Tag Archives: Safer:

Recycle Denim Through Jan. 31 and Help Insulate Homes

by MiloTQBHoozqo Posted on January 15, 2014

Now through Jan. 31, if you drop off your old denim at a Fresh Produce store, you’ll receive a discount and the old denim will be turned into insulation. Photo: Shutterstock

Recycling your old blue jeans obviously benefits the environment, but now through the end of January, if you recycle your jeans at a Fresh Produce retail store, it will also benefit you and communities in need.

Fresh Produce, a national apparel brand for women, is teaming up with Cotton Incorporated, the marketing and research company for cotton, and Blue Jeans Go Green, a denim recycling initiative, to make this happen. When you return your old denim — any style, any brand — to one of Fresh Produce’s 24 stores this month, you’ll receive 15 percent off Fresh Produce’s new denim line, KUT. Then Blue Jeans Go Green will turn the old denim into housing insulation, which will be donated to communities that need it.

“We love the bright colors Fresh Produce apparel is known for and we know that their customers will love this unique program that gives new life to unwanted denim,” Andrea Samber, co-director of strategic alliances for Cotton Incorporated, said in a press release. “By donating jeans and other denim items to Blue Jeans Go Green, Fresh Produce customers are not only helping to divert textiles from landfills, they are helping provide housing insulation to communities in need and getting a discount on new denim purchases at Fresh Produce.”

While this partnership between Fresh Produce and Blue Jeans Go Green is new, the denim recycling program has already made quite an impact. To date, more than 600 tons of denim has been diverted from landfills by Blue Jeans Go Green, and the organization has insulated more than 1,000 homes across the country with their UltraTouch Denim Insulation. Blue Jeans Go Green has also partnered with many organizations, including universities and Habitat for Humanity chapters, to help accomplish its goals.

The denim Blue Jeans Go Green collects is turned into UltraTouch Denim Insulation, made by Bonded Logic Inc. Photo: Bonded Logic

Blue Jeans Go Green has received more than a million pieces of denim thus far, and you can add to this number by dropping your old jeans off at a Fresh Produce location through Jan. 31. If you’re interested in recycling old denim but don’t live near a Fresh Produce store (find locations here), you can also mail your old jeans to Blue Jeans Go Green directly.

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Recycle Denim Through Jan. 31 and Help Insulate Homes

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Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

by Adalberto7975 Posted on January 11, 2014

Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

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More than 300 environmental, peace, and anti-nuclear groups and leaders published an open letter this week urging four prominent climate scientists to stop “embracing nuclear power” as a tool for curbing climate-changing pollution.

In response, one the four scientists reaffirmed his reluctant support for nuclear power, denying that he embraces the technology, but saying there’s “no justification” for claims it could never become safe or affordable.

The debate among environmentalists over nuclear power flared up in November, when the four scientists published a letter calling for increased development and deployment of “safer nuclear energy systems.” The letter was written by some of the climate community’s best and brightest: NASA scientist-turned-activist James Hansen, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and climatologist Tom Wigley.

That letter triggered a cavalcade of opinion articles, many of them arguing that nuclear power is too dangerous and much more expensive than wind and solar power. And now many critics of the scientists’ arguments — from tiny groups to big ones like Greenpeace USA and the Environmental Working Group — have united to voice their opposition in this new letter. Here are some highlights:

We respectfully disagree with your analysis that nuclear power can safely and affordably mitigate climate change.

Nuclear power is not a financially viable option. Since its inception it has required taxpayer subsidies and publically financed indemnity against accidents. New construction requires billions in public subsidies to attract private capital and, once under construction, severe cost overruns are all but inevitable. As for operational safety, the history of nuclear power plants in the US is fraught with near misses, as documented by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and creates another financial and safety quagmire — high-level nuclear waste. Internationally, we’ve experienced two catastrophic accidents for a technology deemed to be virtually ‘failsafe’. …

Moreover, due to the glacial pace of deployment, the absence of any possibility of strategic technological breakthroughs, and the necessity, as you correctly say, of mitigating climate risks in the near term, nuclear technology is ill-suited to provide any real impact on greenhouse gas emissions in that timeframe. On the contrary, the technologies perfectly positioned now, due to their cost and level of commercialization, to attain decisive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the near term are renewable, energy efficiency, distributed power, demand response, and storage technologies.

