Earlier this year, the e-commerce corporation Amazon secured approval to open twonew data centers in Santiago, Chile. The $400 million venture is the company’s first foray into locating its data facilities, which guzzle massive amounts of electricity and water in order to power cloud computing services and online programs, in Latin America — and in one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where residents have protested against the industry’s expansion.
This week, the tech giant made a separate but related announcement. It plans to invest in water conservation along the Maipo River, which is the primary source of water for the Santiago region. Amazon will partner with a water technology startup to help farmers along the river install drip irrigation systems on 165 acres of farmland. The plan is poised to conserve enough water to supply around 300 homes per year, and it’s part of Amazon’s campaign to become “water positive” by 2030, meaning the company will conserve or replenish more water than it uses up.
The reasoning behind this water initiative is clear: Data centers require large amounts of water to cool their servers, and Amazon plans to spend $100 billion to build more of them over the next decade as part of a big bet on its Amazon Web Services cloud-computing platform. Other tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta, which are also investing in data centers to sustain the artificial-intelligence boom, have made similarwaterpledges amid a growing controversy about the sector’s thirst for water and power.
Amazon claims that its data centers are already among the most water-efficient in the industry, and it plans to roll out more conservation projects to mitigate its thirst. However, just like corporate pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions, these water pledges are more complex than they seem at first glance. While the company has indeed taken steps to cut water usage at its facilities, its calculations don’t account for the massive water needs of the power plants that keep the lights on at those very same facilities.Without a larger commitment to mitigating Amazon’s underlying stress on electricity grids, conservation efforts by the company and its fellow tech giants will only tackle part of the problem, according to experts who spoke to Grist.
The powerful servers in large data centers run hot as they process unprecedented amounts of information, and keeping them from overheating requires both water and electricity. Rather than try to keep these rooms cool with traditional air-conditioning units, many companies use water as a coolant, running it past the servers to chill them out. The centers also need huge amounts of electricity to run all their servers: They already account for around 3 percent of U.S. power demand, a number that could more than double by 2030. On top of that, the coal, gas, and nuclear power plants that produce that electricity themselves consume even larger quantities of water to stay cool.
Will Hewes, who leads water sustainability for Amazon Web Services, told Grist that the company uses water in its data centers in order to save on energy-intensive air conditioning units, thus reducing its reliance on fossil fuels.
“Using water for cooling in most places really reduces the amount of energy that we use, and so it helps us meet other sustainability goals,” he said. “We could always decide to not use water for cooling, but we want to, a lot, because of those energy and efficiency benefits.”
In order to save on energy costs, the company’s data centers have to evaporate millions of gallons of water per year. It’s hard to say for sure how much water the data center industry consumes, but the ballpark estimates are substantial. One 2021 study found that U.S. data centers consumed around 415,000 acre-feet of water in 2018, even before the artificial-intelligence boom. That’s enough to supply around a million average homes annually, or about as much as California’s Imperial Valley takes from the Colorado River each year to grow winter vegetables. Another study found that data centers operated by Microsoft, Google, and Meta withdrew twice as much water from rivers and aquifers as the entire country of Denmark.
It’s almost certain that this number has ballooned even higher in recent years as companies have built more centers to keep up with the artificial-intelligence boom, since AI programs such as ChatGPT require massive amounts of server real estate. Tech companies have built hundreds of new data centers in the last few years alone, and they are planning hundreds more. One recent estimate found that ChatGPT requires an average-sized bottle of water for every 10 to 50 chat responses it provides. The on-site water consumption at any one of these companies’ data centers could now rival that of a major beverage company such as PepsiCo.
Amazon doesn’t provide statistics on its absolute water consumption; Hewes told Grist the company is “focused on efficiency.” However, the tech giant’s water usage is likely lower than some of its competitors — in part because the company has built most of its data centers with so-called evaporative cooling systems, which require far less water than other cooling technologies and only turn on when temperatures get too high. The company pegs its water usage at around 10 percent of the industry average, and in temperate locations such as Sweden, it doesn’t use any water to cool down data centers except during peak summer temperatures.
Companies can reduce the environmental impact of their AI business by building them in temperate regions that have plenty of water, but they must balance those efficiency concerns with concerns about land and electricity costs, as well as the need to be close to major customers. Recent studies have found that data center water consumption in the U.S. is “skewed toward water stressed subbasins” in places like the Southwest, but Amazon has clustered much of its business farther east, especially in Virginia, which boasts cheap power and financial incentives for tech firms.
“A lot of the locations are driven by customer needs, but also by [prices for] real estate and power,” said Hewes. “Some big portions of our data center footprint are in places that aren’t super hot, that aren’t in super water stressed regions. Virginia, Ohio — they get hot in the summer, but then there are big chunks of the year where we don’t need to use water for cooling.” Even so, the company’s expansion in Virginia is already causing concerns over water availability.
To mitigate its impacts in such basins, the company also funds dozens of conservation and recharge projects like the one in Chile. It donates recycled water from its data centers to farmers, who use it to irrigate their crops, and it has also helped restore the rivers that supply water-stressed cities such as Cape Town, South Africa; in northern Virginia, it has worked to install cover crop farmland that can reduce runoff pollution in local waterways. The company treats these projects the way other companies treat carbon offsets, counting each gallon recharged against a gallon it consumes at its data centers. Amazon said in its most recent sustainability report that it is 41 percent of the way to meeting its goal of being “water positive.” In other words, it has funded projects that recharge or conserve a little over 4 gallons of water for every 10 gallons of water it uses.
But despite all this, the company’s water stewardship goal doesn’t include the water consumed by the power plants that supply its data centers. This consumption can be as much as three to 10 times as large as the on-site water consumption at a data center, according to Shaolei Ren, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who studies data center water usage. As an example, Ren pointed to an Amazon data center in Pennsylvania that relies on a nuclear power plant less than a mile away. That data center uses around 20 percent of the power plant’s capacity.
“They say they’re using very little water, but there’s a big water evaporation happening just nearby, and that’s for powering their data center,” he said.
Companies like Amazon can reduce this secondary water usage by relying on renewable energy sources, which don’t require anywhere near as much water as traditional power plants. Hewes says the company has been trying to “manage down” both water and energy needs through a separate goal of operating on 100 percent renewable energy, but Ren points out that the company’s data centers need round-the-clock power, which means intermittently available renewables like solar and wind farms can only go so far.
Amazon isn’t the only company dealing with this problem. CyrusOne, another major data center firm, revealed in its sustainability report earlier this year that it used more than eight times as much water to source power as it did on-site at its data centers.
“As long as we are reliant on grid electricity that includes thermoelectric sources to power our facilities, we are indirectly responsible for the consumption of large amounts of water in the production of that electricity,” the report said.
As for replenishment projects like the one in Chile, they too will only go part of the way toward reducing the impact of the data center explosion. Even if Amazon is “water positive” on a global scale, with projects in many of the same basins where it owns data centers, that doesn’t mean it won’t still compromise water access in specific watersheds. The company’s data centers and their power plants may still withdraw more water than the company replenishes in a given area, and replenishment projects in other aquifers around the world won’t address the physical consequences of that specific overdraft.
“If they are able to capture some of the growing water and clean it and return to the community, that’s better than nothing, but I think it’s not really reducing the actual consumption,” Ren said. “It masks out a lot of real problems, because water is a really regional issue.”
The wheels on this bus do indeed go round and round. Its wipers swish. And its horn beeps. Hidden in its innards, though, is something special — a motor that doesn’t vroom but pairs with a burgeoning technology that could help the grid proliferate with renewable energy.
These new buses, developed by a company called Zum, ride clean and quiet because they’re fully electric. With them, California’s Oakland Unified School District just became the first major district in the United States to transition to 100 percent electrified buses. The vehicles are now transporting 1,300 students to and from school, replacing diesel-chugging buses that pollute the kids’ lungs and the neighborhoods with particulate matter. Like in other American cities, Oakland’s underserved areas tend to be closer to freeways and industrial activity, so air quality in those areas is already terrible compared to the city’s richer parts.
Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism. Since Oakland Unified only provides bus services for its special-need students, the problem of missing school for preventable health issues is particularly acute for them. “We have already seen the data — more kids riding the buses, that means more of our most vulnerable who are not missing school,” said Kyla Johnson-Trammell, superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, during a press conference Tuesday. “That, over time, means they’re having more learning and achievement goes up.”
What’s more, a core challenge of weaning our society off fossil fuels is that utilities will need to produce more electricity, not less of it. “In some places, you’re talking about doubling the amount of energy needed,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project.
Counterintuitively enough, the buses’ massive batteries aren’t straining the grid; they’re benefiting it. Like a growing number of consumer EV models, the buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. That allows them to charge their batteries by plugging into the grid, but also send energy back to the grid if the electrical utility needs extra power. “School buses play a very important role in the community as a transportation provider, but now also as an energy provider,” said Vivek Garg, co-founder and chief operating officer of Zum.
Each bus plugs into its own charger, which automatically determines when to draw power or give power back to the grid.
Matt Simon
And provide the buses must. Demand on the grid tends to spike in the late afternoon, when everyone’s returning home and switching on appliances like air conditioners. Historically, utilities could just spin up more generation at a fossil fuel power plant to meet that demand. But as the grid is loaded with more renewable energy sources, intermittency becomes a challenge: You can’t crank up power in the system if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.
If every EV has V2G capability, that creates a distributed network of batteries for a utility to draw on when demand spikes. The nature of the school bus suits it perfectly for this, because it’s on a fixed schedule, making it a predictable resource for the utility. In the afternoon, Zum’s buses take kids home, then plug back into the grid. “They have more energy in each bus than they need to do their route, so there’s always an ample amount left over,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager of V2G integration at Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the utility that’s partnered with Zum and Oakland Unified for the new system.
As the night goes on and demand wanes, the buses charge again to be ready for their morning routes. Then during the day, they charge again, when there’s plentiful solar power on the grid. On weekends or holidays, the buses would be available all day as backup power for the grid. “Sure, they’re going to take a very large amount of charge,” said Kevin Schneider, an expert in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who isn’t involved in the Oakland project. “But things like school buses don’t run that often, so they have a great potential to be a resource.”
That resource ain’t free: Utilities pay owners of V2G vehicles to provide power to the grid. (Because V2G is so new, utilities are still experimenting with what this rate structure looks like.) Zum says that that revenue helps bring down the transportation costs of its buses to be on par with cheaper diesel-powered buses. Oakland Unified and other districts can get still more money from the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, which is handing out $5 billion between 2022 and 2026 to make the switch.
The potential of V2G is that there are so many different kinds of electric vehicles (or vehicle types left to electrify). Garbage trucks run early in the day, while delivery trucks and city vehicles do more of a nine-to-five. Passenger vehicles are kind of all over the place, with some people taking them to work, while others sit in garages all day. Basically, lots of batteries — big and small — parked idle at different times to send power back to the grid.
All the while, fiercer heat waves will require more energy-hungry air conditioning to keep people healthy. (Though ideally, everyone would get a heat pump instead.) “We’re still going to need more generation, more power lines, but energy storage is going to give us the flexibility so we can deploy it quicker,” Schneider said. In the near future, you may get home on a sweltering day and still be able to switch on your AC — thanks to an electric school bus sitting in a lot.
The Department of Homeland Security is soliciting help from the U.S. private sector to run face recognition scans against drivers and passengers approaching the southern border, according to an agency document reviewed by The Intercept.
Despite the mixed track record and ongoing deficiencies of face recognition technology, DHS is hoping to devise a means of capturing the likenesses of travelers while vehicles are still in motion.
According to a “Request for Information” document distributed by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the government is looking for private sector assistance to run face recognition on drivers on passengers en route to the border before they even reach a checkpoint. “[DHS] Tech Scouting is seeking information on technology solutions that can capture biometric data (e.g., facial recognition) of occupants present in vehicles at speed as they approach land border checkpoints,” the document states. “Solutions of interest would have the ability to biometrically scan occupants without requiring them to exit the vehicle and provide checkpoint agents with information to determine if the occupants are a threat and if they may enter the United States.
The document does not elaborate on how such a system would be used to determine whether people in a car constitute a threat to the United States, though prior in-car face recognition pilot programs have checked if drivers had been previously arrested. Vendors that brief DHS on their offerings may be invited to participate in further testing, the document notes.
DHS and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.
Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and longtime researcher of border surveillance technologies, cautioned that face recognition can be deeply intrusive in personal privacy.
“We have already seen how automated license plate readers are able to create a massive surveillance dragnet of people’s vehicles and driving patterns,” Maass said. “If law enforcement is able to add face recognition capture from moving vehicles to the mix, they’ll be able to track not only where your vehicle is going, but who is driving it and who is in the car with you, adding a whole new dimension to the privacy invasion.”
Citing various acts of Congress, CBP says it has a legislative mandate to expand biometric identity checks across land, air, and sea. Anyone who has traveled through a major American airport in recent years has likely been confronted with face recognition cameras at security checkpoints or before boarding international flights — a process that can be opted out of, for now.
Since 2016, CBP has tested the use of face recognition cameras at border crossing to rapidly verify the identities of both drivers and passengers without requiring travelers to leave their cars. The program outsources to a computer the need for a human to compare the picture on a traveler’s ID to the face behind the wheel. In 2018, The Verge reported DHS added face recognition cameras to two lanes of the Anzalduas International Bridge that carries thousands of vehicles over the Rio Grande every day. In 2019, CBP officials told Politico that this program had ended; in 2021, it announced further limited tests of the systems at two lanes of the Anzalduas crossing.
Agency documents show that to date DHS has struggled to remotely identify drivers. A 2024 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General includes a section titled “CBP Does Not Have the Technology to Collect Biometrics from Travelers Arriving in Vehicles at Land Ports of Entry,” which notes the government has been “unable to identify a viable camera solution to reliably capture vehicle travelers’ facial images in real time.”
A 2022 DHS postmortem on the Anzalduas test obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a public records request and shared with The Intercept delivers a conflicting message. The 2022 document says that all “stated objectives were successfully met,” but concedes that drivers and passengers were photographed only about three-quarters of the time, and only about 80 percent of these images were usable — figures confirmed by the 2024 OIG report. This 80 percent figure was reached only after extensive tweaking to the test system. The postmortem document suggests remedying the lackluster capture rate in part by simply taking more photos: “CBP must significantly increase the number of occupants whose image is captured.”
“How many found themselves subjected to prolonged, yet unwarranted, secondary inspection?”
Both documents repeat what’s long been known about face recognition technology: It often goes wrong. This is doubly the case at outdoor border crossings, where faces must be captured from behind windshields, obscured by reflections, hats, sunglasses, shadows, weather, Covid masks, sun visors, and a litany of other realworld obstructions and distortions.
