Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re
From
Belle Lin
November 15 2018, 7:00 a.m.
Illustration: Erik Blad for The Intercept
At the beginning of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would
allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics
and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,”
like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise
would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help
deliver more targeted advertising.
The algorithm would also consider a customer’s physical location — based on
their IP address, primary shipping address, and browser settings — to help
determine their accent. Should Amazon’s patent become a reality, or if accent
detection is already possible, it would introduce questions of surveillance and
privacy violations, as well as possible discriminatory advertising, experts
said.
The civil rights issues raised by the patent are similar to those around facial
recognition, another technology Amazon has used as an anchor of its artificial
intelligence strategy, and one that it controversially marketed to law
enforcement. Like facial recognition, voice analysis underlines how existing
laws and privacy safeguards simply aren’t capable of protecting users from new
categories of data collection — or government spying, for that matter. Unlike
facial recognition, voice analysis relies not on cameras in public spaces, but
microphones inside smart speakers in our homes. It also raises its own thorny
issues around advertising that targets or excludes certain groups of people
based on derived characteristics like nationality, native language, and so on
(the sort of controversy that Facebook has stumbled into again and again).
0-5-1542222720
From Amazon’s patent, an illustration of a process for determining physical
and emotional characteristics from someone’s voice, resulting in tailored audio
content like ads.
Document: United States Patent and Trademark Office
Why the Government Might Be Interested in Accent Data
If voice-based accent detection can determine a person’s ethnic background, it
opens up a new category of information that is incredibly interesting to the
government, said Jennifer King, director of consumer privacy at Stanford Law
School’s Center for Internet and Society.
“If you’re a company and you’re creating new classifications of data, and the
government is interested in them, you’d be naive to think that law enforcement
isn’t going to come after it,” she said.
She described a scenario in which knowing a user’s purchase history, existing
demographic data, and whether they speak Arabic or Arabic-accented English,
Amazon could identify the user as belonging to a religious or ethnic group.
King said it’s plausible that the FBI would compel the production of such data
from Amazon if it could help determine a user’s membership to a terrorist
group. Data demands focused on terrorism are tougher for companies to fight,
she said, as opposed to those that are vague or otherwise overbroad, which they
have pushed back on.
Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, makes it possible for
the government to covertly demand such data. FISA governs electronic spying
conducted to acquire information on foreign powers, allowing such monitoring
without a warrant in some circumstances and in others under warrants issued by
a court closed to the public, with only the government represented. The
communications of U.S. citizens and residents are routinely acquired under the
law, in many cases incidentally, but even incidentally collected communications
may later be used against Americans in FBI investigations. Under FISA, the
government could “get information in secret more easily, and there are mass or
bulk surveillance capabilities that don’t exist in domestic law,” said Crocker.
“Certainly it could be done in secret with less court oversight.”
“You’d be naive to think that law enforcement isn’t going to come after it.”
Jennifer Granick, a surveillance and cybersecurity lawyer at the American Civil
Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, suggested that
Amazon’s accent data could also provide the government with information for the
purpose of immigration control.
“Let’s say you have ICE go to one of these providers and say, ‘Give us all the
subscription information of people who have Spanish accents’ … in order to
identify people of a particular race or who theoretically might have relatives
who are undocumented,” she said. “So you can see that this type information can
definitely be abused.”
Though King said she hasn’t seen evidence of these types of government
requests, she has witnessed “parallel things happen in other contexts.” It’s
also possible that if Amazon was sent a National Security Letter by the FBI, a
gag order would prevent the company from disclosing much, including the exact
number of letters it received. National Security Letters compel the disclosure
of certain types of information from communications firms, like a subpoena
would, but often in secret. The letters require the companies to hand over
select data, like the name of an account owner and the age of an account, but
the FBI has routinely asked for more, including email headers and internet
browsing history.
Compared to some other tech giants, however, Amazon is less detailed in its
disclosures about National Security Letters it receives and about data requests
in general. For example, in its information request reports, it does not
disclose how many NSLs it has received or how many accounts are affected by
national security requests, as Apple and Google do. These more specific
disclosures from other companies show a trend: From mid-2016 to the first half
of 2017, national security requests sent to Apple, Facebook, and Google
increased significantly.
But even if the government hasn’t yet made such requests of Amazon, we know
that it has been paying attention to voice and speech technology for some time.
In January, The Intercept reported that the National Security Agency had
developed technology not just to record and transcribe private conversations,
but also to automatically identify speakers. An individual’s “voiceprint” was
created, which could be cross-referenced with millions of intercepted and
recorded telephone, video, and internet calls.
To create an American citizen’s “voiceprint,” which government documents don’t
explicitly indicate has been done, experts said the NSA would need only to tap
into Amazon or Google’s existing voice data.
Over the past year, Amazon’s relationship with the government has become
increasingly cozy. BuzzFeed recently revealed details about how the Orlando
Police Department was piloting Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition
technology, to identify “persons of interest.” A few months earlier, Amazon was
outed by the ACLU for “marketing Rekognition for government surveillance.”
Meanwhile, in June, the company was busy pitching Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials on its technology.
Though these revelations have set off alarm bells, even for Amazon employees,
experts said that speech recognition presents similar concerns that are equally
if not more pressing. Amazon’s voice processing patent dates to March of last
year. The company, in response to questions from The Intercept, described the
patent as exploratory and pledged to abide by its privacy policy when
collecting and using data.
Privacy Law Lags Behind Technology
Weak privacy laws in the U.S. are one reason consumers are vulnerable when tech
companies start gathering new types of data about them. There is nothing in the
law that protects data collected about a person’s mood or accent, said Granick.
In the absence of strong legal protections, consumers are forced to make their
own decisions about trade-offs between their privacy and the convenience of
virtual assistants. “Being able to use really robust voice control would be
great if it meant you weren’t just being put into a giant AI algorithm and
being used to improve your pitchability for new products, especially when
you’re paying for these systems,” said King.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, first passed in 1986, was a
major step forward in privacy protection at the time. But now, over 30 years
later, it has yet to catch up with the pace of technological innovation.