Instead of embracing nuclear power, we request that you join us in supporting an electric grid dominated by energy efficiency, renewable, distributed power and storage technologies.

Grist asked the climate scientists for a response, and here’s an email we received from Caldeira:

It is time for people to rethink their positions on nuclear power, and make arguments based on facts rather than prejudices.

Any good scientist and any good citizen should be constantly re-examining their positions, so the basic call for us to rethink our position on nuclear power is most welcome. I hope that the signers of this Civil Society Institute letter can bring themselves to re-examine the nuclear power issue with the same objectivity and lack-of-bias that they seek from us.

The letter confusedly suggests that I “embrace nuclear power”, and implies that I somehow discount the importance and potential of solar, wind, and efficiency. I cannot speak on behalf of my colleagues, but at least in my case, these claims are far from the truth.

We embrace things that we love. I don’t love nuclear power. Nuclear power has brought us Chernobyl and Fukushima. If the current industry were scaled up enough to solve the climate problem, there would be one such accident each year — and that is clearly unacceptable. Were I king of the world, I would decree that solar, wind, and efficiency would be the primary means we deploy to solve the climate problem.

But there is no energy storage system that works at the scale of the modern megalopolis. We need a way to power civilization when the sun is not shining and when the wind is not blowing. In a modern real economy, not ruled by benevolent kings, reliable power is required at competitive prices. There are very few technologies that can provide this reliable baseload power. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are the two leading candidates. I think an objective assessment of the facts shows that fossil fuels are far more dangerous than even today’s nuclear power.

But I do not defend today’s nuclear power industry. Even though most nuclear power plants have an excellent safety record, there are an important few that do not. There is no justification for the claim that this important type of electricity generation can never be made sufficiently safe and inexpensive.

To say that an entire category of technology can never be sufficiently improved is, I think, to adopt a position of technological myopia, where one lacks to the capacity to imagine that future technologies can differ substantially from today’s technologies.

I do not embrace nuclear power. There is no power source that one wants to embrace. They all have negative consequences. I do not want a solar PV factory, a massive wind turbine, or a nuclear power plant in my back yard. But I want the juice. The question is not about what power source I embrace, but about what power source I might think myself capable of not rejecting. Many people want to reject power sources, but want the juice that comes from those power sources.

In summary, I applaud the signers of the Civil Society Institute letter for their concern regarding climate change and for their support of solar, wind, and efficiency. Their call for us to rethink our positions on nuclear power is most welcome, and I ask only that they rethink their position with respect to nuclear power with the same degree of receptivity and objectivity that they ask of us.

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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Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

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How Green Are Those Toys Under the Tree?

by vserko45 Posted on December 12, 2013

Lego has long-term plans to become a zero-waste company. Photo: Stefano Tinti/Shutterstock.com

While toy makers depend upon children to want their product, they also know that it’s the parents who have the final say in whether or not those toys make it under the tree on Christmas morning. As more parents are turning an eye to environmental concerns, toy makers are greening up their act, not only in the products they use to create toys, but in the policies they’re putting in place for manufacturing them. Knowing that their business is as much about gaining trust as it is about making toys, toy makers are taking some impressive steps to become more environmentally friendly.

Read on to learn more.

Next page: PVC Gets the Boot

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How Green Are Those Toys Under the Tree?

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

by HoseaHarpur Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, banking regulators finalized one of the most important provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. It’s called the Volcker rule, and it’s supposed to prohibit the high-risk trading by commercial banks that helped cause the financial crisis. Here’s what you need to know about it.

What’s the reason for the new rule? In the run-up to the financial crisis, big banks invested in low-quality mortgage-backed securities. When those over-leveraged bets turned sour, the economy collapsed, and the government had to bail out big financial institutions. The Volcker rule ensures that banks don’t engage in what is called proprietary trading—that is, when a firm trades for its own benefit instead of trading on behalf of its customers. In May 2012, JPMorgan Chase lost $2 billion on a bad trade, which led to calls for a strong Volcker rule.

