Congress is currently considering CISPA – the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act – a bill that purports to protect the United States from “cyber threats” but would in fact create a gaping loophole in all existing privacy laws.
If CISPA passes, companies could vacuum up huge swaths of data on everyday Internet users and share it with the government without a court order.
Oppose CISPA, and call on Congress to reject any legislation that:
* Uses dangerously vague language to define the breadth of data that can be shared with the government.
* Hands the reins of America’s cybersecurity defenses to the NSA, an agency with no transparency and little accountability.
* Allows data shared with the government to be used for purposes unrelated to cybersecurity.
Join us in opposing this bill by posting this statement on your own page and using this online form to send a letter to Congress against CISPA:
Last month the New York Times' public editor solicited reader input on whether reporters should challenge false statements made "by the newsmakers they write about." The overwhelmingresponse from media commentators was, "YES, OF COURSE." Even Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Timesweighed in to say: "The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists," adding, "Could we do more? Yes, always. And we will."
That's good to hear because research out of Ohio State University indicates that passive reporting which "simply lists competing claims without offering any idea of which side is right," may cause readers to become disillusioned about their ability to determine the truth.
But in at least two recentarticles, the Times uncritically reported Republicans' claims that the Keystone XL pipeline would hold down gasoline prices, giving no indication that in fact, experts say the effect would be miniscule at best.
This tolerance for unsubstantiated claims about gas prices is part of a larger pattern among many news outlets: In an effort to capture the political argument of the day, journalists often miss the larger, more interesting, and more important story.
What is the origin and the nature of our problem with gas prices? What can we do about it? Who supports and opposes those solutions? Who benefits from the status quo? If reporters aren't framing their gas price coverage around these questions, they're serving someone -- but it's not the public.
THE PIPELINE AND PRICES
In addition to the New York Times, reporters at CNN, Politico, ABC News, and the Associated Press have served as a vehicle for politicians to link the pipeline to rising gas prices. And of course, Fox News is making the claim outright on an almost hourly basis now. Fox anchor Bill Hemmer said on Monday: "So long as gasoline is getting higher, that's all the Republicans have to say is 'Keystone.'" And that's from the purportedly "straight news" side of the network.
But does this narrative have any merit?
Ray Perryman, the economist hired by TransCanada to assess the economic benefits of the pipeline, told me that his analysis -- the methodology of which hasbeenquestioned -- points to an impact of "around 3.5-4 cents per gallon of gasoline at current prices" once the pipeline "was fully implemented and flowing reasonably close to capacity." Moody's economist Chris Lafakis estimates that when balancing out the different regional impacts, "the pipeline would lower US gas prices by 1.6 cents per gallon."
For comparison, the U.S. average gasoline price has increased nearly 30 cents in the past two months. Perryman, a supporter of the pipeline, added: "I should also point out that a modest change of this nature will often be swamped by the day-to-day factors that impact market prices."
Analysts say gas prices are currently rising due to expectations of global economic growth, concerns about Iranian threats to disrupt oil supply and an influx of speculators.
Energy economist Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business, believes the pipeline "wouldn't lower gasoline prices by any noticeable amount." Keystone XL, he said, would "bring additional oil to the world market, starting around 2020. The effect on oil prices then will be miniscule, the effect in the next couple years nonexistent."
There is currently surplus pipeline capacity for moving Canadian oil into the U.S. A report prepared by oil consulting firm EnSys for the Department of Energy found that "in every scenario studied, with or without KXL, the excess cross-border pipeline capacity persists until after 2020."
Michael Levi, an energy expert at the Council of Foreign Relations said the impact of Keystone XL on gasoline prices "probably depends on the part of the country" but "would be very small either way." Levi wrote in a Washington Post commentary that the pipeline has a likely impact of "less than a dollar a barrel to the long-term price of oil, hardly a decisive factor when prices are already around $100 per barrel."
Canadian economist Andrew Leach said "I can't see any significant reason for KXL to lower gas prices," adding, "Long term, it's probably close to a wash, but if anything, it's a small increase from eliminating the crude glut in the Midwest." Borenstein said something similar: "If anything it will raise gas prices slightly in the Midwest by relieving the bottleneck on getting oil out of that area."
They are referring to the shortage of pipelines available to carry oil from Oklahoma to Gulf coast refineries, resulting in a buildup of Canadian oil in the Midwest, which lowers the price that refineries there pay. Keystone XL would relieve the glut, and thus, shrink the discount. "But there are other pipelines planned that will probably do that long before KXL would get built," Borenstein added.
