Story of Finding Unauthorized Screenshots in Android Phones

Reporters make for odd movie heroes. They are traditionally untidy and unglamorous. But a journalist who is following a story—whether that journalist be Lois Lane or Bob Woodward—can always do double-duty as a protagonist. Reporters uncover the world’s raw narrative material, then refine that material for an audience. Almost every journalism movie is about how the world comes to be represented—and at what cost.

Spotlight (2015) and The Post (2017) are the most recent big-budget newsroom dramas to turn regular working journalists into screen heroes. Both are coated in a political significance that goes beyond their respective storylines about the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and the Pentagon Papers. Spotlight was made before Donald Trump’s election to office, but the ethic it celebrates flies directly in the face of the president’s continual, dishonest demeaning of the American press—particularly in evidence this week.

In this sense, these two movies operate in the moral tradition of championing truth in the face of injustice, whose most famous example perhaps is All the President’s Men (1976). Woodward and Bernstein, facing a coverup that implicates the entire administration, have to reckon with the potential costs of reporting it out: What if they’re wrong? A great movie about journalism has to show this private struggle, the human element of the job.

Into this tradition steps A Private War, a new biopic about the life and death of war correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in Homs, Syria, in 2012. Based on a Vanity Fair article about her life, the film begins in 2001 with Colvin as a foreign correspondent at the Sunday Times in London. She is a raucous and fun woman at the height of her powers. Unlike the schlubby pencil-pushers of Spotlight, she is glamorous, beautiful, and played by Rosamund Pike. She has already cemented her reputation as a bold journalist who reports from the edge of safety. In 1999, she refused to leave an East Timor camp besieged by Indonesian-backed forces, which helped save the lives of its 1,500 residents, who were evacuated a few days later.

We begin in Sri Lanka, amidst the government’s war against the Tamil Tigers. Colvin strolls through a rural, dirt-floor compound, debating history with a nameless source. Their dialogue sets the tone for the rest of the script to come: It’s a little corny and simplistic, but the point certainly gets across. “There are people dying here and nobody knows it’s happening,” she says, trying to get access to the wounded. Later, Colvin is herself wounded and loses an eye, resulting in her wearing a black eye patch for the rest of her life that would become her signature accoutrement.

But the reality of her injury is brutal. The climax of the movie comes when Colvin writes up a searing account of her semi-blinding. Her face is lit up by the laptop screen. The movie cuts to her having sex with a man she has picked up at a party (later to become her partner). She swigs vodka, types, paces. We cut back to the sex scene, then to her slicing prose, cranked out in the middle of the night. “The knowledge of the fragility of the human body never leaves you,” she writes, “once you have seen how easily flesh can be rent by hot flying bits of metal.”

This is the stuff of hard-boiled professionalism, and there’s no denying how well it’s suited to the big screen. But the bluntness of the script is distracting. In her hospital room, she tells a friend that she fears both growing old and dying young. “I’m most happy with vodka martini in my hand, but I can’t stand the fact that the chatter in my head won’t go quiet until there’s a quart of vodka inside me,” she says. It’s expository dialogue without the character-building to back it up. “I hate being in a war zone,” she continues. “But I also feel compelled ... compelled to see it for myself.”

Maybe Marie Colvin did express herself in this way in real life. But Pike’s performance has something clunky and mechanical about it, a sense that she is trying and failing to inhabit a woman much older and tougher than herself. They look alike: They both have faces made of strong planes, animated by intense, hooded eyes. But Pike, 39, just doesn’t read as a hard-bitten American woman who was 56 when she died.

The movie plays out in alternating sequences. Now she is in London, drinking and refusing to acknowledge her PTSD. Now she is in Fallujah, narrowly escaping roadside execution. Now she’s drinking again. This time it’s another war. Award ceremony, war, drinking, war: We flicker back and forth. Then we’re in Homs, where she dies.

It’s a cruel ending that looms over the whole movie. The biopic has a hard task on its hands, which is to weigh up the ethical balance of her reporting, her motives, and the responsibility which must land on her editor for sending her out to Syria in the first place. Colvin ran back to Homs against the advice of her photographer, Paul Conroy, and after having been told that journalists were being targeted. The story of her final broadcast—in which she gave a firsthand account of the siege of Homs in its darkest moments—is extraordinary, and it’s not surprising that it has made it to Hollywood.

But why was she there at all? What drove Colvin’s near-suicidal compulsion to witness human beings in extremis? She needs to “make that suffering part of the record,” we hear. But there are so many questions that the movie cannot bring itself to address. There’s the fact that Colvin brought translators with her into dangerous situations, because she didn’t speak, for example, fluent Arabic. There’s the question of the humanity of the women wailing by a graveside, which—the movie’s logic goes—only becomes real and legible through the act of a Western journalist’s witnessing.

