Tag Archives: states

The Next Generation of GM Crops Has Arrived

by Myrna Posted on June 24, 2014

And so has the controversy. Maciek/Flickr The first of a new generation of genetically modified crops is poised to win government approval in the United States, igniting a controversy that may continue for years, and foreshadowing the future of genetically modified crops. The agribusiness industry says the plants—soy and corn engineered to tolerate two herbicides, rather than one—are a safe, necessary tool to help farmers fight so-called superweeds. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture appear to agree. However, many health and environmental groups say the crops represent yet another step on what they call a pesticide treadmill: an approach to farming that relies on ever-larger amounts of chemical use, threatening to create even more superweeds and flood America’s landscapes with potentially harmful compounds. Public comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft review of the crops will be accepted until June 30. As of now, both the EPA and USDA’s reviews favor approval. Their final decisions are expected later this summer. To keep reading, click here. Credit – The Next Generation of GM Crops Has Arrived Related Articles“Almost Everything It Wanted”There Are 1,401 Uninspected High-Risk Oil and Gas Wells.Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

See the original article here: 

The Next Generation of GM Crops Has Arrived

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, organic, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Next Generation of GM Crops Has Arrived

Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

by MarianneTejada Posted on June 19, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As deadly sectarian violence continues to sweep through Iraq, the country’s oil industry is reeling from a brazen attack on one of its key domestic refineries. Here are five things you need to know about the role of oil in the current conflict, and what it means for the United States and the global economy.

UPDATE Thursday, June 19, 2:50pm EST: In a press conference this afternoon in which he announced the deployment up to 300 additional military advisers to Iraq, President Obama was asked how Iraq’s civil war affects the national security interests of the United States. In response, Obama listed several factors, including “issues like energy, and global energy markets.”

1. Oil infrastructure is a major flash point in the Iraq crisis. After a week-long siege, Sunni extremists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, fought their way into Iraq’s largest oil refinery in the northern city of Baiji on Tuesday and Wednesday. There are conflicting reports about how much of the facility was seized by the militants in the ensuing chaos, and whether Iraqi forces have in fact repelled the attack, as Iraqi military officials claim. Previously, repeated attacks shut down the major Turkey-bound Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline in the north.

A 2003 photo shows a guard tower outside the Baiji oil refinery. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

2. The Iraq crisis is already affecting oil and gasoline prices. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the country has steadily increased its oil production. It’s now the second biggest producer of crude oil in OPEC, exerting a growing influence on the global price of oil. And while the White House said Wednesday that there have been no “major disruptions in oil supplies in Iraq,” the crisis has clearly spooked the global market. Bloomberg reported last week that one international benchmark used by traders surged above $114 a barrel for the first time in nine months.

USA Today reported that even before the battle over the Baiji refinery, Iraq’s oil production had already fallen by about 10 percent, or 300,000 barrels a day, since March. The China National Petroleum Corporation, the giant state-run company that is the biggest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil industry, is now nervously watching for any threats to its $4 billion worth of oil interests.

And there are signs that oil market worries are already being reflected at your local gas station.

“I warned people on my Facebook, friends and family,” says Robert Rapier, an energy analyst and regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal. “I said: If you need to get gasoline, go get it now, because gasoline prices will be going up this week.”

3. But long-term impacts on global oil supply are unlikely, unless the insurgency spreads. For now, the insurgency is limited to the part of the country north of Baghdad. Unless there’s an increased threat of instability in the south, deeper and longer-lasting seismic shocks to the world energy market are unlikely, according to Luay al-Khatteeb, an energy and politics analyst with the Brookings Doha Center and a senior adviser to the Iraqi parliament. While Baiji is the country’s largest refinery, the overwhelming bulk of oil production in Iraq is centered around the city of Basra, in the country’s south, “far from the fault lines,” he said. Khatteeb called the recent oil price increases “baseless,” adding that “there is zero threat whatsoever to oil production.”

But if the conflict does spread south, the effect on oil markets could be severe. “If all Iraq’s production got taken off line, for example, I’m pretty sure you’d see oil prices rise very quickly to $120, $130, maybe even higher,” Rapier said.

Moreover, the battle for the Baiji plant is likely to make the situation in Iraq worse because Baiji mainly refines oil for the domestic market. “The lack of oil products is likely to further the misery and discontent and my prediction is that a lot of that will be directed toward the central government,” said James F. Jeffery, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former US envoy to Baghdad, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

President Barack Obama speaks about energy security and his climate plan at a Walmart in Mountain View, California. Jeff Chiu/AP

4. America imports much less Iraqi oil than it used to. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, he said that America’s dependence on the “tyranny of oil” helped fund terrorism in both Iraq and around the world. “One of the most dangerous weapons in the world today is the price of oil,” he said. “We ship nearly $700 million a day to unstable or hostile nations for their oil. It pays for terrorist bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut.” His opponent that year, John McCain, said at a town hall that his plan to “eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East” would “prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

As president, Obama has continued to emphasize independence from foreign oil. “Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades,” he told an audience at Walmart in Mountain View, California, last month. “And for the first time in nearly 20 years, America produces more oil here at home than we buy from other countries.”

