Did You Know
Did You Know
California Cops Are Collecting Info on Millions of Drivers Who Have Done Nothing Wrong
Daniel Moattar: Law enforcement in four of California’s most populous counties is storing, searching, and sharing detailed records on millions of random drivers ... and possible lawbreaking—in police use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the California counties of Los Angeles, Fresno, Marin, and Sacramento. ... The technology is frighteningly simple: cameras on police cars or roadsides can scan up to 2,000 license plates per minute, storing the plate number, the location, and the time the car was spotted. ... From there, an officer can easily pull other identifying information, like the driver’s name, address, and criminal history, all without a warrant—or even a supervisor’s sign-off. ... The result is that drivers are being tracked and recorded by the police, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong...
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Feb 21, 2020, 2:08pm
Did You Know
Geofencing Is Team Trump’s High-Tech Invasive Targeting of Swing State Catholics, Even in Church
Bill Berkowitz: “Political marketers are using cellphone data from churchgoers to target the GOP base, especially white Catholic and evangelicals in key states for the 2020 presidential election.” ... “Politically-minded geofencers capture data from the cellphones of churchgoers, and then purchase ads targeting those devices,” ... geofencing -- “a location-based service in which an app or other software uses GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi or cellular data to trigger a pre-programmed action when a mobile device or RFID tag enters or exits a virtual boundary set up around a geographical location, known as a geofence ... Businesses can also use geofencing to monitor employees in the field, automate time cards and keep track of company property..
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Feb 18, 2020, 2:17pm
Did You Know
How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news
Kate Yoder: The world has known about the dangers of climate change for decades — so why are oil and gas companies still drilling for crude as if there’s no tomorrow? ... any explanation would have to give some credit to the wizards of public relations. For more than a century, these spinmasters downplayed misdeeds, twisted facts, and cajoled the media into mimicking their talking points. ... Creating a cloud of confusion around established science is one of their well-known tactics ... “People are largely unaware that there’s a massive system running underneath everything,” ... Some Strategies : Fake news ... Corporate philanthropy ... Astroturfing (fake grassroots group) ... False equivalence...
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Feb 13, 2020, 4:35pm
Did You Know
Mexico Is Showing the World How to Defeat Neoliberalism
Ellen Brown: While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico’s new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. ... In 2019, his first year in office, he did what Donald Trump pledged to do — “drain the swamp” — purging the government of technocrats and institutions he considered corrupt ... substantially increasing the minimum wage while cutting top government salaries and oversize pensions; making small loans and grants directly to farmers; guaranteeing crop prices for key agricultural crops; launching programs to benefit youth, the disabled and the elderly; and initiating a $44 billion infrastructure plan...
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Feb 7, 2020, 2:44pm
Did You Know
Indigenous tribes are at the forefront of climate change planning in the U.S.
Naveena Sadasivam : Temperatures in Idaho’s Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers were so warm in 2015 that they cooked millions of salmon and steelhead to death. ... Tribal members living on the Nez Perce reservation are preparing for this new normal. ... As other North American tribes have begun to experience the effects of climate change over the past decade, they too have started to adopt climate resilience and adaptation plans. ... The process often begins with a community assessment to estimate the natural and cultural resources at risk from climate hazards. Following the assessment, consultants or in-house tribal staff can develop a specific plan to protect these resources. ... Indigenous ecological knowledge is a key component of many adaptation plans, and conversations with tribal elders and other community members often inform the assessments....
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Feb 5, 2020, 4:12pm
Did You Know
How the Environmental Lawyer Who Won a Massive Judgment Against Chevron Lost Everything
Sharon Lerner: Last August, during the second-hottest year on record ... an attorney who has been battling Chevron for more than a decade over environmental devastation in South America was put on house arrest. ... Steven Donziger, ... won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over the massive contamination in the Lago Agrio region ... As he was arguing the case against Chevron in Ecuador back in 2009, the company expressly said its long-term strategy was to demonize him. And since then, Chevron has continued its all-out assault on Donziger in what’s become one of the most bitter and drawn-out cases in the history of environmental law. ... “They are afraid of the precedent. Not only is Chevron afraid, the entire extraction industry is afraid of the precedent,” said Weyler. “They do not want to be held responsible for the pollution of their industry.”...
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Jan 29, 2020, 3:46pm
Did You Know
Another Date That Will Live in Infamy: 10 Years After Citizens United
James C. Nelson: On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down one of its worst and most activist decisions ever ... likely, the most pernicious Supreme Court decision ever issued in our nation’s history. ... the wolf of money, dressed up in the sheep’s clothing of corporate political free speech is driving and corrupting our elections, our political processes, our public officials, and our courts; it is drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens; it is responsible for the flood of false information and misleading media; and it is devaluing and diluting the franchise of ordinary voters....
