A war on ‘domestic terrorism’ would be a disaster for US minorities



WAQAS MIRZA
11 JAN 2021

In the aftermath of the Capitol Hill riot, empowering the national security state to wage a war on ‘domestic terror’ is likely to result in marginalised communities being disproportionately targeted.

As denunciations of the storming of Capitol Hill continue to pour in, the political consensus is seamlessly settling into labeling the act as “domestic terrorism.”

Joe Biden condemned the mob as “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists”. The soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, and even ‘Squad’ member Ayanna Pressley joined the chorus. Seemingly oblivious to his own role in contributing to the bungled putsch, Republican Senator Ted Cruz also called the attack “a despicable act of terrorism.”

As of today, at least 25 domestic terrorism cases have been opened in connection with the January 6 violence, according to US Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy.

While the the violence in Washington DC may or may not meet one of the many formal definitions of terrorism in the US, there has been a concerted effort among many Democrats to label the act as such and enact new legislation that would make it easier to prosecute the perpetrators.

This push for new legislation and more funding for law enforcement agencies comes amidst a growing recognition among Democrats that the far-right, among them many white supremacist and ethnonationalist groups, comprise a significant portion of Trump’s base and have increasingly turned to violence to seek their objectives.

In November 2020, for example, a working group advising the incoming Biden administration urged the President-elect “to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.” After the violence on Capitol Hill, according to the Wall Street Journal, Joe Biden “plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism.”

In Congress, too, there is talk of domestic terrorism. A letter signed by Democratic leaders of five House committees asked the FBI Director Christopher Wray to “leverage all available assets and resources” to ensure the perpetrators of the domestic terrorist attack were brought to justice.

Empowering a bloated security state

While the renewed focus on the far-right is understandable given the violence in DC, the reinforcement of the “terrorism” framework raises critical questions regarding the threat to civil liberties and racial and religious minorities that it continues to pose.

The ACLU opposed House Resolution 4192 on those grounds, calling it “unnecessary” as “the offenses it creates largely duplicate existing crimes” as well as “harmful because it expands authorities that law enforcement has abused to target marginalized communities.”

Consider, for example, the No Fly List, a secret government list based on unknown criteria that comprises tens of thousands of individuals prohibited from boarding a plane. It has long been evident that the list is discriminatory, disproportionately targeting Muslims, based on a highly arbitrary criteria without any transparency, and once included a 4-year old child. The list contained only sixteen names on September 11, 2001 but has since bloated to include more than 81,000 names.

Expanding the list to to include the perpetrators of the Capitol Hill attack, as chairman of the Democratic House Committee on Homeland Security recently called for, will not change the arbitrary and secretive basis for punitive state action that the list represents.

Similarly, the vast surveillance apparatus propped up to target American Muslims and the mass surveillance programs established by the National Security Agency, will continue to be detrimental to free speech and political organising when broadened to include even more communities or infused with additional resources and funding.

The demand for a more expansive application of the “terrorism” designation is explicitly a call for more punitive measures, which have been previously been pursued in an arbitrary and discriminatory way and without transparency or hope for redress. It further empowers and expands the national security state, contributing to bloated budgets for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and border patrol, which disproportionately target Muslims and other people of colour in any case.

It is a call for far more widespread surveillance powers being granted to agencies which have a proven record of abusing those powers. It leads even more to legal innovations which continue to constrict the many rights and civil liberties which have already become strained during the war on terror.

This demand is also predicated on the mistaken belief that there can, somehow, be an objective definition of terrorism which would capture perpetrators of ideologically-motivated violence regardless of race, religion, or political use.

The infinite malleability of terrorism

Terrorism, however, is an infinitely malleable category. Even if an objective application was possible, law enforcement and intelligence agencies enjoy wide discretion in deciding who to surveil, investigate, and prosecute.

Given their history, it is not difficult to guess which populations they would target.

This is not mere speculation. The authority granted to local police forces and the FBI to combat the terrorist threat has routinely been used to target innocent individuals as well as non-violent protests and social movements.

The “unnecessarily and dangerously militarized” police force for example, which has been present in full force to crush the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests from 2016 onwards, was the product of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program. While the program pre-dates 9/11, it was ramped up in response to the war on terror.

The FBI’s identification of a spurious “Black Identity Extremist” threat in 2017 also follows the precedents of the war on terror. It echoes the category of “pre-crime,” established to identify terrorist threats before they materialise through specious theories of radicalisation -- dutifully provided by a cottage industry of terrorism experts -- which would feed the preventive prosecution of individuals who had never committed a crime.

Activists from BLM, Occupy, and indigenous rights movements have repeatedly found themselves at the crosshairs of local and federal agencies, empowered by the funding, resources, and broad authority granted to them under the aegis of the war on terror. Innocent Muslims have also remained a primary target.

