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Cause of Suicide: Austerity
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 18:28:11 +0000
New study finds direct link between Greek austerity cuts and increase in male suicides
Sarah Lazare
RINF Alternative News
As governments across the world slash public goods in the name of austerity, a new study finds that such measures in Greece directly correspond with a rise in suicides among males.
Entitled The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide: On the Empirics of a Modern Greek Tragedy, the study was published in April by University of Portsmouth researchers in the journalSocial Science and Medicine.
The torrent of austerity measures following the 2008 global recession led to an increase in male suicides. According to the findings, between 2009 and 2010, 551 men in Greece took their lives “solely due to fiscal austerity.”
Researchers found that every one percent cut in public spending corresponded with a 0.43 percent increase in suicides among men in Greece.
Men between the ages of 45 and 89 are at the highest risk of austerity-caused suicide, the researchers found.
Sarah writes for Common Dreams.
The Bundy Paradigm: Will You Be a Rebel, Revolutionary or a Slave?
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 18:23:55 +0000
John W. Whitehead
RINF Alternative News
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”–John F. Kennedy
Those tempted to write off the standoff at the Bundy Ranch as little more than a show of force by militia-minded citizens would do well to reconsider their easy dismissal of this brewing rebellion. This goes far beyond concerns about grazing rights or the tension between the state and the federal government.
Few conflicts are ever black and white, and the Bundy situation, with its abundance of gray areas, is no exception. Yet the question is not whether Cliven Bundy and his supporters are domestic terrorists, as Harry Reid claims , or patriots, or something in between. Nor is it a question of whether the Nevada rancher is illegally grazing his cattle on federal land or whether that land should rightfully belong to the government . Nor is it even a question of who’s winning the showdown– the government with its arsenal of SWAT teams, firepower and assault vehicles, or Bundy’s militia supporters with their assortment of weapons–because if such altercations end in bloodshed, everyone loses.
What we’re really faced with, and what we’ll see more of before long, is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.” And it won’t matter what the issue is–whether it’s a rancher standing his ground over grazing rights, a minister jailed for holding a Bible study in his own home, or a community outraged over police shootings of unarmed citizens–these are the building blocks of a political powder keg. Now all that remains is a spark, and it need not be a very big one, to set the whole powder keg aflame.
As I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State , there’s a subtext to this incident that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is a pressure cooker with no steam valve, and things are about to blow. This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.
The government has been anticipating and preparing for such an uprising for years. For example, in 2008, a U.S. Army War College report warned that the military must be prepared for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order”–all related to dissent and protests over America‘s economic and political disarray. Consequently, predicted the report, the “widespread civil violence would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”
One year later, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security under President Obama issued its infamous reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism.” According to these reports, an extremist is defined as anyone who subscribes to a particular political viewpoint. Rightwing extremists, for example, are broadly defined in the report as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
Despite “no specific information that domestic rightwing terrorists are currently planning acts of violence,” the DHS listed a number of scenarios that could arise as a result of so-called rightwing extremists playing on the public’s fears and discontent over various issues, including the economic downturn, real estate foreclosures and unemployment.
Equally disconcerting, the reports use the words “terrorist” and “extremist” interchangeably. In other words, voicing what the government would consider to be extremist viewpoints is tantamount to being a terrorist. Under such a definition, I could very well be considered a terrorist. So too could John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., Roger Baldwin (founder of the ACLU), Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams–all of these men protested and passionately spoke out against government practices with which they disagreed and would be prime targets under this document.
The document also took pains to describe the political views of those who would qualify as being a rightwing extremist. For example, you are labeled a rightwing extremist if you voice concerns about a myriad of issues including: policy changes under President Obama; the economic downturn and home foreclosures; the loss of U.S. jobs in manufacturing and construction sectors; and social issues such as abortion, interracial crimes and immigration. DHS also issued a red-flag warning against anyone who promotes “conspiracy theories involving declarations of martial law, impending civil strife or racial conflict, suspension of the U.S. Constitution, and the creation of citizen detention camps.”
Fast forward five years, with all that has transpired, from the Occupy Protests and thetargeting of military veterans to domestic surveillance, especially of activist-oriented groups and now, most recently, the Bundy Ranch showdown, and it would seem clear that the government has not veered one iota from its original playbook. Indeed, the government’s full-blown campaign of surveillance of Americans’ internet activity, phone calls, etc., makes complete sense in hindsight.
