'Golden nail': Quarry near Salzgitter becomes global geological reference point

Research team with Goethe University participation successfully proposes former quarry in Lower Saxony as Global Stratotype Section and Point

GOETHE UNIVERSITY FRANKFURT

Research News

 

IMAGE: SALZGITTER-SALDER: A PERFECT ROCK BOUNDARY SEQUENCE OVER 40 METRES. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO: SILKE VOIGT, GOETHE UNIVERSITY FRANKFURT

FRANKFURT/HANNOVER. The international team of geoscientists led by Prof. Silke Voigt from the Goethe University Frankfurt, Prof. Ireneusz Walaszczyk from the University of Warsaw and Dr André Bornemann from LBEG have thoroughly investigated 40 metres of the geological strata sequence in the former limestone quarry at Hasselberg. The researchers determined that this is only sequence in the transition between Turonian and Coniacian without gaps and it therefore represents a perfect rock sequence to serve geoscientists from all over the world as a reference for their research - a "Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP)" or, in the jargon of geosciences, a "golden nail".

Certain group of bivalve mollusks of the family Inoceramidae, first appeared in the Coniacian, and are found in large numbers in Salder. In Bed 46 of the quarry, the German-Polish scientific team found the oldest appearance of the Inoceramid species Cremnoceramus deformis erectus, which marks the time boundary. Careful studies also revealed other microfossils and a characteristic change in the ratio of the carbon isotopes 12C and 13C, a so-called negative anomaly in the carbon cycle.

"This means that variable geological sequences, such as marine shelf sediments in Mexico or the deep sea in the tropical Atlantic, can now be compared and classified in time," explains Prof. Silke Voigt. "This is important in order to be able to make an exact chronological classification even in the case of incomplete successions and ultimately to see, for example, what the climate was like at a certain time in the past in different places in the world."

Professor Ireneusz Walaszczyk says: "The sequence in Salzgitter-Salder prevails over other candidates, for example from the USA, India, Madagascar, New Zealand and Poland, because we have a perfect rock boundary sequence here over 40 metres, with a well-defined record of events which took place in this interval of geological time."

"The Zechstein Sea left behind massive salt layers in the North German Basin more than 250 million years ago," explains André Bornemann. "The rock layers deposited later exerted pressure on these salt layers, some of which bulged up into large salt domes, deforming younger layers in the process. Salder is located near such a salt dome, so that here the fossil-rich rock layers of the Cretaceous period are steeply upright, resulting in a wonderful profile that is very accessible for scientific investigations. That's why we at LBEG have designated this place as a geotope, and this is one of the most important geopoints of the Harz-Braunschweiger Land-Ostfalen UNESCO Global Geopark."

CAPTION

Layer 46 marks the transition from the Cretaceous Turonian to the Coniacian Age.

CREDIT

Photo and montage: Silke Voigt, Goethe University Frankfurt. Fossil: Walaszczyk et al. (2010)

Background:

In the limestone quarry at Hasselberg near Salder in the north-east of the Salzgitter mountain range, limestone and marl used to be quarried for the cement industry and later for ore processing. Today, it is the location of a well-known biotope and geotope which is the property of the Stiftung Naturlandschaft (Natural Landscape Foundation) and established by the BUND regional association of Lower Saxony. While the care of the quarry site has been entrusted to the Salzgitter district group of BUND, the Harz-Braunschweiger Land-Ostfalen UNESCO Global Geopark looks after the geoscientific part of the quarry. The quarry is not freely accessible for nature conservation reasons, but guided walks are occasionally offered.

90 million years ago, in the second half of the Cretaceous, it was tropically warm on Earth: the ice-free poles ensured high sea levels, and Central Europe consisted of a cluster of islands. In the sea, ammonites developed a tremendous variety of forms, while dinosaurs reigned on land. The first flowering plants began to compete with horsetails and ferns. About 89.39 million years ago, the climate began to cool slightly, sea levels began sink, and a new period in Earth history, the Coniacian, replaced the Turonian.

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Publications:

Voigt S, Püttmann T, Mutterlose J, Bornemann A, Jarvis I, Pearce M, Walaszczyk, I (2021) Reassessment of the Salzgitter-Salder section as a potential stratotype for the Turonian-Coniacian Boundary: stable carbon isotopes and cyclostratigraphy constrained by nannofossils and palynology. Newsl Stratigr, 54/2, 209-228, https://doi.org/10.1127/nos/2020/0615

Walaszczyk, I., Cech, S., Crampton, J.S., Dubicka, Z., Ifrim, C., Jarvis, I., Kennedy, W.J., Lees, J.A., Lodowski, D., Pearce, M. Peryt, D., Sageman, B., Schiøler, P., Todes, J., Uličný, D., Voigt, S., Wiese, F., With contributions by, Linnert, C., Püttmann, T., and Toshimitsu, S. (2021) The Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the base of the Coniacian Stage (Salzgitter-Salder, Germany) and its auxiliary sections (S?upia Nadbrze?na, central Poland; St?eleč, Czech Republic; and El Rosario, NE Mexico). Episodes 2021; 44(2): 129-150l. https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2020/020072

Tweezers of sound can pick objects up without physical contact

Hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers lifts objects off reflective surfaces

TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Research News

 VIDEO: A HEMISPHERICAL ARRAY OF ULTRASOUND TRANSDUCERS WITH PHASE AND AMPLITUDE CONTROL IS DRIVEN TO CREATE AN ACOUSTIC FIELD WHICH CAN TRAP AND LIFT A POLYSTYRENE BALL OFF A REFLECTIVE SURFACE. view more 

CREDIT: TOKYO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new technology which allows non-contact manipulation of small objects using sound waves. They used a hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers to generate a 3D acoustic fields which stably trapped and lifted a small polystyrene ball from a reflective surface. Although their technique employs a method similar to laser trapping in biology, adaptable to a wider range of particle sizes and materials.

The ability to move objects without touching them might sound like magic, but in the world of biology and chemistry, technology known as optical trapping has been helping scientists use light to move microscopic objects around for many years. In fact, half of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to Arthur Ashkin (1922-2020) was in recognition of the remarkable achievements of this technology. But the use of laser light is not without its failings, particularly the limits placed on the properties of the objects which can be moved.

Enter acoustic trapping, an alternative which uses sound instead of optical waves. Sound waves may be applied to a wider range of object sizes and materials, so much so that successful manipulation is possible for millimeter-sized particles. Though they haven't been around for as long as their optical counterparts, acoustic levitation and manipulation show exceptional promise for both lab settings and beyond. But the technical challenges that need to be surmounted are big. In particular, it is not easy to individually and accurately control vast arrays of ultrasound transducers in real-time, and get the right sound fields to lift objects far from the transducers themselves, particularly near surfaces that reflect sound.

Now, Researcher Shota Kondo and Associate Professor Kan Okubo from Tokyo Metropolitan University have come up with a new approach to lift millimeter-sized objects off a reflective surface using a hemispherical array of transducers. Their method of driving the array does not involve complex addressing of individual elements. Instead, they split the array into manageable blocks and use an inverse filter that finds the best phase and amplitude to drive them to make a single trap at some distance from the transducers themselves. By adjusting how they drive the blocks over time, they can change the position of their target field and move the particle they have trapped. Their findings are supported by simulations of the 3D acoustic fields that are created by the arrays, and of course, by their experiments with a polystyrene ball, which speak for themselves (see the video).