As the visibility and threat posted by far-right groups continues to grow, it will be increasingly tempting to reinforce the framework of the war on terror and increase law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ funding and authority to suppress its growth.

An expansion of the national security state and further entrenchment of its authoritarian elements, however, would only result in the continuing repression of already marginalised communities.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Waqas Mirza @waqasahmi is a writer and activist based in Massachusetts. His work focuses on US foreign policy, War on Terror, Islamophobia, surveillance, policing and development.

IT'S TOUGH IN A CHRISTIAN DOMINATED SPORT

How Robert Saleh became the NFL’s first Muslim coach

15 HOURS AGO

The son of Lebanese immigrants, the significance of Saleh's hire as the New York Jets head coach extends beyond the sport.

By signing a five-year contract with the New York Jets last week, Robert Saleh etched himself into the history books by becoming the National Football League’s (NFL) first Muslim-American head coach.

The hiring of Saleh, who is of Lebanese background, on a team in the world’s biggest media market, is a landmark moment for a country embroiled in a reckoning around racial justice and a league fraught by a visible lack of diverse organisational appointments.

“We welcome this development as another sign of the increasing inclusion and recognition of American Muslims in our diverse society,” Ibrahim Hopper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement.

“I think he’s just a trailblazer for a lot of coaches who are Muslim, to let them know that they do have a chance to be a head coach,” said Detroit Lions offensive lineman Oday Aboushi, one of the Muslim players currently in the NFL.

Saleh joins the Jets after spending the last four years as a defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers, which he transformed into one of the NFL's elite units. He is now tasked with overhauling and transforming the Jets, one of the worst teams in the NFL, into a contender under the intense scrutiny that inevitably comes with coaching any franchise in the Big Apple.

And Saleh appears primed for the challenge.

A fiery and charismatic figure, Saleh is known to be a player’s coach and frequently lauded for his leadership skills. Notably bald, his jubilant flexing and celebratory theatrics on the sidelines during games has grown memorable with audiences.


“He’s a leader of men,” Robert Sherman, the star 49ers cornerback, said in a press conference upon Saleh’s departure from the team. Sherman noted he deserved a ton of credit for never making excuses for the injuries the unit suffered the past season and still managing to field a top-5 defense.

A trailblazing path

Son of a construction worker, the 41-year-old Saleh is a native of Dearborn, Michigan, a blue-collar community home to the largest Muslim population per capita in the US. On the margins of Detroit, Dearborn was a place where many Arab refugees who fled war found stability by integrating themselves into the auto industry.

Fordson High School, which Saleh’s attended – with a 95 percent Arab student body – was where his passion for American football was fueled alongside his working-class grit. Abed Ayoub, the legal and policy director for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who grew up near Saleh in Dearborn, called him a “natural-born leader” whose “humility is what sets him apart, and what makes him an embodiment of our working-class Arab American community.”

Having stopped playing football after his tenure at Northern Michigan University, he had a comfy job in finance and appeared to have a secure future ahead of him. What then led him to forge a different career path in the NFL occurred on the morning of 9/11.

On that fateful day, David, his older brother, had begun induction for a new job at Morgan Stanley on the 61st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. After hearing the North Tower was hit, David frantically managed to escape the building just as terrorists flew another plane into the South Tower.

It was an event that shook Robert – highlighting the precarity of life and pushing him to leave his credit analyst role at Comerica to chase his passion for football as a coach.

His first break came with the Houston Texans in 2005 as an intern, which subsequently opened the door for further coaching opportunities as he enjoyed stints as an assistant coach in Seattle and Jacksonville before being hired by San Francisco as a defensive coordinator in 2017.

Defensive Coordinator Robert Saleh of the San Francisco 49ers talk with the linebackers on the sideline during the game against the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium on February 2, 2020 in Miami, Florida. (Michael Zagaris / Getty Images)

On the heels of last year’s Super Bowl when the 49ers prepared to face off against the Kansas City Chiefs, Saleh spoke to the Washington Post on what his presence meant at the pinnacle of America’s sporting spectacle. He traced his family’s roots back to his immigrant Lebanese grandfather and how that generation laboured on factory assembly floors without being able to advance because of the language barrier.

“For me to have the opportunity to coach, and kind of create another trail, has been good,” he said. “That is pretty cool.”

In the same article, Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR’s Michigan chapter, highlighted the importance of Saleh’s cultural impact.

“The sports world has perhaps a much larger effect on pop culture than those other avenues of influence,” Walid said.

“So Coach Saleh doing what he does, and his affiliation with the NFL and having a high profile, will have influence, many of us believe, on how a number of Americans will perhaps look at Muslims in a different light.”