While the Anzalduas postmortem touts a 99 percent accuracy rate when matching drivers and passengers to their ID photos, the OIG’s report makes no such claim. The accuracy figures also lack context and demand answers from the government, said Maass. “The report repeatedly trumpets a 99.2% accuracy rate when officials had both quality probe images and an ID image to compare against, approximately 41,000 comparisons in a month. But this still means that more than 3,280 people that month (more than 100 people a day) experienced a face recognition error,” he explained. “What happened to those travelers? How many suffered a minor inconvenience and how many found themselves subjected to prolonged, yet unwarranted, secondary inspection? And was there any correlation between race and those errors? Those questions were either left unanswered or were hidden in the overly redacted document.”
As DHS reaches out to the surveillance industry for help, the 2022 postmortem document offers a cautionary tale. In 2019, Perceptics, which provides CBP with license plate-scanning technology used at these same checkpoints, was hacked, revealing that the company “removed unauthorized copies of traveler image personally identifiable information (PII) and copied this information to Perceptics’ corporate servers.” The document notes that CBP “performed an assessment of additional data protection and insider threat security controls that could be incorporated to prevent a future incident from occurring,” but doesn’t say which, if any, were implemented.
Also included in the hacked files were emails from Perceptics CEO John Dalton, who noted in a message to a lobbyist, “CBP has none of the privacy concerns at the border that all agencies have inland.”
It began as a devastating, confined storm off the coast of Sicily, striking the luxury yacht Bayesian in the form of a devastating water column resembling a tornado. Probability was inherent in the name (Thomas Bayes, mathematician and nonconformist theologian of the 18th century, had been the first to use probability inductively) and improbability the nature of the accident.
It also led to rich speculation about the fate of those on the doomed vessel. While most on the sunk yacht were saved (the eventual number totalled fifteen), a number of prominent figures initially went missing before being found. They included British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, along with Morgan Stanley International Bank chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo.
Lynch, co-founder of the British data analytics firm Autonomy and co-founder and investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace, had been recently acquitted by a US federal jury of fifteen counts of fraud and conspiracy, along with his co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain, regarding Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy in 2011. While the firm’s acquisition had cost a mighty US$11 billion, HP wrote off a stunning US$8.8 billion within 12 months, demanding an investigation into what it regarded as “serious accounting improprieties, disclosure failures and outright misrepresentations at Autonomy.” Clifford Chance was instructed by Lynch to act for him following the write down of Autonomy’s value in November 2012, hence Morvillo’s presence.
Lynch had his fair share of unwanted excitement. The US Department of Justice successfully secured his extradition, though failed to get a conviction. The investor proved less fortunate in a 2022 civil suit in the UK, one he lost.
For all his legal travails, Lynch stayed busy. He founded Invoke Capital, which became the largest investor in the cybersecurity firm Darktrace. Other companies featured in terms of funding targets for the company, among them Sophia Genetics, Featurespace and Luminance.
Darktrace, founded in 2013, has thrived in the thick soup of security establishment interests. British prime ministers have fallen within its orbit of influence, so much so that David Cameron accompanied its CEO Nicole Egan on an official visit to Washington DC in January 2015 ahead of the opening of the company’s US headquarters.
Members of the UK signals intelligence agency GCHQ are said to have approached Lynch, who proceeded to broker a meeting that proved most profitable in packing Darktrace with former members of the UK and, eventually, US intelligence community. The company boasts a veritable closet of former operatives on the books: MI5, MI6, CIA, the NSA, and FBI. Co-founder Stephen Huxter, a notable official in MI5’s cyber defence team, became Darktrace’s managing director.
Other connections are also of interest in sketching the extensive reach of the cyber industrial complex. This need not lend itself to a conspiratorial reading of power so much as the influence companies such as Darktrace wield in the field. Take Alexander Arbuthnot, yet another cut and dried establishment figure whose private equity firm Vitruvian Partners found Darktrace worthy of receiving a multi-million-pound investment as part of a push into cybersecurity.
Fascinating as this is, such matters gather steam and huff on looking at Arbuthnot’s family ties. Take Arbuthnot’s mother and Westminster chief magistrate, one Lady Emma Arbuthnot. The magistrate presided over part of the lengthily cruel and prolonged extradition proceedings of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks and hounded for alleged breaches of the US Espionage Act. (Assange recently pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917.) Any conflict of interest, actual or perceived, including her husband’s own links to the UK military community as former UK defence minister, were not declared during the legal circus. Establishment members tend to regard themselves as above reproach.
With such a tight tangle of links, it took another coincidence to send the amateur sleuths on a feverish digital trawl for sauce and conspiracy. On August 17, a few days prior to Lynch’s drowning, his co-defendant was struck while running in Cambridgeshire. Chamberlain died in hospital from his injuries, with the driver, a 49-year-old woman from Haddenham, assisting at the scene with inquiries.
Reddit and the platform X duly caught fire with theories on the alleged role of hidden corporate actors, disgruntled US justice officials robbed of their quarry, and links to the intelligence community. Chay Bowes, a blustery Irish businessman with an addiction to internet soapbox pontification, found himself obsessed with probabilities, wondering, “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive meet tragic ends within two days of each other in the most improbable ways?”
A better line of reflection is considering the influence and power such corporations exercise in the cyber military-industrial complex. In the realm of cyber policy, the line between public sector notions of security and defence, and the entrepreneurial pursuit of profit, have ceased to be meaningful. In a fundamental sense, Lynch was vital to that blurring, the innovator as semi-divine.
Darktrace became an apotheosis of that phenomenon, retaining influence in the market despite a scandal spotted record. It has, for instance, survived claims and investigations of sexual harassment. (One of those accused at the company was the most appropriately named Randy Cheek, a sales chief based in the San Francisco office.)
In 2023, its chief executive Poppy Gustafsson fended off a stinging report by the US-hedge fund Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) alleging questionable sales and accounting practices intended to drive up the value of the company before it was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2021. This sounded rather typical and seemed eerily reminiscent of the Autonomy affair. “After a careful analysis,” QCM reported, “we are deeply sceptical about the validity of Darktrace’s financial statements and fear that sales, margins and growth rates may be overstated and close to sharp correction.”
QCM’s efforts did no lasting damage. In April this year, it was revealed that Darktrace would be purchased by US private equity firm Thoma Bravo for the punchy sum of US$5.32 billion. The Darktrace board was bullish about the deal, telling investors that its “operating and financial achievements have not been reflected commensurately in its valuation, with shares trading at a significant discount to its global peer group”. If things sour on this one, Thoma Bravo will only have itself to blame, given the collapse of takeover talks it had with the company in 2022. Irrespective of any anticipated sketchiness, Lynch’s troubled legacy regarding data-driven technology and its relation to the state will remain.
If you’re considering purchasing a new gadget — whether that’s a laptop, a video game console, or a digital camera — you might expect to have access to whatever repair manuals or spare parts the manufacturer produces. But until recently, companies selling electronic devices in the U.S. were under no obligation to provide their customers with the parts or information needed to perform even simple repairs, like replacing a battery.
Last December, New York became the first state in the country to require that electronic device manufacturers make their repair materials available to the public, when the state’s digital “right-to-repair” law — the first such law in the country — went into effect. In July, similar laws in Minnesota and California became enforceable. Over the next two years, consumers in Oregon and Colorado will also be granted the legal right to repair a vast array of digital electronic devices.
Repair advocates say these laws are a critical step toward ending our culture of digital disposability, in which electronics are simply replaced when broken. Discarded gadgets are usually destined to become toxic e-waste, and manufacturing new ones drives environmentally destructive mining and generates carbon emissions and other pollution.
But these right-to-repair laws are brand new, and whether manufacturers across the wide range of affected industries will overhaul their repair practices overnight remains to be seen. Repair advocates are watching tech companies in these states closely, as are the state attorneys general tasked with enforcing the law.
Many manufacturers are still “ostrich head in the sand” when it comes to the right to repair, said Kyle Wiens, CEO of the repair guide site iFixit. “There’s lots of companies that have not thought about this,” Wiens added.
A recent report by the U.S. Public Research Interest Group, or PIRG, a leading advocate for the right to repair, underscores just how far apart different industries are in their repair journeys.
The report identified 21 devices covered by New York’s new right-to-repair law, which requires electronics makers to publicly release any proprietary parts, tools, and manuals needed to repair any devices first sold in the state on or after July 1, 2023. After the law went into effect, PIRG graded each of these devices based on the accessibility and quality of repair manuals, the number of spare parts the manufacturer offers, and the availability of commonly replaced parts like batteries.
A user wears a Meta Quest virtual reality headset at a technology show in Paris, France.
Chesnot / Getty Images
In general, the report found that smartphone makers provided the most comprehensive repair materials. Laptops, tablets, and gaming consoles were a mixed bag, while the digital cameras and VR headsets surveyed scored poorly. The authors were unable to access repair manuals for recent Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm, or Canon digital cameras, while Apple didn’t offer any manuals or spare parts for its new VR headset, the Apple Vision Pro. Meta’s new Meta Quest 3 VR headset also lacks a repair manual, and spare parts offerings are very limited, the report found.
Grist was unable to locate a press contact at Canon, and an email to the company’s investor relations department went unanswered. A representative of Fujifilm North America told Grist in an email that the company’s technical service team “will provide diagnosis verification and self-repair support consistent with applicable Right to Repair requirements.”Media representatives at Nikon, Apple, and Meta didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the report’s findings.
A representative of Sony Electronics told Grist that the company has published around 300 service manuals “and we are in the process of releasing more.” The representative shared a link to the service manual for the Alpha 6700 camera, which PIRG researchers were unable to locate through a web search when they evaluated the camera a few months ago. Report co-author Nathan Proctor told Grist that Sony’s customer service division suggested the researchers check YouTube or iFixit for repair information. That speaks to a broader problem, he said.
“Even companies that are complying, their customer service people … haven’t gotten the message,” Proctor told Grist. “To me that’s a very frustrating state of affairs.”
Proctor emphasized that the findings aren’t a definitive analysis of whether a product is or isn’t in compliance with the law, which contains “a bunch of loopholes,” he said. (Chief among those loopholes: If a company doesn’t offer any repair support to begin with, it’s under no legal obligation to start — in New York or any other state.) Rather, Proctor said, the intent was to show whether manufacturers are complying with the spirit of the law by taking steps to ensure everyone can fix the stuff they own.
Digital cameras and lenses are displayed in the Canon booth at a trade show in Yokohama, Japan.
Tomohiro Ohsumi / Getty Images
“The purpose of this is to kind of signal to manufacturers that someone is going to be paying attention,” Proctor said. “And that they should organize their plans for compliance.”
Preparing for a repairable future will only become more important as newer, and stronger, state laws enter force. The Minnesota and California right-to-repair laws that went into effect on July 1 cover devices going back to 2021. They also include some electronics that got a carveout in New York, such as e-bikes and, in Minnesota’s case, business computers. (However, both states’ laws exclude gaming consoles, which New York’s law covers.)
Meanwhile, right-to-repair laws passed in Oregon and Colorado earlier this year take effect in January 2025 and 2026, respectively. These laws close one big outstanding loophole: Both ban parts pairing, the practice of serializing parts and using software to sync them with specific devices during repair. While some companies, like Apple, claim that the practice is vital for ensuring security and optimal performance after a device is repaired, critics say parts pairing allows manufacturers to unfairly restrict which spare parts can be used to complete a repair job. For instance, in order for a replacement iPhone screen to function properly, the screen must be purchased from Apple and paired using the company’s proprietary software tools.
Apple lobbied against outlawing parts pairing in both Oregon and Colorado. Having lost that battle, the company is now taking steps to open up its parts pairing system, including allowing customers to pair used Apple parts with certain iPhone models. An Apple representative declined to say which iPhone models will be affected by the change, or whether the company plans to extend this less-restrictive pairing process to other devices, like MacBook laptops.
In addition to outlawing parts pairing, the Oregon law will retroactively apply to most electronic devices going back to 2015, the longest coverage period yet.
Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, a trade association representing repair businesses, said it was too early to tell which devices or companies might be out of compliance with the new laws. To answer that question, The Repair Association is in the process of collecting data from its members on numerous products they’re trying to fix and the challenges they’re facing. “We’re expecting there will be lots of holes, we just don’t have any information on where the holes are yet,” she said.
Once those holes are visible, advocates, repair workers, and the public can start pointing them out to state attorneys general, who can file suits against companies that are out of compliance with the law. None of the states with an active digital right-to-repair law has brought a public action against a company yet, but the offices of the attorneys general of California and Minnesota told Grist they are committed to enforcing the law. (The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment on the record.)
If a state determines that a company is in violation of its right-to-repair law, that company could face fines — ranging from $500 per violation in New York to $20,000 per violation in Minnesota.
Whether these penalties are substantial enough to convince tech companies worth trillions of dollars to course correct on repair remains to be seen. But both Gordon-Byrne and Wiens, of iFixit, see an even stronger incentive for companies to follow the law: The embarrassment of being forced to pay the public back for selling unfixable stuff.
“I think the public reputational risks are as significant as the fines,” Wiens said.
In Aurora, Colorado, in 2016 and then in Denver in 2019, police radio transmissions went silent. Many journalists, accustomed to using newsroom scanners for monitoring police radio communications to identify newsworthy events, found themselves suddenly disconnected from crucial updates on events jeopardizing public safety, impeding their ability to report promptly. “Like law enforcement…
The last few weeks have seen a spate of leading technology entrepreneurs, investors and other key figures publicly endorsing Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign to regain the presidency. Among them are elite representatives of PayPal, Tesla, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Palantir. Until rather recently, such a heel turn would have been considered anathema in Silicon Valley. In 2016 and 2020…
INVESTIGATIVE REPORT:By Aubrey Belford of the OCCRP
High in the forested mountains of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island lies an abandoned, kilometer-wide crater cut deep into the earth.
Formerly one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, the open pit now serves as an unsightly monument to the environmental and social chaos that underground riches can create.
Run for years by a subsidiary of Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto, the Panguna mine earned millions for Papua New Guinea (PNG) and helped bankroll its newfound independence. But it also poured waste into local waterways and fuelled anger among locals who felt robbed of the profits.
When an armed uprising ultimately shuttered the mine in 1989, the impoverished island was left reeling.
Nearly three decades later, in late 2022, human rights activists, the local government, and the mine’s former operators joined forces to produce a definitive assessment of the mine’s toxic legacy.
Their report, due to be released later this month, will become the basis for negotiations aimed at getting the mining companies to finally clean up the mess and compensate affected communities.
