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Category: Technology

  • ‘True blue’ tech suppliers to be recognised in procurement push

    The federal government has for the first time defined an ‘Australian business’ for procurement purposes as part of a multi-year project to extract more benefits from its $80 billion annual spend. About 20 per cent of the federal procurement spend goes to the technology sector, and Australian suppliers and advocates on Wednesday welcomed the new…

    The post ‘True blue’ tech suppliers to be recognised in procurement push appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Utilities may soon pay you to help support a greener grid

    Every month you pay an electricity bill, because there’s no choice if you want to keep the lights on. The power flows in one direction. But soon, utilities might desperately need something from you: electricity. 

    A system increasingly loaded with wind and solar will require customers to send power back into the system.  If the traditional grid centralized generation at power plants, experts believe the system of tomorrow will be more distributed, with power coming from what they call the “grid edge” — household batteries, electric cars, and other gadgets whose relationship with the grid has been one way.  More people, for example, are installing solar panels on their roofs backed up with home batteries. When electricity demand increases, a utility can draw power from those homes as a vast network of backup energy. 

    The big question is how to choreograph that electrical ballet — millions of different devices at the grid edge, owned by millions of different customers, that all need to talk to the utility’s systems. To address that problem, a team of researchers from several universities and national labs developed an algorithm for running a “local electricity market,” in which ratepayers would be compensated for allowing their devices to provide backup power to a utility. Their paper, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, described how the algorithm could coordinate so many sources of power — and then put the system to the test. “When you have numbers of that magnitude, then it becomes very difficult for one centralized entity to keep tabs on everything that’s going on,” said Anu Annaswamy, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the paper’s co-author. “Things need to become more distributed, and that is something the local electricity market can facilitate.”

    At the moment, utilities respond to a surge in demand for electricity by spinning up more generation at power plants running on fossil fuels. But they can’t necessarily do that with renewables, since the sun might not be shining, or the wind blowing. So as grids increasingly depend on clean energy, they’re getting more flexible: Giant banks of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, can store that juice for later use. 

    Yet grids will need even more flexibility in the event of a cyberattack or outage. If a hacker compromises a brand of smart thermostat to increase the load on a bunch of AC units at once, that could crash the grid by driving demand above available supply. With this sort of local electricity market imagined in the paper, a utility would call on other batteries in the network to boost supply,  stabilizing the grid. At the same time, electric water heaters and heat pumps for climate control could wind down, reducing demand. “In that sense, there’s not necessarily a fundamental difference between a battery and a smart device like a water heater, in terms of being able to provide the support to the grid,” said Jan Kleissl, director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

    Along with this demand reduction, drawing power from devices along the grid edge would provide additional support. In testing out cyberattack scenarios and sustained inclement weather that reduces solar energy, the researchers found that the algorithm was able to restabilize the grid every time. The algorithm also provides a way to set the rates paid to households for their participation. That would depend on a number of factors such as time of day, location of the household, and the overall demand. “Consumers who provide flexibility are explicitly being compensated for that, rather than just people doing it voluntarily,” said Vineet J. Nair, a Ph.D. student at MIT and lead author of the paper. “That kind of compensation is a way to incentivize customers.”

    Utilities are already experimenting with these sorts of compensation programs, though on a much smaller scale. Electric buses in Oakland, California, for instance, are sending energy back to the grid when they’re not ferrying kids around. Utilities are also contracting with households to use their large home batteries, like Tesla’s Powerwall, as virtual power plants. 

    Building such systems is relatively easy, because homes with all their heat pumps and batteries are already hooked into the system, said Anna Lafoyiannis, senior team lead for transmission operations and planning at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. By contrast, connecting a solar and battery farm to the grid takes years of planning, permitting, and construction. “Distributed resources can be deployed really quickly on the grid,” she said. “When I look at flexibility, the time scale matters.”

    All these energy sources at the grid edge, combined with large battery farms operated by the utility, are dismantling the myth that renewables aren’t reliable enough to provide power on their own. One day, you might even get paid to help bury that myth for good.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Utilities may soon pay you to help support a greener grid on Mar 5, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Potentially ‘catastrophic’ use of AI in nuke systems raised by former Royal Navy boss

    Concerns about the potentially “catastrophic” introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the nuclear weapons’ command, control and communication (N3) systems have been raised by the former First Sea Lord and former Security Minister Lord West of Spithead.

    An AI expert told the Canary that the potential worst-case scenario for introducing AI into nuclear weapons command and control systems is a situation like the one which caused the apocalypse in the Terminator franchise. 

    The Terminator films revolve around an event where the AI in control of the USA’s nuclear weapons system gains self-awareness, views its human controllers as a threat, and chooses to attempt to wipe out humanity. 

    Can’t, or wont?

    Lord West, a backbench Labour peer, raised his concerns via a parliamentary written question which was answered by Ministry of Defence minister of state Lord Coaker. 

    West asked:

    What work is being undertaken, and by whom, regarding the integration of AI in nuclear (1) command, (2) control, and (3) communications systems; and whether they have commissioned research to identify and manage high-risk AI applications?

    Responding, Lord Coaker said:

    The UK’s nuclear weapons are operationally independent and only the Prime Minister can authorise their use. It is a long-standing policy that we do not discuss detailed nuclear command and control matters and so will not be able to provide any additional detail.

    “Research to identify, understand, and mitigate against risks of AI in sensitive applications is underway. We will ensure that, regardless of any use of AI in our strategic systems, human political control of our nuclear weapons is maintained at all times.

    West confirmed to the Canary that his question was inspired by a recent briefing titled Assessing the implications of integrating AI in nuclear decision-making systems, published on 11 February 2025 by the European Leadership Network (ELN) and authored by Non-Resident Expert on AI at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) Alice Saltini. 

    The peer said he found Saltini’s paper very useful and:

    It’s the first time I’ve seen people really addressing [this issue].

    Peer warns about ‘catastrophic’ consequences of introducing AI into nuclear weapons

    West made it clear he doesn’t oppose AI, per se.

    There’s a lot of interest being shown in AI. I understand all of that. That’s fine, and I think there’s some good work going on

    He continued:

    I just am very, very nervous about getting AI into command and control and that area of nuclear weapons, because if anything goes wrong, the results can be so catastrophic.

    West was First Sea Lord and Commander in Chief of the Royal Navy from 2002 to 2006. 

    Reflecting on the response he got from the minister, West said:

    I just wanted to discover what actually has been going on. And I don’t think the answer really made me think, ‘Gosh, yes, they’re looking at this very carefully.

    I got the feeling that there are people saying, ‘Oh, maybe we could do this, that and the other with it’, and I’m not sure what safeguards and what work has been done to make sure that nothing silly is done.

    Explaining why he asked the question, in addition to being inspired by Saltini’s briefing, West said: 

    What I’d like to flag up is to anyone, let’s just be very wary if we do anything in this arena of AI, because [the] results could be so catastrophic.

    Reacting to the government’s line which implied it could use, or already be using AI, in “strategic systems”, West said:

    It gives a huge potential to all sorts of things.

    Appropriate oversight

    West said he wanted more reassurance from the government that it is at least being careful with the rollout of AI in the defence sector, including with appropriate oversight. He said: 

    What I’d like to flag up is to anyone, let’s just be very wary if we do anything in this arena of AI, because [the] results could be so catastrophic

    It would be very nice to have some more clarity about this, and some more reassurance about the work that’s actually going on.

    He recognised, however, that the government is likely unable to provide a full explanation of its activities in the areas of AI in defence because to do so could hand advantages to the UK’s adversaries. He said: 

    You can’t tell people what’s happening, because obviously, it’s going to be highly classified

    [However], you can reassure people and make sure people understand that work is going on – that can be done.

    On oversight specifically, he said:

    What I would like to see is that there’s someone who’s been set up to monitor and take charge of this and lay out the ground rules, and I’d like to know who that is.

    The government previously had a body called the AI Council which was “an independent expert committee that provided advice to government, and high-level leadership of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem”, according to its website, but its last meeting was held in June 2023. 

    A newer body exists called the AI Security Institute, renamed recently from the AI Safety Institute, which appears to focus more on research into AI rather than providing oversight and governance.

    AI has “power-seeking tendencies”

    Saltini is described by the ELN as:

    specialising in the impact of AI on nuclear decision-making.

    She told the Canary:

    the government’s response doesn’t satisfactorily address the core problem of nuclear risks generated by AI.

    She said the reassurance in the parliamentary response that human political control would be maintained:

    rests on the familiar promise of keeping a human in the loop” but added “this approach is dangerously simplistic.

    A critical part of nuclear weapons development and maintenance is choices about the visibility of various parts of the weapon systems for adversaries because that visibility dictates how other states react to certain actions by nuclear-armed countries.

    Saltini said:

    the commitment to “human oversight […] mask critical vulnerabilities.

    As nuclear arsenals modernise under intense geopolitical pressure, integrating AI into nuclear decision-making carries a very real risk of unintended escalation

    Not every nuclear state has made an explicit commitment to human oversight, and even if they had, there is no straightforward way to verify these promises, leaving room for dangerous misinterpretations or misunderstandings of countries’ intentions.

    She explained that:

    AI tools are not perfect and have significant limitations for high-stakes domains” such as nuclear weapons. 

    They are prone to ‘hallucinations,’ where false information is generated with high confidence, and their opaque ‘black box’ nature means that even when a human is in the loop, the underlying processes can be too complex to fully understand. 

    “This is further compounded by cyber vulnerabilities and our inability to align AI outputs with human goals and values, potentially deviating from strategic objectives.

    She went on to hypothesise that introducing AI into nuclear weapons command and control systems could precipitate a situation like the one which leads to the apocalypse in the Terminator franchise. She said:

    As these systems gain greater operational agency, they may display power-seeking tendencies, potentially leading to rapid and unintended escalation in high-stakes environments. All of these limitations persist even when states maintain human oversight

    However, she did say that AI could have safer applications in the defence sector. 

    Generally speaking, when applied narrowly—with built-in redundancies and rigorous safeguards—AI can efficiently synthesise large volumes of data in a timely manner, support wargaming scenarios, and enhance training.

    In the nuclear weapons sector specifically, she said could “optimise logistics by streamlining maintenance schedules for nuclear assets and enhancing overall system efficiency, augmenting human capabilities and improving performance, rather than automating decisions.

    The answer on AI in nuclear weapons is not reassuring

    The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said it strongly opposes the introduction of AI into systems related to nuclear weapons, as well as nuclear weapons themselves. 

    Reflecting on the minister’s response, CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt said:

    Their answer is not particularly reassuring. 

    Perhaps the Prime Minister is the only person who can authorise the use of nuclear weapons, but how much will the decision on what to do depend on information supplied by AI?

    Even if the PM has ultimate control, they would probably be ‘advised’ by AI systems that are there to provide possible strategies relevant to the perceived situation.

    Research into the risks of AI in sensitive applications is most definitely needed, but in the meantime, it seems that those AI systems already in the system will continue to operate.

    Bolt said the focus should be on de-escalation and disarmament, rather than introducing new technologies into nuclear weapons systems. She continued: 

    It would be easier, cheaper and safer for the government to spend time on negotiating nuclear arms reduction and eventual disarmament rather than trying to take part in a race to achieve some high tech goal that, even if achievable, will only be superseded by newer, more elaborate systems. 

    What is needed is a break in this technological anti-weapon – weapon cycle and a move to serious, in good faith, disarmament negotiations as required by our obligations under the NPT.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Tom Pashby

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • UN human rights chief ‘deeply worried by fundamental shift’ in US

    Volker Türk alarmed at growing power of ‘unelected tech oligarchs’ and warns gender equality is being rolled back

    The UN human rights chief has warned of a “fundamental shift” in the US and sounded the alarm over the growing power of “unelected tech oligarchs”, in a stinging rebuke of Washington weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.

    Volker Türk said there had been bipartisan support for human rights in the US for decades but said he was “now deeply worried by the fundamental shift in direction that is taking place domestically and internationally”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Socialism Leads Humanity Out Of Artificial Scarcity

    “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity,” said fictional Captain Picard of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

    Humanity is standing on the cusp. Climate change is presenting the U.S. with the same choice nature has gifted all its species: evolve or die; change is the only constant.

    As the cost of basic goods and, more importantly, energy continues to rise across the capitalist economies of Japan, Western Europe and North America, others have decided to utilize their economy to actually innovate. Instead of phallic vanity projects of the impotent super-wealthy, presented by SpaceX and Blue Origin, the “Chinese Academy of Space Technology” (CAST) has shown humanity a different way forward into the stars.

