treaty ally, also has 16 trade levies designed to keep Chinese steel out of its market.
Amaral, who has met with several members of the U.S. Congress to plead Brazil’s case, said he is “confident” that ultimately the country will be spared the U.S. tariffs. “There is no argument that will justify these measures being taken,” he said in an interview.
Lighthizer shared with European Union officials five general criteria for weighing exemption requests, including a country’s level of cooperation with U.S. aims at the World Trade Organization, its willingness to keep its metals exports at 2017 levels and its handling of trade with China, according to a former U.S. trade official familiar with the discussions.
Officials from Hong Kong, which accounts for 0.2 percent of U.S. aluminum imports, said they have tried in vain to contact officials at the White House, State Department and other agencies seeking clarification.
“We are up for seeking an exemption. But we don’t see any specific procedures for doing so,” said Clement Leung, Hong Kong commissioner for economic and trade affairs.
The Commerce Department is in charge of a separate process that permits companies to win approval to import steel and aluminum products that are not made in the United States without paying the new tax. Applicants must complete a five-page Excel spreadsheet and file a separate form for “each distinct type and dimension of steel product to be imported,” the department said.
Commerce is getting a late start. In 2002, when the United States last imposed steel tariffs, the exclusion system was established four months before President George W. Bush announced the trade measures.
But Reinsch, an international business specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the process should operate in a straightforward manner now that it is up and running. “Commerce knows how to do that,” he said.
A city that has been on edge for weeks as several makeshift bombs exploded without warning — on doorsteps, on a sidewalk and, most recently, in a FedEx shipping center — saw the long-running drama coming to an end. But authorities warned that with the bomber’s obviously extensive preparations, it might not be entirely over.
“Two very important things before we can put this to rest. One, we don’t know if there are any other bombs out there and if so, how many and where they may be,” Mr. Abbott said on Fox News.
“Second, very importantly, we need to go throughout the day to make sure that we rule out whether there was anybody else involved in this process,” he said.
PhotoLaw enforcement responded to an area of Round Rock, Tex., where the police say a bombing suspect blew himself up in his vehicle. Credit
Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, told a local television affiliate that Mr. Conditt bought at least some of his bomb-making supplies from a Home Depot in Pflugerville, a small town about 20 miles northeast of Austin where the suspect lived.
“He did have a battery pack, and he had nails,” Mr. McCaul said.
The crucial break for investigators, Mr. McCaul said, came when Mr. Conditt walked into a FedEx office to mail a package earlier this week.
“From there, we could get surveillance video of him, get his vehicle, his license plate number, identify the individual, go to the Home Depot where he bought the stuff, and eventually, with his cellphone, be able to locate him, which they did this morning,” Mr. McCaul said.
A federal criminal complaint charging Mr. Conditt with unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device was filed on Tuesday night, the authorities said Wednesday, along with a warrant for his arrest.
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Also on Wednesday, the Austin Police said they had detained Mr. Conditt’s two roommates. One was questioned and released; the other was still being questioned as of Wednesday afternoon. Neither roommate was identified.
Earlier in the day, local police and state troopers went door-to-door in the five blocks around Mr. Conditt’s house and told residents they were evacuating the area for their safety as federal agents worked to remove and dispose of homemade explosives found inside the residence.
As they arrived, federal agents notified neighbors, and then approached someone at Mr. Conditt’s home, said Mark Roessler, 57, an information technology manager who lives across the street.
“I watched the truck come down the street and shove the car out of the way, and they started announcing, ‘This is the F.B.I. We’re here to serve search warrants,’” Mr. Roessler recounted. “And then within a few minutes this individual came out the front door. They were giving him clear instructions, had him remove his shirt, and walk toward them.”
Mr. Roessler said he had never seen the person who emerged from the house. “He was wearing some dark pants and a white T-shirt, looked like he had just woken up,” he said.
Law enforcement authorities spent hours closeted with Mr. Conditt’s parents in their white clapboard home with an American flag hanging outside.
“We do not understand what motivated him to do what he did,” the Austin police chief, Brian Manley, told reporters.
Mr. Conditt was a quiet, “nerdy” young man who came from a “tight-knit, godly family,” said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the family for nearly 18 years.
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He was the oldest of four children who had all been home-schooled by their mother, Ms. Harp said, but he had also attended Austin Community College, although college officials said he did not graduate.
“He was always kind of quiet,” she said. “He was a nerd, always reading, devouring books and computers and things like that.”
She said there had never been any hints of violence, until Wednesday morning, when she received a text message from Mr. Conditt’s mother. It read, “Pray for our family. We are under attack” — a reference to a spiritual assault by Satan, Ms. Harp said.