All that we have been subjected to in recent years–living under the shadow of NSA spying; motorists strip searched and anally probed on the side of the road ; innocent Americans spied upon while going about their daily business in schools and stores ; homeowners having their doors kicked in by militarized SWAT teams serving routine warrants –illustrates how the government deals with people it views as potential “extremists”: with heavy-handed tactics designed to intimidate the populace into submission and discourage anyone from stepping out of line or challenging the status quo.
In the same way, the government insists it can carry out all manner of surveillance on us–listen in on our phone calls, read our emails and text messages, track our movements,photograph our license plates , even enter our biometric information into DNA databases –but those who dare to return the favor, even a little, by filming potential police misconduct , get roughed up by the police, arrested, charged with violating various and sundry crimes.
When law enforcement officials–not just the police, but every agent of the government entrusted with enforcing laws, from the president on down–are allowed to discard the law when convenient, and the only ones having to obey the law are the citizenry and not the enforcers, then the law becomes only a tool to punish us, rather than binding and controlling the government, as it was intended.
This phenomenon is what philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument, which essentially says that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we the citizenry have become the nails to be hammered by the government’s henchmen, a.k.a. its guns for hire, a.k.a. its standing army, a.k.a. the nation’s law enforcement agencies.
Indeed, there can no longer be any doubt that militarized police officers , the end product of the government–federal, local and state–and law enforcement agencies having merged, have become a “standing” or permanent army, composed of full-time professional soldiers who do not disband. Yet these permanent armies are exactly what those who drafted the U.S. Constitution feared as tools used by despotic governments to wage war against its citizens.
That is exactly what we are witnessing today: a war against the American citizenry. Is it any wonder then that Americans are starting to resist?
More and more, Americans are tired, frustrated, anxious, and worried about the state of their country. They are afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and they are worried about the economic insecurity which still grips the nation. And they’re growing increasingly sick of being treated like suspects and criminals. As former law professor John Baker, who has studied the growing problem of overcriminalization , noted, “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.”
To make matters worse, a recent scientific study by Princeton researchers confirms that the United States of America is not the democracy that is purports to be, but rather an oligarchy, in which “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy.” As PolicyMic explains , “An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military… In other words, their statistics say your opinion literally does not matter .”
So if average Americans, having largely lost all of the conventional markers of influencing government, whether through elections, petition, or protest, have no way to impact their government, no way to be heard, no assurance that their concerns are truly being represented and their government is one “by the people, of the people, and for the people,” as opposed to being engineered expressly for the benefit of the wealthy elite, then where does that leave them?
To some, the choice is clear. As psychologist Erich Fromm recognized in his insightful book , On Disobedience : “If a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary). He acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle.”
Unfortunately, the intrepid, revolutionary American spirit that stood up to the British, blazed paths to the western territories, and prevailed despite a civil war, multiple world wars, and various economic depressions has taken quite a beating in recent years. Nevertheless, the time is coming when each American will have to decide: will you be a slave, rebel or revolutionary?
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights.
Court orders U.S. to release legal memo that authorized drone strike
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 18:20:39 +0000
Jonathan Stempel
A federal appeals court ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over key portions of a memorandum justifying the government’s targeted killing of people linked to terrorism, including Americans.
In a case pitting executive power against the public’s right to know what its government does, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling preserving the secrecy of the legal rationale for the killings, such as the death of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.
Ruling for the New York Times, a unanimous three-judge panel said the government waived its right to secrecy by making repeated public statements justifying targeted killings.
These included a Justice Department “white paper,” as well as speeches or statements by officials like Attorney General Eric Holder and former Obama administration counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, endorsing the practice.
The Times and two reporters, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, sought the memorandum under the federal Freedom of Information Act, saying it authorized the targeting of al-Awlaki, a cleric who joined al Qaeda’s Yemen affiliate and directed many attacks.
“Whatever protection the legal analysis might once have had has been lost by virtue of public statements of public officials at the highest levels and official disclosure of the DOJ White Paper,” Circuit Judge Jon Newman wrote for the appeals court panel in New York.
He said it was no longer logical or plausible to argue that disclosing the legal analysis in the memorandum jeopardizes military plans, intelligence activities or foreign relations. The court redacted a portion of the memorandum on intelligence gathering.
It is unclear whether the government will appeal, or when the memorandum might be made public.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said the newspaper is delighted with the decision, saying it encourages public debate on an important foreign policy and national security issue.
“The court reaffirmed a bedrock principle of democracy: The people do not have to accept blindly the government’s assurances that it is operating within the bounds of the law; they get to see for themselves the legal justification that the government is working from,” McCraw said in a statement.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Monday’s decision largely reversed a January 2013 ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan.