    The post Socialism Leads Humanity Out Of Artificial Scarcity appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • China Is Already The Leader In Advanced Critical Technologies

    In his first month back in the White House, US President Donald Trump indicated his interest in annexing Greenland and brokering a peace deal for Ukraine that would include access to Ukrainian minerals and metals. It is important to note that Greenland has already been a point of contention around its vast holdings of rare earth minerals with such remarkable names as dysprosium, neodymium, scandium, and yttrium (there are seventeen rare earth minerals that are central to any advanced technology). Given that Greenland is part of Denmark, it is therefore beholden to European Union (EU) rules.

    The post China Is Already The Leader In Advanced Critical Technologies appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • “Opportunism and Fear”: Crypto Industry Sets Its Sights on Governors’ Mansions

    Mayor Steve Fulop of Jersey City, New Jersey, was running for governor when he announced that he would invest part of his city’s pension fund in bitcoin.

    Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., was toying with a challenge to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul when he co-sponsored a resolution calling blockchain technology “the future of innovation.”

    Between them, the two represented an emerging trend among ambitious Democrats: Candidates angling for state office are touting support for the cryptocurrency industry.

    For crypto, the trend could yield rewards. Industry players would like to see friendly state-level financial regulation, loose rules for energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining, and potentially even state pension fund investments in their products.

    One industry critic chalked up the trend of Democrats paying homage to crypto to the industry’s money cannon.

    “I think it boils down to two words: opportunism and fear,” said Mark Hays, who works for the groups advocacy groups Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “I don’t think it gets more nuanced than that.”

    “Right now, a lot of folks are worried about being on the wrong side of that money.”

    For politicians, the push for crypto could draw votes from the young men mostly likely to trade crypto, but there could be bigger rewards to be reaped by attracting deep-pocketed industry donors. Supporters of crypto threw around large sums of money in last year’s elections for national offices and won nearly across the board.

    “The crypto industry, because the industry can print its own money, somewhat literally and metaphorically, it is able to pull a lot of money into electoral races and lobbying activity,” Hays said. “Right now, a lot of folks are worried about being on the wrong side of that money.”

    The move, though, could also invite backlash from Democratic primary voters at a time when the Dogecoin brand has been coopted by Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government office and President Donald Trump has launched a meme coin of his own.

    Becoming Power Players

    Cryptocurrency companies have taken an improbable journey over the past decade from Silicon Valley startups to Washington power players.

    They first flexed their might in 2022, when Sam Bankman-Fried and other executives at the fraudulent crypto platform FTX showered tens of millions of dollars on Democratic and Republican campaigns.

    Bankman-Fried was behind bars by 2024, but other industry figures banded together on a super PAC that spent nearly $200 million on congressional races.

    The group was officially bipartisan and spent millions on Democrats, but it leaned Republican. The spending allocation may have ended up helping tip control of the Senate to Republicans and alienated one Democratic megadonor, who quit the effort in protest and eventually received a refund for his contribution.

    Last year, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the crypto’s top legislative priority, a bill called Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century, or FIT 21, that would slide most cryptocurrencies under an industry-friendly regulatory agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

    Many Democrats were in favor of the bill — including two running in the crowded primary for the New Jersey governor’s race. Both of them, Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Rep. Josh Gottheimer, have been rated by the trade group Stand With Crypto as “strongly” supporting the industry.

    Neither Sherrill nor Gottheimer has talked up crypto on the campaign trail, and the issue has largely flown under the radar, according to an observer of state politics.

    “To most of the public, they haven’t encountered it in the gubernatorial race,” said Kristoffer Shields, the director of the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University.

    Shields still believes there are voters who care intensely about the issue, given the many finance industry professionals who work in New York City and Philadelphia but live in New Jersey.

    Public Pension Investments

    Fulop, the Jersey City mayor and a former Goldman Sachs banker, may have had those voters in mind when he announced in July that he would be investing part of Jersey City’s pension fund in bitcoin.

    Fulop said on X that he had “been a long time believer (through ups/downs) in crypto” and that blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, “is amongst the most important new technology innovations since the internet.”

    “I believe in asset class diversification as a responsible investment strategy.”

    In a statement, Fulop said the city has allocated only a small percentage of its pension holdings to bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund and that it has performed well since the purchases began in November.

    State pension funds represent an attractive opportunity for crypto companies, who have begun lobbying states to invest in their products. If elected to the governor’s mansion, Fulop said he would be open to investing some of the state’s pension money in cryptocurrencies.

    “Similar to what we’ve done with Jersey City’s pension fund, I believe in asset class diversification as a responsible investment strategy,” he said. “Allocating 1 to 2 percent of a portfolio to crypto can provide reasonable exposure while managing risk appropriately.”

    From a political perspective, Shields said, investing in crypto could worry voters about losing money on risky bets. He believes, however, that associating with crypto also provides politicians to grab on to a rare issue that cuts across party lines.

    “The ones who do care care a lot.”

    “Most constituents haven’t thought too much about it or don’t care about it,” he said. “But the ones who do care care a lot.”

    So far, the industry has not directed its vast campaign holdings into the New Jersey gubernatorial race. At least three of the Democrats have received campaign donations from crypto companies or leaders, however.

    Crypto-aligned super PACs spent $242,000 backing Gottheimer during the last election cycle and crypto figures donated $51,000 directly to his campaign organizations, according to the tracker website Follow the Crypto. Money donated to his federal campaign account cannot be transferred to his state account.

    Industry figures have given far less — $3,333 — to Sherrill, who is leading in the polls so far.

    A super PAC supporting Fulop, meanwhile, received a $10,000 donation from Gregory Tusar, a vice president at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.

    “Greg and I have been personal friends for 20 years,” Fulop said in a statement. “We worked together in algorithmic trading at Goldman Sachs long before cryptocurrency even existed. His support of Coalition for Progress has nothing to do with the crypto industry.”

    New York Governor’s Race

    Across the Hudson River, the contours of the 2026 New York governor’s race are already taking shape. Sitting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s weak poll numbers have encouraged other Democrats to consider a primary challenge.

    Hochul in 2022 earned the enmity of the crypto industry by signing a two-year moratorium on cryptocurrency mining, which was motivated by concerns from environmentalists that it would incentivize the reopening of dirty power plants. So far, two rumored Democratic contenders to Hochul have strong connections to crypto.

    Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado was backed by a $1 million donation from an SBF-associated super PAC during his 2022 campaign, which drew accusations that he was supported by “dirty” money even before the collapse of FTX. Delgado’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    Meanwhile, Torres, the New York representative in Washington, has repeatedly touted the benefits of crypto from his perch in Congress. He lambasted regulators under former President Joe Biden for trying to crack down on companies such as Ripple Labs and Coinbase for violating securities laws.

    Both companies contributed to a network of super PACs that backed Torres with $173,000 in spending during the last election cycle. (Torres did not respond to a request for comment.)

    During his time in Congress, he has sponsored at least eight pro-crypto measures, the most recent a resolution expressing general support for digital assets and blockchain technology.

    “Blockchain technology and digital assets represent the future of innovation, economic growth, and financial inclusion,” Torres said in a February 5 statement accompanying the measure’s introduction. “The United States must lead in shaping a regulatory framework that fosters technological advancement while protecting consumers and ensuring transparency. By embracing this next generation, we can create a more equitable financial system that benefits every American.”

    $TRUMP

    Torres, one of two Democrats to co-sponsor the crypto resolution, was embracing crypto at a moment when crypto was embracing Trump.

    Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong was one of the first executives to meet with Trump after his election in November. Last week, the company announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission would drop a 2023 lawsuit against it.

    “There is not much daylight at all between Elon Musk’s worldview and key leading figures of the crypto industry.”

    One of the biggest launches in the crypto world in recent months was by Trump himself, with the introduction hours before his inauguration of the $TRUMP token. The Trump coin sparked a backlash in the crypto world from figures who worried it would harm the industry’s reputation.

    Hays, the advocate with Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress, said candidates should be cautious when embracing the industry, because they may wind up embracing a worldview that alienates their voters.

    “Many, many people are concerned about what Elon Musk is doing. There is not much daylight at all between Elon Musk’s worldview, his goals and objectives, his ideas about how society should effectively be run by techno elites, and key leading figures of the crypto industry,” he said. “Those people see crypto as not only a representation of that worldview, but a means to an end.”

    The post “Opportunism and Fear”: Crypto Industry Sets Its Sights on Governors’ Mansions appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Refusing To Help DOGE ‘Dismantle Critical Public Services,’ Tech Experts Resign

    Over 20 U.S. federal tech workers who were forced into President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency resigned in protest on Tuesday, according to a joint letter obtained by The Associated Press.

    The 21 data scientists, engineers, and product managers were initially part of the United States Digital Service, established during the Obama administration. However, one of Trump’s first executive orders states that it “is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.”

    The post Refusing To Help DOGE ‘Dismantle Critical Public Services,’ Tech Experts Resign appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How to Leak Under the Trump Administration

    President Donald Trump doesn’t have fond feelings for whistleblowers.

    During his first term, Trump’s Justice Department carried out a clandestine spying operation to try to catch leakers. On the campaign trail, Trump on multiple occasions threatened to arrest journalists who don’t reveal their sources — and suggested they should be raped in prison until they give up names.

    For those who want to speak out against wrongdoing within the U.S. government, it has never been more critical to take steps to keep themselves safe. So we compiled these best practices for leaking information in public interest under the Trump administration.

    Don’t Call or Text

    Phone calls and text messages are convenient, but they aren’t safe for whistleblowers. As outlined in a December report from the Office of the Inspector General, the Justice Department in Trump’s first term repeatedly utilized “compulsory processes” — which include subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders — to request “non-content communications records” from phone carriers serving journalists at CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The requests were for both the reporters’ work numbers and their personal numbers.

    Non-content records don’t include the communications themselves — such as copies of text messages or voicemails. Instead, government investigators were keen to gather metadata pertaining to the communications: for instance, who sent a message or made a call to a journalist’s phone and at what time.

    Even if the contents of the conversation are not recorded, the metadata establishes clear links between parties.

    If a metadata search turns up evidence of communication with journalists or rights groups, this alone could reveal who is behind a leak.

    Don’t Email

    Never use a work or personal email address when communicating with journalists.

    In its attempt to root out leaks during Trump’s first term, the Justice Department also sought non-content information pertaining to reporters’ email communications from their email service providers. They wanted details such as the time an email was sent and received, as well as the sender’s email address.

    Related

    The Trump DOJ Loved Leaking, as Long as It Was to Rupert Murdoch’s Newspapers

    While email encryption technology can encrypt the body of the email message and in some cases subject lines as well, the email addresses themselves and dates and times emails are sent and received are not encrypted.

    This means it’s not hard for investigators to use email records to draw a clear line between a journalist and their source — even if they can’t determine what information specifically was exchanged.

    Setting up a separate email account entirely for communicating with journalists or rights groups is an option, but there are a number of potential gotchas. For instance, care should be taken to not reveal any identifying information when setting up a burner email account: Don’t use your phone number for two-factor authentication, choose a throwaway username that is not linked to you in any way, and select a vetted VPN or the Tor network to mask your IP address. Considering all these obstacles, it’s often best to avoid email altogether.

    Don’t Reach Out on Social Media

    The owners of tech’s biggest social media platforms have shown varying degrees of fealty to the Trump administration. These genuflections include Mark Zuckerberg ending DEI programs at Meta, Andy Yen, the CEO of “privacy-first” email provider Proton, going on about how the Republican party today stands for “the little guys,” and Elon Musk, the owner of X, calling shots as a “special government employee.”

    The fact that Trump’s richest fan also owns a popular social media platform should give pause about using X to share sensitive information. It doesn’t take an overactive imagination to see a scenario in which the companies that own communication channels are willing to provide user information to a government they’re eager to please.

    Although social media direct messages are generally unencrypted by default, some social media platforms now offer optional end-to-end encrypted messaging, though this feature needs to be enabled manually. For instance, X direct messages can be encrypted if both parties are verified users, and Facebook Messenger can also be used to send encrypted DMs. But the metadata, or non-content information, would still reveal that your account was in contact with a reporter’s account.

    Selectively Use Encrypted Communication Tools

    Similar metadata risks apply to messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp. Telegram offers encryption, but it is not enabled by default and comes with a number of limitations. WhatsApp encrypts messages by default, but nonetheless reveals a variety of metadata about communications themselves.