But its supporters now worry their efforts will be undermined by a class-action lawsuit launched in May against the mine’s erstwhile operators. The legal effort is being championed by former rebel leaders — and backed by anonymous offshore investors who stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars if it succeeds.
Worldwide litigation boom
The lawsuit is part of a worldwide boom in litigation financing that seeks to take multinational companies to task for ecological or social damage while potentially reaping a fortune for lawyers and funders.
Critics in Bougainville worry the lawsuit will reopen old wounds at a time when the island is making a push to break free of Papua New Guinea and become the world’s newest sovereign nation. Many Bougainvilleans are hoping to reopen the mine, using its wealth to fund their own independence this time around.
The region’s government and many local leaders believe the class action could put the mine’s revival at risk. There are also concerns the lawsuit would leave many Bougainvilleans empty handed, while the anonymous foreign investors would walk away with a significant share of the payout.
Unlike the official assessment, which seeks to identify everyone who needs to be compensated, the class action will only share its winnings — which could potentially be in the billions of dollars — with the locals who have signed on. Others will get nothing.
“There’s already fragmentation in the community and families are already divided,” said Theonila Roka Matbob, who represents the area around Panguna in the local Parliament and has helped lead the government-backed assessment process as a minister in the Autonomous Bougainville government.
She speaks from personal experience. The chief litigant in the class-action lawsuit, Martin Miriori, is her uncle. The two are no longer on speaking terms.
A losing deal Gouged from Bougainville’s lush volcanic heart, the Panguna mine in its heyday supplied as much as 45 percent of PNG’s export revenue, providing it with the financial means to achieve independence from Australia in 1975.
The windfall, however, did not extend to Bougainvilleans themselves. Ethnically and culturally distinct from the rest of PNG’s population, they saw Panguna as a symbol of external domination.
The mine delivered only a miserly 2-percent share of its profits to their island — along with years of environmental havoc.
Locals walk by buildings left abandoned by a subsidiary of Rio Tinto at the Panguna mine site. Image: OCCRP/Aubrey Belford
During the 17 years of Panguna’s operation — from 1972 to 1989 — over a billion metric tons of toxic mine waste and electric blue copper runoff flooded rivers that flowed downstream towards communities of subsistence farmers. The result was poisoned drinking water, infertile land, and children who were drowned or injured trying to cross engorged waterways.
In 1989, enraged Bougainville locals launched an armed rebellion against the PNG government. The mine was shut down, closing off a vital source of revenue for the national government in Port Moresby.
A brutal civil war raged on for nearly a decade, leaving more than 15,000 people dead, while a naval blockade by PNG’s military obliterated the island’s economy.
A peace deal in 2000 granted Bougainville substantial autonomy. But nearly a quarter-century later, the legacy of Panguna and the war it provoked is still deeply felt.
Few paved roads, bridges
There are few paved roads and bridges in the island’s interior. Residents earn a modest living through cocoa and coconut farming, or by unregulated artisanal mining in and around the abandoned Panguna crater.
Rivers polluted by years of runoff are still an otherworldly shade of milky blue.
At least 300,000 people are estimated to live on Bougainville, including as many as 15,000 who live downstream of the mine. Of those, some 4500 have joined Miriori — Roka’s estranged uncle and a tribal leader whose brother, Joseph Kabui, served as the first president of autonomous Bougainville — in seeking restitution through the class-action suit.
“We’ve got to make people happy,” Miriori said. “They’ve lost their land forever, environment forever. Their hunting grounds. Their spiritual, sacred grounds.”
Martin Miriori, the primary litigant in the class action lawsuit. Image: OCCRP/Aubrey Belford
‘Alert to opportunities’ Miriori took many by surprise when he became the public face of the suit filed in PNG’s National Court in May against Rio Tinto and its former local subsidiary, Bougainville Copper Limited.
While the tribal leader and former rebel is a well-known figure in Bougainville, the funders of the lawsuit are not. They have managed to keep their identities secret in part because the company behind the suit, Panguna Mine Action LLC, is registered on Nevis, a small Caribbean island that does not require companies to publicly disclose their shareholders and directors.
Miriori declined to comment on who was behind the company, saying, “I will not tell you where the funding is based … you can source that from our people down there [in Australia].”
James Sing, an Australian based in New York, is Panguna Mine Action’s chief public representative. He initially agreed to an interview, but later referred reporters back to a London-based public relations agency, Sans Frontières Associates.
The agency declined to reveal Panguna Mine Action’s investors.
Litigation funding documents obtained by OCCRP, however, shed some light on the history of the case. The documents show that Panguna Mine Action began to investigate the possibility of a class-action suit as early as July 2021.
The Bougainvillean claimants, led by Miriori, were formally brought into an agreement with the company and its Australian and PNG lawyers in November 2022. The suit was publicly announced this May.
Handsome profit
The lawsuit’s investors stand to profit handsomely from any eventual settlement: Panguna Mine Action is poised to receive a cut of 20 to 40 percent of any payout resulting from the suit, with the percentage increasing the longer the process takes, the funding documents show.
In interviews and statements, both Miriori and Panguna Mine Action have put the potential value of any award in the billions of dollars.
The lawsuit’s financiers defend their substantial share of the potential benefits as standard practice.
“The costs of launching and running the class action against a global miner are significant, and almost certainly could not be met from within Bougainville without funding from an external party,” the company said in its statement.
Panguna Mine Action added it would bear sole responsibility for costs if the lawsuit is unsuccessful.
According to Michael Russell, a Sydney-based class action defence lawyer, such funding arrangements are typical in the burgeoning world of litigation finance, where investors seek out cases that promote virtuous social causes while offering huge potential payoffs.
A similar case is unfolding in Latin America, where more than 720,000 Brazilians are seeking $46.5 billion as part of a gargantuan class action against mining giant BHP and its local subsidiary for their role in a 2015 dam collapse.
In such cases, funders can justify walking away with significant cuts of any winnings because of the substantial risk they face of losing their investment if a case fails, Russell said.
Such cases were rarely initiated at the grassroots level by the victims themselves, he added.
“Most of the time, either the plaintiff firms or the funders will be the catalyst for a claim,” he said. “They are very alert to opportunities.”
Rival restitution plans
Government officials including Miriori’s niece, Roka, say the class-action case, which is due to hold opening arguments in October, threatens to derail the ongoing impact assessment aimed at calculating the full cost of the mine’s environmental impact and developing recommendations for addressing the damage.
The assessment, which counts community members among its stakeholders and bills itself as an independent review, is supported by Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, which has hailed the project as “an important step” towards rectifying the mine’s devastating impact on thousands of Bougainvilleans.
However, while Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper are both funding the project, they have not yet committed to paying for any compensation or cleanup. Roka said she was concerned the lawsuit could reduce the company’s willingness to engage with the process, since it could view the assessment as a tool that could be used against them in the courtroom.
Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama backs the impact assessment and has lambasted the class action suit as the work of “faceless investors . . . taking advantage of vulnerable groups.” (His office did not respond to an interview request.)
He also expressed concern that the court proceedings threaten to “disrupt” his government’s efforts to reopen the mine, which still holds an estimated $60 billion in untapped deposits.
Bougainville’s leaders see the mine as key to securing the island’s economic future as it sets out to form an independent state — a dream that drew overwhelming public support in a 2019 referendum.
Exploration licence
Earlier this year Toroama’s government granted Bougainville Copper a five-year exploration licence for the Panguna site.
The lack of media and polling in Bougainville make it hard to measure public opinion on plans to reactivate the mine, but many locals appear to support reopening it under local control as an essential tool for achieving independence.
Bougainville Copper’s brand is still toxically associated with Rio Tinto and its past abuses, despite the fact that the international mining giant gave away its majority stake for no money in 2016.
The publicly traded company is now majority co-owned by the governments of PNG and Bougainville, and Port Moresby has pledged to hand over all its shares to the autonomous region in the near future.
Panguna Mine Action acknowledges that its effort could stand in the way of the mine’s reopening — but the company says that is a good thing.
“It is our understanding that the people of Bougainville do not wish mining to be recommenced under any circumstances or, alternatively, unless Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper acknowledge the past, pay compensation and remediate the rivers and surrounding valley,” the company said in a statement.
Rio Tinto declined to comment. Mel Togolo, the chairman of Bougainville Copper, told OCCRP that the lawsuit was the work of “a foreign funder who no doubt is seeking a return on an investment.”
View of the tailings located downstream of the Panguna mine. Image: OCCRP/Aubrey Belford
View of the tailings located downstream of the Panguna mine. Photo: OCCRP / Aubrey Belford
‘Only those who have signed will benefit’ The fight over Panguna adds even more uncertainty to long-running anxiety over Bougainville’s future.
With global copper prices soaring on high demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles, the Panguna mine would be an attractive prize for both Western mining companies and firms from China, which is dramatically expanding its influence in the South Pacific.
Since a future Bougainvillean state would be economically dependent on the mine’s revenue, some have raised concerns that control of the mine could become a proxy battle for geopolitical influence in the broader region.
For his part, Miriori expressed little concern that a multibillion-dollar payout might stir resentment by reaching only a fraction of the people affected by the mine’s environmental destruction.
“Only those who signed will benefit,” he said, adding that the opportunity was made “very clear to people” through awareness campaigns.
“Those who have not signed, it’s their freedom of choice.”
An aerial view of the abandoned Panguna mine pit. Image: OCCRP/Aubrey Belford
Among those who did not sign is Wendy Bowara, 48, who lives in Dapera, a bleak settlement built on a hill of mine waste. Bowara said she is looking to the government-backed assessment, not the lawsuit, to deliver compensation and clean up Panguna’s toxic legacy.
“We are living on top of chemicals,” she said. “Copper concentration is high. I don’t know if the food is good to eat or if it’s healthy to drink the water.”
But while it may seem odd given her grim surroundings, Borawa says she strongly supports reopening the mine.
“It funded the independence of Papua New Guinea,” Bowara said. “Why can’t we use it to fund our own independence?”
Allan Gioni contributed reporting.
Aubrey Belford is the Pacific editor for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting project (OCCRP). Republished with permission.
The war in Gaza has been good for the drone startup XTEND. Since October 7, the Tel Aviv company has pivoted to providing the Israeli military with cheap, nimble robot aircraft. This demand helped the company secure $40 million in new venture capital funding, bringing its total raised to $60 million. That money will go toward software refinements to better serve Israel’s Ministry of Defense, its co-founder and CEO Aviv Shapira touted in a press release.
Yet despite its venture capital bounty and recent military contracts, XTEND has also been asking for charity.
“Join Us in Supporting Israel’s Defense,” read the text on the Xtend-Support-Israel.com website, directly above a large “DONATE” button. All donations would be “used for the immediate production & deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines.” The site included a dazzling marketing montage of XTEND robots zooming across buildings, smashing through windows, and dropping what appears to be an explosive device from the air, “enabling soldiers to perform accurate maneuvers in complex combat scenarios.”
XTEND’s fundraising page — taken offline shortly after The Intercept raised questions about it — is one of several similar efforts soliciting charitable, tax-deductible donations to bolster Israeli national security.
U.S. law governing charitable contributions gives wide leeway to nonprofits operating overseas, though questions linger about directing such donations to fund combat.
XTEND did not respond to a request for comment and questions about its Israel Defense Forces fundraising campaign. The Israeli nonprofit AlmaLinks, which was listed on the site as participating in the fundraiser, told The Intercept that upon learning of the campaign it asked XTEND to take it down. A PayPal page for the fundraiser told American donors that tax-free contributions could be sent through the U.S.-based donor-advised fund FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds. FJC disavowed the campaign and said the drone startup was being instructed to cease and desist use of its name.
A drone flies overhead as Israeli forces operate in the Balata refugee camp, in the West Bank city of Nablus, on June 1, 2024.Photo: Majdi Mohammed/AP
XTEND’s drones are flexible, affordable, and outfitted with powerful cameras, making them excellent surveillance tools that can stand in for human soldiers in dangerous situations. Certain models come with a claw, allowing them to drop any manner of item — or weapon — from high above. This functionality has proven transformative in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Even for Israel’s armed forces, among the best-equipped in the world, drones like XTEND’s offer the powerful advantage of an off-the-shelf, somewhat disposable miniature air force.
“Boots on the ground testimonials” included on the site leave little ambiguity about their use. “The best thing to have is drones,” says one uniformed Israeli soldier, his face blurred, in a video set before a house he states was recently cleared of terrorists. “Drones can go inside, do the search, clear the house, put even an explosive, instead of us going in.”
“We have killed dozens of vile terrorists, but we continue to constantly discover more terrorists who are hiding in buildings,” say soldiers in another testimonial video, who explain XTEND’s products are preferable because their radio uplink is not as easily jammed.
In interviews and marketing materials, XTEND tends to argue its drones are a life-saving reconnaissance technology that permit soldiers to hang back from danger while robots lead the charge. But the company is very much in the business of offense too. In December, XTEND told the Wall Street Journal that the IDF is using its robots to “drop grenades” in Gaza. “We were the first drones to enter Be’erik, Faraza, and deal directly (indoors, outdoors, and face to face) with these terrorists,” Shapira explained to the Israeli business publication Calcalist last year. “We learned so much from that.”
Israel’s war on Gaza has been integral to XTEND’s current success and its future, according to local business press reporting. Since the conflict erupted, the company has deepened its ties with the Israeli military. An article in Calcalist announcing the $40 million deal noted that, since the war’s start, “the company has shifted its entire focus in developing systems for the IDF. This new focus has led the company to a decision to upgrade its activity in the military sector.” In the May 10 press release announcing its latest venture capital round, Shapira — depicted in an attached photo dressed as a character from “The Matrix” — explained how the company’s new funds would help refine its drones’ software in part to better serve “Israel’s Ministry of Defense tier-1 units.”
So-called quadcopter drones similar to those manufactured by XTEND have been implicated in a litany of gruesome civilian deaths and injuries. A June 4 report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor described how the IDF has “ramped up” its use of small quadcopters to drop explosives and fire mounted rifles at Palestinians in Gaza.
One Palestinian who spoke to the organization recounted the killing of his cousin: “We were approached by a quadcopter as we went by a side street. I warned him to run and hide as soon as I saw it, but it is likely that his poor hearing prevented him from hearing my call. I told him to hide, as I was doing, when all of a sudden I heard an explosion. When I heard Ibrahim calling, I told him to stay [put] to the right until assistance arrived. I saw him being targeted by a quadcopter bomb.”
An Israeli drone drops tear gas canisters during clashes following a demonstration near the border in Malaka, east of Gaza City, on March 30, 2023.Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via AP
On the webpage soliciting donations for its drones, XTEND listed AlmaLinks, a nonprofit network headquartered in Tel Aviv that connects business leaders with a focus on Jewish and Israeli communities, as the organization that would process donations.
