Sandra Finley

2016-06-24 Interesting to see where US DOD funding goes . . . Lockheed Martin received . . . $XYZ millions to do . . . A, B, C

 Lockheed Martin, War Economy (includes Cdn Census & Trials)  No Responses »
Feb 202019
 

US DOD = US Dept of Defence (Dept of War)

Sent: June 24, 2016
To: Sandra Flnley

From:  Dan

Interesting to see where the US DOD funding goes … http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2016/06/06/bfp-exclusive-report-a-distillation-of-dod-funding-priorities-for-may-2016/

Lockheed Martin received $331,760,390 to provide Israel, Finland, Jordan, andSingapore with Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) alternative warhead rocket pods (290); unitary rocket pods (34); and reduced range practice rocket pods (529). One bid solicited, one received.

Lockheed Martin (Sikorsky) received $85,286,000 to retrofit UH-60M helicopters to full operational capability for Mexico.

Lockheed Martin received $54,906,126 for P-3C Mission System Refresh Program to upgrade the mission computer, acoustic equipment, armament/ordnance, and displays & controls of eight P-3C for Germany. This was not competitively procured, 10 U.S.C. 2304(c)(4), international agreement.

Lockheed Martin received $33,097,520 for continued development/test of Japan’s Aegis modernization baseline computer programs/equipment (upgrades Atago class ships from Baseline 7 Phase 1R to Advanced Capability Build 12 with TI-12).

Dan

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BFP Exclusive Report- A Distillation of DOD Funding Priorities for May 2016

 

2019-01-18 Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship

 Chris Hedges, Freedom of Information, Privacy  No Responses »
Feb 202019
 

There is a gate at our ears.  It shuts when certain words approach.  For my Mother,  the F-word rolls a cement gate across her ears.  For my uncle, the word “socialist” rolled a gate across his ears.   I wish that the this Web Site had named itself something different!

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By Niles Niemuth

World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board chairperson David North called January 16 for the formation of an international coalition of socialist and anti-war websites and journalists to counter Internet censorship.

North issued the call during a livestreamed webinar with journalist Chris Hedges, Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship. The webinar attracted a substantial global audience and was viewed more than 15,000 times on Facebook and YouTube in the 24 hours after it aired. A statement from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange supporting the event was read during the broadcast.

“A coalition needs to be formed to rigorously defend internet freedom, net neutrality, to organize the defense of both websites and individuals who come under attack,” North said. He urged participation in the coalition of all “those who are committed to the fight for socialism and opposition to war,” adding, “The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee are willing on this principled basis to work with those who understand the critical issues involved.”

Full video of the webinar “Organizing resistance to Internet censorship”

The discussion between North and Hedges explored the political context of the efforts to censor the Internet and abolish net neutrality, including the historic levels of social inequality. Both North and Hedges stressed the inseparable connection between war and the destruction of democratic rights, including free speech.

Hedges stated, “Corporate capitalism, globalization, neo-liberalism, whatever you want to call it, is in crisis. First of all, the ideology itself has lost credibility. It no longer holds any currency across the political spectrum. It has been exposed as a lie… The ruling elites are frightened because they watched the political charade that they had set up, in both the Republican and Democratic Party, where the leadership, whether it was the Bush dynasty or the Clinton dynasty, or Barack Obama, have all been servants of the corporate state.”

North and Hedges also examined the pretexts used to justify the suppression of free speech and discussed political strategies to defend democratic rights, including the need for any such movement to be independent of the Democratic Party.

“Of course, the elites seek and have been quite successful at it, channeling energy back into a dead system, i.e., the Democratic Party,” Hedges said. “And this was why, not that he cared or that it mattered, I would not endorse Bernie Sanders because all of that money and energy, remember he even used the word ‘revolution,’ ended up in him running around the country telling everyone to vote for Hillary Clinton.”

David North and Chris Hedges

North stressed the importance of a free and open Internet for the building of an international revolutionary movement of the working class. “Above all we want to defend Internet freedom because we believe that the need for the development of an understanding of the crisis of capitalism, the fight for a revolutionary program is the most critical issue.”

In the course of the event, North reviewed the WSWS’s campaign against censorship of left-wing and anti-war websites, which began last year after the WSWS noted a significant decline in its own referrals from Google search results.

This decline was not the accidental outcome of an algorithm update, North explained, but was an intentional effort to block access to websites that published anti-war and anti-capitalist content. Out of 150 top search terms that previously directed Google users to the WSWS, including “socialism,” “Trotskyism,” and “Russian Revolution,” by June, 145 no longer did so.

“[C]ritics of capitalism, critics of imperialism, critics of the structure, such as myself,” Hedges said, “have been pushed to the margins, out of mainstream publications like the New York Times, where I worked for 15 years. Now, what we’re seeing in essence is that they no longer have a counter-argument to make that anybody is buying. So these marginalized critics—the World Socialist Web Site will print critiques of capitalism, lift up the abuse of the working class, as will a handful (we’re not talking about many) of sites; Counterpunch is very good, Alternet—they are being targeted because the ruling elites now find these critics to be dangerous and potent.”

The discussion drew messages of support from Assange, documentarian John Pilger and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan which were read out during the broadcast.

Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for five and a half years, said he “commended the WSWS” for the event. He noted the danger that the Internet poses to the ruling elite, while warning about their efforts to control the expression of ideas online.

“While the internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core,” Assange said. “Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity.” (Read Assange’s full statement here)

Pilger pointed to the mainstream media’s role in justifying censorship of the Internet: “Dissent once tolerated in the mainstream has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, with journalists policing the perimeters of the new order. Witness the anti-Russia hysteria and the #MeToo witch-hunts, especially in liberal newspapers such as the Guardian and the New York Times. With independent journalists ejected from the mainstream, the world wide web remains the vital source of serious disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism.”