Why is it called the Volcker rule? The rule is named after Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, and later an adviser to President Barack Obama. He advocated this change in financial regulation and persuaded the president to back the rule in 2010, when the Dodd-Frank bill was passed.

2010? What took so long? One reason it took three years to finish the rule is that after the legislation was passed, the actual regulation had to be crafted jointly by five banking regulators—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). That’s a lot of coordination amongst people with different backgrounds and priorities. And during the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney vowed to repeal Dodd-Frank. So for several months, wait-and-see regulators slowed down devising the details of the rule.

Wall Street lobbying also played a big part in delaying the unveiling of the final rule. The financial industry pushed like mad to get key loopholes into the regulation. “It’s relentless, nonstop, day and night lobbying,” Dennis Kelleher, the president of the financial reform advocacy group Better Markets, said a year ago. “It is absolute total nuclear war that Wall Street is engaged in here.” One loophole Wall Street tried to get written into the regulation would characterize certain forms of risky trading as hedging against risk. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

So who won? Kelleher says financial reformers won; these loopholes were not included. “Today’s finalization of the Volcker rule ban on proprietary trading is a major defeat for Wall Street and a direct attack on the high-risk ‘quick-buck’ culture of Wall Street,” he said in a statement. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the rule would have prevented JPMorgan’s $2 billion trading loss last year. CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton, a fierce Wall Street critic, is happy with the rule. Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), one of the authors of the Dodd-Frank law, told Mother Jones today, “I have been confident all along that it would be a tough rule. I’ll make one prediction: all of the cries of doom that you’re going to hear from the financial institutions, three years from now will come to about as much validity as the cries of doom we heard about same-sex marriage.”

Obama noted, “Our financial system will be safer and the American people are more secure because we fought to include this protection in the law….I encourage Congress to give these regulators adequate funding to effectively and efficiently implement the rule, which will help protect hardworking families and business owners from future crisis, and restore everyone’s certainty and confidence in America’s dynamic financial system.”

But the success of the rule depends on how it is implemented. Marcus Stanley, the policy director at Americans for Financial reform, says that he’s “lukewarm” on the rule, mostly because a lot hangs on how it is interpreted by banking regulators who supervise compliance. “Whoever is the primary supervisor has enormous discretion about how this rule will affect trading,” he says, adding that the final Volcker rule does not include transparency provisions that would allow the public to judge whether banks are complying.

So is financial reform all finished now? No. Proprietary trading contributed to the crisis, but it was not the main cause. Regulators still have other Dodd-Frank provisions to finalize. Wall Street watchdogs have to implement plans to wind down failing banks; finish writing rules governing derivatives trading (which was largely unregulated before the financial crisis); and enforce strong requirements regarding the level of reserves banks must maintain.

What’s next? Wall Street is already preparing to fight the Volcker rule in the courts. The regulation could slash the combined annual profits of the eight largest banks by between $2 billion to $10 billion, according to Standard and Poor’s. “Wall Street’s loophole lawyers and other hired guns will… continue to hit at the rule as if it were a piñata,” Kelleher says.

Additional reporting by Patrick Caldwell.

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Here’s the Story Behind the Big Wall Street Reform Rule That Was Just Approved

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Here Are NASA’s Top 19 Typography Tips

by Jonathan Davidson Posted on November 20, 2013

For some people, like Staff Sgt. Dana Fernkas, having access to crucial information depends, in some part, on the typography and design of checklists and manuals. Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock

Whether you’re printing posters for your church raffle or unveiling one of the most important discoveries in modern physics, design matters. For pilots and early astronauts, with their elaborate manuals and checklists telling them how to set controls, or how to deal with emergencies, having clear, legible fonts was literally a matter of life and death.

NASA cares very much about the lives of pilots and astronauts. NASA also doesn’t like to screw around. You don’t get to put one-ton nuclear cars on another planet by screwing around. So, NASA doesn’t screw around with type design.

