Snowden warns today's surveillance technology makes 2013 look like 'child's play'

Julia Conley, Common Dreams
June 8, 2023

Edward Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence agent, was granted political asylum by Russia after he flew in from Hong Kong in June 2013 (AFP Photo/The Guardian)

With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.

"If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today," Snowden told The Guardian, "2013 seems like child's play."

Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.

As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products' vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.

Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.

"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data."

Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries

Protecting the public from surveillance "is an ongoing process," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children's lives and beyond."

In 2013, Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.

"Technology has grown to be enormously influential," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."

Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden's revelations, EFF noted that some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the U.S. government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was "a pipe dream in 2013";
The end of the NSA's bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.

The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans' communications, and "to take privacy seriously," particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.

"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data... or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community's overreaches," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. "It's why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent."

"It's been 10 years since the Snowden revelations," they added, "and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly."

VESTIGIAL CONFEDERATE STATE

Slavery as punishment for crimes is on the chopping block in Ohio

David McAfee
June 8, 2023

Ohio Chamber of Commerce / YouTube screen grab

The Ohio Constitution currently allows slavery when it's used "for the punishment of crime," but that may not be the case for long, according to a CNN report.

Rep. Dontavius Jarrells, a Democrat, reportedly teamed up with Republican Rep. Phil Plummer to introduce an amendment to the state constitution that would remove slavery and involuntary servitude entirely from the document. The proposed change was referred to the Constitutional Resolutions Committee on Wednesday, according to CNN.

"Lawmakers are proposing the language to change to, 'There shall never be slavery in this state; nor involuntary servitude,'" according to the report.

It continues:

"Jarrells told CNN that he wants to change 'archaic and outdated language.' He added that many people he has spoken to about the bill are shocked because they don’t know such language exists in the state Constitution."

“I want my children, when they grow up, to live in a state where the vestiges of slavery no longer exist,” Jarrells said, according to the CNN piece.

According to Jarrells, the proposal must be passed by the House and the Senate before it would be put on the general election ballot. At that point, he told CNN, it would require a 50% majority vote plus one to pass.

"While other lawmakers have tried to amend this clause before, this is the first time a measure has bipartisan support," CNN reported. "In 2016, former Ohio State Rep. Alicia Reece introduced a bill to change the language and Rep. Cecil Thomas introduced another joint resolution in 2020 to remove the exception for slavery and involuntary servitude from the Constitution."

Oceans warmer last month than any May on record
Agence France-Presse
June 7, 2023

Patrick Meinhardt / AFP/File

Sea temperatures at a depth of about 10 metres were a quarter of a degree Celsius higher than ice-free oceans in May averaged across 1991 to 2020, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Year-round, long-term trends have added 0.6C to the ocean's surface waters in 40 years, said C3S deputy director Samantha Burgess, noting that April had also seen a new record for heat.

Temperatures over the ocean could be further boosted in coming months "as we are seeing the El Nino signal continuing to emerge in the equatorial Pacific," she said in a statement, referring to a periodic, natural shift in ocean winds that enhances warming globally.

Above water and over land, meanwhile, Earth's surface temperature last month tied as the second hottest for May, according to C3S.

The Copernicus finding are based on computer-generated models that draw on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations worldwide.

Oceans, which cover 70 percent of Earth's surface, have kept the planet livable as global warming caused by human activity -- mainly the burning of fossil fuels -- has accelerated.

The surface of the planet is, on average, 1.2C hotter than pre-industrial levels, a level which has already unleashed devastating climate impacts.

'Out of control'

Oceans absorb a quarter of the CO2 we spew into the atmosphere, and 90 percent of the excess heat generated by climate change.

But at a terrible price.

Widespread marine heatwaves are decimating coral reefs and the ecosystems that depend on them, including more than half-a-billion people.

The accelerated disintegration from below of giant ice sheets could lift oceans by a dozen meters, and ocean acidification is disrupting life cycles and food chains from the tropics to the poles.