Sheehan’s statement explained that the ruling class was attempting to silence oppositional voices online in order to stampede the American population into supporting war.

“[T]he national security state is devising more and more ways to not only suppress dissent, but guide internet users to think the way the empire wants us to think: The owner of the largest social media site has brazenly admitted as such with surprisingly mild, if any, outrage against it (present company excluded). And, hey, if propaganda isn’t working fast enough to have us marching in lockstep with the war machine, a very convenient, yet fake, ballistic missile warning to the people of Hawai’i might do the job?”

Go to endcensorship.org to view the full discussion and join the fight against Internet censorship.

2018-07-11 Canada, Saudi Arabia and Daniel Turp’s heroic crusade, Montreal Gazette

 Peace or Violence, Rule of Law  No Responses »
Feb 192019
 

In follow-up to:   2016-02-05 Ottawa to face court challenge over $15 billion Saudi arms deal, G&M. (Daniel Turp and students)

 

Despite legal setbacks, the law professor continues to wage war against Ottawa over the sale of armoured vehicles to a murderous regime.

Martin Patriquin, Special to Montreal Gazette

 

Daniel Turp was once a politician. Today, he is a law professor at Université de Montréal. For the last three years he has fought a protracted and seemingly quixotic legal battle against the federal government to hold it accountable for selling weapons to a murderous regime. For this, Turp deserves another title: hero.

The origin of Turp’s wholly appropriate outrage harks back to 2014, in the sunset days of Stephen Harper’s government. In February of that year, Harper’s Conservative government approved the sale of $15 billion worth of LAV-25 armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

As anyone with access to Wikipedia can tell you, selling weapons to the Saudis is a terrible idea. The House of Saud is violent, misogynistic, repressive and exclusionary, with a long history of violent crackdowns on the country’s sizeable Shia minority — and a similar bloodlust for Shias in neighbouring Yemen.

No less than an authority than Gerald Butts, Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary, tweeted his ire in early 2015 by pointing out how practising homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery and/or the consumption of alcohol in Saudi Arabia often results in a death sentence. “Principled foreign policy indeed,” Butts tut-tutted Harper’s Conservatives.

These pangs of Liberal self-righteousness lasted well less than a year. “They aren’t weapons, they’re Jeeps,” Trudeau said with typical poncy aplomb on Tout le monde en parle about a week before the 2015 election. (Go on the internet and type in “LAV-25” to see how little the vehicle in question resembles a Grand Cherokee.) Once in office, Trudeau’s government approved the export of armed vehicles to one of the worst governments on the planet. Principled foreign policy indeed.

And the Liberal government would have done so quietly were it not for Turp. In early 2016, he and a clutch of his law students prepared and filed a motion to prevent this very rubber stamp. It pitted Turp against Stéphane Dion, his old ideological foe on issues of national unity, in a battle whose stakes are infinitely higher: the spilling of blood by way of Canadian-made weaponry.

Turp has been consistently stymied by the courts, which have ruled that Ottawa, in considering how these armed vehicles may undermine the “peace, security or stability in any region of the world or within any country,” had satisfied the tenets of the law regarding this type of sale. This week, Turp suffered another setback when for a second time a federal court judge ruled the government hadn’t “exercised its discretion in an unreasonable manner” during the sale of the vehicles.

And yet facts seemingly belie the government’s case even as Canadian courts bolster it. Last July, the Saudi National Guard deployed the Gurkha RPV, a Canadian-made armoured personnel carrier, in the predominantly Shia town of Al-Awamiyah, killing several civilians. The government suspended arms sales to Saudi for a probe into the incident. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland declared herself “deeply concerned.” Yet sales resumed when the resulting report concluded the Saudis had used “proportionate and appropriate force” against its citizens.

Exactly why the Liberals have been as tenacious in selling weapons to the Saudis as the Conservatives before them is a matter of cynical retail politics. The LAV-25 is manufactured by London, Ont.-based General Dynamics Land Systems. London, surely a lovely place, is also four vote-rich federal ridings that are key to Conservative and Liberal electoral fortunes alike. The 2000 well-paid, unionized General Dynamics jobs in London and beyond are of great political importance — dissenters in Saudi Arabia be damned.

Thankfully, Turp remains a well-placed thorn in the government’s hide. The 63-year-old law professor is seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. Common sense — governments selling weapons to murderers shouldn’t be allowed — will prevail should he be successful. More importantly, it will force these very governments to consider human lives, not just political horse races, when it comes to the exportation of deadly firepower.

twitter.com/martinpatriquin

For Your Selection, February

 For your selection (summary list recent postings)  No Responses »
Feb 192019
 

The last “for your selection” was:

2019-02-14 For your selection, emphasis on role of the universities in “Plummeting insect numbers ‘threaten collapse of nature’”

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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO . . .  DANIEL TURP’S COURT CASE AGAINST $15 BILLION DOLLAR ARMS DEAL TO SAUDI ARABIA?   Q&A

QUESTION:

Le 19 févr. 2019, Sandra Finley a écrit :

Hi!  Daniel Turp,

C’est dommage – je ne parle pas francais.

J’admire votre (métier? oeuvre?) . .  esprit.

Are you still waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court on whether they will hear your appeal?

It appears that you filed information on Nov 7, and are still waiting.

https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/dock-regi-eng.aspx?cas=38321   

2018-11-07

Applicant’s reply to respondent’s argument, (Letter Form), Completed on: 2018-11-07

Daniel Turp

I run an activist email network and blog.  We have followed your progress.

On behalf of this network, to you and to your students:  we stand behind, and are grateful to you for all your work on behalf of the Planet.

