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Category: Technology

  • Fiji academic warns over media ‘climate injustice’ in open access webinar

    By David Robie

    A Fiji-based academic challenged the Pacific region’s media and policymakers today over climate crisis coverage, asking whether the discriminatory style of reporting was a case of climate injustice.

    Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, head of the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific, said climate press conferences and meetings were too focused on providing coverage of “privileged elite viewpoints”.

    “Elites have their say, but communities facing the brunt of climate change have their voices muted,” he told the Look at the Evidence: Climate Journalism and Open Science webinar panel exploring the role of journalism in raising climate awareness in the week-long Open Access Australasia virtual conference.

    Dr Singh, who is also on the editorial board of Pacific Journalism Review and was speaking for the recently formed Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), threw open several questions to the participants about what appeared to be “discriminatory reporting”.

    “Is slanted media coverage marginalising grassroots voices? Is this a form of climate injustice?” he asked.

    “Are news media unknowingly perpetuating climate injustice?”

    He cited many of the hurdles impacting on the ability of Pacific news media to cover the climate crisis effectively, such as lack of resources in small media organisations and lack of reporting expertise.

    ‘Jack-of-all-trades’
    “We are unable to have specialist climate reporters as in some other countries; our journalists tend to be a jack-of-all-trades, and master of none,” he said.

    He did not mean this in a “disparaging manner”, saying “it’s just our reality” given limited resources.

    Key Pacific media handicaps included:

    • The smallness of Pacific media systems;
    • Limited revenue and small profit margins;
    • A high attrition rate among journalists (mostly due to uncompetitive salaries);
    • Pacific journalists “don’t have the luxury” of specialising in one area; and
    • No media economies of scale.

    “Our journalists don’t build sufficient knowledge in any one topic for consistent or in-depth reporting,” he said. “And this is more deeply felt in areas such as climate reporting.”

    He cited recent research on Pacific climate reporting by Samoan climate change journalist Lagipoiva Dr Cherelle Jackson, saying such Pacific media research was “scarce”.

    ‘Staying afloat in Paradise’
    A research fellow with the Reuters Institute and Oxford University, Dr Jackson carried out research on how media in her homeland and six other Pacific countries were covering climate change. The report was titled Staying Afloat in Paradise: Reporting Climate Change in the Pacific.

    Pacific journalists and editors “have a responsibility to inform readers on how climatic changes can affect them, she argued. But this did not translate into the pages of their newspapers.

    “Climate change is simply not as high a priority for Pacific newsrooms as issues such as health, education and politics which all take precedence over even general environment reporting,” Dr Jackson wrote.

    “For a region mainly classified by the United Nations as ‘least developed’ and ‘developing’ countries, it is apparent that there are more pressing issues than climate change.

    “But the fact that the islands of the Pacific are already at the bottom end of the scale in regards to wealth and infrastructure, and the fact that climate change is also threatening the mere existence of some islands, should make it a big story. But it isn’t.”

    Newsroom's Marc Daalder
    Newsroom’s Marc Daalder . . . “we need this [open access] to happen for climate reporting”. Image: Open Access Week 2022 screenshot APR

    The Open Access Australasia media panel today also included Newsroom’s Marc Daalder, The Conversation’s New Zealand science editor Veronica Meduna, and Guardian columnist Dr Jeff Sparrow of the University of Melbourne.

    Critical of paywalls
    Daalder spoke about how open access to scientific papers was vitally important for journalists who needed to read complete papers, not just abstracts. He was critical of the paywalls on many scientific research papers.

    Open access enabled journalists to do their job better and this was clearly shown during the covid-19 pandemic — “and we need this to happen for climate reporting”.

    Meduna said it took far too long for research, such as on climate change, to filter through into public debate. Open access helped to reduce that gap.

    She also said the success of The Conversation model showed that there was a growing demand for scientists communicating directly with the public with the help of journalists.

    Dr Sparrow called for a social movement for meaningful action on the climate crisis and more scientific literacy was needed to enable this.

    Highly critical of the “dysfunctional” academic publishing industry, he said open access would contribute to “radically accessible” science for the public.

    The panel was organised by Tuwhera digital and open access publishing team at Auckland University of Technology.

    Open Access Week 2022
    Open Access Week 2022 … the media climate webinar panel. Image: Open Access Week screenshot APR

  • Apple workers continue 24-hour strike action for a fair agreement

    Apple workers struck for 24 hours, taking the next step in their unprecedented national industrial action campaign for a better agreement. Isaac Nellist reports. 

  • WhatsApp down across cities in India, Meta says working to restore services soon

    #WhatsApp Down is the trending hashtag on the social media platforms

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

  • Company That Makes Rent-Setting Software for Apartments Accused of Collusion, Lawsuit Says

    by Heather Vogell

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

    Renters filed a lawsuit this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation’s biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law.

    The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both.

    The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

    In an email, a RealPage representative said that the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

    The nine property managers named in the lawsuit did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

    They included some of the nation’s largest landlords, such as Greystar, Lincoln Property Company, Equity Residential, Mid-America Apartment Communities and FPI Management — which together manage hundreds of thousands of apartments.

    Four of the five renters named in the suit were Greystar tenants. A fifth rented from Security Properties. Their apartments were located in San Diego, San Francisco and two Washington state cities, Redmond and Everett.

    The lawsuit accused the property managers and RealPage of forming “a cartel to artificially inflate the price of and artificially decrease the supply and output of multifamily residential real estate leases from competitive levels.”

    RealPage’s software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals — not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.

    ProPublica’s investigation found that the software’s design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country’s biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing — potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings.

    RealPage told ProPublica that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

    The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

    “RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

    The lawsuit said that RealPage’s software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers “thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the ‘heads in the beds’) to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher,” it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid “a race to the bottom” on rents, the lawsuit said.

    RealPage brags that clients — who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data — experience “rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market,” the lawsuit said.

    RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said.

    The lawsuit was filed by four law firms and a nonprofit, Justice Catalyst Law, dedicated to developing cases and legal strategies that advance economic and social justice. Gary Smith Jr., one of the lawyers involved, said the investigation into the case had been going on for more than a year.

    “Today’s lawsuit plausibly alleges that Lessors of rental units have coordinated to drive rents up to unprecedented levels, exacerbating the nation’s affordable housing crisis,” Smith said in a media release.

    RealPage counts some of the largest property managers in the country among its clients. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.

    Greystar and FPI Management each control hundreds of buildings in metro areas where rents have risen steeply in recent years. And Equity Residential, Lincoln Property Company and Mid-America Apartment Communities each manage dozens of buildings in high-growth markets.

    RealPage’s clients may gravitate toward high rent-growth markets for several reasons. For instance, tenants in those areas will bear more rent hikes and so offer an opportunity to landlords to make more money.

    But, RealPage says its software, formerly known as YieldStar, steers pricing that beats the market in areas where it operates.

    “Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%,” RealPage urges potential clients on its website.

    Haru Coryne and Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

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

  • Oakland Cops Hope to Arm Robots With Lethal Shotguns

    In a series of little noted Zoom meetings this fall, the city of Oakland, California, grappled with a question whose consequences could shape the future of American policing: Should cops be able to kill people with shotgun-armed robots?

    The back-and-forth between the Oakland Police Department and a civilian oversight body concluded with the police relinquishing their push for official language that would have allowed them to kill humans with robots under certain circumstances. It was a concession to the civilian committee, which pushed to bar arming robots with firearms — but a concession only for the time being.

    The department said it will continue to pursue lethal option. When asked whether the the Oakland Police Department will continue for advocate for language that would allow killer robots under certain emergency circumstances, Lt. Omar Daza-Quiroz, who represented the department in discussions over the authorized robot use policy, told The Intercept, “Yes, we are looking into that and doing more research at this time.”

    The controversy began at the September 21 meeting of an Oakland Police Commission subcommittee, a civilian oversight council addressing what rules should govern the use of the city’s arsenal of military-grade police equipment. According to California state law, police must seek approval from a local governing body, like a city council, to determine permissible uses of military equipment or weapons like stun grenades and drones. Much of the September meeting focused on the staples of modern American policing, with the commissioners debating the permissible uses of flash-bang grenades, tear gas, and other now-standard equipment with representatives from the Oakland Police Department.

    Roughly two hours into the meeting, however, the conversation moved on to the Oakland police’s stable of robots and their accessories. One such accessory is the gun-shaped “percussion actuated nonelectric disruptor,” a favorite tool of bomb squads at home and at war. The PAN disruptor affixes to a robot and directs an explosive force — typically a blank shotgun shell or pressurized water — at suspected bombs while human operators remain at a safe distance. Picture a shotgun barrel secured to an 800-pound Roomba on tank treads.

    While describing the safety precautions taken while using the PAN disruptor, Daza-Quiroz told the subcommittee that the department takes special care to ensure that it is in fact a blank round loaded into the robot’s gun. This led a clearly bemused Jennifer Tu, a fellow with the American Friends Service Committee and member of the Oakland Police Commission subcommittee on militarized policing, to ask: “Can a live round physically go in, and what happens if a live round goes in?”

    “Yeah, physically a live round can go in,” Daza-Quiroz answered. “Absolutely. And you’d be getting a shotgun round.”

    After a brief silence, Commissioner Jesse Hsieh asked the next question: “Does the department plan on using a live round in the robot PAN disruptor?”

    The answer was immediately provocative. “No,” Daza-Quiroz said, before quickly pivoting to hypothetical scenarios in which, yes, just such a shotgun-armed robot might be useful to police. “I mean, is it possible we have an active shooter in a place we can’t get to? And he’s fortified inside a house? Or we’re trying to get to a person —”

    It soon became clear the Oakland Police Department was saying what nearly every security agency says when it asks the public to trust it with an alarming new power: We’ll only use it in emergencies — but we get to decide what’s an emergency.

    The question of whether robots originally designed for defusing bombs should be converted into remote-controlled guns taps into several topics at the center of national debates: police using lethal force, the militarization of American life, and, not least of all, killer robots. Critics of the armed robo-cops note that the idea of Predator drones watching American racial justice protests may have seemed similarly far-fetched in the years before it started happening. “It’s not that we don’t want to debate how to use these tools safely,” said Liz O’Sullivan, CEO of the AI bias-auditing startup Parity and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. “It’s a question of, if we use them at all, what’s the impact going to be to democracy?”

    Some observers say the Oakland police’s robot plan contradicts itself. “It’s billed as a de-escalation facilitator, but they want to keep it open as a potential lethal weapon,” Jaime Omar Yassin, an independent journalist in Oakland who has documented the commission meetings, tweeted. As with any high-tech toy, the temptation to use advanced technology may surpass whatever institutional guardrails the police have in place. Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “The ease of use of weapons as well as the dangerous legal precedence justifying the causal use of weapons makes police less likely to attempt to deescalate situations.”

    “It in many ways lowers the psychological hurdle for enacting that violence when it’s just a button on a remote control.”

    Tu hopes that by cracking down on shotgun robots before they come to be, Oakland and cities across the country can avoid debates about limits on police powers that only come after those powers are abused. She pointed to the Oakland police ban on using firehoses, a bitter reminder of abuses in American policing from the not-too-distant past. “We have an opportunity right now to prevent the lawsuit that will force the policy to be rewritten,” Tu said. “We have an opportunity to prevent the situation, the harm, the trauma that would occur in order for a lawsuit to need to be initiated.”

    Skeptics of robo-policing, including Tu, say these debates need to happen today to preempt the abuses of tomorrow, especially because of the literal and figurative distance robotic killing affords. Guariglia said, “It in many ways lowers the psychological hurdle for enacting that violence when it’s just a button on a remote control.”


    Dallas Police Headquarter Attacked Overnight, Leads To Standoff With Suspect

    Oakland police are seeking to use live shotgun rounds in an attachment to the Remotec Adros Mark V-A1, a robot seen here in a standoff where Dallas police deployed the robot in Dallas, Texas, on June 13, 2015.

    Photo: Stewart F. House/Getty Images

    As the Oakland commission hearing went on, Daza-Quiroz invoked a controversial 2016 incident in Dallas. Police had strapped a C-4 bomb to a city-owned robot and used it to blow up a sniper who’d killed five police officers during a downtown rally. It is widely considered to be the country’s first instance of robotic police killing. While police generally heralded the ingenuity of the response, others criticized it as summary execution by robot. In an email to The Intercept, Daza-Quiroz said the department imagines weaponizing the PAN disruptor on the department’s $280,000 Northrop Grumman Remotec Andros Mark 5-A1 robot — the very same model used so controversially in Dallas.

    Daza-Quiroz noted that the department had never actually attempted to load a live round into the PAN gun for fear of breaking the $3,000 attachment. Yet when Tu asked whether the commission could add policy language that would prohibit arming the robot with lethal 12-gauge shotgun rounds, the department’s vision for robotic policing became clearer. “I don’t want to add a prohibited use,” Daza-Quiroz replied, “because what if we need it for some situation later on?”

    Daza-Quiroz explained that a hypothetical lethally armed robot would still be subject to the department’s use of force policy. Oakland Police Department Lt. Joseph Turner, stressing the need to keep extreme options on the table for extreme circumstances, urged the commission to allow such a killer robot in case of “exigencies.” He said, “I’m sure those officers that day in Texas did not anticipate that they were going to deliver a bomb using a robot.”