Moreover, oceans -- along with forests and soil, which soak up an even larger percentage of human-generated greenhouse gases -- are showing signs of battle fatigue, and their capacity to soak up CO2 could diminish.

Copernicus also reported that temperatures in several parts of the world were higher than normal, including Canada, where wildfires over the last several weeks have so far decimated more than three million hectares (8 million acres).

There are 413 wildfires burning across the country from Pacific to Atlantic, including 249 deemed "out of control".

Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said there's a 60 percent chance that an El Nino will form before the end of July, and an 80 percent change by the end of November.

Most of the warmest years on record have occurred during El Ninos, and scientists are concerned that this summer and next could see record temperatures on land and in the sea.

In Antarctica, meanwhile, sea ice extent reached a monthly record low for the third time this year, with satellite data showing it was 17 percent below average in May.

© 2023 AFP

World warming at record 0.2C per decade, top scientists warn

Agence France-Presse
June 8, 2023

This NASA illustrative image obtained on March 25, 2020 shows NASA's new three-dimensional portrait of methane, the world's second-largest contributor to greenhouse warming, as it arises from a diversity of sources on the ground and how it moves through the atmosphere. © Handout, AFP

Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and diminishing air pollution have caused an unparalleled acceleration in global warming, 50 top scientists warned Thursday in a sweeping climate science update.

From 2013 to 2022, "human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade," they reported in a peer-reviewed study aimed at policymakers.

Average annual emissions over the same period hit an all-time high of 54 billion tonnes of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases -- about 1,700 tonnes every second.

World leaders will be confronted with the new data at the critical COP28 climate summit later this year in Dubai, where a "Global Stocktake" at the UN talks will assess progress toward the 2015 Paris Agreement's temperature goals.

The findings would appear to close the door on capping global warming under the Paris treaty's more ambitious 1.5C target, long identified as a guard rail for a relatively climate-safe world, albeit one still roiled by severe impacts.

"Even though we are not yet at 1.5C warming, the carbon budget" -- the amount of greenhouse gases humanity can emit without exceeding that limit -- "will likely be exhausted in only a few years," said lead author Piers Forster, a physics professor at the University of Leeds.

That budget has shrunk by half since the UN's climate science advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), gathered data for its most recent benchmark report in 2021, according to the Forster and colleagues, many of whom were core IPCC contributors.

Unintended consequences

To have even a coin-toss chance of staying under the 1.5C threshold, emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other drivers of warming generated mostly by burning fossil fuels must not exceed 250 billion tonnes (Gt), they reported.

Bettering the odds to two-thirds or four-fifths would reduce that carbon allowance to only 150 Gt and 100 Gt, respectively -- a two- or three-year lifeline at the current rate of emissions.

Keeping the Paris temperature targets in play would require slashing CO2 pollution at least 40 percent by 2030, and eliminating it entirely by mid-century, the IPCC has calculated.

Ironically, one of the big climate success stories of the last decade has inadvertently hastened the pace of global warming, the new data reveal.

A gradual drop in the use of coal -- significantly more carbon intensive than oil or gas -- to produce power has slowed the increase in carbon emissions.

But it has also reduced the air pollution that shields Earth from the full force of the Sun's rays.

Particle pollution from all sources dampens warming by about half-a-degree Celsius, which means -- at least in the short term -- more of that heat will reach the planet's surface as the air becomes cleaner.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth System Science Data, the new study is the first in a series of periodic assessments that will help fill the gaps between IPCC reports, released on average every six years since 1988.

Deadly heat

"An annual update of key indicators of global change is critical in helping the international community and countries to keep the urgency of addressing the climate change crisis at the top of the agenda," said co-author and scientist Maisa Rojas Corradi, who is also the environment minister of Chile.

