Category Archives: Opinion

Investigating chemical weapons in Syria

Brian Whitaker writes: In the blue corner, Seymour Hersh, one of America’s most famous and highly paid investigative reporters. In the red corner, Eliot Higgins, who sits at home in an English provincial town trawling the internet and tweets and blogs about his findings under the screen name Brown Moses.

On Sunday, in a 5,000-word article for the London Review of Books, Hersh suggested Syrian rebels, rather than the regime, could have been responsible for the chemical weapons attacks near Damascus on August 21.

On Monday, Higgins responded on the Foreign Policy website, demolishing the core of Hersh’s argument in a mere 1,700 words.

While seeking to re-ignite the “whodunnit” debate about chemical weapons, Hersh’s article unwittingly revealed a lot about the changing nature of investigative journalism. Hersh is old-school. He operates in a world of hush-hush contacts – often-anonymous well-placed sources passing snippets of information around which he constructs an article that challenges received wisdom.

The Hersh style of journalism certainly has a place, but in the age of the internet it’s a diminishing one – as the web-based work of Higgins and others continually shows.

The main problem with Hersh’s article is that he seems to have spent so much time listening to his secretive sources, and perhaps became so enthralled with them, that he never got round to looking at a wealth of information about the chemical attacks which is freely available on the internet. The result was that his article posed a number of once-important questions which others had already answered. [Continue reading…]

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How Google should respond to revelation that NSA uses its cookies to track and exploit

Mike Masnick writes: The latest Washington Post story from the Snowden leaks highlights how the NSA was able to effectively piggyback on Google’s ad-tracking cookies to track someone’s online activities and to “enable remote exploitation” (the details of that exploitation are not revealed, but there are a few ways that would be possible).

It’s important to note, first off, that it does not appear that that the NSA is doing this in any “bulk” sense. Rather it appears to be accessing this and other data via more specific orders. That is, rather than going through everyone’s surfing habits, it’s using this particular “trick” when it’s looking for someone (or something) specific, and likely getting a FISA court order to do so.

Still, this should raise very serious concerns — and it should lead internet companies to rethink the way they use cookies. I know that some people want an extreme solution, in which cookies go away entirely, but that ignores the many benefits that cookies/tracking can provide. As we’ve said in the past, privacy is always about tradeoffs, and generally it should be about tradeoffs where individuals can assess if what they’re giving up is worth what they get in return. The problem here is that the information on what they were giving up was not clear at all, and open to abuse — meaning that things may have tilted pretty far in one direction. [Continue reading…]

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If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn’t be seen as a universal hero

Slavoj Žižek writes: In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him – he was impersonated by Morgan Freeman, who also, by the way, played the role of God in another film; rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts remain obliterated by this celebratory vision. In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class is joined by the new black elite. Second, people remember the old African National Congress that promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually obliterated from our memory. No wonder that anger is growing among poor, black South Africans.

South Africa in this respect is just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” – but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticise Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option? [Continue reading…]

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Recognizing Nelson Mandela

Alex DeWaal writes: For more than twenty years, following his conviction and sentence to life imprisonment in 1964, the Apartheid government in South Africa banned pictures of Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners. This ban was so effective that in 1982, following a medical checkup in Cape Town, Mandela’s warders allowed him a stroll on a public beach, confident—correctly—that no-one would recognize him. As told by his biographer William Gumede, “On the beach that day no-one as much as glanced at him. Later, with a glint in his eye, Mandela said he’d wondered what would have happened had he suddenly shouted: ‘I am Nelson Mandela!’”

Mandela’s anonymity was all the more ironic as, for over a decade, the African National Congress and the international Anti-Apartheid Movement had singled him out, from among all the other political prisoners in South Africa, as the symbol for its campaign. Images of his face from the Rivonia trial adorned posters and badges around the world, and in 1984 the song “Free Nelson Mandela” by the ska band The Specials helped to spark a movement by musicians, culminating in the “70th birthday concert” in 1988.

Mandela and his comrades were reluctant to give a single personal face to their mass movement. The ANC was run by a collective leadership in which individuals were required to submit to party discipline. It was profoundly averse to any personality cult. Nonetheless, at the insistence of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement which convinced the ANC that the global campaign against Apartheid needed a rallying symbol, they participated in constructing Mandela’s image to serve as an icon for their cause.