In 1992, NASA researcher Asaf Degani released a report outlining, in detail, all the ways typography can go wrong, and the very best ways to get it right. Degani didn’t care so much about whether this or that font would capture the identity of a hip business—he cared about near-perfect legibility, under a range of strange conditions.

Degani goes into the rationale and reasoning behind his recommendations, pointers that address everything from x-height and kerning to case and color luminosity. If you want to see the research behind Degani’s tips, it’s all in the report. At the end, Degani summed up his recommendations, and while some of them are a little technical, the best ones—”avoid using long strings of text set in italics” or “avoid using black over dark red, green, and blue”—are solid advice that local leaflet-makers would do well adhere to.

Here’s the full list:

1. Sans-serif fonts are usually more legible than fonts with serifs.

2. Avoid using a font that has characters that are too similar to one another, as this will reduce the legibility of the print.

3. Avoid using dot matrix print for critical flight-deck documentation.

4. Long chunks of text should be set in lower case.

5. If upper case is required, the first letter of the word should be made larger in order to enhance the legibility of the word.

6. When specifying font height, or accessing graphs to determine the size of a lower-case character, the distinction between “x” height and overall size should be made.

7. As a general recommendation, the “x” height of a font used for important flight-deck documentation should not be below 0.10 inch.

8. The recommended height-to-width ratio of a font that is viewed in front of the observer is 5:3.

9. The vertical spacing between lines should not be smaller than 25-33% of the overall size of the font.

10. The horizontal spacing between characters should be 25% of the overall size and not less than one stroke width.

11. Avoid using long strings of text set in italics.

12. Use primarily one or two typefaces for emphasis.

13. Use black characters over a white background for most cockpit documentation.

14. Avoid using white characters over a black background in normal line operations. However, if this is desired:

1. Use minimum amount of text.
2. Use relatively large typesize.
3. Use sans-serif to minimize the loss of legibility.

15. Black over white or yellow are recommended for cockpit documentation.

16. Avoid using black over dark red, green, and blue.

17. Use anti-glare plastic to laminate documents.

18. Ensure that the quality of the print and the paper is well above normal standards. Poor quality of the print will effect legibility and readability.

19. The designer must assess the age groups of the pilots that will be using the documentation, and take a very conservative approach in assessing information obtained from graphs and data books.

More from Smithsonian.com:

What if Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Published Today, Had Been in Comic Sans?
How New Fonts Are Helping Dyslexics Read and Making Roads Safer
Cosmic Sans: a New Font Space Geeks Will Love to Hate

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Here Are NASA’s Top 19 Typography Tips

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Forest Service’s firefighting fund can’t keep up with wildfires

by Natalia681 Posted on November 4, 2013

Forest Service’s firefighting fund can’t keep up with wildfires

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NASA

The Forest Service can’t keep up with the rising costs of fighting wildfires in a warming world.

As climate change dries out fire-prone forests, the frequency and intensity of forest fires are increasing. Between 1985 and 1999, the federal government never spent more than $1 billion on fire suppression in a single year, according to this National Interagency Fire Center table [PDF] of firefighting costs since the mid-’80s.

But in 2000, the federal bill came in at $1.4 billion, and then it continued to increase, exceeding $1.5 billion five times from 2006 to 2012. And the number of acres of forest burned each year has also been rising.

This year has been a nightmare fire season in the American West: The U.S. Forest Service, which incurs most of the nation’s forest-fire suppression costs, ran out of firefighting money. Again. From E&E Publishing:

Lightning bolts rained across the West in August, sparking hundreds of wildfires in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and pushing the cash-strapped Forest Service to the brink.

The service had at that point spent $967 million battling wildfires that had torched more than 3.4 million acres in 2013. Its emergency fund exhausted, it had about $50 million left — enough for about half a week.

That’s become business as usual for an agency that’s run out of wildfire suppression funds seven times in the last 12 years. So Chief Tom Tidwell did what his predecessors had done: He raided the agency’s nonfire accounts to make up the shortfall. …

The so-called fire borrowing — a result of insufficient appropriations — has happened with increasing frequency as wildfires have grown more intense and more homes are built in the forest.

