Category: Technology

  • Web Desk:

    According to NBC New York, to expand internet access across New York City, 5G transmission poles are in the works for another Manhattan neighborhood.

    There are already 26 of the three-story towers operational throughout the five boroughs. The city plans to add another 2,000 more over the next few years.

    Matthew Fraser, the city’s chief technology officer, has a message for the residents urging a “no” vote at the community board this week.

    “My message is, you have to give technology a chance,” said Fraser.

    He stood with NYC Mayor Eric Adams when the administration tested out the first Link 5G tower in the Bronx over the summer. It’s the size of a light pole with a boxier shape to hold and encase the technology.

    “It was a real travesty. (In) Public housing, 40 percent of households didn’t have broadband access,” Fraser said.

    But the city knows getting neighborhoods to approve such large towers can be a tall order. The letter to Manhattan’s community board 8, where the business community is opposed to the towers, said the towers are “invaluable tools that provide free high-speed Wi-Fi, free nationwide calling, free charging ports for mobile devices, and 911 and 311 access to millions of people.”

    If the rollout goes smoothly, the idea is that by 2026 people will be able to walk almost anywhere in the city with full bars and full service — and at no cost.

    “That’s the dream. Broadband available and ubiquitous,” Fraser said.

    The post More 5G Towers Coming to NYC first appeared on VOSA.

  • Listen to a reading of this article:

    I don’t desire a future for humanity like the ones imagined by our culturally designated future-imaginers. I don’t want humans living in Elon Musk Mars colonies or Jeff Bezos space cylinders. I don’t want us to fly out into the stars, to disappear into virtual reality universes, or to move away from our humanness by becoming cybernetic organisms.

    Not yet anyway. Not for a long time. Not until we’ve done what we need to do here first.

    Have you ever noticed that most books, shows and movies set in the future tend to depict a humanity that’s more technologically advanced than our own, but thinks and behaves in basically the same way? In the average sci-fi story people are still waging wars, still fighting, conquering, subjugating, toiling and surviving just like today, except they’re doing it out in space surrounded by a bunch of aliens (who are also oddly entangled in the same egoic patternings as humans in the 21st century).

    In this common vision for the future, we have mastered space travel but still haven’t mastered basic psychological health. Our technology has enabled us to kill, enslave, manipulate and exploit among the stars so that we are no longer confined to killing, enslaving, manipulating and exploiting down here.

    This tendency is partly due to the limits of imagination; it’s easy to imagine more advanced versions of our own technology, but trying to imagine a mindframe that’s very different from your own is like trying to imagine being twice as intelligent as you are. Trying to imagine living in a conscious civilization while your own civilization is deeply unconscious is like a dream character trying to imagine life outside the dream. It’s not hard to extrapolate upon existing patterns, but envisioning the complete dissolution of patterns can be much more difficult.

    This tendency is also due to the fact that science fiction writers are telling stories for an immature civilization full of restless minds who would be easily bored by tales of a peaceful future without any major problems. But that’s the kind of future that I want for humanity. A peaceful one without any major problems. One that wouldn’t make a good Hollywood blockbuster.

    And it’s actually kind of a problem that the future which humanity is mentally pointing itself toward is one in which all our restlessness and dysfunction persists. Our steps into the future will be guided by our collective vision for it, and when those visions are about space colonization, virtual reality and transhumanism, our collective compass is going to be skewed toward dysfunction.

    Right now for example most human innovation goes toward generating profits and/or military dominance, which puts us on a trajectory toward more and more technologically advanced personal doodads to buy at the store and more and more ways of killing large numbers of people at a time. It doesn’t put us on a trajectory toward finding ways to make sure everyone has enough, to helping people have more leisure time, to helping humanity move in harmony with our ecosystem. All of those innovations would do infinitely more to create a more pleasant future for humanity than spaceships and laser guns, but our systems do not give rise to them, because they are not profitable and don’t help increase a government’s military power.

    There are so many assumptions baked in to our collective visions for the future and the systems we’ve set up to carry us there. Assumptions like we’ll never have peace; we’ll always have violence, conflict and domination; we’ll always have poverty and the need for endless toil; we’ll never be able to stop consuming our biosphere to death so we’d better get out into space so that capitalism can keep expanding. All of those assumptions point us away from a healthy and harmonious future.

    And of course that’s what you’d expect from a deeply unconscious species, which is what we still are currently. We’re still largely operating on autopilot like any other animal, whipped about by the forces of conditioning patterns that have been reverberating from the most distant reaches of our evolutionary ancestry. A collective history of trauma and fear combined with our newly evolved capacity for abstract thought has left us confused and disoriented in ways we haven’t yet gained lucidity on; an adolescent species in an awkward transition phase.

    And I can’t help but think how productive it would be if, rather than spending our energy trying to dash off into outer space or bury our heads in virtual reality, our movement into the future was focused more on resolving all that? If rather than feeding into our unconscious restlessness by giving ourselves more and more places to try and escape to, we set about learning to simply be here now?

    What if instead of trying to be anywhere but here, humanity made a mad push for enlightenment? What if instead of spending the next centuries trying to get away from the present reality, our society began emphasizing things like meditation and self-enquiry to help us finally truly meet the present reality? What if our science became less focused on profit and destruction and more on trying to find ways to help people be okay with themselves? What if psychedelic institutions were set up around the world to help everyone explore their inner realms and bring the unconscious into consciousness using skillful methods and entheogenic compounds?

    I mean, most of us can’t even sit still in meditation for an hour without their mind racing all over the place and doing everything except what it’s asked to do. Does that sound natural to you? Does that sound like a conscious, healthy species? Or does it sound like a species that, if handed paradise on a golden platter, would immediately destroy it out of boredom?

    A lot of what we see the most influential minds envisioning for our future just looks like restlessness to me, a relentless compulsion to be anywhere but here, much like the mental fidgeting of an individual attempting to meditate. We don’t even have any evidence that humans can live completely independent of Earth’s biosphere, yet it’s taken as a given that we’ll be running off into the stars so we don’t have to make the drastic changes in ourselves that will be necessary to sustain human life on this planet. The idea of simply settling down and learning to be here sounds unthinkably hellish to a mind enslaved to restlessness, to such an extent that it will concoct unrealistic fictions about the future rather than facing reality.

    Even if we did succeed in colonizing space, it wouldn’t solve any of our problems, and it wouldn’t make our future any more pleasant. We’d just be moving our restless, violent, insatiable, discontented minds offworld, where we’ll immediately recreate all the same problems we created down here except we’ll be doing it in artificial bubbles surrounded by deadly black desert on all sides. I mean, you think Thanksgiving is hell? Imagine cooped up with your family all day every day in what’s essentially a mall that you can never leave. Is your head really ready for that?

    A head rattling with mental chatter would be incapable of experiencing any wonder in space exploration, and would be incapable of experiencing joy in the creation of virtual worlds. A serene mind experiences wonder and joy walking across a parking lot. What we really want is equanimity, not space colonization and VR. Deep down we don’t really want to be somewhere else, we want to be able to truly be here.

    I’d really like to see humanity begin recalibrating its visions for the future away from these pathways toward glorified escapism, and toward the creation of a healthy and harmonious world. It might not sell books and movie tickets (at least not right away), but it will point us toward where we all really want to be in our heart of hearts.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on FacebookTwitterSoundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fiPatreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Image via Adobe Stock.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Western Australian government wants one percent of its generated electricity to come from green hydrogen by 2030 and has set up a new government unit to accelerate environmental approval for green energy projects. The target — the equivalent of about 90MW of electricity production capacity — will apply to Western Australia’s main grid, the…

    The post WA government sets ‘modest’ 1% hydrogen target appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • As 2022 comes to a close, we’re thinking about all the big vegan headlines of the year—and there were plenty. Overall, we can confidently say that this year was one filled with plant-based innovation. 

    From lupini beans as a base for dairy-free ice cream to watermelon seeds as a key ingredient for vegan cottage cheese to precision fermentation-made mozzarella, it is clear that the future of dairy does not lie in milking cows.  

    If years past were dominated by vegan burgers, 2022 was all about new plant-based chicken, both in stores and at places like KFC, Panda Express, and other fast-food chains. 

    VegNews.BurgerKingVeganFood.BurgerKingPortugalBurger King

    Speaking of fast food, Burger King spent the year exploring the future of food with vegan pop-ups across the globe. In 2022, the international chain toyed with flipping the script by making plant-based meat the new normal, with animal meat available by request. 

    And market research experts at Research and Markets are predicting that advancements in the vegan food world will continue to grow in the coming years. According to its November report, the global vegan food market is slated to grow by nearly $1 billion in 2022—up from $13.55 billion in 2021. By 2026, the research firm places the market at $18.73 billion. 

    Top 22 vegan news headlines of 2022

    But before we set our sights on what the vegan future may hold, we’re taking a second look at the milestones that defined vegan news in 2022. 

    1 Vegan chicken arrives at KFC 

    Back in January, Beyond Meat’s vegan chicken hit KFC’s 4,000 stores for a limited time and we were eating it up.

    VegNews.BeyondFriedChickenKFC1KFC

    Here’s to hoping KFC revives Beyond Fried Chicken as a permanent option—maybe with a few new vegan dipping sauces?—in 2023. 

    Read more 

    2 Animal-free mozzarella cheese targets pizza shops 

    2023 can’t come fast enough for pizza lovers. That’s because next year is when New Culture promises to put its vegan mozzarella cheese—made dairy-identical with the power of precision fermentation—on pizzeria menus nationwide. 

    VegNews.VeganPizzaCheese2.NewCulture02New Culture

    And it’s not all talk at New Culture as the company is backed by agri-business giant ADM and $23 billion Korean conglomerate CJ CheilJedang, a major player in the US pizza industry. 

    Read more

    3 Starbucks’ first vegan fall drink 

    Okay, it may not be a PSL—which in 2022 still contained dairy ingredients in the US—but Starbucks got cozy this fall with the launch of its first vegan-as is drink, the Apple Crisp Oatmilk Macchiato.

    VegNews.StarbucksFirstVeganFallDrink.StarbucksStarbucks

    Maybe next year, Starbucks will heed the call of many a PETA protests and drop its vegan milk upcharge?

    Read more 

    4 Beyond Orange Chicken lands at Panda Express 

    For at least five nights straight in September, dinner meant another trip to Panda Express for a combo meal of chow mein, Super Greens, and Beyond the Original Orange Chicken—and we know we weren’t the only ones making the nightly voyage. 

    VegNews.BeyondVeganOrangeChicken2.PandaExpressPanda Express

    Spicy, sticky, and sweet. This vegan orange chicken needs to stay on the menu forever. Panda, can you hear us? 

    Read more

    5 Chicago gets a Whole Foods-sized vegan grocery store 

    Massive vegan supermarket PlantX opened its doors in Chicago this summer and grocery shopping has never been the same. 

    VegNews.PlantXMarket

    PlantX

    Reading labels for hidden animal products? Not here. The store has all of the produce, grab-and-go items, meats, cheeses, and desserts of a Whole Foods but without any animal products. 

    Read more

    6 Study links milk consumption with spike in prostate cancer risk in men 

    We’ve been off the teet for quite some time but new research continues to show that consuming animal milk is not for humans. 

    VegNews.IsMilkHealth.Canva5Getty

    Case in point? A major study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in June found that men who consume the most dairy are at a 60-percent increased risk of developing prostate cancer compared to those who abstain from it. 

    Read more

    7 Burger King leads the way for vegan future of fast food 

    When you take a look at the global picture, Burger King is doing the most when it comes to vegan food. Which led us to ask the question in August if the chain would be the first of its kind to drop meat for good.

    VegNews.VeganBurgerKing1

    Burger King UK

    While meat is still on the menu at Burger King, the chain continues to pioneer a plant-based future for fast-food and has introduced plant-based burgers to its menu in more than 70 countries to date.  

    Read more

    8 Keto is the least healthy diet of the year 

    Ever wonder what eating mostly bacon, cheese, and butter will do to your health? These are the building blocks of a keto diet and this way of eating was ranked as the least healthy, according to nutrition experts at US News and World Report.

    VegNews.VeganVSKeto.Canva2Getty

    Not surprisingly, experts ranked plant-centric diets at the top for their filling fiber-rich foods and environmental benefits. 

    Read more

    9 Food Network taps Tabitha Brown to host first vegan show 

    While eating plant-based is quite easy nowadays, Food Network finally came around with its first vegan cooking show It’s CompliPlated, a competition that pits chefs against each other to cook for picky eaters. 

    VegNews.TabithaBrown.FeedtheSoul

    Tabitha Brown/Feed the Soul

    And who better than to host the network’s first vegan show? None other than easy-to-watch personality Tabitha Brown. 

    Read more

    10 Taco Bell gets into vegan beef 

    Taco Bell has been a longtime favorite for many stranded late-night partiers looking for a quick bite of something tasty. This fall, midnight snackers in and around Birmingham, AL were pleasantly surprised with a vegan beef option at approximately 50 Taco Bell locations. 

    VegNews.VeganBeef6.TacoBellTaco Bell

    What would we order? 10 vegan beef soft tacos, al fresco with a handful of fire sauce packets, please. 

    Read more

    11 Taco Bell and Beyond Meat launch vegan steak 

    Mas Taco Bell news? Coming right up … this time with a vegan steak twist.

    VegNews.Beyond Carne Asada SteakSoft Taco.TacoBellTaco Bell

    Beyond Meat and Taco Bell have been teasing their partnership for a few years and in October, that turned into an announcement of epic proportions. Beyond Carne Asada, a marinated vegan steak, arrived at approximately 50 test locations in the Dayton, OH area. 

    The best part? It didn’t cost extra to upgrade from animal meat to Beyond’s vegan steak. 

    Read more

    12 Massive avocado study finds cholesterol benefits 

    Avocados are so temperamental when it comes to ripening but science says eating them has a host of benefits. A study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association this summer found that eating these green-hued berries (that’s right) daily can help lower cholesterol.

    VegNews.AvocadoStudy.CanvaGetty

    And our big batch of guac has been slowly browning in the fridge ever since. 

    Read more

    13 Miyoko’s Creamery makes vegan cottage cheese with watermelon seeds 

    Driven by our desire to end animal exploitation, vegans are a creative bunch when it comes to developing cheese alternatives. 

    VegNews.MiyokosCottageVegNews

    And the queen of vegan cheese, Miyoko Schinner, really outdid herself this year when she showcased the world’s first dairy-free cottage cheese at trade show Natural Products Expo West in March.

    What’s in this magical vegan cheese? Schinner used a combination of plant bases, including watermelon seeds.

    Read more

    14 Crispy vegan chicken sandwich is a North American sell-out success 

    Early in 2022, a sandwich sensation took over vegan fast-food chain Copper Branch’s 40 locations in North America becoming a sell-out success. The crispy plant-based fried chicken—a star ingredient of the Nashville Vegan Fried Chicken Sandwich—is made by Atlas Monroe, a Black woman-owned vegan meat brand. 

    VegNews.VeganChickenSandwich.AtlasMonroeAtlas Monroe

    Founder Deborah Torres famously rejected a $1 million deal on Shark Tank, choosing not to give up 100 percent of the company to the sharks because she knows her worth. 

    Read more

    15 Burger King nixes animal products from kitchen 

    From London to Berlin to Costa Rica, Burger King’s vegan pop-ups are so common nowadays that we stopped counting them. However, for its newest plant-based location in Lisbon, Portugal, the fast-food chain piqued our interest again when it removed all animal products from its kitchen to avoid cross contamination concerns. 

    VegNews.BurgerKingPortugalVeganChickenBurger King

    This means that throughout November, the Whopper, Long Chicken, Chicken Nuggets, and other plant-based options at this Burger King never came out of a shared fryer with animal products. Bravo!

    Read more

    16 Wicked Kitchen’s vegan ice cream is made from lupini 

    Lupini beans are actually legumes and are totally delicious as marinated snacks typical to Mediterranean cuisine. Until this year, we had no idea that they can double as a creamy ice cream base, too.

    VegNews.WickedKitchenIceCream2VegNews

    And it’s all thanks to Wicked Kitchen, a brand that released a variety of novelty vegan ice cream bars made with, you guessed it, lupini beans as a key ingredient. 

    Read more 

    17 Netflix hosts Bad Vegan  pop-up 

    One Netflix documentary that had us glued to our screens was Bad Vegan, which detailed the bizarre true story of Sarma Melngailis and beloved New York City vegan restaurant Pure Food and Wine. 

    VegNews.PureFoodWine.NetflixBadVegan

    Netflix

    To give fans of the film a taste of the menu at the shuttered restaurant, Netflix hosted a delivery-only event with Postmates that made its famous dishes like Caesar salad, Signature Raw Lasagna, and Mallomars available to the public one last time. 

    Read more

    18 Crossroads Kitchen: first vegan fine-dining restaurant on the Las Vegas strip 

    If its die-hard celebrity fans are any indication, Crossroads Kitchen is the place to be for delightful plant-based fare. And this year, the legendary eatery—helmed by acclaimed chef Tal Ronnen—expanded to its second location in a grand way.

    VegNews.CrossroadsLasVegas1.TalRonnenTal Ronnen

    That’s because when it opened its doors on May 28 at the Resorts World Las Vegas, Crossroads Kitchen officially became the first vegan fine-dining restaurant on the strip. 

    Read more

    19 Panda Express tests new Beyond Meat dishes 

    While Beyond Orange Chicken might be hard to beat, we will never say no to more vegan options at Panda Express. The chain explored just that in January with the test launch of beefy Beyond Meat dishes at its Innovation Kitchen location in Pasadena, CA.

    VegNews.BeyondMapoTofuPandaExpressPanda Express

    What was on the menu? A spicy Mapo Tofu with Beyond Beef and a veggie-forward String Beans with Beyond Beef. 

    Read more

    20 IHOP tests vegan breakfast sandwiches 

    Just when we stopped thinking about how IHOP has not yet stepped into the modern era with plant-based options (give us pancakes, already), a Flip’d by IHOP location in the Flatiron neighborhood of New York City came through with some news.

    VegNews.VeganSandwich.FlipdIHOP

    Flip’d

    In February, we connected with Bryan McKenzie, the franchise owner of the location, who as a vegan himself, was excited to put the Plant Based Cali sandwich (the first-ever vegan breakfast offering at IHOP) on the menu for a limited time. 

    Read more 

    21 Vegan chicken that’s made to rival Popeyes is here 

    Listen, we love a chicken sandwich as much as the Popeyes set … we just like ours without cruelty, please.

    VegNews.SkinnyButcher2

    Skinny Butcher

    Earlier this year, new company Skinny Butcher launched just that: vegan chicken products created to rival Popeye’s and Chick-fil-A but with a skinnier carbon footprint and zero animal slaughter. 

    Read more

    22 Burger King gets into vegan chicken with Impossible Foods 

    Did we mention Burger King dominated our headlines in 2022? This last one is special because it takes us full circle back to Burger King’s first plant-based moment: its launch of the Impossible Whopper back in 2019.

    VegNews.ImpossibleChicken.BurgerKing

    Burger King

    Years later, Burger King is still going strong with its longtime partner Impossible Foods, which helped craft its first plant-based chicken offerings in the United States that the fast-food chain tested back in August at participating locations in Cincinnati, OH. All hail the King. 

    Read more

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Trust Lab was founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

    Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

    “I’m suspicious of startups pitching the status quo as innovation.”

    The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

    Though Trust Lab’s stated mission is sympathetic and grounded in reality — online content moderation is genuinely broken — it’s difficult to imagine how aligning the startup with the CIA is compatible with Siegel’s goal of bringing greater transparency and integrity to internet governance. What would it mean, for instance, to incubate counter-misinformation technology for an agency with a vast history of perpetuating misinformation? Placing the company within the CIA’s tech pipeline also raises questions about Trust Lab’s view of who or what might be a “harmful” online, a nebulous concept that will no doubt mean something very different to the U.S. intelligence community than it means elsewhere in the internet-using world.

    No matter how provocative an In-Q-Tel deal may be, much of what Trust Lab is peddling sounds similar to what the likes of Facebook and YouTube already attempt in-house: deploying a mix of human and unspecified “machine learning” capabilities to detect and counter whatever is determined to be “harmful” content.

    “I’m suspicious of startups pitching the status quo as innovation,” Ángel Díaz, a law professor at the University of Southern California and scholar of content moderation, wrote in a message to The Intercept. “There is little separating Trust Lab’s vision of content moderation from the tech giants’. They both want to expand use of automation, better transparency reports, and expanded partnerships with the government.”

    How precisely Trust Lab will address the CIA’s needs is unclear. Neither In-Q-Tel nor the company responded to multiple requests for comment. They have not explained what sort of “harmful actors” Trust Lab might help the intelligence community “prevent” from spreading online content, as the October press release said.

    Though details about what exactly Trust Lab sells or how its software product works are scant, the company appears to be in the business of social media analytics, algorithmically monitoring social media platforms on behalf of clients and alerting them to the proliferation of hot-button buzzwords. In a Bloomberg profile of Trust Lab, Siegel, who previously ran content moderation policy at Google, suggested that a federal internet safety agency would be preferable to Big Tech’s current approach to moderation, which consists mostly of opaque algorithms and thousands of outsourced contractors poring over posts and timelines. In his blog post, Siegel urges greater democratic oversight of online content: “Governments in the free world have side-stepped their responsibility to keep their citizens safe online.”

    Even if Siegel’s vision of something like an Environmental Protection Agency for the web remains a pipe dream, Trust Lab’s murky partnership with In-Q-Tel suggests a step toward greater governmental oversight of online speech, albeit very much not in the democratic vein outlined in his blog post. “Our technology platform will allow IQT’s partners to see, on a single dashboard, malicious content that might go viral and gain prominence around the world,” Siegel is quoted as stating in the October press release, which omitted any information about the financial terms of the partnership.

    Unlike typical venture capital firms, In-Q-Tel’s “partners” are the CIA and the broader U.S. intelligence community — entities not historically known for exemplifying Trust Lab’s corporate tenets of transparency, democratization, and truthfulness. Although In-Q-Tel is structured as an independent 501(c)3 nonprofit, its sole, explicit mission is to advance the interests and increase the capabilities of the CIA and fellow spy agencies.

    Former CIA Director George Tenet, who spearheaded the creation of In-Q-Tel in 1999, described the CIA’s direct relationship with In-Q-Tel in plain terms: “CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them.” An official history of In-Q-Tel published on the CIA website says, “In-Q-Tel’s mission is to foster the development of new and emerging information technologies and pursue research and development (R&D) that produce solutions to some of the most difficult IT problems facing the CIA.”