Generally, under ECPA, government agencies need a subpoena, court order, or
search warrant to compel companies to disclose protected user information.
Unlike court orders and search warrants, subpoenas don’t necessarily require
judicial review.
Amazon’s most recent information request report, which covers the first half of
this year, reveals that the company received 1,736 subpoenas during that time,
1,283 of which it turned over some or all of the information requested. Since
Amazon began publishing these reports three years ago, the number of data
requests it receives has steadily increased, with a huge jump between 2015 and
2016. Echo, its Alexa-enabled speaker for use at home, was released in 2015,
and Amazon has not said whether the increase is related to the growing
popularity of its speaker.
While ECPA protects the data associated with our digital conversations, Granick
said its application to information collected by providers like Amazon is
“anemic.” “The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think
is Chinese, Latino’ and the provider has to argue why they shouldn’t. That kind
of conclusory data isn’t protected by ECPA, and it means the government can
compel its disclosure with a subpoena,” she said.
“The government could say, ‘Give us a list of everyone who you think is
Chinese, Latino.’”
Since ECPA is not explicit, there’s a legal question of whether Amazon could
voluntarily turn over the conversations its users have with Alexa. Granick said
Amazon could argue that such data is a protected electronic communication under
ECPA — and require that the government get a warrant to access it — but as a
party to the communication, Amazon also has the right to divulge it. There have
been no court cases addressing the issue so far, she said.
Crocker, of the EFF, argued that communications with Alexa — voice searches and
commands, for example — are protected by ECPA, but agreed that the government
could obtain the data through a warrant or other legal process.
He added that the way Amazon stores accent information could impact the
government’s ability to access it. If Amazon keeps it stored long term in
customer profiles in the cloud, those profiles are easier to obtain than
real-time voice communications, the interception of which invokes protections
under the Wiretap Act, a federal law governing the interception and disclosure
of communications. (ECPA amended the Wiretap Act to include electronic
communications.) And if it’s stored in metadata associated with Alexa voice
searches, the government has obtained those in past cases and could get to it
that way.
In 2016, a hot tub murder in Arkansas put in the spotlight the defendant’s
Echo. Police seized the device and tried to obtain its recordings, prompting
Amazon to argue that any communications with Alexa, and its responses, were
protected as a form of free speech under the First Amendment. Amazon eventually
turned over the records after the defendant gave his permission to do so. Last
week, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over Echo recordings in a
new murder case, again hoping it could provide criminal evidence.
Dynamic, Targeted, and Discriminatory Ads
Beyond government surveillance, experts also expressed concern that Amazon’s
new classification of data increases the likelihood of discriminatory
advertising. When demographic profiling — the basis of traditional advertising
— is layered with additional, algorithmically assessed information from Alexa,
ads can quickly become invasive or offensive.
Granick said that if Amazon “gave one set of [housing] ads to people who had
Chinese accents and a different set of ads to people who have a Finnish accent
… highlighting primarily Chinese neighborhoods for one and European neighbors
for another,” it would be discriminating on the basis of national origin or
race.
King said Amazon also opens itself to charges of price discrimination, and even
racism, if it allows advertisers to show and hide ads from certain ethnic or
gender groups. “If you live in the O.C. and you have a Chinese accent and are
upper middle-class, it could show you things that are higher price. [Alexa]
might say, ‘I’m gonna send you Louis Vuitton bags based on those things,’” she
said.
Selling products based on emotions also offers opportunities for advertisers to
manipulate consumers. “If you’re a woman in a certain demographic and you’re
depressed, and we know that binge shopping is something you do … knowing that
you’re in kind of a vulnerable state, there’s no regulation preventing them
from doing something like this,” King said.
An example from the patent envisions marketing to Chinese speakers, albeit in a
more innocuous context, describing how ads might be targeted to “middle-aged
users who speak Mandarin or have a Chinese accent and live in the United
States.” If the user asks, “Alexa, what’s the news today?” Alexa might reply,
“Before your news brief, you might be interested in the Xiaomi TV box, which
allows you to watch over 1,000 real-time Chinese TV channels for just $49.99.
Do you want to buy it?”
According to the patent, the ads may be presented in response to user voice
input, but could also be “presented at any time.” They could even be injected
into existing audio streams, such as a news briefing or playback of tracks from
a music playlist.
Andrew DeVore, vice president and associate general counsel with Amazon.com
Inc., right, listens as Len Cali, senior vice president of global public policy
with AT&T Inc., speaks during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer
data privacy in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2018. Facing
growing pressure to protect their customers' privacy, some of the biggest
technology companies told Congress that they favor new federal consumer
safeguards but diverged on some of the details. Photographer: Andrew
Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Andrew DeVore, vice president and associate general counsel with Amazon.com
Inc., right, listens as Len Cali, senior vice president of global public policy
with AT&T Inc., speaks during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on consumer
data privacy in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 26, 2018.
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
New Rules Emerge for Data Privacy
In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, lawmakers have grown
increasingly wary of tech companies and their privacy practices. In late
September, the Senate Commerce Committee held a fresh round of hearings with
tech executives on the issue — also giving them an opportunity to explain how
they’re addressing the new, stringent data privacy laws in the European Union
and California.
California’s regulation, which passed in June and goes into effect in 2020,
sets a new precedent for consumer privacy law in the country. It expands the
definition of personal information and gives state residents greater control
over the sharing and sale of their data to third parties.
Unsurprisingly, Amazon and other big tech companies pushed back forcefully on
the new reforms, citing excessive penalties, compliance costs, and data
collection restrictions — and each spent nearly $200,000 to defeat it. During
the Senate hearing, Amazon Vice President and Associate General Counsel Andrew
DeVore asked the committee to consider the “unintended consequences” of
California’s law, which he called “confusing and difficult to comply with.”
Now that the midterm elections have passed, privacy advocates hope that
congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into legislative action;
thus far, it has not. The Federal Trade Commission is also considering updates
to its consumer protection enforcement priorities. In September, it kicked off
a series of hearings examining the impact of “new technologies” and other
economic changes.
Advocates hope congressional interest in privacy issues will turn into
legislative action; thus far, it has not.
