Beginning today, if you are Australian, everything you do online is being tracked, stored
ed, and retained for 2 years. https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/digital-freedom-and-privacy/go-dark-against-data-retention/go-dark-against-data-retention …
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Snowden and Allies Issue Warnings as Australia Unleashes Mass Spying
Snowden and Allies Issue Warnings as Australia Unleashes Mass Spying
“Go dark against data retention,” consumer advocates tell users in new campaign against invasive surveillance laws
The new laws require Australian telecommunications companies and internet service providers (ISPs) to store user metadata for two years. (Photo: greensefa/flickr/cc)
As new controversial metadata laws went into effect in Australia on Tuesday, whistleblower Edward Snowden took to Twitter to warn the country’s residents about the privacy violations that come along with the legislation.
The new laws require Australian telecommunications companies and internet service providers (ISPs) to store user metadata—like phone records and IP addresses—for two years, during which time it may be accessed by law enforcement without a warrant. Civil liberties and internet freedom groups have criticized the laws as invasive and unconstitutional.
“Beginning today, if you are Australian, everything you do online is being tracked, stored, and retained for 2 years,” Snowden wrote, linking to a campaign by advocacy group GetUp! that gave instructions on how to circumvent the data retention scheme.
Change Everything or Face A Global Katrina
(Photo: Eric Gay/AP)
For me, the road to This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate begins in a very specific time and place. The time was exactly ten years ago. The place was New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The road in question was flooded and littered with bodies.
Today I am posting, for the first time, the entire section on Hurricane Katrina from my last book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Rereading the chapter 10 years after the events transpired, I am struck most by this fact: the same military equipment and contractors used against New Orleans’ Black residents have since been used to militarize police across the United States, contributing to the epidemic of murders of unarmed Black men and women. That is one way in which the Disaster Capitalism Complex perpetuates itself and protects its lucrative market
This material is free for reproduction.
From the Introduction:
I met Jamar Perry in September 2005, at the big Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dinner was being doled out by grinning young Scientologists, and he was standing in line. I had just been busted for talking to evacuees without a media escort and was now doing my best to blend in, a white Canadian in a sea of African-American Southerners. I dodged into the food line behind Perry and asked him to talk to me as if we were old friends, which he kindly did.
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Can’t Touch This: To Stave Off Climate Disaster, Arctic Oil Must Stay in Ground
Can’t Touch This: To Stave Off Climate Disaster, Arctic Oil Must Stay in Ground
‘There is no reasonable scenario in which Arctic oil drilling and a safe climate future co-exist,’ says Oil Change International in new report
U.S. Arctic oil will be exposed to increasing risks associated with mounting public opposition, marked by creative direct actions like this flotilla, says the report from Oil Change International and Greenpeace. (Photo: Backbone Campaign/flickr/cc)
Just days after Royal Dutch Shell commenced drilling at the bottom of the Chukchi Sea, two major environmental groups released a new report confirming what many activists and scientists have already warned—to avert the looming climate crisis, U.S. Arctic offshore oil should be considered “untouchable.”
“There is no reasonable scenario in which Arctic oil drilling and a safe climate future co-exist,” said report author Hannah McKinnon, senior campaigner with Oil Change International (OCI), which issued the study along with Greenpeace. “Drilling in the Arctic is a climate disaster, plain and simple.”
“The President can’t continue to leave the the fate of the Arctic—and his climate legacy—up to a disastrous corporation like Shell.”
—Tim Donaghy, Greenpeace
Untouchable: The Climate Case Against Drilling (pdf) reiterates the warning that, according to the best available science, at least three-quarters of existing fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground in order to limit global warming to 2° Celsius. “Projects that expand or break open new reserves and generate more greenhouse gas emissions clearly fail a test of what is safe for the global climate,” the report states.
Shell Oil’s mishap-plagued hunt for oil in the Arctic is a prime example of such a project, the authors charge, given that “the only scenarios published in defense of Arctic oil exploration are consistent with at least 5 degrees Celsius of global warming—a level widely considered to be disastrous.”
Not only is Arctic drilling bad for frontline communities and the environment, it’s expensive, with Shell depending on sustained high oil prices if it wants to make a profit, the report explains. And from an investor perspective, U.S. Arctic oil is an asset that has a high risk of becoming stranded as billions are poured into exploration for a resource that experts say ultimately cannot be burned safely.
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World’s Oceans Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible
World’s Oceans Could Rise Higher, Sooner, Faster Than Most Thought Possible
New research shows that consensus estimates of sea level increases may be underestimating threat; new predictions would see major coastal cities left uninhabitable by next century
‘Roughly 10 feet of sea level rise—well beyond previous estimates—would render coastal cities such as New York, London, and Shanghai uninhabitable.’ (Image: Woodbine)
If a new scientific paper is proven accurate, the international target of limiting global temperatures to a 2°C rise this century will not be nearly enough to prevent catastrophic melting of ice sheets that would raise sea levels much higher and much faster than previously thought possible.
“Parts of [our coastal cities] would still be sticking above the water, but you couldn’t live there.”
—Dr. James Hansen
According to the new study—which has not yet been peer-reviewed, but was written by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other prominent climate researchers—current predictions about the catastrophic impacts of global warming, the melting of vast ice sheets, and sea level rise do not take into account the feedback loop implications of what will occur if large sections of Greenland and the Antarctic are consumed by the world’s oceans.
A summarized draft of the full report was released to journalists on Monday, with the shocking warning that such glacial melting will “likely” occur this century and could cause as much as a ten foot sea-level rise in as little as fifty years. Such a prediction is much more severe than current estimates contained in reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the UN-sponsored body that represents the official global consensus of the scientific community.
“If the ocean continues to accumulate heat and increase melting of marine-terminating ice shelves of Antarctica and Greenland, a point will be reached at which it is impossible to avoid large scale ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise of at least several meters,” the paper states.
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