Co-author Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a co-chair of the 2021 IPCC report, said the new data should be a "wake-up call" ahead of the COP28 summit, even if there is evidence that the increase in greenhouse gases has slowed.

"The pace and scale of climate action is not sufficient to limit the escalation of climate related risks," she said.

Researchers also reported a startling rise in temperature increases over land areas -- excluding oceans -- since 2000.

"Land average annual maximum temperatures have warmed by more than half a degree Celsius in the last ten years (1.72C above preindustrial conditions) compared to the first decade of the millennium (1.22C)," the study reported.

Longer and more intense heat waves will pose a life-and-death threat in the coming decades across large swathes of South and Southeast Asia, along with areas straddling the equator in Africa and Latin America, recent research has shown.

(AFP)

YouTube demonetizes Candace Owens’ anti-trans videos, citing hateful conduct

2023/06/08

Candace Owens speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference at The Rosen Shingle Creek on Feb. 25, 2022, in Orlando, Florida. - Joe Raedle/Getty Images North America/TNS

YouTube announced it has demonetized multiple videos on the channel of conservative commentator Candace Owens, citing violations of its policies concerning hateful and derogatory content.

The company specified these violations stem from instances of misgendering or deadnaming, although those actions are not stated publicly as part of their policy, reports NBC News.

In a statement Monday, Owens said YouTube extended “an option to delete every video that I’ve ever done pertaining to gender, in which I have accurately gendered someone.” She referred to “accurately gendering” as using the pronouns assigned at birth instead of those preferred by trans people.

In a podcast episode titled “I Have An Announcement to Make,” Owens shared YouTube’s decision to classify her misgendering remarks as “hateful conduct.”

The company blocked ads on “several videos on Candace Owen’s channel for violating our monetization policies, including those against hateful and derogatory content,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said.

According to the company’sguidelines on hateful content, YouTube is allowed to restrict ads from running on content which “promotes discrimination, disparages, or humiliates an individual or group of people.”

Aciman said the policy could lead to action against content that “may include deliberate deadnaming or misgendering of transgender individuals,” which is considered an attack on the LGBTQ+ community.

The decision seems to be a shift for the company, which reportedly stated in 2022 that it does not consider purposeful misgendering as a violation of its rules, according to Axios.

Conservatives like Owens have commonly used deliberate misgendering as way to harass transgender people.

The action stands at the center of a continuing cultural debate online of what constitutes free speech versus hate speech.

© New York Daily News

Hipster couple who run 'pagan home decor' shop exposed as Putin agents

Matthew Chapman
June 8, 2023

A pair of struggling artists known for their outspoken "anti-war" views have been exposed as influence agents of the Kremlin who are trying to destabilize the Eastern European country of Moldova to help Vladimir Putin expand his Ukraine assault, reported The Daily Beast on Thursday.

"The couple, 37-year-old Aleksey Losev and 33-year-old Anna Travnikova, were sanctioned by the U.S. government on Tuesday for their role in 'the government of the Russian Federation’s destabilization campaign and continued malign influence campaigns in Moldova,' along with five other Russian nationals, a press release from the U.S. Treasury’s office said," reported Noor Ibrahim.

Losev and Travnikova, who run a workshop called Julleuchter by Perko which “offers exclusive pagan home decor and specializes in Yule lanterns,” have been active on social media appearing to condemn the war in Ukraine. “In all my life I have not met a single person who would want war. And despite this, wars in our world continue to occur with enviable regularity. I feel pain and powerlessness,” wrote Losev in one post.

But at some point, the couple pivoted to a secret operation to try to expand the war across Eastern Europe, the report alleged.

"According to the announcement, the freshly sanctioned Russians operated as malign influence agents in a 'large global information operation connected to the Russian Federation that targets Ukraine, countries bordering Ukraine including Moldova, Balkan countries, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States,'" said the report. "They are accused of 'provoking, training, and overseeing' anti-government activities in Moldova while maintaining ties to Russian intelligence services."

