The Internet itself had become 'the most significant surveillance machine that we have ever seen,' Assange said in reference to the amount of information people give about themselves online. (photo: Andrew Winning/Reuters)
Internet Has Become 'Surveillance Machine'
ikiLeaks founder Julian Assange blasted the mainstream media, Washington, banks and the Internet itself as he addressed journalists in Hong Kong on Monday via videolink from house arrest in England.
Fresh from accepting a top award for journalism from the prestigious Walkley Foundation in his native Australia on Sunday, Assange spoke to the News World Summit in Hong Kong before keeping a regular appointment with the police.
He defended his right to call himself a journalist and said WikiLeaks' next "battle" would be to ensure that the Internet does not turn into a vast surveillance tool for governments and corporations.
"Of course I'm a goddamn journalist," he responded with affected frustration when a moderator of the conference asked if he was a member of the profession.
He said his written record spoke for itself and argued that the only reason people kept asking him if he was a journalist was because the United States' government wanted to silence him.
"The United States government does not want legal protection for us," he said, referring to a US Justice Department investigation into his whistle-blower website for releasing secret diplomatic and military documents.
The former hacker criticised journalists and the mainstream media for becoming too cosy with the powerful and secretive organisations they were supposed to be holding to account.
In a 40-minute address, he also accused credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard of illegally cutting WikiLeaks off from funding under a secret deal with the White House.
"Issues that should be decided in open court are being decided in back rooms in Washington," he said.
The Internet itself had become "the most significant surveillance machine that we have ever seen," Assange said in reference to the amount of information people give about themselves online.
"It's not an age of transparency at all ... the amount of secret information is more than ever before," he said, adding that information flows in but is not flowing out of governments and other powerful organisations.
"I see that really is our big battle. The technology gives and the technology takes away," he added.
The anti-secrecy activist then help up a handwritten sign from an aide telling him to "stop" talking or he would be late for a mandatory appointment with police.
Assange, 40, is under house arrest in England pending the outcome of a Swedish extradition request over claims of rape and sexual assault made by two women. He says he is the victim of a smear campaign.
* * *
Published on Thursday, November 24, 2011 by CBC News
Arctic Sea Ice Shrinking at 'Unprecedented' Levels
The recent loss of sea ice in the Arctic is greater than any natural variation in the past 1½ millennia, a Canadian study shows.
According to the leading science journal Nature, Arctic sea ice is disappearing on a pace and magnitude unlike anything the Earth has experienced in the past 1,450 years. (Photograph by: HO, Reuters) "The recent sea ice decline … appears to be unprecedented," said Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the study and is a co-author of the paper published Wednesday online in Nature.
"We kind of have to conclude that there's a strong chance that there's a human influence embedded in that signal."
In September, Germany's University of Bremen reported that sea ice had hit a record low, based on data from a Japanese sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite. The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, using a different satellite data set, reported that the sea ice coverage in 2011 was the second-lowest on record, after the record set in 2007.
What makes recent sea ice declines unique is that they have been driven by multiple factors that never all coincided in historical periods of major sea ice loss, said Christophe Kinnard, lead author of the new report.
"Everything is trending up – surface temperature, the atmosphere is warming, and it seems also that the ocean is warming and there is more warm and saline water that makes it into the Arctic," Kinnard said, "and so the sea ice is eroded from below and melting from the top."
In the past, he said, sea ice loss was driven mostly by an influx of warm, salty water from the North Atlantic into the Arctic due to a change in ocean currents, and wasn't necessarily linked to periods of warmer air temperatures.
In contrast, Zdanowicz said, temperature has come to dominate control of the sea ice.
Most of the current data about the recent, rapid sea ice loss comes from satellite measurements that began in the 1970s.
Other reports of sea ice variability come from sources such as ship logs and only go back around 130 years, said Kinnard, a research scientist at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Áridas in La Serena, Chile, who conducted most of the research while doing his PhD and working at the Geological Survey of Canada under Zdanowicz and fellow glaciologist David Fisher.
Zdanowicz said he and his colleagues had some questions in light of the recent dramatic decline of Arctic sea ice: "Is this exceptional? Is this unique? Is this part of a longer cycle?"
The researchers compiled data from more than 60 sources, including ice core records, tree rings and lake and ocean sediments, which all provide information about climatic and sea ice changes over hundreds or thousands of years. About 80 per cent of the data came from ice cores from polar glaciers, and about a third of those were Canadian.
Using those historical data records and statistics derived from modern data correlating sea ice to other factors, the researchers managed to reconstruct sea ice changes over the past 1,450 years — since about 600 A.D.
The model showed that when the sea ice extent was at its lowest historically, at the beginning of that period, at least 8.5 million square kilometers of sea ice covered the Arctic in late summer, the time of year when sea ice is usually at its lowest extent.
"Today, we're lower than eight," Kinnard said.
Data will improve predictions
Kinnard said the information about the causes of past sea ice losses might be useful to scientists who make predictions about sea ice loss and have so far been largely underestimating the rate of its decline: "Which probably indicates that the models are missing something."
Zdanowicz added that climate models are tested by seeing how well they are able to reproduce the past – and the new reconstruction allows for that.
Sea ice also has a strong effect on the overall climate, the scientists noted. For example, it is bright and so it reflects sunlight, reducing warming, while ocean water is dark, absorbing sunlight and increasing warming, said Anne de Vernal, a researcher at the University of Quebec in Montreal who also co-authored the report.
Fisher added that it also affects water and atmospheric chemistry. That in turn could produce feedback that somehow speeds up further sea ice loss.
That means information about sea ice could be useful in predicting other aspects of the future climate.
On the other hand, de Vernal said, the unique nature of the current sea ice loss makes it harder to guess how other systems will respond.
"What we are experiencing at the moment seems to be very exceptional…. This means that we are entering into the world which has no equivalent in the past."
No comments:
Post a Comment