It’s on this point that A Private War fails to meet the standard that a truly excellent journalism movie must hit. Despite the undeniably extraordinary feats that Colvin achieved in life and on the edge of death, A Private War is a hagiography that reduces a complicated woman down to trauma, booze, and typing. Worse, it doesn’t do much justice to the people she met and spoke with in the field. We see a great deal of her private war, but the film’s account of Colvin as a human being does not properly meld with its account of her actual reporting. A Private War does not, in the end, tell a story about stories—only people.

President Donald Trump makes no secret of his litmus test for an attorney general: They should be loyal to the president first, and the rule of law second. He’s invoked Robert Kennedy and Eric Holder as models for their loyalty and their purported efforts to quash politically damaging investigations. A pliant attorney general would allow the president to demolish the Justice Department’s traditional independence, which Trump resents. “I am not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing, and I am very frustrated by it,” he lamented last November.

From that vantage point, Matt Whitaker is perfectly suited to be the interim leader of the Justice Department, where he will oversee special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Whitaker, the U.S. attorney in Iowa from 2004 to 2009, previously served as former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff since last summer. From there, he’s reportedly acted as the White House’s “spy” inside Sessions’s office and curried favor with the president’s top aides. Trump named him acting attorney general after forcing Sessions to resign on Wednesday.

The post is one of the most sensitive and powerful jobs in any presidential administration. Despite this, Trump professed ignorance on Friday about the man he had just chosen to lead the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus. “I don’t know Matt Whitaker,” he told reporters outside the White House before praising the acting attorney general’s credentials. “Matt Whitaker worked for Jeff Sessions, and he was always extremely highly thought of, and he still is.”

By any standard other than Trump’s, however, Whitaker seems stupendously unqualified for the job. Previous attorneys general served as governors, senators, and federal judges before taking the post. Interim ones typically came from within the Justice Department’s upper echelons. Before joining Sessions’s staff last year, Whitaker worked in private practice at a small law firm, mounted a failed U.S. Senate bid in Iowa, made TV appearances as one of CNN’s myriad contributors, and sat on the advisory board of a company accused by the Federal Trade Commission of running a multi-million dollar scam.

So why would the president elevate Whitaker from relative obscurity to one of the most powerful posts in the federal government? After all, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is still available to oversee the Justice Department until Trump nominates—and the Senate confirms—Sessions’s replacement. The answer seems to lie in the president’s hostility toward the Russia investigation, a view largely shared by Whitaker. By appointing Whitaker and supplanting Rosenstein’s oversight of Mueller, Trump is now well-positioned to curtail the inquiry just as it draws closer to his inner circle.

Whitaker’s views on the investigation are well-established. Before joining Sessions’s staff, he told interviewers that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and “no case for obstruction of justice,” wrote an op-ed that opposed scrutiny of Trump’s personal finances, and downplayed the significance of Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with Russians in Trump Tower. At one point, he even floated a scenario on television to shutter the probe. “I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced,” he said last July, “[and] that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigations grinds to almost a halt.”

Trump is known for his avid TV viewing habits, and Whitaker’s appearances reportedly caught his attention. That may have been the entire point. John Q. Barrett, a St. John’s University law professor, recalled a friendly chat he had with the acting attorney general last year. “Whitaker told me in June 2017 that he was flying out from Iowa to NYC to be on CNN regularly because he was hoping to be noticed as a Trump defender, and through that to get a Trump judicial appointment back in Iowa,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night.

It’s unclear how long Whitaker will stay in the current position. Trump is reportedly considering former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as permanent replacements. Trump may decide to hold off on nominating someone until the new Senate is seated in January, when it is expected to have a slightly larger Republican majority. That could give him a greater margin of error to push through a controversial nominee.

Until then, the questions are how much damage Whitaker wants to do to the Russia investigation, how much damage he can do, and how much damage he’s willing to do. In theory, all of Mueller’s power flows from the acting attorney general, whoever that may be. Rosenstein established Mueller’s authority last May in a public memo and has augmented it since then with classified memos. As acting attorney general, Whitaker could theoretically rewrite those memos to narrow the scope of Mueller’s inquiry. He could also quash subpoenas, block indictments, and dismiss the special counsel entirely.

Things could get complicated quickly if any of that happens. Taking any substantive moves against Mueller could invite legal challenges to Whitaker’s authority. Lawyers Neal Katyal and George Conway argued in The New York Times on Thursday that Whitaker’s appointment violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, which requires top executive-branch officials to be approved by the Senate. Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, and Conway, who was considered for a top Justice Department position by Trump, contended that Whitaker can’t exercise the attorney general’s powers because he didn’t go through the confirmation process.

“Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody,” Katyal and Conway wrote. “His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but President Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.” (Asked about this argument on Friday, Trump derided Conway as “Mr. Kellyanne Conway,” referring to Conway’s wife—who serves as Trump’s counselor.)

Whitaker may ultimately turn out to be a responsible steward of the powers of which he has been temporarily vested. But his past criticism of the Russia investigation, coupled with his close ties to the White House, suggest otherwise. Everything about Whitaker’s appointment suggests his purpose is to rein in the Russia investigation and bring the Justice Department closer to Trump’s orbit. However long Whitaker’s tenure lasts, his impact on the American rule of law may last much, much longer.

In the great 1972 political satire The Candidate, Robert Redford plays a novice candidate who runs a slick campaign for Senate and wins an upset against an unbeatable incumbent. On election night, right before the media throng arrives, he turns to his campaign guru, played by Peter Boyle, and says, “What do we do now?” The movie ends without an answer.

House Democrats are no strangers to governance; even with the influx of newcomers, they have a veteran group who have been in the majority before, many under both divided and united government. But the question of what do we do now is still a pressing one, since the dynamic in today’s Washington is unlike any they—and the country—have ever seen.

Party leadership contests will come quickly, followed by the need to draft a rules package that sets out how the House will operate, from floor procedures to ethics considerations. Chairmanships of key committees and subcommittees will need to be settled. And an agenda, substantive and investigatory, should be laid out before the new House convenes on January 3. At the same time, Democrats have to prepare for the possibility of a lame-duck session in which Republicans try to do some mischief, like a resolution on the “caravan,” before they are pushed into the minority.

Of course, they will have to begin with the Trump administration, and the business of keeping it from pushing the country closer to autocracy, extending its kleptocratic corruption and the form of government known as kakistocracy (“rule by the worst”). Next comes establishing an agenda and a set of messages that show Americans why they are worthy of the mantle of governance, now and for the presidential contest in 2020.

The desire for generational change and new blood is understandable. But image and public presentation are only a small part of the qualities needed in a speaker. The ability to shape and carry out an agenda; to give committees and subcommittees freedom while maintaining coherence; to understand the needs, strengths, and weaknesses of the members, knowing when to push and when to back off; to have tactical and strategic skills, especially when showdowns like potential shutdowns are looming; to negotiate effectively with a president and leadership counterparts in both House and Senate—all these are deeply important qualities in a speaker. Simply being young and fresh, or being able to speak to white working-class voters, or fitting demographic checklists, or being good on television—laudable political traits all—are not attributes that alone meet the standards set by Nancy Pelosi.

It is also important to make sure that there is strong leadership input into key committee and subcommittee chairmanships. The strongest members—those who know how to advance an agenda, question witnesses, assemble crackerjack staffs, and who have intellectual heft—should be in charge of the most important committees, and there should be early and regular consultation with leaders to coordinate priorities, especially for investigations and oversight. This does not mean that party leaders would be dictating schedules and agendas; they’d simply be coordinating strategies and letting the committees and subcommittees take charge.

For many decades, Congress has provided orientations for its new members. These used to be bipartisan, including a wide range of experts who taught newcomers the rules of how Congress works. After Newt Gingrich’s speakership in the 1990s, they became more partisan and generally less effective. The Democrats will need a much more robust orientation for members, new and otherwise, who have never served in the majority—and the same for staff. There should also be training about how to conduct investigations—there’s going to be a lot to investigate—how to do oversight, how to ask questions of witnesses, and how to use the alphabet soup of resources available to Congress, from CBO to GAO to CRS.

About those rules—they’re going to change. New members are going to want Congress to evolve, as is their right. But the rules have to be fair, constructive—and practical. In a larger sense, many reformers want a return to “regular order”: more openness in committees and on the floor, more regularity in debate and markups, more ways to encourage actions that are bipartisan. A rules package means more than floor procedures, though. Allowing members to pool staff allowances, a rule Gingrich abolished in 1995, would help. Just as important, a new majority needs to increase staffing and budgets for both members and committees, and especially to add experienced investigators. By empowering the independent Office of Congressional Ethics and Office of Compliance, they can do better with complaints of sexual harassment or misconduct, and put much stronger limits on stockholdings and board memberships for lawmakers. And legislatively, Democrats should reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment, an important source of expert scientific information and reform.

Congress may have its problems, but the real fight against corruption and autocracy is with the Trump administration. The Democrats have to pass a bill protecting Robert Mueller from Trump’s efforts to fire or undermine him, and get the Democrats in the Senate to pressure the majority to take it up. Find ways to make sure there is access to any reports written by Mueller and his team. Give Adam Schiff, the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the resources to dig aggressively into Russian connections and to protect whistleblowers and the integrity of the intelligence services. Make sure Ways and Means under Chairman Richard Neal acts swiftly to gain access to Trump’s tax records. Begin a process to reform the Inspector General Act, ensuring a president cannot sideline or corrupt that independent process. Change the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to prevent its misuse. Use the Committee on Appropriations under Nita Lowey to conduct tough-minded oversight of agencies and programs. Give Jerry Nadler, the incoming chair of the Judiciary Committee, the resources to examine all of Trump’s actions, and those of the Justice Department.