The practice of raiding non-firefighting funds to fight forest fires fuels a vicious cycle. It takes money away from programs that clear would-be fuel out of national forests and it reduces spending on research into firefighting strategies. It also robs reforestation programs of appropriated funds.

E&E Publishing reports that the White House is looking for a solution to what has become an entrenched funding problem. One possibility that’s being explored is treating wildfires like other emergency disasters, funded from the same pot of money that helps repair cities after they are hit by wild storms.

“For whatever reason, lightning strikes that start forest fires are treated differently from a funding perspective than hurricanes and tornadoes and other natural disasters,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said recently. “We think there should be greater alignment.”


Source
Federal Firefighting Costs (Suppression Only), National Interagency Fire Center
Forest Service: ‘It’s just nuts’ as wildfires drain budget yet again, E&E Publishing

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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Forest Service’s firefighting fund can’t keep up with wildfires

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More nukes: James Hansen leads call for “safer nuclear” power to save climate

by KathiIvest Posted on November 4, 2013

More nukes: James Hansen leads call for “safer nuclear” power to save climate

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James Hansen and three other PhD-wielding climate scientists published an open letter Sunday calling on the world to ramp up the development and deployment of “safer nuclear energy systems” to help slow climate change. Nuclear power is a notoriously prickly subject for environmentalists: It promises bountiful zero-carbon power in an era of profligate fossil-fuel burning, currently meeting 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs. But it produces copious amounts of radioactive waste, and it threatens communities living nearby (you may recall Fukushima in Japan, Chernobyl in the former USSR, and Middletown, Pa., near the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors).

In the letter, which is addressed to “those influencing environmental policy but opposed to nuclear power,” the quartet argue that renewables “like wind and solar and biomass will certainly play roles in a future energy economy,” but that such renewables “cannot scale up fast enough to deliver cheap and reliable power at the scale the global economy requires.” Hansen is one of the world’s leading climate experts, renowned for warning Congress about global warming in 1988 when he worked at NASA. Under the George W. Bush administration, he bravely battled efforts to muzzle federal scientists. And in April he announced that he was leaving NASA to pursue a full-time role as a climate activist. Hansen was joined in signing the letter by Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From the letter:

Global demand for energy is growing rapidly and must continue to grow to provide the needs of developing economies. At the same time, the need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions is becoming ever clearer. We can only increase energy supply while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions if new power plants turn away from using the atmosphere as a waste dump. … We understand that today’s nuclear plants are far from perfect. Fortunately, passive safety systems and other advances can make new plants much safer. And modern nuclear technology can reduce proliferation risks and solve the waste disposal problem by burning current waste and using fuel more efficiently. Innovation and economies of scale can make new power plants even cheaper than existing plants. Regardless of these advantages, nuclear needs to be encouraged based on its societal benefits. … With the planet warming and carbon dioxide emissions rising faster than ever, we cannot afford to turn away from any technology that has the potential to displace a large fraction of our carbon emissions. Much has changed since the 1970s. The time has come for a fresh approach to nuclear power in the 21st century.

Not everyone in the green movement is likely to unreservedly agree with these climate scientists’ call for nuclear action. But with voices of this pedigree getting behind nuclear, you can bet the debate will only get hotter starting … now.


Source
‘To Those Influencing Environmental Policy But Opposed to Nuclear Power’, New York Times

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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More nukes: James Hansen leads call for “safer nuclear” power to save climate

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Accidents? What accidents? Shell’s Arctic drillers are ready to roll again

by Jim Bow Posted on November 4, 2013

Accidents? What accidents? Shell’s Arctic drillers are ready to roll again

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OK, so last year was a nightmare for the officials at Shell charged with figuring out how to plunder the Arctic for oil. Shell gets that. Both of the company’s exploratory oil rigs in the region were damaged in accidents, wells were abandoned, a vice president lost his job, and the Obama administration prevented the company from resuming its Arctic work this year.