Indeed, in October, domestic crude oil production surpassed imports for the first time since 1995. More specifically, even though Iraq’s oil production has increased, the US now imports far less Iraqi oil than it did around the time of the 2003 invasion.

That’s not just the story in Iraq. America is now importing less oil overall—20 percent less, in fact—than in 2003. “We’re getting more of that oil domestically,” Rapier said, pointing to increased local production facilitated by the fracking boom, especially in Texas and North Dakota.

And America’s own neighbors are also chipping in to help, says Rapier, pointing to Canadian crude. “We’ve got lower cost production in our neighborhood here.”

This means the United States is now somewhat insulated from big shocks to the market like the 1970s oil crisis, in which oil-producing Arab states imposed a crippling embargo against the US.

“The increase of unconventional oil supplies from new emerging assets in the US, all of this has created some sort of a comfort zone,” said Khatteeb from the Brookings Doha Center.

John Duffield, who authored a 2008 book called Over a Barrel: The Costs of US Foreign Oil Dependence agrees: “I would say we are not as much over the barrel.”

5. But the United States is still tied to global oil markets, and that means what happens in Iraq can have an economic impact here. One thing every expert I spoke to agreed on is this: Even with decreasing oil imports, the US is inextricably linked to world markets. That means that if the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, the US economy may not be immune.

“The cost to the United States of a big oil shock…will be lower than they were in the past,” Duffield said. “Our main vulnerability is not so much the direct impact on oil, but the impact on the rest of the world’s economy, if there’s a big oil supply disruption.” He added that “as long as the world oil market is pretty highly integrated, the US is vulnerable to an oil supply disruption in the Middle East or the Persian Gulf, regardless of the amount of oil it imports from the region.”

Why? Because even though the United States has reduced its use of Middle Eastern oil, many of America’s key trading partners have not. “The oil production in Iraq has risen for seven years in a row,” Rapier said, and that oil is going somewhere. Much of it’s going to Asian economic powerhouses whose economies are deeply tied to our own.

â&#128;&#139;

A US soldier stands guard at a burning oil well at the Rumeila oil fields after the 2003 American invasion. Ian Waldie/Pool/AP

“The United States, strategically, is a major trading power,” said Anthony Cordesman, an energy analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is particularly dependent on the import of manufactured goods from three countries which are extremely dependent on energy imports. Those happen to be China, South Korea, and Japan.”

That’s why Middle Eastern oil still plays an important role in US policy, says Cordesman. “It is precisely because US security is global. It is not a matter of direct US dependence on foreign oil,” he said. “Because what really counts is global prices, and what counts is the steady and predictable flow of oil to a global economy.â&#128;&#139;”

Credit:  

Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What the Battle Over Iraqi Oil Means for America

Brand Fails

by LucilleMickle Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The soccer team from the United States defeated the soccer team from Ghana in the World Cup 2-1 on Monday.

Delta Airlines tried to capitalize:

There are no giraffes in Ghana.

Take from this what you will about America’s view of Africa.

Read article here: 

Brand Fails

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Brand Fails

7 Talking Points You Need For Discussing the Iraq Crisis

by SheilaWozniak Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

1. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney invaded Iraq with no clear and comprehensive plan for what to do after the invasion and the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Weeks before the war, the administration stated there was no reason to fear that sectarian conflict would ensue after Saddam was booted.

2. Following the invasion, the Bush-Cheney administration decided to prohibit the Sunni-dominated Baath Party from participating in a post-Saddam government and decommissioned the existing Baathist-led military. This caused deep resentment among Sunnis, especially former military commanders and soldiers (who would now be available for an armed opposition). The move had the effect of banishing Iraqis with governing and security experience from the post-Saddam order. That would be good for chaos and conflict.

3. The Bush-Cheney deciders, having decimated the Sunni ruling establishment, backed the creation of a government led by hard-line Shiite religious parties, including the party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The Maliki regime has been corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent—and allied closely with the Shiite government in Iran. (Iran was a key sponsor of Maliki when he was in exile during the Saddam years.) The thuggish Maliki government, supported by the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, has treated the Sunni areas of Iran as enemy territory and refused to share power with Sunnis—stoking the deep-seated tensions between Sunnis and Shiites. (As the murderous Sunni ultra-extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, have gained power in Mosul and other Sunni-dominated cities and towns, non-extremist Sunnis have sided with—or tolerated—the jihadists because of their shared hatred of the Maliki regime and the Iraqi military, which Sunnis in Mosul considered an occupying force).

4. President Barack Obama did not leave a residual force of American troops in Iraq after he withdrew US troops because Maliki would not sign a Status of Forces Agreement protecting US soldiers. Though Bush also did not negotiate a long-term SOFA, prominent Republicans, including Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney, have slammed Obama for failing to obtain such an agreement. But Fareed Zakaria reports that a senior Iraqi politician told him, “Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that it’s No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.”

