![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Testing, the Chinese Way
When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?
But Andrew and Cara, now 16 and 18, have only the warmest memories of their years at the International School of Beijing — they mostly didn’t understand that they were being “tested.” As educators and parents in the United States debate new federal programs that will probably expose young children to far more exams and quizzes than is the current norm, I think often of the ups and downs of my children’s elementary education. What makes a test feel like an interesting challenge rather than an anxiety-provoking assault?
Testing of young children had been out of favor for decades among early-childhood educators in the United States, who worry that it stifles creativity and harms self-esteem, and does not accurately reflect the style and irregular pace of children’s learning anyway. (There may be some truth to that. My son, who suffered the flash card assault, was by age 7 the family’s most voracious reader.) Testing young children has been so out of favor that even the test-based No Child Left Behind law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade — at which point, some educators believe, it is too late to remedy deficiencies.
But recently, American education’s “no test” philosophy for young children has been coming under assault, as government programs strongly promote the practice.
First there was No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2003 and required states to give all students standardized tests to measure school progress.
Now, President Obama’s Race to the Top educational competition — which announced billions of dollars in state grants this month — includes and encourages more reliance on what educators call “formative tests” or “formative assessments.” These are not the big once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime exams, like the SATs, but a stream of smaller, less monumental tests, designed in theory, at least, primarily to help students and their teachers know how they’re doing.
Some education experts hail the change as a step forward from the ideological dark ages. “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of course, the tests have to be age-appropriate, Professor Cizek notes, and the Race to the Top program includes funds for research to develop new exams. Filling in three pages of multiple-choice bubbles may not be appropriate for young children. Likewise “high stakes” tests — like the Chinese university entrance exam, which alone determines university placement — create anxiety and may unfairly derail a youngster’s future based on poor performance on a single day.
But Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.”
Other educators recoil at the thought of more tests. “The Obama administration is using the power of the purse to compel states to add more destructive testing,” said Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and many other books on education. “With Race to the Top the bad news has gotten worse, with a relentless regimen that turns schools into test prep courses.”
He said genuine learning in young children was a global process, while tests look at narrow and specific skills, and good teachers don’t need tests to know if a child is learning. He added that for young children, good test results were more a function of whether children can sit still or hold a pencil. “These tests are being added in the name of accountability despite the objections of early-childhood educators who say they have no place in the classrooms,” he said.
Rather than a “low-stress tool to identify gaps in the learning process,” he added, “they are used as a club to punish students who need help.”
I will not pretend that raising children amid a stream of tests is a Zen experience, for them or for their parents. In Beijing, both of my children had subjects or grades in which they performed poorly. There was an entire elementary school year in which my son got consistently mediocre grades in math, in English, in everything, it seemed. It took endless parental cheerleading to maintain his self-esteem. And there were times when — yes — I’m sure he felt bad about himself.
But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it. “Schools do a lot of nurturing and facilitating, and then it’s a bit of a shock for children when they have to sit at a desk all alone and be tested,” Professor Cizek said.
When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested. Will tests be like that in a national program, like Race to the Top?
When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.
“How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” my daughter asked with obvious discomfort after a month. Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.
Number of Families in Shelters Rises
For a few hours at the mall here this month, Nick Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like a regular family again.
Never mind that they were just killing time away from the homeless shelter where they are staying, or that they had to take two city buses to get to the shopping center because they pawned one car earlier this year and had another repossessed, or that the debit card Ms. Lennon inserted into the A.T.M. was courtesy of the state’s welfare program.
They ate lunch at the food court, browsed for clothes and just strolled, blending in with everyone else out on a scorching hot summer day. “It’s exactly why we come here,” Ms. Lennon said. “It reminds us of our old life.”
For millions who have lost jobs or faced eviction in the economic downturn, homelessness is perhaps the darkest fear of all. In the end, though, for all the devastation wrought by the recession, a vast majority of people who have faced the possibility have somehow managed to avoid it.
Nevertheless, from 2007 through 2009, the number of families in homeless shelters — households with at least one adult and one minor child — leapt to 170,000 from 131,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
With long-term unemployment ballooning, those numbers could easily climb this year. Late in 2009, however, states began distributing $1.5 billion that has been made available over three years by the federal government as part of the stimulus package for the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which provides financial assistance to keep people in their homes or get them back in one quickly if they lose them.
More than 550,000 people have received aid, including more than 1,800 in Rhode Island, with just over a quarter of the money for the program spent so far nationally, state and federal officials said.
Even so, it remains to be seen whether the program is keeping pace with the continuing economic hardship.
On Aug. 9, Mr. Griffith, 40, Ms. Lennon, 26, and their two children, Ava, 3, and Ethan, 16 months, staggered into Crossroads Rhode Island, a shelter that functions as a kind of processing and triage center for homeless families, after a three-day bus journey from Florida.
“It hit me when we got off the bus and walked up and saw the Crossroads building,” Ms. Lennon said. “We had all our stuff. We were tired. We’d already had enough, and it was just starting.”
The number of families who have sought help this year at Crossroads has already surpassed the total for all of 2009. Through July, 324 families had come needing shelter, compared with 278 all of last year.
National data on current shelter populations are not yet available, but checks with other major family shelters across the country found similar increases.
The Y.W.C.A. Family Center in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest family shelters in the state, has seen an occupancy increase of more than 20 percent over the last three months compared with the same period last year. The UMOM New Day Center in Phoenix, the largest family shelter in Arizona, has had a more than 30 percent increase in families calling for shelter over the last few months.
Without national data, it is impossible to say for certain whether these are anomalies. Clearly, however, many families are still being sucked into the swirling financial drain that leads to homelessness.
The Griffith family moved from Rhode Island to Florida two years ago after Mr. Griffith, who was working as a waiter at an Applebee’s restaurant, asked to be transferred to one opening in Spring Hill, an hour north of Tampa, where he figured the cost of living would be lower.
He did well at first, earning as much as $25 an hour, including tips. He also got a job as a line cook at another restaurant, where he made $12 an hour.
The family eventually moved into a three-bedroom condominium and lived the typical suburban life, with a sport-utility vehicle and a minivan to cart around their growing family.
In January, however, the restaurant where Mr. Griffith was cooking closed. Then his hours began drying up at Applebee’s. The couple had savings, but squandered some of it figuring he would quickly find another job. When he did not, they were evicted from their condo.