For the last twenty three years of his long life, Mandela had little privacy and no anonymity. Instantly recognized around the world, he became a vessel for many people’s hopes and aspirations, and a symbol of the new South Africa. For Africans, he exemplified leadership and dignity in overcoming racism and oppression: he was the leader they deserved. For white liberals, his forgiveness was a reward of which they could hardly have dreamed. Identities were projected onto him. When Mandela visited America after his release from prison, one young journalist prefaced her question with the words, “as an African American, do you…” before he gently reminded her that he was, in fact, an African. The way he has become idolized and idealized tells us more about the world’s need for such a figure, than about Nelson Mandela himself.

We need to tease apart the wishful thinking from the realities of this great man. [Continue reading…]

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International bill of digital rights: call from 500 writers around the world

Martin Amis, Arundhati Roy, Tom Stoppard, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Henning Mankell, Günter Grass, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and others write:

A stand for democracy in a digital age

In recent months, the extent of mass surveillance has become common knowledge. With a few clicks of the mouse the state can access your mobile device, your email, your social networking and internet searches. It can follow your political leanings and activities and, in partnership with internet corporations, it collects and stores your data, and thus can predict your consumption and behaviour.

The basic pillar of democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual. Human integrity extends beyond the physical body. In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested.

This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.

A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.

* Surveillance violates the private sphere and compromises freedom of thought and opinion.

* Mass surveillance treats every citizen as a potential suspect. It overturns one of our historical triumphs, the presumption of innocence.

* Surveillance makes the individual transparent, while the state and the corporation operate in secret. As we have seen, this power is being systemically abused.

* Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property: it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else: the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.

WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and stored.

WE CALL ON ALL STATES AND CORPORATIONS to respect these rights.

WE CALL ON ALL CITIZENS to stand up and defend these rights.

WE CALL ON THE UNITED NATIONS to acknowledge the central importance of protecting civil rights in the digital age, and to create an international bill of digital rights.

WE CALL ON GOVERNMENTS to sign and adhere to such a convention. [Continue reading…]

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Bashar al-Assad’s sick sense of humor

Ashley Frohwein writes: Here Bashar al Assad goes again. Joining the throngs of world leaders eulogizing the life and accomplishments of Nelson Mandela, the Syrian presidency recently released a statement on its Facebook page declaring that Mandela’s “history of struggle has become an inspiration to all the vulnerable peoples of the world, in the expectation that oppressors and aggressors will learn the lesson that in the end it is they who are the losers.” Emanating from the regime of a dictator who has presided over the multi-year – and seemingly unending – slaughter of “his own people,” few could overlook the statement’s profoundly offensive irony.

The absurdity of such a statement being issued by the Syrian regime suggests that Assad is just saying this stuff for fun, like some kind of sick joke – and indeed, he is. What’s more is that this is only the latest iteration in a longstanding pattern of caustic comedy by the Duck of Damascus.

In October, after the Norwegian Nobel Committee made its regrettable decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons“, Assad proclaimed that the prize “should have been mine” because of his acceptance of the Russian-sponsored plan to rid Syria of its chemical arsenal. After the deal was struck, Assad even had the audacity to ask the UN to equip his troops and supply armored trucks to ship out Syria’s chemical materiel, a request that was rightly rejected outright: “There is no way that the regime will be supplied with equipment that could be used by the army to kill more innocent Syrians,” said one Western diplomat.

When massive demonstrations erupted in Egypt last summer against then president Mohammed Morsi, Mr. Assad, oddly enough, came out in support of the Egyptian protestors. “This is the fate of anyone in the world who tries to use religion for political or factional interests,” he said. Assad’s information minister, Omran Zoabi, told the Syrian state-owned news agency SANA that the “crisis can be overcome if Mohamed Mursi realizes that the overwhelming majority of the Egyptian people reject him and are calling on him to go.” Again with the hypocritical irony. [Continue reading…]

Some people may react to observations about Assad’s hypocrisy by pointing out (as though everyone did not already know), that in the West, we too have hypocritical political leaders. Indeed. But does that make Assad’s hypocrisy any less sick?

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Is Silicon Valley taking a stand in favor of surveillance reform or simply assuming a posture?

Jeff Jarvis writes: Whose side are you on? That is the question MP Keith Vaz asked Alan Rusbridger last week when he challenged the Guardian editor’s patriotism over publishing Edward Snowden’s NSA and GCHQ leaks.

