Tag Archives: agency

European Court Orders Google to Remove Links That Annoyed a Lawyer

by FriedaConstant Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

The European Court of Justice has ruled that Google can be required to delete links to public records even when the records themselves are allowed to remain active:

The case began in 2009 when Mario Costeja, a lawyer, objected that entering his name in Google’s search engine led to legal notices dating back to 1998 in an online version of a Spanish newspaper that detailed his accumulated debts and the forced sale of his property.

Mr. Costeja said that the debt issues had been resolved many years earlier and were no longer relevant. When the newspaper that had published the information, La Vanguardia, refused to remove the notices, and when Google refused to expunge the links, Mr. Costeja complained to the Spanish Data Protection Agency that his rights to the protection of his personal data were being violated.

The Spanish authority ordered Google to remove the links in July 2010, but it did not impose any order on La Vanguardia.

Generally speaking, I’m in favor of greater privacy rights, and I mostly support the EU’s more aggressive approach to privacy than what we have in America. But this ruling is troubling. Not because Google has to delete some links—I can imagine circumstances where that might be justified—but because they’re being treated differently than the newspaper that published the information in the first place. It’s as if the court recognizes that La Vanguardia enjoys freedom of the press, but not Google. I’m not sure how you justify that, aside from a vague notion that La Vanguardia is a “real” press outlet and Google isn’t. But whatever notions you have of press freedoms, they shouldn’t rely on distinctions between old and new media. If La Vanguardia is allowed to publish it, Google should be allowed to link to it.

We’ll see how this plays out. To me, though, it doesn’t even seem like a close call. These are legal records; they were published legitimately; they’re potentially relevant regardless of whether the debts were cleared up; and they aren’t even that old. I certainly understand Costeja’s annoyance, but that’s not a good reason to abridge press freedoms so broadly.

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European Court Orders Google to Remove Links That Annoyed a Lawyer

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The Human Soldiers Behind Obama’s Drone War

by AdelaidPonce Posted on May 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Enemies, innocent victims, and soldiers have always made up the three faces of war. With war growing more distant, with drones capable of performing on the battlefield while their “pilots” remain thousands of miles away, two of those faces have, however, faded into the background in recent years. Today, we are left with just the reassuring “face” of the terrorist enemy, killed clinically by remote control while we go about our lives, apparently without any “collateral damage” or danger to our soldiers. Now, however, that may slowly be changing, bringing the true face of the drone campaigns Washington has pursued since 9/11 into far greater focus.

Imagine if those drone wars going on in Pakistan and Yemen (as well as the United States) had a human face all the time, so that we could understand what it was like to live constantly, in and out of those distant battle zones, with the specter of death. In addition to images of the “al-Qaeda” operatives who the White House wants us to believe are the sole targets of its drone campaigns, we would regularly see photos of innocent victims of drone attacks gathered by human rights groups from their relatives and neighbors. And what about the third group— the military personnel whose lives revolve around killing fields so far away—whose stories, in these years of Washington’s drone assassination campaigns, we’ve just about never heard?

After all, soldiers no longer set sail on ships to journey to distant battlefields for months at a time. Instead, every day, thousands of men and women sign onto their computers at desks on military bases in the continental United States and abroad where they spend hours glued to screens watching the daily lives of people often on the other side of the planet. Occasionally, they get an order from Washington to push a button and vaporize their subjects. It sounds just like—and the comparison has been made often enough—a video game, which can be switched off at the end of a shift, after which those pilots return home to families and everyday life.

And if you believed what little we normally see of them—what, that is, the Air Force has let us see (the CIA part of the drone program being off-limits to news reporting)—that would indeed seem to be the straightforward story of life for our drone warriors. Take Rene Lopez, who in shots of a recent homecoming welcome at Fort Gordon in Georgia appears to be a doting father. Photographed for the local papers on his return from a tour in Afghanistan, the young soldier is seen holding and kissing his infant daughter dressed in a bright pink top. He smiles with delight as the wide-eyed child tries on his military hat.