They lived with Ms. Lennon’s mother at first in her one-bedroom house in Port Richey, Fla., but she made it clear after two months that the arrangement was no longer feasible. The family moved to an R.V. park, paying $186 a week plus utilities. By late July, however, they had mostly run out of options.
They called some 100 shelters in Florida and found that most were full; others would not allow them to stay together.
They considered returning to Rhode Island. An Applebee’s in Smithfield agreed to hire Mr. Griffith. They found Crossroads on the Internet and were assured of a spot. Using some emergency money they had left and $150 lent by relatives, they bought bus tickets to Providence.
Now, the family is crammed into a single room at Crossroads’ 15-room family shelter, which used to be a funeral home. All four sleep on a pair of single beds pushed together. There is a crib for Ethan, but with all the turmoil, he can now fall asleep only when next to his parents. A lone framed photograph of the couple, dressed up for a night out, sits atop a shelf.
The living conditions are only part of the adjustment; there is also the shelter’s long list of rules. No one can be in the living quarters from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The news is even off-limits as television programming in the common area. Residents were recently barred from congregating around the bench outside.
Infractions bring write-ups; three write-ups bring expulsion.
The changes have taken a toll on the family in small and large ways. Ethan has taken to screaming for no reason. Ava had been on the verge of being potty-trained, but is now back to diapers. Their nap schedules and diets are a mess. Their parents are squabbling more and have started smoking again.
Mr. Griffith found that he could work only limited hours at his new job because of the bus schedule. The family did qualify last week for transitional housing, but that usually takes a month to finalize. They are still pursuing rapid rehousing assistance.
Others at the shelter with no job prospects face a steeper climb meeting the requirements.
Every few days, new families arrive. A few hours after the Griffiths got back from the mall, a young woman pushing a stroller with a toddler rang the shelter doorbell, quietly weeping.
China Explores a Frontier Two Miles Deep
When three Chinese scientists plunged to the bottom of the South China Sea in a tiny submarine early this summer, they did more than simply plant their nation’s flag on the dark seabed.
The men, who descended more than two miles in a craft the size of a small truck, also signaled Beijing’s intention to take the lead in exploring remote and inaccessible parts of the ocean floor, which are rich in oil, minerals and other resources that the Chinese would like to mine. And many of those resources happen to lie in areas where China has clashed repeatedly with its neighbors over territorial claims.
After the flag planting, which was done in secret but recorded in a video, Beijing quickly turned the feat of technology into a show of bravado.
“It is a great achievement,” Liu Feng, director of the dives, was quoted as saying by China Daily, an English-language newspaper, which telegraphs government positions to the outside world.
The global seabed is littered with what experts say is trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral nodules as well as many objects of intelligence value: undersea cables carrying diplomatic communications, lost nuclear arms, sunken submarines and hundreds of warheads left over from missile tests.
While a single small craft cannot reel in all these treasures, it does put China in an excellent position to go after them.
“They’re in it for a penny and a pound,” said Don Walsh, a pioneer of deep-ocean diving who recently visited the submersible and its makers in China. “It’s a very deliberate program.”
The small craft that made the trip — named Jiaolong, after a mythical sea dragon — was unveiled publicly late last month after eight years of secretive development. It is designed to go deeper than any other in the world, giving China access to 99.8 percent of the ocean floor.
Technically, it is a submersible. These craft differ from submarines in their small size, their need for a mother ship on the surface, and their ability to dive extraordinarily far despite the darkness and the crushing pressures. The world has only a few.
Jiaolong is meant to go as deep as 7,000 meters, or 4.35 miles, edging out the current global leader. Japan’s Shinkai 6500 can go as deep as 6,500 meters, outperforming craft “all over the world,” according to its makers. Russia, France and the United States lag further behind in the game of going deep.
American experts familiar with the Chinese undersea program say it is unusual in that Beijing has little experience in the daunting field. As a result, China is moving cautiously. Jiaolong’s sea trials began quietly last year and are to continue until 2012, its dives going deeper in increments.
“They’re being very cautious,” Dr. Walsh said. “They respect what they don’t know and are working hard to learn.”
In an interview, Dr. Walsh said that the Chinese were especially interested in avoiding the embarrassment of a disaster that ends with the aquanauts’ entrapment or death. “If I’m the new kid on the block,” he said, “I’m going to make sure that I’ve got bragging rights.”
Still, China is already waving flags. The move resembles how Russian scientists, in the summer of 2007, plunged through the ice pack at the North Pole and planted their flag on the bottom of the ocean. Upon surfacing, the explorers declared that the feat had strengthened Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed.
Wang Weizhong, a Chinese vice minister of science and technology, said that the Jiaolong’s sea trials “marked a milestone” for China and global exploration. The recent successes of the craft, he said in late August at a news conference in Beijing, “laid a solid foundation for its practical application in resource surveys and scientific research.”
But at least one senior Chinese expert questioned what he called “the current propaganda.” The expert, Weicheng Cui, a professor at the China Ship Scientific Research Center, which is building the submersible, said Thursday in an e-mail that the craft’s sea trials had steered clear of contested islands “to avoid any diplomatic issues.”
The flurry of publicity over the flag planting, he said, “is not so helpful for us to complete the project.”
China’s splash in the arcane world of submersibles comes after years of singling out major industries and technologies for rapid development. China is rushing to make supercomputers and jumbo jets. With expanding political ambitions and territorial claims in neighboring seas, it has paid special attention to oceanography and building a blue-water navy, one that operates in the deep waters of open oceans.
The United States once held the submersible lead. In 1960, it sent Dr. Walsh, then a Navy officer, to the ocean’s deepest spot, seven miles down. But over the decades, it lost its edge to France, Russia and, most recently, Japan.
China began its push in 2002. A few Westerners became aware of the guarded effort when China ordered from Russia the forging of a spherical hull about seven feet wide.
At the heart of any submersible lies the hollow sphere where the aquanauts work. It houses a pilot and two observers, who can peer out of tiny portholes. Typically, a dive into the abyss is an all-day affair, requiring hours to and from the bottom.
American experts said China went on a global shopping spree to gather sophisticated gear for its submersible. From the United States, it bought advanced lights, cameras and manipulator arms. Dr. Cui estimated that 40 percent of the craft’s equipment came from abroad.
China also turned to the United States for tutoring. In 2005, five Chinese trainee pilots and one scientist participated in eight dives on Alvin, the oldest and most famous of the world’s deep-diving craft, which is run by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. China “bought time on Alvin to gain experience,” according to the Deep Submergence Science Committee, a group that advises the federal government and universities on ocean exploration.