And that is the question answered today by eight tech giants in their letter to the White House and Congress, seeking reform of government surveillance practices worldwide. The companies came down at last on the side of citizens over spies.

Of course, they are also acting in their own economic (albeit enlightened) self-interest, for mass spying via the internet is degrading the publics’, clients’, and other nations’ trust in the cloud and its frequently American proprietors. Spying is bad for the internet; what’s bad for the internet is bad for Silicon Valley; and — to reverse the old General Motors saw — what’s bad for Silicon Valley is bad for America.

But in their letter, the companies stand first and firmly on principle. They propose that government limit its own authority, ending bulk collection of our communication. They urge transparency and oversight of surveillance, which has obviously failed thus far. And they argue against the balkanization of the net and the notion that countries may insist that data respect national borders.

Bravo to all that. I have been waiting for Silicon Valley to establish whether it collectively is a victim or a collaborator in the NSA’s web. I have wondered whether government had commandeered these companies to its ends. I have hoped they would use their power to lobby for our rights. And now I hope government — from Silicon Valley’s senator, NSA fan Dianne Feinstein, to president Obama — will listen.

This is a critical step in sparking real debate over surveillance and civil rights. It was nice that technology companies banded together once before to battle against the overreaching copyright regime known as SOPA and for our ability to watch Batman online. Now they must fight for our fundamental — in America, our constitutional — rights of speech and assembly and against unreasonable search and seizure. ‘Tis a pity it takes eight companies with silly names to do that. [Continue reading…]

The makeup of the band of corporate reformists seems to have been dictated by PowerPoint, which is to say, everyone named on the slides leaked by Snowden wants to salvage their reputation. But the problem with this type of appeal for reform is that it’s no different from the kind that might be made by any toothless advocacy group. Indeed, if these companies just want to present a wish-list of the kind of reform they claim they would like to see, then it’s pretty obvious that if no such reform is forthcoming then it will be back to business as usual.

The only thing about which we can be absolutely confident is that now, as always, corporations will act in accordance with what they determine are their own interests.

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Capitalism’s march toward global collapse

Harald Welzer writes: The municipal utility company in the city of Potsdam is currently wooing new customers with a special “BabyBonus” offer. The slogan reads, “We value little energy robbers! Welcome to the world!” Every newborn receives a credit of 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, allowing him or her to revel from the start in a world where everything, especially energy, will always be available in abundance. These babies may later find they’re in for a surprise.

When the United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up in Warsaw the weekend before last, it did, despite what most observers and disappointed NGO representatives believe, yield a result. It just wasn’t officially announced: the termination of the at-least symbolic general agreement that urgent action must be taken to counter global warming. In other words, climate change has been definitively removed from the global policy agenda.

The intense concern over climate change triggered by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports in 2007 and widely popularized by Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” — a concern that led even Angela Merkel to make an appearance in the Arctic as the “climate chancellor,” decked out in a red all-weather jacket — actually dissipated a while ago, but no one wanted to say so out loud.

The United States’ lack of interest in an international treaty is dressed up by its argument that gas extracted by fracking is more climate-friendly than coal, while in Japan, the Fukushima disaster and resulting phase-out of nuclear power has provided those responsible with an excellent argument for why the country now needs to burn more coal in order to stay economically competitive. Hannelore Kraft, governor of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, feels much the same way about her own state. And Australia, Canada, Poland and Russia have never really grasped why global warming should stop anyone from burning everything the oil rigs, mines and pipelines have to offer in the first place.

To put it another way: The primacy of economics has prevailed. It no longer seems to matter how we’re supposed to get through the rest of this century if the world grows warmer by three, four or five degrees Celsius. National economies require an ever-growing dose of energy if their business models are to continue functioning, and, in the face of this logic, all scientific objections to the contrary are just as powerless as the climate protest movements, which are, in any case, marginal. [Continue reading…]

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With Iran, Obama can end America’s long war for the Middle East

Andrew J. Bacevich writes: What Jimmy Carter began, Barack Obama is ending. Washington is bringing down the curtain on its 30-plus-year military effort to pull the Islamic world into conformity with American interests and expectations. It’s about time.

Back in 1980, when his promulgation of the Carter Doctrine launched that effort, Carter acted with only a vague understanding of what might follow. Yet circumstance — the overthrow of the shah in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — compelled him to act. Or more accurately, the domestic political uproar triggered by those events compelled the president, facing a tough reelection campaign, to make a show of doing something. What ensued was the long-term militarization of U.S. policy throughout the region.