Though challenges remain in keeping particles trapped and stable, this exciting new technology promises big advances towards transforming acoustic trapping from a scientific curiosity to a practical tool in the lab and in industry.

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Newly-hatched pterosaurs may have been able to fly

UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH

Research News

IMAGE: THE ATTACHED IMAGE SHOWS A FLOCK PTERODAUSTRO GUINAZUI. view more 

CREDIT: DR MARK WITTON

Newly-hatched pterosaurs may have been able to fly but their flying abilities may have been different from adult pterosaurs, according to a new study.

Pterosaurs were a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods (228 to 66 million years ago). Due to the rarity of fossilised pterosaur eggs and embryos, and difficulties distinguishing between hatchlings and small adults, it has been unclear whether newly-hatched pterosaurs were able to fly.

Researchers from the Universities of Portsmouth and Bristol, along with palaeontologist Darren Naish, found that hatchling humerus bones were stronger than those of many adult pterosaurs, indicating that they would have been strong enough for flight.

In the study, published in Scientific Reports, the researchers modelled the flying abilities of hatchlings using previously obtained wing measurements from four established hatchling and embryo fossils from two pterosaur species, Pterodaustro guinazui and Sinopterus dongi. They also compared these wing measurements with those of adults from the same species and compared the strength of the humerus bone, which forms part of the wing, of three hatchlings with those of 22 adult pterosaurs.

Study co-author Dr Mark Witton from the University of Portsmouth said: "Although we've known about pterosaurs for over two centuries, we've only had fossils of their embryos and hatchlings since 2004. We're still trying to understand the early stages of life in these animals. One discussion has centred around whether pterosaurs could fly as hatchlings or, like the vast majority of birds and bats, they had to grow a little before they could take wing.

"We found that these tiny animals - with 25 cm wingspans and bodies that could neatly fit in your hand - were very strong, capable fliers. Their bones were strong enough to sustain flapping and take-off, and their wings were ideally shaped for powered (as opposed to gliding) flight. However, they would not have flown exactly like their parents simply because they were so much smaller: flight capabilities are strongly influenced by size and mass, and so pterosaur hatchlings, being hundreds of times smaller than their parents, were likely slower, more agile fliers than the wide-ranging, but less manoeuvrable adults."

Dr Liz Martin-Silverstone from the University of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences said: "There have been several debates about whether juvenile pterosaurs could fly, but this is the first time it's been studied through a more biomechanical point of view. It's exciting to discover that even though their wings may have been small, they were built in a way that made them strong enough to fly."

The researchers found that while hatchlings had long, narrow wings suited to long-distance flight, their wings were shorter and broader than those of adult pterosaurs, with a larger wing area relative to hatchling mass and body size. These wing dimensions may have made hatchlings less efficient than adult pterosaurs at long-distance travel, but may have resulted in them being more agile fliers, enabling them to suddenly change direction and speed.

The authors speculate that the agile flying style of hatchling pterosaurs may have enabled them to rapidly escape predators and made them better suited to chasing nimbler prey and flying amongst dense vegetation than adult pterosaurs.

Dr Witton said: "That gives us a lot to think about with regard to flying reptile ecology. How independent were the hatchlings from their parents? Did flight style influence habitat choices, and did these change as pterosaurs grew? There's still a lot to learn about the life histories of these animals, but we're confident that, whatever they were doing as they grew up, they were capable of flying from the moment they hatched."

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US 

ISPs spent $235 million on lobbying and donations, “more than $320,000 a day”

Common Cause report says industry lobbying of Congress worsens the digital divide.

JON BRODKIN - 7/20/2021


The biggest Internet service providers and their trade groups spent $234.7 million on lobbying and political donations during the most recent two-year congressional cycle, according to a report released yesterday. The ISPs and their trade groups lobbied against strict net neutrality rules and on various other telecom and broadband regulatory legislation, said the report written by advocacy group Common Cause.

Of the $234.7 million spent in 2019 and 2020, political contributions and expenditures accounted for $45.6 million. The rest of it went to lobbying expenditures.

Comcast led the way with $43 million in lobbying and political contributions and expenditures combined during the 2019-2020 cycle, the report said. The highest-spending ISPs after Comcast were AT&T with $36.4 million, Verizon with $24.8 million, Charter with $24.4 million, and T-Mobile with $21.5 million.

"The dollar amounts are shocking," the report said. "In total, these corporations spent more than $234 million on lobbying and federal elections during the 116th Congress—an average of more than $320,000 a day, seven days a week!"
Cable and wireless lobbies spent big

The cable and wireless industry's top lobbying organizations were third and fourth in spending overall as cable group NCTA spent $31.5 million and wireless group CTIA spent $25.3 million. USTelecom, which represents telcos including AT&T and Verizon, spent $4.8 million.

The rest of the $234.7 million came from CenturyLink with $7.2 million, SpaceX/Starlink with $5.9 million, Sprint with $5.1 million prior to its merger with T-Mobile, ViaSat with $1.9 million, the Wireless Infrastructure Association with $1.6 million, Frontier with $784,000, and HughesNet with $496,000.

The Common Cause report cites campaign-finance data from OpenSecrets.org and includes this table:
Common Cause

Common Cause got help writing the report from the Communications Workers of America union that represents employees of AT&T, Verizon, and other telcos.

Common Cause itself spent $210,000 on lobbying in the two-year cycle and made $35,149 in political contributions, according to OpenSecrets. The Communications Workers of America made $10 million in contributions and spent $2.2 million on lobbying.

Net neutrality lobbying

Net neutrality was one of the top regulatory issues for broadband lobbyists as they fought the Democrats' "Save the Internet Act." In its original version, the bill would have reversed the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules and reinstated the Title II common-carrier regulatory system implemented during the Obama era. The Democratic-majority House of Representatives passed the bill, but then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared it "dead on arrival" in the Senate.

"When the House voted to pass the Save the Internet Act, ISPs condemned lawmakers for advancing 'a highly controversial, partisan proposal that puts the Internet under heavy-handed government control,'" the Common Cause report said. "Given this historic opposition to net neutrality and Title II authority, it is no surprise why the Save the Internet Act did not even receive a vote in the Senate, despite bipartisan passage in the House and polling that showed 77 percent of Republicans and 87 percent of Democrats support net neutrality principles."

Eight of the 15 ISPs and lobby groups analyzed by Common Cause revealed in required disclosures that they lobbied on this bill, the report said. Those include AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, and USTelecom. But while "federal law requires lobbying disclosure reports to include a list of specific bill numbers 'to the maximum extent practicable,'" some of the ISPs did not report lobbying on specific bills.

Common Cause explained:

Frontier Communications, for example, failed to report its lobbying on specific bills but did report paying lobbyists $537,888 during the 116th Congress to lobby on topics that included "rural broadband deployment and adoption" and "broadband mapping issues." Similarly, HughesNet didn't report lobbying on any specific legislation but paid lobbyists $370,000 to lobby on "broadband infrastructure" and "issues related to satellite broadband legislation." SpaceX reported lobbying on "satellite broadband policy and matters related to satellite spectrum" in every reporting period but didn't disclose lobbying on any specific broadband bills...

Other ISPs reported lobbying on some specific broadband legislation but also used broad categories to describe some of their lobbying. Comcast, for example, did not report lobbying on the Broadband DATA Act, a broadband mapping bill, but reported lobbying on "rural broadband deployment and mapping." Similarly, Comcast didn't report lobbying on the RESILIENT Networks Act but did report lobbying on "network resiliency."