Best wishes,

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ANSWER:

From: Daniel Turp
Sent: February 20, 2019
To: Sandra Finley
Subject: Re: Your appeal to the Supreme Court

Dear Ms Finley,

Thank you very much for your kind words that brighten my day!

We are awaiting a decision on a panel of three judges on our leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. It is hard to know when that decision will be made.

Kind regards… et un grand merci !

Daniel Turp

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2018-10-22 Germany halts arms deals with Saudi Arabia,  encourages allies to do the same, Washington Post

 

2016-04-16 Court Challenge to Saudi Arms contract by Canadian Constitutional lawyer Daniel Turp – – interview on The House.

2016-04-15 Vindication: London Protesters Who ‘Put Arms Trade on Trial’ Acquitted (Canada – Saudi Arabia; CWB in Comments)

2016-02-05 Ottawa to face court challenge over $15 billion Saudi arms deal, G&M. (Daniel Turp and students)

Manufacturer and beneficiary of the $15 billion dollar sale of the armoured vehicles:  General Dynamics from the American military-industrial complex through a subsidiary they set up in Canada.

 

2016-01-07 Canadian Arms Sale Pours Fuel on Saudi-Iran Fire, Chronicle Herald

2016-02-16 UK’s Saudi weapons sales unlawful, Lords committee finds, The Guardian

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2019-02-19  Scientist says some pollution is good for you – a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced.  LA Times

2019-02-19  Interesting Opinion Poll Results on Climate Change, implications for export of water, with thanks to David Todtman

– – – – – – – – – – –

2018-10-23 2 articles: ‘City of surveillance’: privacy expert quits Toronto’s smart-city project. & A new initiative will see Alphabet – the parent company of Google – take charge of redeveloping a waterfront district in Toronto. Here’s why that’s troubling, the Guardian

 Privacy of Personal Information; Charter Right; Surveillance; StatsCan Censuses & Surveys  No Responses »
Feb 192019
 

Wired neighborhood planned by Google sister company has raised questions over data protection

Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs has promised a ‘thriving hub for innovation’.
Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs has promised a ‘thriving hub for innovation’. Photograph: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

When it was announced last year that a district in Toronto would be handed over to a company hoping to build a model for new tech-driven smart city, critics were quick to voice concerns.

Despite Justin Trudeau’s exclamation that, through a partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs, the waterfront neighborhood could help turn the area into a “thriving hub for innovation”, questions immediately arose over how the new wired town would collect and protect data.

A year into the project, those questions have resurfaced following the resignation of a privacy expert, Dr Ann Cavoukian, who claimed she left her consulting role on the initiative to “send a strong statement” about the data privacy issues the project still faces.

“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” she wrote in her resignation letter.

After initially being told that the data collected would be wiped and unidentifiable, Cavoukian told reporters she learned during a meeting last week that third parties could access identifiable information gathered in the district.

“When I heard that, I said: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t support this,’” she told the Global News. “I have to resign because you committed to embedding privacy by design into every aspect of your operation.”

Cavoukian isn’t the first to resign amid worries about privacy protection. This month, Saadia Muzaffar, a tech expert and founder of TechGirls Canada, stepped down from the digital strategy advisory panel, saying that the company was not adequately addressing privacy issues she and others had raised.

Quayside, the new district and “urban living laboratory” being developed by Sidewalk Labs, is intended to serve as a prototype that could be studied and replicated across the globe to solve urban issues.

“By combining people-centered urban design with cutting-edge technology,” its vision statement reads, “we can achieve new standards of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.”

In a Google TechTalk video from 2016, Anand Babu of Sidewalk Labs spoke about “reimagining the city as a digital platform” and using tech to solve the problems big cities face.

Google wants to run cities without being elected. Don’t let it, by  Jathan Sadowski     – –   see below.

While details for the city have not been finalized and the final plan for the project won’t be released until next year, in August Sidewalk Labs announced some of its ideas. They plan to use tall timber – instead of steel and concrete – to build sustainable housing, construct new types of roads for driver-less cars, and use sensors to collect data, intended to inform energy usage, help curb pollution, lessen traffic and monitor noise.

Sidewalk Labs invested roughly $50m into the deal initially, with ambitions to scale up. With 3.3m square feet of office and retail space, the city is the largest attempt to marry tech with urban planning in North America.

In a blogpost published last week, Alyssa Harvey Dawson, Sidewalk Labs’ head of data governance, wrote that Quayside would “set a new model for responsible data used in cities”, but that the company was still working to settle on a plan.

“The launch of Sidewalk Toronto sparked an active and healthy public discussion about data privacy, ownership, and governance,” she wrote, linking the latest draft of a digital governance proposal. In her summary, she states that the data collected in the city should be controlled and held by an independent civic data trust and that “all entities proposing to collect or use urban data (including Sidewalk Labs) will have to file a Responsible Data Impact Assessment with the Data Trust that is publicly available and reviewable”.

But, as big tech companies continue to struggle with protecting privacy, experts have highlighted the dangers of the new plan, and answers to their questions have not yet been adequately answered. In an op-ed for the Guardian last year, Jathan Sadowski, a lecturer on the ethics of technology, wrote that handing over public entities like cities to corporations could have negative side-effects.

“Mayors and tech executives exalt urban labs as sites of disruptive innovation and economic growth,” he wrote. “There’s no doubt that urban labs can help in the design of powerful, useful technologies. But building the smart urban future cannot also mean paving the way for tech billionaires to fulfill their dreams of ruling over cities. If it does, that’s not a future we should want to live in.”

Sidewalk Labs issued a statement saying: “At yesterday’s meeting of Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel, it became clear that Sidewalk Labs would play a more limited role in near-term discussions about a data governance framework at Quayside.