Now, without fanfare, President Obama is effectively revoking Carter’s doctrine. The U.S. military presence in the region is receding. When Obama posited in his second inaugural address that “enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” he was not only recycling a platitude; he was also acknowledging the folly and futility of the enterprise in which U.S. forces had been engaged. Having consumed vast quantities of blood and treasure while giving Americans little to show in return, that enterprise is now ending.

Like Carter in 1980, Obama finds himself with few alternatives. At home, widespread anger, angst and mortification obliged Carter to begin girding the nation to fight for the greater Middle East. To his successors, Carter bequeathed a Pentagon preoccupied with ramping up its ability to flex its muscles anywhere from Egypt to Pakistan. The bequest proved a mixed blessing, fostering the illusion that military muscle, dexterously employed, might put things right. Today, widespread disenchantment with the resulting wars and quasi-wars prohibits Obama from starting new ones.

Successive military disappointments, not all of Obama’s making, have curbed his prerogatives as commander in chief. Rather than being the decider, he ratifies decisions effectively made elsewhere. In calling off a threatened U.S. attack on Syria, for example, the president was acknowledging what opinion polls and Congress (not to mention the British Parliament) had already made plain: Support for any further military adventures to liberate or pacify Muslims has evaporated. Americans still profess to love the troops. But they’ve lost their appetite for war. [Continue reading…]

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Among those eulogising Mandela are people who once damned him as a terrorist and supported apartheid

Chris McGreal writes: Nelson Mandela Square sits at the entrance to the glitziest shopping mall in what is reputed to be the wealthiest square kilometre in Africa. Towering over the cafes around the northern Johannesburg piazza, as if guarding the diamond jewellers and designer clothes shops within, is a six metre tall, 2.5 ton statue of the great man dancing.

The mall’s owners say the statue is intended to honour Mandela and his country’s hard-won democracy and most of the shoppers milling around it would probably see it that way. But the great totem always seemed to me to be mocking the new South Africa.

Many of the same prosperous whites who gaze on the giant Mandela from plush cafes and pour out their love and admiration for his sacrifice in saving South Africans from themselves can also regularly be heard bemoaning the state of the country he bequeathed. They worship the man but despair of the legacy of his handiwork in the levels of crime, corruption, authoritarianism and “falling standards” under democratic government.

Not all whites, but a good number of them. And they feel free to do this because when they look at Mandela they see absolution. Their praise of his willingness to forgive comes with the understanding that they too are forgiven and absolved of the past. Freed of responsibility for how South Africa came to be what it is, they head back to the pool and congratulate themselves on their luck in embracing the world’s greatest modern statesman. Bring up past responsibilities and you face being accused of failing to understand Mandela’s message. [Continue reading…]

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Nelson Mandela’s meaning for young South Africans

Sipho Hlongwane writes: How do you encapsulate the weight of Nelson Mandela on South Africa? How do you do so from the perspective of a generation that does not remember the man in jail, or remember when he walked free, and the idolisation that went with that? These are some of the challenges that we face, as we grapple with the legacy of Madiba and apartheid that is thrust upon us.

My first memory of Mandela was around 1993, when a South African defence force helicopter rumbled overhead and poured forth a cloud of voter education pamphlets (which had Mandela’s face on them) into the hazy KwaZulu Natal afternoon air. My friends and I were a few months away from our 5th birthdays, what did we know of such things? Nevertheless, we were conscripted into collecting and destroying the pamphlets by angry adults, who exhorted us not to read the “communist propaganda”.

For the next couple of weeks, we were made to attend a series of meetings hosted by the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom party, which spooked us into fearing the African National Congress, which was coming to take away our homes and force us into communist slave camps.

A taut thread of fear ran through our preschool daily existences. Such were the joys of growing up in an IFP stronghold during the transition years. This rude introduction into South Africa’s often absurd politics helped temper any veneration I might have had of Mandela.

His death will briefly throw the world into a bereavement that befits the passing of an icon. What the rest of the world will blessedly miss is the anguish, doubt and emotional turmoil that has gripped South Africa for the last decade and more, which will now be heightened .

When he still walked among us, Madiba was the people’s man in the truest sense – all South Africans who bought into the post-apartheid ideal of reconciliation and nation building felt that Madiba was somehow an indispensable part of themselves. Inevitably then, there will be a tug of war for ownership of his legacy.

