Poursuivre #Julian_Assange pour avoir publié des documents fait peser de graves menaces sur la liberté de la presse, selon les conclusions du Ministère de la Justice sous Obama. Par Glenn Greenwald
▻https://www.les-crises.fr/poursuivre-julian-assange-pour-avoir-publie-des-documents-fait-peser-de-g
#Politique #USA
New studies show how easy it is to identify people using genetic databases - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2018/10/11/genetic-databases-privacy
n recent months, consumer genealogy websites have unleashed a revolution in forensics, allowing law enforcement to use family trees to track down the notorious Golden State Killer in California and solve other cold cases across the country. But while the technique has put alleged killers behind bars, it has also raised questions about the implications for genetic privacy.
According to a pair of studies published Thursday, your genetic privacy may have already eroded even further than previously realized.
In an analysis published in the journal Science, researchers used a database run by the genealogy company MyHeritage to look at the genetic information of nearly 1.3 million anonymized people who’ve had their DNA analyzed by a direct-to-consumer genomics company. For nearly 60 percent of those people, it was possible to track down someone whose DNA was similar enough to indicate they were third cousins or closer in relation; for another 15 percent of the samples, second cousins or closer could be found.
Yaniv Erlich, the lead author on the Science paper, said his team’s findings should prompt regulators and others to reconsider the assumption that genetic information is de-identified. “It’s really not the case. At least technically, it seems feasible to identify some significant part of the population” with such investigations, said Erlich, who’s a computer scientist at Columbia University and chief science officer at MyHeritage.
The Science paper counted 12 cold cases that were solved between April and August of this year when law enforcement turned to building family trees based on genetic data; a 13th case was an active investigation.
The most famous criminal identified this way: the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California with a series of rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s. With the help of a genetic genealogist, investigators uploaded a DNA sample collected from an old crime scene to a public genealogy database, built family trees, and tracked down relatives. They winnowed down their list of potential suspects to one man with blue eyes, and in April, they made the landmark arrest.
To crack that case, the California investigators used GEDmatch, an online database that allows people who got their DNA analyzed by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry to upload their raw genetic data so that they can track down distant relatives. MyHeritage’s database — which contains data from 1.75 million people, mostly Americans who’ve gotten their DNA analyzed by MyHeritage’s genetic testing business — works similarly, although it explicitly prohibits forensic searches. (23andMe warns users about the privacy risks of uploading their genetic data to such third party sites.)
“For me, these articles are fascinating and important and we shouldn’t shy away from the privacy concerns that these articles raise. But at the same time, we should keep in mind the personal and societal value that we believe that we are accruing as we make these large collections,” said Green, who was not involved in the new studies and is an adviser for genomics companies including Helix and Veritas Genetics.
He pointed to the potential of genomics not only to reunite family members and put criminals behind bars, but also to predict and prevent heritable diseases and develop new drugs.
As with using social media and paying with credit cards online, reaping the benefits of genetic testing requires accepting a certain level of privacy risk, Green said. “We make these tradeoffs knowing that we’re trading some vulnerability for the advantages,” he said.
MC Blak Odhiambo
▻http://www.nova-cinema.org/prog/2018/166-lebanon-days-of-tomorrow/africa-is-in-the-future/article/mc-black-odhiambo
Slammeur et rappeur ultra charismatique, Blak Odhiambo vit à Kibera, le gigantesque bidonville au sud de Nairobi, d’où émerge une bonne partie de l’énergie artistique de la capitale kenyan. Il abrite Masai Mbili, petit studio artistique co-fondé par Otieno Gomba, auteur de l’affiche du festival l’an passé, avec des artistes comme Kevo Stero, Greenman Muleh Mbillo, Kavochy, etc. Il puise son inspiration dans l’imaginaire du reggae, de la musique Kenyane, du Rap US, mais aussi dans les rencontres improbables au grès de ses errances urbaines. Il présentera au Nova son nouveau projet multimedia : Panthera Leo. Avide de rencontres musicales ultra diversifiées (les rappeurs Erko d’Allemagne, Alex Rotka de France, Moroko de Kibera, plusieurs DJs kenyans), nous profitons de sa venue exceptionnelle en (...)
Petite géopolitique des super-héros
▻https://la-bas.org/4996
Les super-héros, édités par Marvel ou DC Comics, font florès dans le cinéma hollywoodien depuis quelques années : Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, Iron Man, Captain America, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Hulk, Thor, Black Panther, Les Quatre Fantastiques, The Watchmen, The Avengers, Justice League… pas une année sans que plusieurs blockbusters sortent sur les écrans du monde entier. Divertissements sans importance destinés à engranger quelques centaines millions de dollars ? Certes, mais l’Amérique du soft power sait aussi, l’air de rien, mettre en scène une géopolitique du bien et du mal parfois bien manichéenne.Continuer la (...)
Professor Green films ’anti-homeless’ bench bar removal - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-42902252
Rapper Professor Green has filmed a video showing the removal of an “anti-homeless” bar fitted to a public bench.
The musician had branded the devices, in Bournemouth, an attempt to make homelessness “invisible”.