“Sidewalk Labs has committed to implement, as a company, the principles of Privacy by Design. Though that question is settled, the question of whether other companies involved in the Quayside project would be required to do so is unlikely to be worked out soon, and may be out of Sidewalk Labs’ hands.

“For these reasons and others, Dr. Cavoukian has decided that it does not make sense to continue working as a paid consultant for Sidewalk Labs. Sidewalk Labs benefited greatly from her advice, which helped the company formulate the strict privacy policies it has adopted, and looks forward to calling on her from time to time for her advice and feedback.”

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A new initiative will see Alphabet – the parent company of Google – take charge of redeveloping a waterfront district in Toronto. Here’s why that’s troubling

‘If the Toronto development goes as planned, it will be one of the largest examples of a smart city project in North America.’ Photograph: Alamy

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, does not suffer from a lack of ambition. Its subsidiaries are tackling topics ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart homes, artificial intelligence to biotech life extension. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Alphabet has decided it will plan, build, and run a city, too – well, part of a city. It’s a bit more surprising that a major city is happily handing Alphabet a neighborhood of prime real estate to call their own.

The project announced last week is a partnership between Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary focused on urban technology, and Toronto. Sidewalk Labs will be in charge of redeveloping a waterfront district called Quayside.

According to reports, this initiative will “include at least 3.3m square feet of residential, office and commercial space, including a new headquarters for Google Canada, in a district that would be a test bed for the combination of technology and urbanism”.

With this district, Alphabet will have its own “urban living laboratory” where it can experiment with new smart systems and planning techniques. It can study how these systems and techniques work in the real world and how people are affected.

Urban labs like this are on trend right now. There are examples around the world of cities, often in partnership with companies, developing or deeming a district a test-bed for technologies like self-driving cars. Indeed, this is not even Sidewalk Lab’s first project. It is also involved in the redevelopment of Hudson Yards in New York City.

But if the Toronto development goes as planned, it will be one of the largest examples of a smart city project in North America. That is: a place built around data-driven, (semi-)automated, networked technologies.

There is much at stake with this initiative – and not just for Toronto and Alphabet, but for cities globally. With a high-profile project like this one, the kind of deals and terms set here could become a template for similar projects in other cities.

Mayors and tech executives exalt urban labs as sites of disruptive innovation and economic growth. However, this model of creating our urban future is also an insidious way of handing more control – over people, places, policies – to profit-driven, power-hungry corporations.

As the Globe and Mail reports, Eric Schmidt said at the announcement: “The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge’.” Ambition alone is not a sin, yet desires like these should evoke suspicion, not celebration.

In an era of intense competition between cities for resources, many cities are focused on achieving constant growth, large returns, and public-private partnerships. This has translated into city leaders expending much energy courting the tech sector – that locus of investment and innovation.

They coax tech companies by offering benefits like looser regulation and lower taxes. They create “innovation ecosystems” made up of things like hackathons, incubators, and co-working spaces meant to attract programmers and venture capitalists. Digital districts, like the one being developed by Sidewalk Labs, are the next-level version of these lures.

Why settle for tax breaks or coding camps when you can lay claim to an entire neighborhood? The city itself is turned into just another platform on which Silicon Valley can build and test new technologies – while also extracting more value and expanding its influence.

It is easy for city leaders to step aside and allow technocrats and corporations to take control, as if they are alchemists who can turn social problems and economic stagnation into progress and growth.

But cities are not machines that can be optimized, nor are they labs for running experiments. Cities are not platforms with users, nor are they businesses with shareholders. Cities are real places with real people who have a right not to live with whatever “smart solutions” an engineer or executive decides to unleash.

These partnerships cannot be a way for city governments to abdicate responsibility and accountability to citizens by handing over (parts of) the city to corporations. Nobody elected Alphabet or Uber or any other company with its sights set on privatizing city governance.

When Sidewalk Labs was chosen to develop Quayside, Schmidt said his reaction was: “Now, it’s our turn.” While this was a joyous exclamation for him, it’s an ominous remark for the rest of us.

There’s no doubt that urban labs can help in the design of powerful, useful technologies. But building the smart urban future cannot also mean paving the way for tech billionaires to fulfill their dreams of ruling over cities. If it does, that’s not a future we should want to live in.

  • Jathan Sadowski is a visiting lecturer in ethics of technology at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

2019-02-19 Scientist says some pollution is good for you – a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced. LA Times

 Chemical poisoning, Gordon Edwards, Radioactive waste, Sustainability  No Responses »
Feb 192019
 

With thanks to Gordon Edwards:

Comment:

Industry loves the concept that pollution can be “sold” as a benefit to people. 

In particular, claiming that chronic radioactive pollution left over from nuclear disasters or from atomic warfare is not ultimately harmful, makes both the spread of nuclear power worldwide and the potential for “limited” nuclear warfare just a bit more attractive to elected representatives and to military leaders.

Below is a good article that briefly summarizes the current situation and the history that led up to it. 

Gordon Edwards.

– – –  – – – – –  – – – – – –

 

Scientist says some pollution is good for you
– a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced

 

by Suzanne Rust, Los Angeles Times

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-secret-science-20190219-story.html

 

In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people.

 

“I wanted to check to see if you might have some time in the next couple of days for a quick call to discuss a couple items …,” Woods wrote to Ed Calabrese.

 

Less than two weeks later, Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.

 

“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science.

 

“Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.

 

It was a glorious moment for Calabrese, who had been snubbed for decades by mainstream public health scientists because of his controversial research and theories.

 

It also signified the major shift the EPA has taken under the Trump administration. More than any before it, this White House has actively sought out advice from industry lobbyists and the scientists they commission in setting pollution rules

 

Denouncing the Obama-era EPA as an agency beholden to environmental extremists, the administration has not only dismissed mainstream science but embraced widely discredited alternatives that critics say are not consistent with the agency’s focus on improving public and environmental health.