Though Alvin can go down only 4,500 meters, or 2.8 miles, it has made thousands of dives and discoveries, and is widely seen among experts as highly productive and well run.
One of the Chinese trainees was Ye Cong, now a pilot on Jiaolong during its sea trials.
Last year’s tests went as deep as 1,000 meters (about a half mile), and this summer’s as deep as 3,759 meters. Next year Jiaolong is to dive to 5,000 meters and in 2012 reach its maximum depth.
Dr. Walsh said the flag issue prompted more awkwardness than swagger among those who are building and testing the new submersible.
“We had a laugh about it,” he recalled of his China visit. “I said, ‘Oh, you’re copying the Russians,’ and they kind of giggled. These guys are pretty apolitical and pretty well insulated” from Beijing. “They’re just contractors doing their job.”
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
There are pictures
t was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness.
The group, Baikal Environmental Wave, was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had polluted nearby Lake Baikal, a natural wonder that by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.
Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.
Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.
As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.
Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.
After The New York Times presented its reporting to senior Microsoft officials, the company responded that it planned to tighten its oversight of its legal affairs in Russia. Human rights organizations in Russia have been pressing Microsoft to do so for months. The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft this year saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.”
Tough Ethical Choices
Microsoft, like many American technology giants doing business in authoritarian countries, is often faced with ethical choices over government directives to help suppress dissent. In China, Microsoft has complied with censorship rules in operating its Web search service, preventing Chinese users from easily accessing banned information. Its archrival Google stopped following censorship regulations there, and scaled back its operations inside China’s Internet firewall.
In Russia, leaders of advocacy groups and newspapers subjected to antipiracy raids said Microsoft was cooperating with the authorities because the company feared jeopardizing its business in the country. They said Microsoft needed to issue a categorical public statement disavowing these tactics and pledging to never cooperate in such cases.
Microsoft has not done that, but has promised to review its policies in Russia.
“We take the concerns that have been raised very seriously,” Kevin Kutz, director of public affairs for Microsoft, said in a statement. Mr. Kutz said the company would ensure that its lawyers had “more clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities.”
“We have to protect our products from piracy, but we also have a commitment to respect fundamental human rights,” he said. “Microsoft antipiracy efforts are designed to honor both objectives, but we are open to feedback on what we can do to improve in that regard.”
Microsoft emphasized that it encouraged law enforcement agencies worldwide to investigate producers and suppliers of illegal software rather than consumers. Even so, it has not publicly criticized raids against small Russian advocacy groups.
With pirated software prevalent in this country, it is not surprising that some of these groups might have some on their computers. Yet the issue, then, is why the police choose to focus on these particular targets — and whether they falsify evidence to make the charges more serious.
Microsoft also says it has a program in Russia to provide free and low-cost software to newspapers and advocacy groups so that they are in compliance with the law.
But the review of these cases indicates that the security services often seize computers whether or not they contain illegal software. The police immediately filed reports saying they had discovered such programs, before even examining the computers in detail. The police claims have in numerous instances been successfully discredited by defendants when the cases go before judges.
Given the suspicions that these investigations are politically motivated, the police and prosecutors have turned to Microsoft to lend weight to their cases. In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun “based on an application” from a lawyer for Microsoft.
In another city, Samara, the police seized computers from two opposition newspapers, with the support of a different Microsoft lawyer. “Without the participation of Microsoft, these criminal cases against human rights defenders and journalists would simply not be able to occur,” said the editor of the newspapers, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev.
The plainclothes officers who descended upon the Baikal Wave headquarters said they were from the division that investigated commercial crime. But the environmentalists said they noticed at least one officer from the antiextremism department, which tracks opposition activists and had often conducted surveillance on the group.
The officers said they had received a complaint from a man named Dmitri Latyshev, who claimed that he had been in the headquarters and spotted unlicensed Microsoft software on the computers. The police produced a handwritten complaint from Mr. Latyshev, dated Jan. 27. The raid occurred the next day.
People at Baikal Wave said they had never seen or heard of Mr. Latyshev. Located in Irkutsk recently, Mr. Latyshev said by phone that he had filed the complaint but would not say why.
Baikal Wave’s leaders said they had known that the authorities used such raids to pressure advocacy groups, so they had made certain that all their software was legal.
But they quickly realized how difficult it would be to defend themselves.
They said they told the officers that they were mistaken, pulling out receipts and original Microsoft packaging to prove that the software was not pirated. The police did not appear to take that into consideration. A supervising officer issued a report on the spot saying that illegal software had been uncovered.
Before the raid, the environmentalists said their computers were affixed with Microsoft’s “Certificate of Authenticity” stickers that attested to the software’s legality. But as the computers were being hauled away, they noticed something odd: the stickers were gone.
In all, 12 computers were confiscated. The group’s Web site was disabled, its finances left in disarray, its plans disclosed to the authorities.
The police also obtained personnel information from the computers. In the following weeks, officers tracked down some of the group’s supporters and interrogated them.
“The police had one goal, which was to prevent us from working,” said Galina Kulebyakina, a co-chairwoman of Baikal Wave. “They removed our computers because we actively took a position against the paper factory and forcefully voiced it.”
“They can do pretty much what they want, with impunity,” she said.
A Company’s Pollution
The paper factory is located on Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake, which is home to hundreds of species that exist nowhere else, including a freshwater seal. Over the years, the factory has spewed mercury, chlorine, heavy metals and other pollutants into the water.
Baikal Wave rejoiced when the factory closed in 2008, having succumbed to sizable losses, as well as pressure from environmentalists. But after the financial crisis hit, the Kremlin worried about unrest from unemployment. In January, Mr. Putin reopened the factory, which has employed as many as 2,000 people, saying that it no longer polluted the lake.
Baikal Wave, which was founded in Irkutsk, one of Russia’s largest cities, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, began planning a protest. That was when the officers showed up.
In a statement, the Irkutsk police said the raid was proper. “The inspection of Baikal Environmental Wave was intended to protect intellectual property and had no connection whatsoever with the activities of the advocacy organization,” the statement said.
It said a forensic examination of the computers in February showed that several contained illegal software that would have cost more than $3,300. Baikal Wave said the examination was fraudulent.
Prosecutors say they are now weighing whether to press charges against Baikal Wave or its leaders. It is possible, though unlikely, that they could face jail time if convicted.
