WORKING FOR A LIVING!!

Port group to close as CWB monopoly ends | Manitoba C0-operator

2012-01-27T16:09:00.000-08:00

Port group to close as CWB monopoly ends | Manitoba C0-operator

CGC XMas Party at The Met Dec 3, 2011

2011-12-07T08:44:00.000-08:00

AMAZON IS LIKE HELL

2011-09-20T16:10:00.001-07:00

The Real Price of Amazon's Free Shipping

A hellishly hot warehouse where workers fry while making internet shopping a breeze.

By Mac McClelland | Tue Sep. 20, 2011 3:01 AM PDT

A couple of weeks ago, my best friend sent me an email. She just got this new expensive makeup she'd ordered on the internet. It had arrived! But then she remembered that story I wrote [1] about a warehouse in Ohio that ships products from online retailers and how miserable everyone who works there is and how shitty they're treated by their employers, and then she felt really sad. So, hey, she said, thanks a lot.
I'm not going to tell her, but now, via the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call [2], there's more confirmation that products are often shipped from the internets to your house by very demoralized workers operating in very depressing conditions because they have no other job options [3]. Specifically, at the Amazon warehouse in the story, an employee got in touch with OSHA when the heat inside hit 102 degrees. Fifteen workers collapsed, and those that went home to beat the heat got negative marks put on their records.
The Ohio warehouse I visited in June was the same kind of benefitless sweat-box. (It also sounds a lot like the sweltering warehouse described to my colleague Josh Harkinson here [4].) The Pennsylvania warehouse mentioned in the Morning Call article was not actually run by Amazon, just like the warehouse I was in wasn't run by the retailers whose product they shipped; both are staffed by temporary workers from a contract agency. Amazon responded [5] by saying, "The safety and well-being of our associates is our number one priority." Hmm, no statement yet on whether they're going to make their contractors treat their employees like human beings. In the meantime, every one of Amazon's millions of customers should write them a really angry letter demanding change. Except we won't. Because then our shipping wouldn't be free.

2011-09-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of Workers Storm Washington Port Over Labor Dispute

LONGVIEW, Wash. -- Hundreds of Longshore workers stormed the Port of Longview early Thursday, overpowered and held security guards, damaged railroad cars, and dumped grain that is the center of a labor dispute, said Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha.

Six guards were detained for a couple of hours after 500 or more Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack, he said.

No one was hurt, and nobody has been arrested. Most of the protesters returned to their union hall after cutting brake lines and spilling grain from car at the EGT terminal, Duscha said.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union believes it has the right to work at the facility, but the company has hired a contractor that's staffing a workforce of other union laborers.

Meanwhile, the international union is investigating reports of a wildcat strike at the ports of Seattle and Tacoma.

"It appears the members have taken action on their own," said ILWU spokesman Craig Merrilees from union headquarters in San Francisco. "We're trying to understand how many are involved and to what extent this apparent wildcat action has spread."

Thursday's violence at Longview was first reported by Kelso radio station KLOG.

Police from several agencies in southwest Washington, the Washington State Patrol and Burlington Northern Santa Fe responded to the violence to secure the scene that followed a demonstration Wednesday.

"We're not surprised," Duscha said. "A lot of the protesters were telling us this in only the start."

One sergeant was threatened with baseball bats and retreated, Duscha said. "One officer with hundreds of Longshoremen? He used the better part of discretion."

The train was the first grain shipment to arrive at Longview. It arrived Wednesday night after police arrested 19 demonstrators who tried to block the tracks. They were led by ILWU International President Robert McEllrath, who said they would return.

The blockade appeared to defy a federal restraining order issued last week against the union after it was accused of assaults and death threats.

EGT chief executive Larry Clarke said it was unfortunate that law enforcement needed to make arrests.

Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects

2011-08-30T21:28:00.001-07:00

Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects
New, from the company that has already brought you superweeds…
By Tom Philpott | Tue Aug. 30, 2011 3:04 AM PDT

Over the past decade and a half, as Monsanto built up its globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar genetically modified seed empire, it made two major pitches to farmers.

