Read moreAn on-street information kiosk stands beside the screen, offering a scrollable map of the local area and directory of local businesses. It’s little-used, as the directory of businesses was always incomplete and intermittently updated, its data now rusty and eroded by time.
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Of the two bars, two pubs and three cafés on the street, only one has recently checked that the location and description data overlaid on Google Maps is present and correct, and thus is fortunate to receive the custom of two hungry Hungarian tourists for a full English breakfast with all the trimmings.
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Holes in data, public and private, may become more relevant than the pothole in the pavement – until you trip over it, at least.
Quotes
Read moreIf there’s a thread that runs through Cruise’s recent movies, it’s this: You may think you know me, but you don’t. His character in the Mission: Impossible movies seamlessly switches faces and is described as “a ghost”; even Ethan Hunt’s surname reflects his elusive nature. In Knight and Day, he’s a high-level spook who’s built an untraceable life on a private island. And in last year’s Jack Reacher, he’s a man without a country, an American citizen who’s barely set foot on the nation’s soil: “blood military,” he’s called. Jack Reacher has “no driver’s license, current or expired, no residence, current or former, no credit cards, no credit history, no P.O. Box, cell phone, email.” By the standards of his home country, he doesn’t exist.
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The allure of an invisible existence is a constant in Cruise’s filmography. In Mission: Impossible, Vanessa Redgrave’s arms dealer says anonymity is “like a warm blanket.” Jack Reacher says living off the grid “started out as an exercise, and became an addiction.” In Rock of Ages, Cruise plays rock legend Stacee Jaxx, a foundering rock star who, like Cruise himself, is known to all but understood by none. When Malin Akerman’s Rolling Stone journalist tries to get under Stacee’s skin, he taunts her with his own inaccessibility. “I know me better than anyone,” he says, pointing at his face, “because I live in here.”
Read moreJapan’s nuclear watchdog has said the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is facing a new “emergency" caused by a build-up of radioactive groundwater. A barrier built to contain the water has already been breached, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority warned. This means the amount of contaminated water seeping into the Pacific Ocean could accelerate rapidly, it said.
Read moreThis corroded site of a lost and forgotten politics made a spectacularly weird setting for the “Share Conference,” an event originally from Belgrade and Novi Sad. It speaks volumes for the new generation of Balkan activists that they can throw an international event in newly Europeanized, relentlessly hip, Croatian Rijeka.
This Adriatic port town, which used to specialize in toxic paper mills and oil refineries, is remodeling itself as a green tourism and cultural hub. Rijeka got everything they bargained for with the Share three day festival of cybergeeks, pirates, dj s and electronic artists. They arrived from all over the world: the Internet-famous, the net-celebrities: the law professors who were were also tattooed djs, the musicians were somehow cryptographers, the elected officials were Icelandic punk poets, the free-software coders who are game designers. They were all young people of searingly high intelligence who lacked any proper career.
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Strange things have happened in this historical city, which has been Roman, feudal, pre-national, post-national, an independent city-state on long occasions, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, various forms of Yugoslavian, and which now happens to be European Union. Ninety years ago, Rijeka was the legendary breakaway pirate republic of the warrior-poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sinister genius of political theater who wanted to make Rijeka his springboard to conquer all the other ancient Italian republics along the Dalmatian coast.
In the ecstatic D’Annunzio dictatorship, for a year and a half, this port city was a world laboratory of twentieth-century extremist politics, a cradle of all kinds of oddities: fascism, newsreels, radio propaganda, nudity, fad diets, cocaine smuggling, air-war, torpedo boats, piracy, ship hijacking, Black Shirts, and the revived-Roman Fascist one-armed salute. Rijeka even briefly boasted its own anarcho-syndicalist constitution, based on music. The “cyberpunk academy” was the official title for the shipboard event in Tito’s post-disaster dystopia, where conclaves were held in the wrecked bedrooms of the dictators, where workshops and panels graced the rusty decks with seating from packing crates. We exchanged codes, secrets, plans, good energy…
Read moreDue to global warming, the glacial lake is also rapidly changing, ideal circumstances for a robot being taught to recognize shifts in a fluid environment.
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The prototype robot has spent the last two years exploring its surroundings, determining the lake’s size and depth, measuring its pH, and observing all meteorological phenomena.
It’s not ready yet: The lander’s instruments are designed for a terrestrial environment, and the current version is far too heavy to be sent into space. But those evolutions will come, said Cabrol.