“All donations will be used for the immediate production and deployment of life saving systems for our IDF troops on the frontlines,” the site read. “All donations are kindly processed through the ALMA LINKS non-profit organization. www.almalinks.org We kindly request that you fill out the information here and at the dedicated donation page for tracking purposes.”
Shapira, XTEND’s CEO, is listed on AlmaLink’s website as a member of its board of trustees. AlmaLinks told The Intercept it had no knowledge of XTEND’s fundraiser and that Shapira does not serve in a decision-making role.
“We were not aware of the XTEND website asking for funds in our name, and as soon as we became aware of it we asked them to take it down,” a spokesperson for AlmaLinks said.
Shapira “is on a purely advisory board of trustees that includes many people and does not have authority to make decisions,” the spokesperson said.
The fiscal sponsor for AlmaLinks is FJC: A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds, a nonprofit donor-advised fund based in New York. Founded in 1995, FJC manages over $300 million in assets and has provided over $400 million in philanthropic grants around the world, according to its website. FJC accepts tax-deductible donations on behalf of AlmaLinks, which then passes the money onward to recipients such as XTEND. Because contributions to foreign nonprofits like AlmaLinks are not tax-deductible, a donation to the American fiscal sponsor FJC would allow donors to benefit from U.S. tax laws.
Potential American donors who came across the online fundraiser were directed to a PayPal page bearing a checkmark icon confirming FJC is the recipient of the funds, and noting any contributions would be earmarked for XTEND.
In response to an inquiry from The Intercept about its role in the fundraiser, FJC CEO Sam Marks disavowed the campaign. “FJC has no relationship with XTEND, and that company is not authorized to use FJC’s 501(c)(3) tax exempt status to fundraise for any campaign,” Marks explained in an emailed statement. “They are being instructed to cease and desist any fundraising campaign using FJC’s name.”
Soon after this exchange, the PayPal page was taken down. Marks did not respond when asked if the PayPal page had been set up without FJC’s knowledge, when FJC became aware of the fundraising campaign, or how much money had been raised to date.
XTEND did not respond to questions about whether it organized the fundraiser without the advance knowledge of AlmaLinks and FJC, and about Shapira’s role on AlmaLinks’ board of trustees.
Diala Shamas, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, questioned whether it was appropriate for a nonprofit to use charitable donations to support a war effort, particularly one that has killed tens of thousands of civilians.
“I’m aware of reports of quadcopters being involved in crimes in Gaza. There is nothing charitable about that,” said Shamas, whose nonprofit legal advocacy group is working on a New York bill to restrict tax-deductible donations to illegal Israeli settlements. “I can’t see this fitting in the New York law definition of charitable purpose, not the IRS definition of charitable purpose.”
Another issue is whether those efforts are supplying equipment being used in violation of international law, Shamas added. “Setting aside the question of charitability all together, there are serious questions of complicity in war crimes here. Even if it weren’t a nonprofit, even if it were just a traditional company, there would be serious legal risks here.”
Legal experts have long warned that charitable contributions cannot be used to support combat, an issue that came up at the height of the war in Ukraine. Charities funding combat against Russia’s invasion faced less scrutiny because of widespread political support for Ukraine, attorney Daniel Kurtz told the Associated Press last year. “You can’t support war fighting, can’t support killing people, even if it’s killing the bad guys,” he said at the time. “It’s not consistent with the law of charity.”
Henry Dale, director of New York University law school’s National Center on Philanthropy and the Law, said that U.S. tax code — and an extreme lack of oversight by the Internal Revenue Service — affords a great deal of latitude to efforts like those of XTEND. Even though XTEND’s fundraising page made clear that the money was for drones, specifically its “Human Extension Platforms” that aid soldiers in combat, the fact that donated funds were advertised as being directed to FJC, whose PayPal site did not mention drones, likely legally insulates the campaign overall, Dale said.
Though the IRS has the ability to strip organizations of their tax-exempt status for engaging in efforts contrary to public policy, “the edges of that doctrine are completely unclear,” Dale said.
Lawmakers and nonprofits experts have long criticized the network of U.S. nonprofits that funnel millions of tax-deductible dollars to settlements in the West Bank that the international community recognizes as illegal. Those concerns have come back with new urgency amid the surge of U.S. fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces during Israel’s war on Gaza.
Pending legislation in New York targets nonprofits that facilitate such donations by making it easier to sue the groups for civil penalties. Lawmakers expanded and reintroduced the “Not on Our Dime” bill in May to include charities in New York fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces amid Israel’s destruction in Gaza. The role of any nonprofit taking part in the XTEND fundraising operation is the kind of activity the legislation seeks to target, said Shamas of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of the campaign backing the bill. FJC’s work includes fundraising for a number of groups that responded to aid Israel after the October 7 attacks, including Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. As recently as 2021, the group has also directed contributions to the Jewish National Fund, which has long financed activity in Israeli settlements.
New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who introduced the bill, said the measure would allow the state attorney general to fine groups funding the genocide, including FJC.
“The purpose of tax breaks is to encourage charitable activity: feeding the poor, clothing the needy, and funding the arts — not to support war crimes and genocide,” said Mamdani. “Funding Israeli war crimes is inconsistent with a charitable purpose.”
XTEND’s fundraiser is just one of many ongoing drone crowdfunding efforts pegged to the war, a review by The Intercept found.
The Israeli Resilience Association, which describes itself as “a group of experienced professionals, and officers from the IDF Special Forces, Secret Service (Shin Bet), and the special forces of the Israeli Police,” has to date raised over $287,000 to send small hobbyist drones into Gaza. Noting that the “current crisis in Israel has put every community throughout Judea and Samaria on high alert,” the One Israel Fund, meanwhile, has raised over $160,000 to furnish illegal settlements in the West Bank with surveillance drones “in cooperation with the regional and local security personnel.”
Even without the legislation, genocide is illegal under international law, Mamdani added. “Fundraising for IDF units carrying out what has been called a plausible genocide in federal and international courts should merit inquiry. Advocating to end tax deductions for these crimes is to call for the bare minimum.”
Media publisher NZME has come under fire for admitting it used artificial intelligence to create editorials that ran in the Weekend Herald and other publications, with a media commentator saying it “can only damage trust”.
A statement from NZME editor-in-chief Murray Kirkness said AI was used in a way that fell short of its standards and “more journalistic rigour would have been beneficial”.
NZME’s standards don’t mandate disclosure but do say stories should be attributed to “the author and/or the creator/provider of the material” in accordance with the company’s Code of Ethics.
A co-author of the annual AUT Trust in News report, Dr Greg Treadwell, told Midday Report it was a poor experiment in AI use.
“I think New Zealanders have to be realistic about the fact AI is going to work its way into the production of news, but I think the Herald has kind of admitted this was a pretty poor experiment in it for a number of reasons, I think.”
Treadwell said the role of the editorial in any major news publication was to be an opinion leader.
‘Not world-shattering’
“I don’t know how many of your readers have actually gone back to have a look at the editorial that the Herald published, but it was sort of a generalist round-up of the arguments for and against Reiko Ioane at centre in the All Blacks back line — not a world-shattering issue, but a really good example of how AI doesn’t really, can’t really do what an editorial should do, which is to take a position on something.
“If you ask it to take a position, it will, and if you ask it to take another position, it will take that position.
“What is lacking here, even if you ask [AI] to take positions, is the original argument we would look to our senior journalists to put into the public domain for us about important issues.”
The editorial in the Weekend Herald on 20 July 2024. Image: Weekend Herald/NZME/RNZ
Public trust in the media was falling and media companies needed to reassure the public it could be trusted, he said.
“When the public hears that AI is being used in places — and perhaps most importantly here is that it wasn’t acknowledged that was being used to create this editorial — then that can only damage trust.
“I think there’s a lot of issues here including that AI can be incredibly useful for data analysis and other things in journalism, but we just have to be incredibly transparent about how we’re using it.”
‘Another world first’
Former Herald editor-in-chief and prominent media commentator Tim Murphy joked on social media the editorial may “have achieved another world first for NZ”.
On the upside, this has got to have achieved another world first for NZ https://t.co/e6UvHMRwXg
The revelation was also panned by some competitor publications, with the National Business Review’s official X account noting that “NBR journalists are intelligent. Not artificial.”
RNZ also approached New Zealand Rugby to ask their thoughts on NZME using AI to analyse the All Black team selection.
In a statement, NZR said it recognised the need for media organisations to have well-established editorial policies and standards.
“These ensure high quality sports journalism and play an important role in telling rugby’s stories.
“NZR is satisfied that the New Zealand Herald has made the appropriate steps to amend the story in question.”
“The Herald and other NZME publications use AI to improve our journalism. In some cases, we also create stories entirely using AI tools,” says an explanatory article headlined NZME, NZ Herald and our use of AI.
“We believe that smart use of AI allows us to publish better journalism. We remain committed to our Code of Ethics and to the integrity of our journalism, regardless of whether or not we use AI tools to help with the production or processing of articles.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Tuvalu has added its voice to the growing tide in the Pacific against deep sea mining, highlighting the momentum against this destructive industry, says Greenpeace.
The Tuvalu government’s call for a precautionary pause on deep sea mining took place at the 29th session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica.
Greenpeace head of Pacific Shiva Gounden congratulated the government of Tuvalu over its “commitment to protecting our oceans”.
“Tuvalu joins a growing chorus of Pacific nations calling for a ban on deep sea mining to safeguard our Moana, which gives and sustains life for millions of people across the Pacific and around the world,” he said in a statement.
“This announcement is courageous and historic, as the proud island nation of Tuvalu again shows global leadership on ocean protection just like they have on climate protection, something we Pacific people see as deeply interconnected.
“The momentum growing against the destructive deep sea mining industry is undeniable.
“For too long, profit-hungry corporations have plundered and exploited the ocean and high seas at the expense of the communities who depend on them, and whose lives and cultures are intrinsically linked with our oceans.”
Pacific says ‘no more’
Gounden said the message was loud and clear — “Pacific Island nations say, no more”.
Tuvalu’s announcement follows statements from the Pacific nations of Vanuatu and Palau at the ISA, with both governments supporting a pause on deep sea mining to protect the oceans for generations to come.
A total of 31 countries, including the UK and Germany, have committed to a moratorium.
Greenpeace Aotearoa spokesperson Juressa Lee (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Rarotonga) welcomed the decisions by Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Palau.
“Pacific peoples are standing up and saying no to deep sea mining. Deep sea mining will do nothing to benefit the people of the Moana but will instead exacerbate the climate and biodiversity crises,” she said.
“Extractivism is just continued colonisation of our heritage lands and waters, livelihoods and ways we see the world, and deep sea mining is no different.
“The intrinsic links to the Moana that Pacific Peoples speak about is valuable matauranga.
“There is so much in Pacific knowledge and culture that can teach us how to live connected to the ocean while also taking care of it.
“After hundreds of years of extraction causing climate disaster and biodiversity loss, governments are now resisting and turning toward Indigenous leadership and today we’ve seen some in the Pacific leading the way.”
Vanuatu has taken a leading role in a bloc of nations fighting to keep marine environment protection on the main agenda of the UN organisation responsible for developing global regulations for seabed mining.
The assembly of the Kingston-based International Seabed Authority is meeting this week with a packed programme, including a vote to pick the next secretary-general who could significantly influence the environmental constraints set on mining.
Deep-sea mineral extraction has been particularly contentious in the Pacific, where some economically lagging island nations see it as a possible financial windfall and solution to their fiscal challenges but many other island states are strongly opposed.
Vanuatu Minister of Climate Change Ralph Regenvanu, at the ISA meeting of the 168 member nations plus the European Union, said an environmental policy was “critical” because it’s likely the body will receive an application to approve commercial seabed mining by the end of this year.
“When you make deliberations in the coming days, please think beyond your national boundaries and think as custodians of our ocean and of the real threat mining the seabed poses for the Pacific region,” Regenvanu said in remarks he explicitly directed at the Pacific island nations which favour deepsea mining.
“Financial exploitation of our ocean may be beneficial for the next decade for our nations, but it could be devastating for the future generations,” he said.
Mining of the golf ball-sized metallic nodules that litter swathes of the sea bed is touted as a source of the rare-earth minerals needed for green technologies, like electric vehicles, as the world reduces reliance on fossil fuels.
Irreparable damage
Sceptics say such minerals are already abundant on land and warn that mining the sea bed could cause irreparable damage to an environment that is still poorly understood by science.
Deep-sea mining opponents have been pushing for the ISA to prioritize protection of the marine environment at the full assembly rather than keep discussion of the issue within its smaller policy-setting council.
Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu speaks during a plenary session at the COP28 UN Climate Summit in the United Arab Emirates in December 2023. Image: Kamran Jebreili/BenarNews
Some see such a policy as the prerequisite for an international moratorium on deep-sea mining in the vast ocean areas outside national boundaries that fall under the ISA’s jurisdiction.
Along with Vanuatu, several nations including Spain, Chile and Canada expressed backing for the assembly to begin discussion of an environmental policy.
China, a powerful voice at the ISA, reiterated its reservations because of the packed agenda, but said it was willing to be flexible. Saudi Arabia was among the nations that criticised the proposal sponsored by Vanuatu and seven other nations but did not formally object.
The assembly is also expected to vote on candidates for the ISA’s secretary-general. The long serving incumbent Michael Lodge has been criticized by organizations such as Greenpeace, who say he has taken the part of deep-sea mining companies rather than being a neutral technocrat.
The British lawyer’s candidacy is sponsored by the pro-mining Pacific nation of Kiribati against Brazil’s Leticia Carvalho, an oceanographer and former oil industry regulator of the South American nation, who has also been critical of his leadership.
Vanuatu also made its mark at the assembly by blocking two organisations linked to deep-sea mining companies from gaining NGO observer status at the ISA.
Regenvanu told the assembly that one of the organisations was made up of subsidiaries of The Metals Company, which has been testing its equipment for hoovering up the metallic nodules from the ocean floor.
The Metals Company is working with the Pacific island nations of Nauru, Kiribati and Tonga to possibly exploit their licence areas in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The 4.5 million square kilometer area in the central Pacific is regulated by the ISA and contains trillions of polymetallic nodules at depths of up to 5.5 km.
Nauru in June 2021 notified the seabed authority of its intention to begin mining, which started the clock on a two-year period for the authority’s member nations to finalise regulations.
International Seabed Authority Secretary-General Michael Lodge (right) at the ISA’s 29th assembly in Kingston, Jamaica this week. Image: Stephen Wright/BenarNews
The Cook Islands, meanwhile, is allowing nodule exploration by other companies in its own waters and does not need ISA approval to mine in them.