 

Calabrese’s role illustrates a different side of this shift: the potential removal of longstanding public health practices and the incorporation of industry-backed and disputed science into federal environmental policy.

 

Calabrese spent decades advancing his ideas, facing skepticism and criticism from peers in the toxicology community while winning funding from companies whose bottom lines conformed with his views.

 

He says most of the pushback he receives comes from left-of-center toxicologists who see him as “the devil incarnate” for accepting industry funding and challenging their ideology. He maintains his science is solid and will be vindicated in time.

 

“These environmental regulatory people are very closed-minded,” he said. They won’t reconsider their standards, and see that some of the agents they call harmful “actually can induce adaptive responses,” Calabrese said.

 

This view — that pollution and radiation can be beneficial — has many experts worried. The fact that such a position may become EPA policy, they say, portends a future in which corporate desires outweigh public and environmental health.

 

“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” said David Michaels, former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who’s a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries too.”

 

If the EPA ultimately adopts Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste. It could also fundamentally alter the way the government assesses new chemicals and pesticides entering the marketplace.

 

“This is industry’s holy grail,” said Michaels.

 

Can pollution be healthy?

 

For decades, federal agencies charged with investigating and regulating carcinogens, toxic chemicals and radiation have been guided by the assumption that if a substance is dangerous at some level, it is harmful at any level. The higher the exposure, the more harm done. The lower the dose, the less. And the risk doesn’t entirely disappear until the substance is removed.

 

This is known as the linear no-threshold model, and industry dislikes it because it generally assumes that there is no level, or threshold, of exposure that can be considered totally safe.

 

But research done on low exposures to toxins has been less than definitive. Experiments designed to test carcinogens and radiation at low levels often produce conflicting results — with, for example, some studies of a chemical showing harm, other studies showing no effect, and a few suggesting a net benefit. In other cases, there is no information at all to guide regulators.

 

In the face of such uncertainty, the EPA and other agencies have taken a cautious approach by relying on the linear no-threshold model. Where data are absent or uncertain, they assume some level of risk.

 

It is an imperfect but protective approach, say many public health specialists. They argue that in a human population that varies widely in age, health and levels of chemical exposures, it is imperative that the agency cast a wide, conservative and protective net.

 

For decades, national and international scientific bodies have upheld this approach. It has been reviewed and re-reviewed dozens of times, including most recently by the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the EPA.

 

At the same time, industry has funded scientists to conduct and promote research designed to poke holes in the linear no-threshold model.

 

And that is where Calabrese comes in. He has long argued that regulators “erred on the side of being protective” at the cost of billions of dollars per year to industry.

 

Calabrese is a proselytizer of hormesis, the idea that dangerous chemicals and radiation are beneficial at low doses. He says they have a stimulating effect.

 

“It’s clearly not mainstream,” said Thomas Burke, professor and director of the Risk Sciences Institute at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.

 

Burke and other experts say there are clearly scenarios where toxic chemicals can have beneficial effects in clinical and pharmacological settings, such as in the case of tamoxifen, which at low doses is effective at preventing and treating breast cancer but at higher doses can lead to blood clots, stroke and uterine cancer.

 

But, they say, what happens in a clinical setting can’t and shouldn’t be immediately applied to a regulatory, public health setting.

 

In the clinical case, “you have a doctor controlling and administering the medication to an individual,” said David Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, who has published studies showing hormetic effects in some industrial pollutants. “The doctor can pull the medication at any time.”

 

“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” he said. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”

 

Therefore, Jacobs said, it would be dangerous to use hormesis as a framework for protecting public and environmental health.

 

“It really doesn’t pass the sniff test” when applying it to public health, Burke said, while allowing for its place in the forum of ideas. “I always teach my classes that there are other theories. It’s like any part of science, there are different points of view. Whether it’s about climate change or low doses.”

 

But he also teaches that one needs to know who has skin in the game. And in the case of hormesis, he said, that’s industry.

 

Big Tobacco embraces disputed research

 

In the early 1980s, Calabrese was a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts, stringing together public agency and industry-funded grants to study chemicals in drinking water and the effects of ozone on mice.

 

His funders included the EPA, the state of Massachusetts, the Hoffman-LaRoche pharmaceutical company and semiconductor giant Digital Corp.

 

Then in 1985, he reached out to the Council for Tobacco Research, the research arm of the tobacco industry, seeking a grant to examine “a possible inherited and metabolic susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers.” His proposal was declined.

 

Sheldon Sommers, a physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital and scientific director of the council, wrote in response to the grant application that Calabrese’s proposal “… is a mad hatter’s tea party sort of epidemiologic approach, and a total $2.1 million plus would likely be frittered away in my opinion,” according to documents from the UC San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive.

 

But by the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.

 

In a 1994 proposal to R.J. Reynolds, Calabrese offered to investigate a new kind of smokeless cigarette for the company, but also incorporate into his research “the loss of current benefits associated with smoking, such as protection from certain types of cancers and other illnesses…”

 

It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries.

 

With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE. Minutes from a 1990 advisory board meeting show the group chose not to use the word “hormesis” in its official name.

 

According to documents, Calabrese and his funders also held off on pushing a hormesis regulatory agenda until they’d built a sizable base of published scientific research.

 

Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.

 

Spokesmen from Exxon Mobil and the Air Force say they no longer fund Calabrese’s work.

 

Calabrese established his own scientific society, the International Dose Response Society, and his own hormesis journal — now called Dose Response — where he served as editor-in-chief.

 

He wrote hundreds of articles, in his own journal and in others (including “Should hormesis be the default model in risk assessment?” and “The importance of hormesis to public health”), organized dozens of conferences and delivered scores of talks.

