radiofree.asia

Category: Technology

  • CSIRO maps $1.7bn electrolyser manufacturing opportunity

    Realising Australia’s green hydrogen production targets could yield an electrolyser manufacturing opportunity worth more than $1.7 billion a year by 2050 if government delivers support for local procurement, according to a new report from the national science agency. Published on Wednesday, the CSIRO report highlights existing advantages in critical minerals as well as existing manufacturing…

    The post CSIRO maps $1.7bn electrolyser manufacturing opportunity appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • New technologies could refine the copper the world needs — without the dirty smelting

    At a laboratory in Newark, New Jersey, a gray liquid swirls vigorously inside a reactor the size of a small watermelon. Here, scientists with the mining technology startup Still Bright are using a rare metal, vanadium, to extract a common one, copper, from ores that are too difficult or costly for the mining industry to process today. 

    If the promising results Still Bright is seeing in beakers and bottles can be replicated at much larger scales, it could unlock vast copper resources for the energy transition.

    Still Bright isn’t the only company seeking to revolutionize copper production. A handful of startups with similar goals have announced partnerships with major mining firms and scooped up tens of millions of dollars of investment. These companies claim their technology can help meet humanity’s surging appetite for the metal, while driving down the industry’s environmental footprint.

    “We’re facing unprecedented demand for copper, and that’s really tied to the electrification of everything,” Still Bright chief of staff Carter Schmitt told Grist.

    A Still Bright employee conducts a feedstock screening experiment at the company’s laboratory in New Jersey.
    Still Bright

    The world cannot reach its climate goals without copper, which plays a central role in the technologies needed to decarbonize. Copper wiring is at the core of the world’s electricity networks, which will have to expand enormously to bring more renewable energy online. Wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion batteries all rely on the mineral, too. As the market for these technologies grows, the clean energy sector’s demand for the 29th element is expected to nearly triple by 2040. 

    At the same time, copper miners are exhausting their best-quality reserves. Copper that is economical to mine is found in rocks known as ores, and grades of the ores that miners are exploiting — the concentration of copper contained in them — have declined steadily over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, easy-to-process minerals near the surface are giving way to more challenging ones deeper down. And the current standard procedure for extracting the metal from the majority of ores results in a lot of pollution.

    About 80 percent of the copper mined today comes from unweathered rocks known as primary copper sulfide ores. After being crushed and ground to a fine powder, the copper inside primary sulfide ores is concentrated using chemicals before being sent to a smelter, where it is refined at high temperatures. 

    The process of concentrating and smelting copper produces a toxic mineral slurry called tailings, and a cocktail of air pollutants including lead and arsenic. In the United States, a single Native American tribe — the San Carlos Apache people — has borne the brunt of that pollution. Two of America’s three copper smelters are located within a few miles of the tribe’s reservation boundaries in southeastern Arizona. Both are among the worst lead emitters in the nation, spewing toxic metals into the air for the better part of a century. (One of these smelters was mothballed four years ago following a labor strike, but is reportedly planning to resume operations to meet surging copper demand.)

    The Asarco smelter in Hayden, Arizona, is located within a few miles of the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.
    Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images

    “This stuff doesn’t go away,” says Jim Pew, the director of clean air practice at the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told Grist. “It falls back to the Earth and permanently contaminates the communities nearby.” (The San Carlos Apache Tribe didn’t reply to Grist’s request for comment.)

    In addition to air pollutants, copper smelters are energy intensive and typically require fossil fuels, driving up costs as well as carbon emissions. If the ore is too low-grade (meaning the concentration of copper is too low) companies simply can’t get enough out to cover the cost of extracting it.

    But globally, low-grade primary sulfide ores contain enormous amounts of copper. A March report by Goldman Sachs estimated that the world’s top five copper miners are sitting on “billions of tons” of such ores — an amount that makes the expected 5 to 6 million ton copper supply shortfall over the next decade look puny. 

    “It’s not that the world is out of copper,” Cristobal Undurraga, CEO of the Santiago, Chile-based startup Ceibo, told Grist. “It is, though, in a form … harder to extract using traditional processes.”

    Founded in 2021, Ceibo is one of several mining technology startups that’s proposing a new, old approach to getting copper out of low-grade sulfide ores: a process known as heap leaching. Heap leaching is already used to process the weathered rocks located toward the top of most deposits, which account for about 20 percent of copper mined today. Miners process these rocks on site by crushing the rock, piling it up into a heap, and spraying it with acid, which percolates through the rock and liberates the valuable metal. The process produces significantly less pollution and carbon emissions than traditional copper smelting — but until recently, no one has figured out how to make it work efficiently for primary sulfide ores.

    Long tubes run toward the horizon across piles of crushed rock, as the sun sets on mountains in the background
    Heaps of crushed ore in Pinto Valley, Arizona, where Jetti’s technology is being applied.
    Thomas Ingersoll / courtesy of Jetti Resources

    Ceibo claims it is able to recover large quantities of copper with a chemical extraction approach that involves altering critical conditions in the crushed ore, such as the pH and oxygen concentration, making it easier for the acid to get to work. Ceibo says its process is flexible and can accommodate the wide variety of geologic and environmental conditions a company might encounter in different parts of the world — or even different parts of the same subterranean pit. “What we are developing is a whole geological platform” that can be adjusted based on those changing conditions, chief technology officer Catalina Urrejola told Grist.

    Ceibo hasn’t revealed many details of its process, which it has mostly tested at the laboratory scale. But the firm has already secured $36 million in venture capital financing to scale up, including funding from major industry players like BHP Ventures, the investment arm of one of the world’s largest copper producers. In November, Ceibo began its first pilot tests with Glencore’s Lomas Bayas Mining Company, based in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

    Another mining startup, Jetti Resources, is already processing primary sulfide ores commercially using heap leaching. The Colorado-based company has developed a proprietary catalyst that alters the surface of the crushed minerals, helping acid penetrate to extract the copper. In 2019, Jetti began deploying its technology commercially at Capstone Copper’s Pinto Valley mine in Arizona. At leaching sites where the firm’s catalyst is being used, Jetti says it has doubled production. 

    “We believe that our catalyst is the only commercially available technology for economically producing copper from chalcopyrite,” a primary sulfide mineral that represents about 70 percent of untapped copper reserves, chief technology officer Nelson Mora told Grist in an email.

    An aerial shot of an industrial facility, with a pond to the right and tan mountains and a blue sky with wispy clouds in the background
    The mine in Pinto Valley, Arizona, where Jetti’s technology is being applied.
    Thomas Ingersoll / courtesy of Jetti Resources

    Holly Bridgwater, director of Australian mining innovation company Unearthed Solutions, thinks the technology startups like Ceibo and Jetti are offering holds promise — despite a lack of public test results.

    “Otherwise, all these mining companies wouldn’t be working with them,” she said. “They would have stopped the trials way earlier if it wasn’t demonstrating value.”

    Still, heap leaching has economic and technological limitations. It can take weeks to months for the chemicals to work their way through a rock pile to extract the copper, which is typically less than 1 percent of the material present. And no company is claiming it can extract everything. Jetti told Grist its process can recover 40 to 70 percent of the copper from chalcopyrite, compared to 15 to 30 percent for “conventional leaching processes.” Undurrago said Ceibo’s technology can recover 70 to 80 percent of the copper from primary sulfide ores in a “reasonable timeframe.” 

    By contrast, Still Bright claims it can extract up to 99 percent of the copper from primary sulfide ores in a matter of minutes. 

    Still Bright’s technology, called “electrochemical reductive leaching,” starts with a copper concentrate similar to what smelters work with. Instead of smelting the metal, Still Bright combines it with a solution of liquid vanadium. The vanadium reacts with the copper, liberating it from the sulfide minerals, before being recycled in an electrolyzer that takes inspiration from vanadium flow batteries. Like heap leaching, this process can take place on-site at a mine in one of Still Bright’s “stirred tank reactors,” rather than at a separate smelting facility.

    The key advantage of Still Bright’s tech, Schmitt says, is that vanadium and copper react incredibly strongly with each other. “You can extract copper really easily and really quickly at ambient temperature and pressure,” Schmitt said.

    The torso of a person wearing a navy blue sweatshirt with the neon green text 'Max Hax' on it. The person is wearing purple disposable gloves and adjusting a metal piece of equipment next to some bottles full of dark blue liquid and a bowl full of dark powder
    A Still Bright employee sets up a viscometer next to a copper concentrate sample and reagent bottles at the company’s laboratory in New Jersey.
    Still Bright

    Initially, Still Bright plans to market its tech as a way to extract copper from particularly challenging ores that can’t be smelted today, as well as from mine waste. Eventually, it hopes to offer a more sustainable alternative to smelting for high-grade copper sulfide ores, too. While Still Bright’s process produces some tailings, it avoids the toxic air pollutants tied to smelting, and potentially the carbon emissions. Because Still Bright’s equipment is fully electric, it can be powered by renewable energy, Schmitt says.

    Still Bright has validated its process at a lab scale and is working on setting up its first in-house pilot project, which it anticipates completing by 2026. 

    Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, declined to comment on the viability of these new technologies as a replacement for copper smelting. But finding alternative ways to refine copper, he says, is “very important” for ensuring vulnerable communities aren’t left footing the bill.

    “We’re going to be using copper for a long time to come,” Pew said. “We should be thinking how do we get that copper without these ancient technologies that pollute so much.”

    While Schmitt and others are hopeful they can bring cleaner refining methods to market, copper mining has additional impacts that improved processing techniques can’t address. No matter what extraction technology is used, copper mines can destroy habitats, create dust and water pollution, deplete freshwater supplies, and interfere with Indigenous peoples’ access to cultural practices and sacred sites. The industry is facing significant backlash over these impacts, with activists and regulators stalling and shutting down major projects in recent years. In Panama, the government recently ordered the shutdown of a major copper mine following mass protests over the threat it posed to water supplies and a court order deeming the project unconstitutional. In Arizona, an indigenous group is fighting to block Rio Tinto and BHP from mining a giant copper reserve that lies beneath lands considered sacred.  

    Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College who studies resource extraction and climate change, says it is “noteworthy” that many of the mining giants pouring money into new copper processing methods — a list that includes Rio Tinto and BHP — are also being criticized over the harmful effects of mining. Whether or not these firms are planning more sweeping environmental reforms, Riofrancos says their investment in clean tech startups draws attention to the fact that the mining industry, along with many climate investors, is beginning to brand resource extraction as a climate solution.

    “This is an emerging focus in the venture capital world — supporting early-stage startups in the critical mineral space,” Schmitt said. “At all stages: the mining, crushing, grinding, and onward to refining, … it’s all needed.”

    Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline New technologies could refine the copper the world needs — without the dirty smelting on Dec 3, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • New course planned to help Pacific media professionals counter disinformation

    Pacific Media Watch

    An Aotearoa New Zealand-based community education provider is preparing a new course aimed to help media professionals in the Pacific region understand and respond to the complex issue of disinformation.

    The eight-week course “A Bit Sus (Pacific)”, developed by the Dark Times Academy, will be offered free to journalists, editors, programme directors and others involved in running media organisations across the Pacific, beginning in February 2025.

    “Our course will help participants recognise common tactics used by disinformation agents and support them to deploy proven educational and communications techniques including lateral reading and ‘pre-bunking’,” says Dark Times Academy co-founder Mandy Henk.

    DARK TIMES ACADEMY

    As well as teaching participants how to recognise and respond to disinformation, the course offers an understanding of how technology, including generative AI, influences the spread of disinformation.

    The course is an expanded and regionalised adaption of the “A Bit Sus” education programme which was developed by Henk in her former role as CEO of Tohatoha Aotearoa Commons.

    “As the Pacific Islands have experienced accelerated growth in digital connectivity over the past few years — thanks to new submarine cable networks and satellite technology — the region has also seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities,” Henk says.

    “By taking a skills-based approach to countering disinformation, our programme can help to spread the techniques needed to mitigate the risks posed by digital technologies.”

    Evidence-based counter disinformation
    Henk says delivering evidence-based counter disinformation education to Pacific Island media professionals requires a depth of expertise in both counter-disinformation programming and the range of Pacific cultures and political contexts.

    “We are delighted to have several renowned academics advising the programme, including Asia Pacific Media Network’s Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, and Professor Chad Briggs from the Asian Institute of Management.

    “Their expertise will help us to deliver a world class programme informed by the best evidence available.”

    Dark Times Academy's Mandy Henk
    Dark Times Academy’s Mandy Henk . . . “The region has seen a surge in harmful rumours and disinformation that is increasingly disrupting the ability to share accurate and truthful information across Pacific communities.” Image: Newsroom

    The programme will be co-taught by Henk, as well as American journalist and counter disinformation expert Brooke Binkowski, and New Zealand-based extremism expert Byron Clark, who is also a co-founder of the Dark Times Academy.

    “Countering disinformation and preventing the harm it causes in the Pacific Islands is crucially important to communities who wish to maintain and strengthen existing democratic institutions and expand their reach,” says Clark.

    Binkowski says: “With disinformation narratives on the rise globally, this course is a timely and eye-opening look at its existence, its purveyors and their goals, and how to effectively combat it.

    “I look forward to sharing what I have learned in my years in the field during this course.”

    The course is being offered by Dark Times Academy using funds awarded in a public competitive grant offered by the US Embassy in New Zealand.

    While it is funded by the US, it is a completely independent programme overseen by Dark Times Academy and its academic consultants.

  • Documents Contradict Google’s Claims About Its Project Nimbus Contract With Israel

    When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.

    While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.

    Related

    Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel

    The $1.2 billion joint contract split between Google and Amazon provides the Israeli government, including its military, with access to state-of-the-art cloud computing and artificial intelligence tools. This has made Project Nimbus a consistent source of protest inside and outside Google, even before Israel’s war on Gaza.

    While Amazon has largely remained silent in the face of employee activism and outside scrutiny, Google routinely downplays or denies the military reach of Project Nimbus — despite the Israeli Finance Ministry’s 2021 announcement that the deal would service the country’s “defense establishment.”

    Google has also sought to reassure those concerned by its relationship with a government whose leadership is being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity by claiming Nimbus is constrained by the company’s general rules and regulations.

    “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” a Google spokesperson told Wired in July and repeated verbatim to Time magazine in August, linking both times to the public-facing copies of each document.

    Google Cloud’s terms of service prohibit, among other things, uses that “violate, or encourage the violation of, the legal rights of others,” any “invasive” purpose, or anything “that can cause death, serious harm, or injury to individuals or groups of individuals.”

    “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government.”

    But the premise that Google policy dictates how Nimbus is used is called into question by a previously undisclosed email from a company lawyer. On December 10, 2020, before the tech giant won the contract, Google lawyer Edward du Boulay wrote to company executives with exciting news: “Google Cloud has been preparing to submit a bid for Project Nimbus (internal code ‘Selenite’), a competitive tender to provide cloud to the Israeli government. The business believes this is currently the largest government procurement of public cloud globally.”

    Du Boulay noted that “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government,” and “Given the value and strategic nature of this project, it carries potential risks and rewards which are significant if we win.” Among Du Boulay’s concerns is the fact that the Israeli “government has unilateral right to impose contract changes,” the lawyer warned. He cautioned further that should it win the contract, Google would retain “almost no ability to sue [Israel] for damages” stemming from “permitted uses … breaches.” The email does not explain what exactly would prevent Google from seeking legal recourse should the Israeli state commit such a breach.

    Google’s suggestion of authority over the contract are further undermined by Israeli governmental contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The documents state that the company’s standard terms of service don’t apply — rather, an “adjusted” terms of service document is in effect.