    Siegel has previously written that internet speech policy must be a “global priority,” but an In-Q-Tel partnership suggests some fealty to Western priorities, said Díaz — a fealty that could fail to take account of how these moderation policies affect billions of people in the non-Western world.

    “Partnerships with Western governments perpetuate a racialized vision of which communities pose a threat and which are simply exercising their freedom of speech,” said Díaz. “Trust Lab’s mission statement, which purports to differentiate between ‘free world governments’ and ‘oppressive’ ones, is a worrying preview of what we can expect. What happens when a ‘free’ government treats discussion of anti-Black racism as foreign misinformation, or when social justice activists are labeled as ‘racially motived violent extremists’?”

    The post CIA Venture Capital Arm Partners With Ex-Googler’s Startup to “Safeguard the Internet” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • In response to the existential threat of climate change, the Tuvaluan government has announced it will become the world’s first “digital nation”. Binoy Kampmark reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Images of a clean-energy future tend to feature wind turbines and solar panels, iconic symbols of the struggle to halt global warming. But the United States is pursuing a much wider range of solutions to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Soon, a direct air capture facility, or a carbon capture and storage project, or a clean hydrogen hub could be proposed in a town near you. Maybe one already has. Two recent laws — last year’s bipartisan infrastructure legislation and this year’s Inflation Reduction Act — offer developers billions of dollars to build these kinds of projects. 

    Experts say these technologies are needed to tackle climate change. They can help cut carbon from hard-to-decarbonize parts of the economy that cannot simply switch over to renewable electricity. But there are very few large-scale examples operating today. To help people visualize what all this new infrastructure could look like, Third Way, a center-left D.C. think tank, commissioned the design studio Gensler to illustrate hypothetical projects, showing how they could be integrated into communities and local economies.

    “Many communities in the U.S., particularly those historically impacted by environmental injustice and unequal distribution of economic benefits, have valid concerns” about these technologies, said Rudra Kapila, a senior policy advisor at Third Way who led the project. In creating these images, she said she hoped to “facilitate constructive conversations on how communities can safely live and work in a changing energy landscape.”

    Of course, a series of images can only go so far in answering the questions and concerns that people may have about living near these projects. But the scenes may help sharpen those questions by giving shape to the scale of the infrastructure, its purpose, where it might go, and its potential risks and benefits. 

    The first three images depict direct air capture projects of different sizes and in different settings. Direct air capture, or DAC, facilities filter carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Their purpose is twofold: By removing carbon from the air, they can balance out emissions from activities like farming and flying that might be hard to eliminate at the source. DAC could also eventually help reverse global warming if we build enough machines to pull more carbon out of the atmosphere than we’re putting in. 

    A stack of fans representing a direct air capture facility sits on the roof of a soda bottling factory in a suburban area with a soccer field in the background and houses and wind turbines in the distance.
    Small, modular, direct air capture plant
    Third Way

    “I think the specific challenges of a direct air capture plant is that they don’t really exist, outside of a couple demonstrations in Europe,” said Shuchi Talati, a senior visiting scholar at the nonprofit Carbon180, which advocates for policies to support DAC and other carbon removal methods but was not involved in creating the images. “And so the biggest challenge is helping people visualize and understand something that they’ve never seen before and have never really thought about.”

    In this first image, small, modular DAC plants — similar to a model currently operating in Switzerland — are installed on the roofs of factories in an industrial part of a suburban town. Kapila warned that the fans on the equipment are loud and should not be sited on or near a school, for example. Here, the machines are powered by electricity from rooftop solar farms and a wind farm in the background. 

    This first image also raises a key question for anyone appraising a DAC project: What will happen to the captured CO2? In Kapila’s narrative of this scene, the “DACME” construction company in the background uses the CO2 as a key ingredient in the concrete it sells. This isn’t far-fetched — there are already a few companies working on embedding CO2 in concrete. The trucks in the foreground suggest a more controversial idea — selling the CO2 to soda companies for carbonation. Kapila said she included the concept because of a reported shortage of CO2 in the beverage industry. But CO2 used for beverage carbonation quickly gets emitted again, meaning a lot of energy would be spent to capture CO2 for no climate benefit.

    Direct air capture machines wind around a green field in a rural area. They are connected to white geometric domes via blue pipelines.
    Mid-size direct air capture plant
    Third Way

    The second image features a project that’s very similar to another existing DAC plant in Iceland, the largest currently operating in the world. Like that facility, the one shown here runs on geothermal energy, a renewable resource that draws on heat beneath the earth’s surface, from a power plant across the river. The scene also shows the carbon dioxide being delivered directly to underground sequestration sites for permanent storage — those geodesic domes are modeled off real CO2 sequestration facilities in Iceland. (You may notice there’s more going on in this scene — Kapila incorporated many ideas about how these technologies could be integrated into local economies into each image, which are mapped out in a series of additional renderings on the project website.)

    Aerial view of a desert in the U.S. west with three clusters of large direct air capture plants and a blue pipeline carrying the captured carbon dioxide to underground storage sites. A nuclear plant is in the distance.
    Mega-direct air capture hub
    Third Way

    The clusters of mega-DAC projects depicted in this third image, all powered by a nuclear plant, would pull hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 out of the air each year. A pipeline on the right side, which Kapila said is meant to be a repurposed oil pipeline, carries the CO2 to underground storage sites. “There have been provisions, both in the Inflation Reduction Act and in the infrastructure bill, specifically for making use of existing infrastructure,” she said.

    Kapila said this hub of DAC plants could be sited in the desert of Texas or New Mexico, currently a major oil-producing region. While no facility of this size exists today, the oil and gas company Occidental is currently building one in West Texas. But unlike the plant depicted here, that facility is planned to run at least in part on natural gas power. And unlike in Kapila’s illustration, some of the CO2 the Occidental plant collects is expected to be piped out to low-producing oil wells, where it will be injected underground in order to dislodge the last drops of oil. 

    Many climate and environmental justice advocates have campaigned against the use of direct air capture, in part because of its potential to prop up the use of fossil fuels. Kapila said she sought to show people that we can design these systems to be independent of fossil fuels, or in a way that greatly diminishes their role in the economy. 

    Talati, who previously worked at the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, said it’s essential to start to build a common understanding of what “good” DAC projects look like. “We need to build a lot more knowledge, whether that’s in communities where DAC might be built, across civil society, and across policy makers,” she said. 

    At the same time, Talati warned that the goal of these conversations should not be to drive public acceptance of these projects. “I think that can be a dangerous way to talk about it, because that means that you are trying to convince people of something without taking the time to build knowledge and understanding,” she said. “When we think about public engagement, I think we want to make sure that we don’t have a preordained outcome in mind.”

    The last two scenes that Third Way created venture into different territory, looking at how to lower emissions at existing heavy industrial sites. 

    The first reimagines a Gulf Coast port as a hub for the production of clean hydrogen. Hydrogen is a fuel that has the potential to sub in for fossil fuels in a number of applications, and it doesn’t release any greenhouse gases when it’s burned. 

    Aerial view of an industrial marine port. Offshore wind turbines spin in a a blue sea, and an ocean platform hosts a hydrogen production plant.
    Clean hydrogen hub
    Third Way

    In this scene, an offshore oil platform has been repurposed for hydrogen production, which can then be used to fuel the ships in the port. Today, the vast majority of hydrogen is produced from natural gas in a process that emits carbon dioxide. But here, offshore wind powers the process, using electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Experts often call this method “green hydrogen,” and while it’s only done at a few small facilities today, it’s set to grow rapidly. The bipartisan infrastructure law gave the Department of Energy $8 billion to spend on clean hydrogen hubs, and a new tax credit created by the Inflation Reduction Act will pay producers up to $3 for each kilogram of clean hydrogen they make.

    Onshore in this scene you’ll find more DAC machines capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. There is also a blending facility, where the hydrogen could be blended with the captured CO2 to create what’s called a synthetic fuel. Blending hydrogen makes it easier to store, transport, and use with existing technologies. But using captured CO2 to make fuels will ultimately release it back into the atmosphere.

    The final image in the series portrays a steel plant, modeled on an existing plant in Pennsylvania, outfitted with a technology called point source carbon capture.

    An aerial view of a steelmaking plant in rural Pennsylvania with mountains, trees, and wind turbines in the background. A carbon capture facility highlighted in blue sits in the middle of the plant.
    Steel plant with point source carbon capture
    Third Way

    Instead of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, as DAC machines do, similar equipment is installed on the flue of the steel plant, capturing carbon before it enters the atmosphere. A defunct coal mine is also visible in the background, symbolizing the potential to store captured CO2 in unmined coal seams.

    The U.S. iron and steel industry sent about 66.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2021, or about as much as 14 million gas-powered cars emit over a year. Steel is a notorious climate challenge, because its use in buildings, vehicles, and appliances make it so integral to modern life, but we don’t yet have many options for making it cleaner. Steelmaking requires massive amounts of energy to produce heat, and it also uses coal in the chemical reaction that turns iron into steel. While some companies are making progress with alternative chemistries, carbon capture is considered one of the best bets for slashing emissions from the sector in the near term.

    Kapil acknowledged the challenges of drumming up public interest in carbon capture technology. “Point source carbon capture, it’s as glamorous as urban plumbing,” she quipped. “But the thing is, we need these systems. To say that we can function without steel would be, you know, we can’t.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Beyond solar: Here’s what the clean energy future might look like on Dec 1, 2022.

  • Merriam-Webster declared “gaslighting” the word of the year this week, if you can believe it. The term, which describes a type of lie that leaves the target doubting their perception of reality, saw a 1,740 percent increase in searches on the dictionary’s site in 2022, with steady interest over the course of the year.

    “In recent years, with the vast increase in channels and technologies used to mislead, gaslighting has become the favored word for the perception of deception,” Merriam-Webster’s editors wrote in an explanation for their selection.  

    Even if you remember what a “gaslight” is, it doesn’t illuminate the word’s meaning. The mind-manipulating connotation came from a 1938 play called Gas Light, later turned into a movie. The plot: A husband tries to trick his wife into thinking she’s losing her mind — and thereby getting sent to an asylum — so he can steal the priceless jewels she’s inherited. His strategy involves sneaking around the house and making the gaslights flicker and dim, while insisting that the lights look totally normal to him.

    The meaning of “gaslighting” in the social-media age is broader, referring to any situation where you wildly mislead someone for personal advantage. Climate advocates have increasingly been applying the term to the actions of the oil industry, which mastered the art of misdirection long before “gaslighting” became part of the vernacular. In the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists warned executives that carbon emissions could lead to catastrophic warming — and then the oil giant proceeded to act as if climate change wasn’t real, sowing doubt about the science and working to block legislation to address rising emissions. 

    Since then, studies have found that Big Oil’s actions (drilling for more oil) don’t match its public turnaround on climate change, indicating that companies are advertising an unrealistically green image. Oil companies portray themselves as problem solvers — BP’s motto is “reimagining energy” — while continuing to make the problem worse. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry has tried to shift the focus to individuals. In a recently unveiled email, sent after Shell posted a widely criticized Twitter poll in 2020 asking people how they planned to address climate change, one of the company’s communications executives said that accusations of Shell “gaslighting” the public were “not totally without merit.”

    An old movie poster shows a man holding a gaslight.
    An advertisement for the 1944 film “Gaslight.” LMPC via Getty Images

    Gaslighting doesn’t just describe the oil industry’s communications, though — the literal “gas lights” that the word refers to began as a fossil-fueled phenomenon. Over the 18th and 19th centuries, a fuel called “coal gas” swept through Europe and the United States, lighting up city streets as well as homes, factories, and theaters through vast networks of pipes. It left behind an important but largely forgotten legacy in our energy system, our polluted soil, and, of course, our language.

    Before gaslights, people lit dark rooms with flickering candles and lanterns that burned fishy-smelling whale oil. What replaced them didn’t smell much better at first. The new technology was the result of chemists messing around with burning coal, wood, peat, animal bladders, and other substances, to see what gases they’d produce. At first, they put the fruits of their labor to use setting off fireworks and flying balloons, but soon found a more practical purpose for “manufactured” gas, sometimes called “town gas” or “artificial gas.” (The name “natural gas” later arose to help differentiate methane.)

    Starting around 1800, the first gas lamps appeared in Paris, London, and Glasgow. They became coveted by factory owners who could now keep their employees toiling after dark, and by city planners looking to make their streets safer from crime. The technology had spread all over Britain by the end of the 1850s, when more than 1,000 gasworks plants had popped up to meet demand. 

    Half a century later, streets all over Europe and America were gaslit. Unlike the candles and oil lamps that preceded them, networks of gas connected homes to a larger energy system — setting the stage for the next advancement in lighting.

    In the late 1880s, the inventor Thomas Edison created the first lightbulb, much to the disappointment of those who had invested in stock of gas companies. His plan to electrify cities with underground cables was sold as clean, healthy, and modern. “Edison’s marketing played up an image of ancient ‘evil’ gaslight in contrast to a new, ‘good’ electric light, coming in as the knight in oh-so-gleaming amour to lift Manhattan from the dark ages,” Alice Bell writes in the book Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis. 

    Gas lighting was known for making a mess. Factory owners found it hard to know what to do with coal tar, the sticky, toxic byproduct of coal gas production. They tried dumping the byproduct into rivers, but it ended up killing the fish. 

    Kids sled down a snowy hill near an industrial factory.
    People play at Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington, after a snowstorm, February 9, 2019. David Ryder / Getty Images

    The technology gradually fell out of use in the 20th century, but gasworks plants left a legacy in the landscape. In Seattle, for instance, the iconic Gas Works Park along Lake Union was home to a major coal gasification plant that opened in 1906, filling the area with smelly, bubbling char for 50 years until it closed. In the 1960s, the landscape architect Richard Haag saw some strange beauty in the abandoned gasworks and worked to convince the city to turn it into a park, keeping some of the towering industrial structures standing. The first soil remediation process took about six years, and cleanup remains ongoing today, with arsenic and other contaminants still present in the lake.

    Much like the industrial structures of Gas Works Park, the term “gaslighting” is a relic of its time— and a reminder of a dirty technology that’s best left in the past.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline <strong>The fossil fuel origins of ‘gaslighting’</strong> on Nov 29, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Elon Musk claims to be “fighting for free speech in America” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform.

    Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.

    As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder, an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.


    Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

    All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial, error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.

    “Andy Ngo’s bizarre vision of ‘antifa’ seems to be the metric used to delete the accounts of journalists and publications, most of which engaged in verifiably good journalism and done so completely above board and TOS observant ways,” Shane Burley, editor of the anthology “¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis,” observed on Twitter. “Paranoid delusions about antifa are driving it.”

    As The Intercept reported last year, Ngo had previously tried and failed to have Loder suspended from Twitter, and also joined a botched attempt to have a court order the researcher to stop tweeting about one of the Proud Boys who took part in the Capitol riot.

    In a phone interview on Monday, Loder, a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert, told The Intercept that their @chadloder account was initially suspended last week for about 90 minutes after Musk had replied to Ngo on Twitter. After briefly regaining access to the account, Loder was suspended again and accused by Twitter of having used another account to evade the ban.

    Loder said that they do have access to another dormant account, @masksfordocs — which was set up in early 2020 as part of an effort by a group of activists to donate N95 masks to doctors during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic — but had not used it for ban evasion. (Ngo had drawn attention to the @masksfordocs account on Twitter, describing it as Loder’s “alt.”)

    “What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder said. “What I suspect happened is that Twitter’s automatic systems flagged my account for some reason and no human being is reviewing these.”

    Since Loder’s account was on a list being passed around by right-wing activists as part of a coordinated campaign to mass-report fabricated violations by left-wing Twitter users, it could have been suspended as a result of that activity. Loder shared screenshots with The Intercept showing that Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers, including QAnon adherents and Proud Boys, had coordinated a spate of complaints about Loder’s tweets and celebrated Loder’s suspension.

    Although Twitter’s Trust and Safety team was made aware of the organized false-reporting campaign against Loder earlier this month — and such coordinated bulk reporting and false-flagging of accounts are violations of Twitter’s pre-Musk policy against “platform manipulation” — that team was subsequently depleted by mass resignations on November 17.

    Still, in a post on the open-source social network Mastodon, Loder joked about the idea that Musk was simply doing Ngo’s bidding.

    No Longer Viable

    Whatever the reason for the suspension, Loder said it’s clear that Twitter is “no longer a viable platform” for antifascist and security researchers.

    “If I get my account back,” Loder said, “it’s only a matter of time before I get mass reported again.”

    Loder, who has shifted to Mastodon, said that for social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.” Now that Musk appears to be reworking content moderation to tilt the playing field in favor of far-right extremists, Loder added, Twitter “is going to turn into Gab with crypto scams.”

    For social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.”

    What that means, Loder said, is that Twitter will probably keep functioning as a website and an app for some time, but be slowly hollowed out as a place to find varying views on matters of public importance, or a space for online organizing against far-right extremism.

    “Twitter is communities of people who choose to organize online,” Loder said, noting how the site has been used by labor organizers and racial justice protesters in recent years to drive real-world change, and by the so-called sedition hunters who have used the platform to crowd-source visual investigations to identify rioters who took part in the failed coup at the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.

    Twitter was a place where communities could gather, despite harassment, because the worst hate speech was banned through content moderation. “Musk has made it clear that’s no longer part of the product,” Loder said. “The entire Twitter information security community has moved to Mastodon.” Some activists who helped create Black Twitter are already talking about how to rebuild their community on that site too.

    “Twitter was never a healthy ‘public square’ for most of us. Let’s not rewrite history while eulogizing the hellsite,” Loder wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “Twitter was a frightening battleground where we managed barely to claw out an uneasy existence amidst the worst violent neo-Nazi extremists who constantly published our home addresses, threatened our kids’ lives, and sent hordes of racist trolls into our mentions.”

    On Mastodon, they added, “The same principles that allowed us to survive uneasily on Twitter will be required here. Community defense, thoughtful pressure on moderation policies, and eternal vigilance. There are no safe spaces but those we make safe through constant effort. We keep us safe.” Twitter, Loder says, will take a long time to die and disappear entirely, “like a rotting whale carcass.”

    Broken Links

    “I’ll have to repair nearly every article I’ve ever written since my tweets got wiped out,” journalist and videographer Vishal Singh wrote on Mastodon on Monday, after being banned from Twitter. “Hundreds of articles written by countless journalists used my tweets. From all sides of the political spectrum. Academic papers that cited my tweets. These links and embeds are now all broken.”

    Days before Singh’s account was suspended, Ngo had posted screenshots of some of the journalist’s angry tweets along with this misleading, factually incorrect summary: “Vishal Singh, an #Antifa far-left violent extremist in Los Angeles who identifies as a journalist, is calling for deadly violence again.” Singh is a left-wing journalist but did not call for violence in the tweets shared by Ngo, and is not violent. Last year, after Singh was attacked twice by far-right anti-vaccine protesters and lashed out in self-defense, Ngo posted a misleadingly captioned video and falsely accused Singh of being the aggressor.

    On Mastodon, Singh shared screenshots of emails from Twitter, showing that while reports had been filed against their account for the same tweets that Ngo had posted as screenshots, the company concluded that none of those tweets violated official policies.

    On Monday, Singh was also suspended from Instagram. “The mass false report campaign by the far-right has not stopped against my social media accounts,” they wrote on Mastodon. “The goal is to suppress all of my journalism.”

    Last Friday, Twitter also suspended the account of CrimethInc, an anarchist collective and publisher. The group takes its name from “thoughtcrime,” a term coined by George Orwell in the dystopian novel “1984.”

    In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.


    Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.

    After the CrimethInc suspension, Ngo claimed, with typically wild and incorrect hyperbole, that the “group operates like ISIS: makes propaganda & training material to radicalize militants toward violence.” He also complained that a dozen affiliated accounts had not yet been suspended. Three days later, almost all of the additional accounts Ngo pointed to had also been suspended by Twitter.

    “Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with ‘free speech’ — it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence,” CrimethInc said in a statement sent to The Intercept.

    The collective also explained that, on the morning of the suspension, it received an email from Twitter saying the company had “received a complaint regarding your account,” but had “investigated the reported content and have found that it is not subject to removal under the Twitter Rules.”

    The group said it had received no further emails from Twitter to explain or justify the ban. “This suggests that the decision to ban our account shortly thereafter was dictated by Musk himself, without regard for the Twitter Rules or any other protocol other than his own apparent allegiance to the far right.”

    Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

    As the investigative journalist Steven Monacelli reported last week, two days after a gunman killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group in Texas that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ gatherings.

    The John Brown Gun Club — named after the white abolitionist leader John Brown who, in 1859, led an armed anti-slavery revolt — assists marginalized communities in defending themselves against white supremacist violence. LGBTQ+ events in Texas, such as a family-friendly drag brunch Monacelli covered in August, frequently attract the attention of armed far-right protesters from the Proud Boys and neo-Nazi groups like Patriot Front and Aryan Freedom Network.

    Twitter’s reason for suspending the account, according to the suspension report, was two tweets that supposably violated Twitter’s rules against “hateful conduct.” One was a reply to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweet with the text “@CBP Mugging at gun point,” and another was a joke about pronouns with the text “Every queer a riflethem.” Without being willfully misread or taken out of context, neither of those tweets constitute hateful conduct.

    Since its Twitter account was suspended last week, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club has been tweeting from a separate account, @elmforkJBGC, which has not yet been suspended. The group has also started posting on Mastodon.

    “The irony isn’t lost on us that our suspension coincides with a coordinated effort to reinstate the most vile antisemitic, transphobic hate accounts,” the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club said in a statement to The Intercept. “Whether this is an indication of the future of leadership of Elon Musk’s running of Twitter, we cannot say but we can say that the timing and reasoning is deliberate and targeted.”

    The post Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Demand for digital skills will be second only to health and care skills over the next four years, while the demand for ‘leading-edge’ green occupations is likely to be marginal, according to a new report by the National Skills Commission. In the modelled period, the demand for digital technologies and electronics skills, will grow by…

    The post Demand for digital skills to grow 16% by 2026 appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

  • ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has opened an investigation into whether rent-setting software made by a Texas-based real estate tech company is facilitating collusion among landlords, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

    The inquiry is being launched as questions have arisen about a 2017 merger between RealPage and its largest pricing competitor. The source told ProPublica some DOJ staff raised concerns about the merger but were overridden by political appointees of former President Donald Trump.

