Garafolo added that Lawrence will receive the most money ever for a defensive player in the first year of his deal, surpassing the $31 million the Chicago Bears paid to Khalil Mack in 2018.
Dallas had previously placed the franchise tag on the defensive end, which would have paid him $20.5 million for 2019, per Clarence Hill Jr. of the Star-Telegram. However, Hill noted the player would refuse to sign the tag and wouldn’t show up without a long-term deal.
Lawrence played last season on the franchise tag and made $17.1 million on the one-year deal.
After proving his high level of play in 2018, it’s clear the defender wanted more security in his future and has now gotten that.
The 26-year-old had a quiet first few seasons in the NFL before breaking out in 2017, totaling 14.5 sacks with 58 combined tackles and four forced fumbles. According to NFL Research, he led the league by pressuring quarterbacks on 14.9 percent of snaps.
After signing the one-year tender, Lawrence proved it wasn’t a fluke with another big season. He finished the 2018 campaign with 64 combined tackles and 10.5 sacks, adding the first interception of his career.
This earned him a second straight Pro Bowl selection as he led a major turnaround on the Cowboys defense, which finished sixth in points allowed per game.
He would have arguably been the top free agent on the open market, but the team kept him under control with the franchise tag. Of course, the two sides were apparently far apart in negotiations for a long-term deal, with Rapoport reporting in early March that the team’s offer to Lawrence was “not considered serious.”
After just nine sacks in his first three seasons combined, Lawrence is now deservedly getting paid like one of the top defenders in the NFL.
Considering the Cowboys now have Lawrence, Leighton Vander Esch and others under contract for several years, their defense could be a force going forward.
Washington, DC – Thirteen years ago, when Shayan Karimi was 11 years old, he begged his parents for a guitar. Around the same time, a relative introduced him to Elton John and Pink Floyd. From that point on, Karimi knew he wanted to be a musician.
In late 2016, his dream moved closer to reality when he was awarded a partial scholarship to study music at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Owing to the absence of a US embassy in Iran, Karimi travelled to Dubai to apply for a visa later that year. He arrived in the United States in January 2017, bringing with him a financial plan for the next four years.
But months of renewed US sanctions and US President Donald Trump‘s travel ban have made life challenging for Iranian students at American universities.
Trump’s decision last May to formally withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement triggered a currency crisis that hammered the value of the Iranian rial.
More pain followed in November after the re-imposition of oil and financial sanctions ushered in banking restrictions that have made direct wire transfers to and from the country all but impossible.
Many students, including Karimi, have struggled to afford tuition and living expenses.
“I came to Berklee with a financial plan for a four-year programme, and it made sense with the exchange rate when I left Iran,” he told Al Jazeera, but “with this devaluation, it doesn’t make sense any more.”
Karimi added, “It has been very challenging and frustrating. The money we had in Iran isn’t worth much any more”.
Karimi, who said he was already working the maximum number of hours permitted under his F1 visa, found himself stretched thin. He struggled to find the money to pay his living costs and tuition expenses not covered by his partial scholarship.
With no other options, Karimi did what many others like him have had to do: He turned to crowdfunding his education on GoFundMe.
So far, he has raised about $8,000, less than one-third of his intended goal. Despite this, he said he remains hopeful about the campaign, especially after several Iranian celebrities shared his page on their social media accounts.
Iranian strudents’ struggle
Karimi is not alone.
Leila Austin, president of the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), said her organisation has received a surge of requests from students looking for help.
“We had students reaching out to us, calling and explaining the situation of struggling to pay tuition because of devaluation of currency and the difficulties in transferring money from Iran to the US because of the re-imposition of sanctions,” she told Al Jazeera.
“If they don’t have the money to pay for their tuition, they will no longer be enrolled at a US university and would then have to go back to Iran,” she added.
Hedieh*, an undergraduate engineering student in New York City, has made handmade hats and gloves to raise money for her tuition.
“Before the [reimposition of] sanctions, my parents were sending me money, but they can’t any more,” she told Al Jazeera.
“Ever since the [reimposition of] sanctions, my father said he can’t send dollars any more. It is a really high conversion rate,” she added.
Studying in New York had been Hedieh’s dream her entire life. She wanted to follow in the footsteps of her mother, who had studied in the US in the 1970s. “Because of her stories, I wanted to follow her path and experiences – she always spoke highly about being in America.”