 

And while his publication portfolio is vast, it is also broad. It includes not just studies of hormesis, but research on soil ingestion, opinion pieces on law and regulatory policy, historical treatise on science, and a few scathing, posthumous rebukes of revered scientists, such as Herman Muller, a Nobel prize-winner and supporter of linear no-threshold.

 

Calabrese insists his funding does not influence his work.

 

“My job involves finding financial support to do studies in my field,” said Calabrese. “I seek support from the private and public sectors. The University independently evaluates each of these for compliance with the rules.”

 

Not all of his money comes from industry or government agencies with extensive toxic waste sites. Between 2000 and 2013, Calabrese received $50,000 from the EPA to hold a conference on soil ingestion, and $50,000 from CalEPA for a reference database he built on cancer publications. He also received a $750,000 joint grant from the EPA and the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade group, to study soil ingestion by construction workers.

 

Yet, despite his prolific career, he has instigated criticism and rebuke from many of his peers for his push on public and environmental health policy. He has been described as a “prominent industry consultant,” having “outlying views,” whose science is “way out there.”

 

For years he failed to get regulatory agencies to take him seriously.

 

Then Donald Trump was elected president.

 

‘We are winning’

 

On Sept. 5, 2017, nearly nine months after Trump was sworn in as president and seven months after Scott Pruitt was confirmed as head of the EPA, Calabrese wrote an email to Milloy, the former coal lobbyist who is a Fox news commentator. The Los Angeles Times obtained the emails through a public records request to the University of Massachusetts.

 

“I wanted to connect with you on whether and how it may be possible to get the EPA to consider changing the LNT [linear no-threshold model] to something far better,” Calabrese wrote.

 

Milloy had served on Trump’s EPA transition team and was still in touch with high-ranking officials in Pruitt’s agency.

 

A few months later, Calabrese wrote to Milloy again, letting him know that he’d corresponded with Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, and sensed interest in a move against linear no-threshold.

 

Not long after Woods, the EPA’s deputy assistant of the Office of Air and Radiation, emailed Calabrese asking if he wanted to talk about “default linear assumptions” and other items.

 

The two arranged a call, and on April 19, 2018, Woods sent Calabrese draft language for a small section in the EPA’s proposed new ruling on transparency, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”

 

“It is good what you have but you need a little more,” wrote Calabrese, who then suggested a line, which he altered twice, in email exchanges with Woods, before settling on this: “EPA shall also incorporate the concept of model uncertainty when needed as a default to optimize low dose risk estimation based on the major competing models (LNT, Threshold, and Hormesis).”

 

In other words, if the EPA is uncertain about a particular chemical’s impacts at low doses, it would abandon linear no-threshold as a default, and try other models instead, including hormesis.

 

On April 25, Milloy sent Calabrese the final wording for the draft proposal, which included Calabrese’s line nearly word for word.

 

“I am almost passing out with surprise and euphoria… ” Calabrese wrote Milloy after seeing the document.

 

The rule was posted for comment in the Federal Register on April 30, although a final ruling has not been announced.

 

John Konkus, an EPA spokesman, said the input and perspective from “the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Dose Response” was welcomed, and reflected the perspective of “a wide variety of scientific experts” the agency reached out to when drafting the proposal.

 

Public health specialists outside the agency say that if the final language is adopted, it is likely to tie the EPA up in knots as it tries and then debates all the alternative models. It could also have profound effects on current and future standards for drinking water, air and toxic waste sites.

 

“EPA tries to be conservative in its setting of risks,” said Jan Beyea, a retired radiation physicist who has worked with the National Academies of Science. “Calabrese and collaborators think that most pollutants are good for you at low doses, so no need to be conservative.”

 

EPA spokeswoman Molly Block declined to speculate on whether the rule would be passed and how it would affect environmental rules that were set based on the linear no-threshold model.

 

Industry groups have praised the proposed change.

 

“We support moving away from over-reliance on the linear no -threshold default,” wrote a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, the trade group for the chemical industry. It’s a method, he says that “frequently results in inflated health risk estimates and unwarranted, costly risk management decisions.”

 

Milloy also seemed pleased with the proposed ruling.

 

“The EPA should be open and transparent about how and what they are basing their decisions on,” he said, “and they should be using the best science available.”

 

In any case, he said, “we’re winning.”

 

2019-02-19 Interesting Opinion Poll Results on Climate Change, implications for export of water, David Todtman

 Bottled, For-Profit Extraction, Export, Commodification, Climate  No Responses »
Feb 192019
 

Return to INDEX

David writes:

Below is an email I just sent to Lois Eaton on a recently published poll in the US. I thought the poll results relate directly to her presentations (on climate change) at our local councils. I think the implications for blocking water export are clear. People–even those on the right side of the political spectrum–are increasingly concerned about climate change. The uncertainty regarding the break down of our climate strengthens the argument in favour of protecting water from for-profit export.

 

Hi Lois,

Below is the URL for a podcast I heard a few days ago. The URL has the written transcript too. Here is an excerpt:

“Climate change concerns are more bipartisan than some political elites would like you to believe, according to a new poll…. Among the biggest findings are that 74 percent of voters believe climate change is happening and 62 percent believe that human activity has caused it. Further, about two out of every three voters, or 67 percent, are worried about climate change and its potential impacts. Also notable, some 88 percent of those interviewed by the researchers say they support growth of the renewable energy sector via funding research, while 81 percent say they support a congressional Green New Deal.” 

On the assumption that the poll is a reasonable reflection of public opinion it is important to note that voters who are on the ‘conservative’ side of the spectrum are shifting their positions. It is reasonable to assume that these poll numbers reflect similar shifts in the Canadian voting public. The implication for our community, efforts by active groups, and your direct presentations to councils are pretty significant, I think. People are increasingly worried.