ISPs' fight against net neutrality also involved funding a campaign in 2017 that generated "8.5 million fake comments" to the Federal Communications Commission in order to "manufacture support for repeal," according to a recent report issued by New York State Attorney General Letitia James.

Fiber-deployment bill failed amid lobbying

ISPs also focused heavily on the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which would have spent $80 billion to deploy future-proof broadband infrastructure nationwide, directed the FCC to collect and publicize data on broadband prices, and eliminated state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband, among other things. The bill prioritized fiber by requiring federally funded ISPs to provide low latency and speeds of at least 100Mbps for both downloads and uploads and by defining "unserved" areas as those lacking access to 25Mbps speeds on both the download and upload side.

Six of the 15 ISPs and trade groups reported lobbying on the bill, including AT&T, Charter, NCTA, T-Mobile, USTelecom, and Verizon, Common Cause wrote, adding:

The Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act seeks to address the digital divide, and ISPs want to define both the divide and its solutions to their benefit. Industry lobbyists have persistently disseminated talking points at the federal and state levels advocating for lower speed requirements and "technology neutrality," both of which aim to limit the preference given to fiber-optic broadband in publicly funded deployment, despite the clear superiority of that technology. ISPs have also been incredibly effective over the years, lobbying at the state level to prohibit municipal broadband and cooperatives from serving communities that have been abandoned by existing providers. Further, the industry has resisted calls for price transparency... and in part owing to the successful efforts of ISP lobbyists, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act did not even receive a vote in the House or Senate during the 116th Congress.

Other bills that failed amid broadband-industry lobbying included the RESILIENT Networks Act, which would change the Communications Act "to require coordination from providers of communications services during times of emergency" and require the FCC to "improve how networks share outage information with first responders," Common Cause wrote. Another was the CONNECT at Home Act that would have prohibited ISPs "from terminating service to a customer during the COVID-19 pandemic and up to 180 days after the pandemic is declared to be over."

ISPs have “profoundly shaped” US policy

Congress approved the Broadband DATA Act, which required the FCC to create more accurate broadband-availability maps. AT&T and other ISPs fought against stricter mapping requirements for years but dropped some of their objections when it became clear that Congress was going to require more accurate maps anyway.

Common Cause wrote:

Despite the industry's support for more accurate broadband maps, large ISPs played a significant role in influencing this legislation to focus strictly on collecting more granular deployment data while ignoring other metrics critical to assessing broadband availability and painting an accurate picture of the digital divide... despite advocacy from public interest groups, the Broadband DATA Act lacks any requirements for ISPs to report on key metrics, including actual speeds, latency, and pricing data. Indeed, large ISPs have opposed mapping efforts that seek to include nondeployment-related data. For example, the industry openly criticized the Biden administration's recently released interactive broadband map, which includes publicly available data on speeds, pricing, and other metrics. While the Broadband DATA Act will get us much closer to granular deployment data, ISP lobbying was successful in limiting Congress' ability to require more data collection across other broadband-related metrics.

The Common Cause report urged Congress to require more specific lobbying disclosures and to pass broadband bills such as the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. Common Cause also lobbied for net neutrality rules and stricter regulation in general, saying that the Trump-era deregulatory approach contributed to rising broadband prices, "a lack of transparent billing practices, and reports of mobile carriers selling their customers' real-time location data."

"Political spending by AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and other major ISPs has profoundly shaped the contours of the digital divide," Common Cause wrote. "But the fight is not over. There are a number of steps our elected officials can take to give power back to the people and begin to close the digital divide."

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.

Is any country installing renewables fast enough to reach climate goals?

A look at 60 countries shows that renewable growth rarely reaches the rates we need.

JOHN TIMMER - 7/20/2021


Researchers and policy analysts have checked and double-checked future climate scenarios. We know how much carbon dioxide we can emit and still keep the world from getting more than 2ºC warmer, and we can use that number to determine how quickly we need to move away from fossil fuels. We have a variety of routes to get there, most of them involving replacing fossil fuels with the cheapest renewable energy sources: wind and solar power. From there, it's a simple matter of determining how quickly wind and solar use have to increase to get us there.

Wind and solar have become the cheapest sources of new electricity in most countries, and we now have massive economies of scale for their production and installation. We also have decades of experience with managing them effectively. There's little reason to think that these renewables aren't poised for explosive growth.

And yet a new study of the history of renewables shows that only a handful of countries have seen that sort of growth. And even when those countries achieved their goals, they only did so for a brief period.

The S curve

A new paper in Nature Energy says that most technologies experience a predictable pattern of adoption. They start with a period of minimal growth, while the technology is expensive, poorly understood, and can't be manufactured at scale. Once a critical point is reached, adoption ramps up to a period of rapid acceleration, with each year seeing higher rates of growth. Over time, however, this increase slows, and the curve flattens out to an extended period of steady growth.
Enlarge / S curves show a period in which growth accelerates before tapering off and stabilizing. John Timmer

This is typically called an S-curve because if you plot growth over time, you get something that looks like a flattened-out S. There's a curve up to the period of the fastest increase, followed by a curve back toward the steady increase seen in a mature technology.


What does this have to do with climate goals? To reach these goals, countries need to get renewable power sources into the period of maximal growth as quickly as possible. But reaching maximal growth is not enough on its own—countries need to stay in the maximal growth phase for as long as possible to achieve a higher plateau when they start a period of stable growth. If we can't manage that, we'll need to look for other ways of hitting our emissions targets.

By now, enough countries have gone through growth and stabilization that the researchers felt they could determine whether sufficient increases are happening and, if so, what conditions enable them. They looked at data from 60 countries that collectively account for over 95 percent of the world's electricity production.
Hitting the accelerator

To start with, the researchers identified when countries entered the growth phase of either wind or solar, and they found that reaching a growth rate of 1 percent was a good marker. Many of those countries could be tracked into a period of maximal growth, and a number then saw growth slow down again, producing the full S curve.

As expected, the exact results varied by country and technology. Wind came down in price first, so most countries saw that technology take off about a decade earlier than solar. But solar became cheaper faster, and it's easier to manufacture at scale and requires less infrastructure to install. So its growth ramped up more rapidly.

Local conditions also mattered. Several countries, mostly in Northern Europe, saw wind take off but haven't seen a similar growth in solar. Others have seen only solar experience a period of rapid growth.

As of the most recent data (2018), there were 11 countries where growth was accelerating, and another 21 have seen three consecutive years of reduced growth, indicating that they had completed the S curve. Critically, the countries that started the acceleration phase later don't seem to hit faster growth rates, suggesting that maturing technology and the experience gained by early adopters don't make it any easier for the countries that adopt wind and solar later.

The researchers' analysis estimated that the median growth rate after the period of acceleration was about 0.8 percent of the countries' electrical supply for wind and 0.6 percent for solar. The highest growth rate was 1.8 percent of the electrical supply per year, and the largest countries rarely saw rates that exceeded 1 percent.

In a few cases, growth hit a plateau and took off again, but there were only three examples of that happening.

Is that fast enough?