5. The United States has provided much training and equipment to the Iraqi military—$25 billion in military aid—before and after the US withdrawal. Yet under Maliki the Iraqi army has not been professionalized and has committed repeated abuses against civilians, according to Human Rights Watch, including unlawful raids and arrests, torture, and indiscriminate shelling. When a relatively small band of jihadists attacked Mosul and Tikrit, four major divisions folded. Training and equipment does not help if soldiers strip off their uniforms and flee because they are not committed to the mission and the government.

6. More US assistance to Maliki and his military may not make the difference. (See No. 5.) Moreover, Iran has sent special forces to Iraq to assist Maliki—bolstering Iraq’s dependence on Iran. If the United States were to funnel additional military equipment (and more advanced equipment) to Maliki’s army, it could well end up with the ISIS jihadists (given the Iraq military’s habit to cut and run) or—get this—with the Revolutionary Guard of Iran. A good deal for Tehran. And if US air strikes are ordered in Iraq to assist Maliki, American fighter jets or drones would be deployed in a tactical alliance with Iran.

7. The current crisis is not the result of inadequate US support of Maliki and the Iraqi military. It is the outcome of Maliki’s failures, which have provided the evildoers of ISIS—a band that does threaten civilians and stability in the region—an opportunity, and these failures were enabled by the Bush administration and unaddressed by the Obama crew. Unless the basic dynamic is altered, any military action—whether taken by the United States, regional allies, and/or NATO—will be as effective as pounding sand.

See the original article here:

7 Talking Points You Need For Discussing the Iraq Crisis

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 7 Talking Points You Need For Discussing the Iraq Crisis

New Study Demolishes the Racist Myths Used to Justify Sex-Selective Abortion Bans

by GilbertBartels Posted on June 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Last year, when lawmakers across the country proposed 476 new restrictions on abortion and reproductive rights, few bills were more popular than bans on sex-selective abortions. The bans, on the books in eight states, make it a crime to perform an abortion for a woman who is motivated by her fetus’ sex.

But debates around these bans have been lacking something: cold, hard proof that there is a “growing trend,” as a failed US House bill put it, of women in the United States having abortions to select for gender. Instead, anti-abortion activists have justified these bans on the basis that there are Asian women immigrating to America—women who supposedly bring with them cultural biases against having girl children.

This week, the University of Chicago Law School released a new study that scrutinizes large sets of data for evidence of sex-selective abortions in America. Titled “Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States,” the paper kneecaps the racist arguments behind the bans.

The authors draw on an analysis of US birth data, numerous interviews in the field, and a broad survey of peer-reviewed social-science publications to identify and bust numerous myths used to promote sex-selective abortion bans. Notably, the study undermines one of the only pieces of empirical support proponents of these bans can point to, a 2008 paper by economists Lena Edlund and Douglas Almond. Edlund and Almond concluded that when foreign-born Chinese, Korean, and Indian women have two daughters, their third child will tend to be a son—a trend that suggests sex-selective abortions are being performed, ban proponents say. Their source is US census data that is nearly 15 years old. The University of Chicago study, using newer data from the 2007 and 2011 American Community Survey, found that when all their children are taken into account, foreign-born Chinese, Korean, and Indian parents actually have more daughters than white Americans do.

The study also notes that India and China are not, as proponents of these bans claim, the only countries with male-biased sex ratios. In fact, the countries with the highest ratios are Liechtenstein and Armenia.

Remarks made by South Dakota Republican state Rep. Don Haggar this spring, as his state debated its ban, provide a typical example of how lawmakers link Asian immigrants to a rise in sex-selective abortions: “Let me tell you, our population in South Dakota is a lot more diverse than it ever was,” he said. “There are cultures that look at a sex-selection abortion as being culturally okay…It’s important that we send a message that this is a state that values life, regardless of its sex.”

But the authors found evidence that the opposite is true. “Recent polling data refutes the existence of son preference among Asian Americans in the United States,” they write. Below are the results of a 2012 survey that asked Asian Americans the following: “In some countries, people are allowed to have only one child. If, for whatever reason, you could only have one child, would you want it to be a boy, a girl, or does it not matter?”

Replacing Myths with Facts: Sex-Selective Abortion Laws in the United States

Other myths the study addresses include:

The notion that male-biased sex ratios are proof of sex-selective abortions. In fact, a skewed ratio can be explained by artificial insemination methods that allow parents to choose the gender of their child.
Arguments that the United States is one of the only countries that doesn’t ban sex-selective abortions. In reality, it is one of only five countries where there are such bans. (The others are China, Kosovo, Vietnam, and Nepal.)
The idea that sex-selective abortion bans unskew male-biased birth ratios. The authors reviewed five years of data in Pennsylvania and Illinois after those states enacted their bans, and found no evidence that the bans changed sex ratios among newborns.

Finally, the study makes the case that sex-selective abortion bans are just another inventive way to restrict abortion. It rejects arguments, by anti-abortion rights groups and lawmakers, that these bans are feminist and protect women. “An analysis of voting records in the six states that have enacted sex-selective abortion bans in the last four years shows that votes on the laws closely follow party lines, with overwhelming support from Republican legislators,” the study says.