    “The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”

    Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

    According to a transcript of the exchange shared with The Intercept, Walker said that Nimbus is subject to Google’s own terms: “When it comes to the Nimbus contract, in particular, this is a contract that is designed and directed at our public cloud work, not at specific military classified sensitive information. It’s not designed for that. And everything that’s on our Cloud network, our public Cloud, is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Service. So, you know, I can assure you that we take all this seriously.”

    Related

    Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services From Google and Amazon

    The Israeli contract document also seems to contradict another common defense of the contract from Google, echoed by Walker, that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” According to the Israeli contract document, however, the government “may make any use of any service included in the supplier’s catalog of services.”

    A separate document pertaining to Nimbus’s “Digital Marketplace,” a suite of third-party software hosted by Google and made available to Nimbus users in the Israeli government, offers another apparent contradiction: “There will be no restrictions on the part of the Provider as to the type of system and information that the Clients may migrate to the service, including vital systems of high sensitivity level.” This second document stipulates that the Israeli government “may make any use of the service within the performance of its function and purpose as a public service for the State of Israel and its citizens,” and that “there will be no restriction of any kind, including ‘permitted use’ rules for a service being offered in the governmental digital marketplace.”

    Should Google not have any meaningful control over Nimbus, the company could face consequences beyond public relations or employee dissent. In October, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory placed a public call for information pertaining to private sector involvement in “the commission of international crimes connected to Israel’s unlawful occupation, racial segregation and apartheid regime,” according to a press release.

    The Abolitionist Law Center, a Pennsylvania-based public interest firm, told The Intercept it is filing a submission detailing how “Google and Amazon Web Services’ provision of advanced technological services to the Israeli government through Project Nimbus violates — by its very nature — each companies’ purported commitments to human rights due diligence obligations,” according to staff attorney Sadaf Doost. “This is most evidently demonstrated by how the Project Nimbus contract itself includes a clause granting authority to Israeli officials to modify the companies’ standard terms of use agreements in ways that have not been made clear to the public.”

    The post Documents Contradict Google’s Claims About Its Project Nimbus Contract With Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Documents Contradict Google’s Claims About Its Project Nimbus Contract With Israel

    When questioned about its controversial cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, Google has repeatedly claimed the so-called Project Nimbus deal is bound by the company’s general cloud computing terms of service policy.

    While that policy would prohibit uses that lead to deprivation of rights, injury, or death, or other harms, contract documents and an internal company email reviewed by The Intercept show the deal forged between Google and Israel doesn’t operate under the tech company’s general terms of service. Rather, Nimbus is subject to an “adjusted” policy drafted between Google and the Israeli government. It is unclear how this “Adjusted Terms of Service” policy differs from Google’s typical terms.

    Related

    Documents Reveal Advanced AI Tools Google Is Selling to Israel

    The $1.2 billion joint contract split between Google and Amazon provides the Israeli government, including its military, with access to state-of-the-art cloud computing and artificial intelligence tools. This has made Project Nimbus a consistent source of protest inside and outside Google, even before Israel’s war on Gaza.

    While Amazon has largely remained silent in the face of employee activism and outside scrutiny, Google routinely downplays or denies the military reach of Project Nimbus — despite the Israeli Finance Ministry’s 2021 announcement that the deal would service the country’s “defense establishment.”

    Google has also sought to reassure those concerned by its relationship with a government whose leadership is being investigated by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity by claiming Nimbus is constrained by the company’s general rules and regulations.

    “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” a Google spokesperson told Wired in July and repeated verbatim to Time magazine in August, linking both times to the public-facing copies of each document.

    Google Cloud’s terms of service prohibit, among other things, uses that “violate, or encourage the violation of, the legal rights of others,” any “invasive” purpose, or anything “that can cause death, serious harm, or injury to individuals or groups of individuals.”

    “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government.”

    But the premise that Google policy dictates how Nimbus is used is called into question by a previously undisclosed email from a company lawyer. On December 10, 2020, before the tech giant won the contract, Google lawyer Edward du Boulay wrote to company executives with exciting news: “Google Cloud has been preparing to submit a bid for Project Nimbus (internal code ‘Selenite’), a competitive tender to provide cloud to the Israeli government. The business believes this is currently the largest government procurement of public cloud globally.”

    Du Boulay noted that “If Google wins the competition, we will need to accept a non negotiable contract on terms favourable to the government,” and “Given the value and strategic nature of this project, it carries potential risks and rewards which are significant if we win.” Among Du Boulay’s concerns is the fact that the Israeli “government has unilateral right to impose contract changes,” the lawyer warned. He cautioned further that should it win the contract, Google would retain “almost no ability to sue [Israel] for damages” stemming from “permitted uses … breaches.” The email does not explain what exactly would prevent Google from seeking legal recourse should the Israeli state commit such a breach.

    Google’s suggestion of authority over the contract are further undermined by Israeli governmental contract documents reviewed by The Intercept. The documents state that the company’s standard terms of service don’t apply — rather, an “adjusted” terms of service document is in effect.

    “The tenderer [Israel] has adjusted the winning suppliers’ [Google and Amazon] service agreement for each of the services supplied within the framework of this contract,” according to a 63-page overview of the Nimbus contract. “The Adjusted Terms of Service are the only terms that shall apply to the cloud services consumed upon the winning bidders’ cloud infrastructure.”

    Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The language about “Adjusted Terms of Service” appears to contradict not only Google’s public claims about the contract, but also how it has represented Nimbus to its own staff. During an October 30 employee Q&A session, Google president of global affairs Kent Walker was asked how the company is ensuring its Nimbus work is consistent with its “AI Principles” document, which forbids uses “that cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” including surveillance, weapons, or anything “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

    According to a transcript of the exchange shared with The Intercept, Walker said that Nimbus is subject to Google’s own terms: “When it comes to the Nimbus contract, in particular, this is a contract that is designed and directed at our public cloud work, not at specific military classified sensitive information. It’s not designed for that. And everything that’s on our Cloud network, our public Cloud, is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Service. So, you know, I can assure you that we take all this seriously.”

    Related

    Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services From Google and Amazon

    The Israeli contract document also seems to contradict another common defense of the contract from Google, echoed by Walker, that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” According to the Israeli contract document, however, the government “may make any use of any service included in the supplier’s catalog of services.”

    A separate document pertaining to Nimbus’s “Digital Marketplace,” a suite of third-party software hosted by Google and made available to Nimbus users in the Israeli government, offers another apparent contradiction: “There will be no restrictions on the part of the Provider as to the type of system and information that the Clients may migrate to the service, including vital systems of high sensitivity level.” This second document stipulates that the Israeli government “may make any use of the service within the performance of its function and purpose as a public service for the State of Israel and its citizens,” and that “there will be no restriction of any kind, including ‘permitted use’ rules for a service being offered in the governmental digital marketplace.”

    Should Google not have any meaningful control over Nimbus, the company could face consequences beyond public relations or employee dissent. In October, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory placed a public call for information pertaining to private sector involvement in “the commission of international crimes connected to Israel’s unlawful occupation, racial segregation and apartheid regime,” according to a press release.

    The Abolitionist Law Center, a Pennsylvania-based public interest firm, told The Intercept it is filing a submission detailing how “Google and Amazon Web Services’ provision of advanced technological services to the Israeli government through Project Nimbus violates — by its very nature — each companies’ purported commitments to human rights due diligence obligations,” according to staff attorney Sadaf Doost. “This is most evidently demonstrated by how the Project Nimbus contract itself includes a clause granting authority to Israeli officials to modify the companies’ standard terms of use agreements in ways that have not been made clear to the public.”

    The post Documents Contradict Google’s Claims About Its Project Nimbus Contract With Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants

    President-elect Donald Trump vows to start his second term with the immediate mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. Like everything else, deportations of the 21st century are an increasingly data-centric undertaking, tapping vast pools of personal information sold by a litany of companies. The Intercept asked more than three dozen companies in the data business if they’ll help; only four were willing to comment.

    While details of the plan have varied, Trump’s intention is clear. He plans to use federal immigration police and perhaps the military to force millions of immigrants out of the United States in an operation the president-elect says has “no price tag.” While the country braces for the possibility of immigrants forcibly rounded up and deported, much of the undertaking will likely remain invisible — the domain of software analysis and database searches of unregulated personal data.

    Related

    LexisNexis Is Selling Your Personal Data to ICE So It Can Try to Predict Crimes

    Regardless of immigration status, it is nearly impossible to exist today without creating a trail of records. DMV visits, electricity bills, cellphone subscriptions, bankruptcy proceedings, credit history, and other staples of modern life all wind up ingested and repackaged for sale by data companies. Information like this has helped inform deportation proceedings under both Republican and Democratic leadership.

    In 2021, The Intercept reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid LexisNexis nearly $17 million to access its database of personal information, which the company says includes 10,000 different data points spanning hundreds of millions of people in the United States. Within just seven months, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, ICE had searched this database over 1.2 million times.

    Similar uses of unregulated private data have become commonplace for immigration and border authorities. In 2020, Protocol and the Wall Street Journal reported on the extensive use of location and other personal data gleaned from smartphone apps by companies like Gravy Analytics and Venntel and resold to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. ICE “has used the data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested,” according to sources who spoke to the Journal.

    Analytic software sold by Palantir has been instrumental to ICE’s deportation efforts; reporting by The Intercept showed the company’s tools were used in a 2017 operation targeting unaccompanied minors and their families.

    Last year, Motherboard reported CBP had purchased access to Babel Street software that “lets a user input a piece of information about a target—their name, email address, or telephone number—and receive a bevy of data in return,” including “social media posts, linked IP address, employment history, and unique advertising identifiers associated with their mobile phone.”

    To see whether corporate America will support Trump’s promised anti-immigrant operation, The Intercept reached out to data and technology companies that hold immense quantities of personal information or sell analytic software useful to an agency like ICE. The list includes obscure data brokers that glean intimate personal details from advertising streams, mainstream cellular phone providers, household-name social networks, predictive policing firms, and more.

    The list is by no means exhaustive. Private firms that quietly collect and sell personal data that could be of use to immigration authorities are innumerable and ever-growing. Some of these companies, like Meta, may not directly sell personal records to third-party customers in the manner of LexisNexis but could be asked to aid in immigration enforcement if presented with a legal request. At times, social media companies have opted to fight such requests they consider overly broad or invasive.

    In 2016, as Trump prepared to begin his first term, The Intercept asked nine major tech firms whether they would help build a nationwide “Muslim registry,” as he had pledged during his campaign. Initially, only one — Twitter — even responded (the answer was no). Eventually, Facebook (as Meta was then known), Apple, Microsoft, and Google stated on the record that they too would not help build a computerized list of Muslims. The country now faces the prospect of another nationally polarizing MAGA campaign pledge, again with horrific civil liberties implications, and again requiring the aid or at least cooperation of one or many technology firms.

    As in 2016, The Intercept posed the same question to each company, and requested a yes or no response: Would your company provide the Trump administration with data or other technical services to help facilitate mass deportation operations, either voluntarily, in response to a legal request, or via a paid contract?

    This is how they responded.

    CompanyIndustryComment
    AirsageLocation data brokerNo response
    Anomaly SixGeolocational surveillanceNo response
    AppleConsumer technologyNo response
    ApprissData brokerNo response
    AT&TTelecomNo response
    AcxiomData brokerNo response
    Babel StreetGeolocational surveillanceNo response
    Booz AllenGovernment technology contractorNo response
    ClearviewFacial recognitionNo response
    ComplementicsData brokerNo response
    CoreLogicData brokerNo response
    DataminrSocial media surveillanceNo response
    Digital EnvoyData brokerNo response
    EquifaxCredit agency/data brokerNo response
    ExperianCredit agency/data brokerNo response
    Flock SafetySurveillance“As I’m sure you’re aware, our mission is to eliminate crime, and build a safer future. However, we don’t create the laws. We operate in CA, a sanctuary state, and our customers follow the enforcement rules of the state. In contrast, we also operate in TX, which is not a sanctuary state, and our customers follow the enforcement rules of the state. At the end of the day, we support the Constitution and the democratically-elected governing bodies having the right to enact laws at the will of the people.”

    When asked again if Flock would engage in a contract pertaining to mass deportations, spokesperson Josh Thomas replied, “We don’t entertain hypotheticals.”
    Fog Data ScienceGeolocational surveillanceNo response
    GoogleInternet/consumer technologyNo response
    Gravy AnalyticsLocation data brokerNo response
    IBMEnterprise/consumer technologyNo response
    InnovisCredit agency/data brokerNo response
    InrixLocation data brokerNo response
    LexisNexisData broker“LexisNexis Risk Solutions provides tools that support the lawful protection of society and the enforcement of the rule of law. Our tools are designed to be used in compliance with all applicable laws and do not single out individuals based on immigration status. We are committed to ensuring that our solutions are used responsibly and ethically, in alignment with established legal standards to promote safety and security within a democracy.”

    When asked if this answer constituted a hypothetical “yes,” LexisNexis Risk Solutions spokesperson Jennifer Richman did not comment further.
    MetaSocial mediaMeta acknowledged receipt of The Intercept’s inquiry but did not provide a response.
    MicrosoftInternet/enterprise/ consumer technologyNo response
    Near/AziraLocation data broker“No. Azira has been expressly built to help business leaders make smart business decisions based on consumer behavior data. The company’s solutions are not designed nor intended for use in law enforcement. Based on Azira’s policies and practices around personal data protection as well as clear restrictions around sensitive locations and applicable privacy regulations, Azira data is not lawfully permitted to be utilized in this scenario.”
    OracleEnterprise technologyNo response
    OutlogicLocation data brokerNo response
    PalantirData analytics“We don’t have a comment.”
    PeregrinePredictive policingNo response
    SafegraphLocation data brokerNo response
    T-MobileTelecomNo response
    Thomson Reuters ClearData broker“Our investigative solutions do not contain data about a person’s immigration or employment eligibility status. They are not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons and non-citizens. Various agencies within DHS engage Thomson Reuters to support their investigations, such as to address child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics smuggling, national security and public safety cases, organized crime, and transnational gang activity.”

    When asked if, even though the company’s products are not designed for “mass illegal immigration inquiries,” said services would ever be allowed for such a use, company spokesperson Samina Ansari said, “We don’t comment on speculation.”
    TransUnionCredit agency/data brokerNo response
    VenntelLocation data brokerNo response
    VerasetLocation data brokerNo response
    VeriskData brokerNo response
    VerizonTelecomNo response
    XSocial mediaNo response

    The post These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Defence industry inquiry wraps up without recommendations

    A Senate inquiry into the Department of Defence’s support for local industry has wrapped up without offering any recommendations to boost sovereign capability or address procurement deficiencies. The Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade quietly completed its inquiry on the final day of Parliament last week, having conducted no additional hearings in…

    The post Defence industry inquiry wraps up without recommendations appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Yes, Labour must invest in AI across the public sector – not least the NHS

    Think tank the Social Market Foundation (SMF), sponsored by ServiceNow, the AI platform for business transformation, has published new research which explores how using AI and automation could dramatically cut waiting times and improve outcomes in the public sector – not least the NHS. One of the key areas of benefit is in GP appointments, where most could be allocated using AI – to help resolve the ‘8am rush’.

    AI for the public sector: a must-have, surely?

    At present, 75% of those who call for an appointment are held in a queue.

    It has been driving public pessimism over the state of public services. Only 37% of people are confident that if they needed an appointment with a GP they could get one quickly.

    AI tech is well-placed to make this process smoother, as out of the roughly 350 million GP patient contacts seen in the latest year, more than 320 million of these could be automatically allocated without staff intervention if results from promising trials were scaled up across the country.

    The independent research looked at dozens of examples, across different types of public sector organisations, where AI was being adopted in public-facing services like DVLA, GPs, and HMRC.