Maia Sandu, the pro-NATO president of Moldova, has long warned that there is a covert Russian effort to engineer a coup in the country; Transnistria, a largely Russian-speaking region of the country, has long had a separatist movement, but the region has been drifting closer to Western alignment and Russian forces have been trying to counteract this shift.

All of this comes as the Russian invasion in Ukraine, which has lasted over a year, lain waste to cities, and killed tens of thousands of people, is now facing a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Commentary: Do we face nuclear confrontation? The erosion of agreements has heightened the risk

2023/06/08

Drew Angerer/Getty Images North America/TNS

You may not know it from watching cable news, going grocery shopping or doing any other mundane chore of daily life, but the world is at an increased risk of nuclear confrontation. That’s at least the assessment of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who delivered a speech at the Arms Control Association last week about a multidecade arms control structure that is gradually losing its sturdiness.

The system of nuclear agreements and risk-reduction measures spurred on by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis “has begun to erode,” Sullivan told the group. His boss, President Joe Biden, was even more dramatic in October when he told a Democratic Party fundraiser that the chances of nuclear Armageddon were at their highest since that high-stakes gambit six decades earlier when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stared each other down for 13 long days in October.

While discussions about nuclear proliferation are often subject to hysteria, troubling developments have led Biden and Sullivan to these worrisome conclusions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the process of deploying tactical nuclear warheads, Iskander-M missiles and nuclear-capable Su-25 aircraft to his ally Belarus. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is pressing forward with his own nuclear development plans, including but not limited to the miniaturization of nuclear warheads, the testing of military reconnaissance satellites and the production of solid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, China’s nuclear modernization remains in full swing, with the Pentagon estimating that Beijing’s nuclear arsenal could reach 1,500 warheads by 2035 if its current pace is maintained. And let’s not forget that the New START accord, the last major nuclear agreement between Washington and Moscow, is no longer operable; last week, the U.S. responded to Russia’s February withdrawal from the deal by limiting the usual information it sends to the Russians.

All of this sounds frightening to those who study nuclear weapons for a living. It’s clearly frightening to the Biden administration as well; otherwise, a senior U.S. security official wouldn’t have spent part of his day delivering an address on the topic.

Fortunately, the White House has a plan to deal with all of this. Unfortunately, the plan has very poor odds of success.

According to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Washington’s strategy relies on two planks: modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons apparatus to ensure that deterrence holds and exploring new nuclear transparency and risk-reduction measures to manage or, better yet, downgrade nuclear rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries.

“Mutual, verifiable nuclear arms control offers the most effective, durable and responsible path to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and prevent their use,” the strategy states. Sullivan reiterated those points last week, reminding everyone in the room that the U.S. is willing to get back to the table with Russia on developing a new arms control framework and enter nuclear talks with China without preconditions.

It takes more than one party for diplomacy to work, however. And as sober-minded as the Biden administration wants to be with one of the most important subjects on the planet, it’s largely talking to itself. Russia, China and North Korea are at best uninterested in pursuing a nuclear dialogue with the U.S.

The three countries all have their own reasons for staying away from the negotiating table.

For China, it’s partly a matter of basic arithmetic. From where Beijing sits, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to enter into bilateral nuclear talks with a country whose nuclear arsenal is nearly 13 times the size of its own. The U.S. has more than 5,200 nuclear warheads in its inventory to China’s 410, according to a Federation of American Scientists assessment.

The Chinese are already at a massive disadvantage numerically, which means any mutual weapons reductions wouldn’t alter the overall picture for the country. It should therefore be no surprise why Beijing would dismiss Washington’s offer to talk. Sadly, there is unlikely to be any U.S.-China nuclear reduction negotiations unless one of two things occurs: Washington drops to Beijing’s level or Beijing rises to Washington’s.