The study sources the recent wave of sex-selective abortion bans to a 2008 article by Northwestern Law professor Steven Calabresi: “Key to eroding Roe v. Wade…is to pass a number of state or federal laws that restrict abortion rights in ways approved of by at least fifty percent of the public,” Calabresi wrote, such as a ban on abortion for sex selection.

The University of Chicago Law School International Human Rights Clinic conducted its study with the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a reproductive health care policy group, and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, a progressive policy group which opposes sex-selective abortion bans. NAPAWF argues these bans perpetuate negative stereotypes against Asian American women, and the group is suing to block a sex-selective abortion ban in Arizona.

Continue reading – 

New Study Demolishes the Racist Myths Used to Justify Sex-Selective Abortion Bans

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on New Study Demolishes the Racist Myths Used to Justify Sex-Selective Abortion Bans

We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 27, 2014

by EdnaBloomfield Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Cpl. Scott Bradley and Lance Cpl. Dakota Marshall, two Marines with Black Sea Rotational Force 14 from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, reach the peak of a cliff with two Romanian soldiers of the 17th Mountain Troop Bn. during Exercise Platinum Lynx in the Carpathian Mountains, May 8, 2014. Exercise Platinum Lynx 14-5 is a bilateral exercise between the United States Marines and sailors, and Romanian Land Forces, designed to build familiarity and interoperability between the United States and their Romanian allies through squad and platoon level infantry training. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Scot Whiting/Released)

View original post here: 

We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 27, 2014

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for May 27, 2014

The Truth About Bug Spray

by KelleLashvrln Posted on May 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
John W. Tomac

If you’re planning on spending time outdoors this summer, you’ll find that the insect repellent aisle of your local pharmacy offers a dazzling array of options to protect you from hungry bugs. Hardcore DEET-based sprays like Off! Deep Woods ($6.79 for 6 oz.) promise to ward off ticks, mosquitoes, flies, chiggers, and gnats for an entire day. Other products—such as Avon Skin So Soft Bug Guard Plus ($6.99 for 4 oz.)—contain sunscreen in addition to insect repellent. There are plenty of plant-based potions—Aromaflage ($30 for 8 ml) claims that its proprietary blend of “citrus fruit, warm cedarwood, and silken vanilla” makes for “a sophisticated, uplifting fragrance that also repels insects.” So do any of them get the job done? And do they cause problems for more than just bugs?

What’s the big deal? I can handle a few mosquito bites.
Scientists believe that mosquitoes choose their human victims by the scent of the bacteria on our skin and in our sweat. Because our bacterial communities vary, some of us are more prone to bites than others. To anyone who has scratched herself silly after a camping trip, the importance of an effective repellent is obvious. But even if you’re lucky enough to be unappetizing to mosquitoes, there’s another reason to choose your bug defense carefully: Insect-borne illnesses are on the rise, and some can be serious, even deadly. Lyme disease, which is transmitted by deer ticks, causes debilitating symptoms in more than 20,000 people every year. In 2013, 2,374 people in 48 states contracted the mosquito-borne disease West Nile virus, and 114 of them died. As climate change intensifies, public health experts expect that more breeds of mosquito will thrive in the United States. As a result, they predict an uptick in West Nile and other insect-borne illnesses, such as yellow fever. Since 2001, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas have had outbreaks of dengue, another mosquito-borne disease that had been considered eliminated in the United States since 1945.

What should I look for in a repellent?
Good question. Despite massive industry lobbying, sunscreen manufacturers must now state clearly on the packaging how well and how long a product works. Repellent companies, however, are hardly required to follow any rules at all. In 2013, when the health watchdog Environmental Working Group analyzed various repellents, researchers found that manufacturers’ claims about how long products last varied widely—even with the same active ingredient in the same concentrations. Some manufacturers claimed that their products were waterproof, even though—beachgoers beware—they did not offer proof. Others boasted exotic active ingredients—like clove oil and lemongrass oil—that have not been adequately tested and may contain high concentrations of allergens. “There should be a way for consumers to compare products,” says EWG senior scientist David Andrews. “And right now, there is really not.”

Doesn’t the government have some basic rules about what they can put on the labels?
Not really. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency drafted a label template that tells consumers what kinds of insects a product protects against and how often it needs to be reapplied. But it’s completely voluntary. What’s more, the graphic will only apply to repellents that you apply to your skin, not wristbands, patches, candles, sonic devices, or any other products that claim to deter bugs.

So do those wristbands work?
Not as well as skin-applied repellents. In 2011, Australian medical entomologist Cameron Webb tested mosquito repellent wristbands and found them much less effective than skin-applied products containing DEET; they only offered protection in a very small area around the wrist. “There is no product—candles, fans, coils, patches, or anything else—that I am aware of that provides comparable protection to a DEET skin-based repellent,” he says. “Even if they work a little bit, they’re not going to protect all of your exposed skin.” Spatial products such as candles, coils, and smoke do drive away bugs, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that they “have not yet been adequately evaluated in peer-reviewed studies for their efficacy in preventing vectorborne disease.”