“Right now we’re at the same place we were 10 or 15 years ago, when we were starting to test Mars rovers in the desert,” she said.
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Until now, extraplanetary robotic explorers have been micromanaged from Earth.
But communication between Earth and Titan would take hours each direction, so the robot must be built with some decision-making and problem-solving capacity. Also, since rain and other weather phenomena occur on Titan, an exploration robot would need to know when something unusual is happening so it can stop what it’s doing and pay attention.
To do this, the robot will have to become familiar with its “normal” environment, and detect when something abnormal happens. For example, if the robot floats near shore, it will be able to recognize that and begin taking photographs and a series of scientific measurements.
This scientific autonomy is an evolution that is likely to take hold in all future extraplanetary robots, not just those that go to Titan, Cabrol said.
“We’re not only building a robot, but a new generation of robots,” she said. “The new generation will not just be sitting around waiting for us to tell them what to do.”
Read moreFour years later, Serco controls more than 20 centres across the nation and more than 10,500 people. The contract, constantly evolving with increasing boat arrivals, is now worth more than $1.86 billion. Other companies, such as G4S, Toll Group, Lohberger Engineering, Decmil and Canstruct are revelling in Labor’s pain. Stopping the boats will be bad for business.
One of the least examined aspects of refugee policy is the companies making a killing from the government’s failure to humanely process asylum seekers. John Howard accelerated outsourcing to the point where dozens of former detainees received compensation after being assaulted or psychologically damaged, while guards still experience post-traumatic stress because they never received appropriate training.
I read almost daily emails from former local employees of some of the world’s largest private prison companies. They tell me about their nightmares and say their managers during the early 2000s would allow detention centres to descend into crisis to force Canberra’s hand and guarantee more funds to “manage” the situation. “The budget for reassuring Australians is bottomless,” journalist David Marr has written.
The idea that private industry is more efficient and cheaper than the public sector is an illusion.
It is adherence to neo-liberal ideology that explains why Australia doesn’t want governments in the business of public services, war, mining and increasingly aid. The state is bad. Private enterprise is good.
Corporate lobbyists grease the wheels – witness the long line of Australian politicians on “study tours” to Britain being wined and dined by Serco, which hopes to persuade them to privatise yet another hospital or juvenile justice program – and the public is left short-changed, with lower standards of care.
During the writing of my new book, Profits of Doom, I spent time with a senior Serco manager who was disgusted with what he saw as his employer exploiting the government’s troubles over asylum seekers. He gave me internal documents that point to price-gouging, especially on ferrying refugees to different camps, understaffing, undertraining and disturbing levels of self-harm by detainees. In one month alone, January 2012, Serco made 65 per cent profit at Northern Territory’s Wickham Point, more than $2.5 million. British Serco management has a “colonial attitude” towards Australia, the source said, and make little effort to understand local conditions.
The company is rarely fined by the government for breaches because, I was told, managers are instructed not to report problems. The bottom line is all that matters. The contract between Serco and the government – I’ve seen one of the latest versions – indicates there are few formal mechanisms that are policed to ensure an accurate reporting regime.
The contract between Canberra and G4S, the British company running Manus Island, is even vaguer and dictates no independent audits. Former G4S manager Rod St George recently told SBS TV’s Dateline there had been rapes and physical abuses in the camps.
Yet the profits keep coming. Decmil won a $137 million contract in June to build a centre on Manus. Guess who will be rapt by the prospect of housing thousands more detainees if Rudd’s “PNG solution” is fully implemented?
My Serco source told me recently that both the company and the Immigration Department were in “chaos” and “can’t handle the boats”. Yet the corporation is reducing staff to “keep profits high”, he said.
Read more“We found a graveyard of comets”, exclaims Professor Ferrín.
He adds:
“Imagine all these asteroids going around the Sun for aeons, with no hint of activity. We have found that some of these are not dead rocks after all, but are dormant comets that may yet come back to life if the energy that they receive from the Sun increases by a few per cent.“Surprisingly, this can happy fairly easily, as the orbits of many objects in the asteroid belt are nudged by the gravity of Jupiter. The shape of their orbits can then change, leading to a decrease in the minimum distance between the object and the Sun (perihelion) and a slight increase in average temperature.
Read moreIf Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector.
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But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.
At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.
Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.
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Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.