    The Oakland Police Department’s assurances that a shotgun-toting robot would be subject to departmental use-of-force policy did not seem to satisfy critics. Nor did the messenger have a record that inspires confidence. A 2013 East Bay Express report on Daza-Quiroz and another officer’s killing of an unarmed Oakland man found that he had been the subject of over 70 excessive force complaints. (One lawsuit prompted a six-figure settlement from the city and the jury ruled for the officers in another; the officers were never charged with a crime, and an arbitrator overturned the police chief’s decision to discipline the officers. Police spokesperson Candace Keas declined to comment on the dozens of excessive force complaints.)

    In the wake of the shooting, which prompted protests, the East Bay Times reported that Daza-Quiroz was asked by an internal investigator why he hadn’t used his Taser instead. He responded, “I wanted to get lethal.”

    “You have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

    The concern is, then, less that police would use a shotgun robot in “certain catastrophic, high-risk, high-threat, mass casualty events” — as the tentative policy language favored by the department currently reads — but that such a robot would be rolled out when the police simply want to get lethal. The vagaries of what precisely constitutes a “high-risk” event or who determines the meaning of “high threat” affords the police too much latitude, Tu told The Intercept in an interview. “It’s not a technical term, there’s no definition of it,” she said. “It doesn’t mean anything.” When asked by email for precise definitions of these terms, Daza-Quiroz said, “High risk, high threat incidents can vary in scope and nature and are among the more challenging aspects of law enforcement.”

    Critics say such ambiguous language means Oakland police would get to use a robot to kill someone whenever they decide they need a robot to kill someone. The policy has analogues in more routine police work: After shooting unarmed people, officers frequently offer post-hoc justifications that they felt their life was in danger.

    “Anytime anyone has a tool, they’re going to use it more,” said Tu. “You have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And the more that police, in general, have military equipment, have more weapons, those weapons get used.”

    After weeks of wrangling, both the commission and the police department agreed on language that will prohibit any offensive use of robots against people, with an exception for delivering pepper spray. The agreement will go for review by the city council on October 18.

    Tu suspects the sudden compromise on the killer-robot policy is explained not by any change of heart, but rather by the simple fact that had the debate continued any longer, the department would have missed the deadline for submitting a policy — and risked losing the ability to legally operate its robots altogether.

    There is nothing preventing the Oakland Police Department from, as Daza-Quiroz said they will, continuing to push for legally sanctioned killing using a PAN disruptor. No matter how the Oakland policy shakes out in the long term, the issue of robotic policing is likely to remain. “I’m sure Dallas [police] weren’t the only ones who had considered lethal force with their robot before doing so, and Oakland police aren’t the only ones who are thinking about it even more now,” Tu told The Intercept. “They’re just the only ones who thought about it out loud with a committee.”

    According to Daza-Quiroz, the department is still looking toward the future. “We will not be arming robots with lethal rounds anytime soon, and if, and when that time comes each event will be assessed prior to such deployment,” he said. When asked if there were other situations beyond a Dallas-style sniper in which police might wish to kill with a robot, Daza-Quiroz added: “Absolutely there are many more scenarios.”

    With thousands of Andros robots operated by hundreds of police department across the country, those concerned by the prospect of shotgun robots on the streets of Oakland or elsewhere refer to what they say is a clear antecedent with other militarized hardware: mission creep.

    “We’re not really talking about a slippery slope. It’s more like a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization.”

    Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics of the PAN disruptor proposal say the Oakland police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech, as happened frequently during the George Floyd protests.

    “As you do this work for a few years, you come to realize that we’re not really talking about a slippery slope. It’s more like a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization,” said O’Sullivan, of Parity. There’s no reason to think the PAN disruptor will be any different: “One can imagine applications of this particular tool that may seem reasonable, but with a very few modifications, or even just different kinds of ammunition, these tools can easily be weaponized against democratic dissent.”

    The post Oakland Cops Hope to Arm Robots With Lethal Shotguns appeared first on The Intercept.

  • What They Want

    The post What They Want first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • WEBINAR: Spreading the Big Lie: How Social Media Sites Have Amplified False Claims of U.S. Election Fraud

    Permalink

    This post was originally published on Press and Publicity – NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

  • Data retention and the devotees of mass surveillance

    The wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement in Europe and elsewhere, despite legal challenges, reports Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • United States: Is the energy transition taking off — or hitting a wall?

    The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act constitutes the boldest climate action so far by the US government, writes Richard Heinberg. However, this doesn’t mean the US or the world is on track to a safe climate future.

  • The New Sorcerers (and Their Apprentices)

    Now it so happened, as Goethe told it, that a sorcerer of superlative technical skills took on an apprentice, eager and diligent in his study of the master’s teachings.  One day, while the master was away, the apprentice, perhaps overly confident in his newly-acquired command of certain techniques, decided to use these powers for a practical, if mundane, purpose.  As a pupil, he was obligated to perform certain tedious household chores, most detestably the endless hauling of pails of water from the nearby stream.  Why not animate, say, a broom to do this tiresome chore?  His acquired powers were already sufficient to perform this transformation, and the broom, hurrying off and then returning forthwith, brought back two pails of water.  The apprentice, proud of his powers and amazed at the prompt carrying out of his command, was nonetheless startled when the broom quickly hurried off again, and again, and again, speedily delivering a dozen of pails of water. Panicking, the apprentice tried to destroy the broom by cutting it in half–only to witness each half becoming a whole, and both scurrying off now to begin bringing twice as many pails!  The house was flooded, with no relief in sight, when the Master suddenly returned.  In consternation, he angrily admonished his over-confident pupil for using such powers which wiser ones would willingly refrain from unleashing.  The Master, acutely aware of the dangers of such misuse, nonetheless calmly de-animated the brooms back to their original purpose.

    Sorcery, a kind of “pre-science,” consists of specific techniques purportedly capable of attaining certain ends.  If one wished to destroy a foe, one employed imitative (homeopathic) magic (“like produces like”) — the infamous voodoo doll being the most well-known example.  If the victim shortly thereafter sickened and died, the efficacy of the magical technique was “confirmed.”

    We now fast-forward to September 30 of this year, when techno-wizard Elon Musk introduced his new “humanoid” robot named Optimus, which promptly demonstrated to a rapt audience the abilities to walk, carry objects, and water plants.  Musk announced, with his typical promoter’s enthusiasm, that he wanted to perfect and mass-produce Optimus as soon as possible, predicting that the “humanoid” would prove even more profitable than his Tesla line of electric cars.

    Entrepreneurial capitalist Musk is unlikely to question his commitment to a rapidly expanding world of “artificial intelligence.”  (An entirely surveilled, behavior-modified and jobless humanity?).  At the same time, he has acknowledged some unforeseen dangers, and the urgent necessity for some regulation of their production and use.  A techno-futurist with an awareness of what is coming, he has joined with such techno-scientific luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates in warning that AI, if insufficiently contained and regulated, constitutes “the largest existential threat to humanity.”

    Since perpetual war by now seems (almost) “normalized,” Pentagon contracts promote the myriad capabilities of robot-soldiers on the battlefield.  Musk has thus urgently warned of an imminent threat from “killer robots” (The Guardian, 17 July, 2017).  Human Rights Watch has long taken this seriously enough to launch their Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, noting that such machines “would be able to select and engage targets without meaningful human control” (The Guardian, 9 Apr. 2015).   (One is hard-pressed not to mention that “human control” of unmanned, automated drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, did not restrain their over-use–even by participant-executioner President Obama!) .  Self-replicating robots already exist, even “self-reconfigurable modular” ones which can re-arrange their design and self-repair–capacities obviously advantageous under battlefield conditions.

    While Goethe’s fable of out-of-control “animated” brooms seems incredibly remote from our present reality, he did prophetically warn of the ease with which empowered instruments can overpower their very creators, wreaking uncontrollable havoc once unleashed.  The profiteering hubris of the current “roboteers,” audaciously claiming an entitlement to introduce a never-ending stream of hi-tech assaults on human independence and dignity, uncannily exhibit the same disastrous grandiosity of Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein.

    Image credit: Sorcerer’s broom from Disney’s Fantasia.

    The post The New Sorcerers (and Their Apprentices) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Meet the Military Contractor Running Fare Collection in New York Subways — and Around the World

    In a cheerfully animated promotional video, a woman narrates Cubic Transportation Systems’ vision for the future. Travelers will pay fares using a ticket-free mobile account. Real-time data will be aggregated, linked, and shared. Deals — such as 50 percent off at a partner coffee shop — may even incentivize users to select certain transit routes at certain times.

    “The more information that is gathered, the more powerful the system becomes,” the narrator tells us. “The piece of the puzzle missing … is you.”

    This is “NextCity,” Cubic Transportation Systems’ idea of a smart city: an urban area that uses technology and networked data to optimize functioning and mobility.

    Over the past decade, Cubic has taken the first steps toward actualizing its vision by snapping up contracts for the development of mobile-based, contactless fare collection systems in eight of America’s 10 largest public transit networks. Gone are the days of cumbersome tokens and flimsy farecards; now, millions of bus and subway riders can pay their fare directly by hovering a smartphone or credit card over a reader.

    Transit authorities have embraced tap-to-pay technology for its convenience and speed, but privacy advocates are worried that the new fare collection systems pose serious surveillance and security risks. The concerns came to the fore as New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, rolled out OMNY, a fare payment system backed by Cubic that’s slated to fully replace MetroCards by the end of 2023. Nevertheless, Cubic’s widespread use of touchless, mobile-based reader technology is sprouting up everywhere — including places like San Francisco and Miami, where public transit riders would need to dig deep into city documents to find Cubic’s roles.

    Cubic is a privately held corporation with broad and varied interests. In addition to its transit operation, Cubic is a vast military contractor doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business with the U.S. military and sales to foreign militaries. The company supplies surveillance technologies, training simulators, satellite communications equipment, computing and networking platforms, and other military hardware and software. Most of the headlines Cubic garners, though, stem from its increasingly indispensable role in public transit systems across the world.

    “I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it.”

    As Cubic’s quiet grip on fare collection takes hold in more cities, the company’s ability to process rider data grows with it, creating a sprawling corporate apparatus that has the extraordinary potential to gather up reams of information on the very people it is supposed to serve. In some cases, its access to that information is explicit in the transit systems’ privacy policies.

    “I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it to police, ICE, and other agencies,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Right now, our data is a huge part of the product, with almost no safeguards against these sorts of abuse.”

    Cubic did not respond to a request for comment.

    MG_1681-Cubic-MTA-NYC

    OMNY, a fare payment system backed by Cubic, installed on a turnstile in a Brooklyn subway station on Sept. 30, 2022.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    Turnstiles and Military Systems

    The privacy concerns around Cubic would be acute even if its interests were limited to transit, but the company wears dual hats as ubiquitous public service provider and defense contractor.

    Cubic Transportation Systems is but one division of Cubic Corporation. The company’s other concerns revolve around providing technologies to U.S. and other security forces. The defense contractor, Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions, handles Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance — or C5ISR — capabilities for the U.S. military. And Cubic also owns a variety of subsidiaries, including Abraxas Corporation, which supplies counterintelligence and cybersecurity software to agencies working in national security.

    Since 1992, U.S. government agencies have awarded Cubic’s defense wing and its subsidiaries billions of dollars in contracts, including more than $42.1 million from the Department of Defense this year alone. One of Cubic’s largest contracts came in 2020, when the Pentagon awarded the company $193.3 million for work on training systems, with over half of the money allocated to foreign military sales in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, Australia, and the U.K.

    Cubic has also provided key support for U.S. drone operations. The company received $1.4 million from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 for Predator/Reaper training software, and in 2020, it signed a cooperative agreement with U.S. Special Operations for the research and development of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies related to drones. Cubic also sells surveillance technologies; a subsidiary that sells video enhancement software has clients including the New York Police Department, U.S. Secret Service, and military criminal investigators.

    The defense contracting business runs in parallel to the transit work — where Cubic’s reach is also international. The company has implemented contactless payment technology in other major cities globally, including London, Sydney, and Vancouver. It controls about 70 percent of the market for public transit fare collection across the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

    In 2013, when the Chicago Reporter flagged that the company responsible for Chicago’s Ventra system — cards for public transit — had national security ties, a Cubic Corporation spokesperson insisted that the transportation and defense wings were “entirely separate entities and not connected through anything but ownership.”

    In annual reports, however, the company emphasized the benefits of its “Living One Cubic” ethos. The reports describe the touchless reader at the center of Cubic’s transit business as “an innovation developed through engineering collaboration” across both divisions of the company. The 2019 annual report also cites the launch of a new internal product management system that will facilitate the sharing of “technical information and data amongst our engineering teams and the overall company.”

    The notion of “One Cubic” is also on display in lobbying disclosures. While Cubic has spent massive sums on more than two decades of defense-industry lobbying, Cubic Corporation has put lesser, though still significant funding into lobbying on transit issues; in 2015, the company started directing its resources into “promot[ing] Cubic transportation technology solutions.” In 2019, the company pushed for the “adoption of integrated fare payment and mobility as a service solutions” — corporate jargon for its mobile-based fare collection systems and public-private transit partnerships.