The first involved weeds. Leave the weed management to us, Monsanto insisted. We've engineered plants that can survive our very own herbicide. Just pay up for our patented, premium-priced seeds, spray your fields with our Roundup herbicide whenever the fancy strikes, and—voilà!—no more weeds.

The second involved crop-eating insects. We've isolated the toxic gene of a commonly used bacterial pesticide called Bt, Monsanto announced, and spliced it directly into crops. Along with corn and soy, you will literally be growing the pesticide that protects them. Plant our seeds, and watch your crops thrive while their pests shrivel and die.

Monsanto focused its technology on three widely planted, highly subsidized crops: corn, soy, and cotton. Large-scale farmers of these commodities, always operating on razor-thin profit margins, lunged at the chance to streamline their operations by essentially outsourcing their pest management to Monsanto. And so Monsanto's high-tech crops essentially took over the corn/soy- and cotton-growing regions of the country.

But now the pitches are wearing thin. Dumping a single herbicide onto millions of acres of farmland has, predictably enough, given rise to weeds resistant to that herbicide. Such "superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country [1], forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding. More than 11 million acres are infested with Roundup-resistant weeds, up from 2.4 million acres in 2007, reckons [2] Penn State University weed expert David Mortensen.

And now insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops, reports [3] the Wall Street Journal. Fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn in some areas of the Midwest are showing damage from the corn rootworm—the very species targeted by Monsanto's engineered trait. An Iowa State University scientist has conclusively identified Bt-resistant root worms in four Iowa fields, the Journal reports.

The findings are not likely isolated to those fields—just like spotting a cockroach on your kitchen floor probably signals an infestation, not that a lone cockroach randomly stumbled in for a visit. Sure enough, farmers in Illinois are also seeing severe rootworm damage in fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn. And it's not just in the United States: In 2010, Monsanto itself acknowledged [4]that in industrial-agriculture regions of India, where Monsanto's Bt cotton is a dominant crop, a cotton-attacking pest called the bollworm had developed resistance.

Just as Roundup-resistant superweeds rapidly bloomed into a major problem after first appearing in the mid-2000s, Bt-resistant superinsects may be just getting started. Colleen Scherer, managing editor of the industrial-ag trade magazine Ag Professional, put it like this: "There is no 'putting the genie back in the bottle,' and resistance in these areas is a problem that won't go away."

So what does all of this mean for Monsanto? If its main attraction for farmers—the promise of easy pest management—is turning to dust in a quite public way, should we expect the company be on the verge of getting crushed under the weight of its failures?

To get a glimpse of how the publicly traded company is faring, I looked at how its stock has been performing over the past year, compared to the broader stock market. Early Monday afternoon, Monsanto's shares were trading at about $71 [5]—a more than 25 percent gain over the past 12 months. Over the same period, the S&P 500—a broad gauge of US stocks—is up just over 10 percent. That means investors have high hopes for Monsanto going forward, despite the high-profile failures. Like weeds and bugs in farm fields, Monsanto shares have developed resistance to toxic tidings.

What gives? The Wall Street Journal article provides a clue:

The [Bt-resistance] finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta [6] AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.

In other words, Monsanto claims it has the answer to the trouble it's cooking up on corn, soy, and cotton fields: more patent-protected GM technology. It has managed to shove US farmers on a kind of accelerating treadmill: the need to apply ever more, and ever more novel, high-tech responses to keep up with ever-evolving pests. And while farmers run ever faster to stay in place, Monsanto just keeps coming up with highly profitable "solutions" to the problems it has generated.

Investors have embraced Monsanto's pitch. Large-scale farmers, battered and desperate for relief, probably will too. But the broader citizenry, in the form of the regulatory agencies that ostensibly guard the public interest [7], should start asking hard questions.

FRACING IS SAFE FOR BC?

2011-08-06T21:51:00.001-07:00

Colorado Study Links Methane in Water to Drilling

by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, April 22, 2009, 7 a.m.
This story was co-published [1] with the Denver Post.