TransCanada told Canada's National Energy Board that in the Midwest, its pipeline would "increase the price of heavy crude to the equivalent cost of imported crude," which would provide Canadian oil companies with an added $2-3.9 billion in annual revenues. Energy analysts disagree about whether this would actually translate to measurable changes in the price of gasoline for consumers.
So at most, the pipeline would lower gasoline prices by a few cents in eight years or so, and it might raise prices in some parts of the U.S. Presenting Keystone XL as an explanation or a solution to the current price spike is simply not serious. So why are journalists who are covering gas prices treating it otherwise?
THE LARGER PROBLEM
The issue of Keystone XL is not the first time mainstream reporters have been complicit in a public discourse over gasoline prices that is riddled with misconceptions. Last spring when prices eventually rose to near-record levels, Republicansandconservativemedia blamed the Obama administration's temporary deep water drilling moratorium enacted after the devastating BP oil spill in the Gulf. Reporters from the New York Times, Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, among others, provided the same he-said/she-said coverage we're seeing now.
Meanwhile, energy experts were saying that "it's not credible to blame the Obama Administration's drilling policies for today's high prices because of the relative scales involved." That quote came from Michael Canes, former chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry.
As it turned out, any decline in offshore production caused by the deep water drilling moratorium was more than overcome by a boost in onshore output. Increasing each year since 2008, U.S. oil production is higher than it's been in eight years and the number of oil rigs in operation is soaring, whichcomplicates Republicans' messaging on gas prices.
"As far as drilling and production, it's going to be really good and robust," energy economist Michelle Michot Foss recently told the Houston Chronicle. "But consumers will be upset because gasoline prices will continue to be high."
Which brings us to the truth of the matter: Ramping up drilling and oil infrastructure can provide some economic benefits, but holding down gasoline prices is not one of them. If we want to be less vulnerable to price spikes, we have to use less oil. Period. That is the context that should pervade news coverage of gas prices.
Economists and energy analysts have repeatedly made this point:
Michael Levi: "Since oil is traded on a global market, the effects of volatility are reflected in the price of every barrel of oil regardless of its origin. This problem can be addressed only by making the U.S. economy more resilient to oil price swings, which includes -- most significantly -- lowering total U.S. oil consumption."
Severin Borenstein: "We should avoid the fantasy of thinking that by choosing a different seller, we are somehow offsetting the impact of Middle East production. To fix the problem, we just need to use less oil."
Tom Kloza: "This drill drill drill thing is tired ... It's a simplistic way of looking for a solution that doesn't exist."
Richard Newell: "We do not project additional volumes of oil that could flow from greater access to oil resources on Federal lands to have a large impact on prices given the globally integrated nature of the world oil market."
Doug Holtz-Eakin: "You can't change the oil price very much with the U.S. exploration."
Ken Green: "We probably couldn't produce enough to affect the world price of oil. ... People don't understand that."
Lou Crandall: "Higher oil prices today are a global phenomenon, and the additional supply from increased drilling by the U.S. would not alter the global balance of supply and demand greatly. ... The only difference is that a somewhat larger share of the revenue would accrue to domestic interests (governmental and private) rather than to foreign suppliers."
Contrast those facts with the framing we're getting from countless news reports:
Beyond the shame of being used by political operatives to distribute a powerful and thoroughly inaccurate message, newsreportsthatprivilegethemyths over the facts help cement a short-sighted perspective on our energy challenges.
THE REAL MEANING OF INDEPENDENCE
To the extent that Americans continue to rely heavily on oil, our economy remains latched to a price that will, for the foreseeable future, be pushed up by Asia's rapidly expanding demand. According to the International Energy Agency, China alone accounted for the majority of the increase in global oil demand last year. The number of cars in operation worldwide surpassed 1 billion in 2010, with half of the growth over the previous year coming from China.
Energy expert Chris Nelder said in an interview that "The rest of the world is pulling on price and we are essentially the losers in that contest because nobody is using gasoline at the level that we do or as inefficiently as we do." The bottom line? "We're not going to do anything about price. What we can do is consume less," Nelder said.
While we remain far and away the world's largest oil consumer and drive several times more cars than China, we are using less than we used to. In large part due to the recession, but also because of conservation efforts, U.S. liquid fuel consumption has not returned to pre-2008 levels and the Energy Information Administration expects "only small increases" in the next two years. Reflecting the differences in demand growth between the U.S. and developing economies, refiners here are now selling more fuel to other countries than we import.
As financial writer Greg Ip noted, a result of slowing U.S. oil consumption "is that the economy will be less sensitive to changes in the oil price." Although much of the media debate focuses on the prices posted at the pump, what matters more for policy purposes is how vulnerable we are to these inevitable price spikes. Given that our vulnerability is based on how much oil we use, news reports on gas prices should, across the board, be talking about cutting consumption.
"Increasing efficiency is going to be a far more productive policy tool than increasing supply," Nelder stated. CFR's Levi also said "fuel economy standards will probably have a substantially larger impact" than Keystone XL.
That's because, as Chris Lafakis explained, higher average fuel economy, "be it through electric vehicles or improved efficiency on conventional vehicles," lowers "the percentage of consumers' incomes that they spend on gasoline."In the same way that changes in gas prices matter less to someone who drives a hybrid than to someone who drives Hummer, economies using oil more efficiently are more resilient to price spikes.
Congress created Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE) in 1975, following the OPEC oil embargo. The standards were not updated until 2007. According to energy analyst Vaclav Smil, "this failure to pursue greater fuel efficiency was an irrational choice and, hence, an irresponsible policy. It came about because of low oil prices, and it led to a higher dependence on imports."
Here's how our fuel economy (grey line) compares to other countries:
The 2007 energy law raised the standards to an average of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. The Obama administration pushed compliance up to 2016 and later enacted standards for heavy-duty trucks. Most recently, the administration proposed another set of standards for model year 2017-2025 cars, requiring "increases in fuel efficiency equivalent to 54.5 mpg." Major automakers agreed to the rules, which work out to a real-world average of about 40 mpg.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that by 2025, the rule would "reduce oil consumption by 2.2 million barrels per day - enough to offset almost a quarter of the current level of our foreign imports." An analysis by the Consumer Federation of America indicates that the standards will result in substantial savings for consumers.
Fuel economy improvements should be a major part of the gas prices story. Policies that encourage the production and adoption of hybrid and electric cars are also relevant, as are investments intransportation infrastructure and alternative fuels. These are not quick remedies, but when it comes to oil dependence, if we're not talking about long-term solutions, we're not talking about solutions at all.
Government, big data pose bigger 'Net threat than criminals - Schneier
By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Feb 23, 2012
[emphasis added]
As Bruce Schneier spent the past decade watching the growing rash of phishers, malware attacks, and identity theft, a new Internet threat has emerged that poses even greater risks, the security expert said.
Unlike the security risks posed by criminals, the threat from government regulation and data hoarders such as Apple and Google are more insidious because they threaten to alter the fabric of the Internet itself.
They're also different from traditional Internet threats because the perpetrators are shielded in a cloak of legitimacy. As a result, many people don't recognize that their personal information or fortunes are more susceptible to these new forces than they ever were to the Russian Business Network or other Internet gangsters.
"Taken as a whole, there's a lot of things going on that affect our industry from outside our industry," Schneier, who is the author of five security books, said during a Wednesday keynote at the 24th General Meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group. "These are things that might be imposed on us. More capability, more usability, less control."
The first of three pillars propping up this outside threat are big data collectors, which in addition to Apple and Google, Schneier identified as Amazon and Facebook. (Notice Microsoft didn't make the cut.)
The goal of their data collection is for marketers to be able to make snap decisions about the product tastes, credit worthiness, and employment suitability of millions of people. Often, this information is fed into systems maintained by governments.
Schneier didn't discuss the effect this unprecedented level of data scavenging has on individual privacy. Instead, he focused on how it ties the hands of people working at ISPs and software companies who work to secure their customers' personal information.
"We in security face enormous threats here because there are things we might want to do that we won't be able to do," he told about 400 people attending the three-day San Francisco conference. "You could see a law that limits what we can do about cookie deletion." Laws that require smartphones or other devices to be equipped with unique identifiers aren't a stretch, either, he said.
Schneier said the threat is often obfuscated by the tremendous technical advances the big data players have offered. Google mail is a safer alternative for average users because there's almost no chance they'll ever lose a message.
Apple's iPhone is wildly popular because it's easy to use and to date has proved largely impervious to real-world malware attacks. But behind the security and reliability, there are threats many don't consider.
"I can't find a program that will erase the data on this thing to a reasonable assurance without jailbreaking it," he said, holding up his iPhone. "For me that's bad."
The age of feudal security
He called the new model "feudal security" in which Kindle Fire owners trust their security to Amazon, iPhone users trust their Apple, and so on. As a result, the devices no longer come with general-purpose capabilities.
