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Barack Obama's 60th birthday offers America a chance to reflect on its past, contemplate its present and look toward a future indelibly shaped by the nation's first Black President.

The occasion of Obama's milestone birthday on August 4 touches a personal chord in those of us who witnessed, participated in, or did a mixture of both during the historic 2008 presidential campaign. The former President is celebrating on Friday with an outdoor party in Martha's Vineyard, where he has long vacationed. Citing a source, CNN reported that rather than bring gifts, guests are being asked to consider supporting non-profits that aid both boys and young men of color and adolescent girls around the world, along with those that help train upcoming community leaders.

I remember watching the 43-year-old Illinois state senator deliver the 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote at Boston's FleetCenter on July 27. Obama, who looked so much younger than his age, spoke for 17 minutes about the virtues of American democracy.

That speech, which made him a political superstar, deftly introduced autobiographical themes that would become familiar beats in Obama's public narrative. Obama presented his biracial background -- as the son of an immigrant Kenyan economist and a White anthropologist with Kansas roots who met as students in Hawaii at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in parts of America -- as a lens through which to view the dynamic racial progress the nation had not yet fully achieved but remained committed to.

In retrospect, parts of the speech that pushed back against dividing America into red states and blue states appear now nave or hopelessly romantic, cynical even, considering the deadly and racially charged partisanship of our times.

But the power of Obama's keynote speech -- and his presidential campaign four years later -- was the way in which it tapped into democratic aspirations best reflected in the Black freedom struggle he took pains to both celebrate and, at times, distance himself from. Obama delivered a speech from America's cradle of liberty that could only be given by a Black politician able to acknowledge historic divisions of race, class, gender, religion and sexuality, while crafting a vision of an American citizenship capable of transcending these divides.

Obama offered his personal biography and political ambitions as a bridge between past and contemporary civil rights activists. More than that, he positioned himself as a political leader whose rhetoric and vision framed the nation as a patchwork quilt of diverse communities that grew stronger as they recognized the common ground of citizenship and dignity that united them.

As he approaches 60, Obama's hair has turned grayer, he looks even thinner now than he did as commander in chief and one can see the impact of time -- and being President -- in the wrinkles and creases that appear visible on a once unlined face.

Last summer, Obama said that "Black Lives Matter" but decried efforts to "Defund the Police" as bad politics that alienated potential allies.

Yet, time out of office has radicalized the preternaturally cautious Obama into calling for an end to the filibuster, if that's what's required to preserve democracy. His characterization of the filibuster as "another Jim Crow relic" offered further proof that Obama 2.0 displays a willingness to confront America's long history of structural racism with the kind of bracing candor he rarely embraced as President.

Obama continues to serve as a Rorschach test for the American political imagination. He likely always will. The first Black president didn't so much as flip the script of American politics as write himself into it. Obama proved to be a fervent believer in American exceptionalism.

Boston launched Obama's national political career, setting the stage for his successful campaign for the US Senate that he would win that November and for his presidential campaign, which he announced from the Illinois State House in February 2007.

Obama's keynote speech turned his memoir "Dreams of My Father," first published in 1995, into an instant bestseller. He followed this up with "The Audacity of Hope," a more conventional but still insightful book about the sources of civic nationalism that united Americans far more than they divided us.

He took the title of his second book from a phrase used by his then pastor, Jeremiah Wright, the fiery Black Liberation theologian who headed Trinity United Church in Chicago. Wright came from a tradition that criticized White supremacy with the kind of candor that -- although very much mainstream in 2021 -- proved scandalous when clips were played by conservative news outlets during the presidential campaign.

Obama's pastor problem took the lid off the most explosive issue of the 2008 Democratic primary contest and the subsequent general election: a Black man was running for president and had a good chance to win.

His candidacy blew the lid off far-flung conspiracy theories that would move from the margin to the center of American political discourse over the last 15 years. Fabricated rumors that Obama was a secret Muslim, had been born in Kenya and educated at an Islamic madrassa as a young boy in Indonesia abounded. Clips of Wright excoriating America's imperial domestic policy seemed to confirm that Obama -- handsome, telegenic, and brilliant -- was a Trojan horse (his middle name was Hussein after all) sent by America's enemies to destroy us from within.