    Congressional leaders have pushed for an investigation into RealPage in three letters to the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission, which were sent after a ProPublica report on the software’s use in mid-October.

    The letters raised concerns that RealPage’s pricing software could be pushing rents above competitive levels and allowing big landlords to coordinate their pricing in violation of federal antitrust laws.

    “We are concerned that the use of this rate setting software essentially amounts to a cartel to artificially inflate rental rates in multifamily residential buildings,” three senators said in a letter in early November. They included Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights.

    The Capital Forum first reported the existence of the investigation and some details on Tuesday.

    RealPage’s software works by collecting information from property managers who are the company’s clients, including what rents they are able to charge tenants. That information is fed into an algorithm that then recommends prices daily for each available apartment.

    Though RealPage says the information is aggregated and anonymized, some experts have said using private data from competitors to set rents could run afoul of antitrust laws, allowing property managers to illegally coordinate their pricing.

    ProPublica found the software is widely used in some markets: In one downtown Seattle ZIP code, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers — every one of which used RealPage’s pricing software in at least some of its buildings.

    RealPage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The company has said RealPage “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.” The company said its software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors like competitors’ rents. The company also said its software helps reduce the risk of collusion that would occur if landlords relied on phone surveys of competitors to manually price their units.

    The DOJ’s investigation represents the second time the federal law enforcement agency has looked into RealPage’s rent-setting software. In 2017, the DOJ flagged a proposed merger in which RealPage sought to buy its biggest competitor, a company called Rainmaker Group, which made rent-setting software known as LRO, or Lease Rent Options.

    RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn, said the $300 million purchase would allow RealPage to double the number of apartments it was pricing, from 1.5 to 3 million units.

    After the acquisition was announced in early 2017, the DOJ requested additional information from the companies involved. Federal regulators scrutinize mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review.

    But the government can request more information from companies and even seek to block the merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.

    A paralegal specialist who worked on the original DOJ probe into RealPage said it was narrowly focused on the impact on competitors who made software with a similar purpose. The paralegal said she was unaware of any complaints by those companies about the proposed merger.

    Merger review guidelines used by both the DOJ and FTC say the agencies “normally evaluate mergers based on their impact on customers,” which include both direct customers and final consumers. But the paralegal said the investigation did not involve talking to tenant advocates or renters.

    “The focus of the investigation was ‘talk to competitors, talk to large rental companies,’” said the paralegal, who did not want to be named because she was not authorized to speak about the investigation. “That was the limited focus.”

    ProPublica found that in the Seattle ZIP code it examined, some of the 10 largest property managers used RealPage’s original pricing software and others were clients of the competitor it acquired.

    Though some career DOJ staff members were concerned about the merger, political appointees leading the agency at the time under Trump chose not to challenge it in court, according to the source with knowledge of the matter.

    The investigation fell at a time when the DOJ’s Antitrust Division was preparing to sue to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which promised to take up a lot of the division’s resources. “It was a resource constraint issue he was trying to balance,” the source said of Makan Delrahim, the former assistant attorney general charged with overseeing the division at the time. In addition, RealPage did not have the same reach then as it does today, the source said.

    Delrahim declined to comment on Tuesday about the first RealPage investigation, saying he was bound by government ethics restrictions from discussing nonpublic aspects of the case and referring questions to the current administration.

    He said that given that it had been almost five years, his “memory is fuzzy at best.” But he added that in general, “as evident from my past record, I was not shy about greenlighting cases that I felt were meritorious even if difficult or unprecedented.”

    Antitrust prosecutions by the division fell to historic lows under Trump.

    The DOJ declined to comment on Tuesday.

    Klobuchar’s recent letter to the DOJ mentioned the 2017 merger, saying that such consolidation can make markets “more susceptible” to collusion and encouraging the department to consider looking at RealPage’s past behavior to see if any of it was anticompetitive.

    RealPage says its customer base across all its products — which also include other types of software, such as accounting — has exceeded 31,700 clients.

    Marketing materials dated 2021 on the company’s website said its so-called revenue management products, formerly called Yieldstar and LRO, are “trusted by over 4 million units.”

    ProPublica also detailed how RealPage’s User Group, a forum that includes landlords who adopt the company’s software, has grown to more than 1,000 members, who meet in private at an annual conference and take part in quarterly phone calls. Klobuchar’s letter raised specific questions about the group, saying the senators were “concerned about potential anticompetitive coordination” occurring through it.

    In addition to the letters from congressional lawmakers, renters have filed three lawsuits in federal court in Seattle and San Diego since mid-October, alleging RealPage and a slew of large landlords are engaging in anticompetitive behavior through the company’s software.

    After the San Diego lawsuit was filed, a RealPage representative said the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” It has not responded to requests for comment on the other two lawsuits.

    A property manager named in one of the Seattle lawsuits, Campus Advantage, said in a statement that it “strongly disagrees with the unsubstantiated allegations in the lawsuit and intends to vigorously defend against the claims. Campus Advantage is proud of its track record creating successful communities.”

    Other property management firms named in the three lawsuits either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. One could not be reached.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • It has been one noisy time for the paladins of big tech.  Jobs have been shed by the thousands at Meta, Amazon and Twitter; FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency company, has collapsed.  Then came the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the healthcare company Theranos, for fraud.

    Pursuing the steps of the college drop-out turned billionaire, Holmes claimed that her company had remarkable technology, capable of diagnosing a number of medical conditions from a mere drop of blood.  The ruse of the blood analyzer known as the Theranos Sample Processing Unit (TSPU), Edison or minilab, worked – at least for a time.  All the way, Holmes was very consciously promoting herself in the mould of Steve Jobs, initially mocked only to become mighty.  Investment flowed into the company coffers.  By 2014, Theranos was valued at $10 billion.

    Some noses were detecting a strange smell in such success.  The Wall Street Journal picked up a scent in 2015.  Unreliable results arising from ineffectual blood-testing technology from Theranos, made available across dozens of Walgreens stores, actually posed a risk to patients.

    The response from Holmes regarding suspicions was pure Apple, which is to say, copied.  “This is what happens when you work to change things.  First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, then you change the world.”

    Cliché followed cliché, platitude bolstered platitude.  At the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit, a gathering bound to be unreliable if not questionable in ethics, she was there to add to the show, only this time sounding like Chumbawamba.  “You’ll get knocked down over and over again, and you get back up… I’ve been knocked down a lot, and it became really clear that this was what I wanted to do, and I would start this company over 10,000 times if I had to.”

    In 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission rather punctured the balloon of hubris by charging Theranos, Holmes and former President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani “with raising more than $700 million from investors through an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance.”

    As the Commission’s media release continued to explain, the allegations focused on false and misleading statements across investor presentations, product demonstrations and media articles claiming that the “portable blood analyzer – could conduct comprehensive blood tests from finger drops of blood, revolutionizing the blood testing industry.”

    Theranos, Holmes and Balwani had also claimed that company products were used to effect by the US Department of Defense in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters.  This fabulous fib was complete by assertions that $100 million in revenue would flow back to the company.  In the Commission’s words, “Theranos’ technology was never deployed by the US Department of Defense and generated a little more than $100,000 in revenue from operations in 2014.”

    After a trial lasting a month, Holmes was found guilty on three counts of wire fraud and one of conspiracy. She was found not guilty on four other counts, and the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on the remaining three counts.  This month, she received a prison sentence of 11 years and three months.  (Lawyers for the government had asked for 15 years.)

    “I am devastated by my failings,” Holmes stated.  “Looking back there are so many things I’d do differently if I had the chance.  I tried to realise my dream too quickly.”  And there, the rationale of the fraud was set out, the fine line between tolerated crookedness and the crookedness that gets you found out.

    Big fraud is an indispensable element to society.  To succeed, a presumption must work: the fraudulent behaviour can only hit a mark with the collusion of the gullible, those willing to fall for the outrageous suggestion, the astonishing proposition.  The world of art forgeries is the best illustration of this fact: is the purchaser intent on collecting the original, or merely a signature?  Throw in a few experts to sign off on authenticity and provenance, and we can forget the reality.

    Orson Welles, in characteristically brilliant fashion, drew out this point in his idiosyncratically subversive F for Fake (1973).  The two stars are the Hungarian aristocrat – or so he purported to be – Elmyr de Hory, and Clifford Irving.  Both figures perpetrated, in their own way, frauds of daring.

    Irving made his name by convincing McGraw-Hill, Inc. that he had worked with billionaire Howard Hughes to produce his life story. To substantiate the account, Irving forged Hughes’ handwriting, which was, as it were, authenticated by the publishing house.  It took the sceptical approach of postal inspectors to change tack and ask for samples of Clifford’s own writing.

    Elmyr’s own contribution to fakery came with art forgeries verging on genius.  With breezy effortlessness, he would whip up a Picasso, a Monet or a Modigliani.  Art collectors and galleries acquired them by the dozens.  Along the way, the armies of the duped and cheated, refusing to do their own critical research and even ask the basic questions, grew.

    While the most gullible are often thought of as the weakest and most vulnerable in society, they can sometimes be the most powerful.  The most acute illustration of this is the fact that those in power, at the very least those with supposed expertise, hate being fooled so blatantly.

    Fraud, for it to be committed to scale, comes with a certain style, a fashion.  Make it plausible, make it receivable.  Holmes did that to a tee, aping, mimicking the Jobs factor, even dressing in his fashion.

    Engineer Andy Hertzfeld’s own account of Jobs is relevant in this regard.  The founder of Apple had a “reality distortion field, a confounding mélange of a charismatic style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.”  Holmes was exploiting the notion of drop out chic, but she was also operating in a world of evangelical hustling and truth stretching.

    The dupes, to some extent, deserve it, and Holmes, as egregious as her behaviour might have been, merely fed it.  To that end, the sentence she received was harsh, even vengeful. Former New York federal prosecutor Andrey Spektor is one who thinks as much.  Federal sentencing, while seeming arbitrary, “requires a humane and common sense result: Defendants must not be punished more than necessary.”  To lock up Holmes in a federal penitentiary till her 50s, was not necessary.  But such is the vicious retaliation that comes from the duped.

    The post Silicon Valley Fake: Elizabeth Holmes and the Fraudster’s Motivation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elon Musk’s Twitter failed to stop the circulation of an antisemitic cartoon posted on the network by Russian diplomats drawing on a trope of Nazi propaganda by depicting Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a huge nose.

    Despite pleas from Twitter users who objected to the anti-Jewish racism of the cartoon, the tweet had not been deleted, contextualized, or restricted in any visible way when this article was published, 17 hours after the image was first posted on the official account of the Russian Embassy in London.

    Before Musk took control of the social network, tweets containing images that used racist tropes to attack individuals or groups based on their ethnic identity were routinely removed from the platform or made impossible to share.

    Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the co-author of the book “Meme Wars,” posted a screenshot of the Russian embassy tweet and noted that the diplomats were using “open antisemitism” to drum up support for the Russian war on Ukraine.


    The cartoon is a version of an old internet meme, in which an image of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard during after-school detention — from the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” — is reworked by inserting topical new text on the board. In the image shared by the Russian officials, the character of Bart was also replaced with a crude depiction of Zelenskyy in which his nose was altered to evoke Nazi imagery of Jews.

    The text on the board, and the tweeted Russian caption for the cartoon, makes reference to speculation encouraged by Russia, but unsupported by evidence, that Ukraine had intentionally fired a defensive missile into Poland during a recent Russian attack as part of a false flag operation intended to draw NATO into the conflict.

    Twitter’s failure to immediately remove the image or restrict the Russian government account that posted it appeared to be in keeping with Musk’s previously stated sympathy with Russia’s war aims and his active embrace of right-wing talking points about the need to make the social network a forum for “free speech,” even if that means allowing hate speech to flourish.

    But Musk’s definition of who should be allowed to speak freely appears to be influenced by the right-wing ideologues and trolls he frequently encourages and agrees with on Twitter. The social network’s decision to allow the Russian government’s racist attack on Zelenskyy came at the same time that some antifascist accounts were being suspended and just after Musk reinstated the accounts of both Donald Trump — who used his tweets to foment the failed January 6, 2021, coup — and Kanye West, who recently tweeted a threat to unleash punishment on “Jewish people.”

    Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a news organization that began with collaborative, open-source investigations on Twitter, was among those who drew Musk’s attention to the image and asked if the social network’s new owner is “okay with state run Twitter accounts using anti-Semitic tropes?” Higgins suggested that Musk could even poll his followers on the platform to see if they “are cool with casual anti-Semitism.”

    Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think tank based in Jerusalem, noted that the tweet came from diplomats working for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who had defended Russia’s wild claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis by endorsing a conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler was Jewish.

    “So what if Zelenskyy is Jewish?” Lavrov told Italian television in May, when he was asked about the Russian claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.” The foreign minister went on to claim that “wise Jewish people” have said that “some of the worst antisemites are Jews.”

    In her comment on the cartoon posted on Twitter by Russian diplomats, Tsurkov wrote: “The people who brought you ‘Hitler was a Jew’ decided to depict Ukraine’s Jewish president this way.”

    Lavrov’s remarks caused outrage and were condemned by his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, as “an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

    Three days later, the hawkish Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov, who is himself Jewish, told viewers that it was perfectly possible for Zelenskyy to be both Jewish and a Nazi, at least according to the definition used by those around Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Nazism, Solovyov insisted, was a form of extreme nationalism that could target any national group, not just Jews. “Nazism doesn’t have to be antisemitic,” he said, “it can be anti-Slavic, anti-Russian.”


    The idea that Russians, not Jews, were the main victims of Nazi Germany has a long pedigree in Russia. As the historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “Bloodlands,” the official Soviet history of the nation’s “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany was written to downplay the suffering of the Jews — influenced by Josef Stalin’s antisemitism.

    “If the Stalinist notion of the war was to prevail, the fact that the Jews were its main victims had to be forgotten,” Snyder wrote. “Also to be forgotten was that the Soviet Union had been allied to Nazi Germany when the war began in 1939, and that the Soviet Union had been unprepared for the German attack in 1941. The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”

    “Putin’s Russian regime talks of ‘Nazis’ not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies,” Snyder wrote on Substack in April. “[T]he Russian policy of ‘denazification’ is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used,” Snyder added, but “operates within the special Russian definition of ‘Nazi’: a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian.”

    “The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside,” Snyder observed. “This is perfectly consistent with Russian war fighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of ‘Nazi.’ This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that ‘Nazi’ means.”

    The post Twitter Allows Russian Officials to Share Antisemitic Cartoon of Zelenskyy appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    The senator tasked with overseeing federal antitrust enforcement is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether a Texas-based company’s price-setting software is undermining competition and pushing up rents.

    Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, sent a letter to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division this month. It was also signed by two other Democrats, Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.

    “We are concerned that the use of this rate setting software essentially amounts to a cartel to artificially inflate rental rates in multifamily residential buildings,” the letter said. It encouraged the DOJ to “take appropriate action to protect renters and competition in the residential rental markets.”

    In mid-October, a ProPublica investigation documented how real estate tech company RealPage’s price-setting software uses nearby competitors’ nonpublic rent data to feed an algorithm that suggests what landlords should charge for available apartments each day. Legal experts said the algorithm may be enabling violations of antitrust laws.

    ProPublica detailed how RealPage’s User Group, a forum that includes landlords who adopt the company’s software, had grown to more than 1,000 members, who meet in private at an annual conference and take part in quarterly phone calls. The senators raised specific questions about the group, saying, “We are concerned about potential anticompetitive coordination taking place through the RealPage User Group.”

    RealPage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    RealPage has said that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner” and that its software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents. The company has said its software helps reduce the risk of collusion that would occur if landlords relied on phone surveys of competitors to manually price their units.

    The DOJ declined to comment on the letter.

    The department five years ago reviewed RealPage’s plan to acquire its biggest competitor in pricing software, but federal prosecutors declined to seek to block the merger, which doubled the number of apartments RealPage was pricing.

    The senators noted that transaction, saying RealPage has made more than 10 acquisitions since 2016. They said in data-intensive industries, “the ability to acquire more data can result in the algorithms suggesting higher prices and can also increase the barriers to entry” for other competitors. The lawmakers encouraged the department “to consider looking back at RealPage’s past behavior to determine whether any of it was anticompetitive.”

    The letter follows two others sent by lawmakers urging the DOJ or Federal Trade Commission to investigate RealPage. Since ProPublica’s investigation was published, three lawsuits have been filed on behalf of renters alleging that the software is artificially inflating rents and facilitating collusion. RealPage has denied allegations in a lawsuit filed in San Diego, and it has not responded to calls for comment about the other two legal actions, filed in federal district court in Seattle.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • In the month since billionaire Elon Musk took possession of Twitter, firing thousands of workers and contractors and throwing its blue check verification system into chaos, people have been leaving the bird app in droves. Twitter has lost more than a million users — including several prominent climate activists, scientists, and journalists. In its place, many are migrating to Mastodon, an open-source social media network where users communicate on decentralized servers.

    Unlike Twitter’s single website, Mastodon is made up of a federation of interconnected yet independent servers, some of which are themed around a particular interest. Even though users can follow and correspond with people from different communities, they can also choose to only view posts from their local server. Several of the servers that have gained momentum in recent weeks are geared toward climate-conscious individuals and groups. 

    Mastodon.green, for example, is a server that says it plans to operate on clean energy and offset carbon based on the number of people in the group. The community currently boasts around 9,800 active users, who are asked to pay a monthly fee to be on the server after a certain trial period. Free sign ups are currently closed due to the unusually high number of people trying to join.

    Paula Kreuzer, a climate activist based in Austria who works with Fridays for Future Vienna, is the administrator of the server climatejustice.social. She said she recently had to close that community, which she launched in early 2020, because of the massive influx of new user requests; the server, which currently has about 10,000 users, saw around 7,000 people join in the past few weeks. 

    Kreuzer describes climatejustice.social as a laid-back place, with less focus on research or scientific discussion and more on activism, networking, and casual conversations. The biggest change in conversation she has seen is a plethora of new users trying to get the hang of a new platform and its quirks. 

    “Asking questions is the best tip I can give people,” Kreuzer told Grist before she hopped on another call to introduce new German users to Mastodon.

    Kim Cobb, an award-winning climate scientist and the director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, is one of the many new Mastodon users still getting a sense of the platform. She recently launched her account on the fediscience.org server, which is geared toward academics and researchers. She said she’s seen an “explosion” of users on that server in recent days, but isn’t yet ready to fully abandon Twitter herself.

    “It’s sort of a gray zone right now,” she said. “So I’m waiting, I’m watching. But I’m also building.”

    Historically speaking, Twitter has played an important role in building people’s awareness of environmental actions, from youth-led climate strikes to viral trash-clean-up videos. On the other hand, the bird app has also been a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Previous leadership went so far as to ban climate change propaganda on the platform, but experts warn climate disinformation could increase under Musk’s watch.

    The way Mastodon is currently set up, it can be slightly easier to find a like-minded community and slightly harder for posts to reach a massive global audience compared to Twitter. Granted, users can still see public posts across most servers using the “federated timeline” view, and people are free to join multiple servers or switch an account from one server to another. Still, not all prominent climate activists are choosing to join science- or justice-themed servers. Greta Thunberg, for example, can be found on mastodon.nu, a server that is run on renewable energy but geared toward residents of Sweden and other Nordic countries.

    While working out the odds and ends can be frustrating for those just joining up, some Mastodon users have found the social media platform to be a nice break from Twitter’s sometimes hostile mood. 

    “I’m enjoying it actually,” said Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute who recently joined Mastodon’s fediscience.org server. “The tone is nicer. The engagement is more interesting and the conversations are more in depth than on Twitter.”

    Mastodon numbers are growing but it is still a relatively small social network, with around 1 million active users compared to Twitter’s roughly 238 million. Gleick, who has over 96,000 followers on Twitter, said it has been hard to wrestle with the potential of losing a large, engaged, and climate-focused audience should he leave the bird app completely. He doesn’t find Mastodon as intuitive as Twitter but, despite the hiccups, he remains intrigued. Twitter wasn’t super easy to use in its early days either, he said.

    But if Musk pushes Twitter platform over the edge, he believes users will find ways to still talk, share, and work in other climate spaces online. 

    “We’re sort of holding our breath to see really how bad it gets,” Gleick said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What is Mastodon and what does it mean for ‘Climate Twitter’? on Nov 17, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • ANALYSIS: By Nick Kelly, Queensland University of Technology and Marcus Foth, Queensland University of Technology

    The Pacific nation of Tuvalu is planning to create a version of itself in the metaverse, as a response to the existential threat of rising sea levels.

    Tuvalu’s Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs, Simon Kofe, made the announcement via a chilling digital address to leaders at COP27.

    He said the plan, which accounts for the “worst case scenario”, involves creating a digital twin of Tuvalu in the metaverse in order to replicate its beautiful islands and preserve its rich culture:

    The tragedy of this outcome cannot be overstated […] Tuvalu could be the first country in the world to exist solely in cyberspace – but if global warming continues unchecked, it won’t be the last.


    Tuvalu’s “digital twin” message. Video: Reuters

    The idea is that the metaverse might allow Tuvalu to “fully function as a sovereign state” as its people are forced to live somewhere else.

    There are two stories here. One is of a small island nation in the Pacific facing an existential threat and looking to preserve its nationhood through technology.

    The other is that by far the preferred future for Tuvalu would be to avoid the worst effects of climate change and preserve itself as a terrestrial nation. In which case, this may be its way of getting the world’s attention.

    Tuvalu will be one of the first nations to go under as sea levels rise
    Tuvalu will be one of the first nations to go under as sea levels rise. It faces an existential threat. Image: Mick Tsikas/AAP/The Conversation

    What is a metaverse nation?
    The metaverse represents a burgeoning future in which augmented and virtual reality become part of everyday living. There are many visions of what the metaverse might look like, with the most well-known coming from Meta (previously Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

    What most of these visions have in common is the idea that the metaverse is about interoperable and immersive 3D worlds. A persistent avatar moves from one virtual world to another, as easily as moving from one room to another in the physical world.

    The aim is to obscure the human ability to distinguish between the real and the virtual, for better or for worse.