There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department.
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Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.
More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.
Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.
Read moreOne doesn’t expect the Gitmo press office to be delightful, but Lieutenant Colonels Pool and Breasseale (the latter was a Department of Defense consultant on The Hurt Locker) are tasked with being our friends. With warmth, charm, and helpfulness, they kept us far away from the prisoners we had come to write about.
They know how to play the game, and they do their homework, making sure to gush over my past work, as well as that of my fellow reporters.
The underlying assumption seemed to be that we were all bleeding-heart lefties, so they were sure to emphasize their fondness for Al Jazeera and support for getting green energy onto bases.
Lt. Col. Pool had nicknamed me “Molly Worrywort” because of my badgerlike inquires about press credentials. Before I arrived, he suggested that I bring a swimsuit. Apparently the big bad terror camp was near some great beaches.
Though there are nearby hotels, visiting journalists sleep in Army tents, in a subdivision called Camp Justice, and the pressroom is inside an airplane hanger—Gitmo is a “battlefield,” after all.
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For all their friendliness, the JTF controls what the media is allowed to see. Photos are prohibited in most places, and whenever I sketched a scene, press officers swarmed around me.
The pressroom was filled with soldiers watching our laptops, listening to us talk. US cell phones don’t get service at Gitmo.
There’s a sticker on all the landline receivers inside the compound: use of this telephone constitutes consent to monitoring.Badges that read military escort at all times are required to be worn at all times.
We were given them inside something called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is plastered with propaganda posters.One features a woman in a ski mask pointing a gun straight ahead; underneath it reads: keep talking, we’re listening. practice opsec [operations security].
I took notes on the back of a pamphlet listing banned items. The security officer inspected my notes, worried that I copied a classification chart. Like so much of Guantánamo, the chart itself was classified.
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The only journalist who has ever really seen Guantánamo is Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Hajj—the US government imprisoned him in Gitmo from 2002 to 2008, mostly to interrogate him about his TV station.
In Gitmo, nothing is certain. All participants are biased, and facts about detainees are hidden behind classifications, razor wire, and improvised legalese.
As I researched Nabil before my trip, there was little information available other than what was relayed by his lawyer, Cori Crider, and a cachet of tribunal transcripts leaked by Bradley Manning.
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My assigned press officer adamantly denied that detainees were ever beaten at Gitmo. I brought up Specialist Sean Baker, who in 2003 played a detainee in an ERF training drill and whose resulting brain injuries landed him in Walter Reed for 48 days. She said that she had never heard of Baker, claiming that detainees throw themselves off stretchers, hoping to show off the resulting bruises to their lawyers.
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Over a direct message on Twitter, the author Neil Gaiman told me a detainee was a fan of his books.
To keep prisoners busy while they waited for the war on terror to end, Gitmo offered art classes, hanging the drawings in a room only the press could visit.
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It is Captain Durand’s view that what detainees are really starving for is attention. “They’re seeing their lawyers on television and seeing media attention from it,” he said. “That encourages more people to join.”
He added “I think it’s interesting that the Taliban were the first to report about [the hunger strike].”
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Language mutates in Gitmo. In court, bland, corporate-sounding terms like privilege team and baseline review referred to government censors and cell searches, respectively. The word contraband didn’t mean guns or coke, but knowledge.
James Connell, a lawyer for 9/11 defendant Ammar al Baluchi, told me: “The ‘informational contraband’ restriction prohibits attorneys from discussing important topics with their clients, including the people who tortured them or the whole idea of jihad.”
The defendants’ opinions and experiences are classified—especially their memories of rendition. Connell added, “The government can only classify information it owns or controls. By classifying the ‘observations and experiences’ of the military commission defendants, the government is claiming something new and horrifying: the power to own and control the minds of the people it has tortured.”
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On Guantánamo, iguanas are endangered. Killing one will get you a $10,000 fine. Military transport skids to a halt to let them cross the road.
Read moreNot only had the Soviet Union—the chief object of the NSA’s spying, and its raison d’etre—disappeared from the map, but now the agency also realized that the main threat was going to be “super-empowered” individuals—terrorists—who might be talking on cell phones or computers anywhere on earth. Above all, these new bad guys were using private technology, rather than the sort of intra-government communications systems that the NSA used to monitor in the Soviet Union or China.
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In a period of a decade or so, Hayden said, the agency went “from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting-edge.”
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 