She ruled for the administration despite skepticism over its antiterrorism program, including whether it could unilaterally authorize killings outside a “hot” field of battle.
“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me,” she wrote.
Civil liberties groups have complained that the drone program, which deploys pilotless aircraft, lets the government kill Americans without constitutionally required due process.
McMahon ruled one month before the Justice Department released the white paper, which set out conditions to be met before lethal force in foreign countries against U.S. citizens could be used.
In a March 5, 2012 speech at Northwestern University, Holder had said it was “entirely lawful” to target people with senior operational roles in al-Qaeda and associated forces.
The Times has said the strategy of targeted killings had first been contemplated by the Bush administration, soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The American Civil Liberties Union supported the Times’ appeal of McMahon’s ruling. Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the ACLU, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case is New York Times Co et al v. U.S. Department of Justice et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Nos. 13-422, 13-445.
(Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)
Reuters
5 Things to Know About How Corporations Block Access to Everything From Miracle Drugs to Science Research
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 18:02:29 +0000
Should a company be able to patent a breast cancer gene? What about a species of soybean? How about a tool for basic scientific research? Or even a patent for acquiring patents (see: Halliburton)?
Intellectual property rights are supposed to help inventors bring good things to life, but there’s increasing concern that they may be keeping us from getting the things we need.
In this wild and contested jungle of the law, which concerns things like patents and copyrights, questions about the implications of allowing limited monopolies on ideas are making headlines. Do they stifle innovation? Can they cause the public more harm than good? Trillions of dollars are at stake. Companies known as “patent trolls” are gobbling up patents, then going on lawsuit sprees and extracting fees against infringement. Corporations are using intellectual property law to squash competitors and block our access to things as vital as lifesaving drugs, to place restrictions on things as intimate as parts of the human body. Third World countries are kept from accessing essential public goods related to everything from food security to education.
Surely, the producers of new ideas should be able to profit from their creations. But furious debates over what should be protected and who should profit are calling attention to the many things that are going wrong in this area. For example, a recentfront-page story in the New York Times detailed how diabetics are being held hostage in America by companies that follow Apple’s playbook to lock patients into buying expensive, patented products that quickly become obsolete. If you don’t buy the product, you don’t miss getting the new iPhone. You may die.
Intellectual property rights have come under intense scrutiny, a trend on display at a recent conference in Toronto on innovation and society, “Human After All“, sponsored by the Institute for New Economist Thinking (INET) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), where I moderated a panel on the topic. Let’s take a look at some of the burning questions and issues in play in this debate.
1. Why Do We Have Intellectual Property Rights?
The notion of giving inventors exclusive rights for a limited time goes back to the medieval era. The first patent in America was granted in 1641 to one Samuel Winslow, who came up with a new way to make salt. Patents could cover both tangible objects and also intangible stuff like methods and ideas. The U.S. Constitution has something to say about patents, namely this:
“The Congress shall have power … To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries…”
Notice the reasoning: We the People, through our representatives, grant intellectual property rights so that we can move knowledge forward — not enrich a few people at the expense of everyone else.
The question of whether ideas themselves should be protected by patents troubled some of the Founders, who saw the potential for abuse. In an 1813 letter, Thomas Jefferson observed that unlike objects, ideas inherently want to be shared: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Intellectual property rights have expanded quite a bit since Jefferson’s day. The Industrial Revolution saw brutal battles over inventions associated with things like the steam engine where the public good was often sacrificed to individual and corporate profits. In the early nineteen twenties, US patent law was revised to favor corporate interests. In 1930, the U.S. began to allow patents for living organisms with the Plant Patent Act. The Motion Picture Association of America, as it emerged, took a hard line on intellectual property and fought for broad protections. As new industries like biotechnology and nanotechnology popped up, companies and individuals sought additional protections for technology. The growth of the Internet set off a yet another wave of intellectual property rights related to patents and copyrights.
Today, what we have is a giant mess, a system plagued by bad actors and bad faith that has often become a means for corporations to smash competition and block human progress rather than advance knowledge. More time and energy is spent by companies coming up with new ways to sue each other than coming up with new ideas (think: Apple v. Samsung). The public purse is picked as taxpayer-funded investments in research are appropriated by profit-making companies. Our patent system fuels inequality by socializing the risk associated with research and discoveries while privatizing the gains. Meanwhile lawyers, as you might expect, are making out like bandits.