If Hedieh cannot pay for her tuition to keep her full-time student status, she risks the possibility of having to return to Iran before finishing her degree.
Hedieh said the financial situation has caused her immense anxiety, affecting her ability to focus and maintain her grades. “How can students focus on their studies and do well with this amount of stress?” she asked.
“I feel hopeless and worried. I had so many hopes but now I don’t feel confident any more. It’s an emotional rollercoaster,” Hedieh said.
There is no data showing how many students have been forced to leave the US due to insufficient funds, but according to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 report of Open Doors, 12,783 Iranian students are currently studying at US institutions.
Travel ban
In addition to the financial challenges, students faced another hurdle after Trump included Iran in a travel ban order, barring nationals from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
In June 2018, in a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of the ban, which has suspended entry to nationals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, as well as North Korea and Venezuela.
Currently, the only visas being issued to Iranians are for students entering on F1 or J1 visas. Many receive only single-entry visas, meaning they must reapply if they leave the US.
Students have expressed frustration and disappointment that their parents could not visit during their studies and attend their graduation.
When Ali Taleghani left Iran in September 2016 to study in the US, he promised his mother he would return to visit her soon.
He had been accepted into a PhD programme in bioengineering at the University of Missouri.
“When I left Iran, I told my mother to not be upset, that I would be able to see her soon and come during the summer break,” the 32-year-old student told Al Jazeera, but Taleghani has not been able to go home or have his mother visit because of the challenges in place.
There were already several barriers to Iranian students attending American universities: application fees, test fees for entrance exams like the SAT or TOEFL, and the need to visit a consulate outside of Iran to obtain a visa.
These issues have not just affected students in the US, but also in Canada, the UK, and other countries.
In December 2018, the University of Reading in the UK told Iranian student Parsa Sadat to retrun to Iran to obtain $6,898 in cash to pay his tuition.
Meanwhile students like Karmimi do their best to try and navigate the geopolitical storm that threatens to derail their studies.
“This is out of our control. There is nothing we can do to save ourselves from this,” Karimi said.
“We wouldn’t be struggling if it weren’t for [the sanctions] – it has completely changed our lives.”
*The individual’s name has been changed at her the request to protect her privacy.
President Donald Trump has doubled down on border security as his top priority, possibly getting in the way of his administration’s trade agenda. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
As the president told reporters that border security ‘is more important to me than the USMCA,’ the vice president was hours away from a multistate tour to promote the new deal.
President Donald Trump’s announcement Thursday that he would be willing to sideline a new trilateral trade pact with Canada and Mexico — a move that would allow him to impose the auto tariffs he has been threatening to unveil — couldn’t have come at a worse time for Mike Pence.
As Trump sat in the Oval Office, telling reporters that border security “is more important to me than the USMCA,” the administration’s proposed replacement for NAFTA, his vice president was hours away from kicking off a multistate tour to promote the renegotiated trade deal.
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The tour, which targets states that will be crucial to the president’s reelection bid, would begin in Pence’s home state of Indiana at Lamb Farms Inc., a family-run business producing a trio of crops — corn, wheat and soybeans — that have been swept up in Trump’s trade wars.
In the coming weeks, Pence will “travel all over to swing districts selling [the president’s] trade message,” a senior White House official told POLITICO, outlining a schedule of stops in farm towns and agricultural regions across Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and other 2020 battlegrounds.
“It’s a legislative effort in that he’s trying to garner support in moderate Democrat districts — ones that [Trump] won — but also political, in that he’ll be touting what Republicans have accomplished” during the president’s first two years in office, the official said.
The same official said Pence was “not at all” bothered by the president’s comments because the White House believes Mexican officials are “showing good faith so far and will continue to work with us so further action won’t be necessary.”
But Trump’s remarks on Thursday raised fresh questions about the status of his trade deal with Mexico and Canada, a revised version of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement that is expected to encounter major roadblocks as the administration attempts to muscle it through Congress by summer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has refused to consider the USMCA until Mexico has implemented a major labor law overhaul. And lawmakers from both parties are worried about moving forward without first lifting the steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump imposed last May.
Some House Democrats have raised concerns about whether the deal’s labor and environmental standards are enforceable. Other lawmakers worry that provisions in the deal could lock in high prescription drug prices. Democrats also want the deal altered to ensure that disputes between countries can be fully enforced through tariff retaliation.
