Project Censored:

This is Part 2 of the annual list from Project Censored of underreported stories from the past year.

6. Global forest protection goals at risk

The United Nations’ goal to end deforestation by 2030 is unlikely to be met, according to the 2023 annual Forest Declaration Assessment, Olivia Rosane reported for Common Dreams in October 2023. The goal was announced to great fanfare at the 2021 U.N. summit in Glasgow, but the failure of follow-through has received almost no notice.

The same month, the World Wildlife Fund issued its first Forest Pathways Report, in which it warned:

The two largest tropical forests are at risk of reaching tipping points. This would release billions of tonnes of carbon and have devastating consequences for the millions of people who depend on the stability of their ecosystems. It would also have a global impact on our climate and catastrophic effects on biodiversity.

The problem is money, according to the report. “We are investing in activities that are harmful for forests at far higher rates than we are investing in activities that are beneficial for forests,” the coordinator of the report, Erin Matson, told Common Dreams. To meet the U.N.’s 2030 goal would require $460 billion annually, according to the report, but only $2.2 billion is being invested. Meanwhile more than 100 times as much public finance is “committed to activities that have the potential to drive deforestation or forest degradation,” known as “gray” finance, the report explained.

While the overall picture is dark, not all countries are failing. “Well over 50 countries are on track to eliminate deforestation within their borders by 2030,” the report noted.

As the report’s lead author, Mary Gagen, noted in an article published by The Conversation, “Global forest loss in 2022 was 6.6 million hectares, an area about the size of Ireland. That’s 21% more than the amount that would keep us on track to meet the target of zero deforestation by 2030, agreed in Glasgow.” At 33% over the necessary target, loss of tropical rainforests was “even more pronounced,” Gagen reported.

In her article, Gagen emphasized four key recommendations: (1) Accelerate the recognition of Indigenous peoples and local communities’ right to own and manage their lands, territories and resources. (2) Provide more money, both public and private, to support sustainable forest economies. (3) Reform the rules of global trade that harm forests, getting deforesting commodities out of global supply chains, and removing barriers to forest-friendly goods and (4) Shift toward nature-based and bio economies.

Corporate media in the U.S. ignored both reports, though one story in the Washington Post discussed the subject the month after both reports were issued, but “made no direct reference to either of them,” Project Censored summarized. In contrast, “International outlets, including Germany’s DW and France 24, a state-owned television network, did produce substantive reports based on the Forest Declaration Assessment.”

7. Military personnel target Gen Z recruits with lurid social media tactics

“If the military was a great, honorable profession, then they wouldn’t need to spend $6 billion a year bribing people to join,” journalist and veteran Rosa del Duca explained. Nonetheless, 2022 was the worst year for recruitment since 1973, when the draft was abolished. That’s the background to the story Alan MacLeod reported for MintPress News about the military, “using e-girls to recruit Gen Z into service.”

While MacLeod also deals with the army sponsoring YouTube stars — male and female — to “join” for a day as part of whole spectrum of social media efforts, his main subject is Army Psychological Operations Specialist Hailey Lujan, whose online videos feature “sexually suggestive content alongside subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) calls to join up,” Macleod reports. “The 21-year-old makes content extolling the fun of Army life to her 731,000 TikTok followers. ‘Don’t go to college, become a farmer or a soldier instead,’ she instructs viewers in a recent video. ‘Just some advice for the younger people: if you’re not doing school, it’s ok. I dropped out of college. And I’m doing great,’ she adds.”

Project Censored noted, “Lujan’s videos seemingly violate the code of conduct of the image-conscious U.S. military, and it is unclear what role the military has in producing Lujan’s content.” But that ambiguity is part of the allure.

“There are many active duty service members with large social media followings, but what makes Lujan stand out is her offbeat, Gen-Z style humor and how she leans into the idea that she is a military propaganda operation,” Macleod writes. “With videos titled ‘My handlers made me post this’, ‘Not endorsed by the DoD :3’ or ‘most wholesome fedpost’, she revels in layers of irony and appears to enjoy the whole ‘am I or aren’t I’ question that people in her replies and mentions constantly debate.”

“I can’t believe she’s getting away with posting some of this stuff,” del Duca said in an interview with MintPress News, “Everyone learns in boot camp that when you are in uniform, you cannot act unprofessionally, or you get in deep trouble.”