The Conditt family is affiliated with Calvary Chapel of Austin, according to the church’s office manager, Dean Miller. It is an evangelical church that meets in a former grocery store in Pflugerville. Its members believe the Bible prohibits same-sex marriage.
It was not immediately clear how involved Mr. Conditt was in the church, but he argued against same-sex marriage in a post he wrote on a blog he created for a political science class at the community college.
“Political protection of a sexual practice is ludicrous,” Mr. Conditt wrote. “I do not believe it is proper to pass laws stating that homosexuals have ‘rights.’”
PhotoInvestigators at the scene in Round Rock, just north of Austin. Credit
Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
McKenna McIntosh, another student in the course, said Mr. Conditt’s views as reflected on his blog were “clear as day.” In a biography on the site, Mr. Conditt described himself as a conservative but said he was “not that politically inclined.” His six posts, which date from January to March 2012, also included arguments in favor of the end of sex-offender registries and in support of the death penalty.
“Living criminals harm and murder, again,” he wrote, “executed ones do not.”
In the post, he pointed to Larry James Harper, a Texas fugitive who killed himself in 2001 as the police closed in after he escaped from prison. He compared him to another escapee, George Rivas, who was captured.
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It seemed almost to foreshadow his own fate.
“If he had wanted or wished for death, he would have just shot himself, like his fellow Texas 7 escapee, Larry Harper, who committed suicide, rather than be captured and re-incarcerated,” Mr. Conditt wrote.
Detective David Fugitt with the Austin police said Mr. Conditt’s family was cooperating and was allowing investigators to search the property, including several backyard sheds.
“We are devastated and broken at the news that our family member could be involved in such an awful way,” the family said in a statement published by CNN. “We had no idea of the darkness that Mark must have been in. Our family is a normal family in every way. We love, we pray, and we try to inspire and serve others. Right now, our prayers are for the families who’ve lost loved ones, for those impacted in any way, and for the soul of our Mark. We are grieving and in shock.”
Real estate records show that Mr. Conditt and his father, William Conditt, bought a house together in Pflugerville in 2017, and family friends said the younger Mr. Conditt was remodeling it.
But neighbors said they saw little of him.
“I think he was pretty much a loner,” said Jay Schulze, a network engineer who lived about two blocks down, adding that Mr. Conditt spent most of his time with his parents.
A neighbor of Mr. Conditt’s parents, Jeff Reeb, 75, said the Conditts had never expressed concerns about their son to him.
“I can tell you nothing about him personally, except that he was a nice, young kid,” Mr. Reeb said. “He always seemed like he was smart. And he always seemed like he was very polite.”
Mr. Reeb added: “My summation is it doesn’t make any sense.”
Austin has been in the grip of the wave of attacks since March 2.
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The first explosions hit African-American residents whose families are well-known in the city’s black community, though two white men were injured by an explosive triggered by a tripwire on Sunday.
The suspect is believed to be responsible for at least six bombs that killed at least two people and wounded five. Four bombs detonated in various locations in Austin where they had been left. Another detonated at a FedEx distribution center in Schertz, Tex., near San Antonio, and a sixth was found, unexploded, in a FedEx facility near Austin’s airport.
The attacks began when a package bomb detonated on the porch of an Austin home, killing Anthony Stephan House, 39. That was followed 10 days later by two bombs that were found outside homes, one of which killed a 17-year-old man.
The first three bombs were apparently detonated when they were picked up or jostled. Later, a package bomb exploded outside another Austin home, set off by a tripwire. The bombs at the FedEx centers were found on Tuesday.
The suspect’s vehicle was traced to a hotel in Round Rock, just north of Austin, Chief Manley said, where a SWAT team surreptitiously surrounded the hotel and called other specialized units. But the suspect drove away before those teams could arrive.
Officers followed the suspect, who stopped in a ditch off Interstate 35, and SWAT officers approached the vehicle on foot.
“The suspect detonated a bomb inside of the vehicle, knocking one officer back” and slightly injuring him, the police chief said. Another officer fired his gun at the vehicle.
Michael Luna, a guest at a Red Roof Inn near the confrontation, told a local news channel that he heard the explosion from the bomb, which sounded as if it had gone off 100 to 200 yards away, when he was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. Mr. Luna, who said he had been in the military, said that the explosion sounded like two grenades going off at the same time, and that he heard a pop afterward that might have been gunfire.
The section of Interstate 35 near that confrontation was a traffic nightmare for hours as commuters moved at a glacial pace in the southbound lanes, many of them presumably unaware of what had happened. State troopers barred access at several ramps along that stretch of the highway.
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By Wednesday morning, aerial video footage of the area from KVUE, a local television affiliate, showed a red sport utility vehicle with blown-out windows next to a blue tarp, surrounded by investigators’ vehicles.