    Given the way government investigators typically demand non-content communication records, end-to-end encryption alone does not mask whether or not someone is talking to journalists or other entities.

    Secure communication tools such as Signal and Session minimize the amount of metadata and user information that platform operators themselves can access.

    Signal can identify the date a particular account was created, as well as when the account last accessed the service. It can also identify a phone number associated with an active username, which is vastly less metadata than other messaging platforms collect.   

    If you’re concerned about your username being linked to your phone number, change your username at regular intervals, which would prevent past usernames from being tied to your phone number.

    Signal routinely posts copies of the requests for user information it receives from the government. These disclosures show that Signal tends to share merely when a particular account was last accessed and first created. Government requests for information from service providers, however, may come with non-disclosure orders that could legally prevent operators from posting notice of these demands on their transparency pages and potentially bar them from notifying the affected users themselves.

    Session, a messenger whose tagline is “send messages, not metadata” reduces the amount of information it stores about its users by, for instance, not using centralized servers to relay messages.  

    Nothing Is a Substitute for OPSEC

    But the best end-to-end encryption and metadata minimization won’t keep you safe without basic operational security.

    Digital access logs may reveal who viewed, printed, or downloaded a copy of the file, and when. The more files you access, the more likely it is that you may be the one common individual who accessed all those files.

    Avoid whistleblower communications while physically present at work. Aside from someone seeing your screen, your employer may also be able to identify that you accessed a particular communication service while on a company network.

    Under no circumstances should you also use work devices when communicating with or transferring data to reporters or rights groups.

    Equally risky are personal devices with any work-assigned device management apps installed. It might seem old-fashioned, but rather than taking a screenshot of a specific document or chat record on a work device, take a photo of the screen with a separate one-time use phone, or at least a personal device.

    Make clear to anyone you might alert of wrongdoing that leaked photos or documents generally should not be published in their entirety. That’s because source material can potentially be linked to the specific device with which it was captured.

    A photo showing a file on your computer monitor, for instance, might include a blemish or a smudge of dirt on the screen. More sophisticated forensic techniques, such as watermarking, can be used to trace the origins of a leaked email or video conference.

    Even emails seemingly sent to a large number of recipients may be individually watermarked, with each message containing some unique change that can be traced to a single recipient. That’s why it’s safest for journalists not to reproduce emails verbatim and instead rely on selective quotes or summarizations.

    After communicating with outside parties, ensure that no records of sensitive communications persist. Be sure to delete not just specific messages, but entire chat histories from all linked devices on which your messaging app of choice is installed. Request that anyone with whom you share sensitive information does the same. Remember to not save each other in your contacts lists, either.

    Blowing the whistle can have a real impact in the world, but it also comes with risks — the threat of prosecution or losing your job among them. Although leak investigations may again become a priority in the Trump administration, these dos and don’ts can help reduce the chances of exposing yourself when you’re shining light on wrongdoing.

    The post How to Leak Under the Trump Administration appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Side event 7 March 2025 on Protection of defenders against technology-facilitated rights violations

    • Location: Physical
    • Date: 07 March 2025
    • Time: 1:00PM – 2:00PM CET
    • Address: Room XXV, Palais des Nations
    • Event language(s) English
    • RSVP Needed: no

    New and emerging technologies have become a fundamental tool for human rights defenders to conduct their activities, boost solidarity among movements and reach different audiences. Unfortunately, these positive aspects have been overshadowed by negative impacts on the enjoyment of human rights, including increased threats and risks for human rights defenders. While we see the increased negative impacts of new technologies, we do not see that governments are addressing these impacts comprehensively.

    Furthermore, States and their law enforcement agencies (often through the help of non-State actors, including business enterprises) often take down or censor the information shared by defenders on social media and other platforms. In other cases, we have seen that businesses are also complicit in attacks and violations against human right defenders.

    Conversely, lack of access to the internet and the digital gaps in many countries and regions, or affecting specific groups, limits the potential of digital technologies for activism and movement building, as well as access to information. 

    The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted in 1998, does not consider these challenges, which have largely arisen with the rapid evolution of technology. In this context, and, as part of activities to mark the 25th anniversary of the UN Declaration on human rights defenders, a coalition of NGOs launched a consultative initiative to identify the key issues faced by human rights defenders that are insufficiently addressed by the UN Declaration, including on the area of digital and new technologies. These issues are also reflected in the open letter to States on the draft resolution on human rights defenders that will be considered during HRC58. 

    This side event will be an opportunity to continue discussing the reality and the challenges that human rights defenders face in the context of new and emerging technologies. It will also be an opportunity to hear directly from those who, on a daily basis, work with defenders in the field of digital rights while highlighting their specific protection needs. Finally, the event will also help remind States about the range of obligations in this field that can contribute to inform the consultations on the HRC58 resolution on human rights defenders. 

    Panelists:

    • Opening remarks: Permanent Mission of Norway
    • Speakers:
      • Carla Vitoria – Association for Progressive Communications 
      • Human rights defender from Kenya regarding the Safaricom case (via video message)
      • Woman human rights defender from Colombia regarding use of new technologies during peaceful protests
      • Human rights defender from Myanmar regarding online incitement to violence against Rohingya people
    • Video montage of civil society priorities for the human rights defender resolution at HRC58
    • Moderator: Ulises Quero, Programme Manager, Land, Environment and Business & Human Rights (ISHR)

    This event is co-sponsored by Access Now, Asian Forum for Human Rights & Development (FORUM-ASIA), Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), DefendDefenders (East and Horn of Africa HRD Project), Huridocs, Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA World), International Service for Human Rights (ISHR), Peace Brigades International, Privacy International, Protection International,  Regional Coalition of WHRDs in Southwest Asia and North Africa (WHRD MENA Coalition). 

    https://ishr.ch/events/protection-of-defenders-against-new-and-emerging-forms-of-technology-facilitated-rights-violations

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Trump Wants US To ‘Partner’ With Russia To Weaken China

    The Donald Trump administration is holding talks between the United States and Russia, and he says he wants to end the war in Ukraine.

    Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even proposed that the US could “partner with the Russians, geopolitically”.

    What is happening here? The simple answer is that this is all about China.

    Trump is trying to divide Russia from China, in an attempt to isolate Beijing.

    The United States sees China as the number one threat to its global dominance. This has been stated clearly by top officials in both the Trump administration and the previous Joe Biden administration.

    The post Trump Wants US To ‘Partner’ With Russia To Weaken China appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It’s Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content

    by Craig Silverman

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

    Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, users spread a false claim on Facebook that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

    “BREAKING — ICE is allegedly offering $750 per illegal immigrant that you turn in through their tip form,” read a post on a page called NO Filter Seeking Truth, adding, “Cash in folks.”

    Check Your Fact, Reuters and other fact-checkers debunked the claim, and Facebook added labels to posts warning that they contained false information or missing context. ICE has a tip line but said it does not offer cash bounties.

    This spring, Meta plans to stop working with fact-checkers in the U.S. to label false or misleading content, the company said on Jan. 7. And if a post like the one about ICE goes viral, the pages that spread it could earn a cash bonus.

    Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year.

    The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety.

    ProPublica identified 95 Facebook pages that regularly post made-up headlines designed to draw engagement — and, often, stoke political divisions. The pages, most of which are managed by people overseas, have a total of more than 7.7 million followers.

    After a review, Meta said it had removed 81 pages for being managed by fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves as American while posting about politics and social issues. Tracy Clayton, a Meta spokesperson, declined to respond to specific questions, including whether any of the pages were eligible for or enrolled in the company’s viral content payout program.

    The pages collected by ProPublica offer a sample of those that could be poised to cash in.

    Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.

    With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.

    “The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.

    In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”

    Clayton said Meta’s community standards and content moderation teams are still active and reiterated the company’s Jan. 7 statement that it is working to ensure it doesn’t “over-enforce” its rules by mistakenly banning or suppressing content.

    Meta’s changes mark a significant reversal of the company’s approach to moderating false and misleading information, reframing the labeling or downranking of content as a form of censorship. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuckerberg said in his announcement. His stance reflects the approach of Elon Musk after acquiring Twitter, now X, in 2022. Musk has made drastic cuts to the company’s trust and safety team, reinstated thousands of suspended accounts including that of a prominent neo-Nazi and positioned Community Notes, which allows participating users to add context via notes appended to tweets, as the platform’s key system for flagging false and misleading content.

    Zuckerberg has said Meta will replace fact-checkers and some automated systems in the U.S. with a version of the Community Notes system. A Jan. 7 update to a Meta policy page said that in the U.S. the company “may still reduce the distribution of certain hoax content whose spread creates a particularly bad user or product experience (e.g., certain commercial hoaxes).”

    Clayton did not clarify whether posts with notes appended to them would be eligible for monetization. He provided links to academic papers that detail how crowdsourced fact-checking programs like Community Notes can be effective at identifying misinformation, building trust among users and addressing perceptions of bias.

    A 2023 ProPublica investigation, as well as reporting from Bloomberg, found that X’s Community Notes failed to effectively address the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reporting from the BBC and Agence France-Presse showed that X users who share false information have earned thousands of dollars thanks to X’s content monetization program, which also rewards high engagement.

    Keith Coleman, X’s vice president of product, previously told ProPublica that the analysis of Community Notes about the Israel-Hamas conflict did not include all of the relevant notes, and he said that the program “is found helpful by people globally, across the political spectrum.”

    Allen said it takes time, resources and oversight to scale up crowdsourced fact-checking systems. Meta’s decision to scrap fact-checking before giving the new approach time to prove itself is risky, he said.

    “We could in theory have a Community Notes program that was as effective, if not more effective, than the fact-checking program,” he said. “But to turn all these things off before you have the Community Notes thing in place definitely feels like we’re explicitly going to have a moment with little guardrails.”

    Before Facebook began cracking down on content in late 2016, American fake news peddlers and spammers based in North Macedonia and elsewhere cashed in on viral hoaxes that deepened political divisions and played on people’s fears.

    One American, Jestin Coler, ran a network of sites that earned money from hoax news stories for nearly a decade, including the infamous and false viral headline from 2016 “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” He previously told NPR that he started the sites as a way to “infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.” Coler said he earned five figures a month from the sites, which he operated in his spare time.

    When people clicked on the links to the stories in their news feed, they landed on websites full of ads, which generated revenue for Coler. That’s become a tougher business model since Meta has made story links less visible on Facebook in recent years.

    Facebook’s new program to pay publishers directly for viral content could unlock a fresh revenue stream for hoaxsters. “It’s still the same formula to get people riled up. It seems like it could just go right back to those days, like overnight,” Coler told ProPublica in a phone interview. He said he left the Facebook hoax business years ago and won’t return.

    In January, ProPublica compiled a list of pages that had been previously cited for posting hoaxes and false content and discovered dozens more through domain and content searches. The pages posted false headlines designed to spark controversy, such as “Lia Thomas Admits: ‘I Faked Being Trans to Expose How Gullible the Left Is’” and “Elon Musk announced that he has acquired MSNBC for $900 million to put an end to toxic programming.” The Musk headline was paired with an AI-generated image of him holding a contract with the MSNBC logo. It generated over 11,000 reactions, shares and comments.

    Most of the pages are managed by accounts outside of the U.S., including in North Macedonia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia, according to data from Facebook. Many of these pages use AI-generated images to illustrate their made-up headlines.

    One network of overseas-run pages is connected to the site SpaceXMania.com, an ad-funded site filled with hoax articles like “Elon Musk Confronts Beyoncé Publicly: ‘Stop Pretending to Be Country, It’s Just Not You.’” SpaceX Fanclub, the network’s largest Facebook page, has close to 220,000 followers and labels its content as satire. One of its recent posts was a typo-laden AI-generated image of a sign that said, “There Are Only 2 2 Genders And Will Ban Atheletes From Women Sports — President.”

    SpaceXMania.com’s terms and conditions page says it’s owned by Funky Creations LTD, a United Kingdom company registered to Muhammad Shabayer Shaukat, a Pakistani national. ProPublica sent questions to the site and received an email response signed by Tim Lawson, who said he’s an American based in Florida who works with Shaukat. (ProPublica was unable to locate a person by that name in public records searches, based on the information he provided.)

    “Our work involves analyzing the latest trends and high-profile news related to celebrities and shaping it in a way that appeals to a specific audience — particularly conservatives and far-right groups who are predisposed to believe certain narratives,” the email said.

    Lawson said they earn between $500 and $1,500 per month from web ads and more than half of the traffic comes from people clicking on links on Facebook. The pages are not currently enrolled in the invitation-only Facebook Content Monetization program, according to Lawson.