    Often, Cubic Corporation’s defense and transportation lobbying is targeted at the same lawmaker or handled by the same firm, with disclosures listing House and Senate defense authorizations alongside federal transportation appropriations.

    For Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the soft wall between Cubic’s transportation and military businesses raises questions that have yet to be addressed by transit authorities about the risks that personal data could move between the two sides of the company.

    “I think it depends on the overlap, and whether the technologies employed are bleeding over to the other side of the company,” said Budington. “And whether the typical concerns, when it comes to the privacy and security of data that’s being handled for the public, are lessened by the fact that you’re part of the intelligence community that is looking for targets and employing military technologies overseas.”

    He added, “That is something that should be raised to the public, and there should be a public debate about it. And I don’t think that there has been.”

    Vague Privacy Policy

    The Cubic Corporation’s privacy policy outlines the notably lenient guidelines governing the use of data provided both through Cubic’s own website and its contracts with clients. The sharing of personal information is permitted among recipients, including Cubic’s family of companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries; external auditors; police, regulators, government agencies, and judicial or administrative authorities; and third parties connected with mergers and acquisitions.

    The company also says it may share information “where disclosure is both legally permissible and necessary to protect or defend our rights” and in “matters of national security.” Personal data may be stored for up to 10 years.

    Cubic’s privacy policy allows data sharing between corporate divisions only if it’s for the product being delivered, not for ancillary business practices. However, Cahn said that it’s difficult to know what corporate firewalls are truly in place when dealing with private companies.

    “I think this highlights one of the broader design tensions with smart cities infrastructure,” Cahn said. “Oftentimes, we have a misalignment of incentives, where companies have every reason to look for ways to monetize our most intimate data, or as a government tracking tool, rather than having incentives to truly keep that information protected.”

    The guidelines for the MTA’s touchless system OMNY have been criticized for their weakness. The Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project found in a 2019 report that the policy permits the MTA and Cubic to store users’ personal data indefinitely, allowing law enforcement and other government agencies access to that and other information. The touchless system’s predecessor, the MetroCard, which Cubic designed and implemented in 1992, already enables enforcement agencies to track users’ whereabouts.

    “There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

    Recent media reports noted that, because OMNY links credit card information to a user profile by design, location tracking could be connected to names, payment cards, and any other information web tracking and data scraping could tie to the account. According to TransitCenter, a group focused on improving public transportation in cities, OMNY would elevate tracking capabilities to a “near-instantaneous” level.

    The MTA’s OMNY privacy policy stipulates that Cubic and other vendors must adhere to privacy practices “at least as stringent” as those in the OMNY policy. Other Cubic-designed systems, though, do not disclose such restrictive rules. The Chicago Ventra program policy simply authorizes the sharing of personal information with Cubic, provided it “maintain[s] the confidentiality of the information” and uses it only as necessary for administering the program.

    Budington, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that phrases such as “necessary to provide services” or “as permitted by law” raise red flags. This vague language cannily obscures any specifics of what the company is doing with the provided data.

    “This is why we at EFF are big advocates for city council ordinances when surveillance technologies are employed on a population,” he said. “There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

    Cubic-MTA-NYC

    A passenger successfully pays subway fare using OMNY, run by Cubic, in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Sept. 30th, 2022.

    Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept

    Public Service, Private Equity

    Cubic Corporation had been publicly traded since it was founded in 1959, but in May 2021, Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital paid roughly $3 billion to take the company private. Veritas also owns the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics database and has acquired business units of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other defense contractors. One critic has suggested that Cubic’s recent acquisition by the private equity firms could exacerbate the company’s lack of interest in safeguarding users’ data.

    Cubic’s defense industry ties highlight a stark paradox: Public transit is widely viewed as an essential public service, but the private contractors that enable the systems may have corporate incentives that don’t align with the goal of a common good. For instance, though the MTA has pushed back against privacy advocates’ concerns, Cubic’s own documents emphasize that it has broad ambitions for the use of rider data.

    A brochure for the back-end analytics tool that Cubic offers to transit agencies boasts that the technology can enable transit authorities to search and visualize large datasets to “make discoveries” and “identify trends.” The software can also aggregate and anonymize personally identifiable information, turning that information into “an analytics-ready dataset that can be securely consumed for research, monetization schemes, and other internal and external purposes.” Experts have noted that even purportedly anonymized data holds privacy risks, as it is often possible to re-identify users with their personal information.

    The company’s vision for NextCity would join data collected by Cubic with other smart-city infrastructure to “build a model for real-time data gathered across a transportation network.” Cubic Corporation’s annual reports outline how it aims to expand its portfolio beyond fare collection to include ride and bike sharing, tolls and parking, and traffic congestion reduction. Toward these ends, Cubic Corporation has acquired multiple companies in recent years that are focused on smart city technologies, including GRIDSMART, which supplies cameras to enable real-time traffic monitoring, and Delerrok, an electronic fare-collection system.

    For now, cities with Cubic’s mobile-based payment systems also offer the option to purchase fare cards with cash, albeit for an additional $5, at select retailers. Individual people concerned with their privacy might opt for this method despite the convenience of OMNY and similar systems.

    Despite the workarounds, transit authorities in major metropolitan areas are increasingly letting any notion of privacy fall by the wayside. As an increasing number of metropolitan areas embrace the concept of smart cities, the privacy risks associated with the technology are poised to grow — until, eventually, everyone’s choice between convenience and privacy might be made for them.

    The post Meet the Military Contractor Running Fare Collection in New York Subways — and Around the World appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • How Amazon, Google, and Facebook Helped Fund the Campaign to Overturn Roe

    When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the country’s top internet companies quickly responded with commitments to help employees in states that moved to ban abortion. In an implicit signal of support for abortion rights, the companies said they would help those employees seek abortions in states where the procedure remains legal.

    In the years leading up to the seismic reproductive rights decision, however, the tech giants sponsored a controversial group that’s worked tirelessly to put the Supreme Court under conservative control, setting the stage for Roe’s reversal.

    The Independent Women’s Forum traces its origins back to the 1991 fight to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. Since then, the group has expanded into promoting a litany of perennial right-wing causes like climate denial, immigration alarmism, and deregulation, but a conservative-dominated Supreme Court remained a focus.

    Public relations plays a key role in its operation. With savvy self-branding as a pro-woman organization, the group fought for the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. The IWF couched support for Bret Kavanaugh as good feminism and any opposition to Amy Coney Barrett as sexism — despite well-founded concerns that their ascensions to the court would spell the end of Roe. The IWF wields a skillful mix of media placement, op-eds, television punditry, and other contributions to the conservative content ecosystem.

    The group also takes advantage of quieter influence peddling as well. In 2020, IWF chief and Vicks VapoRub heiress Heather Higgins boasted to a closed audience of Virginia conservatives about how instrumental the group was in rallying congressional support for Kavanaugh’s nomination. Higgins told the group that the IWF circulated a confidential strategy memo on the Hill. “Most important,” Higgins said, “Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” referring to the Republican senator from Maine.

    Independent Women’s Forum and its sister organization, Independent Women’s Voice, draw on donations from right-wing financial mainstays like the Koch brothers, but in recent years the groups have enjoyed financial support from Facebook’s parent company, Meta; Google; and Amazon. In 2017, Google sponsored an IWF gala at the “gold” donor level, according to brochures provided to The Intercept by True North Research, a progressive watchdog group. Other brochures show that Meta (which at the time still using the name Facebook) sponsored IWF galas in 2018, alongside Google, and 2019. Honorees at IWF events have included notable anti-abortion figures like Rep. Lynne Cheney, R-Wy.; top Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway; and Vice President Mike Pence.

    Corporate disclosures from Amazon show that the company donated undisclosed sums to the IWF in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

    Amazon, Google, Meta, and the IWF did not respond to a request for comment.

    True North founder Lisa Graves characterized the IWF’s efforts as an attempt to launder conservative ideology. “They act as a distaff,” she said in an interview, “in essence providing a woman’s face for the right wing’s critique or attack on progressives and its advance of this extreme and regressive, repressive agenda.”

    Patrice Onwuka, director of the Independent Womens Forums Center for Economic Opportunity, speaks during a town hall event hosted by House Republicans on March 1, 2022 in Washington, DC.

    Patrice Onwuka, director of the Independent Women’s Forum’s Center for Economic Opportunity, speaks during a town hall event hosted by House Republicans on March 1, 2022 in Washington, D.C.

    Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images


    Despite the public perception of Silicon Valley’s alignment with progressive values and liberal causes, tech companies, particularly those fearing state regulation, have long funneled money to right-wing groups like the IWF. At the same time, the IWF routinely pushes policy positions that are highly favorable to its corporate donors.

    The IWF has consistently espoused tech industry-friendly positions on labor, antitrust, and other issues, without disclosing its donors’ interests. Take, for example, an April IWF blog post that warned that antitrust enforcement against Big Tech would prove disastrous. “Tech innovation has been nothing short of miraculous over the past few decades,” wrote Patrice Onwuka, director of IWF’s Center for Economic Opportunity and its go-to defender of powerful tech firms.

    Few issues in tech have galvanized the IWF and Onwuka like the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would block tech companies from leveraging their enormous reach to favor their own services over competitors. In a December 2021 piece titled “Amazon Prime may not be around to save the day next Christmas,” Onwuka claimed, “Senator Amy Klobuchar and others are on a path to end services like Prime’s fast and free shipping and other services that we depend upon.” Onwuka then linked to a blog post by the Amazon-funded Chamber of Progress that claimed, dubiously, that the law would “ban Amazon Prime.”

    In June, Onwuka wrote a jeremiad against congressional antitrust efforts: “The conveniences that make life and work easier and faster and save consumers money may disappear.” Later that day, Onwuka appeared on Fox Business, again protesting antitrust enforcement against the tech industry. “I’m more worried about the impact on small business owners and on women and families that rely on some of the benefits that some of these big four tech companies provide,” she said.

    While shielding Big Tech from antitrust scrutiny has proven a priority for the IWF, the group also stands up directly for its benefactors. In 2019, Onwuka wrote an entire post dedicated sticking up for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Politico reported that he had attended dinners with notable conservative commentators and lawmakers. “Zuckerberg is a private citizen who can eat dinner with whomever he wants,” Onwuka wrote. “His dinner has a clear business purpose and that’s part of doing business.”

    “Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position. But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

    The cordial treatment of industry giants is of course a linchpin of conservatism, and the IWF would almost certainly be warning that antitrust will bring us back to the Bronze Age even without Google sponsoring its gala dinners. But fueling the right-wing punditry mill is a large, ever-expanding facet of Big Tech’s political strategy.

    While there’s no evidence that Zuckerberg or Google CEO Sundar Pichai have any personal opposition to abortion access, their companies no doubt benefit from their support of a broad, thriving conservative discourse ecosystem in which any government regulation is anathema. For tech company leadership, the reality that this ecosystem pushes not just Facebook-friendly laissez-faire economics, but also climate denial and abortion bans is considered a perhaps unfortunate but worthwhile byproduct.

    Silicon Valley’s patronage of right-wing think tanks and campaigns is an arrangement in which there is ample plausible deniability to go around. When The Guardian reported in 2019 that Google was donating to some of the nation’s most notorious climate-denial organizations, a company spokesperson retorted, “We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organizations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy.”

    The multitude of topics on which the IWF engages, and its careful avoidance of publicly opposing abortion access have helped it avoid a reputation as an anti-abortion group. “Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position,” explained Graves, of True North. “But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

    The post How Amazon, Google, and Facebook Helped Fund the Campaign to Overturn Roe appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Creating the Good Anthropocene: Towards a Socialist Future

    Capitalism has always had a chorus of sirens that have striven to allure Homo sapiens from thinking they had any chance to escape its clutches. Margaret Thatcher proclaimed ‘there is no alternative’ in 1980. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘End of History’ in 1992. Given the fall of the Soviet Union, the decline and isolation of the Cuban economy, and the dominance of the ‘Washington Consensus’, the decade after the Cold War was one of capitalist triumphalism. It was during that time the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson famously wrote that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’

    The late Mark Fisher described all this as ‘capitalist realism’ (the title of his 2008 book on the subject), ’the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to even imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ Central to capitalist realism is the idea that an economy based on planning and democracy is not viable, inevitably leading to endemic shortages, bureaucracy, and stagnant growth.

    Such were the arguments put forward by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises in his seminal 1920 essay titled ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.’ Mises asked how could planning boards know which products to produce, how much should be produced at a given time, which raw materials had to be used, and how much of them? Where should production be located and which production process is the most efficient? And how would all this information be gathered and calculated and then be retransmitted back to all the relevant actors throughout the economy? Mises’ answer was that no human process could accomplish it. He argued it is simply beyond the capacity of any planning agency to accurately describe supply and demand across all economic sectors, therefore planners working with flawed data would regularly produce vast mismatches between what is demanded and what is supplied, resulting in inevitable shortages and the requisite barbarism.

    Instead Mises argued the simple mechanism of prices floating in a market contain all the needed information. This argument was later taken up by Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek also viewed prices as information-gathering machines reflecting the discrete bits of knowledge scattered among executives, workers, and consumers. Prices, derived from the collective wisdom of the crowd, could coordinate information through a decentralized network Hayek called a ‘spontaneous order’, making planning unnecessary.