At some point, Democrats will again hold the House, Senate, and presidency. A reform agenda should include a new and improved Voting Rights Act along with actions to make voting easier, including universal voter registration and preregistration, moving Election Day to the weekend, blocking a “citizenship test” for federal elections that is designed to suppress votes, and requiring a paper trail for ballots. A bill to end partisan gerrymandering, and one to repeal the 1967 law that requires single-member House districts, to allow for states to experiment with multi-member districts, should be parts of it. Campaign finance reforms to encourage small donor contributions with matching funds, along with a renewed tough DISCLOSE Act, to oversee spending, round out a “democracy package.” A requirement that presidential candidates disclose their tax returns would also be in order.

To be sure, the first priorities for Democrats are more triage than anything else—preventing Donald Trump from further destroying the health insurance marketplace, degrading the environment, shredding the safety net, and undermining worker safety, the census, voting rights, and so on. But Democrats should also focus on what priorities the party would adopt if it did take over in 2020. Few new laws will be passed in 2019. Still, Democrats can lay down markers for the future—adjusting the Affordable Care Act to extend to more Americans and to work better; creating and protecting jobs; assuring adequate incomes for working-class Americans; implementing training programs and appropriate apprenticeships to provide skills for workers in a swiftly changing global economy; crafting a safety net appropriate for a future world where more jobs are part of the gig economy than the traditional one in which employers provided the benefits; framing a trade policy also appropriate for the new global dynamic; dealing effectively and realistically with climate change and crafting a new alternative energy approach; dealing with cybersecurity dangers; restoring net neutrality. And Democrats need a budget that reflects their values and still addresses the exploding debt crisis caused by Republicans through irresponsible tax cuts.

Whatever bills pass the House, even if they go nowhere in the Senate, Democrats can highlight their plans through the creative use of the House floor. Structured debates—not always pitting Democrats against Republicans—could show Americans that there are thoughtful and workable proposals out there, some of which are not partisan. Excerpts can go on YouTube, providing the fodder for cable news and showing the public that Democrats actually have ideas to grapple with the problems this country faces.

Of course, this is a formidable set of recommendations. But a Democratic House has a formidable set of requirements to set the country right and the stage for 2020. Winning the House is not enough. It’s what they do with it that matters.

It took me a long time to start watching the second season of Making a Murderer. The first season, while wildly compelling—and one of the first true crime documentaries to captivate what felt like the entire country at the same time in late 2015—ultimately pointed strongly toward one conclusion: that Steven Avery, a salvage yard worker living in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, was framed by local police for the rape and murder of a young photographer named Theresa Halbach, for which he received a life sentence. The documentarians Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos followed Avery and his family for months and spun a (fairly convincing) tale about a blue-collar family that struggled to gain community respect and so wound up as the target of local corruption.

The filmmakers presented an equally persuasive case for Brendan Dassey, Avery’s nephew, who confessed to being an accomplice to the crime, but who later said that he invented his confession while under extreme pressure. (Dassey was 16 at the time, and also had a IQ of about 80, which means he was particularly vulnerable to manipulation and coercion). Both Avery and Dassey were found guilty and are serving life sentences, a fact that enraged many Netflix subscribers who were sure after ten hours of couch time that they had witnessed a grave miscarriage of justice.

In presenting the story as they did, the documentarians left out several bits of criminal evidence that didn’t serve the narrative thrust of their film. What Ricciardi and Demos wanted to probe and indict was corruption and systemic malfeasance, and so they chiseled away some of the facts that did not support their case. As Kathryn Schulz wrote in the New Yorker of season one, “The point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying to convict a man or exonerate him. Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.” In trying to expose bias, the filmmakers showed their own.

This is not to say they necessarily drew the wrong conclusions; we still do not know the truth of what happened the night Halbach died, and we may never know. But Ricciardi and Demos’s project might have been even more compelling had they let their conclusions stand up against all the facts. While I felt righteously angry by the end of the first season, I also felt manipulated and exhausted. I wasn’t sure I wanted to experience that queasy feeling all over again.

Yet I am ultimately glad I stuck with the show, as season two sets off in a new direction, following two captivating women, both lawyers, who wear their own commitments and belief systems with a refreshing openness. I don’t think there would have been a second season if the documentarians had not found these women. Avery and Dassey barely appear in the new season; they are floating voices from prison telephones. The show reorients itself and nearly switches genre: It is no longer a Whodunit but a long-form character study, a dual portrait of two legal crusaders, and an examination of the appeals process. If the first season was a bonanza for Netflix, the second season feels as if it belongs on PBS.