Neither Microsoft’s Moscow office nor its local lawyer contacted Baikal Wave to hear its side. The lawyer did provide testimony to the police about the value of the software that Baikal Wave was accused of illegally obtaining.
Baikal Wave sent copies of its software receipts and other documentation to Microsoft’s Moscow office to show that it had purchased the software legally. The group said it believed that the authorities would be under pressure to drop the case if Microsoft would confirm the documents’ authenticity.
Microsoft declined to do so. In a letter to Baikal Wave, the company said it would forward the materials only to the authorities in Irkutsk, which already had copies of them.
“A determination of the actual circumstances of this case and the question of whether a violation of the law took place is the duty of the court,” Microsoft said.
The company also told Baikal Wave that it was willing to have its specialists assist the police in Irkutsk in evaluating the computers.
In response to written questions, Alexander Strakh, Microsoft’s chief antipiracy lawyer in Moscow, said that in all these cases, Microsoft assisted the authorities only as called for under Russian law.
Mr. Strakh was asked whether Microsoft believed that these raids were a tool to suppress the opposition. “We have no direct knowledge of decisions by authorities to use investigations in that manner,” he said.
Microsoft has hired numerous private lawyers across Russia who represent the company in piracy cases. Several of the lawyers have cropped up in these politically sensitive inquiries.
This year, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Krasnodar brought a piracy case against an immigrant rights activist named Anastasia Denisova. She said in an interview that she was surprised at the aggressive posture of Microsoft’s local lawyer.
In an official document, the Interior Ministry said the case against Ms. Denisova was begun “based on an application” from the lawyer. (Microsoft’s Moscow office said that statement was not correct.)
Ms. Denisova said the lawyer overestimated the value of the allegedly pirated software. As a result, the accusations were more serious.
“The Microsoft lawyer was very active, coming to the court all the time, even though he was not summoned,” she said. “He also claimed that he was going to sue me, despite the fact that Microsoft had publicly stated that it would not do so against an advocacy group.”
In May, after Ms. Denisova had spent several months under the threat of a prison sentence, the charges were dropped. Prosecutors acknowledged that the investigation had been mishandled.
Samara, in Russia’s industrial heartland, has been a focal point for these raids. In May 2007, when Mr. Putin was holding a summit meeting there with European leaders, the police sought to prevent protests by seizing computers from several organizations, including Golos, an election monitoring and human rights group, and the local edition of Novaya Gazeta, the country’s most influential opposition newspaper.
Last year, they took computers from another newspaper, Samarskaya Gazeta. According to case records, the police conducted that search based upon a complaint from a man who admitted that he had never been in the newspaper’s offices or seen its computers.
Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev, the editor of both newspapers, said Microsoft’s lawyer in the case regularly appeared at court hearings to back prosecutors and the police. He said the lawyer testified that seized computers contained pirated software even though it was later shown that the computers had never been examined.
“Microsoft says publicly that they have no claims in these cases, but then their lawyers come into the court and say whatever the police want them to say,” Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said.
The Damage Is Done
Prosecutors eventually dropped or suspended the charges against Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev after he was able to discredit them. But he said the damage was done. He said the newspapers lost computers and data, and he spent an enormous amount of time ensnared in legal proceedings. The local edition of Novaya Gazeta had to close.
Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said he now realized that the authorities were not so much interested in convictions as in harassing opponents. Even if the inquiries are abandoned, they are debilitating when they require months to defend.
Microsoft’s Moscow office said its lawyers had conducted themselves properly in the cases in Krasnodar and Samara.
In Irkutsk, Baikal Environmental Wave has also struggled to recover from the raid. It located some old computers and was still able to hold protests against the paper factory.
The seized computers were not returned by the police until July, five months after they were removed. Their hard drives had been inspected by police experts in February. The environmentalists do not know whether all their data remain, and they are sure that files were copied.
Ms. Rikhvanova, one of the group’s co-founders, who has been fighting to defend Lake Baikal since the 1960s, was unable to use her computer. When she got it back, she discovered that it had been disabled by a virus.
When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.
We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.
I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?
But Andrew and Cara, now 16 and 18, have only the warmest memories of their years at the International School of Beijing — they mostly didn’t understand that they were being “tested.” As educators and parents in the United States debate new federal programs that will probably expose young children to far more exams and quizzes than is the current norm, I think often of the ups and downs of my children’s elementary education. What makes a test feel like an interesting challenge rather than an anxiety-provoking assault?
Testing of young children had been out of favor for decades among early-childhood educators in the United States, who worry that it stifles creativity and harms self-esteem, and does not accurately reflect the style and irregular pace of children’s learning anyway. (There may be some truth to that. My son, who suffered the flash card assault, was by age 7 the family’s most voracious reader.) Testing young children has been so out of favor that even the test-based No Child Left Behind law doesn’t start testing students’ reading abilities until after third grade — at which point, some educators believe, it is too late to remedy deficiencies.
But recently, American education’s “no test” philosophy for young children has been coming under assault, as government programs strongly promote the practice.
First there was No Child Left Behind, which took effect in 2003 and required states to give all students standardized tests to measure school progress.
Now, President Obama’s Race to the Top educational competition — which announced billions of dollars in state grants this month — includes and encourages more reliance on what educators call “formative tests” or “formative assessments.” These are not the big once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime exams, like the SATs, but a stream of smaller, less monumental tests, designed in theory, at least, primarily to help students and their teachers know how they’re doing.
Some education experts hail the change as a step forward from the ideological dark ages. “Research has long shown that more frequent testing is beneficial to kids, but educators have resisted this finding,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a professor of educational measurement and evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of course, the tests have to be age-appropriate, Professor Cizek notes, and the Race to the Top program includes funds for research to develop new exams. Filling in three pages of multiple-choice bubbles may not be appropriate for young children. Likewise “high stakes” tests — like the Chinese university entrance exam, which alone determines university placement — create anxiety and may unfairly derail a youngster’s future based on poor performance on a single day.
But Professor Cizek, who started his career as a second-grade teacher, said the prevailing philosophy of offering young children unconditional praise and support was probably not the best prescription for successful education. “What’s best for kids is frequent testing, where even if they do badly, they can get help and improve and have the satisfaction of doing better,” he said. “Kids don’t get self-esteem by people just telling them they are wonderful.”
Other educators recoil at the thought of more tests. “The Obama administration is using the power of the purse to compel states to add more destructive testing,” said Alfie Kohn, author of “The Case Against Standardized Testing” and many other books on education. “With Race to the Top the bad news has gotten worse, with a relentless regimen that turns schools into test prep courses.”