Wait, isn’t DEET toxic?
No. In the ’80s, there were reports of children having seizures after using DEET-based products, but the exact cause of the seizures was never determined. Subsequent studies have found virtually no health risks associated with the ingredient at the concentrations found in commercial repellents.

Anything else I should steer clear of?
EWG suggests skipping products with plant-based active ingredients, even though they sound greener; the EPA does not require registration of these substances, and no one knows how safe or effective they are. The CDC recommends avoiding combined sunscreen-repellents because sunscreen requires much more frequent application than repellent—and the effect of overapplication of repellent hasn’t been well studied. And don’t trust label claims about how long a product can last. That’s determined by the percentage of its active ingredients—but without any way to compare, consumers are left to trial and error.

So what does work? For the best protection against both mosquitoes and ticks, the CDC recommends products containing DEET. For just mosquitoes, the agency also approves of products with the active ingredients picaridin (the active ingredient in most Avon Skin So Soft products), IR3535, and oil of lemon eucalyptus—which, despite its natural-sounding name, is actually a synthetic formulation. EWG found all three of these ingredients to be just as effective as DEET. “You don’t really want to mess around with a product that might or might not work,” says Webb, the Australian entomologist. “Where insect-borne diseases are concerned, it only takes one bite.” And as for the sheer itchy misery of being a mosquito’s idea of a five-star restaurant? Well, you probably don’t want to mess around with that, either.

Visit site: 

The Truth About Bug Spray

Posted in Anchor, Aroma, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Truth About Bug Spray

Glenn Greenwald: How I Met Edward Snowden

by AngelitaHampton Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

This essay is a shortened and adapted version of Chapter 1 of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Security State, and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of Metropolitan Books.

On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.

The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. He is most remembered for what he did after vanquishing Rome’s enemies: he immediately and voluntarily gave up political power and returned to farming life. Hailed as a “model of civic virtue,” Cincinnatus has become a symbol of the use of political power in the public interest and the worth of limiting or even relinquishing individual power for the greater good.

The email began: “The security of people’s communications is very important to me,” and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that “Cincinnatus” could communicate things in which, he said, he was certain I would be interested. Invented in 1991, PGP stands for “pretty good privacy.” It has been developed into a sophisticated tool to shield email and other forms of online communications from surveillance and hacking.

In this email, “Cincinnatus” said he had searched everywhere for my PGP “public key,” a unique code set that allows people to receive encrypted email, but could not find it. From this, he concluded that I was not using the program and told me, “That puts anyone who communicates with you at risk. I’m not arguing that every communication you are involved in be encrypted, but you should at least provide communicants with that option.”

“Cincinnatus” then referenced the sex scandal of General David Petraeus, whose career-ending extramarital affair with journalist Paula Broadwell was discovered when investigators found Google emails between the two. Had Petraeus encrypted his messages before handing them over to Gmail or storing them in his drafts folder, he wrote, investigators would not have been able to read them. “Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers.”

“There are people out there you would like to hear from,” he added, “but they will never be able to contact you without knowing their messages cannot be read in transit.” Then he offered to help me install the program. He signed off: “Thank you. C.”

Using encryption software was something I had long intended to do. I had been writing for years about WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous, and had also communicated with people inside the US national security establishment. Most of them are concerned about the security of their communications and preventing unwanted monitoring. But the program is complicated, especially for someone who had very little skill in programming and computers, like me. So it was one of those things I had never gotten around to doing.

C.’s email did not move me to action. Because I had become known for covering stories the rest of the media often ignores, I frequently hear from all sorts of people offering me a “huge story,” and it usually turns out to be nothing. And at any given moment I am usually working on more stories than I can handle. So I need something concrete to make me drop what I’m doing in order to pursue a new lead.

Three days later, I heard from C. again, asking me to confirm receipt of the first email. This time I replied quickly. “I got this and am going to work on it. I don’t have a PGP code, and don’t know how to do that, but I will try to find someone who can help me.”

C. replied later that day with a clear, step-by-step guide to PGP: Encryption for Dummies, in essence. At the end of the instructions, he said these were just “the barest basics.” If I couldn’t find anyone to walk me through the system, he added, “let me know. I can facilitate contact with people who understand crypto almost anywhere in the world.”

This email ended with more a pointed sign-off: “Cryptographically yours, Cincinnatus.”

Despite my intentions, I did nothing, consumed as I was at the time with other stories, and still unconvinced that C. had anything worthwhile to say.

In the face of my inaction, C. stepped up his efforts. He produced a 10-minute video entitled PGP for Journalists.

It was at that point that C., as he later told me, became frustrated. “Here am I,” he thought, “ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of Top Secret documents from the nation’s most secretive agency—a leak that will produce dozens if not hundreds of huge journalistic scoops. And he can’t even be bothered to install an encryption program.”

That’s how close I came to blowing off one of the largest and most consequential national security leaks in US history.

“He’s Real”
The next I heard of any of this was 10 weeks later. On April 18th, I flew from my home in Rio de Janeiro to New York, and saw on landing at JFK Airport, that I had an email from Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker. “Any chance you’ll be in the US this coming week?” she wrote. “I’d love to touch base about something, though best to do in person.”