While preparing to bring his schematic prowess and larger-than-life presence to revive a once storied New York franchise, Saleh has made Dearborn – and Muslims across America – exceedingly proud.

Can the pandemic be a trigger to stop deforestation once and for all?



FRAN RAYMOND PRICE
4 DAYS AGO

The pandemic has wreaked havoc on forests, but it can also be the fulcrum which leads to an end to this scourge on our planet.

During its ongoing assault on our lives, the pandemic has often been hailed as a boon for the environment, if nothing else. Yet while it may have reduced air pollution or led to a resurgence in wildlife in some areas, when it comes to deforestation, the opposite is true.

In Brazil, the virus outbreak prompted the government to relax environmental regulations, causing the country to recently hit its highest level since 2008, amid an upsurge of illegal logging and forest clearing.

In Colombia, there was an explosion in forest fires in the Amazon as the government reduced monitoring and enforcement of forest crimes to focus on the virus. Madagascar, meanwhile, witnessed an uptick in clearing of the mountainous forests to the north of the country, as the economic pressures caused by Covid-19 created a desperate need for new sources of income that could be provided by fields of marijuana, vanilla, and rice. These are just a few examples – while the most up-to-date forest loss figures aren’t due until later this quarter, all signs point to the pandemic having worsened an already bleak picture across the world.

Global deforestation was already trending upwards well before the pandemic began, as WWF’s new report Deforestation fronts: Drivers and responses in a changing world illustrates. The report shows that an area roughly the size of California was lost to deforestation between 2004 and 2017 in the tropics and subtropics alone.

Commercial agriculture – a vital source of livelihood for millions – is the leading cause of deforestation globally, according to the report, with forested areas cleared to create space for livestock and to grow crops. Through deforestation, we are drastically imperiling every aspect of life on our planet. Is it really worth it? As the American biologist Edward Wilson once put it, “destroying rainforests for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.” 

Not only is deforestation one of the main causes of the 69 percent average decline in wildlife populations that we’ve seen in less than half a century, cutting trees is also a major contributor to climate change, adding carbon dioxide to the air and removing the ability for existing carbon dioxide to be absorbed. Deforestation can also disrupt the lives of local communities, sometimes with profound consequences.

Chela Umire lives in an indigenous reserve in the heart of the Colombian Amazon, where the deforestation rate in the first three months of 2020 exceeded the total for the whole of 2019.

“The jungle is very important to us because we depend on it,” she says. “We get the animals and our food is guaranteed, and so we can live from it and get useful things for our children. I think that in the future if we don’t look after the forest and all its natural resources, the Amazon will become a desert and rising temperatures will bring an end to human life.”

Ironically, given the surge in destruction of forests over the past year, we also know that large-scale deforestation is one of the biggest underlying causes of pandemics. The more we cut down, the greater the chance we’ll face another catastrophe like the one which continues to ruthlessly steal the lives and livelihoods of millions across the world, with the unfettered destruction of the Brazilian Amazon seen as the greatest risk.

However, there is reason for hope. As well as being a trigger for much of the recent acceleration in forest loss, Covid-19 could also prove to be the very fulcrum which leads to an end to this scourge on our planet once and for all.

Never has it been more urgent that we change our relationship with nature. As governments create policies to address the economic and social impacts of the global pandemic, they can choose to help prevent the next one by addressing over-consumption, and put greater value on health and nature. They can choose to adopt a ‘One Health’ approach to their decision-making and take seriously the links between human health and deforestation and other drivers of nature loss.

Since September 2020, more than 80 Heads of State and Government have pledged to take transformative action to reverse biodiversity loss and adopt a One Health approach. Leaders must now turn these commitments into action. It is encouraging to see the launch of PREZODE - the first global initiative to prevent the next pandemic by reducing pressures on biodiversity - at the One Planet Summit earlier this week. But much more action is needed.

Citizens everywhere can play their part by protecting nature where they live, avoiding products linked to deforestation and other forms of ecosystem conversion such as unsustainable meat, soy and palm oil products; and calling on their leaders to champion policies that halt deforestation, such as through the Together4Forests campaign in the European Union.

There’s still time for the pandemic to turn the tide for the world’s forests. It genuinely could, and should, serve as a trigger for greater action to protect them – and ultimately, us too.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Fran Raymond Price has spent her career working to protect forests and improve forestry around the globe. She joined WWF in June 2020 after 18 years at The Na-ture Conservancy (TNC). Fran has served on several boards and task groups, in-cluding the FSC International board (2013-2019) as Vice Chair from 2017 to 2019; FSC US board; the Tropical Forest Foundation board; High Conservation Value Re-source Network Steering Group; and WWF’s North American Forest and Trade Network Advisory Group.

