Turkey goes to the polls, NYC hotels to shelter migrants: 5 Things podcast

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On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: Turkey goes to the polls

Turkey goes to the polls, as voters decide on democracy, and more. Plus, USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer discusses a new submarine, and the importance of the ocean floor, USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen looks at the shift from paper to electronic presidential records, New York City uses hotels as emergency shelters, and an El Niño climate pattern is building. That could mean even warmer temperatures.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson: Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 15th of May 2023. Today, we have the latest from Turkey’s election. Plus, the Navy wants to build a new state-of-the-art submarine, and we look at the shift from paper to electronic for presidential records.

♦ A runoff election between Turkish President Recep Erdogan and his main rival opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, appears likely this morning after a tight election race. The unofficial count is nearly complete, and support for Erdogan dipped below the majority required for him to win reelection outright. According to the state run news organization, Anadolu, Erdogan has 49.3% of the vote while Kilicdaroglu has 45%. If neither candidate gets to 50%, a second vote will take place in about two weeks. Erdogan has ruled Turkey for 20 years, with an increasingly authoritarian grip. Turkish voters this election have largely been concerned about domestic issues, including the economy, civil rights, and an earthquake that killed more than 50,000 people earlier this year. But other countries and investors also eagerly await the outcome. Erdogan has raised the country’s profile around the world, but he’s also eroded democratic institutions, and Turkey is one of the world’s biggest jailers of journalists. Kilicdaroglu has pledged to return the country to a more democratic path, and would also likely put the Muslim country on a more secular course compared to Erdogan. You can read more with a link in today’s show notes.

♦ The US Navy wants to spend billions on a new submarine as several countries ramp up technology on the ocean floor. I spoke with USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer to learn more.

Josh, thanks for hopping back on 5 Things.

Josh Meyer: Sure, glad to be here.

Taylor Wilson: The US Navy has commissioned a new submarine for the ocean floor. What do we know about it?

Josh Meyer: Well, most of it’s very classified, totally top secret stuff, but it’s a Virginia-class sub. It’s estimated to be about 5.1 billion when approved by Congress. Hopefully it’ll be approved by Congress. And it’s designed to be a proposed successor to the USS Jimmy Carter, which is a sub that’s been around for a couple decades now that has spy capabilities on the ocean floor, and the deep ocean depths. And the sub is just one of Washington’s initiatives that are aimed at protecting America’s commercial, and security interests deep under the sea.

Taylor Wilson: And do the Navy and military already have similar technology to what this submarine will have?

Josh Meyer: Yeah, the USS Jimmy Carter has some of these capabilities, but what they’re talking about for this new one are really, really high-tech, and again, very classified versions of underwater drones and submersibles, a lot of automated craft. But, as you probably know, the bottom of the ocean or even at serious depths, the pressure is so strong that it could literally crush a regular submarine or vehicle. So these are specially outfitted craft, and what they’re designed to do is patrol the deep waters where submarines can’t go, and protect our interests, especially on the seabed floor. I wasn’t really even aware of this until I started reporting the story, but there’s hundreds of thousands of miles of cables that are laid at the bottom of the ocean that carry everything from fiber optics and other communications cables to oil and gas pipelines and things like that. And if those are tapped into a hostile enemy to get our telecommunications correspondence, or sabotaged to break up our communications, or disrupt the supply of oil, it could be potentially catastrophic to us and to our allies.

Taylor Wilson: And Josh, do other countries have this kind of technology?

Josh Meyer: Yeah, I mean, it’s an arms race at this point. One of the things we’re very concerned about is Russia. Russia has been very interested and aggressive in mapping the undersea infrastructure, not just up in the Arctic, but all over the place. One of the things that they’re really looking into, and I think so are we, is mining the ocean floor for precious metals and other things that can be used in cell phones and things like that. So that’s one problem. China is also being very, very aggressive with regard to this, and so we’re watching that very closely. But also US allies are also concerned about the vulnerability to the network of pipelines and fiber optic cables and so forth on the ocean floor. France is working on developing this capability, and the UK has also been doing it at least since 2017. Back then, the guy that is now the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, wrote a very long detailed report calling attention to these vulnerabilities and said that they need to be plugged up.