From an online profile posted to LinkedIn by Lopez last year, we learn that the clean-cut US Army signals intelligence specialist claims to be an actor in the drone war in addition to being a proud parent. To be specific, he says he has been working in the dark arts of hunting and killing “high value targets” using a National Security Agency (NSA) tool known as Gilgamesh.

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The Human Soldiers Behind Obama’s Drone War

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Obama makes a push for solar power

by YMKNildadcbtfzo Posted on April 18, 2014

A bright idea

Obama makes a push for solar power

By

Nellis Air Force Base

The White House threw a solar party on Thursday, and the streamers and ticker tape came in the form of millions of dollars of new support for solar projects. The Hill reports:

The Obama administration on Thursday announced a $15 million program to help state, local and tribal governments build solar panels and other infrastructure to fight climate change.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and White House counselor John Podesta announced the program at what the White House billed as a “solar summit” designed to push governments and private and nonprofit businesses to up their use of solar power.

Agence France-Presse elaborates:

Thursday, the White House launched a program to encourage federal agencies, military installations, and publicly-subsidized buildings in the Washington area to install more solar panels on roofs, covered parking garages and open land.

And, earlier in the week, the Energy Department guaranteed at least $2.5 billion in loans for “innovative” solar projects.

The Environmental Protection Agency also pledged Thursday to double the use of renewable energy at its network of 1,500 partners organizations — including schools, public buildings, and businesses — within the next 10 years.

Supporting solar energy isn’t just good for the climate and for air and water quality. It’s good for the economy. A White House fact sheet said the industry employs nearly 143,000 Americans — a number that has grown more than 50 percent since 2010.


Source
Obama puts $15M into solar power, The Hill
Obama launches measures to support solar energy in US, Agence France-Presse
FACT SHEET: Building on Progress – Supporting Solar Deployment and Jobs, The White House

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Obama makes a push for solar power

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Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

by EnriqueBarrier Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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In an entirely unsurprising development, it appears that the Senate report on CIA torture is starting to get leaked. Today, McClatchy reports the complete list of findings from the report, including these:

The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not effectively assist the agency in acquiring intelligence or in gaining cooperation from detainees.
The CIA inaccurately characterized the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques to justify their use.
The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
The CIA manipulated the media by coordinating the release of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The whole story is here, along with the complete list of findings. I expect more like this in the future unless the CIA stops slow rolling its declassification process and allows the report to be substantially released.

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Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

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5 Things You Need to Know About Obama’s NSA Proposal

by Neal75Njqh Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the White House released its proposal to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program, which hoovers up the phone records of millions of Americans. Currently, the NSA stores Americans’ phone metadata (which doesn’t include the content of calls) for five years. Under the President’s new proposal, phone companies will instead be tasked with holding onto this data, which will they will store for 18 months. Additionally, the government would only be allowed to query these records if it gets approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, though the president’s plan includes an exemption for as-yet-unspecified “emergency” situations. Here are five more things you need to know about the President’s proposal:

1. It only addresses the bulk collection of phone records.

The collection of telephone records has gotten a lot of attention from Congress—but documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have revealed many other controversial surveillance programs. Last October, for instance, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had broken Google and Yahoo’s encryption and was siphoning millions of their users records into the agency’s data centers. In a press call on Thursday with civil liberties groups, privacy experts argued that President Obama should make additional reforms that address these other alleged surveillance programs. “Our phone records are sensitive, but so are our financial records, Internet information, email data,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel. “It reveals who we know, where we go, what we do, what we think and what we believe, and those sorts of records need just as much protection.”

2. Phone companies aren’t too psyched about Obama’s plan, so the administration might compensate them.

On Thursday, Verizon announced that it opposes aspects of the plan. “If Verizon receives a valid request for business records, we will respond in a timely way, but companies should not be required to create, analyze or retain records for reasons other than business purposes,” Randal Milch, Verizon’s general counsel and executive vice president for public policy, said in a statement. In a call with reporters on Thurday, White House officials emphasized that the administration has been meeting with phone companies to come up with a workable solution, which could potentially include compensating them for their efforts. “I certainly would envision, consistent with what the government does today with respect to compensating phone companies and others for their production of records in response to lawful court process, I think we would see a similar approach,” said a senior administration official.