The reckless pomposity of Mike Pompeo


TOM HUSSAIN

1 DAY AGO

As the curtain closes on his tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo has cynically pursued a strategy of provocation to undermine the incoming Biden administration.

Some 23 years ago, senior members of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations paid a visit to Abu Dhabi. Over a lunch in which a whole camel - resplendent with glistening hump - was the pièce de résistance, they were pressed by senior Emirati officials over US policy on Iraq.

According to my sources in both camps, the veteran senators were asked why the US persisted with occasional airstrikes against Saddam Hussein's regime. The UAE had just embarked on the massive diversification programme which created the "Hong Kong West" the world is now familiar with. But the US policy of containing Iraq, heavily military defeated as it was after the Kuwait War, was muddying the waters.

As long as uncertainty prevailed about the security situation in the Gulf, the UAE's ability to attract foreign direct investment would be hamstrung. Why not just get rid of Saddam, the Emiratis asked.

Because, they were told by the senators, the US plans for the Middle East were not defined by the threat posed by Saddam. Iraq - and Syria - were the only two Arab states that were practically on an industrial and military par with Israel, they said.

When the US attacked Iraq, it would be with the aim of reducing it to a pre-industrial economy, one of the senators declared, rendering his hosts gobsmacked.

Five years later, whilst investigating US preparations for its invasion of Iraq, I came across evidence of what this would mean, in practical terms, for the people of Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries on Capitol Hill's hit-list.

My sources in the ports and shipping industry gave me good insights into, broadly speaking, what US government cargoes were being pre-positioned at ports in the Middle East as part of the logistical preparations for the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign.

First, stockpiles were gathered at hub ports like Salalah in southern Oman and the UAE's Jebel Ali, and then were transhipped to ports in the northern Gulf, predominantly to Kuwait. Naively, I had expected the US and its allies to cater to the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, seeing as most of them would welcome liberation from Saddam's clutches.

After six months of hopping around port cities in the region, I was mortified by my findings: not a single shipment of humanitarian aid had been shipped by the US. Literally, not one.

The World Food Programme had stockpiled dry food supplies in Jordan, but they were glaringly inadequate considering the scale of the humanitarian disaster that was bound to unfold.

Pompeo’s parting salvo

Since becoming the US Secretary of State in April 2018, Mike Pompeo has single mindedly pursued this destructive, soulless geopolitical agenda.

Seeking to create a fake legacy, Pompeo's tweets and actions on the world stage over the last few weeks have been truly despicable. Certainly, they have been on par with his Neocon responsibility for the fake news about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

I'll start with Pompeo's decision to lift decades-old restrictions on senior US officials visiting Taiwan. He even scheduled a trip to Taipei. There could only ever have been one response from Beijing to Pompeo's brazen attempt to end US adherence to the "One China" policy agreed on by President Nixon in 1972: back down or face a war, the Chinese state media threatened.

Undoubtedly under pressure from Congress and the Biden camp not to trigger World War 3, Pompeo ended his theatrics - much to Taipei's relief. Not, however, before he ensured the premature declassification of details about the Trump administration's policy for the so-called Indo-Pacific region. It confirmed what Beijing had claimed all along: Washington is working aggressively to contain China, up to and including erecting reluctant India as a regional policeman of sorts.

That was provocative, and aimed mainly at further poisoning a US-China relationship undermined by trade warfare before Biden could reset its tone.

But it pales in comparison to Pompeo's moves in the Middle East last week.

The State Department's declaration of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi militia as a terrorist organisation has been greeted with horror and outrage because, if not reversed by Biden, it would exacerbate the world's biggest humanitarian crisis and cause the deaths from malnutrition and sickness of tens of thousands more Yemeni civilians.

Apparently, Pompeo is not satisfied that 85,000 children aged under five died between 2015 and 2018, the first three years of the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen. It is, as British politician David Milliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, described it: "Pure diplomatic vandalism".

US Senator Chris Murphy called it an act of "mind blowing insanity" and demanded that the incoming Biden administration rescind it immediately upon taking office next week.

Pompeo's grand finale came after he had a conspicuously public dinner with Israeli intelligence chief Yossi Cohen at a popular Washington restaurant last Monday. Out of the blue, Pompeo declared that Iran had become the new "home base" for Al Qaeda, after Afghanistan.

He offered no new evidence about the complicated relationship between Iran's security services and exiles of the notorious terrorist organisation - just nonsensical spin.

The same spin, in fact, that was imparted to news of Israel's assassination of Al Qaeda's deputy chief Abu Muhammad al Masri in Tehran in July, when it was leaked by the US in November.