Granick said that as states move to protect consumers where the federal
government has not, California could serve as a model for the rest of the
country. In August, California also became the first state to pass an internet
of things cybersecurity law, requiring that manufacturers add a “reasonable
security feature” to protect the information it collects from unauthorized
access, modification, or disclosure.
In 2008, Illinois became the first state to pass a law regulating biometric
data, placing restrictions on the collection and storing of iris scan,
fingerprint, voiceprint, hand scan, and face geometry data. (Granick says it’s
unclear if accent data is covered under the law.) Being the first state to pass
landmark legislation, Illinois presents a cautionary tale for California.
Though its bill was once considered a model law, only two other states — Texas
and Washington — have passed biometric privacy laws over the past 10 years.
Similar efforts elsewhere were largely killed by corporate lobbying.
A Growing and Global Problem
Activists have looked to other countries as examples of what could go wrong if
tech companies and government agencies become too friendly, and voice accent
data gets misused.
Human Rights Watch reported last year that the Chinese government was creating
a national voice biometric database using data from Chinese tech company
iFlyTek, which provides its consumer voice recognition apps for free and claims
its system can support 22 Chinese dialects. On its English website, iFlyTek
said that its technology has been “inspected and praised” by “many party and
state leaders,” including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
The company is also the supplier of voice pattern collection systems used by
regional police bureaus and runs a lab that develops voice surveillance
technology for the Ministry of Public Security. Its technology has “helped
solve cases” for law enforcement in Anhui, Gansu, Tibet, and Xinjiang,
according to a state press report cited by Human Rights Watch. Activists warn
that one possible use of the government’s voice database, which could contain
dialect and accent-rich voice data from minority groups, is the surveillance of
Tibetans and Uighurs.
Last year, Die Welt reported that the German government was testing voice
analysis software to help verify where its refugees are coming from. They hoped
it would determine the dialects of people seeking asylum in Germany, which
migration officers would use as one of several “indicators” when reviewing
applications. The test was met with skepticism, as speech experts questioned
the ability of software to make such a complex determination.
The amount of information people voluntarily give tech companies through smart
speakers is growing, along with the purchases users are allowed to make. A
Gallup survey conducted last year found that 22 percent of Americans currently
use smart home personal assistants like Echo — placing them in living rooms,
kitchens, and other intimate spaces. And 44 percent of U.S. adult internet
users are planning to buy one, according to a Consumer Technology Association
study.
Amazon’s move into the home with more sophisticated voice abilities for Alexa
has been a long time coming. In 2016, it was already discussing emotion
detection as a way to stay ahead of competitors Google and Apple. Also that
year, it filed a patent application for a real-time language accent translator
— a blend of accent detection and translation technologies. When its emotion
and accent patent was issued last month, Alexa’s potential ability to read
emotions and detect if customers are sick was called out as creepy.
Amazon Grapples With an “Accent Gap”
Amazon’s current accent handling capabilities are lackluster. In July, the
Washington Post charged that Amazon and Google had created an “accent gap,”
leaving non-native English speakers behind in the voice-activated technology
revolution. Both Alexa and Google Assistant had the most difficulty
understanding Chinese- and Spanish-accented English.
Since the advent of speech recognition technology, picking up on dialects,
speech impediments, and accents has been a persistent challenge. If the
technology in Amazon’s patent was available today, natural language processing
experts said that the accent and emotion detection would not be able to draw
precise conclusions. The training data that teaches artificial intelligence
lacks diversity in the first place, and because language itself is constantly
changing, any AI would have a hard time keeping up.
Though Amazon’s new patent is a sign that it’s paying attention to the “accent
gap,” it may be doing so for the wrong reasons. Improved language accent
detection makes voice technology more equitable and accessible, but it comes at
a cost.
Regarding Patents
Patents are not a surefire sign of what tech companies have built, or what is
even possible for them to build. Tech companies in particular submit a dizzying
number of patent applications.
In an emailed statement, Amazon said that it filed “a number of forward-looking
patent applications that explore the full possibilities of new technology.
Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect current
developments to products and services.” The company also said that it “will
only collect and use data in accordance with our privacy policy,” and did not
elaborate on other uses of its technology or data.
But King, who has also reviewed numerous Facebook patents, said that they can
be used to infer the direction a company is headed.
“You’re seeing a future where the interactions with people and their interior
spaces is getting a lot more aggressive,” she said. “That’s the next frontier
for companies. Not just tracking your behavior, where you’ve gone, what they
think you might buy. Now it’s what you’re thinking, feeling, and that is what
makes people deeply uncomfortable.”
For now, people who want to hold onto their privacy and minimize surveillance
risk shouldn’t buy a speaker at all, recommended Granick. “You’re basically
installing a microphone for the government to listen in to you in your home,”
she said.
Related
Forget About Siri and Alexa — When It Comes to Voice Identification, the “NSA
Reigns Supreme”
Interpol Rolls Out International Voice Identification Database Using Samples
From 192 Law Enforcement Agencies
Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Users Interested in “White Genocide” —
Even in Wake of Pittsburgh Massacre
Contact the author:
Belle Lin
✉belle.lin@theintercept.com
t@bellelin_
A Boundless Battlefield
What Happens When a Barrio 18 Soldier Tries to Leave the Gang
f
t
✉
⎕
11
Illustration: Clay Rodery for The Intercept
Danielle Mackey
November 17 2018, 10:00 a.m.
Benjamin suspected the Salvadoran gang Barrio 18 Revolucionarios would kill him
when he asked permission to leave. He was 21 years old and had been in the gang
for a decade. He was ready to die to get out.
He had joined at age 12 because his world didn’t feel right. He thought the
gang looked cool by comparison; it took him years to name the deeper
attraction. Neighborhoods like his were violent places where no one made a
living wage, and the justice system was absent except to punish. Kids like him
were either ignored or treated like criminality coursed through their veins.
But not if he was Barrio 18. The gang, with its brotherhood and strict rules,
promised him protection and stability. Here were his wafer-thin options:
Benjamin could remain passive, buffeted by the winds of danger and impunity. Or
he could do something proactive. He chose to act.