Obama pushed back against this characterization by delivering a bravura March 18, 2008 "race speech" in Philadelphia's Constitution Hall surrounded by a backdrop of American flags that unsubtly signaled his fealty to the American dream.

In that speech, Obama portrayed both Black anger over racial slavery and Jim Crow and White resentment against affirmative action as morally equivalent. He refused to dissociate himself from Pastor Wright (but did several days later) and he recounted that his own White grandmother (Toot, short for Tutu, in the affectionate Hawaiian parlance) expressed fears of Black men that made him cringe. The speech was an enormous success, touted in some quarters as the most significant speech on America's racial divide since Lincoln.

Obama went on to be elected in what still represents the equivalent of a modern-day landslide, with 43% of White voters forming part of a new political coalition: he was also backed by 95% of Black voters and two-thirds of LatinX voters.

Obama's victory ushered in America's Third Reconstruction, a period that continues to this day and has been marked by stunning and unprecedented instances of racial progress. But it has also touched off a fierce backlash symbolically represented by Donald Trump and his MAGA followers. Black people in America experience voter suppression, racially disparate impacts of the Covid-19 health pandemic, police violence against their communities, mass incarceration and the stubborn persistence of racial segregation and economic impoverishment.

By 2020, even Obama seemed to come around and understand the existential dangers posed by the resurgence of White nationalism in American politics. Sixteen years after the fresh-faced young state senator delivered a soaring, optimistic keynote speech in Boston, the now-former President delivered a virtual address that warned that racism might produce the end of the republic.

America's long, rough and tortured road toward a renaissance that might achieve Black dignity and full citizenship has produced thunderclap historical moments. The ratification of the 13th amendment on December 6, 1865, that abolished racial slavery was one. The Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision announced by the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, was another. Barack Obama's November 4, 2008, presidential election victory proved to be the third of these hinge points in our nation's history.

Each of these moments ushered in periods of reconstruction; political, legislative, legal, and personal soul searching that had far-reaching consequences, not only for their eras but most especially our own.

Obama's victory, against the backdrop of economic recession, a mortgage crisis that disproportionately impacted Black Americans, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq inspired domestic and global celebrations and outsized political expectations.

Obama proved to be the last American President to lead under the hard-fought national civil rights consensus on Black citizenship that had been rhetorically supported by commanders in chief since John F. Kennedy. This bipartisan era compelled Democrats and Republicans to offer support for the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday and acknowledge the importance of Black History Month, and it led to the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the first-ever built with federal funds.

Beneath such public displays of unity around race matters lay policy divisions over affirmative action, racial integration in public schools and neighborhoods, racial disparities in health, wealth, and employment and culture wars over the very meaning of American identity, democracy and citizenship that roiled Obama's presidency before exploding during the Trump Era.

The trauma of the past four years, most notably the partisan response to a health pandemic and rioting at the US Capitol, makes many nostalgic for the era that the young Barack Obama thrived in. Such longing yearns for a period before the Birther movement, QAnon, White riots and GOP-led voter suppression and anti-Critical Race Theory legislation. Before Trump conjured the Big Lie of a stolen presidential election, there appeared an alternative course for the nation to embark on.

Barack Obama's enduring power is his ability to allow us to imagine ourselves as a better country, society and people. As a young state senator, presidential candidate, and commander in chief, Obama called America to be its aspirational best.

The Obama campaign's signature innovation was not the use of social media nor the trappings of celebrity that eventually consumed aspects of the American presidency. Obama's ability to tell Americans a fresh interpretation of their own national story helped to make history. Obama's narrative explained that "what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored -- that will not be deterred, that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation -- repair this world and make this time different than all the rest."

The poetry of these words continues to resonate, now more than ever, within Americans who recognize that, however flawed and imperfect a political vessel Obama turned out to be, the freedom dreams he expressed at his best are bigger than any one political leader and can thus never be betrayed.

Obama called us to be our best selves in a manner that allowed supporters to criticize, empathize with and celebrate his successes and shortcoming as our own. He imagined America as a large national family where even political opponents could find kinship in their love of civic ideals rooted in a generous reading of the founding documents as expansive enough to include all those who had been left out at the time of its writing.