    On the surface these arguments seem formidable and have been used against socialism for generations. Lenin himself acknowledged the difficulty of building a planned economy in revolutionary Russia in the aftermath of the destruction of World War I when he said to the Session of the all-Russia C.E.C. in 1918:

    We know about socialism, but knowledge of organization on a scale of millions, knowledge of the organization and distribution of goods, etc.- this we do not have. The old Bolshevik leaders did not teach us this…And we say, let him be a thorough-paced rascal even, but if he has organized a trust, if he is a merchant who has dealt with the organization of production and distribution for millions and tens of millions, if he has acquired experience- we must learn from him.

    But these arguments can certainly be dismantled. Consider first how much planning and public research is already happening in a modern economy.  For instance, in what has now long been an annual routine of anticipation and leaks in the business press, Apple again recently launched its latest version of the iPhone, iPhone 14 (and the pricier iPhone 14 Pro). The release of iPhone 13 last September brought back the long lines of loyal devotees to Apple stores all over the world after the pandemic paused the ritual. It was the iPhone first released in 2007 (followed by the iPad), that ultimately made Apple the first company in the world to reach a trillion dollars in market cap value on August 18, 2018- not to mention the first to reach $2 trillion (August 19, 2020) and $3 trillion (January 3, 2022). In the five year period following the 2007 launch, Apple’s global net sales increased nearly 460 percent. It was the iPhone that more than anything made Steve Jobs a modern icon.

    Beyond that, the iPhone (and smart phones generally) is often held up by defenders of the status quo as proof that the status quo is working just fine. After all, what better evidence of the power of capital than the fact that billions of humans now hold in the palm of their hands more than 100,000 the processing power and more than one million times the Random Access Memory than the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969? A few years ago the meme ‘Capitalism Made Your iPhone’ made the rounds on social media.

    If that narrative sounds compelling, it is also quite incomplete. While Jobs and the product designers at Apple undoubtedly had a talent for synergy and design, the Bauhaus inspired minimalist look to the iPhone was always a large part of its brilliance, the actual technology inside the iPhone has its roots not in Apple labs but in publicly funded research. This includes touch-screen displays, GPS, the Internet, even Siri. The first workable prototype for the internet came in late 1960 with ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. GPS got its start the same way a few years later.  Federal funding for computer science increased rapidly in the 1970s, reaching $250 million annually by 1975. The internet received another boost with the establishment of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, funded by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s (out of which emerged Mosaic which later became Netscape). The U.S. government was an early, sole consumer for processing units based on Integrated Circuits. It heavily subsidized the domestic semiconductor industry in late 1980s to the early 1990s through the SEMATECH program. Apple was able to ride this wave of massive state investments in the technologies that underpinned the iPhone.

    It also has to be pointed out, as brilliantly described by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski in their book The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, that large, successful enterprises, even while operating within a general market economy, do a great deal of large scale planning internally. Some of these companies have larger market caps than most countries’ GDP. Apple and Amazon are worth more than 90 percent of the world’s countries. In 1970 the GDP of the Soviet Union, the second largest economy in the world at the time, came in at around $433.4 billion. In 2021 Wal-Mart’s revenue was $572.8 billion. These organizations eschew internal markets. The different departments, stores, and suppliers don’t compete with each other. Everything is coordinated. To that extant one can say much of the global economy is already planned.

    In fact, there is a recent example of a corporation that actually took markets seriously enough to attempt to incorporate them internally. In February 2013, Edward Lampert, founder of the hedge fund ESL Investments, took over as the CEO of Sears Holdings (the parent company of Kmart and Sears formed after the former bought the latter), one of Wal-Mart’s main competitors. Sears goes back to 1892. Its catalog once revolutionized shopping for Americans, particularly the many back then who lived in rural areas. Lampert announced his intention to create markets within the company, breaking it up into 30, then later 40, autonomous units that would compete with each other. Each unit had their own president, board of directors, chief operating officer, and separately measured their own profit and losses. The idea being this would efficiently produce better data.

    Instead it devolved to absurdity. Creating internal divisions blocked internal synergy. If a division needed help from the HR or IT departments, it had to write a formal request or use a contractor. In order to optimize profits at one division at the expense of others, infighting erupted over everything from floor shelving to advertising space on circulars. The results quickly spoke for themselves. A Bloomberg expose from 2013 described the gross spectacle of screw drivers being advertised next to lingerie. Little funding went to needed upgrades at stores, many of which became dilapidated. Sales dropped by $10 billion. By October 2018 Sears Holdings filed for bankruptcy and Lampert stepped down as CEO (though he remained chairman). While Sears was facing stagnation since the 1990s as online retail took off, it was an epic Randian failure that truly crashed it.

    Compare all that to the fluidity of Amazon. Amazon is certainly a soul-sucking corporation that grinds workers to dust. Yet it has achieved logistical and operational genius. Consider that at any given moment Amazon has 600 million items up for sale, basically all available to be home delivered within two days from strategically placed distribution centers that more and more run on algorithms and robotics. Amazon uses search and point-of-sales data and search history to stock the centers. The result: Amazon receives about 115 orders, basically a full delivery truck worth, every second. That’s 10 million fulfilled orders for a day. An estimated 60 percent of U.S. adults are Amazon Prime members.

    In a November 2019 profile for The Atlantic of Amazon founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos, Franklin Foer had this astute observation:

    Amazon, however, has acquired the God’s-eye view of the economy that Hayek never imagined any single entity could hope to achieve. At any moment, its website has more than 600 million items for  sale and more than 3 million vendors selling them. With its history of past purchases, it has collected the world’s most comprehensive catalog of consumer desire, which allows it to anticipate both individual and collective needs.  With its logistics business—and its growing network of trucks and planes— it has an understanding of the flow of goods around the world. In other words, if Marxist revolutionaries ever seized power in the United States, they could nationalize Amazon and call it a day.

    This would definitely be quite a first step, but only a first step. Socialism focuses on social relations and workers democracy. Simply nationalizing Amazon wouldn’t achieve it and, in fact, risks replacing the dictatorship of capital with another dictatorship. But the greater point holds. Such efficiency, flexible planning, and logistical power could be captured and used to create a just, egalitarian society. In a world full of crisscrossing cables, instant global communication, along with ever expanding AI, the arguments of Mises and Hayek truly lose their power. There are now many trillions of pieces worth of data that could be used to make non-market decisions about how to allocate the use of resources. ‘Big Data’ understandably has a bad name among many leftists; however, data is the lifeblood of any planned economy. Rather than being used for surveillance and targeted advertising, it can be used to determine and fulfill peoples’ needs.

    We have a rudimentary example of how this could work from Chile’s socialist experiment in the early 1970s. By the end of 1971 the Allende government had nationalized more than 150 enterprises, including twelve of the twenty largest companies in the country. Recognizing the difficulty of reordering the economy in the face of fierce opposition and American sanctions, the government instituted Project Cybersyn. The aim, using the limited computing power that was available to Chile at the time (there was only one mainframe IBM 360/50 available for the project, it relied instead on a network of telex machines), to connect data from the factory floor and the State Development Corporation in order to enable quick decision-making in response to changing conditions. The system would provide daily access to production data and modeling tools the state could use to predict future economic behavior. A futuristic control room would facilitate communication and data analysis.

    As described by Eden Medina in her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, though primitive and ultimately not completed, the system did enable the government to overcome a general strike called by the opposition in October 1972. Shortages were quickly reported through the network allowing different enterprises shifted resources. Government data showed raw materials continued to flow to 95 percent of economically crucial enterprises and food supplies were maintained at 50 to 70 percent. Project Cybersyn didn’t survive the Pinochet coup in 1973 so its full potential wasn’t tapped, yet the promise remains. It is easy to imagine what can be planned with today’s computing power and mountains of data.

    Of course, it takes more than advanced computer modeling and AI to build socialism. It first takes the working class democratically controlling the means of production. This can ultimately only be won at the barricades. However, as examples from the technologies of the iPhone to Amazon to the COVID vaccines show, planning works. More and more we are moving toward Trotsky’s vision of the future of human innovation spelled out in Literature and Revolution:

    He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers and he will lay down rules for oceans. The idealist simpletons may say this is a bore, but that is why they are simpletons…. Most likely, thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain.  And man will do it so well the tiger won’t even notice the machine, or feel the change, but will live as he lived in primeval times.

    While there is a wide range of opinions as to when its beginning should be marked, there is now an emerging consensus that the planet is indeed in a new period of geological history, the Anthropocene, one in which human civilization essentially creates its own environment. This concept no doubt causes many to tremble in fear but denial of our collective responsibility will not change it. The specter of global warming, possible future pandemics, and other environmental challenges are awesome, but so are the possibilities of maximizing human freedom, ending war and poverty, and probing deep space. We cannot trust the irrational, unplanned capitalist system with its destructive incentives to fulfill our potential. As the world is witnessing with the COVID pandemic and global food crisis, far from the picturesque visions of Mises and Hayek, a reliance of markets leads to inefficiency, hoarding, and reactionary nationalism. The only good Anthropocene is socialist.  Its vehicle is an empowered global working class. It still has a world to win.

    The post Creating the Good Anthropocene: Towards a Socialist Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The CIA Just Invested in Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Technology

    As a rapidly advancing climate emergency turns the planet ever hotter, the Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: “To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again.” Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital — and, according to the public portfolio its venture capital arm released this month, the CIA.

    Colossal says it hopes to use advanced genetic sequencing to resurrect two extinct mammals — not just the giant, ice age mammoth, but also a mid-sized marsupial known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, that died out less than a century ago. On its website, the company vows: “Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat.”

    In-Q-Tel, its new investor, is registered as a nonprofit venture capital firm funded by the CIA. On its surface, the group funds technology startups with the potential to safeguard national security. In addition to its long-standing pursuit of intelligence and weapons technologies, the CIA outfit has lately displayed an increased interest in biotechnology and particularly DNA sequencing.

    “Why the interest in a company like Colossal, which was founded with a mission to “de-extinct” the wooly mammoth and other species?” reads an In-Q-Tel blog post published on September 22. “Strategically, it’s less about the mammoths and more about the capability.”

    Colossal uses CRISPR gene editing, a method of genetic engineering based on a naturally occurring type of DNA sequence. CRISPR sequences present on their own in some bacterial cells and act as an immune defense system, allowing the cell to detect and excise viral material that tries to invade. The eponymous gene editing technique was developed to function the same way, allowing users to snip unwanted genes and program a more ideal version of the genetic code.

    “CRISPR is the use of genetic scissors,” Robert Klitzman, a bioethicist at Columbia University and a prominent voice of caution on genetic engineering, told The Intercept. “You’re going into DNA, which is a 3-billion-molecule-long chain, and clipping some of it out and replacing it. You can clip out bad mutations and put in good genes, but these editing scissors can also take out too much.”

    The embrace of this technology, according to In-Q-Tel’s blog post, will help allow U.S. government agencies to read, write, and edit genetic material, and, importantly, to steer global biological phenomena that impact “nation-to-nation competition” while enabling the United States “to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards” for its use.

    In-Q-Tel and Colossal did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

    In recent years, the venture firm’s portfolio has expanded to include Ginkgo Bioworks, a bioengineering startup focused on manufacturing bacteria for biofuel and other industrial uses; Claremont BioSolutions, a firm that produces DNA sequencing hardware; Biomatrica and T2 Biosystems, two manufacturers for DNA testing components; and Metabiota, an infectious disease mapping and risk analysis database powered by artificial intelligence. As The Intercept reported in 2016, In-Q-Tel also invested in Clearista, a skincare brand that removes a thin outer epidermal layer to reveal a fresher face beneath it — and allow DNA collection from the skin cells scraped off.

    President Joe Biden’s administration signaled its prioritization of related advances earlier this month, when Biden signed an executive order on biotechnology and biomanufacturing. The order includes directives to spur public-private collaboration, bolster biological risk management, expand bioenergy-based products, and “engage the international community to enhance biotechnology R&D cooperation in a way that is consistent with United States principles and values.”

    The government’s penchant for controversial biotechnology long predates the Biden administration. In 2001, a New York Times investigation found that American defense agencies under Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had continued to experiment with biological weapons, despite a 1972 international treaty prohibiting them. In 2011, The Guardian revealed that the CIA under President Barack Obama organized a fake Hepatitis B vaccine drive in Pakistan that sought to locate family members of Osama bin Laden through nonconsensual DNA collection, leading the agency to eventually promise a cessation of false immunization campaigns.

    CIA Labs, a 2020 initiative overseen by Donald Trump’s CIA director, Gina Haspel — infamous for running a torture laboratory in Thailand — follows a model similar to In-Q-Tel’s. The program created a research network to incubate top talent and technology for use across U.S. defense agencies, while simultaneously allowing participating CIA officers to personally profit off their research and patents.

    In-Q-Tel board members are allowed to sit on the boards of companies in which the firm invests, raising ethics concerns over how the non-profit selects companies to back with government dollars. A 2016 Wall Street Journal investigation found that almost half of In-Q-Tel board members were connected to the companies where it had invested.