Jesse Ellsworth thought something was wrong with his water when it began to smell funny and popped out of his faucet in bursts. Then, in February, the Fort Lupton resident launched an experiment: he flipped on the kitchen tap and took a cigarette lighter to the stream. As flint sparked steel, the water lit on fire like a torch.
Ellsworth is one of at least 29 residents in small farming communities northeast of Denver who have asked either the energy companies or the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to test for natural gas in their water wells.
Now the commission is trying to figure out how the gas got there. Are some of Weld County's 13,957 gas wells leaking methane into drinking water? Or is methane seeping into the water naturally, as it has done from time to time over the years?
So far, officials have determined that at least nine of those contamination cases are not drilling-related; they are likely the result of a water well intersecting with gas underground. But the Ellsworth's well -- which has stronger evidence tying it to drilling -- remains a mystery.
"This one I think is best characterized as an isolated circumstance," said David Neslin, director of the COGCC, "We can't, sitting here today, say 'Yes" that this is coming from somebody's gas well."
While the search for clues continues in Weld County, investigations about methane contamination in Garfield County and other parts of the country have clearly tied the contamination to energy development, strengthening arguments across the country that drilling can put drinking water at risk.
Near Cleveland, Ohio, a house exploded in late 2007 after gas seeped into its water well. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources later issued a 153-page report [2] that blamed a nearby gas well's faulty cement casing and hydraulic fracturing [3] -- a deep-drilling process that shoots millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into the ground under explosive pressure -- for pushing methane into an aquifer and causing the explosion.
In Dimock, Pa., where drilling recently began in the mammoth Marcellus shale deposit, several drinking water wells have exploded and nine others were found with so much gas that one homeowner was told to open a window if he planned to take a bath. In February, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection charged Cabot Oil & Gas with two violations that it says caused the contamination, theorizing that gas leaked from the well casing into fractures underground.
Industry representatives say methane contamination incidents are statistically insignificant, considering that 452,000 wells produced gas in the United States last year. They point out that methane doesn't necessarily come from gas wells -- it's common in nature and can leak into water from biological processes near the surface, like rotting plants.
The industry also defends its construction technology, saying it keeps gas and drilling fluids -- including any chemicals used for hydraulic fracturing -- safely trapped in layers of steel and concrete. Even if some escapes, they say, thousands of feet of rock make it almost impossible for it to migrate into drinking water aquifers. When an accident happens, the blame can usually be traced to a lone bad apple -- some contractor who didn't follow regulations, they say. Those arguments helped the gas drilling industry win rare exemptions from the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act when Congress enacted the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
Now an exhaustive examination of a methane problem on Colorado's Western Slope is offering a strong scientific repudiation of that argument. Released in December by Garfield County, the report concludes that gas drilling has degraded water in dozens of water wells.
The three-year study used sophisticated scientific techniques to match methane from water to the same rock layer -- a mile and a half underground - where gas companies are drilling. The scientists didn't determine which gas wells caused the problem or say exactly how the gas reached the water, but they indicated with more clarity than ever before that a system of interconnected natural fractures and faults could stretch from deep underground gas layers to the surface. They called for more research into how the industry's practice of forcefully fracturing those deep layers might increase the risk of contaminants making their way up into an aquifer.
"It challenges the view that natural gas, and the suite of hydrocarbons that exist around it, is isolated from water supplies by its extreme depth," said Judith Jordan, the oil and gas liaison for Garfield County who has worked as a hydrogeologist with DuPont and as a lawyer with Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection. "It is highly unlikely that methane would have migrated through natural faults and fractures and coincidentally arrived in domestic wells at the same time oil and gas development started, after having been down there ...for over 65 million years."
The Garfield County analysis comes as Congress considers legislation that would toughen environmental oversight of drilling and reverse the exemptions enjoyed by the gas companies. Colorado has already overhauled its own oil and gas regulations, despite stiff resistance from the energy industry. The new rules, which went into effect earlier this month, strengthen protections against, among other things, methane contamination.
Drinking water with methane, the largest component of natural gas, isn't necessarily harmful. The gas itself isn't toxic -- the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't even regulate it -- and it escapes from water quickly, like bubbles in a soda.