The answer is a pretty clear "no." If we work backward from climate-stabilization scenarios, we'd need wind to roughly double its current rate, going from 0.6 percent to 1.2 percent. Based on the experience of several large countries, that would be the equivalent of reaching their maximum growth rate and then staying there. Solar would need to see its current global rate triple, with capacity additions equal to 1 percent of the electric supply every year. And both of those examples are based on the numbers for limiting climate change to 2ºC, when countries have agreed that 1.5ºC is a preferable goal.

As the authors of the paper put it, current scenarios that meet our climate goals require decades of growth in renewables at rates higher than those observed during the peak growth periods of most countries.

That's not to say it's impossible to boost growth rates to get things on track. Plenty of countries have seen growth in renewables despite haphazard or effectively absent policies. But if countries aren't in the process of improving their policy situation, they either need to start pursuing alternatives (like efficiency and carbon capture) or acknowledge that they don't actually intend to reach their commitments.

Nature Energy, 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41560-021-00863-0 (About DOIs).

Despite Tuesday’s flight, Jeff Bezos is running out of time to save Blue Origin

“What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing."

ERIC BERGER - 7/21/2021, 1:30 PM

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew, Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space in the Blue Origin New Shepard on July 20, 2021 in Van Horn, Texas.
Joe Raedle/Getty 


LAUNCH SITE ONE, Texas—Jeff Bezos burst from his spacecraft with a smile on his face as wide as the brim of the cowboy hat atop his head.

The founder of Amazon fulfilled a lifelong dream of flying into space Tuesday morning aboard a rocket and capsule he personally funded. During a few minutes of weightlessness, Bezos and his brother Mark had floated around the New Shepard capsule alongside aviation pioneer Wally Funk and an 18-year-old customer, Oliver Daemen. They tossed Skittles candy into one another’s mouths and enjoyed the view.

“Best day ever,” said Bezos, 57, after landing safely beneath three parachutes. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”

Not everyone was thrilled by the adventures of the richest person in the world. With his brief 10-minute flight, Bezos provoked sharply divided reactions. Some people even wished Bezos had launched and never come back.

These critics expressed frustration with Bezos for busting unions and not treating Amazon employees well. Environmentalists despaired that as the world burns from climate change and other calamities, Bezos responded by jetting into space. And with all of his wealth, Bezos offered an inviting target for those who loathe ultra-rich billionaires and want them to pay their fair share of taxes. Criticism of Bezos spanned the ideological divide, from Tucker Carlson on Fox News to liberal Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Meanwhile, within the space community, people mostly celebrated Bezos’ flight as the dawn of the private spaceflight era, which further opens the high frontier, with both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic starting regular spaceflight service.

Scenes from launch day in Texas. Here, New Shepard rolls out to the launch site in the pre-dawn hours.
Blue Origin








Neither side is necessarily wrong. It is reasonable to both be uncomfortable with Bezos' extreme wealth and what that means for society but also recognize that Blue Origin has advanced spaceflight.

The real question is whether Bezos will make good on his stated intent to use his immense wealth for the good of humanity. What the legion critics of Bezos and Blue Origin miss is that the company legitimately has the goal of ultimately saving planet Earth. While Tuesday’s flight was clearly self-serving for Bezos, Blue Origin has follow-on projects in the works to support moving heavy industry from the surface of our planet into space.

To set humanity on this environmentally sustainable path, Bezos has lavished funding on Blue Origin, investing about $10 billion in the spaceflight company so far, with more coming every year. However, what Bezos has not invested into Blue Origin is his personal time, nor the driven leadership that propelled Amazon to the top of the heap of retail.Advertisement


So after he returned from his spaceflight on Tuesday, what I most wanted to know is whether Jeff Bezos is all-in on space. He has the vision. He has the money. But at the age of 57, does he have enough years or willingness to ensure Blue Origin’s success? Or will he leave Blue Origin to flounder and instead mostly retire to his half-billion-dollar yacht after a suborbital joyride?

The jury is very much out.

The vision

Bezos has a compelling vision for space, and it is entirely genuine. From way back before his Amazon days, Bezos has been a true believer in the power of using space to improve life on Earth. Our planet, he says, is a garden to be preserved.

“This is the only good planet in the Solar System,” he said on Tuesday, repeating a line he has often used. “We’ve sent robotic probes to all of them, and this is the only good one. We have to take care of it. And when you go to space and see how fragile Earth is, you’ll want to take care of it even more.”

To accomplish this, Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 to build a “road to space.” This simply means bringing down the cost of launching rockets by reusing them over and over again. By lowering the cost of reaching space, Bezos seeks to move heavy industry off Earth. Instead of strip-mining our planet, he says, we should glean those resources from lifeless asteroids.

Our insatiable energy needs, too, might be met by space-based solar power farms. And finally, expanding into space will allow humanity to grow as a species, eventually populating orbital settlements near Earth and then other worlds. This unlimited opportunity for expansion would save humans from entering a stasis and from fighting for increasingly scarce resources on Earth.

Bezos is theoretically right about all of this. Today, roughly half the world’s population lacks access to reliable electricity and reasonably high living conditions. The only long-term means to bring this half of the world’s population up to a standard of living enjoyed by the developed world, without destroying the Earth, is probably accessing the bounty of resources in space.


FURTHER READING Jeff Bezos unveils his sweeping vision for humanity’s future in space

Building such a space economy and a spacefaring civilization will not happen overnight, though, and that's why Bezos views Blue Origin as a multi-generational effort. “Big things start small, and this is how it starts,” Bezos said Tuesday.

The company has a plan. It started small with the New Shepard system and learned how to reuse rockets. It is currently developing the much larger New Glenn rocket, which will essentially use the New Shepard design as its second stage. There are plans for even bigger rockets down the line, all to move more mass to and from planet Earth much more cheaply.

Yet this plan has unfolded very slowly, and Bezos has not pushed forward with the same determination displayed by his leadership of Amazon. Blue Origin remains very far from self-sufficiency. Bezos still must pump more than $1 billion into Blue Origin annually to keep the lights on. Even for the world’s richest person, this kind of financial backing does not seem sustainable.Advertisement

Making matters even worse for Bezos? He must compete with Elon Musk and SpaceX.

A rivalry that wasn’t

During the middle of the 2010s, after more than a decade of near silence, Blue Origin emerged from stealth mode with all appearances of becoming a formidable space company. It seemed probable that two titans of the tech industry, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, would now battle for supremacy in the space arena.

In late 2014, Blue Origin stunned the space industry by announcing that it had reached a deal to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, then the premiere launch company in the United States. United Launch Alliance selected Blue’s BE-4 engine for its new Vulcan rocket over an offering from Aerojet Rocketdyne, the blueblood propulsion company behind the majority of large rocket engines in US history.

About a year later, Blue Origin pulled off another feat by safely launching and landing the New Shepard rocket and capsule on its up-and-down suborbital mission. This marked the first time in history that anyone—country or company—had vertically launched a first-stage rocket into space and then landed it back on the ground.

The next month, in December 2015, SpaceX repeated this launch-and-landing feat with its orbital Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. From a technical standpoint, the Falcon 9 landing was much more significant, as it requires about 30 times more energy to boost a payload into orbit and complicated engineering to slow such a booster down and return it to the landing site. No matter: After the Falcon 9 flight, Jeff Bezos cheekily tweeted, “Welcome to the club” to Musk and SpaceX.

Musk was decidedly not amused, but this banter underscored the emerging rivalry—Bezos and Musk, billionaire versus billionaire, on a quest to build reusable rockets and remake the space industry. Back then, it all seemed so clear: The 21st-century space race would be run by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and it was going to be a hell of a thing to watch.

