We Are on the Brink of Mass Extinction

By Sean B. Carroll, The Daily Beast

30 November 14

 

“How strange it is that the past is so little understood and so quickly forgotten… I have tried to drag history up a little nearer to our own times in case it should be helpful as a guide in present difficulties.”

Winston Churchill, 1929

bout 9:30 p.m. on Palm Sunday in 1965, a tornado struck Toledo, Ohio. I was just four years old and asleep when my Dad felt the pressure drop and called the family to the basement.

I didn’t know what a tornado was, I just knew that it was terrifying. All I could hear as we huddled in the dark basement were fire trucks and ambulances racing nearby. The F4 twister cut a long swath of destruction that crossed just four blocks from my house. Fifteen people were killed, more than 200 were injured, and more than 300 families lost their homes.

We had no warning. At the time, sirens were not yet standard in tornado country.

After what remains the largest disaster in Toledo history, the city installed sirens. But so many years later, I still get a tense feeling in my stomach when I see a strong storm approaching.

Fifty years ago, we were just beginning to learn some important lessons from natural disasters, epidemics, and manmade tragedies. As we gather this holiday season to take stock of all that we have to be grateful for, at the top of our list should be those who have had the foresight and resolve to make our world safer.

From 1962-1965, there was a worldwide epidemic of rubella, the so-called “German measles.” During that time, an estimated 12.5 million cases occurred in the U.S., resulting in 2,100 neonatal deaths, more than 11,000 fetal deaths, 2000 cases of encephalitis, and more than 20,000 infants born with congenital blindness, deafness, and heart defects.

Thanks to the development of a vaccine in 1969, fewer than 25 cases now occur per year.

And in 1965, after more than 7,000 studies from 1920-1960 that linked smoking and health problems, Congress adopted the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act which required the placement of health warnings on cigarette packs. Thanks to these and other anti-smoking measures, the fraction of adult Americans who smoke has dropped steadily from 42 percent in 1965 to about 18 percent today, saving an estimated 8 million lives from smoking-related deaths.

And thanks to countless experts on car accidents, plane crashes, train wrecks, earthquakes, and hurricanes, a lot more people have enjoyed a lot more Thanksgivings. Seat belt use alone is credited with saving 300,000 lives over the past forty years.

But now, to that list of calamities to learn from, we need to add “mass extinctions.”

Mass extinctions?

Yes, because nature’s warning lights are flashing. In the past forty years, Earth has lost half of its wild animal populations. Africa’s lions are one telling example. Thought the King of the Beasts was protected?

Think again. Fifty years ago, about 400,000 lions roamed Africa. Today, there are only about 30,000 remaining, as they have disappeared from twenty-six countries.

The fraction of species now at risk of extinction in the near future includes over one quarter of all species being monitored including mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish.

The potential losses of species are on a scale that is rivaled by only a few events in the last 500 million years of Earth’s history. Five times during that span, the majority of species on the planet vanished in a short interval of time. Scientists have now identified the triggers of two of those events: an asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs and much more, and massive eruptions of volcanoes underneath Siberia that decimated the world 252 million years ago.

While the triggers for these two calamities were different, detailed study of what unfolded in the past reveals a common mode of destruction that is relevant to understanding our predicament today: in each case, mass extinction resulted from large and rapid environmental change on a global scale. Indeed, the main weapons of mass destruction unleashed by the Siberian eruptions included enormous quantities of the very familiar climate-changing gas carbon dioxide. The great concern of scientists today is that the potential global temperature changes projected over the next century approach those that took place 252 million years ago.

But these concerns about climate-changing gases are hardly new. In February 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson told Congress: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

There are now a lot of scientists with tense stomachs.

Let’s hope that fifty years from now, future generations might be thanking us for heeding the warnings.

The US/UK Campaign to Demonize Social Media Companies as Terrorist Allies

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

30 November 14

 

n May, 2013, a British Army soldier, Lee Rigby, was killed on a suburban London street by two Muslim British citizens, who said they were acting to avenge years of killings of innocent Muslims by the British military in, among other places, Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, had also been detained and tortured in 2010 in Kenya with the likely complicity of Her Majesty’s Government. The brutal attack on Rigby was instantly branded “terrorism” (despite its targeting of a soldier of a nation at war) and caused intense and virtually universal indignation in the UK.

In response, the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee resolved to investigate why the attack happened and whether it could have been prevented. Ensuring that nothing undesirable would occur, the investigation was led by the Committee’s chair, the long-time conservative government functionary Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Yesterday, Sir Malcolm’s Committee issued its findings in a 191-page report. It contains some highly predictable conclusions, but also some quite remarkable ones.