The two women at the heart of the new season are both lawyers trying to exonerate a member of Avery family, but that is where the similarities end. Steven Avery’s attorney Kathleen Zellner is what some might call a “celebrity” lawyer. She focuses on one thing only, which is getting innocent people out of jail. She is good at it. She has done it over 17 times. She seems like a character out of a John Grisham or Gillian Flynn novel (like Gone Girl’s Tanner Bolt), but she is very real, swanning around Wisconsin in designer suits with crimson lipstick and a sleek blowout.

Zellner has a knack for courting the media. When she files her appeals paperwork at the county courthouse, she makes sure to hold a press conference. She is good at throwing out snappy one-liners (“If you are guilty,” she says bluntly, “I will do a way better job of finding out you are guilty than any prosecutor could.”). But she also has a bloodhound’s nose for unasked questions and breadcrumb trails; she does over a dozen new forensic tests and experiments around the Avery property, claiming that the original defense team put in little legwork the first time round. Zellner’s tactics may be flashy—she tweets openly about the case, and still does—but they come from a place of distrust for institutions, an instinct that has guided her work unknotting so many false convictions. She believes the system is broken and twisted on a grand scale, and so she needs to be larger than life to take it on.

Brendan Dassey’s lawyers take a different path. Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin work for Northwestern University and The Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people who were incarcerated as minors due to forced confessions and other manipulative interventions. Nirider, who gets the most screen time of the team, is less bombastic than Zellner, and perhaps more idealistic. She wears conservative cardigans and sensible clogs (a contrast with Zellner’s velvet blazers and statement jewelry) and spends late nights preparing her cases in her small, cluttered office under buzzing fluorescent lights. While Zellner has yet to have the chance to bring her new case to court, Nirider has been in court defending Dassey several times over the years, as his case moved through a lengthy appeals process.

If Zellner’s story is one of bluster and theatrics, Nirider’s is a slow churn, marking the years that go into trying to extricate someone from the prison system. Dassey’s case made it all the way to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, where at first a panel of three judges upheld the decision of a federal judge, agreeing that Dassey’s confession had been coerced. But after the Wisconsin authorities appealed and asked for a full en banc review (meaning all nine judges of the Seventh Circuit weighed in), Dassey’s conviction remained, and the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear his case. He has now exhausted all options for appeal and continues to serve time. Throughout this arduous process, Nirider looks worn down, and yet she never loses her pluck. She knows the system is a mess and yet wakes up every morning determined to try to navigate it as best she can.

Making a Murderer Part Two doesn’t place a higher value on one woman’s approach, but instead shows both the banal paperwork and canny tricks required to get through the American justice system. Is it better to have a dogged, media-savvy lawyer who tweets about her progress and uses the latest lie-detector technologies? Or one who does tireless pro bono work from an academic perch? Both women meet much resistance at every step of the process. No matter what kind of lawyer a person hires, seeking exoneration, this season shows, requires nearly superhuman stamina. The fights often take years, with long stretches of waiting in between court decisions. And with every dash of hope can come a deluge of crushing news.

What the documentary is missing, as it was in the first season, is a real sense of who in this mess is the victim. We still don’t learn much about Teresa Halbach—a lacuna that so many popular true crime shows and podcasts share. In the first episode of season two, the filmmakers are self-aware enough to note that the Halbach family was devastated at the way the documentary was met with such a ravenous response. And yet they don’t try to deepen her story moving forward. When the series ends, she still feels more like a plot device than a person who once lived.

What you do get from the second season is a sense that no one in this story is happy. All are punished. Both the families of the victim and the convicted are in terrible pain, which shows no sign of abating. The only truth we come away with is that a lot of the evidence in this case doesn’t add up or make sense. It’s all a scramble, and there are no winners. Perhaps this is not how you want your true crime story to end: There’s no big Hollywood twist. Making a Murderer ends not with a bang, but with a whimper—the familiar sense that justice, at least in this case, may remain just out of reach.

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign scrambled the electoral map, as he won several states that some considered reliably, even irrevocably, blue. This week’s midterms, blue wave or not, reversed some of those unexpected gains. While Republican candidates held the line in Ohio and apparently squeaked out narrow victories in Florida, voters turned leftward in three key states in the Upper Midwest. Some political observers now see a map that’s favorable to Democrats as they seek to topple Trump in two years.

“If Trump has lost the benefit of the doubt from voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, he may not have so much of an Electoral College advantage in 2020,” election guru Nate Silver wrote on Thursday. New York magazine’s Gabriel Debenedetti pointed to resounding Democratic victories in some former purple states as a positive sign for Democrats: “It’s now hard to see how Virginia or Colorado, traditional swing states, begin 2020 anywhere but in the blue column, with Nevada leaning that way, too.”