    The size of In-Q-Tel’s stake in Colossal won’t be known until the nonprofit releases its financial statements next year, but the investment may provide a boon on reputation alone: In-Q-Tel has claimed that every dollar it invests in a business attracts 15 more from other investors.

    Colossal’s co-founders, Lamm and Church, represent the venture’s business and science minds, respectively. Lamm, a self-proclaimed “serial technology entrepreneur,” founded his first company as a senior in college, then pivoted to mobile apps and artificial intelligence before helping to start Colossal.

    Church — a Harvard geneticist, genome-based dating app visionary, and former Jeffrey Epstein funding recipient — has proposed the revival of extinct species before. Speaking to Der Spiegel in 2013, Church suggested the resurrection of the Neanderthal — an idea met with controversy because it would require technology capable of human cloning.

    “We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human,” Church said. “Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?” When the interviewer reminded him of a ban on human cloning, Church said, “And laws can change, by the way.”

    Even when the methods used for de-extinction are legal, many scientists are skeptical of its promise. In a 2017 paper for Nature Ecology & Evolution, a group of biologists from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand found that “[s]pending limited resources on de-extinction could lead to net biodiversity loss.”

    “De-extinction is a fairytale science,” Jeremy Austin, a University of Adelaide professor and director of the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, told the Sydney Morning Herald over the summer, when Colossal pledged to sink $10 million into the University of Melbourne for its Tasmanian tiger project. “It’s pretty clear to people like me that thylacine or mammoth de-extinction is more about media attention for the scientists and less about doing serious science.”

    It remains to be seen if Colossal, with In-Q-Tel’s backing, can make good on its promises. And it’s unclear what, exactly, the intelligence world might gain from the use of CRISPR. But perhaps the CIA shares the company’s altruistic, if vague, motives: “To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.”

    The post The CIA Just Invested in Woolly Mammoth Resurrection Technology appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Facebook e YouTube lucram com anúncios que atacam as urnas eletrônicas e a democracia

    O YouTube e o Facebook continuam permitindo a publicação de conteúdos antidemocráticos e com desinformação, com frequência beneficiando a campanha de reeleição de Jair Bolsonaro. É o que mostra a segunda parte de um relatório da ONG SumOfUs, que monitora grandes corporações pelo mundo. A primeira parte abordou como o Facebook lucrou com posts incentivando a violência no 7 de setembro.

    Pesquisadores da ONG analisaram diversos anúncios nas plataformas e encontraram um ecossistema projetado para minar o processo eleitoral de três maneiras específicas: espalhando desinformação sobre as urnas eletrônicas, atacando autoridades do Supremo Tribunal Federal e do Tribunal Superior Eleitoral e promovendo um golpe.

    Na maior parte dos posts do Facebook, os anúncios são pagos por bolsonaristas que decidem divulgar conteúdos originalmente produzidos por Jair Bolsonaro. Como em uma postagem do candidato a deputado estadual Sargento Floriano, que impulsionou em sua página um vídeo de Bolsonaro questionando as urnas eletrônicas e dizendo “nós temos o direito de duvidar”.

    Post impulsionado de ataque às urnas eletrônicas atingiu de 5 mil a 10 mil pessoas, segundo dados fornecidos pelo Facebook.

    Post impulsionado de ataque às urnas eletrônicas atingiu de 5 mil a 10 mil pessoas, segundo dados fornecidos pelo Facebook.

    Imagem: Reprodução

    O YouTube também mantém no ar diversos conteúdos similares, como uma entrevista de Bolsonaro à Jovem Pan atacando o TSE, vista por mais de três milhões e meio de pessoas. Na plataforma, alguns vídeos são ainda mais patéticos, como um do canal bolsonarista Foco do Brasil mentindo que Bolsonaro está acima de Lula nas pesquisas eleitorais. O vídeo foi visto por mais de 171 mil pessoas.

    Esses posts e anúncios engordam a conta bancária da Meta e do Google, donas do YouTube e do Facebook, respectivamente, a um alto custo social. Por isso, o relatório da SumOfUs pede que as empresas tomem atitudes mais assertivas no combate à desinformação, principalmente agora, a poucos dias das eleições. “Essa é a última chance para a Meta e o Google. Eles ainda têm tempo de mitigar alguns dos danos causados se agirem com a urgência e o foco necessários”, conclui o estudo.

    The post Facebook e YouTube lucram com anúncios que atacam as urnas eletrônicas e a democracia appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • No, Elon Musk’s Starlink Probably Won’t Fix Iranian Internet Censorship

    Elon Musk is once again suggesting his business interests can solve a high-profile crisis: This time, the SpaceX CEO says Starlink satellite internet can alleviate Iran’s digital crackdown against ongoing anti-government protests. Iranian dissidents and their supporters around the world cheered Musk’s announcement that Starlink is now theoretically available in Iran, but experts say the plan is far from a censorship panacea.

    Musk’s latest headline-riding gambit came after Iran responded to the recent rash of nationwide protests with large-scale disruption of the country’s internet access. On September 23, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced the U.S. was easing restrictions on technology exports to help counter Iranian state censorship efforts.

    Musk, ready to pounce, quickly replied: “Activating Starlink …”

    Predictably, Musk’s dramatic tweet set off a frenzy. Within a day, venture capitalist and longtime Musk-booster Shervin Pishevar was already suggesting Musk had earned the Nobel Peace Prize. Just the thought of Starlink “activating” an uncensored internet for millions during a period of Middle Eastern political turmoil was an instant public relations coup for Musk.

    In Iran, though, the notion of a benevolent American billionaire beaming freedom to Iran by satellite is derailed by the demands of reality, specifically physics. Anyone who wants to use Starlink, the satellite internet service provider operated by Musk’s rocketry concern, SpaceX, needs a special dish to send and receive internet data.

    “I don’t think it’s much of a practical solution because of the problem of smuggling in the ground terminals.”

    While it may be possible to smuggle Starlink hardware into Iran, getting a meaningful quantity of satellite dishes into Iran would be an incredible undertaking, especially now that the Iranian government has been tipped off to the plan on Twitter.

    Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on satellite communication, said, “I don’t think it’s much of a practical solution because of the problem of smuggling in the ground terminals.”

    The idea is not without precedent. In Ukraine, after the Russian invasion disrupted internet access, the deployment of Musk’s satellite dishes earned him international press adulation and a bevy of lucrative government contracts. In Ukraine, though, Starlink was welcomed by a profoundly pro-American government desperate for technological aid from the West. U.S. government agencies were able to ship the requisite hardware with the full logistical cooperation of the Ukrainian government.

    This is not, to say the very least, the case in Iran, where the government is unlikely to condone the import of a technology explicitly meant to undermine its own power. While Musk’s claim that Starlink’s orbiting satellites are activated over Iran may be true, the notion that censorship-free internet connectivity is something that can be flipped on like a light switch is certainly not. Without dishes on the ground to communicate with the satellites, it’s a meaningless step: technologically tantamount to giving a speech to an empty room.

    Humphreys, who has previously done consulting work for Starlink, explained that because of the specialized nature of Starlink hardware, it’s doubtful Iranians could craft a DIY alterative. “It’s not like you can build a homebrew receiver,” he said. “It’s a very complicated signal structure with a very wideband signal. Even a research organization would have a hard time.”

    Musk is famously uninterested in the constraints imposed by reality, but he seems to acknowledge the problem to some degree. In a September 25 tweet, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Karim Sadjadpour wrote, “I spoke w/ @elonmusk about Starlink in Iran, he gave me permission to share this: ‘Starlink is now activated in Iran. It requires the use of terminals in-country, which I suspect the [Iranian] government will not support, but if anyone can get terminals into Iran, they will work.’”

    Implausibility hasn’t stopped Musk’s fans, either. One tweet from a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council purporting to document a Starlink dish already successfully secreted into Iran turned out to be a photo from 2020, belonging to an Idaho man who happened to have a Persian rug.

    The fandom — and the starpower it’s attached to — might be the point here. Given the obstacles, Musk’s Starlink aspirations may be best understood in the context of his past spectacular, spectacularly unfulfilled claims, rather than something akin to Starlink’s rapid adoption in Ukraine. Musk’s penchant for internet virality has become a key component of his business operations. He has repeatedly made bold pronouncements, typically on Twitter, that a technology he happens to manufacture is the key to cracking some global crisis. Whether it’s Thai children stuck in a waterlogged cave, the Covid-19 pandemic, or faltering American transit infrastructure, Musk has repeatedly offered technological solutions that are either plainly implausible, botched in execution, or a mixture of both.

    It’s not just the lack of dishes in Iranian homes. Musk’s plan is further complicated by Starlink’s reliance on ground stations: communications facilities that allow the SpaceX satellites to plug into earthbound internet infrastructure from orbit. While upgraded Starlink satellites may no longer need these ground stations in the near future, the network of today still largely requires them to service a country as vast as Iran, said Humphreys, the University of Texas professor. Again, Iran is unlikely to approve the construction within its borders of satellite installations owned by an American defense contractor.

    Humphreys suggested that ground stations built in a neighboring country could provide some level of connection, albeit at reduced speed, but that still doesn’t get over the hump of every Iranian who wants to get online needing a $550 kit with “Starlink” emblazoned on the box. While Humphreys added that he was hopeful that a slow trickle of Starlinks terminals could aid Iranian dissidents over time, he said, “I don’t think in the short term this will have an impact on the unrest in Iran.”

    Alp Toker, director of the internet monitoring and censorship watchdog group NetBlocks, noted that many Iranians already watch banned satellite television channels through contraband dishes, meaning the smuggling of Starlink dishes is doable in theory. While he praised the idea of bringing Starlink to Iran as “credible and worthwhile” in the long term, the difficulty in sourcing Starlink’s specialized equipment means that accessing Musk’s satellites remains “a solution for the few,” not a counter to population-scale censorship.

    While future versions of the Starlink system might be able to communicate with more accessible devices like handheld phones, Toker said, “As far as we know this isn’t possible with the current generation of kit, and it won’t be until then that Starlink or similar platforms could simply ‘switch on’ internet in a country in the sense that most people understand.”

    Even with Iran’s culture of bootleg satellite TV, these experts warned that a Starlink connection could endanger Iranians. Rose Croshier, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, noted the risks: “A word of caution: TV dishes are passive — they don’t transmit — so a Starlink terminal (that both receives and transmits data) in a crowd of illegal satellite dishes would still be very findable by Iranian authorities.”

    “I don’t think in the short term this will have an impact on the unrest in Iran.”

    The plan faces further terrestrial hurdles. The complex two-way nature of satellite connections is part of why they’re subject to international regulation, most notably through the International Telecommunication Union, of which both the United States and Iran are members. Croshier pointed to a 2021 paper on satellite internet usage by the Asia Development Bank that explained how “US-based entities such as Starlink … require regulatory approval from the FCC as well the ITU” and that “service provision to customers will require regulatory approval in every country of operation.” Mahsa Alimardani, a senior Middle East researcher at Article19, a free expression advocacy group, tweeted that even if Starlink could beam internet to Iranians in a meaningful way, the company would face consequences from the International Telecommunications Union if it did so without Iranian approval — approval it is unlikely to ever get.

    Then there are sanctions against Iran. Blinken, the secretary of state, announced a relaxation of tech exports, but the restrictions on trade with Iran remain a serious obstacle. “There are a host of human rights related sanctions on Iranian actors in the IT space under a sanctions authority called GHRAVITY that complicate any of this beyond the questions raised of whether Iran would allow Starlink terminals in country,” explained Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and expert on global sanctions. The relaxed rules would still require a special license for Starlink use in Iran, O’Toole said, which he doubts would be granted: “Much of this Starlink stuff doesn’t appear terribly likely to do much, from my point of view.”

    Starlink — or a competitor — may one day bring unfettered net uplinks to Iran and other countries where online dissent is choked out, but for today’s Iranian protesters, the realities far exceed the PR punch of a two-word tweet.

    The post No, Elon Musk’s Starlink Probably Won’t Fix Iranian Internet Censorship appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • How private corporations stole the sea

    Our seas are being ravaged by exploitation for corporate profit, creating a social, economic and ecological crisis that threatens the very life support system of the Earth, writes Guy Standing.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Vic gov’t prioritises rail crossing removals over accessible tram stops

    The Victorian government is dragging its feet on making public transport accessible to people with disabilities. Darren Saffin reports.

  • Former NSA Chief Signed Deal to Train Saudi Hackers Months Before Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder

    In early 2018, former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander worked out a deal with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the cyber institute led by one of his closest aides, Saud al-Qahtani, to help the Saudi ruler train the next generation of Saudi hackers to take on the kingdom’s enemies.

    While the agreement between IronNet, founded by Alexander, and the cyber school was widely reported in intelligence industry outlets and the Saudi press at the time, it faced no scrutiny for its association with Qahtani, after the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi he reportedly orchestrated just a few months later.

    Alexander officially inked the deal with the Prince Mohammed bin Salman College of Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Advanced Technologies — a school set up to train Saudi cyber intelligence agents — at a signing ceremony in Washington, D.C., according to an announcement in early July.