For Russia, the situation is different. Unlike China, Russia is largely at parity with the U.S. — in fact, Russia’s nuclear arsenal is larger than America’s. Yet because U.S.-Russia relations are so acrimonious today, principally over the war in Ukraine, it is almost unfathomable to envision Putin greenlighting serious, substantive nuclear talks with the U.S., Ukraine’s biggest military supplier. Whereas Washington and Moscow have historically separated strategic stability from other issues of dispute, this no longer appears to be the case.

The Russians are currently using the prospect of nuclear arms talks as a way to leverage concrete changes to U.S. foreign policy. This includes reentering arms control agreements, such as New START, that have long been in effect. As Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said over the weekend, Moscow will return to New START only if the U.S. abandons what he called “its fundamentally hostile policy toward Russia.”

As far as North Korea is concerned, what is there to discuss? A nuclear deterrent is the ultimate insurance policy for an internationally isolated state that shares a heavily militarized border with a neighbor, South Korea, whose military is more sophisticated than its own and that considers the world’s predominant superpower its main enemy. North Korea isn’t any more likely to abandon its nuclear weapons program than the U.S. is. No amount of talk about denuclearization from State Department officials is going to change that basic dynamic.

We all like to envision a world without nuclear weapons. Reality, however, has a habit of crushing hopes and dreams.

____

ABOUT THE WRITER

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

Anger as pre-historic stones destroyed for French DIY store

Agence France-Presse
June 8, 2023, 

The fields of stone megaliths in Carnac, northwest France, are a highly protected prehistoric treasure

© FRED TANNEAU / AFP

Around 40 standing stones thought to have been erected by prehistoric humans 7,000 years ago have been destroyed near a famed archaeological site in northwest France to make way for a DIY store, an angry local historian has revealed.

The stones in Carnac were between 50-100 centimeters (20-40 inches) high and stood close to the main highly protected areas of one of Europe's largest and most mysterious pre-historic tourist attractions.

"The site has been destroyed," local archaeologist Christian Obeltz told AFP on Wednesday, having revealed the clearance of the land in the Ouest-France newspaper.

He believes 39 standing stones -- known as menhirs -- have been lost, estimating their age to be around 7,000 years based on carbon dating conducted on stones nearby in 2010.

The land was granted a building permit from the local mayor's office in August last year and DIY chain Mr. Bricolage is currently building a new store there.

Mayor Olivier Lepick told AFP that he had "followed the law" and pointed to the "low archaeological value" of objects found during checks before the construction process began.

The land was not situated in a protected area and had been earmarked for commercial use, he added.

Carnac is famed for its vast fields of stone megaliths which stand in long lines close to the Atlantic coast in the windswept Brittany region.

There are around 3,000 of them on the two main protected areas which extend over more than six kilometers (four miles).

The stones are thought to have had a sacred and funereal function, although various theories exist.

The Regional Office of Cultural Affairs (Drac) for Brittany, which is responsible for ensuring the law protecting cultural monuments is respected, played down the importance of the losses.

"Given the uncertain and in any case non-major character of the remains, as revealed by checks, damage to a site of archaeological value has not been established," it said in a statement on Wednesday.

But local archaeologist Obeltz believes local authorities failed to properly investigate.

"There weren't archaeological excavations in order to know if the stones were menhirs or not," he said.

"We're witnessing a series of failings. The state no longer protects our fellow citizens or our heritage. Appalling," far-right leader Marine Le Pen said on Twitter.

When contacted, the Mr. Bricolage group said it "sincerely regretted the situation" but pointed to authorizations for its store granted last year.

200,000 gallons of sewage quietly leaked in the Florida Keys — some during a hurricane

2023/06/08

In late September, as Hurricane Ian brushed the Florida Keys on its way to hitting the state’s southwestern Gulf coast, nearly 200,000 gallons of raw sewage from the island chain’s billion-dollar wastewater treatment system — not even 10 years old — leaked into the porous ground and nearshore waters.