He said genuine learning in young children was a global process, while tests look at narrow and specific skills, and good teachers don’t need tests to know if a child is learning. He added that for young children, good test results were more a function of whether children can sit still or hold a pencil. “These tests are being added in the name of accountability despite the objections of early-childhood educators who say they have no place in the classrooms,” he said.
Rather than a “low-stress tool to identify gaps in the learning process,” he added, “they are used as a club to punish students who need help.”
I will not pretend that raising children amid a stream of tests is a Zen experience, for them or for their parents. In Beijing, both of my children had subjects or grades in which they performed poorly. There was an entire elementary school year in which my son got consistently mediocre grades in math, in English, in everything, it seemed. It took endless parental cheerleading to maintain his self-esteem. And there were times when — yes — I’m sure he felt bad about himself.
But let’s face it, life is filled with all kinds of tests — some you ace and some you flunk — so at some point you have to get used to it. “Schools do a lot of nurturing and facilitating, and then it’s a bit of a shock for children when they have to sit at a desk all alone and be tested,” Professor Cizek said.
When testing is commonplace and the teachers are supportive — as my children’s were, for the most part — the tests felt like so many puzzles; not so much a judgment on your being, but an interesting challenge. It is a testament to the International School of Beijing — or to the malleability of childhood memory — that Andrew now says he did not realize that he was being tested. Will tests be like that in a national program, like Race to the Top?
When we moved back to New York City, my children, then 9 and 11, started at a progressive school with no real tests, no grades, not even auditions for the annual school musical. They didn’t last long. It turned out they had come to like the feedback of testing.
“How do I know if I get what’s going on in math class?” my daughter asked with obvious discomfort after a month. Primed with Beijing test-taking experience, they each soon tested into New York City’s academic public schools — where they have had tests aplenty and (probably not surprisingly) a high proportion of Asian classmates.
Number of Families in Shelters Rises
For a few hours at the mall here this month, Nick Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like a regular family again.
Never mind that they were just killing time away from the homeless shelter where they are staying, or that they had to take two city buses to get to the shopping center because they pawned one car earlier this year and had another repossessed, or that the debit card Ms. Lennon inserted into the A.T.M. was courtesy of the state’s welfare program.
They ate lunch at the food court, browsed for clothes and just strolled, blending in with everyone else out on a scorching hot summer day. “It’s exactly why we come here,” Ms. Lennon said. “It reminds us of our old life.”
For millions who have lost jobs or faced eviction in the economic downturn, homelessness is perhaps the darkest fear of all. In the end, though, for all the devastation wrought by the recession, a vast majority of people who have faced the possibility have somehow managed to avoid it.
Nevertheless, from 2007 through 2009, the number of families in homeless shelters — households with at least one adult and one minor child — leapt to 170,000 from 131,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
With long-term unemployment ballooning, those numbers could easily climb this year. Late in 2009, however, states began distributing $1.5 billion that has been made available over three years by the federal government as part of the stimulus package for the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which provides financial assistance to keep people in their homes or get them back in one quickly if they lose them.
More than 550,000 people have received aid, including more than 1,800 in Rhode Island, with just over a quarter of the money for the program spent so far nationally, state and federal officials said.
Even so, it remains to be seen whether the program is keeping pace with the continuing economic hardship.
On Aug. 9, Mr. Griffith, 40, Ms. Lennon, 26, and their two children, Ava, 3, and Ethan, 16 months, staggered into Crossroads Rhode Island, a shelter that functions as a kind of processing and triage center for homeless families, after a three-day bus journey from Florida.
“It hit me when we got off the bus and walked up and saw the Crossroads building,” Ms. Lennon said. “We had all our stuff. We were tired. We’d already had enough, and it was just starting.”
The number of families who have sought help this year at Crossroads has already surpassed the total for all of 2009. Through July, 324 families had come needing shelter, compared with 278 all of last year.
National data on current shelter populations are not yet available, but checks with other major family shelters across the country found similar increases.
The Y.W.C.A. Family Center in Columbus, Ohio, one of the largest family shelters in the state, has seen an occupancy increase of more than 20 percent over the last three months compared with the same period last year. The UMOM New Day Center in Phoenix, the largest family shelter in Arizona, has had a more than 30 percent increase in families calling for shelter over the last few months.
Without national data, it is impossible to say for certain whether these are anomalies. Clearly, however, many families are still being sucked into the swirling financial drain that leads to homelessness.
The Griffith family moved from Rhode Island to Florida two years ago after Mr. Griffith, who was working as a waiter at an Applebee’s restaurant, asked to be transferred to one opening in Spring Hill, an hour north of Tampa, where he figured the cost of living would be lower.
He did well at first, earning as much as $25 an hour, including tips. He also got a job as a line cook at another restaurant, where he made $12 an hour.
The family eventually moved into a three-bedroom condominium and lived the typical suburban life, with a sport-utility vehicle and a minivan to cart around their growing family.
In January, however, the restaurant where Mr. Griffith was cooking closed. Then his hours began drying up at Applebee’s. The couple had savings, but squandered some of it figuring he would quickly find another job. When he did not, they were evicted from their condo.
They lived with Ms. Lennon’s mother at first in her one-bedroom house in Port Richey, Fla., but she made it clear after two months that the arrangement was no longer feasible. The family moved to an R.V. park, paying $186 a week plus utilities. By late July, however, they had mostly run out of options.
They called some 100 shelters in Florida and found that most were full; others would not allow them to stay together.
They considered returning to Rhode Island. An Applebee’s in Smithfield agreed to hire Mr. Griffith. They found Crossroads on the Internet and were assured of a spot. Using some emergency money they had left and $150 lent by relatives, they bought bus tickets to Providence.
Now, the family is crammed into a single room at Crossroads’ 15-room family shelter, which used to be a funeral home. All four sleep on a pair of single beds pushed together. There is a crib for Ethan, but with all the turmoil, he can now fall asleep only when next to his parents. A lone framed photograph of the couple, dressed up for a night out, sits atop a shelf.
The living conditions are only part of the adjustment; there is also the shelter’s long list of rules. No one can be in the living quarters from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The news is even off-limits as television programming in the common area. Residents were recently barred from congregating around the bench outside.
Infractions bring write-ups; three write-ups bring expulsion.
