Tag Archives: international

Time to Pull the Plug on Egypt

by Jimmy Charles Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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America’s $1.5 billion annual aid to Egypt is supposed to give us a bit of leverage in high places. But in the wake of yesterday’s massacre by the military—in direct opposition to repeated appeals from the U.S.—that leverage seems to be pretty much nonexistent. For that reason, Marc Lynch thinks it’s finally time to pull the plug. Here’s the conclusion of an interview over at Wonkblog between Lynch and Brad Plumer:

BP: Is it possible to envision how the current crisis in Egypt might get resolved at this point?

ML: Honestly, I think things are going to get a lot worse, not better. The military’s rationale for moving in on the protester camps was that this was a festering wound, we just need to clear it out, do a surgical operation, end this, and move on. I think it’s clear that this is not what’s happening. The streets are incredibly polarized right now, and I think it’ll be extremely difficult to calm things down and get people back on the table.

For the past few years I’ve been one of the more optimistic people that Egypt would work things out. It just seems like there were enough state institutions, enough political consensus, enough of a robust civil society to keep things going.

Now I’m not so sure. I think what we’ve got now is a fairly transparent attempt by the military at Mubarak’s restoration, except without Mubarak. I’ve called it “High Mubarakism.”You’ve got a state of emergency, lots of anti-American propaganda. Sissi is a bit more popular, but I don’t think it will work. Mubarak failed for a reason.

BP: And at this point there’s not much the U.S. can do but watch?

ML: The problem is pretty much everyone is hostile to us at this point. The U.S. tried to take the stance of not supporting a particular group. But the more polarized Egypt got, the more everyone thought we were against them. All the liberals thought we were on the Brotherhood’s side. All the Brotherhood thought we were on the liberals side. So now you’ve got antipathy from every player in Egypt. And it’s being fed by a really malicious and malevolent anti-American propaganda campaign in the state media and in the pro-coup independent media. That just creates a really toxic atmosphere.

So America’s ability to do things like being evenhanded broker or try to mediate the conflict is just infinitely harder in that kind of situation.

I think it’s been fairly clear for over a month that the Egyptian military began planning all of this in the spring, possibly even earlier. It was rolled out very carefully, very strategically, and very ruthlessly. And while Mohamed Morsi may have been no saint, it probably didn’t matter. The military never had the slightest intention of allowing true civilian rule, whether from the Muslim Brotherhood or anyone else.

All the too-clever questions over the past few weeks from reporters trying to get Obama spokesmen to commit to calling the military action a coup was always silly. Everyone knew perfectly well why they didn’t, and everyone knew it made perfect sense for them to leave their options open as long as there was any hope of influencing the course of events. At this point, though, there pretty obviously isn’t, so there’s no longer much point to holding back. Lynch is right: you can’t just ignore the massacre of 500 people. It’s time to pull the plug.

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Time to Pull the Plug on Egypt

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Dot Earth Blog: Is the Internet Good for the Climate?

by Myrna Posted on August 15, 2013

An exploration of the role of the Web in fostering, or impeding, public engagement on global warming. More here: Dot Earth Blog: Is the Internet Good for the Climate? ; ;Related ArticlesIs the Internet Good for the Climate?Oil Reforms by Mexico May Upend MarketsThe Passive House: Sealed for Freshness ;

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Dot Earth Blog: Is the Internet Good for the Climate?

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With Arrests, Signs of Justice in Slaying of Costa Rican Turtle Guardian

by Myrna Posted on August 2, 2013

Eight arrests are made two months after the brutal murder of a young sea turtle guardian in Costa Rica. More:  With Arrests, Signs of Justice in Slaying of Costa Rican Turtle Guardian ; ;Related ArticlesTwo Climate Analysts Fault Gas Leaks, but Not as a Big Warming ThreatA Closer Look at ‘Nonhuman Personhood’ and Animal WelfareGoogle’s Science Fellows Challenge the Company’s Fund-Raising for Senator Inhofe ;

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With Arrests, Signs of Justice in Slaying of Costa Rican Turtle Guardian

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Liam Neeson Joins UNICEF’s Campaign To Stop Violence Against Children, Citing “Taken” As Inspiration

by Sheeritwern Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

Actor Liam Neeson—recently famous for playing a good-natured CIA torturer who massacres ethnic stereotypes who’ve kidnapped his daughter—has a long history of working with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In 1997, Neeson was the celebrity face of Change for Good, a partnership between UNICEF and international airlines. Since then, he has traveled to Mozambique in support of HIV and AIDS prevention programs, and became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2011.

And this week, UNICEF began promoting their new public service announcement starring Neeson. The PSA is part of a campaign to combat violence against children around the world, from gang rape to cyber-bullying. “As a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, I have long followed the issue of violence against children and the devastating impact it has on children, families and communities,” Neeson said. “It was a topic that became increasingly real to me as a child growing up in Ireland and during the filming of Taken, which focuses on one aspect of violence and abuse against children in the form of trafficking and sexual exploitation.” (Neeson has lent his time and celebrity to a number of causes and charities, including that time he stripped almost completely naked to raise money for breast cancer research.)