    Kofe implies three aspects of Tuvalu’s nationhood could be recreated in the metaverse:

    • territory — the recreation of the natural beauty of Tuvalu, which could be interacted with in different ways
    • culture — the ability for Tuvaluan people to interact with one another in ways that preserve their shared language, norms and customs, wherever they may be
    • sovereignty — if there were to be a loss of terrestrial land over which the government of Tuvalu has sovereignty (a tragedy beyond imagining, but which they have begun to imagine) then could they have sovereignty over virtual land instead?

    Could it be done?
    In the case that Tuvalu’s proposal is, in fact, a literal one and not just symbolic of the dangers of climate change, what might it look like?

    Technologically, it’s already easy enough to create beautiful, immersive and richly rendered recreations of Tuvalu’s territory. Moreover, thousands of different online communities and 3D worlds (such as Second Life) demonstrate it’s possible to have entirely virtual interactive spaces that can maintain their own culture.

    The idea of combining these technological capabilities with features of governance for a “digital twin” of Tuvalu is feasible.

    There have been prior experiments of governments taking location-based functions and creating virtual analogues of them.

    For example, Estonia’s e-residency is an online-only form of residency non-Estonians can obtain to access services such as company registration. Another example is countries setting up virtual embassies on the online platform Second Life.

    Yet there are significant technological and social challenges in bringing together and digitising the elements that define an entire nation.

    Tuvalu has only about 12,000 citizens, but having even this many people interact in real time in an immersive virtual world is a technical challenge. There are issues of bandwidth, computing power, and the fact that many users have an aversion to headsets or suffer nausea.

    Nobody has yet demonstrated that nation-states can be successfully translated to the virtual world. Even if they could be, others argue the digital world makes nation-states redundant.

    Tuvalu’s proposal to create its digital twin in the metaverse is a message in a bottle — a desperate response to a tragic situation. Yet there is a coded message here too, for others who might consider retreat to the virtual as a response to loss from climate change.

    The metaverse is no refuge
    The metaverse is built on the physical infrastructure of servers, data centres, network routers, devices and head-mounted displays. All of this tech has a hidden carbon footprint and requires physical maintenance and energy. Research published in Nature predicts the internet will consume about 20 percent of the world’s electricity by 2025.

    The idea of the metaverse nation as a response to climate change is exactly the kind of thinking that got us here. The language that gets adopted around new technologies — such as “cloud computing”, “virtual reality” and “metaverse” — comes across as both clean and green.

    Such terms are laden with “technological solutionism” and “greenwashing”. They hide the fact that technological responses to climate change often exacerbate the problem due to how energy and resource intensive they are.

    So where does that leave Tuvalu?
    Kofe is well aware the metaverse is not an answer to Tuvalu’s problems. He explicitly states we need to focus on reducing the impacts of climate change through initiatives such as a fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty.

    His video about Tuvalu moving to the metaverse is hugely successful as a provocation. It got worldwide press — just like his moving plea during COP26 while standing knee-deep in rising water.

    Yet Kofe suggests:

    Without a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing we may find the rest of the world joining us online as their lands disappear.

    It is dangerous to believe, even implicitly, that moving to the metaverse is a viable response to climate change. The metaverse can certainly assist in keeping heritage and culture alive as a virtual museum and digital community. But it seems unlikely to work as an ersatz nation-state.

    And, either way, it certainly won’t work without all of the land, infrastructure and energy that keeps the internet functioning.

    It would be far better for us to direct international attention towards Tuvalu’s other initiatives described in the same report:

    The project’s first initiative promotes diplomacy based on Tuvaluan values of olaga fakafenua (communal living systems), kaitasi (shared responsibility) and fale-pili (being a good neighbour), in the hope that these values will motivate other nations to understand their shared responsibility to address climate change and sea level rise to achieve global wellbeing.

    The message in a bottle being sent out by Tuvalu is not really about the possibilities of metaverse nations at all. The message is clear: to support communal living systems, to take shared responsibility and to be a good neighbour.

    The first of these can’t translate into the virtual world. The second requires us to consume less, and the third requires us to care.The Conversation

    Dr Nick Kelly, senior lecturer in interaction design, Queensland University of Technology and Dr Marcus Foth, professor of urban informatics, Queensland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.


  • An image of new Twitter owner Elon Musk is seen surrounded by Twitter logos in this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on 08 November, 2022. (Photo by STR/NurPhoto via AP)

    An image of Elon Musk is seen surrounded by Twitter logos, on Nov. 8, 2022.

    Photo: STR/NurPhoto via AP


    Everything in this article was accurate at the time of publication. However, given the speed of changes at Twitter, anything could have happened by the time you read this. Elon Musk might have staged his own death and started a new life in Uruguay. He could have decreed that users may now only post while nude. He may have sold Twitter for $7 to a consortium of Labradors. There’s just no predicting.

    What was predictable was the excruciating torment Musk is now undergoing: Anyone familiar with a basic left-wing critique of corporate media could have foreseen it. Musk would have been far more prepared for the Twitter maelstrom if he’d read “Manufacturing Consent” by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, or “The Media Monopoly” by Ben Bagdikian, or even “The Brass Check” by Upton Sinclair, published in 1919.

    Let’s start at the beginning. It costs money to operate a media corporation. Even ones that are privately held, like Twitter post-Musk takeover, require revenue to operate.

    One potential source is advertising. In 2021, Twitter had revenues of $5 billion, 90 percent of which came from ads. A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, has said that advertising was once 80 percent of the paper’s revenue, and that at other papers it was generally higher, even 95 percent.

    So in a business like Twitter’s, your customers are the advertisers, and your product is the attention of your users. Unfortunately, Musk felt that Twitter’s previous managers were left-wing fascists who hated free speech because they knew their statist blue-hair ideology couldn’t survive the light of day. Musk was sure things would be different if he were managing Twitter. Now he is. Let the freewheeling, raucous political debate begin! No sacred cows, no safe spaces.

    Except Musk immediately discovered that advertisers hate freewheeling, raucous political debate. Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, explained this cogently in a recent article about his experience running an outlet devoted to politics:

    Advertisers don’t want to be near controversy. Indeed, they don’t even want to be near things that are upsetting or agitating. This is why all political and political news media face an inverse premium in advertising because the content is inherently polarizing. You can show the same ad to the same people the same amount of times and you’ll get more money if the content is fashion or parenthood or entertainment than if it’s politics. It’s a bedrock rule of the world of advertising.

    This is why Twitter was the way it was before Musk bought it: not because of the politics of its staff, but because advertisers demanded it. Likewise, it’s why its advertising has now fallen off a cliff. As Sinclair wrote over 100 years ago, “If the newspaper fails to protect its big advertisers, the big advertisers will get busy and protect themselves.” It’s not simply that Unilever doesn’t want its ads appearing next to tweets from a Turkish bot-net shrieking about reannihilating the Armenians. It’s not even that corporations will never be crazy about subsidizing anti-corporate manifestos. It’s that they’d prefer an audience that isn’t thinking at all, except about what to buy next.

    Truth and Business

    Indeed, it goes even deeper than that. Musk told advertisers just a few days ago that Twitter wants to be “in the business of truth.” Even if that were what Musk truly wanted himself — it’s obviously not — that is absolutely the last thing advertisers want. As everyone learned when they were 6 years old and successfully pressured their parents into buying them a Star Wars toy that didn’t actually fly like in the commercials, advertisers are in the business of lying.

    So even though Musk doesn’t understand precisely why advertisers dislike free speech, he is correct to believe that they do. He’s therefore moved onto the next possible source of revenue: subscriptions. According to various reports, he hopes to make subscriptions the source of at least 50 percent of Twitter revenue.

    But why would anyone pay for Twitter? One answer would be to see fewer ads. Except people willing to pay for Twitter are going to be the audience that advertisers most want to reach: heavy users with money. This is why Twitter’s specialists crunched the numbers and informed Musk that Twitter would plausibly lose money on many $8/month subscribers.

    Then there’s the basic question of fairness. If you want to create a vibrant digital town square, as Musk has said he does, how can you exclude those who can’t afford $8/month — which is many Americans, but even more of Twitter’s users outside the U.S.? You can of course lower the price for them, but then subscriptions are going to be even less lucrative.

    There is one possible final source of revenue for Twitter: subsidies. Musk could, in theory, just pay for Twitter’s staggering losses out of his own pocket, gradually spending down his personal $200 billion fortune. As the fictional press baron Charles Foster Kane says in “Citizen Kane,” “I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. At the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in 60 years.” But it turns out Musk’s passionate devotion to free speech doesn’t go quite that far.

    This is why Musk is now thrashing around in incompetent fury. He enthusiastically impaled himself on the horns of this fundamental dilemma of political speech, one that no one has ever solved. He could have avoided his hilarious nightmare if he’d just read a few books with a radical perspective on the media. But people who do that tend not to become the richest person on earth.

    Government Subsidies

    However, there is one, and only one, potential solution here. Media outlets could be subsidized by the government.

    This may sound anti-American if you’ve had a high-toned education and been properly indoctrinated. But in fact, the media received massive subsidies in the early decades of the United States, mostly in the form of free or low-cost postal rates. The Founding Fathers were explicit about the reasons for this. Thomas Jefferson endorsed the concept in his first address to Congress as president, because it would “facilitate the progress of information.” Madison wrote that “a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people … is favorable to liberty.” [Emphasis in original] Therefore, he contended, postage “above half a cent, amounted to a prohibition … of the distribution of knowledge and information.” The total government spending to support newspapers reached, as a percentage of the economy, the equivalent today of over $30 billion per year.

    It’s true that government funding of the media creates obvious dangers. Yet technology has advanced to the point where these could largely be eliminated. One particularly promising idea is that of the economist Dean Baker, who’s proposed that every America get a $100 voucher from the federal government that they could grant to any journalistic (or artistic) endeavor they liked.

    But while we wait for that, we should remember that many people have dreamed Musk’s dream before, and all have awoken to this unpleasant reality. While it’s largely forgotten now, John B. Oakes, who created the New York Times op-ed page in 1970, originally hoped it could be a forum for unfettered political debate. He tried to garner submissions from Curtis LeMay and Noam Chomsky to John Birch Society co-founder Robert Welch and Gus Hall, the head of the U.S. Communist Party. The page even tried to hire Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni.

    It didn’t work. The op-ed page slowly calcified under all of these pressures, and then Oakes was removed from his position by A.O. Sulzberger Sr., the grandfather of the paper’s current publisher. Twitter’s Wall Street creditors will probably play the role of Sulzberger for Musk, and sooner rather than later.

    The post Elon Musk Would Have Done Better With Twitter If He’d Read Noam Chomsky appeared first on The Intercept.

  • Back in June, a measure to tax the wealthiest Californians to raise funds for electric vehicles and wildfire fighting qualified for the state ballot. At first, it seemed like a clear winner. The initiative had the support of hundreds of environmental and public health groups, unions, firefighters, and elected officials. The American Lung Association, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the California Democratic Party all endorsed it, with 63 percent of voters saying they would support the measure on election day this November.

    If any state would support a tax for climate action it would be California, where nearly two-thirds of residents believe local officials should do more to address climate change. But on Tuesday, Californians resoundingly rejected the initiative, with 59 percent voting it down.

    What happened? How did an immensely popular environmental ballot initiative fail in a state that prides itself on being one of the most progressive on climate?

    In short: A governor broke party ranks, billionaires launched an opposition campaign, and a corporation with a PR problem turned out to be a major liability. Let’s dig in.

    The surprise twist came in late July, soon after the California Democratic Party endorsed Prop 30, as the measure was called. Governor Newsom and the California Teachers Association announced their formal opposition. The teachers association took issue with putting “a special interest lock box” on taxes that would traditionally fund schools. Governor Gavin Newsom narrowed his sights on the rideshare company Lyft, the proposition’s primary funder. He started campaigning heavily against the measure, starring in a September television ad where he asked Californians to vote against “[Lyft’s] sinister scheme to grab a huge taxpayer funded subsidy.” He even donated his own re-election funds to the opposition group. 

    “Gavin Newsom has a lot of credibility as a climate advocate in the state,” said Catherine Wolfram, a climate and energy economics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “The fact that he came out against Prop 30, voters paid attention to that.” 

    California law requires rideshare companies to log 90 percent of all miles in electric vehicles by 2030, and Newsom accused Lyft of trying to use taxpayer dollars to foot the bill for its transition to electric. Once Newsom spoke out against the measure, it started slipping in the polls.

    Corporate involvement in drafting and promoting legislation is something that many Californians take issue with, and with good reason. In 2020, Lyft and Uber pushed through a heavily contested measure, Prop 22, to reclassify workers as contractors, which gets companies off the hook for providing minimum wage, overtime, health care, and other benefits. 

    a lyft sign in the foreground and a woman walking with bags in the background
    Lyft spent over $45 million on a California ballot measure to fund electric vehicles that failed on Tuesday.
    Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty

    But in this case, Prop 30 wasn’t exactly the carve out for Lyft that Newsom said it was. According to the clean transportation groups who devised the measure, Lyft came on, mostly as a funder, once the basic contours of the measure were already established. “There was nothing in there that specifically mentioned Lyft,” said Steven Maviglio, who consulted on press strategy for the proposition. “The measure would have benefitted low- to middle-income Californians by subsidizing electric vehicles and installing charging stations in their neighborhoods. Lyft would have benefitted in that its drivers fall into the category of being Californians.” The measure slated 50 percent of its EV funding for low-income communities, which are disproportionately impacted by air pollution.

    The money raised from the Prop 30 tax, an estimated $3.5 billion to $5 billion annually, would have gone to the California Air Resources Board, the Energy Commission, and CAL FIRE, state agencies Newsom funds with his own budget to reach California’s climate targets. These include a 40 percent emissions reduction by 2030 and 100 percent EV sales by 2035 in a state where transportation comprises 50 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to some of the worst air quality in the country. 

    Beyond Lyft’s involvement, there are other reasons Newsom and other Prop 30 opponents pushed back against the measure. Some of the biggest funders of the opposition campaign were billionaires who would have been affected by the 1.75 percent tax increase on incomes over $2 million a year. Top donors to the No to Prop 30 campaign included Netflix Founder Reed Hastings, investment company founder Mark Heising, Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Moritz, and Catherine Dean, chief operating officer of Govern for California, an influential donor network composed primarily of Bay Area venture capitalists and tech executives. Several of the big Prop 30 contributors, like Hastings, Dean, and Heising, were also big supporters of Newsom’s 2022 gubernatorial reelection bid, with some maxing out allowed donation levels

    Newsom expressed his concerns about increasingly relying on high-income earners to fund state programs. California gets most of its revenue from income taxes, and people who make over $2 million — the 0.2 percent of residents, taxed at 13.3 percent of their income — already make up 30 percent of the state’s income tax revenue, according to CalMatters. This pool can be a volatile and unstable source of funding as it is heavily tied to fluctuating markets. Other opponents expressed concerns about driving high-income earners out of the state, although studies show the people moving out of California are low- and middle-income residents who can no longer afford to live there; high earners are the ones moving in.

    Opponents also argued that California ballot measures that carve out portions of the budget for specific issues limit the flexibility of the governor and the legislature to allocate funds. “Climate is such a big topic and there are interlocking issues,” said Wolfram. “Ballot propositions are the wrong way to do climate policy.” 

    Ultimately, Lyft was the opposition’s biggest talking point. “The other side never got around that Lyft had written and funded the campaign,” said Matthew Rodriguez, campaign manager for No on Prop 30.

    Maviglio, who has consulted on strategy for California environmental measures like the plastic bag ban and the water bond, warned against reading the vote as an indication of voter’s beliefs on climate change or progressive taxation. It’s much easier to get a “no” vote on a ballot measure than a “yes,” he said, so long as the opposition can sow some seeds of doubt in the minds of voters, which in this case they were able to do by focusing on Lyft. “The conversation was never about the actual policy,” said Bill Magavern, policy director at the Coalition for Clean Air.

    What’s next for the future of EVs in the state? The good news is there is money for clean transportation. After lobbying from Newsom, California legislators recently approved a historic $54 billion in climate spending with $10 billion set aside for electric vehicle funding over five years. There is also money from the federal Inflation Reduction Act coming in for EV incentives, as well as an expected $384 million from the Infrastructure Bill for charging stations in California. But experts say it’s nowhere near enough. “The $10 billion is a promise, not a law,” said Magavern, adding that past electric vehicle subsidy programs in the state have consistently run out of money. Lack of charging stations has also emerged as a clear roadblock in efforts to mandate the transition to electric trucks for the shipping industry. And while the past two years have seen big budget surpluses, Governor Newsom has already warned about restrictions next year; Magavern worries that climate change programs will be among the first to be cut.

    “We are in a crisis when it comes to climate and air pollution and wildfires,” said Magavern. “To meet the emergency, we needed to do something out of the ordinary. [A tax increase] wouldn’t pass the legislature so it took something like a ballot initiative.”

    Meanwhile in New York, a historic $4.2 billion bond act for conservation, water quality infrastructure, flood risk reduction, and climate change mitigation passed with no organized opposition. The measure, which will allow the state to raise money for projects by taking on debt, also had a large coalition of environmental and labor groups behind it, and is projected to create 84,000 jobs across New York State. “New Yorkers said ‘yes’ to investing in clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, reduced flooding, environmental justice, and jobs,” said Kate Boicourt, director of climate resilient coasts and watersheds for the New York chapter of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This act… is a win for everyone and will make an impact in communities across the state for generations to come.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How California’s initiative to fund electric vehicles went terribly wrong on Nov 11, 2022.

  • ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    The health complaints started rolling in within weeks of the activation of a new cellphone tower in August 2020 in Pittsfield, an old factory town in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. Seventeen residents reported headaches, dizziness, insomnia or confusion. A few children had to sleep with “vomit buckets” by their beds.

    Like many people, Bobbie Orsi had never paid close attention to questions about the health effects of cellphone technology. She mostly viewed it as an issue that had long ago been put to rest. But after becoming the chair of Pittsfield’s Board of Health as the complaints emerged, Orsi, a 66-year-old registered nurse who had spent much of her career in public health, decided to educate herself. She combed through a stack of research studies. She watched webinars. She grilled a dozen scientists and doctors.

    Over several months, Orsi went from curious, to concerned, to convinced, first, that radio-frequency emissions from Verizon’s 115-foot 4G tower were to blame for the problems in Pittsfield, and second, that growing evidence of harm from cellphones — everything from effects on fertility and fetal development to associations with cancer — has been downplayed in the United States.

    Orsi and the Pittsfield board decided to try to do something about Verizon’s tower. They quickly discovered that they would get no help from federal regulators. The Federal Communications Commission, which has responsibility for protecting Americans from potential radiation hazards generated by wireless transmitters and cellphones, has repeatedly sided with the telecom industry in denying the possibility of virtually any human harm.

    Worse, from Orsi’s perspective, federal law and FCC rules are so aligned with the industry that state and local governments are barred from taking action to block cell towers to protect the health of their citizens, even as companies are explicitly empowered to sue any government that tries to take such an action. It turned out that Verizon, in such matters, has more legal rights than the people of Pittsfield.

    Still, the lawyers for Orsi and her colleagues thought they saw a long-shot legal opening: They would argue that the FCC’s exclusive oversight role applied only to approving cell tower sites, not to health problems triggered after one was built and its transmitters switched on. In April 2022, the Pittsfield Health Board issued an emergency cease-and-desist order directing Verizon to shut down the tower as a “public nuisance” and “cause of sickness” that “renders dwellings unfit for human habitation.” (Several families had abandoned their homes.) The order was the first of its kind in the country. It was, Orsi said, “a gutsy move — maybe naively gutsy.”

    The Board of Health in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, tried to fight Verizon over a 4G tower. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

    Almost as quickly as the battle began, it ended. On May 10, Verizon sued the city in federal court. The company contended that the Pittsfield residents’ medical complaints were bogus. And, in any case, Verizon argued, the cease-and-desist order was barred because federal law gave the FCC the sole power to regulate wireless-radiation risks. Fearing a hopeless and costly David-and-Goliath battle, Pittsfield’s City Council refused to fund the fight. A month later, the Board of Health withdrew its cease-and-desist order.

    But it was a signal of a growing fear — other cities have fought cell sites only to be forced to back down — and evidence of a striking shoulder-to-shoulder partnership between a federal agency and the industry it is supposed to regulate. The build-out of a new generation of wireless networks, known as 5G, is amping up the stakes of this conflict for localities across America. It will require an estimated 800,000 new base stations, including both towers and densely spaced “small cell” transmitters mounted on rooftops and street poles. That means nearly tripling the current number of transmitters, and many of them will be placed close to houses and apartments.

    The FCC has held firm to its position that there’s no reason for concern. In a statement for this article, a spokesperson said the agency “takes safety issues very seriously” but declined to make officials available for on-the-record interviews.

    The FCC is an improbable organization to serve the role of protecting humans. It specializes in technical issues that make the communications system function, not in health and safety. “At the FCC, they feel like this is really not their problem,” said Edwin Mantiply, who dealt with cellphone-radiation issues before retiring from the agency four years ago. “It’s not their job to do this kind of thing. They might have a token biologist or two, but that’s not their job.” The result, Mantiply said, was that in situations where the science isn’t black and white — and it isn’t when it comes to cellphones — the agency tended to listen to the telecom industry, which vehemently insists that cellphones are safe. “They don’t really want to deal with uncertainty,” Mantiply said of the FCC.

    In the view of Mantiply and a rising number of scientists, there’s more than enough evidence about cellphone risks to be concerned — and some of the strongest evidence comes from the federal government itself. In 2018, a massive, nearly-two-decade study by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, found “clear evidence” that cellphone radiation caused cancer in lab animals. “We’re really in the middle of a paradigm shift,” said Linda Birnbaum, who was director of the NTP until 2019. It’s no longer right to assume cellphones are safe, she said. “Protective policy is needed today. We really don’t need more science to know that we should be reducing exposures.”

    The FCC rejected the need for any such action when it reviewed its standards on cellphone radiation in 2019. The agency decided it would continue to rely on exposure limits it established in 1996, when Motorola’s StarTAC flip phone was considered cutting edge.

    The Motorola StarTAC flip phone was considered cutting edge in 1996 when the Federal Communications Commission established exposure limits for cellphones. The agency has not updated those limits since. (SSPL/Getty Images)

    The way the FCC went about reexamining its standards so dismayed a federal appeals court that, in 2021, it excoriated the agency for what it called a “cursory analysis.” The court accused it of “brushing off” evidence of potential harm and failing to explain its reasoning. The agency’s “silence,” the court said, left unclear whether the government even “considered any of the evidence in the record.” The appeals court ordered the agency to revisit the adequacy of its safeguards.