Only it hasn’t been. There has been no race. Since the end of 2015, Blue Origin has launched its suborbital New Shepard system just 15 more times, an average of fewer than three missions per year. Only this week did humans finally get on board for a launch. As for the BE-4 engine, after promising it would be ready for spaceflight in 2017, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a flight-ready version to United Launch Alliance more than four years later.


SpaceX, by contrast, has ascended. Since December 2015, the company has successfully flown more than 100 orbital missions. It has developed and flown the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, and may soon debut its still more titanic Starship launch system. With the Starlink Internet constellation, SpaceX now operates more satellites than any nation or company in the world. And in 2020, thanks to SpaceX, NASA broke its dependency on Russia for human spaceflight. NASA astronauts now ride to space in style inside the sleek Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Blue Origin has also lost out when it comes to large government contracts worth billions of dollars, something Bezos craves as he seeks to find some return on his massive investment in Blue Origin. In 2020, the Department of Defense said it would only allow United Launch Alliance and SpaceX to bid on national security launch contracts in the mid-2020s. Blue Origin protested and lost. Then, in April, NASA chose SpaceX alone for a prestigious Human Landing System. This came after Bezos showily unveiled his company’s “Blue Moon” lander in 2019. Blue Origin protested this, too, and a decision is expected in early August. It would come as a surprise if Blue Origin succeeds.

In short, a once-promising space race has become something of a damp squib. In late 2019, while reporting for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff, I asked Musk why he thought Blue Origin had fallen behind. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," Musk replied.

King of buildings

The road to Launch Site One travels north out of the dusty, time-worn town of Van Horn in West Texas. The two-lane road slaloms back and forth, twisting between weathered mountains like the rattlesnakes slithering through the nearby desert.

The mountains are green here, and Bezos owns a large chunk of them, with more than 300,000 acres under his control, including the Sierra Diablo range to the west of US Route 54. Where the mountains don’t climb hundreds of meters above the desert, a vast sea of scrubby flatlands spread into the distance, broken only by gullies. These are mostly dry, but they can fill quickly during nocturnal thunderstorms that brighten the night sky with brilliant lightning.


FURTHER READING  Behind the curtain: Ars goes inside Blue Origin’s secretive rocket factory

Here, on about 80,000 acres, Blue Origin has built a launch and landing site for New Shepard, as well as test facilities for its rocket engines. A drive around Launch Site One, with its crisp white buildings rising above the desert, underscores the fact that Bezos is unquestionably good at building space infrastructure. The company has always been impressive in this way.

Bezos founded Blue Origin near his Amazon headquarters in Seattle, and for the first few years, it served mostly as a think tank exploring different ways to get into space. But soon, Bezos and a small team of engineers settled on the New Shepard plan to demonstrate reuse. During the first half of the 2010s, Blue Origin looked to be moving rapidly, as it built BE-3 rocket engines and New Shepard boosters. Visitors remarked that the burgeoning factory in Kent, Washington, had the feel of SpaceX’s frenetic headquarters in California.

In recent years, Blue Origin has kept on building things. In 2017, Blue Origin said it would invest $200 million to build a BE-4 rocket engine factory in Northern Alabama. Later that year, the company said it had nearly completed construction of a massive manufacturing factory in Florida for its New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin has also expanded its factory in Washington.

All told, Blue Origin now has millions of square feet of facilities. Currently, it just has precious little rocket hardware. For all of its construction efforts, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a BE-4 engine to United Launch Alliance. And the massive New Glenn rocket, about which Bezos has been talking for a decade, remains at least a couple of years away from its first flight.


FURTHER READING  Increasingly, the ULA-Blue Origin marriage is an unhappy one

The industry has taken notice, with popular memes such as United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno repeatedly asking, “Jeff, where are my engines?” Others show the huge New Glenn factory in Florida, which appears to be mostly empty.

As Blue Origin has fallen behind SpaceX in recent years, morale has declined, according to multiple sources. Bezos pushed the company further from its roots in late 2017 by sidelining long-time president Rob Meyerson and hiring a traditional aerospace veteran, Bob Smith, to become chief executive. Coming from Honeywell, Smith instituted a more bureaucratic management style, and Blue Origin’s progress seemed to slow significantly. Whereas Bezos' debut flight on New Shepard could have occurred as early as 2019, it slipped by months and eventually years. Critics of Smith’s plodding management style started referring to the company as “Blue Honeywell.”Advertisement


The decline in morale at Blue Origin coincided with a period when Bezos was increasingly distracted by making visits to Hollywood for Amazon Prime video, the assassination of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for the Washington Post), a divorce from his wife MacKenzie, and more. He spent less time at the rocket company, and it suffered as a result.

The question is, now that Bezos has tasted spaceflight, will he become reinvigorated and pursue his ambitions with abandon?

“Losing to SpaceX cannot please him,” said Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound, a new book about Bezos and his retail empire. “What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing.”

However, Stone is not sure Bezos will take a strong hand at Blue Origin. Although Bezos seeded the company with principles, he also seeded dysfunction by installing a very different leader in Smith. Since 2017, Bezos has more or less let Smith run Blue Origin with freedom, and he may continue to do so. “It’s hard for me to see Bezos taking on a more prominent executive role at Blue Origin,” Stone said. 

Space needs both

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are about 20 years old now. Both companies were founded by brilliant men capable of being ruthless in their business practices. Both founders see humanity’s future among the stars. But so far, one company has prospered while another has dithered. The difference, I think, is that from the beginning, Elon Musk has been all-in on SpaceX. Even today, while Bezos is enjoying the billionaire life and planning voyages on his mega-yacht, Musk is living in a $50,000 house in rural South Texas to keep his Starship project on track.

What we cannot know is whether this spaceflight experience will change Bezos. Certainly, he seems to have come back from his space trip more concerned about climate change. Shortly after the flight, Bezos said of his priorities moving forward, “I’m going to split my time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund.” He has already committed $10 billion to his climate charity.

Much of the spaceflight community would appreciate a renewed focus on space by Bezos. There is a hunger for an alternative to Musk, for a true competitor that everyone envisioned Blue Origin would become back in 2015. Quite simply, Musk rubs some people the wrong way. He does not always play well with others. Often, SpaceX looks to grind its competitors into dust rather than find partnerships. Where the industry would like to see soufflés, Musk is happy to break eggs on the way to space—anything to get the job done. Which, to be fair, SpaceX does more than any other company in spaceflight

.
Enlarge / Elon Musk exits federal court on April 4, 2019 in New York City. He might be laughing at a Jeff Bezos meme.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images


NASA, the US military, and other industry companies would welcome Blue Origin with open arms if the company could only execute on its programs. Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA who has known both Musk and Bezos for more than a decade, says such a competition would be tremendously helpful.

"Throughout history, great rivalries in business, science, and technology have led to great advancements,” she told Ars. “Having two extremely wealthy individuals who have an interest and long-term commitment to developing a spacefaring civilization is likely to benefit us all.”

Garver cited Leonardo and Michelangelo, Edison and Tesla, and Gates and Jobs as historical examples of this dynamic at work, by which the power of two improved each other and the state of progress.