Footage posted on his Instagram account shows a man replacing one of the bars with a larger one to turn the bench into a “homeless shelter”
Dorset Police said officers were called to the town centre but “no offences were identified”.
Bournemouth council said it was disappointed Green had declined an invite to speak with officials.
Wolfgang Streeck: The Return of the Repressed. New Left Review 104, March-April 2017.
▻https://newleftreview.org/II/104/wolfgang-streeck-the-return-of-the-repressed
Lies, even blatant lies, have always existed in politics. We need think only of Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council, with his aerial photographs proving the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As to Germany, one still remembers a defence minister, greatly revered up to this time as a social democrat of the old school, who claimed that the German troops sent into Afghanistan at the urging of the US were defending, ‘at the Hindu Kush’, the security of Germany. However, with the neoliberal revolution and the transition to ‘post-democracy’ [8] associated with it, a new sort of political deceit was born, the expert lie. It began with the Laffer Curve, which was used to prove scientifically that reductions in taxation lead to higher tax receipts. [9] It was followed, inter alia, by the European Commission’s ‘Cecchini Report’ (1988), which, as a reward for the ‘completion of the internal market’ planned for 1992, promised the citizens of Europe an increase in prosperity of the order of 5 per cent of the European Union’s GDP, an average 6 per cent reduction in the price of consumer goods, as well as millions of new jobs and an improvement in public finances of 2.2 per cent of GDP. In the US, meanwhile, financial experts such as Bernanke, Greenspan and Summers agreed that the precautions taken by rational investors in their own interest and on their own account to stabilize ever ‘freer’ and ever more global financial markets were enough; government agencies had no need to take action to prevent the growth of bubbles, partly because they had now learned how to painlessly eliminate the consequences if bubbles were to burst.
At the same time, the ‘#narratives’ [10] disseminated by mainstream parties, governments and PR specialists, and the decisions and non-decisions associated with them, became ever more absurd. The penetration of the machinery of government by previous and future Goldman Sachs managers continued apace, in recognition of their indispensable expertise, as if nothing had changed. After several years during which not a single one of the bank managers who had shared responsibility for the crash of 2008 had been brought to justice, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder returned to the New York law firm from which he had come, which specializes in representing financial companies under government investigation—and to a princely million-dollar salary. And Hillary Clinton, who together with her husband and daughter had amassed a fortune in the hundreds of millions in the sixteen years since leaving the White House—from Goldman Sachs speaking fees among other things, far above the earnings even of a Larry Summers—entered the election campaign as the self-designated representative of the ‘hardworking middle class’, a class that in reality had long since been reduced by capitalist progress to the status of a surplus population.
Harvard researchers find Wikipedia articles aren’t as biased as you might think — Quartz
▻http://qz.com/820251/wikipedias-best-articles-are-as-neutral-as-the-encyclopedia-brittanica-researche
#Wikipedia se situe entre les deux droites américaines, donc.
Today, Wikipedia is less overtly blue or red and instead looks purple with “a slight blue leaning to it,” says Greenstein. Though he hasn’t done such an analysis, he says New York Times editorials would look somewhat similar.
Welcome to Britain, the new land of impunity
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/05/britain-land-of-impunity-fat-cats-politicians
What do you have to do to fall out of favour with this government? Last month, the security company G4S was quietly rehabilitated. It had been banned in August 2013 from bidding for government contracts after charging the state for tagging 3,000 phantom criminals. Those who had died before it started monitoring them presented a particularly low escape risk. G4S was obliged to pay £109m back to the government.
Eight months later, and before an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office has concluded, back it bounces seeking more government business. Never mind that it almost scuppered the Olympics; never mind Jimmy Mubenga, an asylum seeker who died in 2010 after being “restrained” by G4S guards, or Gareth Myatt, a 15-year-old who died while being held down at a secure training centre in 2004; never mind the scandals at Oakwood, a giant prison it runs. G4S, described by MPs as one of a handful of “privately owned public monopolies”, is crucial to the government’s attempts to outsource almost everything. So it cannot be allowed to fail.
Accountability has always been weak in the UK, but under this government you must make spectacular efforts to lose your post. At the Leveson inquiry in May 2012, the relationship between the then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt and the Murdoch empire that he was supposed to be regulating was exposed in gory detail. He was meant to be deciding impartially whether to allow the empire to take over the broadcaster BSkyB, but was secretly exchanging gleeful messages with James Murdoch and his staff.
We all knew what it meant. The emails, the Guardian observed, were likely to “sever the slim thread connecting Hunt to his cabinet job”. “After this he’s toast … it’s over for Hunt,” wrote Tom Watson MP. Ed Miliband said: “He cannot stay in his post. And if he refuses to resign, the prime minister must show some leadership and fire him.” We waited. Hunt remained culture secretary for another four months, then he was promoted to secretary of state for health.
A real Mr Green – Stephen, this time – was ennobled by David Cameron and appointed, democratically of course, as minister for trade and investment. In July 2012, a US Senate committee reported that while Lord Green was chief executive and chairman of HSBC, the bank’s compliance culture was “pervasively polluted”. Its branches had “actively circumvented US safeguards … designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords and rogue regimes”.