    All this has left Orsi frustrated. Petite and intense, she has been through these sorts of fights before. Years ago, with the eventual support of the Environmental Protection Agency, she helped push General Electric to clean up the toxic chemicals it had dumped in Pittsfield.

    Now she feels powerless. “The Board of Health has a mandate to protect the citizens of Pittsfield,” she said. “But the bottom line is the FCC has made it impossible for us to do anything. If a company can come in and do something to make people sick, and the Board of Health has no authority to act, that’s ludicrous.”

    Bobbie Orsi, the chair of Pittsfield’s Board of Health, combed through research studies and grilled scientists to educate herself on the risks of cellphone technology. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

    To see how completely the U.S. telecom industry has prevailed in the rhetorical war over cellphone safety so far, consider this example. In February 2019, near the end of a hearing largely devoted to extolling the wonders of 5G technology, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., asked representatives of two wireless industry trade groups what sort of research the industry was funding on the biological effects of 5G, which remains largely untested. “There are no industry-backed studies, to my knowledge, right now,” replied Brad Gillen of the CTIA (originally called the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association). “I’m not aware of any,” replied Steve Berry of the Competitive Carriers Association.

    Wireless companies maintain that cellphones and base stations operating within the FCC’s exposure limits pose no proven risk. A CTIA spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The consensus of the international scientific community is that radiofrequency energy from wireless devices and networks, including 5G, has not been shown to cause health problems.” Included in that list was the National Cancer Institute. The spokesperson also said the industry is in favor of additional science. (Verizon itself declined to comment on the record for this article.)

    In a September 2021 meeting with Pittsfield’s Board of Health, for example, Verizon’s chief expert was a University of Pittsburgh theoretical physics professor named Eric Swanson. He testified that wireless radiation is far too weak to cause cancer or any of the problems the Pittsfield residents were reporting. He suggested they have psychological problems.

    Fears of radio-frequency radiation, Swanson declared in the videotaped meeting, are based entirely on “fringe opinion,” backed only by cherry-picked evidence. Swanson said he’d spotted one such study on “an Alex Jones website” and voiced exasperation: “This is the kind of stuff I have to deal with.” Concerns about wireless radiation, he said, are at odds with the overwhelming scientific consensus. “All international bodies,” he said, “declare cellphones to be safe.”

    The FCC has been similarly scornful. In a June 2020 Washington Post op-ed, Thomas Johnson, general counsel for the agency during the administration of President Donald Trump, wrote: “Conjectures about 5G’s effect on human health are long on panic and short on science.” Johnson has since decamped to a law firm that represents telecom companies. (Johnson declined requests for comment.)

    Signs in Pittsfield denounce the Verizon cell tower. (Patrick Dodson for ProPublica)

    “It’s a slog at the moment to convince people this isn’t just crazy stuff,” said Louis Slesin, an MIT-trained environmental policy Ph.D. and the editor of Microwave News, an industry newsletter that has chronicled the wireless-radiation debate for four decades. “This is part of the organized campaign to devalue the science, with the government as a co-conspirator. The other really important factor is nobody wants to hear this because everybody loves the technology. If you shut down people’s phones, the country would come to a stop.”

    But a growing body of international research asserts that there is reason to worry about harms — many of them unrelated to cancer — from wireless radiation. Henry Lai, an emeritus professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, has compiled a database of 1,123 peer-reviewed studies published since 1990 investigating biological effects from wireless-radiation exposure. Some 77% have found “significant” effects, according to Lai. By contrast, an earlier review by Lai found that 72% of industry-sponsored studies reported no biological effects.

    One branch of research has studied radiation impacts on test animals, mostly rats and mice, but also guinea pigs, rabbits and cows. Another has examined epidemiological patterns, looking for health effects on human groups, such as heavy long-term cellphone users or people living near cellphone towers. Studies have found impacts on fertility, fetal development, DNA, memory function and the nervous system, as well as an association with an array of cancers. Several investigations reported a significantly increased risk of brain tumors, called gliomas, among the heaviest cellphone users. And the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, in 2011 classified wireless radiation as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

    Individual studies underline the value of simple precautions, which include using a headset or speaker and keeping the phone away from direct contact with your body. In 2009, Ashok Agarwal, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic’s American Center for Reproductive Medicine, found that exposing human semen to cellphone radiation for an hour caused a “significant decrease” in sperm motility and viability, impairing male fertility. He advises patients to avoid carrying phones in their pants pockets.

    Epidemiological studies show a rise in behavioral disorders among children whose mothers were heavy cellphone users while pregnant, while lab research found hyperactivity and reduced memory in mice exposed in the womb to cellphone radiation. “The evidence is really, really strong now that there is a causal relationship between cellphone radiation exposure and behavior issues in children,” said Dr. Hugh Taylor, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine and past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The period of fetal brain development is a “very vulnerable time,” he said.

    The American Academy of Pediatrics has written that the FCC’s safeguards “do not account for the unique vulnerability and use patterns specific to pregnant women and children.” It urged the agency to adopt measures “protective of children,” warning that their thinner skulls leave them “disproportionately impacted” by cellphone radiation, and called for better consumer disclosure about exposure risks.

    Both the FCC and Food and Drug Administration websites dismiss the existence of any special health risk to children. And the agencies don’t counsel people to limit their exposure. Instead they list safety steps, while insisting they’re really not necessary. The FCC’s “Wireless Devices and Health Concerns” page, for example, notes that “some parties” recommend safety measures, “even though no scientific evidence currently establishes a definitive link between wireless device use and cancer or other illnesses.” It then states, in bold: “The FCC does not endorse the need for these practices.” Only then does it list “some simple steps that you can take to reduce your exposure” to radio-frequency energy from cellphones.

    Efforts in the U.S. to promote awareness of wireless-radiation risks have sparked fierce industry resistance. In 2014, the CDC added this modest language to its website: “Along with many organizations worldwide, we recommend caution in cellphone use.” An influential industry consultant emailed the CDC within days, as a public-records request later revealed, complaining that “changes are truly needed” in the CDC’s language. The agency quickly softened its warning, which now says: “Some organizations recommend caution in cellphone use.”

    The industry’s main trade group, CTIA, has beaten back local consumer-disclosure measures. For example, in 2015, CTIA sued Berkeley, California, after its City Council passed an ordinance requiring retailers to post a safety notice warning customers that carrying a cellphone tucked in a pocket or bra might expose them to excessive radiation. (This was based on FCC guidelines, typically buried in small-print information included with new phones, that phones shouldn’t be kept in direct contact with the head or body.) A five-year legal battle, including a trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, ensued. It ended after the FCC weighed in, saying the ordinance interfered with its exclusive authority by “over-warning” consumers and frightening them “into believing that RF emissions from FCC-certified cellphones are unsafe.” With that, the judge ruled against the city.

    “The industry doesn’t want you to pay any attention to that stuff because that just creates anxiety among users,” said Joel Moskowitz, director of the Center for Family and Community Health at the University of California-Berkeley, who advised the city in its fight. “They want you to think these devices are perfectly safe.”

    By contrast, more than 20 foreign governments have adopted protective measures or recommended precautions. France requires new phones to be sold with headsets and written guidance on limiting radiation exposures; it also bans phones marketed to small children and ads aimed at anyone younger than 14. Greece and Switzerland routinely monitor radio-frequency radiation levels throughout the country. Britain, Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, India and South Korea urge citizens to limit both their own exposure and cellphone use by children. The European Environment Agency does too, noting: “There is sufficient evidence of risk to advise people, especially children, not to place the handset against their heads.”

    When the FCC’s rules on radio-frequency emissions from phones and transmitters were adopted 26 years ago, just 1 in 6 Americans owned cellphones, which they typically used for short periods. Today, 97% of adults own a cellphone, and they use the device for an average of five hours a day. More than half of children under 12 own a smartphone.

    Then and now, the FCC’s rules targeted just one health hazard: the possibility that wireless radiation can cause immediate “thermal” damage, by overheating skin the way a microwave oven heats food. Most experts agree that risk is nonexistent under any but the most unusual circumstances.

    Meanwhile, the FCC doesn’t even consider “biological” impacts: the possibility that wireless exposure, even at levels well below the FCC limits, can cause an array of human health problems, as well as harm to animals and the environment. The FCC’s approach matches the industry’s long-standing position: that wireless radiation is simply too weak to cause any nonheating damage.

    Of course, the wireless industry has every incentive to take this position. Going back to the 1990s, the industry has recognized the financial peril posed by health concerns over radiation, and it has pressed the public and government to reject them altogether.

    In 1994, for example, Motorola swung into action when it learned of troubling research by Lai and a University of Washington colleague, Narendra Singh, who found that two hours of exposure to modest levels of wireless radiation damaged DNA in the brains of lab rats. Such changes can lead to cancerous tumors.

    Motorola’s then-PR chief described a strategy to discredit the findings in a pair of memos that were later leaked to Microwave News. Motorola’s approach would serve as a template for the industry’s response to troublesome research over the three decades that followed. The researchers’ methodology would be challenged for raising “too many uncertainties” to justify any conclusions. The scientists’ credibility would be questioned and their findings dismissed as irrelevant. Finally, friendly academics, “willing and able to reassure the public on these matters,” would be recruited to rebut the findings. (At the time, Motorola defended its conduct as the “essence of sound science and corporate responsibility” and affirmed that there was “a sound scientific basis for public confidence in the safety of cellular telephones.”)

    Doubters in the government would be neutralized too. As the FCC moved toward adopting wireless-radiation limits in 1996, EPA officials, whose experts had conducted the most extensive government research on wireless-radiation risk, affirmed their concern about possible biological harm in a presentation to the FCC. They urged the FCC to follow a two-stage strategy: to meet a looming congressional deadline by first setting interim limits covering known thermal effects; then to commission a group of experts to study biological risks and develop permanent exposure guidelines.

    But the FCC never pursued “Phase 2.” Instead, just months later, Congress completed a multiyear defunding of the EPA’s wireless-radiation group, sidelining the agency from researching the issue. This left most independent study of the issue to scientists in other countries. At the EPA, a lone radio-frequency radiation expert named Norbert Hankin remained, periodically rankling the wireless industry by publicly rebutting “the generalization by many that the [FCC] guidelines protect human beings from harm by any or all mechanisms.”

    Going forward, the FCC, which has no in-house health or medical expertise of its own, would increasingly rely on the FDA and industry-influenced technical organizations. (The FDA itself has collaborated with the CTIA, the wireless industry trade group, to study cellphone safety. That research found “no association” between exposure to “cell phones and adverse health effects.”)

    Still, there was enough concern among government scientists from multiple agencies that, in 1999, the FDA asked the NTP to “assess the risk to human health.” The NTP conducts detailed lab studies, typically on rodents, to evaluate environmental hazards. Its findings, widely regarded as the gold standard for toxicology work, routinely prompt federal public-health actions.

    The FDA requested that the NTP conduct its own animal experiments, which were “crucial” to assess cancer risk because of the long delay between human exposure to a carcinogen and a tumor diagnosis. As an FDA memo put it, “There is currently insufficient scientific basis for concluding either that wireless communication technologies are safe or that they pose a risk to millions of users.”

    The NTP study was the biggest the agency had ever conducted and lasted over a decade. It used an unusually large number of rats and mice — some 3,000 — and involved both setting up a lab in Chicago and designing and constructing special radiation-exposure chambers for the rodents in Switzerland. The final report was released in November 2018.

    The results were dramatic. The study found “clear evidence” of rare cancerous heart tumors, called schwannomas, in male rats; “some evidence” of tumors in their brains and adrenal glands; and signs of DNA damage. The percentage that developed tumors was small, but, as the study’s authors noted earlier, “Given the extremely large number of people who use wireless communication devices, even a very small increase in the incidence of disease resulting from exposure” could have “broad implications for public health.”

    The federal government’s scientists had spoken. But the parts of the government charged with following the science and protecting people responded (in the case of the FCC) by publicly ignoring the results or (in the case of the FDA) pooh-poohing them. The study changed nothing, said Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and the chief official advising the FCC on wireless issues, in a statement at the time of the study’s release. Shuren disputed several key findings and asserted that the study “was not designed to test the safety of cellphone use in humans,” even though his own agency had commissioned it specifically for that reason. He added: “We believe the existing safety limits for cellphones remain acceptable for protecting the public health.” (An FDA spokesperson said Shuren declined to comment.)

    The NTP findings, combined with similar results that year from the Ramazzini research institute in Italy and other studies, demanded a strong response, according to three long-time former government experts who spoke to ProPublica. “It should have been the game-changer,” added Moskowitz, the Berkeley public-health researcher.

    The former government officials believe the NTP findings should have led to a detailed statistical risk assessment by federal health agencies, spelling out the possible incidence of cancer in the general population; development of stricter FCC limits to address biological risks; prominent user warnings detailing simple steps people should take to minimize their exposure; and dramatically increased research funding.

    None of that happened. “Their conclusion was, ‘Oh, there was nothing going on,’” said Birnbaum, the NTP’s then-director and a toxicologist. “Many of us found that very hard to believe.”

    Today Birnbaum, who retired in 2019 after 40 years with government health agencies, is tempered in her assessment of the evidence. “Do I see a smoking gun? Not per se. But do I see smoke? Absolutely. There’s enough data now to say that things can happen.” Birnbaum said the NTP results should have triggered a consumer advisory akin to “the black-box warning on a drug, to say this has been associated to possibly cause cancer.”

    Even as the NTP study was happening, the FCC in 2013 had been prodded by a Government Accountability Office report to review its radio-frequency exposure limit, unchanged since 1996. “We recognize that a great deal of scientific research has been completed in recent years and new research is currently underway, warranting a comprehensive examination,” the FCC wrote, in opening its inquiry.

    Over the six years that followed, 1,200 comments poured into the FCC’s docket, including scores of studies (and a briefing on the NTP findings); appeals for stronger protections signed by hundreds of international scientists; and 170 personal accounts of “electro-sensitivity” radiation sickness, similar to the complaints in Pittsfield, resulting from neighborhood cell towers. An Interior Department letter voiced concern about the impact of radiation from towers on migrating birds, noting that the FCC’s limits “continue to be based on thermal heating, a criterion now nearly 30 years out of date and inapplicable today.”

    The FCC was overwhelmed by the flood of comments, according to Mantiply, the agency official most involved in radio-frequency issues during this period. “We didn’t have the resources to even read all the comments,” he told ProPublica.

    Edwin Mantiply, a former FCC official, thought the agency was ignoring the issue of cellphone risk. (Greg Kahn, special to ProPublica)

    Mantiply thought higher-ups were ignoring the issue. “There was really nothing being done on it,” he said. “The inquiry was just on a back burner, and the back burner was turned off.” So Mantiply, a soft-spoken physical scientist, decided to take action. In 2017, as the FCC’s review of its wireless standards entered its fourth year, he said, he and three colleagues proposed hiring an outside consulting firm to conduct an environmental assessment, a detailed formal examination, of the submissions on the radiation safety limits. But their boss, Julius Knapp, the head of the FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology, summarily rejected the proposal, according to Mantiply. “He said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that.’ He let us know in no uncertain terms. He just rejected it in a single meeting.”

    (Knapp, who is now retired, declined to comment on the record. FCC officials, through a spokesperson, declined requests to discuss the matter. Former FCC engineer Walter Johnston, one of the colleagues Mantiply identified as backing his proposal, said he didn’t remember it ever being presented as a “formal recommendation.”)

    Mantiply’s proposal came at a time when the Trump White House and FCC commissioners were aggressively promoting 5G. FCC leadership was “not really thrilled with us pushing these inquiries,” Mantiply said. “They just felt like it’d get a lot of attention, that it would be in The Washington Post.”

    On his final day at the FCC in August 2018, as he was retiring after 42 years in government, Mantiply raised the issue with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel during a brief courtesy visit. “Don’t dismiss all this stuff because you’re hearing from industry, and they’re dismissing it,” Mantiply told her. “There’s uncertainty, and we don’t know what’s going on. It’s a very, very difficult problem.” Rosenworcel, he said, listened politely.

    Fifteen months later, the FCC voted unanimously to shut down its review after six years. There was no need to change anything, the commissioners concluded. After examining the record, the FCC declared in a written order, it had seen no evidence that the science underlying its standards was “outdated or insufficient to protect human safety.”

    The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., disagreed. Responding to a pair of lawsuits filed by the Environmental Health Trust and other activist groups, the court ruled in August 2021 that the FCC had failed to meet “even the low threshold of reasoned analysis” in finding that its limits “adequately protect against the harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation unrelated to cancer.” (The FCC had responded sufficiently to fears that wireless radiation causes cancer, the judges wrote.)

    It was a striking rebuke, given the judiciary’s practice of offering agency decisions a high degree of deference, especially on technical matters. The court wrote that it was taking “no position in the scientific debate” on wireless radiation’s effects, but it was scornful of the FCC’s heavy reliance on three “conclusory” statements from the FDA about safety. In oral argument, one judge also challenged the FCC’s claim that an interagency working group was closely monitoring concerns about wireless exposure on the FCC’s behalf; in fact, the group hadn’t met since 2018.

    The FCC’s actions, the court wrote, waved off any concern about protections for children and ignored “substantive evidence of potential environmental harms.” And the FCC had said nothing about the potential impacts of the many technological changes, including 5G, that had taken place since 1996. “Ultimately,” the court wrote, “the Commission’s order remains bereft of any explanation as to why, in light of the studies in the record, its guidelines remain adequate.”

    With that, the court sent the issue back to the FCC, for either a fresh review of its 26-year-old standard or better explanations to justify it. In the 15 months since, the FCC, now led by Rosenworcel, who was elevated by President Joe Biden, has taken no formal action.

    In its statement to ProPublica, the FCC said it is exploring “next steps” with its “federal partners.” However, the FDA, the FCC’s chief partner on health concerns, said in its own statement that it is not currently working with the FCC on any response to the court ruling. There’s been no visible sign of any preliminary FCC steps, according to four lawyers and representatives of the environmental groups that brought the court challenge.

    In the past few years, with the appearance of more neighborhood cell towers and transmitters, pressure has begun to rise on this issue beyond environmental groups, longtime activists and officials in liberal jurisdictions. In November 2020, a bipartisan state commission in New Hampshire charged with investigating 5G issued a detailed report concluding that wireless radiation “poses a significant threat to human health and the environment.” Among its recommendations: that all new cell towers be at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) from any residence, school or business. And in April, Mark Gordon, the Republican governor of Wyoming, wrote to Rosenworcel, urging the agency to reexamine its radiation limits based on “current scientific research” to make sure “the health and safety of our citizens is prioritized.”

    In Pittsfield, Orsi and her colleagues on the board have grown resigned to their inability to take action against Verizon. Reactions have varied around town. One group of affected neighbors is waging its own separate long-shot legal battle with the company. Others are coping with dark humor. Before Halloween, the local daily suggested dressing up as a cellphone tower to “strike fear in the heart of your neighbors.” Nobody in Pittsfield is holding out hope that the federal government will intervene.

    “It’s very natural for the FCC to listen to the industry,” said Mantiply, the former agency staffer. “That’s their audience and who they deal with most of the time.” But, he added, “They’re answering to industry more than anything.”

    Do You Work for the Federal Government? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You.

    Doris Burke contributed research.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • In the fall of 2010, the District of Columbia was preparing to do something bold: allow overseas voters to cast their ballots online. A few weeks ahead of the November general election, it conducted a mock internet election and invited the public to try and hack the system. Within a few days, computer scientists at the University of Michigan had gained near complete control of the election server.

    The team took control of webcams mounted inside the server room that housed the pilot, used login information to match specific ballots to specific voters, and changed not just votes that had been cast, but also ones that would be. “There is little hope for protecting future ballots from this level of compromise, since the code that processes the ballots is itself suspect,” the team wrote in a follow-up paper.

    Afterward, D.C. officials confirmed that they had failed to see the attacks in their intrusion detection system logs, didn’t detect their presence in the network equipment, and only realized what had happened after seeing the group’s calling card: the University of Michigan fight song playing on the “Thank You” page that appeared after voting.

    Technology has improved significantly since 2010, but internet voting presents a unique challenge. With paper, voters can verify that their ballot is correct before they mail it or insert it into a scanner. Once that ballot is tabulated, there’s no way to connect it back to the voter. It is irretrievable. When you cast a vote electronically, how do you ensure that the ballot the election office receives is the same ballot that you submitted — while also maintaining anonymity, producing an independent paper trail, allowing for some way to audit the results, providing publicly verifiable evidence if errors are detected, and ensuring that candidates can contest the results?

    “No currently known technology—including blockchain—is close to enabling mobile or Internet voting systems to simultaneously achieve of all these requirements,” researchers from MIT wrote in a 2021 peer-reviewed paper titled “Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting.”

    The year of the D.C. meltdown, Brooke Pinto wasn’t yet living in the District. But after becoming the youngest-ever D.C. councilmember in 2020, she began working on one of the most expansive mobile voting bills in the country.

    Allowing any eligible voter to cast a ballot using an internet-connected device, Pinto has claimed, would make voting more accessible, especially for voters of color, those with disabilities, and older adults. It could also raise the chronically low turnout rates in the District: 28 percent for the 2020 primary and around 67 percent for that year’s general, a little lower than the national average.

    Pinto had no formal experience in voting or technology, but she said constituents had talked about it during her campaign. According to emails obtained through a public records request, in July 2021 her brother introduced her to Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist who made millions from stock and options received from his work at Uber.

    Tusk has poured money into a nonprofit and lobbying apparatus dedicated to pushing internet voting nationwide. His organization, Mobile Voting, has already conducted 21 internet voting pilots in seven states, and Tusk Philanthropies, which also works to combat food insecurity, has registered lobbyists in at least 12 states and Washington, D.C. Last year, Tusk Philanthropies announced a $10 million grant program to fund the development of a new internet-based voting system, according to NPR, in the hopes that every American will have the option to vote electronically by 2028.

    His crusade could not come at a more perilous time for American democracy. Trust in the system is historically low, disinformation around voting technology is especially rampant, and many lawmakers are already suspicious of private companies providing any kind of assistance to election offices, which continue to be chronically underfunded.

    After Pinto signaled her interest in pushing internet voting, Tusk’s team, including his organization’s D.C. lobbyist, Max Brown of Group 360, commissioned a public poll on the issue, rallied support from prominent civil rights groups like the NAACP, connected Pinto with experts, and helped draft the legislation and an op-ed in support of it.