The changes have taken a toll on the family in small and large ways. Ethan has taken to screaming for no reason. Ava had been on the verge of being potty-trained, but is now back to diapers. Their nap schedules and diets are a mess. Their parents are squabbling more and have started smoking again.
Mr. Griffith found that he could work only limited hours at his new job because of the bus schedule. The family did qualify last week for transitional housing, but that usually takes a month to finalize. They are still pursuing rapid rehousing assistance.
Others at the shelter with no job prospects face a steeper climb meeting the requirements.
Every few days, new families arrive. A few hours after the Griffiths got back from the mall, a young woman pushing a stroller with a toddler rang the shelter doorbell, quietly weeping.
China Explores a Frontier Two Miles Deep
When three Chinese scientists plunged to the bottom of the South China Sea in a tiny submarine early this summer, they did more than simply plant their nation’s flag on the dark seabed.
The men, who descended more than two miles in a craft the size of a small truck, also signaled Beijing’s intention to take the lead in exploring remote and inaccessible parts of the ocean floor, which are rich in oil, minerals and other resources that the Chinese would like to mine. And many of those resources happen to lie in areas where China has clashed repeatedly with its neighbors over territorial claims.
After the flag planting, which was done in secret but recorded in a video, Beijing quickly turned the feat of technology into a show of bravado.
“It is a great achievement,” Liu Feng, director of the dives, was quoted as saying by China Daily, an English-language newspaper, which telegraphs government positions to the outside world.
The global seabed is littered with what experts say is trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral nodules as well as many objects of intelligence value: undersea cables carrying diplomatic communications, lost nuclear arms, sunken submarines and hundreds of warheads left over from missile tests.
While a single small craft cannot reel in all these treasures, it does put China in an excellent position to go after them.
“They’re in it for a penny and a pound,” said Don Walsh, a pioneer of deep-ocean diving who recently visited the submersible and its makers in China. “It’s a very deliberate program.”
The small craft that made the trip — named Jiaolong, after a mythical sea dragon — was unveiled publicly late last month after eight years of secretive development. It is designed to go deeper than any other in the world, giving China access to 99.8 percent of the ocean floor.
Technically, it is a submersible. These craft differ from submarines in their small size, their need for a mother ship on the surface, and their ability to dive extraordinarily far despite the darkness and the crushing pressures. The world has only a few.
Jiaolong is meant to go as deep as 7,000 meters, or 4.35 miles, edging out the current global leader. Japan’s Shinkai 6500 can go as deep as 6,500 meters, outperforming craft “all over the world,” according to its makers. Russia, France and the United States lag further behind in the game of going deep.
American experts familiar with the Chinese undersea program say it is unusual in that Beijing has little experience in the daunting field. As a result, China is moving cautiously. Jiaolong’s sea trials began quietly last year and are to continue until 2012, its dives going deeper in increments.
“They’re being very cautious,” Dr. Walsh said. “They respect what they don’t know and are working hard to learn.”
In an interview, Dr. Walsh said that the Chinese were especially interested in avoiding the embarrassment of a disaster that ends with the aquanauts’ entrapment or death. “If I’m the new kid on the block,” he said, “I’m going to make sure that I’ve got bragging rights.”
Still, China is already waving flags. The move resembles how Russian scientists, in the summer of 2007, plunged through the ice pack at the North Pole and planted their flag on the bottom of the ocean. Upon surfacing, the explorers declared that the feat had strengthened Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed.
Wang Weizhong, a Chinese vice minister of science and technology, said that the Jiaolong’s sea trials “marked a milestone” for China and global exploration. The recent successes of the craft, he said in late August at a news conference in Beijing, “laid a solid foundation for its practical application in resource surveys and scientific research.”
But at least one senior Chinese expert questioned what he called “the current propaganda.” The expert, Weicheng Cui, a professor at the China Ship Scientific Research Center, which is building the submersible, said Thursday in an e-mail that the craft’s sea trials had steered clear of contested islands “to avoid any diplomatic issues.”
The flurry of publicity over the flag planting, he said, “is not so helpful for us to complete the project.”
China’s splash in the arcane world of submersibles comes after years of singling out major industries and technologies for rapid development. China is rushing to make supercomputers and jumbo jets. With expanding political ambitions and territorial claims in neighboring seas, it has paid special attention to oceanography and building a blue-water navy, one that operates in the deep waters of open oceans.
The United States once held the submersible lead. In 1960, it sent Dr. Walsh, then a Navy officer, to the ocean’s deepest spot, seven miles down. But over the decades, it lost its edge to France, Russia and, most recently, Japan.
China began its push in 2002. A few Westerners became aware of the guarded effort when China ordered from Russia the forging of a spherical hull about seven feet wide.
At the heart of any submersible lies the hollow sphere where the aquanauts work. It houses a pilot and two observers, who can peer out of tiny portholes. Typically, a dive into the abyss is an all-day affair, requiring hours to and from the bottom.
American experts said China went on a global shopping spree to gather sophisticated gear for its submersible. From the United States, it bought advanced lights, cameras and manipulator arms. Dr. Cui estimated that 40 percent of the craft’s equipment came from abroad.
China also turned to the United States for tutoring. In 2005, five Chinese trainee pilots and one scientist participated in eight dives on Alvin, the oldest and most famous of the world’s deep-diving craft, which is run by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod. China “bought time on Alvin to gain experience,” according to the Deep Submergence Science Committee, a group that advises the federal government and universities on ocean exploration.
Though Alvin can go down only 4,500 meters, or 2.8 miles, it has made thousands of dives and discoveries, and is widely seen among experts as highly productive and well run.
One of the Chinese trainees was Ye Cong, now a pilot on Jiaolong during its sea trials.
Last year’s tests went as deep as 1,000 meters (about a half mile), and this summer’s as deep as 3,759 meters. Next year Jiaolong is to dive to 5,000 meters and in 2012 reach its maximum depth.
Dr. Walsh said the flag issue prompted more awkwardness than swagger among those who are building and testing the new submersible.
“We had a laugh about it,” he recalled of his China visit. “I said, ‘Oh, you’re copying the Russians,’ and they kind of giggled. These guys are pretty apolitical and pretty well insulated” from Beijing. “They’re just contractors doing their job.”
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
There are pictures
t was late one afternoon in January when a squad of plainclothes police officers arrived at the headquarters of a prominent environmental group here. They brushed past the staff with barely a word and instead set upon the computers before carting them away. Taken were files that chronicled a generation’s worth of efforts to protect the Siberian wilderness.