Billions of dollars from Mexican drug barons, from Iran and from “obviously suspicious” travellers’ cheques “benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business” sluiced through its tills. Out went dollars and financial services to banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh linked to the financing of terrorists. The Guardian reported that HSBC “continued to operate hundreds of accounts with suspected links to Mexican drug cartels, even after Green and fellow executives were told by regulators that HSBC was one of the worst banks for money laundering.”
Green refused to answer questions and sat tight. He remained in post for another 17 months, until he gracefully retired in December 2013.
#G4S #Murdoch #BSkyB #outsourcing #HSBC #drugcartels #SaudiArabia #AtosHealthcare
The failure works both ways, of course. As Polly Toynbee has shown, the Help to Work pilot projects, which G4S will run, reveal that it is a complete waste of time and money. Yet the government has decided to go ahead anyway, subjecting the jobless to yet more humiliation and pointlessness. Contrast the boundless forgiveness of G4S to the endless castigation for being unemployed.
Greenpeace: Turkish gov’t destroying forests to promote construction
▻http://todayszaman.com/news-342625-greenpeace-turkish-govt-destroying-forests-to-promote-const
Turkey’s forests are being destroyed for construction in defiance of Turkish environmental law, while the authorities attempt to justify these projects with pronouncements that the construction is “for the public benefit,” “to the country’s advantage” and “necessary,” according to a press release issued by Greenpeace Mediterranean on Thursday to mark March 21, World Forestry Day.
Deniz Bayram, legal representative of Greenpeace Mediterranean, stated in the press release that Turkey had used inadequate legal justifications to sacrifice areas of forest for the sake of mega projects and investment in energy production. “The term ’public benefit’ is vague, and it is usually interpreted as solely the economic and industrial development of our country,” Bayram said. “But this [interpretation] causes a rapid destruction of our forests. The ’public interest’ is not only economic development. The right to live in a healthy environment is also legitimate,” he added.
Voir venir, réfléchir, proposer (Le Monde diplomatique)
►http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/carnet/2013-11-20-Voir-venir-reflechir-proposer
S’il admet sa cécité – pourquoi ne pas le dire, sa nullité –, M. Greenspan ne manque pas d’associer à son échec d’autres brillants esprits et institutions prestigieuses qui, à la veille de la catastrophe, annonçaient eux aussi un avenir radieux : le Fonds monétaire international, estimant que « le risque économique mondial » avait « décliné » au printemps 2007 ; la banque JP Morgan, prévoyant une accélération de la croissance pour 2009 ; l’hebdomadaire The Economist, sûr et certain, fin 2006, que « le capitalisme de marché, la locomotive qui tire l’économie mondiale, fait bien son travail ». Tous ceux-là, et tant d’autres, n’ont « rien vu venir »…
Dedefensa.org : Stasi-of-America hait autant Greenwald que Snowden
►http://www.dedefensa.org/article-stasi-of-america_hait_autant_greenwald_que_snowden_14_06_2013.htm
Dans sa chronique du 12 juin 2013 sur Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo alimente indirectement l’appréciation de cette situation nouvelle qui est d’attaquer le journaliste avec la même vindicte que sa source, d’attaquer “le messager“ autant que l’auteur du “message”. Il développe le cas de Greenwald à partir d’une chronique ou l’autre qui a mis en cause ce journaliste, – qualifié par le New York Times de « blogger of a British website » (le Guardian devenu British website)... Raimondo ne le fait pas sans une certaine ironie jubilatoire, compte tenu du cadre-Système général développant une campagne-turbo à la gloire des homosexuels. Greenwald lui-même est gay, – et un journaliste dissident, et de quelle dissidence, qui s’avère être gay, est par conséquent implicitement fustigé pour être gay également, – et la situation de gay devient alors la cause de l’opprobre de type petit-bourgeois qu’on connaît bien, que le Système reprend à son compte. (Comme pour le soldat Manning,bien entendu.) Raimondo, gay lui-même et farouchement dissident, peut donc exercer toute sa verve et mettre la campagne-Système de “libération des gays” au niveau qui est le sien, celui du ramassage des ordures...
La concrétisation des expériences de pensée :
▻http://fauxphilnews.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/experimental-philosophy-gets-real
“Sure, people will say that pushing a man in front of a speeding trolley is wrong on paper,” says Greene, the study’s lead author. “But what happens when they actually get out there and kill a man? Still wrong? Nobody knew because nobody had tested it.”
Ça fait penser à l’expérience de Milgram :
►http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expérience_de_Milgram
Je suis d’ailleurs assez dubitatif quant à la validité morale de ce type d’expérience (c’est explicité dans la fiche Wikipédia concernant Milgram).
Ici, en particulier, poser la question sous l’angle du « mal » et du jugement moral (« is it wrong ? ») alors que l’expérience elle-même repose sur le fait d’organiser le meurtre (certes fictif) de quelqu’un et de le faire en manipulant quelqu’un par le mensonge, ça me semble très discutable.