    The SpaceXMania pages identified by ProPublica were recently taken offline. Lawson denied that they were removed by Meta and said he deactivated the pages “due to some security reasons.” Meta declined to comment.

    It remains to be seen how hoax page operators will fare as Meta’s algorithmic reversals take hold and the U.S. fact-checking program grinds to a halt. But some Facebook users are already taking advantage of the loosened guardrails.

    Soon after Zuckerberg announced the changes, people spread a fake screenshot of a Bloomberg article headlined, “The spark from Zuckerberg’s electric penis pump, might be responsible for the LA fires.”

    “Community note: verified true,” wrote one commenter.

    Mollie Simon contributed research.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • Tech-Enhanced Deliberation For Cooperative Decision-Making

    In 2025, we will be exploring ways to put this in practice in MONDRAGON’s cooperatives to learn how the principles behind citizens’ assemblies – sortition (randomly selecting decision makers), deliberation, and rotation – can be applied in the context of cooperative decision making and governance. The goals are to help lead to a more engaged workforce and membership, as well as to result in better, more informed, and legitimate decisions in times of complexity. 

    Furthermore, we will test how new technologies can enrich deliberation processes and facilitate new approaches to decision making in cooperatives.

    The post Tech-Enhanced Deliberation For Cooperative Decision-Making appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Know Your Enemy: Pay Attention!

    Matt and Sam are joined by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to discuss his new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.

  • Poised to Take Over TikTok, Oracle Is Accused of Clamping Down on Pro-Palestine Dissent

    Larry Ellison has been at Donald Trump’s side since he took office last month. The man Trump referred to as “one of the most serious players in the world” was front row at the inauguration, and then watched as the president signed an executive order on artificial intelligence — a major business interest for tech giant Oracle.

    And Ellison, Oracle’s billionaire co-founder, was sitting next to Rupert Murdoch in early February when Trump created a fund to facilitate the purchase of TikTok. His presence was no accident.

    Last month, after the Supreme Court upheld a law banning TikTok, Oracle emerged as a leader in the race to take control of the Chinese-owned short-form video platform.

    While the campaign against TikTok was led by China hawks in Washington, it was the ire of pro-Israel activists that perhaps best explains why Oracle is such a natural choice to take over the social media app.

    Related

    The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves.

    The campaign to ban the app kicked into high gear after Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel. The timing spurred talk that the push for a ban wasn’t just about American national security, but Israel’s too. Politicians even tied their campaigns against TikTok to alleged Hamas propaganda being hosted on the platform.

    Oracle, which had already taken control of some of TikTok’s day-to-day operations, had taken a firm pro-Israel stance and, according to an Intercept investigation, clamped down on pro-Palestine activism inside the company.

    Last November, Israeli American Oracle CEO Safra Catz told an Israeli business news outlet, “For employees, it’s clear: if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here—this is a free country.”

    Collaborations between the company and Israeli government agencies have been wide-ranging, encompassing everything from direct technology work with the military to software intended to help Israel with public relations — including, according to internal company messages, on social media platforms like TikTok.

    Critics of Israel’s war on Gaza exist within Oracle’s 160,000 global staff, though they have faced repression and punishment related to their stances. The dissent and the backlash, half a dozen Oracle employees told The Intercept, was part of an internal crisis for pro-Palestinian staffers at the tech giant over its unwavering support of Israel.

    Oracle employees who spoke with The Intercept described an environment of fear, and half a dozen said they were seeking to leave the company.

    “The environment is horrible, people are terrified to even mention Palestine,” one employee, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, told The Intercept. “I cannot stand it anymore.”

    “People are terrified to even mention Palestine.”

    Sixty-eight Oracle employees signed an open letter last year criticizing the company’s partnerships with Israel. Many have also raised alarms about what they said were biases in certain company programs, including the removal of avenues for staff to donate money to pro-Palestinian causes.

    According to multiple Oracle staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihoods, one employee was terminated for allegedly violating the company’s branding and Slack policies after they created a combined Palestinian Oracle logo on a watermelon — a symbol of Palestinian solidarity — that was posted in a Slack channel and put on social media.

    While companies such as Google and Amazon have been criticized for their work with the Israeli military and suppression of pro-Palestinian voices, employees and observers told The Intercept that Oracle stands out for its steadfast commitment to Israel.

    “We have been seeing a theme across the tech sector where pro-Palestinian voices inside companies have been targeted and repressed for their actions,” said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer for 7amleh, also known as the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement. “This shows the influence that the right-wing Israeli government has on the tech sector in Silicon Valley.”

    Ties to Israel

    Oracle, a Texas-based tech giant that rose to prominence with software and services related to database management, has a rich history with Israel — one of several of the company’s nation-state clients.

    Both Catz and Ellison have close relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Catz met with Netanyahu a few months before the war on Gaza began to discuss the expansion of Oracle’s work in Israel. And Ellison, a Republican megadonor in the U.S., once offered Netanyahu a place on Oracle’s board of directors and invited him to visit his private Hawaiian island.

    Oracle’s initial high-profile deal with the Israeli government came in 2021, when it became the first multinational tech company to offer cloud services in the country. The database giant established a $319 million data center in Jerusalem for the project.

    Not all of Oracle’s work in Israel, though, is publicized. Even as it announced its cloud computing deal, Oracle was working on a four-year highly confidential project with the Israeli Air Force called “Project Menta,” according to screenshots of Slack postings obtained by The Intercept. (Neither Oracle nor the Israeli Ministry of Defense responded to requests for comment.)

    Project Menta, which was previously undisclosed, has allowed Israel’s air force to do a “bunch of important military stuff that we can’t share with you,” Shimon Levy, head of communications at Oracle Israel, wrote to colleagues on Slack in December 2021, according to three internal sources. Levy appended a sword emoji to his message.

    In 2022, Levy also announced in the same channel that the Israeli military’s Unit 81 — essentially a technology solutions division housed within the country’s intelligence apparatus — was in the final stage of a three-year program with Oracle to expedite procurement by allowing every soldier to make their own military purchase requests.

    That same year, Oracle hosted a hackathon with the Israeli military to “develop technical solutions to acute social challenges.”

    “Look at those faces!” Levy wrote in the post accompanied by a photo from the event. “We’re there to support the soldiers in their mission to make the world a better place, using Oracle’s technology!”

    Oracle and the War on Gaza

    Immediately after the attacks of October 7, 2023, Oracle publicly declared its support for Israel. Catz also demanded the inscription “Oracle Stands with Israel” be displayed on all the company’s screens, in more than 180 countries.

    Throughout the war, company officials continued to tout their support for Israel — and discuss incipient and ongoing projects working with the Israeli government. At one point, in Slack, Levy remarked that the Israeli Ministry of Defense was “a demanding customer with very high standards.” 

    Related

    Israeli Group Claims It’s Working With Big Tech Insiders to Censor “Inflammatory” Wartime Content

    A month into the war, Levy took to the company Slack to laud the Oracle employees that were leading an “important volunteering initiative to develop and operate a unique tool” for Israeli public relations on social media. The project, called “Words of Iron,” was developed in collaboration with Israeli ministries to help the country elevate pro-Israel content and counter critical narratives on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.

    In February 2024, the Israeli military cyber department and Oracle collaborated on another hackathon “to find tech solutions for rehabilitating Israeli settlements near Gaza using Oracle’s technology,” Levy wrote, according to internal Slack messages. Levy also announced that the company had donated bags with medical and environmental supplies to Israel Defense Forces soldiers, valued at half a million dollars.

    Last summer, Catz attended a private lobbying meeting with U.S. senators to advocate for the continuation of weapon shipments to Israel. And, in the fall, Oracle announced it was partnering with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, one of Israel’s largest defense companies, on an AI project to provide “warfighters with quick, actionable insights in the battlespace.”

    “What’s pretty astounding to me is how flagrant the complicity is,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at Access Now. “They are definitely taking advantage of the impunity that Israel enjoys. There are no consequences.”

    By the time Catz returned to Israel in November for her second trip since the war broke out, some employees were feeling deeply uncomfortable in the workspace.

    On LinkedIn, Hani Risheq, director of enterprise architecture at Oracle UK posted: “Can any of the 155K+ worldwide Oracle employees with a different opinion than that of Catz’s voice their opinion without being penalised or even shown the door?”

    Cutting Help to Palestinians

    Meanwhile, as Israel began its bombing and full-scale invasion of Gaza, some employees said that the company was restraining support for Palestinians.

    Like many companies, Oracle operates a program to match employee donations to charitable causes. As the war raged, relief organizations like Medical Aid for Palestinians and UNRWA were taken off the internal giving page and no longer listed as accepting matching donations, four employees told The Intercept.

    Oracle employees told The Intercept that the company chalked up the disappearance of the Palestinian-oriented charities to changes in policy that focused on education, environment, and health — though the Oracle employees pointed out some of the charities in question did focus on those areas. When they asked for the charities to be reinstated, they received no response.

    In Catz’s public statements to Israeli media, she referred to pro-Palestinian rights groups as “brainwashing organizations,” adding, “They don’t even know the facts.”

    Activists disagree with Oracle’s blanket statements surrounding Israel’s war on Gaza.

    “Right now, you have to be living under a rock to claim ignorance,” said Fatafta of Access Now. “There is no single big tech company, its CEOs or executive management, that can claim a lack of knowledge about what has happened in Gaza.”

    In the press, the company has had no compunction about clearly taking sides, dismissing the idea that its work with Israel amid the onslaught against Gaza could cause problems with clients in other parts of the world. “Absolutely not,” said Yael Har Even, deputy CEO of Oracle Israel, when asked about the possibility. “Safra always says — the U.S. first, the second country is Israel, and after that the whole world.”

    The post Poised to Take Over TikTok, Oracle Is Accused of Clamping Down on Pro-Palestine Dissent appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • How Israeli propaganda filters into NZ media – drop it, says Mediawatch

    COMMENTARY: By Saige England

    Mediawatch on RNZ today strongly criticised Stuff and YouTube among other media for using Israeli propaganda’s “Outbrain” service.

    Outbrain is a company founded by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) military and its technology can be tracked back to a wealthy entrepreneur, which in this case could be a euphemism for a megalomaniac.

    He uses the metaphor of a “dome”, likening it to the dome used in warfare.

    Outbrain, which publishes content on New Zealand media, picks up what’s out there and converts and distorts it to support Israel. It twists, it turns, it deceives the reader.

    Presenter Colin Peacock of RNZ’s Mediawatch programme today advised NZ media to ditch the propaganda service.

    Outbrain uses the media in the following way. The content user such as Stuff pays Outbrain and Outbrain pays the user, like Stuff.

    “Both parties make money when users click on the content,” said Peacock.

    ‘Digital Iron Dome’
    The content on the Stuff website came via “Digital Iron Dome” named after the State of Genociders’ actual defence system. It is run by a tech entrepreneur quoted on Mediawatch:

    “Just like a physical iron dome that scans the open air and watches for any missiles . . . the digital iron dome knows how to scan the internet. We know how to buy media. Pro-Israeli videos and articles and images inside the very same articles going against Israel,” says the developer of the propaganda “dome” machine.

    Peacock said the developer had stated that the digital dome delivered “pro-Jewish”* messages to more than 100 million people worldwide on platforms like Al Jazeera, CNN — and last weekend on Stuff NZ — and said this information went undetected as pro-Israel material, ensuring it reached, according to the entrepreneur: “The right audience without interference.”

    According to Wikipedia, Outbrain was founded by Yaron Galai and Ori Lahav, officers in the Israeli Navy. Galai sold his company Quigo to AOL in 2007 for $363 million. Lahav worked at an online shopping company acquired by eBay in 2005.

    The company is headquartered in New York with global offices in London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington DC, Cologne, Gurugram, Paris, Ljubljana, Munich, Milan, Madrid, Tokyo, São Paulo, Netanya, Singapore, and Sydney.

    Peacock pointed out that other advocacy organisations had already been buying and posting content, there was nothing new about this with New Zealand news media.

    But — and this is important — the Media Council ruled in 2017 that Outbrain content was the publisher’s responsibility: that the news media in NZ were responsible for promoted links that were offered to their readers.

    “Back then publishers at Stuff and the Herald said they would do more to oversee the content, with Stuff stating it is paid promoted content,” said Peacock, in his role as the media watchdog.

    Still ‘big money business’
    “But this is also still a big money business and the outfits using these tools are getting much bigger exposure from their arrangements with news publishers such as Stuff,” he said.