The unspoken truth in South Africa is that Mandela has been politically irrelevant since 1999. His successor Thabo Mbeki’s bristly nine years in power all but erased Mandela’s genial and reconciliatory years from the popular imagination. The Mbeki years were the natural next step in the development of the nation’s cracked psyche, but it didn’t make them any less painful or scary. The memories of apartheid and the violence of the transition years were still fresh. Like a baby weaned off breast milk, we pined for the comfort of the Madiba years.

The sight of Hollywood and the jet set laying themselves at Madiba’s feet didn’t help: it served to reinforce our nostalgia. To suggest publicly that Mandela could no longer lead the country in any material way bordered on sacrilege. His death will now force every South African to deal with this fact. [Continue reading…]

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How can so many African leaders ignore Mandela’s legacy?

Patience Akumu writes: The world has stopped for a moment to focus its attention on Africa. This is not something that happens often. No, they are not talking about senseless civil wars, crippling poverty, appalling HIV/Aids statistics or blatant dictators. They are talking about a black man who freed his country from an inhumane regime; who dared to dream of a tolerant, united and poverty-free Africa and dedicated his life to the attainment of this dream. In turn, God rewarded him with 95 years of a robust, purposeful life. If Nelson Mandela was from the Luo ethnicity like me, his death would herald two weeks of drinking, merry-making and dancing to the sounds of ffumbo drums in celebration of the resting of an honourable elder.

Seeing the glowing eulogies fills me with the same unsettling pride that gripped my younger soul as I listened to my high school African nationalism teacher talk about the struggle of great leaders to liberate the continent. She spoke of Mandela in the same breath as Kwame Nkurumah, Julius Nyerere, Daniel Arap Moi, Muammar Gaddafi, Yoweri Museveni and Robert Mugabe.

These are the men who stood up to oppressive regimes and dedicated their lives to fighting injustice and transforming the continent, she told us. The fiery way in which she spoke, and reading about the anti-colonial struggle from authors such as Chinua Achebe and Ousmane Sembène, made me want to leap out of my seat.

I was in awe of these great men and wanted to save a continent that, she informed us, was on the brink of sinking under the weight of endless social, economic and political problems.

Today, 10 years later, listing some of these names alongside Mandela seems quite odd. It is hard to imagine, for instance, that Mandela, Mugabe and Museveni all once sung the same song of liberty, equality and tolerance.

Mandela is one of the few African leaders who sang the song to the very end. [Continue reading…]

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Nelson Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Peter Hain writes: “Ah, Peter, return of the prodigal son!” Nelson Mandela beamed, welcoming me to his Johannesburg home in February 2000.

Although on an official government visit, in a sense I was also being welcomed to my “home” – to South Africa, the panoramic, sunshine country of my childhood, as the first-ever British minister for Africa to be born on that continent.

Almost to the day, 10 years before, many of us had watched, tears welling up, as he had walked to freedom after 27 years in prison. And a long time before that – in March 1966 – I was a teenager aboard an ocean liner steaming out of Cape Town, past Robben Island where Mandela and his fellow leaders of the African National Congress were jailed. My anti-apartheid activist parents had been forced to leave their beloved country and the “island from hell” disappeared in the stormy mist as we headed for exile in Britain.

People forget how tough it was then, how hard the struggle was to be for decades afterwards. The resistance had been closed down, leaders such as Mandela imprisoned, tortured, banned or forced underground.

Within a few years, Mandela had almost been forgotten. British diplomats dismissed the ANC and Mandela as a busted flush. The white racist police state seemed omnipotent.

But in Britain, the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) had kept the flame of freedom flickering. Soon it was lit by our militant protests, which stopped white South African rugby and cricket tours in 1969-70. The country had been forced into global sporting isolation.

On Robben Island, brutal white warders, all fanatical rugby fans, vented their fury on Mandela and his comrades at the ostracism of the mighty Springboks, unwittingly communicating a morale-boosting message through the news blackout. [Continue reading…]

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The misleading metaphor of the selfish gene

David Dobbs writes: A couple of years ago, at a massive conference of neuroscientists — 35,000 attendees, scores of sessions going at any given time — I wandered into a talk that I thought would be about consciousness but proved (wrong room) to be about grasshoppers and locusts. At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named Steve Rogers was describing these two creatures — one elegant, modest, and well-mannered, the other a soccer hooligan.

