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Prof. Chris Busby at the European Parliament 2013 Video – Europeans should sign this petition!

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March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The Internet is a surveillance state

March 16, 2013 –

Editor’s note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive.”

(CNN) — I’m going to start with three data points.

One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks.

Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.

Bruce Schneier

And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name.

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

Increasingly, what we do on the Internet is being combined with other data about us. Unmasking Broadwell’s identity involved correlating her Internet activity with her hotel stays. Everything we do now involves computers, and computers produce data as a natural by-product. Everything is now being saved and correlated, and many big-data companies make money by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources.

News: Cyberthreats getting worse, House intelligence officials warn

Facebook, for example, correlates your online behavior with your purchasing habits offline. And there’s more. There’s location data from your cell phone, there’s a record of your movements from closed-circuit TVs.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

There are simply too many ways to be tracked. The Internet, e-mail, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines: these have become necessities, and it’s fanciful to expect people to simply refuse to use them just because they don’t like the spying, especially since the full extent of such spying is deliberately hidden from us and there are few alternatives being marketed by companies that don’t spy.

This isn’t something the free market can fix. We consumers have no choice in the matter. All the major companies that provide us with Internet services are interested in tracking us. Visit a website and it will almost certainly know who you are; there are lots of ways to be tracked without cookies. Cellphone companies routinely undo the web’s privacy protection. One experiment at Carnegie Mellon took real-time videos of students on campus and was able to identify one-third of them by comparing their photos with publicly available tagged Facebook photos.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you’ve permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you’re using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can’t maintain his privacy on the Internet, we’ve got no hope.

In today’s world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect — occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer — to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they’re not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.

Fixing this requires strong government will, but they’re just as punch-drunk on data as the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines notwithstanding, no one is agitating for better privacy laws.

So, we’re done. Welcome to a world where Google knows exactly what sort of porn you all like, and more about your interests than your spouse does. Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations, because increasingly your conversations are conducted by e-mail, text, or social networking sites.

And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.

Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.

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http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/index.html?hpt=hp_c

March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Radioactive Reality “Something is going badly wrong offshore” Fukushima update 3/16/13

March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Environmental laureates demand urgent change in global environmental and climate protection

The declaration specifies four concrete fields of action:

1. Universal access to modern energy supplies in conjunction with the formulation of positive targets for energy efficiency and the use of renewable energies, such as the doubling at least of the proportion of renewable energies in the global energy mix and a significant increase in energy efficiency. Progress should be monitored by an international agency.
2. Accelerated development of sustainable innovations in the fields of energy efficiency and renewable energies which have global significance, in other words, those which are relevant to people. The technologies in question are generally already in place, for example, energy-efficient buildings and electrical appliances, solar-powered cooling systems, solar-powered desalination facilities for the production of drinking water, efficient public transport systems, zero-emission vehicles, highly efficient and economical renewable energy systems and storage technologies. First and foremost, these are products which are targeted at the needs of poorer regions, such as simple power supplies and water purification systems. The convention cites international business competitions such as the “Golden Carot” program in the US and highly effective market-stimulating feed-in tariffs started in Germany and adopted in more than 60 countries worldwide as positive and particularly successful examples of suitable incentive programmes.
3. Financing of innovation and infrastructure development by the abolition of environmentally harmful subsidies, the introduction of financial transaction taxes and green taxation such as a CO2-tax, reductions in military spending including the abolition of nuclear weapons, and an exclusive focus on sustainable innovations and infrastructure in future economic stimulus programmes.
4. The acknowledgement by the planet’s leading corporations of the environmental and social impacts of their business practices, and their subsequent adoption of the systems and technologies necessary for a sustainable and equitable future.

The environmental laureates participating at the convention see the current critical situation as a failure of imagination. It is not the dream of a sustainable society that is unrealistic, but the blind belief that the status quo can be prolonged with marginal adjustments…..

 

Freiburg, Germany- Posted by: Pressenza IPA Posted date: 17 March 2013

Laureates from 44 countries propose two-speed model instead of search for the lowest common denominator within the international community

Freiburg, Germany, 16 March 2013 – Until this coming Sunday, the 2nd International Convention of Environmental Laureates is being staged by the European Environment Foundation EEF in Freiburg, Germany.  Today a declaration in which the participating environmental laureates urge a fundamental change in environmental and climate policy was signed. The constant search for the lowest common denominator within the international community must be replaced by a two-speed model. The participants at the convention specify four concrete fields of action in their declaration.