The Defense Department didn’t respond when MacLeod reached out for clarification.

“Lujan is not the only online military influencer, but her overt use of her sensuality and her constant encouragement of her followers to enlist make her noteworthy.” Project Censored noted. “She is using her femininity to recruit legions of lustful teens into an institution with an infamous record of sexism and sexual assault against female soldiers.” MacLeod wrote.

“The branches of the U.S. military are no stranger to partnerships with entertainment giants that traditionally engage viewers from all walks of life — as in armed forces’ partnerships with the National Football League. But this new attempt to appeal to niche youth audiences has not been scrutinized,” Project Censored said.

“It is now well-established (if not well-known) that the Department of Defense also fields a giant clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job it is to influence public opinion, the majority doing so from their keyboards,” MacLeod reported, adding that a 2021 Newsweek exposé “warned that this troll army was likely breaking both domestic and international law.”

As of May 2024, Project Censored reported “no new coverage on this specific instance” that appears to take such lawbreaking to a new level.

8. New federal rule limits transcript withholding by colleges and universities

More than six million students have “stranded credits” due to the practice of colleges and universities withholding students’ transcripts to force them to repay loan debts. But a new federal Department of Education regulation will make withholding more difficult, Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner reported for The Hechinger Report in December 2023. Transcript withholding “has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators,” they wrote. “Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice.”

The rule was part of a package also intended to “strengthen the U.S. Department of Education’s ability to protect students and taxpayers from the negative effects of sudden college closures,” the DOE said in a press release. It went into effect in July. Specifically, it prevents withholding a transcript for terms in which a student received federal financial aid and paid off the balance for the term.

“As Katherine Knott reported for Inside Higher Education ... the new policy is part of a set of regulations intended to enhance the DOE’s oversight of institutions by providing additional tools to hold all colleges accountable,” Project Censored explained. “But these protections do not apply to institutions that accept no federal student aid, including many for-profit colleges.” However, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is also investigating transcript withholding, which the Bureau has deemed abusive because the practice is ‘designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.’ ”

“It’s a huge step forward, and it’s really going to benefit a lot of people,” Martin Kurzweil, an official at consulting firm Ithaka S+R, told Knott. The firm first identified the problem in a paper three years ago. He called the decision “stunning,” given it was just three years since his firm identified the problem. “That’s lightning speed in policy terms,” he told Knott. “It speaks to the salience of this issue and unfairness in transcript withholding. I commend the Education Department for taking this so seriously.” Practically, it’s essentially a national ban, he added. “I suspect that for a lot of institutions, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth to try to carve off a term that was completed but not fully paid for. It’ll be administratively difficult.”

Another expert — Edward Conroy, a senior policy adviser at the New America think tank, told The Hechinger Report something similar: that it probably helps all students, not just ones getting federal aid. “It wouldn’t completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, ‘We’re just going to stop doing this period,’ ” Conroy told them. “The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn’t that big; you don’t want to have separate administrative systems.”

This has already been seen at the state level, The Hechinger Report noted:

For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren’t and have opted to grant all requests.

Corporate news coverage has been limited as of May, Project Censored noted. There was only limited corporate news coverage of the transcript withholding rule. When the rule package was announced in October 2023, the Washington Post published a substantive report on the package, emphasizing the protections from sudden college closures, but only briefly noted the issue of transcript withholding. Early reporting in U.S. News & World Report and the New York Times (in a partnership with The Hechinger Report) did cover the issue. But the government’s response has gone virtually unnoticed.

9. Controversial acquitted-conduct sentencing challenged by U.S. commission

You might be surprised — even shocked — to learn that federal judges can determine defendants’ sentences based on charges they’ve been acquitted of by a jury. But in April, the United States Sentencing Commission, or USSC — a bipartisan panel that creates guidelines for the federal judiciary — voted to end the practice as it applies to “calculating a sentence range under the federal guidelines.”

The change will significantly limit federal judges’ use of acquitted-conduct sentencing, as the legal news service Law360 and Reason magazine reported. The commission voted unanimously “to prohibit judges from using acquitted conduct to increase the sentences of defendants who receive mixed verdicts at trial,” Stewart Bishop reported for Law360, but was “divided” on whether its proposal ought to apply retroactively. There are still narrow circumstances where such conduct can be considered — if it underlies a charge the defendant is found guilty of as well as the acquitted crime.