Sonny Williams, Assistant Minister to the Cook Islands Prime Minister, told the assembly that his country is proceeding with caution to ensure both conservation and sustainable use of marine resources.
“Deep seabed minerals hold immense potential for our prosperity,” he said. “To unlock and develop this potential we must do so responsibly and sustainably, prioritising the long-term wellbeing of our people.”
Greenpeace deep-sea mining campaigner Louisa Casson said the ISA assembly would not complete the complicated process of agreeing on deep-sea mining rules at its current meeting.
Non-governmental organisations and governments that want to take a cautious approach to deep sea mining are hoping the assembly meeting will make incremental progress toward achieving a moratorium on mining, she told BenarNews.
The “IT For IDF” conference in Rishon LeZion, just south of Tel Aviv, brought together tech firms from across the world to support the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and beyond.
Many of the assembled companies are not household names in the United States, but several multinational firms — like Nokia, Dell, and Canon — were present at July 10 event.
The mission they had gathered to support was clear. Onstage, a brigadier general with the Israeli military gave a presentation that connected the Nakba, the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, the current war on Gaza, and more wars in the decades to come. His call to action splashed across the big screen: “Each generation and its own turn — this is our watch!”
One company, however, was conspicuously absent: Google.
For the last two years, Google had been a marquee sponsor of IT For IDF — the company is a natural partner for the event, given Google Cloud’s foundational role in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract aimed at modernizing cloud computing operations across Israeli government that it shares with Amazon.
This year was supposed to be no different and, until just days before the conference started, a Google Cloud logo was displayed alongside other sponsors on the IT For IDF website. Then Google abruptly vanished from the site without explanation.
When asked by a news outlet about the logo’s disappearance, the conference organizers claimed they weren’t aware Google had been on their website and suggested its inclusion was an error. “It’s possible that we used their logo by mistake but they are not a sponsor,” a spokesperson told 404 Media, “as far as I know.”
Google’s own corporate schedule, reviewed by The Intercept, seems to contradict this statement. The document includes upcoming Google events in Israel, and IT For IDF 2024 is on the list. On this internal schedule, Google is explicitly labeled as a co-sponsor of the conference in partnership with CloudEx, an Israeli cloud computing consultancy.
CloudEx CEO Ariel Munafo moonlights as an adviser to the IDF’s Center of Computers and Information Systems, known as Mamram, where he is helping other IDF units build out their cloud computing operations, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The apparent about-face on Google’s sponsorship of IT For IDF is just one recent example of companies seeking to distance themselves from Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians. Though much business has gone on as usual amid the destruction, some companies have, at various times, and to various extents, shifted their business plans in Israel.
Google continues to work with the IDF, as it has for years on the Nimbus contract. The company’s odd vanishing act from a conference focused on a lucrative customer relationship stands as one of the most high-profile examples of what appears to be PR anxiety.
The tech giant has shown some squeamishness over some of Nimbus’s objectives in the past. The project has drawn international criticism and prompted a dissent campaign among Google employees, over 50 of whom were fired in April for protesting the contract. The Israeli government emphasizes Nimbus’s military dimensions, but Google has persistently tried to downplay or outright deny that its contract for Israel includes military work.
Close-up of an official photo from the IT For IDF event showing the painted-over sponsor display.Photo: IT For IDF
Official event photos posted to a public album and reviewed by The Intercept suggest that Google’s connection to the IDF networking event was literally whitewashed before it began. Official photos of a step-and-repeat backdrop for the conference contains all the event’s original sponsors’ logos, sans Google — and includes one square that appears to have been hastily painted over. Neither Google nor People and Computers, the conference’s organizer, responded when asked whose logo was underneath the paint.
The logo of Cisco, which claimed to 404 Media that it was “not a sponsor of this conference,” remained on display.
Even without a presence at the conference, Google loomed over an event dedicated to the prosecution of a war from which it has struggled to distance itself.
One of the event’s big draws was a presentation by Col. Racheli Dembinski of Mamram, on the Israeli military’s use of cloud platforms during the war in Gaza, during which she highlighted the role of Google Cloud, according to Israeli press.
A later talk presented by the “technology lead for Google Cloud Platform and CloudEx” noted that CloudEx’s partnership with Google entailed “working closely on several production cloud-hosted projects” with the Ministry of Defense.
Commit, another cloud computing reseller that was recently named “2024 Google Cloud Sales Partner of the Year for Israel” for its work implementing Project Nimbus, took to the stage to hawk its battlefield management software.
Google’s insistence that Project Nimbus is peaceful in nature is at odds with the public record. Nimbus training materials published by The Intercept in 2022 cited the Ministry of Defense as a customer. Recent reporting by Wired detailed the project’s connection to the IDF since its inception. When it was announced in 2021, Project Nimbus was touted by the Israeli Finance Ministry as serving the “defense establishment.”
In May, journalist Jack Poulson reported on Google’s long-running collaboration with IDF information technology units like Mamram, noting an intensification in such work since October 7.
Despite all this, Google has routinely refused to discuss the Nimbus work or its humanitarian implications with the press. The company generally responding to inquiries about the project or criticism of its military nature with a boilerplate statement that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
The Intercept revealed in May that Nimbus requires two prominent Israeli weapons manufacturers, Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, to use Google and Amazon cloud computing services in their work.
The messaging app Signal is described by security professionals as utilizing the gold standard of cryptography. Unlike many competitors, its default is end-to-end encryption — and on top of that, the app minimizes the amount of information it stores about users. This makes it a powerful communication tool for those seeking a private and secure means of chatting, whether it’s journalists and their sources, activists and human rights defenders, or just ordinary people who want to evade the rampant data-mining of Big Tech platforms.
Signal continues to introduce privacy-enhancing features such as usernames that can be used in lieu of phone numbers to chat with others — preventing others from finding you by searching for your phone number. But the app still requires users to provide a working phone number to be able to sign up in the first place.
For privacy-conscious individuals, this can be a problem.
In response to subpoena requests, Signal can reveal phone numbers. Relying on phone numbers has also led to security and account takeover incidents. Not to mention that the phone number requirement costs Signal more than $6 million annually to implement.
Signal insists on its site that phone numbers are a requirement for contact discovery and to stymie spam. (Signal did not respond to a request for comment). Other encrypted messaging platforms such as Session and Wire do not require phone numbers.
There are someways around Signal’s phone number policy that involve obtaining a secondary number, such as using temporary SIM cards, virtual eSIMs, or virtual numbers. But these approaches involve jumping through hoops to set up anonymous payment measures to procure the secondary numbers. And sometimes they don’t work at all (that was my experience when I tried using a Google Voice number to sign up for Signal).
I wanted a way to get a Signal account without leaving any sort of payment trail — a free and anonymous alternative. And thus began my long and tedious journey of registering Signal with a pay phone.
Finding a Pay Phone
The first step was actually finding a pay phone, a task which is dismally daunting in 2024.
The Payphone Project lists around 750,000 pay phones, but after attempting to cross-check a sampling of the hundreds of alleged pay phones in my town with Google Street View and Google Earth satellite images, I came to the quick realization that the list was woefully outdated. Many of these phones no longer exist.
A Google Maps search for pay phones in my area brought up of a half-dozen pins. Using Street View, I found that four locations seemed to have something resembling a pay phone box. Trekking out to them, however, revealed that one no longer had a pay phone, though discoloration of the store façade revealed the precise spot the pay phone used to be; another pay phone looked like it had been the victim of a half-hearted arson attack; the third and fourth lacked dial tones.
Asking on a community subreddit resulted in suggestions that once again led me to places without any working pay phones, or posts berating me for needing a pay phone in 2024 and inquiring about the legality of the endeavors I wished to pursue which would necessitate pay phone usage.
Failing at finding a functional pay phone through a systemic approach, I resorted to brute opportunism — keeping my eyes peeled for pay phones as I went through the dull drudgery of a modern life made ever bleaker by the lack of public phone access.
A Working Pay Phone, That Is
I didn’t just need to find a working pay phone — no small feat in 2024. I also needed to find one able to receive incoming calls, so I could get Signal’s activation message.
On a recent visit to Tampa, where I travel annually to discuss security matters and set things on fire, I spotted a pay phone while leaving Busch Gardens. Picking up the receiver, I was delighted to hear the telephonic equivalent of a pulse: a dial tone.
Now that I had a phone with a dial tone, the next step was to test whether it could receive incoming calls. This is because Signal’s registration process requires a phone number that can either receive a text message or a verification call.
To test whether a pay phone can receive incoming calls, you need to know one thing: the pay phone’s own phone number. Some pay phones reveal their numbers on the phones themselves, but not always.
If the number isn’t listed on the phone — it wasn’t in this case — there’s a workaround that doesn’t involve a paper trail leading back to your cellphone. Use the pay phone to call what’s known as an ANAC (automatic number announcement circuit), which provides an ANI (automatic number identification) service. In other words, it’s a phone number you can call which then reads out the phone number you are calling from. Lists of ANAC numbers have been bantered about for years, though like pay phone lists, almost all are now defunct.
One stalwart ANAC number that has withstood the test of time for over 30 years, however, is 1-800-444-4444. Feel free to try it. Call the number, and it should read yours back to you.
Back at Busch Gardens, I rang up the ANAC and had a number read back to me. The next and final step was to test whether the number actually accepted incoming calls. Unfortunately, when I called the number the ANAC line had read back to me, I reached the Busch Gardens main line, asking me to enter my party’s extension. In other words, this wasn’t actually the pay phone’s number, it was just the general theme park number.
Days later, during a layover on my trip home from Tampa, I noticed a small bay of pay phones at a small regional airport. I repeated the above rigamarole, and lo and behold, when I called the pay phone’s number from the neighboring pay phone, I was able to answer and talk to myself. Finally, success.
I took out a burner phone on which I wanted to set up Signal, which had no SIM or eSIM of any kind, and proceeded to enter the pay phone’s phone number when setting up Signal. Signal first insists on attempting to send a verification code via an SMS text message, so you have to initially go through that fruitless route. But after a few minutes, you can then select the option to receive the verification code via a voice call.
Moments later, the pay phone rang, and I was finally able to set up a Signal account.
The next and final step was to set up a PIN and enable a registration lock so that someone else wouldn’t be able to take over the account by going to the same pay phone and registering their own version of Signal with that same number. The registration lock expires after a week of inactivity, so you also have to keep using the Signal account. It took a while, owing to Signal’s onerous registration requirements coupled with the increasing lack of public phone access, but in the end I proved there is a way to use Signal with an untraceable phone number.
A Step-by-Step Guide
Obtain a phone. It doesn’t need to have an active phone number associated with it, and can be either an old phone you have around or a dedicated burner phone.
Locate a pay phone.
Find the pay phone’s phone number (call 1-800-444-4444 if it’s not written on the phone).
Make sure the pay phone can receive incoming calls.
Enter the pay phone number into Signal, and use the ‘Call me’ option to receive a verification call (this option shows up only after the SMS timer runs out).
Input the confirmation code, set up a PIN and enable Registration Lock in the Signal app.
Australia has announced more than A$68 million over the next five years to strengthen and expand Australian broadcasting and media sector engagement across the Indo-Pacific.
As part of the Indo-Pacific broadcasting strategy, the ABC will receive just over $40m to increase its content for and about the Pacific, expand Radio Australia’s FM transmission footprint across the region and enhance its media and training activities.
And the PacificAus TV programme will receive over $28 million to provide commercial Australian content free of charge to broadcasters in the Pacific.
The strategy provides a framework to help foster a vibrant and independent media sector, counter misinformation, present modern multicultural Australia, and support deeper people-to-people engagement.
It focuses on three key areas, including:
supporting the creation and distribution of compelling Australian content that engages audiences and demonstrates Australia’s commitment to the region;
enhancing access in the region to trusted sources of media, including news and current affairs, strengthening regional media capacity and capability; and
boosting connections between Australian-based and Indo-Pacific media and content creators.
Crucial role
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said media plays a crucial role in elevating the voices and perspectives of the region and strengthening democracy.
Wong said the Australia government was committed to supporting viable, resilient and independent media in the region.
Minister for International Development and the Pacific Pat Conroy said Australia and the Pacific shared close cultural and people-to-people links, and an enduring love of sport.
“These connections will be further enriched by the boost in Australian content, allowing us to watch, read, and listen to shared stories across the region — from rugby to news and music.
Conroy said Australia would continue and expand support for media development, including through the new phase of the Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) and future opportunities through the Australia-Pacific Media and Broadcasting Partnership.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said a healthy Fourth Estate was imperative in the era of digital transformation and misinformation.
“This strategy continues Australia’s longstanding commitment to supporting a robust media sector in our region,” she said.
“By leveraging Australia’s strengths, we can partner with the region to boost media connections, and foster a diverse and sustainable media landscape.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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SiegedSec, a collective of self-proclaimed “gay furry hackers,” has claimed credit for breaching online databases of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that spearheaded the rightwing Project 2025 playbook. On Wednesday, as part of string of hacks aimed at organizations that oppose trans rights, SiegedSec released a cache of Heritage Foundation material.
In a post to Telegram announcing the hack, SiegedSec called Project 2025 “an authoritarian Christian nationalist plan to reform the United States government.” The attack was part of the group’s #OpTransRights campaign, which recently targeted rightwing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch, and a Minnesota pastor.
In his foreword to the Project 2025 manifesto, the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, rails against “the toxic normalization of transgenderism” and “the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” The playbook’s other contributors call on “the next conservative administration” to roll back certain policies, including allowing trans people to serve in the military.
“We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for,” one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle vio, told The Intercept.
In its Telegram post, SiegedSec said it obtained passwords and other user information for “every user” of a Heritage Foundation database, including Roberts and some U.S. government employees. The remainder of more than 200GB of files the hackers obtained were “mostly useless,” SiegedSec said.
The Intercept reviewed copies of files provided to the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets. They included an archive of the Heritage Foundation’s blogs and a Heritage-aligned media site, The Daily Signal, as of November 2022.
This is at least the second hack against the Heritage Foundation this year. In April, Heritage shut down its network following a cyberattack tentatively attributed to nation-state hackers. SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation in early June, according to vio, who denied involvement in the earlier attack.
A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation declined to comment on the breach.
SiegedSec’s other recent operations have targeted NATO and Israeli companies to oppose the war in Gaza.
In the courtroom, the New York Times has taken a hard line against OpenAI. The newspaper sued the artificial intelligence startup alongside investor and partner Microsoft, alleging that OpenAI scraped articles without permission or compensation. The Times wants to hold OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for billions of dollars in damages.
At the same time, however, the Times is also embracing OpenAI’s generative AI technology.
The Times wants to hold OpenAI and Microsoft responsible for billions of dollars in damages.