2. Patents Have Exploded Since the 1980s.
If you talk to some of the bright-eyed folks in Silicon Valley, America is on an innovation roll. Since the 1980s, the number of patents sought has soared, and the pace is accelerating. Over the last two decades, businesses have increasingly used patents to sue or threaten to sue other companies to get them to pay licensing fees. 2012 was quite a year for patents: the number of court cases increased 29 percent in that year alone, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Costs associated with the litigation come to billions per year.
Michele Boldrin and David Levine, authors of Against Intellectual Monopoly, have noted that in a single four-year period, from 1997 to 2001, patent applications leapt by 50 percent. Meanwhile, the number of lawyers working on intellectual property in America went from 5,500 to nearly 22,000.
But are we really getting so much more creative with all these patents? Boldrin and Levine don’t think so. It appears that the number of patents has grown not because there is more innovation, but simply because the number of things that could be patented grew.
As economists William Lazonick and Oner Tulum have pointed out, changes in the law have allowed certain parties, like venture capitalists, to grow rich on patents at the expense of the public. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it easier for companies, particularly those in biotech, to profit from the results of government-backed research done in universities. Seen an ad for Botox lately? Lazonick and Tulum point out that Botox is a drug whose medical applications were developed in taxpayer-funded universities in the 1960s. In 1983, something known as the Orphan Drug Act allowed companies like Allergan, which got hold of Botox, to commercialize certain kinds of drugs that were developed for use in a small population when additional properties of the drugs were discovered. In 2013, Botox generated $1982 million in revenues for Allergan, of which 54 percent were for therapeutic uses that your doctor prescribes and 46 percent were for the cosmetic uses that the company advertises.
3. Intellectual Property Rights Can Block Innovation.
One of the biggest arguments in favor of robust intellectual property rights is that they are supposed to drive innovation, giving big rewards to those who come up with new ideas. But a growing list of experts, such as Boldrin and Levine, counter that this is nonsense. “Intellectual monopoly is not a cause of innovation,” they write, “but it is rather an unwelcome consequence of it.” They argue that in young, dynamic industries, intellectual monopoly doesn’t play a major role — it’s only when the ideas run out that companies become obsessed with having the government protect the old ways of doing business.
In other words, an explosion in patents could be a sign that a country is getting less innovative, not more.
Boldrin and Levine provide numerous examples in their book of how patents shut down innovation, from a steam engine patent that may have delayed the Industrial Revolution by a couple of decades to the Wright brothers American patent on the airplane which forced innovative work in the industry to move to France.
More recently, Heidi Williams examined work done in the area of human genome sequencing by the Human Genome Project (a public entity) and also by Celera (a private company). Williams concluded that Celera’s intellectual property rights claims resulted in a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development.
Economist Petra Moser states that if you look at history, intellectual property laws have always had the potential to squelch progress:
“Overall, the weight of the existing historical evidence suggests that patent policies, which grant strong intellectual property rights to early generations of inventors, may discourage innovation. On the contrary, policies that encourage the diffusion of ideas and modify patent laws to facilitate entry and encourage competition may be an effective mechanism to encourage innovation.”
4. The Public Is Getting Harmed and Cheated.
It’s increasingly clear that taxpayers are getting ripped off, particularly in areas like in pharmaceuticals. Through entities like the National Institutes of Health, the federal government pays for basic research that gets plundered by corporations that make tremendous profits (and then, of course, lobby to have their taxes reduced). Companies like Apple expect the U.S. government to protect their intellectual property rights all over the world, yet they assiduously avoid paying taxes. Considering the fact that iPhones, for example, would not exist without taxpayer-funded research in everything from touchscreen technology to GPS, this is especially maddening.
Battles between companies and sovereign countries are heating up. Eli Lilly and the Canadian government are gearing up for a showdown since the Canadians took away the company’s rights to two popular new drugs, one for attention-deficit disorder and another for psychotic illness. Despite the fact that countries are supposed to have the right to set their own domestic laws for rules of medicine patents, big corporations are increasingly able to get around them and effectively challenge national policy. Free trade pacts have become a prime vehicle for this. The much-debated Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact being negotiated between North American and Asian countries and backed by President Obama, has provoked outrage because it would enhance drug company profits by protecting patents on drugs and medical procedures while blocking less expensive generic drugs. The fear is that powerful corporations will blow right past the laws of individual countries and use patents in ways that pose serious human rights questions.