    He pointed out that the recently appointed Outbrain boss for Australia New Zealand and Singapore, Chris Oxley, had described Outbrain as “a leader in digital media connecting advertisers with premium audiences in contextually relevant environments”.

    The watchdog Mediawatch said that news organisations should drop Outbrain.

    “Media environments where news and neutrality are important aren’t really relevant environments for political propaganda that’s propagated by online opportunists who know how to make money out of it and also to raise funds while they are at it, ” said Peacock.

    “These services like Outbrain are sometimes called ‘recommendation engines’ but our recommendation to news media is don’t use them for the sake of the trust of the people you say you want to earn and keep: the readers,” said Peacock.

    Saige England is a journalist and author, and member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

    * Being “pro-Jewish” should not be equated with being pro-genocide nor should antisemitism be levelled at Jews who are against this genocide. The propaganda from Outbrain does a disservice to Palestinians and also to those Jewish people who support all human rights — the right of Palestinians to life and the right to live on their land.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • China-Africa Space Co-op Shows Tech’s Multipolarization, Democratization Trends


    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    In recent years, cooperation between China and Africa in the space field has deepened. However, some Western media outlets have tried to distort the nature of this cooperation. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that China is “building space alliances in Africa to enhance its global surveillance network and advance its bid to become the world’s dominant space power.” The article also cited remarks from the Pentagon, claiming that China’s space projects in Africa and other parts of the developing world are a “security risk.”

    The real security risk is not cooperation or the sharing of technology, but the ideological prejudice of the West that clings to hegemony and obstructs progress. For a long time, space and other high-tech fields have been dominated by the US and its allies. Behind the smear campaigns of Western media lies the West’s fear of China-Africa cooperation.

    The cooperation between China and Egypt in space technology, referred to by foreign media as “China’s secretive overseas space program,” has been open and transparent. Public records show that Egypt is the first country to carry out satellite cooperation with China under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. At the end of 2023, the jointly designed and developed satellite MISRSAT-2 was successfully send into orbit. An Egyptian Space Agency official said that the project has promoted the training of Egyptian space professionals, helping Egypt become a leader in the field of space satellites in Africa and the Middle East. This “teach a man to fish” approach is a key step for Africa to achieve autonomous industrialization and modernization.

    Western media’s smear campaign against China-Africa space cooperation ignores the legitimate need for African countries to develop space technology. Space technology and monitoring systems can be used for weather monitoring, agricultural planning, environmental protection, and disaster management, helping Africa address climate change, improve agricultural productivity, optimize resource management, and enhance national emergency response capabilities.

    More broadly, China-Africa space cooperation reflects the changing global technological cooperation landscape and the reshaping of development rights. In the past, developing countries often had to rely on Western countries for technological aid, which came with many restrictions. However, through the concept of South-South cooperation, China has provided a more equal and sustainable cooperation model, helping African countries achieve self-development in critical fields such as space technology. This not only enhances Africa’s position in the global technology system, encouraging developing countries to participate in global technology governance, but also contributes to advancing the global multipolarization process.

    “Space is not a club for the rich,” said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert. Through win-win cooperation with Africa, China is helping more developing countries to quickly enter the mainstream of global technological development, embodying the democratization and multipolarization trend of modern technology, he noted.

    The focus of African and Global South countries is on more practical and sustainable development needs, rather than geopolitical games. The US and Western countries must choose the right path – abandoning the mind-set of technological hegemony, adopting a more open and inclusive approach, and actively participating in the global technological cooperation process.

    From infrastructure construction to focusing on modernization and cutting-edge technology, the “sour grapes” narrative of foreign media cannot conceal the fruitful outcomes of China-Africa cooperation. While the West is busy weaving lies, China and Africa have already woven a network of development and illuminated an autonomous future with technology, writing a new chapter of unity and development for the Global South.

    The post China-Africa Space Co-op Shows Tech’s Multipolarization, Democratization Trends first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A human rights perspective on Turkey’s drone exports

    Turkey’s rapid rise as a major drone exporter has sparked debate over its human rights implications. Begum Zorlu explores Turkey’s “no-questions-asked” policy and highlights potential war crimes linked to Turkish drones.

    It has been over two years since journalist Stephen Witt published an article in The New Yorker titled “The Turkish drone that changed the nature of warfare.” While the claim might initially seem exaggerated, Witt contended that Turkey’s drones have become a strategic asset for militaries around the world and a critical diplomatic tool for Turkey.

    Since the article’s publication, Witt’s argument appears to hold some truth. According to the Turkish Exporters Assembly, Turkey’s defence and aerospace industry exports have reached nearly $5.8 billion this year. Particularly, Bayraktar TB2 drones’ success in overcoming advanced air-defence systems in Ukraine has led to increased interest from states around the world, including European countries such as Poland and Croatia, which have decided to purchase them.

    But what sets Turkey’s drones apart, and what are their implications for human rights? There is an ongoing debate surrounding the ethics of drones, the threats posed by the introduction of AI models (particularly in target selection) and the consequences of increasing arms expenditure. While these issues are closely interconnected, this post will centre on understanding why Turkey has become a dominant drone exporter and exploring the broader human rights concerns linked to its drone sales.

    Turkey’s rise as a drone exporter

    The use of drones has become a central feature of modern warfare, significantly shaping military strategies worldwide. While the United States pioneered their widespread deployment during the war on terror, many other states have since expanded their use in military operations. Their growing popularity over the past decade can be attributed to their cost-effectiveness compared to traditional military equipment, their ability to reduce risks to personnel and their capacity to conduct operations with greater precision and flexibility.

    Since 2016, with the leadership of multiple companies, like Baykar and Turkish Aerospace Industries, Turkey has increased its production of drones with the main aim of reducing dependency on external actors. In an age of increasing demand for drones, the country’s rise as a significant drone exporter can be attributed to two key factors. First, what has been termed Turkey’s “no-questions-asked” policy on drone exports allows the sale of military equipment without strict regulatory checks, making Turkish drones appealing to a wide range of buyers. This goes hand in hand with Turkey’s aim of leveraging drone exports as a diplomatic tool to solidify its geopolitical presence in regions like Africa or Central Asia, as these exports foster multiple relationships, including the training of armed personnel.

    Secondly, their affordability compared to other major sellers, combined with their proven battlefield success, particularly in Ukraine, has made them highly sought after by a broader range of buyers, especially low-and middle-income countries. As a Crisis Group report underlines, they offer significant value for money and perform better than the Chinese and Iranian alternatives. Their ability to visibly demonstrate success, such as recording precision strikes on targets, further validates their effectiveness.

    Thinking about human rights implications

    The proliferation of drones in modern warfare has introduced significant discussions about human rights violations, resulting in civilian casualties, indiscriminate targeting, and the erosion of accountability in conflict zones. The most visible case of drones targeting civilians has been in the war on terror, where US drone strikes have frequently resulted in significant civilian casualties in countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. These strikes, often conducted with limited accountability, have raised critical ethical and legal questions about the use of drones. The expansion of their accessibility risks two critical areas of development:

    1. A drone arms race

    We are already seeing an increasing rise in arms trade this year. According to SIPRI, global military expenditure reached a record high of $2,443 billion, the highest documented by the organisation. Military spending accounted for 2.3 per cent of the global GDP. As drones become cheaper and easier to access without regulatory frameworks, there are fears of what could be termed a “drone arms race”. Zhar Zardykhan, writing for Global Voices, highlights how the reduction of barriers to entry is enabling smaller states like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to purchase advanced UAVs such as the Bayraktar TB2.

    In Central Asia, the increasing deployment of armed drones by nations like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both with a history of border disputes, is heightening fears of conflict escalation. The affordability and rapid spread of drones can further complicate diplomatic efforts, exacerbating regional instability. Furthermore, increased defence spending can overshadow the need to invest in vital infrastructure and the well-being of communities.

    2. Increasing civilian casualties

    The increasing accessibility of drones, particularly to states with domestic insurgency, can heighten the risk of civilian attacks. As an example, Turkey has significantly increased its drone transfers to Africa, particularly since 2020, framing these sales as support for states in combating insurgencies. However, Amnesty International, in its review of drone attack cases in the region, highlighted an emerging pattern that leads to the targeting of civilians.

    In the case of Turkey, its sale of drones, notably to Ethiopia, has raised significant concerns from humanitarian groups and Western states. According to The Economist, the Bayraktar TB2 may have been involved in an airstrike that killed at least 58 civilians in the Tigray region. Mali is another contentious case of Turkey’s sales, where humanitarian actors have highlighted regime repression and war crimes exemplified by a drone attack where 13 civilians, including 7 children, were killed in drone strikes by the Malian army.

    Instances involving Bayraktar TB2 drones have been documented by humanitarian actors, including their deployment by Burkina Faso’s military in strikes that caused civilian deaths at markets and a funeral—actions that Human Rights Watch identified as violations of the laws of war. Amnesty International also pointed to two strikes during Somali military operations supported by Turkish drones, which resulted in the deaths of 23 civilians, as potential war crimes.

    Urgent need for global regulation

    It is important to note here as Hartman and Béraud-Sudreau demonstrate that the human rights dimension is not limited to Turkey’s exports. The US and their allies regularly supply arms to autocratic regimes, exposing an inconsistency between their proclaimed values and their foreign policy actions. However, the rise of Turkish drones, especially since the 2020s, marks a significant shift in the international arms trade dynamics and poses ongoing questions on human rights. It can be argued that the lack of comprehensive international mechanisms governing drone technology and other arms, coupled with a broader absence of international cooperation, has created opportunities for Turkey to transfer armed drones more comfortably. Regulations on drone warfare are relatively weak compared to other areas of international law.

    While this post focused on Turkey’s drone exports in Africa as an illustrative case, Turkey’s role in Libya, Iraq and Syria raises additional questions on human rights. For example Martins, Tank and İşleyen highlighted a controversy surrounding allegations of the deployment of a fully autonomous Turkish drone, the STM Kargu-2, in Libya. Although these claims remain contested, the incident raises further concerns about the lack of international regulations on drone exports and possible use of artificial intelligence.

    As Tara Sonenshine highlights, in the last two decades, experts have been trying to establish international arms agreements, with some nations supporting a 2016 UN proposal to document drone trade. However, these efforts have fallen short of producing comprehensive legislation. In this context, unchecked accessibility of these weapons amplifies the risks of a global arms race, civilian casualties and regional instability. This underscores the urgent need for strengthened international cooperation and regulatory frameworks to address the broader human rights implications of unregulated drone warfare.

    All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Department of Sociology, LSE Human Rights, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

    Image credit: Boevaya mashina

    This post was originally published on LSE Human Rights.

  • The IRS Is Buying an AI Supercomputer From Nvidia

    As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept.

    With Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency installing itself at the IRS amid a broader push to replace federal bureaucracy with machine-learning software, the tax agency’s computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, will soon be home to a state-of-the-art Nvidia SuperPod AI computing cluster. According to the previously unreported February 5 acquisition document, the setup will combine 31 separate Nvidia servers, each containing eight of the company’s flagship Blackwell processors designed to train and operate artificial intelligence models that power tools like ChatGPT.

    The hardware has not yet been purchased and installed, nor is a price listed, but SuperPod systems reportedly start at $7 million. The setup described in the contract materials notes that it will include a substantial memory upgrade from Nvidia.

    Though small compared to the massive AI-training data centers deployed by companies like OpenAI and Meta, the SuperPod is still a powerful and expensive setup using the most advanced technology offered by Nvidia, whose chips have facilitated the global machine-learning spree. While the hardware can be used in many ways, it’s marketed as a turnkey means of creating and querying an AI model. Last year, the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded military R&D lab, acquired a $20 million SuperPod setup to train bespoke AI models for use by government agencies, touting the purchase as a “massive increase in computing power” for the United States.

    How exactly the IRS will use its SuperPod is unclear. An agency spokesperson said the IRS had no information to share on the supercomputer purchase, including which presidential administration ordered it. A 2024 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration identified 68 different AI-related projects underway at the IRS; the Nvidia cluster is not named among them, though many were redacted.

    But some clues can be gleaned from the purchase materials. “The IRS requires a robust and scalable infrastructure that can handle complex machine learning (ML) workloads,” the document explains. “The Nvidia Super Pod is a critical component of this infrastructure, providing the necessary compute power, storage, and networking capabilities to support the development and deployment of large-scale ML models.”