3. The plan is still missing a lot of key details.

According to a press release issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York School of Law on Thursday, the Obama administration has yet to “identify the standard that the government must meet to obtain a court order, beyond a vague reference to ‘national security concerns.’ Nor does the fact sheet identify any limits on the government’s ability to keep and search the records it obtains, which will necessarily include large amounts of information about innocent Americans.” In the White House press, a reporter asked senior administration officials how long the NSA could keep querying data once it had obtained a court order. An official responded: “I’m not going to presuppose what that time period would be right now.”

4. Obama could end the program now if he wanted to, but he’s waiting for Congress to act.

President Obama could end the NSA’s bulk collection program without congressional approval, but he’s choosing not to. A senior White House official said on Thursday, “The President believes the government should no longer collect and hold the bulk telephone metadata. He’s also got a responsibility as commander-in-chief to ensure that we maintain the capabilities of this program, and he wants to see it done in a way that also responds to the concerns that have been identified and to create a program and have a discussion about it, and have legislation that would promote confidence in our intelligence-gathering activities.”

5. There are competing bills to end the program. Privacy advocates hate one of them.

On Thursday, privacy advocates took issue with the NSA reform bill introduced this week by members of the House intelligence committee. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), ends the bulk collection program, but doesn’t require strict judicial review before the NSA queries phone companies for their customers’ records. President Obama’s proposal, in contrast, does require this review. The ACLU’s Richardson notes that the Rogers-Ruppersberger plan would allow the FBI and other agencies to directly demand information from companies. “It’s not a fix, it’s not even a half-measure,” she said. Privacy advocates support the USA Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), which includes more civil liberties protections.

More here:

5 Things You Need to Know About Obama’s NSA Proposal

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

by au87rr Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is interesting:

U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move likely to please international critics but alarm many business leaders and others who rely on smooth functioning of the Web.

Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance last year.

I won’t pretend I’m thrilled about this, even if it was probably inevitable at some point. Whatever else you can say about the United States and the leverage its intelligence community gets from control over internet plumbing, it’s also true that the US has been a pretty competent and reliable administrator of the most revolutionary and potentially subversive network ever invented. Conversely, global organizations don’t have a great track record at technocratic management, and world politics—corrosive at best, illiberal and venal at worst—could kill the goose that laid the golden egg. I certainly understand why the rest of the world chafes at American control, but I nonetheless suspect that it might be the best of a bad bunch of options.

Then again, maybe not. There are also plenty of global standards-setting organizations that do a perfectly good job. Slowly and bureaucratically, maybe, but that’s to be expected. Maybe ICANN will go the same way. We’ll see.

In any case, I think we can expect Republicans to go ballistic over this.

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US Announces Plan to Give Up Control Over Internet Plumbing

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Blacking out America would be a cinch, because there’s not enough distributed solar

by ankllydpz Posted on March 14, 2014

Blacking out America would be a cinch, because there’s not enough distributed solar

By

Shutterstock

Crippling America’s old-fashioned electrical grid for a long period of time would be disturbingly easy. Saboteurs need only wait for a heat wave, and then knock out a factory plus a small number of the 55,000 electric-transmission substations that are scattered throughout the country.

That’s according to the findings of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission analysis. “Destroy nine interconnection substations and a transformer manufacturer and the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer,” wrote FERC officials in a memo for a former chair of the agency.

FERC’s alarming findings about the grid’s vulnerability were reported this week by The Wall Street Journal:

A small number of the country’s substations play an outsize role in keeping power flowing across large regions. The FERC analysis indicates that knocking out nine of those key substations could plunge the country into darkness for weeks, if not months.

“This would be an event of unprecedented proportions,” said Ross Baldick, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

No federal rules require utilities to protect vital substations except those at nuclear power plants.

The thought of a terrorist attack on a substation is not merely hypothetical:

In last April’s attack at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf substation, gunmen shot 17 large transformers over 19 minutes before fleeing in advance of police. The state grid operator was able to avoid any blackouts.