The “unauthorized discharges” weren’t disclosed to the public or the five-member board that oversees the wastewater utility. The leaks were revealed in two February “warning letters” issued by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

The letters to the utility — the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority — were obtained by the Miami Herald/FLKeysNews.com this week. A month ago, the Herald obtained documents revealing that the state environmental agency flagged the Keys utility in January 2022 because the Lower Keys portion of the centralized wastewater treatment system leaked more than 90,000 gallons of sewage between June 2020 and February 2021.

The Miami Herald also obtained a memo from April 2023 written by the utility’s engineering chief revealing that repairs to parts of the system on Cudjoe, Ramrod, Sugarloaf and Big Coppitt Keys are estimated to cost consumers more than $16 million.

Greg Veliz, executive director of the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority, said the problems with the Lower Keys portion of the system pre-date his tenure leading the utility, which began about two years ago. The issues, he said, are due to flaws in the way the system was constructed in 2017.

“Some of the stuff didn’t get done right, and we’re correcting that,” Veliz told the Miami Herald/FLKeysNews.com this week.

Veliz added that the Keys utility found and reported the leaks to the state.

“For the record, all of these issues were self-reported and we are in constant contact with [Florida Department of Environmental Protection] to ensure that we are moving toward eventual compliance,” he said. “We are currently on schedule for all remediation tasks set in our consent orders.”

Cara Higgins, the only one of the five Aqueduct Authority board members to respond to repeated requests for comment on the issues with the system, said she and her colleagues were “not made aware of the specifics of the spill.”

However, she said repairs and improvements to the system are an ongoing process.

“We have been told by staff that, along with occasional mechanical issues, our climate, heavy rainfall and king tides are to blame for a majority of the problems,” Higgins said in an email.

Sewage in the Keys is transported via a series of pipes and pump stations to centralized locations on Cudjoe and Big Coppitt. Once there, it is treated to remove harmful pathogens and other waste, and the remaining water is injected into a deep well.
‘Not toilet-to-street’

Veliz, the utility’s executive director, said that the system in Cudjoe Key, the portion responsible for the majority of the leaks, was designed to handle 500,000 gallons of water a day. During heavy storms, however, a deluge of rain can force up to three million gallons of water into the system.

“We’re not prepared to hold that,” he said. He added that most of the water that overflows from the system is rain, not pure sewage.

“It’s not toilet-to-street,” Veliz said. “Two-thirds of that is rainwater.”

The majority of the leaks included in the state’s Feb. 7, 2023, warning letter occurred at the Cudjoe Key Wastewater Treatment Plant, about 23 miles northeast of Key West. There were five “unauthorized discharges or unpermitted sanitary sewage overflows,” according to the letter:

▪ The largest was 126,000 gallons that leaked on Sept. 29.

▪ The second-largest leak during that window of time from the Cudjoe plant was 24,600 gallons on Sept. 27, wrote Jason Andreotta, director of FDEP’s southeast district.

▪ There were also six “unauthorized discharges” from the system that were not related to Hurricane Ian between October and January, including a large leak of 63,604 gallons on Oct. 7, Andreotta said.

It was not immediately clear where the sewage water ended up. Jon Moore, spokesman for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, said Wednesday that he was working to gather that information.

The FDEP also sent a warning letter to Keys utility on Feb. 7 about more than 33,000 gallons that discharged in a total of three leaks during Hurricane Ian, as well as more than 1,850 gallons from two leaks not related to the hurricane in October and January.

Veliz said the immediate fixes the utility is working on includes replacing manhole covers and sealing rings and exporting capacity from the Big Coppitt plant, most of which he said comes from the Navy base, to the city of Key West.

Much of that work has been done, Veliz said, but it’s not immediately clear how effective it’s been.

“Unfortunately, it’s going to take another heavy rain to see it if’s working,” Veliz said.
Aging water pipe infrastructure

The Aqueduct Authority’s sewer woes are compounded by the revelation earlier this year that the 40-plus-year-old freshwater underground pipe system is in disrepair and in need of replacing.