Acquitted conduct had been allowed under a lower standard — if the judge found the charges more likely truth than not, rather than the jury’s standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

It’s “a practice that has drawn condemnation from a wide range of civil liberties groups, lawmakers, and jurists,” C.J. Ciaramella reported for Reason, which in turn has “raised defendants’ scores under the federal sentencing guidelines, leading to significantly longer prison sentences.”

But now, “Not guilty means not guilty,” chairperson of the USSC, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, said in a news release. “By enshrining this basic fact within the federal sentencing guidelines, the Commission is taking an important step to protect the credibility of our courts and criminal justice system.”

Project Censored noted that “Acquitted-conduct sentencing partly explains why two Black men from Virginia, Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne, have been serving life sentences for the murder of police officer Allen Gibson in 1998 despite being found not guilty by a federal jury in 2001,” a case whose reconsideration has been reported on repeatedly by Meg O’Connor at The Appeal. The initial travesty of justice in this case was that police hid exonerating evidence from their original attorneys, and because of that, they pleaded guilty to lesser state charges. That was then used to give them life sentences in federal court, even though they were acquitted of murder in that trial. An evidentiary hearing was ordered by the Virginia Supreme Court in February, and the judge in that hearing allowed some new evidence to be introduced — but not all of it. Still, it’s possible that Richardson could be released from prison.

There’s been little corporate media coverage. Project Censored cited one story in Bloomberg Law, but nothing in the New York Times nor the Washington Post as of June. In addition, “Richardson’s and Claiborne’s cases have received nearly no national coverage by corporate outlets,” except for a March 2023 BET report, “which addressed coerced confessions but not acquitted-conduct sentencing.”

10. Generative AI apps raise serious security concerns

Generative artificial intelligence, or AI, apps carry considerable risks, some poorly understood, which can result in exposing sensitive data and exposing organizations to attacks from bad actors. In response, both government and businesses have taken steps to limit or even block AI access to data.

Congress “only permits lawmakers and staff to access ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of the app with enhanced privacy features, and forbids them from using other AI apps or pasting blocks of text that have not already been made public into the program,” Project Censored noted. A follow-up regulation banned the use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on government-issued devices. And the National Archives and Records Administration is even more restrictive. In May, it “completely prohibited employees from using ChatGPT at work and blocked all access to the app on agency computers.” What’s more, “Samsung decided to ban its employees’ use of generative AI apps (and develop its own AI application) in May 2023 after some users accidentally leaked sensitive data via ChatGPT,” Priya Singh reported for Business Today in April.

Programs such as ChatGPT and Copilot are built by a training process that collects and organizes data which can be regurgitated in response to just a snippet of text. They are then “aligned” with an added layer of training to produce helpful output — which is what ordinary users normally see.

But something as simple as asking ChatGPT to repeat a word endlessly can cause it to break alignment and reveal potentially sensitive data, Tiernan Ray reported for ZDNet in December 2023. Researchers from Google’s DeepMind AI research lab found that ChatGPT “could also be manipulated to reproduce individuals’ names, phone numbers, and addresses, which is a violation of privacy with potentially serious consequences,” he reported. “With our limited budget of $200 USD, we extracted over 10,000 unique examples,” the researchers wrote. “However, an adversary who spends more money to query the ChatGPT API could likely extract far more data.”

And while training data itself can hold sensitive information, users are constantly adding new sensitive data that can also be exposed. In an article for tech news site ZDNet, Eileen Yu cited a survey of some 11,500 employees in the U.S., Europe (France, Germany and the U.K.), and Asia (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea), which found that “57% of employees used public generative AI tools in the office at least once weekly, with 22.3% using the technology daily,” and that “31% of employees polled admitted entering sensitive information such as addresses and banking details for customers, confidential HR data, and proprietary company information into publicly accessible AI programs (and another 5% were unsure if they had done so).”

“Corporate media have given a lot of breathless coverage to the existential threat to humanity allegedly posed by AI,” Project Censored noted.“Yet these outlets have been far less attentive to AI apps’ documented data security risks and vulnerability to hackers, issues that have been given exhaustive coverage by smaller, tech-focused news outlets.”

Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News and a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Salon.