The updated trade deal also includes agreements that have already taken effect that effectively bar the U.S. from imposing new auto tariffs on its North American neighbors, meaning Trump would run afoul of the agreed-upon guidelines if he moved to slap import taxes on vehicles from Mexico a year from now — something he has vowed to do instead of closing the southern border if the country fails to curb the “massive amounts of drugs” flowing across the border into the United States.
“We’re going to give them a one-year warning, and if the drugs don’t stop … we’re going to put tariffs on Mexico and products, in particular, the cars … and if that doesn’t stop the drugs, we close the border,” Trump said Thursday, teasing a “massive” auto tariff of 25 percent.
Trump’s threat to back out of the auto deal with Mexico could give the country reason to be reluctant about ratifying the overall agreement. Some experts say Trump’s cavalier attitude might also make it harder for China to reach a deal if Beijing is unsure the president will keep his word.
Amid the growing uncertainty surrounding the USMCA, Pence has turned to talking up the prospect of an imminent and historic trade deal with China, as well as with other major U.S. trading partners.
“What I heard today here, consistently, is real urgency — that the farmers who always are land-rich and cash-poor have been feeling the weight of low commodity prices. They’ve been burning through capital, burning through equity, so it’s imperative that Congress act … to ratify the USMCA, so that they know and have certainty about access to the Canadian market, to the Mexican market,” Pence told reporters following his event at Lamb Farms.
American farmers have been grappling with sinking commodity prices, in part, because of the ongoing trade disputes Trump is entangled in with China and other countries. Soybean farmers faced an especially tough year in 2018 after being blocked from foreign markets, according to statistics released last month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which found that 80 percent of the industry’s annual harvest was sitting in storage last December. The problem became so bad that the Trump administration created a $12 billion program last September to bail out farmers being affected by the president’s trade policies.
“We are making progress on renegotiating our entire trading relationship with China, and I want to promise you it’s going to put American agriculture and American workers first,” Pence told the farmers in Lebanon, Ind., according to a transcript provided the White House. Pence also mentioned trade negotiations with Japan and the European Union that will begin soon.
Meanwhile, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said he plans to approve new labor legislation by the end of this month that could boost some congressional Democrats’ willingness to seriously consider what they’ve repeatedly dubbed “NAFTA 2.0.”
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has also been holding meetings with key Democrats on Capitol Hill to talk through the new trade deal and address lingering concerns, one of which includes ratifying the deal while stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum imports remain in place — something Republicans also have spoken out against.
“It’s very, very important that the White House get on board on doing away with these tariffs so we can get this thing not only before the Congress of the United States, but before the Senate in Mexico and the Parliament, House of Commons, in Canada,” Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said on a conference call with reporters in February.
On Thursday, Pence said he and the president are pushing for the USCMA to be approved by Congress “this spring,” an aggressive timeline that would allow Trump to tout the agreement out on the trail later this summer, when White House aides say he’s expected to step up his campaign schedule with weekly rallies. Trump threatened to withdraw from NAFTA in late December in an attempt to light a fire beneath Congress on the renegotiated version, though he has yet to follow through.
By Friday morning, however, Trump was back to tweeting about prioritizing security at the border over finalizing his trade deal with Canada and Mexico.
“This will supersede USMCA,” he wrote of ending the flow of unauthorized immigrants and illicit drugs into the U.S before hopping on a plane to a border town in California.
Democrats’ bid “is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics,” Consovoy wrote. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
A lawyer for President Donald Trump is urging the Treasury Department to reject House Democrats’ demands for Trump’s tax returns.
In a letter released Friday, William Consovoy said the administration should deny the request because lawmakers do not have a legislative reason for seeking the returns. Democrats merely want the president’s confidential filings so they can search for things to embarrass him, he said.
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“Requests for tax returns and return information must have a legitimate legislative purpose,” he wrote to Brent McIntosh, general counsel at the Treasury Department.
The Democrats’ bid “is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics.”
“It would be a gross abuse of power for the majority party to use tax returns as a weapon to attack, harass, and intimidate their political opponent,” he said.
The letter comes on the heels of Democrats’ formal request this week for six years’ worth of Trump’s individual and business returns, running from 2013 through 2018. Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) is demanding the administration turn over the documents by April 10.
Democrats are citing a nearly century-old law that allows the heads of Congress’s tax committees to examine anyone’s returns. Some experts say Democrats don’t need a legislative reason to demand Trump’s returns, noting the law simply says the Treasury secretary “shall” provide the tax committees with requested documents.