The Metcalf substation sits near a freeway outside San Jose, Calif. Some experts worry that substations farther from cities could face longer attacks because of their distance from police. Many sites aren’t staffed and are protected by little more than chain-link fences and cameras.

FERC complained that the Journal was “highly irresponsible” to publish the story. But all the newspaper did was expound upon public warnings issued by the agency’s former chair around the time of last year’s attack.

And if the agency had chosen to cooperate with the Journal‘s reporter, it could have told her about the former chair’s formula for protecting America from an epic blackout: install lots of solar panels, all over the place. “A more distributed system is much more resilient,” then-FERC chair Jon Wellinghoff said during an energy summit last April.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Blacking out America would be a cinch, because there’s not enough distributed solar

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Quote of the Day: People Sure Use Their Webcams for a Lot of Kinky Stuff

by KarissaRamaciot Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Britain’s GCHQ, lamenting the images they got when they tapped into Yahoo webcam chats:

It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.

Imagine that. On a more serious note, GCHQ was tapping into Yahoo webcam chats:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery — including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications — from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Unsurprisingly, Yahoo was not amused when it learned about this.

Source:

Quote of the Day: People Sure Use Their Webcams for a Lot of Kinky Stuff

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

by TammaraMog Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the February 10 issue of the New Yorker, Rachel Aviv has an outstanding piece on Tyrone Hayes, the University of California-Berkeley biologist whose research found that atrazine, a widely used herbicide, caused extreme sexual-development problems in frogs at very low levels. Aviv’s article follows a superb Hayes profile by Dashka Slater published in Mother Jones in 2012. Aviv’s piece gives some key background on just why it’s so hard for the US Environmental Protection Agency to take action on chemicals like atrazine, which in addition to harming frogs, is also suspected of causing thyroid and ovarian cancers in people at low doses. Here’s the key bit regarding the EPA and its reliance on cost-benefit analyses to determine what chemicals the public can and cannot be exposed to:

In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling, the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible, demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”

Hat tip: Kathleen Geier.

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Why the EPA Can’t Manage To Block This Gnarly Herbicide

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Climate change has turned southern England into a soggy teabag

by YolandaFoust Posted on February 10, 2014

Climate change has turned southern England into a soggy teabag

By

Adam Moralee

If you want to know what most of southern England looks like right now, take a peek into your mug of Earl Grey.

The region has taken an almighty soaking during the past week, following the wettest January on record. (And when we say “on record,” we’re talking about nearly 250 years worth of data.)

The unprecedented drenching shut down rail lines over the weekend. At least 5,000 homes have been flooded in the county of Somerset in the southwest of the country, and the government is warning that thousands more are vulnerable throughout the region as rivers swell. Al Jazeera reports:

Severe flooding and landslips cut off rail links to large parts of southwest England for more than 24 hours at the weekend as the government came under pressure for its handling of storms battering Britain.

Some areas have been underwater for over a month in the wettest January on record, with angry residents criticising the government for not doing enough to prevent flooding or reacting quickly enough to help those affected by the devastation.

The military has been brought in to help build flood defences and evacuate properties.

The Telegraph reports that more rain — and flooding danger — is on its way:

Britain’s flooding crisis is set to deepen this week after the Environment Agency warned that lives could be at risk from expected flooding along the River Thames.

The Environment Agency has dramatically increased the number of “severe” warnings, indicating a risk to life, from two to 16 as it warns that rivers already swollen by flood water could continue rising for at least 24 hours.

And as the floods set in, so too is a realization that this is a disaster that we have helped to bring upon ourselves — by filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. The BBC explains:

Climate change is likely to be a factor in the extreme weather that has hit much of the UK in recent months, the Met Office’s chief scientist has said.

Dame Julia Slingo said the variable UK climate meant there was “no definitive answer” to what caused the storms.

“But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change,” she added.

“There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

As if the watery wintertime weather in Britain weren’t already miserable enough, now we’ve gone and carbonated it.


Source
UK weather: flooding crisis set to deepen, The Telegraph
Heavy storms strike Britain’s southwest, Al Jazeera
Met Office: Evidence ‘suggests climate change link to storms’, BBC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change has turned southern England into a soggy teabag

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