The Times’s use of the technology came to light thanks to leaked code showing that it developed a tool that would use OpenAI to generate headlines for articles and “help apply The New York Times styleguide” — performing functions that, if applied in the newsroom, are normally undertaken by editors at the newspaper.
“The project you’re referring to was a very early experiment by our engineering team designed to understand generative A.I. and its potential use cases,” Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told The Intercept. “In this case, the experiment was not taken beyond testing, and was not used by the newsroom. We continue to experiment with potential applications of A.I. for the benefit of our journalists and audience.”
Media outlets are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence — using large language models, which learn from ingesting text to then generate language — to handle various tasks. AI can be employed, for example, to sort through large data sets.
More public-facing uses of AI have sometimes resulted in embarrassment. Sports Illustrated deleted posts on its site after its readers exposed that some of its authors were AI-generated. The British tabloid Daily Mail posted an AI article taking a Saturday Night Live satire for real news.
Some newsroom applications for AI are furtive, but in some cases, outlets publicize their AI work. Newsweek, for instance, announced an expansive, if nebulous, embrace of AI.
Like other outlets, the Times has not been shy about its use of AI. The website for the paper’s Research and Development team says, “Artificial Intelligence and journalism intersect in our reporting, editing and engagement with readers.” The Times site highlights 24 use cases of AI at the company; the style guide and headline project aren’t listed among them.
Because of its regurgitative way of operating, many view AI in newsrooms with skepticism. As the media industry sheds jobs — more than 20,000 positions were lost in 2023 — there are also worries that AI could take away even more roles for journalists. In 2017, the Times eliminated its copy edit desk, shifting some of the copy editors into other roles. The desk used to be responsible for enforcing the style guide, one of the tasks the publication tested with AI.
A screenshot of a tool built by the New York Times’s research and development team to harness OpenAI for headline writing.Screenshot: The Intercept
The Times code became public last month when an anonymous user on the 4chan bulletin board posted a link to a collection of thousands of the New York Times’s GitHub repositories, essentially storage of collections of code for collaborative purposes. A text file in the leak said the material constitutes a “more or less complete clone of all repositories of The New York Times on GitHub.”
The Times confirmed the authenticity of the leak in a statement to BleepingComputer, saying the code was “inadvertently made available” in January.
The leak contains more than 6,000 repositories totaling more than 3 million files. It consists of a wide-ranging collection of materials covering the engineering side of the Times, but little from the newsroom or business side of the organization appears to be included in the leak.
The Times has spent $1 million on its suit alleging copyright infringement against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Intercept is engaged in a separate lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
“Do Not Improvise”
One of the New York Times’s AI projects, titled “OpenAI Styleguide,” is described in its accompanying documentation as a “prototype using OpenAI to help apply The New York Times styleguide.” The project also includes a headline generator.
The style guide checker utilizes an OpenAI large language model known as Davinci to correct all errors in an article’s headline, byline, dateline, or copy — the text of the article — that violate the Times’s style guide. The prompt tells the OpenAI bot, “Do not improvise. Do not use rules you may have learned elsewhere.”
A copy of the Times style guide resides in a separate repository, which is also available in the leak.
The headline generator component of the project tells OpenAI: “You are a headline writter [sic] for The New York Times. Use the following Article as context. Do not use prior knowledge.” The generator also allows the operator to impose several constraints, such as specifying which words must and must not be used.
“Generate a numbered list of three sober, sophisticated, straight news headline based on the first three paragraphs of the following story.”
The OpenAI Styleguide project is not the only instance the Times has experimented with using OpenAI for headline generation. Another repository contains a separate headline generation project using an OpenAI chatbot called ChatGPT. The project was part of a Maker Week at the Times, in which staff work on “self-directed projects.” The Maker Week headline generator tells the bot: “Generate a numbered list of three sober, sophisticated, straight news headline based on the first three paragraphs of the following story.”
Another Maker Week project that uses OpenAI tools is “counterpoint,” described as an “application that generates counterpoints to opinion articles.” The project appears to be unfinished, only instructing the bot to extract keywords from an article.
Aside from OpenAI Styleguide, the Times Github leak contains source code for various applications. Some are research projects — “an effort to build a predictive model of print subscription attrition” — and others cover things like technical job interview test questions, staff training materials, authentication credentials, prototypes for unreleased games, and various personal information.
Here is the speech by Papua New Guinea’s Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Timothy Masiu, at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference dinner at the Holiday Inn, Suva, on July 4:
I thank the School of Journalism of the University of the South Pacific (USP) for the invitation to address this august gathering.
Commendations also to the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) for jointly hosting this conference – the first of its kind in our region in two decades!
It is also worth noting that this conference has attracted an Emmy Award-winning television news producer from the United States, an award-winning journalism academic and author based in Hong Kong, a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, a finalist in the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, and a renowned investigative journalist from New Zealand.
Mix this with our own blend of regional journalists, scholars and like-minded professionals, this is truly an international event.
Commendation to our local organisers and the regional and international stakeholders for putting together what promises to be three days of robust and exciting interactions and discussions on the status of media in our region.
This will also go a long way in proposing practical and tangible improvements for the industry.
My good friend and the Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji, the Honourable Manoa Kamikamica, has already set the tone for our conference with his powerful speech at this morning’s opening ceremony. (In fact, we can claim the DPM to also be Papua New Guinean as he spent time there before entering politics!).
We support and are happy with this government of Fiji for repealing the media laws that went against media freedom in Fiji in the recent past.
In PNG, given our very diverse society with over 1000 tribes and over 800 languages and huge geography, correct and factful information is also very, very critical.
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Professor Biman Prasad and Timothy Masiu, PNG’s Minister for Information and Communications Technology, at the conference dinner. Image: Wansolwara
Our theme “Navigating Challenges and Shaping Futures in Pacific Media Research and Practice” couldn’t be more appropriate at this time.
If anything, it reminds us all of the critical role that the media continues to play in shaping public discourse and catalysing action on issues affecting our Pacific.
We are also reminded of the power of the media to inform, educate, and mobilize community participation in our development agenda.
IT is in the context that I pause to ask this pertinent question: How is the media being developed and used as a tool to protect and preserve our Pacific Identity?
I ask this question because of outside influences on our media in the region.
I should know, as I have somewhat traversed this journey already – from being a broadcaster and journalist myself – to being a member of the board of the largest public broadcaster in the region (National Broadcasting Corporation) – to being the Minister for ICT for PNG.
From where I sit right now, I am observing our Pacific region increasingly being used as the backyard for geopolitical reasons.
It is quite disturbing for me to see our regional media being targeted by the more developed nations as a tool to drive their geopolitical agenda.
As a result, I see a steady influence on our culture, our way of life, and ultimately the gradual erosion of our Pacific values and systems.
In the media industry, some of these geopolitical influences are being redesigned and re-cultured through elaborate and attractive funding themes like improving “transparency” and “accountability”.
This is not the way forward for a truly independent and authentic Pacific media.
The way we as a Pacific develop our media industry must reflect our original and authentic value systems.
Just like our forefathers navigated the unchartered seas – relying mostly on hard-gained knowledge and skills – we too must chart our own course in our media development.
Our media objectives and practices should reflect all levels of our unique Pacific Way of life, focusing on issues like climate change, environmental preservation, the protection and preservation of our fast-fading languages and traditions, and our political landscape.
We must not let our authentic ways be lost or overshadowed by outside influences or agendas. We must control WHAT we write, HOW we write it, and WHY we write.
Don’t get me wrong – we welcome and appreciate the support of our development partners – but we must be free to navigate our own destiny.
If anything, I compel you to give your media funding to build our regional capabilities and capacities to address climate change issues, early warning systems, and support us to fight misinformation, disinformation, and fake news on social media.
I don’t know how the other Pacific Island countries are faring but my Department of ICT has built a social media management desk to monitor these ever-increasing menaces on Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram and other online platforms.
This is another area of concern for me, especially for my future generations.
Draft National Media Development Policy of PNG Please allow me to make a few remarks on the Draft National Media Development Policy of PNG that my ministry has initiated.
As its name entails, it is a homegrown policy that aims to properly address many glaring media issues in our country.
In its current fifth draft version, the draft policy aims to promote media self-regulation; improve government media capacity; roll-out media infrastructure for all; and diversify content and quota usage for national interest.
These policy objectives were derived from an extensive nationwide consultation process of online surveys, workshops and one-on-one interviews with government agencies and media industry stakeholders and the public.
To elevate media professionalism in PNG, the policy calls for the development of media self-regulation in the country without direct government intervention.
The draft policy also intend to strike a balance between the media’s ongoing role on transparency and accountability on the one hand, and the dissemination of developmental information, on the other hand.
It is not in any way an attempt by the Marape/Rosso government to restrict the media in PNG. Nothing can be further from the truth.
In fact, the media in PNG presently enjoys unprecedented freedom and ability to report as they deem appropriate.
Our leaders are constantly being put on the spotlight, and while we don’t necessarily agree with many of their daily reports, we will not suddenly move to restrict the media in PNG in any form.
Rather, we are more interested in having information on health, education, agriculture, law and order, and other societal and economic information, reaching more of our local and remote communities across the country.
It is in this context that specific provision within the draft policy calls for the mobilisation – particularly the government media – to disseminate more developmental information that is targeted towards our population at the rural and district levels.
I have brought a bigger team to Suva to also listen and gauge the views of our Pacific colleagues on this draft policy.
The fifth version is publicly available on our Department of ICT website and we will certainly welcome any critique or feedback from you all.
Before I conclude, let me also briefly highlight another intervention I made late last year as part of my Ministry’s overall “Smart Pacific; One Voice” initiative.
After an absence for several years, I invited our Pacific ICT Ministers to a meeting in Port Moresby in late 2023.
At the end of this defining summit, we signed the Pacific ICT Ministers’ Lagatoi Declaration.
For a first-time regional ICT Ministers’ meeting, it was well-attended. Deputy Prime Minister Manoa also graced us with his presence with other Pacific Ministers, including Australia and New Zealand.
This declaration is a call-to-arms for our regional ministers to meet regularly to discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by the all-important ICT sector.
Our next meeting is in New Caledonia in 2025.
In much the same vein, I was appointed the special envoy to the Pacific by the Asia-Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD) in Mauritius in 2023.
Since then, I have continuously advocated for the Pacific to be more coordinated and unified, so we can be better heard.
I have been quite bemused by the fact that the Pacific does not have its own regional offices for such well-meaning agencies like AIBD to promote our own unique media issues.
More often than not, we are either thrown into the “Asia-Pacific’ or “Oceania” groupings and as result, our media and wider ICT interests and aspirations get drowned by our more influential friends and donors.
We must dictate what our broadcasting (and wider media) development agenda should be. We live in our Region and better understand the “Our Pacific Way” of doing things.
Let me conclude by reiterating my firm belief that the Pacific needs a hard reset of our media strategies.
This means re-discovering our original values to guide our methods and practices within the media industry.
We must be unified in our efforts navigate the challenges ahead, and to reshape the future of media in the Pacific.
We must ensure it reflects our authentic ways and serves the needs of our Pacific people.
As many as 200,000 AI-related jobs could be created in Australia by 2030 if the federal government provides deliberate policy support, according to a new report by the Tech Council of Australia. The Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Workday-backed ‘Meeting the AI skills boom’ report, to be published on Tuesday, argues that reaching an AI workforce of…
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The world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste opens later this year on Olkiluoto, a sparsely populated and lushly forested island in the Baltic Sea three hours north of Helsinki.
Onkalo — the name means “cavity” or “cave” in Finnish — is among the most advanced facilities of its kind, designed for an unprecedented and urgent task: safely storing some of the most toxic material on Earth nearly 1,500 feet underground in what’s called a deep mined geologic repository.
The process requires remarkable feats of engineering. It begins in an encapsulation plant, where robots remove spent nuclear fuel rods from storage canisters and place them in copper and cast iron casks up to two stories tall. Once full, these hefty vessels, weighing around 24 metric tons, will descend more than a quarter-mile in an elevator to a cavern hollowed out of crystalline bedrock 2 billion years old. (The trip takes 50 minutes.) Each tomb will hold 30 to 40 of these enormous containers ensconced in bentonite clay and sealed behind concrete. As many as 3,250 canisters containing 6,500 metric tons of humanity’s most dangerous refuse will, the theory goes, lie undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Deep beneath the surface, the Onkalo facility will store spent nuclear fuel rods in chutes carved into the bedrock. Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO/Posiva
Nothing assembled by human hands has stood for more than a fraction of that. The world’s oldest known structure, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, is a bit more than 11,000 years old. Designing Onkalo to endure for so unfathomably long is necessary because the material left behind by nuclear fission remains radioactive for millennia. Safely disposing of it requires stashing it for, essentially, eternity. That way nothing — be it natural disasters, future ice ages, or even the end of humanity itself — would expose anyone, or anything, to its dangers.
“The plan is that there will be no sign [of the facility],” said Pasi Tuohimaa, communications manager for Posiva, the agency that manages Finland’s nuclear waste. “Nobody would even know it’s there, whether we’re talking about future generations or future aliens or whatever.”
Building such a place, as technologically complex as it is, might be easier than convincing a community to host it. Gaining that approval can take decades and rests upon a simple premise.
“One of the principles of geologic disposal is the idea that the generations that enjoy the benefits of nuclear power should also pay for and participate in the solution,” said Rodney Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist at Stanford University and co-director of the university’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
The long process of gaining such support is called consent-based siting, an undertaking many in the nuclear energy sector consider vital as the world abandons fossil fuels. Nuclear power accounts for almost a fifth of the United States’ electricity generation, and its expansion is among the few elements of the Biden administration’s energy agenda that enjoys strong bipartisan support. Over the last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has touted the nation’s newest reactor, celebrated plans for an experimental small modular reactor, and unveiled a $1.5 billion loan to restart a defunct plant in Michigan.
An aerial view of Onkalo, the world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste, during construction. It opens later this year on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto. Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO/Posiva
These are hardly one-offs. The U.S. intends to triple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Yet experts say there isn’t enough public discussion of how to deal with the corresponding increase in radioactive trash, which will compound a problem the country has deferred since the start of the nuclear age. After botching plans for a deep mined geological repository a generation ago, the United States is scrambling to catch up to Finland and several other nations, including Canada, which could choose a site by year’s end.
As the U.S. races toward a post-carbon future in which nuclear energy could play a key role, policymakers, energy experts, and community leaders say dealing with the inevitable waste isn’t a technical problem, but a social one. Engineers know how to build a repository capable of safeguarding the public for millennia. The bigger challenge is convincing people that it’s safe to live next to it.