“Neither Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic appear to be much of a rival to SpaceX today, but the winner in the competition to expand the railroads and aviation weren't always obvious, either,” she said.
The verdict

If Bezos thinks about this or reflects on how Blue Origin has so far fallen short of SpaceX, he does not talk about it publicly. Two moments on Tuesday, after his historic spaceflight, suggest he may not do a whole lot about it regardless.

Two hours after Bezos and his fellow passengers landed, they climbed onto a stage near the launch pad to receive their “astronaut” wings. The event, billed as a “press conference,” instead saw Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell ask softball questions about the flight. The answers were interesting, and Bezos obviously took deep satisfaction from the event. At one point, he removed a necklace he had worn during the flight, got down from the stage, and put it around his mother’s neck. It seemed to be his way of telling his mom he had fulfilled his childhood dreams.

After all of that, Bezos allowed for just three actual press questions to be asked. Two came from TV networks and the other from Reuters. Only one of the questions got near the troubles at Blue Origin, asking about timelines for future rocket development. Bezos simply didn’t answer the question. He welcomes no public scrutiny of Blue Origin, and in doing so, he only invites more.

After the sham “press conference,” the four newly minted astronauts drove over to the landing site where the New Shepard rocket landed. It looked sooty and slightly worn in the midday sunshine, but it was no less brilliant for the wear-and-tear. New Shepard is a fine piece of engineering and a reasonable place for a launch company to start learning about spaceflight. The problem is that by beginning his company with a focus on space tourism and flying on the very first mission himself, Bezos only plays into the hands of critics. They might easily say Blue Origin is all about Bezos gratifying his spaceflight ambitions or about allowing a handful of wealthy tourists to reach a high-altitude vantage point for looking down on commoners.

Enlarge / Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (black hat) walks with Jeff Bezos after his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images



With New Shepard in the background, Bezos and the blue flight suit-clad astronauts posed for photographs. Near the end of the photo session, Bezos called out, “Hey Bob, come here. You should be in the photo, too.” At this invitation, a smiling Bob Smith emerged from a small group of onlookers and stood in the middle of the four people who had just gone into space. Cameras clicked.

This gesture by Bezos hardly seemed to be that of someone dissatisfied with the CEO of his rocket company.

After the photo opportunity, Bezos climbed behind the wheel of his Rivian truck and drove right onto the landing site, making a circle around the rocket, before roaring off into the hazy desert, bound for points unknown. Kind of like his rocket company.

EBAY EXECS TARGETED JOURNALISTS —

Lawsuit: eBay tried to “terrorize, stalk, and silence” couple that ran news site

Filing in bloody pig mask case says "morning shots of alcohol" were common at eBay.

JON BRODKIN - 7/21/2021, 1:30 PM

Enlarge / A bloody pig mask mailed to cyberstalking victims by then-eBay employees.

A former eBay security official who pleaded guilty for his role in a cyberstalking conspiracy has asked for leniency in sentencing while blaming his actions in part on a "drinking culture" at eBay that contributed to his alcoholism.

"eBay had a bar on campus that opened at 3:00 p.m., and drinking was part of the culture, with alcohol present throughout the office space where it was typical to take morning shots of alcohol with co-workers," a sentencing memorandum for 56-year-old defendant Philip Cooke said yesterday. It was filed in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

Cooke was senior manager of security operations for eBay's Global Security Team, making an annual salary of $185,000 when he played a role in the harassment of a couple that operated a news website. The harassment—in response to news coverage that eBay executives did not like—involved sending threatening messages and deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask to the couple's home in Natick, Massachusetts. Cooke was promoted by eBay to director of security operations and given a raise to $205,000 in June 2020, about 10 months after the cyberstalking campaign began and just before it became public.

Ex-CEO among defendants in suit against eBay

In addition to criminal charges, Cooke is one of the defendants in a lawsuit filed by the harassment victims today. Ina and David Steiner of Natick, who run news website EcommerceBytes, filed the complaint against eBay and the alleged perpetrators of the cyberstalking in the same US District Court. Defendants include eBay itself, former eBay CEO Devin Wenig; former eBay Chief Communications Officer Steven Wymer; and Progressive F.O.R.C.E Concepts (PFC), a security firm that employed Cooke as a contractor before he became a full-time eBay employee.

FURTHER READING  eBay execs sent roaches and “bloody pig mask” to harass journalists, feds say

"eBay... engaged in a coordinated effort to intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk and silence the Steiners, in order to stifle their reporting on eBay," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit said that Wenig and Wymer:

provided the other Defendants with carte blanche authority to terminate the reporting of the Steiners by whatever means necessary, with Defendant Wymer expressing "... I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes." Defendant Wymer promised the defendants he would "embrace managing any bad fallout" if the plan went south, further directing, "We need to STOP her." All of the horrific, vicious and sickening conduct that followed was committed by employees of eBay and PFC, while acting in the scope of their employment under the authority of and for the benefit of eBay and PFC.

Wenig and Wymer were not hit with criminal charges when other eBay employees were arrested and charged last year.

The Steiners' lawsuit said:

Starting with an online intimidation campaign, the defendants taunted Ina Steiner using a phony Twitter handle pretending to be an eBay seller, and directly threatened her to stop reporting on eBay. The online attacks continued to escalate into threatening and disturbing package deliveries, which included live spiders, cockroaches, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and a book entitled "Grief Diaries: Surviving Loss of a Spouse" sent directly to David Steiner. These messages and deliveries often were accompanied by ominous simultaneous Twitter messages such as "do I have your attention now, cunt?" Shockingly graphic and vulgar messages, such as "U are sick motha fuckers…and every one will kno! U fuckin cunt ass bitch!" paired with taunting emails and deliveries, including pornography and "Hustler: Barely Legal" magazines sent to the Steiner's neighbors' home in David Steiner's name, to defame the Steiners and attempt to disgrace them and tarnish their reputation within their community.

Some of the conspirators traveled from California to Massachusetts and, among other things, "menacingly stalked and tailed the Steiners in a black van and other rental vehicles, repeatedly circling the block, tracking their every move, and following David Steiner when he left the residence. The defendants even went as far as to attempt to break into the Steiner garage in order to install a GPS tracking device on their vehicle," the lawsuit said.

eBay issued a statement last year that said an "internal investigation found that, while Mr. Wenig's communications were inappropriate, there was no evidence that he knew in advance about or authorized the actions that were later directed toward the blogger and her husband."

eBay provided a statement to Ars today, saying, "The misconduct of these former employees was wrong, and we will do what is fair and appropriate to try to address what the Steiners went through. The events from 2019 should never have happened, and as eBay expressed to the Steiners, we are very sorry for what they endured. As noted by the US Attorney's Office when this matter first came to light, eBay cooperated fully with the government's investigation, noting that 'eBay was extremely cooperative with the investigation in helping state and federal authorities figure out what had happened and collect evidence of the crime.'"

eBay “culture” exacerbated alcohol problem

Cooke's sentencing memorandum quotes his wife as saying that a "drinking culture at eBay" exacerbated an alcohol abuse problem that got worse after Cooke retired from a career as a captain in the Santa Clara Police Department. Cooke went to work for Progressive F.O.R.C.E Concepts about a year after retiring from police work, and "while the job provided a place to go, a purpose, and new colleagues, it did not resolve his drinking problem." After taking a full-time job at eBay in April 2019, Cooke "continued to drink heavily, especially with his friends and colleagues." That was a few months before the cyberstalking campaign began.