Within a few years, he saw that the gang’s promise was a siren song. A few
years after that, he found the courage to plot his escape.
He called his mother to say goodbye. He summoned the leaders of the area
cliques. He delivered his speech: He had done much for the gang, killing dozens
who wished the group harm, especially MS-13 rivals. He had collected extortion
taxes to feed and clothe the tens of thousands of members and their families
and to hire defense lawyers when they were arrested. Now he felt called to
evangelical Christianity, so he had researched churches and chosen one that was
strict; no vices like alcohol or non-Christian music allowed. It would keep him
out of trouble. He had earned his retirement.
Benjamin is about 5 1/2 feet tall. He is thin and angular; his face runs from
cheekbones to sharp nose to jutting jaw. He has cobalt hair cropped close and
pupils so glossy dark they’re nearly mirrors. He looks like a falcon. He could
play Dracula. And in that moment, he stood before his audience, the gang’s
leaders, pleading for a second chance at life.
To his surprise, they said yes. They let him go. He had to check in regularly
and couldn’t do anything to harm the gang, like snitching. He couldn’t ask them
for favors or use his previous affiliation to gain anything. They would observe
his change to ensure it was genuine. They reserved the right to call him back
to active duty. But with those conditions, he was free.
I met Benjamin five weeks later. (“Benjamin” is a pseudonym; as for most people
in this article, to use his real name would cause an immediate threat to his
life.) We met as part of a project: For four years, I followed four kids as
they tried to leave their gangs. None of them knew each other. They were all
under age 22.
One fled MS-13 without permission. She changed her name, moved across the
country, and had a child. The gang tracked her down. Now she is paying to save
her child’s life, and her own, with constant criminal favors. Another, a young
man who also deserted MS-13 without permission, withdrew from our interviews,
so ashamed of his past that he decided to amputate it, to banish his former
self. The third retired with permission from Barrio 18, found work at a chain
of thrift stores run by evangelical Christians, went to church every day, and
raised his toddler son. His name was Jonathan Osvaldo Tobar. On August 7, 2015,
he was shot dead in the middle of a market by unidentified gunmen. His funeral
was a tense juxtaposition of the people one meets in such a life.
The fourth was Benjamin.
Paradoxically, the danger faced by gang members increases when they leave. In
the gang, Benjamin was a soldier in a war. He was armed and he was backed by an
army. But the problem with retiring is that the battlefield has no boundaries,
and the war has no end. That’s in part due to a colloquial belief in Salvadoran
society that gang members are people forever ruined. Given the havoc they
wreak, they are reviled. So society blocks on-ramps to civilian life like
education and employment. Police see them as fodder for vengeance. For former
enemies, they’re easy prey.
Yet even in the hardest moments, Benjamin believed he could be salvaged. There
are an estimated 60,000 gang members in El Salvador. What is the solution to
this problem if they can’t retire?
He didn’t expect society to welcome him. “People don’t trust us. They don’t
like us and I understand why,” he told me. “If I’m well-known in some places,
it isn’t because I was a good person. Imagine how much evil I did to numerous
families, how much pain I caused them.” He saw the ostracization as karma. “I’m
paying off a tiny bit of the many things I did.”
Kids like Benjamin try to leave their gangs by hiding in plain sight. They bury
their pasts and attempt to start over. They do it in myriad ways and so well
that often they’re even unaware of each other. Alone, they shed skin like any
wild creature and take on a new identity.
But their needs are akin to those of child soldiers or war veterans — and the
devastating cruelty wrought by gangs leaves little public will to provide that
kind of support. As a result, the process is like burrowing through a boulder
with a screwdriver. Exhausting. Seemingly impossible. You sweat it out alone.
There are some exceptions. Retiring to evangelical Christianity, as Benjamin
did, is a path that has existed almost as long as the gangs themselves. But it,
too, can be hazardous. And as Benjamin would find, swapping gang for church
means trading one black-and-white vision of the world for another. It was
initially effective but became insufficient the longer he lived and the more
his world blossomed into color.
There was one more problem. El Salvador is small. Like the civilians threatened
by gangs — who very frequently must flee the country to survive — kids trying
to leave gangs can only hide for so long.
Benjamin’s attempt began in December 2015. We met nearly once a week. He shared
his experiences with me, a foreign journalist, because he was desperate to
circulate his story. He knew many gang members who wanted to leave, but they
were afraid. He wanted to show them they could.
“I’d like to be recognized by society. It’s not that I want to be famous. It’s
like with young people who want to be guitarists — they have an example of some
well-known guitarist,” he told me. “There is no example for me, to show me a
better life is possible. I have to be that example.”
No Extra Lives
Violence didn’t appear in Benjamin’s life when he joined the gang. He was born
into violence.
His uncle, who raised him as a son, was a guerrilla fighter in the 12-year
Salvadoran civil war, which ended in 1992 after a nominally democratic
government, funded by billions of dollars from the U.S., tried to annihilate a
leftist guerrilla force. The war turned his uncle into an alcoholic who spent
most of his time playing war-themed video games. When 12-year-old Benjamin
murdered a boy in a gang initiation — a repelling and traumatic experience that
became easier with repetition, he told me — in his mind he retreated to images
from his uncle’s games, as if willing the bloody boy to come back to life in a
next round.
The civil war introduced particular kinds of violence to El Salvador.
Government death squads pulled students off buses and church workers from their
beds, aiming to puncture leftist thought and litter the roadsides with tortured
corpses as messages to those considering dissent. Thousands of youth taken by
the state simply disappeared.
In December 1988, the Spanish Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró, who lived and
taught at the Central American University in San Salvador, described what raged
around him in the introduction to a book called “The Social Psychology of War.”