In reality, the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda has been defined by expediency and betrayal, according to noted Iran-focused journalist and scholar Barbara Slavin. Stanford University scholar Asfandyar Mir has dismantled Pompeo's claims with his own previous statements, concluding that America's chief diplomat was not motivated by any fresh threat from Al Qaeda.

The same can be said of Pompeo's connivance with the Mossad chief in planning and executing the biggest Israeli airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria.

Whilst there is no debating that a freshly-arrived cache of Iranian missiles was fair game for Israel, Pompeo's primary aim was to mine the waters for the Biden administration by making the prospective return of the US to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that much more difficult.

Indeed, if there is a legacy to Pompeo's term as US Secretary of State, it is one of provocation, instigation, demonisation, inhumanity and hypocrisy.

America and the world will be a far better place without him.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

AUTHOR
Tom Hussain @tomthehack is a journalist and analyst on Pakistan affairs and geopolitics in South Asia.

Sharing profitability with users may be the only way forward for Facebook

RAVALE MOHYDIN

If Facebook wants to maintain its status as the world's biggest social media network it will need to rebuild trust, yes, but more importantly it will need to share a piece of the pie.

Facebook has an identity crisis: is it a platform or a publisher?

For many people, Facebook is their primary news source. For the same people though, it is also a platform, through which they connect with family and friends, find reviews for restaurants and even buy or sell goods. For more than half of all Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians and Brazilians, it is the internet itself.

Facebook is many things to more than 2 billion people – however, its growth is slowing. For the first time ever, it reported a decrease in the numbers of daily active users in the US & Canada region in 2017 Q4.

The slowdown could be due to the changes introduced in 2017 to News Feed, Facebook’s most lucrative product, which changed the type of content shown to users, showing less viral videos that were likely to increase time spent on Facebook.

Facebook also announced that they would only promote content from trustworthy publishers, leading to a jump in the stock prices of media companies such as News Corp and the New York Times. But there is still time before these strategies bear fruit, and investors have decided— for now—to stay put.

In the tech world, however, a company’s valuation is based on how the company will do in the future, given its current state and trajectory. At this point, it looks like Facebook is no longer ‘cool’ to use, as more teenagers – who are the future, literally – in the US and UK are leaving in high numbers.

Facebook can, on the other hand, benefit from its gigantic international audiences: as of January 2018, India, Brazil and Indonesia alone had more than 500 million Facebook users. But here again, Facebook’s future is vulnerable, as foreign governments, along with companies, are beginning to worry about threats to national security, given the disastrous Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Turkey, with its 51 million Facebook users, has already developed an alternative search engine. China never even let Facebook in.

The question remains: how does Facebook protect itself…from itself?

It appears that its own ad-driven business model, resulting in an insatiable appetite for users’ time and data without any consideration for societal costs, is going to be its Achilles’ Heel.

Do we need Facebook?

Facebook, as it is, does have its benefits though. It enables global economic activity by helping to unlock new opportunities through connecting people and businesses, lowering barriers to marketing, and stimulating innovation.

According to a Deloitte report, the ‘Facebook Economy’ resulted in global economic activity worth $227 billion and supported more than 4.5 million jobs in 2014 alone.

Additionally, social movements, such as the Women’s March held one day afer the inauguration of Donald Trump, are arguably more powerful today than they used to be because of Facebook.

Such a powerful platform took time and effort to develop, and no alternatives – with the same level of popularity – exist. Even if a more ethical alternative came into being right now, it will take a very long time to reach the scale at which Facebook has achieved user buy-in. It is important that the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater.

Facebook instinctively knows that its users’ “wellbeing” (read: engagement) is the currency that can sustain its continued growth, and is the right direction to take. However, its attempts to help users ‘spend more time meaningfully’ by using it as a platform to build and maintain social connections, feels like an attempt to fit into a dress that it outgrew five years ago.

A strategy that seems old, and at worst, painfully earnest and saccharine sweet – probably turns off many users (like me). Before that happens, Facebook needs to, yes, definitely go back to its roots, but in a stronger manner.

Without taking responsibility for all content on the platform, Facebook can never truly counter fake news. Without countering fake news, they will never be bona fide publisher.

Instead of trying to be something they are not capable of taking responsibility for (imagine monitoring and editing all content produced all day every day by all 2.2 billion users on Facebook), they should instead focus on what they are truly the best at: being a platform.

They can take it to the next level by allowing users to rent out their data to advertisers for a limited time, after which it self-destructs.

This is not an entirely new idea. Airbnb and Uber Technologies, part of the Sharing Economy, are already doing it, enabling users to rent out their homes and their cars, respectively. This is more sustainable than following a freemium pricing strategy – offering ‘premium’ features at a price – because that risks many users quitting or not upgrading, resulting in a drop in advertisement revenue.