    Making a huge difference

    The SMF then evaluated how making more widespread use of existing AI tech and automation could speed up the progress that departments are already delivering. A few examples of this include:

    • Across GP practices, AI could cut patient waiting times by almost three quarters (73%) overall and almost half (47%) during peak times – ending the notorious ‘8am rush’ for appointments. This has been proven in practices already trialing AI-powered triage systems.
    • AI is already helping reduce rates of non-attendance in some trusts and hospitals, which could save £345 million in savings every year for the NHS if scaled up.
    • At DWP and HMRC, two of the government’s largest user-facing departments, more comprehensive adoption of AI tools and automation could help streamline caseloads and save over 4,300 working years. These savings would free up precious time for civil servants to spend on delivery and more complex cases which require human support.
    • Today, almost 20% of applications to the DVLA for a driving license that require a medical review take more than 90 days to process. This paper-based decision process could be significantly shortened by investing in AI-driven technology, like Optical Character Recognition, which allows physical text to be read by computers.

    A new department for all public sector AI needs

    The report supports the creation of a strong Digital Centre of Government in DSIT and recommends that the Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT):

    • Becomes a ‘one-stop shop’ for all public sector AI and automation needs, providing guidance and advising departments on the right opportunities.
    • Highlights and shares case studies and learnings where AI and automation have already been implemented successfully across the UK government.
    • Appoints departmental automation leaders to work with DSIT to proactively identify key opportunities for automation, and oversee the successful implementation of new projects.
    • Creates a ‘Head of Citizen Experience’ role within the Digital Centre to consider the horizontal citizen journey across multiple public sector organisations to ensure interoperability and efficiency.
    • Creates a ‘Data Academy’ to ensure civil servants have access to resources to equip themselves with the key skills needed to understand and harness the tech.

    Labour must prioritise this

    Sam Robinson, Senior Researcher, Social Market Foundation, said:

    Public services in the UK are creaking under increasing demand and, for far too many people, failing to deliver. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are more opportunities than ever to streamline public services and give the public back thousands of years of their time. The technology is already here; government now needs to be bold enough to use it.

    Feryal Clark MP, Minister for AI and Digital Government, said:

    Technology has incredible potential to reshape public services, making things more efficient and improving the experience for everyone who uses them.

    This government has a bold vision for harnessing the power of tech in the public sector. We’re already exploring how innovative tools like generative AI can make a real difference, such as reducing the workload for teachers.

    AI public sector UK

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tasmania ramps up innovation ambition with strategic plan

    The Tasmanian government is leaning into its innovation tilt with the plans for a new Advanced Technology Industries Strategy that promises to leverage the state’s unique geographic location. According to a consultation paper released on Tuesday, the strategy would turn Tasmania into a hub for advanced technologies related to “polar, remote and extreme environments”. It…

    The post Tasmania ramps up innovation ambition with strategic plan appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes

    Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes.

    As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy way of planning vegan dinners or weekends away with friends. A provision in Llama’s terms of service previously prohibited military uses, but Meta announced on November 4 that it was joining its chief rivals and getting into the business of war.

    “Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg.

    One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release.

    But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities.

    Llama 3.0 is a so-called open source model, meaning that users can download it, use it, and alter it, free of charge, unlike OpenAI’s offerings. Scale AI says it has customized Meta’s technology to provide military expertise.

    Scale AI touts Defense Llama’s accuracy, as well as its adherence to norms, laws, and regulations: “Defense Llama was trained on a vast dataset, including military doctrine, international humanitarian law, and relevant policies designed to align with the Department of Defense (DoD) guidelines for armed conflict as well as the DoD’s Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence. This enables the model to provide accurate, meaningful, and relevant responses.”

    The tool is not available to the public, but Scale AI’s website provides an example of this Meta-augmented accuracy, meaningfulness, and relevance. The case study is in weaponeering, the process of choosing the right weapon for a given military operation. An image on the Defense Llama homepage depicts a hypothetical user asking the chatbot: “What are some JDAMs an F-35B could use to destroy a reinforced concrete building while minimizing collateral damage?” The Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, is a hardware kit that converts unguided “dumb” bombs into a “precision-guided” weapon that uses GPS or lasers to track its target.

    Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.”

    Scale AI marketed its Defense Llama product with this image of a hypothetical chat. Screenshot of Scale AI marketing webpage

    Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless. Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death.

    “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting.”

    “I can assure you that no U.S. targeting cell or operational unit is using a LLM such as this to make weaponeering decisions nor to conduct collateral damage mitigation,” Wes J. Bryant, a retired targeting officer with the U.S. Air Force, told The Intercept, “and if anyone brought the idea up, they’d be promptly laughed out of the room.”

    Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept.

    “Since the question specifies JDAM and destruction of the building, it eliminates munitions that are generally used for lower collateral damage strikes,” Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, told The Intercept. “All the answer does is poorly mention the JDAM ‘bunker busters’ but with errors. For example, the GBU-31 and GBU-32 warhead it refers to is not the (V)1. There also isn’t a 500-pound penetrator in the U.S. arsenal.”

    Ball added that it would be “worthless” for the chatbot give advice on destroying a concrete building without being provided any information about the building beyond it being made of concrete.

    Defense Llama’s advertised output is “generic to the point of uselessness to almost any user,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services. He also expressed skepticism toward the question’s premise. “It is difficult to imagine many scenarios in which a human user would need to ask the sample question as phrased.”

    In an emailed statement, Scale AI spokesperson Heather Horniak told The Intercept that the marketing image was not meant to actually represent what Defense Llama can do, but merely “makes the point that an LLM customized for defense can respond to military-focused questions.” Horniak added that “The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.”

    Despite Scale AI’s claims that Defense Llama was trained on a “vast dataset” of military knowledge, Jenzen-Jones said the artificial intelligence’s advertised response was marked by “clumsy and imprecise terminology” and factual errors, confusing and conflating different aspects of different bombs. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting,” he said. Why an F-35? Why a JDAM? What’s the building, and where is it? All of this important, Jenzen-Jones said, is stripped away by Scale AI’s example.

    Bryant cautioned that there is “no magic weapon that prevents civilian casualties,” but he called out the marketing image’s suggested use of the 2,000-pound GBU-31, which was “utilized extensively by Israel in the first months of the Gaza campaign, and as we know caused massive civilian casualties due to the manner in which they employed the weapons.”

    Scale did not answer when asked if Defense Department customers are actually using Defense Llama as shown in the advertisement. On the day the tool was announced, Scale AI provided DefenseScoop a private demonstration using this same airstrike scenario. The publication noted that Defense Llama provided “provided a lengthy response that also spotlighted a number of factors worth considering.” Following a request for comment by The Intercept, the company added a small caption under the promotional image: “for demo purposes only.”

    Meta declined to comment.

    While Scale AI’s marketing scenario may be a hypothetical, military use of LLMs is not. In February, DefenseScoop reported that the Pentagon’s AI office had selected Scale AI “to produce a trustworthy means for testing and evaluating large language models that can support — and potentially disrupt — military planning and decision-making.” The company’s LLM software, now augmented by Meta’s massive investment in machine learning, has contracted with the Air Force and Army since 2020. Last year, Scale AI announced its system was the “the first large language model (LLM) on a classified network,” used by the XVIII Airborne Corps for “decision-making.” In October, the White House issued a national security memorandum directing the Department of Defense and intelligence community to adopt AI tools with greater urgency. Shortly after the memo’s publication, The Intercept reported that U.S. Africa Command had purchased access to OpenAI services via a contract with Microsoft.

    Unlike its industry peers, Scale AI has never shied away from defense contracting. In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, CEO Alexandr Wang, a vocal proponent of weaponized AI, described himself as a “China-hawk” and said he hoped Scale could “be the company that helps ensure that the United States maintains this leadership position.” Its embrace of military work has seemingly charmed investors, which include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta. “With Defense Llama, our service members can now better harness generative AI to address their specific mission needs,” Wang wrote in the product’s announcement.

    But the munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed confusion over who, exactly, Defense Llama is marketing to with the airstrike demo, questioning why anyone involved in weaponeering would know so little about its fundamentals that they would need to consult a chatbot in the first place. “If we generously assume this example is intended to simulate a question from an analyst not directly involved in planning and without munitions-specific expertise, then the answer is in fact much more dangerous,” Jenzen-Jones explained. “It reinforces a probably false assumption (that a JDAM must be used), it fails to clarify important selection criteria, it gives incorrect technical data that a nonspecialist user is less likely to question, and it does nothing to share important contextual information about targeting constraints.”

    “It gives incorrect technical data that a nonspecialist user is less likely to question.”

    Bryant agreed. “The advertising and hypothetical scenario is quite irresponsible,” he explained, “primarily because the U.S. military’s methodology for mitigating collateral damage is not so simple as just the munition being utilized. That is one factor of many.” Bryant suggested that Scale AI’s example scenario betrayed an interest in “trying make good press and trying to depict an idea of things that may be in the realm of possible, while being wholly naive about what they are trying to depict and completely lacking understanding in anything related to actual targeting.”

    Turning to an LLM for airstrike planning also means sidestepping the typical human-based process and the responsibility that entails. Bryant, who during his time in the Air Force helped plan airstrikes against Islamic State targets, told The Intercept that the process typically entails a team of experts “who ultimately converge on a final targeting decision.”

    Jessica Dorsey, a professor at Utrecht University School of Law and scholar of automated warfare methods, said consulting Defense Llama seems to entirely circumvent the ostensible legal obligations military planners are supposed to be held to. “The reductionist/simplistic and almost amateurish approach indicated by the example is quite dangerous,” she said. “Just deploying a GBU/JDAM does not mean there will be less civilian harm. It’s a 500 to 2,000-pound bomb after all.”

    The post Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Lucid Summations of Fundamental Issues

    In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

    What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

    That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

    In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentences in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves.  For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

    With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

    • With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

    • The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

    • Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East.  Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

    • There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

    • The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

    • The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

    • The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

    • Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

    • The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

    • The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

    • Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

    But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

    So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

    We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
    And the big fool says to push on

    Bad advice.

    The post Lucid Summations of Fundamental Issues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Intercept’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI Advances on Claim It Removed Reporters’ Bylines

    In an order on Friday, a federal court rejected OpenAI’s effort to toss a lawsuit filed by The Intercept over using its journalists’ work to train ChatGPT without permission or credit.

    One of The Intercept’s claims under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act will move forward against OpenAI, although another claim was dismissed, along with all of its claims against Microsoft. 

    “This decision shows that the DMCA provides critical safeguards for news organizations against encroachment by AI companies and presents a viable approach to challenging the unauthorized use of digital news content for AI training, regardless of whether that content has been registered with the Copyright Office,” said Matt Topic, The Intercept’s attorney in the litigation and a partner at law firm Loevy + Loevy, in a statement following the order.

    This is a “first-of-its kind decision,” according to Topic.

    The Intercept filed its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in February, joining a growing number of media outlets that accuse the companies of various copyright violations. The Intercept offered a novel argument under a provision of the DMCA that forbids stripping out “copyright management information” such as a work’s title and author, which The Intercept alleges OpenAI did in building the training data for ChatGPT.

    In a brief order, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed this claim to proceed against OpenAI. Rakoff wrote that a full opinion “explaining the reasons for this ruling will issue in due course.”

    Rakoff dismissed The Intercept’s claim that OpenAI violated another provision of the DMCA, which prohibits distributing content knowing that this copyright management information was removed. He also dismissed The Intercept’s claims against Microsoft under both DMCA provisions.

    The post The Intercept’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI Advances on Claim It Removed Reporters’ Bylines appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Bourgeoisie Crisis

    The post Bourgeoisie Crisis first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

    Donald Trump pitched himself to voters as a supposed anti-interventionist candidate of peace. But when he reenters the White House in January, at his side will be a phalanx of pro-military Silicon Valley investors, inventors, and executives eager to build the most sophisticated weapons the world has ever known.

    During his last term, the U.S. tech sector tiptoed skittishly around Trump; longtime right-winger Peter Thiel stood as an outlier in his full-throated support of MAGA politics as other investors and executives largely winced and smiled politely. Back then, Silicon Valley still offered the public peaceful mission statements of improving the human condition, connecting people, and organizing information. Technology was supposed to help, never harm. No more: People like Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Trae Stephens, and Marc Andreessen make up a new vanguard of powerful tech figures who have unapologetically merged right-wing politics with a determination to furnish a MAGA-dominated United States with a constant flow of newer, better arms and surveillance tools.

    Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech.

    These men (as they tend to be) hold much in common beyond their support of Republican candidates: They share the belief that China represents an existential threat to the United States (an increasingly bipartisan belief, to be sure) and must be dominated technologically and militarily at all costs. They are united in their aversion, if not open hostility, to arguments that the pace of invention must be balanced against any moral consideration beyond winning. And they all stand to profit greatly from this new tech-driven arms race.

    Trump’s election marks an epochal victory not just for the right, but also for a growing conservative counterrevolution in American tech that has successfully rebranded military contracting as the proud national duty of the American engineer, not a taboo to be dodged and hidden. Meta’s recent announcement that its Llama large language model can now be used by defense customers means that Apple is the last of the “Big Five” American tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta — not engaged in military or intelligence contracting.

    Elon Musk has drawn the lion’s share of media scrutiny (and Trump world credit) for throwing his fortune and digital influence behind the campaign. Over the years, the world’s richest man has become an enormously successful defense contractor via SpaceX, which has reaped billions selling access to rockets that the Pentagon hopes will someday rapidly ferry troops into battle. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet has also become an indispensable American military tool, and the company is working on a constellation of bespoke spy satellites for U.S. intelligence agency use.

    But Musk is just one part of a broader wave of militarists who will have Trump’s ear on policy matters.

    After election day, Musk replied to a celebratory tweet from Palmer Luckey, a founder of Anduril, a $14 billion startup that got its start selling migrant-detecting surveillance towers for the southern border and now manufactures a growing line of lethal drones and missiles. “Very important to open DoD/Intel to entrepreneurial companies like yours,” Musk wrote. Anduril’s rise is inseparable from Trumpism: Luckey founded the firm in 2017 after he was fired by Meta for contributing to a pro-Trump organization. He has been outspoken in his support for Trump as both candidate and president, fundraising for him in both 2020 and 2024.

    Big Tech historically worked hard to be viewed by the public as inhabiting the center-left, if not being apolitical altogether. But even that is changing. While Luckey was fired for merely supporting Trump’s first campaign, his former boss (and former liberal) Mark Zuckerberg publicly characterized Trump surviving the June assassination attempt as “bad ass” and quickly congratulated the president-elect on a “decisive victory.” Zuckerberg added that he is “looking forward to working with you and your administration.”

    To some extent, none of this is new: Silicon Valley’s origin is one of militarism. The American computer and software economy was nurtured from birth by the explosive growth and endless money of the Cold War arms race and its insatiable appetite for private sector R&D. And despite the popular trope of liberal Google executives, the tech industry has always harbored a strong anti-labor, pro-business instinct that dovetails neatly with conservative politics. It would also be a mistake to think that Silicon Valley was ever truly in lockstep with progressive values. A 2014 political ad by Americans for a Conservative Direction, a defunct effort by Facebook to court the Republican Party, warned that “it’s wrong to have millions of people living in America illegally” and urged lawmakers to “secure our borders so this never happens again.” The notion of the Democrat-friendly wing of Big Tech as dovish is equally wrong: Former Google chair and longtime liberal donor Eric Schmidt is a leading China hawk and defense tech investor. Similarly, the Democratic Party itself hasn’t meaningfully distanced itself from militarism in recent history. The current wave of startups designing smaller, cheaper military drones follows the Obama administration’s eager mass adoption of the technology, and firms like Anduril and Palantir have thrived under Joe Biden.

    What has changed is which views the tech industry is now comfortable expressing out loud.

    A year after Luckey’s ouster from the virtual reality subsidiary he founded, Google became embroiled in what grew into an industry-wide upheaval over military contracting. After it was reported that the company sought to win Project Maven, a lucrative drone-targeting contract, employees who had come to the internet titan to work on consumer products like Search, Maps, and Gmail found themselves disturbed by the thought of contributing to a system that could kill people. Waves of protests pushed Google to abandon the Pentagon with its tail between its legs. Even Fei-Fei Li, then Google Cloud’s chief artificial intelligence and machine learning scientist, described the contract as a source of shame in internal emails obtained by the New York Times. “Weaponized AI is probably one of the most sensitized topics of AI — if not THE most. This is red meat to the media to find all ways to damage Google,” she wrote. “I don’t know what would happen if the media starts picking up a theme that Google is secretly building AI weapons or AI technologies to enable weapons for the Defense industry.”

    It’s an exchange that reads deeply quaint today. The notion that the country’s talented engineers should build weapons is becoming fully mainstreamed. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” Luckey explained in an on-campus talk about his company’s contributions to the Ukrainian war effort with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”

    This “warrior class” mentality traces its genealogy to Peter Thiel, whose disciples, like Luckey, spread the gospel of a conservative-led arms race against China. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Luckey told Bloomberg TV in a 2023 interview. At the Reagan National Defense Forum in 2019, Thiel, a lifelong techno-libertarian and Trump’s first major backer in tech, rejected the “ethical framing” of the question of whether to build weapons.” When it’s a choice between the U.S. and China, it is always the ethical decision to work with the U.S. government,” he said. Though Sinophobia is increasingly standard across party affiliations, it’s particularly frothing in the venture-backed warrior class. In 2019, Thiel claimed that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” and two years later suggested that bitcoin is “a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”

    Thiel often embodies the self-contradiction of Trumpist foreign policy, decrying the use of taxpayer money on “faraway wars” while boosting companies that design weapons for exactly that. Like Trump, Thiel is a vocal opponent of Bush- and Obama-era adventurism in the Middle East as a source of nothing but regional chaos — though Thiel has remained silent on Trump’s large expansion of the Obama administration’s drone program and his assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. In July, asked about the Israeli use of AI in the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, Thiel responded, “I defer to Israel.”

    Thiel’s gravitational pull is felt across the whole of tech’s realignment toward militarism. Vice President-elect JD Vance worked at Mithril, another of Thiel’s investment firms, and used $15 million from his former boss to fund the 2022 Senate win that secured his national political bona fides. Vance would later go on to invest in Anduril. Founders Fund, Thiel’s main venture capital firm, has seeded the tech sector with influential figures friendly to both Trumpism and the Pentagon. Before, an investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

    An earlier adopter of MAGA, Thiel was also investing in and creating military- and intelligence-oriented companies before it was cool. He co-founded Palantir, which got its start helping facilitate spy agency and deportation raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now part of the S&P 500, the company helps target military strikes for Ukraine and in January sealed a “strategic partnership for battle tech” with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, according to a press release.

    Before, a tech investor or CEO who publicly embraced right-wing ideology and products designed to kill risked becoming an industry pariah. Today, he can be a CNBC guest.

    The ripple effect of Palantir’s success has helped popularize defense tech and solidify its union with the American right. Thiel’s Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also an Anduril investor, is reportedly helping Trump staff his new administration. Former Palantir employee and Anduril executive chair Trae Stephens joined the Trump transition team in 2016 and has suggested he would serve a second administration. As a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, Thiel ally Jacob Helberg has been instrumental in whipping up anti-China fervor on Capitol Hill, helping push legislation to ban TikTok, and arguing for military adoption of AI technologies like those sold by his employer, Palantir, which markets itself as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. Although Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a self-described Democrat who said he planned to vote against Trump, he has derided progressivism as a “thin pagan religion” of wokeness, suggested pro-Palestine college protesters leave for North Korea, and continually advocating for an American arms buildup.

    “Trump has surrounded himself with ‘techno-optimists’ — people who believe technology is the answer to every problem,” Brianna Rosen, a strategy and policy fellow at the University of Oxford and alumnus of the Obama National Security Council, told The Intercept. “Key members of his inner circle — leading tech executives — describe themselves in this way. The risk of techno-optimism in the military domain is that it focuses on how technology saves lives, rather than the real risks associated with military AI, such as the accelerated pace of targeting.”

    The worldview of this corner of the tech industry is loud, if not always consistent. Foreign entanglements are bad, but the United States must be on perpetual war-footing against China. China itself is dangerous in part because it’s rapidly weaponizing AI, a current that threatens global stability, so the United States should do the very same, even harder, absent regulatory meddling.

    Stephens’s 2022 admonition that “the business of war is the business of deterrence” argues that “peaceful outcomes are only achievable if we maintain our technological advantage in weapons systems” — an argument that overlooks the fact that the U.S. military’s overwhelming technological superiority failed to keep it out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. In a recent interview with Wired, Stephens both criticized the revolving door between the federal government and Anduril competitors like Boeing while also stating that “it’s important that people come out of private industry to work on civil service projects, and I hope at some point I’ll have the opportunity to go back in and serve the government and American people.”

    William Fitzgerald, the founder of Worker Agency, a communications and advocacy firm that has helped tech workers organize against military contracts, said this square is easily circled by right-wing tech hawks, whose pitch is centered on the glacial incompetence of the Department of Defense and blue-chip contractors like Lockheed and Raytheon. “Peter Thiel’s whole thing is to privatize the state,” Fitzgerald explained. Despite all of the rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements, a high-tech arms race is conducive to different kinds of wars, not fewer of them. “This alignment fits this narrative that we can do cheaper wars,” he said. “We won’t lose the men over there because we’ll have these drones.”

    In this view, the opposition of Thiel and his ilk isn’t so much to forever wars, then, but rather whose hardware is being purchased forever.

    The new conservative tech establishment seems in full agreement about the need for an era of techno-militarism. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the namesakes of one of Silicon Valley’s most storied and successful venture capital firms, poured millions into Trump’s reelection and have pushed hard to reorient the American tech sector toward fighting wars. In a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” published last October, Andreessen wrote of defense contracting as a moral imperative. “We believe America and her allies should be strong and not weak. We believe national strength of liberal democracies flows from economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power). Economic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength.” The firm knows full well what it’s evoking through a naked embrace of strength as society’s greatest virtue: Listed among the “Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism” is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, co-author of the 1919 Fascist Manifesto.

    The venture capitalists’ document offers a clear rebuttal of employees’ moral qualms that pushed Google to ditch Project Maven. The manifesto dismisses basic notions of “ethics,” “safety,” and “social responsibility” as a “demoralization campaign” of “zombie ideas, many derived from Communism” pushed by “the enemy.” This is rhetoric that matches a brand Trump has worked to cultivate: aspirationally hypermasculine, unapologetically jingoistic, and horrified by an America whose potential to dominate the planet is imperiled by meddling foreigners and scolding woke co-workers.

    “There’s a lot more volatility in the world, [and] there is more of a revolt against what some would deem ‘woke culture,’” said Michael Dempsey, managing partner at the New York-based venture capital firm Compound. “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth because we saw in this past election a bunch of people get very political and make donations from their firms.”

    “It’s just more in the zeitgeist now that companies shouldn’t be so heavily influenced by personal politics. Obviously that is the tech industry talking out of both sides of their mouth.”

    Despite skewing young (by national security standards), many in this rightward, pro-military orbit are cultural and religious traditionalists infused with the libertarian preferences of the Zynternet, a wildly popular online content scene that’s melded apolitical internet bro culture and a general aversion to anything considered vaguely “woke.” A recent Vanity Fair profile of the El Segundo tech scene, a hotbed of the burgeoning “military Zyndustrial complex” commonly known as “the Gundo,” described the city as “California’s freedom-loving, Bible-thumping hub of hard tech.” It paints a vivid scene of young engineers who eschewed the progressive dystopia of San Francisco they read about on Twitter and instead flocked to build “nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight China” beneath “an American flag the size of a dumpster” and “a life-size poster of Jesus Christ smiling benevolently onto a bench press below.”

    The American right’s hold over online culture in the form of podcasts, streamers, and other youth-friendly media has been central to both retaking Washington and bulldozing post-Maven sentiment, according to William Fitzgerald of Worker Agency. “I gotta hand it to the VCs, they’re really good at comms,” said Fitzgerald, who himself is former Google employee who helped leak critical information about the company’s involvement in Project Maven. “They’re really making sure that these Gundo bros are wrapping the American flag around them. It’s been fascinating to see them from 2019 to 2024 completely changing the culture among young tech workers.”

    A wave of layoffs and firings of employees engaged in anti-military protests have been a boon for defense evangelists, Fitzgerald added. “The workers have been told to shut up, or they get fired.”

    This rhetoric has been matched by a massive push by Andreessen Horowitz (already an Anduril investor) behind the fund’s “American Dynamism” portfolio, a collection of companies that leans heavily into new startups hoping to be the next Raytheon. These investments include ABL Space Systems, already contracting with the Air Force,; Epirus, which makes microwave directed-energy weapons; and Shield AI, which works on autonomous military drones. Following the election, David Ulevitch, who leads the fund’s American Dynamism team, retweeted a celebratory video montage interspersed with men firing flamethrowers, machine guns, jets, Hulk Hogan, and a fist-pumping post-assassination attempt Trump.

    Even the appearance of more money and interest in defense tech could have a knock-on effect for startup founders hoping to chase what’s trendy. Dempsey said he expects investors and founder to “pattern-match to companies like Anduril and to a lesser extent SpaceX, believing that their outcomes will be the same.” The increased political and cultural friendliness toward weapons startups also coincides with high interest rates and growing interest in hardware companies, Dempsey explained, as software companies have lost their luster following years of growth driven by little more than cheap venture capital.

    There’s every reason to believe a Trump-controlled Washington will give the tech industry, increasingly invested in militarized AI, what it wants. In July, the Washington Post reported the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute was working on a proposal to “Make America First in AI” by undoing regulatory burdens and encouraging military applications. Trump has already indicated he’ll reverse the Biden administration’s executive order on AI safety, which mandated safety testing and risk-based self-reporting by companies. Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer during the first Trump administration and managing director of Air Force contractor Scale AI, is reportedly advising Trump’s transition team on policy matters.

    “‘Make America First in AI’ means the United States will move quickly, regardless of the costs, to maintain its competitive edge over China,” Brianna Rosen, the Oxford fellow, explained. “That translates into greater investment and fewer restrictions on military AI. Industry already leads AI development and deployment in the defense and intelligence sectors; that role has now been cemented.”

    The mutual embrace of MAGA conservatism and weapons tech seems to already be paying off. After dumping $200 million into the Trump campaign’s terminal phase, Musk was quick to cash his chips in: On Thursday, the New York Times reported that he petitioned Trump SpaceX executives into positions at the Department of Defense before the election had even begun. Musk will also co-lead a nebulous new office dedicated to slashing federal spending. Rep. Matt Gaetz, brother-in-law to Luckey, now stands to be the country’s next attorney general. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Luckey shared that he is already advising the Trump transition team and endorses the current candidates for defense secretary. “We did well under Trump, and we did better under Biden,” he said of Anduril. “I think we will do even better now.”

    The post Trump’s Election Is Also a Win for Tech’s Right-Wing “Warrior Class” appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Tech firm Palantir spoke with MoJ about calculating prisoners’ ‘reoffending risks’

    Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

    The US spy tech company Palantir has been in talks with the Ministry of Justice about using its technology to calculate prisoners’ “reoffending risks”, it has emerged.

    The proposals emerged in correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act which showed how the company has also been lobbying new UK government ministers, including the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Collins and Rocket Lab challenged over satellites linked to Israeli war crimes

    Asia Pacific Report

    The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) has written to the Minister for Space Judith Collins and Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck to warn that satellites being launched from the Māhia Peninsula are “highly likely” to conduct surveillance for Israel.

    And also to assist in the commission of war crimes in Gaza and in Lebanon, said PSNA national chair John Minto.

    “Three companies are of particular concern to us: BlackSky Technology, Capella Space, and HawkEye 360,” Minto said in a statement.

    “In particular, BlackSky has a US$150 million contract to supply high temporal frequency images and analysis to Israel,” Minto said.

    “We believe it is highly likely that BlackSky provides data to Israel which it uses to target civilian infrastructure across Gaza and Lebanon.”

    Minto said that PSNA understood that Rocket Lab had launched satellites for BlackSky since 2019.

    The advocacy group also aware that by the end of 2024, Rocket Lab was expected to begin deploying BlackSky’s constellation of next generation earth observation satellites, with improved capability.

    Asking for suspension
    “We are asking the minister and Rocket Lab to suspend all further satellite launches for BlackSky, full stop,” Minto said.

    “For Capella Space and HawkEye 360, we are asking that the minister suspend satellite launches from the Māhia Peninsula until an investigation has taken place to assure New Zealanders that further launches will not put us in breach of our commitments under international law.

    “New Zealanders don’t want our country used to support war crimes committed by Israel or any other country”, he said.

    “If we are serious about our responsibilities under international law, including the Genocide Convention, then we must act now.”

    Stopping the satellite launches was the “least we can do”.

    A PSNA support lawyer, Sam Vincent, said: “New Zealand has solemn responsibilities under international law which must trump any short-term profit for Rocket Lab or the convenience of our government.”

    He said that all three companies were sponsors of a geospatial intelligence conference in Israel taking place in January 2025 [Ramon GeoInt360], of which the Israel Ministry of Defence and BlackSky were “leading partners” and HawkEye 360 and Capella Space were sponsors.

    Minto added: “All the alarm bells are ringing. These companies are up their eyeballs in support for Israel.”


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • COP29: Does NZ have the credibility to lead carbon trading talks?

    By Eloise Gibson, RNZ climate change correspondent

    New Zealand’s Climate Change Minister Simon Watts is going to the global climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan next week, where he will be co-leading talks on international carbon trading.

    But the government has been unable to commit to using the trading mechanism he is leading high-level discussions about, and critics say he is also vulnerable over New Zealand’s backsliding on fossil fuels.

    New Zealand has consistently pushed for two things in international climate diplomacy — one is ending government subsidies for fossil fuels globally, and the other is allowing carbon trading across international borders, so one country can pay for, say, switching off a coal plant in another country.

    COP29 BAKU, 11-22 November 2024
    COP29 BAKU, 11-22 November 2024

    Nailing down the rules for making sure these carbon savings are real will be an area of focus for leaders at the COP29 summit, starting on 11 November.

    But as Watts gets ready to attend the talks, critics say his government is vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy on both fronts.

    In a bid to bring back fossil fuel exploration, the government wants to lower financial security requirements on oil and gas companies requiring them to set aside money for the costs of decommissioning and cleaning up spills.

    The coalition says the current requirements — brought in after taxpayers had to pay to deal with a defunct oil field — are so onerous they are stopping companies wanting to look for fossil fuels.

    Billion dollar clean-ups
    At a recent hearing, Parliament’s independent environment watchdog warned going too far at relaxing requirements could leave taxpayers footing bills of billions of dollars if a clean-up is needed.

    The commission’s Geoff Simmons spoke on behalf of Commissioner Simon Upton.

    “The commissioner was really clear in his submission that he wants to place on record that he doesn’t think it is appropriate for any government, present or future, to offer any subsidies, implicit or explicit, to underwrite the cost of exploration.”

    The watchdog said that would tilt the playing field away from renewable energy in favour of fossil fuels.

    Energy Minister Shane Jones says the government’s Bill doesn’t lower the liability for fixing damage or decommissioning oil and gas wells, which remain the responsibility of the fossil fuel company in perpetuity.

    But climate activist Adam Currie says that only works if the company stays in business.

    “The watering down of those key financial safeguards increases the risk of the taxpaper having to yet again pay to decommission a failed oil field.