Watch the PSA here:

“By generously giving his time and talent…Liam Neeson helped garner attention to UNICEF’s #ENDviolence initiative,” Marissa Buckanoff, a spokeswoman for UNICEF, told Mother Jones in an email. “His compassion and dedication to the issue will make a real difference in children’s lives as this powerful video message is one more way to urge everyone…to join forces and make the invisible visible and help stop violence against children.”

Other celebrity Goodwill Ambassadors include “Twitter Nazi hunter” Mia Farrow and Orlando Bloom. UNICEF works with famous entertainers on a regular basis; for instance, pop singer Katy Perry traveled with the organization to visit slums and villages in Madagascar earlier this year.

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Liam Neeson Joins UNICEF’s Campaign To Stop Violence Against Children, Citing “Taken” As Inspiration

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Global Warming Could Cause 50 Percent Increase in Violent Conflict

by Raisacjayv Posted on August 1, 2013

Mother Jones

This week the exiled head of the Syrian opposition movement said he would meet representatives of President Bashar al-Assad in Geneva, a promising turn for a conflict that has left 100,000 dead, including many civilians, since spring 2011. It has been a long, bitter battle, but for many Syrians one root of the violence stretches back to several years before al-Assad’s troops began picking off anti-government protestors. Beginning in 2006, a prolonged, severe drought decimated farmland, spiked food prices, and forced millions of Syrians into poverty—helping to spark the unrest that eventually exploded into civil war.

The Syrian conflict is just one recent example of the connection between climate and conflict, a field that is increasingly piquing the interest of criminologists, economists, historians, and political scientists. Studies have begun to crop up in leading journals examining this connection in everything from the collapse of the Mayan civilization to modern police training in the Netherlands. A survey published today in Science takes a first-ever 30,000-foot view of this research, looking for trends that tie these examples together through fresh analysis of raw data from 60 quantitative studies. It offers evidence that unusually high temperatures could lead to tens of thousands more cases of “interpersonal” violence—murder, rape, assault, etc.—and more than a 50 percent increase in “intergroup” violence, i.e. war, in some places.

“This is what keeps me awake at night,” lead author Solomon Hsiang, an environmental policy post-doc at Princeton, said. “The linkage between human conflict and climate changes was really pervasive.”

Any cop could tell you that hot days can make people snap—last summer veteran police boss William Bratton argued that a warm winter contributed to a rash of murders in Chicago. But Hsiang and his colleagues wanted to see how this pattern held up across the globe, at different times and with different kinds of conflict, to gauge just how much the climate can lead to violence.

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Global Warming Could Cause 50 Percent Increase in Violent Conflict

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WATCH: How to Get Syria as Much Attention as the Royal Baby Fiore Cartoon

by Margherit Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: How to Get Syria as Much Attention as the Royal Baby Fiore Cartoon

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The NSA’s Biggest Surveillance Program Yet: X-KEYSCORE

by NielPostma231 Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Glenn Greenwald’s latest disclosure from the Snowden files is an NSA program called X-KEYSCORE, which collects a truly vast amount of information. How vast?

The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large….The XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. One document explains: “At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours.”

To solve this problem, the NSA has created a multi-tiered system that allows analysts to store “interesting” content in other databases, such as one named Pinwale which can store material for up to five years.

It’s not clear precisely what’s being collected, but it appears to be exclusively foreign signals intelligence: phone conversations, emails, chat, etc. Because it’s non-U.S., this includes the content of the communications, not just the metadata:

An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKeyscore to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages. An analyst can monitor such Facebook chats by entering the Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen. Analysts can search for internet browsing activities using a wide range of information, including search terms entered by the user or the websites viewed….The XKeyscore program also allows an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.

But does this include U.S. persons, or only foreign nationals? This is where things get a little murky:

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a ‘US person’, though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

….The NSA documents assert that by 2008, 300 terrorists had been captured using intelligence from XKeyscore.

….While the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008 requires an individualized warrant for the targeting of US persons, NSA analysts are permitted to intercept the communications of such individuals without a warrant if they are in contact with one of the NSA’s foreign targets….An example is provided by one XKeyscore document showing an NSA target in Tehran communicating with people in Frankfurt, Amsterdam and New York.

Greenwald suggests that this validates Snowden’s statement in an earlier interview that “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.” But that’s not clear at all. X-KEYSCORE appears to be a database search tool, not a real-time surveillance tool, nor does it appear to give anyone “authority” to wiretap a U.S. citizen. Rather, it hoovers up tremendous volumes of foreign communications, which can then be searched by NSA analysts.

As Greenwald points out, there are known “compliance problems” with NSA’s surveillance programs, since communications by U.S. persons end up in this database if the other end of the conversation is overseas—and these communications can therefore end up on an analyst’s desktop. The NSA’s minimization procedures are supposed to prevent such “inadvertent” targeting of U.S. persons, but as Greenwald reported earlier, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule.

Anyway, this is my best guess about what this all means. But I might have missed something. Read the entire story for more.