Besides, it’s hard to determine what features would be included in the upgraded (paid) version (capping number of friends one can have? Limiting number of status updates? All these lead to less user engagement, an anathema for Facebook).

‘Steem’, a blockchain-based rewards platform for publishers to monetize content and grow community is already betting on people creating social data if they can profit from it.

In the Art of War, Sun Tzu writes ‘in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity’. Facebook has the chance, once again, to make waves.

19 APR 2018

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.


AUTHOR
Ravale Mohydin @Ravale_Mohydin

 writes about media effects on society, public diplomacy and non conventional warfare. She is an alumna of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Lahore University of Managament Sciences. She currently works at TRT World Research Centre.

Imagining a socialist internet


FAHAD DESMUKH

Can we move toward an internet where your personal data isn't currency to be traded with advertisers, and where services exist for the common good? The good news is that it already exists.

There’s a massive elephant in the room, and the problem is far bigger than Facebook. It's capitalism, and how it manifests itself on the internet.

The solution? A socialist internet - in which the internet is a tool for common good rather than a vehicle for profit.

Guess what? That internet already exists.

Let's be clear on what the fuss is about. An external researcher harvested the personal details of 50 million Facebook users by getting them to use a "personality app".

He then gave the data to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, without getting the consent of the users.

Cambridge Analytica has bragged about it’s role in the Trump campaign and was involved in the Brexit campaign – and the concern is that Facebook data may have been used to support these victories.

What we should be equally worried about is that Facebook already has the data of not just those 50 million users, but of all more than 2 billion active users, and in far greater detail.

They know who most of your friends and acquaintances are, how often you interact with them, what your likes, dislikes, hobbies and work interests are, where you live, where you travel, what your face looks like, your contact information, your phone and laptop model, your internet service provider (ISP), which websites you visit and much more.

We willingly give our private data to Facebook, and give Facebook the consent to use it to earn its annual net income of almost US $16 billion.

Without our consent, Facebook has also (willingly or unwillingly) shared large amounts of our data with government bodies such as the US National Security Agency.

Of course, none of this information is new, but it should make us realise that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is probably the least of our problems when it comes to privacy.

Facebook is just a symptom of a larger disease

The #DeleteFacebook campaign makes it seem like Facebook is an isolated case of an online business that has overstepped its boundaries.

However, most of us should be well aware by now that the problem isn't that of Facebook alone, but it is the business model shared by most internet behemoths controlling the most valuable online real estate, in which we are not the customers, but the commodity.

Facebook and other social media sites sell our eyeballs to advertisers so that we can buy their products. That is their business model.

This business model is novel in some ways, but in essence it is not different from traditional ad-based media. They give us free content to consume, and then sell some of our attention to businesses wanting to sell us things.

The key difference, as far as privacy is concerned, is that the internet allows the businesses to know far more about our personal lives and preferences than was the case for traditional media.

For example, a commercial radio station trying to sell an ad spot to an advertiser would only be able to provide the broad generalised demographics and preferences of its listeners, not the personal and granular details that Facebook offers. But if that radio station could do what Facebook can, then it would, because that is the model of success that we idealise – and it's called capitalism.

One way to describe capitalism is as an economic system in which things are produced not to meet a social need, but so that the capitalist can sell them for a profit. This is precisely what corporations have done to the internet – they have turned it in to a big marketplace to sell things that most people do not need so that a tiny privileged few can hoard more wealth.

As long as we are living in such a system, the pressure will always be on companies like Facebook to be as predatory as they can to maximise profits for its shareholders.

It is what drives capitalists to steal private data and sell it to the highest bidder, or to steal entire communities of humans and sell them to the highest bidder.

Those of us who believe that a better world can be created, in which poverty is eradicated and the caste system of worker and capitalist is abolished, are often accused of being dreamers and Utopians.

It's difficult to imagine that societies without capitalism have existed in the past, or that a world without capitalism is possible in the future, so, when it comes to privacy and social media, many people will just shrug and say that this is just how the world works. Since Facebook is offering us their platform, they will obviously take something from us in exchange.

However, when it comes to software and the internet, it shouldn't be so difficult to imagine a better world, because it already exists – and it’s a large eco-system of software developer communities that have defied the hegemony of capitalism to a large extent.

The open internet

Free and open source software (FOSS) is a category of software that anyone is free to use, modify and distribute without compensating the original developer – in essence, it is software that does not have a private owner.

The idea behind the free software movement is that society as a whole benefits from having software that is communally owned as it allows the public to use the software, and encourages software developers to improve on each other's work rather than re-inventing the wheel within the confines of private company walls.