Thousands fled the armed forces, “pursued like animals,” while in the U.S.,
President Ronald Reagan boasted that those same forces were defenders of
democracy. Reagan was performing a part, “‘the good guy in the movie,’ ‘the
righteous cowboy,’” the priest wrote, and was ignorant about El Salvador. But
his administration’s “ideological blindness and tooth-and-nail militarism,”
Martín-Baró wrote, turned the country into “a living laboratory in which the
principles of ‘low intensity conflict’ have been put into practice,” thus
changing El Salvador forever. “War has become part of the frame of reference of
Salvadoran lives. In some way, the fact that there’s war is now assumed as
‘natural,’ and no one is surprised by the daily aspects of shootouts and
ambushes, cadavers and wounded.” Martín-Baró was murdered by the army less than
a year later.
On January 16, 1992, 16 signatures on paper, the peace accords, officially
ended the war. Violence remained.
Gangs that had formed among war refugees in Los Angeles were then deported to
El Salvador. The government shored up its post-war power by turning on this new
internal enemy, meeting it with a bellicose security policy called mano dura,
“iron fist.”
It wasn’t that murders spiked when the gangs arrived. In fact, the first years
of the 21st century were a time of relative peace: The homicide rate dropped
and reached a post-war low. But the ruling right-wing party, the Nationalist
Republican Alliance, known by its Spanish acronym ARENA, feared its weak
prognosis in the 2004 presidential elections. So in 2003, the president
announced mano dura, which had the simultaneous effect of fishing up gangs from
a cauldron of national problems and then selling ARENA as the only force
capable of vanquishing them. ARENA won.
Gangs offered an opportunity: Political parties could prop up this straw man —
young people in poor communities — and then humiliate, incarcerate, beat, and
kill them, and emerge victorious at ballot boxes nationwide.
Between July 2003 and July 2005, the police arrested 30,934 alleged gang
members in SWAT-style raids choreographed for news cameras. Many detainees were
released and re-arrested 48 hours later, according to scholar José Miguel Cruz.
The Salvadoran president erroneously claimed in 2004 that gangs committed 40
percent of the country’s murders; the national coroner’s office counted only 10
percent.
Mano dura was repression masquerading as policy — but 80 percent of the
population bought into it. “Gang members have a mental illness called murder,”
said police chief Ricardo Meneses. The following year, the FBI described in a
press release how it was “ganging up on” gangs by partnering with Salvadoran
authorities.
Mano dura has remained and mutated ever since. In response, the gangs became
sophisticated and heinous. Their victims multiply in a country besieged by
grief and fear. For those who suffer, the most important thing is not that the
policy doesn’t work, or that violence-as-security is a self-perpetuating cycle.
Mano dura gave victims a name for the cause of their misery. It gave them a
stability similar to what Benjamin sought in the gang.
The policy had striking success in just two areas: in continually selling
itself despite being counterproductive, and in selling the image of gang
members as irreformable youth who no longer belong to El Salvador or any
nation, to whom nothing is owed but iron bars or bullets.
In January 2015, police director Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde announced that
“any member of the institution who needs to use their firearm to comply with
the duty of self-defense, or defense of others, should do so without fear.” The
reaction was vivid: In 2014, police had killed 49 suspected gang members. In
2015, they killed 320. The police followed the U.S. model, creating elite
anti-gang forces, one of which did target practice on images of Osama bin
Laden’s face. “These two gangs need to be annihilated,” said former New York
City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to the Salvadoran press in May 2015, when he was hired
as a security consultant whose services cost millions of dollars.
“I see the faces of wealthy politicians, and then I see [people] who work all
day, every day and make $5 a day,” Benjamin told me in April 2016. “Why do so
many youth become gang members? Because they see that. Why are they arming the
police? There will be more deaths. They’re not thinking with their brains.
They’re thinking of their money, of their power.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to members of MS-13, the
one Salvadoran gang he’s apparently aware of, as “animals.” This is the same
word he chose to refer to Middle Eastern combatants who he argued the U.S.
should torture by waterboarding. He employs the term with a goal: to rally his
base. The president, like Reagan before him, is ignorant of the situation. He
is using gangs to increase his power. But in El Salvador, state security forces
are torturing and murdering young people suspected of gang membership, and the
words of the U.S. president are encouraging them.
This is the new war, a Russian doll of a war: gangs against each other, police
against them all. Civilians again in the middle. It is as bloody as its
predecessor, its engine pumped with the same gasoline: men who want power.
Benjamin wanted out.
leaving-gang-el-salvador-02-1541874095
Normal Dangers
The first thing Benjamin did on his first morning of freedom was smoke pot.
“Habit,” he told me. Also terror. Still in bed, he burned through five blunts,
paralyzed by a refrain: “What will come of me?”
Every day of the past decade of his life had been determined by the gang. The
gang’s interests were his duties, its members were his peers. The gang’s risks
were his and its forms of protection were too. But not anymore. He didn’t even
have a place to live; he had woken up in the gang house, and today he must
leave. Then, a scarier thought: There was a trade-off implicit in his decision.
Yesterday he had an identity, but today he had freedom.
He bounced between hostels until just before Christmas, when he found an
affordable apartment in an old brick structure near the National University of
El Salvador, four stories tall and packed with people. He was relieved to have
a room. He needed to lock himself in it for protection from former enemies and
police — “people who want me dead” — but also from himself. He had spent most
days high on marijuana or acid or cocaine before leaving the gang, and his
zealous new evangelical identity prohibited drugs, so he was antsy to wean
himself off them. He needed to whittle himself down to his acceptable parts,
his holy parts.
Within days, it was clear that loneliness would be the hardest part.
He spent Christmas alone. He was a marked man now; it would put his mother at
risk to be together on a predictable day. So he sat on the floor and leaned
against the wall under a window. There were families gathered outside.
“Everyone was so happy at midnight, giving each other hugs. A ton of people in
the streets. And there I was, just listening to them. I laughed at the funny
things they said,” he remembered, “and then I cried.” He got high and tried to
sleep.
Leaving home was always risky. One afternoon, he arrived late to our meeting at
the Metrocentro mall food court. The block around his apartment had been
teeming with anxious cops — there had been a homicide — and he feared that an
officer would arrest him, a solitary young man near a crime scene. So he waited
until a neighbor with her toddler daughter offered to walk hand in hand as if
he were an older son. Everyone knew the police were dangerous.
He tried reconnecting on Facebook with friends from childhood. One by one, they
shut him out.