Taylor Wilson: USA TODAY Domestic Security Correspondent Josh Meyer, thanks as always.

Josh Meyer: My pleasure.

♦ Taylor Wilson: New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced yesterday that the city will use the historic Roosevelt Hotel to accommodate an expected wave of asylum seekers. He said the city will use the Roosevelt to provide up to 1,000 rooms for migrants expected to arrive in the coming months after the expiration of Title 42 pandemic era rules, those measures that allowed federal officials to turn away asylum seekers from the US border with Mexico. The Roosevelt will join several hotels across New York, converted to emergency shelters.

♦ National Archives and Records Administration is struggling to maintain a flood of presidential records in recent years. USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Bart Jansen has more on that, and the tricky shift from paper to electronic records. Hello, Bart.

Bart Jansen: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson: Thanks for hopping back on. So you wrote about how the National Archives is struggling to maintain this flood of presidential records in recent years. Just how many documents are we talking about here, Bart?

Bart Jansen: Well, it’s hundreds of millions of emails, hundreds of millions of pages of documents, and the volume has only been growing over the recent decades as more electronic messages are exchanged back and forth.

Taylor Wilson: And what are some of the complications to that transition to electronic records?

Bart Jansen: Well, the big challenge for the National Archives is just the volume. Congress approved the Presidential Records Act in the aftermath of Watergate to basically distinguish that presidential records had been the President’s records, personal records up to that point. After Richard Nixon, they said, “Well, these should be public records. They should be publicly accessible. It’s government business.” And so beginning with the Reagan administration, they started storing these things. But with electronic records, there wasn’t much email under Reagan, and so there were only… President George H. W. Bush transferred something like 20 gigabytes of electronic records. Well, you could hold that in your phone right now. That grew just exponentially to four terabytes of electronic records under the Clinton administration. Now each terabyte is like 500 hours of movies, or more than 86 million pages of documents. So he’s got four terabytes. It grows under the Obama administration to 250 terabytes of electronic information. Trump also had 250 terabytes, but he only had one term, so the pace of the growth doubled under the Trump administration. And the White House has directed that all federal agencies begin storing all of their records electronically by next June, 2024. And so the flow of this electronic version of records is only going to grow. It’s just a monstrous problem for them.

Taylor Wilson: And Bart, there are also now all kinds of secure apps that allow people to hide and even erase messages. What do advocates say about these when it comes to presidential records?

Bart Jansen: Well, that’s right. As I said, the Presidential Records Act was created to try to hold on to records, and the National Archives takes ownership of an administration’s records on Inauguration Day at noon on January 20th, as one administration switches over to the other. The problem is you got to get a hold of those records. In the search of Donald Trump’s estate in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, FBI agents found 11,000 documents down there, so you need to just take possession of the records. Basically, the presidents and their administrations turn these over to the National Archives. Another facet, as you mentioned, is there are now apps – WhatsApp, Signal, Wickr – that destroy messages as soon as the recipient reads them. And so that raised concerns that those documents won’t be preserved then. So an advocacy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the Trump administration, tried to get them to prevent them from using these apps. Federal courts were reluctant to weigh in though because they said, “Well, each administration will preserve its own records.” But the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said, “Boy, Richard Nixon could have only dreamed of this type of technology.”

Taylor Wilson: And could artificial intelligence technology, we’ve seen this popping up, especially in the last couple of years, hurt or help this problem?

Bart Jansen: The problem with as many electronic records as they’ve got is, it’s hard to then look through them and find what you’re looking for. And so the National Archives is testing a program called its Electronic Records Archives, and they are trying to get a better handle on these electronic records. And also a guy who used to serve as a litigation chief for the National Archives, Jason Baron, he’s now a professor over at the University of Maryland, he suggests that if they adopted more artificial intelligence to search through the emails, it would help folks find what they’re looking for and basically give better public access to the records. Short of that, this huge volume of records that you can’t really look at, he calls that a dark archive.

Taylor Wilson: Bart Jansen, great insight as always. Thanks so much.

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