Keenly aware of the historic divisions, conflicts and disagreements that perpetually threatened to undermine the republic, for a brief period Obama allowed the world to see America as a place of endless possibilities. His 60th birthday calls us to reflect on the seemingly vast distance between that time and our own, as well as the steps necessary to renew the nation's democratic faith and confidence in the ability to achieve the country we have always imagined ourselves to be.

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Barack Obama at 60: Why he matters - Action News Now

Kyah Simon is a game-changer, history-maker, and the latest Matilda to bring up 100 appearances.

Joining the likes of Cheryl Salisbury, Lisa De Vanna, Heather Garriock, Joey Peters, and Anissa Tann, Simon is Australias ninth centurion and is the first Indigenous footballer to reach this milestone.

The proud Anaiwan and Biripi womanjoins current teammates Clare Polkinghorne, Elise Kellond-Knight, and Emily van Egmond in the 100 club and is the first Indigenous Matilda to reach the milestone.

Simons national team career is one filled with extraordinary highs and brutal lows.

Since debuting at age 16 in a game against Hong Kong in 2007, Simon has gone to two FIFA Womens World Cups, two Olympics, and three AFC Womens Asian Cups.

On a rainy night in Chengdu, back in 2010, an 18-year-old Kyah Simon stepped up to take Australias final penalty in the AFC Womens Asian Cup final.

Seemingly unfazed by the magnitude of the moment, she converted and won Australia its first ever Asian Cup. The celebrations of the Matildas in the rain are instantly recognisable.

A year later in Germany, she became the first Indigenous Australian to score at a FIFA Womens World Cup with a brace against Norway.

In 2015, she proved she lives for the big moments when she got her name on the scoresheet in Moncton, Canada.

Up against Brazil, Lisa De Vannas initial shot was parried into the path of Simon. She made no mistake on the rebound. The celebration is once again iconic. Simon, with her arms outstretched, running in the rain. Navy shirt, yellow collar.

It was Australias first win in a knockout game at a World Cup.

But for every game-winning goals theres been a big injury. Unfortunately for Simon, they are something she had to get used to. A year or so before her Matildas debut, she broke her tibia and fibula in a local match at age 15.

But that injury taught her resilience and Simon is one of the most determined and strong Matildas around.

Theres been shoulder surgeries, ankle surgeries, an ACL tear, knee reconstruction, and plenty of niggles and strains.

Despite their quantity, Simons story is not one of injury. For every set back, she has returned bigger and better. Even in making this Olympic squad she had to overcome more surgeries and a limited domestic season.

Her best absolutely outshines her setbacks and heartbreaks. Through talent and perseverance, she has now joined that exclusive 100 club.

At Tokyo 2020 she has shown just how good she is, playing with freedom out wide and more centrally. One hundred games is an important milestone but theres still plenty to come for Kyah Simon.

BRONZE MEDAL MATCH DETAILSMatildas v United States6:00pm AEST kick-offWatch it LIVE via the Seven Network and 7plus app (check your local listings)

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More to come from Kyah Simon as she reaches 100 caps - Matildas

Amazons cover-your-ass gesture, while certainly laudable, has had very little impact thus far on the bigger picture. Along with the smaller companies like Rank One, Cognitec, and NEC, which continue to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, other strains of similar technology are further expanding the surveillance state and perpetuating a culture of fear and racism in America. A year after the George Floyd protests, we remain at an inflection point for law enforcement, but instead of pausing more potentially dangerous surveillance systems until the government sorts out regulation, the vast majority of tech companies and lawmakers have chosen instead to continue full speed ahead. Together, theyre applying a move-fast-and-break-things mentality to things that, if broken, cannot be fixednamely privacy, freedom, and human lives.

If demand is running high for security solutions recently, its because violent crime has risen as well. Just last week, between July 17 and July 23, at least 430 people were killed in 915 shootings across the country, according to Gun Violence Archives collaboration with ABCs This Week. Only halfway through the year, 2021 is already on pace to top 2020 in gun-related deathswhile 2020 was already the deadliest year for shootings in two decades.