Anticipating the administration’s arguments, Democrats contend they do have a legislative reason for seeking the returns, saying they want to vet the IRS’s audit of the president’s returns.
Consovoy rejected that contention, suggesting it is little more than a fig leaf.
“If Chairman Neal genuinely wants to review how the IRS audits presidents, why is he seeking tax returns and return information covering the four years before President Trump took office?” he said. “Why is he not requesting information about the audits of previous presidents? And why can he not simply ask the IRS to explain its policy?”
The agency should not hand over the documents until it gets a legal opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Consovoy added.
A Treasury Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Neal declined comment.
The IRS has automatically audited every president’s returns since the 1970s, both to instill confidence that the president is paying his or her share and to help the agency avoid having to decide which chief executive to scrutinize. Those audits are a matter of the IRS’s internal policy, and not required by law.
Democrats say they don’t know how rigorous those audits are or if they really happen. Calling it a matter of oversight of the IRS, they point to an episode during the Nixon administration when the agency initially blessed that president’s returns before backpedaling when a subsequent audit by Congress’s independent Joint Committee on Taxation found Nixon actually owed almost $500,000.
When Amazon announced a deal to acquire Eero, the maker of a groundbreaking WiFi system, it sounded like a classic Silicon Valley success story: a promising startup is acquired by the biggest bidder in the land, and everyone rolls around in cash. But that is not this story. This story is about investors losing tens of millions of dollars and dozens of employees left with meaningless stock.
According to confidential documents viewed by Mashable, Amazon acquired Eero for $97 million. Eero executives brought home multi-million dollar bonuses and eight-figure salary increases. Everyone else, however, didn’t fare quite so well. Investors took major hits, and the Amazon acquisition rendered Eero stock worthless: $0.03 per share, down from a common stock high of $3.54 in July 2017. It typically would have cost around $3 for employees to exercise their stock, meaning they would actually lose money if they tried to cash out.
Former and current Eero employees who chose not to exercise those options are now empty-handed. And those who did exercise options, investing their financial faith in the company, have lost money.
Meanwhile, the Eero execs who stay to help Amazon wage its war for smart home domination will take home around $30 million.
The circumstances surrounding Eero’s sale to Amazon speaks to how exceedingly difficult it is to compete in the smart home market. Creating hardware takes time and money, the sort of money that is usually found in the pockets of tech giants. If you want to win in the product sector, you want to be on the side of the giants. And even then, your win may still be a loss.
Great expectations
At its inception, Eero checked off all the boxes for Silicon Valley: a “disruptive” product, chummy co-founders with Stanford pedigrees, an origin story that started in an apartment, and big promises about how its wireless mesh router system would reinvent home WiFi with cutting-edge technology. It even had a sleek, minimalist design.
In 2016, Eero’s system hit the shelves. Reviewers, including at Mashable, were delighted by the performance and the packaging. Three months after the successful product launch, it had a valuation of over $277 million.
Eero’s primary product is a “mesh wireless router,” which changes the way internet access is delivered throughout the house, resulting in coverage that is faster and more consistent. Instead of one central modem and router duo, mesh WiFi systems communicate between multiple devices placed throughout a home, which allows the fastest WiFi signals to reach through more physical barriers. Installing and setting up Eero is simple — no surly cable guy required — and the system is managed via an app on your smartphone.
Eero’s home WiFi system.
Image: EERO
Eero may have been first to mesh WiFi, but competition came fast. Multiple companies including Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the next year.
According to former Eero employees, the biggest challenge came from Google. The tech giant launched its own mesh network, Google Wifi, in late 2016, for just $299. At the time, Eero was selling for $500. Eero declined to comment for this story, instead pointing to a March 12 blog post confirming the sale.
The company tried to remain a step ahead and diversify — most notably with Hive, a smart home security system — but then Google dropped a bomb: a similar product called Nest Secure. Soon after, Eero abandoned Hive, leading to a period of malaise and confusion.
“The day they killed [Hive] was the day the company changed,” said a former employee.
After Eero employees returned from the holidays, 20 percent of the staff was cut. Next came massive attrition. An ex-employee described it as a period of “desperate fear.” Morale was so low that HR disabled group emailing and prohibited employees from sending out goodbye emails to say they were leaving.
Then the really big news dropped.
Movin’ on up?
On February 11, Eero announced to the public that Amazon had acquired the company. Rumors about the specifics of the deal spread quickly. But any excitement dissipated once employees realized that neither Eero nor Amazon was disclosing a price. That discomfort turned to anger as the documents started to arrive.