5. Things Don’t Have to Be This Way.
While we certainly want to promote new ideas and to reward creativity, many feel that intellectual property laws aren’t the best way to do this. As Levine has written:
“It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is monopoly, are the best or the only way of providing that reward.”
Several of the economists I spoke to at the INET/CIGI conference, such as Italian economist Giovanni Dosi and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, have suggested other ways of rewarding inventors, such as prizes. Stiglitz has pointed out that prizes, as opposed to patents, could help reward research that might not be commercially profitable, like developing a cure for AIDs, or other urgent global problems.
Clearly the notion of public benefit has to be vigorously defended in discussions of intellectual property rights. There are many ways the public good get a better deal. The government, for one, could claim rights to revenues for ideas and inventions that were funded with taxpayer money. Or it could force companies like Apple that benefit from such research to pay their share of taxes. So far, the government has not exercised its muscle because there is an imbalance of power between public and private sector.
We need to recognize that science and technology grow by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection blocks exactly what it’s supposed to enhance: ideas that help us live better. The intellectual property system needs to be reevaluated so that social and economic progress aren’t hampered by laws that only reward the few, and the public good becomes a top priority.
Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
6 Reasons Why Corporations Fail to Do the Right Thing
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 17:13:51 +0000
Six reasons why international business remains dangerous to workers and the environment, even when its leaders genuinely want to do better
Four years ago yesterday, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 men and spilling thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf. This Thursday is the first anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers.
What has happened in the time since these disasters? BP was barred from drilling in U.S. deepwater—until last month. Western clothing brands are upgrading Bangladeshi factories, but the fundamentals of their business haven’t changed: Brands outsource production to factories serving multiple clients in low-wage, low-regulation countries (not just Bangladesh).
The lack of fundamental change in these industries—and others, such as financial services after the 2008 crisis—suggests disasters like these are bound to happen again.
Indeed, every corporate crisis evokes a sense of déjà vu. The Rana Plaza catastrophe bore echoes of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The unfolding story of General Motors’ faulty ignition switches brings back 1970smemories of the Ford Pinto, whose infamously fire-prone fuel tanks went unfixed because upgrading them would have cost more than the $200,000 Ford set for a human life.
Why does the corporate world fail to learn from its tragic past? From 1999 to 2008, I worked for BP in Indonesia, China, and at the company’s London headquarters. It was my job to assess and mitigate the social and human rights risks to communities living near major BP projects, a role that existed because the executives I worked with understood that what was good for those communities was good for our business.
I did innovative, progressive work bringing in experts and setting up partnerships and programs to benefit contract workers and neighbors of big BP projects in the developing world. But, obviously, I did not manage to prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster, or the 2005 explosion of a BP refinery in Texas City that killed 15 people and injured many more.
I wanted an answer to that question, and I decided to write a book, reflecting on both my own experience and, also, documenting the experiences of my peers in other companies who similarly thought they were making progress mitigating risks to stakeholders, but then were faced with evidence to the contrary: supply chain managers in apparel companies who were sourcing at Rana Plaza; tech executives working to protect privacy but still seeing users persecuted with the data their companies collect.
Why, with this global invisible army of people working to prevent them do these disasters still happen? Why do they still happen when there are an unprecedented number of CEOs talking about corporate social responsibility (CSR)? More importantly, what does this “invisible army” need to succeed?
Here are some of the themes that emerged from my interviews and reflections:
1. People lie. More than one person I interviewed told me a story of touring a factory, doubling back on the pretense of forgetting something, and catching workers turning in their goggles or other protective gear. Factory owners will hide bad news if failing an audit means losing business.
A few companies like H&M are said to have committed to multi-year contracts with suppliers, which are hoped to strengthen relationships between firms and suppliers, enabling them to address problems together, and remove incentives for suppliers to lie about conditions for fear of losing business. But in the meantime, as Jeremy Prepscius of Business for Social Responsibility, where I’m a human rights advisor, told me, “There’s always one good factory, and there’s always one that lies better than everybody else. So guess which one would have the cheaper price?”
2. People don’t talk to each other. Big organizations often operate in distinct, siloed divisions, and multi-disciplinary issues like human rights and sustainability often fall through the cracks. As director of corporate citizenship at Microsoft, Dan Bross oversees assessments that cut across multiple functions like legal and product development to identify potential risks to users. He told me, “I have a horizontal job in a vertical world.”
3. Safety and responsibility cost money—and no one gets rewarded for disasters averted. Even those companies not living explicitly by Ford’s 1970s model have to perform some sort of cost-benefit analysis. Since the work that I did for BP and that my peers do for their companies is preventative and complex, it can be hard to justify the expense of any one intervention.
