US Requested Tens of Thousands of Facebook Users' Data in Just 6 Months

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 by Common Dreams
Report welcome, but "governments don't necessarily need intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to get our data."
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

The U.S. requested data on between 20,000 and 21,000 Facebook users during the first six months of 2013, the social networking site announced on Tuesday.

"Whereas transparency reports detail lawful access requests, we are living in a world where governments exploit over-permissive, vague and outdated laws with impunity."

Facebook revealed the number of requests as part of its first-ever Global Government Requests Report.

While over 70 countries made user requests during the six-month period, the vast majority were from the U.S.. India came in second, requesting data on 4,144 users, and the U.K. came in third, requesting data on 2,337 users.

"Unlike other countries, which had an exact figure, the US data was given as a range due to it being forbidden for companies to disclose how many requests they have had," BBC News reported.

Facebook stated, "We continue to push the United States government to allow more transparency regarding these requests, including specific numbers and types of national security-related requests. We will publish updated information for the United States as soon as we obtain legal authorization to do so."

Though the "vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings," the report includes "both criminal and national security requests," Facebook noted.

Writing on Facebook's new transparency information, TechCrunch reported Tuesday:

The “Five Eyes” group of nations that share signal intelligence (United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) had at least 100 requests in the first six months of the year. New Zealand and Canada included. That matters. It indicates that countries participating in mass surveillance do so in every way possible. I think that the number of requests helps us understand the zeal of these nations to look into private activity.

UK-based surveillance watchdog Privacy International welcomed Facebook's transparency report, but said that greater legal protections must in place given the "terrifying reality—that governments don't necessarily need intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to get our data." They said in a statement:

we are left with a disturbingly hollow feeling regarding Facebook's gesture, and it has little to do with Facebook itself. Since documents leaked by Edward Snowden have been published and analysed, the veil has been lifted on what information governments actually collect about us. [...]

Whereas transparency reports detail lawful access requests, we are living in a world where governments exploit over-permissive, vague and outdated laws with impunity. What is needed is a new strong legal framework that all governments must abide by. Until then companies like Facebook are left with the burden of having to determine what information may be 'lawfully' demanded by each country, and deciding what they can or cannot release. This is too much to ask of these companies, and too great a trust to be placed in them.

Canadian and US Pipelines - A Map of them

US government takedown requests more than triple in 12 months, says Google Report

By Jeff Blagdon on June 18, 2012

In its new Transparency Report, Google presents a look at the number and nature of the takedown requests it received from governments and copyright holders during the second half of 2011. In an accompanying blog post, the company states that current trends are "troubling," before stating that it complies with 65 percent of court orders and 47 percent of "more informal requests" to remove material from its search results (e.g., requests from police and executive branches of government). 

The report indicates that the number of US court and government requests to remove material more than doubled over the previous 6-month period — from 92 to 187. The number for the same period (July to December) in 2010 was 54.

Since May, the report now includes takedown requests from copyright holders and reporting organizations like Marketly. Also present are notes on specific removal requests by governments, including a gem from Passport Canada concerning video footage of a Canadian citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet (Google didn’t comply).

The UK makes the highest number of information requests per capita
 
Statistics on the user data requests that Google receives from courts and government agencies are also available in the report, broken down by country. The top spot once again goes to the US, with 6,321 requests and a 93 percent rate of full or partial compliance on Google’s part. The country with the highest number of information requests per capita might surprise you, however — the United Kingdom makes 23 for every million citizens (the US is slightly lower, at just over 20), and gets compliance 64 percent of the time. In comparison, Canada posted a more restrained 1.18 per million.

Existing Drug Becomes Cheap Cancer Cure In Canada

University of Alberta scientists do understand the cause of cancer. The dying off of old cells to be replaced by new cells is a normal part of our cellular life-cycle and keeps us well. It seems that in cancerous cells, our body has forgotten how to tell the aged cells how to die off and be replaced by healthy new cells.

This process is governed by the mitochondria and is known as "cell death" or "apoptosis". In a cancer cell, the mitochondria has lost the ability to direct the cell to die off - the sick cell becomes "immortal", spreading and making the person increasingly unwell.