But the gas becomes dangerous when it evaporates out of the water and into peoples' homes, where it can become flammable. It can also suffocate those who breathe it. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the concentration of gas increases it can cause headaches, then nausea, brain damage and eventually death.
The Garfield County report is significant because it is among the first to broadly analyze the ability of methane and other contaminants to migrate underground in drilling areas, and to find that such contamination was in fact occurring. It examined over 700 methane samples from 292 locations and found that methane, as well as wastewater from the drilling, was making its way into drinking water not as a result of a single accident but on a broader basis.
As the number of gas wells in the area increased from 200 to 1,300 in this decade, methane levels in nearby water wells increased too. The study found that natural faults and fractures exist in underground formations in Colorado, and that it may be possible for contaminants to travel through them.
Conditions that could be responsible include "vertical upward flow" "along natural open-fracture pathways or pathways such as well-bores or hydraulically-opened fractures," states the section of the report done by S.S. Papadopulos and Associates, a Maryland-based environmental engineering firm specializing in groundwater hydrology.
The researchers did not conclude that gas and fluids were migrating directly from the deep pockets of gas the industry was extracting. In fact, they said it was more likely that the gas originated from a weakness somewhere along the well's structure. But the discovery of so much natural fracturing, combined with fractures made by the drilling process, raises questions about how all those cracks interact with the well bore and whether they could be exacerbating the groundwater contamination.
"One thing that is most striking is in the area where there are large vertical faults you see a much higher instance of water wells being affected," said Geoffrey Thyne, the hydrogeologist who wrote the report's summary and conclusion. He is a senior research scientist at the University of Wyoming's Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute, a pro-extraction group dedicated to tapping into hard-to-reach energy reserves.
The report, referred to as the Garfield County Hydrogeologic Study, has been met with cautious silence by the industry and by its regulators.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state's regulatory body, would not respond to questions from ProPublica because it hasn't thoroughly analyzed the data behind the November report, said its acting director, David Neslin.
Neither the Colorado Oil and Gas Association nor Encana, the Canadian energy company that drills in the study area, would comment on the Garfield County report. Both referred questions to Anthony Gorody, a Houston-based geochemist who specializes in oil and gas issues and frequently is employed by the energy industry.
Gorody dismissed the report's conclusions as "junk science."
"This is so out of whack. There are a handful of wells that have problems. These are rare events," said Gorody, president of Universal Geosciences Consulting. "They are like plane crashes -- the extent tends to be fairly limited. I do not see any pervasive impact."
Most of the methane in the study area, Gorody said, came from shallow gas-bearing rock or decaying matter near the surface -- not from the deep gas produced by the energy industry. He criticized the report's methodology, saying the way that researchers linked the stray gas with the deep gas formations was speculative at best.
Thyne, standing by his report, said researchers had traced the origin of the gas by conducting the equivalent of a forensic investigation, analyzing its isotopic signature, or molecular fingerprint. The molecular structure showed that most of it was thermogenic, meaning it matched the deeply buried deposit where gas was being drilled, called the Williams Fork Formation. A minority of the samples were difficult to identify by this method, so Thyne used another scientific process to study them. He is confident they, too, were thermogenic in origin.
In most cases, the study couldn't pinpoint the exact pathway the contaminants had used to travel a mile and a half up into the drinking water aquifer. So Thyne could only reason the possibilities.
The methane could be seeping into water wells through natural fractures, he said, or through leaks in the well casings or cement, or from the well heads.
When a pipe extends 8,000 feet below the earth's surface, he said, "there are numerous potential leak points along the way. So is it leaking at 8,000 feet and coming up a well bore, a natural fault or fracture? Or is it leaking 500 feet from the surface? We don't know."
The most plausible explanation, Thyne said, is that the same type of well casing and cementing issues that had proved problematic in Ohio and are suspected in Pennsylvania were presenting problems in Colorado too.
"The thesis is that because of the way the wells are designed they could be a conduit," said Garfield County's Jordan, who commissioned the report.
Jordan worries that the methane leaks could be a sign of worse to come.
"We suspect the methane would be the most mobile constituent that would come out of the gas fields. Our concern is that it's a sort of sentinel, and there are going to be worse contaminants behind it," she said. "It's not just sitting down there as pure CH4 (methane). It's in a whole bath of hydrocarbons," she said, and some of those "can be problematic."
Want to tell us about your own experience? Click here. [4]
Want to contact the reporter directly? Click here. [5]