    The document notes that the SuperPod will be run by the IRS Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics division, or RAAS, which leads a variety of data-centric initiatives at the agency. While no specific uses are cited, it states that this division’s Compliance Data Warehouse project, which is behind this SuperPod purchase, has previously used machine learning for automated fraud detection, identity theft prevention, and generally gaining a “deeper understanding of the mechanisms that drive taxpayer behavior.”

    “The IRS has probably more proprietary data than most agencies that is totally untapped.”

    It’s unclear from the document whether the SuperPod purchase had been planned under the Biden administration or if it represents a new initiative of the Trump administration.

    Some funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was earmarked for upgrading IRS technology generally, said Travis Thompson, a tax attorney with Boutin Jones with an expertise in IRS AI strategy. But “the IRS has been going toward AI for quite some time prior to IRA funding,” Thompson explained. “They didn’t have enough money to properly enforce the tax code, they were looking for ways to do more with less.” A June 2024 Government Accountability Office report suggested the IRS use artificial intelligence-based software to retrieve “hundreds of billions of dollars [that] are potentially missing from what should be collected in taxes each year.”

    Thompson added that the agency is ripe for machine-learning training because of the mountain of personal and financial data it sits atop. “The IRS has probably more proprietary data than most agencies that is totally untapped. When you look at something like this Nvidia cluster and training machine learning algorithms going forward, it makes perfect sense, because they have the data there. AI needs data. It needs lots of it. And it needs it quickly. And the IRS has it.”

    Related

    Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

    The purchase comes at a crossroads for U.S. governance of artificial intelligence tech. In Trump’s first term, the RAAS office was assigned “responsibility for monitoring and overseeing AI at the IRS” under Executive Order 13960, which he signed shortly before leaving office in 2020. This executive order put an emphasis on the “responsible,” “safe” implementation of AI by the United States — an approach that has fallen out of favor by American tech barons who now advocate for the breakneck development of these technologies unburdened by consideration of ethics or risk. One of Trump’s first moves following his inauguration was reversing a Biden administration executive order calling for greater AI safety guardrails in government use.

    Many of the AI industry for whom “safe AI” is now anathema have become close allies of the new Trump White House, such as Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. This wing of Silicon Valley has reportedly pushed the new administration to leverage artificial intelligence to help dismantle the administrative state via automation.

    This week, the Wall Street Journal reported Musk’s liquidators had arrived at the IRS, an agency long the target of disparagement and distortion by Trump and Republican allies. Days before, the New York Times reported, “Representatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have sought information about the tax collector’s information technology, with a goal of automating more work to replace the need for human staff members.”

    The IRS has in recent years increasingly turned to AI for automated fraud detection and chatbot-based support services — including through collaboration with Nvidia — but a new Nvidia supercomputer could also be a boon to those interested in shrinking the agency’s human headcount as much as possible. A February 8 report by the Washington Post quoted an unnamed federal official who described Musk’s end goal as “replacing the human workforce with machines,” and that “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”

    Musk underlings are reportedly contemplating replacing humans at the Department of Education with a large language-based chatbot, as well.

    Wired previously reported that Musk loyalist Thomas Shedd, placed in a directorship within the General Services Administration, has talked of an “AI-first” agenda for Trump’s second term; DOGE staffers have already reportedly turned to Microsoft’s Azure AI platform for advice on slashing programs. While the Nvidia SuperPod couldn’t on its own replicate services like those provided by Microsoft, it is powerful enough to train AI models based on government data.

    Thompson told The Intercept that efforts to slash the federal workforce and more aggressively deploy artificial intelligence systems fit hand-in-glove.

    “I firmly believe that rooted behind the reduction in the human workforce that seems to be goal of current administration, there’s an overarching goal there to implement more technology-based systems in order to do the jobs,” he explained. “If you’re going to reduce your workforce, something has to pick up the slack. Something has to do the job.”

    The post The IRS Is Buying an AI Supercomputer From Nvidia appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The Development of New Technology

    The post The Development of New Technology first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Democrats Swear They’ll Fight Elon Musk. But What About the Cash They Took From SpaceX?

    There’s a pesky fact for congressional Democrats crying foul about Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. government: Many of them took campaign cash from a Musk company PAC.

    The SpaceX political action committee doled out more than half a million dollars to Democrats during the last campaign cycle — including thousands that flowed to Democrats after Musk became a party pariah by campaigning for Donald Trump.

    SpaceX revenues have been buoyed by more than $15 billion in government contracts since its 2002 founding. The company made headlines this week when, amid Musk’s attempts to purge federal employees and starve numerous agencies to death, SpaceX received another $39 million contract from NASA.

    Like many Beltway players, the company gives out cash on a bipartisan basis through an employee-funded PAC.

    Over the last two years, its spending began tilting toward Republicans, and the PAC’s payouts paled in comparison to the $290 million that Musk himself spent on the election. Nevertheless, the SpaceX donations could open Democrats to charges of hypocrisy.

    “We took that in good faith.”

    House and Senate Democrats have been nearly unanimous in condemning Musk’s rampage through the federal government, filing bills, and firing off fiery tweets. On the question of how to approach the donations from SpaceX, however, they seem to be less united. Some appeared poised to keep the cash. Others gave a more ambiguous response when asked whether they would return the money, or had any concerns about it now.

    “It’s something we have to think about,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who took in $7,000 from the PAC in the last cycle.

    “We took that in good faith, before we realized that Elon Musk was going to come into our country, an unelected bureaucrat,” said Rosen, whose leadership PAC received $3,000 from the SpaceX PAC at the end of October. “God knows what they have downloaded. Your information, your records, your health care, your Social Security. No one imagined that Elon Musk would be taking over Americans’ data and enriching himself because of it.”

    During the run-up to the 2024 election, at least 77 Democratic congressional campaign committees received money from the SpaceX PAC. The group also gave $30,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $15,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, campaign spending organs controlled by the party’s centrist-skewing leadership in Congress. (Neither group responded to requests for comment.) More money went to leadership PACs affiliated with elected officials.

    Overall, Democrats received at least $567,000 from the SpaceX PAC, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Republicans netted $866,000 in the same period.

    “My Wife Drives a Tesla”

    As with all corporate PACs, the money that SpaceX gives to candidates comes from employees rather than the company itself. Musk himself has given only $30,000 to the PAC over the years and none since 2019, years before he claims he started voting for Republicans.

    Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., whose campaign received $4,000 from the SpaceX PAC, drew distinction between Musk and Musk’s companies.

    “My concern is with Elon’s behavior,” Heinrich said. “I don’t have issues with his companies. My wife drives a Tesla. That doesn’t mean he should be in people’s data at Treasury. That is the concern here, the actual behavior and the fact that he is unaccountable to anyone, from what I can see.”

    While many members of Congress don’t have to worry about flak for the SpaceX donations until 2026, a pair of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates could face questions in the June primary, as NJ.com noted last week.

    The campaign organizations of Democratic New Jersey Reps. Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer respectively received $10,000 and $2,500 from SpaceX PAC, according to Federal Election Commission records. (Gottheimer’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

    A spokesperson for Sherrill’s gubernatorial campaign said neither Musk nor his companies had donated to her in the state race, and that she would not accept donations from them in the future.

    “To be clear, Mikie will stand up to anybody who threatens New Jersey — especially unelected billionaires,” said Sean Higgins, the campaign spokesperson. “Mikie has been fighting back against Musk, rallying with constituents and unions, holding a telephone town hall, and cosponsoring legislation to restrict Musk’s access to Treasury data — and will continue pushing back against his cuts that threaten programs like Social Security and Medicare.”

    Some Democrats Aren’t Worried

    The PAC spending highlights a split between Democrats who reject corporate cash and those who accept it. Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for the Justice Democrats, which supports progressive candidates and opposes taking corporate cash, said Musk was pulling off a “corporate coup” of the government, aided by the big business campaign spending that drowns out voters’ voices.

    “Either Democrats can continue to enable it alongside Republicans or they can tackle it head on.”

    “Either Democrats can continue to enable it alongside Republicans,” he said, “or they can tackle it head on, reject all corporate PACs as a party policy, and restore the trust and credibility that they have spent decades losing with working class voters.”

    From a once marginal position, the no-corporate-PAC pledge is increasingly touted by Democratic candidates as a sign that they reject corruption.

    Critics of the pledge say that Democrats never took a large share of their campaign contributions from corporate PACs anyways — and that corporate lobbyists have found a way to skirt the pledge by giving personal checks.

    Related

    Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class”

    Of the dozens of Democrats who did receive SpaceX PAC money, many sat on committees with oversight of SpaceX contracts. That kind of spending is distressingly common, according to Louisa Imperiale, the chief advancement officer at the election reform group Issue One.

    “This is what we would consider corporate capture of Congress, that you can, by design, give money and curry favor with the politicians who regulate your industry — or in most cases, choose not to regulate your industry,” she said. “We have the big corporate money players making sure their voices get heard and effectively drowning out the voices of constituents.”

    Imperiale dismissed the idea that receiving money from a corporate PAC was any less concerning than receiving money from a billionaire like Musk.

    “Any corporate PAC giving money to a sitting congressperson that regulates their industry is just a recipe for corruption,” she said. “Separating the individual from the corporation, from the corporate PAC, to me is a bit of a distinction without a difference.”

    The post Democrats Swear They’ll Fight Elon Musk. But What About the Cash They Took From SpaceX? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • How may I help you, today?

    The post How may I help you, today? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elon Musk is seizing government data to profit from AI. It’s a dystopian nightmare.

    Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fed data from the Department of Education into artificial intelligence (AI) software. At the same time, Musk has led a $94.7bn bid to purchase OpenAI – the previously non-profit company that developed Chat GPT.

    The AI revolution is only viable as socialist

    Musk already owns xAI, which he founded in March 2023. The billionaire has issued warm words on the future of the technology. Speaking via a conference in Paris in May 2024, Musk said:

    If you want to do a job that’s kind of like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.

    This idea is progress. One’s purpose can be intellectual, social, creative, and comedic rather than working for the sake of it. Musk said the lack of a job would require a “universal high income” – otherwise known as a citizens dividend.

    The thing is, this is the same guy that gave a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration. He tried to establish plausible deniability around the salute through coupling it with saying “my heart goes out to you”, but the highly concerning stunt fooled basically no one except corporate media hacks. Celebrating Nazi ideals is the opposite to a socialist vision for the fourth industrial revolution.

    Musk and xAi – corporate sanitising

    As a ‘public benefit company’, Musk’s xAI is also a contradictory act of corporate sanitising. This type of corporation says it will “create public benefit” at the same time as saying that “the creation of public benefit is in the best interests of the Benefit Corporation”. So when these two ideals inevitably collide, which wins? Well, public benefit companies have no cap on return profits.

    Indeed, xAI released Grok-2 in August 2024 – an AI service that can generate image as well as text responses. But that service is limited only to paid up X (formerly Twitter) subscribers. Another example of the issue with the lofty claims of public benefit company xAI is that these corporations are supposed to value environmental concerns.

    Yet xAI developed a super computer to process data for AI that environmental campaigners say is guzzling vast amounts of gas without even a permit to do so. What’s the point of AI delivering progress for humanity, if the planet becomes unhabitable?

    On 11 February, the US (and the UK) refused to sign up to even a basic declaration regarding AI. The acknowledgement states that it seeks to ensure that “AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all”, while “making AI sustainable for people and the planet”.

    Vice president JD Vance showed his backwards thinking on AI when speaking about his opposition to the declaration. He said that “Should a deal seem too good to be true, just remember the old adage that we learned in Silicon Valley, if you aren’t paying for the product: you are the product.”

    The thing is, AI becomes a self-sustaining product that doesn’t require significant or eventually basically any labour – therefore it doesn’t require payment.

    Musk: this won’t end well

    Calum Chace, author of Surviving AI, previously warned that without a socialist vision for the technology:

    There will be people who own the AI, and therefore own everything else…Which means homo sapiens will be split into a handful of ‘gods’, and then the rest of us.

    With Musk and his ilk at the helm, this is exactly what may happen.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Powerless – another Asia-Pacific angle on the long siege of USAID

    COMMENTARY: By Robin Davies

    Much has been and much more will be written about the looming abolition of USAID.

    It’s “the removal of a huge and important tool of American global statecraft” (Konyndyk), or the wood-chipping of a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” (Musk) or, more reasonably, the unwarranted cancellation of an organisation that should have been reviewed and reformed.

    Commentators will have a lot to say, some of it exaggerated, about the varieties of harm caused by this decision, and about its legality.