Trials using  dichloroacetate (DCA) have proven this compound can reactivate the mitochondria restoring the cell's original function of "apoptosis" enabling shrinkage in tumor size and mass. Testimonials have shown reversal in illness, remission, clean health tests, increased health and vitality. Favourable results (scientifically measurable) have been accomplished within days (less than a week) of starting treatment with DCA.

"Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a professor at the University of Alberta Department of Medicine, has shown that DCA causes regression in several cancers, including lung, breast, and brain tumors."

It sounds too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their immortality. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakiss experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump dont get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become immortal, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:  they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy, says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they cant make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

The Keystone Victory

Friday, November 18, 2011 by The Nation

by Mark Hertsgaard

 

Victories against climate change have been rare, so it’s vital to recognize them when they happen. The Obama administration’s decision to delay the Keystone XL pipeline is one such victory—arguably the most important achievement in the climate fight in North America in years.

True, the administration’s November 10 statements did not outright kill the 1,700-mile pipeline, which the TransCanada company wants to build to transport highly polluting tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas coast. Yes, President Obama or his successor could try to greenlight the project in 2013, when the State Department’s new review of the project is due. But that’s unlikely, as TransCanada’s CEO, Russ Girling, has acknowledged. The project’s contracts require the pipeline to be completed by 2013, or refineries will be free to look elsewhere for supply, which Girling expects they will.

In any case, such caveats mean only that the Keystone victory is not absolute. But when a $7 billion project involving the number-one US trading partner and oil supplier, a project that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only a year ago said she was “inclined” to approve, is very publicly postponed—even as the inspector general of the State Department launches an investigation into cronyism involving a former top aide to Clinton—good luck putting that Humpty Dumpty together again.

The climax of the Keystone campaign came November 6, when some 12,000 activists surrounded the White House (evidently a first) to urge Obama to honor his 2008 campaign pledge to fight climate change. “We want jobs but not as gravediggers for the planet,” Roger Toussaint, head of Local 100 of the Transport Workers of America, told the crowd in one of the strongest green declarations by a US labor leader. (Unfortunately, other elements of organized labor did not play against stereotype; the Building Trades Unions went so far as to team up with the oil industry to launch a “Jobs for the 99” campaign, co-opting Occupy rhetoric for their pro-pipeline propaganda.)

The breadth of the anti-pipeline coalition—indigenous people, progressive labor unions, youth, faith, farmer, community and environmental activists—was just one way this crusade contrasted with previous environmental campaigns. Other key differences: demands were more concrete and more radical. Strategy was set more by grassroots activists than by Beltway insiders. Tactics stressed people power—putting feet on the street, going to jail—over policy papers. The message was comprehensible to ordinary people rather than off-putting. And thanks to the Occupy movement, journalists were primed to pay attention to street protests.

All these factors combined not only to deliver the immediate victory over Keystone but to reanimate a movement that had been reeling after the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 and the defeat of climate legislation on Capitol Hill in 2010. “You need victories to build a movement, and how you win can be as important as what you win,” explained Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, an NGO that punctured the “energy independence” rationale for Keystone by revealing that the oil it transported to Texas would be sold on the world market, not reserved for American gas tanks. Kretzmann added, “For once a big battle coming out of the environmental community was not about an obscure policy proposal, like cap and trade. [The pipeline] was made into a moral issue about what we want the future of our country to be and what we’re willing to do about it. At the White House, I had one seasoned activist tell me, ‘I feel like I finally can crawl out of the fetal position I’ve been in since Copenhagen.’”

As with the Occupiers, establishment voices quickly registered their disapproval—and their political tone-deafness. Some, like Council on Foreign Relations fellow Michael Levi, even suggested that the delay would hurt the climate fight, because Bill McKibben and other climate organizers had muddied their message by taking advantage of the “not in my backyard” sentiments of Midwestern farmers who—oh the horror!—are Republicans. Such NIMBYism, Levi sniffed, could be used to undercut future deployment of wind farms and other clean energy sources.