Company Owned By Cancer Research Donor Lobbied Against Designation of Formaldehyde as Carcinogen

2010-08-25T12:04:00.001-07:00

Company Owned By Cancer Research Donor Lobbied Against Designation of Formaldehyde as Carcinogen

by Marian Wang ProPublica, Yesterday, 3:53 p.m.
A prominent philanthropist, cancer survivor, and American businessman, David Koch, has given millions to the cause of cancer research, while his company—Koch Industries—has lobbied against formal recognition of formaldehyde as a carcinogen, The New Yorker reported in a piece published today.
Koch sits on the advisory board of the National Cancer Institute—a position he was appointed to in 2004 by President Bush, reported The New Yorker.
The National Cancer Institute published a study in 2009 concluding that formaldehyde causes cancer in humans. Here’s The New Yorker, describing that study’s findings:

The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government.

As we’ve noted, prior to the May 2009 study, the National Cancer Institute had also performed a preliminary study that linked formaldehyde to leukemia, but members of Congress including Sens. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and David Vitter, R-La., managed to delay the EPA from officially designating the chemical as a “known carcinogen.” (The EPA in June, however, released a draft assessment of formaldehyde that supports that designation, but it’s not yet official.)
In 2005, Koch Industries bought Georgia-Pacific, one of the world’s largest plywood manufacturers and a major formaldehyde producer. The company has donated to both Vitter and Inhofe.
In a letter to federal health authorities sent last December, the company’s vice-president of environmental affairs wrote that “the company ‘strongly disagrees’ with the N.I.H. panel’s conclusion that formaldehyde should be treated as a known human carcinogen,” reported The New Yorker.
The National Cancer Institute’s director, Harold Varmus, told The New Yorker that at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center—where he used to work and where Koch donated $40 million dollars and serves on the board—it wasn’t uncommon for donors to have large business interests, but “the one thing we wouldn’t tolerate in our board members is tobacco.” Varmus was “surprised,” however, when The New Yorker told him about Koch Industries’ stance on formaldehyde.
We’ve asked Koch Industries to comment the matter but have not yet heard back.
For more, read the full New Yorker piece—a profile of David Koch and how he’s influenced American politics for right-wing causes.David Koch

WikiLeaks

2010-08-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

Collateral Murder, 5 Apr 2010

Donate to WikiLeaks

Unless otherwise specified, the document described here:

Was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaksworking with our source.

Was classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public before release.

Is of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance.

Any questions about this document's veracity are noted.

The summary is approved by the editorial board.

See here for a detailed explanation of the information on this page.

If you have similar or updated material, see our submission instructions.

Contact us

Press inquiries

Follow updates

Release date: April 5, 2010

Summary

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting three airstrikes from a US Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 in New Baghdad, Iraq. At least eighteen people were killed in the airstrikes, including two journalists working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen.

The video was recorded by the gunsight camera on the Apache helicopter, identified as Crazyhorse 18, and is accompanied by the radio communications of the helicopter gunmen as they communicate with their commanders and troops on the ground.

When the video begins, the helicopter is circling above the city. It then focuses in on a group of men walking in the street, including the Reuters journalists. The soldiers in the helicopter state that they see members of the group carrying weapons, ask their commanding officers for permission to engage (fire), and fire upon the group with 30mm rounds.

The camera then follows Chmagh as he crawls along the road, and the soldiers can be heard urging him to pick up a weapon. A van, carrying 2 children to special school along their farther, arrives and several men pick Chmagh up and begin to carry him toward the van. The helicopter requests and is given permission to fire upon the van as it tries to leave. They fire upon the van with 30mm rounds.

The video then shows ground troops arriving at the area. A soldier can be seen running as he carries one of the children wounded in the attack on the van.