 

Here is the link to Yale’s public page on the poll.
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/who-is-changing-their-mind-about-global-warming-and-why/

 

Here is the URL to the podcast and pod cast transcript:
https://therealnews.com/stories/new-poll-shows-increased-bipartisan-desire-to-act-on-climate-change?fbclid=IwAR1rTwUbp4UjaxwmavqBTO6I8xlPUAxMwxegX4swFGeeQ2Om7SD1eXWZy48

 

2019-02-16 How Taylor Swift showed us the scary future of facial recognition, The Guardian

 Privacy of Personal Information; Charter Right; Surveillance; StatsCan Censuses & Surveys  No Responses »
Feb 172019
 

Surveillance at concerts is just the beginning, as fears grow around an unregulated, billion-dollar industry

 

Gabrielle Canon in San Francisco   @GabrielleCanon

Fri 15 Feb 2019 11.00 GMT;    Last modified on Sat 16 Feb 2019 01.40 GMT

 

Taylor Swift has used facial recognition software for safety at events – but how far should the technology go? Photograph: Matt Winkelmeyer/TAS18/Getty Images for TAS

Taylor Swift has used facial recognition software for safety at events – but how far should the technology go?

Taylor Swift raised eyebrows late last year when Rolling Stone magazine revealed her security team had deployed facial recognition recognition technology during her Reputation tour to root out stalkers. But the company contracted for the efforts uses its technology to provide much more than just security. ISM Connect also uses its smart screens to capture metrics for promotion and marketing.

 

Facial recognition, used for decades by law enforcement and militaries, is quickly becoming a commercial tool to help brands engage consumers. Swift’s tour is just the latest example of the growing privacy concerns around the largely unregulated, billion-dollar industry.

Surveillance fears grow after Taylor Swift uses face recognition tech on fans

Read more

 

ISM Connect uses “smart screens” to simultaneously enhance security, advertise and collect demographic data for brands. “When fans attend events they are their most passionate selves, and it is at these pinnacle and personal moments that they are open to new ideas” the company says on its website. “Our products enhance and ensure security at immense and highly visible events, while providing advertisers with a seamless, immersive platform to connect to their brand advocates.”

 

At Swift’s shows, ISM installed cameras behind kiosks marked as “selfie stations”, drawing concert-goers in with Swift trivia and behind the scenes footage. Their hidden cameras scanned the facial features of fans interacting with the screens, the company explained in a series of posts on its website. They also outlined how this helped generate metrics used to enhance the tour, in a post that has since been removed.

 

It’s unclear what exactly happened with the data next. A security contractor told Rolling Stone that the data was sent to a central command team in Nashville to be checked against a database of known Swift stalkers. The Guardian has not independently confirmed the report. Rolling Stone’s source could not be reached for comment, despite several attempts.

 

But ISM’s trademark for its “FanGuard” technology confirms it uses “facial recognition to identify persons of interest for security purposes”, and includes protections for the “design and development of electronic data security systems”.

 

And its website says, it uses those same smart screens to deliver demographic information and metrics to help educate promotors on how best to direct their marketing efforts. Both ISM and Swift’s team declined to provide further details on how the data was used.

 

ISM’s “data metric smart cameras” have been used at Nascar tracks, Daytona Beach’s luxury mall and at the Redskins’ FedEx field. Soon they will be at Minor League Baseball stadiums, and ISM hopes to integrate them into “smart cities”. Already, the company’s screens have captured engagement and demographic data on over 110 million event-goers at more than 100 venues, according to their website.

 

Like the technology itself, the industry is expanding rapidly as it becomes a profitable tool for retail and marketing companies.

 

A facial recognition verification system in Dulles international airport, Virginia. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

A facial recognition verification system in Dulles international airport, Virginia.

 

In the next two years, facial recognition is expected to become a $9.6bn market, according to a 2015 report from Allied Research. But regulation in the burgeoning industry has failed to keep pace. Companies are expected to police themselves, and aren’t hold to account for how they collect, use, and store the data.

 

Privacy advocates, researchers, and industry experts have all begun to sound the alarm about the lack of governmental oversight with this type of technology and the stealthy way it can be used to collect data on crowds of people. And, they warn, the industry is growing exponentially, becoming far more widely used than most people realize.

 

ISM says on its website that it doesn’t keep the information it collects, and that biometric cameras don’t produce an actual, identifiable image of someone. The company also emphasizes that signs inform crowds that they “might be filmed”.

 

More than half of all American adults have had their likeness cataloged in databases used for facial recognition matching, according to a 2016 Georgetown law study, and a quarter of law enforcement agencies across the country have access to those databases. Mass surveillance has only gotten more pervasive since then, said Clare Garvie, a senior associate at the center on privacy and technology and one of the authors on the study.

We underestimate the threat of facial recognition technology at our peril

Cynthia Wong

Read more

 

“We knew when we were writing in late 2016 that facial recognition technology would only become more common,” she said, adding that advancements have made it even easier for law enforcement agencies or companies to collect real-time data on crowds of people without their knowledge.

 

“It is going to become more widespread and more advanced, especially in the absence of common sense legislation governing how it can and more importantly – how it can’t – be used,” she said. “A company such as Walmart, or Saks Fifth Avenue, or a venue or a law enforcement agency can adopt this technology and provide no notice to the public.”

 

“If every shopping mall, and baseball game, and convenient store is tracking every move, knows who you are, and recording what you are doing and buying and that’s all being sent to some corporate repository, that could still have serious consequences and change what it feels like to live in America” the American Civil Liberty Union’s (ACLU) senior policy analyst Jay Stanley told the Guardian in December.