What’s striking about both analyses, each written by sharp and well-informed observers, is the absence of discussion about the potential impact of voter suppression. While Americans will decide which presidential candidate to support based on the economy, immigration, and other issues, it’s increasingly clear that state election laws and rules will govern whether they can translate those decisions into actual votes. From Ohio to Georgia, Republicans have sought to constrain the electorate to their benefit. If they do so in several key states over the next two years, it may well decide the 2020 election.

Trump loves to talk about his Electoral College landslide, partly because it obscures his shellacking in the national popular vote and partly because it was a genuinely impressive victory. His path to the White House effectively ran through five states—Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—though he did not need to win them all. Pennsylvania, Florida, and just one more would have sufficed. Clinton, meanwhile, could have lost Florida and still won, narrowly, by taking Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Instead, Trump won all five states and sailed into the White House with 306 electoral votes. Can he do it again in 2020? Trump has defied the odds before, but running the board in the Great Lakes region will be even harder the second time around. In 2016, Trump won by extraordinary close margins in three of the five key states: 10,704 votes in Michigan, 44,292 votes in Pennsylvania, and 22,748 votes in Wisconsin. Thanks to America’s peculiar system, a presidential election in which 138 million people cast their ballots came down to fewer than 78,000 voters in three states.

There’s evidence that voter-suppression laws may have helped tip the balance towards Trump. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who was ousted by voters on Tuesday, oversaw a series of changes that structurally tilted the state’s electoral contests toward Republicans. Shortly after taking power in 2011, Walker and state Republican leaders oversaw a gerrymandering process that ensured the GOP could win two-thirds of the state legislature’s seats even if they only won a majority of the total vote. He also signed a bill in 2015 that dismantled the state’s nonpartisan ethics and elections commission and replaced it with two commissions staffed by political appointees.

Walker’s most decisive legislation was a voter ID law passed in 2011, which required voters to present a government-issued photo identification when casting a ballot. Federal judges blocked the law from going into effect for years, citing the disproportionate impact it would have on black voters who often lacked the necessary IDs. When it went into force during the 2016 election, however, it appeared to have a critical impact, as Mother Jones’ Ari Berman reported:

After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote.... [T]hat finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law.

In two of the five key states, voting rights are relatively secure. Republicans in Pennsylvania passed a voter ID law in 2012, but state judges blocked its implementation two years later. (The state’s supreme court also won a showdown with state GOP lawmakers, striking down gerrymandered maps in favor of more balanced ones earlier this year.) Voters in Michigan, meanwhile, passed a measure on Tuesday that will enact automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse absentee ballots. Democratic control of the state governorships in both states makes it unlikely that Republicans will pass new restrictions before 2020.

The same can’t be said for the two major perennial swing states on the list. Ohio Republicans won big on Tuesday at all levels, save for a U.S. Senate seat successfully defended by incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown. The defeats of gubernatorial contender Richard Cordray and secretary of state candidate Kathleen Clyde leave Democrats with scant influence over the state’s election laws headed into 2020. Clyde’s loss in particular is stinging: As a state lawmaker, she championed reforms like automatic voter registration and opposed Republican efforts to impose new restrictions.

Ohio has a reputation for stringent measures aimed at its own electorate. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s controversial purge of the state’s voter rolls. The state purged more than two million voters from its rolls between 2011 and 2016, removing voters who had died or moved as well as thousands who had simply not cast a ballot in recent elections and failed to return a notice. Ohio lawmakers also passed strict voter ID laws, which the courts blocked, and sharply cut early voting access, which the courts didn’t.

In Florida, where Republicans have controlled the levers of power for a quarter-century, restrictive voting laws are a persistent threat. In 2012, under Governor Rick Scott, state officials brawled with the federal government over a campaign to remove suspected noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls by using flawed data that disproportionately targeted nonwhite voters. He imposed new barriers on Floridians who sought to regain their voting rights after completing their sentences—changes that favored white and Republican applicants over those from other backgrounds. In 2011, he signed a controversial law that cut early voting days in half and made it harder for third-party groups to register new voters. Will Republican governor-elect Ron DeSantis, assuming he survives a potential recount, pick up where Scott left off?

Republicans often justify strict voter laws by pointing to the illusory threat of voter fraud. In many cases, however, we know that the real motives are more sinister. Former Florida GOP officials, including former Governor Charlie Crist and former party chairman Jim Greer, admitted to the Palm Beach Post in 2012 that state lawmakers used voter fraud as an excuse to pass laws that would make it harder for Democratic voters to cast a ballot. Republican officials elsewhere have given up the game from time to time: The leader of Pennsylvania’s state House predicted in 2012 that the state’s voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win there over Barack Obama, while Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel openly credited their version with electing Trump in 2016.