"When he returned to eBay as an employee, Phil's drinking problem became even worse," his wife said in the memorandum. "I remember one time Phil didn't come home from work until around 4am the following day. When I asked him where he had been, he said he closed down a bar with his coworkers and slept in his car for a few hours until he felt safe to drive home. I knew Phil and his coworkers had a liquor cabinet at work, but what I didn't know until later was they were taking shots of alcohol in the morning."

Cooke's filing asked the court for a sentence of "home confinement for whatever period the Court believes is necessary, 12 months supervised release, a $200 special assessment, no restitution (as none has been requested), and no fine."

The filing went on:


As a result of this prosecution, Mr. Cooke has endured extensive punishment already... He lost a job he enjoyed, was devastated by the disappointment he caused his family, and was humiliated in his community—a community he honorably and faithfully served [as a police officer] for 30 years. He has accepted full responsibility for his misconduct, is very remorseful for his bad choices, and wants to do whatever it takes to put his life right. Since accepting responsibility, he has addressed his substance abuse issue, remained sober, and successfully trained to facilitate meetings in a substance abuse program in California for both other substance abusers and also for their friends and families.

The document downplays Cooke's role in the conspiracy, saying that he didn't travel to Massachusetts and that he warned fellow employees against some of the worst parts of the plan. The filing said:

While Mr. Cooke joined the plan to engage in a "white knight strategy" to send harassing and anonymous Twitter messages to soften up the victims for eBay's security team's assistance, and viewed at least some draft messages in connection with that scheme, he was not personally involved in two or more separate "instances" of harassing the same victim. His involvement is more fairly described as a single "course of conduct" or "a pattern of conduct comprised of 2 or more acts evidencing a continuity of purpose pattern of activity."

Guilty pleas by five ex-eBay employees

Cooke pleaded guilty in October 2020 to one count of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and one count of conspiracy to commit witness tampering. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and restitution.

Four other former eBay security employees pleaded guilty in October 2020. They are Brian Gilbert, former senior manager of special operations for eBay's Global Security Team; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay's Global Intelligence Center; Stephanie Popp, eBay's former senior manager of Global Intelligence; and Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who was an intelligence analyst in eBay Global Intelligence. Like Cooke, all four pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit cyberstalking and conspiracy to tamper with witnesses and are waiting to be sentenced.

While the harassment case involves only eBay, the sentencing memorandum noted a similar drinking culture at Facebook.

"I did not know about the drinking culture at eBay and Facebook," Cooke's wife said in a statement quoted in the memorandum. "First, he worked as a contractor for eBay which has a bar on campus where he would drink with his coworkers. They would often leave that bar and go over to a local bar/restaurant and continue drinking until late at night. Then he started working at Facebook where they allowed drinking during the day and would often have free alcohol available."

Crime and attempted cover-up

In June 2020, the US Department of Justice announced the cyberstalking charges, saying the harassment campaign "included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries—including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig mask—and conducting covert surveillance of the victims."

"It is alleged that in August 2019, after the newsletter published an article about litigation involving eBay, two members of eBay's executive leadership team sent or forwarded text messages suggesting that it was time to 'take down' the newsletter's editor," the DOJ announcement said at the time. Another message from one eBay executive to another allegedly said, "we are going to crush this lady," referring to Ina Steiner.

The executives were unnamed in court documents at the time but identified in news reports as Wenig and Wymer, with Wymer sending the "we are going to crush this lady" message. In another text, Wenig allegedly told Wymer to "take her down."

A Department of Justice release issued after Cooke's guilty plea explained his role in planning and trying to cover up the strange stalking campaign against the Steiners.

"As part of the second phase of the campaign, some of the defendants allegedly sent private Twitter messages and public tweets criticizing the newsletter's content and threatening to visit the victims in Natick," the DOJ said. Cooke and other eBay security employees "planned these messages to become increasingly disturbing, culminating with 'doxing' the victims (i.e., publishing their home address)," the DOJ said. Charging documents "alleged that the same group intended then to have Gilbert, a former Santa Clara police captain, approach the victims with an offer to help stop the harassment that the defendants were secretly causing, in an effort to promote good will towards eBay."

The DOJ also alleged that "Cooke and several of the other defendants discussed the possibility of presenting Natick Police with a false investigative lead to keep the police from discovering video evidence that could link some of the deliveries to eBay employees. As the police and eBay's lawyers continued to investigate, the defendants allegedly deleted digital evidence that showed their involvement, further obstructing what had by then become a federal investigation."Advertisement

“Involved in every aspect”

A Silicon Valley Voice article last year stated:

Although Cooke didn't do any of the dirty work himself, he's alleged to have been involved in every aspect of the conspiracy from the harassing tweets and messages directed at the victims, to generating ideas for a series of creatively revolting deliveries—including live cockroaches and pornography—to physically stalking the victims, to the attempted cover up in which the pair discussed using Santa Clara police officers.

In a text to Gilbert, Cooke seemed to approve details of the plan to mislead police investigators. "Copy all. Good plan and cover. Brian, important to be convincing so they don't start looking to find video of who purchased the gift cards," the text said, according to the Silicon Valley Voice article. Those gift cards were used to send the pig masks and other deliveries to the Natick couple. Cooke's text also advised finding "a friendly" contact in the local police department.
Cooke “warned” against parts of the plan

Cooke's sentencing memorandum claimed that "Cooke did not know or understand that he had any authority or responsibility whatsoever to 'approve' any of the messages that were sent to the victims," that he suggested changes to a message to "tone it down," and that he "warned the group that they should not proceed" with parts of the plan, such as publishing the victims' address.

In a meeting on August 6, 2019, Cooke "told the group that in California, the messages could not be threatening, and if the victims said 'stop,' the messages had to stop," the memorandum said. "When surveillance was discussed, Mr. Cooke told the group it was dangerous and that they should contact a Massachusetts private investigator and not undertake surveillance themselves." Cooke also warned them that the use of GPS tracking devices was "illegal in California and possibly illegal in Massachusetts and suggested contacting a Massachusetts private investigator to find out," the court document said.

Cooke left for a trip to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East on August 8, 2019.

"While overseas where he was traveling alone, Mr. Cooke drank heavily," the sentencing memorandum said. "On August 20, 2019, while in India, Mr. Cooke saw and responded to a draft Twitter message from Gilbert, to which he acquiesced with a 'thumbs up emoji' and later assented to a plan to use multiple accounts to send the message string with a 'copy all.'"

At this time, "Cooke was unaware that his coconspirators had attempted surveillance in Massachusetts," and he was not aware that colleagues "might have engaged in role play at the victims' house" or "directed creation of fake person-of-interest reports to conceal their activities," the memorandum said.

The memorandum added:


Mr. Cooke often found the information he did receive incredible, not believing that [Senior Director of Safety & Security James] Baugh would actually direct and that others participate in the activities described. Mr. Cooke regularly deleted messages from Baugh because so many of them were entirely inappropriate for the workplace and because he believed Baugh was "messing with him." In his few months at eBay, Mr. Cooke had received inappropriate and false messages from Baugh, and he had difficulty distinguishing which ones were serious.

Baugh is one of the defendants in the case filed by the Steiners and is facing criminal charges.

Steiners suffered “permanent psychological trauma”

The Steiners' lawsuit said the couple now suffers from "permanent psychological trauma and damage" because of the cyberstalking. The complaint asked for financial damages, saying that because of "the threats and intimidation and the wire and mail fraud, the Steiners feared for their lives and the conspiracy has hampered their ability to continue at the same level, causing them significant economic damage."