“It hurts to be in the streets,” he told me. “On the bus, I hear someone answer
a phone and say, ‘Wait for me, I’ll be there soon!’ And I think, ‘No one is
waiting for me anymore.’” He saw people hugging each other, walking to school
or to a store, “all of those daily things that take people to other people.”
There was relief on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday evenings, when he could go to
church services and youth group. Otherwise, he rarely left his apartment,
except for our meetings. Most days, “I don’t speak a word,” he told me in late
January. “Imagine spending just one full day staring at the wall.” Benjamin
spent weeks like that. He simmered in regret. “I wish I could be a child again.
I wish I could do none of the things I did with my life.”
As the weeks passed, Benjamin’s language changed. He became a
fire-and-brimstone Christian. He diagnosed the downfall of a society that
produced people like him, a biblical lineup of sinners: Prostitutes.
Homosexuals. Drug addicts. Rap. Bad fathers. Women with necklines too low.
Women who posted “half-naked photos on Facebook.” Women who were “losing their
value.”
It was a straight path out of the gang. The world was still a battlefield, but
he was now a soldier in a different army.
He made progress he could measure. Once, on a bus to pay rent with money that
his aunt, an immigrant in the U.S., lent him, two men robbed him at gunpoint. I
asked him if he considered retreating to his clique. “Look,” he said dreamily,
as if in love. “When you return to Christ, you forget the gang.”
Searching for a job was hard. When asked for his resume, he had nothing to
offer. He had to lie about his past. But employers wouldn’t hire a young man
with no history.
Another complicating factor: He had been incarcerated in 2013, and he’d been
violating the terms of his parole. He was obligated to study upon release, but
that would mean regularly crossing MS-13 territory to get to the public school,
which was too dangerous. Now there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
These struggles are nearly universal in the experience of those who try to
leave Salvadoran gangs, but that doesn’t make them any easier to face. One day
we visited one of Benjamin’s mentors, a pastor and former gang member named
Julio Iglesia, who lived deep in a labyrinthine hot zone called Tikal. Iglesia
was from the first generation of homegrown Barrio 18 members, the ones who
joined what the deportees from California started. “In this country, there has
never been peace,” he told me. “We live at war.”
Across from Iglesia sat a giant man, his face etched in “18” ink, trembling.
The man had left the gang after serving a jail sentence. Days earlier, he
narrowly avoided yet another murder attempt by a joint patrol of police and
soldiers. But Iglesia interceded, saving him. “They want to kill me because of
what I have on my body,” the man said. “They’ll never again see me doing
something bad. They sought me out. It’s because of what I have on my body.”
The pastor’s wife hung wet laundry on a line on the front porch. She dashed
inside and bolted the metal door when a group of kids, guns in hand, sprinted
down the street toward the community border. Tikal was Barrio 18 and the
neighbors were rivals. Iglesia warned us that we needed to leave because if
gunfire broke out, the police would show up and splay out house to house. The
state of siege would last until tomorrow. Benjamin was at great risk.
A tense 30 minutes passed before we could find someone with a car to hustle us
out of the conflict zone.
For Benjamin, these were normal dangers. The chance to sit with someone who was
once in his shoes was precious. But he was beginning to worry that he wasn’t
strong enough to become good. Even the most faithful iron posture toward the
world can’t save a holy soldier from loneliness.
Then he met Zelda.
You’re a Mess
The night they met, Zelda came home from a bar and found Benjamin curled up
drunk on the front steps. The landlord evicted disorderly residents, so Zelda
hooked her thin arms under the new neighbor kid, who had spent weeks locked in
his room down the hall. “I don’t think he ever even ate,” she told me later.
Zelda told me this story at a gay bar in San Salvador. She wore a sleeveless
T-shirt and suspenders, her head half-shaved. Tattoos scaled her bicep. She
spoke with a half-smile and a confident chin.
She deposited Benjamin in his apartment that first night, and the next morning,
she woke up hungover and suspected he’d feel worse. She made soup and knocked
on his door. He opened it, hair askew and eyes sleepy. “Take a shower, you’re a
mess,” she laughed. “Then come eat, and then you can go back to bed.”
He stumbled into her apartment minutes later, smelling of soap, without
pleasantries. This kid must have dropped out of the wilderness, she thought. He
told me a few days later — months before I heard the story from Zelda — that he
felt shy around this shockingly friendly stranger.
Zelda was a lesbian feminist painter who taught art therapy workshops to
victims of domestic violence. He gazed at the walls covered in her paintings.
“So you like art?” she asked. He mumbled something about loving it since he was
a child. “He might have even drooled a little,” Zelda chuckled as she
remembered in the bar. “He was in a trance.”
He told her he was a Christian, but she noticed a tattoo on his heel. “That’s a
big tattoo for a Christian,” she joked. “He just laughed. He was always
laughing,” she told me at the bar. “He never told me much about himself, just
that he used to do drugs and graffiti and live on the street.”
For the duration of their friendship, Benjamin struggled with withholding his
full story from Zelda. “I’m afraid she’ll reject me,” he told me at the time.
Zelda started bringing Benjamin meals. He seemed so lonely, and who could live
like that, staring at four walls all day? She delivered the apartment building
gossip: who was sleeping with whom, who he could trust and who he shouldn’t.
One of the men on their floor was rumored to be MS-13. He was aggressive and
referred to Zelda as “the dyke.” Benjamin started helping her avoid him.
Benjamin expected to face difficult tests on this journey to a new life. He
didn’t expect Zelda. The church members who made his second chance possible,
the only people who knew his full story, preached that people like Zelda were
sinners akin to addicts and adulterers. People like Zelda were far from God,
and Benjamin’s salvation would come from walking in the opposite direction.
But now he had company for the endless days. One afternoon, Benjamin wandered
to the roof of the apartment building. Blinking in the sun, he found Zelda
there painting. She was smoking a joint and offered him a drag. He said he used
to smoke but was a Christian now. Zelda, an atheist, laughed and handed it to
him. He took a drag.