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Jan 21, 2020, 12:38pm
Did You Know
Coal Mine's Closure Leaves Hopi, Navajo Homes Without Heat This Winter
Melissa Sevigny: The Kayenta coal mine in northeastern Arizona shut down last year, along with the power plant it supplied. ... For decades tribal members relied on Kayenta coal to heat their homes, and now it’s their first winter without reliable or affordable fuel. ... Losing coal has led to a public health crisis on the Hopi Nation. There are few other options for heating homes. Propane and space heaters are expensive, and many houses don’t have electricity. Trees are scarce; the nearest places to buy or cut wood are hours away by car. ... Some Hopi blame the tribal government for not preparing better for Kayenta’s closure. But Vice Chairman Clark Tenakhongva says the U.S. government bears responsibility for forcing Hopi to mine coal that made the Southwest’s cities flourish, while the reservation remains in poverty...
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Jan 16, 2020, 12:59pm
Did You Know
To Help Australia, Look to Aboriginal Fire Management
Abaki Beck: Historically, bushfires in Australia were a lot less common than they are today. Climate change is partially to blame. ... But the ongoing impacts of colonialism—including poor land management—is also part of the puzzle. ... For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal Australians managed their environment through controlled burns. ... Aboriginal fire management, also called cultural burning, involves an intimate relationship to the land. It is not one specific technique, but a localized understanding of what is needed for the environment at the time. ... If the fire is too hot, it may harm seeds and nutrients in the soil. Cultural burners often avoid burning logs or trees where animals and insects live. While the Aboriginal fire management is proactive, Western-style controlled burning, also called hazard reduction burning, is reactive...
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Jan 14, 2020, 4:15pm
Did You Know
Finland Ends Homelessness And Provides Shelter For All In Need
Kathrin Glosel: How everyone is given residence in Finland: It is NGOs such as the “Y-Foundation” that provide housing for people in need. They take care of the construction themselves, buy flats on the private housing market and renovate existing flats. The apartments have one to two rooms. ... Homeless people turn into tenants with a tenancy agreement. They also have to pay rent and operating costs. Social workers, who have offices in the residential buildings, help with financial issues such as applications for social benefits. ... The policy applied in Finland is called “HousingFirst”. It reverses conventional homeless aid. ... Homeless people get a flat – without any preconditions...
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Jan 10, 2020, 12:52pm
Did You Know
How the oil industry has spent billions to control the climate change conversation
Emily Holden : America’s oil companies are trying to rebrand themselves as part of the solution to the climate crisis, launching a campaign to counter top Democrats’ proposals to rapidly cut pollution from the power plants and cars that run on the industry’s petroleum and natural gas. ... They say natural gas – a fossil fuel that emits heat-trapping carbon dioxide – is helping to slow climate disruption by providing an alternative to coal. ... The campaign is part of a strategy in which the oil industry has funneled billions of dollars into its defense, threatening to outpace climate action advocates ... “And the path to a serious climate bill requires disabling the fossil fuel industry’s obstruction apparatus that has been the thing that has prevented that from happening.”...
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Jan 8, 2020, 3:28pm
Did You Know
Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Fossil Fuel Companies Plan to Drill More
Lana Cohen: Over the next five years, oil and gas companies will pour $1.4 trillion into new extraction projects, according to a report published by the Global Gas and Oil Network, an NGO working to promote the decline of oil and gas production. This would virtually assure that the planet will heat more than the 1.5°C threshold that is widely considered to be the point at which things go from bad to worse for humankind. ... It is not the only oil and gas company trying to greenwash, i.e. making their actions seem more environmentally friendly than they are. Five of the world’s largest oil companies have collectively spent $1 billion rebranding themselves as environmentally friendly since 2016...
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Dec 24, 2019, 12:06pm
Did You Know
How ICE Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants
Max Rivlin-Nadler:Emails sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California. ... In this case, ICE used Thomson Reuters’s controversial CLEAR database, part of a growing industry of commercial data brokers that contract with government agencies, essentially circumventing barriers that might prevent the government from collecting certain types of information. .... “When you have someone with a fairly common name, Facebook makes it so much easier to be tracked” ... “If anything you post online can be used against you forever, even if you pose no immediate threat to anyone, then the dragnet that people feared would happen under Trump is already happening,”...
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Dec 23, 2019, 3:06pm
Did You Know
Facebook says California’s new privacy law doesn’t apply to its trackers. These lawyers disagree.
Sara Morrison: “This is par for the course for this company.” ... When the CCPA )California Consumer Protection Act)... goes into effect on January 1, it will be the strictest digital privacy law in the United States to date, and the first law in the country that gives adults some rights over the collection of their data. ... Companies will be required to tell California residents what data about them is being collected, if it’s being sold, and to whom. ... It will give California residents the ability to opt out of having their data sold, and in some cases let them access and delete data a company has about them. ... (Facebook) believes its web trackers are exempt from CCPA’s regulations, which have exceptions for data exchanged with a “service provider” that is “necessary to perform a business purpose.”...
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Dec 17, 2019, 4:18pm
Did You Know
‘The Cost of Sanity, in this Society, Is a Certain Level of Alienation’
Caitlin Johnstone: Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ... It’s not always easy to be on the outside of consensus reality. ... There’s a general consensus that we live in the kind of society we were taught about in school ... This consensus is grounded in delusion. It is insanity. ... our understanding of the world is constantly being deceitfully manipulated ... “Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. ... Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.”...
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Dec 13, 2019, 12:02pm
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