In fact, much of the software that forms the backbone of the internet and the web today is a product of the FOSS movement, whether it is the operating system of a website server (Linux), the software that delivers a webpage to you (Apache or nginx), the platform used to manage a website (Wordpress) or the browser on your computer to view a website (Firefox).

There is also a benefit to privacy. Capitalist entities like Facebook and Microsoft keep the source code of their software a fiercely guarded secret, so that no one can examine how it works in order to prevent anyone from copying or modifying it.

This means that when Facebook or Microsoft tell us that their software is not spying on us or stealing data from us, we have no way of verifying this and just have to take their word for it. FOSS software, on the other hand, is transparent.

For many of us, it may still be hard to understand the economics of how or why anyone would work on building a product that they cannot sell. But one example of this is Wikipedia.

Not only is the software used to run Wikipedia FOSS, but crucially all of the articles on Wikipedia have been written by volunteers, and can be freely copied, improved and distributed by the public.

The volunteers contribute their time to Wikipedia not in order to make a financial profit, but because they believe that society can benefit from their knowledge, as they can benefit from the knowledge of others.

This idea of helping each other voluntarily (sometimes called “mutual aid”) is at the same time both intuitive and extremely alien. On the one hand, this is how we behave with our family and friends, yet it is alien because our interactions with the rest of society are not dominated by sharing.

So, the technological groundwork has already been laid for an internet which doesn't doesn't steal data or exploit its users. It now requires the political and moral will of the rest of society to adopt those tools and services. They don't have the massive marketing budgets that the corporations have so you have to search for them yourself. And they don't have all of the frills of commercial projects just yet, but as more and more people join and contribute the services will get better and will start looking more like what you’re used to.

So for example, an alternative to Facebook is the Diaspora social network, where the data of users is not in the possession of a single corporate entity. Instead, the data is distributed across several independently managed but federated “pods”, among which you can choose where put your data (or you can even set up your own pod if you have a bit of technical knowledge).

The FOSS movement has shown that the internet and information technology can serve a greater purpose than a marketplace in which the richest companies always win – often at the unknown expense of the public.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT World.

26 MAR2018 

AUTHOR
Fahad Desmukh @desmukh
is a journalist and researcher based in Islamabad, Pakistan, and a member of the research collective Bahrain Watch.

World Wide Web inventor opposes Australia's 

news payment plan

To check the tech giants' power, Canberra is pursuing world-first laws that would require Google and Facebook to compensate Australian news organisations, or pay millions of dollars in fines.

This file photo taken on October 1, 2019, shows the logos of mobile apps Facebook and Google displayed on a tablet in Lille, France. (AFP Archive)

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia's plan to force digital giants to pay media outlets for news content is "unworkable" and undermines a "fundamental principle" of the internet.

Canberra is pursuing world-first laws that would require Google and Facebook to compensate Australian news organisations, or pay millions of dollars in fines.

The aggressive move to check the tech giants' power has prompted blowback from the US firms, with Facebook warning Australians could be blocked from sharing articles on its "News Feed", while Google has been experimenting with hiding local news in searches.

Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who created the web in 1989, said in a submission to an Australian Senate inquiry he is "concerned that the code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online".

"The ability to link freely -- meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees -- is fundamental to how the web operates, how it has flourished till present, and how it will continue to grow in decades to come," he wrote.

In the submission dated January 18, Berners-Lee said he supports the need for publishers to be "properly rewarded" for their work but "constraints on the use of hypertext links are not the correct way to achieve this goal".

"If this precedent were followed elsewhere it could make the web unworkable around the world," he wrote.

"I therefore respectfully urge the committee to remove this mechanism from the code."

READ MORE: Facebook threatens ban on Australians sharing news posts

The Office of the US Trade Representative has also urged Australia to abandon its "burdensome" plan, saying there could be "long-lasting negative consequences" for consumers and companies.

Canberra's initiative has been closely watched around the globe, as news media worldwide suffer in an increasingly digital economy where big tech firms overwhelmingly capture advertising revenue.

The planned legislation has received widespread support from Australian media organisations, many of which have been hit hard by a drop in revenue during the coronavirus pandemic.

READ MORE: Australia to force Google and Facebook pay for news in unprecedented move

The digital giants have also made submissions to the inquiry, with Facebook urging a return to the voluntary code of conduct first mooted by Canberra.

"Facebook remains willing to pay Australian news publishers for news content made available on Facebook, as long as it is subject to genuine commercial considerations," it said.

Google has said some revisions to the draft proposal have improved the law but called for several further amendments to the rules.

Australia plans to introduce the new rules this year, with the Senate committee set to hold public hearings from Friday.

BREAKING NEWS

We might finally know how dinosaurs had sex

© Provided by BGR dinosaur mating

Dinosaur bones have told scientists a lot about how the ancient animals lived, hunted, and died, but reproduction has remained largely a mystery.