The Steiners' lawsuit also says their reputation was damaged. "The various online accounts created by defendants in order to send anonymous tweets and direct Twitter messages left readers and advertisers with the impression that plaintiffs' news coverage of eBay was biased and unfair," the lawsuit said. "Thus, plaintiffs' reputation as objective and impartial journalists and editors and the standing of EcommerceBytes as an unbiased trade publication, suffered as a direct result of defendants' acts."

GET A BLACKBERRY ITS ENCRYPTED

An explosive spyware report shows limits of iOS, Android security

Amnesty International sheds alarming light on an NSO Group surveillance tool.

LILY HAY NEWMAN, WIRED.COM - 7/24/2021

Enlarge / A report this week indicates that the problem of high-caliber spyware is far more widespread than previously feared.
Pau Barrena | Getty Images


The shadowy world of private spyware has long caused alarm in cybersecurity circles, as authoritarian governments have repeatedly been caught targeting the smartphones of activists, journalists, and political rivals with malware purchased from unscrupulous brokers. The surveillance tools these companies provide frequently target iOS and Android, which have seemingly been unable to keep up with the threat. But a new report suggests the scale of the problem is far greater than feared—and has placed added pressure on mobile tech makers, particularly Apple, from security researchers seeking remedies.

This week, an international group of researchers and journalists from Amnesty International, Forbidden Stories, and more than a dozen other organizations published forensic evidence that a number of governments worldwide—including Hungary, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—may be customers of the notorious Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group. The researchers studied a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers associated with activists, journalists, executives, and politicians who were all potential surveillance targets. They also looked specifically at 37 devices infected with, or targeted by, NSO's invasive Pegasus spyware. They even created a tool so you can check whether your iPhone has been compromised.

NSO Group called the research “false allegations by a consortium of media outlets” in a strongly worded denial on Tuesday. An NSO Group spokesperson said, "The list is not a list of Pegasus targets or potential targets. The numbers in the list are not related to NSO Group in any way. Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or potential target is erroneous and false.” On Wednesday, NSO Group said it would no longer respond to media inquiries.

NSO Group isn’t the only spyware vendor out there, but it has the highest profile. WhatsApp sued the company in 2019 over what it claims were attacks on over a thousand of its users. And Apple’s BlastDoor feature, introduced in iOS 14 earlier this year, was an attempt to cut off “zero-click exploits,” attacks that don't require any taps or downloads from victims. The protection appears not to have worked as well as intended; the company released a patch for iOS to address the latest round of alleged NSO Group hacking on Tuesday.

In the face of the report, many security researchers say that both Apple and Google can and should do more to protect their users against these sophisticated surveillance tools

“It definitely shows challenges in general with mobile device security and investigative capabilities these days," says independent researcher Cedric Owens. “I also think seeing both Android and iOS zero-click infections by NSO shows that motivated and resourced attackers can still be successful despite the amount of control Apple applies to its products and ecosystem

Tensions have long simmered between Apple and the security community over limits on researchers’ ability to conduct forensic investigations on iOS devices and deploy monitoring tools. More access to the operating system would potentially help catch more attacks in real time, allowing researchers to gain a deeper understanding of how those attacks were constructed in the first place. For now, security researchers rely on a small set of indicators within iOS, plus the occasional jailbreak. And while Android is more open by design, it also places limits on what’s known as “observability.” Effectively combating high-caliber spyware like Pegasus, some researchers say, would require things like access to read a device's filesystem, the ability to examine which processes are running, access to system logs, and other telemetry.

A lot of criticism has centered on Apple in this regard, because the company has historically offered stronger security protections for its users than the fragmented Android ecosystem.

“The truth is that we are holding Apple to a higher standard precisely because they're doing so much better,” says SentinelOne principal threat researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade. “Android is a free-for-all. I don't think anyone expects the security of Android to improve to a point where all we have to worry about are targeted attacks with zero-day exploits.”

In fact, the Amnesty International researchers say they actually had an easier time finding and investigating indicators of compromise on Apple devices targeted with Pegasus malware than on those running stock Android.

“In Amnesty International’s experience there are significantly more forensic traces accessible to investigators on Apple iOS devices than on stock Android devices, therefore our methodology is focused on the former," the group wrote in a lengthy technical analysis of its findings on Pegasus. “As a result, most recent cases of confirmed Pegasus infections have involved iPhones.”

Some of the focus on Apple also stems from the company’s own emphasis on privacy and security in its product design and marketing.

“Apple is trying, but the problem is they aren't trying as hard as their reputation would imply,” says Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green.

Even with its more open approach, though, Google faces similar criticisms about the visibility security researchers can get into its mobile operating system.

“Android and iOS have different types of logs. It's really hard to compare them,” says Zuk Avraham, CEO of the analysis group ZecOps and a longtime advocate of access to mobile system information. “Each one has an advantage, but they are both equally not sufficient and enable threat actors to hide.”

Apple and Google both appear hesitant to reveal more of the digital forensic sausage-making, though. And while most independent security researchers advocate for the shift, some also acknowledge that increased access to system telemetry would aid bad actors as well.

"While we understand that persistent logs would be more helpful for forensic uses such as the ones described by Amnesty International’s researchers, they also would be helpful to attackers,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED. “We continually balance these different needs.”

Ivan Krstić, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in a statement that “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place. For over a decade, Apple has led the industry in security innovation and, as a result, security researchers agree the iPhone is the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”

The trick is to strike the right balance between offering more system indicators without inadvertently making attackers’ jobs too much easier. “There is a lot that Apple could be doing in a very safe way to allow observation and imaging of iOS devices in order to catch this type of bad behavior, yet that does not seem to be treated as a priority,” says iOS security researcher Will Strafach. “I am sure they have fair policy reasons for this, but it’s something I don’t agree with and would love to see changes in this thinking.”

Thomas Reed, director of Mac and mobile platforms at the antivirus maker Malwarebytes, says he agrees that more insight into iOS would benefit user defenses. But he adds that allowing special, trusted monitoring software would come with real risks. He points out that there are already suspicious and potentially unwanted programs on macOS that antivirus can't fully remove because the operating system endows them with this special type of system trust, potentially in error. The same problem of rogue system analysis tools would almost inevitably crop up on iOS as well.

“We also see nation-state malware all the time on desktop systems that gets discovered after several years of undetected deployment," Reed adds. “And that's on systems where there are already many different security solutions available. Many eyes looking for this malware is better than few. I just worry about what we’d have to trade for that visibility."

The Pegasus Project, as the consortium of researchers call the new findings, underscore the reality that Apple and Google are unlikely to solve the threat posed by private spyware vendors alone. The scale and reach of the potential Pegasus targeting indicates that a global ban on private spyware may be necessary.

“A moratorium on the trade in intrusion software is the bare minimum for a credible response—mere triage,” NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted on Tuesday in reaction to the Pegasus Project findings. “Anything less and the problem gets worse.”

On Monday, Amazon Web Services took its own step by shutting down cloud infrastructure linked to NSO.

Regardless of what happens to NSO Group in particular, or the private surveillance market in general, user devices are still ultimately where clandestine targeted attacks from any source will play out. Even if Google and Apple can’t be expected to solve the problem themselves, they need to keep working on a better way forward.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.