The United States knew, even before the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant began operating in Pennsylvania in 1957, how best to dispose of the effluvium generated by splitting atoms to generate electricity. Earlier that year, geologists and geophysicists wrote a National Academy of Sciences report that proposed burying it. Opinions haven’t changed much in the 67 years since.
“The only viable way to possibly deal with the issue of isolating radioactive waste that can remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years from the environment is a deep geologic repository,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s really no alternative.”
Yet this refuse, most of it from the nation’s 54 commercial reactors, remains in what amounts to cold storage. Depleted fuel rods are kept on-site in water tanks for about half a decade, then moved to steel and concrete canisters called dry casks and held for another 40 years in what’s known asinterim storage. Only then is the material cool enough to stash underground. That last step has never happened, however. The nation’s 85 interim storage sites hold more than 86,000 tons of waste, a situation that’s akin to leaving your trash behind the garage indefinitely. The situation could grow more dire as the nation invests in advanced small modular reactors.
Canisters of nuclear fuel waste sit in storage in the German town of Ahaus in 2024. Guido Kirchner/picture alliance via Getty Images
“It’s a pet peeve of mine, to be honest,” said Paul Murray, who became the Department of Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in October. “Everybody talks about the shiny new reactors, but nobody ever talks about back-end management of the fuel that comes out of them.”
Congress attempted to rectify that in 1982 when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. President Ronald Reagan called the law “an important step in the pursuit of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” It required that the federal government begin taking responsibility for the nation’s nuclear waste by 1998, and that the utilities generating it pay a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity to be rid of it. The plan stalled because the government never took possession of most of the waste. That failure has allowed the utilities to collect $500 million in fines from Washington each year since 1998. A report that the Government Accountability Office released in 2021 noted that federal liabilities could reach $60 billion by 2030.
The federal government’s missteps continued when plans for a deep geologic repository derailed about 15 years ago. The 1982 law directed the Department of Energy to provide the president, Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency with suggestions for several sites. Congress amended the law in 1987 to designate one: Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas on land the Western Shoshone Nation considers sacred.
This top-down process was the antithesis of consent-based siting, and it collapsed amid community opposition and the efforts of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Nevada Democrat convinced President Obama to scuttle the proposal, which by that point had cost $13 billion. The Obama administration convened a panel of scientists to devise a new plan; in 2012, it suggested creating an independent agency, giving it responsibility for the nuclear fund and directing it to revamp the effort through consent-based siting.
A sign warns people to stay away from the proposed nuclear waste dump site of Yucca Mountain, located 100 miles north of Las Vegas, in 2002. David McNew/Getty Images
That recommendation mimicked what Finland had done, and Canada was doing, to build community consensus. Posiva spent four decades working toward the facility on Olkiluoto; the Canadian search started 24 years ago with the creation of the independent Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Yet more than 10 years after the Department of Energy made consent-based siting its official policy, there’s been little progress toward a deep mined geologic repository in the U.S. for commercial nuclear waste. (Radioactive refuse generated by the defense industry has, since 1999, been secured 2,150 feet underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.)
Instead of identifying possible sites for a deep geologic repository, the Energy Department directed Murray, who has a background in nuclear technology and environmental stewardship, to address a backlog of waste that could, by his estimate, take 55 years to clear out of interim storage. Much of this trash is languishing in dry casks that dot power plants in 37 states. Last year, he formed a 12-member Consent-Based Siting Consortia to start the search for a federally-managed site that would temporarily consolidate the nation’s waste until a permanent site is built.
He could start by looking at existing energy communities with coal-fired power plants that have been decommissioned or soon will be, according to Kara Colton. She leads the Energy Communities Alliance, a coalition of local governments that is part of the consortia and is distributing $1 million in federal grantsto three communities interested in hosting a nuclear waste storage facility. (Additional grants will be available this summer.) But she worries that, without a concerted, long-term effort by the government to find a permanent repository, no one will commit to participating.
A nuclear waste storage pool at a reprocessing plant at the La Hague nuclear fuel reprocessing site in northwestern France. Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images
“This is a multi-generational project and we have a political system that changes all the time,” she said. “Without assured funding, we’re checking every year to see if the progress that’s made will change.”
But Murray’s quest to consolidate temporary waste storage may be moot. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Department of Energy lacks the authority to designate an interim storage site unless that facility is tied to a plan to establish a deep mined geologic repository. That makes Murray’s efforts “pretty meaningless,” Lyman said.
Murray concedes that his mission faces challenges. “Without a robust repository program, it’s very difficult to site interim storage,” he said. “We have to, as a nation, start a repository program, otherwise people think they’ll become the de facto disposal facility.”
Gaining consensus for a permanent storage site, then building it, could take 50 years, he said. In the meantime, the nation’s utilities continue to pile up 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste each year.
If 50 years sounds preposterous, consider that Finland began its search for a repository site in 1983. Within a decade, the government had considered four locations in a process that weighed community opinions alongside geological and environmental criteria like bedrock density, groundwater movement, and potential changes in the movement and formation of the glaciers above due to climate change.
Eurajoki, a rural village of just over 9,000 people, provided the greatest social support and the best geographical factors. When the town council voted to approve the site in 2000, its members, and many residents, seemed predisposed to the idea because Olkilouto, which is 8 miles away, already hosted two reactors. (A third, Olkiluoto 3, opened in April 2023; the three plants provide about one-third of the country’s electricity.)
Workers rest in the bedrock halls, some 1,500 feet underground, of Posiva’s Onkalo facility in Finland. Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO/Posiva
Still, Posiva, the independent agency charged with establishing a deep geologic repository, engaged in a long-term campaign to foster community support and trust, teaching residents about nuclear energy and waste storage to alleviate their concerns. Tuohimma, Posiva’s communications manager, called it a “long road show” with origins in the company’s efforts to sell the technology in the 1970s. Although the Finnish Green Party and Greenpeace expressed concerns about the project — stemming from the building of new nuclear plants and not disposal of the waste — opposition has since eased. Construction of the 1 billion euro facility started in 2000; Posiva estimates that over the next century, running, filling, and eventually sealing the site will cost 5.5 billion euros. How long that takes will depend upon the rate at which the country generates radioactive waste.
Eurajoki Mayor Vesa Lakaniemi told German news site DW that hosting all that nuclear infrastructure generates about 20 million euros in taxes each year. That’s almost half the town’s annual revenue and is “how we can plan our future investments,” including a renovated school, a new library, and an 8 million euro sports facility. Lakaniemi believes residents ultimately supported the project because of Posiva’s safety record, and because Finns tend to trust their government and its institutions.
Canada’s efforts have not gone so smoothly.
The country’s hunt for a site began in 2002 when parliament passed the Nuclear Fuel Waste Act. The law established the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, or NWMO, which unveiled a nine-step plan in 2010 that would lead, within a decade or so, to an agreement to host a repository. Within two years, 21 communities had expressed interest in doing just that.
The agency spent the past dozen years winnowing the list to the two most geologically and socially appropriate sites. To do that, it began by ensuring each candidate had a suitable site — one large enough for the required infrastructure, yet far enough from drinking water supplies and protected lands like national parks. Communities also had to outline the material benefits they would receive from the employment opportunities and industrial development the project would foster.
Over time, the screening process cut the list of potential sites to two. The first is South Bruce, a small farming community roughly 100 miles west of Toronto and about 35 miles from the country’s largest nuclear power plant. The other is Ignace, a rural town about 150 miles northwest of Lake Superior.
Jim Gowland, a farmer, is head of the Community Liaison Committee for South Bruce, which argues that a nuclear waste disposal facility will be a key source of jobs for the small Canadian town 100 miles west of Toronto. Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images
The First Nations communities in those locations — the Saugeen Ojibway Nation near South Bruce and the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation near Ignace — also must provide consent, but that process is separate, and generally less publicized, from those taking place in the townships.
The site near Ignace sits on what is roughly equivalent to federal land, which makes acquisition easier than in South Bruce, where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization had to sign agreements with property holders to eventually purchase their land for the 1,500-acre project, should it go through. That meant selling the idea not only to the community, but to individual landowners. The agency gained support by spending liberally to help the town with everything from new fire trucks to a scholarship fund to paying some municipal salaries. All told, it has given the town more than $9.3 million since 2013. (Ignace has received almost $14 million since 2018.)
Still, the idea of hosting a repository has divided the 6,000 or so residents in South Bruce, who were once united by their participation in church groups and youth sports. Supporters say they trust the science showing that repository technology is safe, and they point to the benefits it’s already brought. But critics worry about the impact of all that radioactive material on the town now and decades into the future, and they worry the potential economic and environmental costs haven’t been adequately studied. They also feel the NWMO is less interested in considering their perspectives and answering their questions than in selling the repository through fiscal promises.
Carolyn Fell, the agency’s communications manager in South Bruce, said residents can find her in the office five days a week, where she is happy to answer questions. “We have heard concerns from the community, and at every turn we do our best to answer in a very up-front and transparent way,” she said.
Michelle Stein isn’t so sure about that. She and her husband Gary raise cattle and sheep on a farm they bought in South Bruce 30 years ago. They also raise three children there, with dreams of them taking over. But after NWMO started signing agreements with adjacent landowners for what would become 1,500 acres back in 2019, Stein’s kids moved away. Now, she worries her land could soon be worthless and her livelihood gone.
Hundreds of protesters gather on the front lawn of Parliament Hill in February to oppose another nuclear waste site in Ottawa, Canada. Dave Chan/AFP via Getty Images
“In my opinion, they should at least pay us what they paid people who sold at the beginning of the project,” Stein said. She also fears the impact the facility might have on groundwater, and whether anyone would buy beef and lamb grown alongside a nuclear site. She feels some of her neighbors, and the town council, have been bought off by NWMO’s investments in the community.
“They say they won’t come into a non-willing community,” Stein said, “but they’re certainly pushing us to be willing.”
Stein joined more than a dozen others in organizing Protect Our Waterways to oppose the project. The group’s volunteer chair, Anja Vandervlies, worries the buffer zone, which prohibits living or farming within a certain distance of the facility, might end up including some or all of her farm. She and Stein have testified before the town council, written op-eds for the local paper, and erected bright yellow, handmade billboards reading, “Say No to NWMO” and “Stop Canada’s Nuke Dump!” But they have felt crowded out by what they considered aggressive marketing by the agency. In 2022, their field of candidates for town council fared poorly in the election; Mayor Mark Goetz said he and the body’s fiveelected members now publicly support the waste facility.
Goetz succeeded his father, who was mayor in 2012 when South Bruce told the Nuclear Waste Management Organization it was interested in hosting the repository. Goetz said his father was interested in the economic development the project would bring to a community heavily dependent on agriculture. He rejects claims that the town council has not sought community input, noting that it has held hundreds of events over the past 12 years. He’s also grateful for the financial support the NWMO has provided thus far. More than that, however, he believes someone has to host the site, so why not South Bruce?
“We’ve benefited from cheap nuclear power, and I don’t think we should leave this waste to sit for future generations to deal with,” Goetz said.
Voters will decide the matter in a referendum in October. More than 50 percent of voters must cast ballots for it to count, which, to Goetz’s mind, makes the council’s position largely moot.
“The beauty of the referendum is that everyone gets an equal vote,” he said. “It’s a democracy, and it’ll be majority rule, so it doesn’t really matter which way the council decides.”
But if the referendum brings out less than 50 percent of voters, the decision falls back to the town council.
A win in South Bruce won’t necessarily be enough, though, because the Saugeen Ojibway Nation also must endorse the idea. Even then, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization will make the final decision later this year, and it also has an eye on the location near Ignace.
That option, called the Revell site, sits about midway between Ignace and the larger town of Dryden. Vince Ponka, the agency’s regional communications manager for northern Ontario, described it as an egg-shaped formation of granite several miles long and deep within the Canadian Shield, a vast igneous and metamorphic formation that rings Hudson Bay.
“It’s an ideal piece of rock to hold the [deep mined geologic repository],” he said. Although the facility would be beyond the city limits, Ignace would host the “Center of Expertise,” an office and educational complex meant to teach people about the repository. He called it a “real architectural gem” that could boost economic development.
Jodie Defeo, a registered nurse and an Ignace town council member, said she was indifferent when she learned about the possibility of a repository 14 years ago, but any skepticism was allayed last summer during a trip to Olkiluoto that the Nuclear Waste Management Organization funded.
Specialty trucks, like this one pictured outside the Onkalo facility, are designed to carry canisters of spent nuclear waste through underground tunnels, where they’ll be deposited and encased in bentonite clay. Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO/Posiva
“There was no sense of caution or anything, it appeared like there was no cause for concern” among the people of Eurajoki, she said. She saw the improvements the tax revenue made in the local schools and infrastructure, and she returned home a booster. She believes a similar facility could bring good fortune to Ignace, which fell upon hard times when the mining industry began to dwindle a few decades ago.
“There are no pots of money for aging infrastructure,” she said. Few jobs, a tanking housing market, and a dwindling population result in a tiny tax base. While her 17-year-old son is interested in staying in Ignace, her 27-year-old son moved to Thunder Bay, a city of roughly 110,000 almost three hours south on the shore of Lake Superior. For Defeo, the possibility of hosting a repository brings with it a sense of hope.
“I feel like we could be on the cusp of a change,” she said.
Wendy O’Connor doesn’t share her optimism. She’s the communications officer for Thunder Bay and volunteers with the opposition group We the Nuclear Free North. She said that although Ignace raised its hand to host the repository, all the waste will pass through her city. The trucks carrying it will trundle about 1,000 miles along the Trans Canada Highway, a largely two-lane road that hugs the coast of Lake Huron and the cliffs of Lake Superior. She’s worried about the risk of accidents on the highway or at the site.
Of course, there is always the risk that radioactive material will leak while in transit or short-term storage, something that has happened in Germany and New Mexico over the past two decades — though with no known health impacts.
“We can say with confidence, accidents are not only possible but they occur,” said Ewing, the Stanford University professor. But, he added, they are studied and mistakes remedied.
Although scientists express confidence in the engineering of repositories, it is almost inevitable that, over millennia, some of the canisters within them will corrode, some of the barriers sealing their tombs will erode, and some of the waste will leak. Theoretically, it is safer that it happens deep within the Earth, where it poses a far smaller threat. As the 2018 Stanford report that Ewing helped produce notes, “‘safe’ doesn’t mean zero health risks for hundreds of thousands of years, but a health risk that is low enough to be acceptable to today’s population and future generations.”
Given the risks, however small, of hosting the nation’s nuclear waste, some wonder if consent-based siting is little more than a form of flattery, a way of paying a community to take on a task no one else wants to do.