What distinguishes the EEF International Convention of Environmental Laureates from other conferences and summits is the diversity of its participants. Eighty winners of internationally renowned environmental prizes have come together from 44 countries. The conference delegates cover a wide spectrum, from scientists to environmental and civil rights activists, from successful ecological entrepreneurs to publicists and critics of capitalism. The EEF is convinced that such a broad base is necessary to put global environmental and climate protection on a new, workable footing.

The EEF does not see its convention as a contrary model to the major international environmental and climate summits. The laureates are of the opinion, however, that developments have reached a point at which the field should no longer be left entirely to career politicians. “The environmental and climate summits in the international political arena scarcely go beyond mere bartering over emission limits and volumes”, explains Eicke Weber, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the EEF and Head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE). As Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Member of the Board of Trustees of the EEF and Co-President of the Club of Rome points out, “These international negotiations must continue, however, since they have indeed long been generating important impetus for initiatives in individual countries, bilateral agreements and vital technological developments. If we continue in this way, though, we are unlikely to succeed in finding the lowest common denominator within the international community on the subject of global environmental and climate protection.”

In their declaration, entitled “Call for Action to Policy Makers and Pioneers of Change”, the participants at the convention express their alarm in the face of the current accumulation of crisis situations. These, in their opinion, are closely related on various levels and mutually detrimental. They are the imbalance in wealth and poverty, the problem of hunger and malnutrition, climate change and other ecological crises, financial crises and excessive debt in many countries and, finally, high unemployment particularly among young people. According to Rainer Grießhammer, Member of the Board of Trustees of the EEF and Head of the Institute for Applied Ecology in Freiburg, “These undesirable global trends can no longer be tackled in isolation. The current standard growth model does not deliver the necessary control information and impetus for a sustainable future.”

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March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Anti-Nukes Move from Norway to Bahrain

After a full week of intensive activities in Oslo during the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, major anti-nuclear campaigners moved Monday to the Bahraini capital, Manama, in yet another step towards the abolition of atomic weapons.

“Nuclear weapons – the most inhuman and destructive of all tools of war – are at the peak of a pyramid of violence in this increasingly interdependent world,” said campaigners during the presentation of an anti-nuclear exhibition held on Mar. 11 in Manama.

“The threat of atomic weapons is not in the past,” the organisers said. “It is a major crisis today.”

Organised by the Tokyo-based non-governmental civil society association Soka Gakkai International (SGI), with the support of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), together with the UN Information Centre in Manama and promoted by the Bahraini and Japanese ministries of foreign affairs, the exhibition — “From a Culture of Violence to a Culture of Peace: Towards a World Free from Nuclear Weapons” — will be held in Manama from Mar. 12-23.

The First Ever in an Arab Country

“This exhibition –the first ever in an Arab country – (represents) a step further toward making the human aspiration to live in a world free from nuclear weapons a reality,” SGI’s executive director for peace affairs, Hirotugu Terasaki, told IPS.

“The very existence of these weapons – the most inhuman of all – implies a major danger,” said Terasaki, who is also the vice president of this Buddhist organisation that promotes international peace and security, with more than 12 million members all over the planet.

Asked about the argument used by nuclear powers that the possession of such weapons is a major guarantee of safety and security – the so-called “deterrence doctrine” – Terasaki said, “The world should now move beyond this myth.”

“Security” begins with basic human needs: shelter, air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat. People need to work, to care for their health, to be protected from violence, according to the SGI exhibition.

According to Terasaki, nuclear weapons differ from other, so-called “conventional”, weapons in two main regards.

Nuclear Bombs Are Now Several Thousand Times More Powerful Than the One Dropped on Hiroshima

“One is their overwhelming destructive power. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 delivered a blast equivalent to about 13 kilotons of TNT,” he said.

Some 140,000 people lost their lives just at the end of that year, he said.

“Since then nuclear weapons with yields of more than 50 megatons have been developed, several thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

Whereas conventional weapons can, at least to some degree, distinguish between military and civilian targets, nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately, destroying all life on a massive scale, according to Terasaki.

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March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

UK and Canada try to revive UK nuclear! Privatising nuclear fuel production!

March 18, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments