What’s inside the Justice Department’s secret cybersecurity memo?

National Journal reports: Sen. Ron Wyden has many problems with the cybersecurity bill that the Senate may take up before the August recess.

But he can only talk about some of them publicly. Other reservations remain strictly classified.

Wyden, the Democratic privacy hawk from Oregon, claims that a classified Justice Department legal opinion written during the early years of the George W. Bush administration is pertinent to the upper chamber’s consideration of cyberlegislation — a warning that reminds close observers of his allusions to the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers years before they were exposed publicly by Edward Snowden. [Continue reading…]

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NSA will not be allowed to keep old phone records

The New York Times reports: Analysts at the National Security Agency will no longer be permitted to search a database holding five years of Americans’ domestic calling records after Nov. 29, the Obama administration said on Monday.

Legislation enacted in June barred the N.S.A. from collecting Americans’ calling records after 180 days, but did not say what would happen to the data already gathered. Under a new system laid out by the USA Freedom Act, the government will not hold the bulk data, which is used to analyze links between callers in search of terrorism suspects.

Earlier this month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to say whether the government would keep using the data collected under the old procedures or would purge it after the new system is in place. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change ‘triple threat’ increases severe flooding risk in biggest U.S. cities

The Guardian reports: America’s biggest cities are at far greater risk of serious flooding in the coming decades than was previously thought, because of a “triple threat” produced under climate change, researchers said on Monday.

A combination of sea-level rise, storm surge and heavy rainfall – all functions of climate change – exposes New York, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston to a much greater degree, research published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change found.

“Call it a triple threat,” said Steven Meyers, a scientist at the University of South Florida and one of the authors. “What this shows is that there is an increasing risk of compound flooding, from storm surge and rainfall at the same time.” [Continue reading…]

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Hunting down the world’s most notorious fish poacher

The New York Times reports: As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes.

In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes — the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunder’s engine room almost submerged in murky water. “There is no way to stop it sinking,” the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished below.

It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For 110 days and more than 10,000 nautical miles across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one another’s cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history. [Continue reading…]

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Thousands of salmon die in hotter-than-usual Northwest rivers

Reuters reports: Unseasonably hot water has killed nearly half of the sockeye salmon migrating up the Columbia River through Oregon and Washington state, a wildlife official said on Monday.

Only 272,000 out of the more than 507,000 sockeye salmon that have swum between two dams along a stretch of the lower Columbia River have survived the journey, said Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife fisheries manager John North.

“We’ve never had mortalities at this scale,” said North.

The die-off comes as U.S. West Coast states grapple with drought conditions and the Columbia is seeing the third-highest count of sockeye returning from the ocean to spawn since 1960, federal figures show. [Continue reading…]

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Uber and the lawlessness of ‘sharing economy’ corporates

Frank Pasquale and Siva Vaidhyanathan write: In February, Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky compared his firm’s defiance of local housing ordinances with that of Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule. Meanwhile, a tweeter compared Uber to Rosa Parks, defying unjust laws. Chesky quickly backed down after widespread mockery. Companies acting out of self-interest comparing themselves with the noble heroes of civil rights movements is as absurd as it is insulting.

But there is a better analogy from the US civil rights era for law-flouting firms of the on-demand economy. It’s just not the one corporate leaders claim. They are engaged in what we call “corporate nullification”, following in the footsteps of Southern governors and legislatures in the United States who declared themselves free to “nullify” federal law on the basis of strained and opportunistic constitutional interpretation.

Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back, they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender. [Continue reading…]

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A milestone for wind energy: Work underway on first offshore platforms in U.S. waters

The Washington Post reports: With the lowering of giant steel legs to the sea bottom off Rhode Island, construction has officially begun on the country’s first offshore wind farm, starting what U.S. officials hope will be a race to harness a vast energy resource capable of powering millions of homes along the East Coast.

The project developer, Deepwater Wind, marked the “steel-in-the water” milestone for its Block Island Wind Farm on Monday, an event witnessed by federal and state officials who crowded into a boat to view the foundations for two wind-tower platforms jutting above the water.

The farm’s five turbines are expected to begin turning next year, providing electricity for about 17,000 nearby homes while also boosting prospects for planned wind-energy projects from Massachusetts to the Carolinas, or so Obama administration officials hope. [Continue reading…]

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Musk, Hawking, and Chomsky warn of impending robot wars fueled by artificial intelligence

The Verge reports: Leading artificial intelligence researchers have warned that an “AI arms race” could be disastrous for humanity, and are urging the UN to consider a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons.” An open letter published by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) and signed by high-profile figures including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Noam Chomsky, warns that weapons that automatically “select and engage targets without human intervention” could become the “Kalashnikovs of tomorrow,” fueling war, terrorism, and global instability.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades,” states the letter, citing armed quadcopters (a technology that has already been deployed in a very crude fashion) as an example. The letter notes that although it’s possible that the use of autonomous weapons could reduce human casualties on the battlefield, this itself could be a mistake as it would “[lower] the threshold” for going to war. [Continue reading…]

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8,000 years ago, the overwhelming majority of men never reproduced

Francie Diep writes: Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same.

“It wasn’t like there was a mass death of males. They were there, so what were they doing?” asks Melissa Wilson Sayres, a computational biologist at Arizona State University, and a member of a group of scientists who uncovered this moment in prehistory by analyzing modern genes.

Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then, as more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. “Maybe more and more people started being successful,” Wilson Sayres says. In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man. [Continue reading…]

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The self-government revolution that’s happening under the radar in Syria

Frederic C. Hof writes: With Iran circling the wagons around an ever-shrinking Syrian statelet nominally headed by Bashar al-Assad, a key question is coming into sharp focus: Who might ultimately replace the ruling clan if Tehran cannot keep its clients afloat? The answer is both complex and hopeful: Self-government at local levels is taking root in Syria and forms the basis for what should come next.

One of the few uplifting experiences to be had in any Syrian context these days is to meet with young Syrian activists, as I recently did in Gaziantep, Turkey. A young lawyer said something striking: “This is not just a revolution against Bashar al-Assad. It is a revolution for self-government. Replacing Bashar with someone else issuing decrees from Damascus — even someone much better than Bashar — is not acceptable.”

From the beginning of the Syrian uprising, unarmed activists have formed, under the worst security conditions imaginable, local councils to provide governmental services to their neighbors. This is revolutionary. For 40 years the Assad family had concentrated in its own hands, in Damascus, the direct governing of all Syrians. Officials assigned to Syria’s outback were, at best, order-taking clerks. At worst they were active members of a clan-dominated police state and terror network. Unless Iran helps its client re-subjugate Syria, the days of Damascus-dominated governance are done.

There are today hundreds of local councils throughout non-Assad parts of Syria. Some operate clandestinely in areas overrun by the so-called Islamic State. Some operate in areas where the Assad regime — with Iran’s full support — unloads helicopter-borne “barrel bombs” onto schools, hospitals and mosques. Some operate in neighborhoods subjected to Iranian-facilitated starvation sieges. These local councils are supported by a vast network of civil society organizations — the kinds of voluntary professional associations that undergird Western democracies. All of this is new to Syria. It is the essence of the Syrian Revolution. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey accused of bombing Kurdish fighters in Syria

The Associated Press reports: Turkish troops have shelled a Syrian village near the border, targeting Kurdish fighters who have been battling the Islamic State group with the aid of U.S.-led airstrikes, Syria’s main Kurdish militia and an activist group said Monday.

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, said the Sunday night shelling on the border village of Til Findire targeted one of their vehicles. It said Til Findire is east of the border town of Kobani, where the Kurds handed a major defeat to the Islamic State group earlier this year.

In cross-border strikes since Friday, Turkey has targeted both Kurdish fighters as well as the IS group, stepping up its involvement in Syria’s increasingly complex civil war. The Syrian Kurds are among the most effective ground forces battling the IS group, but Turkey fears they could revive an insurgency against Ankara in pursuit of an independent state.

On Monday the YPG and Syrian rebels captured the town of Sareen in northern Syria, which had been held by the Islamic State group, according to The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center in Syria, two activist groups that track the civil war. [Continue reading…]

Bloomberg reports: U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria risk coming under attack from Turkey if they don’t align themselves with Turkish interests in the country.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told newspaper editors over the weekend that the Syrian Kurd PYD group battling Islamic State must side with “moderate rebels” supported by Turkey against the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“We want moderate rebels to replace” Islamic State fighters as they’re pushed back from Turkey’s border, Davutoglu said. The PYD will be treated “in the same way” as Islamic State “if they engage in activities that disturb us,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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U.S.-Turkey deal aims to create de facto ‘safe zone’ in northwest Syria

The Washington Post reports: Turkey and the United States have agreed on the outlines of a de facto “safe zone” along the Turkey-Syria border under the terms of a deal that is expected to significantly increase the scope and pace of the U.S.-led air war against the Islamic State in northern Syria, according to U.S. and Turkish officials.

The agreement includes a plan to drive the Islamic State out of a 68-mile-long area west of the Euphrates River and reaching into the province of Aleppo that would then come under the control of the Syrian opposition. If fully implemented, it would also bring American planes in regular, close proximity to bases, aircraft and air defenses operated by the Syrian government, and directly benefit opposition rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Operations in the targeted area would stop short of meeting long-standing Turkish demands for a full-scale, declared no-fly zone, but the area could eventually become a protected haven for some of the estimated 2­ million Syrian civilians who have fled to Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian Kurdish leader: Turkey aids ISIS

Rudaw reports: The Islamic State has multiple heads and bodies and the ones attacking the Kurds have Turkish origins, Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party co-head Salih Muslim has said in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper published Saturday.

Muslim said that they cannot ascertain the involvement of the Turkish government, but there was a possibility certain groups that were influential in Turkey in the past and the present might be involved.

Regarding assistance from the Turkish government in allowing Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga to cross Turkish territories and fight against ISIS in Kobani, Muslim argued that the Turkish gesture was due to pressure from the United States.

Muslim also talked about the relationship between the Kurds and the Syrian regime. “Ocalan knew that the Syrian regime was using the Kurds for its own agendas against Turkey and Iraq, but the relationship was useful for the Kurds,” he said referring to imprisoned Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan.

“The People’s Protection Units (YPG) can become part of the Syrian army,” said Muslim, only if the army changes its ideologies and practices. “There is no going back to the past,” he said.

The 93rd and 17th Brigades of the Syrian army deliberately abandoned weapons to be seized by ISIS in Tedmur and other areas in Syria, and the same thing happened in the Iraqi city of Mosul, claimed Muslim. [Continue reading…]

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James Hansen warns of rapid sea level rise

Environment News Service reports: Leading climate scientist and activist James Hansen is warning that the 2 degree Celsius limit to Earth’s temperature rise agreed by world leaders is “highly dangerous.” His new research paper shows that sea levels are rising much more quickly that previously believed.

An adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, Dr. Hansen is lead author of a paper entitled, “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous” just published in the journal “Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussion.”

The paper is published ahead of the United Nations Climate Summit set for Paris in November and December. There world leaders are expected to agree on a universal, legally-binding agreement to limit the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

“Humanity is rapidly extracting and burning fossil fuels without full understanding of the consequences. Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as increasing extremes of heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, floods, and encroaching seas,” the authors write. [Continue reading…]

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Alaskan villages imperiled by global warming need resources to relocate

Victoria Herrmann writes: The Arctic is warming at a rate almost twice the global average, making climate change’s effects there far more intense and rapid than any other ecosystem in the world. While nature photographs of polar bears and melting ice dominate media narratives, the top of the world is home to 4m people who face an uncertain future.

Coastal erosion, forest fires and storm surges are threatening the physical and economic safety of settlements across the Arctic Ocean shoreline. Further inland, thawing permafrost is compromising the stability of transportation, sanitation and public service infrastructure built upon once-sturdy foundations. In Alaska alone, 31 villages face imminent threat of destruction from erosion and flooding. Many of these villages have 10 to 20 years of livability before their streets, schools and homes become uninhabitable. At least 12 have decided to relocate – in part or entirely – to safer ground to avoid total collapse.

This week, the United States approaches the First Hundred Days mark of its leadership of the Arctic Council, a high-level governmental forum for the world’s eight Arctic nations to act on circumpolar challenges. Leadership gives the US a two-year opportunity to lead the international community in confronting climate change there. Though the US, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, has seen some successful polar initiatives implemented in the past few months, there is much more work to be done. [Continue reading…]

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Goodbye Wall Street, hello Silicon Valley

The Wall Street Journal reports: More top Wall Streeters are California dreaming.

A technology-fueled gold rush is drawing seasoned financial executives with the promise of sunshine, fresh managerial challenges and compensation that can top even the seven-figure paychecks common in the investment world.

Blackstone Group LP said Friday that its chief financial officer, Laurence Tosi, is leaving the private-equity firm to become finance chief at Airbnb Inc., the booming home-rental service. He is just the latest Wall Street executive to move west to take advantage of massive investor interest in fast-growing companies seeking to upend entire swaths of the economy.

Mr. Tosi, 47 years old, has made a good living by any standard since he joined Blackstone following its 2007 initial public offering. He earned about $15 million last year, according to filings, and $33.8 million over the past three years, not including dividends and some other perks, such as proceeds from investments made in the firm’s funds. [Continue reading…]

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‘Sea slaves’: The human misery that feeds pets and livestock

The New York Times reports: Lang Long’s ordeal began in the back of a truck. After watching his younger siblings go hungry because their family’s rice patch in Cambodia could not provide for everyone, he accepted a trafficker’s offer to travel across the Thai border for a construction job.

It was his chance to start over. But when he arrived, Mr. Long was kept for days by armed men in a room near the port at Samut Prakan, more than a dozen miles southeast of Bangkok. He was then herded with six other migrants up a gangway onto a shoddy wooden ship. It was the start of three brutal years in captivity at sea.

“I cried,” said Mr. Long, 30, recounting how he was resold twice between fishing boats. After repeated escape attempts, one captain shackled him by the neck whenever other boats neared. [Continue reading…]

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