In the third attack depicted in the video, the Apache helicopter fires upon a building with Hellfire missiles. The video shows several armed and unarmed people entering the building, which is described as abandoned or under construction. The building was occupied by 3 families. The helicopter requests and receives permission to fire upon the building, and shoots three Hellfire missiles. A man can be seen walking in front of the building as the first missile is shot, and several people helping the wounded are visible around the building as the second and third missiles hit.

After the incidents, Reuters filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the video, without success. Several scenes from this video were described by the Washington Post reporter David Finkel in his book "The Good Soldiers". The Washington Post later stated that they never had the video.To see Murder Click Me.

Safe Driving Ads That Shock

2010-07-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

Twitter terror arrest: cause for alarm

2010-01-21T18:05:00.000-08:00

Twitter terror arrest: cause for alarm: "

The arrest of a man for making a joke about terrorism on Twitter is the inevitable consequence of a paranoid, risk-averse society

It seems one can no longer make jokes about terrorist bombs without risking arrest. At a juncture in history where terrorists have taken to sporting exploding underpants, this is unfortunate to say the least.

It's hard to muster much sympathy for the unnamed German airline passenger who was arrested recently for making a joke to security about the bomb in his underwear. He deserves his fine for wasting the time of security personnel, plus another for aggravated stupidity and perhaps a third for bringing the German sense of humour into disrepute.

The case of Paul Chambers, however, should cause us all rather more concern. He was due to fly from Doncaster's Robin Hood airport to Ireland in the New Year, but heavy snow intervened. In frustration, he sent off a tweet to his friends. 'Robin Hood airport is closed,' he wrote. 'You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!'

Not the funniest comment ever to grace Twitter for sure, but utterly banal – the kind of throwaway remark that any one of us might say out loud to our friends, or thoughtlessly bash into the box on a social networking site or a newspaper comment forum. South Yorkshire police didn't see it that way. Last week Chambers was arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and questioned for seven hours before being released on police bail. He has been suspended from work and his computer, iPhone and laptop have been confiscated and he has been banned from Robin Hood Airport for life, which may be the only saving grace.

Police say they were alerted to the comment on his closed Twitter feed by a tip-off, although it's a reasonable assumption that the phrase 'blowing the airport sky high' might have tripped a few alarms on electronic signals intelligence systems at GCHQ. I know how these things work. I've never missed an episode of Spooks. Nonetheless, one would hope that somewhere down the line a real human being might intervene, decode the hidden messages contained within those 140 characters and detect the presence of an arcane cipher known as a 'joke'. If that proves beyond the capabilities of our intelligence services, then in this age of body scanners and electronic imaging, perhaps a gadget could be invented that could detect the presence of humour in a sentence from 25 feet away. They could test it on ITV sitcoms to eliminate the risk of false positives.

On the one hand, it is easy to dismiss this as an isolated case of police over-reaction. File it alongside the Muslim schoolboy questioned after uploading a photo to Facebook of himself posing with a gun (he was playing paintball at the time); or the unfortunate man recently cleared of an extreme pornography charge after prosecutors accepted that the animal involved in the bestial scene was actually a cartoon tiger, not a real one. Or the arrest of photographers taking pictures in public; or any of the hundreds more seemingly isolated recent instances of people being detained or arrested for activities that barely tickle the toes of criminality.

Perhaps the most telling and frightening detail of the Chambers case is the explanation given by the arresting officer: 'It is the world we live in.' The world we live in is a surreal, incomprehensible collage of inflated authority and over-bearing bureaucracy which cannot differentiate between schoolboy humour and a death threat. Arrests like this one are an inevitable consequence of a society where paranoid risk aversion has run spectacularly out of control. In our desperate urge to prevent atrocities such as terrorist attacks, child abuse or violent crime, we find ourselves chasing shadows, just in case danger lurks beneath.

One price we pay for safe passage at the airport is that we need to avoid making tasteless jokes in questionable humour. Like most sensible people, I accept this and abide by it. But I refuse to accept that one price worth paying to protect our way of life should be that we refrain from making tasteless jokes on the internet from the comfort of our own homes and offices. For some of us, making tasteless jokes on the internet pretty much is our way of life.