Prominent Republicans and the National Fraternal Order of Police have tied the crime-spike to the Defund the Police rallying cry that emerged from last years protests, despite the fact that little defunding has actually taken place yet, and the fact that violent crime is also up in cities that maintained or increased funding for police. The panic around the surge also seems to somehow disregard the anomaly factor of a once-in-a-century pandemic, prior to which violent crime had plunged precipitously since the early 1990s. But panic has never historically been confused with rational, analytical thinking; so instead of looking into Americas surplus of guns and lack of a social safety net, the powers that be are instead beefing up surveillance systems.

A lot of people have an innate fear of being monitored and tracked. They put pieces of tape over their laptop camera lens, like a Band-Aid that might heal any vulnerability to being seen involuntarily. They avoid smart home gadgets, such as Amazon Echo, for fear that everything they say will be recorded and archived. However, eventually, everyone must go outside and enter the public sphere, at which point they find themselves in constant risk of being surveilled in one way or another.

Smileyoure on candid panopticon.

What lawmakers and law enforcers both seem to want, in theory, is the digital equivalent of magic: the omniscient ability to catch criminals in the act, find them anywhere they may attempt to flee, and even predict their crimes before they happen. In practice, however, the equipment that tech companies have produced to meet these ends ranges from spotty to catastrophic.

Lets take a look at some of whats taking a look at us.

ShotSpotter is, for lack of a better way to put it, Shazam for crime noise. Its a tool that uses hidden microphone sensors to detect the sound and location of gunshots, and then puts out an alert for participating police officers. Currently in use in more than 100 cities, the technology generates, in Chicago alone, an average of 21,000 alerts each year. The company claims it is 97% accurate.

Not only does the device inform officers about potential active crime scenes, its website also promises to help build courtroom-ready cases. Unfortunately, as Motherboard reported earlier this week, those cases are often built with altered evidence.

According to the report, ShotSpotters analysts have the ability to manually override its algorithms and reclassify a sound as a gunshot, or change other factors like the location of the sound, or the time it took place, according to the needs of the case. These analysts have frequently modified alerts at the request of police departments.

The danger doesnt end there, either. The law enforcement tendency to use ShotSpotter exclusively in predominantly Black and Latino communities is poised to further the already disproportionate rate of police brutality in those communities. It was a ShotSpotter alert this past March, for instance, that sent police to a street in Chicago where they ended up shooting and killing 13-year-old Adam Toledo.

Atlanta-based Flock Safety made headlines recently for its $150 million Series D round of funding, and pledge to reduce crime by 25% in the next three years. Operating on motion sensors, the device pairs solar-powered license-plate readers with cloud-based software. Police have used license-plate readers for at least a decade, but the ones made by Flock Safety are said to be more powerful than their predecessors. They automatically take down the make, model, color, and distinguishing marks of any vehicle that passes by, and record the date and time as well. Flock Safety also issues an alert whenever it spots a known stolen vehicle, or one thats fled a crime scene. The product is already set up in 1,200 communities in 40 states, and used by over 700 law enforcement agencies.

Just like gunshot detection systems, however, license plate readers can be used for unsavory ends.

Beyond merely solving crimes like stolen cars, some of Flock Safetys competitors have been adopted by ICE agents to track down undocumented immigrants. These types of devices are not immune to error either. In 2018, for instance, another license-plate reader in the Bay Area led police to pull over a vehicle and point guns at the driver and his passenger, all over a rental car incorrectly identified as stolen.

Acquired by Amazon in 2018, Ring is a doorbell-security camera hybrid that records and sends video to users phones, and to Amazons cloud, based on motion sensors. It has famously captured some funny neighborhood moments, cementing it in some peoples imaginations as a quirky facet of modern living, but it also carries much more sinister connotations. Mainly, it turns the prospect of anyone ever coming near ones door into an alarming event, providing law enforcement with a flood of false alertsand an abundance of questionable opportunities.

Rings promise to consumers is Protection at every corner, and it fulfills that promise by deputizing Ring owners in the war on crime. Citizens report suspicious people, who may only be suspicious in their own minds, and either sic the cops on themthe so-called Karen problemor possibly take matters into their own hands, like George Zimmerman. Police, meanwhile, know that many doors with a Ring on it contain footage that might help them either solve a case, or perhaps indulge a wild hunch.