Predictably, the report, while offering some criticisms, completely cleared the British intelligence agencies of any responsibility for the attack. It concluded: “we do not consider that any of the Agencies’ errors, when taken individually, were significant enough to have affected the outcome,” and “we do not consider that, given what the Agencies knew at the time, they were in the position to prevent the murder.”

But while British intelligence agencies bear no blame, the Committee identified the real culprit, which it claimed could have – but culpably failed – to stop the attack: an unnamed U.S. social media company (now reported to be Facebook). The Committee noted that one of Rigby’s killers, Michael Adebowale, had an online conversation (presumably on Facebook) with an “individual overseas” in December, 2012, in which Adebowale said “that he intended to murder a soldier.”

Sir Malcolm’s Committee claimed that the British intelligence agencies such as GCHQ and MI5 – despite being among the most aggressive and unrestrained electronic surveillance forces on the planet – had no possible way to have accessed that exchange. But, the Committee said, the social media company not only had the ability – but also the duty – to monitor the communications of all its users and report anything suspicious to the UK Government. Its failure to do so in this case, claimed the report, was the proximate cause of why the attack was not stopped (had the British agencies had access to this exchange, “there is a significant possibility that MI5 would then have been able to prevent the attack”).

All of this, argued the report, underscores how social media companies have become terrorist-helpers due to their refusal to monitor and report their users’ communications to the British Government. Here is this warped blame-shifting in the Committee’s own words:

The report then goes on to lecture social media companies that they must conduct themselves differently in the future:

The companies should accept that they have a responsibility to notify the relevant authorities when an automatic trigger indicating terrorism is activated and allow the authorities, whether the US or UK, to take the next step.

And Sir Macolm’s Committee all but scoffs at the notion that having these companies monitor and report their users’ conversations might actually violate privacy and turn these companies into skulking spy agencies for the state. Sir Macolm’s Committee notes that “several of the companies attributed the lack of monitoring to the need to protect their users’ privacy,” but, it proclaimed, “that argument should not be allowed to prevail” when it comes to “terrorist atrocities.”

Also predictably, the report does far more than merely complain about this. Instead, it does what the U.S. and UK Governments have been doing for almost 15 years now: brazenly exploits the fears and emotions surrounding this attack to demand still more spying powers for itself. In particular, it demands changes to the legal obligations of U.S. social media companies “either through legislation” in the U.S. or “by a treaty with the UK which places an obligation on US companies to provide this information” – i.e., whatever is requested by the UK Government.

The irony of Her Majesty’s Government blaming others for its own intelligence failures is stark indeed. This is a government that indiscriminately collects so much of the world’s private communications that they literally don’t know what to do with it. Among the documents published in my book was a GCHQ slide boasting that it “has massive access to international internet communications” and “we receive upwards of 50 billion events per day (and growing)”.

In fact, Sir Macolm’s report itself makes clear that the intelligence agencies of Her Majesty’s Government already collect such massive quantities of private communications that they have no ability even to understand what they’ve collected: in other words, they can’t detect terror plotting because they’re overloaded with the communications of millions of innocent people around the world, or are too busy trying to figure out the identities of visitors to the WikiLeaks website or ensnare hactivists in “honey traps” and thus unable to monitor actual terrorists. From the report (redactions in original):

In fact, the UK Government had in its possession information that would have triggered suspicions about one of the attackers, but the report itself notes that “GCHQ’s failure to report an item of intelligence which revealed contact between an unknown individual (later identified as Adebowale) and the AQAP extremist CHARLIE was significant.” This is a government that collects so much of people’s private communications that they have no idea what they are collecting.

But it’s never enough. A single attack on a single soldier is instantly and brazenly exploited to demand even more spying powers, to insist on new laws and treaties giving them even more access to more private communications. Nobody – including al Qaeda or ISIS – so effectively terrorizes U.S. and British citizens as much as their own governments do.

The Guardian‘s coverage of Sir Malcolm’s report is superb. Beyond the comprehensive reporting, they have an article detailing the (justifiable) indignation of tech companies over the blame-shifting report, the comments of a former British terrorism official on the stupidity of imposing such obligations on social media companies, an editorial and an op-ed arguing that British intelligence agencies have primary responsibility to stop such attacks yet failed to connect the ample “dots” they had, and, best of all, a piece from the paper’s home affairs editor Alan Travis denouncing the report’s conclusions “as outrageous as it is wrong-headed” as “a case of shooting the messenger.”