Read more
Obama Cracks Down on Transparency
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:43:15 +0000
Steven Aftergood
RINF Alternative News
The Director of National Intelligence has forbidden most intelligence community employees from discussing “intelligence-related information” with a reporter unless they have specific authorization to do so, according to an Intelligence Community Directive that was issued last month.
“IC employees… must obtain authorization for contacts with the media” on intelligence-related matters, and “must also report… unplanned or unintentional contact with the media on covered matters,” the Directive stated.
The new Directive reflects — and escalates — tensions between the government and the press over leaks of classified information. It is intended “to mitigate risks of unauthorized disclosures of intelligence-related matters that may result from such contacts.” See Intelligence Community Directive 119, Media Contacts, March 20, 2014.
Significantly, however, the new prohibition does not distinguish between classified and unclassified intelligence information. The “covered matters” that require prior authorization before an employee may discuss them with a reporter extend to any topic that is “related” to intelligence, irrespective of its classification status.
The Directive prohibits unauthorized “contact with the media about intelligence-related information, including intelligence sources, methods, activities, and judgments (hereafter, ‘covered matters’).”
If an employee’s contact with the media involves an unauthorized disclosure of classified information, then he could be subject to criminal prosecution. But even if classified information were not communicated to the reporter, the Directive indicates, violation of the new policy “at a minimum… will be handled in the same manner as a security violation.”
“IC employees who are found to be in violation of this IC policy may be subject to administrative actions that may include revocation of security clearance or termination of employment,” the Directive states.
The new Directive creates an anomalous situation in which routine interactions that are permissible between an intelligence employee and an ordinary member of the public are now to be prohibited if that member of the public qualifies as “media.”
So under most circumstances, an intelligence community employee is at liberty to discuss unclassified “intelligence-related information” with his or her next-door neighbor. But if the neighbor happened to be a member of the media, then the contact would be prohibited altogether without prior authorization.
Meanwhile, the Directive defines membership in “the media” expansively. It is not necessary to be a credentialed reporter for an established news organization. It is sufficient to be “any person… engaged in the collection, production, or dissemination to the public of information in any form related to topics of national security….”
Moreover, even approved contacts are to be formally documented for future review. “IC elements should ensure their records on media contacts are sufficient to support executive and legislative branch oversight requirements.”
Essentially, the Directive seeks to ensure that the only contacts that occur between intelligence community employees and the press are those that have been approved in advance. Henceforward, the only news about intelligence is to be authorized news.
The IC policy bears some resemblance to a proposal that was advanced by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2012, and then withdrawn in response to widespread criticism.
The Senate’s initial version of the FY2012 intelligence authorization act (Section 506) would have required that only specifically designated officials would be permitted to provide “background or off-the-record information regarding intelligence activities to the media.”
That provision would “lead to a less-informed debate on national security issues, by prohibiting nearly all intelligence agency employees from providing briefings to the press, unless those employees give their names and provide the briefing on the record,” said Sen. Ron Wyden at the time.
“I haven’t seen any evidence that prohibiting the intelligence agencies from providing these briefings would benefit national security in any way, so I see no reason to limit the flow of information in this manner,” he said then.
Likewise, there is no particular reason to think that routine interactions between intelligence agency employees and reporters — especially on unclassified matters — pose any kind of threat to national security, or that limiting them will offer any benefit. However, the new policy is likely to be effective in reducing the quality, independence and critical content of intelligence-related information that is available to the press and the public.
“I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks,” said outgoing National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander at an eventon March 4. At the time, it was unclear what he was referring to, but he might have had the March 20 Intelligence Community Directive 119 in mind.
Steven Aftergood writes for FAS.
Facial recognition – coming soon to a shopping mall near you
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:33:57 +0000
John Hawes
Technology giant NEC’s Hong Kong branch is promoting a small, “easy to install” appliance which will enable businesses to monitor their customers based on facial recognition.
From a recent NEC press release:
The new Mobile Facial Recognition Appliance enables organizations in any industry to offer an ultra-personalized customer experience by recognizing the face of each and every customer as soon as they set foot on the premises.
Face recognition is becoming ever more sophisticated and accurate, bringing automated detection and tracking of people by the way they look within reach of all sorts of people.
For law enforcement this technology is, of course, a dream. Despite limited success in the real world, any modern conspiracy thriller worth its salt includes a scene where creepily intrusive/heroically hardworking forces of law and order are shown to be able to find anyone passing near any security camera, and follow them around with minimal effort.