    Tusk argues that, because only extreme idealogues vote in their party primaries, politicians have no incentive to compromise, fueling hyperpartisanship and gridlock. But if we made voting significantly more convenient, he says, it would dramatically increase turnout and make policy more representative. “This is the only way to change the political inputs,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “This is the only way to stop mass shootings, to come up with solutions to problems ranging from immigration to opioids, health care to education, climate change to infrastructure.”

    However, assuming the technology is perfectly secure, there’s a problem. The foundation of Tusk’s argument — that internet voting will “exponentially” increase turnout — is contradicted by mountains of evidence, including research he’s funded. Even one of Tusk’s own grantees has spoken out against the bill.

    None of this has dissuaded Tusk. “Short of committing a crime,” he’s said, there’s “nothing unethical about anything I could possibly do to try to make mobile voting happen.”

    Bradley Tusk, chief executive officer and founder of Tusk Ventures Ltd., listens during the Power of Data: Sooner Than You Think global technology conference in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019. The event convenes leaders on the front lines taking action to move the technology industry forward. Photographer Cate Dingley/Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Bradley Tusk attends a conference in the Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 30, 2019.

    Photo: Cate Dingley/Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Mobile Voting declined to grant interviews for this story, and much of the information about its programs is available only through open records requests (or is not public at all). And Tusk’s philanthropic and venture capital arms did not respond to a request for comment.

    Even when organizations providing funding around elections do disclose, trust is hard to come by. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, donated $400 million to the Center for Tech and Civic Life. The money was meant to help election offices respond to the pandemic, every eligible jurisdiction that applied for a grant received one, and the company later published a copy of its tax form listing all of the funds it had distributed. Still, Republicans accused the tech billionaire of conspiring to bribe election officials and steal votes, with one Republican congresswoman decrying that the “liberal non-profit group flooded left-leaning counties … with opaque private funding to increase voter turnout.”

    Described by Fast Company as “Silicon Valley’s political savior,” Tusk served as communications director for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., from 2000 to 2002; was deputy governor of Illinois from 2003 to 2006; and managed Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 campaign for a third term as mayor of New York City.

    In 2011, he became Uber’s first political adviser and worked until 2015 to expand ride-hailing in major cities across the country. When he left the company, he owned what some reports estimated as $100 million in stock. Over the past 15 years, he’s personally donated at least $359,000 to Democratic candidates (and at least $25,000 to Republican ones), according to FollowTheMoney.org.

    In 2015, he founded Tusk Ventures, a venture capital fund that primarily invests in startups in highly regulated industries, like gambling, cannabis, and insurance. A year later, he launched Tusk Philanthropies, which supports Mobile Voting and mimics the playbook that Tusk developed while at Uber.

    When discussing a major election nonprofit that advocates for handmarked paper ballots, Tusk said on his podcast, “You know what paper ballots got us? Bush v. Gore. You know what that got us? The Iraq War. You know what that got us? Hundreds of thousands of people killed for no reason. My voting technology’s never killed a single person. Theirs has killed hundreds of thousands.”

    Tusk also frames opposition as proof that he’s succeeding. “It probably goes without saying that those who like things the way they are—in other words, every current politician, interest group, union, major donors, and anyone else who has no interest in making it easier for people to challenge their power—will raise a host of objections to mobile voting,” Tusk wrote in his 2018 book, “The Fixer.” Regardless of what opponents say about security or practicality, he suggests, they’re really just afraid of the competition.

    And it also means growing more quickly than even proponents would advise. Chris Walker is the clerk for Jackson County, Oregon, one of the places that has partnered with Mobile Voting to offer internet voting for military and overseas voters. Walker loves the system and wishes the state would expand its use to other groups, including voters with disabilities, victims of natural disasters, first responders, and out-of-state voters. But it’s imperative that the process move slowly, she said recently.

    “Should it be mainstream right now? Absolutely not, I don’t think we’re ready for that.”

    In 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, California’s secretary of state convened a task force to study the possibility of voting online. “We went in assuming that the idea was, ‘Well, what’s the best way to bring internet building to the people of California?’” says David Jefferson, who was chair of the technical issues committee and has advised five successive Californian secretaries of state on technology-related issues. “I realized that there were profound security problems,” he says. “Not only that, but there were not going to be any solutions to them. … They were unsolvable.”

    Still, Mobile Voting is trying to solve them by developing its own digital absentee voting system. On its website, Mobile Voting says that the system is based on the requirements identified by the U.S. Vote Foundation, and it links to a 2015 report to which Jefferson contributed. He says he’s unimpressed by what he’s seen from Mobile Voting so far. “There is nothing on that site but prose — no technical specs at all — not even a cartoon architectural diagram,” he wrote in an email.

    Beyond the dearth of technical details, he also raised the issue of who would own the system; have legal liability for its failures; maintain, operate, and upgrade it; and — perhaps most critically if it were to be adopted nationwide — certify it.

    “There is nothing on that site but prose — no technical specs at all.”

    Jefferson has worked for years to stop internet voting legislation, including a bill in California that passed the Senate in May but was later pulled down by its author. Nationwide, at least 21 internet voting-related bills were introduced this year, according to Voting Rights Lab, which documents and analyzes voting and election laws. That includes the one in D.C.

    In January 2022, Councilmember Brooke Pinto’s staff started editing the D.C. internet voting bill with Jocelyn Bucaro, a former elections official who now serves as the director of the Mobile Voting project, according to the emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. Over the next few weeks, the two parties exchanged at least three drafts of the legislation, according to emails obtained through FOIA. Meanwhile, Pinto also received guidance from Max Brown, the $17,000-average-a-month lobbyist working on behalf of Mobile Voting, according to lobbyist reports from D.C.’s Board of Ethics and Government Accountability.

    To offer feedback on the bill’s security components, Brown emailed Pinto’s legislative director with the names of three people he described as “3rd party folks unaffiliated with us” and “arms length from our advocates. One was on Mobile Voting’s Circle of Advisors. (Brown says he was told they weren’t affiliated with Mobile Voting and that he never spoke to or met any of them).

    Another was Andre McGregor, a former partner at ShiftState Security. In late 2018, ShiftState conducted a security assessment of Voatz, one of the internet voting vendors that Mobile Voting has hired to provide the technology for at least one of its pilots. McGregor told Slate that the company’s technology did “very well” but did not release the company’s underlying report.

    Researchers at MIT later discovered that Voatz had “vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user’s vote,” and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden asked McGregor to explain his positive review. “Several state officials have cited your company’s audit in response to my office’s inquiries about Voatz’s security or lack thereof,” wrote Wyden. “These officials believe, reasonably so, that Voatz’s technology passed a comprehensive audit.”

    ShiftState did not release the underlying report. McGregor had been a part of Mobile Voting’s Circle of Advisors, but he says his involvement with the group ended in late 2021, before Brown sent that email to Pinto’s office. After being contacted by The Intercept, McGregor says he asked Mobile Voting to remove his name from its Circle of Advisors.

    The third recommendation, Donald Kersey, is general counsel to another Circle of Advisors member, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner. In his email to Pinto’s legislative director, Kersey criticized the bill for being “light on procedures,” like minimum security standards, and attached spreadsheets of technical materials. However, the bill requires that the Board of Elections be the one to develop the system’s security protocols — and within 180 days of the law taking effect.

    “When people ask for best practices for voting online, it’s rather like asking for best practices for driving drunk.”

    Ultimately, though, the bill’s lack of specificity may not matter, says Ron Rivest, a cryptographer at MIT who co-invented one of the most widely used algorithms to securely transmit data. “When people ask for best practices for voting online, it’s rather like asking for best practices for driving drunk,” he says.

    Though Pinto has cited the example of online banking to suggest that online voting is also feasible, she acknowledged to The Intercept that “there are differences, of course, between the two.” She mentioned that banks have protocols for when an account is hacked and that the stakes are different when it comes to our democracy.

    There are other challenges, including remotely verifying a voter’s identity and ensuring that a voter’s device is free from malware. But perhaps the biggest challenge that Pinto failed to mention is this: Unlike applying for a passport or submitting your taxes, casting a ballot must be done anonymously — and for that reason, it can never be recovered or modified. (Even in a blockchain-based electronic voting system, which allows anonymity and security, users must still use potentially vulnerable devices and network infrastructure, meaning such a system is still susceptible to serious failures.)

    “Electronic ballot return faces significant security risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of voted ballots. These risks can ultimately affect the tabulation and results, and can occur at scale,” says a 2020 report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Election Assistance Commission, and the FBI.

    Even a grant recipient of Tusk Philanthropies doesn’t believe the practice is safe. “For the foreseeable future iVoting solutions introduce far more risk than benefit because there remain too many technical problems to verifiably solve,” said Gregory Miller, COO and co-founder of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, or OSET, which Miller said received a two-year, $1 million grant from Tusk Philanthropies.

    On its website, Mobile Voting says that OSET was awarded funding to support the development of “an open-source, end-to-end verifiable mobile voting solution for digital absentee voting.” Miller says this is not a correct characterization.

    “We do not consider ourselves as a ‘partner’ in their pursuit of mobile voting,” he wrote in an email. He added, “We are not actively researching or attempting to develop any software solutions to attempt to address some of the challenging problems to iVoting.”

    He then linked to an open letter he says that OSET had signed, urging the D.C. Council not to pass Pinto’s bill.

    WASHINGTON, D.C. - JANUARY 2: Brooke Pinto, the council member for ward two, poses for a portrait before being sworn in as a member of the Council of the District of Columbia outside of the Wilson Building in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, January 2, 2021 (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

    Brooke Pinto is sworn in as a member of the Council of the District of Columbia outside of the Wilson Building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 2, 2021.

    Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

    On February 18, 2022, Pinto formally introduced the Mobile VOTE Act along with seven co-sponsors, a majority of the council. Its coalition of supporters would eventually include more than a dozen progressive organizations, faith groups, and racial justice nonprofits, including the D.C. chapter of the NAACP.

    In April, the group demanded a public hearing for the bill, something that the chair of the committee in charge of the bill, Charles Allen, had refused to do, citing security concerns raised by experts. For Tusk, the lines were clear: Supporters of his bill, generally “people of color who really want to be able to increase access to voting,” he said on his podcast, and Allen, a “rich, white … out-of-district” member who represents “rich white people.”

    Pinto, the bill’s champion, had lived in D.C. for eight years, did not vote in the District before 2020, and had only registered the year before. She was the only candidate in her ward to decline participating in the public financing program, personally contributed $45,000 to her campaign, and had the most money coming from out of state of all the candidates in her race.

    During her campaign, she also boasted of being “the only candidate to have endorsements from a sitting U.S. senator and sitting U.S. congressmember,” both of which her family had reportedly donated to over the past decade. Critically, she was also endorsed by the Washington Post. “Unlike some candidates promising the sky under the banner of progressive justice,” the editorial board wrote, “she is steeped in reality and would hit the ground running with grit and smarts.”

    In the 2020 primary, she won by only 379 votes — and with just 28 percent of the total. A little more than a quarter of voters turned out.

    To put pressure on Allen, Pinto, Mobile Voting, and its allies framed the issue as a moral imperative. “If passed and signed into law, this expansion of voting options would represent a remarkable victory in the civil rights struggle of our day,” said Pinto and the Rev. H. Lionel Edmonds, senior pastor of the Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church, in an op-ed written in consultation with Tusk’s lobbyist, Max Brown, according to public records.

    It appeared that the public was on their side. As at least one press clipping repeated, 70 percent of D.C. residents supported a mobile voting option. Mobile Voting often touts these kinds of customer satisfaction surveys, like the 100 percent of survey respondents in Denver who said that of all the methods of voting, they preferred voting on their smartphone.

    “Unless you are seriously informed about the security issues, who would say no?” says David Jefferson. “It does sound like a good idea.”

    Tellingly, another study found that West Virginia voters who were told that the system was secured by blockchain technology were less willing to use it again. “Maybe it tips them off to this idea that, ‘Oh right, there’s security risks here with mobile voting,” said the study’s author, Anthony Fowler, a professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.

    To further vouch for the security of its pilots, Mobile Voting has also cited at least one “independent” audit conducted by the National Cybersecurity Center, a Colorado-based nonprofit established in 2016 “for cyber innovation and awareness.”

    Mobile Voting has hired the NCC to manage and implement at least two of its pilot programs and paid them a fee to do so, according to memoranda of understanding obtained by open records requests. That includes a 2020 pilot in King County, Washington, which demonstrated that “with top-notch platform development, effective election official training and voter education, mobile voting can be accomplished securely,” said Forrest Senti, then director of business and government initiatives at NCC and now vice president of programs and operations — and another member of Mobile Voting’s Circle of Advisors. (The NCC did not grant an interview for this story and does not disclose its conflict of interest policy or financial statements).

    In 2020, Tusk donated $40,000 to Shemia Fagan’s campaign to become Oregon’s secretary of state — the most he’s ever donated to a candidate and Fagan’s largest individual donor, according to FollowTheMoney.org. After Fagan won her race and became the state’s chief election official, a bill was introduced in the state’s legislature to create an internet voting system. The content of the legislation matched a document that Mobile Voting’s lobbyist had emailed to Pinto’s legislative director a few months earlier — and it would’ve put Fagan in charge of creating the rules around the system’s implementation.

    Fagan did not support the bill, and the bill did not pass. Fagan told The Intercept her independent judgment was never compromised by Tusk’s donation and that she declined Mobile Voting’s invitation to join its Circle of Advisors, saying she wanted to focus instead on restoring trust in vote by mail. As for her position on internet voting, she says she did meet with representatives from Mobile Voting. “Ultimately, they could not refute the strongest concerns raised by the opponents,” she said.

    MG_1909

    The Mobile Voting Project website displayed on an iPhone on Nov. 3, 2022.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    In the end, Mobile Voting’s D.C. coalition wasn’t able to persuade Charles Allen, who never granted the bill a public hearing. But Tusk wasn’t daunted. “I haven’t started putting pressure on this guy,” he said in a podcast episode released in June. “There’s stuff that I’ve found out about him that hasn’t become public yet that’s gonna really fuck up his life.”

    In a public survey Mobile Voting had commissioned about voting in the District, just 2 percent of respondents believed voting was difficult to begin with.

    The District automatically registers voters, allows online and same-day registration, and could soon verify residents to vote without them having to register at all. For this year’s midterms, the Board of Elections has automatically mailed every actively registered voter an absentee ballot, which can be returned up to seven days after Election Day, one of the most permissive deadlines in the country. And the District offers eight days of early voting.

    Nationally, D.C. is better than most, but it’s not as much of an outlier as you might expect. Forty-six states and D.C. offer early in-person voting, and 35 states and D.C. either conduct all-mail elections or offer no-excuse absentee voting.

    “Convenience does help, but it doesn’t have a transformative effect” on turnout.

    “Convenience does help, but it doesn’t have a transformative effect” on turnout, says Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Columbia University and the co-author of a book on turnout.

    Paul Gronke, a political science professor at Reed College, agrees and points out that turnout is even more complicated for primaries, which Tusk considers so fundamental to his reform because of how heavily gerrymandered most districts are. “You don’t have party cues anymore, so you have to search for other cues,” Gronke says. That process takes substantially more effort and information.

    Another underlying issue, says Fowler, the University of Chicago professor, is that most people don’t vote based on where their ballot matters most. If that were the case, turnout rates would be highest in local elections.

    Tusk also argues that radical primary voters have hijacked our politics, which isn’t well supported by evidence, says Lee Drutman, a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies. “Primary voters are more politically engaged and stronger partisans, but not significantly more ideologically extreme,” writes Drutman. Other researchers have found the same.

    Nor is there compelling evidence that engaging more voters would significantly change our politics, according to a 2020 Knight Foundation survey of 12,000 chronic non-voters. “If they all voted in 2020,” the report said, “non-voters would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates.”

    However, this group was less likely to actively seek out news, agree that votes are counted fully and accurately, or believe that politicians’ decisions have a strong impact on their lives — attitudes that internet voting is unlikely to change. Likewise, Tusk’s reform does little to register voters, combat gerrymandering, open up primaries, make elections more competitive, improve the quality of the candidates running, or diminish the power of dark money and political action committees.

    As to the effect of internet voting on participation, would it increase turnout in the District — or anywhere else — by 10, 20, 30 percent?

    “There’s zero evidence to support that kind of a claim,” says Fowler, who received a grant from Tusk Philanthropies for his research, which found between a 3 to 5 percentage point turnout bump in West Virginia’s internet voting pilot.

    Internet voting’s potential to raise turnout is even weaker for the 15 percent of D.C. residents who don’t have smartphones. In “The Fixer,” though, Tusk makes a suggestion: “It’d be far cheaper to just buy them for everyone than to run a government this inefficient and this ineffective because no one bothers to vote.”

    In theory, however, internet voting could substantially help other groups, something that Tusk uses to his advantage.

    “We’ve either made it available to deployed military or people with disabilities,” Tusk said on a podcast in 2021. “We’ve found one group on the right that no one can object to, and one group on the left that no one can object to.”

    Per a 2009 federal law, military and overseas voters have the option to receive a blank ballot electronically for federal elections, and 31 states also allow them to return that ballot electronically. Some states require that voters explicitly waive their right to a secret ballot.

    In that light, the president of Democracy Live, one of Mobile Voting’s technology vendors, says he sees his company’s online portal not as a silver bullet, but rather as a better solution than the fax or email option commonly offered. “It’s not, ‘Let’s go do online voting for America,’” says Bryan Finney. Instead, it’s “Can we do that better? Can we do that more securely?”

    Combined, the people casting ballots electronically represented less than .2 percent of all the votes cast in 2020. However, voters with disabilities are increasingly advocating to use those digital options for themselves.

    These voters have always faced significant barriers. It can be difficult just getting to poll sites, which then present challenges of their own, and voting at home can be just as fraught, especially as states have limited the kind of assistance that voters can receive. Until recently in Indiana, voters could only be helped by a “traveling board” of elections officials who would come to their homes. Thanks to a recent court decision, they can now be assisted by almost anyone — but that’s not the victory it may seem, says Michelle Bishop, voter access and engagement manager at the National Disability Rights Network.

    “We are basically telling them to ask someone else to mark a ballot they will never be able to verify and just trust that it was marked as intended,” she says.

    For now, Pinto has backed off of internet voting. “Since introducing the bill, I have had many more conversations with residents and experts and my staff and I have read additional reporting on the issue,” she told The Intercept. “At this time, mobile voting is not ripe to move forward as additional security protections are likely needed to be considered.”

    Still, others, if not Tusk’s, will inevitably pop up elsewhere, says MIT’s Ron Rivest. “It’s like Whac-A-Mole.”

    And once a right is expanded to one group, another usually follows. In 2018, West Virginia officials said they had no plans to extend mobile voting beyond the relatively small overseas population. “Secretary [of State Mac] Warner has never and will never advocate that this is a solution for mainstream voting,” his deputy chief of staff told the Washington Post. In 2021, internet voting in the state was offered to voters with qualifying disabilities. This February, it was expanded again to certain first responders.

    Or, as Tusk put it in 2019, “What we learned at Uber is once the genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put back in.”

    This reporting was made possible through grants from the Gumshoe Group and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

    The post An Uber Millionaire Wants You to Vote on the Internet — Despite the Inherent Vulnerabilities appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Since the takeover, Musk has moved quickly to put his stamp on the company, firing its previous chief and other top officials

    This post was originally published on The Asian Age | Home.

  • Ahead of the United Nations Climate Conference (COP27) on November 6, governments are making a big deal of their pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But, even if all the pledges were kept, global warming would still reach catastrophic levels by the end of the century, argues Ben Radford.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Ahead of the COP27 climate meeting in Egypt, Breaking Green podcast spoke to Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.

    The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.

    In one instance, Google continued to place ads on a publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U.S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after being contacted by ProPublica.

    Google ads are a major source of revenue for sites that spread election disinformation in Brazil, notably false claims about the integrity of the voting system that have been advanced by the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro. Voters in Brazil are going to the polls on Sunday with the outcome in doubt after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting.

    The investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about COVID-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.

    The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

    Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.

    Google’s publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

    ProPublica’s examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails.

    A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica it’s because Google invests in oversight based on three key concerns.

    “The number one is bad PR — they are very sensitive to that. The second one is trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny or potentially regulatory action that could impact their business. And number three is revenue,” said the former leader, who agreed to speak on the condition that their name not be used in order not to hurt their business and career prospects. “For all these three, English-speaking markets primarily have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the efforts are going into those.”

    ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

    The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

    A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

    In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

    Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

    A spokesperson for the Red Cross said its ad appeared on the far-right German site due to an automated placement it did not directly control.

    “Please note that based upon our Fundamental Principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides in issues of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature, so we would purposefully not advertise on a story or site such as the one you shared with us,” said a statement from the organization.

    Coach and St. John did not respond to requests for comment.

    Google’s policy is to remove ads from individual articles that violate its rules, and to take sitewide action if violations reach a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed ads from at least 14 websites identified in the investigation after being contacted by ProPublica.

    Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company has put more money into non-English-language enforcement and oversight, which has led to an increase in the number of ads blocked on pages that violate its rules. He declined to provide figures or to say how many people Google has working on non-English-language content and ad review.

    “We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”

    The data about ad removals comes from Google’s most recent Ads Safety report, which emphasized the removal of ads from more than half a million pages that violated policies against harmful claims about COVID-19 and false claims that could undermine elections. But Google does not release a list of pages or publishers it took action against, the countries and languages they operate in or other data related to its Ads Safety report.

    Google has been vocal about its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, support fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” But the investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable.

    Laura Zommer, the general director of the Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as the first fact-checking organization in Latin America, said Google’s failure to invest in oversight of sites in languages other than English causes serious harm in emerging democracies.

    “The problem is that disinformation that takes hold in less developed democracies can cause even more damage than the disinformation circulating in countries with more developed democracies,” said Zommer, who is also the co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.

    In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries where democracy is fragile, 26 of the 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading claims in the region earn money from Google, according to data from local fact-checkers.

    “If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t care that it has made false information, hate speech and toxic propaganda profitable in societies like ours, and has no intention to do anything to change because it wouldn’t financially pay off, that is devastating,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a member of the editorial board of Bosnian fact-checking site Raskrinkavanje, which shared data with ProPublica.

    A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.

    Along with unequal enforcement across languages, ProPublica found disparity across and within regions.