I take seriously any message from Laura Poitras. I replied immediately: “Actually, just got to the US this morning… Where are you?” We arranged a meeting for the next day in the lobby at my hotel and found seats in the restaurant. At Laura’s insistence, we moved tables twice before beginning our conversation to be sure that nobody could hear us. Laura then got down to business. She had an “extremely important and sensitive matter” to discuss, she said, and security was critical.

First, though, Laura asked that I either remove the battery from my cell phone or leave it in my hotel room. “It sounds paranoid,” she said, but the government has the capability to activate cell phones and laptops remotely as eavesdropping devices. I’d heard this before from transparency activists and hackers but tended to write it off as excess caution. After discovering that the battery on my cell phone could not be removed, I took it back to my room, then returned to the restaurant.

Now Laura began to talk. She had received a series of anonymous emails from someone who seemed both honest and serious. He claimed to have access to some extremely secret and incriminating documents about the US government spying on its own citizens and on the rest of the world. He was determined to leak these documents to her and had specifically requested that she work with me on releasing and reporting on them.

Laura then pulled several pages out of her purse from two of the emails sent by the anonymous leaker, and I read them at the table from start to finish. In the second of the emails, the leaker got to the crux of what he viewed as his mission:

The shock of this initial period after the first revelations will provide the support needed to build a more equal internet, but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here. We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search through universal laws, but only if the technical community is willing to face the threat and commit to implementing over-engineered solutions. In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man.

“He’s real,” I said when I finished reading. “I can’t explain exactly why, but I just feel intuitively that this is serious, that he’s exactly who he says he is.”

“So do I,” Laura replied. “I have very little doubt.”

I instinctively recognized the author’s political passion. I felt a kinship with our correspondent, with his worldview, and with the sense of urgency that was clearly consuming him.

In one of the last passages, Laura’s correspondent wrote that he was completing the final steps necessary to provide us with the documents. He needed another four to six weeks, and we should wait to hear from him.

Three days later, Laura and I met again, and with another email from the anonymous leaker, in which he explained why he was willing to risk his liberty, to subject himself to the high likelihood of a very lengthy prison term, in order to disclose these documents. Now I was even more convinced: our source was for real, but as I told my partner, David Miranda, on the flight home to Brazil, I was determined to put the whole thing out of my mind. “It may not happen. He could change his mind. He could get caught.” David is a person of powerful intuition, and he was weirdly certain. “It’s real. He’s real. It’s going to happen,” he declared. “And it’s going to be huge.”

“I Have Only One Fear”
A message from Laura told me we needed to speak urgently, but only through OTR (off-the-record) chat, an encrypted instrument for talking online securely.

Her news was startling: we might have to travel to Hong Kong immediately to meet our source. I had assumed that our anonymous source was in Maryland or northern Virginia. What was someone with access to top-secret US government documents doing in Hong Kong? What did Hong Kong have to do with any of this?

Answers would only come from the source himself. He was upset by the pace of things thus far, and it was critical that I speak to him directly, to assure him and placate his growing concerns. Within an hour, I received an email from Verax@******. Verax means “truth teller” in Latin. The subject line read, “Need to talk.”

“I’ve been working on a major project with a mutual friend of ours,” the email began. “You recently had to decline short-term travel to meet with me. You need to be involved in this story,” he wrote. “Is there any way we can talk on short notice? I understand you don’t have much in the way of secure infrastructure, but I’ll work around what you have.” He suggested that we speak via OTR and provided his user name.

My computer sounded a bell-like chime, signaling that the source had signed on. Slightly nervous, I clicked on his name and typed “hello.” He answered, and I found myself speaking directly to someone who I assumed had, at that point, revealed a number of secret documents about US surveillance programs and who wanted to reveal more.

“I’m willing to do what I have to do to report this,” I said. The source—whose name, place of employment, age, and all other attributes were still unknown to me—asked if I would come to Hong Kong to meet him. I did not ask why he was there; I wanted to avoid appearing to be fishing for information and I assumed his situation was delicate. Whatever else was true, I knew that this person had resolved to carry out what the US government would consider a very serious crime.

“Of course I’ll come to Hong Kong,” I said.

We spoke online that day for two hours, talking at length about his goal. I knew from the emails Laura had shown me that he felt compelled to tell the world about the massive spying apparatus the US government was secretly building. But what did he hope to achieve?

“I want to spark a worldwide debate about privacy, Internet freedom, and the dangers of state surveillance,” he said. “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. I’ve accepted that my life will likely be over from my doing this. I’m at peace with that. I know it’s the right thing to do.” He then said something startling: “I want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures. I believe I have an obligation to explain why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve.” He told me he had written a document that he wanted to post on the Internet when he outed himself as the source, a pro-privacy, anti-surveillance manifesto for people around the world to sign, showing that there was global support for protecting privacy.