A new fossil from China provides such an incredibly well-preserved look at the dinosaur’s hindquarters that it shows the orifice that was likely used for expelling waste as well as for mating.
This discovery only shows how this particular dinosaur species likely mated.

Despite the fact that they lived tens of millions (and in some cases, hundreds of millions) of years ago, we know a surprising amount about dinosaurs. That’s thanks in large part to the fact that they left plenty of bones behind for us to find, study, and make educated guesses about.

But while hard bones are the most durable and long-lasting remnants of dinosaurs left today, soft tissue is much harder to come by. Because of that, understanding more complex behavior like mating has been a huge challenge. Now, a new fossil from China is helping to open the eyes of scientists and offer clues as to how one species (and perhaps other) dinosaurs pooped, peed, and reproduced.

Butterflies create jet propulsion with a clap of their wings

Scientists at Lund University in Sweden set out to verify a decades-old theory that insects "clap" their wings together, squeezing out the air between with such force that it thrusts them forward.

"Oogomadara" or tree nymph butterflies, the largest butterfly in Japan, fly at Ryugujo Butterfly Garden in Okinawa island, Japan, February 16, 2007. (Reuters Archive)

The whimsical, wafting flight of butterflies may not give the impression of top aerodynamic performance, but research has suggested their large flexible wings could be perfectly designed to give them a burst of jet propulsion.

Scientists at Lund University in Sweden set out to verify a decades-old theory that insects "clap" their wings together, squeezing out the air between with such force that it thrusts them forward.

In their aerodynamic analysis of free-flying butterflies published in the journal Interface, they showed that the clap function does generate a jet of air propulsion.

But they also found that the butterflies perform this move "in a far more advanced way than we ever realised," said co-author Per Henningsson, a professor in the department of biology at Lund University.

At the moment the wings beat together they "were not just two flat surfaces slamming together," he told AFP.

Instead, they form a "pocket" shape believed to trap more air.

When the researchers recreated this using mechanical wings, they found that those with butterfly-like flexibility that form this pocket at the moment of impact were 22 percent more effective in the amount of force created and 28 percent more efficient in the amount of energy used compared with rigid wings.

The team suggested that their findings could have uses for drones that use clapping wing propulsion.

A banded orange butterfly rests on a palm at the Camden Children's Garden in Camden, New Jersey, on September 27, 2005. (AP)

Predator evasion

Henningsson said the "dramatic improvement" in performance came as a surprise.

"This is the type of finding that is the most exciting for a scientist – the ones you didn't really expect," he said.

Butterfly wings "although conventionally considered aerodynamically inefficient" might be particularly good at forming this pocket shape, he added, suggesting they may have evolved enhance clap propulsion as a way to evade predators that might spot them as they take off.

"To minimise the risk of capture, butterflies typically take off very fast and suddenly and many of them fly in an erratic and unpredictable manner," he said.

"If indeed the clap is improved dramatically by the cupped shape of the wings this would allow a butterfly to take off faster and avoid being captured better, and hence you can imagine a strong selective pressure on this feature."

The study suggested other creatures – like fish or frogs – may also have developed clapping propulsion using cupped wings, fins or feet.

Henningsson said while the theory of the wing clap has been around since the 1970s, studies on butterfly flight had often relied on tethered butterflies or used simulations.

But improvements in technology to measure flow meant the authors were able to observe the creatures in natural flight.

READ MORE: Did blue butterflies help unearth mass graves in Bosnia?

READ MORE: Climate change in North America leaves monarch butterfly vulnerable

All-natural Covid-19 vaccine made from honeycombs shows promising results

Ireland’s Cellnutrition Health’s natural vaccine is showing promising results during test trials on animals by combatting the ever-mutating coronavirus, bacteria fungi and certain parasites

.

This picture taken on November 13, 2019 shows bees on a piece of honeycomb with honey at Chinese farmer Ma Gongzuo's apiary in Songyang county in China's Zhejiang province. (AFP)

An Ireland-based nutritional supplements company has announced its natural vaccine, made from honeybee comb, has shown promising results combatting viruses, including Covid-19.

Cellnutrition Health says it "is in the process of testing and producing a new vaccine for all viruses including the ever-mutating coronavirus, bacteria fungi and certain parasites" in a press release published earlier this month.

The company claims it's BEEMAR Formula vaccine is showing successful results in its four-year clinical trials treating infectious bronchitis virus, a member of the coronavirus family.

BEEMAR boosts no side effects as it only uses two active ingredients marine plasma and non-allergenic bee material sourced from protein-based enzymes, lysozymes.

"The first test batches of both the vaccine and immunotherapy will be used specifically to prevent and treat Covid-19," the release said.