Ally Fogg

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Why You Shouldn't Trust Facebook with Your Data: An Employee's Revelations

2010-01-21T17:31:00.000-08:00

Why You Shouldn't Trust Facebook with Your Data: An Employee's Revelations: "

The abuse of private data by Facebook employees was pretty much inevitable; the simple act of amassing data tends to lead to corruption. What's sad is how lightly the social network reportedly controls its employees.

There's a great interview on TheRumpus.net with an anonymous Facebook employee. Here are some of the things she divulges:

As of a few months ago, Facebook records and archives information on whose profile you view. (Apparently this was already publicly known.)

Facebook has 200-220 million active users, and more than 300 million total accounts, including disabled accounts and potential fakes.

At one point, Facebook staff widely used a 'master password' that unlocked access to anyone's account. Use of this password has been 'deprecated,' i.e. discouraged, implying the password might still exist and work. What was the password? 'With upper and lower case, symbols, numbers, all of the above, it spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,' more or less. It was pretty fantastic.'

The Facebook employee is aware of at least two coworkers being fired for abusing their access to profiles; the employee herself also inappropriately access profiles.

Facebook employees can 'just query the database' to find your Facebook messages.

The picture that emerges is one of loose internal controls on private data access. Sure, the master password has been replaced by a system in which Facebook staff must log a justification when they view users' private profile data. But the employee said managers aren't 'on your ass about it,' leaving the door open for situations like this one:

When I first started working there, yes — I used it to view other people's profiles which I didn't have permission to visit. I never manipulated their data in any way; however, I did abuse the profile viewing permission at several initial points when I started at Facebook.

It also sounds like controls are lax on Facebook's backend database:

Your messages are stored in a database, whether deleted or not. So we can just query the database, and easily look at it without every logging into your account. That's what most people don't understand.

It seems safe to assume that if this particular employee obtained unauthorized account data, and knows of two other people who did, the practice has been reasonably widespread at Facebook, recent 'crackdown' or not.

Sensitive data hoards inevitably attract attempts at unauthorized access. Whether it's hospital employees peeking at celebrity medical records or federal workers abusing their wiretap access 100 times in two tears (dubiously claiming it was an 'accident'), people confronted with a pile of information feel compelled to start digging.

The best protection for a user: Throw as little as possible onto the pile.

(Pic: Facebook office by Matthew McDonald)

Earthquake in Haiti

2010-01-16T21:27:00.000-08:00

Earthquake in Haiti: "

Tuesday afternoon, January 12th, the worst earthquake in 200 years - 7.0 in magnitude - struck less than ten miles from the Caribbean city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The initial quake was later followed by twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0. Structures of all kinds were damaged or collapsed, from shantytown homes to national landmarks. It is still very early in the recovery effort, but millions are likely displaced, and thousands are feared dead as rescue teams from all over the world are now descending on Haiti to help where they are able. As this is a developing subject, I will be adding photos to this entry over the next few days, but at the moment, here is a collection of photos from Haiti over the past 24 hours. [See also Haiti 48 hours later]. (48 photos total)

A Haitian woman is covered in rubble on January 12, 2010 in Port-au-Prince after a huge earthquake rocked the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, toppling buildings and causing widespread damage and panic, officials and AFP witnesses said. A tsunami alert was immediately issued for the Caribbean region after the earthquake struck at 2153 GMT. (DANIEL MOREL/AFP/Getty Images)

WOODY ALLEN OFFENDING BILLBOARD

2009-05-18T11:55:00.001-07:00

THE CULTURE OF THE UNDERCLASSES THEODORE DALYRYMPLE

2009-03-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

EMIL POZNIAK

2009-03-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Human Slider

2009-01-30T16:26:00.001-08:00

Japanese Human Slip-n-Slide - Watch more Free Videos

WHY BOYS NEED PARENTS

2008-11-30T18:13:00.000-08:00

This is for those mother's of boys, sisters of boys, grandmother's of boys and boys that have grown older. And anyone else who needs a laugh.�

Why boys need parents...