He stood silently. He clearly was here to stay. “OK, kiddo,” she said. “Tell
me, what color is the sky?” He looked up, then looked back at her. “No one’s
ever asked me that,” he said. A few seconds later he ventured: “Blue?” She
smiled. “That’s what everyone thinks. But there are many tones that make up
that blue. Look back up. Tell me what they are.” He smiled and inhaled sharply.
“He always used to do that when he was excited about something,” she told me at
the bar, mimicking him and laughing. “He was like a child, so excited about the
world.”
“You’re not a bad guy,” she told him. “You’ve got a good heart.”
In the next conversation that Benjamin and I had, he repeated this phrase three
times: “You’ve got a good heart.”
Soon, Zelda was toting Benjamin out with her friends, other lesbian feminist
activists. She had to defend him more than once. To explain himself, he could
only offer that he used to be a drug-addicted street kid and was now an
evangelical Christian, neither of which played well here. But Zelda is
charismatic. If anyone could sneak an evangelical kid without a history into a
lesbian feminist clan, it was Zelda.
They took him to a concert by the Guatemalan rapper Rebeca Lane. They took him
to the beach for a weekend. He told them he didn’t know how to swim, an excuse
to avoid removing his shirt and exposing his torso covered in Barrio 18
tattoos. “He was stuck to a plastic chair the whole time,” Zelda remembered.
They took him to dinners at fast food restaurants at malls. Sometimes they’d
end the night at a bar. Benjamin chuckled uncomfortably as he recounted how,
more than once, the group separated into couples, a long table of women kissing
— plus Benjamin, the boy nursing a Pilsner, the evangelical with a big secret.
“I think that if they knew what I used to be, they’d immediately reject me,” he
told me then. Once he asked one of Zelda’s friends what her opinion was of the
kids who retire from gangs. “I’ve never met anyone like that,” she told him.
“If I ever did, I’d have to think hard about it.” He didn’t say anything else.
“I know them, and I know now that they’re good people, and I’d have criticized
them once, people like this,” he told me. In fact, he loved hanging out with
Zelda’s friends because they had pride in spite of society’s rejection. “They
value themselves so much,” he said. Benjamin was born into a hyper-macho
society and then he joined the gang, which concentrates that machismo. He’d
never had friends who autopsied reggaeton songs to air out their misogyny, much
less queer women.
But this wasn’t easy. Apart from Zelda, the church was all he had. “It’s God
who has allowed me to step aside [from the gang], but this confuses me,” he
told me.
Benjamin had never lived outside the battlefield. Zelda was teaching him to see
parts of life that are invisible in war.
During the beach weekend, they walked the shore. She pointed to a piece of
driftwood. Benjamin saw nothing in it, but Zelda’s finger traced its outline in
the air and then he could see: It was a woman, waist to hip to thigh. They
coaxed it from the waves and whittled it into an ad hoc sculpture. “I feel like
I’m falling in love with life,” he told me later.
But he wasn’t naive. “Sometimes I feel like my destiny is to die for having
been a gang member,” he told me. He felt that it wouldn’t matter what he did to
change; the end result would be the same. “But I find the motivation in
myself,” he said. “I carry on.”
leaving-gang-el-salvador-03-1541874141
Left for Dead
Benjamin had just finished buying groceries when a police patrol detained him
at a bus stop in a middle-class neighborhood called San Luis. It was a
Wednesday evening in April, at about 7:30 p.m. When one officer lifted
Benjamin’s shirt and discovered his tattooed torso, he said to the others, “Ah,
here’s one we can kill.” They loaded him into the back seat of the patrol
truck, folding him over at the waist so he could not be seen through the
window, and drove him to a police station, where they led him into a room
through a back entrance.
For the next several hours, a group of officers tortured him. The torture was
methodical and fit the patterns recorded that year by human rights
investigators: They maced him, thrust his head into a bucket of water to
simulate drowning, hung him upside down, and beat him until he lost
consciousness. They put a plastic bag over his head to simulate suffocation,
smacked him in the face with the butts of their rifles, and kicked him until he
felt his ribs “bend.” Benjamin drifted in and out of consciousness. “They’re
just going to beat me to death,” he remembers thinking. But the police had
another plan.
They put him back in the truck, again doubled over. Benjamin estimates that it
was past midnight. The officers drove around looking for kids walking the
streets in Barrio 18 neighborhoods, whom he said they planned to execute. Then
they’d kill Benjamin and position the boys’ bodies together as if they had died
after ambushing the police. This is a method of extrajudicial murder common in
El Salvador since 2015.
Benjamin was lucky; they found no one to kill. But the officers decided he was
weak enough that they could just throw him out, shirtless, in MS-13 territory,
where his tattoos would make him a quick target. They tossed his body in front
of a graffiti-covered house in an MS-13 stronghold called Los Llanitos and
drove away.
He lay still. Then he crawled through shrubbery and ditches on the side of the
road. He made it to La Santisima Trinidad, a nearby Barrio 18 neighborhood,
where a young gang member on lookout duty took him to the clique leader, who
recognized Benjamin’s old alias and offered him shelter for the night. Benjamin
was wary. He knew he was not allowed to ask favors under retirement rules, but
the leader told him this was different. So he accepted, and the next morning,
they drove him to his apartment and carried his swollen body up the stairs.
We saw each other two weeks later. He said he had forgiven his torturers.
Benjamin was five months out of the gang, and life was a wonder. It was as if
he had been blind and gifted sight. This made him extremely generous toward
other people’s wrongs, including his torturers. He understood the police like
he did his former self: locked in a war between brotherhoods, kept there by a
screwed-up world.
But the brush with death unsettled him. He asked me for a favor: If I ever read
in the paper that he died in an armed confrontation with police, to please
debunk that story. “I’m telling you that I will never go back to the gang.
Never. Never,” he swore. He desperately wanted other youth to know it was
possible to leave, and he wanted to remain proof of it, alive or dead.
In late August, though, his resolve was tested. He began to receive messages
from his former clique.
