A feature interview on Green Majority Radio: Fresh from the New York City climate march, host Daryn Caister chats with Michael Riordon about Bold Scientists.
We range far and wide: science and scientists – bold and not, knowing our place (in nature), who owns knowledge, hubris and humility, power and resistance… Far and wide.
Hear it here: http://greenmajoritymedia.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/419-bold-scientists/.
“An ultra-secretive government agency is collecting hugely revealing information on thousands of law-abiding Canadians.”
Communications Security Establishment Canada. We pay for it, they spy on us. That’s the deal. They spy on all our communications, all the time: phone, email and internet, contacts, conversations, relationships, religious and political affiliations, medical records, financial transactions….
OpenMedia.ca is on the case. But they can’t do it alone. The Canadian government needs to hear a very loud NO from everyone of us who cares.
David Lyon, world authority on surveillance and social control: “Indifference is appropriate only for those who think that efficiency, convenience and speed qualify as values to be placed over openness, fairness, and the accountability of those whose task it is to process personal data.”
Add your voice here: https://openmedia.ca/CSECisWatching?src=156782.
More on David Lyon, our very Transparent Lives and ‘social sorting’ in Bold Scientists. Read an excerpt here.
And pass it on, far and wide.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of our own choosing. George Orwell, 1949, in 1984.
Protest: “Homosexuals don’t need treatment,” Haidian court, Beijing, July 31, 2014. Photo: Li Hao/Global Times.
A young man in China, Xiao Zhen, has taken a courageous public stand against the forced ‘conversion’ of gay people in his country. (Xiao Zhen is a pseudonym, to protect himself and his family from harassment.)
“I was electro-shocked at a gay ‘cure’ center. Doctors hypnotized me and said they would ‘shock the gay’ out of me.
In families like mine, being gay is still seen as something that can be cured, and scam clinics prey on that fear. Now, I want my friends, my family and everyone in China to understand that being gay is normal.”
Though I’ve never met Xiao Zhen, I think of him as a younger brother. In 1968 I underwent the same electro-shock ‘treatment’ in Canada, for the same reason. Then it was called ‘aversion therapy,’ now it’s rebranded more positively as ‘conversion therapy.’ Either way, it’s torture. This should not happen to anyone, anywhere.
Remarkably, not only has Xiao Zhen taken the clinic to court, in a landmark case for China, now he has also taken an even bolder step: a petition to the World Health Organization.
“If we can get the World Health Organization (WHO) to join in and speak out against gay ‘cures’, it could help convince officials to finally ban these dangerous gay ‘cures.’
Will you sign my petition asking WHO Director Dr. Margaret Chan to speak up now and condemn gay ‘cures’ in China?”
More than 87,000 people have already signed the petition. Please add your voice here, and pass this message on to others.
Psychiatry and psychology are among the many tools marshalled by the powerful to repress nonconformity and dissent. More on this, and the resistance, in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, available September 4 from Between the Lines.
“Who’s to say, now that Google has become an arm of law enforcement, how long that arm will reach? I mean, can we really trust a giant transnational corporation to have our best interests at heart?” Thom Hartmann, The Daily Take, via Truthout, August 06 2014.
Good questions.
Bloomberg News, a US business paper, August 2013: “The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.”
As Thom Hartman notes, “we can all agree that child porn is a bad thing.” But then who’s next? Recent exposures of NSA tactics by Edward Snowden and others have made clear that the surveillance state and its corporate partners will grab everything they can, then they decide later who and what is good or bad.
In Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, I asked David Lyon about the comforting mantra that if we’ve done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, Lyon replied: “The idea that I’m innocent until proven guilty is seriously compromised if I’m placed arbitrarily in a category of suspicion, and the reassuring notion that if I have nothing to hide I have nothing to fear is completely falsified when my name is put on a list about which I know nothing.”
Take this blog, for example. Its purpose is to share news and questions about how science is done, and what impacts it has on nature and humanity. But what’s to stop Google from deciding that a blog critical of Google should be shut down?
There are alternatives to the giant trawler called Google. None of them is 100% secure, but at least some browsers are less inclined to sell us all to the highest bidder. One example: DuckDuckGo. And others.
So who cares, some say.
David Lyon again: “Indifference is appropriate only for those who think that efficiency, convenience and speed qualify as values to be placed over openness, fairness, and the accountability of those whose task it is to process personal data.”
Join David Lyon in tracking the trackers. Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, coming September 4, 2014 from Between the Lines.
“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.” – William Binney, July 5, at a conference in London, England, organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
Image: Reality Uncovered
Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to escape the US National Security Agency, was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Soon after September 11, 2001, he resigned in protest against Washington’s embrace of mass surveillance.
“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney told the conference. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in.”
All communication. That means you and me. Right now.
Details in The Guardian, UK, via Reader Supported News, here.
1984 + 30, and counting…
Surveil the surveillers in Bold Scientists: dispatches from the battle for honest science, due September 2014 from Between the Lines.
Michael Riordon 