    Qahtani’s proxy at the signing noted in a statement that “the strategic agreement will ensure [Saudi Arabia is] benefiting from the experience of an advisory team comprising senior officers who had held senior positions in the Cyber Command of the US Department of Defense.” Alexander’s for-profit cyber security firm IronNet would work closely with the Saudi Federation of Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones, an affiliate of the college devoted to offensive cyber operations and at the time overseen by Qahtani.

    Saudi Arabia’s agreement with IronNet was part of a host of moves to step up its cyber capabilities, coinciding with a campaign against the kingdom’s critics abroad. Khashoggi, then a Washington Post columnist and prominent Salman critic, received a series of threatening messages, including one from Qahtani, warning him to remain silent. Khashoggi, whose family and close associates discovered listening malware electronically implanted on their smartphones, was then lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul.

    It was there that a team dispatched by Qahtani detained and tortured the Saudi government critic. Qahtani, according to reports, beamed in through Skype to insult Khashoggi during the ordeal, allegedly instructing his team to “bring me the head of the dog.” Khashoggi was then dismembered with a bone saw.

    IronNet’s agreement tied to the alleged mastermind behind the killing of Khashoggi is not listed on the IronNet website, and it is not known if the business relationship still stands — or what the extent of it ever was. IronNet and representatives of the Saudi government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The Saudi Arabia relationship, according to former IronNet employees, has largely been shrouded in secrecy, even within the firm.

    Qahtani’s role of enforcer on behalf of bin Salman, well known prior to the Khashoggi slaying, has closely followed the young prince’s meteoric rise as the effective leader of Saudi Arabia.

    In 2017, Qahtani played a pivotal role in the abduction and interrogation of hundreds of Saudi elites, who were held captive at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, at which they were forced to pledge loyalty and money to Salman. Qahtani personally led the questioning efforts, according to reports.

    Later that year, he reportedly participated in the interrogation of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who was beaten and forced to resign. The following year, according to the brother of Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, Qahtani also directly participated in the torture of al-Hathloul, where he mocked her and threatened to have her raped.

    On behalf of the kingdom, Qahtani has made it his personal quest to acquire and expand Saudi cyberwarfare tools. Beyond the deal with IronNet and other top-flight American cyber experts, he has spent over a decade directly negotiating the accumulation of computer and phone infiltration technology.

    Qahtani took the helm of official state-backed efforts to expand Saudi Arabia’s cyber offensive capabilities in October 2017, when he was named president of a committee called the Electronic Security and Software Alliance, later renamed the Saudi Federation for Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones.

    Earlier this year, SAFCSP signed an agreement with Spire Solutions, a consulting firm that partners with a wide range of cyber intelligence contractors. Haboob, another cyber venture promoted by Qahtani, is a private venture that recruits hackers on behalf of the Saudi government. Haboob’s chair, Naif bin Lubdah, is on SAFCSP’s board of directors.

    In 2018, Chiron Technology Services, another American cyber consulting firm, also inked a memorandum of understanding to provide training to the same Saudi hacker school advised by IronNet. Chiron’s team includes top talent recruited from the U.S. Air Force, Army, and NSA, including Michael Tessler, who previously worked at the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations command, which handles high-profile computer infiltration missions of foreign governments.

    Jeff Weaver, the chief executive of Chiron, said in an email that his company signed a memorandum of understanding “with the college to develop a cybersecurity curriculum in support of their technical degree programs. However, no collaboration ever occurred, and they never called on us to contribute. We haven’t heard from them since 2018.”

    Online cyber sleuths identified Qahtani’s multiple handles on online hacking forums, where he was an active member seeking to purchase hacking tools. A screen name used by Qahtani, for instance, appeared to have purchased a remote access trojan known as Blackshades, which can infect targeted computers to modify and seize files, activate the webcam, and record keystrokes and passwords.

    Cybersecurity researchers have identified powerful hacking technology implanted on the phones of Khashoggi’s family, likely by agents of the United Arab Emirates, a close Saudi ally. Several received malicious texts that infected their phones with Pegasus, a tool created by the NSO Group to remotely access a target’s microphone, text messages, and location.

    Qahtani, who briefly faced house arrest, was swiftly cleared of wrongdoing in Khashoggi’s death by the Saudi government. Five of the hitmen in the squad sent to kill Khashoggi were sentenced to death, including Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, an intelligence officer who worked under Qahtani. Qahtani’s current relationship with the institute is unknown.

    People hold posters of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, near the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul, marking the two-year anniversary of his death, Friday, Oct. 2, 2020. The gathering was held outside the consulate building, starting at 1:14 p.m. (1014 GMT) marking the time Khashoggi walked into the building where he met his demise. The posters read in Arabic:' Khashoggi's Friends Around the World'. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

    People hold posters of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, near the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul, on Oct. 2, 2020.

    Photo: Emrah Gurel/AP


    Following Khashoggi’s killing, many U.S. firms faced pressure to exit business deals with Saudi Arabian entities. Yet, in the years following Khashoggi’s murder, the Saudi cyberwarfare institute central to the plot has continued to do business with Western defense industry leaders.

    In 2019, BAE Systems, a major defense contractor based in the U.S. and the U.K., entered into a training agreement with the MBS College of Cyber Security. Last year, Cisco unveiled a training relationship with the Saudi Federation of Cybersecurity, Programming, and Drones.

    BAE, reached for comment, distanced itself from the deal. “BAE Systems works with a number of partner companies based in Saudi Arabia,” said a spokesperson for the company. “ISE, one of our Saudi partner companies, was awarded a contract in 2019 by the MBS College for Cyber Security to provide support services to establish the college, such as general staffing and facilities management but this contract wasn’t activated and is still on hold.”

    Alexander has continued to do work in the region as a member of Amazon’s board. Intelligence Online, a trade outlet for intelligence contractors, reported, “As a partner of Amazon, for which it offers native surveillance of its AWS’ cloud traffic, IronNet helps the company win public contracts, especially since CEO Keith Alexander has sat on Amazon’s board.”

    IronNet, however, has faltered in recent months, with two waves of layoffs this year and a lawsuit from investors. The company has touted skyrocketing growth, like many defense-related contractors, by promising to harness growing security threats. Much of the American traditional defense industry has long sought lucrative foreign relationships, particularly with the Saudi Arabian government, a path IronNet appears to have attempted to follow.

    And President Joe Biden, who promised during his election campaign to make the Saudi state a “pariah” over the slaying, has since appeared to move on from the scandal. In June, he traveled to Riyadh to shore up the U.S.-Saudi alliance and request an increase in oil production. The four-year anniversary of Khashoggi’s slaying is on October 2.

    The post Former NSA Chief Signed Deal to Train Saudi Hackers Months Before Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • New $42M guaranteed basic income program is using innovative tech to distribute funds

    By: Chase DiBenedetto

    As guaranteed income programs continue to expand and benefit thousands of families around the country, Illinois’ Cook County unveiled the largest one yet: A $42 million promise for thousands of Chicago-area families.

    The substantially-endowed Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income Pilot will serve 3,250 low-income families, each receiving $500 monthly cash payments for 24 months. It’s similar to many other city-based free money programs, which range anywhere from $200 to $2,000 a month for thousands of households, that offer a localized glimpse into what could be accomplished with Universal Basic Income (UBI). Studies of direct cash payments and universal income have provided ample evidence that such aid promotes both financial and social prosperity among lower-income communities, and can provide needed assistance to portions of the population that often go untouched by federal relief. Recent U.S. Census data has also shown that general direct aid in the form of straight-to-individual payouts helped reduce poverty overall.

    Guaranteed income programs offer a similar type of long-term cash payments as UBI — a standardized financial safety net with few to no conditions attached — but for a select group of city residents. They’re a great way to prove the aid’s efficacy.

    “With a $42 million investment, this two-year pilot is the largest publicly funded guaranteed income initiative in American history and will provide thousands of our residents with a stable economic foundation — many for the first time in their lives,” said Cook County Board of Commissioners president Toni Preckwinkle.

    The program is in partnership with global NGO GiveDirectly, which will oversee the program’s payment administration, and technology company AidKit, which will help build and host applications and payment processing tools for participants.

    “The core of it is really wanting to empower people with choice, dignity, and opportunity,” said AidKit CEO and co-founder Katrina Van Gasse. “Direct cash assistance is one of the most direct ways to do that.”

    AidKit’s payment technology is uniquely accessible to a broad range of prospective recipients, and was intentionally designed to help make the logistic process of direct cash assistance more efficient. The organization was originally founded after seeing the success of tech built and installed to support the Left Behind Workers Fund, a pandemic relief program for undocumented workers in Colorado. The company began to scale its services to aid more than a dozen emerging direct cash and guaranteed income programs, starting initially with Atlanta, Georgia’s In Her Hands income pilot.

    “Our highest goal at AidKit is to leverage technology to improve people’s lives. Cook County Promise represents an unprecedented opportunity to do that at scale,” wrote Van Gasse in the program’s press release. The organization has become a go-to resource for similar programs around the country, helping to distribute $50 million dollars to more than 34,000 people in various test programs like Cook County Promise.

    “We created a tool that effectively and efficiently gets direct cash assistance out to people who need it most, in a dignified way. And it’s really focused on ensuring we’re reaching the most vulnerable populations that are typically excluded,” Van Gasse explained. “How do we make sure this is accessible for them?”

    What makes AidKit’s tech so successful is its ease — the sign-up process for recipients is designed for mobile device compatibility and fully completed in under 30 minutes. Applicants don’t need their own computers or laptops, and the simplicity benefits those working to assist these populations, as well. Required documents can be submitted on the applicant’s time, with both in-person and online support if needed, and uploaded simply by taking a photograph.

    The application forms (and all follow-up communications) are also multilingual, available via text-to-voice technology, and compatible with screen readers. They can be accessed by people with a range of verbal and literacy skills, as well as people with disabilities. The process is also easy for those who are unbanked, a group which makes up approximately five percent of the population, according to AidKit. The application allows for direct cash payments via bank transfer as well as prepaid debit card or virtual card, which can be picked up by or delivered to recipients.

    It’s important that options like these exist for those involved. “Some programs are designed in a way where it can feel like such a black hole for people. Applicants are just swimming in this black hole, and they have no idea what’s happening next, what they’re supposed to do, and what their status is,” Van Gasse said. “The way we’ve designed AidKit is to make it really just a supportive and informed experience.”

    Cook County Promise isn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last, guaranteed income program born and fostered in the Chicago area. Chicago City Alderman Gilbert Villega originally announced a proposed guaranteed income program in April 2021, which boasted a $30 million endowment for 5,000 families and was tested that June. The Resilient Communities program began issuing monthly payments this past July, and will continue to supplement the incomes of 5,000 families with a year of $500 monthly payments.

    The program is a substantial, and history-making, addition to these direct cash efforts. AidKit’s simple-to-use technology is helping to prove that such initiatives are scalable, and that they’re efficient social interventions — as long as they have the appropriate political, financial, and technological support.

    Applications for the Cook Country Promise pilot will go live on Oct. 6. City residents can sign up to receive updates and information on how to apply.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Small communities could be buying, selling and saving money on electric power right now – here’s how

    ANALYSIS: By Soheil Mohseni, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Alan Brent, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Globally, the electricity sector is shifting from large, centralised grids powered by fossil fuels to smaller and smarter renewable local networks.

    One area of strong interest is “energy arbitrage”, which allows users to buy and store electricity when it is cheaper and sell or use it when the cost is high.

    But Aotearoa New Zealand is slow to take this up — even though it is a crucial part of the transition to a zero-carbon future. Why is this?

    Small-grid technologies and infrastructure are still in the experimental phase, being tested for effectiveness and desirability of different set-ups, ownership models and commercial arrangements.

    And intelligent energy-management systems that can provide a prescient forecast of market dynamics are not used widely.

    To better understand these dynamics, we have modelled a theoretical “microgrid” in a residential subdivision, Totarabank, in the North Island of Aotearoa.

    Satellite image of the case study area.
    This satellite image shows the case study area. Image: Google Earth™ mapping service/Author provided

    We used the model to forecast the expected commercial returns from investing in microgrids and to unlock potential revenue streams from energy arbitrage.

    Smart scheduling of batteries
    Energy arbitrage requires battery storage and intelligent control to make the most of a local renewable energy system’s generation.

    This can be achieved by forecasting short-term future electricity consumption and linking this to the spot power price on the market. Sophisticated real-time controllers then decide if the local system should store or sell to the market (or store and sell later).

    Battery storage systems can vary in size, from community-scale batteries supplying a neighbourhood to batteries within a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs). The fundamental controlling processes required to achieve an optimal outcome are broadly the same, except that community batteries are stationary while EV batteries move around.

    Community batteries can store electricity purchased from the grid during off-peak periods and then discharge it during peak periods. Neighbourhoods with solar power can charge community batteries in the middle of the day when solar-generated electricity is abundant and discharge during the higher-priced evening peak.

    EV batteries can be used similarly, using cheaper night rates or periods of surplus wind during the night to charge. The energy stored in EV batteries can then be discharged into local loads or sold back into the grid when the price is highest, creating an additional revenue stream.

    Modelling return on investment
    In our modelling, we assumed the primary reasons people will invest in clean-energy technologies are sustainability, energy independence and resilience. We believe energy arbitrage could be an enabler of capital-intensive microgrids, as opposed to an investment made on a purely commercial basis.