With the FBI‘s latest plans to expand facial recognition data this sort of thing comes another step closer to reality.
It’s not just the feds and the snoops that love the idea though. In the business world, who people are and what they’re up to has become the basis of a massive industry, with big data on anyone and everyone being used to hone and target advertising and promotions in an effort to suck in a few more customers.
So it should come as little surprise that developers of facial recognition technology are targeting their solutions at the commercial sector.
In the past we’ve seen businesses trying to monitor potential customers by tracking their mobile devices – examples of shops and marketeers watchinghow people circulate around their premises using WiFi include the infamousWiFi-sniffing rubbish bins.
Of course, there are ways of hiding from this kind of snooping – disabling WiFi when away from known and trusted hotspots, shutting down unnecessary location services, or simply not carrying a smartphone, can keep us out of the databases of the monitoring firms.
But our faces are less easy to leave behind. Everyone has some kind of face, some more pleasant to look at than others, and most of us, barring those with cultural or religious reasons to keep them hidden, parade around with them on plain view.
Unlike other biometrics such as fingerprints or body odour, our faces can be observed with usable accuracy from considerable distances, often without us being aware of being watched.
So they are the ideal metric for commercial as well as security monitoring. No need to hope people have their devices with them and keep them open to sniffing; just a quick look, and a look-up, and you can tell who it that’s walking in, and the kind of stuff they might be nudged into spending their cash on.
It goes further though. Faces are not just a signpost to who we are, they also say a lot about what we’re thinking and feeling.
"The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart." - St Jerome
The human brain learns to pick up on emotional clues from facial expressions within about six months from birth. As technology to mimic this perception advances, it surely won’t be long before we’re not just spotting people passing our cameras, but working out what their expressions reveal.
Combined with the vast amounts of data linked to our identities across the internet, this promises massive potential insight into our lives.
It’s not going to be much of a step from the animated billboard by the escalator blaring out “Hi Dave, long time no see, need some new underwear?” to “Hi Dave, you look a bit down today, and I see Janine’s Facebook status shows she’s newly single, maybe some gin would be good about now?”
For now at least the official product page for NEC Hong Kong’s latest innovation focuses heavily on security implementations – airports and other borders and barriers, “criminological work” – mentioning customer management potential only towards the end of the list.
The press release reveals a much more worrying focus on commercial applications though.
Any advance along this road is another nail in the coffin of privacy. Whether you think privacy is an outdated concept, or continue to value it highly, it’s hard to deny the ever-growing encroachment of both The Man and commercial interests into what used to be our private lives.
We could be due for a boom in sales of Groucho glasses.
Via Naked Security
Big Brother ‘spy car’ is watching parking sites
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:30:43 +0000
Callum Keown
A £30,000 ‘spy car’ is being used by Oxford City Council to catch motorists who fail to pay their parking fees.
The council bought a Citroen Berlingo last March and has kitted it out with cameras that scan motorists’ number plates in its car parks to alert wardens if a fee has not been paid.
The existence of the car only emerged last week following a report by privacy campaigner Big Brother Watch over councils’ use of CCTV cameras to enforce parking and traffic infractions and today the Oxford Mail can reveal what it is being used for.
However, city council spokeswoman Louisa Dean said there were no figures on how many fines its deployment had led to. Fines are issued manually by wardens after they have been alerted that a driver has not paid for their parking.
The council said it was proving to be a valuable addition for its parking system but Liberal Democrat leader Jean Fooks was uncomfortable with its use.
Mrs Fooks said: “I think people should pay for parking fines, obviously, but it does make me feel uncomfortable.
“The county council has cameras on High Street but at least people know they are there, people don’t know it (the ANPR vehicle) exists.
“The city council has spent public money on this and I’m sure people would like to know if it is cost-effective and how many people it has caught.
“Figures should be made available.”
Big Brother Watch has dubbed such vehicles as ‘spy cars’, but Ms Dean defended its use. She also rejected criticism that fines were simply an additional form of cash for the council.
She said: “Parking enforcement is not about quotas or income generated from penalties, it is about improving safety and traffic flow.
“We also need to manage supply and demand for car parking spaces in an extremely busy city.
“We are pleased with the ANPR vehicle as it speeds up the process for enforcement officers to check if cars are parked illegally.”
Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles said: “The fact the council doesn’t record proper statistics about the penalties being issued only begs the question if they are trying to hide the facts from the public.”