“I was really surprised when the announcement came, and I knew instantly it was bad,” one ex-employee said. “When they don’t announce the price, it’s not good. What I didn’t know was how bad it actually was.”
Employees tried to guess from news reports and social media what the deal meant for them. When the stock price leaked, some ex-employees breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t exercise their options in the first place. Others were left with worthless stock and disappointment.
The letter, dated February 15, gave employees four days to decide what to do with their Eero shares. Some even received the letter on or after the deadline.
This would be the last communication that most ex-employees would receive from Eero. But those who chose to purchase or exercise their stock received a “phonebook-sized” packet of dense financial information — including acquisition terms that tell a different story than Amazon and Eero’s glowing announcement.
“I was far less salty about the situation before I got this document,” an ex-employee said. “I don’t begrudge the executives their payout, but I feel like they could have taken a little bit less to not screw the employees who spent their own money because they believed in the company.”
First, the documents (reviewed by Mashable with financial experts) open with a reiteration about the stock price from Weaver.
“Unfortunately, the transaction will not result in the financial return we all hoped for,” Weaver wrote in the introduction.
It revealed that the final sale price was $97 million. Crunchbase reports that Eero took $90 million in venture capital (the Wall Street Journal put the number at $100 million). PitchBook, a highly accurate source of VC information, claimed a final $40 million Series D fundraising round from December 2017 brought that number up to $138 million. An additional $10 million debt line Eero took out brings the total money put into the company at $148 million — 150 percent of the Amazon sale price.
“I knew instantly it was bad.”
“One obvious way you can judge whether it was a great exit or not is if the exit valuation is lower than the amount of capital that was invested in the startup,” Rob Chandra, a partner at Avid Park Ventures, and lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas business school, explained. “So it’s not a great exit.”
Still, $97 million is nothing to sneeze at. It looks, at first glance, like the company may have given investors something close to what they’d put in, while providing jobs at Amazon for the remaining employees.
But that’s not the case. The story that the financial documents tell indicates that things turned out even worse for investors — and yes, for employees — than they might look.
The documents state that after transaction costs and debt, the actual price will be closer to $54.6 million. That means that Amazon is covering around $40 million of the debt that Eero owes. Ex-employees believe the debt to be from hardware manufacturing costs, since they said that Eero took on corporate financing to actually manufacture the products. Jeff Scheinrock, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and an experienced investor and entrepreneur himself, agreed that this was likely the case.
“What this says about it was that Eero was cash strapped,” Scheinrock said. “A lot of this money is going to pay off debts. They were having difficulty and probably couldn’t raise additional money, so they had to look for an exit.”
That left about $54 million for employees and investors. By looking at stock prices listed in the acquisition documents, the amount raised in each funding round, and the amount of shares each VC received in these rounds, you can get a good idea of the investors’ losses. Ultimately, thanks to a “last in, first out” philosophy, Eero’s Series D investors, led by Qualcomm, will recoup 84 percent of their investments. The seed round and Series A-C investors will all get back 31 cents on the dollar.
But not everyone involved with Eero lost.
Amazon created a “Management and Employee Retention Plan” for key Eero executives. As part of this plan, the documents state that it is allocating 10 percent of the “actual consideration” (the $54 million transaction price) to executive bonuses and pay increases, even if that meant bigger losses for investors.
Ten executives are getting the majority of that money. The three co-founders — Nick Weaver, Nathaniel Hardison, and Timothy A. Schallich (who goes by Amos) — plus other company executives and affiliates, will collectively receive ~$3.7 million in cash as a “transaction bonus.”
The ten executives will also receive between ~$29 and ~$23 million in salary increases, retention and yearly bonuses that vest over three years (for a potential total of $32.6 million). These are all financial incentives for what Amazon apparently views as the core Eero team to stay on and build the product.
“Eero is a customer-focused, inventive team that has quickly developed an impressive WiFi solution that makes technologies at home just work,” an Amazon spokesperson told Mashable when asked why the company acquired Eero.
Still, ex-employees wonder if there might have been more money for stockholders had the executives not been granted so much in cash and bonuses.
Executives could get up to $32 million in buyout bonuses.
Image: Bob Al-Greene / Mashable
“They’re not valuing the company very much for the past contributions,” Avid Park Ventures partner Rob Chandra said. “They’re really valuing it more in terms of what it’s going to do in the future.”