The group, Baikal Environmental Wave, was organizing protests against Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to reopen a paper factory that had polluted nearby Lake Baikal, a natural wonder that by some estimates holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.
Instead, the group fell victim to one of the authorities’ newest tactics for quelling dissent: confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software.
Across Russia, the security services have carried out dozens of similar raids against outspoken advocacy groups or opposition newspapers in recent years. Security officials say the inquiries reflect their concern about software piracy, which is rampant in Russia. Yet they rarely if ever carry out raids against advocacy groups or news organizations that back the government.
As the ploy grows common, the authorities are receiving key assistance from an unexpected partner: Microsoft itself. In politically tinged inquiries across Russia, lawyers retained by Microsoft have staunchly backed the police.
Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued. The lawyers rebuffed pleas by accused journalists and advocacy groups, including Baikal Wave, to refrain from working with the authorities. Baikal Wave, in fact, said it had purchased and installed legal Microsoft software specifically to deny the authorities an excuse to raid them. The group later asked Microsoft for help in fending off the police. “Microsoft did not want to help us, which would have been the right thing to do,” said Marina Rikhvanova, a Baikal Environmental Wave co-chairwoman and one of Russia’s best-known environmentalists. “They said these issues had to be handled by the security services.”
Microsoft executives in Moscow and at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., asserted that they did not initiate the inquiries and that they took part in them only because they were required to do so under Russian law.
After The New York Times presented its reporting to senior Microsoft officials, the company responded that it planned to tighten its oversight of its legal affairs in Russia. Human rights organizations in Russia have been pressing Microsoft to do so for months. The Moscow Helsinki Group sent a letter to Microsoft this year saying that the company was complicit in “the persecution of civil society activists.”
Tough Ethical Choices
Microsoft, like many American technology giants doing business in authoritarian countries, is often faced with ethical choices over government directives to help suppress dissent. In China, Microsoft has complied with censorship rules in operating its Web search service, preventing Chinese users from easily accessing banned information. Its archrival Google stopped following censorship regulations there, and scaled back its operations inside China’s Internet firewall.
In Russia, leaders of advocacy groups and newspapers subjected to antipiracy raids said Microsoft was cooperating with the authorities because the company feared jeopardizing its business in the country. They said Microsoft needed to issue a categorical public statement disavowing these tactics and pledging to never cooperate in such cases.
Microsoft has not done that, but has promised to review its policies in Russia.
“We take the concerns that have been raised very seriously,” Kevin Kutz, director of public affairs for Microsoft, said in a statement. Mr. Kutz said the company would ensure that its lawyers had “more clearly defined responsibilities and accountabilities.”
“We have to protect our products from piracy, but we also have a commitment to respect fundamental human rights,” he said. “Microsoft antipiracy efforts are designed to honor both objectives, but we are open to feedback on what we can do to improve in that regard.”
Microsoft emphasized that it encouraged law enforcement agencies worldwide to investigate producers and suppliers of illegal software rather than consumers. Even so, it has not publicly criticized raids against small Russian advocacy groups.
With pirated software prevalent in this country, it is not surprising that some of these groups might have some on their computers. Yet the issue, then, is why the police choose to focus on these particular targets — and whether they falsify evidence to make the charges more serious.
Microsoft also says it has a program in Russia to provide free and low-cost software to newspapers and advocacy groups so that they are in compliance with the law.
But the review of these cases indicates that the security services often seize computers whether or not they contain illegal software. The police immediately filed reports saying they had discovered such programs, before even examining the computers in detail. The police claims have in numerous instances been successfully discredited by defendants when the cases go before judges.
Given the suspicions that these investigations are politically motivated, the police and prosecutors have turned to Microsoft to lend weight to their cases. In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun “based on an application” from a lawyer for Microsoft.
In another city, Samara, the police seized computers from two opposition newspapers, with the support of a different Microsoft lawyer. “Without the participation of Microsoft, these criminal cases against human rights defenders and journalists would simply not be able to occur,” said the editor of the newspapers, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev.
The plainclothes officers who descended upon the Baikal Wave headquarters said they were from the division that investigated commercial crime. But the environmentalists said they noticed at least one officer from the antiextremism department, which tracks opposition activists and had often conducted surveillance on the group.
The officers said they had received a complaint from a man named Dmitri Latyshev, who claimed that he had been in the headquarters and spotted unlicensed Microsoft software on the computers. The police produced a handwritten complaint from Mr. Latyshev, dated Jan. 27. The raid occurred the next day.
People at Baikal Wave said they had never seen or heard of Mr. Latyshev. Located in Irkutsk recently, Mr. Latyshev said by phone that he had filed the complaint but would not say why.
Baikal Wave’s leaders said they had known that the authorities used such raids to pressure advocacy groups, so they had made certain that all their software was legal.
But they quickly realized how difficult it would be to defend themselves.
They said they told the officers that they were mistaken, pulling out receipts and original Microsoft packaging to prove that the software was not pirated. The police did not appear to take that into consideration. A supervising officer issued a report on the spot saying that illegal software had been uncovered.
Before the raid, the environmentalists said their computers were affixed with Microsoft’s “Certificate of Authenticity” stickers that attested to the software’s legality. But as the computers were being hauled away, they noticed something odd: the stickers were gone.
In all, 12 computers were confiscated. The group’s Web site was disabled, its finances left in disarray, its plans disclosed to the authorities.
The police also obtained personnel information from the computers. In the following weeks, officers tracked down some of the group’s supporters and interrogated them.
“The police had one goal, which was to prevent us from working,” said Galina Kulebyakina, a co-chairwoman of Baikal Wave. “They removed our computers because we actively took a position against the paper factory and forcefully voiced it.”
“They can do pretty much what they want, with impunity,” she said.
A Company’s Pollution
The paper factory is located on Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake, which is home to hundreds of species that exist nowhere else, including a freshwater seal. Over the years, the factory has spewed mercury, chlorine, heavy metals and other pollutants into the water.
Baikal Wave rejoiced when the factory closed in 2008, having succumbed to sizable losses, as well as pressure from environmentalists. But after the financial crisis hit, the Kremlin worried about unrest from unemployment. In January, Mr. Putin reopened the factory, which has employed as many as 2,000 people, saying that it no longer polluted the lake.
Baikal Wave, which was founded in Irkutsk, one of Russia’s largest cities, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, began planning a protest. That was when the officers showed up.