In a healthy democracy, there would be no need to worry about whether the 2020 election will reflect the will of the American people. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent aversion to protecting voting rights, and a decade of manipulation by state GOP officials, that basic principle can’t be guaranteed. One party is trying to win elections, and the other is trying to make winning impossible for anyone else.

The First World War, which ended a century ago Sunday, was supposed to be a hinge-moment in history: a war to end all wars, and a war to end the imperialism that had shaped the West’s interaction with the world for centuries. After the United States joined the war in 1917, President Wilson insisted it be fought in the cause of self-determination.

But despite its massive toll, the war did not end empire, and many of today’s struggles are rooted in that failure, including Americans’ own imperial investments in war.

As the firing ceased on the Western front, conflict continued in a different gear elsewhere. During the war, the British Empire had expanded vastly into the Middle East, the former terrain of the defeated Ottoman Empire. As hostilities ceased in Europe, Britain violently suppressed rebellion in these newly occupied territories, as well as in India, Ireland, and Egypt.

The British government drew on new military technologies, especially airpower, in these post-armistice counter-insurgencies, partly to convince the British public that war really had ended: Then, as now, air warfare meant fewer “boots on the ground” and more “discreet” intervention abroad. Shifting the methods of colonial intervention allowed empire to survive in an increasingly anti-imperial age.

But the mass death of World War I had also shocked many Britons into fresh skepticism of military technology. Many sections of the public attacked the arms industry for having driven humanity to an apocalyptic juncture.

Scandalized by the high wartime profits of arms companies like Vickers—then supplying bombers for aerial counterinsurgency in Iraq—and members of parliament owning shares in such companies, critics discerned a “secret international”: a complex of arms firms, banks, and governments fomenting war out of greed. The Labour MP Hugh Dalton noted that the Ottomans had used Vickers’s guns against the British; he condemned directors of arms firms as “the highest and completest embodiment of capitalist morality.” 

In truth, arms manufacturers had been crucial to the creation of modern capitalism: military contracting for the eighteenth-century wars that established Britain’s global empire helped drive the industrial revolution, though we like to celebrate that transformation as a triumph of Enlightenment values. The British also spread arms around the world, equating their spread with the spread of civilization itself. They were convinced that scruples about who they sold to would merely forfeit profit, prestige, and influence to their rivals, the French and the Dutch.  

In the nineteenth century, when Britain was no longer an empire on the make, the armed “native” became a more threatening figure. The British began to police arms sales in the Middle East and South Asia especially. World War One redoubled this concern: The Middle East expert Mark Sykes worried that enough arms had spread to “arm every black man who wants a rifle.”

In the 1920s and 30s, global arms conventions tried to prohibit arms exports to Africa and the Middle East, but were thwarted by loopholes and vested interests—including the American arms industry. The British themselves, captive to the diehard eighteenth-century logic, subsidized the military strength of two rival powers in the Arabian peninsula, including the Wahhabi-backed House of Saud, which emerged the regional victor in 1925. Some MPs worried that the Saudis would next turn their British arms against Britain as the dominant power in the region.

Certain interwar observers fleetingly recognized the extent of the British economy’s dependence on arms manufacturing. The science-fiction writer H.G. Wells noted that the arms profits accrued not just to companies’ leaders, but also to workers in those industries and to “thousands of persons of all ranks of life, as lesser shareholders.” A 1935 government inquiry into the private manufacture of arms likewise alighted on the truth that war was central to the British economy, concluding that the line between military and civilian manufacturing was so blurry that it was impossible to say who was and wasn’t making or profiting from arms. Arms and their parts were central to industry in general—as they had been since the industrial revolution—intersecting with the automobile industry, civilian aviation, and so on. “Large numbers of people, of all classes…by reason of their employment, their business interests or by the holding of shares,” the commission reported, “may have a financial interest in war or the preparation for war.”  

Shortly after the commission submitted its report, the Germans occupied the Rhineland, and Britain began rearming, with the approval of Labour politicians like Dalton—the First World War had taught the importance of not being adequately prepared as much as it had fomented distrust of arms-makers. As the commissioners had anticipated, intensification of arms-making had an enormous impact on the economy: Rearmament pulled Britain out of the Great Depression.

We live among this geopolitical and moral detritus of the end of the First World War. Seizing the baton of global imperial power, including heavy reliance on airpower, the U.S. has long sealed its partnerships with authoritarian rulers around the world with arms sales. And once again, the Middle East is a key focus of those concerned with the spread of arms. Both Saudi Arabia’s role in the war and famine in Yemen and the Khashoggi affair have provoked renewed public questioning of the Saudi-U.S. partnership in particular. President Trump insists that Saudi arms deals are crucial for American workers and industry—a bogus claim. The military-industrial economy is too old and wide for any one arms deal to matter significantly. As in the past, these deals are about maintaining American influence as much as money. Trump argues that if the U.S. pulls out, Russia and China will profit—echoes of eighteenth-century imperial logic.