 

Illinois is the only state with laws requiring companies and agencies to have opt-in consent before they can collect biometric information. It’s also the only state mentioned by ISM Connect where it doesn’t offer its technology. In January, San Francisco introduced legislation that would make it the first city in the country to ban its police department from using the technology.

At Swift’s shows, kiosks marked as ‘selfie stations’ scanned fans’ faces. Photograph: Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

 

In the rest of the country, companies have been left to police themselves – and many don’t consider it to be a problem. Only a quarter of Americans believe facial recognition technology should be regulated or restricted by the government, a recent survey from the Center for Data Innovation found. The number drops even more when public safety is cast as a tradeoff. Garvie says that’s likely because Americans perceive the technology largely as a convenience tool. It makes it easy to tag friends in photos on Facebook or speed through lines at TSA checkpoints.

 

Kelly Gates, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Our Biometric Future, a book on facial recognition and the culture of surveillance, says this attitude may come at a price.

 

“People’s lives – everything we do – is online,” she said. “So much data is collected all the time and automation and machine learning algorithms are coming up with ways to do things with that data, and it will affect our lives going forward.”

 

Mary Haskett, the co-founder of the facial recognition company Blink Identity, compared the public’s lack of understanding of the impact of facial recognition technology to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. “[Users] didn’t realize how much in-depth information Facebook had, and more importantly how that information was being used to manipulate them,” she said. Only now, she added, these issues are quickly making their way into the physical world.

 

Haskett spent over a decade working for the US Department of Defense doing what she describes as “large scale national identity systems” and other programs “installed into foreign governments”. But these days, development of the tech is increasingly aimed at consumers.

 

“The problem is that what the technology can do is far more invasive and personal than people realize, and this will only get worse as AI technology continues to grow in capability.”

2016-02-16 UK’s Saudi weapons sales unlawful, Lords committee finds, The Guardian

 Peace or Violence  No Responses »
Feb 162019
 

Report finds UK arms ‘highly likely to be cause of significant civilian casualties in Yemen’

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor

An explosion from an aerial bombardment near Sana'a in Yemen

An explosion from an aerial bombardment near Sana’a in Yemen

The UK has supported Saudi-led involvement in Yemen since the latter’s civil war began in March 2015. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA

 

The UK is on “the wrong side of the law” by sanctioning arms exports to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen and should suspend some of the export licences, an all-party Lords committee has said.

 

The report by the international relations select committee says ministers are not making independent checks to see if arms supplied by the UK are being used in breach of the law, but is instead relying on inadequate investigations by the Saudis, its allies in the war.

 

It describes the humanitarian plight of Yemenis as “unconscionable”.

 

It is the first unanimous report from a parliamentary committee describing Saudi arms export sales as unlawful, and comes ahead of an imminent high court appeal by campaigners to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia on the grounds they are in breach of humanitarian law.

‘The violence is unbearable’: medics in Yemen plead for help

 

The report places no legal obligation on ministers, but is likely to add indirectly to the pressure on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to seek a way out of the war in Yemen through negotiation, rather than further military offensives to dislodge Houthi rebels in the capital Sana’a and the port city of Hodeidah.

 

Although a patchy ceasefire holds around Hodeidah, Saudi airstrikes are reported by the Yemen Data Project to be at their most intensive since the four-year civil war began in Saada governorate along the border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

 

The US Congress voted earlier this week to suspend US arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen, but the White House has signalled the president will veto the resolution if necessary.

 

The Lords’ international relations committee concludes following a short inquiry: “The government asserts that, in its licensing of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, it is narrowly on the right side of international humanitarian law. Although conclusive evidence is not yet available, we assess that it is narrowly on the wrong side: given the volume and type of arms being exported to the Saudi-led coalition, we believe they are highly likely to be the cause of significant civilian casualties in Yemen, risking the contravention of international humanitarian law.”

 

The committee also asserts that the UK “should immediately condemn any further violations of international humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition, including the blocking of food and medical supplies, and be prepared to suspend some key export licences to members of the coalition”.

 

It adds it is “deeply concerned that the Saudi-led coalition’s misuse of the weaponry is causing – whether deliberately or accidentally – loss of civilian life.

 

“Relying on assurances by Saudi Arabia and Saudi-led review processes is not an adequate way of implementing the obligations for a risk-based assessment set out in the arms trade treaty.”

 

The committee, chaired by the former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Howell, describes the British as supporters of the Saudis in the civil war.

Britain’s role in Yemen crisis

 

The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has taken up the search for a peace settlement in Yemen as his single most important priority, apart from Brexit, and travelled to Warsaw this week to meet with Saudi, UAE and US ministers to discuss the state of the limited Yemen ceasefire negotiated in Stockholm in December.

 

The joint statement issued by the four countries following their talks was sharply critical of the Houthis adherence to the Stockholm agreement, but nevertheless agreed to do more to stabilise the Yemen economy in the north.

 

However, the peers urge the UK to be more active.

 

The committee, including senior former diplomats, says: “The government should give much higher priority to resolving – not just mitigating – this situation, particularly in light of the tension between its support for the Saudi-led coalition and its role as a major donor of humanitarian relief to those affected by the conflict.”

 

In its latest update on the war, the NGO International Crisis Group says: “Though the battle for the Red Sea port and city of Hodeidah is paused until the UN-brokered deal to demilitarise the area succeeds or collapses, fighting on other fronts has intensified, particularly along the Saudi-Yemeni border … Saada governorate has faced more Saudi bombardments than any other part of Yemen since the war began in March 2015, with the majority of strikes taking place near the border.”

Appreciating the library book “Call them by their true names : American crises (and essays)”, by Rebecca Solnit

 Change  No Responses »
Feb 152019
 
Call them by their true names : American crises (and essays)
Book
2018
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