But Shell is delighted to announce that its problems have largely been fixed and it’s ready to return to some American-controlled Arctic waters next year. From E&E Publishing:

In a teleconference with energy analysts, Shell Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said the company will submit an exploration plan for the Chukchi “in the next few weeks.” Shell officials added, however, that the company has not yet reached a final decision on drilling.

Although Shell is moving forward in the Chukchi [the waters just north of the Bering Strait, and to the west of the more northerly Beaufort Sea], the company is postponing its Beaufort Sea operations for the foreseeable future.

Henry said the company also expects to abandon its battered drill rig the Kulluk and will take a write-off “of a few hundred million in the fourth quarter” of this year if the rig is scrapped.

Shell is taking a renewed look at Alaska a year after the company spent more than $5 billion in an unsuccessful campaign to explore in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. …

Despite last year’s problems, Henry said the company is eager to gauge the size of the oil reserves on its Chukchi leases. The Interior Department estimates that the region could hold 12 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Shell wants us to know that everything will probably be peachy, but Earthjustice attorney Holly Harris isn’t ready to buy the oil-industry promises:

Before Shell starts boasting about its new plans for the drilling in the Arctic Ocean, the company should explain why it couldn’t safely conduct its operations under last year’s plans. We’ve already watched Shell lose control of two different drill rigs in less than a year, with one of them catching fire and the other one running aground off the coast of Alaska. The federal government chastised Shell earlier this year that it needed to answer ‘serious questions regarding its ability to operate safely and responsibly in the challenging and unpredictable conditions’ of the Arctic Ocean. We’re still waiting for those answers. Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is just too risky and no company has figured out how to respond to an oil spill in icy waters.

Drilling in the Arctic Ocean would also take us in the wrong direction when it comes to addressing the challenges of climate change … The president can make a generational commitment to take action against the devastating effects of climate change by leaving the oil in the ground and preventing oil drilling in the pristine waters of the Arctic Ocean.

Time will tell whether the Obama administration sides with hopeful Shell officials or with skeptical environmentalists.


Source
Shell Plans to Drill in The Arctic in 2014, Earthjustice
Offshore drilling: Shell will return to Arctic in 2014, E&E Publishing

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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Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!

by Edbre23ne Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned a lot over the past few months about the breathtaking scope and depth of US government surveillance programs. It’s going to take a while to digest all the details he’s disclosed, but in the meantime it might be a good idea to step back and ask some pointed questions about what it all means—and what kind of country we want to live in.


Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?


Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!


Timeline: How We Got From 9/11 to Massive NSA Spying on Americans


Meet the Data Brokers Who Help Corporations Sell Your Digital Life


Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

What keeps the NSA’s capabilities from being abused in the future?
With only a few (albeit worrying) exceptions, Snowden’s documents suggest that today the NSA is focused primarily on foreign terrorism and mostly operates within its legal limits. But the agency has built an enormous infrastructure that sweeps up email, phone records, satellite communications, and fiber-optic data in terabyte quantities—and if history teaches us anything, it’s that capabilities that exist will eventually be used. Inadvertent collection of US communications is required by law to be “minimized,” but even now there are plenty of loopholes that allow the NSA to hold on to large quantities of domestic surveillance for its own use and the use of others. And there’s little to keep it from covertly expanding that capability in the future. All it would take is another 9/11 and a president without a lot of scruples about privacy rights.

What kind of independent oversight should the NSA have?
Right now, oversight is weak. There are briefings for a few members of Congress, but the NSA decides what’s in those briefings, and one leaked report revealed that the agency has set out very specific guidelines for what its analysts may divulge to “our overseers.” That caginess extends to the FISA court charged with making sure NSA programs remain within the law: In a 2011 opinion recently released by the Obama administration, the court noted that the NSA had misled it about the specific nature of a surveillance program for the third time in three years.

No organization can adequately oversee itself. If the NSA is allowed to decide on its own what it reveals to Congress and to the courts, then it’s under no real oversight at all.