During the 2012-13 financial year – prior to the Berlingo’s use – Oxford City Council made a surplus on its parking charges of £4.56m, a rise on the previous 12 months.
Last week’s report by Big Brother Watch revealed the county council’s cameras enforcing restrictions on the city’s bus gates had caught 94,217 motorists between April 2008 and March 31 last year. It had received £3.3m in fines.
Via ThisisOxford
Recruiting Thugs for the Police State
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:22:45 +0000
Kurt Nimmo
Sir Robert Peel is considered the father of modern policing. He was influenced by the legal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. Bentham called for a centralized and politically neutral police force for the maintenance of social order and protection of people and property against crime.
In the 1850s, in response to public fear of a paramilitary police, Peel organized the cops along civilian lines and made them answerable to the public. Peel and London’s Metropolitan Police Service went out of their way to make sure police uniforms did not resemble military uniforms (blue instead of red). Police were armed with wooden truncheons and rattles to signal the need for assistance. “The police are the public and the public are the police,” was one of the Peelian Principles.
It took Lincoln and the Northern War of Aggression to mutate the role of police in the United States. Police forces became paramilitary, whereas before the war police were non-uniformed and lacked a paramilitary hierarchy.
In 2005, the Peelian philosophy was finally discarded when the Supreme Court ruled the police do not have a constitutiuonal duty to protect citizens.
Due largely to the federal government and the Pentagon, police across the country are now militarized. In 1997, the National Defense Authorization Act included the 1033 program authorizing the Defense Department to dispense surplus military equipment to municipal police departments. Following the 9/11 attacks and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the federal government doled out a staggering $34 billion in “terrorism grants” to local police forces.
Across the United States, police now represent a bona fide military force. Peelian Principles of community service are a thing of the past. Police recruitment (see above video) dwells on gun play, SWAT raids, and attack dogs. The idea that the police “must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public” is a remote and archaic concept. Soldiers do not “maintain the respect of the public.” They kill people and break things. They occupy countries and enforce martial law.
The state considers the American people the enemy. Urban Shield, ASCO and a multitude of related “drills” and “exercises” are not about preventing terrorism – they are about acclimating the American people to living in a police state.
Via Infowars
Activists want net neutrality, NSA spying debated at Internet conference
Posted:Mon, 21 Apr 2014 16:02:59 +0000
Participants at the conference also want concrete measures to emerge from the conference
John Ribeiro
A campaign on the Internet is objecting to the exclusion of issues like net neutrality, the cyberweapons arms race and surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency from the discussion paper of an Internet governance conference this week in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
A significant section of the participants are also looking for concrete measures and decisions at the conference rather than yet another statement of principles.
The proposed text “lacks any strength,” does not mention NSA‘s mass surveillance or the active participation of Internet companies, and fails to propose any concrete action, according to the campaign called Our Net Mundial.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the surveillance programs of the U.S., which allegedly included real time access to content on servers of Internet companies like Facebook and Google.
The Global Multistakeholder Meeting on the Future of Internet Governance, also called NETmundial, released Thursday a document to guide the discussions starting Wednesday among the representatives from more than 80 countries .
An earlier document leaked by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks proposed international agreements for restraining cyber weapons development and deployment and called for the Internet to remain neutral and free from discrimination. WikiLeaks said the document was prepared for approval by a high-level committee.
Dilma Rousseff, the president of host country Brazil, has been a sharp critic of surveillance by the U.S. after reports that her communications were being spied on by the NSA.
Though the Brazil discussion document does not directly mention NSA surveillance, it refers to the freedom of expression, information and privacy, including avoiding arbitrary or unlawful collection of personal data and surveillance.
The meeting’s call for universal principles partly reflects a desire for interstate agreements that can prevent rights violations such as the NSA surveillance, wrote Internet governance experts Milton Mueller and Ben Wagner in a paper. The Tunis Agenda of the World Summit on the Information Society also called for globally applicable public policy principles for Internet governance.
“But there have been so many Internet principles released in recent years that it is hard to see what the Brazil conference could add,” Mueller and Wagner wrote.
Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Commission, wrote last week in a letter to NETmundial that she continued to strongly believe “that the outcomes of NETmundial must be concrete and actionable, with clear milestones and with a realistic but ambitious timeline.” She identified a number of areas where “concreteness” could be achieved, including the globalization of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in March it plans to end its 16-year oversight of ICANN. The move appeared to be in response to criticism of U.S. control of the Internet. ICANN’s president Fadi Chehadé has also called for greater accountability for his organization.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John’s e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com