    Some will welcome it from a conservative perspective, believing that USAID was either not aligned with or acting against the interests of the United States, or was proselytising wokeness, or was a criminal organisation.

    Some, often more quietly, will welcome it from an anti-imperialist or “Southern” perspective, believing that the agency was at worst a blunt instrument of US hegemony or at least a bastion of Western saviourism.

    I want to come at this topic from a different angle, by providing a brief personal perspective on USAID as an organisation, based on several decades of occasional interaction with it during my time as an Australian aid official.

    Essentially, I view USAID as a harried, hamstrung and traumatised organisation, not as a rogue agency or finely-tuned vehicle of US statecraft.

    Peer country representative
    My own experience with USAID began when I participated as a peer country representative in an OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) peer review of the US’s foreign assistance programme in the early 1990s, which included visits to US assistance programmes in Bangladesh and the Philippines, as well as to USAID headquarters in Washington DC.

    I later dealt with the agency in many other roles, including during postings to the OECD and Indonesia and through my work on global and regional climate change and health programmes, up to and including the pandemic years.

    An image is firmly lodged in my mind from that DAC peer review visit to Washington. We had had days of back-to-back meetings in USAID headquarters with a series of exhausted-looking, distracted and sometimes grumpy executives who didn’t have much reason to care what the OECD thought about the US aid effort.

    It was a muggy summer day. At one point a particularly grumpy meeting chair, who now rather reminds of me of Gary Oldman’s character in Slow Horses, mopped the sweat from his forehead with his necktie without appearing to be aware of what he was doing. Since then, that man has been my mental model of a USAID official.

    But why so exhausted, distracted and grumpy?

    Precisely because USAID is about the least freewheeling workplace one could construct. Certainly it is administratively independent, in the sense that it was created by an act of Congress, but it also receives its budget from the President and Congress — and that budget comes with so many strings attached, in the form of country- or issue-related “earmarks” or other directives that it might be logically impossible to allocate the funds as instructed.

    Some of these earmarks are broad and unsurprising (for example, specific allocations for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment under the Bush-era PEPFAR program) while others represent niche interests (Senator John McCain once ridiculed earmarks pertaining to “peanuts, orangutans, gorillas, neotropical raptors, tropical fish and exotic plants”) — but none originates within USAID.

    Informal earmarks calculation
    I recall seeing an informal calculation showing that one could only satisfy all the percentage-based earmarks by giving most of the dollars several quite different jobs to do. A 2002 DAC peer review noted with disapproval some 270 earmarks or other directive provisions in aid legislation; by the time of the most recent peer review in 2022, this number was more like 700.

    Related in part to this congressional micro-management of its budget — along with the usual distrust of organisations that “send” money overseas — USAID labours under particularly gruelling accountability and reporting requirements.

    Andew Natsios — a former USAID Administrator and lifelong Republican who has recently come to USAID’s defence (albeit with arguments that not everybody would deem helpful) — wrote about this in 2010. In terms reminiscent of current events, he described the reign of terror of Lieutenant-General Herbert Beckington, a former Marine Corps officer who led USAID‘s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) from 1977 to 1994.

    He was a powerful iconic figure in Washington, and his influence over the structure of the foreign aid programME remains with USAID today. … Known as “The General” at USAID, Beckington was both feared and despised by career officers. Once referred to by USAID employees as “the agency’s J. Edgar Hoover — suspicious, vindictive, eager to think the worst” …

    At one point, he told the Washington Post that USAID’s white-collar crime rate was “higher than that of downtown Detroit.” … In a seminal moment in this clash between OIG and USAID, photographs were published of two senior officers who had been accused of some transgression being taken away in handcuffs by the IG investigators for prosecution, a scene that sent a broad chill through the career staff and, more than any other single event, forced a redirection of aid practice toward compliance.

    Labyrinthine accountability systems
    On top of the burdens of logically impossible programming and labyrinthine accountability systems is the burden of projecting American generosity. As far as humanly possible, and perhaps a little further, ways must be found of ensuring that American aid is sourced from American institutions, farms or factories and, if it is in the form of commodities, that it is transported on American vessels.

    Failing that, there must be American flags. I remember a USAID officer stationed in Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami spending a non-trivial amount of his time seeking to attach sizeable flags to the front of trucks transporting US (but also non-US) emergency supplies around the province of Aceh.

    President Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has somehow determined to his own satisfaction that the great majority (in fact 98 percent) of USAID personnel are donors to the Democratic Party. Whether or not that is true, let alone relevant, Democrat administrations have arguably been no kinder to USAID than Republican ones over the years.

    Natsios, in the piece cited above, notes that The General was installed under Carter, who ran on anti-Washington ticket, and that there were savage cuts — over 400 positions — to USAID senior career service staffing under Clinton. USAID gets battered no matter which way the wind blows.

    Which brings me back to necktie guy. It has always seemed to me that the platonic form of a USAID officer, while perhaps more likely than not to vote Democrat, is a tired and dispirited person, weary of politicians of all stripes, bowed under his or her burdens, bound to a desk and straitjacketed by accountability requirements, regularly buffeted by new priorities and abrupt restructures, and put upon by the ignorant and suspicious.

    Radical-left Marxists and vipers probably wouldn’t tolerate such an existence for long. Who would? I guess it’s either thieves and money-launderers or battle-scarred professionals intent on doing a decent job against tall odds.

    Robin Davies is an honorary professor at the Australian National University’s (ANU) Crawford School of Public Policy and managing editor of the Devpolicy Blog. He previously held senior positions at Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and AusAID.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Varieties Of Worker Cooperatives In Tech

    Working conditions in the tech sector are deteriorating. Leading tech firms like Google, once considered top employers, have laid off thousands of workers despite reporting profits. Traditional tech firms struggle to reconcile the paradox of high job quality and profitability. Can worker cooperatives offer an alternative for tech workers? Known for prioritizing equity and social well-being, can they succeed where traditional firms fail? I believe worker cooperatives are a viable solution for tech workers.

    I want to share a framework that explains the different varieties of tech worker cooperatives.

    The post Varieties Of Worker Cooperatives In Tech appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ICE Wants to Know If You’re Posting Negative Things About It Online

    Amid anger and protest over the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to monitor and locate “negative” social media discussion about the agency and its top officials, according to contract documents reviewed by The Intercept.

    Citing an increase in threats to ICE agents and leadership, the agency is soliciting pitches from private companies to monitor threats across the internet — with a special focus on social media. People who simply criticize ICE online could pulled into the dragnet.

    “In order to prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” the procurement document reads.

    If this scanning uncovers anything the agency deems suspicious, ICE is asking its contractors to drill down into the background of social media users.

    That includes:

    “Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE; 2). Information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organization(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence; and 3). Information indicating a potential for carrying out a threat (such as postings depicting weapons, acts of violence, refences to acts of violence, to include empathy or affiliation with a group which has violent tendencies; references to violent acts; affections with violent acts; eluding [sic] to violent acts.”

    It’s unclear how exactly any contractor might sniff out someone’s “proclivity for violence.” The ICE document states only that the contractor will use “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles” to accomplish its automated threat detection.

    Once flagged, the system will further scour a target’s internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world position and offline identity. In addition to compiling personal information — such as the Social Security numbers and addresses of those whose posts are flagged — the contractor will also provide ICE with a “photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates.”

    The document also requests “Facial Recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject.” The contract contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.

     

    The posting indicates that ICE isn’t merely looking to detect direct threats of violence, but also online criticism of the agency.

    As part of its mission to protect ICE with “proactive threat monitoring,” the winning contractor will not simply flag threatening remarks but “Provide monitoring and analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative).”

    “ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm.”

    Such sentiment analysis — typically accomplished via machine-learning techniques — could place under law enforcement scrutiny speech that is constitutionally protected. Simply stated, a post that is critical or even hostile to ICE isn’t against the law.

    “ICE’s attempts to capture and assign a judgement to people’s ‘sentiment’ throughout the expanse of the internet is beyond concerning,” said Cinthya Rodriguez, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente. “The current administration’s attempt to use this technology falls within the agency’s larger history of mass surveillance, which includes gathering information from personal social media accounts and retaliating against immigrant activists. ICE’s attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us.”

    Related

    How ICE Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants

    The document soliciting contractors appears nearly identical to a procurement document published by ICE in 2020, which resulted in a $5.5 million contract between the agency and Barbaricum, a Washington-based defense and intelligence contractor. A new contract has not yet been awarded. ICE spokesperson Jocelyn Biggs told The Intercept, “While ICE anticipates maintaining its threat risk monitoring services, we cannot speculate on a specific timeline for future contract decisions.”

    ICE already has extensive social media surveillance capabilities provided by federal contractor Giant Oak, which seeks “derogatory” posts about the United States to inform immigration-related decision-making. The goal of this contract, ostensibly, is focused more narrowly on threats to ICE leadership, agents, facilities, and operations.

    Civil liberties advocates told The Intercept the program had grave speech implications under the current administration. “While surveillance programs like this under any administration are a concerning privacy and free speech violation and I would fight to stop them, the rhetoric of the Trump administration makes this practice especially terrifying,” said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Threats to ‘punish’ opponents or deport those exercising 1st Amendment rights combine with these invasive practices to create a real ‘thought police’ scenario.”

    The post ICE Wants to Know If You’re Posting Negative Things About It Online appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The New Normal

    The post The New Normal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 2 obscure clean energy metals are caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war

    In the summer of 2023, Vasileios Tsianos, the vice president of corporate development at Neo Performance Materials, started getting calls from government officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Within the world of industrial material manufacturing, Neo is best known for making rare earth magnets, used in everything from home appliances to electric vehicles. But these calls weren’t about rare earths. They were about something considerably rarer: the metal gallium.

    Neo recycles a few dozen tons of high-purity gallium a year, mostly from semiconductor chip manufacturing scrap, at a factory in Ontario, Canada. In North America, it’s the only industrial-scale producer of the metal, which is used in not only chips, but also clean energy technologies and military equipment. 

    China, the world’s leading producer by far, had just announced new export controls on gallium, apparently in response to reports that the United States government was considering restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor chips to China. 

    All of a sudden, people wanted to talk to Neo. “We’ve spoken to almost everyone” interested in producing gallium outside of China, Tsianos told Grist.

    Since Tsianos started receiving those calls, tensions over the 31st element on the periodic table — as well as the 32nd, germanium, also used in a bevy of advanced technologies — have escalated. In December, China outright banned exports of both metals to the United States following the Biden administration’s decision to further restrict U.S. chip exports. 

    Now, several companies operating in the U.S. and Canada are considering expanding production of the rare metals to help meet U.S. demand. While Canadian critical minerals producers may get swept up in a new geopolitical tit-for-tat should Trump go through with his threat to impose tariffs, U.S. metal producers could see support from the new administration, which called for prioritizing federal funding for critical minerals projects in a Day 1 executive order. Beyond the U.S. and Canada, industry observers say China’s export ban is fueling global interest in making critical mineral supply chains more diverse so that no single country has a chokehold over materials vital for a high-tech, clean energy future.

    “This latest round of export bans are putting a lot of wind in the sails of critical minerals supply chain efforts, not just in the U.S. but globally,” Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute, a research center focused on technological solutions to environmental problems, told Grist.

    Gallium and germanium aren’t exactly household names. But they are found in products that are indispensable to modern life — and a fossil fuel-free society. With its impressive electrical properties, gallium is used in semiconductor chips that make their way into everything from cell phones to power converters in electric vehicles to LED lighting displays. The metal is also used in the manufacturing of rare earth magnets for electric vehicles and wind turbines, in thin film solar cells, and sometimes, in commercially popular silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan. 

    A close-up of two, side-by-side, black solar panel arrays against a cloudy sky
    Gallium is sometimes used in silicon solar photovoltaic cells, where it can help increase performance and extend lifespan. Baris Seckin / Anadolu via Getty Images

    Germanium, meanwhile, is used to refract light inside fiber optic cables. In addition to helping form the backbone of the internet, the metal’s exceptional light-scattering properties make it useful for infrared lenses, semiconductor chips, and high-efficiency solar cells used by satellites.

    There aren’t many substitutes for these two elements.  Some silicon-based semiconductors lack gallium, and specialized glasses can be substituted for germanium in certain infrared technologies. Solar cells are often doped with boron instead of gallium. But these two metals have specific properties that often make them the ideal material. When it comes to clean energy, Tsianos told Grist, there are no substitutes “within the material performance and cost trade-off spectrum” offered by gallium.