What happened to the Fourth Amendment?
Back in 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that although a warrant is required to tap a telephone line, none is needed to acquire phone records. This means that police don’t need a warrant to find out whom you’ve been calling and who’s been calling you.

Whatever you think of this ruling, it was fairly limited at the time. Today it’s anything but. The NSA now sweeps up records of every single phone call made in the United States under the authority of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which gives it power to obtain any “tangible thing” that’s relevant to a terrorist investigation. Did Congress mean for that section to be interpreted so broadly? Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), one of the authors of the Patriot Act, doesn’t think so. But the NSA does, and the FISA court has backed it up.

Another law, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, allows the NSA to obtain access to vast categories of online communications without a warrant. It’s supposed to apply only to foreigners, but via errors and loopholes plenty of Americans end up being targeted too. In fact, one of the loopholes specifically allows the agency to use domestic data collected “inadvertently” if it shows evidence of a crime being or “about to be” committed. This provides a pretty obvious incentive to gather up bulk domestic communications in hopes of finding evidence of imminent activity. And the practice isn’t limited to national security cases: The Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, has a special division dedicated to using intelligence intercepts in drug cases, a fact that it routinely conceals from courts and defense attorneys.

What all this means is that the traditional constitutional requirement of a particularized warrant—one targeted at a specific person—is fast becoming a relic. In the NSA’s world, they simply collect everything they can using the broad powers they’ve been given, then decide for themselves which records they’re actually allowed to read. Is that really what we want?

Does all this surveillance keep us safer?
There’s no way to know for sure, since virtually everything about the NSA’s programs is classified. But shortly after the publication of the first Snowden documents, the head of the NSA told Congress that its surveillance programs had “contributed” to understanding or disrupting 50 terrorist plots—10 of them domestic—since 9/11. That amounts to less than one domestic plot per year. Of the handful he described, the most significant one involved a Somali immigrant who sent a few thousand dollars back to fighters in Somalia.

When you narrow things down to just the NSA’s collection of domestic phone records—perhaps its most controversial program—things get even shakier. In 2009, a FISA court judge who had received detailed reports on the program expressed open skepticism that it had accomplished much. And two US senators who have seen classified briefings about all 50 plots say that the phone records played “little or no role” in disrupting any of them. If this is the best case the NSA can make, it’s fair to ask whether its programs are worth the cost, either in money or in degraded privacy.

What about corporate surveillance?
Government eavesdropping isn’t the only thing we have to worry about. We’re also subjected to steadily increasing data collection from private actors. It’s true that, unlike a government, a corporation can’t put you on a no-fly list or throw you in jail. But there are at least a couple of reasons that corporate surveillance can be every bit as intrusive as the government variety—and possibly every bit as dangerous too.

First, if Target can analyze your shopping habits to figure out if you’re pregnant—and it can—another company might figure out that you’re in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and then start badgering you to buy worthless insurance policies. Multiply that by a thousand and “targeted advertising” doesn’t seem quite so benign anymore.

Second, there’s nothing that prevents the government from buying up all this information and combining it with its programs into an even bigger surveillance octopus. That was the goal of the Orwellian-named Bush-era program known as Total Information Awareness. It was officially killed after a public outcry, but as we now know, it never really went away. It just got split apart, renamed, and dumped into black budgets.

Even the NSA itself is in on the action: The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that the agency collects more than just phone records and data packets. Via internet service providers and financial institutions, it also gathers web search records, credit card transactions, and who knows what else. In addition, the NSA has long maintained a deep collaboration with the leading-edge data mining companies of Silicon Valley. And why not? As the New York Times put it, both sides realize that “they are now in the same business.”

Can we save privacy?
I call this the “David Brin question,” after the science fiction writer who argued in 1996 that the issue isn’t whether surveillance will become ubiquitous—given technological advances, it will—but how we choose to live with it. Sure, he argued, we may pass laws to protect our privacy, but they’ll do little except ensure that surveillance is hidden ever more deeply and is available only to governments and powerful corporations. Instead, Brin suggests, we should all tolerate less privacy, but insist on less of it for everyone. With the exception of a small sphere within our homes, we should accept that our neighbors will know pretty much everything about us and vice versa. And we should demand that all surveillance data be public, with none restricted to governments or data brokers. Give everyone access to the NSA’s records. Give everyone access to all the video cameras that dot our cities. Give everyone access to corporate databases.