Amazon, when asked, said it values Eero for “both.”
(Hard)ware
The key to Eero’s future is also what contributed to its failures.
Many outlets, including Mashable, speculated that Amazon’s acquisition of Eero had everything to do with the tech giant’s plans and desire to increase its dominance in the home. When Eero announced the deal on March 12, it mentioned more communication between Alexa and Eero devices. One ex-employee said this was something Eero was already discussing in 2018, but that it didn’t make practical sense at the time.
The Googles and Amazons of the world have the “cash, the size, the structure, to buy markets,” Scheinrock said. “If you’re just a single market company [like Eero], it’s very hard to compete with somebody who’s a giant.”
Hardware startups require a lot of cash, and technological progress can render a product obsolete before it has a chance to take off. Nearly all (97 percent) of the 400 hardware startups tracked in a 2017 report from CB Insights either died or became “zombies,” companies that survive for awhile with VC money, but eventually fizzle out.
“When you do it right, there’s a pathway to building extremely valuable hardware companies that have competitive differentiation. Companies that do achieve this can win at scale and aim to go public,” Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse Ventures, said. “But it’s hard in the home right now for startups. The market is extremely fragmented, there’s a lot of noise, and you’re competing against giant tech companies looking to ‘own’ the consumer at home.”
When asked about whether Amazon thinks its presence makes life harder for small hardware companies, a spokesperson instead focused on how its investments help “developers and device makers of all sizes create products.”
The bar for success in home hardware tech is incredibly high — but it can be reached. According to Winterroth, Peloton is a notable example. The indoor bike manufacturer created a product useful and compelling enough to stand and grow, profitably, on its own. On the other hand, many players have fallen at the hands of an overcrowded hardware market populated with well-funded super players. Remember Lighthouse? How about Jibo?
“You either get bought, or you die.”
Winterroth points out that Google and Amazon’s race for dominance in the home also creates massive opportunity. Between Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and all of their physical iterations, there’s no clearly dominant smart home system. But that also makes these larger players desperate to compete. Home devices are in part a marketing strategy to make customers live their lives — including shopping, watching, and using the internet — entirely through the device’s company. So, as the ex-Eero employees pointed out, they are willing to sell these products much more cheaply than a startup can afford to do.
“If you do not have a product that’s an order of magnitude better than what’s out there, you’re being drowned out by the marketing coverage and go-to-market strategies of big companies,” Winterroth said. “It’s a very high barrier for small companies to overcome.”
To actually compete against these companies, the product itself must appear instantly valuable for consumers, enter the market at the right time, execute perfectly, and be a conduit to subscription and software services. For most companies — including Eero — that’s too high a bar to reach.
“I just think that the growing consensus is that hardware is a losing bet, especially when you’ve got all the big boys undercutting you,” an ex-employee said. “There’s just no winning with hardware. You either get bought, or you die.”
Yes, Airbnb is totally cool with hosts placing video cameras inside their rentals. And yes, it’s creepy as hell.
The issue of hidden cameras in Airbnbs is once again back in the news this week, after a family traveling through Ireland discovered a camera disguised as some sort of smoke detector in their rental. And while, according to CNN, Airbnb eventually sided with the family, the latest privacy-violating incident forces us to confront a larger structural issue sure to turn off many a renter: Airbnb policy permits hosts to put recording devices inside of their units.
You read that correctly. There is no explicit Airbnb ban on hosts recording guests inside of the rented house or apartment in question. Airbnb does have rules governing the practice, but they shouldn’t necessarily put you at ease.
For starters, Airbnb’s policy on cameras states that a host must “disclose all surveillance devices in their listings,” and that hosts are required to “disclose if an active recording is taking place.”
A good start, right? Well, maybe. When reached for comment, an Airbnb spokesperson provided the below screenshot of a real listing that the company says properly discloses surveillance devices.
Image: airbnb
The disclosure, buried at the bottom of the listing, is troublingly vague.
“Surveillance or recording devices on property,” it warns. “For added peace of mind, we have security cameras by gate entrance and common areas.”
Just what, exactly, is a common area? An outside back patio? The front hallway? A living room? It’s not clear. It would be all too easy for a renter to either overlook the disclosure, or misread it and think it applied to something like a back deck.
We followed up with Airbnb for clarification, and a spokesperson replied that the above disclosure applies to the “property in general.” In other words, yeah, that’s all the warning you’re going to get if there’s a camera inside the rental.