    Because a little bit goes a long way, the market for both metals is small — and it’s dominated by China. In 2022, the world produced about 640 tons of low-purity gallium and a little over 200 tons of germanium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In recent years, China has accounted for virtually all of the world’s low-purity gallium output and more than half of refined germanium. 

    That’s partly due to the fact that both metals are byproducts of other industries. Gallium is typically extracted from bauxite ores as they are being processed to make aluminum oxide, while zinc miners sometimes squeeze germanium out of waste produced during refining. China is a leading producer of these common metals, too — and its government has made co-extracting gallium and germanium a priority, according to Wang. “It is very strategic,” he said.

    China’s dominance of the two metals’ supply chains gives it a considerable cudgel in its ongoing trade war with the U.S. America produces no virgin gallium and only a small amount of germanium, while consuming approximately fifty tons a year of the two metals combined. A U.S. Geological Survey study published in November found that if China implemented a total moratorium on exports of both metals, it could cost the U.S. economy billions. Weeks after that study was published, China announced its ban.

    The ban is so new that it’s not yet clear how U.S. companies, or the federal government, are responding. But America’s high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t without fallback options. North of the border, Neo’s facility in Ontario stands ready to double its production of gallium, according to Tsianos. “We have the capacity,” he told Grist. “We’re waiting for more feedstock.” 

    Currently, Neo’s only source of gallium is the semiconductor industry. Chip makers in Europe, North America, and Asia send the company their scrap, which it processes to recover high-purity gallium that feeds back into semiconductor manufacturing. But Tsianos says Neo is piloting its technology with bauxite miners around the world to create new sources of virgin gallium. The idea, he says, is that bauxite miners would do some initial processing on-site, then send low-purity gallium to Neo for further refining in Canada. Tsianos declined to name specific bauxite firms Neo is partnering with, but said the company is “making progress” toward making new resources available.

    Meanwhile, in British Columbia, mining giant Teck Resources is already a leading producer of germanium outside of China. The firm’s Trail Operations refinery complex receives zinc ore from the Red Dog mine in northwest Alaska and turns it into various products, including around 20 tons of refined germanium a year, according to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate. (Teck doesn’t disclose production volumes.) 

    That germanium is sold primarily to customers in the U.S., Teck spokesperson Dale Steeves told Grist. In wake of the export ban, Steeves said that the firm is now “examining options and market support for increasing production capacity of germanium.”

    Two metallic cylinders sit on a blue and white table in front of laboratory equipment
    Germanium substrates wafers at a Umicore facility in Olen, Belgium. Umicore

    Kwasi Ampofo, the head of metals and mining at the clean energy research firm BloombergNEF, told Grist that in the near term, he would expect the U.S. to “try to establish new supply chain relationships” with countries that already have significant production, like Canada, to secure the gallium and germanium it needs. That may be true whether or not Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canadian imports become reality. Tsianos was bullish in spite of the tariff threat, noting in an email that Neo “remains the only industrial-scale and commercially-operating Gallium facility in North America.”

    “[W]e are committed to continue serving our European, American, and Japanese customers in the semiconductor and renewable energy industries,’ Tsianos added.

    Steeves told Grist that a trade war between the U.S. and Canada would be “a negative for the economy of both nations, disrupting the flow of essential critical minerals and increasing costs and inefficiencies on both sides of the border.” Teck, he said,  “will continue to actively manage our sales arrangements to minimize the impact to Trail Operations.”

    While Canada may be the U.S.’s best short-term option for these rare metals, farther down the line Ampofo expects to see the U.S. take a  “renewed interest” in recycling — particularly of military equipment. In 2022, the Department of Defense announced it had initiated a program for recovering “optical-grade germanium” from old military equipment. At the time, the initiative was expected to recycle up to 3 tons of the metal each year, or roughly 10 percent of the nation’s annual demand. The Defense sub-agency responsible for the program didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the program’s status.

    There’s another small source of production capacity in the U.S. The global metals company Umicore recycles germanium from manufacturing scrap, fiber optic cables, solar cells, and infrared optical devices at an optical materials facility in Quapaw, Oklahoma, as well as in Belgium. The company has been recycling germanium since the 1950s, a spokesperson told Grist, calling it a “core and historical activity at Umicore.” Umicore declined to disclose how much of the metal it recycles and wouldn’t say whether China’s export ban will impact this part of its business.

    While recycling is able to fill some of the nation’s gallium and germanium needs, there may be a larger source of both metals lurking in sludge ponds in central Tennessee. 

    There, in the city of Clarksville, the Netherlands-headquartered Nyrstar operates a zinc processing facility that produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. A U.S. Department of Energy spokesperson told Grist that the company has previously partnered with Ames National Laboratory’s Critical Materials Innovation Hub to develop processes for extracting gallium, which isn’t typically produced from zinc waste. 

    A silvery industrial facility is seen behind some shrubs and a road, with wispy clouds in a blue sky in the background
    Nyrstar’s zinc processing facility in Clarksville, Tennessee, which produces wastes containing gallium and germanium. Nyrstar

    In 2023, Nyrstar announced plans to build a new, $150-million facility, co-located with its existing zinc smelter in Clarksville, capable of producing 30 tons of germanium and 40 tons of gallium a year. However, the current status of the project is uncertain, with no timetable to begin construction. A spokesperson for Nyrstar told Grist the company is “continu[ing] to work on and evaluate the business case” for the facility, while declining to offer additional details.

    Making a business case to produce gallium or germanium is the central challenge for firms outside of China, experts told Grist. As Tsianos of Neo put it, these metals are a “side hustle” that requires major up-front investment for a relatively small amount of extra revenue. Moreover, a bauxite or zinc miner’s ability to produce gallium or germanium typically hinges on the market conditions for the metal it is primarily focused on. That means “if aluminum prices are low or the zinc prices are low, the mine or the smelter might just not operate, even if the world is sort of screaming out for more gallium or germanium,” Wang said.

    Still, there’s more economic incentive to produce these metals now than there was a few years ago. The recent geopolitical drama, Tsianos says, has caused a “bifurcation” in the price of gallium. Outside of China, the price of the metal is now “almost double” what it is within the nation’s borders. 

    “There’s a structural change in the market that has created a business case for outside of China production,” Tsianos said. “And it started because of the export control.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 2 obscure clean energy metals are caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war on Feb 7, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • DeepSeek Is Showing Us that Another Tech World Is Possible

    Last week, a Chinese startup, DeepSeek, released R1, a large-language model rivaling ChatGPT, that is already unraveling the U.S. tech world. The open-source model performs just as well, if not better, than its American counterparts.

    The shock comes mainly from the extremely low cost with which the model was trained. R1 cost just $5.6 million to train. Meanwhile, OpenAI spent at least $540 million to train ChatGPT in 2022 last year alone and plans to spend over $500 billion in the next four years. Meanwhile, Meta revealed it plans to spend over $65 billion on AI development in 2025.

    This incredible achievement is made even more impressive as DeepSeek trained the model on less powered AI chips than those used by American companies, such as the Nvidia H100 GPU. The Biden administration banned China from importing the most powerful AI chips, used by American companies like OpenAI and Meta, as part of the U.S.’ hostility and economic warfare with the country. Rather than limiting China’s AI development, these sanctions have facilitated a small startup to produce language models that outperform ChatGPT, Gemini, and others with only a fraction of the costs. Further still, using these less powerful chips significantly reduces the energy used to train the model. This is another significant benefit in an industry known for its environmental costs. While DeepSeek used American chips to train R1, the model actually runs on Chinese-made Ascend 910C chips produced by Huawei, another company that became a victim of U.S. sanctions.

    Silicon Valley has long been hailed as an untouchable technological powerhouse, largely as a result of the economic warfare of successive U.S. governments to sanction any competition to it. For too long, there has been a tight partnership between tech companies and the U.S. government, where tech moguls have accumulated eye-watering wealth in exchange for sustenance to the American empire through its perceived technological dominance. DeepSeek has revealed this fallacy openly.

    DeepSeek’s R1, costing just $5 million to train, caused the most significant loss for any company in U.S. history at $600 billion. This was from Nvidia’s stocks, the major supplier of AI chips, including the most advanced chips the U.S. has banned China from importing. After enjoying their stock value doubling in recent years, this loss significantly impacts the U.S. technological industry. The U.S. attacks on China’s development are already coming back to harm it.

    Not only is R1 cheaper than its American competitors, but people using the tool have found it provides more accurate and, crucially, results that do not only echo the interests of U.S. imperialism. I asked DeepSeek’s R1, Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama: Should the U.S. arm Israel? Give me a clear, short answer that includes your judgment.

    ChatGPT: Yes, the U.S. should arm Israel, as it is a crucial ally in a volatile region. However, this support should be paired with active efforts toward peace and conflict resolution to ensure long-term stability.

    Gemini: Yes, the U.S. should continue to arm Israel to ensure its security, but with stricter conditions tied to progress on human rights and a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians.

    Llama: The U.S. should provide military aid to Israel, but with conditions that ensure the aid promotes regional stability, supports a two-state solution, and respects human rights.

    R1: The decision to arm Israel should be based on strategic interests, regional stability, and adherence to international law. While Israel has a right to self-defense, the U.S. should ensure that arms transfers do not exacerbate conflicts or contribute to human rights violations. A balanced approach, prioritizing diplomacy and peace, is essential.

    These answers did shock me a little, despite what I expected from these models. While R1 includes some colonial language, such as the fallacy that Israel has a right to self-defense, which, of course, no country particularly occupying power has, it is much better than the others. While this prompt is simplistic, it reveals how quickly and overtly these other models incorporate U.S. imperialist agendas.

    The U.S. tech industry has been bloating for years. Eight of the ten wealthiest people in the world are in the tech industry. One look at Trump’s inauguration attendees already revealed how close these companies are to political power in this country. These companies are also deeply embedded within the American war machine. Google used its AI to help Israel commit genocide. OpenAI is using its technology to target weapons for murder. Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank want $500 billion to create AI infrastructure in the U.S.; one of the major players involved has publicly sought an AI-data system of mass surveillance.

    DeepSeek reveals to us not only the incredible development happening in China but also how this is seen only as a challenge to U.S. dominance rather than a benefit for people worldwide. Just like their impressive poverty reduction program that has lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty, their world-leading climate policies include building more solar power than all countries combined last year and significantly reducing the costs of producing clean energy for everyone. U.S. officials attack all of these achievements in the government and media because they reveal that an impoverishing system of climate-destroying, violent extraction for the wealthy few is not the only way.

    This is why the hawkish chorus has already begun attacking open-source software for ‘national security’ concerns or ‘censorship’. We know their playbook already—they just performed the same moves with RedNote as millions of Americans turned to the app in the brief period TikTok went dark. However, many are still active on the platform, and the 90-day suspension of the ban isn’t too far in the future.

    U.S. attacks on TikTok have fostered beautiful exchanges between Chinese and Americans, exposing the propaganda Americans have been fed about China and concerning Chinese people that what they have learned about the U.S. is true. U.S. attacks on China’s AI development have made China more innovative and efficient, producing DeepSeek R1 and undoubtedly many more such developments. Not only does this expose how devastating for humanity American economic warfare is, it also uncovers just how this policy of hostility won’t save U.S. hegemony. It’s not just China. The destructive years of the U.S. and Saudi-led bombing of Yemen forced the country to develop renewable and decentralized electricity infrastructure, moving away from a reliance on fossil fuels and sustaining energy for hospitals and homes even when the country is bombed. Venezuela has achieved near total food self-sufficiency in response to U.S. sanctions and blockade. American warfare, in all its forms, has forced countries to disrupt their ways of life completely.

    China’s ability to develop this AI at a lower cost, both financially and to the environment, is a win for us all. If the U.S. collaborated with China instead of erecting barriers and sabotage, just imagine how much more we could do.

    The post DeepSeek Is Showing Us that Another Tech World Is Possible first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Need A Data Revolution To Avert Climate Disaster

    The fires in Los Angeles represent a catastrophic failure to anticipate and respond to environmental threats. In the aftermath of such devastation, an obvious question looms: How did we miss the warning signs?

    The answer is clear. Unlike other feedback systems designed to drive immediate response — think of the life-saving equipment in intensive care units, or even a car’s fuel gauge — the tools we use to monitor climate resilience and risk are dangerously, and indefensibly, outdated.

    Take the Planetary Boundaries framework, one of the most recognized global indicators of humanity’s transgression of critical ecological thresholds, such as climate stability and biodiversity.

    The post We Need A Data Revolution To Avert Climate Disaster appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.