    “Simon Watts is about to go to COP and urge other countries to end fossil fuel subsidies while at home they are handing an open cheque to fossil fuels  .. This is a classic case of do as a say, not as I do.”

    Getting flack not feared
    Watts says he does not fear getting flack for the fossil-friendlier changes when he is in Baku, citing the government’s goal of doubling renewable energy.

    “No I’m not worried about flak, New Zealand is transitioning away from fossil fuels . . . gas [from fossil fields] is going to need to be a means by which we need to transition.”

    Nor does he see an issue with the fact he is jointly leading negotiations on a trading mechanism his own government seems unable to commit to using.

    Watts is leading talks to nail down rules on international carbon trading with Singaporean Environment Minister Grace Fu. Her country has struck a deal to invest in carbon savings in Rwanda.

    New Zealand also needs international help to meet its 2030 target, but the coalition government has not let officials pursue any deals. NZ First refuses to say if it would back this.

    Watts says his leadership role is independent of domestic politics and ministers around the world are keen to nail down the rules, as is the Azerbaijan presidency.

    “Our primary focus is to ensure that we get an outcome form those negotiators, our domestic considerations are not relevant.”

    Paris target discussions
    He said discussions on meeting New Zealand’s Paris target were still underway.

    His next challenge at home is getting Cabinet agreement on how much to promise to cut emissions from 2030-2035, the second commitment period under the Paris Agreement.

    Countries are being urged to hustle, with the United Nations saying current pledges have the planet on track for what it calls a “catastrophic” 2.5 to 2.9 degrees of heating.

    A new pledge is due for 2030-2035 in February.

    A major goal for host Azerbaijan is making progress on a deal for climate finance.

    Currently OECD countries committed to pay $100 billion a year in finance to poorer countries to adapt to and prevent the impacts of climate change.

    Not all the money has been paid as grants, with a large proportion given as loans.

    Countries are looking to agree on a replacement for the finance mechanism when it runs out in 2025.

    Watts said New Zealand would be among the nations arguing for the liability to pay to be shared more widely than the traditional list of OECD nations, bringing in other countries that can also afford to contribute.

    Oil states such as UAE have already promised specific funding despite not being part of the original climate finance deal.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • A Robot’s Perspective on Humans

    The post A Robot’s Perspective on Humans first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions

    The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats.

    Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried ushered in a “crypto winter” in Washington, the industry wielded a $200 million campaign bankroll to buy itself back into D.C.’s good graces.

    Crypto-backed candidates were close to running the table in Senate races after the election of Republican Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. The election of Trump, who has promised to make America the world’s “crypto capital,” sent bitcoin prices soaring.

    Only the undecided Arizona Senate race between Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake left in doubt a total sweep in top-level races for favorites of the digital currency industry. The crypto candidate in that race, Gallego, was ahead in the count as Arizona continued to process the ballot on Wednesday.

    “Those decisions are going to have consequences in terms of big crypto spending money for or against you.”

    The near-total victory put members of Congress and potential candidates on notice that if you don’t take positions favored by the industry, crypto will come after you with millions, said Rick Claypool, research director at the progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

    “Now, the message that Congress receives,” Claypool said, “is very much that how you vote on crypto-related policy, those decisions are going to have consequences in terms of big crypto spending money for or against you.”

    Crypto skeptics like Claypool warned that the results of the spending could soon be felt and that ordinary Americans would need to hang onto their wallets.

    “In all likelihood, crypto deregulation is coming,” said Claypool. “People are going to have to be really careful about what they’re doing with their money. It looks like a tragedy waiting to happen.”

    The results capped an extraordinary election that marked a new era for campaign finance with Citizens United, the 2011 Supreme Court decision, coming to full fruition.

    Related

    Crypto Billionaires Could Flip the Senate to the GOP. Here’s What They Want.

    Since Citizens United, business interests have often funneled their money through “dark money” nonprofits. This year, however, the crypto industry was straightforward about its massive spending to boost supporters and blast opponents.

    The industry raised more than $197 million and spent at least $133 million on federal races, according to campaign finance reports compiled by technology researcher and writer Molly White.

    The money was split between Republican and Democratic candidates at the congressional level in the primaries, but heavy spending on Moreno in the race’s final weeks tipped the overall balance toward the GOP.

    A Crypto Mandate?

    Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s defeat was a stinging loss for consumer advocates who had long found a vocal leader in the Senate Banking Committee chair. Moreno was a car dealer with little statewide profile but an enthusiastic blockchain booster, when the industry adopted him as its candidate.

    Brian Armstrong, the CEO of leading cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, celebrated the industry’s wins on social media.

    “Welcome to the new members of America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever… 219+ pro-crypto candidates and counting have now been elected to the House & Senate. Tonight the crypto voter has spoken decisively – across party lines and in key races across the country,” he wrote Wednesday.

    Yet many ordinary Americans probably never realized crypto was on the ballot. The tens of millions of dollars the leading industry lobbying group, the Fairshake PAC, spent on Moreno and other candidates never mentioned crypto, instead seizing on issues like inflation and immigration.

    “I don’t think it’s an endorsement by the voters of cryptocurrencies at all, because the millions they presented in ads to advance the crypto sector’s interest didn’t say a word about crypto,” Claypool said.

    “The millions they presented in ads to advance the crypto sector’s interest didn’t say a word about crypto.”

    Crypto already scored a major victory in the House of Representatives this year when it won bipartisan support for its top priority, a bill to shift oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a regulator that is perceived as more industry-friendly, the understaffed Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

    The industry’s victories in Senate races give it clear momentum when the new Congress takes office in January.

    Even without immediate action in Congress, crypto could see its most aggressive regulator defanged. Trump could replace crypto foe Gary Gensler as the SEC chair, although he could not fire him from the commission outright.

    Crypto investor Cameron Winklevoss celebrated the impending changeover on X.

    “Imagine how much we are going to accomplish in the next 4 years,” he wrote, “now that the crypto industry won’t be hemorrhaging $ billions on legal fees fighting the SEC and instead investing this money into building the future of money. Amazing awaits.”

    Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.

    The post Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions

    The cryptocurrency industry took a victory lap Wednesday. Devotees of digital currencies had cause to celebrate: An ally in Donald Trump had taken the White House and a slew of pro-crypto congressional candidates won races that included at least two Senate seats.

    Only two years after the spectacular collapse of frauds like Sam Bankman-Fried ushered in a “crypto winter” in Washington, the industry wielded a $200 million campaign bankroll to buy itself back into D.C.’s good graces.

    Crypto-backed candidates were close to running the table in Senate races after the election of Republican Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. The election of Trump, who has promised to make America the world’s “crypto capital,” sent bitcoin prices soaring.

    Only the undecided Arizona Senate race between Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake left in doubt a total sweep in top-level races for favorites of the digital currency industry. The crypto candidate in that race, Gallego, was ahead in the count as Arizona continued to process the ballot on Wednesday.

    “Those decisions are going to have consequences in terms of big crypto spending money for or against you.”

    The near-total victory put members of Congress and potential candidates on notice that if you don’t take positions favored by the industry, crypto will come after you with millions, said Rick Claypool, research director at the progressive consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

    “Now, the message that Congress receives,” Claypool said, “is very much that how you vote on crypto-related policy, those decisions are going to have consequences in terms of big crypto spending money for or against you.”

    Crypto skeptics like Claypool warned that the results of the spending could soon be felt and that ordinary Americans would need to hang onto their wallets.

    “In all likelihood, crypto deregulation is coming,” said Claypool. “People are going to have to be really careful about what they’re doing with their money. It looks like a tragedy waiting to happen.”

    The results capped an extraordinary election that marked a new era for campaign finance with Citizens United, the 2011 Supreme Court decision, coming to full fruition.

    Related

    Crypto Billionaires Could Flip the Senate to the GOP. Here’s What They Want.

    Since Citizens United, business interests have often funneled their money through “dark money” nonprofits. This year, however, the crypto industry was straightforward about its massive spending to boost supporters and blast opponents.

    The industry raised more than $197 million and spent at least $133 million on federal races, according to campaign finance reports compiled by technology researcher and writer Molly White.

    The money was split between Republican and Democratic candidates at the congressional level in the primaries, but heavy spending on Moreno in the race’s final weeks tipped the overall balance toward the GOP.

    A Crypto Mandate?

    Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s defeat was a stinging loss for consumer advocates who had long found a vocal leader in the Senate Banking Committee chair. Moreno was a car dealer with little statewide profile but an enthusiastic blockchain booster, when the industry adopted him as its candidate.

    Brian Armstrong, the CEO of leading cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, celebrated the industry’s wins on social media.

    “Welcome to the new members of America’s most pro-crypto Congress ever… 219+ pro-crypto candidates and counting have now been elected to the House & Senate. Tonight the crypto voter has spoken decisively – across party lines and in key races across the country,” he wrote Wednesday.

    Yet many ordinary Americans probably never realized crypto was on the ballot. The tens of millions of dollars the leading industry lobbying group, the Fairshake PAC, spent on Moreno and other candidates never mentioned crypto, instead seizing on issues like inflation and immigration.

    “I don’t think it’s an endorsement by the voters of cryptocurrencies at all, because the millions they presented in ads to advance the crypto sector’s interest didn’t say a word about crypto,” Claypool said.

    “The millions they presented in ads to advance the crypto sector’s interest didn’t say a word about crypto.”

    Crypto already scored a major victory in the House of Representatives this year when it won bipartisan support for its top priority, a bill to shift oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a regulator that is perceived as more industry-friendly, the understaffed Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

    The industry’s victories in Senate races give it clear momentum when the new Congress takes office in January.

    Even without immediate action in Congress, crypto could see its most aggressive regulator defanged. Trump could replace crypto foe Gary Gensler as the SEC chair, although he could not fire him from the commission outright.

    Crypto investor Cameron Winklevoss celebrated the impending changeover on X.

    “Imagine how much we are going to accomplish in the next 4 years,” he wrote, “now that the crypto industry won’t be hemorrhaging $ billions on legal fees fighting the SEC and instead investing this money into building the future of money. Amazing awaits.”

    Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.

    The post Crypto Sweep Puts Congress on Notice: Vote With Us or We’ll Come After You With Millions appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Trump Might Get Unfettered Surveillance Powers. How Did We Get Here?

    If Donald Trump wins on Tuesday, he will regain the keys to a global surveillance apparatus with few limits.

    Privacy advocates have warned since Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the government’s surveillance tools could be misused by presidents of any stripe. In the intervening decade, however, Congress has failed to rein in those powers.

    Now, Trump is preparing to retake office with a plan that includes deploying the military on domestic enemies. He would have at his disposal a program that compels American companies to cooperate with the National Security Agency, rules for “foreign” surveillance that changed at the stroke of a pen, and data peddlers who sell location information to the government.

    “The only thing that really stands between a president misusing all of these authorities and not are the individuals who work in these agencies, who have sets of rules and standards that they follow,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But one of the things we have seen, on the side of President Trump, is that is something he is trying to eliminate.”

    “KILL FISA”

    Trump spoke out loudly this spring against the reauthorization of a key spying law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

    “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Trump said on social media.

    Trump was right that the law was used, by FBI agents who lied to a court to obtain warrants, to spy on his campaign. The debate raging in Congress when Trump sent out his message, however, centered on another part of the law that allows warrantless surveillance.

    Related

    Trump Allies Are Giddy About House Intelligence Committee’s Surveillance Bill

    Ultimately, some Trump-aligned Republicans in Congress warmed up to the surveillance bill thanks to concessions that included a two-year “sunset” allowing Trump the chance to help rewrite the bill if he wins.

    Still on the books: a section of the law that allows “backdoor” searches of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and text messages collected without a warrant because the government was ostensibly trying to collect foreign intelligence. The FBI alone conducted 200,000 such searches in 2022.

    After the Snowden revelations, advocates fought hard to pry open a window into warrantless surveillance. The view they gained has been troubling.

    The FBI has violated its own rules thousands of times, including when searching for information on January 6 rioters and demonstrators protesting against the murder of George Floyd. The bureau also searched for information on 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, according to a partially declassified document released in 2023.

    Still, the House of Representatives this year narrowly failed to approve a warrant requirement for searches about Americans, long one of the highest priorities for privacy advocates. The vote scrambled party lines, with some MAGA Republicans lining up with progressives in favor of a warrant.

    If Trump wins, he would have a chance to haggle with Congress over the program. Many advocates, though, are skeptical that he would try to rein in warrantless surveillance. They note that he signed a similar spying law in 2018.

    “He only hates the so-called deep state because the FBI went after him.”

    Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former congressional aide, said he anticipates that Trump would try to purge perceived enemies rather than curb spying.

    “He only hates the so-called deep state because the FBI went after him,” Eddington said. “So how do you solve that problem? You ‘reform’ the FBI. And I don’t think there’s any question that’s what they have in mind.”

    Cohn said she fears in particular surveillance being misused to target immigrants — but she will fight for stricter limits on spying whether Trump or Kamala Harris is in office.

    “I think EFF will be fighting this regardless of who wins the election,” she said. “The Democrats and Harris especially, they’re not standing up for reforms of these things either. The Biden administration was supportive of this (FISA) extension.”

    Growing Powers

    Advocates have won some victories since 2013, including greater oversight from a special surveillance court and more transparency. The latest reauthorization from Congress, however, includes a section that gives the government even greater power to compel companies to comply with its orders.

    Apparently in an attempt to bring data centers under the law’s reach, Congress rewrote it so broadly, critics say, that almost anyone could be forced to help the government spy.

    “Whoever the next president is can go to the cleaning crew for the New York Times or The Intercept and compel them under gag without a warrant to ‘facilitate’ NSA access to those communication systems,” said Sean Vitka, the policy director for Demand Progress. “And it is incredibly dangerous.”

    “The next president has a terrifying ability to rewrite those rules in secret and without notice.”

    Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., says he is trying to pass a “fix” for the law this year, but it is unclear whether he will succeed.

    While government critics have fought a decadelong battle for a warrant requirement in FISA, they warn there are other government authorities and emerging technologies that may pose just as big a threat.

    One is Executive Order 12333, signed in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, which is supposed to provide a framework for surveillance focused abroad.

    “It’s not a statute, it’s not a law,” Vitka said. “In the executive branch’s mind, it’s the executive branch’s own set of limits on its own inherent authority. However, the next president has a terrifying ability to rewrite those rules in secret and without notice.”

    Private Data-Mongering

    Then there is the government’s growing reliance on private data brokers who have amassed massive quantities of data on ordinary Americans. Apps ranging from navigation to dating sell their data to the brokers, who turn around and sell it to the federal and local law enforcement agencies. The brokers’ clients include the FBI, the DEA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    The data also gets sold to private actors: One broker sold information about people who had visited Planned Parenthood clinics to an anti-abortion group.

    As of now, the government argues that the information it buys from those brokers does not require a warrant.

    Related

    Your Car Is Spying on You, and a CBP Contract Shows the Risks

    “Even though you need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on a car for a month, they” — courts — “have not said the same thing about buying that information from a data broker scraping it out of your car or out of your phone,” Vitka said.

    Beyond the programs that privacy advocates are already concerned about are the ones that haven’t yet come to light. 

    Advocates noted that the Snowden revelations shocked the same members of Congress who had voted for the laws authorizing the surveillance, and that the George W. Bush administration used twisted legal interpretations to justify domestic surveillance for years before being exposed.

    “It’s been the failures of previous Congresses, Republican and Democrat, and previous administrations, Republican and Democrat, to recognize the absolutely toxic danger that a centralized, imperial presidency represents to the republic,” Eddington said. “We’re perhaps on the cusp of seeing the effects of that, whether it’s Trump or somebody like Trump down the road, being able to seize power and behave in fascistic, autocratic or even totalitarian ways.”