“I only have one fear in doing all of this,” he said, which is “that people will see these documents and shrug, that they’ll say, ‘We assumed this was happening and don’t care.’ The only thing I’m worried about is that I’ll do all this to my life for nothing.”

“I seriously doubt that will happen,” I assured him, but I wasn’t convinced I really believed that. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance.

This felt different, but before I took off for Hong Kong, I wanted to see some documents so that I understood the types of disclosures the source was prepared to make.

I then spent a couple of days online as the source walked me through, step by step, how to install and use the programs I would need to see the documents.

I kept apologizing for my lack of proficiency, for having to take hours of his time to teach me the most basic aspects of secure communication. “No worries,” he said, “most of this makes little sense. And I have a lot of free time right now.”

Once the programs were all in place, I received a file containing roughly twenty-five documents: “Just a very small taste: the tip of the tip of the iceberg,” he tantalizingly explained.

I unzipped the file, saw the list of documents, and randomly clicked on one of them. At the top of the page in red letters, a code appeared: “TOP SECRET//COMINT/NO FORN/.”

This meant the document had been legally designated top secret, pertained to communications intelligence (COMINT), and was not for distribution to foreign nationals, including international organizations or coalition partners (NO FORN). There it was with incontrovertible clarity: a highly confidential communication from the NSA, one of the most secretive agencies in the world’s most powerful government. Nothing of this significance had ever been leaked from the NSA, not in all the six-decade history of the agency. I now had a couple dozen such items in my possession. And the person I had spent hours chatting with over the last two days had many, many more to give me.

As Laura and I arrived at JFK Airport to board a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, Laura pulled a thumb drive out of her backpack. “Guess what this is?” she asked with a look of intense seriousness.

“What?”

“The documents,” she said. “All of them.”

“README_FIRST”
For the next 16 hours, despite my exhaustion, I did nothing but read, feverishly taking notes on document after document. One of the first I read was an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which had been created by Congress in 1978, after the Church Committee discovered decades of abusive government eavesdropping. The idea behind its formation was that the government could continue to engage in electronic surveillance, but to prevent similar abuse, it had to obtain permission from the FISA court before doing so. I had never seen a FISA court order before. Almost nobody had. The court is one of the most secretive institutions in the government. All of its rulings are automatically designated top secret, and only a small handful of people are authorized to access its decisions.

The ruling I read on the plane to Hong Kong was amazing for several reasons. It ordered Verizon Business to turn over to the NSA “all call detail records” for “communications (i) between the United States and abroad; and (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” That meant the NSA was secretly and indiscriminately collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans, at least. Virtually nobody had any idea that the Obama administration was doing any such thing. Now, with this ruling, I not only knew about it but had the secret court order as proof.

Only now did I feel that I was beginning to process the true magnitude of the leak. I had been writing for years about the threat posed by unconstrained domestic surveillance; my first book, published in 2006, warned of the lawlessness and radicalism of the NSA. But I had struggled against the great wall of secrecy shielding government spying: How do you document the actions of an agency so completely shrouded in multiple layers of official secrecy? At this moment, the wall had been breached. I had in my possession documents that the government had desperately tried to hide. I had evidence that would indisputably prove all that the government had done to destroy the privacy of Americans and people around the world.

In 16 hours of barely interrupted reading, I managed to get through only a small fraction of the archive. But as the plane landed in Hong Kong, I knew two things for certain. First, the source was highly sophisticated and politically astute, evident in his recognition of the significance of most of the documents. He was also highly rational. The way he chose, analyzed, and described the thousands of documents I now had in my possession proved that. Second, it would be very difficult to deny his status as a classic whistleblower. If disclosing proof that top-level national security officials lied outright to Congress about domestic spying programs doesn’t make one indisputably a whistleblower, then what does?

Shortly before landing, I read one final file. Although it was entitled “README_FIRST,” I saw it for the first time only at the very end of the flight. This message was an explanation from the source for why he had chosen to do what he did and what he expected to happen as a result—and it included one fact that the others did not: the source’s name.

“I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

Edward Joseph Snowden, SSN: *****
CIA Alias “***** “
Agency Identification Number: *****
Former Senior Advisor | United States National Security Agency, under corporate cover
Former Field Officer | United States Central Intelligence Agency, under diplomatic cover
Former Lecturer | United States Defense Intelligence Agency, under corporate cover”

See more here: 

Glenn Greenwald: How I Met Edward Snowden

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Glenn Greenwald: How I Met Edward Snowden

7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

by AlfredoBML Posted on May 6, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The new National Climate Assessment, being launched today by the Obama administration, is a landmark document.

It is a landmark because unlike the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it is written in plain language that ordinary mortals can understand. (“Evidence for climate change abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.” “Data show that natural factors like the sun and volcanoes cannot have caused the warming observed over the past 50 years.”)

It is a landmark because unlike past National Assessments, this report is not being buried or ignored. Rather, President Obama is using it to launch a very impressive communications campaign aimed directly at Americans via one of their most trusted scientific sources, TV meteorologists.