In a statement, the Irkutsk police said the raid was proper. “The inspection of Baikal Environmental Wave was intended to protect intellectual property and had no connection whatsoever with the activities of the advocacy organization,” the statement said.
It said a forensic examination of the computers in February showed that several contained illegal software that would have cost more than $3,300. Baikal Wave said the examination was fraudulent.
Prosecutors say they are now weighing whether to press charges against Baikal Wave or its leaders. It is possible, though unlikely, that they could face jail time if convicted.
Neither Microsoft’s Moscow office nor its local lawyer contacted Baikal Wave to hear its side. The lawyer did provide testimony to the police about the value of the software that Baikal Wave was accused of illegally obtaining.
Baikal Wave sent copies of its software receipts and other documentation to Microsoft’s Moscow office to show that it had purchased the software legally. The group said it believed that the authorities would be under pressure to drop the case if Microsoft would confirm the documents’ authenticity.
Microsoft declined to do so. In a letter to Baikal Wave, the company said it would forward the materials only to the authorities in Irkutsk, which already had copies of them.
“A determination of the actual circumstances of this case and the question of whether a violation of the law took place is the duty of the court,” Microsoft said.
The company also told Baikal Wave that it was willing to have its specialists assist the police in Irkutsk in evaluating the computers.
In response to written questions, Alexander Strakh, Microsoft’s chief antipiracy lawyer in Moscow, said that in all these cases, Microsoft assisted the authorities only as called for under Russian law.
Mr. Strakh was asked whether Microsoft believed that these raids were a tool to suppress the opposition. “We have no direct knowledge of decisions by authorities to use investigations in that manner,” he said.
Microsoft has hired numerous private lawyers across Russia who represent the company in piracy cases. Several of the lawyers have cropped up in these politically sensitive inquiries.
This year, prosecutors in the southwestern city of Krasnodar brought a piracy case against an immigrant rights activist named Anastasia Denisova. She said in an interview that she was surprised at the aggressive posture of Microsoft’s local lawyer.
In an official document, the Interior Ministry said the case against Ms. Denisova was begun “based on an application” from the lawyer. (Microsoft’s Moscow office said that statement was not correct.)
Ms. Denisova said the lawyer overestimated the value of the allegedly pirated software. As a result, the accusations were more serious.
“The Microsoft lawyer was very active, coming to the court all the time, even though he was not summoned,” she said. “He also claimed that he was going to sue me, despite the fact that Microsoft had publicly stated that it would not do so against an advocacy group.”
In May, after Ms. Denisova had spent several months under the threat of a prison sentence, the charges were dropped. Prosecutors acknowledged that the investigation had been mishandled.
Samara, in Russia’s industrial heartland, has been a focal point for these raids. In May 2007, when Mr. Putin was holding a summit meeting there with European leaders, the police sought to prevent protests by seizing computers from several organizations, including Golos, an election monitoring and human rights group, and the local edition of Novaya Gazeta, the country’s most influential opposition newspaper.
Last year, they took computers from another newspaper, Samarskaya Gazeta. According to case records, the police conducted that search based upon a complaint from a man who admitted that he had never been in the newspaper’s offices or seen its computers.
Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev, the editor of both newspapers, said Microsoft’s lawyer in the case regularly appeared at court hearings to back prosecutors and the police. He said the lawyer testified that seized computers contained pirated software even though it was later shown that the computers had never been examined.
“Microsoft says publicly that they have no claims in these cases, but then their lawyers come into the court and say whatever the police want them to say,” Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said.
The Damage Is Done
Prosecutors eventually dropped or suspended the charges against Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev after he was able to discredit them. But he said the damage was done. He said the newspapers lost computers and data, and he spent an enormous amount of time ensnared in legal proceedings. The local edition of Novaya Gazeta had to close.
Mr. Kurt-Adzhiyev said he now realized that the authorities were not so much interested in convictions as in harassing opponents. Even if the inquiries are abandoned, they are debilitating when they require months to defend.
Microsoft’s Moscow office said its lawyers had conducted themselves properly in the cases in Krasnodar and Samara.
In Irkutsk, Baikal Environmental Wave has also struggled to recover from the raid. It located some old computers and was still able to hold protests against the paper factory.
The seized computers were not returned by the police until July, five months after they were removed. Their hard drives had been inspected by police experts in February. The environmentalists do not know whether all their data remain, and they are sure that files were copied.
Ms. Rikhvanova, one of the group’s co-founders, who has been fighting to defend Lake Baikal since the 1960s, was unable to use her computer. When she got it back, she discovered that it had been disabled by a virus.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-12 06:19 pm (UTC)Many years later I've taken about three times as much instruction in German as French, and thanks to Internet probably exposed to the former about four times as often, and I'm only marginally more comfortable with German verb forms than French ones.
Looking back I have no idea if she ever used those tests to give us our final grade.
Meanwhile, once I got to law school and absorbed everyone else's "if it doesn't contribute to the final mark I don't care" attitude... well let's just say I'm still wondering why they didn't flunk me out by third year.
Without trying to generalize to all humanity, I think the best regimen for someone like me would be to have weekly tests that are usually pretty taxing with a few OMGWTF moments, which unless you're constantly doing poorly or constantly doing supremely well don't count for your final mark and are just somewhat embarrassing to do poorly in.
And for the tests to be explicitly narrow in scope with a clear disclaimer at the beginning of the course that no one should think they're supposed to be representative of your whole ability, just an arbitrary slice of the things that come to mind as being important and quantifiable.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-12 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 12:30 am (UTC)And science would require making a few changes that are bound to be expensive. Buying the latest smartboard is a one-time investment, who cares if it pays off? Cutting class sizes down to 18 - that means lowering them by up to 50% in some areas! - costs money year after year after year, and you have to build new classrooms.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 12:44 am (UTC)Yeah, we'd probably wind up having to look into different ways of funding education other than property taxes, which ensures that the affluent get more money for their schools than the poor, which always seemed to me a really good way to insure inequality perpetuates itself.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 01:10 am (UTC)Well, that presumes that this isn't the ultimate goal, of course.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 01:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 01:55 am (UTC)So a situation where THEIR kids can go to school with other people like them, and where they have the best of everything (and there's a limited size pie here - redistributing more evenly means that their kids have less advantages!) and they can pull in lots more funds when needed to pay for extra - that's to their best.
And if some poor kids get screwed, well, it's too bad, but their families should care more, their parents should be more involved, like in *our* school.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-13 02:02 am (UTC)