This is, needless to say, easier said than done, and Brin acknowledges plenty of problems. Nonetheless, his provocation is worth thinking about. If privacy in the traditional sense is impossible in a modern society, our best bet might be to make the inevitable surveillance more available, not less. It might, in the end, be the only way to keep governments honest.

Originally posted here – 

Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!

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What You Need to Know About The Massive Cyclone Heading Towards India

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on October 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Cyclone Phailin NOAA

By Saturday afternoon, a massive cyclone currently traveling across the Bay of Bengal is expected to hit the coast of India. The government has evacuated more than a quarter million people to prepare for the storm, named Cyclone Phailin (pronounced: phie-lin), which it expects to cause massive power outages, floods, and damage to homes in the region. Here are some facts on the storm, and what’s ahead:

How bad is this storm?

The India Meteorological Department describes Phailin as a “very severe” storm, and the National Center for Atmospheric research rates it as a Category 5. It’s expected to hit the coast with winds up to 137 miles per hour, 9.8 or more inches of rain, and storm surges up to 11.5 feet. For reference, the storm surge in the Battery in New York City during Superstorm Sandy peaked at 9.2 feet, and the surge in nearby Kings Point, NY was 12.7 feet according to the Weather Channel. The India Meteorological Department predicts “extensive damage” to houses made from hay and mud, which are common in the region, as well as flooding, power outages, traffic disruption, and “the flooding of escape routes” in areas affected by the cyclone.

Writing at Quartz, meteorologist Eric Holthaus thinks that Cyclone Phailin could be more damaging than current estimates (emphasis added):

At one point (2 am Friday, India time), one satellite-based measure of Phailin’s strength estimated the storm’s central pressure at 910.2 millibars, with sustained winds of 175 mph (280 kph). If those numbers were verified by official forecast agencies, they would place Phailin on par with 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, and break the record for the most intense cyclone in Indian Ocean recorded history.

To get a sense of the size of the storm, this satellite image from the University of Wisconsin shows the cyclone, which appears to be about half the size of India.

Where is it heading?

Cyclone Phailin will primarily hit two states on the eastern coast of India, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, and is expected to cause heavy rainfalls in a third, West Bengal. Low-lying areas near the coast, which is dotted with small fishing towns, are expected to be damaged by the storm surge. Reuters reports that the Indian government has made an effort to evacuate people, though not all of them are willing to leave:

Some 260,000 people were moved to safer ground and more were expected to be evacuated by the end of the day, authorities in the two states said. Not everybody was willing to leave their homes and belongings, and some villagers on the palm-fringed Andhra Pradesh coast said they had not been told to evacuate.

“Of course I’m scared, but where will I move with my family?” asked Kuramayya, 38, a fisherman from the village of Bandharuvanipeta, close to where the hurricane is expected to make to landfall, while 3.5-metre (12-foot waves) crashed behind him. “We can’t leave our boats behind.”

What’s the difference between a cyclone and a hurricane?

There isn’t one. Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon, but they have different names depending on where they occur. (This National Geographic article has a complete breakdown of storm names by region.)

Do cyclones hit India often?

Bangladesh and the eastern coast of India have a history of devastating cyclones. According to Weather Underground‘s history of cyclones in the region, “most of the deadliest tropical storms on earth have occurred in the Bay of Bengal when tremendous storm surges have swamped the low-lying coastal regions of Bangladesh, India, and Burma.” Of Weather Underground‘s list of the 35 deadliest storms on record, 26 of them occurred in the Bay of Bengal.

As cyclone Phailin heads towards land, the Hindu Times reports that many people are recalling the massive Cyclone 05B, often referred to as the Odisha cyclone, that hit the area in 1999 and killed nearly 10,000 people.

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What You Need to Know About The Massive Cyclone Heading Towards India

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