    Specifically, we considered a grid-connected microgrid integrating solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind turbines. The system is also backed by a community battery and has a fleet of 10 personal EVs to serve.

    A schematic showing the modelled microgrid.
    The modelled microgrid includes wind and solar power, a community battery and a fleet of electric vehicles. Image: Author provided/The Conversation

    We considered two scenarios: one with grid arbitrage revenues and one without.

    Our results suggest revenues procured explicitly from energy arbitrage could reduce the total cost of the system by at least 12 percent. To put this into perspective, for a typical NZ$10 million town-wide microgrid investment, this means $1.2 million in savings.

    Another interesting finding was that the length of time the batteries were able to sustain critical loads during unplanned grid outages was greater by about 16 hours per year, compared to the case without intelligent control. This is a remarkable resilience advantage.

    So what does this kind of analysis mean for you? If you are part of a community interested in owning and operating a microgrid, you now have enough evidence to ask your developer to consider energy arbitrage so the community can participate in the electricity market to make a profit.

    If you own an EV and are trying to get cheaper night rates, this is a heads-up on future offerings from electricity retailers to get your storage-on-wheels to work with the vehicle-to-grid technology.

    On the whole, energy arbitrage is an excellent tool to provide support for renewable energy investment decisions and help firm up revenue forecasts.The Conversation

    Dr Soheil Mohseni, postdoctoral research fellow in sustainable energy systems, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington and Dr Alan Brent, professor and chair in sustainable energy systems, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • To ensure access to electric cars, some activists are calling attention to ‘charging deserts’

    Advocates for low-income communities and people of color have long argued that if electric cars are necessary for American roads and the health of the planet, then they should be accessible to all Americans, not just the ones with disposable income.

    But for years, they have also worried that electric cars and trucks could be out of reach — too expensive and too hard to charge. If there are neighborhoods that are already food deserts, why expect them to have a charging station or three?

    The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, also known as IRA, has several rules and benefits designed to bridge the electric vehicle gap, but some activists are still worried. 

    “Left unchecked, the electric vehicle boom could pass an entire generation of Black and Brown drivers by,” said Michael Brown, an advisor for Neighborhood Forward, a national racial justice advocacy organization. 

    For instance, one of the new IRA tax credits for charging stations installed after 2023 would cover up to 30 percent of their installation cost. The full benefits of this credit would only apply to charging stations located in a rural community or a low-income community — defined as a census tract with a poverty rate of at least 20 percent.

    “The fact that there is now funding available across the country for deploying charging infrastructure, I think it’s a good sign,” said Alvaro Sanchez, the vice president of policy at the Greenlining Institute, an environmental justice nonprofit based in Oakland, California. (Sanchez was a 2019 Grist Fixer).

    And for those interested in buying an electric car but discouraged by the cost, a $7,500 tax credit on new EVs will likely help. But the problem, both automakers and advocates say, is that the credit comes with strict rules about where new EVs must be built and where their batteries must be sourced. They argue that these rules would mean that too few EVs would qualify, continuing to make it hard for potential buyers to buy one.

    Even a $4,000 tax credit on used EVs would force potential new buyers to wait, as the credit would only apply to used EVs put into service after Dec. 31 of 2023.

    Overall vehicle ownership rates are far lower for households of color than for white households. And households of color tend to hold onto cars for a longer time. These inequities in car ownership are largely driven by the racial wealth gap and lack of intergenerational wealth, as well as discriminatory auto insurance and auto loan rate policies that make it harder for people of color to afford cars. 

    In low-income communities around the US, finding an electric vehicle charging station is often as difficult as finding a grocery store. Charging stations are more likely to be found in dense clusters in wealthier and generally whiter urban areas. Drive, or walk, through a low-income community of color or a rural area, and you would be hard-pressed to find a charging station. Advocates call these areas “charging deserts.” They also argue that this lack of access to charging stations has contributed to lower rates of EV ownership among racial minorities. Advocates argue that if there’s no access to charging stations, how will people be motivated to buy an EV?

    “We can’t build equitable infrastructure anywhere if the money isn’t available, let alone in the communities that need it the most,” said Michael Brown.

    Both Brown and Sanchez are nonetheless encouraged by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits, as well as provisions in last November’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The November bill allocated $7.5 billion to build out a national network of 500,000 charging stations and required states to submit mapping plans of their part of the charging infrastructure.  

    But the build-up of the national charging network would be prioritized on “Alternative Fuel Corridors” along the Interstate Highway System, benefiting electric vehicle owners who are commuting or making long-distance trips.

    Earlier this year, Indiana’s Department of Transportation announced that it would follow the Act’s guidelines and use $100 million of its funding to expand the state’s portion of the national charging network along these corridors. 

    The state’s plan faces criticism from the Indiana Alliance for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for Electric Vehicle Infrastructure and Economic Opportunities, a coalition of Black-owned businesses, faith institutions, nonprofits and civil rights groups. The alliance argues that the charging infrastructure plan would bypass communities of color and not prioritize Black-owned businesses.

    a blue sign for electric vehicle fast charging station along a highway with little traffic
    A sign along the Pacific Coast Highway in California announcing an electric vehicle fast charging station up ahead. OnTheRunPhoto via Getty Images

    “I think you’d be hard pressed to find a senator or congressman who knows the best location to place electric vehicle chargers to combat inequity,” said Brown. “There must be top-down pressure followed by an open conversation to ensure equity in the development stages.” 

    Activists and community members in neighborhoods of color have reflected on the missed opportunities of previous massive national infrastructure projects. The creation of the federal interstate highway system in the 1950s decimated historically Black neighborhoods and facilitated the transfer of wealth from urban financial centers to the country’s then segregated suburbs. The system also created more opportunities for car ownership among whites, while exacerbating the racial wealth gap and cementing the dependency of Black and other minority communities on poorly-funded public transit. 

    Lionel Rush, who is part of the Indiana Alliance and the president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance in Indianapolis, told Indiana Public Radio earlier this month that if the EV charging stations were not equitably placed and designed to serve communities of color, those communities would be permanently left behind in the electric vehicle revolution.

    “If we don’t get in now, we’re going to be behind — and we’ll never catch up,” he said. 

    Sanchez of the Greenlining Institute believes that the biggest solution is making sure that EV infrastructure equity doesn’t just exist on paper. That means pressuring states and the federal government to track where implementation is going well and where it might be exacerbating or creating new gaps. 

    “We need to make sure that we are adjusting our approach so that we are not leaving too many communities behind,” he said. 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline To ensure access to electric cars, some activists are calling attention to ‘charging deserts’ on Sep 22, 2022.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Facebook Report Concludes Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights

    Facebook and Instagram’s speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites’ parent company Meta.

    “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication.

    Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company’s censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

    “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact.”

    Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military air strikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain.

    Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta’s delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the “first quarter” of the year.

    While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames “a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur.”

    Though BSR is clear in stating that Meta harms Palestinian rights with the censorship apparatus it alone has constructed, the report absolves Meta of “intentional bias.” Rather, BSR points to what it calls “unintentional bias,” instances “where Meta policy and practice, combined with broader external dynamics, does lead to different human rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic speaking users” — a nod to the fact that these systemic flaws are by no means limited to the events of May 2021.

    Meta responded to the BSR report in a document to be circulated along with the findings. (Meta did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about the report by publication time.) In a footnote in the response, which was also obtained by The Intercept, the company wrote, “Meta’s publication of this response should not be construed as an admission, agreement with, or acceptance of any of the findings, conclusions, opinions or viewpoints identified by BSR, nor should the implementation of any suggested reforms be taken as admission of wrongdoing.”

    According to the findings of BSR’s report, Meta deleted Arabic content relating to the violence at a far greater rate than Hebrew-language posts, confirming long-running complaints of disparate speech enforcement in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The disparity, the report found, was perpetuated among posts reviewed both by human employees and automated software.

    “The data reviewed indicated that Arabic content had greater over-enforcement (e.g., erroneously removing Palestinian voice) on a per user basis,” the report says. “Data reviewed by BSR also showed that proactive detection rates of potentially violating Arabic content were significantly higher than proactive detection rates of potentially violating Hebrew content.”

    BSR attributed the vastly differing treatment of Palestinian and Israeli posts to the same systemic problems rights groups, whistleblowers, and researchers have all blamed for the company’s past humanitarian failures: a dismal lack of expertise. Meta, a company with over $24 billion in cash reserves, lacks staff who understand other cultures, languages, and histories, and is using faulty algorithmic technology to govern speech around the world, the BSR report concluded.

    Not only do Palestinian users face an algorithmic screening that Israeli users do not — an “Arabic hostile speech classifier” that uses machine learning to flag potential policy violations and has no Hebrew equivalent — the report notes that the Arabic system also doesn’t work well: “Arabic classifiers are likely less accurate for Palestinian Arabic than other dialects, both because the dialect is less common, and because the training data — which is based on the assessments of human reviewers — likely reproduces the errors of human reviewers due to lack of linguistic and cultural competence.”

    Human employees appear to have exacerbated the lopsided effects of Meta’s speech-policing algorithms. “Potentially violating Arabic content may not have been routed to content reviewers who speak or understand the specific dialect of the content,” the report says. It also notes that Meta didn’t have enough Arabic and Hebrew-speaking staff on hand to manage the spike in posts.

    These faults had cascading speech-stifling effects, the report continues. “Based on BSR’s review of tickets and input from internal stakeholders, a key over-enforcement issue in May 2021 occurred when users accumulated ‘false’ strikes that impacted visibility and engagement after posts were erroneously removed for violating content policies.” In other words, wrongful censorship begat further wrongful censorship, leaving the affected wondering why no one could see their posts. “The human rights impacts … of these errors were more severe given a context where rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and safety were of heightened significance, especially for activists and journalists,” the report says.

    Beyond Meta’s failures in triaging posts about Sheikh Jarrah, BSR also points to the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy — referred to as “DOI” in the report — a roster of thousands of people and groups that Meta’s billions of users cannot “praise,” “support,” or “represent.” The full list, obtained and published by The Intercept last year, showed that the policy focuses mostly on Muslim and Middle Eastern entities, which critics described as a recipe for glaring ethnic and religious bias.

    Meta claims that it’s legally compelled to censor mention of groups designated by the U.S. government, but legal scholars have disputed the company’s interpretation of federal anti-terrorism laws. Following The Intercept’s report on the list, the Brennan Center for Justice called the company’s claims of legal obligation a “fiction.”

    “Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

    BSR agrees the policy is systemically biased: “Legal designations of terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim, and thus Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

    Palestinians are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the blacklist, according to the report: “Palestinians are more likely to violate Meta’s DOI policy because of the presence of Hamas as a governing entity in Gaza and political candidates affiliated with designated organizations. DOI violations also come with particularly steep penalties, which means Palestinians are more likely to face steeper consequences for both correct and incorrect enforcement of policy.”

    The document concludes with a list of 21 nonbinding policy recommendations, including increased staffing capacity to properly understand and process Arabic posts, implementing a Hebrew-compatible algorithm, increased company oversight of outsourced moderators, and both reforms to and increased transparency around the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy.

    In its response to the report, Meta vaguely commits to implement or consider implementing aspects of 20 out of 21 the recommendations. The exception is a call to “Fund public research into the optimal relationship between legally required counterterrorism obligations and the policies and practices of social media platforms,” which the company says it will not pursue because it does not wish to provide legal guidance for other companies. Rather, Meta suggests concerned experts reach out directly to the federal government.

    The post Facebook Report Concludes Company Censorship Violated Palestinian Human Rights appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • This Former Popeyes Chef Is Now Making Vegan Fried Chicken

    A former product developer for major fast-food chains Popeyes and Wendy’s has now switched over to making vegan meat for plant-based chicken startup Nowadays. As the brand’s Director of Product Development, chef Chris Johnson has already used his expertise to create Nowadays’ first crispy whole-cut vegan chicken cutlets and tenders, which are expected to launch in early 2023. 

    At Popeyes and Wendy’s, Johnson was part of a team of chefs developing new menu items and says his exposure to plant-based meat at Wendy’s allowed him to understand its potential for mainstream consumers. While the fast-food chain has never had a permanent meatless offering, last year it offered a meatless Spicy Black Bean Burger for a limited-time after its first veggie burger option was tested at select locations in 2015. However, Johnson saw an opportunity to make vegan meat a lot better.

    VegNews.VeganNuggets.Nowadays

    Nowadays

    “I was exposed to several plant-based meat brands during my time at Wendy’s and was inspired by the impact they could have—but also saw an opportunity to make plant-based products more meat-like in flavor, texture, and versatility that mainstream eaters would enjoy,” Johnson tells VegNews. 

    Nowadays gets into the vegan chicken game

    Nowadays was founded just two years ago in San Francisco by food industry veterans Max Elder and Dominik Grabinski with the mission of improving human and planetary health with “good for you” fried chicken made with simple, animal-free ingredients. Its flagship product, vegan chicken nuggets, are made with just seven ingredients with a base of non-GMO yellow peas for protein and yeast and mushroom extracts to impart that umami flavor found in their traditional counterpart. 