The truth, as McKibben has said many times, is that he and his colleagues came to the Keystone party fairly late. “The indigenous peoples in Canada have been fighting this from the start, and then folks along the route” got active, McKibben told The Nation. “I joined in this spring, when [NASA scientist James] Hansen made clear the size of the [tar sands] carbon pool. Our role was to take a regional fight and make it national and international, which I think we managed to do.”

And not a moment too soon. One day before Obama’s announcement, the International Energy Agency released its annual report on the “World Energy Outlook.” The IEA is no den of subversives; it’s run by many of the world’s largest oil-consuming nations. Its report warns that without radical changes in the world’s energy infrastructure in the next five years, humans will make climate change irreversible. In this context the defeat of Keystone is exactly the kind of radical change, in infrastructure and activism, that’s needed.

Netflix Staged Fake Event & Hired Fake Customers To Gush To Press

Henry Blodget | Sep. 23, 2010

Netflix, a company that has done just about everything right, has been busted for staging a fake event to celebrate its move into Canada--and, worse, hiring actors to pose as customers to extol the service to the press.

The fake event was staged in Toronto. The actors were given written instructions about what to say to reporters.

Netflix explained the gaffe to the AP this way--without actually owning up to it:

A Netflix Inc. spokesman says the company didn't intend to mislead reporters. He apologized.
The spokesman says Netflix couldn't get permission to close an entire street for the event. It dodged the problem by getting a film permit, hiring actors and pretending to shoot a company documentary.

Didn't intend to mislead reporters? What did it intend to do, then?

Embarrassing.

G20 - Toronto

vidlink

Canada investigating US officials over torture

By Daniel Tencer
Monday, June 14th, 2010

Canada's Mounties have been quietly running an investigation into US and Syrian officials linked to the arrest and deportation of a Canadian citizen who was tortured in a Syrian prison, and could lay criminal charges in the matter, sources report.

The news comes the same day that the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal brought by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer who was detained at New York's JFK Airport in 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links and flown to Syria, where he was tortured for the better part of a year.

A long and expensive inquiry into the matter held by the Canadian government exonerated Arar, finding that Canadian officials had given US authorities incorrect information linking Arar to terrorism. In 2007 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Arar and offered him a $10.5 million settlement.

Now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has set its sights on the US officials responsible for sending Arar to be tortured in Syria, a country that is not on friendly terms with the US. The investigation is "unprecedented," reports the Toronto Star.

The Star reports:

Code-named “Project Prism,” the four-member RCMP probe was first disclosed by the Toronto Star last December. It was thought then to be focused mainly on the actions of Canadian government officials in the Arar rendition saga.

But Arar’s lawyers now say the Mounties are looking foremost to Syria and the United States for the missing pieces to the Arar puzzle, which already was the subject of an exhaustive Canadian inquiry that ended in full exoneration for Arar, including a public apology from Ottawa and $10 million in damages.

“The US should be conducting its own criminal investigation of the officials responsible for sending an innocent man to Syria for a year to be interrogated under torture, not covering for them," attorney Maria LaHood of the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement.

"Again, the Canadians are doing the right thing by criminally investigating not only Syrian officials, but officials from the US as well. The Obama administration should look to the Canadian example and do what's right - apologize to Maher and hold his torturers accountable.”

But the refusal by the Supreme Court to take up the case means Arar's last legal avenue in the US is closed in a decision that could impact similar cases.

"Today's decision eliminates my last bit of hope in the judicial system of the United States," Arar said in a statement.

"When it comes to 'national security' matters the judicial system has willingly abandoned its sacred role of ensuring that no one is above the law," he alleged.

The system of secret renditions, under which terror suspects were sent to third countries for tough interrogations outside the US legal system, was developed under the former administration of president George W. Bush.

The practice was halted by the current administration of President Barack Obama.

Arar's lawyer David Cole said "the courts have regrettably refused to right the egregious wrong done to Maher Arar.

"But the courts have never questioned that a wrong was done. They have simply said that it is up to the political branches to fashion a remedy.

"We are deeply disappointed that the courts have shirked their responsibility," Cole stressed.

Influential senator Patrick Leahy meanwhile said he was disappointed, noting that "the United States' secret rendition of Maher Arar to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year, remains a stain on this nation's legacy as a human rights leader around the world."