But there’s something else significant going on here that I want to highlight. All of this is part of a clear and definitely coordinated campaign by the U.S. and UK Governments to demonize social media companies as terrorist-helpers in order to force them to act as (even more) obedient snooping agents for the National Security State.

It is well-established that, prior to the Snowden reporting, Silicon Valley companies were secret, eager and vital participants in the growing Surveillance State. Once their role was revealed, and they perceived those disclosures threatening to their future profit-making, they instantly adopted a PR tactic of presenting themselves as Guardians of Privacy. Much of that is simply self-serving re-branding, but some of it, as I described last week, are genuine improvements in the technological means of protecting user privacy, such as the encryption products now being offered by Apple and Google, motivated by the belief that, post-Snowden, parading around as privacy protectors is necessary to stay competitive.

The U.S. and UK surveillance agencies are genuinely petrified of encryption, because, although not perfect, it presents a serious impediment to their ability to spy on the internet. But these governments have a problem: they function in what is effectively an oligarchy, which means that tech giants like Google – which fund and thus control political officials - are far too rich and powerful to be meaningfully controlled. Even in the 1990s, the tech sector was able to prevent the Clinton administration – exploiting the Oklahoma City bombing – from enacting legislation to require backdoors into all encryption. These companies are vastly more powerful now, and there is almost no prospect that meaningful legislation could be enacted to limit their product choices.

Instead, the U.S. and UK Governments are trying to pressure these companies to do what they had been doing – limitlessly cooperating with the Surveillance State – through a PR pressure campaign. Right now, in a post-Snowden world, the PR incentive framework for these companies pushes them to demonstrate a commitment to privacy. As Sir Malcom’s report noted:

Encryption is also becoming a market differentiator, particularly after the NSA leaks, as individuals have become more concerned about the privacy of their communications. MI5: “one of the effects of the Snowden disclosures has been to accelerate the use of default encryption by the internet companies.”

That is the incentive formula the National Security State is desperate to change. And the strategy for doing so is to depict these companies as Friends of the Terrorists, endangering public safety, every time they refuse dictates to help spy.

FBI Director James Comey in September said at a Press Conference about ISIS: “What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to hold themselves beyond the law,” while the New York Times printed this: “‘Terrorists will figure this out,’ along with savvy criminals and paranoid dictators, one senior official predicted.” True to form, British security officials were even more unhinged, as the newly appointed GCHQ chief accused social media companies of becoming the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.”

Just yesterday, Lord West, “a former admiral who served as UK security minister until 2010? said that Snowden revelations have killed people due to increased encryption use: “Since the revelations of the traitor Snowden, terrorist groups, in particular Isil (Islamic State), have changed their methods of communications and shifted to other ways of talking to each other. Consequently there are people dying who actually would now be alive.” Meanwhile, former NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly called the Snowden disclosures “the worst leak” because “we see major corporations having difficulty doing business outside the US and, as a result, putting impenetrable encryption in their products which ultimately hurts the whole law enforcement effort.”

The plan, quite obviously, is to make it untenable for these companies ever to offer privacy protections or market encryption products by demonizing them as Allies of the Terrorists when they do. Just behold the blatant fear-mongering near the end of Sir Malcolm’s report:

The irony here is obvious, as even post-Snowden, these tech companies – despite their newly minted PR campaign – continue to play a vital, cooperative role in the Surveillance State. Sir Malcolm’s report itself recognizes that “the companies we contacted all confirmed that, if UK authorities requested information in an emergency situation, they would provide that information.” And Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like continue to be in bed with the U.S. and UK National Security State in all sorts of untoward ways. It’s stunning that anyone could maintain a straight face while depicting Facebook, of all companies, as some sort of excessive privacy guardian. As the Guardian‘s Travis noted, “Facebook even has a team in Dublin handling standard British requests and another dedicated team in California dealing with emergencies.”

Still, even the smallest gestures of defiance, symbolic protection of user privacy, and minimal responsiveness to user demand, cannot be tolerated by “Collect it All” snooping agencies. And thus every “terror” attack, no matter how limited in scope, is instantly seized upon to manipulate public emotions into acquiescing to more surveillance powers, while the message is simultaneously sent that anyone who resists the Surveillance State is a friend and ally of terrorists, pedophiles, and all other sorts of menacing criminals. That is the campaign which Sir Malcolm’s odious little report was clearly designed to advance.