Up until recently, Ring let police privately ask users to share video footage their cameras have captured. Thanks to vocal criticism from civil liberties groups and privacy advocates, though, police now have to publicly make requests through Rings Neighbors app, a sort of digital bulletin board where people can post alerts for their community. Amazon also recently set limits on what footage police can ask for, and how much of it, after the Electronic Frontier Foundation found police officers attempting to use Ring footage to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. (Exactly the kind of hypocrisy Amazon got called out for with its gesture supporting Black Lives Matter last June.)

Rings collaboration with law enforcement runs deep, with the company even drafting press statements and social media posts for police to promote its cameras with, and officers seeming to relish the technology in turn. As Gizmodo reported in 2019, police in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, apparently raffled off Rings to members of certain communities, and were specifically instructed by superiors to verify that the users knew how to receive police requests for Ring footage.

Similar to Rings Neighbors, Citizen is another highly localized crime notification app. Its original name was Vigilante when it launched in 2016, which says pretty much everything about the companys intentions, even before the part where it encouraged users to approach the crime problem as a group and see what they could do about it. (Vigilante here is not to be confused with Vigilant Solutions, a facial recognition software company employed by many police officers.) Vigilante was swiftly banned, until it rebranded as Citizen, with a reduced emphasis on personal intervention. It now has more than 7 million users across 30 cities.

Even with the new name, the app still indulges fantasies of vigilantism, and helps mold more Kyle Rittenhouseswith unreliable information, to boot. The apps alerts are based on uncorroborated 911 calls, which sometimes get details wrong. Back in May, for instance, Motherboard reported that Citizen CEO Andrew Frame put out a $30,000 bounty for info leading to the arrest of a suspected arsonist, imploring his staff to FIND THIS FUCK, only to later discover that the man whose head hed put a price on was innocent.

Even more recently, the app has gone beyond deputizing civilians in the war on crime to quietly hiring teams of amateur field reporters to scour cities like New York and Los Angeles for crime scenes to livestream. Anyone interested in making $200 for an 8-hour shift (in New York) or $250 for a 10-hour shift (in Los Angeles) can become, essentially, Jake Gyllenhaals creepy character from the film Nightcrawler. If simple phone notifications isnt enough to get people looking over both shoulders all the time, perhaps a series of snuff films will do the trick.

Finally, theres Palantir: the supposed ultimate tool for surveillance.

Named after the Seeing Stones in Lord of the Rings, Palantir is designed to take in reams of data collected by any number of organizations, everything from license plates and fingerprints to identities of confidential informants and email records, and enable users to spot hidden connections between them. It was forged with the help of Peter Thiel, and fueled by the same omniscient ambition as the Pentagons former data-mining program, Total Information Network. Although it has worked with just about every alphabet soup acronym in government, BuzzFeed News last year described it as the most secretive company in law enforcement.

Almost 5,000 police officers in Los Angeles have access to the all-seeing eye of Palantir. They can use one of many available non-Amazon facial recognition tools to take a photo of anyone they deem suspicious, instantly uncover their identity, and then plug it into Palantir to find out untold gobs of info about them, warrant-free. Like magic. In fact, Palantir also helps with whats known as predictive policing, current technologys answer to the precogs from Minority Report. Its an idea premised on the belief that algorithmic data can determine where future crimes may take place and when.

According to research from the Brennan Center, the Los Angeles Police Department first began to explore the possibility of predictive policing back in 2008. Since then, the LAPD has implemented a variety of predictive policing programs, including LASER, which identifies areas where gun violence is thought likely to occur, and PredPol, which calculates so-called hot spots with a high likelihood of crimes. But there is a massive difference between deploying speed traps on highways where speeding has historically been prevalent, and sending police to neighborhoodsor near specific peoplebased solely on previous patterns, to stop crime before it happens. Especially when, as The Next Web points out, the data the predictive policing has collected may be based on various forms of unlawful and biased police practices.

Ultimately, any algorithm used to predict or prevent crime is only as reliable as the human operating it is fallible.

Why are todays police increasingly becoming equipped with tools one might use to track down terrorists? Especially when they cant even seem to keep body cameras working properly.