Open environments are increasingly being replaced with closed systems that are designed to give users less control.
In addition to the threat from big data—which Schneier coined "the risks of Layer 8 and Layer 9 attacks"—he said Internet users are being harmed by the surge in government attempts to redesign Internet infrastructure. As more and more of the world goes online, it's a given more crime will follow, he said. As a result, laws such as the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act—which mandated telecom companies redesign switches and other gears so law enforcement agents could tap them—are slowly being extended to Internet technologies, possibly such as Skype and Hushmail.
Another example is a push among governments in Europe to require ISPs to store logs of user activity for 12 months or longer in case the information is needed in an investigation.
"Here, we have an example of government coming in an effort they believe will make us all safer," he said. "I look at it and say it's much less safe because once you have that data you're going to have to secure it. And the securest thing you can do is to delete it. So again we're seeing people who are not Internet security people trying to push a security policy."
The third force of this outside, nontechnical threat is posed by a "cyberwar" arms race, in which countries around the planet develop weapons such as the Stuxnet worm, case each other's networks, and possibly even plant backdoors in case they're needed during a time of war.
"We're now living in a world where nations are stockpiling cyber weapons," he said. "The military industrial complex is alive and well and quite happy to spend lots of money on cyber weapons and cyberwar and cyber defense. This feels incredibly destabilizing to me. I'm not convinced these things couldn't go off by accident "
Schneier's hour-long talk barely touched on his newest book, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, which was published earlier this month. He said Wednesday's talk was a preview of one he's scheduled to give next Tuesday at the RSA security conference.
The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read
By Michael Hastings
Rolling Stone
February 10, 4:25
Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war.
That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. "How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?" Davis boldly asks in an article summarizing his views in The Armed Forces Journal.
Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled "Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort" – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so.
Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We've decided to publish it in full; it's well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.
Here is the report's damning opening lines: "Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan."
Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is "open source" – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. "If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes," Davis writes. "It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II."
According to the Times story, Davis briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members and sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general, and of course spoke to a New York Times reporter; only after all that did he inform his chain of command what he'd been up to.
Evidently Davis's truth-telling campaign has rattled the Pentagon brass, prompting unnamed officials to retaliate by threatening a bogus investigation for "possible security violations," according to NBC News.
Although Davis's critics have tried to brush off his claims as merely the opinions of a "reservist," – as Max Boot put it – his report is full of insight, analysis, and hard data that back up each one of his claims. He details the gross failure of training the Afghan Army, the military's blurring of the lines between public affairs and "information operations" (meaning, essentially, propaganda), and the Pentagon's manipulation of the U.S. media. (He expertly contrasts senior military officials public statements with the actual reality on the ground.)
Davis concludes: "It is my recommendation that the United States Congress – the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in particular – should conduct a bi-partisan investigation into the various charges of deception or dishonesty in this report and hold broad hearings as well," he writes. "These hearings need to include the very senior generals and former generals whom I refer to in this report so they can be given every chance to publicly give their version of events."
In other words, put the generals under oath, and then see what story they tell.
FBI in the market for app to monitor social networks
By Zeljka Zorz
Help Net Security
January 27, 2012
The US FBI is looking into the possibility of using an "Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application" for increasing its situational awareness, and to that effect has issued a request for information to determine if there are companies that could provide them with it.
"This must be a secure, light weight web application portal, using mash-up technology," it says in the request. "The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow[FBI's]Strategic Information and Operations Center [SOIC] to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats. The product must have the capacity to allow the user to retain control of cached and real-time proprietary data; the ability to share it with selected partners, and[…]the ability to adapt quickly to changing threats to maintain the strategic and tactical advantage."
The FBI wants the application to be able to search and scrape social networking and news sites (Twitter, Facebook, CNN, MSNBC, and others) for breaking events, crisis and threats; to automatically filter the data according to definable parameters; to notify the users about these events and show them on maps (Google Maps, ESRI, Yahoo Maps, and others) according to priority; and to be able to quickly summarize threats and incidents and send out these summaries to FBI management and field offices.
Special interest has been shown for information that can be collected from social sites, so the application must be able to "instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all 'publicly available' tweets across the Twitter Site and other 'publicly available' social networking sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.)," because "social media will be a valued source of information to the SIOC intelligence analyst in a crisis because it will be both eyewitness and first response to the crisis."
To Have Blind Faith in Bad Leaders IS NOT PATRIOTISM or LOYALTY
We will continue to be used by politicians and corporations as long as we remain silent to the lies that they hide behind which allow them to stay in power
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