Five months earlier, the Salvadoran government had begun a draconian policy
called “extraordinary measures,” meant to seal off gang prisons. Inside the
prisons, food and drinking water were restricted, and skin diseases and
tuberculosis ripped through the population in a torrent, killing 53 percent
more inmates in 2017 than the year before. The Red Cross could no longer enter
prisons, nor could inmates’ families. Originally temporary, parts of the policy
have since become permanent, with the support of U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes,
despite an outcry from the United Nations and Red Cross.
Between the suffering in the prisons and the extrajudicial murders outside of
them, his former clique decided they needed everyone on duty.
At just past 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, a gang member sent Benjamin an audio clip via
Facebook listing nearly 20 members of their clique who had been arrested or
killed since Benjamin left. “The situation with the system is so black right
now I don’t even consider going outside,” he said. Then he wrote in nearly
illegible gang slang: “Activate again asshole. Damn we need people.” Then,
“Help us out. We’re going to figure out how to pull up the neighborhood. This
is our time.”
Benjamin dodged. “Truly I’d like to but the truth is that the price is high for
turning your back on God,” he wrote. “But I do want to talk to you about many
things, nothing bad, just important.” He was suggesting that he would try to
convert his former homeboy, and he hoped it would quiet the demands.
Then one evening in mid-September, at just past midnight, another member of the
clique wrote on WhatsApp with a more concrete request: They needed to find
$3,000 to pay a lawyer for incarcerated homies. They asked Benjamin to find the
money. “I’m going to try to figure out how I can help you,” Benjamin responded.
Then he wrote to me, “They don’t want that answer. They want me to activate
again.” That is, they didn’t just want his money. They wanted their soldier
back.
This wasn’t an invitation. He began to believe he was not far from his tomb. If
he refused the clique’s demand, they might kill him along with his surviving
family members — his mom and 4-year-old niece, his late sister’s child. The
three of them could try to flee the country, but with his arrest warrant, he
couldn’t go anywhere legally. He could kill himself. Or he could join again,
which would prove society right that he was impossible to salvage.
“I want to die, I don’t know what to do, and I’m afraid,” he told me. “I wish I
could run and scream and cry until I just die.”
Benjamin was arrested before the month was over. He was accused of extorting
more than $7,000 from a business with a group of other young people.
In the first phone call he made to his mother from the police holding cell, he
swore that he was innocent and asked her to tell me. He said there was proof in
the house where they were arrested.
So his mother and I went. Benjamin and two young men who lived there were
arrested together, and the boys’ mother answered our knock. She was clearly
traumatized. She spoke to us, through a door cracked open, for 15 minutes. She
said the boys had been playing guitar in a room when the police arrived, forced
their way in, tied everyone up, and beat Benjamin and the brothers. Then they
ransacked the house while insulting her for raising “rats.” They detained her
youngest child in the police cruiser, threatening to turn him over to child
services for her maternal incompetence.
Telling the story, she seemed to experience a flashback. At least they didn’t
take her youngest, she said. She was struggling to pay the daily fees for her
sons’ meals in the police holding cells. She was bitter and scared and didn’t
see Benjamin’s mother as an ally. She had no allies. “I wish I could fly away,”
she said. “Anywhere but this country.”
Benjamin’s mother had been silent, afraid the woman would slam the door. As if
coaxing a cowering animal, she said that Benjamin told her that something in
the home proved that the boys were innocent. The woman disappeared for a few
moments. She returned and slipped Benjamin’s Bible through the narrow opening.
A Religious Shield
A Bible is not proof of anything.
This is Salvadoran society’s Catch-22 with ex-gang members: The Bible is only
proof if we believe Benjamin. We cannot be sure he didn’t do it. And how are we
to believe someone who we know is capable of so much harm?
The night the police tortured Benjamin, they found his Bible in his backpack
and accused him of using it as a shield, of faking Christianity. The accusation
isn’t without evidence. Some people have costumed themselves in evangelicalism
while continuing to commit gang crimes. Or, even if Benjamin had actually
retired, perhaps he participated in this one extortion to save his life. It was
clear he had run out of options.
But the Salvadoran police also have a record of planting weapons and drugs on
kids from poor communities, gang-identified or not, in order to arrest them.
I asked a retired member of MS-13 for their perception of the way the story
ended. They reminded me that one potent gang tool to force retirees to
reactivate was making false accusations to the police. Once the retiree is in
the state’s hands — in prison — they’re also in the gang’s hands, because El
Salvador jails gang members according to affiliation.
Another question is whether it matters. Benjamin’s goal was for someone to
finally recognize that kids like him exist. Someone to ratify that he was doing
everything possible to leave the battlefield. His goal was to share his
process, in all its imperfections, in the hope that his story would loosen the
chains that hold other kids hostage. He accomplished that goal at least.
But there is still a structure in place that prevented him — and many others —
from achieving a sustainable new life. It’s a cage made of discrete bars. One
is the iron fist: Mano dura inflates the power of gangs, legitimizes state
abuses, and leaves unaddressed the injustices that cause the problem in the
first place.
Another is the lack of options: Although employers are beginning to hire people
like Benjamin — sometimes with careful support from U.S. federal agencies —
this is still rare. Hiring them is far more labor-intensive for employers and
involves risk. Ex-gang members are veterans of a particularly cruel and
personal war, and they need acute, integrated emotional, logistical, and
financial support to become civilians. El Salvador is full of hardworking
unemployed people who’ve never been connected to gangs and don’t need that much
from employers. So it’s less fraught to continue pushing gang members out of
the equation, insisting that they are permanently ruined and must be locked up
or disposed of, as if that weren’t a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In late 2017, Benjamin was found guilty of extortion and received a sentence of
eight years in prison. His lawyer was a public defender who told me at one
hearing, “He’s probably guilty. These kids always are.”
In May 2018, his mother sent me a short video by an international news agency
about ex-gang evangelicals in the Gotera prison, where Benjamin is
incarcerated. In it, there is a scene of a sea of inmates in white T-shirts,
clapping and singing in a church service. And suddenly there he is. He stands
among the throng, eyes closed, chin raised, mouth open in song.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Fund for Investigative
Journalism and a fellowship with the Schuster Institute for Investigative
Journalism, with support from the Ford Foundation.
👆