At the beginning of last summer, during the peak of the George Floyd protests, when Amazon put a pause on its facial recognition software (it has since extended the pause indefinitely), it seemed as though America might have a serious moment of introspection over which communities were bearing the brunt of over-policing and why; but that moment has evaporated. Just as the country started to collectively question the polices power in shaping narrative, the narrative of crime is rising in cities where police were defunded quickly took over. At this point, the idea of actually defunding the police and beefing up social services in any meaningful way has curdled into a cynical talking point that Democrats may use in the 2022 election.

If all this enhanced surveillance tech was already ramping up while crime was falling over the last few decades, I shudder to think of how much more of it well get as crime rises as it has recently. The more that average citizens feel panicked, the more Silicon Valley will crank out new and inevitably flaw-prone systems to exploit the situation. Police departments will continue working with those companies, which not only give them the opportunity to cut corners or act on biases in some cases, but ironically also make them look progressive and future-forward while doing it.

At a certain point, this continued dependence on expensive, unreliable equipment begins to look like a feature and not a bug. The use of machines to reduce the possibility of human error in police work as much as possible might just be a way to avoid ever truly dealing with the kinds of deeper issues about the role of police in society that reached a boiling point last summer.

Its as futile as putting a Band-Aid over a bullet woundor putting a piece of tape over your laptop camera and thinking that means no one can find out what youre up to.

[Correction: a previous version of this article incorrectly linked Flock Safety specifically to ICE.]

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Violent crime is up. Expanding the surveillance state is not the solution - Fast Company

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State Rep. Ron Reynolds and U.S. Rep. Al Green were both arrested Tuesday at the U.S. Capitol while demonstrating for federal voting legislation.

The two Democratic lawmakers were at a rally organized by the National Clergy United for Justice that civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton also attended.

Green, a Houston Democrat, told The Texas Tribune that he and his colleagues moved to the street after praying in front of the Supreme Court when they were approached by Capitol police. He said protesters were told they would be arrested if they hadnt moved after three warnings.

According to Greens office, the lawmakers were arrested on charges of crowding, obstructing, or incommoding.

Reynolds, of Missouri City, is the first Texas House Democrat arrested during the groups decampment to Washington, D.C., to block a state voting restrictions bill. The state lawmakers have been out of Texas for more than three weeks. Theyve spent that time lobbying their federal counterparts to pass voting rights legislation like the For the People Act, which they believe could preempt the proposed voting restrictions back home.

The state has a long history of voter suppression, and the latest iteration of it involves denying people the right to vote in hours that are convenient to them when theyre getting off of work, Green said in reference to one aspect of the GOP-backed voter restrictions, which looks to ban 24-hour voting in the state.

Reynolds said in an interview that he remains confident in his partys efforts to stall the bills because the special session ends this week.

I think that our position is strong. Were essentially a few days away from killing all [Gov. Greg] Abbotts items that he put on call for the special session, he said.

Still, Abbott has vowed to continue calling special sessions until the Texas bill passes.

Tuesdays arrests come after U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, was arrested last week as she demonstrated in support of federal voting legislation.

Efforts to pass federal voting legislation have remained futile, mainly because of a filibuster backed by the GOP and Democratic senators like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin that requires 60 senators to put a bill on the floor. If passed, the For the People Act would end partisan gerrymandering and create a nationwide automatic voter registration system.

We believe that this has been a very necessary trip where we have moved the needle. Now we havent gotten federal legislation passed, but were certainly right there a lot closer than we were when we came here to D.C. three weeks ago, Reynolds said.

In a video posted from Greens Twitter account Tuesday, he and Reynolds sang along to We Shall Overcome as Capitol police officers came over to handcuff them. The song was a frequent refrain during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The post was captioned with the hashtag #GoodTrouble a reference to the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis, who encouraged defying the law in pursuit of moral good.

Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America, Lewis said on the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers were assaulted by state and local police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Another one of the federal voting bills stalled in Congress is the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which could bring back federal preclearance a policy that gives the federal government the authority to vet state voting laws for discrimination against voters of color.

For Green, the references to Lewis are personal.

I was arrested twice with John Lewis, and we were taken to jail, Green said. And we were detained and jailed for some time he and I were cellmates.

Join us Sept. 20-25 at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival. Tickets are on sale now for this multi-day celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the days news, curated by The Texas Tribunes award-winning journalists. Learn more.