    VegNews.VeganNuggets2.Nowadays

    Nowadays

    In July, the brand made its retail debut with the launch of its vegan chicken nuggets at Whole Foods Markets in the Southern Pacific region, with more locations and retailers expected to be added by the end of this year. The nuggets can also be found at LA vegan burger chain Honeybee Burger and Aunts et Uncles restaurant in Brooklyn, NY.

    The brand’s new homestyle vegan chicken tenders are also made with pea protein and are tossed in a savory homestyle coating with a peppery finish that the brand says complements the wholesome chicken flavor of the tender. Likewise, Nowadays new cutlets feature a crispy panko-style breading with a blend of savory spices with hints of garlic, cayenne, and pepper. Both products can be fried or baked to a crisp, golden brown.

    “Working with Nowadays offers me the opportunity to develop plant-based products designed for the mainstream, with a simple ingredient approach that makes me proud,” Johnson says.

    The startup’s vegan chicken products are all made using its proprietary technology which creates whole cuts of plant-based meat that mimics the unique shape of natural-cut animal-based tenders without the use of a mold.

    Making vegan chicken mainstream

    Now that Johnson has pivoted from meat-centric fast food to vegan chicken, his goal is to provide options that can become go-to staples for everyday eaters. “I want to create delicious and nutritious plant-based meats that become go-to staples for eaters everywhere, whether at home or out-to-eat, and to convince even the most-skeptical meat lovers to take another bite,” he says. 

    Nowadays was able to invest in new product development, including its new cutlets and tenders, after closing an oversubscribed $7 million seed round earlier this year. Coincidentally, its investment round also saw participation from the likes of fourth-generation traditional meat producers Standard Meat Company, which has been in operation since 1935.

    VegNews.NowadaysVeganChicken.ErinScott

    Nowadays

    While it’s not unusual to see traditional chefs and meat companies getting into plant-based chicken as more consumers begin to realize the environmental and ethical costs of producing live birds for consumption, Nowadays’ ability to leverage such expertise is notable. And as the company grows, it hopes to scale its low-cost production technology, allowing its vegan meats to plug directly into existing production finishing lines and eventually reach cost parity with their animal-derived counterparts. 

    “I see Nowadays’ products as the perfect canvas for the flavor and texture innovation that mainstream consumers are looking for,” Johnson says. “Leveraging my product development experience and our unique whole-cut manufacturing platform, Nowadays can uniquely offer craveable comfort that closely mimics meat but is better for both people and the planet.”

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Qld-South Korea signs $20bn green ammonia deal

    Queensland will export more than one million tonnes of green ammonia to South Korea annually by 2032 as three of the country’s largest conglomerates and Queensland-based Ark Energy embark on a $20 billion hydrogen and ammonia supply chain development project. Ark Energy’s 3 gigawatt Collinsville Green Energy Hub, which is still under development, will support…

    The post Qld-South Korea signs $20bn green ammonia deal appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Fortescue’s $9bn decarbonisation plan for mining operations

    Andrew Forrest’s $9 billion package to accelerate the decarbonisation of iron ore giant Fortescue’s operations by 2030  includes the mass deployment of more renewable energy as part of an accelerated plan “to transition to the post fossil fuel era.” The US$6.2 billion (AU$9.24 million) will be mostly invested in financial years 2024-28 and includes the…

    The post Fortescue’s $9bn decarbonisation plan for mining operations appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Carrick Ryan joins InnovationAus as a columnist

    Former counterterrorism agent Carrick Ryan will join the InnovationAus.com roster of columnists, bringing a focus on the cross-section of technology and the law, with a particular focus on privacy and judicial overreach. After 10 years as a federal agent at the Australian Federal Police (AFP), of which five was spent serving on the NSW Joint…

    The post Carrick Ryan joins InnovationAus as a columnist appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Canal que pagou apoiador fake de Bolsonaro recebeu grana pública no YouTube durante a pandemia

    O canal Foco do Brasil, que contratou um apoiador fake para fazer uma pergunta a Bolsonaro e viralizar em 2020, recebeu pelo menos R$ 9,3 mil de verbas públicas em sete meses de pandemia, entre 2020 e 2021. A grana foi repassada ao canal por meio de anúncios do governo federal no YouTube.

    No auge, o canal – um dos investigados no inquérito autorizado pelo ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal Alexandre de Moraes sobre os atos antidemocráticos de 2020 – chegava a faturar dezenas de milhares de reais por mês em propaganda. Parte dela vinha do próprio governo, central em sua cobertura: diariamente, o Foco do Brasil publicava vídeos com falas do presidente no cercadinho do Palácio da Alvorada.

    Como a Folha revelou hoje, em abril de 2020, o publicitário Beto Viana foi pago para ir ao cercadinho do Alvorada questionar se Bolsonaro havia assistido à entrevista do então ministro da Saúde, Henrique Mandetta, na Globo. Bolsonaro respondeu que não assistia à emissora. A resposta viralizou. A pergunta foi combinada previamente com seu contratante, identificado como Anderson. Segundo a reportagem, naquele mesmo dia, o publicitário recebeu R$ 1.100. A Folha também mostra que o governo sabia do combinado com o apoiador fake para garantir “livre acesso” a ele.

    Segundo investigação da CPI da Pandemia, o Foco do Brasil foi o maior beneficiado em verbas públicas despejadas para publicidade no YouTube em canais cloroquiners – ou seja, que incentivavam o ineficaz tratamento precoce – em um período de sete meses durante o auge da pandemia. Do total de R$ 44 mil, repassados a 34 contas, o Foco do Brasil abocanhou R$ 9,3 mil. O filé de sua programação eram os vídeos exclusivos de Bolsonaro, que ele recebia por WhatsApp direto de um assessor do presidente, Tércio Arnaud Tomaz, um dos membros do chamado gabinete do ódio. Era uma via de mão dupla: o canal recebia grana, conteúdo e atuava como linha auxiliar da comunicação de Bolsonaro.

    “A propaganda de conteúdo extremista no campo digital culmina, de fato, em ações subsequentes: as manifestações reais contra o estado democrático de direito, criando um ciclo que se realimenta, com a difusão das manifestações pelos canais de internet dos produtores, que, por sua vez, são alardeados e replicados em perfis pessoais de redes sociais de agentes do estado, gerando mais visualizações”, afirmou a investigação da Polícia Federal no âmbito do inquérito dos atos antidemocráticos do STF.

    O canal não está na lista dos que tiveram a monetização suspensa pelo YouTube após uma decisão do Tribunal Superior Eleitoral para tentar coibir fake news. Segundo o inquérito do STF, entre março de 2019 e maio de 2020, o Foco do Brasil lucrou mais de 307 mil dólares – mais de R$ 1,6 milhão – com anúncios no YouTube.

    The post Canal que pagou apoiador fake de Bolsonaro recebeu grana pública no YouTube durante a pandemia appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Two ways to think about Patagonia’s $3 billion climate donation

    When Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard announced last week that he and family members were giving away the company to use its profits to fight climate change, the move was hailed as historic and remarkable by philanthropic experts. 

    The outdoor retailer, with a history of sustainability and environmental efforts, once told people to “think twice” before buying one of its iconic jackets. Now, in the wake of their decision to give away the company, some observers are in fact thinking twice — about whether the giveaway is actually that groundbreaking.

    According to some legal experts, it’s a typical tax move. 

    Chouinard, his wife, and their two adult children transferred all of the company’s voting stock, or 2 percent of all shares, to the newly created Patagonia Purpose Trust, as first reported by the New York Times. The rest of the company’s stock has been transferred to a newly created social welfare organization, the Holdfast Collective, which will inject a projected $100 million a year into environmental nonprofits and political organizations. Patagonia Purpose Trust will oversee this mission and company operations. The giveaway was valued at roughly $3 billion and did not merit a charitable deduction, with the family paying $17.5 million in taxes on the donation to the trust. 

    While this move is groundbreaking in the philanthropic world, New York University law professor Daniel Hemel told Quartz that the giveaway allowed the family to reap the benefits of a commonly used tax law maneuver used by philanthropists. The Chouinard family paid more than $17 million in taxes when all was said and done, however, Hemel noted that the payment is a small percentage of the donation made, and the way the trusts and ruling organizations played out still allowed the family to call the shots on both the business and its future charitable contributions.

    The Chouinard family’s gift has been compared to a recent move by conservative billionaire Barre Seid, who sold his entire company to the tune of $1.6 billion to fund right-wing political actions. When the New York Times reported on Seid, his transaction was noted to be shaded in dark money, while Patagonia’s was historic, despite both billionaires funneling money into 501c4 organizations. Hemel called out this juxtaposition both on Twitter and in his recent interview, where he said the gifts were “substantively similar.”

    Billionaires use charitable giving to address a variety of issues, from right-wing politics to preserving wildlife. Communication and public policy professor Matthew Nisbet of Northeastern University has been outspoken against the role philanthropy and billionaires play in climate change before and told Grist that the newly announced Patagonia decision may be applauded by many in environmental industries, but Yvon Chouinard has essentially gone from a reluctant billionaire to political fat cat.

    “Now that they’ve invented this (model) and introduced it to the marketplace for politically motivated billionaires, regardless of their background, everyone’s going to do it,“ Nisbet said. “This is an escalating zero-sum political arms race.” With the creation of the new 501c4 Holdfast Collective, Nisbet likened this new organization to other notable political spending groups, such as the National Rifle Association and the conservative Club for Growth.

    Portrait of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, sitting at a desk writing on a piece of paper and looking into the camera
    Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.
    Campbell Brewer

    A 501c4 organization, considered a tax-exempt, social welfare organization by the Internal Revenue Service, is not required to disclose its donors but must disclose money granted to other organizations equal to $5,000 or more. 501c4 organizations can engage in political lobbying related to the organization’s mission, but can not advocate on behalf of or against a specific candidate.

    Nisbet feared that the influx of cash controlled by an interest group would set the agenda of climate issues in the political realm moving forward. “Do you believe that our politics should be decided by billionaires who can spend hundreds of millions of dollars in elections with no accountability, no transparency, and pick and choose winners or pick and choose issues?” he asked.

    Lack of transparency in political spending and philanthropy has mired public perception of charitable giving, causing long-standing scrutiny that dates back to 20th-century oil baron John D. Rockefeller’s creation of his namesake foundation. 501c4 organizations have funded anti-climate Facebook ads and directly influence climate legislation at the state level, with little knowledge of who funds these actions. While the source of the Holdfast Collective’s funding will come directly from Patagonia’s profits, Nisbet said he worries the new organization could become a way for other billionaires to donate and influence climate issues. Modern-day billionaires have taken climate change, the environment, and agriculture under their charitable wings more often in recent years, despite 10 percent of the world’s richest people producing half of the globe’s carbon emissions. 

    Soon-to-be trillionaire Jeff Bezos created a $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund in 2020, but Amazon has come under fire from watchdogs for undercounting its carbon footprint, punishing climate-focused workers, and polluting neighboring communities. Bill Gates has focused his philanthropy on agriculture and global hunger, while critics accuse him of gobbling up American farmland and cornering the market on seeds. Both Bezos and Gates have poured billions into tech-focused climate solutions, as well as Tesla founder Elon Musk also offering up $100 million for carbon capture innovations.

    Patagonia has increased its political presence in recent years when it went to the courtroom to fight for the conservation of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah and joined legal battles against logging, as well as commented on voting rights. The outdoor retail giant does have a long history of charitable giving, as they’ve donated 1 percent of all profits to environmental causes for decades and donated back $10 million of tax cuts to climate advocates. 

    Patagonia spokesperson Corley Kenna told Grist that, at this time, there are no publicly announced organizations that the company’s future funds will go to, but “all options are on the table.” She said Chouinard and the Holdfast Collective are interested in tackling the root causes of the climate crisis, including land and water protection, grantmaking to on-the-ground groups, and funding policy focused on solutions. 

    The spokesperson strongly rebuked the criticism that the recently announced company transition is not rooted in transparency and will fuel untraceable funds, citing Patagonia’s long history of transparency about its manufacturing, giving, and leadership.

    “Yvon Chouinard, the Chouinard family, and the Holdfast Collective is not an extension of a political party,” Kenna said. “What we’re talking about here is a family that is committed to addressing the existential crises facing our planet.”

    With big-name companies and wealthy families entering the fray, climate-focused philanthropy has grown in recent years, but still accounts for less than 2 percent of global giving, according to a report last year by ClimateWorks Foundation. Shawn Reifsteck, vice president of strategy and communications for the foundation, said Patagonia is “trailblazing a new way for companies to give back for generations to come” and he hopes others will follow suit. Philanthropic strategist Bruce DeBoskey said more and more philanthropists are recognizing that the traditional model of writing checks and giving grants has not been successful in solving overarching societal problems and billionaires are adopting new models of giving, such as the Chouinard family’s giveaway.

    “It’s not about changes in the tax laws that I’m aware of,” DeBoskey said. “It’s about the changes in thinking.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Two ways to think about Patagonia’s $3 billion climate donation on Sep 20, 2022.

  • Back-door proliferation: IAEA, AUKUS and nuclear submarine technology

    Australia’s operation of nuclear-powered submarines will make it the first non-nuclear weapon state to manipulate a loophole in the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection system. Binoy Kampmark reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.