There is another important restriction that Airbnb puts on cameras inside of rentals, but this, too, shouldn’t completely assuage your concerns. The aforementioned policy states that the company “[prohibits] any surveillance devices that are in or that observe the interior of certain private spaces (such as bedrooms and bathrooms) regardless of whether they’ve been disclosed.”
However, that implicitly allows for hosts to put cameras in places — like living rooms or kitchens, perhaps — that Airbnb doesn’t consider to be “certain private spaces.”
Essentially, you stumbling to the bathroom at 2 a.m. in a state of undress could be fair game for recording, as long as you have to pass through the living room to get there. You would be forgiven for finding that unsettling.
It’s worth emphasizing again that, yes, Airbnb does ban hidden cameras, undisclosed recording devices of any kind, and cameras inside of bedrooms or bathrooms. But that really isn’t enough. As demonstrated by the Airbnb-provided example of a listing abiding by the rules, guests are still forced to navigate some serious gray areas when it comes to their privacy. And that’s not OK.
Making disclosures more prominent, and requiring hosts to specify the exact location and type of recording devices inside of a home, would go part of the way toward addressing the issue. But only part of the way. Banning interior recording devices completely is the only true policy that would assure guests that a host isn’t watching their almost every move — all with Airbnb’s tacit approval.
Thousands of people have rallied in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to protest President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s failure to stem a surge of intercommunal violence in the centre of the country.
The demonstration on Friday was called for by Muslim religious leaders, opposition parties and civil society groups, including organisations representing the mainly Muslim Fulani herding community.
Organisers said 15,000 people were part of the march and a mass prayer ceremony, which came nearly two weeks after the massacre of at least 153 people in the Fulani village of Ogossagou, near the town of Mopti in central Mali. Police put the number of demonstrators at 10,000.
The Ogossagou slaughter was allegedly carried out by members of the Dogon ethnic group – a hunting and farming community with a long history of tension with the nomadic Fulani over access to land – and marked the deadliest act of ethnic bloodshed in West Africa’s Sahel region in living memory.
Keita responded to the attack on the Fulani villagers by disbanding a vigilante group, whose fighters are suspected of being behind the killings.
Instability grips central Mali
Critics argue the Malian leader has not done enough to prevent intercommunal violence and on Friday called for him to “get out” of office, while also demanding the withdrawal of the United Nations MINUSMA peacekeeping mission present in the country.
The UN has more than 16,000 personnel on the ground in the country, including a contingent of 12,418 troops made up of forces from countries including Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Togo and Chad.
“Our children, our husbands and our parents are dying because of the bad government of IBK and his clan,” Mariam Fomba, the widow of a soldier, told the AFP news agency.
“Enough is enough, we cannot continue with this regime,” Fomba said.
Mali has struggled to return to stability since armed groups linked to al-Qaeda took control of the country’s north in early 2012, prompting a military intervention by France.
Although the militias were driven back, they have since spread into the ethnic mosaic of central Mali and across the wider Sahel, an arid region between the Sahara desert and Africa’s savannas, to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
UN human rights office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said the massacre last month marked a surge in “violence across communal lines and by so-called ‘self-defence groups’ apparently attempting to root out violent extremist groups” in central Mali.
More than 200 people have been killed by the vigilante groups since the start of this year, according to the UN, which has dispatched human rights experts to investigate the March attack.
Amid mounting concerns of cyberattacks and ailing voting infrastructure, members of the Election Assistance Commission face delays in getting security clearances as applications get locked up in massive backlogs. | Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
A massive backlog in security clearances applications raises questions on whether federal advisers can effectively combat cyberattacks
Only half the members of a federal commission advising states on election threats have security clearances, raising questions about whether it can effectively help local and state officials defend against adversaries such as Russian hackers.
And no members of the four-person Election Assistance Commission had clearances during the last two election cycles, including the period when Kremlin-linked hackers are suspected of mounting a range of cyberattacks against state election offices, the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
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The delay in issuing security clearances for commission members is part of amassive backlog of application approvals throughout the entire federal government. But it’s a particularly acute problem for the EAC, one of the key agencies offering guidance to state and local officials about how to protect themselves from security risks.
“The people entrusted with securing our elections need to know what threats they’re supposed to address,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the lawmakers who has focused the most on election security, told POLITICO in a statement. “An Election Assistance [Commission member] without a security clearance is like making a baseball player hit without a bat.”
Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, who previously led a national group of secretaries that works closely with the EAC, called it “imperative” that the commissioners receive their clearances “so that we can all be rowing in the same direction to defend our democracy against our foreign adversaries.”
“Ensuring the integrity of our elections and protecting them from undue foreign influence takes a whole team,” he said.
The situation may be on the verge of improving. Commission members Thomas Hicks and Donald Palmer, who lack clearances, hope to receive interim ones “in the near future,” EAC spokeswoman Brenda Soder said, adding that they have “completed the necessary paperwork and fingerprints.”
“In public comments, private meetings, official letters and testimony before Congress, the Commissioners have clearly and consistently stated their desire to obtain security clearances,” Soder said. “The EAC is pleased the Commissioners are now on track to gain their security clearances and believes this development will help the Commission enhance its ability to assist election officials and voters.”
Hicks, who chaired the commission in 2016 and 2018, first revealed he lacked a security clearance in an interview with a Baltimore television station in July. “We’re working on correcting that problem,” he said at the time.
Hicks has actually been waiting since August 2016, Soder told POLITICO. Palmer joined the agency in February.
Christy McCormick, the agency’s current chairwoman, has an interim clearance. Only Benjamin Hovland, who joined the EAC in February, has a full clearance, which he received in his previous job as a Senate staffer.
In addition, Hicks, McCormick and then-Commissioner Matthew Masterson all lacked security clearances during the 2016 election, and Hicks and McCormick still didn’t have them in 2018 — both periods when intelligence officials warned of Russian hackers probing vulnerable election systems and state officials frantically sought more information about the threat.
Without clearances, Hicks and Palmer have limited access to classified intelligence, potentially restricting their awareness of specific threats and vulnerabilities.
The governmentprovides one-day “read-ins” so that people without clearances can attend specific events, and all four EAC commissioners were invited to a classifiedbriefing in February under that arrangement, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss internal processes. (Condos noted that the commissioners “have always had access and invitation to the briefings” for state officials.) But these temporary read-ins do not cover ongoing access to classified files.
Ben Buchanan, a cyber conflict researcher at Georgetown University who has written about election security, said a security clearance “almost always seems to be a necessary condition for meaningful understanding and policymaking in government cyber operations.”
“It’s possible that a lot of the commissioners’ work is state-focused and doesn’t require one,” said Buchanan, “but a clearance and appropriate briefings seem necessary to understand and help counteract foreign threats.”
The clearance issue also appears to undermine one of the core missions of the EAC, which is to serve as an emissary between local officials and federal bodies such as the Department of Homeland Security.
Even though relationships between DHS and states have improved, many state and local election officials contact the EAC more regularly than they do other federal agencies. But because Hicks and Palmer lack security clearances, they can’t fully serve as intermediaries or brokers on many sensitive security topics.
Many secretaries of state already have their security clearances, meaning there may be rooms that the secretaries can enter but the two EAC commissioners can’t, unless they received prior approval.
“I hope that the lack of clearances doesn’t prevent the commissioners from receiving threat and incident information and working with elections officials across the country to secure our democracy,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement.
The interim clearance that McCormick has — and that Hicks and Palmer may soon receive — is functionally identical to a permanent clearance, according to an official at the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters. Agencies award interim clearances to people who are expected to pass their background checks to let them review classified material while that process continues.
Hicks and Palmer aren’t alone in waiting. DHS has acknowledged that the backlog in security clearances is particularly acute for state and local election officials, and in advance of the 2018 midterms, the department beganmaking it a priority to approve clearances for election supervisors ahead of other applicants. But that priority evidently did not extend to the leaders of the EAC, ostensibly one of the closest partners to DHS on election security.
The clearance issue has probably compounded existing bureaucratic struggles for the EAC, a tiny agency that many lawmakers have treated as abackwater of the federal government ever since its creation in 2002.
President Barack Obama nominated Hicks to fill a vacant spot in April 2010. But the Senate was slow to act, and in December 2011, after the other EAC commissioners’ terms expired, the EAC wentdormant for three years, withno leaders to vote on policy decisions. In December 2014, the Senate finally confirmed Hicks, along with Masterson and McCormick, whom Obama had nominated that July.
But the fourth commission spot remained open for several more years, and when Masterson left the EAC in March 2018, the commission again lost its quorum, preventing major decisions. President Donald Trump restored the EAC to full membership by nominating Palmer and Hovland, who were confirmed in January.
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