    The post Trump Might Get Unfettered Surveillance Powers. How Did We Get Here? appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Scientists found a new ally in the fight to clean up CO2 emissions: ‘Chonkus’

    Tucked away in the most extreme nooks and crannies of the Earth are biodiverse galaxies of microorganisms — some that might help scour the atmosphere of the carbon dioxide mankind has pumped into it.

    One microorganism in particular has captured scientists’ attention. UTEX 3222, nicknamed “Chonkus” for the way it guzzles carbon dioxide, is a previously unknown cyanobacterium found in volcanic ocean vents. A recent paper in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology found it boasts exceptional atmosphere-cleaning potential — even among its well-studied peers. If scientists can figure out how to genetically engineer it, this single-celled organism’s natural quirks could become supercharged into a low-waste carbon capture system.

    Cyanobacteria like Chonkus, sometimes referred to by the misnomer blue-green algae, are aquatic organisms that, suck up light and carbon dioxide and turn it into food, photosynthesizing like plants. But tucked away inside their single-celled bodies are compartments that allow them to concentrate and gobble up more CO2 than their distant leafy relatives. When found in exotic environments, they can evolve unique characteristics not often found in nature. For microorganism researchers, whose field has long revolved around a handful of easy-to-manage organisms like yeast and E. coli, the untapped biodiversity heralds new possibilities.

    “There’s more and more excitement about isolating new organisms,” said Braden Tierney, a microbiologist and one of the lead authors of the paper that identified Chonkus. On an expedition in September 2022, Tierney and researchers from the University of Palermo in Italy dove into the waters surrounding Vulcano, an island off the coast of Sicily where volcanic vents in shallow waters provide an unusual habitat — illuminated by sunlight and yet rich with plumes of carbon-dioxide. The location yielded a veritable soup of microbial life, including Chonkus.

    three men in scuba suits under water huddle around a clipboard and scientific instruments. green sea grass is under them. the blue of the water above them is light and effuse with light.
    Researchers from Two Frontiers and the University of Palermo diving near Vulcano. John Kowitz / Two Frontiers

    After Tierney retrieved flasks of the seawater, Max Schubert, the other lead author of the cyanobacteria paper and a lead project scientist at the scientific nonprofit Align to Innovate, got to work identifying the different organisms in it. Schubert said that out in the open ocean, cyanobacteria like Chonkus grow slowly and are thinly dispersed. “But if we wanted to use them to pull down carbon dioxide, we would want to grow them a lot faster,” he said, “and grow in concentrations that don’t exist in the open ocean.”

    Back in the lab, Chonkus did just that — growing faster and thicker than other previously discovered cyanobacteria candidates for carbon capture systems. “When you grow a culture of bacteria, it looks like broth and the bacteria are very dilute in the culture,” Schubert said, “but we found that Chonkus would settle into this stuff that is much more dense, like a green peanut butter.”

    Chonkus’ peanut butter consistency is important for the strain’s potential in green biotechnologies. Typically, biotech industries that use cyanobacteria and algae need to separate them from the water they grow in. Because Chonkus does so naturally with gravity, Schubert says, it could make the process more efficient. But there are plenty of other puzzles to solve before a discovery like Chonkus can be used for carbon capture.

    CyanoCapture, a cyanobacteria carbon capture startup based in the United Kingdom, has developed a low-cost method of catching carbon dioxide that runs on biomass, housing algae and cyanobacteria in clear tubes where they can grow and filter CO2. Although Chonkus shows unique promise, David Kim, the company’s CEO and founder, said biotechnology companies need to have more control over its traits, like carbon storage, to use it successfully, and that requires finding a way to crack open its DNA.

    CyanoCapture’s photobioreactors full of bacteria that can filter out carbon dioxide from emission sources.
    CyanoCapture

    “Oftentimes we’ll find in nature that a microbe can do something kind of cool, but it doesn’t do it as well as we need to,” said Henry Lee, CEO of Cultivarium, a nonprofit biotech start-up in Watertown, Massachusetts, that specializes in genetically engineering microbes. Cultivarium has been working with CyanoCapture to help them study Chonkus but has yet to figure out how to tinker with its DNA and improve its carbon capturing attributes. “Everybody wants to juice it up and tweak it,” he said.

    Since the expedition to Vulcano where Tierney scooped up Chonkus, the nonprofit he founded to explore more extreme environments around the world, the Two Frontiers Project, has also sampled hot springs in Colorado, volcanic chimneys in the Tyrrhenian Sea near Italy, and coral reefs in the Red Sea. Perhaps out there, researchers will find a chunkier Chonkus that can pack away even more carbon, microbes that can help regrow corals, or more organisms that can ease the pains of a rapidly warming world. “There’s no question we’ll keep finding really, really interesting biology in these vents, Tierney said. “I can’t stress enough that this was just the first expedition.”

    Kim noted that out of all the microbes out there, less than 0.01 percent have been studied. “They don’t represent the true arsenal of microbes that we could potentially work with to achieve humanity’s goals.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Scientists found a new ally in the fight to clean up CO2 emissions: ‘Chonkus’ on Nov 5, 2024.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Exploiting Meta’s Weaknesses, Deceptive Political Ads Thrived on Facebook and Instagram in Run-Up to Election

    by Craig Silverman, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism

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

    This story was reported in collaboration with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

    In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

    Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

    In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”

    There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.

    Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”

    Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

    The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.

    The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.

    Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

    The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

    More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.

    A deceptive ad used the image of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and the state seal. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.

    Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.

    A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.

    “We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “… [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”

    Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.

    By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.

    Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.

    “Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.

    He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.

    “There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”

    Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.

    “This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.

    Meta’s Rules

    Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

    Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.

    In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.

    One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.

    Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.

    Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.

    Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren’t abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.

    Patriot Democracy

    Adam Klotz’s Facebook page and an example of an ad featuring a deepfake version of President Donald Trump’s voice (Screenshots by ProPublica)

    The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.

    The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)

    Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.

    Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.

    “If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”

    The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.

    Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”

    The Government Cash Program Facebook page falsely listed itself as a “Government Website.” (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.

    One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.

    Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.

    “With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.

    When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”

    They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.

    An example of a Trump coin ad run by the Stars and Stripes Supply Facebook page (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.

    The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.

    In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”

    A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.

    It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.

    A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.

    The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.

    Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.

    Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.

    Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.

    Two ads run by the Patriot Democracy network falsely promised government subsidy checks. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

    One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.

    More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.

    The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.

    A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.

    “It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.

    Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.

    Taking on a Network

    Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.

    In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.

    The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.

    As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.

    Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.

    Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.

    Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.

    Officials in Alaska and Ventura County, California, were alarmed by ads that used their seals without permission. (Screenshots by ProPublica)

    Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.

    Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.

    Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.

    Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.

    American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”

    “This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”

    On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”

    He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”

    Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.

    ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.

    A deceptive ad for car insurance falsely suggested that President Joe Biden was sending government checks to pay for gas. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.

    Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.

    In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.

    The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.

    North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)

    Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

    Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.

    Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.

    The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.

    Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”

    Still Locked Out

    After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.

    “As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.

    Methodology

    The pages and networks included in this investigation were identified by searching Meta’s Ad Library for keywords including “benefits,” “subsidy,” “stimulus,” “$6400” and “burial.” The initial keywords were chosen based on examples sourced from reports, FTC investigations and lawsuits. Each page added to the initial seed set was vetted by viewing its ads, advertiser disclaimer information, and page content and manager information.

    Using this initial set, we expanded the list of keywords based on ads run by the pages and by searching the Ad Library for websites that the ads linked to. We then used the Ad Library Report interface to identify all pages for each advertiser. We also looked for pages that ran ads using the same advertiser disclaimer information.

    Patriot Democracy

    In the case of the Patriot Democracy network, we connected the pages and ads together via three domains that were used in “paid for by” ad disclaimers: informedempowerment.com, tacticalempowerment.com and patriotdemocracy.com. The disclaimers that used these domains often used the same phone numbers or addresses. Additionally, a Domain Name System analysis showed that all three domains resided on the same server.

    Pages in the Patriot Democracy network often used identical advertiser disclaimer information such as addresses and phone numbers. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

    Determining Metrics

    To determine the total number of ads, ads removed and impressions, we relied on the Meta Ad Library application programming interface. For each page identified using the above methodology, we pulled all the ads via the API. To ascertain which ads had been removed, we filtered out ads that had the text “This content was removed because it didn’t follow our Advertising Standards.” However, if Meta had taken action at the page level, this ad text would not update.

    Meta’s Ad Library does not offer exact numbers for impressions of individual election and social issues ads. Instead, it offers ranges. We used the most conservative number offered by Meta, the “lower bound.” This means that cumulatively, these ads likely had tens of thousands more impressions.

    The Ad Library provides the total spending for election and social issues ads run on a page, which is the source of all of the dollar amounts cited in this investigation.

    Mariam Elba contributed research.

    Data collection and analysis for this story was done in conjunction with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • Islands Business publisher Samantha Magick – storyteller, risk-taker and community champion

    By Teagan Laszlo, Queensland University of Technology

    For Samantha Magick, journalism isn’t just a job. It is a lifelong commitment to storytelling, advocacy, and empowering voices often overlooked in the Pacific.

    As the managing editor and publisher at Islands Business, the Pacific Islands’ longest surviving news and business monthly magazine, Magick’s commitment to quality reporting and journalistic integrity has established her as a leading figure in the region’s news industry.

    Magick’s passion for journalism began at a young age.

    “I wanted to be a journalist when I was like 12,” Magick recalls. “When I left school, that’s all I wanted to study.”

    She remembers her family’s disapproval when she would write stories as a child, as they thought she was “sharing secrets”. Despite that early condemnation, Magick’s thriving journalism career has taken her across continents and exposed her to diverse media landscapes.

    After completing a Bachelor of Communications with a major in journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, Magick began her career at Communications Fiji Limited (CFL), a prominent Fijian commercial network.

    She progressed over 11 years from a cadet to CFL’s news director.

    Guidance of first boss
    Magick attributes some of her early success to the guidance of her first boss and CFL’s founder, William Parkinson. She considers herself fortunate to have had a supportive mentor who led by example and dared to take risks early in life, such as founding a radio station in his 20s.

    After leaving CFL, Magick’s career took her across the globe, including regional Pacific non-government organisations, news publications in Hawai’i and Indonesia, and even international legal organisations in Italy.

    Magick, who is of both Fijian and Australian heritage, returned to Suva in 2018, where she began her current role as Islands Business’s managing editor.

    “I’ve chosen to make my life in Fiji because I feel more myself here,” Magick says, reflecting on her deep connection to the island nation.

    Magick’s vision for Islands Business focuses on delving into the deeper, underlying narratives often overshadowed by breaking news cycles and free, readily available news content.

    “We need to be able to demonstrate the value of investigation, big picture reporting rather than the day-to-day stuff,” Magick says.

    Magick prides herself on creating a diverse and inclusive newsroom that reflects the communities it serves.

    Need for diverse newsroom
    “You have to have a diverse newsroom,” she emphasises, recognising the importance of amplifying marginalised voices. “For example, there is a conscious effort to make sure our magazine is not full of photos of men shaking hands with other men.”

    Magick also believes journalists have a responsibility to advocate for change, as demonstrated by Islands Business’s dedication to tackling pressing issues from climate change to media freedom.

    “Why would I give a climate change denier space?” Magick questions when discussing the need to balance objectivity and advocacy. “Because it’s kind of going to sell magazines? Because it’s going to create a bit of a stir online? That’s not something we believe in.”

    Despite her success, Magick’s career has not been without challenges. Magick worked through Fiji’s former draconian media restriction laws under the Media Industry Development Act 2010, while also navigating the shift to digital media.

    Islands Business general manager Samantha Magick (right)
    Islands Business managing editor Samantha Magick (right) with Fiji Times reporter Rakesh Kumar and chief editor Fred Wesley (centre) celebrating the repeal of the draconian Fiji media law last year . . . ““Why would I give a climate change denier space?” Image: Lydia Lewis/RNZ Pacific

    Magick emphasises the need to constantly upskill and re-evaluate strategies to ensure she and Islands Business can effectively navigate the constantly evolving media landscape.

    From learning to capitalise on social media analytics to locating reputable information sources when many of them feared to speak to the journalists due to the risk of legal retribution, Magick believes flexibility and perseverance are crucial to staying ahead in media.

    In her early career, Magick also faced sexism and misogyny in the media industry. “When I think back about the way I was treated as a young journalist, I feel sick,” Magick says as she reflects on how she and her female colleagues would warn each other against interviewing certain sources alone.

    Supporting aspiring journalists
    The challenges Magick has faced undoubtably contribute to her dedication to supporting aspiring journalists, as evident through Kite Pareti’s journey. Starting as a freelance writer with no newswriting experience in March 2022, Pareti has since progressed to one of two full-time reporters at Islands Business.

    Pareti expresses gratitude for the opportunities she’s had while working at Islands Business, and for the mentorship of Magick, whom she describes as “family”.

    “Samantha took a chance on me when I had zero knowledge on news writing,” Pareti says. “So I’m grateful to God for her life and for allowing me to experience this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

    Magick reciprocates this sentiment. “Recently, I am inspired by some of our younger reporters in the field, and their ability to embrace and leverage technology — they’re teaching me.”

    Magick anticipates an exciting period ahead for Islands Business, as she aims to attract a younger, professionally driven, and regionally focused audience to their platforms.

    When asked about her aspirations for journalism in the region, Magick says she hopes to see a future where Pacific voices remain at the centre, “telling their own stories in all their diversities”.

    Teagan Laszlo was a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian Government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is published in a partnership of QUT with Asia Pacific Report, Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and The University of the South Pacific.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Pentagon Purchased OpenAI Tools for Military Operations Across Africa

    Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI’s technology is “essential” for its mission.

    The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM’s rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market. “The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives,” the document reads, including “its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises.”

    The document, labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, is marked as FEDCON, indicating it is not meant to be distributed beyond government or contractors. It shows AFRICOM’s request was approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency. While the price of the purchase is redacted, the approval document notes its value is less than $15 million.

    Like the rest of the Department of Defense, AFRICOM — which oversees the Pentagon’s operations across Africa, including local military cooperation with U.S. allies there — has an increasing appetite for cloud computing. The Defense Department already purchases cloud computing access from Microsoft via the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project. This new document reflects AFRICOM’s desire to bypass contracting red tape and buy immediately Microsoft Azure cloud services, including OpenAI software, without considering other vendors. AFRICOM states that the “ability to support advanced AI/ML workloads is crucial. This includes services for search, natural language processing, [machine learning], and unified analytics for data processing.” And according to AFRICOM, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which includes a suite of tools provided by OpenAI, is the only cloud provider capable of meeting its needs.

    Related

    OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban on Using ChatGPT for “Military and Warfare”

    Microsoft began selling OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model to defense customers in June 2023. Earlier this year, following the revelation that OpenAI had changed its mind on military work, the company announced a cybersecurity collaboration with DARPA in January and said its tools would be used for an unspecified veteran suicide prevention initiative. In April, Microsoft pitched the Pentagon on using DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation tool, for command and control software. But the AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI’s products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing.

    OpenAI’s stated corporate mission remains “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

    The AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI’s products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing.

    The document states that “OpenAI tools” are among the “unique features” offered by Microsoft “essential to ensure the cloud services provided align with USAFRICOM’s mission and operational needs. … Without access to Microsoft’s integrated suite of AI tools and services, USAFRICOM would face significant challenges in analyzing and extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data. … This could lead to delays in decision-making, compromised situational awareness, and decreased agility in responding to dynamic and evolving threats across the African continent.” Defense and intelligence agencies around the world have expressed a keen interest in using large language models to sift through troves of intelligence, or rapidly transcribe and analyze interrogation audio data.

    Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI last year and now exercises a great deal of influence over the company, in addition to reselling its technology. In February, The Intercept and other digital news outlets sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.