The grasshopper, he noted, sports long legs and wings, walks low and slow, and dines discreetly in solitude. The locust scurries hurriedly and hoggishly on short, crooked legs and joins hungrily with others to form swarms that darken the sky and descend to chew the farmer’s fields bare.

Related, yes, just as grasshoppers and crickets are. But even someone as insect-ignorant as I could see that the hopper and the locust were wildly different animals — different species, doubtless, possibly different genera. So I was quite amazed when Rogers told us that grasshopper and locust are in fact the same species, even the same animal, and that, as Jekyll is Hyde, one can morph into the other at alarmingly short notice.

Not all grasshopper species, he explained (there are some 11,000), possess this morphing power; some always remain grasshoppers. But every locust was, and technically still is, a grasshopper — not a different species or subspecies, but a sort of hopper gone mad. If faced with clues that food might be scarce, such as hunger or crowding, certain grasshopper species can transform within days or even hours from their solitudinous hopper states to become part of a maniacally social locust scourge. They can also return quickly to their original form.

In the most infamous species, Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, these phase changes (as this morphing process is called) occur when crowding spurs a temporary spike in serotonin levels, which causes changes in gene expression so widespread and powerful they alter not just the hopper’s behaviour but its appearance and form. Legs and wings shrink. Subtle camo colouring turns conspicuously garish. The brain grows to manage the animal’s newly complicated social world, which includes the fact that, if a locust moves too slowly amid its million cousins, the cousins directly behind might eat it.

How does this happen? Does something happen to their genes? Yes, but — and here was the point of Rogers’s talk — their genes don’t actually change. That is, they don’t mutate or in any way alter the genetic sequence or DNA. Nothing gets rewritten. Instead, this bug’s DNA — the genetic book with millions of letters that form the instructions for building and operating a grasshopper — gets reread so that the very same book becomes the instructions for operating a locust. Even as one animal becomes the other, as Jekyll becomes Hyde, its genome stays unchanged. Same genome, same individual, but, I think we can all agree, quite a different beast.

Why?

Transforming the hopper is gene expression — a change in how the hopper’s genes are ‘expressed’, or read out. Gene expression is what makes a gene meaningful, and it’s vital for distinguishing one species from another. We humans, for instance, share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps. Those genetic distinctions aren’t enough to create all our differences from those animals — what biologists call our particular phenotype, which is essentially the recognisable thing a genotype builds. This means that we are human, rather than wormlike, flylike, chickenlike, feline, bovine, or excessively simian, less because we carry different genes from those other species than because our cells read differently our remarkably similar genomes as we develop from zygote to adult. The writing varies — but hardly as much as the reading.

This raises a question: if merely reading a genome differently can change organisms so wildly, why bother rewriting the genome to evolve? How vital, really, are actual changes in the genetic code? Do we even need DNA changes to adapt to new environments? Is the importance of the gene as the driver of evolution being overplayed?

You’ve probably noticed that these questions are not gracing the cover of Time or haunting Oprah, Letterman, or even TED talks. Yet for more than two decades they have been stirring a heated argument among geneticists and evolutionary theorists. As evidence of the power of rapid gene expression mounts, these questions might (or might not, for pesky reasons we’ll get to) begin to change not only mainstream evolutionary theory but our more everyday understanding of evolution. [Continue reading…]

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Do antivirus companies whitelist NSA malware?

Mathew J. Schwartz writes: Dear antivirus vendors: Are you aiding and abetting National Security Agency (NSA) spying?

That’s the subject of an open letter, sent in October to leading antivirus vendors, from 25 different privacy information security experts and organizations. The letter asks the vendors to detail whether they’ve ever detected state-sponsored malware or received a government request to whitelist state-sponsored malware, and how they would respond to any such requests in the future.

The letter, sent from Dutch digital rights foundation Bits of Freedom, requested that the firms respond by November 15. “Please let us know if you feel that you cannot, or cannot fully, answer any of the above questions because of legal constraints imposed upon you by any government,” it said.

“Since we learned that the NSA has surreptitiously weakened Internet security so it could more easily eavesdrop, we’ve been wondering if it’s done anything to antivirus products,” letter signatory Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT, said in a blog post. “Given that it engages in offensive cyberattacks — and launches cyberweapons like Stuxnet and Flame — it’s reasonable to assume that it’s asked antivirus companies to ignore its malware. We know that antivirus companies have previously done this for corporate malware.”