But most of all, it is a landmark because it shows, unequivocally, that we simply do not live in the same America any more, thanks to climate change. It is a different place, a different country. Here are some of the most striking examples of how:

1. America is much hotter than it was before. According to the assessment, the 2000s were the hottest decade on record for the United States, and 2012 was quite simply the hottest year ever (for the contiguous US).

2. That translates into extreme heat where you live. Of course, nobody feels temperature as a national average: We feel it in a particular place. And indeed, we’ve felt it. The National Climate Assessment makes clear that extreme heat waves are striking more than before, and climate change is involved. Take Texas’ extreme heat in the summer of 2011, the “hottest and driest summer on record” for the state, with temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees for 40 straight days! “The human contribution to climate change approximately doubled the probability that the heat was record-breaking,” notes the assessment.

Oh, and if we continue to mess around, it gets a lot, lot worse: By 2100, a “once-in-20-year extreme heat day” will occur “every two or three years over most of the nation.”

Projected decline in water stored in snow across the Southwest National Climate Assessment.

3. America is parched. According to the assessment, the Western drought of recent years “represents the driest conditions in 800 years.” Some of the worst consequences were in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and 2012, where the total cost to agriculture amounted to $10 billion. The rate of loss of water in these states was “double the long-term average,” reports the assessment. And of course, future trends augur more of the same, or worse, with the Southwest to be particularly hard hit. As seen in the image at right, projected “snow water equivalent,” or water held in snowpack, will decline dramatically across this area over the course of the century.

4. But when it rains, the floods can be devastating. At the same time, climate change is also exacerbating extreme rainfall, because on a warmer planet, the air can hold more water vapor. Sure enough, the United States has seen record rains and floods of late, including, most dramatically, a June 2008 Iowa flooding event that “exceeded the once-in-500-year flood level by more than 5 feet,” according to the assessment.

More generally, reports the document, the “amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average” since 1991. Staggeringly, the Northeast has seen a 71 percent increase in the amount of precipitation that now falls in the heaviest precipitation events, rain or snow, since 1958.

National Climate Assessment.

5. There is less of America. Thanks to global warming, the United States has shrunk. That’s right: Sea level around the world has risen by eight inches in the last century, swallowing up coastline everywhere, including here. Granted, “eight inches” in this case is just an average; the actual amount of sea level rise varies from place to place. But the risk is clear: When a storm like Sandy arrives, those living on the coasts have less protection. Quite simply, they’re closer to the danger.

Such is the condition for quite a lot of Americans: Almost 5 million currently live within four vertical feet of the ocean at high tide, according to the assessment. In the future, they’re going to live even closer than that, as sea level is projected to increase by one to four feet over the coming century.

Oh, and then there’s the infrastructure. “Thirteen of the nation’s 47 largest airports have at least one runway with an elevation within 12 feet of current sea levels,” notes the assessment.

6. Alaska is becoming unrecognizable. Nowhere is global warming more stark than in our only Arctic state. Temperatures there have increased much more than the national average: 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1949, or “double the rest of the country.” The state has the United States’ biggest and most dramatic glaciers—and it is losing them rapidly. Meanwhile, storms batter coasts that used to be insulated by now-vanished sea ice.

And the ground is literally giving way in many places, as permafrost thaws, destabilizing roads, infrastructure, and the places where people live. Eighty percent of the entire state has permafrost beneath its surface. The state currently spends $10 million per year to repair the damage from thawing permafrost and is projected to spend $5.6-$7.6 billion repairing infrastructure by 2080.

7. America is ablaze. More drought, and more heat, means more wildfires. And sure enough, the United States has been setting numerous records on this front. In 2011, Arizona and New Mexico had “the largest wildfires in their recorded history, affecting more than 694,000 acres.” The same went for scorching Texas that year; it also saw unprecedented wildfires and 3.8 million acres consumed in the state. That’s “an area about the size of Connecticut,” notes the assessment.

And then there is Alaska, where “a single large fire in 2007 released as much carbon to the atmosphere as had been absorbed by the entire circumpolar Arctic tundra during the previous quarter century.” Because, on top of everything else, increasing wildfires actually make global warming itself worse, by releasing still more carbon from the ground.

In sum, you don’t live in America any more. To borrow a page (or, a title) from Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, perhaps we should say you live in Ameriica. It is a different place, a different country, and by now, everybody is noticing.

Link:  

7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 7 Scary Facts About How Global Warming Is Scorching the United States

Experimental Efforts to Harvest the Ocean’s Power Face Cost Setbacks

by Myrna Posted on April 27, 2014

The shuttering of an ambitious project is the latest setback for the nascent wave energy sector in the United States. View original article: Experimental Efforts to Harvest the Ocean’s Power Face Cost Setbacks ; ;Related ArticlesNuclear Industry Gains Carbon-Focused Allies in Push to Save ReactorsYears After Chernobyl, Building ProgressForced to Flee Radiation, Fearful Japanese Villagers Are Reluctant to Return ;

This article is from:

Experimental Efforts to Harvest the Ocean’s Power Face Cost Setbacks

Posted in Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, organic, organic gardening, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Experimental Efforts to Harvest the Ocean’s Power Face Cost Setbacks