    An OpenAI spokesperson told The Intercept, “OpenAI does not have a partnership with US Africa Command” and referred questions to Microsoft. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did a spokesperson for AFRICOM.

    “It is extremely alarming that they’re explicit in OpenAI tool use for ‘unified analytics for data processing’ to align with USAFRICOM’s mission objectives,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, who has previously conducted safety evaluations for OpenAI. “Especially in stating that they believe these tools enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, when in fact it has been demonstrated that these tools are highly inaccurate and consistently fabricate outputs. These claims show a concerning lack of awareness by those procuring for these technologies of the high risks these tools pose in mission-critical environments.”

    Since OpenAI quietly deleted the portion of its terms of service that prohibited military work in January, the company has steadily ingratiated itself with the U.S. national security establishment, which is eager to integrate impressive but frequently inaccurate tools like ChatGPT. In June, OpenAI added to its board the Trump-appointed former head of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone; the company’s current head of national security partnerships is Katrina Mulligan, a Pentagon alum who previously worked in “Special Operations and Irregular Warfare,” according to her LinkedIn profile.

    On Thursday, following a White House directive ordering the Pentagon to accelerate adoption of tools like those made by OpenAI, the company published an article outlining its “approach to AI and national security.” According to the post, “The values that guide our work on national security” include “democratic values,” “human rights,” and “accountability,” explaining, “We believe that all AI applications, especially those involving government and national security, should be subject to oversight, clear usage guidelines, and ethical standards.” OpenAI’s language is a clear reflection of the White House order, which forbade security and intelligence entities from using artificial intelligence in ways that “do not align with democratic values,” the Washington Post reported.

    Related

    After Training African Coup Leaders, Pentagon Blames Russia for African Coups 

    While the AFRICOM document contains little detail about how exactly it might use OpenAI tools, the command’s regular implications in African coup d’états, civilian killings, torture, and covert warfare would seem incompatible with OpenAI’s professed national security framework. Last year, AFRICOM chief Gen. Michael Langley told the House Armed Services Committee that his command shares “core values” with Col. Mamady Doumbouya, an AFRICOM trainee who overthrew the government of Guinea and declared himself its leader in 2021.

    Although U.S. military activity in Africa receives relatively little attention in comparison to U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, AFRICOM’s presence is both significant and the subject of frequent controversy. Despite claims of a “light footprint” on the continent, The Intercept reported in 2020 a formerly secret AFRICOM map showing “a network of 29 U.S. military bases that stretch from one side of Africa to another.” Much of AFRICOM’s purpose since its establishment in 2007 entails training and advising African troops, low-profile missions by Special Operations forces, and operating drone bases to counter militant groups in the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin, and the Horn of Africa in efforts to bring security and stability to the continent. The results have been dismal. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance on the continent. According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, the annual number of attacks by militant Islamist groups in Africa now tops 6,700 — a 74,344 percent increase.

    As violence has spiraled, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror, including in Niger last year. (At least five leaders of that July 2023 coup received American assistance, according to a U.S. official.) U.S. allies have also been implicated in a raft of alleged human rights abuses. In 2017, The Intercept reported a Cameroonian military base used by AFRICOM to stage surveillance drone flights had been used to torture military prisoners.

    Dealing with data has long been a challenge for AFRICOM. After The Intercept put together a count of U.S.-trained coup leaders on the continent, for example, the command admitted it did not know how many coups its charges have conducted, nor did the command even keep a list of how many times such takeovers have happened. “AFRICOM does not maintain a database with this information,” spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept last year.

    AFRICOM’s mismanagement of information has also been lethal. Following a 2018 drone strike in Somalia, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists” and destroyed one vehicle, and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” A secret U.S. military investigation, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, showed that despite months of “target development,” the attack on a pickup truck killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse.

    The post Pentagon Purchased OpenAI Tools for Military Operations Across Africa appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Netflix Wiped Most of Its “Palestinian Stories” Collection — and Erased the Whole Thing in Israel

    In 2021, Netflix moved to create a new movie collection for its viewers.

    “Netflix will launch the Palestinian Stories collection, showcasing films from some of the Arab world’s finest filmmakers,” said an announcement of the new grouping. “[T]he collection is a tribute to the creativity and passion of the Arab film industry as Netflix continues to invest in stories from the Arab world.”

    Thirty-two films were slated for inclusion, with more additions planned.

    Now, however, following a purge of at least 24 films from Netflix’s library, the landing page for the collection contains just a single film for streamers in the United States: Lina Al Abed’s 2019 documentary “Ibrahim: A Fate to Define” — and that’s just if you access it from the U.S.

    “This erasure of Palestinian voices by Netflix follows many ugly decades of suppression of Palestinian viewpoints.”

    Accessing the page from an Israeli IP address, not only are the 24 films gone, but “Palestinian Stories” doesn’t exist at all: The URL for the landing page instead yields to 404 error page saying the site can’t be found. The Israeli page reportedly used to include 28 movies.

    The disappearance of the films, whose impending absence was noted by Sunjeev Bery, came a year into Israel’s relentless assault on the Gaza Strip and escalations in the West Bank — an intensifying war against the very Palestinians whose stories Netflix sought to elevate with its collection.

    “This erasure of Palestinian voices by Netflix follows many ugly decades of suppression of Palestinian viewpoints and narratives by Western news and entertainment media companies,” said a letter calling for reinstatement of the films from 30 pro-Palestinian organizations, including Freedom Forward where Bery, an Intercept contributor, is executive director.

    The entertainment giant offered scant details as to why exactly two dozen Palestinian films were wiped out in a matter of weeks. In response to an inquiry from The Intercept, Netflix spokesperson Rachel Racusen said, “As part of the licensing deal for these films, the licensing period will conclude in October 2024 which is why these films will no longer be available on service.”

    Racusen added, “This is standard practice in content licensing. Similar examples include Friends which is no longer available in the US or Mr. Robot which is no longer available in Arabic countries” — a statement that was echoed, but not attributed, in a Variety article on the films’ disappearance.

    Global Wipeout

    On their help pages, Netflix says shows and movies are removed from the platform based on licensing agreements. When a particular film’s license is expiring, Netflix says it evaluates whether the rights are still available, how popular the film is in the region in question, and the corresponding cost to renew the license.

    Netflix’s initial announcement said the titles would be available for streaming globally. After the films were wiped out in the U.S., The Intercept tried to view the titles in Israel and other countries. In the sample of countries whose IP addresses were used by The Intercept to access Netflix, at least some, if not all, of the titles had been wiped across the globe.

    In Korea, as in Israel, the Palestinian Stories landing page didn’t exist at all, resulting in an error message. In other countries, such as the United Kingdom and Ukraine, the page includes “Ibrahim: A Fate to Define” — the film available to U.S. viewers — as well as a second film, Ameen Nayfeh’s “200 Meters.”

    The Palestinian Stories collection is no longer displayed in search results on Netflix.

    After the Palestinian Stories collection first launched, Netflix was criticized by the right-wing Zionist organization Im Tirtzu. At the time Netflix responded that it “believes in artistic freedom and is continuously investing in authentic storytelling from all over the world,” leaving the films up for viewers.

    In an article on the Netflix website pointing viewers to titles that will be leaving the service this month, none of the Palestinian films are mentioned.

    Instead, the list highlights such titles as Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat” and “Magic Mike,” which are also slated to be removed from the platform this month.

    The post Netflix Wiped Most of Its “Palestinian Stories” Collection — and Erased the Whole Thing in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Crypto PAC Throws a Lifeline to Ted Cruz in Tightening Senate Battle

    Two political action committees with ties to the cryptocurrency industry are coming off the sidelines to help Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as he faces an unexpectedly tight reelection fight with Democratic U.S. Rep. Colin Allred.

    Allred is not known as a crypto skeptic; he voted for the industry’s top-priority bill this year. That has not stopped the two PACs from doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent days to aid Cruz, who has said he wants Texas to be “the oasis on planet Earth for bitcoin and crypto.”

    The sums don’t compare to the firehouse of cash, heavily favoring Republicans, that a separate industry group — Fairshake — has unleashed in other races. Still, the spending suggests that industry factions trust only Republicans to reduce regulation.

    “The only way to protect Bitcoin is to beat Democrats in the House and Senate so we can block White House regulation.”

    “We believe the only way to protect Bitcoin is to beat Democrats in the House and Senate this November so we can block White House regulations,” Bitcoin Freedom PAC, one of the groups that gave to Cruz this week, says on its website. “Democrats in Congress are a rubber stamp for Biden, and he’s made it clear that Bitcoin is in his sights if we don’t fight back.”

    Bitcoin Freedom PAC, which is affiliated with the business influence group Club for Growth, made the biggest cash infusion to Cruz’s race. The PAC gave $350,000 to a pro-Cruz PAC on October 9, according to a Wednesday filing with the Federal Election Commission.

    The same day, Bitcoin Freedom PAC received $215,000 from another group called the Crypto Freedom PAC, which in 2022 received $4.9 million from Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, whose investment firm owns $1 billion worth of bitcoin exchange-traded funds.

    Bitcoin Freedom sent its money to the pro-Cruz Truth and Courage PAC, but another group made a much smaller expenditure on its own. The Bitcoin Voter PAC spent $5,000 on pro-Cruz text messages last week, according to FEC filings. The PAC is also running Facebook ads with the video of Cruz proclaiming that Texas should be a crypto “oasis.”

    The Bitcoin Voter PAC is receiving support from a $2 million campaign organized by three Bitcoin mining companies, according to a Wednesday report from Fox Business. The group is also supporting Donald Trump and Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick.

    Alarm Bells for GOP

    The money spent on Cruz came as Republicans rang alarm bells about his tightening race with Allred, a centrist Democrat who is fighting an uphill battle against decades of GOP dominance in Texas.

    Cruz is running well behind Trump in the state with a narrow 48 to 47 percent polling lead over Allred, according to an Emerson College survey released Wednesday.

    Cruz has spoken at industry gatherings, downplayed bitcoin mining’s threat to the Texas electrical grid, and last year bought up to $100,000 worth of Bitcoin himself.

    Scores of Democrats voted for the bill loosening oversight of the crypto industry in the House of Representatives, and another major PAC has backed some Democrats in their races for the House and Senate.

    Allred doesn’t have a reputation as a crypto scold in Congress. In July, he voted for an industry-supported bill that would transfer oversight of the industry from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has aggressively pursued enforcement actions against crypto companies, to the under-resourced Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is known for having a lighter regulatory touch. 

    A crypto pressure group rated Allred as “somewhat supporting” crypto. That didn’t cut it for the most ardent crypto backers.

    “Digital assets should play a major role in the future of the American economy,” Club for Growth President David McIntosh said in a statement to The Intercept, “and Texas voters deserve a long-time leader like Sen. Cruz who has consistently supported their implementation as opposed to someone … ‘somewhat’ supportive.”

    The post Crypto PAC Throws a Lifeline to Ted Cruz in Tightening Senate Battle appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

    A former senior Israeli government official now working as a Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

    Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

    It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

    “It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

    Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.” In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”

    Cutler did not respond to a request for comment; Meta declined a request to interview her.

    Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.

    “Voice of the Government”

    Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”

    In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.

    In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”

    A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.” In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.” In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”

    Though Meta has extensive government relations and lobbying operations aimed at capitols around the world, few other governments enjoy their own dedicated high-level contact within the company. The company employs no counterpart to Cutler’s role solely representing Palestinian viewpoints; tens of millions of Meta users across the entire Middle East and all of North Africa share one policy director. A single policy lead oversees the entire Southeast Asian nations market, with a population of nearly 700 million. This raises concerns among experts about a deep power imbalance inside Facebook when it comes to moderating discussion of a war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans. 

    “If Meta wishes to behave ethically, it must ensure that Palestinians also have a seat at the table,” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York told The Intercept.

    Flagged for Moderation

    Records reviewed by The Intercept show Cutler pushed for the removal of an SJP post promoting a reading list of books including authors associated with two Marxist-Leninist militant groups, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Though it remains a Meta-designated terrorist group according to a copy of the list obtained by The Intercept in 2021, the DFLP has not been considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government since 1999, when it was delisted by the State Department “primarily because of the absence of terrorist activity.” The PFLP remains designated by both Meta and the United States.

    According to a source familiar with Cutler’s actions, these efforts have included lobbying for the deletion of posts quoting celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who served as a PFLP spokesperson nearly 60 years ago and was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Kanafani, whose works have been widely translated and published in countries around the world, enjoys global literary renown and mainstream recognition; his 1969 novella “Returning to Haifa” was cited as a recommended book by New York Times podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” last year.

    Internal records show Cutler later lobbied for the removal of an SJP Instagram post describing Leila Khaled — an 80-year-old former PFLP member who helped hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and has in the decades since become an outspoken icon of Palestinian solidarity — as “empowering.” 

    These same records demonstrate Cutler regularly singled out Instagram content belonging to SJP at the University of California, Los Angeles, claiming to policy colleagues that this chapter had been associated with violent protests, citing an Israeli news report about an April 29 melee at the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Local and national press accounts described a peaceful protest until a pro-Israeli mob attacked the encampment with fists, weapons, and bear spray, injuring 15 people. 

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    Facebook and Instagram Restrict the Use of the Red Triangle Emoji Over Hamas Association

    Throughout the year, Cutler internally flagged several SJP UCLA posts, including those mentioning a reading list of PFLP-associated authors, an on-campus “PFLP study group,” and a post containing a red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance. 

    Mona, a UCLA undergraduate and SJP member who spoke on the condition of being only identified by her first name, said the chapter’s Instagram account was periodically unable to post or share content, which the group attributed to enforcement actions by Meta. In August, the organization’s chapter at Columbia University reported its Instagram account had been deactivated without explanation. A member of SJP Columbia said the chapter did not have a record of deleted Instagram content but recalled Meta removing multiple posts that quoted Kanafani.

    The Israeli government has been vehement in its criticism of anti-Zionist groups like SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, and has denounced campus organizing as an attempt to import terrorism to American college campuses.

    Records show Cutler has requested the deletion of non-student content, too. Following Iran’s October 1 missile attack against Israel, Cutler quickly flagged video uploaded to Instagram of Palestinians cheering from the Gaza Strip. Records show Cutler has also repeatedly lobbied to censor the Instagram account of Lebanese satellite TV network Al Mayadeen when it posted sympathetic content about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

    These actions are “Typical Jordana,” according to Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former Middle East and North Africa policy chief. “No one in the world could tell me that a lot of what she does is not an overreach of her authority.”

    Zeitoon, who departed the company in 2017, told The Intercept that Cutler’s role inside Meta differed from those of other regional policy managers.  

    “That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. ”

    “If I was head of public policy for Jordan, and I went on TV and said I represent the interests of Jordan within Meta, I would be fired the second day,” said Zeitoon, a Jordanian national, whose mandate at Meta was to oversee the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. “That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. None of us was ever hired with the premise that we’re representing our governments.”

    During his tenure, Zeitoon says he often fielded informal requests from the government of Jordan, but that he drew a clear line at acting on its behalf. “The Jordanian government hated my guts when I was there, because they thought that I was obliged because I’m Jordanian. I might guide you, I might be over-friendly, if you call me at night I might accept your call. But at the end of the day, Facebook pays my salary.”

    BuzzFeed News reported that in 2017 Facebook employees had “raised concerns about Cutler’s role and whose interests she prioritizes,” evidenced by an argument “over whether the West Bank should be considered ‘occupied territories’ in Facebook’s rules.” Zeitoon recalled this clash as emblematic of Cutler’s tenure, adding that when he was there, she “tried to influence decision makers within the company to designate the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ territory” rather than using the term “occupied” — a phrasing used by the United Nations when describing the region.