    Africa Check shared a list of 68 active English-language URLs that had been fact- checked as false by teams in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya since 2019, as well as 45 French-language articles that had been debunked by its French-language checkers. ProPublica’s analysis found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had ads from Google, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French-language articles.

    Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit organization that researches disinformation, said Google should be required to equally enforce its policies across languages and regions and to be transparent about its oversight decisions.

    “These companies have decided to go global in their services, and that was their own decision for growth and to make revenue,” he said. “It’s not possible to make this choice and not face the accountability needed to be in all of these countries at the same time.”

    Google’s Global Ad Dominance

    Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising business. Last year it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from companies paying to place ads on Google products such as search and YouTube. But in 2021 Google earned $31 billion by placing its customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites around the world. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.

    These publishing partners range from major news outlets such as The New York Times to small sites run by individuals. In order to join the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet requirements that include publishing original content and adhering to policies against unreliable and harmful claims and sexually explicit content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, publishers in the network receive 68% of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.

    Google’s ad systems are also used to place ads on websites that are not necessarily members of its Display Network. These publishers work with ad technology companies that have partnered with Google, and which use its technology to buy and sell ads. As with ads placed on sites in the Display Network, Google and the publisher both earn money.

    Google places ads on publisher sites using an automated auction system called programmatic advertising. The process starts when a person visits a webpage or opens an app. As the page loads, the site or app owner collects information about the ad space available along with data about the user, which can include location, age range, browsing history and interests.

    The data is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated by Google, where ad buyers — ranging from major brands like Spotify to smaller local businesses — can place a bid to show an ad to the specific user visiting the website or app. Bids are placed, or not, based on the user and publisher data shared with potential advertisers and the price an advertiser is willing to pay to reach that person.

    In the blink of an eye, the top bidder wins the auction and the ad loads on the page. Money flows from the ad buyer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), eventually making its way to the website or app publisher.

    In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

    How much of Google’s revenue comes from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of digital display ads placed every day by Google has a different price point that fluctuates based on the combination of advertiser, target website and the users the ad will be shown to. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely automated digital ad buying and selling process dominated by Google. This means advertisers have to rely in part on the mix of automation and human review Google uses to ensure its publisher partners don’t violate its rules.

    The findings of fact-checkers could be used by Google to enforce its policy against placing ads next to content that makes unreliable and harmful claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases scientists, to identify and investigate claims spreading on the web, on social media and in traditional media. Their articles and associated ratings are used by platforms including Meta to help enforce policies around false and harmful content. Google already highlights fact-checks in search and Google News results to direct people to trustworthy information. But the company does not use fact-checks to keep ads off of pages with unreliable or harmful claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it does not pay fact-checkers for the results of their research.

    “When it comes to ads, they obviously monetize disinformation. Whether it’s without knowing or knowing, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been a public announcement from Google’s side that has acknowledged fact-checking as a signal for their ads monetization business.”

    Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s relationship with fact-checkers.

    Failed Enforcement in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia

    On Sept. 20, as he prepared to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader who has expressed strong support for the invasion.

    The Putin meeting was a propaganda coup for Dodik. Even better for him, Google helped ensure it was lucrative.

    After the meeting, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the meeting and quoting Dodik about plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while sowing doubt about genocide committed during the Bosnian war, a frequent Dodik talking point. A ProPublica reporter viewing those stories was served ads for Saks Fifth Avenue department store, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed via Google’s ad systems. ProPublica also documented ads from brands such as Guess on false ATV articles claiming that Serbia had found a cure for COVID-19 and NATO was planning to deploy troops to Ukraine.

    A Saks spokesperson said its ads were not supposed to have appeared on ATV, and that the company would block the site from future campaigns.

    “It was not our intention to advertise on this site as it violates the brand safety guidelines we have in place with our ad partner,” said a statement from the company.

    An eBay spokesperson also said its ad was not placed “intentionally” on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.

    Ads for Guess appeared recently on an ATV article from 2020 that falsely claimed Serbia had a cure for COVID-19. (ProPublica screenshot)

    Google is helping the site earn money by placing ads on false and divisive content in spite of the ATV website and its related TV station being sanctioned in January by the U.S. Treasury Department due to Dodik’s “corrupt activities and continued threats to the stability and territorial integrity” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik “exerts personal control over ATV,” approves content and corruptly funnels government contracts to the outlet, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.

    Google removed ads from the ATV website after being contacted by ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. ATV and representatives from Dodik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

    ATV is one of the 30 most frequent sources of false and misleading content published in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, according to data provided to ProPublica by Raskrinkavanje. Of the 30 sites most flagged by Raskrinkavanje for false claims, 26 made money with Google. The list included popular sites in the region, such as the websites of tabloid newspapers, as well as smaller operations that in some cases don’t disclose their owners or are run by fringe figures.

    ProPublica also scanned close to 10,000 active articles that fact checkers in the three Balkan countries flagged for false claims since 2019. Just over 60% were earning money with Google. The articles included a range of falsehoods about national politics, the pandemic, vaccines, the war in Ukraine and other topics.

    “It might just be a financial matter for Google, but for us it’s a corrosive influence on our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.

    Ads for Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, BetMGM and a women’s clothing site were placed via Google’s systems on a Srbin.info article falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccines can change people’s DNA. (ProPublica screenshot)

    Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin.info, a Serbian website that publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election conspiracies about the U.S. and anti-LGBTQ content. Its homepage features a prominent hyperlink directly to the official Kremlin website. Google ads abound there and on article pages.

    Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin.info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 per month, with Google ads providing a key portion of the revenue.

    “The editorial policy of Srbin.info from the beginning was to offer relevant alternative news, not to brainwash people or to determine how they should live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist society based on single-mindedness and we got sick of single-mindedness.”

    In April, Srbin.info published an article claiming that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could change the genetic makeup of people and alter “human genetics forever.” The story cited debunked claims by an American doctor who falsely claimed children’s DNA could be altered by the vaccines.

    Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify, and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who viewed the story. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on the Balkan sites and articles identified by ProPublica in the analysis.

    Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the vaccines article contained information he felt was “relevant for the public” because it came from a medical professional.

    Google also placed ads on an article making a similar false claim when it spread across a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can change “the genetic structure of a person” was reported by B92, which is among the 30 sites in the region most often flagged by fact-checkers. It eventually corrected its story, but has a history of publishing false claims and potentially harmful health content.

    B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but could be poisonous if the fruit is cracked (it later corrected this story); and that there’s a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name some of the stories local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had ads from Google when viewed by ProPublica, except for the cancer cure story, which was deleted by the site at some point after publication.

    B92 did not respond to a request for comment.

    The rampant anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Just 25% of people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest rates in Europe. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April by Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests conspiracy theories have taken hold among the population. Almost half of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines contain “dangerous nanoparticles,” and 38% believe the mRNA vaccines “alter DNA.”

    Brazil’s Disinfo Boom

    For at least four years, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has sowed doubt and spread disinformation about the country’s electoral process and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a 2021 Supreme Court investigation that documented his false claims.

    Aiding his efforts are pro-Bolsonaro websites with big audiences — and a slew of ads courtesy of Google.

    One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple based in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, it published a story containing a clip from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the risks of electronic voting machines. The site used this to undermine confidence in Brazil’s electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but have repeatedly been proven secure, and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the country.

    On Oct. 2, the day Brazilians voted in the first round of the presidential elections, Terra Brasil Notícias was one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites threatened with a fine by the head of the country’s Superior Electoral Court for publishing a falsehood about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he’d vote for Lula.

    Marie Santini, director of the Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the number of junk news and disinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as their audience, exploded in Brazil in part because Google ads make it easy for people to earn money from this type of content. She likened it to people who might drive for Uber to earn extra cash.

    “You don’t need to make quality content or really work with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from your house and you receive some money,” she said. “It’s a way to make money for people that are without opportunity. But who is making money on a large scale? Of course, it’s the platform, Google.”

    In response to the court’s finding, Terra Brasil Notícias took down the story that repeated the false claim about Lula. It also deleted its article about U.S. voting machines after Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos contacted the site last month. In an email, Aos Fatos listed eight recent articles from the site that it rated as false, and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on its relationship with Google. In response, the site published the email from Aos Fatos and defended the articles. It later deleted all of them. As of this writing, it still earns money with Google.

    Terra Brasil Notícias did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.

    Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of right-wing and left-wing messaging groups and websites. They shared a list of 262 active Portuguese-language websites in Brazil that circulated in messaging groups and were labeled by researchers as publishing false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites flagged for disinformation earn money with Google. When that list was compressed to the 30 most shared sites in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, ProPublica found that 80% of them earn money with ads placed via Google.

    “This ecosystem of sites is very important for politics in Brazil,” said Santini. “They are very powerful because people consume this thinking that it’s journalism, but it’s only propaganda. And it’s paid by Google ads.”

    Ads are also funding COVID-19 disinformation in Brazil. Google placed ads on a false October 2021 story from Stylo Urbano that claimed people could develop AIDS as the result of COVID-19 vaccinations; a false December 2020 story on the same site claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a false February 2021 article on the site that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19.

    After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed its ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.

    Brazil is one of several countries in Latin America where false claims are funded by Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of websites they said are frequent sources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) currently earn money with Google.

    The coalition was led by Chequeado, the Argentinian nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado has received support from Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But it and other platforms’ ongoing failure to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make their work more difficult, according to her.

    “The fight against disinformation is unequal, as is the world,” Zommer said.

    An Anonymous Network in Spain

    Google’s enforcement failures in Spanish, a language spoken by roughly 550 million people, extend beyond Latin America.

    On Sept. 22, the site Euskal News, based in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, published an article that suggested excess deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of COVID-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted from another site, said the vaccines are possibly “causing deaths in a figure well above the average. The failure could not be more resounding.”

    There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing excess mortality. But the story is standard fare for Euskal News, a Google publishing partner that mixes anti-immigrant content and vaccine disinformation with warnings of an impending globalist and EU takeover.

    A EuskalNews story with Google ads that falsely linked excess death figures in the Netherlands to vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

    Google placed ads on a May 6 article that falsely linked the presence of microplastic fibers in people’s lungs to mask wearing, even though the study in question was conducted pre-pandemic. Google also placed ads on a page on the site that falsely says Pfizer’s vaccine resulted in thousands of adverse effects. That claim, and the internal Pfizer documents it’s based on, has repeatedly been debunked by fact-checkers. Though it placed ads on that article, Google blocked them from another on the same site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.

    ProPublica documented additional pages on Euskal News with vaccine disinformation where Google appears to have blocked ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before examining its overall relationship with a site, but it did remove ads from the site after being contacted by ProPublica.

    Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not list an owner, and its articles do not have bylines. However, research by a Spanish digital security and investigations firm identified connections between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News but said it’s a person from his “ideological environment.” The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.

    Euskal News was one of 32 active Spanish sites flagged by the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab as frequent sources of false and misleading claims. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44%, earn money with Google.

    Alaphilippe, who runs the DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information and often lack credible or transparent sources.”

    Google declined to comment on the Spanish sites and articles identified in ProPublica’s analysis.

    Media Capture and False Content in Turkey

    Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media environment has transformed dramatically.

    National newspapers and TV stations have been taken over by people aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading Reporters Without Borders to assess that 90% of Turkey’s national media is under government control. The outlets adhere to “a tight chain of command of government-approved headlines, front pages and topics of TV debate,” according to a recent Reuters investigation.

    One byproduct of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian information environment — RSF says there are currently nine journalists in jail in the country — is that once-reliable publications publish false articles about politics, the pandemic and a range of clickbait meant to attract and earn money from traffic coming via Google search, according to Emre Kızılkaya, chair of the International Press Institute’s National Committee in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for IPI revealing how Google search rewards pro-government outlets and the at times false information they publish.

    “President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies used multiple tactics for media capture in the past two decades, enabling them to control most of the largest news outlets today. These outlets owe most of their digital traffic — and revenue — to Google Search,” Kızılkaya, who also edits a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.

    ProPublica analyzed over 1,000 articles rated false by Turkish fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% are earning money from Google ads. Of the 50 outlets contained in that data that were most frequently flagged by fact-checkers, 45 earn money with Google. That’s the highest of any country analyzed in the investigation.

    “In Turkey, disinformation pays and propaganda works. Google is still a part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. “The ProPublica data confirm the findings in our recent studies that demonstrated Google’s algorithmic bias towards Turkey’s pro-government media outlets at the expense of endangering fragile communities here.”

    Google declined to comment on its search and ad efforts in Turkey.

    Monetizing the German Far Right

    In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration website Freie Welt is run by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, the former deputy leader of Germany’s major far-right AfD party.

    One of the website’s articles, which had Google ads on it, falsely argues that the shortage of wheat in Ukraine was a result of U.S. companies buying one-third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women in Pfizer’s vaccine trial miscarried, a lie that has been debunked by fact-checkers.

    Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites the EU DisinfoLab identified as consistent sources of false and misleading content. A third of them earn money with Google.

    An ad for the American Red Cross was placed on a Journalistenwatch article that claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Image has been blurred by ProPublica to conceal other ads on the page. (ProPublica screenshot)

    The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of the “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an ad from the American Red Cross on an article falsely claiming that COVID-19 is like the flu. Another article falsely linking the decline in the birth rate in Germany to COVID-19 vaccines also earned money from Google.

    Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt did not respond to requests for comment.

    Google placed ads on a Report24 article that falsely claimed the World Health Organization warned against kids getting the COVID-19 vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

    Some of the German-language sites identified by the EU DisinfoLab are based in neighboring Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian website that regularly spreads false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter was shown an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, on an article from June 2021 that falsely claims that the World Health Organization advises against children and teenagers getting COVID-19 vaccines.

    Hydeline did not respond to a request for comment.

    In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson from Report24 who did not provide their name said the above articles were “carefully researched and contain all necessary sources — as every article on our website does.” They said ProPublica’s questions and findings are similar to “the biased, fake news producing, pharma industry funded fact-checkers.”

    The site claimed that no Google ads appeared on the articles in question, and there hadn’t been any “for a long time.” The site did not respond after being sent screenshots showing Google ads on the article pages.

    After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed ads from Report24. The company declined to comment about the German sites and articles identified in the analysis.

    Money for Falsehoods in French

    Last October, just ahead of the United Nations global climate summit, Google announced it would no longer place ads on content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” on climate change.

    “Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” read a notice attributed to the Google Ads team.

    But as with its policy about COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, Google often fails to enforce its climate policy across languages. Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.

    A story with false claims about climate change had ads for eyewear company Caddis and furniture maker Rove and a health PSA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry association. (ProPublica screenshot)

    In just one example, the French site 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely stating that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and “the climate emergency is imaginary.” Google had placed multiple ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited it, including for Caddis eyewear and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the CDC, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry body.

    Kathy Kayse, chief media strategy and partnerships officer for the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on donated media space to place ads for its public service campaigns. This means the organization did not pay to place its ad on 1 Scandal.

    “Because of this model, we cannot always predict or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.

    Caddis, Rove, the CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have removed ads from the site in response to questions from ProPublica.

    ProPublica also analyzed two sets of French-language articles rated false by IFCN-accredited fact-checkers in France and Senegal.

    Among the recent fact-checked French links earning money with Google is a May article from InfoDuJour that falsely claimed people vaccinated against COVID-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects.” The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of multiple fact-checks, that warned people against receiving doses of the “harmful” vaccines.

    The same site also recently published an article that claims athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was supposed to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.”

    On Aug. 1, InfoDuJour published an article headlined “Anti-Covid vaccines finally recognized as dangerous!” The page currently brings up a notice from the site that says Google found the article violated its policy about harmful COVID-19 misinformation. “To meet the digital giant’s conditions and avoid penalty, we have decided to delete the article,” the page says.

    Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in the northeast of France. He told ProPublica that his site’s coverage of the pandemic and vaccines provided it with unprecedented traffic.

    “Our media has gained a lot of visibility,” he said in an online message sent via the site’s customer support tool. “Last July we recorded 3.2 million unique visitors. And the advertising earnings from Google, about €3,000!” — roughly $2,979 at current exchange rates.

    Gay defended his site’s pandemic content, saying it is “taking care to balance the information and to give divergent opinions.” He complained that traffic has since fallen since Google and Twitter took action against his site, noting that it was removed from Google News and Google Discover, the latter of which highlights news stories in the Google app. He said he deleted some anti-vaccine articles in order to keep earning money with Google.

    “This planetary censorship is unique in the history of humanity,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages.”

    Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.

    Another French-language site earning money with Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours.com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations by the EU DisinfoLab and fact-checkers at Les Observateurs that revealed it was part of a network of more than 10 sites publishing false information, reprinting Russian propaganda and stealing content from other outlets.

    In the ensuing years the site continued to earn money from Google on articles with false claims that cunnilingus can help prevent cancer, a man killed over 20 pizza delivery men, and a woman named her children Corona and Virus. Ads from Google also appear on content that 24Jours.com copies word-for-word from other sites — even articles stolen from fact-checkers such as Les Observateurs.

    The operator of 24Jours.com, who on WhatsApp identified himself as Kennedy and said he was in Cameroon, told ProPublica that he stopped posting “fake news” in 2019, and that many sites copy content from sources such as Reuters. After being informed that sites pay to license content from Reuters and other sources, Kennedy said he would remove the infringing content.

    “Less than 10% of the content on my website are copied from other websites,” he said.

    Kennedy estimated Google is currently blocking ads from 26 articles on his site. When told that ProPublica was reaching out to Google to ask about his site, he said he would disable Google ads.

    Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

    This post was originally published on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica.

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk looks up as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway on August 29, 2022. - The meeting, held in Stavanger from August 29 to September 1, 2022, presents the latest developments in Norway and internationally related to the energy, oil and gas sector. - Norway OUT (Photo by Carina Johansen / NTB / AFP) / Norway OUT (Photo by CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images)

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Stavanger, Norway, on Aug. 29, 2022.

    Photo: NTB/AFP via Getty Images


    Elon Musk (and his consortium of much smaller investors) now owns Twitter. We need to take seriously the possibility that this will end up being one of the funniest things that’s ever happened.

    That’s because as of this moment, it looks like Musk dug a big hole in the forest, carefully filled it with punji sticks and crocodiles, and then jumped in.

    This was made immediately clear by Musk’s “Dear Twitter Advertisers” tweet as the deal closed:


    The statement starts off, promisingly, with a blatant lie: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important for the future of civilization to have a common digital town square.” Musk apparently believes that no one will remember that until three weeks ago, he was desperately trying not to buy Twitter. The only reason he did is because he was about to lose Twitter’s lawsuit to force him to buy it. This may be the greatest “you can’t fire me because I quit” moment in history.

    The significance of the rest of his statement is more subtle. To understand it, you have to start with the basics.

    Twitter currently makes 90 percent of its revenue from advertising. (The rest is largely from data licensing.) This means that you, the Twitter user, are not Twitter’s customers. You are its product. Its customers are corporate advertisers and, as every businessperson knows, the customer is always right. Grocery stores care about the people shopping for Cheetos, not about the feelings of the Cheetos themselves.

    Twitter’s content moderation has sometimes been heavy-handed — especially when it froze my account because David Duke got mad at me. But this is not because Twitter is run by a woke mob. It’s because Twitter needs to keep advertisers happy — and their top priority is a certain kind of environment for their ads.

    This can take specific forms. Delta probably has it written into its contract that its ads won’t run near any tweets about plane crashes. But more generally, advertisers don’t want anything controversial that gets people out of the buying mood, or worse, mad at the brands themselves. Proctor & Gamble can’t allow its ads for Charmin, targeted at the Upscale Panera Mom micro-demographic, to appear below frothing diatribes about annihilating all Muslims.

    Twitter is also, speaking just in financial terms, a crummy business. It’s only been profitable for two years of its existence, 2018 and 2019. In 2020 it lost over $1 billion, rebounding to lose a mere $222 million in 2021.

    To make matters worse, Musk’s deal to buy Twitter involved taking out $12.5 billion in loans. This means that Twitter will have to come up with an additional $1 billion a year to service this debt.

    This is why Musk hit the ground running with a groveling attempt to propitiate advertisers. He absolutely must keep them happy.

    Thus if Twitter simply continues on its current path, it will lose huge amounts of money indefinitely. But if advertisers get nervous about Musk’s management and flee the platform, it could see losses every year in the multiple billions of dollars.

    It’s true that Musk has said, “I don’t care about the economics at all.” But even as the richest man on earth, he has to care about them. He has a current estimated net worth of $220 billion, but that’s not $220 billion in cash sitting in a bank vault — it’s mostly tied up in his stakes in Tesla and SpaceX.

    Thus to cover big Twitter losses, he would have to sell off more of his stock every year. This would be painful in monetary terms but more so in terms of power: Eventually he would get into a situation in which he could lose control of the companies, Tesla in particular. Moreover, Tesla is publicly traded, and while it’s fallen 45 percent since its high a year ago, it remains way overvalued by normal metrics. Right now its price-earnings ratio is 70. The historical average for the S&P 500 is about 15. The price-earnings ratio for both Ford and GM right now is 6.

    This is why Musk hit the ground running with a groveling attempt to propitiate advertisers. He absolutely must keep them happy. As he put it, “Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.”

    And that’s where the hilarity begins. Musk has engaged in endless paeans to the glory of free speech and the need to end Twitter’s invidious censorship. This clearly isn’t a subject he’s thought deeply about, since he said back in May that Twitter should delete “tweets that are wrong and bad.” Still, his vague pronouncements have given him a legion of right-wing acolytes who feel they’ve been ill-treated by Twitter.

    But they are not Musk’s constituency now. Advertisers are. Even if Musk had some genuine commitment to free speech (which he absolutely does not), it would be essentially impossible for him not to continue significant content moderation.

    That’s why, after a brief nod to his wish for Twitter to be a place “where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” he quickly pivoted to telling advertisers that “Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all.”

    This could have been the mission statement of pre-Musk Twitter. But now there’s one big difference: When the content moderation of Twitter remains largely the same, the sense of betrayal among Musk’s super-fans will explode with the force of a supernova. And they will scream at Musk about it nonstop — on Twitter.

    Another mogul might have the fortitude to ignore this. But Musk does not, judging by past performance. You can also judge this by current performance: On his first full day on the job, Musk is personally “digging in” to the complaints of Catturd ™.


    And while Musk has announced a new “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” he will feel constantly compelled to either explain why he’s standing by his underlings’ moderation decisions, or reverse them. Then he will inevitably be drawn into personally making more and more content calls, perhaps giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to individual tweets.