As of two weeks ago, however, only six security vendors — ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab, Norman Shark, Panda, and Trend Micro — had responded to the request for information. [Continue reading…]

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Mandela stood up against American power

Peter Beinart writes: Now that he’s dead, and can cause no more trouble, Nelson Mandela is being mourned across the ideological spectrum as a saint. But not long ago, in Washington’s highest circles, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Unless we remember why, we won’t truly honor his legacy.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan placed Mandela’s African National Congress on America’s official list of “terrorist” groups. In 1985, then-Congressman Dick Cheney voted against a resolution urging that he be released from jail. In 2004, after Mandela criticized the Iraq War, an article in National Review said his “vicious anti-Americanism and support for Saddam Hussein should come as no surprise, given his longstanding dedication to communism and praise for terrorists.” As late as 2008, the ANC remained on America’s terrorism watch list, thus requiring the 89-year-old Mandela to receive a special waiver from the secretary of State to visit the U.S.

From their perspective, Mandela’s critics were right to distrust him. They called him a “terrorist” because he had waged armed resistance to apartheid. They called him a “communist” because the Soviet Union was the ANC’s chief external benefactor and the South African Communist Party was among its closest domestic allies. More fundamentally, what Mandela’s American detractors understood is that he considered himself an opponent, not an ally, of American power. And that’s exactly what Mandela’s American admirers must remember now. [Continue reading…]

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Mandela was never a revolutionary, always a radical

Gary Younge writes: A fitting way to commemorate Nelson Mandela is to describe his arrival in the townships during the first democratic elections in 1994. The crowds travelled up to 100 miles in cattle trucks or minibuses to get to places that apartheid had deliberately made remote and barren. Then they waited for hours, in a ramshackle stadium with little shade. Despite being punctual in his personal life, Mandela on the campaign trail was always late: a victim of overambitious scheduling and inefficient minders.

Finally, the crowds saw his cavalcade throw up dust in the distance, and they began to sing the campaign song Sekunjalo Ke Nako (Now is the Time). Everyone started to dance, ululations and cheers growing in intensity. Many of those present had not seen Mandela even on TV, and knew his face only from posters and newspaper pictures. Flags and placards hoisted above heads created a ripple at first, then a wave of excitement on a sea of black, gold and green.

The rush of energy did not subside until Mandela had taken the stage half an hour later. By then the crowd had got what it came for – proximity, a sighting, to be present in history. For hours after the rally, people walking home from the stadium punched the air and shouted “amandla” (“power”) at passing cars.

The problem with personifying a national, political aspiration, as Mandela did, is that it becomes difficult to see where the man starts and the movement ends. [Continue reading…]

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Desmond Tutu on Nelson Mandela: ‘Prison became a crucible’

Desmond Tutu writes: For 27 years, I knew Nelson Mandela by reputation only. I had seen him once, in the early 1950s, when he came to my teacher-training college to judge a debating contest. The next time I saw him was in 1990.

When he came out of prison, many people feared he would turn out to have feet of clay. The idea that he might live up to his reputation seemed too good to be true. A whisper went around that some in the ANC said he was a lot more useful in jail than outside.

When he did come out, the most extraordinary thing happened. Even though many in the white community in South Africa were still dismissing him as a terrorist, he tried to understand their position. His gestures communicated more eloquently than words. For example, he invited his white jailer as a VIP guest to his inauguration as president, and he invited the prosecutor in the Rivonia trial to lunch.

What incredible acts of magnanimity these were. His prosecutor had been quite zealous in pushing for the death penalty. Mandela also invited the widows of the Afrikaner political leaders to come to the president’s residence. Betsie Verwoerd, whose husband, HF Verwoerd, was assassinated in 1966, was unable to come because she was unwell. She lived in Oranje, where Afrikaners congregated to live, exclusively. And Mandela dropped everything and went to have tea with her, there, in that place.

He had an incredible empathy. During the negotiations that led up to the first free elections, the concessions he was willing to make were amazing. Chief Buthelezi wanted this, that and the other, and at every single point Madiba would say: yes, that’s OK. He was upset that many in the ANC said Inkatha was not a genuine liberation movement. He even said that he was ready to promise Buthelezi a senior cabinet position, which was not something he had discussed with his colleagues. He did this to ensure that the country did not descend into a bloodbath. [Continue reading…]

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