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The NSA’s Biggest Surveillance Program Yet: X-KEYSCORE

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Unfortunately, the NSA Surveillance Program Probably Won’t Cause an Overseas Uprising

by Rob Sutter Posted on July 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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James Fallows recommends a Guardian column from this weekend about the real effect of the Edward Snowden affair. John Naughton says it’s not about Snowden—and I agree. Rather, it’s about what we now know:

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users’ data.

Actually, this isn’t really true. We’ve known for years that federal agencies have been issuing NSLs and warrants to get data from Facebook and others. We’ve known for years that the NSA was collecting phone records.

Which isn’t to say that Snowden’s disclosures haven’t mattered. They have. The public (and Congress) react far more strongly to documented details than they do to general knowledge that something is going on. Snowden’s revelations have plainly galvanized public opinion and spurred Congress into action. That’s a big deal. But it’s not because we really know all that much more than we did before. This is why I’m a little skeptical of the conclusion Naughton draws from this. I’m going to quote Fallows’ version of it since it’s a little clearer:

In short: because of what the U.S. government assumed it could do with information it had the technological ability to intercept, American companies and American interests are sure to suffer in their efforts to shape and benefit from the Internet’s continued growth.

American companies, because no foreigners will believe these firms can guarantee security from U.S. government surveillance;
American interests, because the United States has gravely compromised its plausibility as world-wide administrator of the Internet’s standards and advocate for its open, above-politics goals.

Why were U.S. authorities in a position to get at so much of the world’s digital data in the first place? Because so many of the world’s customers have trusted U.S.-based firms like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc with their data; and because so many of the world’s nations have tolerated an info-infrastructure in which an outsized share of data flows at some point through U.S. systems. Those are the conditions of trust and toleration that likely will change.

This is one of those arguments that I’d really like to believe. After all, it’s perfectly logical, and it helps make the case against a program that I don’t like. And yet, for several reasons, I just don’t think I buy it.

First, I suspect that the vast, vast majority of overseas Facebook/Microsoft/etc. customers already assume that intelligence agencies can read their files if they want to, and they just don’t care. These users aren’t spies or terrorists, and rightly or wrongly, they believe that intelligence agencies aren’t interested in them and won’t find anything interesting even if they are.

Second, would moving to a non-U.S. service protect you? Sure, if it’s one of those super-secure, highly-encrypted data vaults you read about once in a while. But that’s something very few people are interested in. They just want ordinary internet services: email, social networking, chat, etc. And if you’re a foreign national using a non-U.S. service, guess what? The NSA has no restrictions at all about spying on you. It’s true that they actually have to figure out how to get your data, since they can’t just demand it via warrant. But they can use any method they want to intercept or steal it. There are no rules when it comes to overseas data.

Third, I assume that most foreign governments have police and intelligence agencies that work in much the same way as the FBI and the NSA. We don’t hear much about this since they operate on a far smaller scale, but if the French police want access to your email, they can get a warrant issued for it. Likewise, I suspect that French intelligence agencies have some of the same data mining capabilities as the NSA. It’s certainly nowhere near as broad, but I’ll bet it exists.

Put all this together, and it’s really not clear to me that broad public reaction is going to be very strong. Will Danish users stop using Facebook until some Danish company creates an alternate social networking platform? Probably not. The fear of NSA spying is simply nowhere near as compelling as the huge inconvenience of everyone being on a different platform and being unable to chat and share pictures with their friends in other countries.

As for businesses, they’re probably less interested in avoiding NSA spying than they are in staying ahead of hackers and concealing their more dubious dealings from ordinary law enforcement agencies. Using a non-U.S. platform won’t do them any good on either of these scores.

We’ll see, of course. Maybe this is the beginning of a long decline in U.S. information services, as overseas users start to move to other platforms. It’s possible. Unfortunately, I sort of doubt it. At most, I suspect we’ll start to see a bit more nationalistic reliance on domestic network infrastructure, but that’s something that’s always been likely anyway. Beyond that, people will just keep on doing what they’ve been doing.

UPDATE: For a contrary take, read Henry Farrell here. He believes that privacy authorities in Europe will drive major changes in surveillance law, which is a fairly widespread view. I suspect that things will turn out differently than Henry does, but it’s worth reading his argument.

Originally posted here – 

Unfortunately, the NSA Surveillance Program Probably Won’t Cause an Overseas Uprising

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Quakes Thought to Help Release Methane From Seabed

by Myrna Posted on July 28, 2013

Seepage of methane, a greenhouse gas, in the Arabian Sea may be linked to a 1945 earthquake, a study suggests. The finding may affect global warming estimates. View article: Quakes Thought to Help Release Methane From Seabed Related Articles Obama Says He’ll Evaluate Pipeline Project Depending on Pollution A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at That ‘North Pole Lake’

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Quakes Thought to Help Release Methane From Seabed

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Can Genetic Engineering Save the Orange, and Vice Versa?

by Myrna Posted on July 28, 2013

An orange grower’s wise and promising search for a gene that can save citrus from a spreading scourge. This article: Can Genetic Engineering Save the Orange, and Vice Versa? Related Articles The GMO debate is about more than Monsanto. A Closer Look at That ‘North Pole Lake’ Arctic Methane Credibility Bomb

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Can Genetic Engineering Save the Orange, and Vice Versa?

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