That problem became evident in March when three water pipe breaks in a week threatened to cut off the fresh water supply the island chain receives from Florida City on the mainland.

The cost to completely replace all the pipes exceeds $1 billion, and Veliz said the utility doesn’t have that money on hand.

For now, the utility is in the process of a $42 million project in the Upper Keys Village of Islamorada to replace five miles of pipe. The project began in April and is expected to be completed in early 2025, according to the Aqueduct Authority. It’s being funded with with $35 million in grants and $7 million in low-interest loans, the utility said in a statement.
Already under investigation

The Florida environment department informed the Keys authority in May that it was investigating the utility for not keeping up with the aging freshwater infrastructure. In a May 5 letter, Andreotta, the same state official who wrote the warning letters over the sewer leaks, said the Keys utility “failed to maintain its system in good operating condition so as to function as intended, and that the piping infrastructure is “a very deteriorating water system that has not undergone assessment until recent years.”

Andreotta added a reverse osmosis desalinization plant on Stock Island in the Lower Keys, which augments the fresh water supply that comes from the mainland in Florida City, is also deteriorating.

Veliz said that he and other utility officials are negotiating with the state to resolve all of the issues. He said part of coming into compliance includes the construction of another reverse osmosis plant, which he said is 80% complete. He said the utility has about $115 million of projects underway.

“No one can say that right now,” Veliz said. “To say we’re not looking to improve our infrastructure is not exactly true.”

© Miami Herald

Multifunctional self-healing liquid metal hydrogel developed for human-computer interaction

Peer-Reviewed Publication

HEFEI INSTITUTES OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 

IMAGE: SCHEMATIC STRUCTURE AND APPLICATION OF THE LIQUID METAL HYDROGEL. view more 

CREDIT: LI XIAOFEI

Recently, researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Prof. TIAN Xingyou and Prof. ZHANG Xian, along with associate Prof. YANG Yanyu from the College of Materials Science and Engineering at Zhengzhou University, used gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) to initiate the polymerization and serve as flexible fillers to construct liquid metal/polyvinyl alcohol(PVA)/P(AAm-co-SMA) double network hydrogel.

"The resulting material was super-stretchable and self-healing," said LI Xiaofei, first author of the paper, "it will promote the research and practical application of hydrogels and liquid metal in intelligent devices and military fields."

The study was published in Materials Horizons.

Most conductive hydrogels suffer from subpar mechanical qualities and lack desirable self-recovery and self-healing abilities, severely limiting hydrogels' potential uses. Liquid metals like gallium indium alloy (EGaIn) can tougen polymers by conforming to their changing shapes. Also, gallium (Ga) in EGaIn can initiate vinyl monomer's free radical polymerization.

In this research, the team built a liquid metal/PVA/P(AAm-co-SMA) double network hydrogel (LM hydrogel) with EGaIn serving as both the polymerization initiator and the flexible fillers.

The PVA network used PVA microcrystals and coordination interaction of Ga3+ and PVA as cross-links, while the P(AAm-co-SMA) network used hydrophobic association and the EGaIn microspheres. The LM hydrogel was endowed with excellent super-stretchability (2000%), toughness (3.00 MJ/m3), notch resistance, and self-healing property (> 99% at 25 °C after 24 h) due to the multiple physical cross-links and the synergistic effect of the rigid PVA microcrystal network and the ductile P(AAm-co-SMA) hydrophobic network.

"The sensors developed for it can be used in health monitoring and motion identification through human-computer interaction," said LI Xiaofei, "thanks to the LM hydrogel's sensitive strain sensing capability."

As a result of EGaIn's low infrared emissivity and remarkable photothermal, LM hydrogel shows considerable promise in infrared camouflage.

---

JOURNAL

Materials Horizons