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State Rep. Ron Reynolds and U.S. Rep. Al Green arrested while demonstrating for federal voting bill at U.S. Capitol - The Texas Tribune

A wide range of federal statutes reach conduct overseas. When those statutes include private rights of action, Americans may find themselves with claims against defendants with fewif anyties to the U.S.

Since the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Daimler v. Bauman cut back states authority to hale non-resident corporations into court for conduct unrelated to their activities in-state, many have assumed that these would-be plaintiffs are out of luck.

Now, in Douglass v. Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha, the Fifth Circuit has decided to take a second look at the question of whether and how that rule applies when federal courts hear federal-law claims against corporations based abroad.

Federal courts personal jurisdiction usually depends on the long-arm statutes of the states in which they sit. Those statutes are subject to the 14th Amendments Due Process Clause, which limits states jurisdiction over non-resident defendants to situations where the claims against them arise from, or relate to, their in-state conduct.

But federal law has its own long-arm provisions, governed by the Fifth Amendment, that are intended to fill in where state law leaves gaps.

Although the Fifth and 14th Amendments Due Process clauses are worded identically, the Supreme Court has gone out of its way, in cases like Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court, to leave open whether the clauses impose the same constraints. And the government has argued, most recently last term in Ford v. Montana Eighth Judicial Dist. Ct., that the U.S.s unique constitutional prerogatives and powers permit the exercise of federal judicial power in ways that have no analogue at the state level.

Yet most federal appellate courts, including the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, Federal, and D.C. circuits, have assumed or held without much analysis that federal service-of-process provisions are subject to the same limits as their state-law counterparts. The only difference they have recognized is that litigants proceeding under federal service-of-process provisions can aggregate defendants contacts with the U.S. as a whole, instead of any single state.

Its worth asking why. After all, a central justification for the focus on forum contacts under the 14th Amendment is the need to protect interstate federalism. But federalism is beside the point when a federal court hears federal-law claims against, say, a foreign terrorist organization that injures Americans traveling abroad or a foreign company that traffics in overseas property confiscated from U.S. citizens. And its not clear how much the inconvenience that litigating here imposes on non-resident foreign defendants should weigh against the judgment of Congress that Americans should be able to bring claims based on foreign conduct.

These are among the questions the full Fifth Circuit will consider when it rehears Douglass.

The appeal arises from a collision in Japanese waters on June 17, 2017, between the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald and a cargo ship (MV ACX Crystal) chartered by a Japanese shipping company that left seven U.S. sailors dead and dozens injured. In consolidated cases, the victims and their survivors sued the company under the federal Death on the High Seas Act. They asserted personal jurisdiction under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4(k)(2), which allows service of process in federal-law suits where the defendant is not subject to jurisdiction in any state.

Finding no connection between the accident and the shipping companys limited U.S. contacts, the district court dismissed the suits under Daimler. A panel of the Fifth Circuit grudgingly affirmed, devoting much of its per curiam opinion to casting doubt on circuit precedent that subjected Rule 4(k)(2) to the same 14th-Amendment standard as its state-law counterparts. The two active judges on the panel concurred, urging the full court to revisit the issue. It agreed to do so July 2.

With virtually no guidance from the Supreme Court, the case promises to take the predominantly conservative appeals court back to first principles. That could lead to interesting debates about federal power, sovereignty, and what it means to be faithful to the U.S. Constitutions text. And it could make the Fifth Circuit, which includes Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, the go-to forum for federal claims against non-resident foreign corporations.

Although its impossible to predict the outcome, it seems unlikely that the court took the case en banc just to confirm its prior precedent. The question is how far it will go.

The now-vacated panel decision gives one hint: It endorsed a compromise position suggested by an amicus brief from civil-procedure scholars that would read the Fifth Amendment to allow jurisdiction over foreign corporations for claims based on foreign conduct that is related to their U.S. operations. But the court could go further still and hold, as the governments brief in Ford suggested, that the Constitution imposes no territorial constraints on federal authority.

Whatever the result, the Supreme Court is sure to face calls to weigh in before long.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. or its owners.

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Eugene Sokoloff is counsel at MoloLamken LLP where he focuses on critical motions and appeals.

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Just How Long Is the Long Arm of U.S. Jurisdiction? - Bloomberg Law