    Zeitoon doubted the Meta spokesperson’s claim that all internal escalations are treated equally, no matter who submits them. Recalling his time working in a high-ranking role at the company, he said his complaints received immediate attention: “My report goes to the top,” he said. He expects the same would be true today for content flagged by Cutler — especially at a moment when Israel is at war. “I’m sure all she reports is code red.”

    Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was reminded of the case of Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy head for India — another rare instance in which a single country had its own dedicated representative within the company. Das resigned from her position in 2020 after a Wall Street Journal report found she had lobbied for the uneven enforcement of hate speech rules that benefited India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which she supported personally. “Meta is the communications platform for much for the world, but of course not every voice is heard equally,” Brooking said in an interview.

    Zeitoon concurred: “No governments in the world have been able to create a network of influence and pressure on Meta as strong as the Israeli and the Indian governments.”

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    Cutler is not the first or only prominent figure within Meta to help foster relations between the company and governments. Her colleague Joel Kaplan, who served as White House deputy chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration, joined Facebook in 2011 to head the company’s operations in Washington, D.C., a move the New York Times reported “will likely strengthen its ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is the former deputy prime minister of the U.K. Many of the staffers who help Meta craft and enforce its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy join following years of work at the Pentagon, State Department, federal law enforcement, and spy agencies. The revolving door between government and major internet companies is vast and ever-turning not just at Meta, but also its most prominent rivals. 

    As recently as February 2023, Cutler’s name was floated as a possible next head of the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, a government propaganda office tasked with surveilling and undermining protesters and activists abroad. The ministry has reportedly made extensive use of Meta’s platforms to infiltrate student groups and conduct propaganda campaigns. In June, Haaretz reported a project originally founded by the ministry had targeted Black lawmakers in the U.S. with “hundreds” of phony Facebook and Instagram accounts “to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative.” Meta later shut these accounts down.

    Evelyn Douek, a content moderation scholar and professor at Stanford Law School, said Cutler’s direct intervention is “obviously extremely concerning” given the specific stakes. “You have a person inside Meta representing the interests of the government on an issue about which there is deeply contested political debate it appears, to favor one side of that debate. The concerns about bias and disproportionate enforcement of a policy when that is happening seem obvious.”

    Lever, the Meta spokesperson, said that Cutler’s role in public policy is distinct from the company’s Content Policy officials, noting the former “engage” with governments but do not actually have a role in drafting rules. In her Jerusalem Post interview, however, Cutler stated “I’m part of a team of people who are helping to develop and build Facebook’s policies.”

    Douek argued that internet platform users are best served by keeping the creation of speech rules entirely separate from their enforcement. “It’s really highly problematic if you have people whose job at Meta is not the fair enforcement of content moderation rules, but rather their job is to please government interests intervening in the enforcement of the platform’s rules,” she said.

    This at a minimum creates the appearance of a foreign government meddling in an intensely domestic political issue — a dynamic Meta has historically worked to combat. “Campus protests and what is happening in the United States right now is a deeply contested fault line in American politics. And this has been an issue about what are the appropriate limits on campus speech and how should we be dealing with this,” Douek said. “A foreign country’s interests are being overly represented in how that debate is moderated, that should also raise concerns.”

    The post Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • After Major Industry Donor Pops Up, Harris Makes Bizarre Proposal: Crypto for Black Men

    Days after a leading crypto industry figure endorsed her, Vice President Kamala Harris gave cryptocurrencies a vague embrace this week — as part of a pitch to Black men.

    Along with a pledge to legalize weed, the policy document released by Harris’s campaign Monday made a bid for Black men’s votes with ambiguous wording about regulating crypto. The move left industry critics wondering whether she backs strong or weak safeguards at a time when the industry is pouring money into political races.

    “What she is doing is reflecting the will of some of her funders.”

    While the crypto industry has spread its money around — spending more than $200 million on the congressional campaigns of friendly candidates from both parties — leading crypto figures have mostly backed former President Donald Trump. The preference is largely seen as a rebuke of the Biden administration’s willingness to regulate the scandal-plagued sector.

    Crypto skeptics were divided on how to interpret Harris’s comments, with one saying that they seemed to be aimed as much at donors as voters.

    “What she is doing is reflecting the will of some of her funders,” said Jared Ball, a professor of communication and Africana/Black studies at Morgan State University, “which is to get some policy support to give engagement in crypto trading more legitimacy, which is just going to help fleece more people.”

    Courting Crypto

    Since entering the race in July, Harris has courted business leaders who took a dour view of the Biden administration thanks to its enforcement of antitrust and securities laws.

    That cohort includes the Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who announced their support for Trump days before Biden dropped out of the race. Their firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions of dollars in cryptocurrency, moves that coincided with scrutiny of crypto by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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    Once a critic, Trump has turned into a crypto booster since launching his campaign. At a crypto conference in July, Trump said the industry’s regulations would be “written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” More recently, he’s been shilling a cryptocurrency of his own.

    Harris has been far more circumspect. Behind the scenes, however, she has engaged with industry insiders.

    In an October 4 post on X, Horowitz, a longtime friend of Harris’s, said he had had “several conversations” with Harris and her advisers. Saying he was “encouraged” by the discussions, Horowitz announced that he was making a large donation to the Harris campaign.

    “As we stated earlier, the Biden Administration has been exceptionally destructive on tech policy across the industry, but especially as it relates to Crypto/Blockchain and AI,” Horowitz said. “So, while I am very hopeful that the Harris Administration will be much better, they have not yet stated their intentions.”

    The Agenda

    Harris had already made some encouraging comments about cryptocurrencies before Horowitz made his tweet. Within two weeks of their meeting coming to light, however, she rolled out her most direct statement on the issue in a policy paper on helping Black men.

    Losing ground among Black men to Trump in the polls, Harris has ramped up her direct appeals. Her nine-page “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” included conventional-sounding ideas, such as $20,000 forgivable loans for entrepreneurs and expanded apprenticeship programs.

    The most attention-grabbing sections, however, called for legalizing recreational marijuana and, finally, making it easier for Black men who own crypto “to benefit from financial innovation.”

    The paper said that Harris “will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.”

    Surveys suggest that Black Americans, wary or shut out of traditional financial institutions, have invested in cryptocurrencies at higher rates than other Americans. Critics say that has left Black people more vulnerable to fluctuations in the volatile crypto market.

    Since releasing the policy document, Harris has not elaborated on what sort of “regulatory framework” she would like to see. Rick Claypool, the research director for Public Citizen’s president’s office, said the statement was “a bit of a Rorschach.”

    The industry has long said that it supports regulations, just weak ones enforced by the short-staffed Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Meanwhile, critics who liken the industry to a giant Ponzi scheme say that existing regulations enforced by the SEC are appropriate.

    “Black Capitalism”?

    Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress, said his “overarching concern” was that the industry would secure lax oversight under the guise of regulatory clarity: “a wolf in sheep’s clothing thing.”

    The Harris campaign did not comment on whether she supports regulation under the CFTC or the SEC.

    “The specific role that crypto has played in this discussion has just been to refurbish those old claims.”

    Leaving aside that question, Ball, the Morgan State professor, said his larger concern was the document’s suggestion that “Black capitalism” could close the racial wealth gap.

    “The specific role that crypto has played in this discussion has just been to refurbish those old claims and give them new packaging,” Ball said.

    Still, at least one industry critic said he saw signs for hope in the Harris campaign document.

    “I have written that no one should be in crypto,” said Algernon Austin, the director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “But given that people are, definitely more regulation, more transparency, more safeguards would be an improvement.”

    The post After Major Industry Donor Pops Up, Harris Makes Bizarre Proposal: Crypto for Black Men appeared first on The Intercept.

    This post was originally published on The Intercept.

  • The nation’s first commercial carbon sequestration plant is in Illinois. It leaks.

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.

    A row of executives from grain-processing behemoth Archer Daniels Midland watched as Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, took the podium at a Decatur city council meeting last week. It was the first meeting since she and the rest of her central Illinois community learned of a second leak at ADM’s carbon dioxide sequestration well beneath Lake Decatur, their primary source of drinking water. 

    “Just because CO2 sequestration can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” the retired elementary school teacher told the city council. “Pipes eventually leak.” 

    ADM’s facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country, and is on the forefront of a booming, multibillion-dollar carbon capture and storage, or CCS, industry that promises to permanently sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide deep underground. 

    The emerging technology has become a cornerstone of government strategies to slash fossil fuel emissions and meet climate goals. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, has supercharged industry subsidies and tax credits and set off a CCS gold rush. 

    There are now only four carbon sequestration wells operating in the United States — two each in Illinois and Indiana — but many more are on the way. Three proposed pipelines and 22 wells are up for review by state and federal regulators in Illinois, where the geography makes the landscape especially well suited for CCS. Nationwide, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is reviewing 150 different applications. 

    But if CCS operations leak, they can pose significant risks to water resources. That’s because pressurized CO2 stored underground can escape or propel brine trapped in the saline reservoirs typically used for permanent storage. The leaks can lead to heavy metal contamination and potentially lower pH levels, all of which can make drinking water undrinkable. This is what bothers critics of carbon capture, who worry that it’s solving one problem by creating another.

    A woman holds a folder of papers seated next to an elderly man
    Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, sits by her husband, Paul Rosenberger, at a city council meeting in Decatur, Illinois, earlier this month. They are both concerned about leaks from the commercial carbon sequestration plant that sits in their town. Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco / Grist

    In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site after it was reported by E&E News, which covers energy and environmental issues. Additional testing mandated by the EPA turned up a second leak later that month. The EPA has confirmed these leaks posed no threat to water sources. Still, they raise concern about whether more leaks are likely, whether the public has any right to know when leaks occur, and if CCS technology is really a viable climate solution.

    Officials with Chicago-based ADM spoke at the Decatur City Council meeting immediately after Rosenberger. They tried to assuage her concerns. “We simply wouldn’t do this if we didn’t believe that it was safe,” said Greg Webb, ADM’s vice president of state-government relations. 

    But ADM kept local and state officials in the dark for months about the first leak. They detected it back in March, five months after discovering corrosion in the tubing in the sequestration well. However, neither leak was disclosed as the company this spring petitioned the city of Decatur for an easement to expand its operations. The company also remained tight-lipped about the leak as it took part in major negotiations over the state’s first CCS regulations, the SAFE CCS Act, between April and May, according to several parties involved. 

    As a result, when Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed those CCS regulations into law at ADM’s Decatur facility in July, he was unaware of the leak that had occurred more than 5,000 feet below his seat, his office confirmed.

    “I thought we were negotiating in good faith with ADM,” bill sponsor and state Senator Laura Fine, a Democrat, said in a statement. “When negotiating complex legislation, we expect all parties to be forthcoming and transparent in order to ensure we enact effective legislation.”

    It’s unclear whether ADM was required by law to report the leaks any sooner than it did. According to the company’s permits, it only has to notify state and local officials if there are “major” or “serious” emergencies. The EPA wouldn’t comment on whether ADM was required to disclose, and neither the EPA nor ADM would confirm if the two leaks in Decatur qualified as “minor” emergencies. 

    In a statement, an ADM spokesperson said “the developments occurred at a depth of approximately 5,000 feet. They posed no threat to the surface or groundwater, nor to public health. It is for those reasons that additional notifications were not made.”  

    That’s little comfort to Jenny Cassel, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. 

    “It’s a little terrifying,” Cassel said. “Because if the operator, in fact, made the wrong decision, and there is in fact a major problem, then not only will local officials not know about it, EPA is not going to know about it, which is indeed what appears to have happened here.”

    The Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, which applauded the signing of the regulatory bill earlier this summer, called ADM’s decision to keep the March 2024 leak from the public “unacceptable and dangerous.” 

    David Horn, a city councilman and professor of biology at Decatur’s Millikin University, said the city was blindsided. “This information was substantive, relevant information that could have influenced the terms of the easement that was ultimately signed in May of 2024,” he said, adding that the delay in disclosure calls into question the long-term safety of CCS, and the ability of the EPA to protect water in the face of future CCS mishaps.

    ADM waited until July 31 to notify the EPA of the leak, more than three months after it was discovered. The EPA alerted a small number of local and state officials and ordered the company to conduct further tests. They also issued a notice for alleged violations, citing the movement of CO2 and other fluids beyond “authorized zones” and the failure of the company to comply with its own monitoring, emergency response, and remediation plans.

    But the infractions weren’t made public until September 13, when E&E News first reported the leak.  

    Two weeks later, ADM notified the EPA that it had discovered a second suspected leak. Only then did they temporarily pause CO2 injections into the well. 

    Councilman Horn says that isn’t good enough. 

    “The ADM company was aware of the leak in March, and we were not aware of it until September,” Horn said. “So really the city of Decatur, its residents, the decision-makers have been on the back foot for months.”

    Meanwhile, the city of Decatur has contracted with an environmental attorney. They have yet to pursue any legal action. 

    Central Illinois is becoming a hotspot nationwide for the nascent CCS industry because of the Mt. Simon Sandstone, a deep saline formation of porous rock especially suitable for CO2 storage. It underlies the majority of Illinois and spills into parts of Indiana and Kentucky. It has an estimated storage capacity of up to 150 billion tons of CO2, making it the largest reservoir of its kind anywhere in the Midwest. 

    However, there is concern that pumping CO2 into saline reservoirs near subsurface water risks pushing pressurized CO2 and brine toward those resources, which would pose additional contamination risks. “Brine is pretty nasty stuff,” said Dominic Diguilio, a retired geoscientist from the EPA Office of Research and Development. “It has a very high concentration of salts, heavy metals, sometimes volatile organic compounds and radionuclides like radium.” 

    Horn says with so many more wells planned for Illinois, the Decatur leaks should be a wakeup call not just to the city, but to the region. He is particularly concerned about any future wells near east central Illinois’ primary drinking water source, the Mahomet aquifer, which lies above the Mt. Simon Sandstone formation. 

    Close to a million people rely on the Mahomet aquifer for drinking water, according to the Prairie Research Institute. In 2015, the EPA designated the underground reservoir a “sole source,” meaning there are no other feasible drinking water alternatives should the groundwater be contaminated. When it comes to the Mahomet aquifer, “there is no room for error if there is a mistake,” said Horn. 

    In light of the CCS boom headed their way, rural Illinois counties are stepping up to protect themselves from future carbon leaks, said Andrew Renh, the director of climate policy at Prairie Rivers Network, a Champaign-based environmental protection organization. 

    DeWitt County, half an hour north of Decatur, passed a carbon sequestration ban last year. To Decatur’s west, Sangamon County previously expanded an existing moratorium on transporting or storing CO2 underground. And just last week, Champaign County, directly east of Decatur, advanced an ordinance to consider a 12-month moratorium on CCS. 

    Rehn said his organization would like to see all 14 counties that overlap the Mahomet aquifer impose such bans.

    In the meantime, his hope is that state legislators finish what the Illinois counties have started. Two companion bills introduced earlier this year would patch up the regulatory gaps left by the CCS bill Pritzker signed into law this summer. The bills would outright prohibit carbon sequestration immediately in and around the Mahomet Aquifer.  

    “My community, as well as many surrounding areas, depend on the Mahomet Aquifer to provide clean drinking water, support our agriculture, and sustain industrial operations,” bill sponsor and state Senator Paul Faraci, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Protecting the health and livelihood of our residents and industries that rely on the aquifer must remain our top priority. 

    As the Decatur city council meeting adjourned last week, Rosenberger helped her husband Paul Rosenberger put on his coat. The row of ADM officials behind her walked past and then lingered in the council chamber. “I’m not afraid of them,” Rosenberger said as she wheeled her husband out.  

    “We haven’t changed anything yet,” Rosenberger said. “But I think maybe we can.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The nation’s first commercial carbon sequestration plant is in Illinois. It leaks. on Oct 21, 2024.


    This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.