Today’s tech moguls emphasize the importance of defense contracts. Amazon spent millions this year lobbying for contracts for its facial recognition technology, cloud computing services, and other products. “If big tech companies are going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, we are in big trouble,” said Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recently. Lockheed Martin’s sales in Saudi Arabia for 2019 and 2020, meanwhile, are in the range of $900 million. Government departments likewise consider “industry outreach” and relationships with potential contractors “standard” practices. History shows that contracting has long been a mainstay of industrial growth.

But some segments of American labor are increasingly uneasy about military contracts. Within Amazon, workers are deeply concerned that the company’s facial recognition technology may be used by ICE to track illegal immigrants. Hundreds have written to Bezos expressing their refusal to build a platform for government surveillance that violates human rights. Similar dynamics are unfolding at Microsoft and Google. Google employees have successfully stymied renewal of the company’s controversial contract to provide artificial intelligence for analyzing drone footage.

The gun control debate also fuels such moral reckoning within major companies. Blackstone and JP Morgan, which pulled out of “Davos in the Desert” after the Khashoggi affair, also tried to distance themselves from firearms manufacturers after the Parkland shooting. These moves have enhanced their brand appeal among many, though it’s doubtful they have affected the gun industry as a whole. Still, they signify a search for a new “capitalist morality,” echoed by Silicon Valley investors belatedly cringing at the flow of Saudi money that provided tech companies with crucial liquidity in recent years.

Venky Ganesan, a partner at the technology investor Menlo Ventures, told The Washington Post last month that he sees acceptance of such money as a “real moral challenge” going forward. Ro Khanna, Silicon Valley’s Congressman, is calling on the valley to acknowledge that Saudi activities are a “slap in the face” of the “Enlightenment ideals” at the heart of its work. (Here, again , the notion that pacific Enlightenment values drive innovation obscures the historic role of defense contracts, even in the growth of Silicon Valley.)

In the Middle East, the struggle since World War I has been to shake off Western power. But in the West, the Khashoggi affair has prompted calls for fresh intervention against Saudi Arabia—a shift in one way, but still perpetuating the post-World War One sense of imperial prerogative in the region. To rethink the place of arms-making in our economy is to reinvent that foreign policy, to envision a different postcolonial world.

Much like the arms critics that emerged a century ago from the wreckage of World War I, the gun control movement and the recent criticism of America’s enabling of Saudi horrors are asking us to try again to navigate towards a different economic morality. If government contracts remain essential to industry, might we reach for a world in which governments contract for something other than surveillance and military technologies?

Major arms contractors of the past—Remington, Le Creuzot, Vickers—at some point also manufactured other goods: typewriters, farm implements, electric shavers, bicycles, sewing machines, speedboats, rail material. After World War One, defeat forced the German arms-maker Krupp to turn “swords into ploughshares” by making typewriters, surgical instruments, household pipes, and cinematograph machines. As we face environmental devastation, welfare rather than warfare contracts might offer a way forward; ploughshares are actually more crucial to “security” than arms.

It may not be possible to moralize capitalism without changing it into something else, and there’s no guarantee of an easy solution. When guilt compelled the fictional arms-maker Tony Stark to quit arms-making, he wound up weaponizing himself, giving us Ironman. But what kind of story would it be if Tony Stark had done nothing at all? The first step towards change is always to try to imagine another way forward.

The Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith gave us the mythic ideal of pacific economic transformation. He also offered advice on managing the moral qualms of modern capitalism: He prescribed restraint in sympathy, blocking out of “miseries we never saw,” limiting our sympathies to the immediate, visible effects of capitalism, lest our guilt become paralyzing. Yemen has long remained beyond many Americans’ moral awareness. But Khashoggi, who wrote for The Washington Post—owned  by Jeff Bezos--was not. His killing broke the Smithian dam against American empathy for victims of the American-backed Saudi regime. Front-page features on the Saudi horrors in Yemen have followed.

The 1935 Royal Commission explored the idea of nationalizing the arms industry, to neutralize it. Ultimately, the commission concluded it wasn’t possible: the arms industry was so interconnected to other industries that it would mean nationalizing the entire economy. The reality was that British society as a whole was implicated in arms production, despite critics’ focus on the villainy of directors of arms firms. As we commemorate the end of the First World War, more aware of our collective complicity in violence, we might try to more effectively revisit the lost causes embraced by those grieving survivors: the end of war and empire, and the end of the arms-manufacturing that gives life to both.