The storage tunnels beneath the Onkalo facility are carved out of crystalline bedrock 2 billion years old. Tapani Karjanlahti/TVO/Posiva
“A cynic would say that what it really means is that every community has its price,” said Lyman. “The question is how much compensation is enough, and is the level of compensation that will be enough something that the industry and the government can afford. These are all unanswered questions.”
But as the efforts in Finland and Canada show, at least the approach provides a community with a say in its future — something the U.S. government denied the people of Nevada when it chose Yucca Mountain all those years ago. The collapse of that effort shows the limitations of a top-down approach, and the nation’s growing stockpile of nuclear waste underscores the urgent need to address a problem too long ignored. As Lyman noted, the country needs to push forward. It must be mindful of intergenerational equity by making the best choice it can to protect those who will be here hundreds, even thousands, of years from now, using the best science and technology available today. And that, in the eyes of many experts in the field, means developing deep mined geologic repositories.
“Any strategy to increase nuclear power that doesn’t include a strategy to handle the waste should not be pursued,” Ewing said.
Of course, nuclear energy is not the only path leading the world away from fossil fuels, and there are legitimate safety concerns and other reasons to question its place in a post-carbon future. But as long as the United States and other governments consider expanding its use, they will have to figure out what to do with the inevitable waste it generates, and do so with the support of the communities that will bear that burden.
Israel opposed a proposal at a recent United Nations forum aimed at rebuilding the Gaza Strip’s war-ravaged telecommunications infrastructure on the grounds that Palestinian connectivity is a readymade weapon for Hamas.
The resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia for last week’s U.N. International Telecommunication Union summit in Geneva, is aimed at returning internet access to Gaza’s millions of disconnected denizens.
It ultimately passed under a secret ballot on June 14 — but not before it was watered down to remove some of its more strident language about Israel’s responsibility for the destruction of Gaza. The U.S. delegate at the ITU summit had specifically opposed those references.
Israel, for its part, had blasted the proposal as a whole. Israel’s ITU delegate described it as “a resolution that while seemingly benign in its intent to rebuild telecommunications infrastructure, distorts the reality of the ongoing situation in Gaza,” according to a recording of the session reviewed by The Intercept. The delegate further argued the resolution does not address that Hamas has used the internet “to prepare acts of terror against Israel’s civilians,” and that any rebuilding effort must include unspecified “safeguards” that would prevent the potential use of the internet for terrorism.
“Based on this rationale, Gaza will never have internet.”
“Based on this rationale, Gaza will never have internet,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy adviser with the digital rights group Access Now, told The Intercept, adding that Israel’s position is not only incoherent but inherently disproportionate. “You can’t punish the entire civilian population just because you have fears of one Palestinian faction.”
The Israeli Ministry of Communications did not respond to a request for comment.
Getting Gaza Back Online
When delegations to the ITU, a U.N. agency that facilitates cooperation between governments on telecommunications policies, began meeting in Geneva in early June, the most pressing issue on the agenda was getting Gaza back online. Israel’s monthslong bombardment of the enclave has severed fiber cables, razed cellular towers, and generally wrecked the physical infrastructure required to communicate with loved ones and the outside world.
A disconnected Gaza Strip also threatens to add to the war’s already staggering death toll. Though Israel touts its efforts to warn civilians of impending airstrikes, such warnings are relayed using the very cellular and internet connections the country’s air force routinely levels. It is a cycle of data degradation that began at the war’s start: The more Israel bombs, the harder it is for Gazans to know they are about to be bombed.
The resolution that passed last week would ensure “the ITU’s much needed assistance and support to Palestine for rebuilding its telecommunication sector.” While the agency has debated the plight of Palestinian internet access for many years, the new proposal arrives at a crisis point for data access across Gaza, as much of the Strip has been reduced to rubble, and civilians struggle to access food and water, let alone cellular signals and Wi-Fi.
The ITU and other intergovernmental bodies have long pushed for Palestinian sovereignty over its own internet access. But the Saudi proposal was notable in that it explicitly called out Israel’s role in hobbling Gaza’s connection to the world, either via bombs, bulldozers, or draconian restrictions on technology imports. That Saudi Arabia was behind the resolution is not without irony; in 2022, Yemen plunged into a four-day internet blackout following airstrikes by a Saudi-led military coalition.
Without mentioning Israel by name, the Saudi resolution also called on the ITU to monitor the war’s destructive effects on Palestinian data access and provide regular reports. The resolution also condemned both the “widespread destruction of critical infrastructure, failure of telecom services and mobile phone outages that have occurred across the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the aggression by the occupying power” and “the obstacles practiced by the occupying power in preventing the use of new communications technologies.”
In a session debating the resolution, the U.S. delegate told the council, “We have made clear to the sponsors of this resolution that we do not agree with some of the characterizations,” specifically the language blaming the destruction of Gaza and the forced use of obsolete technology on Israel. “The United States cannot support this resolution in its current form as drafted,” the delegate continued, according to a recording reviewed by The Intercept.
Whether or not the U.S. ultimately voted for the resolution — the State Department did not respond when asked — it appears to have been successful in weakening the version that was ultimately approved by the ITU. The version that did pass was stripped of any explicit mention of Israel’s role in destroying and otherwise thwarting Gazan internet access, and refers obliquely only to “the obstacles practiced in preventing the use of new communication technologies.”
The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s other questions about the resolution either, including whether the administration shares Israel’s terror-related objections to it.
The U.S. has taken a harsher stance on civilian internet blackouts caused by a military aggressor in the past. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing national internet disruptions it caused, the State Department declared, “the United States condemns actions that block or degrade access to the Internet in Ukraine, which sever critical channels for sharing and learning information, including about the war.”
Outdated Technology
The approved resolution also calls on ITU member states to “make every effort” to both preserve what Palestinian telecom infrastructure remains and allocate funds necessary for the “return of communications in the Gaza Strip” in the future. This proposed rebuilding includes the activation of 4G and 5G cellular service. While smartphones in the West Bank connect to the internet with 3G wireless speeds unsuitable for many data-hungry applications, Gazans must make do with debilitatingly slow 2G service — an obsolete standard that was introduced to the United States in 1992.
Fatafta, of Access Now, noted that Israel does have a real interest in preventing Gaza from entering the 21st century: surveillance and censorship. Gaza’s reliance on insecure cellular technology from the 1990s and Israeli fiber connections makes it trivial for Israeli intelligence agents to intercept texts and phone calls and institute internet blackouts at will, as has occurred throughout the war.
The resolution is “an important step, because the current status quo cannot continue,” she said. “There is no scenario where Gaza can be allowed to keep a 2G network where the rest of the world has already moved on to 5G.”
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After Russian hackers exploited a flaw in a widely used Microsoft product during one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, the software giant downplayed its culpability. However, a recent ProPublica investigation revealed that a whistleblower within Microsoft’s ranks had repeatedly attempted to convince the company to address the weakness years before the hack — and that the company rebuffed his concerns at every step.
Here are the key things you need to know about that whistleblower’s efforts and Microsoft’s inaction.
Years before the SolarWinds hack was discovered in 2020, a Microsoft engineer found a security flaw these hackers would eventually exploit.
In 2016, while researching an attack on a major tech company, Microsoft engineer Andrew Harris said he discovered a flaw in the company’s Active Directory Federation Services, a product that allowed users to sign on a single time for nearly everything they needed. As a result of the weakness, millions of users — including federal employees — were left exposed to hackers.
Harris said the Microsoft team responsible for handling reports of security weaknesses dismissed his concerns.
The Microsoft Security Response Center determines which reported security flaws need to be addressed. Harris said he told the MRSC about the flaw, but it decided to take no action. The MSRC argued that, because hackers would already need access to an organization’s on-premises servers before they could take advantage of the flaw, it didn’t cross a so-called “security boundary.” Former MSRC members told ProPublica that the center routinely rejected reports of weaknesses using this term, even though it had no formal definition at the time.
Microsoft product managers also refused to address the problem.
Following the MSRC’s decision, Harris escalated the issue to Microsoft product leaders who, he said, “violently agreed with me that this is a huge issue.” But, at the same time, they “violently disagreed with me that we should move quickly to fix it.”
Harris had proposed the temporary solution of suggesting that customers turn off the seamless single sign-on function. That move would eliminate the threat but result in users needing to log on twice instead of once. A product manager argued that it wasn’t a viable option because it risked alienating federal government customers and undermined Microsoft’s strategy to marginalize a top competitor.
Microsoft was also concerned that going public with the flaw could hurt its chances of winning future government contracts worth billions of dollars, Harris said.
At the time Harris was trying to convince Microsoft product leaders to address the flaw, the federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him.
Harris eventually learned that the flaw was even more dire than he originally thought. Once again, Microsoft opted to not take action, he said.
In 2018, a colleague of Harris’ pointed out how hackers could also bypass a common security feature called multifactor authentication, which requires users to perform one or more additional steps to verify their identity, such as entering a code sent via text message.
Their discovery meant that, no matter how many additional security steps a company puts in place, a hacker could bypass them all.
When the colleagues brought this new information to the MSRC, “it was a nonstarter,” Harris said.
Researchers outside of Microsoft also warned the company about the flaw.
In November 2017, cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post detailing the same flaw Harris had identified.
Microsoft would later claim this blog post was the first time it had learned of the issue, but researchers at CyberArk told ProPublica they had reached out to Microsoft staff at least twice before publication.
Later, in 2019, cybersecurity firm Mandiant would publicly demonstrate at a cybersecurity conference how hackers could exploit the flaw to gain access to victims’ cloud services. The firm said it had given Microsoft advance notice of its findings.
Russian hackers ultimately exploited the very flaw Harris and the others had raised.
Within months of Harris leaving Microsoft in 2020, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers used the flaw in the SolarWinds hack. Exploiting the weakness, hackers vacuumed up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile. The Russians also used the weakness to compromise dozens of email accounts in the Treasury Department, including those of its highest-ranking officials.
In congressional hearings after the SolarWinds attack, Microsoft’s president insisted the company was blameless.
Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds, and he said customers could have taken more steps to secure their systems.
When asked what Microsoft had done to address the flaw in the years before the attack, Smith responded by listing a handful of steps that customers could have taken to protect themselves. His suggestions included purchasing an antivirus product like Microsoft Defender and securing devices with another Microsoft product called Intune.
After ProPublica published its investigation, lawmakers pressed Microsoft’s Smith if his prior testimony before Congress was incorrect.
Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., asked Smith about his prior congressional testimony, in which he said that Microsoft had first learned about this weakness in November 2017 from the CyberArk blog post. ProPublica’s investigation, Magaziner noted, found that Harris had raised it even earlier, only to be ignored. The lawmaker asked Smith if his prior testimony was incorrect.
Smith demurred, saying he hadn’t read the story. “I was at the White House this morning,” he told the panel.
He also complained that ProPublica’s investigation was published the day of the hearing and said that he’d know more about it “a week from now.”
However, ProPublica had sent detailed questions to Microsoft nearly two weeks before the story was published and had requested an interview with Smith. The company declined to make him available. Instead, Microsoft had issued a statement in response. “Protecting customers is always our highest priority,” a spokesperson said. “Our security response team takes all security issues seriously and gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was aligned with the industry consensus.”
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Members of Congress pressed Microsoft on Thursday to strengthen how it handles reported security flaws in its ubiquitous products after a series of cyberattacks struck the federal government.
The criticism from members of the House Homeland Security Committee came in response to a new ProPublica investigation that found Microsoft repeatedly rebuffed a company engineer who, beginning in 2017, warned that a product flaw left millions of users vulnerable to attack, including federal employees. Russian hackers later exploited that weakness in one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, widely known as SolarWinds.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee’s top Democrat, entered the news organization’s story into the congressional record. He then asked Microsoft President Brad Smith if the company has since established a process “to ensure that employee concerns about security at Microsoft or their products are prioritized and addressed.”
Smith, sitting alone at the witness table in a packed hearing room, told lawmakers that the company is shifting its approach to security. Microsoft is trying “to empower every employee to focus on continuous improvement and speak up … and to ensure that those voices are heard and heeded,” he said.
Smith added, “We want a culture that encourages every employee to look for problems, find problems, report problems, help fix problems and then learn from the problems.”
As ProPublica reported, that is not the corporate culture that the former Microsoft engineer, Andrew Harris, encountered in the years leading up to SolarWinds. Harris said product leaders, who were focused on Microsoft’s drive to dominate the cloud computing market, told him that addressing the weakness he’d identified would undermine the company’s business goals of securing federal government contracts and marginalizing competitors.
The federal Cyber Safety Review Board, in its own examination of Microsoft’s role in a separate hack perpetrated last year by Chinese attackers, also found the company’s security culture “inadequate” and in need of an “overhaul.” Microsoft “deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management,” the board found, resulting in a “cascade of … avoidable errors.”
On Thursday, Smith said Microsoft accepted responsibility for the board’s findings and has since moved to tie executive bonuses to cybersecurity. He said security would also be part of every Microsoft employee’s performance review, and thus would indirectly impact compensation across the company.
Microsoft’s promise to change its security culture echoes a similar pledge from founder Bill Gates more than 20 years ago. “When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security,” Gates wrote at the time.
In the decades since, former employees told ProPublica, developing new products and features was often prioritized over fixing security bugs in existing offerings.
While the official subject of Thursday’s hearing was the cybersafety board’s report on the China hack, members of the committee asked Smith question after question about ProPublica’s SolarWinds investigation, which Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., called a “bombshell report.”
She said the hearing was a “reckoning moment” for the company, which has repeatedly downplayed its role in SolarWinds. One of the flaws the Russians exploited involved a Microsoft application, which was supposed to ensure users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs. The weakness allowed intruders to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through sensitive data in the cloud, including emails.
Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., asked Smith about his prior congressional testimony, in which he said that Microsoft had first learned about this weakness in November 2017, when an outside cybersecurity firm published a report on it. ProPublica’s investigation, Magaziner noted, found that Harris had raised it even earlier, only to be ignored. The lawmaker asked Smith if his prior testimony was incorrect.
Smith demurred, saying he hadn’t read the story. “I was at the White House this morning,” he told the panel.
Later, Smith complained that ProPublica’s investigation was published the day of the hearing and said that he’d know more about it “a week from now.” ProPublica sent detailed questions to Microsoft nearly two weeks before the story was published on Thursday and requested an interview with Smith. The company declined to make him available.
On Thursday, Smith pointed out that the weakness in Microsoft’s product could also be found in other companies’ software. Cybersecurity specialists have noted, however, that Microsoft’s version was one of the most widely used, including by the federal government.
When Ramirez asked how Harris’ discovery would have been handled differently today, Smith said, “I think what’s most important for today is simply to note how we are changing … how we elevate these issues and reward people for finding, reporting and helping to fix problems.”