    It will be hell on earth for him. No matter what decisions he makes, he will infuriate large swaths of Twitter. The left will see its suspicions about him confirmed. The right will see him as a horrendous sellout, just another lying Big Tech swine. Joe Rogan will shake his head sadly about what happened to Elon. Eventually what used to give Musk the greatest pleasure, opening up Twitter on his phone, will be a source of excruciating pain.

    And that’s just the beginning. Musk has important business interests around the world, and the potential riptides are endless. What happens when Kim Kardashian starts tweeting about how Taiwan is an independent country? Will the government of China quietly suggest to Musk that he do something about this, or will they make things hard for Tesla’s Shanghai plant and block the import of Teslas? What do other Tesla shareholders do if he defies China, and they find out his little bird app adventure is losing them money? What happens when a SpaceX rocket explodes, but Musk has been too busy adjudicating which Nazi furries are going to be suspended for a month?

    This future is obviously not foreordained. Possibly Musk will do what no human has ever be able to do before and invent 1) content moderation that everyone likes at an enormous scale, and 2) a way to make huge amounts of money off Twitter. Maybe Tesla will become so profitable that he can use it to subsidize Twitter until 2090. But the most likely outcome is that he’s just asked the monkey’s paw to grant him his greatest wish. Now look as the paw crooks its gnarled finger, and Musk’s love for Twitter ends up obliterating the Twitter experience for one specific user: Elon Musk.

    The post By Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Has Created His Own Hilarious Nightmare appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • On the evening of July 14, NASA launched the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, 250 miles up to perch on the International Space Station. With the satellite’s speed in equilibrium with the Earth’s gravitational pull, the instrument took off into orbit and has been circling our planet once every 90 minutes ever since.

    EMIT belongs to a category of equipment known as spaceborne imaging spectrometers and was designed to examine how flurries of airborne, mineral dust on the Earth’s surface affect temperature changes across the globe.

    In the three and a half months following EMIT’s launch, the tool has not only successfully mapped out massive dust plumes and their effect on the changing climate, but has also identified another key piece to the global warming puzzle: more than 50 methane “super-emitters,” some of which had previously gone unseen. 

    Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is a byproduct of decomposing organic material and the leading component of natural gas — the fuel used in power plants as well as in heating and cooking appliances in buildings. In the 20 years after release, methane is estimated to be 80 to 90 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. In 2021, the amount of methane in the atmosphere soared to the highest level on record. And super-emitters — oil fields, pipelines, landfills, animal feedlots, and other facilities that emit methane at unusually high rates — are a major part of the problem. Researchers have estimated that super-emitters account for between 8 and 12 percent of all methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

    The super-emitters that EMIT identified included oil and gas infrastructure east of the port city of Hazar, Turkmenistan, emitting methane at a rate of 111,000 pounds per hour. Off of Carlsbad, New Mexico, the apparatus detected a previously unidentified 2-mile-long plume rising from the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world. A waste-processing complex in Iran, also previously unknown to scientists, was found to emit an estimated 18,700 pounds of methane per hour.

    Scientists at NASA aren’t the only ones using satellites to track methane leaks. A French geoanalytics company called Kayrros SAS uses a combination of satellite data and algorithms to identify super-emitter sites. In February, researchers from Kayrros and various climate institutions announced that they had used satellite instruments to identify more than 1,800 major releases of methane globally in 2019 and 2020.

    While carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane breaks down after about a decade. Due to this timeframe of atmospheric response, a deceleration in the rate of global warming could come to fruition relatively swiftly if the world confronts its methane emissions.  

    Last fall, during the annual United Nations climate conference in Scotland, the United States and European Union announced the Global Methane Pledge, an international initiative aiming to slash the world’s methane emissions by 30 percent by the end of this decade. More than 100 countries have signed onto the pledge. Researchers say that slowing methane emissions can be achieved at relatively low cost — for instance, by requiring oil and gas companies to repair leaky equipment and forbidding them from intentionally venting methane into the air. Improving livestock manure management and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells are other strategies that could yield major benefits.

    NASA hopes that EMIT can be part of those solutions. “Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed — quickly.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A NASA satellite launched to detect dust has discovered huge methane leaks on Oct 28, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Read this story in Persian

    As furious anti-government protests swept Iran, the authorities retaliated with both brute force and digital repression. Iranian mobile and internet users reported rolling network blackouts, mobile app restrictions, and other disruptions. Many expressed fears that the government can track their activities through their indispensable and ubiquitous smartphones.

    Iran’s tight grip on the country’s connection to the global internet has proven an effective tool for suppressing unrest. The lack of clarity about what technological powers are held by the Iranian government — one of the most opaque and isolated in the world — has engendered its own form of quiet terror for prospective dissidents. Protesters have often been left wondering how the government was able to track down their locations or gain access to their private communications — tactics that are frighteningly pervasive but whose mechanisms are virtually unknown.

    “This is not a surveillance system but rather a repression and control system to limit the capability of users to dissent or protest.”

    While disconnecting broad swaths of the population from the web remains a favored blunt instrument of Iranian state censorship, the government has far more precise, sophisticated tools available as well. Part of Iran’s data clampdown may be explained through the use of a system called “SIAM,” a web program for remotely manipulating cellular connections made available to the Iranian Communications Regulatory Authority. The existence of SIAM and details of how the system works, reported here for the first time, are laid out in a series of internal documents from an Iranian cellular carrier that were obtained by The Intercept.

    According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their phones. The tools can slow their data connections to a crawl, break the encryption of phone calls, track the movements of individuals or large groups, and produce detailed metadata summaries of who spoke to whom, when, and where. Such a system could help the government invisibly quash the ongoing protests — or those of tomorrow — an expert who reviewed the SIAM documents told The Intercept.

    “SIAM can control if, where, when, and how users can communicate,” explained Gary Miller, a mobile security researcher and fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “In this respect, this is not a surveillance system but rather a repression and control system to limit the capability of users to dissent or protest.”

    SIAM gives the government’s Communications Regulatory Authority — Iran’s telecommunications regulator — turnkey access to the activities and capabilities of the country’s mobile users. “Based on CRA rules and regulations all telecom operators must provide CRA direct access to their system for query customers information and change their services via web service,” reads an English-language document obtained by The Intercept. (Neither the CRA nor Iran’s mission to the United Nations responded to a requests for comment.)

    The SIAM documents are drawn from a trove of internal materials from the Iranian cellular carrier Ariantel, including years of email correspondence and a variety of documents shared between Ariantel employees, outside contractors, and Iranian government personnel. The cache of materials was shared with The Intercept by an individual who claimed to have hacked Ariantel, and believed the documents were in the public interest given the ongoing protests in Iran and the threat SIAM might pose to demonstrators. (Ariantel did not respond to a request for comment.)

    The details of the program reported here are drawn largely from two documents contained in the archive. The first is a Persian-language user manual for SIAM that appears to have originated from within the Office of Security of Communications Systems, or OSCS, a subdivision of the CRA. Emails reviewed by The Intercept show that this SIAM manual was sent to Ariantel directly by the CRA and repeatedly forwarded between the mobile carrier’s employees in recent years. The emails show that the CRA and Ariantel discussed SIAM as recently as August. The second document, produced during a proposed deal with a Spanish telecom contractor, is an English-language manual that documents many of the same SIAM capabilities. Miller told The Intercept that the English SIAM manual appeared to be written by a person or people with specialized technical knowledge of mobile networks.

    Experts on mobile security and Iranian government censorship say the functionality revealed by the SIAM program poses a clear threat to protesters demonstrating against the government over the past month.

    “These functions can lead to life-and-death situations in a country like Iran, where there is no fair judicial process, no accountability, and we have a huge pattern of violations of people’s rights,” said Amir Rashidi, an internet security and digital rights expert focused on Iran. “Using the tools outlined in this manual could not only lead to mass surveillance and violations of privacy — it can also easily be used to identify the location of protesters who are literally risking their lives to fight for their basic rights.”

    ONTARIO, CANADA - 2022/09/23: A sticker saying "Iran: The internet is down and they are killing the people" seen on the back of a road sign during the demonstration. Hundreds gathered to honour Mahsa Amini and to protest against the Iranian government in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Katherine Cheng/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

    A sticker that reads “Iran: The internet is down and they are killing the people” is seen on the back of a road sign during a demonstration where hundreds gathered to honor Mahsa Amini and to protest against the Iranian government, on Sept. 23, 2022, in Toronto.

    Photo: Katherine Cheng/SOPA/LightRocket via Getty Images


    Iranians regularly complain of slowed internet access on mobile devices during periods of protest — an abrupt dip in service that makes smartphone usage difficult if not impossible at moments when such a device could be crucial. Based on the manuals, SIAM offers an effortless way to throttle a phone’s data speeds, one of roughly 40 features included in the program. This ability to downgrade users’ speed and network quality is particularly pernicious because it can not only obstruct one’s ability to use their phone, but also make whatever communication is still possible vulnerable to interception.

    Referred to within SIAM as “Force2GNumber,” the command allows a cellular carrier to kick a given phone off substantially faster, more secure 3G and 4G networks and onto an obsolete and extremely vulnerable 2G connection. Such a network downgrade would simultaneously render a modern smartphone largely useless and open its calls and texts to interception — both of obvious utility to a government clamping down on public gatherings and speech.

    While not directly mentioned in the manuals, downgrading users to a 2G connection could also expose perilously sensitive two-factor authentication codes delivered to users through SMS. The Iranian government has previously attempted to undermine two-factor authentication, including through malware campaigns targeting dissidents.

    “Generally speaking, forcing a phone to use the 2G network would still allow the phone to receive a two-factor SMS authentication message because SMS is sent over the mobile signaling network,” explained Miller. “However, the effect of forcing a user onto the 2G network, more importantly, would essentially render the corresponding real-time application services such as P2P communication, social media, and internet useless.”

    While current 5G and 4G cellular connections have more robust built-in encryption systems to thwart eavesdropping, the 2G cellular standard, first introduced in 1991, generally does not encrypt data or uses outdated encryption methods that are easy to crack. Law enforcement agencies in the United States have also employed this technique, using hardware like the controversial “stingray” device to create a bogus 2G network blanketing a small area and then trick targeted phones into connecting to it.

    Miller pointed out that the target of a 2G downgrade might experience the attack as little more than spotty cell reception. “It can be viewed as a method to appear as if the network is congested and severely limit a user’s data services,” Miller said.

    Slowing connectivity is only one of many telecom tools available to Ariantel — and the CRA — that could be used to monitor political dissent. SIAM also provides a range of tools to track the physical locations of cell users, allowing authorities to both follow an individual’s movements and identify everyone present at a given spot. Using the “LocationCustomerList” command allows SIAM operators to see what phone numbers have connected to specified cell towers along with their corresponding IMEI number, a unique string of numbers assigned to every mobile phone in the world. “For example,” Miller said, “if there is a location where a protest is occurring, SIAM can provide all of the phone numbers currently at that location.”

    SIAM’s tracking of unique device identifiers means that swapping SIM cards, a common privacy-preserving tactic, may be ineffective in Iran since IMEI numbers persist even with a new SIM, explained a network security researcher who reviewed the manuals and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing their safety.

    SIAM’s location-tracking power is particularly alarming given the high-stakes protests taking place across Iran. The Intercept reviewed undated text messages sent to Iranian mobile phone users from local police in the city of Isfahan informing them that they had been confirmed to have been in a location of “unrest” and warning them not to attend in the future. Many Iranian social media users have reported receiving similar messages in recent weeks, warning them to stay away from the scene of protests or from associating with “anti-revolutionary” opponents of the government online.

    Armed with a list of offending phone numbers, SIAM would make it easy for the Iranian government to rapidly drill down to the individual level and pull a vast amount of personal information about a given mobile customer, including where they’ve been and with whom they’ve communicated. According to the manuals, user data accessible through SIAM includes the customer’s father’s name, birth certificate number, nationality, address, employer, billing information, and location history, including a record of Wi-Fi networks and IP addresses from which the user has connected to the internet.

    While much of Iran’s surveillance capacity remains shrouded in mystery, details about the SIAM program contained in the Ariantel archive provide a critical window into the types of tools the Iranian government has at its disposal to monitor and control the internet, as it confronts what may be the greatest threat to its rule in decades.

    “These documents prove something that we have long suspected, which is that even devices that use encryption for messaging are still vulnerable because of the nature of internet infrastructure in Iran,” said Mahsa Alimardani, a senior researcher with the internet freedom organization Article 19. “Security measures like two-factor identification using text messages still depend on telecommunications companies connected to the state. Average internet users are forced to connect through nodes controlled by these companies, and their centralization of authority with the government makes users vulnerable to insidious types of surveillance and control.”

    TEHRAN, IRAN - SEPTEMBER 19: People gather during a protest for Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by morality police allegedly not complying with strict dress code in Tehran, Iran on September 19, 2022. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

    People gather during a protest for Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by morality police for allegedly not complying with strict dress code, in Tehran, Iran, on Sept. 19, 2022.

    Photo: Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images


    The latest round of protests in Iran kicked off in mid-September, after a young woman named Mahsa Jina Amini was killed while in the custody of the country’s notorious morality police, following her arrest for wearing her mandatory head covering improperly. While the movement originated with women opposing the brutality of hijab enforcement, anti-government outrage quickly spread among Iran’s youth, from universities to secondary schools across the country. The government’s crackdown took a variety of shapes, including brute force, with security services in riot gear squaring off with demonstrators in the street and a quieter effort to shut down civilian communications.

    Internet shutdowns have by now become a familiar tool of political control in the hands of the Iranian government and other states. A violent Iranian crackdown against protests over fuel prices in November 2019 was accompanied by a nationwide shutdown lasting nearly a week, the first-ever use of an internet blackout to isolate an entire country. That shutdown severed tens of millions of people from the global internet. It was a chilling demonstration of the broad technical powers that Iranian authorities had quietly engineered.

    The CRA is known to play an integral role in filtering Iran’s internet access. In 2013, the agency was among a list of Iranian government entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for its role in the “blockage of hundreds of public Internet websites” around the time of the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election. The agency’s powers are believed to have grown since then, as the Iranian government has embraced the concept of “internet sovereignty” as a means of social control. A report on the November 2019 cyber crackdown by Article 19 found that the shutdowns were carried out in large part by officials from the CRA ordering internet service providers to shut down during the unrest.

    The Iranian government has long viewed internet freedom as a national security issue and has taken steps to securitize Iranians’ online access. As in the United States, where the National Security Agency has used government secrecy and legal coercion to turn the telecom and data sectors into intelligence-gathering tools, the Iranian state compels communications networks to give the government access through required hardware and software. In Iran, where the autocratic reach of central government leadership touches nearly every aspect of the state without even superficial democratic oversight, the powers afforded by this integration are far greater and far more draconian in consequence.

    Part of this effort has included directly assigning Iranian intelligence personnel to government bodies tasked with internet regulation, like the CRA. The Article 19 report notes the close personnel relationship between the CRA’s OSCS division and Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence.

    Though Iranians have complained of slowed data connections and total internet blackouts at times, the telecom crackdown has consequences beyond losing one’s connection. Demonstrators have reported visits from government authorities at their homes, where the agents were armed with specific knowledge of their whereabouts and activities, such as when they were using their phones to record video.

    While some of what SIAM does is benign and required for administrating any cellular network, Miller, the Citizen Lab researcher, explained that the scope of the system and the Iranian government’s access to it is not. While most countries allow law enforcement and security agencies to legally obtain, intercept, and analyze cellular communications, the surveillance and control powers afforded by SIAM are notable in their scale and degree, said Miller: “The requests by CRA go well beyond traditional lawful intercept requirements, at least in non-repressive countries.”

    SIAM allows its operators to learn a great deal not just about where a customer has been, but also what they’ve been up to, a bounty of personal data that, Miller said, “can enable CRA to create a social network/profile of the user based on his/her communication with other people.”

    “Controlling user communications is a massive violation of basic and fundamental human rights.”

    By entering a particular phone number and the command “GetCDR” into SIAM, a system user can generate a comprehensive Call Detail Record, including the date, time, duration, location, and recipients of a customer’s phone calls during a given time period. A similar rundown can be conducted for internet usage as well using the “GetIPDR” command, which prompts SIAM to list the websites and other IP addresses a customer has connected to, the time and date these connections took place, the customer’s location, and potentially the apps they opened. Such a detailed record of internet usage could also reveal users running virtual private networks, which are used to cover a person’s internet trail by routing their traffic through an encrypted connection to an outside server. VPNs — including some banned by the government — have become tremendously popular in Iran as a means of evading domestic web censorship.

    Though significantly less subtle than being forced onto a 2G network, SIAM can also be used to entirely pull the plug on a customer’s device at will. Through the “ApplySuspIp” command, the system can entirely disconnect any mobile phone on the network from the internet for predetermined lengths of time or permanently. Similar commands would let SIAM block a user from placing or receiving calls.

    Rashidi, the internet security expert, said participants in the recent demonstrations, as well as Iranians living near scenes of protest, have reported internet shutdowns targeting their mobile devices that have downgraded phones to 2G access, particularly during the late afternoons and evenings when many demonstrations occur.

    Rashidi said the widespread use of VPNs in Iran represents another vulnerability the SIAM system could exploit. The program makes it possible to check particular IP addresses against particular VPNs and thereby deduce the identities and locations of the users accessing them. “The government can easily identify IP addresses in use by a particular VPN provider, pass the addresses to this location function, and then see where the people are who are using this VPN,” said Rashidi.

    Although the documents don’t mention SIAM’s use against protesters or any other specific target, Miller said the functionality matches what he’s observed in this and other digital crackdowns in Iran. “CRA has defined rules and regulations to provide direct access to mobile operators’ system, and SIAM is a means to this end,” he said. “If all telecom operators in Iran are required to provide the CRA with SIAM or similar direct access, they could, in effect have complete control over all user mobile communications throughout the country. Controlling user communications is a massive violation of basic and fundamental human rights.”

    The post Iran’s Secret Manual for Tracking and Controlling Protesters’ Mobile Phones appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Study says deployment of technology in public by Met and South Wales police failed to meet standards

    Police should be banned from using live facial recognition technology in all public spaces because they are breaking ethical standards and human rights laws, a study has concluded.

    LFR involves linking cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be checked against those photos to see if they match.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • For millions of incarcerated people around the country, receiving mail from our loved ones is a source of momentary joy, a tangible connection to family and friends in the form of birthday cards, baby pictures or handwritten letters bringing news from home.

    On many of my worst days inside, hearing my name called out for mail has lifted my spirits; all my problems fade into the background as I tear open an envelope containing photos of the family dog.

    But now I’ll never get another piece of mail again while I’m in prison.

    In January, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) banned the 86,000 prisoners in its custody from receiving physical mail. All incoming mail (excluding legal documents) will be digitized by JPay, a for-profit contractor. Incarcerated residents will only be able to view scanned versions of our letters and photographs on tablets or at communal kiosks in cell blocks or dorms.

    Over the past few years, multiple states have adopted the same restrictions — as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which oversees 122 facilities — in an attempt to prevent contraband like drugs from entering correctional institutions. But according to Nazish Dholakia of the Vera Institute of Justice, out of the 3.1 million items of contraband that entered the FDC between January 2019 and April 2021, roughly just 1 percent came through the mail.

    In fact, reports suggest that in most prisons and jails in the U.S., correctional officers are the primary source of drugs and other contraband, not the mail. The Justice Department identified this trend as far back as 2003.

    Eliminating physical mail severs one of the only palpable ties we have with the outside world. When my father passed away unexpectedly last year, the many sympathy cards I received brought me a small measure of comfort. I would read the handwritten notes over and over with tears in my eyes. I held the last picture ever taken of my dad — a glossy 3″-by-5″ print sent by my stepmom — in my hands for hours, memorizing his features before placing it reverently in my photo album for safekeeping.

    Getting mail in prison is a time-honored ritual dating back centuries. Held inside a Birmingham jail in the Jim Crow South, Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have tucked a letter from his wife into his Bible for inspiration. Oscar Wilde had an illicit pen pal. Many despondent prisoners over the years have found hope from a simple written word or a snapshot of the life they left behind.

    We treasure these mementos behind bars because we have little else.

    Under the new policy of digitizing mail, incarcerated people are losing the visceral experience of touching a letter or smelling perfume on an envelope, but we must also endure the technical problems associated with a nascent system.

    The addition of scanning has resulted in extended wait times for mail delivery, blurry photographs and unreadable letters. Missing pages are a common occurrence, while some mail is just lost in a quagmire of inefficiency.

    In the FDC, personal tablets issued by JPay frequently malfunction, and replacements can take months to arrive. Without a tablet, the only option is to view incoming mail on a communal kiosk that continually breaks. Some days the line to use a kiosk is longer than the phone line, resulting in arguments and disorder.

    And still, drugs like K2, a synthetic cannabinoid, flood prisons and jails nationwide.

    Texas prisons stopped in-person visits and restricted mail in 2020, but that didn’t stop drugs from entering the system. In Pennsylvania, drug positivity rates actually increased after a digital mail service was implemented, according to The Intercept’s Lauren Gill.

    Prison mail has long been subject to inspection, but with for-profit companies operating virtually unregulated, new privacy issues emerge: Friends and family of the incarcerated now have their correspondence and photos saved on a database — a digital diary compiled without their consent.

    In addition to storing personal information indefinitely, programs like MailGuard, created by the Florida-based company Smart Communications, have the ability to share the sender’s email and IP addresses, GPS location and home address with correctional agencies.

    With no real evidence of costly digital mail services preventing the flow of contraband into prisons and jails, one has to ask about other motives.

    Companies like JPay have long exploited Florida prisoners for services ranging from phone calls to canteen provisions to medical co-pays. Restricting physical mail could just be the latest ploy to extract money from our hardship.

    For example, incarcerated residents in the FDC have the option of paying to print copies of our mail for $0.25 for black-white printouts and $0.50 for color photos, adding to the long list of revenue-generating schemes already thriving in the criminal legal system. Charging for printed copies of our mail is an egregious practice being utilized in many other states who have digitized mail, including California, Washington and Texas. After all, our families have already paid the postage for our mail… why should we pay again?

    It’s hard for me to imagine not receiving mail anymore, and harder still to think about losing such an important lifeline to my loved ones. A strong social connection with people on the outside encourages successful reentry back into society. By restricting mail, the FDC has needlessly limited my support system in the name of “security.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.